Grantcoulson's Blog

   Everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts.

    Y2K panic–Global Warming panic–see the parallels.

    If you feed a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll get really angry because you stopped giving him free fish.

    In Toronto, a shopkeeper apprehended a shoplifter with a long criminal history. The crook got a deal on his sentence for testifying against the shopkeeper who is on trial for forcible confinement, among other charges. Is it difficult to write satire because the world writes it better than anyone?

    More inadvertent satire appears in The Beautiful Tree.

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

    When government workers, such as those from the U.N., review education in poor countries, they invariably come up with several recommendations, untouched by facts.

    The first is an increase in funding for government schools. Imagine a government official recommending more government spending.

    The second is the statement that private education is inferior even when it is not. Damn the facts, full speed ahead.

      The third is that private education must be closely regulated without recognizing that regulation merely provides a lever for corruption. The more rules, the more money it costs to pretend they are complied with. The data from homeschooling, reported in an earlier post, show the opposite–regulation has no effect on results.

    The fourth is that private education exploits the poor when it is the government officials who exploit the school owners by requiring bribes. Any real business is exploitation. Marx taught us this and he’s been right about everything.

    The fifth is that only government schooling is accountable. So wrong the opposite is correct. Private schooling is accountable to the parents and public schooling sets up a maze impenetrable by anything.

    In the end, government reports are all IS, no DOES in either relying on data or worrying about corroboration.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     Today, I have a few points from The Beautiful Tree. I haven’t finished this book, although it does represent the notion that government should do what it can do better than individual initiative. When someone finds out what that is, let me know.   

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

     The book talks about education in poor countries which have it all wrong, as do the international agencies which pour billions of dollars down the black hole of government incompetence. The assumption is that education leads to development when it is the other way round.

    I didn’t write this book, although it confirms everything flowing from the incentives hypothesis. A few salient points and one of the best quotes I’ve read anywhere.

    Tooley studied private education in several poor countries. The general points are: International agencies, both governmental and non-government give billions of dollars earmarked for “free and compulsory education”. –free and compulsory in the same sentence without explaining the contradiction. English is a slippery language. A large amount of the money goes to expensive central offices and central office salaries. The officials in these expensive offices say, a) There are no private schools in their country, and b) If there are, they serve the rich. Both of these statements are so wrong that, as usual in government bureaucratese, their opposites are true.

     Many government schools are filled with teachers who, although highly paid, are absent, late, sleeping or not teaching. The central offices are filled with people who believe, because they are government experts, they are anointed with automatic divine wisdom. Any parent who chooses a private school is deluded. One official described them as “ignoramuses”, giving voice to a widely held belief. The government school officials, after being shown that private schools exist, insist the teaching is of very poor quality. They also state that the poor do not have private schools because they are unaffordable. Again the opposite,  the teaching is of high quality and tuition is low.

    The same officials believe that private schools are a cause of problems for the public system rather than a response to the problems of the public system.

     In my opinion, this is the best quote in the book, from a parent in Kenya, “One father summed it all rather neatly as to why he still preferred private schooling for his daughter rather than what was provided free in the public school: ‘If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and vegetables, you have to pay for them.’” (p. 124).

     Another good one, from India, “Were his teachers qualified? I asked. He began by telling me that he trained them himself; at the end of each term, they had workshops to increase the academic standard, and that was fine. Then he added: ‘We don’t cherish qualifications, we cherish your output. Can you perform? That is the important thing, not whether you have certificates.’” (p. 43).

    When next I talk about the book, I’ll look at costs and results. It appears that the government schooling is much more expensive, but makes up for it by being less effective.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

   Concentrating on the producer will not necessarily produce a bad product, but it will be worse than the one produced by those concentrating on the customer. Case study–GM concentrating on the UAW while Toyota concentrated on car buyers.

    In today’s New York Times, a columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, maintains that the recession must be ended by better schooling. Education, Friedman contends, will enable workers, “…to invent smarter ways to do old jobs.”. Two things are wrong with this hypothesis. The first is the truth of the hypothesis. The second is that government schooling will produce these skills.

    Entrepreneurs are created by opportunity, not education. To expect government workers to create entrepreneurs is like depending on government enterprises to create automobiles (Trabant, Fiat, Lada), or, more properly, good automobiles which people will purchase. The strangest deal in history was when the USSR bought an assembly line from Fiat (fix it again Tony) and made the Lada, a shining success of government enterprise.

    Recessions are the result of easy money policy. It took several centuries for cumulative inflation to reach 100%. Since 1940, inflation has risen 1400%. Thanks are due to the necessary control of money by government agencies. Where would we be without them? Now, someone is suggesting that a government agency (government schooling) will fix the recession problem.

Cheerios and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

I’m reading two fairly new books. The first is The Beautiful Tree, A Personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, as the cover says. I haven’t finished the book, but, while education isn’t that important, poor people seem to provide it for themselves better than their government. “A fool can put on this coat better than a wise man can put it on for him.” Find it here.

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

The other is, Doctoring the Mind. The book is another in the series attacking  psychiatry for its reliance on drugging as a treatment method. As someone has said, “Psychiatry and the makers of psychopharmacological drugs are conjoined twins joined at the wallet”. This is the Amazon.com link.

Bental, R.P. (2009). Doctoring the Mind. Washington Square, New York, New York University Press.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of

Hope: How the Social Sciences Look Busy

Without Accomplishing Anything: Wherein the

Iron Law of Contingencies is used to Explain

the Consistent, and Embarrassing, Failure of

the Social Sciences.

The DIW (Does it work) Criteria Applied to Direct Instruction

“First, and this really makes it unique in commercial learning systems, it is field tested. “…if teachers or children have trouble with material presented, the program is at fault. Revisions are made to correct the problems.” Direct Instruction is based on the assumption that if there are consistent errors in student responding–the errors come from inadequate curriculum material or inadequate student preparation–both of these lead to changes in the teaching programs. Non-learning is attributed to poor teaching.  Contrast this with the ordinary school situation when non-learning is ascribed to faulty students and textbooks are never tested in any systematic way.

Direct Instruction, briefly described above, was part the most successful part of the Follow Through experiment. The creators of Direct Instruction are guided by research and the abiding belief that student errors are the result of bad teaching, not incapable students.  Direct Instruction has revised its original programs several times since their beginning and added others such as spelling and writing.

1. Speed of change. Large-scale implementation of Direct Instruction in a school produces large changes within a year’s worth of instruction. With individual clients, I have produced two to three grades improvement in reading scores in less than 30 hours of instruction.  All of these students were victims of Whole Language instruction and had learned guessing techniques. They had also been labelled as dyslexic, learning disabled, and as having an attention deficit disorder and myriad other, “sophisticated” characterizations that experts foist upon students.

2. Duration of change. Several years of Direct Instruction during the beginning school years have produced long-term changes in academic behavior such as higher rates of high school graduation and higher rates of college attendance.

3. Amount of change. Direct Instruction typically produces large increases in academic performance. Some classes are several years ahead of the average in their school district after two or three years in Direct Instruction.

4. Able to overcome individual differences. One of the chants from the Book of Wrong is that students have different “learning styles”.  All students learn when taught from the same good curriculum using the same effective methods.  The only difference is the rate of learning. In the absence of good teaching, student attributes are important. In the presence of good teaching, all students learn.

5. Transferability to other situations. Academic behavior is the most transferable of all learned things. Two plus two equal four wherever it occurs.  Teaching academic basics well ensures transfer will occur.

6. Orderliness and reproducibility of data from individuals. If the programs are followed, they will work for everyone even for students with severe cognitive deficiencies who take much longer to learn.

7. The behavior has not been changed by a variety of other techniques. Students who have not learned to read using Whole Language can the taught to read using Direct Instruction. The reverse has  not been demonstrated.

8. Works with clients who are “resistant”, “unmotivated” and etc. Success is the greatest reinforcer. With fast pacing, frequent success, quick progress, and lots of verbal reinforcement,  the vast majority of students need no more incentive.

9. Spends much more time on production than explanation. Most academic fads are based on vast arrays of philosophical meanderings. Direct Instruction is based on research and results.

10. Does not appeal to a currently popular political movement for support. Direct Instruction takes an opposite position to all of the assumptions from The Book of Wrong.

11. Can produce high rates of behavior. There is enough practice with Direct Instruction, especially with Precision Teaching added in, to produce fluent rates of academic behavior even in young students.

12. Can be used in large groups for efficiency. Direct Instruction programs are designed to teach a whole class or a significant part of it. Although Direct Instruction programs can be used as remedial programs when academic fads have failed, they are most successful when used as the sole instructional method from the beginning of a student’s career. Even when used remedially, these programs can be used with large groups of students.

13. Produces change in the ultimate criterion. Does it accomplish what it advertises or does it produce “statistically significant” but small changes in weakly related pencil and paper measures? If we are teaching a student mathematics, we want the student to be able to do mathematics, not appreciate, understand or value it. We want him to be able to do it. Many of the “tests” for academic subjects are centered on understanding and appreciation rather than accomplishment and much academic research, whether on education or not, waxes poetic over differences which are statistically significant even when very small.

14. Is transportable. Direct Instruction programs are specifically written to take the guesswork out of implementation. In other language, Direct Instruction is “scalable”, able to be implemented by almost anyone with proper training. To be scalable and sustainable, of course, would require the correct incentive structure, something never possible in the public education.

“A teacher’s diligence is likely to be proportioned to the motive which he has for exerting it.” Adam Smith.

Academically, the DIW Criteria can be summarized: Does it produce significant changes quickly and efficiently for all students. Are the academic skills taught useful in themselves and useful in future academic pursuits? Is the program effective for everyone? The answer for all of these question is yes when Direct Instruction is used.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

     Mathematics education in North America has gone through two major fads in the last four decades. The first was the "New Math" in which mathematicians decided how to teach mathematics without regard to teaching methods. The second was the "New New Math" in which mathematics teachers decided how and what to teach without regard to mathematics. In neither case was the radically different curriculum tested with students before it was adopted in most areas of the U.S. and Canada. In both cases it failed and produced several generations which hated mathematics.

            The Asian "Solution"

     Another suggestion is that we should study Far Eastern methods from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan for clues to teach math.  Children from these countries regularly score much higher in mathematics than children from North America.  In fact, if several schools from each place are studied, it is not unusual to see the worst Asian schools scoring higher than the best North American schools.  Much has been made of these results, but the fact is that Asian students get much more mathematics instruction per school year than North American students.  One survey of school hours found that Grade 5 children in Taiwan had almost 5 times as many hours of mathematics instruction as children in comparable American schools.  Students learn by doing and Asian students have many more opportunities to do math.

     Charles Greenwood and his associates have studied schools for decades and found, among other things, that students in regular schools have very little opportunity to respond, especially in basic skills.  Greenwood also found that increased opportunity to respond was correlated with improved school performance.  This is an adequate explanation for the Asian results.  Asian students get more practice and do better on tests.  There is no magic in Far Eastern teaching methods.  The solutions to the problems of teaching are in the scientific literature, not in the supposed superiority of teaching methods of other countries.

Cheerio and ttfn.

Grant Coulson

    As long as we remember that politics is about evoking emotions, education is not about teaching and learning, and responsibility in government workers is not about economic consequences linked to performance, many more things are understandable.

    Today, I consider the various levels of activity in the social sciences. Only the last two are of a DOES variety, the others being all IS. The second last, prediction, is usually forgotten,such as Montreal’s mayor long ago (1976) prediction that, “The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby.” The Olympics only lost $2,000,000,000, so he was close enough for government work.

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

In science, the level of utility is layered like this, from least to most powerful:

Discussion

    Discussion about problems in education, rehabilitation and psychotherapy provides the illusion of knowledge and solutions. These discussions are a staple of  talk shows where "experts" speak knowledgeably  about things they can’t do, but say they can, using Hollywood words, full of drama and empty of significance.

    The equally irrelevant  twin of discussion, interpretation, holds the same fascination for silver-tongued practitioners. They go on and on about the reasons for things. As in all areas, those who can’t produce do a lot of talking. Lindsley calls them "glib reponders" who dazzle with wit and obfuscate with rhetoric, but cannot produce anything useful.

Description

    If the majority of applications in the social sciences were assessed on an evolutionary scale, they would not have emerged from the primordial slime of description. Psychiatry believes that description has utility and has a very thick book which catalogues behavior, a substantially useless exercise, especially since most of the categories were created by consensus or voting, based on "clinical intuition". They have not discovered mental diseases, but created them. Cataloguing provides the illusion of progress, but tells nothing about how to change and prevent self-destructive or immoral behavior. Cataloguing is destructive in all areas. In education, cataloguing permits educators to slip from under their teaching responsibility by pointing to deficiencies in their students as the cause of non-learning. One of the problems with cataloguing is that behavior is always contextual. A running man  may be running for a train or training for a run, but not knowing the context makes it impossible to tell. As we shall see later, the set of consequences and contexts of behavior contain the most important factors in explanation, prediction and change. Those who profit from description use a change in labels as indication that progress is being made. For example, minimal brain damage morphed into learning disability which will change to another label and give the impression of progress in education. Although none of the labels has helped teach students better, a substantial industry centers around testing for these complex hypothetical entities, making pointless recommendations, and charging astounding amounts of money for reporting on the amount of imaginary qualities possessed by the examinee.

    The frenzied unreality involved in this kind of  activity reminds me of a field marshal who plans an attack and believes that the thickest arrow represents a successful advance before the battle. Or in theology where true believers make up hypothetical elements and then spend happy hours debating, with great fervor and authority, the true nature of their imaginary contrivances.

Explanation

    Explanation, as you will see many times, gives an even stronger belief in progress. "Poverty causes crime", "poverty causes poor academic achievement", "post-traumatic stress causes crazy behavior", "low self-esteem causes poor grades" and etc. are pseudoexplanations which have little value in preventing or fixing problems. Explanation, in terms of hypothetical things going on in the "brain", "mind", "psyche", or other hypothetical places, is good for "explaining" other hypothetical things, but for nothing else. Changing  hypothetical things is easy, and many people are paid fearsome amounts of money for talking about how easily they can change them. The brilliant patina of explanation is blinding.

Prediction

    Prediction is the first order of usefulness to force reality on the  practitioner. Predictions are either right or wrong or, since we’re dealing with probabilities, more or less useful. "Experts", with "decades of experience in            (this blank is filled with the name of the area of "expertise" such as psychiatry, psychology, social work or, more specifically, "working with these kind of clients") predict behavior no better than the less exalted without "rich experience" and always do worse than statistically based prediction. One would have to work quite hard to construct a statistical prediction instrument that does worse than "clinical judgment". Confidence and length of experience should never be confused with ability.

    There is a trap in good prediction. For example, we know that children from higher socioeconomic classes tend to do better in school. Fortunately, this correlation is  strongest with really bad teaching, the kind we find in the vast majority of  public schools.  We can take this as an iron rule or provide such good teaching that the effect of class becomes considerably muted. "Which is better?", he asked, rhetorically.

Production

    Those who are allowed to replace results with intentions will never produce anything useful.

    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.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

    The present first lady of the U.S., Michelle Obama, has a piece in which she brings out the usual assumptive bromides of education–its overwhelming importance to economic development–the importance of teacher credentials–the steps being taken by her husband’s government–and, etc..

     The Obamas, great supporters of the public school system, send their children to a private school and always have, but you can’t ignore the appetite of teacher unions for leftist politicians and the support they give you and paradoxes never bother politicians because consistency doesn’t get votes.

    One quote, "And good teachers aren’t just critical for the success of our students. They are the key to the success of our economy." You can read the rest by clicking on “piece” above.

    For a less polemic, and a more data based reply see "Does Education Matter" by Alison Wolf.

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

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

This worked so well with Whole Language, we thought we’d have the same success with mathematics

    The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) decided that too many students were abandoning mathematics as soon as they could.  Their answer, of course, was not in methods which taught mathematics in the most effective and positive way, but from "experience" and a good hard think about what should be done from the viewpoint of "social justice", child-free theories of learning and political considerations.

    The problem with relying on experience, is that it is a poor teacher, especially in teaching, where many students learn in spite of the teaching methods.  The problem with having a good hard think, especially when using a committee,  is that group consensus takes over and produces the fad du jour as NCTM has done twice before.  So it was with the 1989 Standards produced by the NCTM, which have had a large impact on elementary and high school mathematics teaching throughout North America.  An additional problem with the NCTM Standards is that they were written by elementary and high school teachers and the mathematics is murky and often incorrect, according to many mathematicians.  The wondrous paradox in mathematics teaching is that, in spite of the precision of mathematics, the NCTM analysis of the subskills required is of the same poor quality as teacher produced documents in other academic areas. As one critic said, "’Explore’, ‘develop’, and ‘understand’, and their variants, are much more prominent in the text than ‘know’,'prove’, and ‘remember’." If that were not enough, the NCTM Standards are based on a mistaken notion of the nature of committees and co-operation in the workplace. The framers of the Standards seem to believe that "training workshops" for civil servants, where everyone enjoys a catered lunch and spends hours solving problems "with input from everyone" is the workplace norm. As faithful descendants of John Dewey, they regard individualism with suspicion and collectivism with favor. As civil servants, of course, it is their notion of productive work which is suspect. In spite of its obvious failings, the NCTM standards have been adopted by almost every state and province as the criteria by which textbooks are judged.

    The California State Mathematics Framework, based on the NCTM Standards, was published in 1992.  It stated, "It is a myth that children must master lower-order skills before they master higher ones." Mathematics, apparently, is the only pursuit for which this is true.  California repudiated these Standards in 1997 after poor results and complaints of parents.  Large scale polgrams are easier to refute because the bad results are apparent to so many people and result in  many complaints.

    The NCTM Standards used the same faulty construction process as the California Whole Language fiasco.  This included:

    1.  Creation by committee.

    2.  Ignoring research. As usual, in state-protected monopolies, political correctness and fads predominated.  One NCTM gem on this is, "The question, "Is Curriculum A better than Curriculum B?" is not a good research question because it is not really answerable." As usual, all curricula are the same, therefore, they must all be treated with respect.  Then, ignoring this operating assumption, the NCTM goes on to make very strong recommendations about what a mathematics curriculum should be, including the fact that mathematics subskills should be de-emphasized.

    This appeared in a net-based journal on mathematics: "Starting in 1968, the government funded a huge study called Project Follow-Through.  It cost a billion dollars and ran almost thirty years.  The purpose was to examine how different teaching methods or philosophies affected student performance.  What they found was that the traditional "direct instruction" method was the most effective.  Are you familiar with this study?"

    Gail Burrill, President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics replied, "I have never heard of it."  This is one of the clearest examples of the title of this section.  When people rely on their own experience, they  ignore the research done by hundreds of people. Ms. Burrill has written a series of teaching programs for mathematics obviously not based on the largest research project on teaching.

    Subsequently, research has shown many instances in which texts based on NCTM principles have: a), lowered scores on standardized tests, or, b),  produced much worse results than Direct Instruction.  This has been ignored by the apologists of the Standards who, like all others in these instances, are more interested in defending their philosophy than dealing with the data because their jobs are guaranteed.

    3.  Domination by layman-based theory vaguely based on psychological and educational theorizing without data support.

    4.  Faith in teachers to apply concepts guided only by the underlying philosophy.  In this case; however, training may have made matters worse by training teachers to carefully do something which does not work.

    5.  Accolades from those who don’t know anything about teaching  mathematics but like the underlying assumptions about how children learn to do mathematics.

    6.  Lots of money made by those who teach the "new philosophy" or, for the more academically inclined, the new paradigm.

    The only entertaining debate in education I have been able to find is whether these techniques are more detrimental to teaching reading or mathematics.  There is no definitive answer to this intriguing question.  Many students give up on mathematics.  This is because it has been taught so poorly, with so little emphasis on fluency,  not because of the intrinsic difficulty of the subject although, mathematics, of all subjects, is easiest to present as an extended IQ test with mathematical puzzles and tests.

    The kind of mathematics based on the NCTM Standards can be called: arithmetic-free math, skill-free math, social math, random discovery math, answer-free math, theoretical math, mathematics-free math, mathematics without numbers and so on. One book inspired by it and emphasizing all the things the progressivists think they know was called "Rain Forest Algebra".  Reading these Standards is a strange experience because they give pride of place to every educational misconception currently in favor with those to whom philosophy of education is more important than results.  A widely used "reform" text has this in the teacher’s guide for the 2nd grade.  "…there is no such thing as a number fact.  There are only relationships and these relationships are created inside the child’s head." This post-modern jargon, which holds that reality is "socially constructed", is at the heart of many of the problems with modern education.  One of the critics of this philosophy offered to allow those who believe that  gravity is a socially constructed concept to refute gravity’s reality by launching themselves from the balcony of his high-rise apartment. I’d pay money to see it and would be willing to bet the splat would be the same as that made by those who believe that gravity is a law of physics, independent of  people’s perception of its validity.

    A similar pseudo debate as that in reading has been going on in teaching mathematics.  The debate is between teaching facts and teaching understanding.  A good program, of course, teaches both.  The "reform" movement, based on the same non-data notions from the same non-teachers we have already seen, says that it is teaching understanding and ends up teaching neither problem-solving nor basic facts.  In California, for example, the mathematics standards based on reform mathematics, did not expect students to do long division with divisors larger than one digit–ever.  The students do, however, have to write about their feelings while doing their math projects.  At this point, California’s fourth grade students were better than Louisiana and Mississippi and worse than 36 of the other 39 states tested.  The rationalizations about this are just as fascinating as those about the failure of Whole Language.  A generation of students has been condemned to a "revolutionary" teaching method which has never been demonstrated to work.  Fifty-four percent of the freshmen entering California State University needed remedial mathematics.  Programs based on NCTM mathematics have the distinction of being inferior to traditional mathematical methods.  It is difficult to believe that anything could be worse than traditional methods. In the exotic world of education, the NCTM Standards were designed to help lower-scoring groups. Naturally, they did the opposite. The supporters of NCTM believe that since the new "approach" would teach mathematics more effectively, and stated that critics of the Standards believed that, "…the Standards could be seen as a threat to the current social order." Instead, the Standards produced poorer learning in the groups the Standards were supposed to "serve".

    In one experiment pitting Direct Instruction against a program based on NCTM, the lower half of the Direct Instruction group performed better than the NCTM group. In addition, the Direct Instruction teacher assigned little homework and needed very little preparation time. Direct Instruction was much more effective and efficient.

    Two programs have been demonstrated to be vastly superior to NCTM dogma.  The Direct Instruction methods of Engelmann and his associates consistently outperformed other methods with young children in Project Follow Through and have done so in many other experiments and demonstrations since then.  John Saxon, who was unsatisfied with mathematics textbooks, developed a series of texts based on careful increases in the skill set and cumulative review to produce fluency.  The Saxon curricula regularly outperform standard texts by a wide margin.  Many states rejected them, with South Carolina’s textbook adoption committee giving them a score of 20 out of 100, the lowest score possible.  In many states where pilot projects had shown large increases in test scores and in the number of students taking advanced courses, textbook adoption committees rejected Saxon books because they did not reflect the NCTM methods.  In the upper grades, exposure to the Saxon methods dramatically increases the likelihood that students take advanced mathematics.  The poignancy of the Saxon story is that he regularly offered free textbooks nationwide to any school which would use them properly.  His offer was accepted infrequently, indicating, once again, that the education system is more interested in form than function.  The arrogance of the NCTM is an example of what happens when a state-supported organization must defend its power base.  The defense of the power base becomes more important than producing results.  As Saxon says, "A mathematician will say ‘prove it’ when you state a premise.  An NCTMer will say, ‘Who are you?’" (Education week, December 6, 1996).

    The success of Saxon and Direct Instruction shows that the NCTM process is flawed beyond repair.  For Saxon and Direct Instruction, the sequence of teaching is produced by field testing over many years.  For the NCTM, a committee builds a consensus.  Naturally, students only respond to what works and not to a consensus of what should work according to current theory.  The NCTM is not interested in this kind of development as witnessed by the  comment of  a president of NCTM  about  the results of Project Follow Through  quoted above,  "I have never heard of it." A surgeon hears about this new device called a scalpel and is asked what he thinks of it. "I’ve never heard of it.", he replies.

    The debate on mathematics is based on a failure to separate curriculum from teaching methods.  In the "old days", mathematics teaching used methods based on the notion of, "Many will be called, but few chosen".  If a student did not succeed in learning mathematics, the student was inferior.  The conclusion was, that many students hated math because it wasn’t interesting enough.  If the teaching methods outlined in this chapter are used, almost all students can learn mathematics without pain and frustration although natural aptitude forces a ceiling as always.  The reason the drill needed to learn mathematical facts is usually so boring is that it does not use goals, encouragement, reinforcement and proper sequencing and moving on when an aim is met.  Students will hate math until the component skills are taught to the level of fluency required to proceed successfully to the next set of skills.  If  given a task for which they are not prepared, most will give up and curse the frustration brought by vain attempts.  Mathematics is not unique in this.

    Proponents of NCTM mathematics and Whole Language have maintained that neither has been refuted because neither has been "really tried".   This illustrates Karl Popper’s contention which applies to many other areas in the social sciences: "If something is so vague that it cannot be disconfirmed, it is scientifically useless."

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     The conceptual and data base for GLOBAL WARMING (so important it must be in caps) is crumbling like halvah in the fingers of an orangutan. Interesting that the term was popularized by the collective, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, and is being destroyed by individuals.

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

The California Whole Language Experience–The Perfect Example of a Polgram

    "I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in America.", Theodor Geisel, aka, Dr. Seuss.

    Educational authorities in California were proud of being pioneers in Whole Language implementation. Whole Language is favored in many other states and all ten Canadian provinces have adopted Whole Language as a method to teach reading. Many school districts will not "allow" phonics instruction. British Columbia operated on the basis of an educational program called "Year 2000" founded on the works of developmental and popular psychologists  who are data-shy and have not taught children successfully. These efforts are bound for failure. They will, in their efforts to enhance-self-esteem, make many students hate school. They will produce reading and mathematics behavior which is well below the national norms of forty years ago. These disasters come about because the educational authorities have no DOES IT WORK  (DIW) filter or no "nonsense filter", as one writer calls it.

    The California experience showed the same process as other polgrams. Something strikes resonance with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, of a social sciences profession, and is then adopted by a few authorities. The movement, like religious revivals, absorbs and creates true believers. Others count numbers of adopting agencies when they should be weighing the evidence and counting the number of successful outcomes. The movement reaches critical mass and dozens of other authorities rush to adopt. A few years later, those who always knew better demonstrate that the revolutionary technique has been a tragedy and the whole vox populi exercise begins again with authorities rushing to another socially appealing  vacuum and forget that democracy and science are opposites. Given the recent history of education in North America, one can formulate the following rule: "If most education authorities are using a method, it will not only be the wrong one, but will be worse than what it replaces."

Whole Language–Data-Free, Data-Immune, But Still Used: The Largest Polgram in the Social Sciences

    Attacking Whole Language is as unsporting as shooting dead squirrels in the living room, but it must be done. Whole Language is an example of a data-free educational theory based on romantic notions of how children learn. Its teaching methods, relying on pictures, guessing and "integration", are a good example of theory without results.

    Some of these things happened in California where reading scores in 1994 were higher than only Louisiana and Guam. These results are not attributable to California’s high proportion of non-English speaking students because the scores for California’s white students were the lowest in the nation. The next phase for Whole Language proponents is quite predictable. They maintain that Whole Language training imparts skills which are so subtle and powerful–note the paradox, powerful skills which cannot be measured–that ordinary tests cannot show them. This is always the last-ditch attempt of those who cannot do something. "We’re doing really important things. You’re just not sophisticated enough to measure them." Parents in California, who are more attuned to results than theory, demanded the reading programs be changed and the state brought in the very experts which the terminally trendy had excoriated in the late 1980s. The students not taught reading are now in high schools, colleges and universities which must either teach remedial reading or lower their academic standards.

    How It Came To Be
    In 1987, educational authorities in California were concerned about its middle placing in nation-wide tests of the reading ability of its grade school students. California wanted to become "world class" and "prepare for the 21st century", two phrases, in governmental parlance,  which should send shivers down the spine. What followed was the classic example of how to make things worse by "postmodern reform", another shudder-inducing concept.

    There was no evidence to support the route that California took. The Follow Through data indicated that the Language Experience method was one of the worst for teaching students to read. Many real experts in education, those who understood data, warned against implementation. They were ignored as reactionary (note the leftist rhetoric) or anti-progressive ( again, a damning label from the left) or old-fashioned or phonicators (those who favored phonics).

    The Whole Language process is a classic example of an ideologically-based, data-free methodoloy being imposed upon a profession, education, which has no DIW filter in place. A method is accepted with great enthusiasm, but without supporting data. A few  scientists insist on measuring the impact of the "new" method. When it is found to be worse than what it supplants, the enthusiastic supporters, who are really believers, discount the results. They maintain that if the right questions were asked, their technique would show huge superiority. Some political or judicial event intervenes and the technique is discarded. The social sciences are brought into well-deserved disrepute yet again. The public seems to have a very short memory, because the cycle gets repeated again and again. With the majority of educational jurisdictions in North America mandated to use Whole Language, this is a polgram which has negatively affected tens of millions of students. Whole Language, I predict, will be regarded as one of the classic cases of a polgram. It has all the ingredients, supreme arrogance of the originators, lack of data, enthusiastic acceptance by those whose knowledge about education would better suit them to be carnival pitchmen. Then follows clarion calls of "don’t do it" by those who know something, a massive repudiation by the data, frantic attempts to put a positive light on damaging outcomes and a final capitulation of the true believers who were disciplined by lawsuits, arrival of a new fad or public opinion and not by loss of jobs, pensions or pay.

    One of the instigators of the Whole Language movement in California, Bill Honig, says, "I don’t mind saying it has been a disaster, as long as it’s clear to everyone that it was done with the best of intentions by a lot of really committed people." Those of us who know we should pay attention to data, are sorry they weren’t committed much earlier.

    Honig, who presided over California’s implementation of Whole Language stated, "…it is the curse of all progressives, who control much of what happens in the field of education, that we are anti-research and anti-science, and we never seem to grasp how irrational that attitude is. This is probably our deepest failure." Since people respond to incentives in predictable ways, the deepest failure in the situation is the contingencies under which public employees operate.

    He also said, "People didn’t know how important automaticity (the ability to decode words quickly and effortlessly) was before. But all that information is in now." Of course, evidence for the importance of automaticity had been "in" for at least three decades before California’s institution of Whole Language. The Social Sciences are filled with experts who don’t know anything because there is no consequence for not knowing. Honig should get credit for admitting blame. The typical government worker is like the little boy with pie crust crumbs around his mouth sitting beside a half-eaten apple pie taking refuge in the passive voice by saying, "The pie got eaten."

    Whole Language is sometimes contrasted with the mindless "Dick and Jane" series filled with pictures and inane dialogue. The Dick and Jane readers were a kind of  Whole Language, stemming from the "reading in context–with pictures" silliness from a number of sources which had been popular in North American education from the early part of the twentieth century. Strangely enough, the teaching techniques were more effective than those currently used. There are those who correlate the dramatic decline of literacy in the U.S. with the advent of Whole Language. They are probably right. The illiteracy rate for potential Army inductees was rising dramatically from World War 1 to the Vietnamese war  and is now  declining.

    "California goes through a very careful process of approving materials for adoption…." Ken Goodman. Careful means looking at materials from the IS side, not the DOES, and careful doesn’t have to be correct if the person has no economic stake in outcomes.

    The Direct Instruction reading program was rejected by the California state authority in 1988 because the reading passages for the early grades had "no literary merit". As someone who has taught hundreds of "learning disabled" children to read, I can say, without doubt, that children are so thrilled to be reading, they don’t care about "literary merit". "Literary merit" is one of the intellectually empty phrases the silly use to muddy the waters. As in many educational matters, what seems reasonable, necessary and desirable to an adult has absolutely no effect on the child.

    One Whole Language assumption is that children learn reading the way they learn spoken language.  A child’s spoken language utterances are corrected thousands of times while he is learning.  If we taught speaking as the Whole Language theorists believe we should teach reading, we would regard all babbling as delightfully creative and the child, at eight, would be saying, "Momma go store"  and we would be bound to believe this was delightfully innovative. 

  
    "When the art of education becomes a science (no comma in original), we will then have the luxury of making changes after research has identified those which are best." Barry McGhan, Education Week, February 17, 1993.  There are many rigorous scientific findings in education. The luxury that teachers have is that they can ignore them because there are no consequences for failure.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

    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

If the government takes $1.00 from us and gives back $.40, why are we supposed to be grateful?

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

Education Explained by the Metaphor of Dead Horse Racing

    If the government finds that it has a dead horse on its hands, a horse for which it paid, naturally, much more than the horse was worth, even when alive, it will relentlessly present at least one of the following. Spin doctors worth their salt will pound away at all of them. Watch for them in your local and national media. Remember, German propaganda guaranteed the Red Army would be “hurled back from the gates of Berlin.” in April 1945, just before capitulation. Beware the dead horse pronouncements from “official sources”, but be sure to enjoy the humor, otherwise, you might start worrying about the value your tax dollars  bring. Government pronouncements are based on fond hope, sincere desire and rhetoric. Do not confuse any of these proclamations with truth. Their purpose is spin.

    The horse will soon arise from its rationally planned torpor and show itself to be the champion we always knew it to be. The only thing required is more money for those costly, special oats our experts find so necessary for dead horse nutrition.

    This dead horse is much cheaper than other dead horses which don’t run nearly as fast.

    The horse will race just fine if we get a stronger, bigger, and more expensive whip.

    We provide employment for many people.

    The horse is only sleeping.

    There are rumors that some horses are not quite dead, showing a nostril flare or a tail twitch. We must go and study these extraordinary horses. We can only study these horses in warm places in winter and cool places in summer.

    We will show our initiative and creativity by organizing a conference to study dead horses. Sessions at these conferences will have titles such as, “Blended funding for dead horse maintenance.”, “Relevant factors in dead horse racing.”, “The dead horse in historical context.”, “Social Justice and the dead horse.”, “Optical conditions fostering the illusion of aliveness in the presence of deadness.” , “Social constructivism in horse racing.”, “How to make it appear the horse is winning.” and so on. There will be considerable admiration for the dead horse minders and self-congratulatory oratory will flow.

    A commission must be empanelled and “experts” paid exorbitant fees. This commission will miss several deadlines (the longer they sit, the greater their fees–can you say Law of Contingencies). Their recommendations will be such things as, “Change the color of the bridle.”, “Empower the rider.”, “Stable the horse in a nicer barn.”

    The horse needs better shoes.

    Not enough people are betting on this horse, so we must make betting on it compulsory.

    This is our horse, so, it is the best horse.

    The horse is not dead.

    The horse needs a lot of money to keep it running at this “world-class” pace.

    This is the only horse we have and the only horse we can ever have.

    The horse will be fine with a new rider.

    Even talking about getting a new horse will fatally undermine our democratic principles and cause chaos which can only be imagined. Considerable attention will be paid to “champion horse deniers.” with dark hints about their lack of sanity, sincerity, patriotism and intelligence.

    The horse will be made more responsible by having higher standards for the speed of dead horses.

    We must pay specialists and consultants large amounts of money to groom the dead horse.

    The union must be consulted and agree to every step. This will require more money for the unionized workers, catered negotiation sessions and an intricate set of rules set up which will require frequent and costly grievance procedures.

    We need to study other dead horses.

    The live horses ahead of our horse must be penalized for running faster. We will take money from the purses they win and give it to the connections of the dead horse because competition is an archaic and hurtful model for horse racing, totally out of step with postmodern thought.

    All the horses in the race are dead so we race just as fast as they.

    The fact that the horse is dead is the fault of everyone except the horse, the trainer and the jockey.

    If we ride this horse better, it will win.

    We will create a team of dead horses which will race much faster than this dead horse alone.

    We must find the lowest-paid employee associated with this dead horse and fire him.

    We define the speed of the dead horse as the planned and required speed. As they say in computer-land, “This is not a bug, it’s a feature.”

    Faster horses are obviously cheating.

    This is a “world class” dead horse.

    The complex nature of horses precludes any determination of “real” racing speed, so our horse is, in spite of appearances, really going faster than any other horse.

    Follow the golden  sequence for dead horses. First, deny that the horse is dead.  Second, explain that the death of the horse is someone else’s fault. Third, explain the good reasons you had for murdering the horse. Fourth, promise never to kill another horse. Fifth, kill another horse. Deny that the horse is dead…..

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson