Merchandizing Science (...or Religion? ...or Politics?)

We cannot act on information alone; the information must first be understood, then interpreted for relevance, and finally command belief and commitment. But what if the citizen cannot assess the truth of the available information or its import for action? --- Harry S. Broudy, Truth and Credibility. The citizen's dilemma (New York: Longman, 1981) p. 13.

Information: Food or Sewage? The expression "GIGO," Garbage in, garbage out, used to have some meaning even beyond the world of IT enthusiasts. Now, even though it is more widely recognized, it becomes evermore reduced in cogency. Broudy's comment above was, in 1981, still merely a worry; it was dismissed by many who persisted in letting a smile be their umbrella.

However, Broudy's comment rings true as we see long revered, even though lip-serviced, standards of decency, civility and authority publicly, blatantly disregarded; especially, by self-proclaimed "pragmatic" leaders. The distinction between the concepts of "leader" and "usurper" has become increasingly blurred. (See Leadership as Usurpation) Foresightfulness, consideration, tolerance, fairness, compassion and, especially, memory are — often publicly and with celebration — cast aside, as "activists" of all persuasions rush to exercise their roles as "change agents" or "disrupters" under the banners of "democracy," "liberty," "Amendment-protection," "entrepreneurship," "greatness" and "social justice."

Arenas of Competition

There seems to be a bias in our culture that anything characterized as research is akin to Godly Revelation. But it's no news that RESEARCH can be badly planned, badly executed, off-target or trivial. And, increasingly, individuals from scientific, religious and governmental communities either rush to participate,or, more passively, support the scramble with contributions that result from their own self-serving miscreation, e.g. tampering with research, faking news reports, ignoring critical violations of law or producing, often dangerous, sub-standard products. (See Retraction Watch)

Why does this happen? It seems that it is because we treat failure as the greatest of disgraces. Individual persons or (usually small) enterprises are expected to take great risk with their resources to provide social benefits without a compensating safety net should they fail. Yet ridicule awaits them as "losers." This anti-failure taboo is so great that even celebrities would rather be caught publicly in a lie about their attempts, than to own up about their failures. (See Barbara Ehrenreich's (2009) Smile or Die ISBN:9781847081735)

Example: The Mysterious "Impossibility" of Multitasking. President Gerald Ford used to be characterized by some as "unable to walk and chew gum at the same time." However, considered judgment held it that the intelligent and accomplished Mr. Ford had been targeted by animadversion. He was not only able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but, like most of us, do many more complex things by multi-tasking.

But -- according to some highly-degreed pundits, we were wrong! Multi-tasking is impossible! RESEARCH proves it! So it is dangerous to multi-task because we are likely to make many more mistakes because we have to switch attention too much to be accurate while we multi-task.

When do we risk such mistakes? When we multi-task! But then, we CAN NEVER make such mistakes, because as RESEARCH shows, multi-tasking is impossible! We CAN'T DO IT! And since it is, and supposedly has ever been impossible, we COULDN'T HAVE DONE IT! So Gerald Ford's detractors, who were no doubt composing their thoughts as they were typing them up while telling them to listeners and judging their reactions were -- in other words -- multi-tasking. (Is there no longer any sensitivity to self-contradiction?!)

There Are Three Problems within this "debate." The first is that to say that we can't multitask assumes there are clear, generally accepted boundaries that distinguish one task from another. That, when humans who use the word, "task," they are invoking the same criteria of identification that researchers do. This is unconvincing because the latter's conclusions about multitasking are so different from what many intelligent practitioners in various fields think about it and DO with it. Multitasking research offers, apparently, not a correction to our language, but a redefinition. The claim that it is impossible to multitask attracts attention, it seems to be an effective marketing tool. But is essentially a bait-and-switch maneuver. (See Low Cost Interventions for a Better World: Reform by Redefinition?)

The second problem is that multitasking research appears to assume that the human brain is something like a computer with only one processor, so that parallel processing, which many computers employ, doesn't exist for humans. But, even though NPR ( Think You're Multitasking? Think Again) may doff its hat to Multi-tasking Impossibility theories, many others have made similar criticisms to the ones here. (Psychology Today (3/30/11) Myth of MultiTasking)

The third problem is that the debate really deals with paying attention to the implementation of goals. Many tasks we undertake may have become for us, to some extent, automatic. This doesn't mean that they are no longer tasks. And of course breakdown in implementation may occur if we have too many things to pay attention to. This realization, once comprehended, does not promise to have much market impact.

Does a Pluralistic Democracy Require "Sleight-of-Tongue" to Persist? Even if the ambiguities of promotional language have some desired market impacts, this in no way guarantees that we will find more people cooperating on the same page of the same agendas. Nor does it promise eventual reduction of conflict or improved leadership. (See Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making?.) It is snake oil for our societal forebodings.

Is there a future for a nation of persons who will not be concerned beyond their own individual (or familial, or tribal) interests? Are we doomed to a perpetual war of every person against each other? Many people seem to think so to judge by their willingness to put some kind of Leviathan in public office.

Nicholas Rescher in Pluralism. Against the Demand for Consensus. (Clarendon Press. 1993, p.180. ) writes

The key consideration for the conduct of interpersonal affairs is that the activities of people can harmonize without their ideas about ends and means being in agreement. (See also, page 7 on coming to terms with realities of individual difference.)

It's easy to say that we have to learn to get along with each other. But will mental analgesics, happy talk, get us to The American Dream? Or can we just work, one day at a time, at living with a lot of fussin', feuding', and fightin' as we stumble toward our Alabaster Cities, toward Making America Great? Let us be patient, think clearly and hope so.

To follow up on these ideas, see It’s Effective? Effective For What? Maintaining working relationships.

Cordially
--- EGR

The “Mea Culpa” Culture in Public Education: failure is the worst sin.

updated 4/14/19

Mea Culpa, Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault — Prayer of Confession, RC Church.)

The media has something similar, except it’s known as ‘mea culpa’ culture. Essentially, it allows them to print and broadcast any amount of utter codswallop and then later hold their hands up and admit: “We got it wrong.” A good example of this phenomenon is the case of The New York Times and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” — Bryan MacDonald, RT Question More, 8-17-14

A Teacher’s Mea Culpa. On July 14, 2014 the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front page story about a teacher who — after a seven years in teaching — had decided to leave her job in the School District of Philadelphia.

Originally with ten or so friends from Teach of America, she decided to stay beyond their original two-year commitment and work in Philadelphia. “Starry-eyed” and looking forward to a decades-long career teaching in the School District, she started teaching in a middle school. (Teaching middle school is a hard way to begin. My first day was rough. See My First Classroom Teaching Experience.) She really seems to have worked hard at reaching her students. She spent a lot of her own money to buy needed school supplies when they were not provided by the school district.

She began her Philadelphia career in a middle school where I had supervised education students from Widener University in 1994 and ’95. The school was big, crowded, architecturally very difficult to provide supervision for and, by my observations, full of disorder, rough-housing and bullying in the stairwells and secondary halls.That she persisted as a teacher there is an indicator, I think, of her dedication — or hubris?

Then our teacher was transferred to a troubled high school (my wife spent a year there, ’95-’96) where she had to cope with trying to teach algebra to classes with special education students mixed in despite her never having had the training to teach them. Electronic teaching aides — with missing pieces — were provided. She bought what she needed to make them work. Most of her “algebra students” knew nothing above the third grade level of math. Fire alarms would go off frequently, necessitating either evacuation of the school, or illegal disregard by administration, risking a catastrophe. When she called for help with students’ fighting, it would take “seven minutes” for someone to come.

After being transferred again to an even more troubled high school, she needed to take a leave for medical reasons. After a 10 days’ absence for oral surgery, she was told by a school district doctor that she could not return to work for three months for fear that she might “get hit in the face.” The Inquirer printed a statement — on page 1A — she made after deciding to leave:

My students weren’t able to make progress this year. I did them an injustice. The School District did them an injustice. They did not get the education they should have.

One wonders whether the moral education she has as a child had ever sunk in: how could she possibly confess to having inflicted an “injustice” — an “injustice”! — on her students when she had continued work so hard and long with them under very difficult conditions? What about administration? Did they have no responsibility? The teacher “corrects” this tendency on our part to spare her a martyrdom:

It’s not the administration’s fault. “My principal was working hard, but there was one of him.”

The Evidence of Fault? There are several issues here:

a. What has the teacher construed as evidence of such injustice?
b. Has an injustice actually occurred?
c. Is there a deeper issue she’s just not ‘fessin’ up to?

What did that teacher take as evidence of injustice being suffered by students? Their behavior:

"Students don’t verbalize it. They act on it. They run the halls. They smoke in school. They cut class."

In other words they acted like many students in schools, both public and private, in affluent neighborhoods; also, as well as in colleges and universities.

Has injustice actually occurred? Usually the justness of a person’s act is judged by whether they have the ability and resources to prevail in a situation. If the circumstances they faced would be normally overwhelming, their failure is not a case of injustice. Patients who die from ebola have not been unjustly treated if they die despite earnest and professionally correct treatment by their doctors.

There is a deeper issue. Another comment the young teacher makes points to ambition, a motive, which, — though not uncommon in newcomers and often admired — throws a different light on the whole story. “I’m going to get a nursing degree. Teaching degrees just don’t get you anywhere!”

Was this teacher’s mea culpa really a sincere confession of injustice? Or is it a strategem to acquire new employment by showing herself ready to make excuses to obscure administrative and organizational faults? “Hire me and I’ll cover for you!"(See The Social Consequences of Defensive and Counterdefensive Attributions.)

"Buffering" personnel, who "run interference" for their higher-ups, are much in demand. (See Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making? ).

Failure is the Greatest Sin. In this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave have appeared over the years numbers of — shall we be generous and call them — “confused, misguided or misinformed people,” who have promulgated the idea that despite all external circumstances that impede us, the positive thinking person will prevail in achieving whatever his or heart truly yearns for.

Failure is the fault of the individual who fails in life, because positive thinking, alone, is sufficient to avoid failure. Many education departments in many a university teach this dogma despite otherwise fervent secular commitments. (See Lurpofactsomosis: Reinvigorating American Education).

The teacher featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer seems to have a “positive attitude” of that ilk. Initially, she joined Teach for America, helping her to avoid the training period and costs of more conventional university access to experimenting with public school pupils. (See Can Education Be Made A Science?). She was probably inculcated with the attitude that her above average personality and intelligence — as proven by joining TFA — , as well as avoidance with “typical educators” would, if coupled with “positive thinking” allow her Michelle-Rhee-like ascent into to the upper echelons of educational reformers and policy-makers.

Far from the problems of dealing with “unjustly” troubled kids in middle- or high school classrooms.

For more information and to examine these issues further, see Cannonfodder: preparing teachers for public schools.).


Cordially
--- EGR

The School Failure Mythology

edited 10/11/20

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!. -- The Blind Men and the Elephant
John Godfrey Saxe (1816 - 1887)

Philadelphia’s new (2012) Superintendent of Public Schools has declared a substantial number of schools to be “failing schools” and has announced that they will be closed down. The newsmedia, which fanfares almost every new superintendent as an educational savior -- and remains strangely quiet when said saviors leave to escape the mess they have enhanced -- is again bubb-bubb-bubbling with delight.

The parents of the children who attend the “failing” schools are vociferously NOT delighted. They want the schools to remain open. The idea of having to pry kids out of bed earlier to be bussed through hostile gang territories to schools out of the neighborhood is clearly not a welcome prospect. And how, many ask, is destroying relationships with teachers and administrators the kids know supposed to help them avoid “failure.”

Also weighing in on (or dodging) the issue are teachers, administrators, and university people. For not too obscure reasons the teachers side with the parents, the administrators have determined silence to be the better part of valor, and the university professors of education tend to side with the superintendent, although there are nay-sayers.

Three basic facts are persistently disregarded:

1. Without a substantial, persistent consensus on what schools should be about, there are no practical standards to determine what counts as success or as failure, no matter what litanies of directives fall from the lips of funding agencies.

2. Just because one party (or a few parties) to the controversy presumes to impose a set of standards, does not automatically bring every interested party into agreement.

3. Ignoring or denying 1 and 2 above does not change their reality.

Many a state legislature in its profound unwisdom has put some phrase into their school code about providing each child with a “thorough and efficient education.” New Jersey did this back in the early 1970s. I was in a Temple University group asked by a New Jersey legislator in 1973 to help define "thorough and efficient education" after the legislation codifying the language had already been passed. Despite our best efforts, he did not manage to get the definition we produced, as “accommodating” (read here, “vague”) as it was, widely accepted when he took it home.

Through the early 2000’s I would ask administrators from New Jersey what had been decided about the meaning of the phrase “thorough and efficient education.” How was it put into practice? The general response was “inconsistently” or “haphazardly,” adding that it was a “mess of a criterion.”

The underlying situation is that our citizens have long entertained a variety of conceptions as to what schools should be doing and what should count as school success. The fact that there are, besides public schools, parochial and private schools in great variety is one proof of this.

Another proof is that, by and large, parents -- and students themselves -- do not see academic knowledge and intellectual skills to be school goals anywhere near as important as those aiming at the students’ emotional and physical well-being.

This was shown years ago in an intensive study reported in John Goodlad’s 1984 book, A Place Called School. In general, he found that intellectual goals in schools far exceed parental preferences; whereas, social goals do not meet levels preferred by students and parents. (Goodlad, pp. 62-69)

Little has changed, except for the increasingly strident hyperbole about “common standards,” and the attempts by governmental and professional educational organizations to impose their own conceptions of educational success on parents too poor or unknowledgeable to escape or resist.


For references and to examine these issues further, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies


Cordially
--- EGR

Technician, or Magician: Can You Tell the Difference?

udated 1/26/21

… he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currently without discovery ... — Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark, 1656

If baldness treatments really work then why does a wealthy man like Donald Trump still have problems? If Hollywood spas and diets really work, then why are they visited again and again by pretty much the same movie stars? If prisons help to reduce crime, why is the American prison population the largest in the world and still growing?

If pious declarations of Faith mean anything then

a. why is the Bible Belt plagued by “acts of God” so very much more than the Sin Cities of this country; and
b. why are many of the previously unsuccessful “prophets” of the End Time still pushing their wares?

Why do even “the best” hospitals and universities closely guard data as to their successes and failures? Why does the popularity of our political, economic and psychological pundits contribute directly to the failure of their predictions? (See Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment)

What is the difference between a magician (an illusionist) and a technician? It is not, merely, that one wears stage clothes and the other, "scientific" garb, e.g. a stethoscope, a loupe or a sheepskin. The important difference is whether the causes and effects they believe to be at work are, in fact, at work.

People everywhere show a desperate willingness to believe in some kind of causal connection, a hope that somebody, somewhere knows what and how to do something. Many sincere people, possessed by one or another blinding Faith, stumble about in search for answers. But their very Faith often makes it impossible even to carefully examine the “answers” they encounter.

If private and parochial schools are so much better than public schools, why don’t the better students of the former consistently beat out those of the latter? Why are schools, already crammed full of gimcracks and geegaws from a thousand different manufacturers and universities, nonetheless perpetually in “need” of reform?

How many school "reformers" turn out to be little more than illusionists? How much talent, hope and money has been wasted pursuing their illusions?

For references and to examine these issues further, see The Teacher as Technician


Cordially
--- EGR

Sustaining Illusions of Leadership

The appearance of moral authority and even a sacred aura at the top of the hierarchy is essential to sustain the privileges of leadership. -- Jeffrey S. Nielsen, (2004) The Myth of Leadership

I find it depressing that we would want to discuss the state of leaderhip in organizations from the perspective of what feels good and uplifting, rather than what the evidence shows to be true. -- Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015) p. 194 Leadership BS

In all-too-many an organization in this U.S. of A, there is often little more that shouts “Leadership!” than a big, big salary. This is like confusing a rectal syringe with a thermometer.

There is a two-way superstition at work here. When organizations are successful, their leadership gets the most of the credit, even when luck plays a major role in that success. (See Marshall Goldsmith on The Success Delusion.) When businesses do not succeed, their leaders are not infrequently sacrificed -- especially in professional sports -- to the misfortunes that have befallen them. (See also, G. I. Kolev, Pay for Luck in CEO Compensation: Evidence of Illusion of Leadership?)

Some theorists have emphasized subordinating purely internal goals to integration into the community where the organization is located. Many business leaders and even leaders of public institutions disagree, emphasizing that the business of their business is their own business: even after they have asked for public assistence.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Philip Selznick, LEADERSHIP IN ADMINISTRATION
Also see Edward G Rozycki (1994) LEADERSHIP vs. MORALITY: AN UNAVOIDABLE CONFLICT?

Cordially
--- EGR