Pre-Disaster Educational Planning and Personal-Best Learning

Thursday, November 10, 2005

By Robert Oliphant
Columnist EducationNews.org

Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Hurricane Katrina will probably stay in our national-disaster vocabulary for a long time, especially where American cities are concerned. Right now, I suspect, a number of school boards are probably grilling candidates for the post of school superintendent with questions like "What would YOU do if WE had to close down our schools for six weeks?"

For parents and educators as well, this particular question is worth thinking about. To ask it, after all, indicates the underlying social and civic importance of what might be called the L-word ("learning"), as opposed to the physical existence of hurricanes, school buildings, classrooms, teachers , and even school superintendents. For aspiring school superintendents, then, here are some learning-related points worth considering if a panel of examiners asks one to start thinking about the unthinkable.

Learning is voluntary . . . . There's no doubt that teachers are important.
But students must always do the actual learning, either in a classroom setting or by themselves at home. With school buildings, classrooms and teachers out of the picture, a cautious candidate for school superintendent would probably begin by pointing out that closing a school system will require some kind of personal-best learning program, ideally one that will offer suitable rewards to those learners who volunteer to participate.

Learning is difficult . . . . Our natural tendency toward forgetfulness protects our minds against confusion. But it also requires us to spend plenty of time, directly or indirectly, in the learning process, very much like hammering soft nails into hard, resistant wood. Nationwide, therefore, our accreditation organizations still measure the learning process in credit hours at the rate of roughly 40 hours each week from each average-ability full-time student. So our candidate's major challenge will be that of explaining the time-commitment challenge, namely, how to persuade young people to spend 240 hours of their precious time in learning activities that will be practical and nationally creditable.

Practically considered, especially for grades 4 through 12, our candidate will probably urge the school board to think about a city-wide reading program. At an overall national-standard rate of 300 words per minute for fiction, such a program would open the door to personal-choice fiction reading by each student at 18,000 words per hour, which translates into one 300-page novel in five hours, and 48 of them (or the equivalent) in 240 hours. With an ambitious target like this, a school superintendent can well afford to let each learner choose what he or she wants to read - as long as the hours add up to an educationally respectable total.

Learning is measurable . . . . As far as personal choice reading goes, the National Endowment for the Arts, in " Reading at Risk," has recently called for a "nationwide renaissance of literary reading" that explicitly defines "literary" as encompassing ANY KIND of novel: Danielle Steele or Daniel Defoe, Ann Rice or Ann Tyler. In addition, there's plenty of research, much of it pulled together by Stephen Krashen and his followers, to indicate that any youngster who demonstrably reads 48 personally chosen novels will certainly achieve substantial improvement in vocabulary awareness (especially multiple meanings), reading comprehension, and other language skills.

With thousands and thousands of novels available (especially via Internet), along with language-skills improvement as a program target, our candidate will probably urge the school board's approval of measurable-impact testing. In so doing, he or she would certainly draw attention to current medical practice, where physicians now prescribe personal-choice wholesome diet and exercise for their patients, while monitoring the impact later on with low-cost on-site standardized tests covering pulse rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, etc.

Maximum-time reading, maximum impact upon language skills, low cost impact-testing - our candidate could argue persuasively for such a program by pointing to organizations like Thomson Prometrics ( http://web.archive.org/web/20060902055218/http://www.prometric.com/), which offers proctored testing opportunities worldwide for XML certification, along with 360 other test-certification programs that range from the American Concrete Institute to the Wyoming Insurance Department. Coming closer to home, he or she could also point out the importance of language skills in these programs, along with the fact that today full service book stores like Barnes and Noble give test-taking manuals over ten times the shelf space that they give to dictionaries.

Learning is manageable . . . . If a mind, as Marva Collins famously put it, "is a terrible thing to waste," it is even more a terrible thing to invade, even under the color of law, social value, and educationally good intentions. So it's quite likely that our aspiring school superintendent will invoke current managerial theories, including the game-theory contributions of James Buchanan, Herbert Simon. and Thomas Schelling , all Nobel prizewinners, to support a "Liar's Dice" system for encouraging high, non-coercive levels of learner participation.

As in the game show Jeopardy, a Liar's Dice program links each high activity claim to an equally high level of risk and potential reward. Thus a 240-hour reading activity claim producing an A-level test score would justify an A-level performance certificate, along with an equivalent level of academic credit. In contrast, if the same 240-hour claim yielded a B-level score, the participant would earn only a C plus certificate. If worked out in detail by testing professionals, this approach would produce a very high level of participation and achievement at a very low cost per participant.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . Our candidate for school superintendent might well close by telling the school board that a city of 100,000 with a K-12 public school enrollment of 15,000 might well produce 2.6 million hours of measurably useful personal-best learning with such a disaster-response educational program, doing so at a preliminary design-cost of less than $200,000. As in any job interview, the question itself is purely hypothetical. But I believe it would open the door to many other equally interesting questions and a lively exchange - all in the interests of responsible public service.

Responsible public service today has many doors, very much like the Beatles' movie "Help," where four separate doors open from the street onto the same spacious living room. One of those doors, and the most important, is that of formally accredited public education. But the others, especially those opening up in the private sector today, are well worth knowing about, and using.

As our nation becomes more and more disaster-conscious, I believe that pre-disaster planning is going to get much more attention in the next couple of years, along with open discussion of all reasonable alternatives - deservedly so, I'm sure most of us will agree.