Productive Confusions: Faith with Doctrine, Community with Church

"Hey, how 'bout them Phillies!"
"What? Two good games? Fuhgeddaboudit! I lost my faith years ago!"
--Typical fan comments in Philadelphia

**

Confusion, which relies on ignorance, naiveté or inattention, is a much used marketing tool, both for commercial and political purposes. Why? Because it works. ("Idealists" who think that everyone appreciates the value of providing a good education, should dwell on this point. See The Classroom Teacher: Who Wants Experts?")

Confusing "faith" with "doctrine" and "community" with "church" has its pay-offs, too. The question to be asked is the ancient, "Cui bono?," "Who benefits?" Do not jump to the conclusion that the answer is: the faithful or a community of faithful.

Confusing faith with doctrine is like confusing a baseball fan with a player, or a hunter with a soldier. The differences here rest on the fact that the behavior of players and soldiers is constrained by discipline, by "rules of engagement," which fans and hunters need pay no attention to.

But even more important, professional ball-players, like soldiers, have commitments to team or to armed service; commitments that amateurs likely do not have. Professionals come with agendas generally not shared with the laity or with civilians.

In the same way, community may be confused with church, even when it is capitalized, e.g. "Church." This is like confusing a home with a house, or love with marriage. They may sometimes coincide, but they are still critically distinguishable.

And who benefits from the confusions? Ask yourself the economic question: "From which persons to which others do transfers of wealth occur?" Who gets the loot? Look past the smoke and mirrors of claims of a "spiritual" transaction. Such may occur, but are they the point?

There are those who believe that such confusion could be cured to some degree if our public schools could include some religious components, a vision of something higher than individual success and happiness, or market competitiveness. Maybe.

But, let us shift our eyes, for a moment, away from celestial glory and salvation, down to the problems we have to deal with everyday in our worlds of commerce and politics. Down to where moth or rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Religion, Intelligent Design and the Public Schools: serving God to Mammon?


Cordially
--- EGR

** Bill Klem. (n.d.). AZQuotes.com. Retrieved August 02, 2016, from AZQuotes.com Web site:
http://www.azquotes.com/quote/648998

Are Humans Rational? What’s At Stake?

..(we) retained utility theory as a logic of rational choice but abandoned the idea that people are perfectly rational choosers. -- D. Kahneman , (2011) Thinking: Fast and Slow, p.314

Reason is not a Tribe --Circle of Reason

…the growth of organizations themselves may create conflict where no previous consciousness of conflict existed. -- K. Boulding, Conflict and Defense: a general theory. (1963, p. 145)

What’s at stake? The dream of almost every “leader” in the history of mankind: subjugating others without feeling guilt, or without provoking moral opprobrium. Adding to the many god-given missions, we find: cultural superiority, Manifest Destiny, tribal primacy, economic efficiency, saving democracy, mental-physical health, Critical Thinking, beauty, racial purity and school reform. Throughout history these ideas have been used to separate people as worthy or unworthy of respect, social acceptance, or, even of life itself.

Into this crowd of ideological slogans struts Rationality, of ancient and solemn pedigree. Rationality has been recently refurbished as a touchstone of practical and moral dominance for a new crusade, which like many of its predecessors, will identify those to be privileged and those to be subjugated.

Many of Rationality's present enthusiasts pursue the dominance of a “Tribe of Reason.” This tribe is presently a loose confederation that, once achieving dominance, will likely struggle among themselves to createa hierarchy of "professions" -- with the usual assymetrical distributions of privileges and obligations. (A good deal of this sorting out and privileging has been done already in higher education.}

Every organization, every profession in our society has a stake in being perceived as a member of the Tribe of Reason in order to safeguard its economic opportunities, if not its moral status. (See, for example, America’s Interfaith Structure ) Rationality makes intolerance of so-designated Irrationality morally acceptable.

Even the most-focussed human minds encounter major impediments, both psychological and social, to rationality, the optimal pursuit of what they value. And theorists have long hoped to clarify rational action by seeking to mathematize notions of rationality. But they have met with mixed success. (See Kahneman, cited in epigraph and also, Is It Reasonable to Be Logical?)

The ephemerality of thought and the oscillations of taste and mood seem to offer no small reasons why thought processes appear more or less random and why decision appears to decay away from standards of optimality, e.g. utility theory(!) But is apparent randomness really irrational decay? Or, actually, a manifestation of values pluralism? Why must cultural variation or mental vicissitude diminish the status of persons or organizations to the point of being in need of, or open to, subjugation?

For references and to examine these issues further, see Pluralism and Rationality: the Limits of Tolerance


Cordially
--- EGR

Public School Failure is a Symptom; not, a Cause. - GKC

Today’s school reformers charge that our public schools stink. No doubt some of them do. But what if their poor performance is symptomatic of a far more basic problem?

I once owned a home that developed cracks in the plaster on either side of the fireplace. When I patched them they quickly reappeared. This happened repeatedly. So I hired a plasterer who said he could fix them for good. But his efforts also failed. The cracks soon were back. Further investigation revealed that the homebuilder had skimped on concrete when pouring the fireplace footer. In consequence, as the ground froze and thawed, the fireplace moved and the plaster cracked. No amount of repair work would fix the cracks until this very expensive to correct footer problem was dealt with.

America’s low performing schools are like the cracks in my home’s plaster. No amount of fiddling will fix them because something far more basic is amiss. And, that “something” is America’s monstrous economic inequality.

Can such inequality actually cause poor student learning? Yes, and there is plenty of research that proves it. Today, in fact, as the gulf between America’s rich and poor quickly widens, so does the chasm in children’s educational achievement. Family income now almost matches parental education as the most muscular predictor of student academic success.1

How can anyone reasonably demand that no child be “left behind” when the wealth of the top 0.1% of our population equals that of the entire bottom 90%;2 Or compare what the average CEO makes compared to the average American worker. A study by the Harvard Business School found that Americans believe U.S. CEO’s make about 30 times the average worker’s wages. In actuality they make more than 350 times as much. This is more than double the ratio in any other country in the world.3

Now let’s see how inequality specifically impacts U.S. youth:

* Fully 44% of U.S. youngsters fewer than 18 years of age now live in low-income families.

* 22% of U.S. children live in academic achievement destroying poverty.4

* 6.2 million of them live in households lacking the means to regularly get enough nutritious food.5

* And 2.7 million have a parent in prison — where they help the “land of the free” achieve the world’s highest incarceration rate.

These and similar realities impact school outcomes in a wide variety of destructive ways. Here is just one of them: 10% of all school age children, the great majority of them poor, have undiagnosed vision problems;6 Even the most short-sighted of school reformers should be able to see that impaired vision blights learning. But do any of them acknowledge, much less address, problems like this? Nope. They proceed as if public schooling occurs in a vacuum.

And let’s not forget that:

* The reformer’s much vaunted charter schools don’t play by the same rules as traditional public schools. For instance, most can send problem students back to their traditional public school. Direct comparisons, which aren’t that flattering to begin with, are therefore bogus.

* The reformer’s cyber charters, that unintentionally facilitate religious fanaticism, are producing abysmal academic results;7

* Poverty area schools — desperately in need of additional resources — typically are starving for funds;

* Government officials, both state and national are fostering slap dash teacher preparation; and, of course, the most poorly prepared candidates end up teaching in America’s educational Calcutta’s.

* America’s middle class, the main reservoir of successful public school students, has been evaporating since the Reagan years.

Sure, some educators accomplish less than can reasonably be expected. But this typically occurs only after they have unsuccessfully struggled with the effects on their students of toxic inequality. Not being saints, some eventually give up and dysfunction sets in. But, they weren’t without hope when they began teaching. They gave up only after bitter experience repeatedly crushed their hopes.

We hear a lot about teacher accountability these days. But why should educators be held accountable for cleaning up the god-awful consequences for children of bottomless greed? Greed, by the way, that is aided and abetted by the best government money can buy? It isn’t public educators, but plutocrats and their pet politicos who should be held accountable for the soul-destroying, academic achievement smashing misery that their policies and procedures produce.

It’s not that children badly damaged by social injustice, plutocratic greed and bought politicians can’t be successfully taught. Given an orderly environment, thoughtful innovation, adequate training, on-going support for both teachers and students, unusually devoted staff and uncommonly wise leadership, success is possible. But, considering present-day resources and priorities, what are the odds of getting any, much less all, of this in quantity?

Reforming “failing” schools is chasing a will-of-the-wisp. So-called school failures seldom are school failures at all. They are just another of the numerous foul and rapidly metastasizing consequences of the preposterously unfair way our nation’s wealth is distributed.

-- Gary K. Clabaugh, Ed. D
Professor Emeritus, LaSalle University


FOOTNOTES

1 Wither Opportunity? rising inequality, schools and children’s life chances, Edited by Greg Duncan and Richard Mumane , Russel Sage Foundation, 2011, PP. 91-92.

2 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Exploding wealth inequality in the United States, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, http://equitablegrowth.org/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states/

3 Roberto Ferdman, The Pay Gap Between CEO’s and Workers Is Much Worse Than You Realize, The Washington Post, September 23, 2014,

4 Child Poverty, National Center for Children in Poverty, http://www.nccp.org/top5cs/childpoverty.html

5 Hungry Children Suffer, Nokidhungry, https://www.nokidhungry.org/problem/hunger-facts

6 Heslin KC, Casey R, Shaheen MA, Cardenas F, Baker RS. Racial and ethnic differences in unmet need for vision care among children with special health care needs. Arch Ophthalmol Chic. 2006;124:895–902.

7 New Report: cyber charter schools’ Performance is Dismal, October 29, 2015, http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/29/new-reports-virtual-schools-performance-is-dismal/

The University as Rumpelstiltskin

And when the girl was brought to the King he took her into a room which was quite full of straw, gave her a spinning-wheel and a reel, and said, "Now set to work, and if by to-morrow morning early you have not spun this straw into gold during the night, you must die." -- Rumplestiltskin, Brothers Grimm.

David Leonhardt in “Colleges Are Failing in Graduation Rates” (New York Times of September 9, 2009 , B1) tells us that universities are failing in their “core mission”: to turn teenagers into college graduates, (straw into gold?) The evidence? Highly selective, usually private, universities have a higher graduation rate than open-admissions or non-competitive, usually public universities. As a result, Leonhardt claims, social inequality has “soared” and productivity growth has slowed down.

But is “turning teenagers into college graduates” really “the core mission" of universities? And has social inequality increased since the beginning of the 1900’s when very, very few of middle and working class students were able to get into college?

A third question: has economic productivity over these last 110 years fallen also?

Answers: no, no and no.

Leonhardt based his column on an article by Mark Schneider, a political scientist who is a tad more circumspect about making broad claims. (See Schneider,M. The costs of failure factories in American higher education. Educational Outlook. No. 6. October 2008. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research)

Although Schneider’s title contains the rock’em-sock’em hype, “failure factories” to characterize public universities, he hedges his bets: what he actually says is, if we worry about students not graduating from high school and attempt to coerce high schools with low graduation rates into doing something about it, then why ignore the public university “failure factories” whose graduation rates are significantly lower than our public high schools?

Why, indeed? But why hold high schools, with their compulsory attendees, more responsible for outcomes than are public universities? Those that attend public universities are not forced there by law.

To examine these issues further, see Moral Responsibility in the Education Industry: 
how much can school reform enhance a student's occupational fitness?

Cordially
EGR

The Achievement-Gap-GDP-Gap Myth: Selling Snake Oil?

edited 7/26/18

(I)f ...(student)... achievement gaps were closed, the yearly gross domestic product of the United States would be trillions of dollars higher, or $3 billion to $5 billion more per day -- Javier C. Hernandez (2009)

Would it were so. But this wishful thinking, on which many reform proposals have been based and marketed, is highly misleading. Most people with a poorly performing automobile would take it to be a joke, for example, if someone said,

Buy just one new replacement tire, and your gas mileage will increase, your engine will stop missing and the accident rate in your city will go down 50%.

A much cited slide presentation report by McKinsey & Company (2009) that detailed findings on the economic impact of the achievement gap in America's school beats on this same drum. A crucial item buried in slide 88 of McKinsey's 119 slide presentation is this: the difference between the actual GDP and the hypothesized GDP is "determined by assumptions about the ability to make use of higher skilled people and the quality of economic institutions."

Although some economists believe that cognitive and economic development are linked, they recognize that public school classrooms are not the only, or even the most important influences that affect this relationship. For example, Hanushek and Woessmann (2008 ) write,

Overall economic institutions ... can be viewed as preconditions to economic development. And, without them, education and skills may not have the desired impact on economic outcomes.

For example, the so-called "overeducated" often find themselves misfit in their economy, so that even high levels of their particular cognitive skills fail to provide "human capital," i.e. skills that translate into economic payoffs.

But what has been dropped from reform propaganda is the critical condition that appropriate, healthy economic institutions must be available so higher skills acquired can be put to use. (Since the 2008 report that Hanushek co-authored, he has said little about this condition, preferring, it seems, to take the easy ride on the school reform bandwagon.)

The present school reform undertakings, like the many that have preceded them in the past 100 years, represent little more than the triumph of hope over experience.

For references and links to cited articles and to examine these issues further, see Moral Responsibility in the Education Industry: 
how much can school reform enhance a student's occupational fitness?


Cordially
--- EGR

Want Effective Teachers? Serving Whose Purposes?

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A lady asked (Benjamin) Franklin,"Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic," replied Franklin, "if you can keep it." -- Adapted from The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 ed. Max Farrand, vol. 3, appendix A, p. 85 (1911, reprinted 1934)

That’s the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them. -- Scott Reed, Republican Strategist and Lobbyist (NYT mag. 10-16-11, 47)

In the United States of America, a country where, repeatedly in public ceremonies, much is made of its being a democracy. Here, in the US of A, the idea of “controlling” people is taboo, not to be spoken of, "an elephant in the room."

Rather, most Americans are taught to think that educated, informed citizens, consulting their consciences, freely and rationally choose to vote for the leadership of those people who, in fact, support the values of the voters. This is the professed political ideal.

This ideal helps us understand why a lot of concern is expressed over what is taught in schools, particularly in public schools. (See The Ideal School: What should it be like?) But is that a concern because people fear that teaching is not up to producing ideal citizens?

Or is it, rather, because many people, “important” opinion influencers, feel that the ideal rational citizen of a democracy would be a threat to their interests, political, social and economic?

For references and to examine these issues further, see The Classroom Teacher: Who Wants Experts?

Cordially
--- EGR

Should Colleges Be Made Responsible For Their Graduates’ Earnings?

Riddle:
What’s the first question that college graduates learn to ask on the job?
”Will you have fries with that?”
-- A sad, current joke.

Many college students go into substantial debt to pay tuition. Yet, they graduate unable to find jobs that pay enough to permit them to live in poverty, even, and pay back their education loans. Education Week reports,

Students at proprietary colleges represent 12 percent of
higher education enrollment, yet they take out 26 percent of
all student loans and represent 46 percent of all student loan
dollars in default. -- Education Week, June 10, 2011

The same article in Education Week, announces new regulations by the U.S. Department of Education that require college degree programs to disclose information about loan repayment rates and graduates’ earnings. The expectation is that if college programs fail to graduate students who can avoid loan default, they will lose federal funds to support student tuition loans.

Is it fair to the colleges and universities to make them responsible for economic outcomes of student career choices?

One argument has it: Yes! Make them accept the burden. Students are strongly encouraged by university personnel into programs on the basis of their “personal interest” with little consideration when they choose a major as to how they will support themselves afterwards. If earning potential were to become a touchstone of desirability, universities might have to, for example, dip into endowments or provide special scholarships to support the faculties needed to maintain certain traditionally highly esteemed programs with low graduate earnings potential.

A counter-argument has it: No! It is a basic moral principle that the burden of one’s responsibility ought be constrained by the range of one’s control. The requirements for and the availability of employment outside the educational institution are not controlled by those educational institutions. We live in a society that has a more-or-less free market economy. This introduces a certain whimsy into the existence and size of job markets.

There is a good argument for exempting K-12 education from later-life employment responsibilities. (See below) However, a college education is not compulsory the way basic education is. And, unlike basic education, it is strongly correlated with a person’s level of economic success.

To examine the argument against basic education’s economic responsibility, see Moral Responsibility in the Education Industry: 
how much can school reform enhance a student's occupational fitness? Can higher education offer the same kind of defense?


Cordially
--- EGR

Are There Experts in Education? Should There Be?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King. -- Erasmus.

What makes an expert? Two things: Can-Do and “Proper” Interest.

Interestingly enough, Can-Do is not necessary. In a community of ignorant people, the least ignorant might be identified as an expert, provided someone has sufficient and “proper” interest in what the “expert” supposedly can do. The dilemma of expertise is this: only a real expert knows enough to recognize others as real experts. The “experts” of everyday life are usually those whom influential ignoramuses designate as such.

“Proper” interest is most important because “really trivial, disgusting or shameful” things – things your Mom and Dad warned you against – are supposed not to invite us to admire “expertise.” For example, there are, amongst “well-brought-up” people, no recognized experts on sniffling, or on growing toenail fungus. Nor are there “experts” at musical flatulence.

The 'gator hunting expert of Flamingo, Florida is an almost nobody in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Schlegel expert from Cambridge is not anyone special in Flamingo. Such are the joys of diversity.

An important corollary: people seen as threats are not usually recognized as “experts” by those who feel threatened. Annoyers, disrupters and damagers are usually not bestowed with the honorific title, “expert,” no matter how skillfully they annoy, disrupt and damage.

Should schoolteachers strive to be experts? Maybe not. Let's just focus on the teachers, who, because of their skills, actually cause the learning they intend. In the minds of some, such truly expert teachers would have a potential for disruption. They could affect the demand for goods and services. If they convince their students not to smoke or to watch less TV, in the long run they might undermine whole industries. Such teachers might expose children to "dangerous" knowledge!

Students might come to realize that their sex appeal is not enhanced by imbibing quantities of Coke or Pepsi, or by paying twice as much money for designer labels sewn conspicuously on their clothing. Profits might fall and jobs might be lost.

In addition, truly “expert” teachers would be in a position to communicate radical ideas, for example, respect, or concern, for persons different from oneself, that might -- in someone's opinion -- "take us down the path to (whatever)ism." In short, the more expert teachers are, the greater the possibility for both economic and social upheaval. So many people might want to forget about developing teacher expertise. It is safer to let them muddle along and leave the real world to its own devices.

"Education is a weapon whose effect depends
on who holds it in his hands and who is struck with it."-- Joseph Stalin

To examine these issues further, see What Can a Teacher Do?


Cordially
--- EGR