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26 December 2011

The church and cockroaches in changing times

How about guerilla church?

Are you familiar with K and r strategy? Me neither until last week, then I haven’t been able to keep it out of my analytical mind, applying the concept all over the place.

I was reading someone last week, I forget who exactly who. Probably Phillip Schlechty. I’ve been digging into him a lot these past weeks as I prepare a design to evaluate metro schools. Anyway… I was reading along when mention was made of someone or something being a “K-strategist.” Now I remember. It was Schlechty and he was writing about textbook publishers. Not knowing what a K-strategist was I Googled. Among the first handful of entries was an article by a Bob Campbell in the September 3, 1981 New Scientist.

He explained that terms, K strategist (capital K) and r strategist (lower-case r), have escaped from evolutionary biology are are being applied in social realms such as banking and book publishing. He says,

Briefly, the r strategist produces large numbers of offsprings which tend to be small and live a relatively short time; the parents take little or no care of the young…. The K strategist produces larger offspring which are usually carefully brought up, have high interspecific competitive ability and live a relatively long time. As there is a large investment in each offspring the K strategist produces relatively few young. …In nature a typical r strategist is an insect pest, “small and randy,” like the locust, quick to exploit a new environment; a K strategist might be an elephant closely adapted to a particular environment which it exploits to a maximum.

You can see how this concept can apply to publishers. The textbook and standardize test guys invest a lot of time and effort in producing a text book or a test. They are not about to let their produce whither after one season, so they perpetuate the textbook and test and they become permanent and invasive. Look at our school system, for instance, the state uses Pearson for it statewide tests (TCAP) and many LEAs adopt Pearson textbooks as their curriculum.

But consider. The cockroach, a r strategist par excellence, has survived many environmental changes. Some estimate that they are over 350 million years old. So where’s the dinosaurs?

Anyway. It has had me thinking among other things about the state of the church. I see around me here in Nashville a number of church fragments being formed. Fragments such as home groups, home churches (check out Jerry and Cindy Bryant’s H2H), small-small congregations (check out Midtown Fellowship). Couple this with what we experience around us as the our rapidly changing society and culture, then you too may see that a large monolithic church needing lots of money to sustain buildings, grounds, and staff may not be what is needed at this time.

What may be needed is not necessarily cockroach churches, for we have a caring and loving God. He would not spawn something without nurture and care. But, maybe, more of a guerilla church which relies upon the Holy Spirit for direction more than a bureaucratic hierarchy or an oligarchy of the elite anointed.

For those queasy about the term, “guerilla,” a guerilla church doesn’t use terrorist tactics or advocate violent overthrow or confrontation, but rather is a church using divine power.

— —
Actually I was reading a section in Heinz-Dieter Meyer & Brian Rowan’s The New Institutionalism in Education.

Posted 26 December 2011 † Jack § Evaluation § church § the ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:
30 August 2011

Last week’s Gibson raids may impact owners of vintage guitars: From yesterday’s Slashdot

Appearing in yesterday’s Slashdot discussions: ” Environmental Enforcement Agents Targeting Guitars”

etrahedrassface writes “According to the Wall Street Journal, Federal agents again raided guitar maker Gibson this past week, seizing several pallets of wood and computer documents. At the heart of the issue is the wood that is being used in guitars and whether or not it comes from sustainable sources. The company insists it is being harassed and made to ‘cry uncle’ to the government’s enforcement laws. The article notes that exotic fret and tone woods are protected in order to prevent the equivalent of ‘blood diamond like trade,’ but the ramifications now extend to guitar owners. If you play a vintage guitar, or a hand-built guitar made of old stock woods that were legally obtained years ago, you better not fly with it. John Thomas, a law professor at Quinnipiac University and a blues and ragtime guitarist, says, ‘there’s a lot of anxiety, and it’s well justified.’ Once upon a time, he would have taken one of his vintage guitars on his travels. Now, ‘I don’t go out of the country with a wooden guitar.’”

Discussion link

Wall Street Journal article link

Posted 30 August 2011 † Jack § Reportage ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:
25 August 2011

Things are not in place to improve our schooling

Things are not in place in Metro Nashville to improve public schooling and do better for our children and youth no matter how many tweaks we make to our calendar, programs, curriculum, instruction, sanctions and incentives. Anywhere from 40 percent to 65 percent of the components of achievement— depending on subject and grade level— occur with parents, families, neighborhoods. (I found a good synthesis of studies on the variance components of achievement tests at New Zealand Ministry of Education site in 2006. Try looking for “Best Evidence synthesis.”)

Schools and school systems are limited as to what they can change. When kids enter school they have already a physical, personality, ethnicity, and gender shape. They bring with them conditioning from their

  • Parents. What are their parenting styles? Do they live with both parents or do they come from a single-parent household? What are about their parents ages? Were they teenagers when they begat children? Young adults, middle-aged, mature or just plain o-l-d? What do the parents invest financially toward their children’s up bringing? What about the time they spend with their children? Are they/have they been divorced? What are their work habits? Their level of education? Cultural identity? Genetic endowments?
  • Family. How many siblings are there? Is it a “blended” family? What is their family structure?
  • Neighborhood. What’s the residential makeup: houses, apartments, condos, housing development? What’s the socio-economic-status of the neighborhood? The social group(s) active and available? What’s the culture there?

So when we ask ourselves what can we learn from the success of others about educational change and improvement we should recognize it may have taken altering conditions other than purely school-related ones.

For instances, take “the old country” from which my Mother emigrated: Finland. Read the article, “Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?” in the on-line edition of September’s Smithsonian. “Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around.”

Finns began working on public education 40 years. They started with creating a new cadre of teachers .They now have some 62,000 teachers (in 3,500 schools) with master’s degrees, which is required and available only to the top 10 percent of university graduates. The article notes:

…a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

A principal interviewed for the story is quoted as saying, ““Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers.”

Let me give one more excerpt that goes with my contention that we need changes in what goes on outside of school:

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

Hey. You can read the article yourselves.

The New Republic also had a recent article on Finland, by the way, “The Children Must Play: What the United States Could Learn from Finland about Educational Reform.”

Posted 25 August 2011 † Jack § Commentary § Education § Evaluation § Individuals and Community § Kids ‡ Comments (0) °
10 August 2011

We need relationship with one another

I am beginning to see that we can/I can overcome the malaise that is America at this moment if we/I approach relationships with one another with the same thrill an abandonment these young people have in launching themselves in space: play video

Posted 10 August 2011 † Jack § Commentary ‡ Comments (0) °
24 July 2011

Five basic research questions in education studies

There seems to be five basic questions at the heart of any education research. I use to give these to students in evaluation and measurement courses I taught ages ago. These are not original to me; although I don’t remember where I picked them up. I am indebted to the original author.

Identifying your primary question is initial to any investigation, particularly those involving innovations and their effects upon the behaviors, skills and attitudes of people.

Here are the five basic research questions:

  • How many are there? This is usually called Description.
  • What is the relationship between this and that? This is called Prediction.
  • Why is it so? This is called Explanation.
  • Does it/will it work? This is called Assessment.
  • What does it mean? This is called Understanding or Meaning.

With this frame we see that research can be about:

Description: Descriptive research is “the attempt to discover facts or describe reality.” It asks questions such as how much? how often? and so on. It is intended to describe as fully as possible a particular phenomenon.

Perhaps the most extensive descriptive research is that conducted by the US Bureau of Census. The Census is conducted every 10 years. The goal of the Census is to count every person living in America and provide descriptive data on us as a population. Information is available on not just on how many Americans there are but what do we look like in terms of age, gender, workforce participation, living standards, ethnic background and so on. The amount of data collected is enormous and takes years to collate and then distribute.

It is not just the Census Bureau that conducts descriptive research. Many organizations, both private and government conduct research of this kind. Examples, include the federal, state and local education agencies, for instance, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Various statistical profiles of our schools in Metro can be found on state and on the MNPS sites. The epidemiology and the health care services evaluation divisions have assembled health status information for persons who are residents of Nashville/Davidson County. On their website, you can access health data on population, mortality, natality, and adult and youth behavior risk surveys.

Prediction: The goal of research can be prediction. We may want to know the connection between certain events. This type of research is about “making projections about what may occur in the future or in another setting.”

Predictive research in education is of great significance to certain organizations and individuals. For example, knowing the dropout rate (descriptive research) does not provide us with information of why and in what circumstances certain students drop out of school. If we could identify the relationships between the children who drop out of school and their circumstances, home environments, contexts, individual characteristics, then preventive programs could be developed and target those children and conditions. Still prediction is speculation. No matter how sophisticated and/or complicated the analyses. the results of predictive studies does not give us certainty.

Explanation: Research of this kind does involve attempts to understand “why or how something occurred.” We want to know the cause-effect relationship between things or why things happen. Has X caused Y? This what realist evaluation attempts.

In education, a lot of work is based on assumptions of causality. However, there is very little research that demonstrates a relationship between learning, such as what occurs in schools, and a particular program or factor. By definition, learning is multi-casual and that makes explanation very difficult.

It is very difficult to demonstrate cause-effect, particularly when researching social phenomenon. Perhaps the most famous example of an association but not an absolutely certain connection is the link between smoking and cancer. For causation to exist, we would have to be able to demonstrate that in each and every instance of someone being a smoker, that person will develop cancer. We know from our own experience that it doesn’t happen every time. What we do know from research is that there is a high association between smoking and developing cancer. The link, therefore, is a high probability rather than a certainty because cancer can be triggered by a number of factors other than smoking.

Assessment: This type of research focuses on “methods to plan intervention programs, to monitor the implementation of new programs and the operation of existing ones, and to determine how effectively programs or clinical practices achieve their goals.”

Teachers, students, parents, and funding bodies often want to know that what we are doing is working. We may need to evaluate the success, or otherwise, of a new program or new service. Often, we have to evaluate what we have done before we can get money to continue our work. Using research methods to undertake evaluation is an important skill for workers.

Understanding/meaning: This is research that wants to know how people subjectively understand things. It is an attempt “to gain access to that personal, subjective experience.”

A lot of very important research seeks to know people’s own experience. For example, what is it like to be a mother or a teacher or a student, or all three? What is the experience of being a student in an alternative learning center? How do the families of juvenile offenders cope with what their children are doing?

Each of these questions is more concerned about what it is like for the person involved than counting or predicting or even trying to work out an explanation. Teaching and learning is essentially discourse with language. We educate children in order to change their behavior by changing their inner language. So in our work, it is very important to have people tell us what they think is really going on. This type of research will help us do that.

Posted 24 July 2011 † Jack § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °
18 July 2011

An unsettling view of evaluation research from Rosenstock-Heuessy

We’ve been listening/watching a series of discussions by Eugene Paterson held last year at the Florida campus of Asbury Theological Seminary (available at iTunes U). He is much more than merely the author of The Message, you know. Among the people, authors, poets he mentions as influencing his thinking is Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

I remember a couple of years ago reading Peter Leithart’s series of blog posts on Rosenstock-Huessy work. I went to Leithart blog this morning and found this comment by him. “Oh, oh,” I thought to myself, “am I assisting in the death of the program and projects I evaluate? I have to tie them down, strap them up so they won’t wiggle and then carve them up to analyze them “scientifically,” “statistically?” What do you all think?

Science, he [Rosenstock-Huessy] says, is really good at studying dead things. Dead things are predictable, and you can do repeatable experiments; but living things are illogical, unsystematic, unpredictable, uncontrollable. He dismisses the rationalism of the Greeks and of the Enlightenment as an adolescent obsession: “Natural reason is a very special reason sprouting in the unfulfilled mentality between 14 and 25. It is the Reason of the classroom student…”

Posted 18 July 2011 † Jack § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °
18 July 2011

Difference between News Corp & Atlanta public schools?

A two-column story in this morning’s The New York Times recounts the investigation of the Atlanta public school system that uncovered “the biggest cheating scandal ever in a public school district.”

Over in its “Business Day” section, the Times has a column by David Carr on the tactics of the News Corp of Rupert Murdock.

Although there is a difference between condoning or even encouraging principals and teachers “cooking” their students’ test scores and hacking telephones, bribing police, and general all around unethical and criminal acts of the newspapers, both articles describe the behavior as cultural and perpetuated at the top: By Beverly F. Hall, the recent superintendent of Atlanta’s schools and by Rupert Murdock and his executives. The school system apparently didn’t have the money and wide enough influence to ward off disclosure of the cheating deeds as did New Corp newspapers.

Both scandals came to light through “outside” investigations. The Guardian kept at looking into the hacking and the previous investigations by the Scotland yard and Parliament. With Atlanta it was the former governor who appointed a team headed by two former prosecutors and a police detective. They oversaw 60 investigators who conducted over 2000 interviews.

I keep wondering what happen to the state evaluation and assessment units that should have looked into Atlanta cheating. I worked previously with two people who worked for the state in assessment and evaluation. I’ll have to ask Dave Harmon what happen to digging up evidence of the fraud.

Posted 18 July 2011 † Jack § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °
07 May 2011

A “forensic” look at the bare bones of program interventions

If I imagined myself as a forensic scientist investigating program interventions instead of being a run-of-the-mill evaluator what would I find? Going beneath the surface, dissolving the flesh covering interventions I find their bare bones.

They’re helpful in recreating “the crime” and puzzling over program intervention outcomes. Take, for instance, the account of horses escaping Spanish expeditions as they were exploring the Southwest. Horses were not native to North America and were alien to the Indians when they found them. At this time— from what I recall of the account given by Peter Matthiesson— the Indians had progressed from the hunter-gatherer stage to the agricultural stage. When the Paiutes came upon these strange beasts, they ate them. However, the Cheyenne dropped their hoes and mounted horses and returned to buffalo hunting. Only now they were mobile and more efficient at it.

If I may use this story as an illustration of a program intervention. Horses, as the intervention, were introduced to two target population. And you got two different outcomes.

Now think of the essence, the “bare bones” of this and any program intervention, whether an educational practice, a community substance abuse prevention program and you’ve got four elements linked together:

  • Interventions provide resources (horses) to targeted program participants (North American Indians).
  • Theses resources trigger choice mechanisms of the participants.
  • Mechanisms are used selectively depending on the characteristics and situational context of the participants (Paiutes and Cheyenne).
  • Decisions lead to actions (eating and hunting).
  • Actions lead to outcomes (one-time full tummy or awesome horsemen hunters).

Well, okay, maybe five things. I am still building this; trying to translate the realist model of Pawson & Tilley.

Think of resources as including not only material item, such as stipends and other bribes, but also as cognitive tools such as concepts, reasoning structures and forms of discourse. A good example of what I am trying to get across are the resources cited in the Nasir & Cook study, Becoming a hurdler: How learning settings afford identities.They find three used by the track coaches in teaching and named them: material, relational, and ideational. The material resources provided the content of learning; the relational resources provided the “why” and “how” of learning; and the ideational provided guides to what is good practice and in selecting good goals for learning.

And think of choice mechanisms as those found in Kahneman, for example:

According to Kahneman, there are four ways in which an individual can make a judgment or decision:

  1. No intuitive response comes to mind, and the judgment is produced by the controlled mode, i.e., rational, logical thinking;
  2. An intuitive judgment happens and is endorsed by the controlled mode;
  3. An intuitive judgment happens and serves as an anchor for adjustments that respond to other features of the situation, i.e., is modified by the controlled mode; or
  4. An intuitive judgment happens and is identified as incompatible with a subjectively valid rule, and blocked from overt expression thus leading to a requirement for the controlled mode to solve the problem.

    5. Kahneman says that the relative frequencies of these ways, from most to least frequent, is #2 - #3 - #1 - #4

Let me know if you have discovered anything picking through the carnage of program interventions.

Posted 07 May 2011 † Jack § Evaluation ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,
04 March 2011

I am modifying Hauerwas’ maxims…

  • You only act in the world you see.
  • You only see what you learn to read

When Stanley Hauerwas was in town last month for a Lenten series at Christ Church Cathedral, he began his lecture Friday night by announcing: “You only act in the world you see” and “You only see what you learn to say.”

I’ve changed the “say” in the second to “read.”

Here read is meant to be taken in its broadest sense. We read people. We read the sky, the weather. We read time. We read the “signs of the times.” We read music. And so on. You get the picture. We read the world as well as books.

For me, reading opens up more vistas. As an example, take a look at James Elkins’ “Strategies For Reading” page on his Lawyers and Literature site.

(I could have just as easily said, “You only see what you learn the patterns for.”)

I’ve got more I want to say about this, but it will have to be later. Meanwhile repeat:
“You only act in the world you see” and “You only see what you learn to read” and ponder them.

Posted 04 March 2011 † Jack § Decision making § Discourse ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged:
25 February 2011

Confession: I can be an analytical tyrant. Please forgive any of my excesses. I repent.

I had to get this off my chest after this realization I had after a meeting with a client yesterday. Pretty much this month I have been developing two products I thought my client needed but at the meeting I saw they were not really wanted by the people, or, at least, not wanted or needed at the present. Maybe they were just what I wanted. Of course I was able to adapt and got into the flow of the group discussion which led to some workable and worthwhile outcomes. Thank God for his grace and mercy and granting me flexibility.

You would think that after all these years I would have gotten this revelation earlier. But I am thankful that I got it now and I am ready to change.

I know my “analyst” button is not always on, but I exercise it enough both in and out of work, that I am perceived as being somewhat obtuse and bewildered if people just don’t “get it.” This bewilderment too often, I am afraid, leads to crankiness. You’ve seen the print of the alchemist in a meadow peering through the air to the mechanism (or is it a rainbow?) of the world. That’s me. Too many times I’ve had people tell me that when I am asked for the time, I respond with how to make a watch.

Now I have heard this clearly. I am determined to be sensitive to what people are saying that is unsaid. (Listening to what is between the lines.) And not necessarily rush to the particular, molecular composition of things, but rather to the broad, whole of things.

Now where did I put that book I got from the closing sale of Davis-Kidd, The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda? He said there are ten of them.

Posted 25 February 2011 † Jack § Commentary § David Olney's Oh Yeah! § Evaluation ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: