Need Everyone Agree?: Changing Resisters to Supporters.

Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true. -- Familiar idiom.
	Powerful Persuasion?

Here is a thought experiment to try with your friends, family or students:

a. Fill in the blank with a goal, a situation, condition or event, to complete the following sentence:

Wouldn’t it be a better world if everyone could agree on (Goal).
You could substitute other phrases for “a better world” such as “nice,” wonderful,” “a real moral improvement,” or “peachy keen” or “healthier.” Pick something you can get your group to agree on as a substitution.

b. Once you have your statement, e.g. Wouldn’t it be more environmentally sound for people to agree to ban all automobile traffic from inner city commercial areas?, ask your participants to speculate as to who would likely agree to the statement (and why) and who would likely oppose it (and why).

c. Using the chart available at Assessing the Likelihood of Implementing Change , (ALIC) locate your supporters and resisters and the proportions of each you estimate there are. Fill in Line A on the chart.

d. Continue using the above chart to speculate how much you would have to change the percentages of each subgroup to bring them to the likelihood of supporting the change (here, agree with the statement.) Fill in Line B on the ALIC.

e. Considering the Ways to Overcome Resistance suggested by Kotter and Schlesinger in the ALIC, fill in the grid block the likelihood, or your group’s likelihood, of finding the resources to implement these ways, e.g. education & communication, participation & involvement, … etc.

Now consider the following questions:

1. Is the goal well enough defined to be operationalized to avoid a slow shifting (creep) of the target? (See Operationalization.)

2. Consider some of the costs involved in implementing the changes needed; would they be worth the benefits hoped for? Consider who it is who would perceive the achieved goal as a benefit; and, who would think it to be a cost. (You might want to revisit step b. above at this point.)

3. Considering the costs involved in implementing the changes needed, would it be wiser to redefine the Goal so as to shrink the budget needed? (This is a very common practice in all institutions, public and private.)

4. Are the needed ratios of supporters and resisters (see Line B in the ALIC) likely to remain constant through the change process?

To examine these issues further, if you are involved with education, see POLITICS, CONSENSUS AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM

If you are involved with other kinds of organizations, or if you want a more general overview, see Employee Resistance to Organizational Change

Cordially
--- EGR

Pseudo-Planning: Disguising Leadership Weakness?

edited 082018

Both teachers and students want science to be authentic, challenging, and engaging. How do you make this happen?   -- ASCD Twitter entry, link to source.

Noble aims no doubt: the kind that warms the hearts of the technically challenged in any field. Leadership cadres are not infrequently composed of no minute proportion of those once-upon-a-time competent persons elevated -- according to the Peter Principle -- beyond their level of competence. Such governing groups tend to rest confident of having done a day’s (a meeting’s) work when they formulate goal statements that ring of sound public relations planning.

The Blind Leading the Blind. (P. Bruegel, the Elder)

Who would reject as undesirable -- using the ASCD examples -- such outcomes as authenticity, challenge, and engagement as goals for school curriculum? But two problems tend to be sloughed off as merely technical, i.e. to be left to subordinates whose burden it will be to try to implement the pursuit of such Holy Grails without knowing their targets or the unavoidable costs involved in achieving them.

Of course, should these technicians threaten to spend more than a pittance of resources researching these problems, i.e. target consensus and feasible implementation, budgets can be restricted to what is politically possible, i.e. to levels that will not raise objections from external powers, equally technically challenged, whose objections might threaten the continued incumbency of the leadership.

So, for example, the “American public” -- read “strong political influencers” -- is concerned about terrorism and lawlessness, but apparently more concerned about the high costs, both to budgets and individual convenience, of technically efficient approaches to dealing with them, e.g. intensive surveillance and inconveniences to personal freedoms. (For more on problems with the formulation of goal statements, see Achieving Educational Goals: The Basic Model)

This situation illustrates the Rule of Imminence: the more distant the threat, the greater the cost discount (unless the more distant cost is vastly greater than the nearer, e.g. nuclear conflict vs. loss of control over a market.). So it is that defense industries exaggerate imminent possibilities of US involvement in foreign armed conflict, while their competitors beat warning drums about domestic infrastructure failures.

Educational and political leaders play this out as, for example in the recent past, a matter of trying to raise graduation rates by changing curriculum for fear of loss of national competitiveness. Forget about other so-called more important influences on a child’s school success. Those are likely cost-enhancing technical quibbles by politically insensitive squints. Defining school goals are the leadership’s task!

Wadoo, zim bam boddle-oo,
Hoodle ah da wa da,
Scatty wah !
(- 1935, Ira Gershwin, It Ain't Necessarily So)

For a list of related essays with links dealing with educational goals. see More on Educational Goals


Cordially
--- EGR

Hiding the “Elephant in the Room”: avoiding consideration of competing options

mediated 3/15/19

Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without the abrasive friction of conflict. -- Saul Alinsky

"Mutually cost-enhancing objectives," MCEO’s, are objectives which are operationally or politically unlikely of being fulfilled simultaneously, because progress made toward one tends to undercut the progress made toward the other. Pursuit of MCEO’s is the mechanism of cost-benefit conflict.

People in most undertakings have encountered such beasts, and not infrequently, for example:

a. you often can’t gain speed for a vehicle and cut fuel costs at the same time;
b. you can’t achieve both great muscle strength and running speed; and
c. on a fixed budget, you can’t accumulate savings and also spend profligately.

However, MCEO’s tend to be the “invisible bugs” in educational or other social programs. Particularly in situations where there is a delicate political balance needed to maintain organizational stability, MCEO’s tend to be the “elephants in the room” that are deliberately disregarded, discussion of which participants are dissuaded from pursuing -- “We don’t go there,” is the warning given.

Is your political candidate’s opponent a womanizer? If your own is, also, “you don’t go there” -- in public at least. Less newsworthy, of course, is the conflict between the objectives of having all kids achieve a high school diploma and college entrance; or between graduating college and finding high quality employment, or, even, providing adequate medical care without reducing those who provide or need it to poverty.

Some MCEO combinations seem unavoidable: e.g. every birth predicts a future death; every option exercised means others are foregone. But perhaps many MCEO’s can be softened by innovative procedures that avoid ultimate mutual cost generation. That hope has long sprung eternal even in the face of hard experience.

Any two feasible options may compete, if circumstances force it: for example, if they are funded from the same budget. Or, if the different options are championed by different power-holders within the organization. In general, MCEO’s are no more than special cases of competing options. But "special" because "banned," as it were, from public discussion.

Cordially, -- EGR

References

For some issues on MCEO's in historical educational context, see Clabaugh & Rozycki (1986) School Reform via Teacher Professionalization: Is it Cost-effective?”

For persistent problems in American education with MCEO's, see Clabaugh & Rozycki, Dissecting School Benefits: a typology of conflicting goals.

The Costs and Risks of Education: exempting the traditional.

updated 11/21/18

“We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice” -- Henry David Thoreau

Scalpels. If you were to give scalpels to toddlers, you wouldn’t be surprised if they cut themselves. But you wouldn’t -- you shouldn’t, at least -- jump to the conclusion that every person with a scalpel is a toddler.

Toddlers lack foresight and are ignorant of many a cause-and-effect-connection. So, what would you do with toddlers and scalpels; especially, if apparent grown-ups had the minds and emotional development of toddlers?

For example, some people claim to be advocates concerned about “what’s good for the environment” and they feel it necessary to, at least, remonstrate with gardeners or farmers who use weed control compounds, even such as Roundup, which leave no toxic residues in the soil. (But see How Toxic is the World’s Most Popular Herbicide Roundup?)

Toddler-minded dilletantes with weed-killers can create substantial collateral damage. But carefully applied they can help gardeners and farmers reduce otherwise unnecessary weed-control costs.

Gun Control. In the USA an issue paralleling that of our scalpels' example is gun control. With a major difference. Scalpels are not as readily available or as sought with as intense avidness as are guns (or weedkillers).

Toddlers, or toddler-minded people would be, indeed, are, dangerous with guns. But not everyone who has a gun need be a toddler, or toddler-minded, or dangerous. This is simple logic. Partisan fussing and fuming over the controversy does not change that. For stentorian voices to invoke “liberty” or “2nd Amendment Rights” does not practically address the issue of the high rate of death or injury facilitated by easy access to guns.


But neither does the suggestion that laws be passed and enforced to reduce or prevent access to guns: short time gains here may well generate longer term ills. Also, we have to consider the immediate costs of training personnel to enforce such laws and prosecute their offenders. And who is ready to exacerbate our already overgrown penal crowding situations by adding to the prison population? (And see THE COST OF ARMING SCHOOLS: The Price of Stopping a Bad Guy with a Gun)


The pass-and-enforce-laws-and-prosecute-offenders proposal comes up in this context, too, with opponents apparently willing to disregard real damage as inconsequential, e.g. merely a cost of having a “free market.”


It is at this point in the public argument that proposed restrictions are modified to suggest that education can play a role. Just as scalpels are generally restricted to those whose education has prepared them to put them to proper use, so, it is suggested, could guns be made available to those whose education in the proper use of guns has qualified them to be trusted with them. (See Gun Fun or Safe Kids? Must we make trade-offs?)


Overlooked Pachyderms. One elephant in the room is cost. How much would it cost to “educate” all those who want guns, or any potentially dangerous item, to use them carefully? This would obviously be a major expenditure. Would anyone want to have their taxes raised to provide it? And how likely is it that enough people would want to forego using these “scalpels?”

The second bigger and consequently even less talked about elephant in the room is that the possible harms risked to life and limb are, to judge by the behavior of our population, of lower priority than the convenience of maintaining ready “scalpels.”

At this point, usually, some people, holier, in their own opinion, than others, stand up and start wagging their fingers at gun-owners, particularly. Or, they may indulge in berating gas-powered lawn-mower users or loggers or fishermen for despoiling the environment; or, for being unwilling to “reduce their carbon footprint.” (Surely, it is the practice of lemmings to reduce their carbon footprint to the absolute minimum.)

But are these same people willing to give up highways, bridges, sewers and electric lines, automobiles, airplanes, inoculations and police protections to forestall the injuries and loss of lives which are typically, although inadvertently, consequent to their construction and maintenance? (See Schools are spending billions on high-tech security. But are students any safer?)

An easy example is that of a highway on which occurs a certain number of deadly accidents a year. No doubt this number could be reduced using additional safety devices and surveillance methods. But as the cost per life that might be saved goes up substantially, the interest in raising taxes to pay for it does not. This explains the common practice of many a township’s avoiding installing traffic lights demanded by worried parents until and unless some critical carnage occurs at the intersection.

Similarly, it has been the practice in some public school districts, if students show persistent high rankings on SAT’s, to try to induce new teachers to leave -- usually by burdening them with extra duties or less attractive facilities -- before they get tenure and merit substantial salary increases. Who need pay for experienced teachers if the kids do just as well with greenhorns? (See Do We Really Need Better Teachers? What For?)

On the other hand, in schools, “scalpels” frowned on by outspoken community members are often categorized as instruments of “violence.” And “violence,” it is preached, has no place in schools! So, for example, karate or riflery classes, as well as certain kinds of shop classes are unlikely to be found even in high schools. Can’t trust those teen-age tots with such “scalpels!”

But traditionally esteemed activities, as risky as they may be, are OK! Just think football, basketball, wrestling, hockey, lacrosse and even rugby and fencing. Such sports are not even readily characterized by their enthusiasts as violent. After all, they are traditional, school-approved activities! They can’t be violent! (See Permissible School Violence)

Nonetheless, it remains a feeble moral position, indeed, hypocrisy, even, to complain about the collateral damage brought about by the practices of other people while disregarding the risks of one’s own collateral inflictions.


To examine these issues further, see Pursuing Educational Targets: 
What is the Collateral Damage?

Also, see Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making? .


Cordially
--- EGR

Do We Really Need Better Teachers? What For?

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind. -- John Godfrey Saxe (1816 - 1887)

What is a better teacher? Better for what? What is the “improvement” supposed to aim at? These are primary questions. Secondary questions are whether it is worth the cost compared to other options, or to the status quo. Who gains what from “improving teachers “-- whatever that means? Who pays for it?

A recently retired member, a world-explorer, has offered a real live elephant to your organization, The Harmony Club. “How would we take care of this elephant?” you ask Sam, a member and, in life, a car-parts dealer. “First, you get a better steering wheel for your car,” he replies.

You are perplexed. “A better steering wheel?” you respond. “What for?” “Well,” says Sam, “you’re gonna be pulling that animal around in a trailer a lot and you’ll need more control and comfort when you do it!”

“A trailer? Why will we need a trailer?” you demur. Sam replies, “To get the elephant back and forth to the vet and to the state and county fairs.” “And to visit my kids’ schools,” adds Susan, also a member and, in life, a school board president.

“Harmony Club will need to hire an accountant, too,” breaks in member Stewart, a business school professor, “in case we decide to charge people money to come see the beast.”

“But what about food and shelter and clean-up and TLC?” you ask.

“Piffle,” says Susan. “That’s small stuff. Let the neighborhood kids come visit the elephant to keep it company. The rest you can get other members to help you with. At this juncture we’re trying to deal with the really important things.”

Do we really need better teachers for our public schools? Better for what? And will the improvement be worth the cost -- since “better” often means “more expensive?” And what kinds of things here are being assumed to be benefits? (See Dissecting School Benefits: a typology of conflicting goals)

Let’s revisit the questions, “Do we really need better teachers?” and “What for?” We can look to examine several possible answers. The first group I will call Student-Oriented Aims.

Do we really need better teachers? What for?
Student-Oriented Aims:

a. for better test scores
b. for more learning
c. to increase student interest
d. to increase student motivation
e. to reduce boredom.

Note that these aims each immediately in turn raise the important questions: For which students? What other factors affect the outcomes aimed at?

Do we really need better teachers? What for?
Economic-political Aims:

f. to create new jobs (assumption: they are pertinent, ultimately to student-oriented aims)
g. to open educational budgets to new entrepreneurs.
h. to placate powerful yet ignorant critics

The great pretense in all kinds of (not just public) schooling is that Student-Oriented aims take precedence over Economic-political Aims. The reverse is nearer the truth. This is a reality and diluting our beers with tears is probably a pointless endeavor.

For more than a century, Americans having been beating the drum for better public schools and better teachers. What they have not been doing is addressing our two basic questions. This is possibly very wise until that time is reached when a tolerance for variation, if not a congruence, in aims can be reached. Muddled thinking about educational aims is the cost we pay to minimize open social conflict on these issues.

For more references and to examine these recurrent issues further, see School Reform via Teacher Professionalization: Is it Cost-effective?


Cordially
--- EGR

Preaching Against Violence: Band-Aids on a Dirty Wound?

edited 10/17/18

We are apt to forget that children watch examples better than they listen to preaching. -- Roy L. Smith, American clergyman

The sincerity and urgency with which a proposal is promoted is no indicator that it will be useful and lasting. Indeed, one may suspect the contrary to be true.

If you’re an educator who has worked for some years, you might remember some items on the following list: teaching machines, 4-MAT, mastery curriculum, Writing Across the Curriculum, Transcesence, Chisenbop, Values Education, Behavioral Objectives, Life Adjustment, Great Books, Competency-Based Learning, Teacher-Proof Curriculum, the Junior High School, Performance Contracting, Industrial Education, Suggestopedia, the Project Method, Computer Literacy, The New Math, The Paideia Proposal, America 2000, or the Open Classroom.

They came and they went, leaving little trace but crippled or wasted school budgets. These items were, in their day, promoted with a zeal and a printed output that required the sacrifice of vast forests to support that literature.

Educational reform has, like a 20-year locust, crawled once again to the surface of the public consciousness. Americans have been “reforming” the public schools cyclically for over a century. The list of “fads” given above is some indicator of the past successes enjoyed.

And even more, in a broader context, there is nowadays extensive effort to "Make America Great Again!" that, despite repeated promises, will likely result in social and environmental rubble.

There is a scene in an Agatha Christie mystery where Hercule Poirot ponders the meaning of the various clues he has gathered when his client thunders impatiently, “Don’t just stand there thinking, do something!”

There’s the rub! Americans, (and Brits, apparently, too) especially those considered to be “leaders,” are so imbued with being “proactive” that they and their supporters imagine that quick action, any random flailing out, will make up for shoddy thinking, misapprehension of the problem, and sloppy communication. Dealing with “violence,” in the schools, in the streets, or among nations, provides more than ample example of these faults.

Ancient wisdom cautions us against charging ahead armed only with good intentions. It also counsels us to moderation, because all actions produce costs as well as benefits.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Doing Violence to 'Violence'

Cordially -- EGR

Perplexing Educational Decisions: what you'd like vs what you must

You can do anything, but not everything. — David Allen

Why aren't the best teachers assigned to teach the worst students?
Why do many schools spend more money on landscaping than on salary increases?
When school budgets are cut, why is it more likely that a music teacher rather than a football coach will lose his job?

The answers to these questions are all cut from the same cloth: it depends on the distinction between what a community can agree that:

a. it would be nice to do; and,

b. what needs to be done.

Like many organizations, schools are run by decision-makers who are very concerned with who pays the costs, and who gets the benefits. And what keeps them, the decision-makers, employed.

For more on this see Mission vs. Function: Limits to Schooling Aspiration
-- EGR

What Benefits Should Schools Promote? For Whom?

People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong. -- Bill Vaughn

School reformers point to the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on basic education and complain that we are not getting our money's worth. They may be right. But we will never know for sure if we continue our habit of vague, contradictory and hopelessly optimistic expectations regarding what schooling can accomplish.

Some of this cockeyed optimism is understandable. When it comes to children, our hopes for a better tomorrow encourage a particularly nutty breed of optimism. Even life's most grizzled veterans find their hopes triumphing over their experience.

But schooling has become far too important and expensive to be totally given over to wishful thinking. At least some realism is required. To that end we would like to clarify what schools can and cannot reasonably be expected to do.

To continue the discussion see Dissecting School Benefits: a typology of conflicting goals

Cordially,

-- EGR

A Good Education: substance or symbol?

... people can engage in trade-off reasoning. They do in all the time -- every time they stroll down the aisle of a supermarket or cast a vote ...We expect competent, self-supporting citizens of free market societies to know that they can't always get what they want and to make appropriate adjustments. -- Philip E. Tetlock (1999) "Coping with trade-offs: Psychological constraints and political implications."

Public schools face conflicts that both private and parochial schools, so long as they have sufficient budgets, can avoid. These conflicts are based in religious and other value differences.

Religion is always a controversial item in the public school context. Although religious indoctrination is officially not permissible in a public school, what constitutes religious indoctrination is often vague. Consequently, school practices are not uniform from one district to another.

Public schools give lip-service to pluralisms of various kinds, preaching equality of treatment across ethnic, religious, racial, sexual, gender and, even age boundaries. This often bumps up against local, and even broader, traditions. (See Trading-Off "Sacred" Values: 
Why Public Schools Should Not Try to "Educate")

In spite of these problems, public schools are expected to provide each child in them a good education. What this consists of is often highly controversial. So it is, in our pluralistic society, that perceived employability and status become the common yardsticks of judgment.

What counts, in public education, as a school benefit, or cost, is a matter for debate. This debate is dampened to a great extent by informal agreements to understand every school undertaking as being “preparation for the world of work.” Even the honorifics of academic achievement are lead back to some notion of “developing intellect in order to enhance economic productivity.”

Not that it has been working! Grade inflation, wide-scale academic dishonesty, graduate unemployment and an “over-qualified” workforce are four indicators that something is amiss.

To find further references for exploring these issues, see Dissecting School Benefits: a typology of conflicting goals

Cordially
--- EGR

To Improve the Schools, Hunt for Witches!

How can you tell who’s a witch? It’s sometimes difficult: they seldom wear pointy black hats anymore. However, in education you can spot them because they talk about – in public even – what everyone already knows and disregards. They mention and hold up for inspection, even, the “elephants in the room.” They must be silenced because, as every “politically sensitive” person knows, Truth Does Not Help!

Those of you who are considering going into education might well look into the case of a Bucks County, Pennsylvania teacher, who, so to speak, “violated the secrecy of the confessional”: she published a blog criticizing the failings of her students (and, by implication, the failing of their parents), although not identifying the students themselves.

If you’ve got to toe the line on secrecy that tightly, you bloggers – or letter-writers, even -- might as well go into an occupation or profession that gives you far more in pay and perks and far less abuse, e.g. the NSA or CIA or Special Forces. Even now, the principal of her school is adding his own bundle of faggots – she "debased the disabled" (Phila Inquirer 2/24/11, B1) -- to the bonfire preparations expecting to immolate the sorry, indiscreet wench at the next school board auto-da-fe. Just remember, Truth Does Not Help!

Public schools, far from being a powerful reformative influence, reflect the basic advantages and disgraces of their communities. If you, personally, don’t have the inclination – or the guts – to struggle with this, don’t go into teaching.

To examine these issues further, see Public Schools: Our Face in the Mirror


Cordially
--- EGR

Who Benefits From School Reform? A Trick Question.

Who does benefit from school reform? Don’t say, “Everyone.” You don’t know everyone. And even if you mean that everyone should benefit, that is a different story. If should’s were does’s, we’d all be rich, happy and beautiful.

Who benefits from school reform? Don’t say, “the kids.” This may make you feel warm deep inside, but that’s where the warmth stays. Expect to be asked, “Which kids?” “Whose kids?” “Where, when, how?”

Does this mean that the idea of benefits from school reform is romantic nonsense? No. It just means that it is highly relative. And in our pluralistic democracy, “highly relative” means “politically difficult to achieve” and when publicly talked about, “likely little more than B.S.”

Certainly, nothing is a reform unless it is a change. And no change is a reform unless it is for the better, that is, the ratio of benefits to costs increases as compared to the status quo.

So, can we recast our “trick question” as “Who receives an increase in benefit/cost ratio when schools are changed?” That’s getting somewhere.

Now we have to tackle the reasonable distinction between benefits (or costs) as perceived in contrast to actual benefits (or actual costs). And who makes those judgments?

To examine these issues further, see Pursuing Educational Targets: 
What is the Collateral Damage?


Cordially
--- EGR

Merging School Districts: Benefits and Costs

edited 12/30/18

Edward Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, wants to reduce the State’s 501 school districts into a substantially smaller number. One reason he gives is that this will reduce duplicated and top-heavy administrative costs of public schools. But what are some other costs and benefits?

The Digest of Education Statistics reports that in 1939-40 there were 117,108 school districts distributed among the then 48 states. In 2005-6 there were 14,166 school districts distributed among 50 states. What educational benefits were gained, what costs suffered by this substantial consolidation? Clearly, the more localized the governance, the easier it is to suppress diversity. And if there is some – or, even, a lot -- of private dipping into the budget – this is Pennsylvania, after all -- fewer people are likely to find out and even fewer to get something done about it.

But consolidation also brings about an extension of resources to more kids: access to libraries, gymnasia, science labs and exciting daily bus tours of the school district on the way to and from school.

In addition, consolidation expands the target of curricular possibilities, superstitions and fads, always more or less fresh from University or governmental theorists, e.g. brain-based learning, Suggestopedia, language labs, computer past-times, learning styles and other Proposals to uplift our Paideia, leave no child behind and prepare them to excel in the global economy of future centuries.

And what is the Charter School movement about, if not deconsolidation? Every charter school success provides evidence that consolidation is the wrong direction to move in. Yet persistent Charter School inadquacies caution us to rush to change.



To examine these issues further, see Really Want Change? Deconsolidate the Schools!

Cordially
EGR