Today’s entry contains more about Follow Through, mentioned in a previous post, but first, I’ll mention another monumental failure of government “experts”.
This is a perfect example of the IS of intention being overwhelmed by the DOES of uselessness from an interview of Warren Buffet from here: Its explains that a government agency, specifically set up to monitor two Government Sponsored Enterprises, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, failed to raise concerns when many individuals were raising them long before the meltdown. Both these closely monitored entities cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars, but I’ll bet no one in the oversight agencies was fired.
QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?
Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that’s $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies.
QUICK: Mm-hmm.
Mr. BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you can get them on the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to Sarbanes and Oxley every year. And they went–wrote 100 page reports, and they said, ‘We’ve looked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.’ And then all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350–340 page report examining what went wrong, and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit committee. They didn’t have a word in there about themselves, and they’re the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.
from the Book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
And now back to Follow Through: The data, where one should always start, are on this blog here:
Project Follow Through
"Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats." Howard Aiken.
One of the largest experiments in the social sciences began in 1967. Two hundred thousand, at-risk school children from across the U.S. were exposed to 22 different educational techniques as part of the "War Against Poverty." which was to lead to the "Great Society", another failed Utopian notion, by the way."It’s never worked, but, by Jingo, we’ll get ‘er right this time." Proponents of each of the many, very different, educational techniques were given large budgets to train and supervise teachers and implement their procedures in many classrooms in many schools. The schools volunteered for each approach so that enthusiasm and compliance with the methods were high for all approaches.The experiment was based on the reasonable idea that, if teaching methods were directly compared, the results should indicate a wide range of effectiveness. The best methods would be supported and disseminated to schools of education which, in turn, would train teachers in the most effective methods. The least effective methods would be relegated to the "ash heap of history". The results produced by the Direct Instruction (DI) methods were by far the most impressive. The other method which showed promise was Behavioral Education, but its results were well below those of DI. The reading portion of the DI program was, among other things, phonics based. The other techniques, most of which are still in use today by proponents who are sure they are right with the data, presumably, being wrong, were little or no better than the standard techniques they replaced. Doing no better than standard practices in education was not a proud boast then and it is not a proud boast now. The vast improvement visualized by the "Great Society" framework did not occur. Ineffective methods are still used, and effective ones ignored because the Great Society ignored Contingencies, as all Great Societies do. If any example of the inevitability of governmental irresponsibility is ever needed, one need only turn to the Follow Through data and the subsequent fate of the discredited methods. When government agencies occasionally get something right, they then proceed to rectify the situation by getting everything else wrong from then on.
Direct Instruction (DI), originally based on work by Carl Bereiter and Siegfried Engelmann, is a system of instruction which uses scripted lessons, fast pacing, constant questioning and feedback, careful analysis of the curriculum and extensive testing on real students in real classrooms. Many further experiments have supported the superiority of DI. DI techniques have lifted the accomplishment of low-performing schools by as much as 70 percentile points.
Siegfried Engelmann has this to say about the assumptions behind Direct Instruction. “The philosophy behind the program is basically simple. We say in effect, ‘Kid, it doesn’t matter how miserably your environment has failed to teach you the basic concepts that the average five-year-old has long since mastered. We’re not going to fail you. We’re not going to discriminate against you, or give up on you, regardless of how unready you may be according to traditional standards. We are not going to label you with a handle, such as dyslexic or brain-damaged, and feel that we have now exonerated ourselves from the responsibility of teaching you. We’re not going to punish you by requiring you to do things you can’t do. We’re not going to talk about your difficulties to learn. Rather, we will take you where you are, and we’ll teach you. And the extent to which you fail is our failure, not yours. We will not cop out by saying, He can’t learn. Rather, we will say, I failed to teach him. So I better take a good look at what I did and try to figure out a better way.’” Zig Engelmann, founder of Direct Instruction.
The programs are based on several operating principles which, naturally, are directly opposed to those used in any government school system.
1). The better structured the program, the easier it is to tell if it is being implemented correctly.
2). Children in a typical classroom are placed in three, instructionally homogeneous groups because, while all children learn the same way, they don’t learn at the same rate and they don’t start at the same place.
3). The presentation of a rule or example must be consistent with only one interpretation.
4). Most authors assume that what they believe they are teaching is what the children are learning. In DI, what the children are learning is constantly tested, not assumed.
5). The program designer regards student errors as an indication of a weakness in the program rather than a weakness in the student.
6). New teaching involves teaching one new thing at a time.
7). Given the non-intuitive complexity of teaching even "simple" operations and knowledge, the authors of Direct Instruction came to the conclusion that scripted presentations would be required so that confusion would be minimized and all the elements of the presentation covered.
8). Instruction must start at the level of the student’s knowledge–starting "above" the student’s knowledge–basing instruction on concepts not known by the student–is a sure path to failure.
9). Scripted lessons allow the teacher to teach rather than requiring her to be both teacher and instructional designer.
10). Scripted lessons allow teaching to be faster in that more examples and more student responding can be presented per unit of time.
11). Teachers are monitored very closely, after initial training, for several years to ensure proper implementation.
12). Instruction is structured to provide generalizable skills which can be used in any appropriate situation. In other words, Big Ideas are taught.
Because most social scientists cannot tolerate clear-cut outcomes, a fair bit of controversy has accompanied the results of Follow Through, but gentle reader, as we know from the introduction, a RIF about a good method is whether its results can be repeated in other places, with other subjects, and by other researchers. The DI results have been repeated many times since then.
The educational establishment either ignored or rejected these results because they did not support prevailing educational theory. Results do not matter when they have no economic consequences. According to some education providers, the lessons are too rigid and curb teacher creativity, as if teacher creativity is what is important in education.
A telling remark about an evaluation of Follow Through came from an evaluation which missed the mark, but which did contain the following: "The audience for Follow Through evaluations is an audience of teachers to whom appeals to the need for accountability for public funds or the rationality of science are largely irrelevant." In other words, don’t worry about wasting money on methods which don’t work, you’re teachers.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
