In Science, the Kids Are (Not) Alright

As a nation concerned about the educational welfare of our children, we can no longer assume what we think they should know is more important than how well they can learn. It is time to consider a new way of thinking about education and teaching that is student-centric in focus and causal in its foundations. There is a more basic question we need to ask before proceeding. In our approach to education, the primary and sustaining question to be asked is not just “How much do students know?” (Academic performance) but rather “How well are our students learning?” (Cognitive capacity).

In his classic work, A Mind at a Time, Dr. Mel Levine tells of the young boy Fritz who came into his office and, during his examination, noticed an otoscope lying on the counter. After explaining that it was a light used to look into someone’s ears, Dr. Levine remarked that it was broken despite having tried everything he knew to fix the instrument. The boy eagerly proclaimed, “I’ll fix it for you” and thought out loud, “Let me see now, how is this supposed to work?” The young patient probed as only a small boy can and quickly had the loose connections tightened and the otoscope back in working order. With that, he had changed the doctor forever.

What struck Dr. Levine was Fritz‘s unwillingness to repair the light without first understanding how such lights were supposed to work. Dr. Levine has applied the “Fritz Principle” to his practice and profession ever since.

For many years the nation’s educators have successfully applied the Fritz Principle to education in search of “best practices’ and “turn-arounds” for teaching, schools, testing and other interventions. But we have never adequately applied the Fritz Principle to the ability of our students’ brains to function as they should in order to learn more effectively. We have never before had the ability to ask what learning capacity looks like when functioning optimally in the life of our students.

We are not asking the right question because we have never fully contemplated the fact nor confronted our fear that American kids can't keep up no matter what level or grade they are operating on as a student (yes, even our best and brightest kids).

What we see on the surface and most commonly address as a nation is often merely a symptom. The danger of addressing symptoms is that they don't get to the core issues and they distract us from the distress of having to deal with causes. They DO enable us to play a partisan and fruitless blame game that avoids the unseemly and shocking conclusion that our kids can’t compete because they can’t learn. The nation and its factions have chosen to debate the issues: forever fault-finding and pitting each faction as the scapegoat. It's the teachers, or the parents, or the curriculum, or the budget, or the government and on and on.

Perhaps worst of all, we have come to suggest that some children are somehow to blame or academically immoral, guilty in the first degree of their own undoing and even beyond help.

There are a variety of reasons that can cause learning and reading difficulties. Drawing from recent and numerous studies determining the prime cause of learning problems in the US, approximately 10% are due to poor or inadequate instruction. Another 5% are attributed to one or more sensory defects such as hearing or vision problems. Up to 10% can be associated with low motivation and environmental circumstance. The balance -roughly 75% of learning and reading difficulties among US students and adults are the direct consequence of a cognitive skill weakness.

Just as crucially, weak cognitive skills have limited the effectiveness of the entire educational equation. They compromise and restrict the vital teaching components. The academic gap, high dropout rate, need for remediation and low global ranking of U.S. students need to be re-examined in light of the increasing lack of students’ core mental capacity to learn adequately.

Discoveries in brain science and innovations in educational theory have recently converged and made it possible to help every student identify mental strengths as well as the limitations in the way of their success. To put it bluntly, we can now begin to measure the health (or unhealthiness) of learning in every student…and improve their “smarts” regardless of race, gender, socio-economic status, geography, religious convictions, IQ or education.

Thanks to Dr. Levine and other neuroscientists, it is now possible not only to watch the brain function but also to realize how the brain can compensate for injury and disease, and adjust its activities in response to new situations or changes in environment.

Most importantly, our children’s brains can increase the capacity to store and process information through developmental training exercises. It is now entirely possible to cultivate learning capacity and enhance academic performance by addressing weak cognitive skills and strengthening giftedness.

We already screen for hearing and vision. The new science of learning has shown that we can screen and work to re-wire the brain for improved attention, processing speed, sequential and spatial ordering, working memory, logic and reasoning, auditory processing, visual processing and long-term memory.

We are now poised to help every child build learning skill capacity and become smarter. An already available, accessible and affordable cognitive skill developmental approach could win not just the current race, but educational and economic rewards long into the future. As a result, No Child Left Behind would become Every Child Empowered to Learn.

When cognitive skills are strong, academic learning is fast, easy, efficient, and fun. Yet as long as the basic mental skills for learning continue to be limited or missing, progress for many children will continue to be very difficult if not impossible. Traditional educational processes have not adequately addressed cognitive skill evaluation and training as a non-negotiable staple that can make response to intervention the success it needs to be. Cognitive skill development is not only for students needing special interventions but for the gifted and talented and every kid in between. The earlier, the better!”
Better techniques, greater access to technology and tutoring, and more dollar investment are good elements, but the lack of cognitive skill screenings and comprehensive brain training will continue to result in “more of the same.” It all begins with asking the right question.

Just as researchers in medicine work to understand physical disorders by their causes, cognitive skill development allows education to move beyond an academic and correlative model to a new understanding that is foundational to improving academic performance.

An educational endeavor that is causal in nature becomes more precise in its predictability. Rather than compare the average performance of one set of schools, students, or methods against others, the cognitive development approach examines the state of education through the lenses of an individual student’s ability to think. We can evaluate and then “rewire” the synaptic pathways that facilitate a child in the learning process.

By providing these causal baselines and benchmarks, cognitive skill evaluation and development creates a common language and framing of all educational issues in terms of “capacity prior to performance”. This allows a broader agreement on what is needed for students and how to achieve it.

Causal benchmarks and baselines are now in place to inform and enhance all the performance-based (correlative) educational innovations presently being developed. Rather than ends in and of themselves, these substantial innovations now become means of change serving from a causal foundation. Cognitive skill development becomes a catalytic enhancement for:

• Academic Standards and Testing accountability Measures
• Multiple Intelligence, Right Medium, Aptitude Batteries and other diagnostic Strategies
• Geographic (rural, urban, etc.), Gender, Ethnic and Age Appropriations
• Professional Development and Ongoing Education Grants
• Teacher Distribution Models and Alternative Compensation Incentives
• Curriculum Recalibration and Content Renovation Projects
• School Environment and Ethos (longer day/year, etc) Interventions
• Failing School Improvements and Closures
• Charter and School Autonomy Movements
• Computer-based online school (custom-configured modular) Instruction
• Remediation and Dual Enrollment Programs
• Special Education and Response to Intervention (RTI) Applications

Perhaps just as crucial, these significant reforms and innovations are no longer in competition with one another but working in a common and unifying goal: the capacity of a student to learn and achieve their full potential.

But the greatest benefit is not systemic or structural in nature. It is intensely personal.

Some price, modest or substantial, is paid every time a young mind is asked to perform something in a way for which it is not wired. There is nothing as desperate as a child who cannot seem to operate their mind to meet the expectations placed on them, requirements like the need to spell accurately, write legibly or recall multiplication tables automatically. Desperation creates feelings of incompetence and incompleteness (“I’m not good enough!”) as everyone witnesses a seemingly inexplicable downward spiral in terms of self-worth and capability.

Too many of our children are misread, oversimplified, maltreated, or else falsely accused and asked to live with the categories and scores they have been given. We can and need to do better. We must!

Truth is, they can be helped to identify the strengths of their minds as well as the limitations that get in the way of their success or mastery. It is possible to cultivate their learning capacity and enhance their feelings of worthwhileness by addressing their weak cognitive skills and strengthening their giftedness.

There is nothing as exhilarating and priceless as a child, having been given the freedom to know and the power to change their learning capacity, and having discovered that the humiliation is over, exclaiming, “I am not stupid! I am smart! Come help me learn s’ more ‘cause I can make a difference!” That is the true “Race to the Top” and one we cannot afford to lose.

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This comment was submitted by Jack P. (Mickey) Elliott, Executive Vice President of Cognitive First, and by Larry Hargrave, Founder of Cognitive First, a Colorado based nonprofit organization whose mission is “to empower under-resourced, under-served and disadvantaged children with the cognitive (mental) skills and strategies to maximize their learning capacity and improve their academic performance.” To learn more about sponsorships in the Colorado cognitive first initiative, go to http://cog1st.org or to respond to this article, email OverTheTop@cog1st.org.

Really? The parents are the problem? When we put our children in school, we expect these people who have college degrees in their area of expertise to actually do their job. That is what we pay them to do. That they don't do their job, that's our fault? Seriously? Any other profession if they did such a poor job we would have fired them, but we don't have that power. We can't change schools unless we pay a fee or more from our homes into another district, unless they fail AYP two years in a row (thanks to No Child Left Behind), and this failure is a common ocurrance. But then we can only move our child to another school that has failed AYP two years in a row. Hmmm.

If it's the parent's fault, why do the homeschooled children do so much better than our publicly educated students? In that case, the parents have complete control and obviously do a superior job compared to their paid counterparts. Here I would say the real difference is that the parents care if their students learn. Whereas the teachers and administrators can continue to draw a paycheck regardless of whether they have for the last ten years graduated only 60% of their students, and where only 68% of those students can pass the state test for adequate training and college preparation.

The school has the right to deny my student acess into AP courses even though he was recommened by his PSAT scores. They have the right to hold my child back and make him retake his math course even though he passed it with a B. They have the right to spend, and spend, and spend, even though I question and try to present research data that contradicts their opinion. I have no power, and no voice in my students' education.

If I'm to get the blame, I want the power to change things. Give me the power to change it through vouchers where I can make myself heard with my feet, and a voice where the public schools agree that I am ultimately in charge of my students' education. Then you can rightfully blame me, the parent. Until then, I suggest you get off the blame-game train, and actually try to find a REAL solution to this problem.