It’s a paradox–a mystery–an unpleasant fact in the center of our lives that we manage not to think about much: The Great American Education Machine is broken. We’ve been shoveling money into the schools’ locomotive firebox for more than a generation, but our train keeps falling behind.
His point? For the last 50 years educators have been beavering away in exactly the opposite direction. They convinced us that bigger schools and centralized education funding would be good for kids. It’s beginning to look like they were wrong. Maybe their “success” is the reason more money has bought such mediocre results. Walberg, an educational psychologist with impeccable credentials, is using hard-core research results to poke the school establishment with a sharp stick.
Walberg’s 35-page resume lists 300 journal articles, 69 book chapters, and 49 books he has published. Most he wrote with other authors. “I treasure colleagueship,” he says. “You know what they say–if two people agree, one of them is superfluous.” Most of his writings deal with the causes, effects, and measurement of learning; institutional and personal productivity; and international comparisons of achievement.
Almost as useful as the doctorate was his experience on the cutting-edge computers of the day, vacuum tube mainframe monsters that intimidated many of his colleagues. To this day, on authorial teams Walberg tends to be the one who knows how the mathematics works. On the NAEP board, says Musick, “Herb had more expertise in statistics and evaluation than anyone else.” Bernard Gifford, formerly vice president of education at Apple Computer, once called him “the scorekeeper [of] the learning society.”
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That title pretty well indicates the Herbert Walberg that Chester Finn met 15 years ago. Finn, an assistant U.S. secretary of education under William Bennett calls Walberg “a scholar’s scholar, a low-visibility academic” writing on topics that could only interest another educational psychologist. But the research tool he was incubating would change that.
“But we don’t use only vote counts. We also calculate the magnitude of the effect, calibrating all the studies to a common scale. Then we can say, not just that most studies of homework show a positive effect, but give an index of how much or how often it helped.” (Let’s put this mathematically: For each individual study he subtracts the mean of the experimental group from the mean of the control group, then divides the result by the standard deviation of the control group, giving a figure comparable across all studies. The means do not have to be standardized-test scores; they can be responses on a psychological attitude test, or teacher assessments of student interactions–anything numerical is grist for the meta-analytical mill.)
As the title suggests, Walberg treats schooling as a matter of science, not sentiment. He sees education as a business–and, in the case of the U.S., not a healthy one. “By measurable standards, U.S. educational productivity has not kept up even with that of U.S. smokestack industries such as steel, automobiles, and consumer electronics–which themselves are declining as world-class competitors in quality and costs. . . . If education proceeds by fads rather than cumulative research, it will fail to make the great advances in productivity that have characterized agriculture and industry in theis century.”
