A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR. URI TREISMAN: I'm really fascinated. A few points about the main on that first line of discussion about quality. And I'm impressed at the Commission's ability to gather very quickly what I consider to be the best in research and practices about professional development and induction, and the like. So, I want to give this to my doctoral students, and who have done several chapters in their dissertations.

The demand side is more problematic, and there I think you need to pay more attention, respectfully said. Malinowski in "The Sexual Life of Savages", one of my favorite books, talks about the Trobrian Islanders coming to believe their own mythology as if it were truth. The truth is that math and science outside of the pieces of it that are cultural knowledge, like multiplication tables, really aren't all that high a priority for local communities and school boards. And one of the things that -- certainly not close to literacy and good citizenship. So what we need to analyze are the ways in which we can increase the demand for quality mathematics and science.

And, first, I want to make some points, some quick points about that, and then also show some data related to your discussions, which I think might jar you in the spirit of being provocative.

First, demand. Senator Glenn mentioned the 15,000 school boards out there. School boards in this country are hypersensitive about their local control of their schools. This is a core American value that school policy is controlled locally. Now, what do schools care then? They care about doing things their own way, but they want to know that what feels good is good, and they want to know how they measure up in comparison with schools in other places, on their own terms.

So we need to look at strategies, like expanding NAEP, developing research and tools for states and local districts to develop assessments that reflect their values and principles, but that allow them to compare their performance with the performance of people in other districts. Not all that hard a technical task. There need to be tools for school boards that give them visions of what good math and science education looks like based around the national standards. And these need to be made available in ways that can be customized and shaped for local district and state standards.

Further out there are using the technology to allow districts and states to create their own textbooks for very low cost and redirect the monies to professional development. And we also need on the demand side competing options, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and other structures that certify teachers, but it needs to be an environment in which there are competing principles, all right, so that this can be wrestled down and communities need to decide what really matters for their kids. I think only one is pretty dangerous. It causes people in my state to put on military things and run around in the woods with guns. So it's much better to have many.

Second, math and science are unnaturally suppressed. They're important not only for the economy, but most important for citizenship. If that's true, then we need to look at math and science in all the other areas of the school curriculum. We need to examine the unnatural suppression of mathematics and science. There are no good math and science programs in elementary and middle schools that don't have great principals, as Senator Glenn has already mentioned. Some states, like Ohio and Texas, several states, are working on administrator training. I have yet to see states that have developed materials for those administrators that help them understand what good math and science look like.

School finance. There were talks about 1 billion and 1 1/2 billion dollars. That's actually a round-off error. Public education is a 300 billion dollar enterprise. The biggest opportunity, if there is demand, is in the adequacy lawsuits taking place in state after state. The current wave of school reform litigation is not addressed with equity; it's addressed with adequacy. And the states, like West Virginia, that define what math and science were required, defined it as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. That was the Supreme Court's definition. The definitions for math and science, what is adequate, would stun people who've worked in math and science education. There's been no discussion between professional groups and the judges and attorneys who work on these cases.

Equity. Where is the demand for equity? Reform models. State Supreme Courts are requiring in some cases that equity be addressed with the use of comprehensive school reform models. Virtually none of the comprehensive school reform models which really are central to equity have math or science components that reflect standards. So we need to ensure, or you need to ensure, that federal solutions to equity also address math and science in ways that reflect professional society standards.

There's one last comment here. Many of the things you've talked about and have seen, professional development, recruitment strategies, are beautiful, but there are round-off errors in the real world of doing this work. If you look at the beautiful things you've seen in professional development, literally, they're the fourth or fifth decimal place. Most monies for professional development and for teacher recruitment are spent in very, very traditional ways not connected to student performance changes.

The one exception here is induction. Relatively little money has gone into induction, and a lot of that money has been used for innovation, and there's some research base around it. So that's an area which you may -- may want to consider a priority. It's a newer area of launching projects.

And if I could just take two minutes, I want to say something with data. On the technology, principals now spend twice as much on technology as text books. Texas spends half a billion a year on instructional technology, a quarter of a billion on instructional materials. Nothing in licensing of administrators has changed to reflect the new areas in which principals have authority to spend. And if we don't upgrade those standards and talk about the connection between technology and math and science learning, what we'll have is expensive technology being used to deliver bad instruction cheaper, which is the dominant use of technology in schools today.

[See Slide 1] The first quick data point. You can't see that, so it's just there as a poetic symbol. You talked about TIMSS; you must be careful, what TIMSS actually shows is that the variations across states in the United States is roughly the same as the distribution across countries. The top states for 13 year-olds in the second study were Taiwan, Iowa, Korea, North Dakota and Minnesota. The bottom states are West Virginia, Arkansas, Hawaii, Jordan, Mississippi. The distribution is not the way it's presented in some of your texts. What's important is that we know how to educate children in parts of the United States. The question is, whose children do you choose to educate. That is the key issue. When you generate a crisis by improperly using TIMSS data, the opponents of public education will say "Even they say that education is a failure."

[See Slide 2a] and [Slide 2b] Second, there are massive differences across states in the United States on NAEP. And we need to, I think you need to focus in on why the differences are so large in states that look like each other. This is one of the reasons we need more tools of this type. California, near the bottom for each of the ethnic groups. Texas is near the top. Massive differences on NAEP performance.

[See Slide 3a] and [Slide 3b] Also, if you look at southeastern states that are very similar ethnically and economically, big differences in student performance, and these differences are traceable to their state policies, their leadership structures and their finance structures. So if we can't, if we don't have the theory that explains big differences across states, then questions will be asked.

And I think I will not show more of these slides because they're not coming across clearly. But I want to say that for demand, the most powerful thing that I've seen in my state, Texas, is tools that allow districts to see where they stand in comparison with other districts that they perceive as peers. And I think that that is a federal role to produce those kinds of instruments and tools.

This page last modified May 8, 2000 (gkp)