Mostly education Mail 687 20110809

Mail 687 Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Means, medians, modes; discipline; and education in general. Includes a long ramble about education when I was in school. See Below.

 

A deaf man wants sign language interpreter at nudist camp in Cayuga County:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/08/deaf_mans_complaint_nudist_cam.html

Ya just can’t make this stuff up. The ADA has visited such mischief.

Of course, I’m showing my traditionalist roots here, I suppose.

Ed

Perhaps it is important and just; but is it something we can afford now? There are perfections that we can’t afford to pay for just yet…

Fallen Angels

Got contacted by Amazon yesterday, regarding the updated content. (They had earlier said I could get a refund for it. I never did, figuring the new content would show up eventually.)

It was interesting, hearing a bit of the behind the scenes info, especially Michael Flynn’s first meeting with Sherrine!

Thanks!

Vik-Thor Rose

If you go to the "Manage Your Kindle" page, you can re-download a title that you already purchased and downloaded before. You lose any bookmarks or highlighting, but you do get the latest version of the book.

Education System

The point being that Boeing could in those days count on the Seattle public school system to deliver workers capable of learning to do useful work. There would be failures, but in general, high school graduates could be taken into the work force and taught skills. They didn’t have to learn to read or to do elementary math, they understood the concept of measurement, and they could generally be relied on to have something approaching satisfactory work habits.

I believe this is simply an over correction by my parents’ generation (also yours) to the changing economics of the US at the time.

I was born in 1969 in Flint, Michigan and got to see this first hand in a hyper-intense environment. In the beginning of my educational career it was all about options: I could go on to become a welder or an electrician if I wanted to. GM/Flint collapsed in 1980. By the time I had graduated high school (1987) the guidance counselors preached endlessly about the fact that manufacturing jobs were gone, and vocational schools were closing quickly to suit. Everything was about retraining factory workers to become computer programmers, because no-one should be flipping burgers in their 30’s, right? Completely missing the fact that we still need electricians and welders.

The educational system hasn’t fixed that attitude yet.

My son — now 18 — will not be a college graduate. He will take some community-college level courses to fill out his vocational training but that’s it. He’s a bright boy, but doesn’t have the work ethic or studious nature to learn for learning’s sake. He doesn’t want to. College-prep high school was awful for him (B- averages, and he hated it), but there were few alternatives in a district where 97% of the HS graduates were expected to go on to college. My son would have been the brightest electrician or best mechanic you could hire, but alas, it’ll take him years to get the experiences he should have gotten in school while learning Advanced English Composition.

Injustice consists of treating equals unequally and treating unequals equally. Our school system is designed to be unjust.

School discipline

I was checking out rules and regulations for substitute teachers at a school district in Texas. If a fight breaks out between students you are not to interfere. You must call security to handle it. Lordy when I was a child you’d have one of those male WW II vets on your ass so quickly your head would spin, nobody would dare start a fight in class. Frankly the female teachers who’d been kids through the depression and the war years weren’t someone to mess with either. Quite a few of them had done manual labor in factories, and I suspect could throw a mean bunch. Of course these day if you are male you put your freedom at risk if you become a teacher. If you get accused of sexual molestation you are guilty until proven innocent and the legal costs will break you. Some school districts have safeguards against that crap but all in all the male teacher in a public school is thing of the past.

The administrative overhead in today’s schools is unreal. All those reports for the state and the feds to fill out to get the money. No wonder so many teacher pencil whip the the reports just to get them done and out of the way. The public schools are getting as bad as the universities when it comes to having to meet payroll for people who aren’t actually teaching but doing mandated paper work. I was talking to a Pakistani about testing. He said that in Pakistan they had to set up an elaborate blind system for grading tests. The test were given numbers and graded by people who didn’t know the students. He said otherwise the graders would be bought off or intimidated into giving good grades. Sure glad something like that couldn’t happen here….oh wait it has.

Douglas R. Chandler

There are no universal remedies, but we do know that the American education system worked pretty well with small school districts, schools controlled by the local taxpayers who paid for them, and total decentralization, all this in the days before Federal Aid to Education. I can recall when it was seriously believed that the Federal Government had no authority to grant money for education; that was a matter for the states. One breakthrough was “impacted areas” grants in which the local schools had to educate a lot of children of military personnel based locally (and whose parents didn’t pay local property taxes) so the Feds threw in money – and shortly after began to “help” those school districts, which meant control. You could see it happen. Now the military would prefer, if it could, to run its own schools for dependents – who wants to condemn his children to the American public school system?

My wife was for some years a teacher in a county detention school: she became the teacher of last resort and taught thousands of children to read who had been given up on – labeled dyslexic – by the Los Angeles school system. They were lucky enough to be sentenced to reform school which rescued them from the public schools. Kids unlucky enough to be sentenced to the public schools were worse off.

Average vs median

Dr. Pournelle,

I keep reading "half the children are below average", but that’s not the definition of "average", but of "median". In large numbers and with a normal distribution, the two measures could be the same (or close), but do we have a normal distribution?

***********

and another point about the "bunny inspectors":

We need the bunny inspectors, because we have the rules that must be followed. If we don’t have enforcement behind the rules, people will not do "the right thing" that the rules define. We believe that we can create the perfect life, remove all injustice, create equality and fairness by crafting the proper set of rules. And that, of course, requires enforcement and enforcers, hence the "bunny inspectors".

The deeper these rules root into our lives, attempting to define and regulate activities that should be part of our shared culture, the more enforcers we will require, until everyone is an enforcer, and neighbor turns against neighbor as in 1930’s Germany.

I remember in the 60’s going out to dinner with another computer guy and learning his wife was going to law school and thinking, "I don’t believe we need another lawyer". Little did I know.

I am quite aware that the word “average” has a number of meanings, but in general parlance it is not intended to be specific. In any given classroom the distribution of scores will vary a lot, and probably won’t be a normal bell curve. In some places all the children in a given class will be “below average”, while in others they may all be “above average.” Lake Wogegon doesn’t exist, but there may be approximations to it.

To explain: there are three measures of central tendency in any given population: the mean, the median, and the mode. The mean is the average score: that is, take all the scores, add them up, and divide by the number. That’s the mean, and is the usual meaning of “average”. The other two measures of central tendency are the median and the mode. The median is the middlemost score, the 50^th percentile. Finally, there is the mode, which is the most frequent score.

In a large population assuming a random distribution the three scores will be the same, or nearly so. In statistical models from which we generally draw inferences they will be exactly the same, but of course very few things in life exactly fit models. Take height of adults for example: a “normal” curve, the familiar bell-shaped curve, extends to infinity at the top and zero at the bottom, but no population of adults will have any examples of people four inches tall, nor of any twenty feet tall. The model doesn’t actually fit the population, but for most purposes we don’t care and inferences made from study of the model will be valid. The median and mean will be pretty close to equal. The mode, however, will be a problem because there will be two modes, one close to the median height of women, and one fairly close to the median height of men. We have to take account of that: there are two populations, and clothing designed to fit the “average” may not fit as many people as we thought.

And of course samples may not fit the model at all. If we take a class drawn from people living on the shores of Lake Washington in the Seattle region and compute their family wealth, the averages will be considerably higher than the national average, but the means and medians probably won’t be enormously different – until we add the children of Bill Gates to any of those classes, in which case the “average” or mean will be out of sight high and only the Gates children will be “above average.” All the others will be below average, even if the lowest income in the class is still higher than the national average.

The point here is that one needs to be careful in making inferences about samples, but then that is the whole point of the science of statistics and statistical inference. The whole point is to infer probabilities. It is not exactly true that “half of the children are below average” but the statement remains useful as a reminder of what we are facing. There are classes in which all the children are above average – I would guess that to have a distinct probability if we are measuring IQ among classes of children whose parents have lake front property on Lake Washington and comparing it to the national IQ (average both mean and median about 100). More interestingly, though, if we take samples from less fortunate districts and measure IQ, we are likely to find that while all the measures of central tendency in the class will be below the national average, we may confidently predict that at least one of the students will be above average and we can’t exclude the possibility that one will be outstandingly high.

And that presents us with a dilemma. Do we subject the above average kids to an education designed for those below average? Or would it be more effective to try to combine the above average with some others of similar ability, and remove them? Can we afford that? Is it just to deprive the dull normal of the advantage of having some bright normal and bright in their classroom? Is it just to make the bright endure classes geared largely for normal and dull normal? Just what the hell are we trying to accomplish here, and just what is fair to whom?

In my case I went to first grade in a Catholic school in a lower middle class district. There were two grades, first and second, in the room, with perhaps 15 in each grade. The Sisters were dedicated teachers and had no interference of families in their educational duties: they spent as much time with each student as they thought would be useful. Since I could already read when I got to first grade I mostly got second grade instruction, and in second grade (same classroom) I was encouraged to read books well beyond my grade level – but I was not exempted from having to learn the addition and multiplication tables by pure rote, Deo gratia, for which I am grateful to this day.

Then we moved to Capleville, where the teachers were 2 year Normal school graduates, there were two grades to the room, and 20 to 25 to the grade. My companions in school were farm children, none of whom expected to go to college. Some did intend to enlist in the armed forces, particularly after World War II broke out. None of the teachers including the principal (who also taught 7-8 grade) were four year college graduates, all of them had home lives, and no one lived near the school. In my case our place on Holmes Road was about 2 miles from the school if we cut across country, more on the roads. I was on the very nearly last stop of the school bus, which was good in the mornings, but meant it took forever to get home in the evening, so I often walked home with a buddy who was my nearest neighbor (about a mile from our place, down by the railroad). My life changed. Fortunately my parents bought the Encyclopedia Britannica so I had something to read. There wasn’t any television, and the radio used batteries because we didn’t yet have electricity where I lived. Fortunately the school curriculum included textbooks geared for a bit higher level than the teachers expected the students to achieve. The history lessons had details that one got credit for knowing but weren’t required. So did the math books. That worked out well for me.

I don’t know the point of this ramble, actually, but I’ll leave it here since it took a while to write.

My point is that I know that there are different meanings of “average” but that doesn’t change the nature of the education problem. As a general statement, in any normal public schoolroom in which the students haven’t been selected, a fair number of them will be below average. I shorten that to say this isn’t Lake Wobegon and the school system must be designed around the general principle that half the pupils will be below average. That half will not benefit from a world class university prep education.

Half the pupils will be above average. Of that half, only about half will benefit greatly from a world class university prep education, but a fair number will, and more will benefit from a college prep education. School systems have to be designed with this in mind.

I don’t assume that I have the competence to make that design for everyone in the nation. I don’t think anyone does. Leaving things to local school boards isn’t going to produce a perfect system of education, but it almost certainly produced a better system than what we have, back when we tried it. And it did that without Federal Aid to Education, which wasn’t even considered constitutional. And of course we used to argue that Federal Aid would mean Federal Control, and that would over time produce bureaucratic nightmares rather than greatly improved public schools.

Education, Anti-Matter, and Black Monday View 687 20110808

Dr. Thomas Sowell occasionally produces columns entitled ‘Random Thoughts’. They are usually interesting. Here is one of his ‘random thoughts’ today:

"I have never believed for a moment that Barack Obama has the best interests of the United States at heart."

Neither have I.

The rest of his ‘random thoughts’ for today can be viewed here:

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2011/08/09/random_thoughts 

 

Bob Ludwick

One should not lightly ignore Tom Sowell.