Education: Vertical or Horizontal

Microeconomists work with two concepts of integration: vertical and horizontal. Can these apply also to education?

In the business world, an example of vertical integration could be a manufacturing company which expands by purchasing the company which provides raw materials and by purchasing the company which distributes and retails its finished products.

An example of horizontal integration might be a regional supplier of one product purchasing the suppliers of the same product in neighboring regions, or even by acquiring other suppliers of the product in its own region.

Applying these principles to education, one might conclude that, in many cases, American education is vertically integrated. Many public schools systems, and quite a few private ones, cover the supply chain from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Some even include pre-K.

On the other hand, there seems to be a lack of horizontal integration. Although the nationwide impact of federal policies is growing, it remains a small influence on the day-to-day operations of most public schools. The impact of state governments varies somewhat among the fifty states, from those states which allow local school boards to have the majority of the decision-making power to those state governments which make significant educational policy decisions and leave it to the local boards to implement the statewide policies.

In any case, it is plausible to hypothesize that public education systems in the United States are more vertically integrated than horizontally integrated.

What would be the effect of reversing this situation? How would it be if education were more horizontally integrated, and less vertically integrated?

This might happen if, e.g., the K through 12 system were broken into three units: the K through 5 primary school, the 6 through 8 middle school, and the 9 through 12 high school. Of course, these divisions are somewhat arbitrary.

Having divided the system into three segments, each of the segments could merge with neighboring regional segments at the same level. The K through 5 segment in one town or county could merge with the K through 5 segment in a neighboring town or county.

The total number of educational systems would at first be increased, as each system is divided into three systems, but then the number of systems would decrease, as the systems which serve the same levels merge with each other.

A K-12 system serves 13 levels. A school district with 20,000 pupils serves approximately 1,500 pupils at each level.

A system with more horizontal and less vertical integration would serve 20,000 pupils — for example, in grades 9 through 12 — by serving 4 levels with 5,000 pupils at each level.

By breaking the K-12 range into three units, more focus and specialization could bring expertise to each level.

It seems odd that the currently widespread K-12 model addresses the education of five-year-old Kindergarten pupils in the same breath with which it addresses the education of eighteen-year-old 12th-grade students. Is it efficient to place such disparate enterprises into the same administration?

If this project were carried out, then eventually one might see utterly separate teacher training programs at the university level: Why would a Kindergarten teacher and a twelfth-grade calculus teacher attend the same “school of education” at the university? Eventually, they might have utterly separate professional associations and collective bargaining units. There would be separate boards of education at the state and local levels.

These suggestions are not purely hypothetical. In several countries around the world, variations of these ideas have been implemented.

With a decrease in vertical integration, more proficiency in teaching could be developed for each level. Pedagogical methodologies would be more finely-tuned.

Different Ways of Measuring School Safety

Evaluating any aspect of education in the United States is a complex task. There are geographic variables: from city to city, from county to county, and from state to state. There are various types of schools: public, private, and charter — and within those three categories, numerous subcategories. There are various levels: some localities operate a K through 6 elementary school, while others opt for K through 5; similar choices exist for ways to figure secondary education up through grade 12.

The generalizations which human thought naturally seeks are therefore difficult to produce accurately. It is more informative to ask about schools within one of the fifty states than to ask about national statistics. It is more productive to ask about a county’s or a city’s schools than to ask about statewide averages. It is most significant to learn about one specific school.

While people often investigate national trends in education, they usually also have in mind one particular school. Yet one must inspect national statistics, if for no other reason than it is the mode of the current time to discuss education in this way.

This includes the grim and troubling topic of school shootings.

According to a September 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), there were 108 deaths in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools in the years from 2000 to 2021. Confusingly, the same source gives an average annual of between 40 and 60 violent deaths at American schools. The discrepancy may arise from including non-firearm deaths.

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) lists 573 shooting fatalities from 1970 to 2022 in schools, a rate nearly double the NCES figures.

The contrast between the NCES numbers and the CHDS numbers highlight the need to pay attention to statistical methodologies.

By contrast, Statista reports that there were 21,156 homicides in the United States in 2021. That is part of a long-term downward trend in the annual number of homicides which began in 1991, when there were 24,700 deaths by homicide.

This would yield a general result of roughly five to eleven deaths per year in school shootings, with perhaps approximately 21,000 homicides per year outside of schools.

One might conclude that schools are not such terribly dangerous places after all.

Yet the number of shooting deaths, or even the larger number of violent deaths, is only one way to measure the safety, or lack of safety, in schools.

Significant other forms of harm can, and sadly do, happen to students, like graduating without the ability to accurately manipulate the quadratic formula, or to present well interpersonally in job interviews. It is a tangible harm for students to complete a K-12 program without being able to conceptualize abstractly the grammar of their native language or of a second language which they have studied.

In sum, it is harmful to students not to receive the full content of a legitimate curriculum. Their lives are diminished if they cannot find Paraguay on a map, or explain General Pershing’s significance in WW1. They have lost something if they have not read the works of Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Locke, P.G. Wodehouse, or H.P. Lovecraft.

To keep students safe is first to reduce even further the small number of deaths which do occur in schools, but also to ensure that the lives thus saved are enriched and enlivened by significant learning.

What’s the Difference Between Homework and Studying? And Why Does It Matter?

At some point during the K-12 years, students should — but sometimes don’t — conceptualize the distinction between “doing homework” and “studying.” Until these two activities are understood as separate, a student’s progress remains suboptimal.

As long as studying remains a mysterious activity, often indistinguishable from doing homework, teachers often remedy the situation by assigning more homework to make up for the lack of studying. A concrete example:

A teacher might assign the students to “study pages 50 to 100” with the goal of being prepared for a classroom discussion of those pages three days from now and a written examination about those pages four days from now. This assignment will be productive if the students understand what it means to study and if they know how to study.

If the teacher suspects that the students do not know what studying is, and do not know how to study, then the teacher may well create homework to substitute for the studying that can’t or won’t happen. Such homework might be in the form of, e.g., a series of questions about the assigned pages: questions which the students must answer in written form, bringing those written answers to class after completing the homework outside of class time.

In response to those who argue that “teachers assign too much homework” or that “teachers give too great a weight to homework in the grading process,” one might answer that if more time, energy, and attention were devoted by teachers to explaining study skills; if more time, energy, and attention were devoted by students to learning study skills and to studying; and if both parents and society expected students to study; then less homework would be needed and less homework would be assigned.

There is a reciprocity: where there is more studying, there is less homework; where there is less studying, there is more homework.

Surveying school systems around the globe, one can find various configurations: some schools assign little homework, but students are expected to be able to study a text and prepare for discussions and examinations by studying the text. Other schools expect little studying, and students prepare for discussions and prepare for examinations by completing many homework assignments.

Studying is a skill which is part of the move toward independent learning. Homework is an activity which is part of dependent learning. The K-12 journey is, one hopes, a move from dependent to independent learning.

Hiring an Expert Speaker to Present to Your Faculty? Do Your Homework: Examine the Public Record

During the 2021-2022 academic year, the Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) hired Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz to give a series of presentations to teachers. Thousands of dollars were paid to Dr. Sealey-Ruiz for a series of Zoom tele-presentations or webinars.

These events proved initially to be relatively unremarkable. This, however, changed abruptly.

One presentation was scheduled the day after a separate presentation had been scheduled, not primarily for the AAPS teaching faculty, but rather for the Ann Arbor community at large. Someone had envisioned that parents and other residents of the city would want to attend this online event. The event was quite poorly attended. Among the several causes leading to the minimal participation was a lack of publicity about the event. It is not clear whether this was due to poor planning or an internal communications glitch inside the AAPS. It was, in any case, probably an innocent mistake or miscalculation; it does not seem that anyone intended to deliberately torpedo the event.

It certainly would have been disappointing to the administration of the AAPS that so few people logged on to see and hear the presentation by Dr. Sealey-Ruiz. It certainly was also a disappointment to Sealey-Ruiz herself, although her rate of pay for the work was not affected by the attendance numbers.

What was, however, noteworthy was anger and invective which Dr. Sealey-Ruiz aimed at the teachers at the next day’s meeting. Fresh off the disappointment of the previous day’s low attendance, and apparently unaware that teachers had not been asked to attend the poorly-attended session, but rather merely informed about it, she accused teachers of a long list of failings. More precisely, the meeting had barely been mentioned to the teachers at all, buried in a multi-page administrative email, so that a few teachers were barely aware of its existence, and many other teachers not aware at all.

It seemed not to have occurred to Dr. Sealey-Ruiz, or not to matter to her, that this was simply to be explained as a communications glitch, and not as some grand statement of intent.

Instead, she continued with her embarrassing and shocking tirade, hurling reproaches in a painful tongue-lashing. It is not surprising that she would be angry or disappointed. It is surprising that she leveled a significant degree of animosity toward the faculty and that she failed to understand that it was probably innocent miscommunication which led to insufficient publicity and the subsequent low levels of attendance.

Yet the surprise might have been predicted. A survey of Dr. Sealey-Ruiz’s published works reveals hints about her temperament. She has a rather high opinion of herself. In one passage from her book Love from the Vortex, she writes:

I have come to the realization that no man on earth will ever be able to comprehend the depths of love I have to offer.

Her work is largely affective. She refers repeatedly to a concept which she calls “critical love.” Her writing makes it clear that her concept of education is driven by emotion.

In another passage from that book, she writes:

I am truly happy that you are happy. Yet, I am also sad about your happiness; for, if you were experiencing just a little unhappiness, then it could open up an opportunity for me to experience total bliss.

Given the two quotes above, and other similar texts which could be cited, the bitter outburst, captured on Zoom and witnessed live by almost 2,000 participants, might not have been a surprise.

The lesson: It might be good to screen or otherwise look into speakers before hiring them for a series of presentations.

The Omnibus Grade: A Systemic Weakness in Measuring and Evaluating Students

Educators who otherwise disagree on nearly every topic can unite around the position that the current system for measurement and evaluation, as it is found in most U.S. public school systems, is suboptimal. A semester’s worth of work in a high school class is allegedly captured in a single letter.

More detailed and nuanced grading systems are desirable, and will give more information about the student. Many such systems are possible: the readers, upon reflection, can envision their own.

Imagine that, at the end of the semester, a student were to receive four grades: a numerical or letter grade in each of three categories — mastery of content and curriculum, work habits and completion, and ranking relative to peers — the fourth grade would consist of a narrative or commentary on the student and the student’s work.

This system would much more powerfully describe the student’s experience and achievements during the semester. Again, this is simply one of many hypothetically possible systems which would be superior to current practice.

Yet the reader is ill-advised to invest much energy into the task of imagining a better grading system, or how the current system could be improved. Change is unlikely.

In order to implement any significantly preferable grading system, agreement or consent would be required from: parents, teachers, administrators, local school boards, state-level education bureaucrats, admissions officers at colleges and universities, local voters, labor union leaders, national-level education bureaucrats, and others.

The likelihood of finding a new grading system which is both significantly better and capable of obtaining approval from the above-listed stakeholders is near zero. America is stuck with a suboptimal grading system.

In the absence of a newer and better system, admissions officers at colleges and universities develop workarounds: increased reliance on standardized testing, face-to-face interviews, each institution’s own admissions test, etc.

The current high school grading system is bad, and not likely to get better.

Resilience in High School Students: Can They Obtain It?

Anyone who works with teenagers on a regular basis will report the divide between those who have resilience and those who don’t. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as:

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.

The question poses itself: if some people aren’t resilient, can those people become resilient? Mary Pipher writes:

Resilience is not a fixed trait and we can master the skill of resilience in the same ways we learn to cook, drive, or do yoga. Growth isn’t inevitable.

Those who don’t develop resilience will “remain locked in their smallest selves cosseted by blankets of familiar but outdated ideas,” or,

Others wither emotionally over time and deal with life’s many body blows by becoming more isolated and self-involved.

In an educational setting, resilience is the ability to focus one’s self on one’s work, even if the last piece of work went badly, and even if this piece of work isn’t easy, or isn’t likely to be completed perfectly.

Resilience is the ability to override one’s emotions and direct one’s self to one’s duty — to get the job done — to “just do it,” in the words of the famous advertising slogan.

Public Conversation about Education: Not Reserved for the Specialists

If a society gives more than mere lip service to the concept of democracy, it must tolerate and even encourage open discussion about a variety of issues, including education. All the more so if members of the general public are themselves educated.

In a democratic society, there is a tension between the specialist and the general public. Technical expertise is valuable and valued, yet the resource people with these professional skills should not become exclusive or elitist. Educators possess insights corresponding to their work, but many citizens who work in other fields are capable of analyzing these insights.

Sadly, some educators individually, and the education establishment as a whole, exude an aura of elitism: author Mortimer Smith reports that “one such” leader

among the educators, referring to arguments carried on by “the nonprofessional part of society” about “the character of the skills and the methods of teaching them,” says loftily that “in reality this is not the business of society at large, any more than the kinds of prescriptions doctors give to patients should be a matter of public discussion.” (In other words, the message of the educator to the parent concerned about what should be taught and how it should be taught, is this: Mind your own business.) This unfortunately is not simply a case of individual, eccentric arrogance; the American Association of School Administrators makes precisely the same point in their claim that school board members are no more competent to pass on curriculum matters “than the patient’s family can pass on the scientific details of the doctor’s treatment.”

Such behavior merely fuels suspicions among the public that the ordinary citizens are being managed or handled, and are not part of a truly democratic dialogue about education.

Smith introduces a comparison between education and medicine. Just as a healthcare practitioner explains a diagnosis and various treatment options to a patient, so an educator should explain various alternatives to students and parents. Just as patients should be given maximum information and empowered to make as many choices as possible, so also schools should inform and defer to the decision-making of students, parents, and the community at large.