I think of two very broad education reform camps. One calls into question the basic arrangement of institutions involved in U.S. education, arguing that the contradictory priorities in the system almost guarantee mediocrity. The solution, therefore, cannot be a nibbling around the edges of reform, but wholesale change: for some reformers, that means a market solution with greater parental choice, often coupled with more stringent human resources policies. For others the solution is a complete change—via technology—of the way we think of “learning.”

The second group of reformers argues that the system of education institutions is mostly fine, and that factors external to the system are responsible for our woes (which are, in any case, exaggerated). Some point to social and economic factors, others to the incoherence in curriculum (cf the Common Core), and others to the very reform measures (especially standardized tests used to evaluate schools and teachers) instituted by the other group of reformers.

In his new book Improbable Scholars,  UC Berkeley professor of education David Kirp offers an unusually readable account of what improved schooling would look like if you’re in the second camp. His explicit mission: to show that educational excellence is possible with the system as it exists now, even in districts that face enormous challenges.  He makes a fair case, given the limitations of the method he employs.

Improbable Scholars follows in the tradition of numerous education books by recounting time that the author spent in a school or district. Kirp tells the story of Union City, NJ, a city like so many others in the US: it has a great manufacturing past (“Embroidery Capital of the United States”) but was unable to find a new economic identity when cheap imports undermined its industries. Now most of its residents live in poverty, and a large percentage are recent immigrants who speak little English.

But Union City schools are unlike most districts with this profile. Despite the demographics, Union City students score about average on state tests. Ninety percent graduate high school, and sixty percent go on to college.

How they do it is Kirp’s subject, and in one sense this book has the feel of many others.  The account is told through stories. We meet Alina Bossbaly, a local legend of a third-grade teacher who is able to connect even with the most difficult children, and to make them feel a part of the classroom community, a process that has come to be known as “Bossbaly-izing” children.

We meet long-time Union City Mayor Brian Stack, strong supporter of education, savvy politico in a tough political town, and point man in the procurement of funding for the new 180 million dollar high school.  

Kirp is an academic, not a journalist, so although he’s an able writer, you’re not in the hands of a professional storyteller or fact-finder. But what you get from Kirp is a deeper analysis, a better-than-even tradeoff in this case.

So what is Kirp’s conclusion? He offers a list of key factors that he says must be in place for a district to thrive:

• District leaders put the needs of students ahead of those of staff
• They invest in quality preschool
• They insist that a rigorous curriculum is consistently implemented
• They make extensive use of data to diagnose problems
• The engender a culture of respect among the staff
• They value stability and avoid drama—they make a plan and stick with it for the long haul
• They never stop planning and reviewing the results of their plans.

When a district posts a remarkable record, it’s natural to ask “how did they do it?” The obvious problem is you’re looking at a single district. Maybe the real key to Union City is the Mayor. Maybe it’s the fact that many of the students come from countries with a tradition of respect for authority.

Kirp makes a case that other unusually successful districts have the same set of factors in common. It’s no substitute for a quantitative analysis, but KIrp at least shows that he’s aware of the problem.

And to be clear, I read the book in this wise, as something like an ethnographic study. Books like this offer detail and texture that larger scale, more rigorous analyses lack. In so doing, they ought to be inspiration to more quantitatively oriented researchers for what they are missing and where to turn their sights next. 

When it comes to criticizing methods he thinks are ineffective, Kirp is less sure-footed. He dismisses the notion that the relationship between school funding and student achievement is uncertain by noting that such suggestions leave administrators “shaking their heads.” There is an extensive and complex literature on the impact of funding, and the proper conclusion is by no means as simple Kirp would like us to believe.

Likewise, I’m rankled by Kirp’s assertion that “If you’re a teacher or principal whose job is on the line and your ordered to accomplish what seems unattainable, cheating is a predictable response.” This sounds an awful lot like a tacit pass to cheating educators.

The section of Improbable Scholars devoted to “what doesn’t work” left a bad taste in my mouth because it comes at he end of the book, but it is a mere five pages long.

If you’re curious about one vision of successful education that more or less maintains the status quo and actually gets into some detail, Improbable Scholars is a good choice.

I like Wikipedia. I like it enough that I have donated during their fund drives, and not simply under the mistaken impression that doing so would make plaintive face of founder Jimmy Wales disappear from my browser.

Wikipedia is sometimes held up as a great victory for crowdsourcing, although as Jaron Lanier has wryly observed, it would have been strange indeed to have predicted in the 1980's that the digital revolution was coming, and that the crowning achievement would be a copy of something that already existed--the encyclopedia.

That's a bit too cynical in my view, but more important, it leapfrogs an important question: is Wikipedia a good encyclopedia?

For matters related to education, my tentative answer is "no." For some time now I've noticed that articles in Wikipedia got things wrong, even allowing for the fact that some topics in education are controversial.

So in a not-at-all scientific test, I looked up a few topics that came to mind.

Reading education in the United States: The third paragraph reads:

There is a large literature using many different methods to assess whether sound plays a role in the decoding of experienced readers, and ample evidence that it does. For example, people are slower to read tongue-twisters than control text (McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982). Whether it is necessary to access meaning or is a byproduct of that process is more controversial. There is also pretty good evidence that speed reading can't really work, due to limitations in the speed of eye movements (Rayner, 2004)

Next I looked at mathematics education. The section of most interest is "research" and it's a grab-bag of assertions, most or all of which seem to be taken from the website of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. As such, the list is incomplete: no mention of the huge literatures on (1) math facts (e.g. Orrantia et al 2010), nor of (2) spatial representations in mathematics: Newcombe, 2010. The conclusions are also, at times, sketchily draw ("the importance of conceptual understanding:" well, sure), and on occasion, controversial ("the usefulness of homework:" a lot depends on the details.)

Learning styles: You probably could predict the contents of this entry. A long recounting of various learning styles models, followed by a "criticisms" section. Actually, this Wikipedia entry was better than I thought it would be, because I expected the criticism section to be shorter than it is. Still, if you know nothing about the topic, you'd likely conclude "there's controversy" rather than there's no supporting evidence (Riener & Willingham, 2010).

Finally, I looked at the entry on constructivism (learning theory). This was a pretty stringent test, I'll admit, because it's a difficult topic.

The first section lists constructivists and this list includes Herb Simon, which can only be called bizarre, given that he co-authored criticisms of constructivism (Anderson, Reder & Simon, 1997).

The rest of the article is a bit of a mish-mash. It differentiates social constructivism (that learning is inherently social) from cognitive constructivism (that learners make meaning) only late in the article, though most authors consider the distinction basic. It mentions situated learning in passing, and fails to identify it as a influential third strain in constructivist thought. A couple of sections on peripheral topics have been added ("Role Category Questionnaire," "Person-centered messages") it would appear by enthusiasts.

Of the four passages I examined I wouldn't give better than a C- to any of them. They are, to varying degrees, disorganized, incomplete, and inaccurate.

Others have been interested in the reliability of Wikipedia, so much so that there is a Wikipedia entry devoted to the topic. Two positive results are worthy of note. First, site vandalism is usually quickly repaired. (e.g., in the history of the entry for psychologist William K. Estes one finds that someone wrote "William Estes is a martian that goes around the worl eating pizza his best freind is gondi.") The speedy repair of vandalism is testimony to the facts that most people want Wikipedia to succeed, and that the website makes it easy to make small changes.

Second, Wikipedia articles seem to fare well for accuracy compared to traditional edited encyclopedias. Here's where education may differ from other topics. The studies that I have seen compared articles on pretty arcane topics--the sort of thing that no one has an opinion on other than a handful of experts. Who is going to edit the entry on Photorefractice Keratectomy? But lots of people have opinions about the teaching of reading--and there are lots of bogus "sources" they can cite, a fact I emphasized to the point of reader exhaustion in my most recent book.

Now I only looked through four entries. Perhaps others are better. If you think so, let me know. But for the time being I'll be warning students in my Spring Educational Psychology course not to trust Wikipedia as a source.


References

Anderson, J. R., Reder, L. M., & Simon, H. A. (2000). Applications and Misapplications of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Instruction. Texas Education Review, 1(2), 29-49.

McCutchen, D., & Perfetti, C. A. (1982). The visual tongue-twister effect: Phonological activation in silent reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21, 672-687.

Newcombe, N. S. (2010). Picture This. American Educator, 1, 29.

Orrantia, J., Rodríguez, L., & Vicente, S. (2010). Automatic activation of addition facts in arithmetic word problems. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(2), 310-319.

Radach, R. (2004). Eye movements and information processing during reading (Vol. 16, No. 1-2). Psychology Press.

Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 42(5), 32-35.

Psychologists have long looked to Oxford Press for top-flight works of original scholarship and useful synthesis volumes. Now Oxford is publishing a new series, Fundamentals of Cognition, designed to serve as very brief summaries of the state of the field, suitable for an undergraduate course or as the key reading in a beginning graduate course.

The first volume has been published: Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition by Sara Shettleworth and if it’s any indication of the quality of future volumes, Oxford has done very well indeed.

In a mere 124 pages Shettleworth offers the reader a good (though necessarily hurried) look at comparative cognition: the field that  asks what humans have in common with other creatures regarding how they think, and what makes humans unique?

As she reviews highlights of this complex literature, Shettleworth shows us some of the key principles of comparative cognition. For example, different species might use very different cognitive strategies to solve the same problem: to orient in space, species might use dead reckoning, vectors, landmarks, route-learning or cognitive maps.

Another example: because animals have different abilities than we, humans may be insensitive to how they experience a problem. For example, because the visual systems of some birds and honeybees extend into the ultraviolet range, a scientist looking a brightly colored flower or plumage may mistake what a bird or bee responds to.

Another key principle that has frustrated many an undergraduate is Lloyd Morgan’s Cannon: boiled down, it means that one shouldn’t interpret animal behavior as reflecting more sophisticated cognition if simpler cognition will do. It’s natural to interpret an animal behavior as reflecting cognitive processes humans would invoke in that situation. The animal may be doing what humans do, but for very different reasons or different methods.

Most often, this “other mechanism” is simple association. Time and time again, Shettleworth points out that what looks like sophisticated communication, say, or empathy, is explainable by the operation of relatively simple associative models, and that more work is actually needed to persuade us that the claimed cognitive process is actually at work. Such reading leads to momentary frustration, but ultimate admiration for the care of the scientists.

So how exactly are species different than humans? First, I should repeat that species are all different from one another, and so the question that might interest us (as it interested Darwin) is whether humans are in any way unique? Shettleworth closes with a review of a few proposed answers—e.g., Mike Tomasello’s suggestion that humans alone cooperatively share intentions—but ultimately casts her vote with none.

This is a wonderful book for a reader with a bit of background in psychology, but make no mistake, it’s not popular reading. Shettleworth sets out to review the field, not to offer choice bits to tempt a reader who was not otherwise interested.

Should educators read this book? Direct applications to educational practice are unlikely to spring to mind, but educators who, as part of their practice, are deeply immersed in understanding human cognition and development will likely find it of value.

In Tyranny of the Textbook Beverlee Jobrack offers many observations that you’ve heard before. Standards alone won’t improve achievement. Testing alone won’t improve achievement. Technology alone won’t improve achievement. What makes the book worth reading is not Jobrack’s thoughts on these topics, because they are, frankly, fairly ordinary. But her thoughts on the textbook industry make the book well worth your time.

The kernel of her argument has three pieces:

(1)    Textbook development: Textbooks are developed based on tradition and based on competitors’ products. No one in the publishing industry worries about whether the materials are effective. As Jobrack notes, publishers are for-profit enterprises. They need decision-makers to adopt their textbooks. Decision-makers do not base adoptions on effectiveness—or at least, publishers believe that they do not.

(2)    Textbook adoption: What factors drive adoptions? To the extent that teachers have any input, it will be teacher leaders, and they already teach well. They have an existing set of lesson plans that work well. So they are not interested in a textbook that would necessitate rewriting all of those lesson plans. So new textbooks tend to be conservative. Further, just three publishing companies account for 75% of the market. So most of the books look the same. Consequently, relatively trivial features have an outsize influence on adoption decisions.

Trivial features like the cover design. Like the font size. Like whether the important features are clearly labeled or a bit more difficult to find.

Content matters to adoptions, according to Jobrack, only insofar as the publishers ensure that all of the state standards are “covered.” But she goes on to point out that there is little or no attention paid to ordering and presenting this content in a way to ensure that students learn. Again, effectiveness of learning is simply not on the publishers radar screen.

(3)    Why textbooks matter: Jobrack argues that textbooks are hugely important because they constitute a de facto curriculum. Beginning teachers are overwhelmed by the prospect of writing lesson plans, and so depend heavily instructional materials provided by publishers.

Is Jobrack right about all this? She ought to know whereof she speaks. She was promoted through the editorial ranks until she was the editorial director of SRA/McGraw-Hill. Still, we should bear in mind that these are mostly Jobrack’s impressions, not a systematic study of publishing business practices.

I admit that I’m probably more ready to believe Jobrack on publishing because her description so often matches my own experience. Like the beginning teachers she describes, when I first started teaching cognitive psychology, I relied heavily on published materials.  I laid out four textbooks on my desk, used the sequence of topics they all shared, and cobbled together lectures by stealing the best stuff from each.

I saw the conservatism Jobrack describes much later when I prepared to write my cognitive textbook and told my editor that I wanted to do something really different than what was currently on the market. Her response: “Okay, but don’t make it more than about 20% different or you’ll never get any adoptions.”

A point Jobrack makes indirectly but strikes me as more important than she realizes is the role of measurement. Jobrack notes that publishers would be motivated to make textbooks effective if that drove the market. Well, in order to know whether they are effective, we—teachers, administrators, parents, researchers, policymakers—need to agree on what we mean by effective and on a way to measure it. The textbook problem brings fresh urgency to this issue.

 Whether Jobrack is right or not, I hope this book will prompt greater discussion about textbooks, and greater scrutiny of adoption processes.