Making Learning Easier

In nearly every industry, there is one primary goal.  That goal is to do more with less work.  We want to produce more, in less time, with less effort.  We want to provide services for more people with less work, in less time.  This desire to increase profits and improve outcomes with less expenses, in less time, with less work is nearly universal.  There is one exception: Education.

In education, the mentality is that more work is better.  Some teachers have the view that if students are working less hard than they worked in school, then the students are getting off easy.  The "I had to work so hard for this, so you should too" mentality is pretty common in schools.  Another common mentality is that students that are not spending a lot of time and effort learning are lazy.  It is pretty much taken for granted that time and effort spent are equal to the learning that occurred.

Imagine the CEO of a company telling employees that the company is not going to automate processes, because the CEO had to do things manually when he was a grunt worker, and it would be unfair for the current grunts to have it any easier.  That CEO would be canned so fast!  Successful businesses are constantly looking for ways to cut fat.  If they can find a reasonably cheap way to make a process take half the time, they will do it.  They even do this for learning activities, like training.  Training is important, but if training time can be cut in half without sacrificing learning, then we should do it.  Streamlining processes is better for everyone (except the employees who have to find new jobs...).

Laziness in business is a bad thing, but so is useless work.  If a fast food restaurant has a lot of employees but not much work, the employees will be told to clean.  If the cleaning is finished and things are still slow, a good fast food place does not tell the employees to clean all the same things again (though bad ones do this all the time...).  Employees are let off early.  There is no attitude that an employee should be constantly doing worthless busywork to avoid laziness.  If an employee's services are not needed, then the employee is sent home.  If the situation becomes chronic, employees schedules are cut or they start getting laid off.

Lastly, imagine a business that treats time and effort as value produced.  No one cares about actual output.  An employee who does five times the work, but only works half the time of another employee is treated as less valuable.  Raises and promotions are not based on performance but rather on time served.  Some companies do work like this.  Those companies have been slowly dying out over the last several decades.  Many still exist, but the truly successful and promising businesses of today care more about productivity than time spent.  The guy that spends half of his time on Facebook but produces more than three other guys is more likely to get the raise.  Some businesses are allowing flexible schedules for more productive employees, because they are more interested in how much is produced than how much time is spent producing it.  Even though many businesses still value time more than production, it is beginning to be widely recognized that valuing production over time is a more sustainable and profitable long term business strategy.

Now, let's apply this to learning.  What if we could teach everything from kindergarten through 3rd grade in a single year?  What if we could do it in exactly the same amount of time we currently spend on just kindergarten?  Maybe this is impossible, maybe it is not, but what if it was possible?  If it was, our current education system would reject it.  They would say that one school year is not enough time to learn all of this stuff.  They would say that we would be letting the students off too easy.  They would compare time spent to learning, as if there were a mathematical formula proving that the maximum speed of human learning is too slow for this to work.  Or maybe I am wrong, and they would not, but I would argue that they already have done this.

We have proof that there are better teaching and learning methods than what we currently use in the U.S.  The problem is that administration would rather spend money on new white boards (seriously, we already have enough) than on equipment for improving learning.  They are skeptical.  They don't think kids are capable of learning that fast, and they treat using technology to speed up learning as cheating.  When you show them that they are wrong, they will praise you and say a bunch of nice words, but their "I had to do it the hard way, and so should you" attitude does not change.  The problem with improving the U.S. educational system is not about mental, monetary, or technological constraints anymore.  The problem is the attitude of those in charge, who think that anything that makes learning easier or faster is unfair cheating.

We need to treat education more like a business.  The desired outcome is for students to learn (and retain, within reason) a bunch of specific stuff.  The input is money, time, and teachers.  In a business, we would be looking for ways to streamline the process.  A student takes 13 years to teach enough to get through the public school system.  How can we reduce that?  Maybe we can trim some fat.  Is there something we are teaching them that is worthless (in some places, there are)?  Is there some way we could change how we teach that would help learning to be faster (the evidence points to heck yes)?  What can be do to reduce costs, without sacrificing quality (hint: make the process faster)?  Can we reduce the number of teachers without sacrificing quality (another hint: fire crummy teachers and use some of the money saved to pay the good teachers more, so they have more time and motivation to figure out how to teach faster)?

Frankly, this should be an easy task.  Just over the last 5 years, education research has come up with many ways of improving learning speeds (in fact, I would argue that this is evidence that our current system may actually be using the single worst possible method for teaching).  Cut the fat in places like homework (there is no reason teachers should be grading 30 minutes to an hour worth of homework per student each day, when research has repeatedly shown that there is no value in more than 15 minutes of homework a day).  In fact, using the right teaching techniques, some schools have managed to teach students as much as any institutionalized public school, while letting students choose whether they want to learn or play each day.

I once complained that there was not enough research on education, and I still believe that, but over the last few years, we have seen a large amount of new research done.  There are no more excuses.  If our public education officials cannot treat this more like a business, we don't need them.  Maybe we should be electing people with real business experience for this job, instead of a bunch of budding politicians with strong opinions but no real world experience (or even a tiny bit of research) in either business or education.  (My solution is home school.  At least that way, I can be sure that the teachers are actually fully invested in the well being of my children!)

Linked Learning

One of the problems with this public school system is that it no longer serves its original purpose.  The U.S. public school system was intended to prepare students for entry level jobs with good long term career potential.  Our modern school system fails horribly in this, and it really does not even do a good job of preparing students for college.  It does teach some useful skills, but they are too general and U.S. schools rarely teach application enough for the skills to be immediately applicable to real life.  That is beginning to change, with linked learning.

Linked learning teaches through application.  Students learn by applying their skills in real life situations.  Not only does this teach real life work skills (including communication skills), it also happens to be about the most effective way of learning and remembering what was learned.

An article I recently read discusses the experience of a California high school using linked learning.  Students choose a general field to train in.  They choose from engineering, business, science and technology, and digital media.  These programs focus on applications in the chosen field, but the education is still general enough to be useful regardless of what careers the students eventually choose.  Also, despite the focus in a single field, these students tend to do better in college in all fields.

One of the best things about linked learning is that it can easily be done in a way that allows students to apply all of their classes to their projects.  Science and math classes can help for the mathematical parts of the project, even if they are limited to accounting and scheduling.  Language classes teach research and written communication skills that are essential to most decent jobs.  Biology can be useful in many aspects, including the impact a project might have on people or animals.  And, classes aside, these group projects also help students develop face-to-face communications and teamwork skills.

Further, most projects at this particular school are regularly reviewed by people working in the field the project falls within.  Students are given the opportunity to get advice from experts in their chosen field.  Besides the obvious learning opportunities, this also gives students a feel for what working in that field is like.

If this is the future of U.S. education, and given the government funding going into it, it might be, we are looking at a much better future than I ever would have predicted.  This does not fix our post-secondary education system, but linked learning has made a big impact on students, who are much more enthusiastic about learning than a vast majority of students have been in all of U.S. history.  If linked learning is the future of U.S. education, it might not matter if universities can fix their problems, because if they don't, they will probably be left in the dust, without much impact on education at all.

High School Graduation Exams

In a common trend nationwide, many states have mandated high school graduation exams.  These exams are often very similar to GED exams, and high school students must pass them to graduate.  Aside from known problems with standardized testing, it turns out this posses another rather major problem: It hinders students from getting into good colleges.

This is very counter intuitive, but what it comes down to is that high schools that lack sufficient funding are often forced to choose between college preparation and preparing students for the graduation exam.  Since students can graduate without the college preparation, it is almost always the one to suffer.

Obviously, this is a major problem.  Without college preparation, high school literally offers no benefit.  When the public school system was created, its primary intent was to prepare students for the workplace.  The skills learned in high school were sufficient to qualify for a vast majority of entry level jobs.  This is no longer the case.  Few employers willing to accept education lower than college even care about high school graduation.  The improvement in employability gained by high school graduation is negligible.  In other words, without college preparation, high school is a colossal waste of four years.  If we are not going to reform our public education system to meet its original goal, the least we can do is reform it to meet the goal of preparing students for college.

While teaching to exit exams is a major problem that hinders the ability of high schools to prepare students for what really matters, the most basic solution is incredibly simple.  Choose an exit exam that will help with college preparation.  There are two incredibly obvious candidates, and neither of them will take any extra work from the schools.  These exams are the SAT and the ACT.  While both of these tests are graded, their grades mean different things to different schools.  Some colleges care more about high school GPAs than about these aptitude tests.  Some schools will accept ACT scores as low at 18, while others require 24 or 27 or higher.  Schools or states can easily pick a minimum grade that counts as passing though.  The benefit of using these tests, instead of some state mandated test that means nothing in the real world, is that teachers will be teaching to the tests that actually matter.

The ideal situation would be to administer both of these tests, with minimum passing scores on each, because there is really no solid standard which all colleges use.  Often more competitive schools prefer the SAT, mostly because it penalizes students for wrong answers.  Many schools prefer the ACT though, because they consider penalizing incorrect answers to be counterintuitive or even unethical, since it encourages students to second guess themselves and skip questions they may know the answers to, resulting in inaccurate scores.  Many schools will accept either test.  Teaching to both will not only offer the biggest benefits, it will also make sure students have a reasonably broad education in the subjects colleges will expect them to already have a background in.

There is potential for state mandated high school exit exams to be valuable to students, but arbitrary tests that do not ensure students are prepared for the real world are totally worthless.  High schools that do not prepare students for college are a waste of time, money, and effort.  While there is a lot of reform that needs to happen to meet this goal, one of the simplest things that would make the biggest difference is replacing current high school exit exams with real world college entrance exams.  This would help low income students the most, and they are the ones that need it the most, but overall, it would have a major impact on education in the U.S., as it would help a great many very smart students get into colleges that can do them justice.