Gerald W. Bracey

Gerstner and Thompson were only the latest members of what I have come to call the Education Scare Industry to try and create anxiety over test scores and jobs. As John P. Smith III of Michigan State University showed in the Winter 1999 American Educational Research Journal, there is a small library of such warnings including "A Nation At Risk" (1983), Educating Americans for the Twenty First Century (1983), Investing in People (1989), America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages (1990), and the SCANS report, What Work Requires of Schools (1991) are all in that tradition. We can now add former senator John Glenn's hysterically titled commission report Before It's Too Late (2000) to the collection (all the while preparing a Rotten Apple Award for it).

All of these dire warnings have been sounded in the absence of any FIRM data (or in the instance of "A Nation At Risk", through the use of selective, spun, and distorted data). As I have pointed out repeatedly, the higher the tech, the lower the skill often needed for it. Common examples I use are today's cameras and today's computers compared to those of 30 year, or even ten years ago. Smith points out that researchers and commentators have been split on the issue, some arguing that technology makes work more complex, some claiming it "deskills" workers and others taking the position that work tomorrow will look a lot like work yesterday. "Since many more positions for sales clerks are created than for system analysts, the demands for lower skilled jobs outweigh those for higher skilled positions." In fact, retail sales accounts for almost as many jobs as the top ten fastest growing occupations combined (these data can be found in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook 2000).

Smith decided it might be nice to actually have some empirical evidence on the matter and, being in Michigan, sought to find changes in the mathematics demands on workers assembling automobiles. Smith tells us that putting a car together involves hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses in a hierarchy. What Smith calls Tier 1 suppliers provide materials directly to those who carry out the final assembly. Tier 2 suppliers supply Tier 1 suppliers, while Tier 3 suppliers send materiel to Tier 2. To fully understand the jobs involved Smith had to visit many different sites.

He also had to conceptualize what "mathematics in the workplace" really means. In school, mathematics takes place in "math class." On the job, it is distributed throughout the process and often not immediately available to inspection:

Mathematics reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from school mathematics. In fact, the algorithms taught in school are often not the computational methods of choice for either workers or students. In both school and work settings, people solve numerical problems using multiple strategies, including methods of their own invention, and often reason mentally without recourse to paper and pencil or calculation tools. At work, numerical computation emerges from measuring and/or reasoning about quantities. At school, however, students struggle with multiplicative concepts in part because schools focus on numbers and arithmetic, rather than on more fundamental issues of quantities and their relationships. Finally, visualization has been an important nonnumerical resource in solving geometric problems in workplaces.

Smith's first draft of this research was written in 1997 so it makes no reference to TIMSS observations of teachers, but his comments seem quite consonant with the conclusions drawn from the TIMSS videotape studies.

The task of translating this into a scheme to code workplace behaviors for mathematics demands seems daunting. Smith devised four general categories with 16 sub-categories within them: Measurement, Numerical and Quantitative (counting and computing), statistical process control (algebraic formulas, graphical representation), and Spatial and Geometric.(visualization, use of coordinate systems, etc).

Smith describes the research in much detail and then asks the question "What level of mathematical competence do high school graduates need to participate in "high-tech workplaces? Does the United States need to rank first internationally in mathematics and science--as suggest in Goals 2000--for out students to enter and succeed in "world-class" manufacturing workplaces? As judged by this study, the answer is no…Managers and human resource personal interviewed in this study…corroborate this general assessment: the equivalent of an eighth -grade mathematics education is adequate preparation for modern, nonprofessional work."

Smith does feel that while workplace demands don't outstrip school curricula, those curricula do not match the workforce well. "Students bound [for the sort of work described in the study] would appear better served by problem-based curricula aligned with the standards of the National Council of teachers of Mathematics, which emphasize making sense of quantitative situations, technology for computation and representation, and understanding and explanation, than by traditional computation-based curricula. Many times workers we spoke with spontaneously commented that the purpose of mathematics escaped them in school and became clear only at work. Situated, problem-based curricula may help to narrow the gap between 'abstract' mathematics and its uses in the world."

Smith realizes his findings might not generalize to other occupations, but, even so, "broad claims about the 'higher skills' that workers need should be examined with a degree of caution." Amen.

LITERACY: RICH GETTING RICHER

Many reasons have been put forward for the lower academic performance of low SES students. A study by Nell K. Duke of Michigan State University suggests another: the poorer learning environments of schools serving low income kids. Her research appears in the Summer, 2000 issue of the American Educational Research Journal.

She notes at the beginning people generally agree that when it comes to developing literacy, the more print experience the better. "Scholars recommend extensive reading practice, daily read-aloud, and routine writing. Qualifiers such as 'substantial' and 'ongoing' are frequently used to suggest the quantity of textual experience necessary for acquisition of a particular form of text."

While quantity is important, but so is variety. "If we wish students to learn to read and write extended text forms (e.g., books, newspapers, magazine), students must have experience reading and writing extended text.

In her study, Duke repeatedly visited first grade classrooms in some very high- and very low-SES schools in an urban area. She looked at the kinds and amounts of print experience children in these classrooms were having.

She found classroom libraryies in low-SES schools were about 40% smaller than those in high SES schools and fewer books were added during the year. Fewer books in low-SES classes were displayed to call attention to them, and the children in low-SES schools used them less often and in fewer ways. "For example, whereas seven [of ten] high -SES classrooms had a specific time during which students were to read or look at books silently, only two [of ten] low-SES classrooms had that time."

One low-SES classroom had a four-shelf rolling cart of books. Two shelves were hard for the kids to get to, but it didn't seem to matter since the books on those shelves were seldom used, being mostly textbooks from the 1960's and some reference books not designed for early elementary grades. New books added during the year were almost all those purchased by the teacher with her own money, or gifts to the teacher from friends.

Similarly, high-SES classrooms displayed more and more varied types of printed material on the walls and other parts of the classroom environment and the teachers called attention to them more often. The print on the walls and elsewhere in the classrooms of high-SES classes were more often integrated with books and topics of study. One high-SES classroom, for example, displayed many pieces of print related to horses. These included poems, some of which were written by students, a large wall display of horse jokes from a children's magazine, a class-composed list of horse-related words, a list of horses of the world, a class-composed informational text about horses, and student-made labels on various horse related items. This print environment was accompanied by a large number of books, some informational about horses, others fictional narratives. Topics changed frequently

In contrast, "With few exceptions, the only occasions on which lower SES classrooms had an integrated display of environment print and classroom library resources was when they related to an upcoming holiday."

High-SES classes spent more time with extended text activities while low-SES classes spent more time with letters, words, and phrases. The differences in time were not huge. For instance, high-SES kids spent 49% of their time with extended text compared to 35% of the time for low-SES kids.

The relatively small differences in time, though, obscure the qualitative differences in what was going on. For instance, in one high-SES classroom, "Each morning students read familiar poems from their poetry anthologies. Some mornings they learn and add new poems. The teacher also has poems written on chart paper. During poetry times, the teacher draws students attention to and provides explicit instruction about rhyming words, particular phonograms, contractions, and compound words."

In a low-SES classroom, "Students were to have brought in something from home beginning with the letter 'p.' Class makes a list of things brought from home, beginning with this letter. In groups, students think of names of things that begin with the letter 'p'. Students practice writing upper-and lower-case ps [p's? It appears as ps in the text] on a paper with pictures of a pig and a pumpkin on it. Students who have finished may draw something that begins with the letter "p" on the back of their worksheet."

Thus, even when the high-SES teachers are teaching phonics, they are doing so within an activity that engages the children with literature and meaningful experiences with extended text.

High-SES students were given more choice in their reading, were more likely to have a high degree of authorship in their writing and were more likely to write for audiences beyond the teacher. For instance, one class wrote letters to the authors of books they read.

Duke developed an elaborate coding system to facilitate her analysis. Knowing, though, that while all coding systems capture some aspects of what is being observed, they also obscure other aspects, I called Duke and asked her what her system might have missed. One thing she mentioned was that in the high-SES classrooms, students could often talk to each other about what they were reading. In the low-SES classrooms, kids sat in rows and were discouraged from ever (her emphasis) talking to anyone other than the teacher. This might or might not have been necessary for classroom management (I didn't ask about that), but it greatly diminished the richness of the learning environment.

Duke also referred to the differences in bathroom facilities, both for adults and kids as "mind-boggling." High-SES classes had one or two bathrooms attached and children went as necessary, missing only a minute or two of classroom activity. In the low-SES classes, children were lined up and taken together, a process requiring 15-20 minutes.

Beyond that, she said, "Read Kozol."