Education Follies

California finally acted to ensure that high school students met some minimum performance criteria before they could graduate — and look what happens:

From the San Jose Mercury News:

A lawsuit seeking to ensure that no high school senior is denied a diploma simply for failing California’s new exit exam was filed Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of tens of thousands of 12th graders who have not passed the test.

The complaint asserts that there are so many inequities in California public schools that some students have not had a fair opportunity to learn the eighth-grade math and 10th-grade English language skills the exam measures. It also states that funding for extra instruction to help students pass has been inadequate.

The plaintiffs will seek an injunction preventing the state from enforcing the exit exam requirement for this year’s graduating class.

According to the article, the basis for the suit (the “angle” they’re using to get the result they want) is that the legislation requiring that students pass the “exit exam” before they can graduate offers no alternative — pass the exam, or you don’t graduate. I don’t understand the legal theory behind this, as I know of no requirement for “alternatives”. But what do I know about creative lawyering?

Some who know me are surprised at my stance on education, as I am myself largely “uneducated” (at least, in the conventional sense) — I graduated from high school, but not from college; my professional education was done on my own. So folks expect me to espouse the benefits of self-education and to dismiss the benefits of a formal education. They’d be right on the former, but dead wrong on the latter.

My concerns about the state of our formal education stem from my politics — and my patriotism. I know that the vast majority of people need that formal education to learn the skills they need to get a job (especially that first one), to contribute to society, and to prepare them for independent adulthood. Because I’ve spent my entire career in high-tech industries, and because I’ve hired many people into the companies I founded or worked for, I’ve had occasion to witness firsthand how well our educational system achieves these goals. And because for the past 12 years I’ve worked extensively with employees in foreign countries (Estonia, Russia, and England), I’ve also had a chance to compare the results of our educational system with that of other countries.

And this makes me fear for my country’s future, folks — because I see the young people of other countries being educated in a manner that is frighteningly superior to ours. The example I’m most familiar with is Estonia (and this includes, to some extent, older Estonians who received all or part of their education under the Soviet regime). I know hundreds of people there, and I’ve worked closely with many of them. For the most part these are software engineers and computer scientists (by our terminology). My general observation: right out of school, the majority of the Estonians have a much better fundamental background in computer science and have far better mathematics skills than the majority of their American-educated counterparts will ever achieve. The only area in my own experience where the Americans have an edge is in the process and management of software development — and even here, the Estonians are catching up rapidly.

But perhaps even more importantly, the Estonians (and other non-Americans) by-and-large have a cultural expectation that what matters for their personal success is results. Not how hard they try, not how they feel about things, but results. In engineering terms, they understand that they need to get the right answer, or to build something that actually works.

This is not to say that Americans all don’t get the need for results — obviously, many do. But it seems to me that our educational system is not helping in this regard. Our system produces graduates — not all of them, but enough for me to be concerned — who really, truly, don’t understand that in order to succeed in their profession, the actually have to get results. The right answer is important; engineers really do have to build things that work. And not all of our high school or university graduates understand this at all.

On many occasions in my career as an employer, I have run into this in fuzzy or indirect ways, where I can only suspect that our educational system has done my employee no favors. On a few memorable occasions I have been slapped upside the head with an incident that unambiguously made the point. One example: a couple of years ago I was running the IT organization for a company with a substantial datacenter and about 50 US employees. One of the guys working for me was a desktop technician; his job was to keep all the desktop computers and laptops that our employees used working correctly. From my observations of his work, I thought he was a mediocre technician — he took a long time to resolve problems, and was unable to resolve far too many of them. In his annual review, I gave him relatively low ratings, and in our discussion about those ratings I explained why. As we talked, I could see this poor fellow getting more and more puzzled, until finally I just asked him why. He said “You’re not giving me any credit at all for working hard! I’ve been working 10 or more hours every day for months!” That led into a (for me) very interesting discussion about this issue, and we finally got to a point where he asserted to me that it “should” be true that someone who worked very, very hard but didn’t achieve the desired would be more rewarded by the company (raises, bonuses, etc.) than someone who achieved all the desired results with little effort. He really, truly believed that, and I could not dissuade him — so I told him he needed to find work at a company with beliefs more compatible with his own. He left shortly after this discussion.

I have never run into this attitude with an Estonian employee.

Back to the article and the lawsuit: the whole point of the exit exam is to prove the student can get results with their education. I support that 100%! That’s exactly what will be expected of them in the careers most of them pursue; most careers (politics, therapy, and few others excepted) demand results — and there is no “alternative” way to succeed. I believe the same thing should be true of our educational system; the only thing that makes me unhappy about the exit exam is how low it sets the bar. I’d like to see similar objective requirements put in place for university graduates. And I’d like to see the bar set high in all cases.

Such objective criteria are but a beginning. Next on my list would be a return to grading systems that actually mean something; where only a few students achieve the top rankings, and they achieve those rankings because they stand out in terms of the results they’ve delivered. But now I’m dreaming…

This lawsuit is unadulterated liberal poppycock. I hope is is summarily dismissed, with prejudice.