Plato's Disciples

I’m not a fan of Plato. I believe he was, at heart, a fascist. He preferred “philosopher kings” to democratically elected leaders. He was anti-family and a proponent of social engineering. He was a misogynist even by his day’s standards. He was egomaniacal in his belief that philosophers could change human nature and build a utopian society. Hogwash. I adhere to William F. Buckley’s view that we’d be better governed by “the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty.”

I mention Plato because it appears the Matawan-Aberdeen Regional School District shares his disdain for common sense. Like Plato, our school district prefers a “scientific approach” that is founded, not in science, but upon intellectual hubris.

At the past board meeting I asked about two programs whose combined cost is over $135,000 – Schools Attuned Training and Reading Recovery Teachers-In-Training. On the spot, without any notes or preparation, Kimberley Honnick, the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction, explained each program in detail including their histories, the organizations involved, the methodologies, and the school district’s need for them. Ms. Honnick is likely the foremost expert on education I have ever met. Yet, I profoundly disagree with her regarding the need for these and similar programs funded by the school district.

Schools Attuned Training is provided by All Kinds of Minds, a non-profit organization founded in 1995 by Dr. Mel Levine, a pediatrician and author of “The Myth of Laziness”, and Charles R. Schwab, the noted financier. The basic idea is that every child has strengths and weaknesses. When a child struggles in school, we need to pinpoint his strengths and weaknesses through a “neurodevelopmental profile” and then customize an educational method that plays to his strengths.

The program is touted as scientifically based and highly regarded among educators. But does it actually improve education? Since I can’t find a single study suggesting it does, I would have to say no.

In 2003, All Kinds of Minds hired Dr. Diana L. Montgomery to research the effectiveness of the program by reviewing participant surveys taken during the course. She did not do any follow up to measure the program’s effectiveness in the classroom. This is like measuring the effectiveness of a skydiving course by asking people whether they liked the course and then ignoring whether they survived the jump.

Surely, in the past twelve years, Charles Schwab could have funded a study to clinically prove the effectiveness of this program. But doing so would have risked showing the program is actually ineffective.

So, that’s $75,000 we’re spending on a program to design courses around “neurodevelopmental profiles” even though there’s no scientific basis to believe the program works.

Reading Recovery, created by Marie Clay in 1979, is an early intervention program designed to reduce literacy problems. It, too, focuses on classroom instruction customized to the child’s needs. For the $61,410 spent on the program, the school district could have purchased nearly 3,000 copies of “Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training” from Amazon.com at a price of $21.50 per copy, shipping included. You would have to buy the book since neither the Matawan-Aberdeen Library nor any library associated with the Middlesex Automation Consortium carries a copy of this “bestseller”.

Does Reading Recovery work? In 1995, Reading Research Quarterly published a study by Dr. Timothy Shanahan and Dr. Rebecca Barr that states Reading Recovery “is less effective and more costly than has been claimed, and does not lead to systemic changes in classroom instruction, making it difficult to maintain learning gains.”

In a 2002 review of prior studies, Dr. Aleidine J. Moeller, the Director of the Teachers College Institute at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, stated the following:

• “Evaluations with a controlled group find that children who return to the classroom as successfully ‘recovered’ students immediately begin falling behind. Their learning rate is slower than that of other low achieving children.”
• “Even with the best classroom instruction, there will still be some students who don’t make adequate progress and need additional, more intensive instruction. Reading Recovery has not met the needs of these lowest performing students.”
• “[B]y virtue of the number of students who can be reached, Reading Recovery is at least 200% more expensive than other first grade interventions.”
• “[S]tudents in Reading Recovery may experience problems with self-esteem when they do not perform well.”
• “[In 23 years,] Reading Recovery has not changed as a result of new research on reading.”

In summary, Reading Recovery is an expensive program that is more likely to harm than help the child.

A key point to remember is that the $135,000 dollars spent on training do not include the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on additional teachers to provide the one-on-one mentoring these programs require.

Why would the faculty so strongly support these programs? Because teachers love one-on-one programs. Individualized programs create the need to hire more teachers and give teachers the emotional reward of seemingly helping a child. Whether the students actually benefit appears largely irrelevant.

Why would the school board vote to support such programs? Because they don’t do their homework. The school board doesn't research the programs they fund with our tax dollars.

Plato asked an interesting question – Why are intellectuals so often ineffectual leaders? He answered by saying that intellectuals are accustomed to the light of day while most of the world operates in darkness, i.e. ignorance. Intellectuals, according to Plato, find it difficult to work in darkness.

I disagree. The problem isn’t that there’s not enough light. The problem is that too many intellectuals choose to close their eyes to reality. >>> Read more!