Grantcoulson's Blog

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

     Later, I began teaching injured workers who required upgrading so they could change their careers to one requiring intellectual rather than physical work.  In one study we showed that a grade gain of one year in mathematics could be produced with an average of 19.9 hours of instruction.

     Similar powerful results have been produced by others.  Johnson and Layng, at the Morningside Academy in Seattle, have created large changes in the academic behavior of children who have been "diagnosed" with attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, etc.  They accomplished similar results with untaught adults from the slums of a large American city.

     One of the impressive things about Morningside is the attention that these "attention disordered" children pay to their work.  I was in a classroom for an hour and a half as an observer.  There were 16 students and about as many teachers who were learning Morningside teaching methods.  The room was noisy, mostly from the adults, although there was some Direct Instruction choral responding going on.  I observed the students, who were working in 5 different groups, mainly on their own, to see how much time was wasted.  The only non-academic behavior I saw was a 13-14 year old boy trying to attract a girl’s attention for about 20 sec.  When she ignored him, he went back to work.  All of these students had been labelled as having attention deficit disorder or dyslexia or both.  Perhaps their eight weeks of summer school had cured their supposed neurological disability in some magical way.

     Thaddeus Lott was principal at Wesley Elementary School in Houston Texas, a school in an impoverished area.  Using Direct Instruction, he raised the percentage of 3rd graders passing the district criteria for reading from 18% to 85%.  In another school under Lott’s direction, the pass rate for fourth year math went from 30 to 90%.  This is impressive not only for where it was accomplished but for the fact that Wesley  excluded a far smaller percentage of "special need students" than other schools.  Some proponents of Whole Language and even officials within the school district accused Lott of cheating, a charge which was demonstrated to be groundless.  Lott attributed the investigation to the "Whole Language groupies" which then dominated.  The accusers could not grasp the fact that something works so much better than their theories although these theories are taught in actual faculties of education.

     Lott did many things to achieve these results.  He used an effective, scientifically-based curriculum (Direct Instruction).  He trained and monitored teachers carefully.  One of his observations was that newly graduated teachers do not learn to teach effectively in teacher’s colleges. Cult members only learn cultish behavior which has nothing to do with reality or effectiveness.

     The social services, of which teaching is a part, have always been subject to fads because they are still in the pre-scientific stage of development.  Whole Language, for example, was widely accepted before the data dictated acceptance and naturally, a disaster ensued.  Steven Stahl, who published two review articles on Whole Language, concluded that Whole Language instruction is as effective as instruction using basal readers although Direct Instruction is far superior to both.  To do as well as basal readers is still not a proud boast.  The Whole Language debacle is a classic example of what happens when methods are chosen "theory-down" rather than "data-up".  There is a better way.  Science in the social services always leads practice by several decades.  It’s time practice caught up, but it will not until we choose methods rationally on the basis of results and not by whether we "feel good" about them based on some intuitive, and always mistaken, notion of how students learn.  The way things are done in education are so ludicrous that the solutions cause more problems than the solutions they displace.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     As a way of showing how these techniques are used, I will take you through the sequence of events which would take an innumerate (fancy way of saying someone who can’t do arithmetic) person to the end of Grade 9 math.  By the way, if someone can’t do math, there is a name for the cause.  The unseen villain is dyscalculia.  Sound familiar? First a problem behavior is named and then the behavior is explained by the label.  Making fun of the people who do this is too easy, so I’ll go back to what can be accomplished, even for someone "with" dyscalculia.  We’ll call our hero Rick.

    Rick had a poor start in math, and by Grade 6, as far as he was concerned,  the math teacher was speaking in a combination of Gregorian Chants and hexadecimal.  In spite of all the attempts of the social-work oriented people in Rick’s school to enhance his self-esteem and create an environment in which his creativity would flourish, Rick felt incredibly bad in math class.  He avoided it when he could and was in a trance when he couldn’t.  It is fair to say that Rick hated math.  When his mother brought him to me she asked if I had a teaching certificate.  I said, "No, I don’t have the same credentials as those who have failed to teach him so I won’t be doing more of the same." Every good story needs irony.

    Even if Rick had thought he was good in math or had high self-esteem, that would not reflect in his mathematical behavior.  A worldwide study of math students found that Korean students ranked first and students from the U.S.  ranked last.  Twenty-three percent of the Korean students answered that they were good in math compared to 68 percent of the American students.

    When Rick gets in the clutches of a Power Teacher, our teaching argonaut needs to do a number of things: 1).  Determine what skills our young lad has.  Standardized achievement tests are of little value for this.  As you will remember, these kinds of tests are made to compare students.  Not much help at all.  The Power Teacher will find that Rick doesn’t have many skills after taking math for six years  because  they’ve been teaching non-behavior at school.  2).  Keep Rick motivated or, in behavioral terms, make sure that his behavior is reinforced by reinforcing success and by ensuring that success is possible through the sequence of exercises given him.  3).  Ensure that Rick starts his exercises below his level of competence.  4).  Ensure that Rick has attained a high level of fluency in each skill before going on to more complex skills.  There are many other components of this program, but I’ll content myself with this partial list.  Notice that these steps are the opposite of what happens in the average school.
    The first test of Rick’s skills (remember we are not testing Rick, his essence will remain unknown to us, we are interested in his mathematical behavior) will show us that he can do perhaps 12 to 15 digits correct per minute in simple arithmetic facts such as 21/3, 9+6, 17-9 and 7X8 with the help of his fingers. He hides his digital teaching aids under the table, but our Power Teacher has seen this before and pretends he doesn’t notice.  There is no point in telling him not to use his fingers.  He will stop soon enough.  At such a slow rate, he makes many mistakes.  We do not inquire after his self-esteem or test his creativity.  We check how fast he can write digits.  This may be holding him back and we may start with the exercise of writing 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and repeat.

    If his speed in digits is OK or we make it OK, we’ll go to the basic math facts.  If he can improve on exercises in which facts such as 7+9, 14-9 are mixed, we’ll continue with this exercise.  If he doesn’t show early improvement, we’ll move to practice sheets with fewer different facts.  Since most mathematics instruction, even on basic facts is inefficient, we may start with 9+0, 3-0 as special (and easy) cases until we establish the component skills necessary for the final exercise sheet.  Remember, we are doing two things, teaching skills and maintaining and improving motivation.  We plot results on the Standard Behavior Chart and make sure to show Rick when he’s improving although he soon starts to determine this himself.  The teacher claps, squeals, shakes Rick’s hand and generally carries on when Rick makes an aim.  Rick knows enough math to realize that 32 per minute is faster than 29 per minute.  The reinforcement for improving is automatic. We continue through the math curriculum, ensuring that Rick’s behavior is fluent for each activity before moving on to the next.  This ensures that we are using the, "teach once, remember always" method rather than the process followed by the spiral curriculum, "teach a little bit, have the student forget, wait a few months and teach a little bit again…." a procedure which is like looking at a reflection in opposite mirrors.  It just goes on and on.

    Rick gradually begins to understand the language of the math teacher.  The teacher says things such as, "Eighty-one divided by 9 is 9." and, glory to Pythagoras, Rick can "understand" this.  His math projects show large increases in frequency.  Rick starts to get a little cocky about math.  "What’s so hard about this? Is this the best you can do? Give me something tougher?" The Power Teacher seizes this opportunity to throw in an easy exercise or two so that Rick reaches his fluency aim in one try.  This is quite a powerful reinforcer and I recommend that the school system use it more.  The school system won’t, of course, because the student is supposed to be motivated "internally" and fluency is beyond them.  The Power Teacher has been using number equations, so when algebra is introduced it holds no mystery.  This story, being hypothetical, has a happy ending.  Rick catches up in math.  I used the Power Teaching techniques to boost Rick’s ability in math from Grade 1 to Grade 6.5 in 50 hours of instruction and then to Grade 9.5 in another 30 hr. The last two tests were given by the school.  The story is hypothetical only because the student’s name wasn’t Rick and the total number of math instruction hours was 40, not 80 and Rick’s grades in math, in spite of knowing practically no math to being above grade level, never rose above the minimum required for promotion.  These results have been replicated hundreds of times by myself and other people.  The results are as real as they are ignored.  I still puzzle about what happened to Rick’s dyscalculia, that "brain condition" cured without neurosurgery.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     Someone asked this question on October, 30, 2009. It’s very relevant, so I thought I’d reply to all.

    “I’m afterschooling my two sons, and looking for a math curriculum that uses PT as an element. Do you know of any structured curricula that I could use to help move their math instruction, particularly their computation skills forward?”

Thank you ..

    I always encourage parents to homeschool because, as you’re teaching skills and not political viewpoints and not using the educult’s concepts, your teaching can be much more efficient. Two hours a day is easily sufficient. Nonetheless, my answer would be the same for afterschooling. as for  homeschooling Here it is.

    I would use Connecting Math Concepts from SRA, developed by Engelmann and associates. CMC develops concepts in the usual, effective Direct Instruction fashion and contains a sufficient amount of practice for most students. The placement tests can be downloaded here–click on placement test and then on the individual test.  This program is quite pricy, but it’s the one we use.

   At my outfit, the Precision Learning Centre (yes Centre, it’s in Canada), we supplement with random math sheets until the student is fluent in the basic math facts such as 7+3= , 17-9= , etc. The level of expected fluency is determined by age, grade, and other personal characteristics of the student. Each exercise has an easily reachable aim and reaching it garners a lot of things such as praise and money we believe are positive reinforcers. The Precision Teaching Behavior Charts can be purchased at BRCO.  Look under Standard Celeration Charts. You’ll probably want the 4EC, but a number of others will do. People get quite exercised about the specific chart to use, but the important thing is that the student gets more fluent (faster and more accurate) and learns more facts. Again, standard students don’t need nearly as much practice as special needs students although the latter astonish me continually.

As I tell parents, these programs are not the best because I use them. I use them because they’re the best.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H. L. Mencken.

    According to a professor of medicine (citation not available, but the facts are easily checked), New Zealand has gone through its flu season. It was predicted there would be 18,000 deaths from H1N1. There were 17. Out by a factor of 1,058.82. Close enough for government work.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

   Three carpooling friends are gathered at a bar where they go every Thursday night for a beer before going home. There is a Scotsman, an American and a Canadian. On their way home, their car is demolished by a train at a level crossing when the signals failed.

    On arriving in Heaven, the admission clerk says there has been an rare error, and none of the men is scheduled to arrive in less than 50 years. He tells them they have a procedure for such errors and, in return for a $50 processing fee, each will be returned to Earth.

    “Och ay”, says the Scot, “I cannae speak for the others, but my life is worth $50.” He pays and leaves.

    “Listen, buddy”, says the American, “This is a marginal cost and can’t be worth more than $37.50.” The clerk relents, the American pays the money and gets back to Earth.

    Next Thursday, the Scot and the American show up at the bar causing the bartender to believe he’s in the presence of ghosts. The two explain the unusual event and allay the bartender’s fear. “One question”, the barkeep asks, “What happened to your friend, the Canadian.”

    “I don’t think we’ll see him again.”, says the Scotsman. “He’s still up there waiting for the government to pay for it.”

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

The Best Way

    There is an unwritten rule in the social sciences that one should never use phrases such as "The Best Way".  One should use the more modest, "A Better Way".  This is based on the notion that the social sciences must be based on the democratic ideal where all techniques are given equal value.  If I hadn’t passed the following through the DIW filter, I wouldn’t write about it.  I could call it "A Better Way" or "Another Way" or "One of The Best Ways" or "The Way I Like Best".  What would be the purpose of that? That would show that I had not done my work.  On with The Best Way.

    My first exposure to behavioral-based education was in the early 1970s when I met Eric Haughton who had been a student of Odgen Lindsley who in turn had been a student of B.F.  Skinner.  Dr.  Lindsley had developed a method of daily educational measurement called Precision Teaching.  Precision Teaching has two main components: The first is the Standard Behavior Chart on which the student’s behavior is charted daily.  The second is the emphasis on fluency of responding.  Students who are not taught to fluency will tend to forget the skill and become mired when fundamental behavior is required in complex academic work.  For example, if the student cannot do the multiplication table, he will not be able to perform decimal multiplication.  Precision Teaching has discovered, using fluency as a basic assumption, a teach-once, remember-always method.  For example, when finding out what skills a student has in mathematics, it is very common to find that the student can only do part of the multiplication table correctly even if the student "tests" at Grade 8 or Grade 9.  Once the student can produce 70 to 80 digits correct per min.  in basic arithmetic exercises, he will not forget these basic facts.  The student will also be able to transfer the multiplication skill to more complicated mathematical questions.  Precision Teaching is an easy way to solve the problem of testing student knowledge.  Rather than providing academic progress reports once every 3 or 4 months, Precision Teaching procedures provide information on progress several times an hour.

    "Continuous measurement is like navigating by knowing where the ship is each minute as opposed to knowing where the ship is every three years. Which ship would you rather be on? When we must navigate without measures, we are lost most of the time. No doubt that is why it is called dead reckoning." Bushnell and Baer, 1994.

    Fluency pervades other areas of psychology, but has had little impact on education outside of behavior analysis.  Expert musicians, dancers, chess players and athletes, according to an extensive review, are only fast and accurate in their own area.  They have no superior abilities in skills other than those they have practiced much more than their less "talented" colleagues.  For example, an expert musician has a very good memory for musical scores but average memory for random words or digits. 

     Haughton’s technique fulfilled many of the Power Criteria formulated in the first chapter.  It worked quickly.  It worked where regular school failed.  It produced vast change in Pauline’s everyday functional behavior, such as writing, which improved markedly.  These results were published in a journal on exceptional children distributed throughout Canada and, surprisingly, did not result in one inquiry.  I should have known then that results do not impress public educators.  However, Pauline became functionally literate and numerate.  Her "motivation", which in behavior analysis terms is something the program produces, not an internal or eternal property of the student, was so great that she worked at this project seven days a week and would have done much more than 20 minutes a day had we allowed her.  Progress shown on daily charts has that effect.  Motivation is a variable we change by good programming and not a property we attribute to students we like.  As usual, the social services have reversed cause and effect when they talk about mysterious, "internal" causation located deep within the student and outside the realm of the program. This conceptualization, of course, takes the responsibility away from the programmer and places it on the client. who is responsible for "resistance" and "denial", but not for success.

     During four years at Sacajawea elementary in Great Falls Montana, Precision Teaching for 20 to 30 minutes per day was incorporated into the usual poor curriculum for public schools. Compared to similar schools in the district, this modest and inexpensive addition produced advances of 25 to 43 percentile points on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. All "learning disabled" students in the school took the criterion test whereas these lower functioning students did not take the test in the comparison schools.  As is inevitable with all spectacular successes in public education,  a new principal dropped the program and results settled back to dreary mediocrity after bright and undeniable accomplishment.

     Power Teaching, or hyper-accelerated education as a more descriptive label, is a blend of Precision Teaching, Direct Instruction, Programmed Learning, the Personalized System of Instruction and Behavior Analysis. This combination is practiced by many people, in private educational enterprises and developed independently because of the usefulness of the various components and the formidable usefulness resulting from their combination. This combination was "formally" introduced by Johnston and Layng in 1992 as the "Morningside Model of Generative Instruction", in a paper which provides an excellent introduction and overview.  Power Teaching depends on two concepts largely ignored by other techniques.  The first is fluency, accuracy and speed, in tool and basic skills before moving on in the curriculum.  The second concept is opportunity to respond or practice.  Students learn by doing and the more opportunities to practice they have, the more they learn.  This combination requiring fluency and providing many opportunities to respond consistently produces faster results than any other method, yet attracts little attention from public education systems.

    In basic mathematics, fluency is measured by digits correct per minute.  For example, in fraction calculations, the aim is 70 digits correct per minute on a practice sheet with all the different types of fraction problems presented in random order.  When students reach a fluent level in an academic behavior, they remember, are less distractible and are more likely to apply the skill to new types of problems (Johnson and Layng, 1994).  Fluency goals provide the framework for the academic curriculum and must be met before the student is given more complex work.  For example, it is not unusual for a student to score in the Grade 5 to 9 level at intake assessment in mathematics, according to standard tests, and be slow and inaccurate in simple multiplying, dividing, adding and subtracting, a situation which is a red flag for future trouble.  The first academic task with these students is to bring their responding to 70 correct digits per minute or higher for the basic mathematics skills of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

    Basic skills are always assessed initially and brought to a level of fluency which makes them functionally useful for further work.  One of the reasons for the emphasis on fluency in basic skills is that it is difficult for the student to succeed with complex calculations, for example, those involving negative numbers, brackets, exponents, and decimals, without being fluent in the basic skills of mathematics.  As Johnson and Layng (1992) point out, once basic skills are mastered to fluency, more complex skills are easier to teach than those supposedly simpler.

    Greenwood, Hart, Walker and Risley (1994) have found that in ordinary classrooms, teacher behavior consumes much more class time than student behavior thus depriving the students of the opportunity to practice.  The hyper-accelerated method requires that, even when new procedures are being introduced, student responding must be at a rate of at least once per six seconds.  This is contrasted to standard teaching procedures in which the teacher "explains" the concept and the students listen, without responding, for long periods of time.  This is required by mainstream teaching philosophy because the teacher is "imparting knowledge" rather than teaching academic behaviors.  Remember, if you’re not teaching behaviors you’re teaching non-behaviors.  This makes it very difficult to determine what you’ve taught and puts it beyond measurement.

  Bushnell, D., & Baer, D.. (1994) Measurably Superior instruction means close, continual contact with the relevant outcome data. Revolutionary?   In R. Gardner, D.M. Sainato, J.O. Cooper, T.E. Heron, W.L. Heward, J. Eshelman, & T.A. Gross (Eds.).  Behavior Analysis in education: Focus on Measurably Superior Instruction. (pp. 4-10). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

  Greenwood, C. R., Hart, B., Walker, D., & Risley, T. R. (1994). The opportunity to respond revisited: A behavioral theory of developmental retardation and its prevention. In R. Gardner III, D. M. Sainato, J. O. Cooper, T. E. Heron, W. L. Heward, J. W. Eshleman, & T. A. Grossi (Eds.), Behavior analysis in education: Focus on measurably superior instruction (pp. 213-223). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

     Johnson, K.R. and Layng, T.V.J. (1992). Breaking the structuralist barrier: Literacy and numeracy with fluency. American Psychologist, 47, 1475-1490.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson       

    I learned two things in university, the location of the library and the importance of data. No one mentioned how to determine which data had value. This is something I develop in my book, Shadow

Dancing on the Grave of Hope.

    I see that GM, using my money, is advertising as aggressively as before the bailout.

    Any class war will be between those who ride on the gravy train and those who pull it.

    Social justice means not caring about the race, color or creed of the people who pay for  social engineering.

              The Big Historical Lie in Education

    As with all falsehoods visited upon us by ideologues, whether this a lie or an oversight resulting from the lack of scholarship which in turn comes from the lack of necessity for scholarship, it is difficult to say. Where there are no consequences for falsehood,  truth occurs sporadically and randomly–not a conspiracy, but a mixture of truth and falsehoods leaning to the necessity of government control and provision of education.

    This lie is shown in an exemplar quotation from the World Bank which states, “In practice no country has achieved significant improvement in…primary education without government involvement.” quoted by Tooley in The Beautiful Tree, p. 207.

    Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute.

    Facts against the necessity of government schooling are found in:

West, E.G. (1994) Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy Third Edition, Revised and Expanded. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Wolf, A. (2002) Does Education Matter? Myths about education and economic growth . London: Penguin Books.

    As West says, about education in England and Wales, “When the government made its debut in education in 1833 mainly in the role of subsidiser it was as if it jumped into the saddle of a horse that was already galloping.” p. 172. West outlines the large increase in the number of students before government control. This is consistent with Wolf’s observation that prosperity leads to education, not the other way around.

    Individual striving will take care of education when it is prudent to do it and will do it much cheaper than any government agency.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

In West’s historical look at education, he notes that the state jumped on a horse that was already galloping in terms of taking over private schools which were doing a good job. What West doesn’t mention is that this horse was immediately steered into a wall, which brings us to the metaphor of Dead Horse Racing, presented earlier.

West, E.G. (1994) Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy Third Edition, Revised and Expanded. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

What follows is from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

      A complete explanation of the components of effective teaching is found in Johnson and Layng and will be expanded in future posts. I’ve talked about Direct Instruction and today will discuss fluency. There are three other components, Applied Behavior Analysis, Programmed Instruction and The Individualized System of Instruction. A interesting side note about this combination is that several people, myself included, I modestly add, came up with them more or less independently. This is not as difficult as it may appear since each of the components is effective on its own. This combination of methods is not used, officially, in any public school system because effectiveness and efficiency are not rewarded in public institutions.

         Fluency: The Swiss Army Knife of Education  

    "Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them"  Alfred North Whitehead in Introduction to Mathematics.

    "What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence." Samuel Johnson.

    The notion of the importance of fluency, resulting from practice, elegantly presented by many, has been supported by the research on expert performance which is rigorously ignored by education.

    Fluency is a concept pioneered by Skinner, Lindsley and Haughton and comes from the study of the fundamental properties of behavior.  Fluency, which is speed with accuracy along with a dash of smoothness, is the description of expert performance in areas as different as reading, bricklaying, basketball, computer programming and mathematics.  Education has traditionally emphasized percent correct and disregarded the powerful variable of time, important in other sciences.

    Binder, "The mere presence or accuracy of a response class in the repertoire of a learner is not sufficient to ensure progress through a curriculum sequence that depends on that response class as a prerequisite or component." Eric Haughton’s analogy was "…that, like atoms requiring a certain valence of energy to combine, behavioral elements require a certain frequency to form compound response classes." Binder 1996, p.  60.

    Cumulative dysfluency means that many component skills are not learned to fluency.  The longer the unfortunate student is in the educational system, the more influence dysfluencies will have on  his performance.

    My first student I taught using assumptions about fluency and basic skills was Pauline, an 22 year old "street" person who was functionally illiterate.  Pauline tried hard, but when she wrote down telephone messages, for example, the results were impossible to decipher.  It was no surprise when Pauline went to the local adult retraining center and tested at the Grade 2 level.  Eric Haughton suggested that Pauline was lacking the most basic tool skills in math, reading and writing.  We started her practicing basic math facts, writing the letters of the alphabet and reading simple passages, all in one-minute periods.  Pauline improved in all her projects and became very enthusiastic about increasing her scores.  After twenty days of practice, her telephone messages started to make sense and gradually became as readable as anyone’s.  At the end of 3 months of 15 to 20 minutes a day practice, Pauline retook the entrance exam and scored at the Grade Eight level.  I followed  her first few months of  successful upgrading in the community college.  As Carl Binder says, "…in order to acquire and smoothly attain competence on a given composite skill or knowledge task, one must achieve both accuracy and speed on its components or prerequisites." 1993, p.  9.  Component learning will have to improve far past 100 percent accuracy to allow smooth transition to more complex material.  Students enjoy practice when they have an aim of "setting a new record" competing against themselves.

    A fluent reader is fast and accurate.  The words spoken follow the text and are read understandably at high speed.  Words are not omitted, substituted or inserted.  Fluent behavior is automatic.  It can be performed well under conditions of distraction, fatigue and high levels of emotion.  A high level of fluency will be retained over long periods without practice.  Accuracy alone does not distinguish between good and poor students.  Good students are faster.  If new skills are taught before a certain level of fluency is reached, the new skills will not be readily acquired.  Because a student has a reachable aim in each exercise, practice is much more pleasant as the student competes against his old score.  As one student said, "If you don’t have an aim, you’re aimless.  When skills are not taught to the level of fluency, they are taught to the level of dysfluency.  When many skills are required for a task, and the student has not learned each to fluent level, the result will be frustration and inability to perform the task.  In mathematics, for example, students who face a new task without mastering the sub-skills required, may as well be looking at a problem posed in Swahili with an answer required in Sanskrit.

Binder, C. (1993)  Behavioral Fluency: A new paradigm. Educational Technology, 33, 8-14.

Binder, C. (1996) Behavioral Fluency: Evolution of a New Paradigm. The Behavior Analyst, 19(2), 163-197.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

    A socialist doesn’t care what you do as long as it’s compulsory.

    This probably doesn’t have to be said to readers of this blog, but with all the easy money currently available (The government’s answer to every problem is to do more of the same thing that caused it.), there is, even now, at least one bubble forming. When this bubble bursts, everything but easy money will be blamed. Count on it.

    Yesterday, I outlined the Big Lie of government intervention in schooling, preceded by a relentless propaganda campaign which ignored and distorted facts and removed all accountability. Today, I will give another example and see where it led.

       Socialism uses coercion to make only one thing possible and then justifies the outcome as necessary. For example, Ontario, Canada was once served by private suppliers of electricity until Adam Beck, a socialist with government backing, used every coercive trick to put them out of business. While this was being accomplished, he proceeded to found a “public utility” which did what all public utilities do. It hid costs, incurred huge debt and become a model of inefficiency. This public utility had many consultant engineers in spite of having hundreds of engineers on payroll. One engineer of my acquaintance got many consulting contracts which gave him several chances to visit “The Sea of Elbows”.  He would go to a large room with dozens of cubicles separated by three feet high partitions, each cubicle with an engineer. There he would observe the “Sea of Elbows” as the high priced help leaned back in their comfortable office chairs and contemplated their situation with their hands clasped behind their heads. Apparently the creation of this ridiculous and expensive enterprise met with royal approval because the ruthless pursuer of public good became Sir Adam Beck.

    The bill from this utility is more than passing strange. It has charges as “debt retirement”, “regulation charges”, and “delivery charges”, all of which are much more than “electricity charges”. With any government utility, the amusement is unintended, but it ain’t free.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

  If you can’t do it cheaper and better than a government agency, you’re not trying very hard OR, more behaviorally: If you can’t do it better and cheaper than a government agency, you must be getting government money OR If you can’t do it better and cheaper than a government agency, you’ll soon be out of business.

    The government would like to be the car and the driver, but the best it can be is a noisome, free-riding passenger.

    Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute.

    I’ve  enjoyed working through The Beautiful Tree for many reasons. One is that it illustrates in both fact and analysis, the principles of the IS-DOES distinction. It shows the tremendous arrogance, the aura of infallibility and true ignorance of government agencies. They should never be taken seriously. An adjunct is the HINIBU (horrible if not invented by us from Ogden Lindsley) assumptions about private and government enterprise held by unaccountable elitists. Another principle it illustrates is that government assumptions are FACT-FREE–stating emphatically there are no private schools for the poor when there are thousands and FACT-IMMUNE–nothing changes when the facts contradict the “official” line and they almost always do. Ignoring facts is a sure outcome of having non-contingent income.

    The teachers in private schools were less “credentialed”, on average, than those of government schools. The data are in flat contradiction to the official stance that “better” qualified teachers would do a better job. This follows the well-known distinction of acquisition and maintenance. It is one thing to acquire knowledge, but the conditions under which it is applied determine how effective it will be. The conditions of accountability in the private sector are much more effective than in government service where showing up is usually necessary and sufficient.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson   

     Can a government, wrong about GLOBAL WARMING, be trusted to be right about anything?

    More from The Beautiful Tree, an investigation of private schools in poor countries.

    In the Middle Ages, so the story goes, monks were debating the important question about the number of teeth in a horse”s mouth. The learned, aged monks divided into factions concerning the best sources for this information. Some were in favor of Aristotle, others of other scholars. A young monk, naive in his simplicity, suggested they look in the mouths of a few horses. He was immediately excommunicated.

    Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute.

    Tooley went to several countries and studied the results from private and government schools, dividing the private schools into “recognized”  (usually meaning those which paid bribes and “unrecognized” (ones which didn’t).

    He points out that the thorny “pay for performance” scheme, so beloved of reformers, cannot be solved in government schools, but is easily solved in private schools. He mentions a poor school in Hyderabad, India, where the owner installed a closed circuit TV system to watch teachers. This solution would never be possible in government schools.

    “All I read pinpointed the problem clearly: the incentive structures are all wrong in the public-sector schools. In the private schools, on the other hand, the incentive structures work in the opposite, positive, direction for each school owner. All school owners depend on parents’ (sic)  using their schools; if parents don’t, the school owners are out of a job. So this invisible hand of the competitive market keeps all school owners on their toes, constantly monitoring the performance of their teachers, without whose high performance school owners will suffer. It’s this invisible hand that is working in the educational market in exactly the same way that it does, as the World Bank points out, in the market for sandwiches. (p. 166).

    The international experts discount this because, “The development experts didn’t appear to trust poor parent’s judgment, so accountability to parents couldn’t possibly be the answer.” (p. 167).

    Tooley “looked in the horse’s mouth” with a massive study of schools in India, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. He found:

     Unannounced visits showed more teaching in private schools.

      Playgrounds were better in government schools.

      Private school students scored higher on standardized tests.

     Private schools cost a small fraction of government schools.

     Government school teachers had much more formal schooling than private school teachers.

     “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?, Groucho Marx.

    Cheerio and ttfn,

   Grant Coulson