Grantcoulson's Blog

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    Almost all the psychoactive drugs  given to children are prescribed in North America.

   “We’ve tried Adderall, Zooloft, Prozac and Ritalin. None of them worked, so now he’s turned to drugs.”

   Of the several hundred children I’ve seen who are on psychoactive drugs, I’ve observed positive effects in two. One was a “typical” child whose behavior improved with Ritalin. Another was an autistic child who responded to the off-label use of Prozac.

Ritalin Gone Wrong
By L. ALAN SROUFE

THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?

In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

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   Just because they aren’t working doesn’t mean we should stop using them.

Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs.

What gets publicized are short-term results and studies on brain differences among children. Indeed, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that seem at first glance to support medication. It is because of this partial foundation in reality that the problem with the current approach to treating children has been so difficult to see.

Back in the 1960s I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns out, however, that there is little to no evidence to support this theory.

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     Ah yes, the medical metaphor.

In 1973, I reviewed the literature on drug treatment of children for The New England Journal of Medicine. Dozens of well-controlled studies showed that these drugs immediately improved children’s performance on repetitive tasks requiring concentration and diligence. I had conducted one of these studies myself. Teachers and parents also reported improved behavior in almost every short-term study. This spurred an increase in drug treatment and led many to conclude that the “brain deficit” hypothesis had been confirmed.

But questions continued to be raised, especially concerning the drugs’ mechanism of action and the durability of effects. Ritalin and Adderall, a combination of dextroamphetamine and amphetamine, are stimulants. So why do they appear to calm children down? Some experts argued that because the brains of children with attention problems were different, the drugs had a mysterious paradoxical effect on them.

However, there really was no paradox. Versions of these drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks. And when we reviewed the literature on attention-deficit drugs again in 1990 we found that all children, whether they had attention problems or not, responded to stimulant drugs the same way. Moreover, while the drugs helped children settle down in class, they actually increased activity in the playground. Stimulants generally have the same effects for all children and adults. They enhance the ability to concentrate, especially on tasks that are not inherently interesting or when one is fatigued or bored, but they don’t improve broader learning abilities.

And just as in the many dieters who have used and abandoned similar drugs to lose weight, the effects of stimulants on children with attention problems fade after prolonged use. Some experts have argued that children with A.D.D. wouldn’t develop such tolerance because their brains were somehow different. But in fact, the loss of appetite and sleeplessness in children first prescribed attention-deficit drugs do fade, and, as we now know, so do the effects on behavior. They apparently develop a tolerance to the drug, and thus its efficacy disappears. Many parents who take their children off the drugs find that behavior worsens, which most likely confirms their belief that the drugs work. But the behavior worsens because the children’s bodies have become adapted to the drug. Adults may have similar reactions if they suddenly cut back on coffee, or stop smoking.

TO date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems, the very things we would most want to improve. Until recently, most studies of these drugs had not been properly randomized, and some of them had other methodological flaws.

But in 2009, findings were published from a well-controlled study that had been going on for more than a decade, and the results were very clear. The study randomly assigned almost 600 children with attention problems to four treatment conditions. Some received medication alone, some cognitive-behavior therapy alone, some medication plus therapy, and some were in a community-care control group that received no systematic treatment. At first this study suggested that medication, or medication plus therapy, produced the best results. However, after three years, these effects had faded, and by eight years there was no evidence that medication produced any academic or behavioral benefits.

Indeed, all of the treatment successes faded over time, although the study is continuing. Clearly, these children need a broader base of support than was offered in this medication study, support that begins earlier and lasts longer.

Nevertheless, findings in neuroscience are being used to prop up the argument for drugs to treat the hypothesized “inborn defect.” These studies show that children who receive an A.D.D. diagnosis have different patterns of neurotransmitters in their brains and other anomalies. While the technological sophistication of these studies may impress parents and nonprofessionals, they can be misleading. Of course the brains of children with behavior problems will show anomalies on brain scans. It could not be otherwise. Behavior and the brain are intertwined. Depression also waxes and wanes in many people, and as it does so, parallel changes in brain functioning occur, regardless of medication.

Many of the brain studies of children with A.D.D. involve examining participants while they are engaged in an attention task. If these children are not paying attention because of lack of motivation or an underdeveloped capacity to regulate their behavior, their brain scans are certain to be anomalous.

However brain functioning is measured, these studies tell us nothing about whether the observed anomalies were present at birth or whether they resulted from trauma, chronic stress or other early-childhood experiences. One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience.

It is certainly true that large numbers of children have problems with attention, self-regulation and behavior. But are these problems because of some aspect present at birth? Or are they caused by experiences in early childhood? These questions can be answered only by studying children and their surroundings from before birth through childhood and adolescence, as my colleagues at the University of Minnesota and I have been doing for decades.

Since 1975, we have followed 200 children who were born into poverty and were therefore more vulnerable to behavior problems. We enrolled their mothers during pregnancy, and over the course of their lives, we studied their relationships with their caregivers, teachers and peers. We followed their progress through school and their experiences in early adulthood. At regular intervals we measured their health, behavior, performance on intelligence tests and other characteristics.

By late adolescence, 50 percent of our sample qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis. Almost half displayed behavior problems at school on at least one occasion, and 24 percent dropped out by 12th grade; 14 percent met criteria for A.D.D. in either first or sixth grade.

Other large-scale epidemiological studies confirm such trends in the general population of disadvantaged children. Among all children, including all socioeconomic groups, the incidence of A.D.D. is estimated at 8 percent. What we found was that the environment of the child predicted development of A.D.D. problems. In stark contrast, measures of neurological anomalies at birth, I.Q. and infant temperament — including infant activity level — did not predict A.D.D.

Plenty of affluent children are also diagnosed with A.D.D. Behavior problems in children have many possible sources. Among them are family stresses like domestic violence, lack of social support from friends or relatives, chaotic living situations, including frequent moves, and, especially, patterns of parental intrusiveness that involve stimulation for which the baby is not prepared. For example, a 6-month-old baby is playing, and the parent picks it up quickly from behind and plunges it in the bath. Or a 3-year-old is becoming frustrated in solving a problem, and a parent taunts or ridicules. Such practices excessively stimulate and also compromise the child’s developing capacity for self-regulation.

Putting children on drugs does nothing to change the conditions that derail their development in the first place. Yet those conditions are receiving scant attention. Policy makers are so convinced that children with attention deficits have an organic disease that they have all but called off the search for a comprehensive understanding of the condition. The National Institute of Mental Health finances research aimed largely at physiological and brain components of A.D.D. While there is some research on other treatment approaches, very little is studied regarding the role of experience. Scientists, aware of this orientation, tend to submit only grants aimed at elucidating the biochemistry.

Thus, only one question is asked: are there aspects of brain functioning associated with childhood attention problems? The answer is always yes. Overlooked is the very real possibility that both the brain anomalies and the A.D.D. result from experience.

Our present course poses numerous risks. First, there will never be a single solution for all children with learning and behavior problems. While some smaller number may benefit from short-term drug treatment, large-scale, long-term treatment for millions of children is not the answer.

Second, the large-scale medication of children feeds into a societal view that all of life’s problems can be solved with a pill and gives millions of children the impression that there is something inherently defective in them.

Finally, the illusion that children’s behavior problems can be cured with drugs prevents us as a society from seeking the more complex solutions that will be necessary. Drugs get everyone — politicians, scientists, teachers and parents — off the hook. Everyone except the children, that is.

If drugs, which studies show work for four to eight weeks, are not the answer, what is? Many of these children have anxiety or depression; others are showing family stresses. We need to treat them as individuals.

As for shortages, they will continue to wax and wane. Because these drugs are habit forming, Congress decides how much can be produced. The number approved doesn’t keep pace with the tidal wave of prescriptions. By the end of this year, there will in all likelihood be another shortage, as we continue to rely on drugs that are not doing what so many well-meaning parents, therapists and teachers believe they are doing.

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Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

      Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    The State of the Union emphasized, not spending cuts, but ways to get the government more money. This is not a good sign.

Schools of Education

Walter E. Williams

Larry Sand’s article "No Wonder Johnny (Still) Can’t Read" — written for The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, based in Raleigh, N.C. — blames schools of education for the decline in America’s education. Education professors drum into students that they should not "drill and kill" or be the "sage on the stage" but instead be the "guide on the side" who "facilitates student discovery." This kind of harebrained thinking, coupled with multicultural nonsense, explains today’s education. During his teacher education, Sand says, "teachers-to-be were forced to learn about this ethnic group, that impoverished group, this sexually anomalous group, that under-represented group, etc. — all under the rubric of ‘Culturally Responsive Education.’"

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    The shibboleths guiding schools of education are so strange that the opposites are correct.

Education majors are woefully lacking in academic skills. Here are some sample test questions for you to answer. Question 1: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million? a) 40,000, b) 250,000, c) 2,500,000, d) 1/4,000,000 or e) 4/1,000,000. Question 2: Martin Luther King Jr. (insert the correct choice) for the poor of all races. a) spoke out passionately, b) spoke out passionate, c) did spoke out passionately, d) has spoke out passionately or e) had spoken out passionate. Question 3: What would you do if your student sprained an ankle? a) Put a Band-Aid on it, b) Ice it or c) Rinse it with water.

Guess whether these questions were on a sixth-grade, ninth-grade or 12th-grade test. I bet the average reader would guess that it’s a sixth-grade test. Wrong. How about ninth-grade? Wrong again. You say, "OK, Williams, so they’re 12th-grade test questions!" Still wrong. According to a Heartland Institute-published School Reform News (September 2001) article titled "Who Tells Teachers They Can Teach?", those test questions came from prospective teacher tests. The first two questions are samples from the Praxis I test for teachers, and the third is from the 1999 teacher certification test in Illinois. According to the Chicago Sun-Times (9/6/01), 5,243 Illinois teachers failed their teacher certification tests. The Chicago Sun-Times also reported, "One teacher failed 24 of 25 teacher tests — including 11 of 12 Basic Skills tests and all 12 tests on teaching learning-disabled children." Yet that teacher was assigned to teach learning-disabled children in Chicago. Departments of education have solved the problem of teacher test failure. According to a New York Post story (11/14/11) titled "City teacher tests turn into E-ZPass," more than 99 percent of teachers pass.

Textbooks used in schools of education advocate sheer nonsense. A passage in Enid Lee et al.’s "Beyond Heroes and Holidays" reads: "We cannot afford to become so bogged down in grammar and spelling that we forget the whole story. … The onslaught of antihuman practices that this nation and other nations are facing today: racism, and sexism, and the greed for money and human labor that disguises itself as ‘globalization.’" Marilyn Burns’ text "About Teaching Mathematics" reads, "There is no place for requiring students to practice tedious calculations that are more efficiently and accurately done by using calculators." "New Designs for Teaching and Learning," by Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm, says: "Content knowledge is not seen to be as important as possessing teaching skills and knowledge about the students being taught. … Successful teachers understand the outside context of community, personal abilities, and feelings, while they establish an inside context or environment conducive to learning." That means it’s no problem if a teacher can’t figure out that a quarter-million is the same as 250,000. Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar’s text "Methods that Matter" reads, "Students can no longer be viewed as cognitive living rooms into which the furniture of knowledge is moved in and arranged by teachers, and teachers cannot invariably act as subject-matter experts." The authors add, "The main use of standardized tests in America is to justify the distribution of certain goodies to certain people."

Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education can benefit from slum removal.

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    This has been true for decades. The only way to stop them wasting money is to give them less. The only way to stop them abusing power is to give them less. The cult only stops when the money stops.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

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

From a review on amazon,com

The conventional wisdom about higher education goes like this. It is imperative for government to get more and more students into and through college because we are now in a "knowledge economy" and unless we have enough highly skilled workers, we will fall behind. Almost no one in politics or the education establishment ever questions those beliefs. It is widely accepted that increasing the amount of formal education is the means by which states or nations that are relatively poor can lift themselves up economically.

Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College in London challenges the conventional wisdom in this extraordinarily insightful book. Actually, it’s more than a challenge — it’s a thorough refutation. She demonstrates that the "knowledge economy" does not significantly change the broad contours of the labor force, that a high public "investment" in formal higher education is neither necessary nor sufficient for strong economic growth; and that the best educational policy to follow would be to ensure that young students learn well the academic basics (which many now don’t, even if they graduate from college).

Does Education Matter? is absolutely essential reading for anyone with an interest in educational policy.

       Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

     I use the analysis INTEND-IS-DOES to locate the problem that renders this exercise in political cosmetics useless. We INTEND to teach children– what we do IS this–it does not measure what the procedure DOES. In other words looking at the IS cannot inform one about the DOES. If teachers are doing the proper thing under the theory of teaching which holds sway in the Ohio branch of public schooling, it does not mean they are teaching any better. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Winston Churchill.

Teachers Observed

Ohio teachers to be watched and graded on classroom performance — and many are OK with that
Published: Monday, January 02, 2012, 6:00 AM  
Patrick O’Donnell, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Teachers across Ohio should expect a lot more criticism of their classroom work in the next few years.

Their principals will be in their classrooms more. Or their assistant principals, or even outside evaluators, all watching them, taking notes and essentially grading the teachers.

Don’t expect glowing reviews either, or the perfunctory check mark in the column marked "Satisfactory." Each teacher will be graded as Accomplished, Effective, Developing or Ineffective and some will even be fired if they don’t improve their marks over time.

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     I’ll believe the fired thing when it is verified by someone outside the government.

"It’s going to take a little bit of adjustment for some people," said Deb Tully, director of professional issues for the Ohio Federation of Teachers, one of the two large teachers unions in the state. "I don’t know a lot of people who want to be told they’re doing just OK when they put their heart and soul into it."

But teachers aren’t complaining much — not about this part of their new state-required evaluations, at least. They see potential for the classroom observation, and the coaching and feedback that should follow, as a chance for constructive criticism, not just judgments.

That’s what state officials say they want to happen. Tom Gunlock, vice president of the Ohio Board of Education, said the teacher evaluation framework the board passed in November, and which will be used statewide by the 2013-14 school year, is meant to find the strengths and weaknesses of teachers and help teachers improve their weak areas.

"Everyone thinks this is a cut and dried attempt to fire teachers," Gunlock said. "That is the least of our desires here."

Even the OFT says some teachers may be fired deservedly – if they’re poor teachers and don’t improve after coaching.

"If they document that someone truly doesn’t get better, I’m totally comfortable with that," Tully said. "Kids in the classroom deserve the best teachers we can get for them."

The plan leaves a lot of leeway to local districts, but sets a basic framework all must follow.

State law passed last year requires measures of student academic growth, like standardized tests and the Value Added measure, to make up 50 percent of a teacher’s rating. The state board is still working on what tests it can use along with the Ohio Achievement Assessment tests now given and how to measure growth in grades and subjects that are not tested.

Gunlock said he hopes to have a list of measures early next year that districts can use along with Value Added.

Though those measures draw criticism from teachers, the state plan for the other 50 percent of the rating has much stronger support.

The board in November required districts to evaluate teachers with at least two 30-minute visits to each classroom each year, in addition to shorter stops in the classroom. It also calls for teachers to be evaluated based on educator standards the state passed in 2005. Those standards were set with input from teachers.

"Those are things we pretty much agreed make a teacher a good, solid teacher," said Tully. She also said that longer classroom visits by evaluators are better for teachers than the brief pass-throughs that often occur now.

But how much weight is given to different factors – like the learning environment a teacher creates or how much a teacher collaborates with others – will be up to districts.

Gunlock said 139 districts are doing full evaluations of teachers now to test-drive the plan.

After a district does its own evaluation of a teacher using the observations and the 2005 standards, those results are then used along with the student growth measures to set the teacher’s overall rating. The state has set a matrix for how those two halves must be combined that puts teachers in the highest and lowest designations only if they excel or fail in each half.

The Cleveland school district is starting its own teacher evaluation plan this year in 23 schools that district chief Eric Gordon says fits within the state plan. Gordon said instead of using a quick checklist that a principal can fill out on a short visit or two, teachers evaluate themselves and principals visit classrooms multiple times, often gathering student work or materials created by the teacher, for a full picture.

The teacher and administrator will compare evaluations and talk about how they differ. Gordon said the evaluation is meant to go beyond just impressions of an observer.

"It’s really important that the evaluator find evidence to support claims, rather than just saying it’s my opinion," Gordon said. "They have to say, ‘I observed this,’ or ‘I collected that.’"

Though the highest-rated teachers can be observed every two years, all others must be observed yearly. Those observations – and the discussions and coaching that follow – pose a significant challenge, many educators say.

Principals or assistant principals will need to spend the extra time with each teacher, which adds to their work or cuts into other tasks. Julie Davis, executive director of the Ohio Association of Elementary School Administrators, said principals would love to be in classrooms but their days are often consumed with safety or budget issues, parents, discipline and other daily duties.

"In reality, as much as they’d like to do this, there are other demands," Davis said, noting that many districts have already cut assistant principals to save money. "Something has to give here."

Gunlock said, however, that the state board considers the classroom more important than other issues principals face.

"Maybe there’s some other stuff you’re doing, but you have to let other people do it," he said.

The state also wants to make sure any evaluator, principal or not, understands the state standards and has some perspective outside their district, so the Ohio Department of Education is requiring every evaluator to be certified.

That will require each evaluator to take a course over a few days. Gunlock said prospective evaluators will likely watch videotape of a teacher and write evaluations. The trainer will also evaluate the taped lesson and compare the evaluations. Prospective evaluators will have to pass a test to be certified, he said.

The state has not decided who will pay for the training. The Department of Education has begun its search for trainers, many of whom will be set up through county Educational Service Centers.

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   I can smell a lot of money being given to outside evaluators. I predict learning will not improve. This is an example of the political pretend games which passes for responsibility in public education. Little is said about student learning because the lack of connection between “proper teaching” and learning is too painful to contemplate.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    
    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

      My best wish for 2012 is that it becomes the year of the tax producer rather than the year of the tax consumer.

      January the first was the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the euro. There was much less fuss on the anniversary than on the launch and much less celebration than would have been expected 10 years ago.

     I blogged several times on James Tooley’s book, The Beautiful Tree, his analysis of private schools in poor countries. He found they were more effective and less costly than government schools. He also found many more of them than government officials either knew about or would acknowledge.

Many of India’s Poor Turn to Private Schools

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

DOING MORE WITH VERY LITTLE At the private Holy Town High School in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, students in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood receive English-language instruction at a modest tuition, and score well on standardized tests.
By VIKAS BAJAJ and JIM YARDLEY
Published: December 30, 2011

HYDERABAD, India – For more than two decades, M. A. Hakeem has arguably done the job of the Indian government. His private Holy Town High School has educated thousands of poor students, squeezing them into cramped classrooms where, when the electricity goes out, the children simply learn in the dark.

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Parents in Holy Town’s low-income, predominantly Muslim neighborhood do not mind the bare-bones conditions. They like the modest tuition (as low as $2 per month), the English-language curriculum and the success rate on standardized tests. Indeed, low-cost schools like Holy Town are part of an ad hoc network that now dominates education in this south Indian city, where an estimated two-thirds of all students attend private institutions.

"The responsibility that the government should shoulder," Mr. Hakeem said with both pride and contempt, "we are shouldering it."

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    We should all pray really hard that the government does not try to pretend shoulder the responsibility because we know how that works out.

In India, the choice to live outside the faltering grid of government services is usually reserved for the rich or middle class, who can afford private housing compounds, private hospitals and private schools. But as India’s economy has expanded during the past two decades, an increasing number of India’s poor parents are now scraping together money to send their children to low-cost private schools in hopes of helping them escape poverty.

Nationally, a large majority of students still attend government schools, but the expansion of private institutions has created parallel educational systems – systems that are now colliding. Faced with sharp criticism of the woeful state of government schools, Indian policy makers have enacted a sweeping law intended to reverse their decline. But skeptics say the litany of new requirements could also wipe out many of the private schools now educating millions of students.

"It’s impossible to fulfill all these things," said Mohammed Anwar, who runs a chain of private schools in Hyderabad and is trying to organize a nationwide lobbying campaign to alter the requirements. Referring to the law, he said, "If you follow the Right to Education, nobody can run a school."

Education is one of India’s most pressing challenges. Half of India’s 1.2 billion people are 25 or younger, and literacy levels, while improving, could cripple the country’s long-term prospects. In many states, government education is in severe disarray, with teachers often failing to show up. Rote drilling still predominates. English, considered a prerequisite for most white-collar employment in India, is usually not the medium of instruction.

When it took effect in April 2010, the Right to Education Act enshrined, for the first time, a constitutional right to schooling, promising that every child from 6 to 14 would be provided with it. For a nation that had never properly financed education for the masses, the law was a major milestone.

"If we nurture our children and young people with the right education," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, commemorating the act with a televised address, "India’s future as a strong and prosperous country is secure."

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      They should pay attention to history–as prosperity increases, schooling increases, not the other way ‘round and, if private schooling is doing much of the heavy lifting, it should be allowed to continue to do so because when the government takes over, the massive pretending begins.

Few disagree with the law’s broad, egalitarian goals or that government schools need a fundamental overhaul. But the law also enacted new regulations on teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement in school administration that are being applied to government and private schools. The result is a clash between an ideal and the reality on the ground, with a deadline: Any school that fails to comply by 2013 could be closed.

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     For those who have followed my blog, these are input variables and have nothing but theoretical relationship to amount of learning.

Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing Indian education, has scoffed at claims that the law will cause mass closings of private schools. Yet in Hyderabad, education officials are preparing for exactly that outcome. They are constructing new buildings and expanding old ones, partly to comply with the new regulations, partly anticipating that students will be forced to return from closing private institutions.

"Fifty percent will be closed down as per the Right to Education Act," predicted E. Bala Kasaiah, a top education official in Hyderabad.

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     Damn the results, full speed to government control. Hundreds of years have shown this to be the only way to greatness….oh, wait, it’s the fast way to the opposite.

As a boy, M. A. Hakeem listened as his father bemoaned the slow progress of his fellow Muslims in India. “Son,” he recalls his father’s saying, “when you grow up, you should provide education to our community.”

A few months after Mr. Hakeem completed the 10th grade, his father died. A year later, in 1986, Mr. Hakeem opened a small preparatory school with nursery classes. He was 15 years old.

Not yet old enough to vote, Mr. Hakeem held classes in his family’s home and enlisted his two sisters to handle administrative tasks. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Hakeem had opened Holy Town. The school has since produced students who have gone into engineering, commerce and other fields.

“I’m fulfilling my father’s dream,” Mr. Hakeem said.

When Holy Town opened, Mr. Hakeem’s neighborhood at the edge of the old quarter of Hyderabad had one private school, a Catholic one. Today, there are seven private schools within a half-mile of Holy Town, each charging a few dollars a month and catering to Muslim students with a largely secular education in English.

Their emergence roughly coincided with the economic liberalization that began in 1991. For decades, government officials had blamed rural apathy for India’s high illiteracy rates, saying that families preferred sending their children into the fields, not the classroom. But as the economy started taking off, public aspirations changed, especially among low-income families.

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     Get the government out of the way, and good things happen, even if officials have another story. This works in practice, but how does it stand up in theory?

“In India today, demand is not really a constraint for education — it’s the supply,” said Karthik Muralidharan, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied Indian education. “Parents are seeing education as the passport out of poverty.”

The rising demand created a new market for private schools, and entrepreneurs big and small have jumped at the chance to profit from it. Corporate educational chains opened schools tailored to higher-income families, especially in the expanding cities. Low-cost schools like Holy Town proliferated in poorer neighborhoods, a trend evident in most major cities and spreading into rural India.

Estimating the precise enrollment of private schools is tricky. Government officials say more than 90 percent of all primary schools are run by or financed by the government. Yet one government survey found that 30 percent of the 187 million students in grades 1 through 8 now attend private schools. Some academic studies have suggested that more than half of all urban students now attend private academies.

In Mumbai, so many parents have pulled their children out of government schools that officials have started renting empty classrooms to charities and labor unions — and even to private schools. In recent years, Indian officials have increased spending on government education, dedicating far more money for new schools, hiring teachers and providing free lunches to students. Still, more and more parents are choosing to go private.

“What does it say about the quality of your product that you can’t even give it away for free?” Mr. Muralidharan said.

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    The ultimate question.

Most low-cost private schools also follow rote-teaching methods because their students have to take standardized tests approved by the government. But some studies suggest that teachers in government schools are absent up to 25 percent of the time. Poor children who attended private schools scored higher on reading and math tests, according to a study by Sonalde Desai, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and other scholars.

“There is not much teaching that happens in the government schools,” said Raju Bhosla, 32, whose children attend one of Hyderabad’s low-cost private schools. “I never even thought about putting my kids in government schools.”

Across Hyderabad, work crews in 58 locations are expanding government schools or constructing new ones. To education officials, the building spree signals a rebirth of the government system, part of an $800 million statewide program to bring government schools into compliance with the new law.

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      For those who don’t know, one way to drive your competitors out of business is to make regulations so ridiculous that only you can meet them.

For Mr. Sibal, the national education minister, government schools had atrophied because of a lack of money. Under Right to Education, states can qualify for more than $2 billion to improve facilities, hire new teachers and improve curriculums, he said.

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    Yup, that’ll do it.

“All these changes are going to transform the schools system in the next five years,” Mr. Sibal predicted. As for the tens of thousands of private schools opened during the past 15 years to satisfy the public’s growing hunger for education, Mr. Sibal said, “We’ve given them three years time,” referring to the 2013 compliance deadline. “We hope that is enough.”

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    As a government official, he hopes it won’t be enough.

Skepticism abounds. Elite private schools, already struggling with requirements that they reserve slots for poor and minority students, have filed lawsuits. But the bigger question is what will happen to the tens of thousands of low-cost private schools already serving the poor.

James Tooley, a British scholar who has studied private education in India, said government statistics grossly underestimate private schooling — partly because so many private institutions are not formally registered. In a recent survey of the eastern city of Patna, Mr. Tooley found 1,224 private schools, even though government records listed only about 40.

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     Nothing can be regarded as certain until the government has denied it. They are only out by a factor of 30.6.

In Hyderabad, principals at several private schools said inspectors regularly threatened them with closings unless they paid bribes. Now, the principals say, the inspectors are wielding the threat of the Right to Education requirements and seeking even bigger bribes.

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   The typical government daily double, tougher regulations equal bigger bribes.

Mr. Anwar, the private school entrepreneur trying to organize a lobbying campaign, estimated that roughly 5,000 private schools operated in Hyderabad.

“Can the government close 5,000 schools?” he asked. “If they close, how can the government accommodate all these students?”

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    All government officials are fervently hoping it can close the competition out completely.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

The Martian wants to know about our child-rearing practices. A helpful earthling  explains. "One of the most important aspects is schooling. Our children must attend an institution where they are judged by jobs-for-life government workers who are protected from responsibility by a militant union. These workers have the arrogance, indifference and incompetence that can only be generated by guaranteed employment. During their stay in the educational system, our children are subjected to relentless leftist propaganda whose basic assumption is that a government solution is the only valid response to any problem, especially those involving "social justice". If the child does not learn quickly enough, he is considered to be deficient. If he is outstanding in his studies, the credit goes to the outstanding work of the teachers. Many parents judge their children based on how well the children do in this kind of setting." The Martian, although well-trained in earthly dialect, is struck silent by the logic of earthly practice. from Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope.

    I always ask public officials, "If education is so important, why do you do it so poorly?"

Why Alex can’t add (or subtract, multiply or divide)
MARGARET WENTE | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Thursday’s Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011 2:00AM EST

A parent I know went to an information session about math at his kid’s school. After listening to the visiting curriculum expert explain how important it was for students to “understand” the concepts, he asked: “So, how important is it for them to learn the times tables?” The expert hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t give an answer.

Parents across Canada might be surprised to learn that the times tables are out. So are adding, subtracting and dividing. Remember when you learned to add a column of numbers by carrying a number over to the next column, or learned to subtract by borrowing, then practised your skills until you could add and subtract automatically? Forget it. Today, that’s known as “drill and kill,” or, even worse, “rote learning.” And we can’t have that.

“The designers of the new curriculum have decided it would be a really good idea not to teach these things,” says Robert Craigen, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Manitoba. He sat on the province’s math curriculum committee for years. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in what he had to say. So today, he’s got calculus students who never learned long division. “The undergirding motive is: We want to teach understanding, and all this mechanical detail gets in the way of understanding.”

The common methods used to add and subtract are known as standard algorithms. They are efficient and foolproof. But, instead of being taught these methods, students are encouraged to find “strategies,” such as breaking numbers into units of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones and working horizontally. It works, but it’s not efficient. And every time a student sees a new problem, he has to start from scratch – and pick his “strategy.” It’s like playing the piano without ever learning scales, or hockey without basic drills.

The loony thing is that Canada is way behind the times. After a decade of disastrous experimentation in the United States, this approach to math education has been repudiated. The leading U.S. heavyweights in math came out decisively against it in 2008. Sadly, it seems this news has not yet reached Canada. Here, curriculum developers and boards of education are pressing forward, undeterred by the objections of math experts or the bafflement of parents and children alike.

Maybe it’s all a plot by Kumon to drum up business. Kumon is a wildly popular chain of math-tutoring schools. It has 321 centres in Canada, with a total of 54,000 students. “I wait with many mothers and we talk about the education system,” one Kumon mother told me. “This group is, of course, very upset with the lack of basic knowledge taught in the public schools. Most are teaching math at home after dinner.”

Another parent says: “My son used to love math when it was just about numbers, but now that it’s all writing words and describing how he feels about triangles, he’s not so enthusiastic. The math teachers at the high school where my husband works grumble that Grade 9 students come in not knowing their basic facts well enough.”

Lots of teachers are upset, too. Here’s part of a letter to Anna Stokke, another math professor who, with Prof. Craigen, has launched a reform movement to restore some common sense to math education. (Their site, wisemath.org, is worth a visit.) “I feel what is occurring in the schools is almost criminal,” the teacher wrote. “The difficulty which faces me every day is that I am prevented from teaching the ‘basic skills’ to my students. … Math worksheets and drills are frowned upon. Written tests are a definite no-no. … Marks on report cards are not to be less than 50 per cent. … How can one teach algebra/fractions/per cent/ratios when the basic facts are lacking? How can one pursue higher-level problem-solving when the foundations of mathematics don’t exist?” But many teachers don’t know enough to be upset, because their grounding in math is dismal to begin with.

The biggest losers aren’t your kids, of course. The biggest losers are the kids of parents who can’t afford tutoring, or don’t have the time to teach them times tables, or don’t even know their kids need help. It’s called two-tier education. And it’s here.

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   From the comments

Born Vancouverite

4:59 PM on December 15, 2011

As a former Educator, I have some insight into this whole fiasco.
(1) most parents don’t care. Unless if there’s a F on the report card, which doesn’t happen much anymore.
(2) the public teaching profession is a joke.
(a) the ‘teachers’ are a product of silly revisionism education, they don’t know how to teach, only crowd control
(b) school councillors are worse than teachers. If your child asks re career options, s/he isn’t going to get a straight answer, but the quick and easy answer
(c) An ‘A’ today is equivalent to a ‘C’ of 1980.
(d) the enrolment standards at Canadian Universities have been lowered to make it easier to be accepted. SFU in Burnaby now offers remedial English classes. A University!
(e) most University profs are no better. It’s only about minimal work for maximum salary.
(f) why teach your child the basics when it’s easier not to bother and just have a group project to do?

The level of incompetence in the public school system is nauseating. I have no respect for their so-called profession. They don’t deserve a raise come contract time, they deserve to be fired. And ONLY, the qualified ones re-hired and be held accountable to the taxpayer.

    When the educult loses its power, all will be over for the privileged life of government workers, but don’t count on it happening tomorrow.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

   Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    Warning Ontario to stifle its rising debt load, ratings agency Moody’s lowered the province’s outlook to “negative” from “stable” on Thursday.

     Just when California North thought it could waste, sorry “invest” borrowed money forever on things like green energy and placating civil servants. They should be told those days are long past. The only way to stop governments wasting money is to give them less of it.

     I devoted a few posts to explaining and agreeing with, Clear Teaching, a short e-book written by Shep Barbash explaining and extolling the virtues of Direct Instruction. This prompted a short reply from Mark Barnes, a teacher in the public school system. I look at his objections below because they are standard within the world of public education although most public school officials I know are unaware of any methods than their own.

http://www.joannejacobs.com/2011/12/clear-teaching-with-direct-instruction/

        Any program built on placement tests, rules for behavior, drill and practice, scripted lessons, rewards and summative assessment, to name a few, should be dismissed. The research is outdated and flawed — most of it done by Engelmann himself, and he’s never even been a teacher in the K-12 world.

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     This is called argument by fiat, assumptive knowledge, statement, etc. It’s true because I say it’s true. The research is outdated and flawed because I say it is. It’s done by Engelmann himself, thence, it can’t be true. There are so many errors in this one paragraph that one could devote a book to refuting them. The bottom line is that the results are not mentioned, just the techniques which he finds objectionable. One can dismiss results when one’s well-being doesn’t depend on results as in government employment.

Of course, no one dares take his ridiculous 100K challenge, because it’s so easy to manipulate. I can get my students to show monumental leaps in any area we study, if I create the testing instrument and teach to it. This is exactly what is wrong with education today, and DI only makes it worse. Teachers are so busy running the traditional script day after day — DI, worksheets, rewards, punishments, homework and tests — that real teaching and learning is rarely done.

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     “Real Teaching” is what I say it is. The manipulation statement reflects a profound lack of knowledge of competition found in public employees. No one would race without the same track for both. If two parties put up substantial money and status in a contest neither would engage under conditions unfavorable to oneself. Anyone who took Engelmann’s challenge would be foolish because the challenger would lose.

Legitimate transformation in the classroom involves eliminating everything that people like Engelmann are selling. We need to replace all of this with student-centered environments that provide autonomy, collaboration, project-based instruction and meaningful narrative feedback, instead of number and letter grades.

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    My theory would fix things. Your actual behavior is stupid. So there.

There’s plenty of legitimate research to support these things done by recognized leaders in the K-12 world — Stephen Krashen, Nancie Atwell, Alfie Kohn, Angela Maiers and Mark Forget, to name a few.

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    The “research” to which he alludes are many people citing each other and is merely strongly held opinion.

     No one I know would ever use the methods of these “experts” to teach children who have been ill-served by the public system. If they were foolish enough to use the “methods”, they would soon be out of business. This fact is as convincing as the lack of response to Engelmann’s $100 K challenge. If these theories work so well someone should be using them to make money by producing results.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

A short, highly readable, free book about Direct Instruction has been published by Shep Barbash and is available on the  Education Consumers website.

     Today, I end my examination of Clear Teaching by  Barbash. There are so many ways that public education can go wrong that being more correct is a snap. What is difficult is putting a good system in place. Engelmann and associates have managed this. Below are some more of the things Direct Instruction get right.

P. 43. If there are mistakes in the program, or if the program is vague or leads them to a dead end, they will know something is wrong but they won’t know how to fix it. It’s not because teachers don’t know how to teach. It’s because there’s a great difference between teaching and designing effective instruction. Most learning failures are caused by bad programs, not bad teachers. No amount of good teaching behavior can bail a teacher out of a bad program. If you want to get mad at somebody, get mad at the people who give you broad-brush strokes about teaching and then leave you to figure out the details because they don’t know how to do it.”

    This difference between teaching and instructional design is important. Teaching is fleeting and cumulative and difficult. Instructional design is difficult in a different way. Teachers are expected to do both.
     
P. 49. The science he invented has not been refuted. It’s been banished and ignored.

      The reason it’s been ignored is that results do not matter in government work.

Pp 26-27. Engelmann creates placement tests so sensitive they tell teachers not only which grade level but which lesson the learner should start in a program (i.e., the one in which the learner can do at least 70% of the tasks correctly on the fi rst try). He also creates mastery tests after every five to ten lessons so that teachers can make informed and timely decisions about what to do next—whether to go on to the next lesson, re-teach students A and B some things, or jump student C ahead in the program. He field-tests programs prior to publication to see how much and what kind of practice students need to master specific concepts and relationships, and he revises the programs as needed to make sure they get it.

  Since I know a little about psychometric tests, I can attest that the Direct Instruction Placement Tests are uncannily accurate. One of the outstanding principles of Direct Instruction is that teaching is evaluated continuously.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies