No Occam’s Razor on the Fifth Floor of the SOB 
By Martin Harris

Perhaps, like me, you are so simple-minded as to think that, if your public school students aren’t learning the pretty basic grade school content in math and reading, as shown by various nationwide testing protocols, then your highly-skilled professional educators would conclude that, assuming the teaching staff they have personally recruited into their classrooms are also highly skilled professionals, then maybe something’s amiss with the curriculum design itself. That analysis would reflect the Occam’s Razor principle, the maxim declaring that "all other things being equal, the simplest solution is best". If you’re a highly skilled professional student of philosophy, you already know that it’s attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th century English logician, and known in Latin as the "lex parsimoniae". 

There must be a few such simple-minded folks wandering the halls of the US Department of Education in Washington, because a group of them, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, has looked at the dismal test scores (in 8th grade math, for example, the national average student score is 278 out of a possible 500, while Vermont comes in at 287 or 38 percent proficient, able to function at grade level) and has come to the simple answer: that curriculum needs a re-work. Their report doesn’t mention the history of "New Math", whereby public education chose to abandon the traditional math curriculum basics back in the ‘70’s, but does explicitly call for what a Wall Street Journal story calls "a laserlike focus on the essentials". No more forays into set theory or other-than-base-10 counting systems, but instead an old-fashioned triad of objectives: "quick and effortless recall of arithmetic facts in early grades; mastery of fractions in middle school; and rigorous algebra courses in high school". But there’s no such simplistic thinking in Montpelier, no evidence of any Occam’s Razor on the top floors of the State Office Building opposite the State House, from which educational-bureaucracy venue the rules for spending Vermont’s annual $1.5 or so billion, on a shrinking enrollment now down to some 95,000, now extend to control the State’s public education enterprise. 

Instead, a far more intellectually complex cogitation prevails. Consider, for example, the recent decision by Education Commissioner Cate to address a continuing pattern of poor test scores at Missisquoi Valley Union High School, not by examining curriculum diversions-from-basics over the last 30 years, but rather by authorizing the school to hire a $95,000 "school improvement officer with a $30,000 budget to boost standardized test scores", per recent news reports. A far more nuanced and sophisticated response, don’t you agree? 

This isn’t the first sophistication-eruption from the Fifth Floor: it started almost two decades ago, when the highly-skilled education professionals up there decided that they were too smart to have their classroom results publicly measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal testing regime with origins in the 1960’s for selected samples of students at 4th, 8th, and 12th grades in various subjects. For a while, they simply chose to leave Vermont’s page on the National Digest of Educational Statistics blank (indeed, up through 1992, Vermont posted no results for 4th or 8th grade math) but more recently they adopted a more subtle approach by purchasing, deploying, and then publicizing the results of commercially-sold easier tests, starting with VtDRE and NSRE and now moved on to NECAP. And if NECAP, in turns, fails to produce sufficiently impressive numbers, a new test will be purchased and deployed. Yes, the dismal Vermont NAEP results are in the federal NDES book, but you’ll not find them posted in any of the school district annual reports, nor on any of the usual in-state education websites, thus demonstrating a far more urbane and sophisticated method of dealing with the test score problem than simply recognizing it and dealing with it. 

In contrast, here’s the Occam’s Razor recommendation from the NMAP: "students must have a clear grasp of the meaning of basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division…" My goodness, how crudely blunt and unresponsive to sensitive nuance these under-educated simpletons must be. 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights