The State of Education in the United States

The State of Education in the United States: Cornerstones for a More Effective Education

By: Enrique R. Suarez International Educator/Professor/ Management Consultant www.wix.com/suarezenrique/delta [email protected] 813-850-1676 USA

The Problem • Secondary education is under increasing attack for not preparing students to cope with modern life. • Failures appear in the form of corporate executives who misjudge the complexities of growth and competition, government leaders who are at a loss to understand economic and political change, and publics that support inappropriate responses to immigration pressures, changing international conditions, rising unemployment, the drug culture, governmental reform, and inadequacies in education.

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The Problem • Growing criticism of education may direct attention to incorrect diagnoses and ineffective treatments. • Weakness in education arises not so much from poor teachers as from inappropriateness of material that is being taught. • Students are stuffed with facts without having a frame of reference for making those facts relevant to the complexities of life. [email protected]

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The Problem • Responses to educational deficiencies are apt to result in public demands for still more of what is causing the present educational failures. • Pressures will increase for additional science, humanities, and social studies in an already overcrowded curriculum, a curriculum that fails to instill enthusiasm and a sense of relevance. • Instead, an opportunity exists for moving toward a common foundation that pulls all fields of study into a more understandable unity. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Much current dissatisfaction with pre-college education arises from past inability to show how people interact with one another and with their physical environment, and to reveal causes for what students see happening. • Because of its fragmentary nature, traditional education becomes less relevant as society becomes more complex, crowded, and tightly interconnected. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Education is compartmentalized into separate subjects that, in the real world, interact with one another. • Social studies, physical science, biology, and other subjects are taught as if they were inherently different from one another, even though behavior in each rests on the same underlying concepts. • For example, the dynamic structure that causes a pendulum to swing is the same as the core structure that causes employment and inventories to fluctuate in a product-distribution system and in economic business cycles. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Humanities are taught without relating the dynamic sweep of history to similar behaviors on a shorter time scale that a student can experience in a week or a year. • High schools teach a curriculum from which students are expected to synthesize a perspective and framework for understanding their social and physical environments. • But that framework is never explicitly taught. Students are expected to create a unity from the fragments of educational experiences, even though their teachers have seldom achieved that unity. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Missing from most education is direct treatment of the time dimension. • What causes change from the past to the present and the present into the future? How do present decisions determine the future toward which we are moving? How are lessons of history to be interpreted to the present? Why are so many corporate, national, and personal decisions ineffective in achieving intended objectives? [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Conventional educational programs seldom reveal the answers. Answers to such questions about how things change through time lie in the dynamic behavior of social, personal, and physical systems. • Dynamic behavior, common to all systems, can be taught as such. It can be understood. • Education has taught static snapshots of the real world. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • But the world's problems are dynamic. The human mind grasps pictures, maps, and static relationships in a wonderfully effective way. • But in systems of interacting components that change through time, the human mind is a poor simulator of behavior. • Mathematically speaking, even a simple social system can represent a tenth-order, highly nonlinear, differential equation. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Mathematicians can not solve the general case for such an equation. • No scientist, citizen, manager, or politician can reliably judge such complexity by intuition. • Yet, even a junior high school student with a personal computer and coaching in computer simulation can advance remarkably far in understanding such systems. • Education faces the challenge of undoing and reversing much that people learn by observing simple dynamic situations. [email protected]

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Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness • Experiences in everyday life deeply ingrain lessons that are deceptively misleading when one encounters more complex social systems (Forrester, 1971). • For example, from burning one’s fingers on a hot stove, one learns that cause and effect are closely related in both time and space. Fingers are burned here and now when too close to the stove. Almost all understandable experiences reinforce the belief that causes are closely and obviously related to consequences. • But in more complex systems, the cause of a difficulty is usually far distant in both time and space. [email protected]

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Cornerstones for a More Effective Education • The cause originated much earlier and arose from a different part of the system from where the symptoms appear. • To make matters even more misleading, a complex feedback system usually presents what we have come to expect, an apparent cause that lies close in time and space to the symptom. [email protected]

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Continue… • However, that apparent cause is usually a coincident symptom through which little leverage exists for producing improvement. • Education does little to prepare students for succeeding when simple, understandable lessons so often point in exactly the wrong direction in the complex real world. • Two mutually reinforcing developments now promise a learning process that can enhance breadth, depth, and insight in education. These two are: - System dynamics and - Learner-centered learning. [email protected]

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Precursors of System Dynamics • System dynamics evolved from prior work in feedback-control systems. The history of engineering servomechanisms reaches back several hundred years. • Popular writing, religious literature, and the social sciences have grappled with the closed-loop circular nature of cause and effect for thousands of years (Richardson, 1991). • In the 1920s and 1930s, understanding the dynamics of control systems accelerated. [email protected]

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Continue… • New theory evolved during development of electronic feedback amplifiers for transcontinental telephone systems at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and work at MIT on feedback controls for analog computers and military equipment. • After 1950, people became more aware that feedback control applies not only to engineering systems but also to all processes of change— biological, natural, environmental, and social.

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education • During the last 30 years, those in the profession of system dynamics have been building a more effective basis than previously existed for understanding change and complexity. • The field rests on three foundations:

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education 1. Growing knowledge of how feedback loops, containing information flows, decision making, and action, control change in all systems.  Feedback processes determine stability, goal seeking, stagnation, decline, and growth. Feedback systems surround us in everything we do.  A feedback process exists when action affects the condition of a system and that changed condition affects future action.  Human interactions, home life, politics, management processes, environmental changes, and biological activity all operate on the basis of feedback loops that connect action to result to future action. [email protected]

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education 2. Digital computers, now primarily personal computers, to simulate the behavior of systems that are too complex to attack with conventional mathematics, verbal descriptions, or graphical methods. High school students, using today's computers, can deal with concepts and dynamic behavior that only a few years ago were restricted to work in advanced research laboratories. Excellent user-friendly software is now available (High Performance Systems, 1990; Pugh, 1986). [email protected]

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education 3. Realization that most of the world's knowledge about dynamic structures resides in people's heads.  The social sciences have relied too much on measured data.  As a consequence, academic studies have failed to make adequate use of the data base on which the world runs— the information gained from living experience, apprenticeship, and participation.  Students, even as early as kindergarten, already have a vast amount of operating information about individuals, families, communities, and schools from which they can learn about social, business, economic, and environmental behavior. [email protected]

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education • The system dynamics approach has been successfully applied to behavior in corporations, internal medicine, fisheries, psychiatry, energy supply and pricing, economic behavior, urban growth and decay, environmental stresses, population growth and aging, training of managers, and education of primary and secondary school students. • Nancy Roberts first demonstrated system dynamics as an organizing framework at the fifth and sixth grade levels (Roberts, 1975). • Her work (Roberts, 1978) showed the advantage of reversing the traditional educational sequence that normally progresses through five steps:

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education  Learning facts  Comprehending meaning  Applying facts to generalizations  Analyzing to break material into constituent parts  Synthesizing to assemble parts into a whole.

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education • Most students never reach that fifth step of synthesis. • But, synthesis—putting it all together—should be placed at the beginning of the educational sequence. • By the time students are in school they already possess a wealth of observations about family, interpersonal relations, community, and school. • They are ready for a framework into which the facts can be fitted. Unless that framework exists, teaching still more facts loses significance. [email protected]

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education • In his penetrating discussion of the learning process, Bruner states, "the most basic thing that can be said about human memory… is that unless detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten" (Bruner, 1963, p. 24). • For most purposes, such a structure is inadequate if it is only a static framework. • The structure should show the dynamic significance of the detail—how the details are connected, how they influence one another, and how past behavior and future outcomes arise from decision-making policies and their interconnections. [email protected]

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education • System dynamics can provide that dynamic framework to give meaning to detailed facts. Such a dynamic framework provides a common foundation beneath mathematics, physical science, social studies, biology, history, and even literature. • In spite of the potential power of system dynamics, it could well be ineffective if introduced alone into a traditional educational setting in which students passively receive lectures. • System dynamics can not be acquired as a spectator sport any more than one can become a good basketball player by merely watching games. [email protected]

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System Dynamics in Pre-College Education • Active participation instills the dynamic paradigm. Hands-on involvement is essential to internalizing the ideas and establishing them in one’s own mental models. • But traditional class rooms lack the intense involvement so essential for deep learning.

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Learner-Centered Learning • Those who have experienced the excitement and intensity of a research laboratory know the involvement accompanying new discoveries. • Why should not students in their formative years experience similar exhilaration from exploring new challenges? • That sense of challenge exists when a classroom operates in a “learner-centered-learning” mode.

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Learner-Centered Learning • Learner-centered learning substantially alters the role of a teacher. • A teacher is no longer a dispenser of knowledge addressed to students as passive receptors. Instead, where small teams of students explore and work together and help one another, a "teacher" becomes a colleague and participating learner. [email protected]

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Learner-Centered Learning • Teachers set directions and introduce opportunities. Teachers act as guides and resource persons, not as authoritarian figures dictating each step of the educational process. • The relationship is more like being a thesis adviser than a lecturer. • In the more successful schools, system dynamics is combined with a classroom reorganization we call “learner-centered learning.” [email protected]

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Learner-Centered Learning • Such a project-oriented approach goes by various names in other proposals for K-12 education, but is especially powerful when coupled with system dynamics. • Learner-centered learning focuses on solving substantial problems. • Teachers are no longer lecturers, no longer the source of all wisdom, not even necessarily authority figures. [email protected]

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Learner-Centered Learning • Teachers becomes advisors and coaches to students who are doing projects that may lie beyond the teacher’s experience. • Indeed, moving to learner-centered learning can be traumatic for some teachers who feel they must be in command of all that the students are doing and learning.

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Learner-Centered Learning • A junior-high classroom can become much like a university research laboratory. • Students address projects with real-world significance for which they have not been given the necessary background and techniques. • They start by facing the challenge of learning what they need to know in order to accomplish the project. [email protected]

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Learner-Centered Learning • Such an approach departs from the highly unrealistic format of most education that is found all the way up through college. • Education in most schools could hardly be more unrealistic. Students, when they are given a problem, can usually assume they have been taught everything needed to solve the problem. • How many of you in your own affairs find that challenges come pre-equipped with everything for a solution? [email protected]

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Learner-Centered Learning • In the full use of learner-centered learning, if a student asks a specific question, the teacher may not know the answer, but, even if the teacher does know the answer, rather than answering, the better approach is to discuss how the student might find the answer. • Complex systems behave in ways entirely different from our expectations derived from experience with simple systems. [email protected]

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Learner-Centered Learning • Because intuition is based on simple systems, people are misled when making decisions about complex systems. • Six examples show the dangers in judging reallife systems based on a lifetime of conditioning from simple systems:

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1. Cause and Effect not Closely Related • From simple systems we learn that cause and effect are closely related in time and space. • When we touch a hot stove, we are burned here and now. Experiences that are understandable almost always drive home the lesson that the cause of a symptom is to be found nearby and immediately before the observed consequence. • But in complex systems the cause of a symptom is usually far back in time and arises from an entirely different part of the system. [email protected]

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Continue… • To make matters even more misleading, complex systems usually present what appear to be causes that are close in time and space to the immediate problem, but those apparent causes are only coincident symptoms. • Learning ever since childhood teaches lessons that cause people to misjudge and mismanage complex systems. [email protected]

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2. Long-Term vs. Short-Term Tradeoffs • In a simple system, a goal can be accomplished and a task finished. When the water glass is full we turn off the water, the objective has been met, and there are probably no direct unpleasant consequences. • However, in complex systems there is nearly always a tradeoff. If the short-term goal is maximized, the result is a longer-term undesirable consequence. • A child takes a toy from a playmate, the goal of having another toy is achieved, but a fight is likely to ensue.

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Continue… • Borrowing on credit cards enhances the short-term standard of living with the longer consequence that the standard of living must be lowered to pay interest and refund the loan. • Excessive welfare programs in many countries relieved immediate social pressures but led to mounting governmental debt and severe political consequences as expenditures had to be curtailed. • Gratification of immediate desires may lead some to stealing with the later consequence of jail. [email protected]

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3. Ineffective Actions • In simple systems, it is clear what must be done to achieve a goal. • One turns the steering wheel in the right direction to keep a car on the road. • But in complex systems, the obvious decisions are often ineffective. An exceedingly large fraction of policies in complex systems have very little effect. [email protected]

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Continue… • Nevertheless those low-leverage policies receive most of the attention in business and government. • Debate centers around decisions that will be defeated by consequences emerging from other feedback loops in the system. Taxes may be raised to balance the budget, but the extra governmental income can become an excuse for more expenditure and the budget remains in deficit. • Experience from simple systems misguides people to take actions that the system itself can defeat. [email protected]

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4. Wrong Directions for Effective Actions • In simple systems, the direction of action to achieve a goal is obvious. Diligent work and longer hours will increase income. • In complex systems, even when a rare high-leverage policy has been chosen, the desirable direction to change that policy is often unclear, or worse, may usually be misjudged and the policy moved in the wrong direction. • In the Urban Dynamics model, low-cost housing was found to be a high-leverage policy for affecting the vitality of a city and well being of its residents. Governments had been constructing lowcost housing, but that is the wrong direction. Old and decaying housing, which is the principal stock of low-cost housing, should be removed, not augmented.

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Continue… • Low-income housing uses land space that could instead be used for job-creating industrial structures, while the housing draws in people who need jobs. • The additional housing reduces jobs while increasing the number of people who need jobs. Additional housing is not a way to alleviate poverty but instead is an active force for increasing poverty. • The validity of the model has been verified by urban trends. It is only through comprehensive modeling of complex systems that we can hope to overcome the policy errors that arise from a lifetime of learning the wrong lessons from simple systems. [email protected]

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5. Blaming Others • In simple systems, the cause of a failure is clear. One trips over a rock because the foot was not raised high enough; it is obvious that the fault was our own. • In complex systems, causes are more obscure; it is not evident that we have caused our own crises, so, there is a strong tendency to blame others. • However, the practice of blaming others diverts attention from the real cause of trouble, which is usually our own actions. [email protected]

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Continue… • By looking to others as the culprits, we take attention off the more embarrassing, but more productive, need to change our own actions. • A management will blame the competition, or bankers, or its employees for low profits or falling market share, even though other companies in the same business, that deal with the same customers and bankers, are successful. The difference must lie in the policies of the failing company. • The United States has a problem of illegal drugs, so drug supplying countries are blamed, rather than asking why our country is the largest market for drugs. [email protected]

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6. Collapse of Goals • In simple systems, goals are reinforced and maintained. The goal of staying in the proper highway lane is sustained by the threat of an accident. • In less obvious systems, goals can gradually erode. One’s goal of maintaining a sound financial condition can yield to pressure to borrow for a vacation or to purchase a fancier automobile. • The goal can gradually decline from a safe financial condition, to wanting to fall no farther into debt, to striving to meet debt payments, to hoping to avoid foreclosure on one’s house.

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Continue… • In some countries there was a time when unemployment rates of 4% were considered high, gradually the goal eroded until 8% or more became the norm. • Unless a public emerges from our schools with an understanding of the ways in which real-life systems in families, schools, business, and politics must be handled in ways very different from the lessons learned from simple systems, we will continue to have stress-creating failures. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • Changes in the world as a whole bear directly on the future of the United States. • American urbanization and industrialization are a major part of the world scene. • The United States is setting a pattern that other countries are emulating. However, the example set by the United States is not sustainable. [email protected]

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Continue… • Our foreign policy and our overseas commercial activity are running contrary to changes that should occur in the world system. • The following issues are raised by preliminary studies. • Implications for action must be examined more deeply and confirmed by more research into the assumptions about structure and detail of the world system. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • Industrialization may be a more fundamentally disturbing force in world ecology than is population. • In fact, the population explosion is perhaps best viewed as a result of technology and industrialization. • I include medicine and public health improvements as a part of the industrialization that has led to rising population. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • Within the next century, the world will be facing a four-pronged dilemma: Suppression of modern industrial society by a natural resource shortage, Collapse of world population from changes wrought by pollution, Population limitation by food shortage, or Population control by war, disease, and social stresses caused by physical and psychological crowding. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • We may now be living in a “golden age” where, in spite of the worldwide feeling of malaise, the quality of life is, on the average, higher than ever before in history and higher now than the future offers. • Efforts for direct population control may be inherently self-defeating. • If population control results, as hoped, in high per capita food supply and material standard of living, these very improvements can generate forces to trigger a resurgence of population growth.

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Future Policy Issues • The high standard of living of modern industrial societies results from a production of food and material goods that has been able to outrun rising population. • But, as agriculture reaches a space limit, and as both reach a pollution limit, population tends to catch up. • Population will then grow until the “quality of life” falls far enough to generate sufficiently large pressures to stabilize population. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • There may be no realistic hope for the present underdeveloped countries reaching the standard of living demonstrated by the present industrialized nations. • The pollution and natural resource load placed on the world environmental system by each person in an advanced country is probably 10 to 20 times greater than the load now generated by a person in an underdeveloped country. • With four times as much population in underdeveloped countries as in the present developed countries, their rising to the economic level of the United States could mean an increase of 40 times the present natural resource and pollution load on the world environment. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • Noting the destruction that has already occurred on land, in the air, and especially in the oceans, no capability exists for handling such a rise in standard of living for the present total population of the world. • A society with a high level of industrialization may be nonsustainable. • Present societies may be self-extinguishing if they exhaust the natural environments on which they depend. [email protected]

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Future Policy Issues • Or, if unending substitution for declining natural resources is possible, the international strife over pollution and environmental rights may pull the average world-wide standard of living back to the level of a century ago. • From the long view of a hundred years hence, the present efforts of underdeveloped countries to industrialize along Western patterns may be unwise. • They may now be closer to the ultimate equilibrium with the environment than are the industrialized nations. [email protected]

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Continue… • The present underdeveloped countries may be in a better condition for surviving the forthcoming worldwide environmental and economic pressures than are the advanced countries. • When one of the several potential forces materializes that is strong enough to cause a collapse in world population, the advanced countries may suffer far more than their share of the decline. [email protected]

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A New Frontier • It is now possible to take hypotheses about separate parts of a social system, combine them in a computer model, and learn the consequences. • The hypotheses may at first be no more correct than the ones we are using in our intuitive thinking. • But the process of computer modeling and model testing requires these hypotheses to be stated explicitly. [email protected]

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Continue… • The model comes out of the hazy realm of mental models into unambiguous model statements to which all have access. • Assumptions can then be checked against all available information and can be rapidly improved.

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A New Frontier • The great uncertainty with mental models arises from inability to anticipate the consequences of interactions between parts of a system. • This uncertainty about future dynamic implications of assumptions in a model is totally eliminated in computer models. • Given a stated set of assumptions, the computer traces the resulting consequences without doubt or error. • Computer simulation is a powerful procedure for clarifying issues. It is not easy. Results will not be immediate. [email protected]

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A New Frontier • We are on the threshold of a great new era in human pioneering. • In the past there have been periods characterized by geographical exploration. • Other periods have dealt with the formation of national governments. • At other times the focus was on the creation of great literature. [email protected]

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A New Frontier • Most recently we have been through the pioneering frontier of science and technology. • But science and technology are now a routine part of life. Science is no longer a frontier. • The process of scientific discovery is orderly and organized.

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A New Frontier • The next frontier for human endeavor is to pioneer a better understanding of environmental, economic, and social systems. • The means are available. The task will be no easier than past development of science and technology. • For the next 50 years we can expect rapid advance in understanding the complex dynamics of social systems.

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A New Frontier • To do so will require research, development of teaching methods and materials, and creation of appropriate educational programs. • The research results of today will find their way into secondary schools just as concepts of basic physics moved from research laboratories to general education over the last century. [email protected]

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A New Frontier • What we do today affects our future many decades hence. • If we follow intuition and the fallacies embedded in mental models, the trends of the past will continue into deepening difficulty. • If we set appropriate research and education programs, which are now possible, we can expect a far sounder basis for future action. [email protected]

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