Grantcoulson's Blog

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:    

    “The sky is falling.”, said Chicken Little.

    “Looks fine to me.”

    “No, the other sky.”

    Whenever another alarmist report about “climate change” appears, it is almost always because a change in a model results in predictions which are more dire. It’s the other sky, the one with the hockey stick graph–Perfect example of IS-DOES, the topic of today’s offering.

    On to matters educational. This is background because the greatest product of government is “spin” designed to indicate that all is well, getting better and well under control. From whence cometh this nonsense?

   Production is the hallmark of a successful program. Education is supposed to produce better academic performance. Drug rehabilitation is supposed to produce a decrease in drug use. Production separates the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats and the doers from the talkers. When you base your usefulness on production, you can run but you can’t hide, although the criteria for usefulness in the social sciences are so soft that running and hiding have always been easy. Effectiveness in government agencies is easy to camouflage by the weasel words of sensitivity, diversity, equality and whatever other "…y" is currently in favor. Using production as the criterion for success changes problem-solving from  "he is"–the characteristics of the person to "how to"–how to produce the change. In this book, I will use a fairly substantial twist on a distinction introduced by Odgen Lindsley. This book will use the IS-DOES distinction where IS, is what is hoped for and done, and DOES is what is accomplished.  What you do is not what you accomplish.  What you do is not what you get done. Political analysts make the somewhat similar expressive-utilitarian distinction. Almost every social sciences program, being political,  is sold on the basis of a thin version of IS, with intention implying production. The IS substitutes for DOES and results don’t occur. The IS should never be confused with the DOES. If this is confusing, just remember that intentions are not results. IS is not DOES. This confusion stems from most social sciences being part of a political system where appearance and propaganda are everything and results, nothing.

    IS          DOES 

         Ineffective-Show                                     Effective-Go

         How we do things                                   What we get done
         or what we intend
          to do

         political                                                      practical

        may work                                                   indicates what happens

        described in                                                described in 
        florid language                                           simple language

         rhetoric                                                       reality

         usually pretense                                        always reality   

         can be hidden                                             can’t be hidden

         unspecified methods                                  unspecified results

    All good programs require an IS component so that others can know what is being done. It’s when the IS is mistaken for the DOES or substituted for the DOES  that the mischief is done.

    An anecdote helps understand the difference he said, patronizingly, between a teacher and an educator, between IS and DOES: The high status, Grade Eight girls in a school had a strange ritual. They would put on lipstick and press their lips to the bathroom mirror. The principal, the teacher, decided to stop this annoying practice by the tried and true method of "The Lecture". He assembled the offending students in the washroom and, with reason and example, provided all the grounds why the mirror-kissing practice was unacceptable. The girls accompanied this with titters and "Yah, right". The janitor, the educator, saying not a word, went to a toilet, dipped his squeegee, and cleaned the mirror. Lip imprinting stopped. Both had an IS, but only the janitor had a DOES of any value.

    And this is an example of government "IS": This is a quote from a website of the Ministry of Education of Ontario. "Effective educators are life-long learners, deeply reflective in their practice, collaborative and focused on improving achievement for all students." This is what passes for accomplishment in a politically-run education system, a sincere and warm desire coupled to feel-good words.  Who needs accomplishment when spin is centrally important? Here’s mine: "Effective educators are those who produce results."-This, as we shall see, is yet another example of the IS-DOES distinction.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:  

      Education isn’t alone in this failing, but it is one of the biggest polgrams. Some observers delicately point out that politics fulfills the “expressive” function so that effectiveness and efficiency are less important than how something looks. In this spirit, I present the following definitions:

The Polgram: What Passes for a Program in the Social Sciences or, Why this mess?

program-n-a plan or system under which action may be taken toward a goal. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.     

      
    In this book, a program is a systematic application of  procedures (IS) which produces a desirable outcome (DOES). A real program will produce results superior to the efforts which pass as programs in the social services. Social science programs, as all government programs, are evaluated by intention, not results. Slogans such as,"Our school produces life-long learners.", have no evidence to support them.  These politically motivated programs will be called polgrams.

polgram-n-a procedure masquerading as a program with two distinct characteristics; a) assumption rather than production of results and, b) consistent with and\or supported by a political movement and\or social science fad without empirical support. A polgram is fact-free (is not based on procedures which work) and fact-immune (will not be discarded because it is ineffective). Coulson’s real-life dictionary.

Cumulative versus Random Skill Development

    In the spiral curriculum, topics are taken up and then dropped. Several topics may be "covered" during the year and then "covered more deeply" the next year. In the cumulative knowledge curriculum, teaching is based on the last thing the student learned and proceeds in a stepwise fashion to ensure that forgetting does not occur.

Student characteristics are so important that teaching is irrelevant

    Some research shows that the student’s background explains almost all of his success in school and the kind of instruction explains very little.  This is true only when the  teaching is poor. With good teaching, disadvantaged students can outperform those with poor teaching who have much more beginning advantage.

    The typical socialist-liberal response to the fact that, on the average, better students come from homes with higher incomes is astounding. If everyone had a higher income, they state, student achievement would be higher, so poor children must be given money. All buses have wheels, so if you put wheels on a pig, it’s a bus.

Medication

    Most  psychoactive drugs given for student behavior and most UFO reports occur in North America.

    According to those who believe in pharmaceutical control of behavior, some children, mainly boys,  suffer from a physiological defect which produces inattention and hyperactivity to such a degree that learning is impaired. A number of drugs are supposed to alleviate this condition to the benefit of all concerned. Behavior and learning are improved.

    The amount of improvement achieved by these drugs is quite small when compared to the best classroom management and teaching techniques. North America has a love affair with drugs (and UFOs), but drugs used to change the behavior of school children appear to have slight impact on teaching and behavior problems.

    A bizarre, and possibly local,  variation of this love affair with drugs is the following prediction, given by a number of different psychologists to three different sets of parents: "Your child must have these drugs because, if he doesn’t, he’ll become a criminal and\or drug addict in his teen years." Where this strange piece of advice came from, I’ll never know.

    Another tragedy occurs when a student gets a drug to "treat" attention deficit disorder, exhibits side effects from the drug such as sleeplessness, and then get additional drugs to alleviate the side effects. This "cascading" effect can cause additional problems necessitating additional medications.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

     I see that Krugman, in the New York Times, is claiming that only immediate action will save the environment. Since Krugman is a relentless statist, the opposite, as usual, is true.

    Anyway, on to education myths. North American education has received a non-contingent flow of money for well over a century. This has inevitably led to a cult out of touch with reality, but absolutely sure of its own superiority to the non-cult untermenschen. When a government-supported cult develops, its form  is unpredictable, but ineffectiveness is inevitable and contempt for outsiders  inevitable. The assumptions about teaching are so wrong, that their polar opposites are correct.

    "The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore so it eats it. It’s rather like getting tenure." — Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Giving someone tenure is a sign of grave problems in an organization and it like giving a player a lifetime team position on the basis of  his Little League play.

    Now for three of these assumptions:

The Difference Between Teaching and Measuring

    The emphasis on "teaching" what is believed to be general problem solving, techniques which can applied to any problem, without teaching requisite skills, is, in practice, just more of the IQ measuring which is really contemporary education. A small percentage of students can do it, and the ones who can’t benefit not at all. 

    Here’s an example: "Make 4 triangles from each of four squares. Make four different shapes from each set of 4 triangles. Equal sides of the triangles must not touch. Glue (my personal favorite) the figures in the space below. Print the name of each figure." In the wise words of Homer Simpson, "What the hell?"

The Curriculum

    "The teacher’s behavior is like driving that (curriculum) automobile.  If the car is well designed, the teacher has the potential to drive fast and safely.  If the curriculum is poorly designed, it will break down no matter how carefully the teacher drives." Engelmann, 1992, p.  7

    "Any impossible task can be divided into 39 steps, each of which is possible." 

    Most curricula are student-independent in two senses. The first is that they have never been tested on students, but spring from the latest theory or political epiphany. The second is that blocks of time are devoted to each "topic" independently of how the student does. The student is "exposed" or the topic is "covered". A year of math makes as much sense as a pound of happiness. Some students get through it in three weeks, others in two years. A year is an input or "IS" variable and is meaningless without the "DOES". There is no provision for mastery learning. This leads to cascading failure where the problems of today are caused by the solutions of yesterday. Not learning requisite skills results in new "teaching" becoming increasingly more ineffective.

    A former president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, John Dossey, objected to a national test of academic achievement on the grounds that it was curriculum dependent.  Curriculum dependent means "the test is dependent on what the student has learned in school."  Mr.  Dossey compares this with the student’s "mathematical thinking", which is apparently neither taught nor learned in school.  Where it comes from, no one seems to know.  Head for the roundhouse Nellie, they’ll never corner you there.

No one has won, so all must have prizes

    In many discussions of education, many people have said, in essence, "No method has proved to be superior to any other, so any method may be used. They’re all equally valid." or, my favorite, since I made it up, but it summarizes the concept,  "Since nothing is known, we need to know nothing." Because methods vary widely, and wildly, it couldn’t possibly be true that all are equally valid although this is still taught as truth in schools of education. Similar nonsense is also promulgated in other social sciences such as psychology, psychiatry and social work where all well-known theories are given equal weight. Since billions of dollars have been spent on "educational research", it makes one wonder why this inquiry has not led to some conclusion. There are valid conclusions, of course, they’re just not the ones that the Grand Theories demand.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

    "Since government services are paid for through the compulsion of taxes, they have no market price. But without market prices, we have no way of knowing the importance that free people would place on those services versus other things they want." John Stossel

    "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx. Don’t be put off by a Marx quotation, it’s one of the few wise things he said. Marx was, of course, one of those who, Thomas Sowell points out, believed himself to be one of "The Anointed", someone who reckons himself as one of the few uniquely suited to direct the affairs of others. Smith, on the other hand, recognized that people do better directing their own affairs.   

    What most people think they know about the social sciences comes from entertainment masquerading as information or from government-decreed experts masquerading as experts. We hear about multiple personalities, anti-drug programs,  recovered memories, dramatic interventions, and cures of the month without cease. Most of  this valueless junk is disseminated by relentless self-promoters, government workers who have no obligation to be effective, entertainment pretending to be reality, or worse, by all three together.

    Well over three decades ago, N. H. Azrin embarked on a series of experimental investigations into programs designed to ease certain kinds of undesirable conditions. "In each of these areas, numerous books had been written as to how to cure the problem, many precise correlational studies had revealed population characteristics associated with the problem, many theoretical analyses and explanations had been offered, analog experiments with animals or nonpatients had been conducted, illustrative cases studies of one or two cases had been described, and typically, controversy existed as to which analysis of the problem was more valid. Conspicuously absent, or near absent, for each problem were experiments that critically evaluated the proposed treatment….Our ability to talk about, and explain, problems greatly exceeded our ability to show we could cure them. In selecting a problem to study, one hardly need fear that a solution already existed." (bold italics not in original).  Azrin produced two of the exemplar programs in this book by developing techniques which work much better than the ones most used then, and, not surprisingly, now. The sad and pathetic reality is that, although the example programs used in the present book were chosen from among thousands because of their effectiveness, and are thereby standouts, the vast majority of practitioners, even in the narrow specialties concerned, are not even aware of these programs. For example, a president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, an association of public educators, by her own admission, had not even heard of  the largest systematic experiment in education, Project Follow Through. The Law of Contingencies would predict that we should be astounded when public employees show knowledge, not when they show ignorance, because when knowledge is not required, it is rarely acquired.

    Contingencies, the rules describing the connections among circumstances, behavior and consequences, determine, to a large extent, what behavior occurs when.  This book will examine how  contingencies control the behavior of practitioners of the social sciences. A behavioral contingency is the rule about what consequences follow what behavior under what circumstances. For example, the circumstances under which  pay is delivered to a teacher is a strong determinant of the teacher’s classroom activity. Contingencies in private business govern the  exchange of  goods and\or services for money.  To paraphrase and Anglicize Alexandre Dumas,  we will "cherchez les contingencies" and look for the payoffs for activities of practitioners in the social sciences. There are surprises galore, a few good, most not,  waiting. The basic assumption of this book is that contingencies in the social sciences have two important effects. The first is that they hold the key to learning and behavior change in the customers of the social sciences. The second is that contingencies, paradoxically, explain why effective techniques are seldom used by the practitioners of the social sciences and, consequently, why the social sciences are  unsuccessful in almost all of their applications.

    In criminal investigations, the first question asked is "cui bono?"—who benefits? In human affairs in general, one should always ask, "Who benefits and how?" In the romantic rhetoric of the social sciences, the benefit is supposed to accrue to the recipient and the provider works for altruistic reasons–"I just like to help people." The contingencies in most social science applications are the opposite of those required by success. The actions of  those in the social sciences cannot be understood without knowing  the contingencies influencing these actions. Equally important will be an analysis of the absence of contingencies supporting productive outcomes.

    "…, it (a contingency analysis) replaces the traditional practice of blaming the actors for the action. Calling… officials dishonest, and the politicians corrupt offers no direction for future action. Unless the behavior of these individuals is correctly analyzed and different contingencies are arranged, the problems will recur repeatedly.”  (emphasis added) (Pennypacker, 1992, 1245). Pennypacker, in the same article, predicted the demise of General Motors.  The reasons that  problems recur is that the contingencies remain the same. Contingencies provide the thread which guides us through the labyrinth of human behavior in general and social sciences programs in particular.

    N.HAzrin. (1977) A strategy for applied research: Learning based but outcome oriented. American Psychologist , 32(2), 140-149.

     Pennypacker, H. S. (1992): "Is Behavior Analysis Undergoing Selection by Consequences?" American Psychologist vol. 47. 1491 –1498

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

 The historical record is clear, cap-and-trade agreements in the 13th century obviously saved the environment and the greed of the 20th put it at risk again.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

 When the global warmers finally admit that sunspots are the cause of climate change, schools will be teaching that sunspots are caused by capitalists driving SUVs.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

“Years ago, I used the one textbook that consisted of primarily Great Books authors for my research paper course and saw that in the edition I started using contained selections from Adam Smith and Karl Marx but when the next edition came out Adam Smith had been removed and Karl Marx retained. I wrote the textbook author and asked him why he removed the author who has proven historically true and retained the one that has been historically discredited. He wrote back that he had to consider sales and that meant considering what his market wanted and since his market was academics and school teachers he had to omit Adam Smith and keep Karl Marx.” Bruce Gans.

http://www.ednews.org/articles/an-interview-with-bruce-gans—a-book-to-be-read-%28or-re-read%29.html
 

    An academic is someone who uses complicated methods and close, logical reasoning to reach the wrong conclusion.

Cheerio and ttfn.

Grant Coulson

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

     "The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is not that of his corporation, but that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence. (italics added)" Adam Smith. "Corporation", in our time would be equivalent to an exclusive union, backed by government coercion, which grants exclusive dominion over a particular profession so that no one can practice that trade and customers can be taken for granted such as public school teachers or public prosecutors. No one gets fired for incompetence, the customer has no say in the delivery of the service and things get worse over time.

    When this situation prevails, outrage breaks out periodically and "reform" occurs with fanfare and promise. None of these reforms reform, so that nothing changes except that things get worse. The workers are protected against incompetence and the taxpayers against competence.

    The nature of the incompetence is not predictable, but its inevitability is. Bizarre usage is common in public and publically protected enterprises and these will be outlined in the coming months. but it is the lack of economic discipline from the customers, the lack of consequences, which is at the base of all. Watch and see as I outline them. As a case in point, watch GM (government motors) and Chrysler deteriorate even further under the astute governance of political and union managers. It will be political theater at its finest as face is saved and assets and sales decline.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

     The Martian wants to know about our child-rearing practices. A helpful earthling  explains. "One of the most important aspects is schooling. Our children must attend an institution where they are judged by jobs-for-life government workers who are protected from responsibility by a militant union. These workers have the arrogance, indifference and incompetence that can only be generated by guaranteed employment. During their stay in the educational system, our children are subjected to relentless leftist propaganda whose basic assumption is that a government solution is the only valid solution. If the child does not learn quickly enough, he is considered to be deficient. If he is outstanding in his studies, the credit goes to the outstanding work of the teachers. Many parents judge their children based on how well the children do in this kind of setting." The Martian, although well-trained in earthly dialect, is struck silent by the logic of earthly practice.

     "Teaching is very easy if you don’t care about doing it right and very hard if you do." Thomas Sowell.

      "Too often what are called ‘educated’ people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years." Thomas Sowell.

     Why do we say, "Gates, Wozniak and Jobs revolutionized the personal computer  in spite of not graduating from university." rather than "Gates, Wozniak and Jobs revolutionized the personal computer because of not graduating from university."? A considerable amount of progress has come from those who failed at, or didn’t care about, academic achievement.

     "The paradox of universal, compulsory, state controlled schooling is that so long as we insist upon it, we cannot learn whether we need it, what we need it for, how it does whatever we suppose it does, or what might, if anything, better take its place." Laura Hersh Salganik, 1981.

     A few years ago, a teacher told me I didn’t know anything about teaching–in spite of the fact that I had successfully taught many students untaught by the regular school system. What he meant is that I knew nothing about myths that pass as knowledge in the teaching profession. I didn’t go through the proper "rites de passage" to enter the cult, thence, I was incomplete, imperfect and incompetent. This criticism, as the criticism passed by all cults, had nothing  to do with whether my students learned, quickly, slowly or, not at all. It had to do with the form of my indoctrination, and form, as ever for true political believers, is all. This educator’s remark illustrates two major things that are wrong with the current educational situation. The first is the belief that education makes one complete in a field and is thus, both a necessary and sufficient condition. The second is that results are irrelevant to any discussion of educator competence.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

from the book:

Shadow Dancing on the

Grave of Hope:

    There are three problems with education; the irrational reverence accorded it, how it is done so poorly in government and, alas, most private, schools, and how it can be done better.

    "We tell them what to learn and test them, but we do not actually teach." B.F. Skinner (2004).

    Edward Gibbon, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, remembers the tutor from his days at Oxford. The tutor, “…well remembered he had a salary to receive, and only forgot he had a duty to perform. …fourteen months at Oxford were the most unprofitable and idle of my whole life.”

    "So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college  yet.’"  Steve Jobs before he and Wozniak did the smart thing and started Apple. In the same vein, I must mention Winston Churchill,  a great man of letters, no combination of which  represented a college degree, who wrote many enduring books yet passed no examination at the university level and very few elsewhere.

    One of the widest applications of  technological advance in the modern age is the use of the personal computer. The vast majority of operators have taught themselves or been trained outside the public education system as necessity dictated.

    “When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” Dresden James.

    If public education is intended to educate, it is a failure. If it is intended to provide a long, very expensive test of IQ, persistence, dependability and ability to get along with people it is a very inefficient, partial success. One of the reasons it is a partial success is that IQ, persistence, dependability and ability to get along with others are quite specific to the educational environments in which they are measured. The popularity and belief in the necessity of as much education as possible shows that public relations surrounding larnin’ in government schools, hysterically proclaiming education’s importance, is very effective. If teaching is evaluated by the learning of the student so that subject mastery is a requirement of teaching, that method is real teaching and not just another device for sorting students by IQ, but the great majority of teaching is not even close to producing mastery.

    " If you want to fire a hired man, send him to the back forty and tell him to throw that pile of stones over the fence. After he’s finished, tell him to throw them back. If he does it, fire him for being stupid. If he doesn’t, fire him for not doing what he’s told." The activities in education follow the stone-throwing model. Nobody knows if most of them are necessary and the students that cotton to the uselessness are punished for being intransigent. Those who don’t catch on are punished by doing the useless exercises.

    "As long as a student (1) learns things easily from technically unsound teacher presentations, (2) readily retains what has been learned with technically unsound practice afterwards, and (3) has a strong familial support structure in place to keep the student on track and make sure the student’s learning is progressing, then the student stands a good chance of becoming educated in public schools. This is because this student can be educated in virtually any school. We don’t need a public sector monopoly to provide educational services to these students, any fool is up to the task.

     Whether we need a public sector monopoly for providing educational services for the remaining kids is debatable. There certainly is no evidence that the public sector provides these services any better than the private sector. And, they’ve had an awfully long time trying to get their game together. Too long, maybe."  K. DeRosa from D-Ed Reckoning Blog–July 14, 2008.

    “A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and … the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government…” (John Stuart Mill, 1859).

    "America’s decision to have its public schools funded by a government monopoly is stunningly stupid. Having a union-dominated monopoly run them is even stupider. Unionized monopolies create ossified, bloated bureaucracies that don’t serve people well." p. 107, John Stossel, Myths, Lies ands Downright Stupidity, NY: Hyperion, 2006.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson