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
