Grantcoulson's Blog

        The Examples Aren’t Hard to Find and Don’t Have to be Forced   

     An article in the National Post (in Canada) on “The Danger of Jailhouse Informants” provides a perfect example of incentiveseverywhere. A lawbreaker (every informer has a record or, more importantly, charges pending), is housed with a person awaiting trial who proclaims his innocence. The informant then reports that the other has “confessed”. The confession is presented in court or used for leverage in a plea bargain and the informant gets the relief of gentler legal sanctions. I’ve brushed by a couple of these examples when I used to testify in court.  The testimony of the informants was as nonsensical as could be. If one looks at the incentive situation, one need not ask, “Why did this go wrong?

    Thomas Sowell, one of the wisest men of modern times, provides a current example of the bizarre notion of what happens when the notion of “social justice”, so beloved of the “social change agent” theory in education, seeps into government economic policy. As Sowell points out, a “magic number”,  in this case a percentage of the populace owning their own homes, is arrived at by politicians. The politicos then pass legislation to underwrite the home loans for the formerly unmortgagable. The housing bubble caused by government intervention then bursts and the politicians, who pay no price for the billions lost on the guaranteed loans, lecture on “greed” as the cause of the whole mess.

     Now to more excerpts. When last we met, I was in the middle of yet more polemic (polemic doesn’t mean untrue–just biased) about the education system. To continue–

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

     Clinton, like all other fervent supporters of teacher’s union who have held the President’s position, and the current office-holder, always send their children to private schools. In addition, Obama was involved in a spectacularly unsuccessful, but extremely well-funded exercise to "reform" Chicago public schools. Expenditure, "experimentation" and fervour all increased, but test scores did not. As in all reform efforts, which are bound to fail without changes in contingencies, hope was at a premium, "real" change was promised, but the only change that occurred was cosmetic.

    Another socialist tendency is that of manufacturing a crisis which, naturally, only the government can solve. Global Warming is currently one of these crises constantly brought to the fore in public schools. If the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the earth in a year is a hundred story skyscraper, the amount produced by human activity is equal to the depth of the linoleum on one floor.  I predict that this "crisis" will pass (into Global Cooling)  without a hint of apology from its proponents for, (a) being wrong, (b) being hysterical, (c) spending billions of dollars for nothing,  (d) making many gullible people, including millions of students, fear the imminent arrival of the warm version of the Apocalypse, and, (e) being the basis for really awful movies. Carbon trading, the bizarre offspring of  Global Warming, is like trading the rights to name leprechauns. Meanwhile, this silly propaganda is pumped out at high volume to students of all ages as another example of  "Why The Government Must Do Something Because  Greedy Capitalists Are Ruining The Environment". Aah, the Eternal Dance of Stupidity never ends, and the bad news is that it never gets any more entertaining except for the entertainment inherent in the productions of the profoundly uninformed. Since solar activity is the main cause of heat-cooling cycles, once the Global Warming hysterics accept this, they will link sunspots to capitalists driving SUVs and all will be presented as fact in public schools.

    An odd paradox of educational union activity is that the union uses radical means to defend the status quo in which an uninterrupted stream of money is the essential part. Public education in North America has one assumption that is passing strange. It ridicules Creationism, with a capital C, as unscientific. Creationism is difficult to prove or disprove and probably deserves as much attention as any of the thousands of assumptions of the many religions in the world. On the other hand, public education rabidly supports socialism, a system which always demonstrably fails, without a hint of debate among educators.

    The silliest thing I ever read about education is from an article in an education magazine titled, "If it wasn’t around in the Middle Ages, it’s a fad." I quote, "If there had been a single ‘reform" that actually did what it advertised, that is, helped kids learn better, faster, easier, we’d all know about it because the word would spread like wildfire as schools and districts and states adopted this wonder in wholesale lots." The contingencies of a state-controlled education system not only prevent this from happening, but require its opposite.  A government educational bureaucrat operates in an environment where student achievement is not a factor in advancement, status, salary or job retention.  You get what you reinforce, and public education does not reinforce behavior which  gets results. As is inevitable with government bureaucracies,  it reinforces the opposite.  

    Techniques of teaching in public education did not change for decades.  Teachers presented the material through lecture and textbooks. Presentation was deemed to be sufficient and those who don’t learn were deemed to be deficient. Fancy names such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorder (with or without hyperactivity) were to come later. Those who did not learn very much very quickly were labelled as "slow" or "dim". It is a long tradition in public education to blame, by label, the students who fail to learn under the primitive forms of teaching to which they are subjected.

      North American education has increasingly come under the control of  psychologists, social workers  and social engineers who believe that "social development" fostered by the education system is more important than academic skills and\or that "social development" is necessary for academic skills to be acquired.  As is usual in education, these assumptions are so wrong that their opposites are true.

    Education is a perfect example that:

1).  The social sciences are filled with experts who think they know a lot, speak a very convincing line of laymanship,  but can’t produce anything.  Educational polgrams in North America, because of the large numbers of students involved, affect more people than all other polgrams combined.  Unfortunately, they convince a lot of people.  Given the necessities for survival and advancement in a state run bureaucracy, that is sufficient. Many educational experts have what is called "an extended verbal repertoire" which means they can describe things convincingly, but is as close to teaching as announcing a boxing match is to throwing a left hook.

2).  Change in the social sciences rarely makes things better and usually makes them worse.  There never was a "golden age" in education.  There were just times when students learned much more than they do now, but those times weren’t nearly as golden as they could have been if the practices of the educational system were based  on the best evidence.

3).  Nothing will change for the better until employment, wages and promotion depend on student learning and not on baby-sitting and pious statements of intentions about lofty societal goals.  Alas, this will never occur in a public bureaucracy. You get what you reinforce and you don’t get what you don’t reinforce.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

                    History of Education in the West

    Public schooling in North America has various roots, but one of the most important was Martin Luther, who, strangely enough, while in revolt against the Catholic Church, believed that public schooling should produce citizens obedient to the Emperor, rather than the Pope. He apparently did not see the irony of this position, but the fate of revolutionaries is to create new orthodoxies and logic plays no part. The "Prussian Model" was widely copied in North America. Prussian education was education by the state, for the state because children belonged to the state, not the parents. The Prussian model of education, with its emphasis on obedience to secular authority, produced exactly what it was supposed to, the thuggish servility which was so useful to Prussian-German warlords in the Franco-Prussian war and World Wars One and Two. It was an unusual model to import to North America because of its anti-individualism, but fitted in well with the academic love affair with socialism which was gaining momentum throughout the Western World. Socialism is, of course, profoundly and fundamentally, anti-individual. Education, as all areas of the social sciences, has always had lofty, unrealized goals. It is supposed to lead to "The Ideal Man" through application of the training in Socialism. Any system based on the always-failed notion of "The Perfectability of Human Nature" must fail.

    A little known fact is that when education became compulsory and "free", two contradictory terms which appear together in much of government literature, private education was well established. The government "jumped into the saddle of a horse that was already galloping" (West, Education and the State, 1965).

    North American public education started with small schools organized, financed and administered by the local community. State and provincial governments came to take an increasingly large part, based on the unproven notion that larger government could do it better. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, faith in the state  grew as belief in socialism became increasingly popular.. The person responsible for the centralization of education in Ontario, Egerton Ryerson, argued that the state, "…constitutes…a collective parent…and is bound to…secure them all that will qualify them to become useful citizens to the state." (italics added).  The notion that a citizen’s only purpose in life is to serve the state, lifted from the assumptions of the Prussian system,  was  fostered by the education system throughout North America. A new kind of slavery was born, more sinister because the shackles were invisible. Concurrent with this was the belief that education experts could do a better job of raising children than "untrained" parents. The central tenets of the nature of the "expertise" change periodically and contradictorily, but no matter, experts are still experts.  The system became increasingly centralized and bureaucratized with predictable results.  With achievement not a requirement and teacher accountability weakened as unions protected jobs, fads, an inevitable consequence of public bureaucracies,  have taken over, and society in general and students in particular are blamed when learning does not occur.  If the student learns, the system takes credit.  If the student does not learn, the student is blamed. The typical public educator cares about the teaching method and not about the result, because using the method and speaking the philosophy are what is reinforced for teachers in the public education system, as it is for members of all public bureaucracies and cults in general.  Behavior which gets results is not reinforced and  frequently punished.  You get what you reinforce.       

    One of the reasons that education became a polgram is that education unions  grew in size and political influence. As Bill Clinton, President of the United States told the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the U.S., "You’ll be my partners. I won’t forget who brought me to the White House." This powerful lobby must continue to obstruct any powerful change in education because it is fighting for what every union fights, maximum pay for minimum work, job security, an increase in membership, protection from independent review, insulation from the real world, protection from competition and recognition of indispensability through relentless propaganda. Unfortunately for the teacher unions, you can have a guaranteed job or respect, never both. Teacher unions regard schools as a place where adults are paid, not a place where students are taught, thus violating Adam Smith’s precept that the customers must be the prime consideration in all production. In addition, because they are public employees, the central assumptions of public education have always been in the socialist direction that students should be trained to believe that government agencies can solve every social problem. This tendency can be traced from the early Greek philosophers, through John Dewey, a zealous admirer of the Soviet Union, to the present.  As Dewey, father of modern American educational theory said, "…the State can do no wrong, for right is determined by what the State does."  A more frightening statement cannot be imagined. Needless to say, Dewey was an avowed socialist who believed that teachers should be "change agents". To further illuminate the power of Dewey’s intellect, he was also a phrenologist. One of Dewey’s disciples, Harold Rugg, wrote, "The chief function of schools is to plan the future of society.", as if technological change and entrepreneurs were not the prime movers of societal change and planned societies always come a cropper.

    As Walberg and Bast point out, "By participating in socialist-inspired campaigns for social change, educators have ignored Adam Smith’s discovery that the social good is more likely to be served through free and spontaneous cooperation than by deliberate planning and use of government authority."

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

Deep Background—Incentives Everywhere

     The European’s Union’s atom smasher, supposed to be an instrument to usher in a new phase in scientific discovery, is still broken down after operating for a few days. Give a bunch of people at lot of other people’s money (it was only 10 billion or so) to spend and hope for the best. How did this go wrong? How will this be spun? The Concorde made a lot of money and the Airbus is just raking it in so the smasher will eventually justify its cost. That is the IS. Checking with the results–the Concorde lost money and the Airbus is losing money. That is the DOES. I’m sure they’ll get it right this time. After all, time and money is all any government organization needs to achieve proper, even astounding, results.

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

    Reform efforts are always doomed because nothing fundamental, to wit, the incentive structure,  changes.

    Here is a bit of proof from Siegfried Engelmann, one of the few people in education whose programs can produce results far superior to those of public schools. There will be more about Engelmann’s programs later. Engelmann says, "I have personally worked with over 200 schools that have achieved excellent performance, far above the mean of schools with comparable demography. NOT ONE WAS ABLE TO MAINTAIN THIS LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE. (capitalization in original)  A new superintendent, or a new state framework, or a new epiphany about how students learn have ravaged these programs so that after a few years, the school population returns to the pre-intervention rate of failure, and nobody… says one word. The process is like those magic drawing boards that whisk away what had been drawn and keep no record of the earlier inscription."

     Engelmann is not referring to trivial results. Improvements of 70 percentile points or more on standard tests have been reported. The return to the low baseline may be immoral, unconscionable and unbelievable, but nobody in the system really cares because caring has no consequences.

    The lecture is probably the easiest of all "teaching" methods to use. The lecture is all IS and no DOES.  I had a social psychology professor who gave a brilliant series of lectures.  Imagine my dismay when I found that he had taken them, word for word, from a book without acknowledgement or reference.  Lectures are easy to give, but not useful because a student must respond frequently to learn efficiently. One method which did not rely on lectures, but produced excellent student learning in university courses, called the Personalized System of Instruction,  was outlawed at the university where some of the best results were produced. Learning is not important, but lectures are. Form is always valued over function where consequences are absent. Accomplishment is not rewarded at public institutions. The other problem is that native ability provides much less of a separator when instruction is good and the primary reason for public education, sorting students, becomes less easy.

    The same story has been repeated often in governmental application of social sciences. Since the baseline is so low, remarkable improvements are easy to demonstrate, but impossible to maintain. The persons responsible either leave or are punished for success. The program stops,  gets watered down, or is superseded by a "superior" method which doesn’t work and the results get dismal again. Nobody says a word because nothing important, such as continued employment, pay, pension or career advancement, depends on success. The system can be based on dreams, custom, intuition, Divine Revelation, sincere belief, an exciting new fad, a boring old fad or anything else. The only useful reform is escape.

Change the incentives or leave it alone.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

These are the results from the homeschooling study mentioned a few posts ago. My comments are interleaved in this font.

The Results

Overall the study showed significant advances in homeschool academic achievement as well as revealing that issues such as student gender, parents’ education level, and family income had little bearing on the results of homeschooled students.

National Average Percentile Scores

Subtest
Homeschool
Public School

Reading
89
50

Language
84
50

Math
84
50

Science
86
50

Social Studies
84
50

Core^a
88
50

Composite^b
86
50

a. Core is a combination of Reading, Language, and Math.
b. Composite is a combination of all subtests that the student took on the test.

These are the most basic results—homeschooled children scored higher in every category with the lowest difference being 34 percentile points. If this had occurred in an academic study favoring public schooling, the wires would be burning up as the elitists and their shills sang the good news onto the hills. Now there’s a mixed metaphor, but it’s mine.

There was little difference between the results of homeschooled boys and girls on core scores.

Boys—87th percentile
Girls—88th percentile

This in contrast to the “problem” which seems to exercise some public schoolers—girls score higher than boys. The solution—homeschool.

Household income had little impact on the results of homeschooled students.

$34,999 or less—85th percentile
$35,000–$49,999—86th percentile
$50,000–$69,999—86th percentile
$70,000 or more—89th percentile

Household income, one of the standard excuses of government schools has little impact. The solution is (this is a test)_______.

The education level of the parents made a noticeable difference, but the homeschooled children of non-college educated parents still scored in the 83rd percentile, which is well above the national average.

Neither parent has a college degree—83rd percentile
One parent has a college degree—86th percentile
Both parents have a college degree—90th percentile

Whether either parent was a certified teacher did not matter.

Certified (i.e., either parent ever certified)—87th percentile
Not certified (i.e., neither parent ever certified)—88th percentile

That has to sting. The very idea.

Parental spending on home education made little difference.

Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentile

The extent of government regulation on homeschoolers did not affect the results.

Low state regulation—87th percentile
Medium state regulation—88th percentile
High state regulation—87th percentile

HSLDA defines the extent of government regulation this way:

States with low regulation: No state requirement for parents to initiate any contact or State requires parental notification only.

States with moderate regulation: State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress.

State with high regulation: State requires parents to send notification or achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials).

Well I never. Regulation has no effect. I would have thought it would have a negative effect, but facts are facts.

The question HSLDA regularly puts before state legislatures is, “If government regulation does not improve the results of homeschoolers why is it necessary?”

In short, the results found in the new study are consistent with 25 years of research, which show that as a group homeschoolers consistently perform above average academically. The Progress Report also shows that, even as the numbers and diversity of homeschoolers have grown tremendously over the past 10 years, homeschoolers have actually increased the already sizeable gap in academic achievement between themselves and their public school counterparts-moving from about 30 percentile points higher in the Rudner study (1998) to 37 percentile points higher in the Progress Report (2009).

Not mentioned is the theory that children need to interact with their peers to be socialized properly. Homeschooled children score higher on these tests as well. Children can only be socialized by adults who have the knowledge of cultural values and usages.

   So there you have it. Gender, parent education, teacher certification and family income had little or no effect. The largest effect was government school versus homeschool.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

     Here are data from the ignored but famous Follow Through. The students were divided into six groups according to IQ. According to educult theory, they should learn at different rates. They didn’t of course. Remember when looking at these data that they were gathered from students who were taught well.

     The data are for reading and mathematics and show almost exactly the same slope. You can find these data, and much more about Direct Instruction here. Slow learners are not slow with correct instruction.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

   Follow this link for information about homeschooling.  I will have more to say about this study, but it shows many of the "problems" in public education such as socioeconomic status, state control and teacher certification are "solved". Homeschooling works because parents are vitally interested in outcome, unlike the workers in government schools who do not have to be.

    What follows is from the "Book of Right", the set of assumptions which will produce learning.

1.  Although students come from different backgrounds, and some are much easier to teach than others, what education brings to the student is much more important than what the student brings to education.

2.  All subjects are hierarchically arranged by logic and there is a sequence of instruction which must be followed by all but the most exceptional of high-performing students.

3.  Reinforcement is a very powerful determinant of student achievement.  The main reinforcer in education is the improvement the student sees in his skills.  Ill-constructed curricula, the kind found in almost every government school, result in a steady diet of failure for most students.

4.  Having a system of education which is not a civil servant bureaucracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for effective education.   You can’t do it with such a bureaucracy, but just because you don’t have a bureaucracy doesn’t mean you can do it.

5.  Higher order thinking skills are explicitly taught, not fondly hoped for.

6.  Methods of teaching are determined by scientific research, not consensus based on experience and sincere belief.

7.  Teachers use a curriculum and lesson plans which have been demonstrated to work best and are not expected to create their own.

8.  Psychological assessments are used rarely, but assessment of student progress, which means assessment of the effectiveness of teaching,  occurs at least daily.

9.  Teachers are taught how to teach in detail rather than being expected to apply vague philosophical maundering.

10.  Special education is rarely needed because students are taught well on the first go round.

11.  If a student does not learn, the blame is not placed on neurological impairment, but on faulty teaching methods.

12.  Self-esteem is not taught because it does not have to be.

13.  Students are not given "projects" until component skills have been mastered and rarely thereafter.

14.  No attention is paid to individual "learning styles" because these hypothetical entities have no effect on learning.

15.  Academic success can be measured by reliable and valid standardized tests, although many of these tests are too simple.

16.  Students are expected to perform correctly in spelling, writing, reading, and mathematics and it does not stifle creativity.

17.  The precepts of Whole Language are not used to teach reading because these precepts are wrong.

18.  Students are not expected to create their own reality because this leads to frustration and slow learning.

19.  Students are not expected to learn when it is developmentally appropriate but when they are taught.

20.  The concept of multiple intelligences is ignored because it has no positive effect on learning.

21.  The teacher is a teacher and not a facilitator.

22.  The spiral curriculum is not used because things are taught properly the first time.

23. The customer is the parent and the customer must have the economic power to move his child to another teaching situation when unsatisfied.

24. In private education, the cost of education is known. In public education, the cost can never be known because there is no motivation to tell the truth and every motivation not to.

25. The curriculum must be tested on children and provision must be made for mastery learning. Passage of time or exposure does not guarantee learning.

26. Students are not tortured by "creative problem solving" because this is just another crude IQ test and has no value aside from categorizing students yet again.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

Today we conclude the list of the myths of education which are so wrong that their opposites are correct. These usages are so bizarre that they can only be explained by the Law of Contingencies. When there is no connection between accomplishment and economic advantage, strange behavior will occur. This strange behavior will be accompanied by a plummy sense of entitlement, high confidence and arrogant incompetence. And that’s public education for you.

Relentless Indoctrination in the Politics of the Left

    Most public employees are virulently anti-entrepreneur, anti-free enterprise, anti-capitalism, pro-government, anti-Western, and etc.. Throughout his school career, which lasts 18 years if the person gets a standard, four-year Bachelor of Arts, the student is subjected to an unending propaganda stream that holds that government solves all problems, everyone should work 190 days a year, have many benefits and an early pension. This comes under the heading of, "NOT A GOOD WAY TO RAISE CHILDREN WHO WILL BE INDEPENDENT AND PRODUCTIVE."

Social Justice

    "The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master." Ayn Rand.

    Nothing sends the social engineers into full throat better than a fad based on theoretical injustice.

    Most schools of education are founded on the notion that they should promote "social justice". This is based on two mistaken notions. The first is that present society is unjust compared to a hypothetical socialist alternative. As in all socialist diatribes, IS is compared to DOES, a comparison which has always been silly as are all arguments of the form, "My ideal is much better than your real." The second is that all inequalities are the result of iniquity. A little reflection and research will convince one that the first notion is trivial and the second incorrect, yet, upon these notions, the concept of social justice is based. Another reason to be wary of the notion of training teacher to be "change agents" in the service of social justice is that the academy is consistently wrong about things like Global Warming, economic interventions and socialism. so passing on this "wisdom" is like teaching an athlete to do the long jump on his hands–picturesque but not effective.

    While it’s fun to point out the inadequacies of public education, this exercise must come to an end. A public utility will have negative utility as long as the money keeps coming independently of accomplishment.

   They’re always wrong, but never uncertain

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     Although spending billions of dollars on useless programs is not amusing, the arguments about education are hilarious. One side, usually the progressivists, launch a rhetorical attack, without data, and the other side replies by citing data. Such an exchange took place a few years ago between a chap called Allington and Siegfried Engelmann, the main creator of Direct Instruction. I include two paragraphs from Engelmann’s reply. It refers to the kind of Baltimore school shown in The Wire. Some of the data are shown in the next, but previous, entry on City Springs.

     Specifically, City Springs school went from being 115th in a district of 120 schools to being 12th overall and 5th in fifth grade reading. The school was and is 98 percent African-American and in a neighborhood considered among the worst in Baltimore for crime, violence, and failure. When we began with the school, not one student in the third grade nor one in the fifth grade passed the Maryland state test. Last year, 50 percent of the fifth graders passed the reading test, and 75.9 percent passed the math test. Furthermore, the median score of fifth graders was the 67th percentile in reading on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) and the 50th percentile in math. The school is only the second Baltimore City school in the history of Maryland’s school probation program to be removed from the list of failed schools. The current fifth graders perform about 1 1/2 standard deviations above the fifth graders we started with five years ago.

    One more challenge to Allington: identify one school with a truly disadvantaged student population (not one with displaced middle-class or working-class children) that uses "literature-based" approaches consistent with all the things you have "learned about teaching" and that performs anywhere near the level of City Springs. Produce one anywhere in the country. I’ll bet you that you can’t do it. And I’ll bet you that we can turn around any school that implements Direct Instruction according to the numbers. That school will have all Kindergarten children reading by the end of the school year (not reciting stories as they look at pictures, not guessing on the basis of "context," not reading signs or playing cloze games, not discussing and then reading what they discussed, but reading). And the acceleration will continue as the children go from grade to grade. This is not a promotional claim but something I will bet the ranch on.

Siegfried E. Engelmann

    These people never take up the challenge because they would much rather chat about education than show they can do it. The other reason is they know they can’t do it. Lack of economic responsibility always produces nonsense.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

     These are data from City Springs School in Baltimore and show the cumulative effect of Direct Instruction in Reading and Math. Naturally, these results are at risk because a change in regime will bring them crashing down to the 9th and 14th percentiles. Public education reminds me of the comment made about that fascinating character, Errol Flynn. “You can depend on him. He will always let you down.” True or not of Flynn, you can depend on a public institution. It will always let you down.

     “Remember, Peter. With great power comes great responsibility.” Uncle Ben to Spiderman. With as much respect to kindly old Ben as one can muster for a fictional character, with great power comes no responsibility. That’s what power is.

Cheers and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

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

The only people who are smart enough to tell others what to do are  smart enough to know they should not tell others what to do.

Results in the basement. Spending through the roof.

    There is no evidence that spending more money results in better outcomes. The results for the District of Columbia’s schools are dismal, yet costs are $29,000 per pupil per year. In addition, many of the costs of education are hidden or misstated. Some jurisdictions do not include the costs of construction, building maintenance, unfunded pensions, teacher training, committees to study and reform education and many other costs. No one knows what education costs.

    All government agencies are well known for understating costs. In the Follow-Through experiment, considerable additional resources of money and people were devoted to each model.  These additional resources produced no improvement. Only good teaching produced results.

    The argument about money for public education is brightly illogical. On the one hand, they will argue that student achievement is tied to education and income of the parents, native language and other factors over which the school has no control. Educators frequently use this argument to "explain" low student achievement. One the other hand, they keep asking for more money. Logically, they cannot have it both ways.

    The most famous case of lots of money producing nothing is from  Kansas City, Missouri where a judge ordered increased funding because the system was failing, a common result in public enterprise. "Fail, and we give you more money."  Progressive education "experts" expected that the level of funding would light the way to the brighter future they always promise. The teacher student ratio was 1:13. Teaching amenities included a wild-life sanctuary, a zoo and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The parochial school system in the city had a ratio of administrators to students of  1 to 4000 whereas the lavishly funded public system had a ratio of 1 to 60. Four thousand divided by 60 gives the difference of 66.6 times more administration in the public system.  The increased funding did not result in better scores, but in spectacular waste and corruption. Quelle surprise. Much of the equipment bought with the extra money was never unboxed.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson