The Tests Are Coming!

The kids are just about apoplectic. [1]  Mom needs to refill her Prosac.  The teachers have all contacted their NEA shop foremen to lodge preliminary complaints.  Administrators across the nation are salivating with the anticipatory delight of using the upcoming disaster to demand larger budgets.  Legislators have gone to ground waiting for the storm to pass.

The tests are coming.

High school juniors and seniors across the nation are starting to feel the antiseptic sting of testing.  Tests -- designed by teachers, mandated by state and federal legislators, sanctioned by unions and hailed by administrators as the answer to poorly performing schools -- will soon determine who gets a diploma and who gets a certificate that reads, "I attended almost all the classes and all I got was this stupid certificate."

These same tests, in some states, will determine which teachers get raises, which school districts the government labels underperforming,  and may even have an effect on litigation and legislation.

Sadly, no one has any idea what to expect.  If any of the students at P.T. Barnum PS 101 actually took any physics they would immediately recognize that this is a personal lesson in the Third Law of Thermodynamics. [2]  Interestingly enough, where public education preaches the perfection of random chance in developing the universe, our world, and all life, the small amount of chaos driving public education has certainly made a mess of things.  In this universe only planning, design, thought, intelligence, and superb execution can render a superior product -- even if the raw materials are your kids and even if the desired product is "the best students, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even teachers in the world."  Doing nothing and expecting random change to improve the classroom is making our kids idiots.

Using thought and design in a material fabrication process is so elementary to manufacturing engineers that they don't even teach it any more.  As a "given," they just move beyond it during the first manufacturing courses.  Manufacturing engineering teaches the how and what of using design.  They introduce the concepts of lean engineering; computer-aided engineering and design are specialities.  But manufacturers already know the things that our schools ignore:

1.  You have to know what you are making before you design.
2.  You have to select the raw materials by known properties and capacities.
3.  The manufacturing process must be tooled specifically for the material, the operator, and be capable of producing the end-product.
4.  The design specifications tested at the end must be used to design the production tools used in the manufacturing.
5.  Quality depends on planning and testing.

School districts seem uninterested in superior students.  If the school superintendent were as concerned with his students as a comb manufacturer is about his combs, he'd be thinking of the whole process.  But he isn't.  He isn't paid to think about the process.  A doctor of education (an Ed.D, not a Ph.D.) is not expected to study those things.  He or she will study feelings and esteem in the classroom.  These issues pale when the administrator's job is threatened by a little test!  Ed.D.s, as a lot, are pretty useless except in the government-subsidized disasters of our public school systems.  Maybe they are pretty useless there, too.

Comparing schools to material fabrication manufacturing renders the following equivalents:

School Entity	Manufacturing Equivalent
Students	Raw Materials
Teachers	Operators
Syllabus	Tools
Curricula	Blueprint
Administrators	Middle-Management

Every material fabrication manufacturer in the world knows something of the character and nature of his raw materials before he starts his process.  Schools don't.

Every material fabrication manufacturer in the world knows the precise skill and abilities of his operators on the line before they push their first button or cut their first die.  Schools don't.

Every material fabrication manufacturer in the world knows the scope and limitations of his tools in the process.  Schools don't.

Every material fabrication manufacturer in the world has a fully-engineered blueprint and a process design document showing exactly how to succeed (and profit) with this product.  Schools don't.

Every material fabrication manufacturer in the world limits middle-management to reduce costs, knows how to best use them to pinpoint and correct problems, and rewards middle management only if the line works.  Schools don't.

There is a trend here and if you aren't a product or a participant of the current government school system you can probably identify it. (This is a multiple-choice test.)

Q: Why Can't Johnny Read?
a) There isn't enough money in government education.
b) There is too much competition for government education to succeed.
c) Everybody's self-esteem is so damaged that students can't learn.
d) Government schools are unaccountable to parents, irresponsible with tax dollars, ignorant of good teaching techniques, filled with incompetent employees, use bad tools, follow bad designs, and are lost in their own fear of exposure.

The answers to government-run education problems are so simple that they aren't even taught to incoming engineering students:  Design.  Plan.  Test.   Engineers know how these things work.  Teachers don't.  This isn't surprising.  Education attracts those in the lower academic realms.  Teachers fare poorly during entrance exams and in intelligence test scores compared to engineers, chemists, and art students..

As you might expect, those choosing math and physics had the highest average academic ability. Those choosing chemistry and other sciences were close seconds. Those choosing physical education and home economics were at the bottom. No surprises here. But look at those choosing teaching. Just barely above physical education!

But look at the field of education. It is also biased to favor those of lower academic ability, though not as dramatically so as physical education. It was this that caused many to sound the alarm that we were not attracting the best and the brightest into the field of education. [3]

Put an engineer in charge of a school and the results will be ... well, engineered.  The first thing an engineer would ask is, "What are we trying to accomplish here?"  This is a good question.  The answer would frighten most parents. 

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we’re in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That’s because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system. And in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, none are allowed to advertise or to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild.[4]

Schooling is not for the kids.  Schooling is for the teachers, administrators, professional educrats, and a convenient target of political harangue (on either/any side).  This must change.

Consider for a brief moment a working school:  a school that works.  This school would receive uneducated candidates and produce educated matriculates.  How would that work?

Firstly, every candidate would be examined for character and ability before assignment to a class.  There is no reason to test a candidate at the end if you can identify a 99 percent failure rate at the beginning.  Students unprepared to learn at the level of the curricula and syllabus will not learn at the level of the curricula and syllabus.  It's cruel but true.  However, matching students' skills and abilities to classes designed to challenge and reward at their own level is the best use of each raw material.  Self-esteem will probably improve, too.

Secondly, every teacher should be examined for character and ability before assuming the right and responsibilities of a curricula and syllabus.  This is especially important if the student is a "known quantity" and expects a certain level (sub-par, par, or above-par) of instruction.  Coincidentally, educrats all agree that the sub-par student -- the "at-risk" student -- requires a much greater ability and commitment by the teacher than does the average or above-average student.  With the numbers of "at risk" students already identified in our government schools, the teachers better be extraordinary!

The curricula must be selected that teaches and requires mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, classical languages, and English.  The syllabus for these courses must stress quantitative skills and have quantitative measurements of daily and weekly success.  Students who are incapable of the rigors of the curricula must be demoted and introduced to the curricula at the level at which they can grow.  Teachers who cannot present and explain the curricula must be demoted, remediated, or terminated.  Administrators have a chance to exercise that enormous power they've accumulated: test and choose.  What shall they do with the incompetents?  Where shall they get the extraordinary?  Let's give them a chance to earn those expensive administrator dollars that come out of American's paychecks (at the point of the bayonette).  And administrators and middle-managers must jetison a whole lot of failed ideology, too.

Engineers discard a whole load of ideas as irrelevant to each process.  One favorite educrat idea ripe for the trebuchet says that all students should achieve equally.  "To each according to his need.  From each according to his abilities." [5]  Follow this edict and accept academic failure right now!  Every child is different.  Your child is clearly superior to every other child in the neighborhood.[6]  Perhaps some children should never be allowed into school.  Perhaps some children should be allowed to leave before they damage the academic opportunities of the other students.  School is not for everybody.  Jail is not for everybody.  Success is not for everybody.  This is why we keep score.

Engineers design things and plan things.  Engineers have a very simple way to get things done.  I.  Find out where you are.  II.  Find out where you want to be.  III.  Figure out an effective way to get there.  Teachers should think more like engineers.  (If they could, they wouldn't have become teachers, though.)  The hard thing about step "I" is that no one in the education bureaucracy wants to know where they are.  They like to think the students who show up at the door are prepared for the "next step."  If they show up at the door to first grade, the educrats like to think they are ready for it.  If they show up at the Eleventh Grade door, they assume they are ready for that, too.

Someone should try showing up at the door to Harvard Law School and see if the educrats there take the same laissez faire attitude.  Chances are, unless the candidate who appears at the entrance to Harvard Law School has a) superior primary education, b) extraordinary undergraduate scores, c) LSAT scores that would knock an elephanton its trunk, and d) a whole lotta money, they won't even get the chance to say "hi, how's things in..."

Notice the mention of extraordinary scores.  That implies testing.  It implies rigorous testing by rigorous institutions.  It implies testing that result in scores that mean something.  As the "D-Day" for testing comes in each state students are already weak-kneed.  It appears that teachers and legislators are going "all wobbly" too.[7]  That's because they don't know what to expect -- beyond failure and disaster.  But that may be the best guess.

If you don't know where you are and you don't know where you're going and you have no idea how you'll get there, disaster seems like that was the original plan. 

 

~ Dexter

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[1]ap·o·plec·tic Of, resembling, or produced by apoplexy: an apoplectic fit.
Exhibiting symptoms associated with apoplexy.
Extremely angry; furious: "members of Congress who otherwise become apoplectic about wasteful government spending" (Dan Morgan).
This will probably be on the comprehension portion of your test.

[2]  First Law :  There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Second Law :  You can't win.  The best you can do is break even.
Third Law :  You can't break even.

[3] The Decline of Education, March 1994, Proceedings of the AAPT regional meeting at Princeton University.

[4]The Public School Nightmare, John Taylor Gatto, Library of Halexandria, 2003

[5] Louis Blanc, The Organization of Work, 1840

[6]  Not really, but maybe.

[7] Panel votes to loosen AIMS graduation requirement, Paul Davenport, Associated Press

Distance Makes The Business Grow Richer

There is no doubt American businesses thrive.  There remains much doubt, however, as to the reason.  A simple Google search for "business consultant" yields 489,000 hits.

That's a lot of people out there professing to know enough about business to tell other businesses about business.  The US Census bureau lists a few more than seven million businesses with paid employees in 2001.  Seven percent of those firms are business consultants.  One business in fourteen consult to other businesses about business.

If businesses actually understood what makes business work, there would be fewer business consultants and a lot more businesses that didn't offer business consulting (but rather actually made something or serviced something for profit).

Imagine if the ratio of patients to doctors was 13 to 1.  At one family per day your family doctor could come around to your house once ever two weeks just to check up on the kids.  He'd still have enough time for a round of golf every day and he'd still get every fourteenth day completely off. 

Doctors would quickly go broke and start selling Mary Kay products if there were such a glut. But a need exists in the business world for one in fourteen businesses to be business consultants. Business must be sick. 

P.T.  Barnum was wrong, though.  Maybe there isn't a sucker born every minute.  Maybe the same ones keep coming back again and again. If so, the sick businesses remain sick, even after assessment and treatment.  They never get well and they keep the business consultants busy. 

That's okay for the business consultants. So long as there are enough consultants for a business to retain some anonymity, a sick business can "consultant shop" from consultant to consultant, taking the advice it likes and rejecting the hard choices from each. 

But what makes a successful business?  That is the "golden fleece" of the business consulting businesses.  Robert Heller, in a commentary titled “Non-Management: Leading by example and total quality,” says the best business is defined by hands-on management.  This conclusion couldn’t be more wrong.

American business works best that works apart from executive interferrence.  The error in conclusion is an error in assumption.  A person whose only job is the management and direction of others will begin with the assumption that a person whose only job is the management and direction of others is necessary to success. This assumption was never true and it will never be true. 

Studies edge ever closer to the conclusion that workers, given a vision and a place to perform, will find the most efficient and most effective way of doing their jobs.  Intrusion by middle or upper management can only inhibit or quash efficiency, effectiveness, or even the ability to work. 

Jason Tanz, writing in Fortune Small Business Magazine, provides a brief history of management.

1909	Peter Drucker Writes First Management Book
1911	Rise of the Machines. Think of employees as replaceable parts.
1923	Managing by Committee. Management by Decentralized Committee.
1927	Management by Group Decision-making.
1938	Management by wandering around.
1950	Deming and Total Quality Management (Arrghh!!!)
1978	Transformational leadership. CEOs change the world.
1984	CEO as celebrity.
1990	Servant leadership.
2001	Workers no longer need companies and can work for themselves.

The next step in this business management slippery slope is ”employees can manage themselves!"  And this will be the revolution that sets business on its most productive cycle yet.

Businesses that fill their cubes and lines with employees who don't need supervisors, managers, or bean-counters will be the ones who get ahead faster, adapt quicker, and profit most.  Employees who can't manage themselves will be retrained or removed. 

Employees, at liberty to work best as they see fit, fully rewarded for their own contribution, and committed to achievement and personal growth will benefit everyone in the company. 

It only took business management theory 100 years to realize this.

This is the truth our Founding Fathers knew more than 200 years ago:  that free people with authority to govern their own lives will produce more, require less assistance, and become greater -- both individually and aggregately -- than will any society under authoritarian rule or threat. 

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.  ~~ Thomas Paine: Rights Of Man

Mr. Paine argued that man has rights (he wrote before the necessity of accommodating the sensitivities of gender-specific nouns) and those rights are not advanced by governments.  Governments usually inhibit them. 

If we examine with attention into the composition and constitution of man, the diversity of his wants, and the diversity of talents in different men for reciprocally accommodating the wants of each other, his propensity to society, and consequently to preserve the advantages resulting from it, we shall easily discover, that a great part of what is called government is mere imposition.  

Government is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilisation are not conveniently competent; and instances are not wanting to show, that everything which government can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common consent of society, without government ~~ Thomas Paine: Rights of Man, Of Society and Civilization

Even more to the point, James Madison in Federalist No.  45 stated that the federal government is unnecessary to the governance of a free people.

The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former.

Clearly, the direction of federalist theory is working opposite that of business management theory.   Starting from a Constitution that enumerated the boundaries of the federal government, not its power, the federal government is now an all-powerful engine. There is not a single aspect of social or market life that is not regulated and overseen by the fed.

Starting with the definition of a self-sufficient and independent constituency, citizens have decayed into mewling and needful dependents, constantly crying, "Increase the dole! Increase the dole!"  No level of interference is too great.  No amount of micro-management is excessive.

America was founded on the belief that free peoples did not need the federal government so much as the federal government needed free peoples.  Governments were considered an imposition.

Today the federal government thinks of its constituency as little more than interchangeable parts to be taxed, consumed, used, abused, and then replaced with the new generation that hasn't learned, yet, that the federal government is an unnecessary evil.  The next step, backward along the management line, is the rise of the robber-baron government where "management" is the lash of the whip and the sting of a fist.

Our founders believed the best government is that which governs least. As John Adams said,

Nothing is more certain from the history of nations, and the nature of man, than that some forms of government are better fitted for being well administered than others.

And nothing is more certain from the history of man than this, that some states of man are better fitted for humanity than others.  Free men alone can constitute free governments.

~ Dexter

Poor is good and good is bad

Our world is up-side-down.  Hard work is vilified and laze and poverty are counted as righteousness.  There are motives at work (pardon the double-entendre) in this social reconstruction that are culturally dangerous and constitutionally deadly.  It has taken decades for the shift and the incremental nature of the changes have camouflaged the severity of it.

The American outlook after the war (just pick any war where American politicians and journalists let the military fight and win) were filled with superlatives and high expectations.  Any boy could grow up to be the president.  Anybody could work hard and maybe become the next J. Paul Getty.  Sixty years ago American discourse was full of heroes and rags-to-riches stories and the expectation that everyone must do their best to achieve the highest possible goals. 

Despite the sociological redefinitions by FDR's depression-era programs, our grandparents went to their graves believing that anyone who was poor deserved it through their own immorality.  They were either bums or drunks or just lazy -- and all of those were known sins.  No hard working, God fearing American would stay poor long, they believed.

All evidence shows that they were (mostly) right.  Attitudes -- promoted and re-engineered during the past fifty years by social scientists, academics, journalists and socialist politicians -- now oppose that longstanding evidence.  Our current culture demonizes work and wealth and canonizes laze and poverty.

The contrast of just a few decades is striking.  Not only is poverty a condition the liberals divorce from personal responsibility (just like divorce is a condition without cause), but they endow the impoverished with greater virtue than the priesthood.  Extrapolating the liberal philosophy, the righteousness of poverty is esteemed above the sins of wealth.  

Marx (Carl, not Groucho) wrote that "... every class struggle is a political struggle."[1]   Today, liberals make every political struggle into a class struggle.  Therefore, the left strives to redefine political, personal, or social problems as symptoms or results of class struggle.   Since those with wealth also hold mastery [economic, social, political] and the poor do not, the left equates poverty with servitude.  They further insist that the wealthy are evil and the poor are righteous.

Liberals have, therefore, endowed the poor -- with whom few would actually classify themselves [2,3]  -- with an elevated, martyr and higher moral status.  Disregarding whether the poor are impoverished from drug abuse, alcoholism, choice, bad decisions in youth, or any of hundreds of reasons related to personal responsibility (or its lack), the poor are held in esteem by the political left.  (Even though dismissed in their own analysis, poll results from an NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School poll showed that drug abuse, single-parent homes, lack of motivation, decline in motivation, and poor quality schools were major contributors to poverty.[4])

Simultaneously, liberals view poverty as an inescapable prison.  The World Socialist Web Site sees gloom in every census report.  The number of poor, they report, remained constant between 1996 and 1997.  The implication is that all those in poverty in 1996 remained in poverty in 1997.[5]   According to the liberals, even if the poor would want to leave, the poor cannot escape poverty on their own.

Conservatives do not similarly disregard or condemn the poor to an eternity of poverty.  Conservatives retain the historical belief that we reap what we sew.  And America, like no other place on earth, offers unbounded opportunity to rise above circumstances, poverty, ignorance, and even a dismal voting record.  Therefore, the poor are not morally better or worse.  They just haven't yet put forth sufficient effort to achieve the kind of success that we all want for ourselves and our children.

Indeed, few of America's poor remain poor.  Between 1993 and 1994 almost half of those in poverty were so categorized for less than four months and the rate of "chronic" poverty for that time period was 5.3 percent.[6]  This supports the conservative view that poverty is transitory and can change depending on decisions and actions taken by those in poverty.  According to analysis of IRS data, six out of seven tax filers in the bottom twenty percentile in 1979 rose to the top twenty percent by 1988.[7]  Sometimes the cause of poverty might be wholly outside of someone's control.  Apparently, though, it seems getting out of poverty remains in most people's control.

Facts about poverty and the poor are immaterial to the liberal notion of what poverty is and what causes it.  Methods to escape poverty are even less relevant to the liberal.  What is important is that the poor will always be with us.[8]   It is also important that the poor are not powerful, so the liberal can rhetorically usurp their aggregate power for political discourse. 

Since definitions of poverty and membership of the poorer class is more opinion than fact, liberals can also pontificate about the plight of the poor and about their needs and few in the community can contradict the rhetoric.

This gives the liberal full authority to promote the socialist agenda using the poor as their Trojan Horse.  Economics is a hard subject.  Few liberals wade past the jingoistic jargon of class struggle and never comprehend the beauty of the free market or the liberation of capitalism.  The following tenets of liberal economic philosophy are gospel:

Ø The economic pie is static.
Ø There are only so many dollars, only so many hours, and only so many products in the economy.
Ø In a static economy if one person has something it is because he took it from another.
Ø Wealth is a product of greed, not industry.
Ø Everyone deserves the same goods and services as everyone else.  There is no personal responsibility in the economy.
Ø Only government can define when someone has "too much" of something, like money or goods.
Ø Government's responsibility is the equitable redistribution of wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little.

Economics, historic evidence, and common sense refutes these beliefs.  The economic pie is dynamic.  America's economic growth through the 20th century is evidence of that.  No consumer -- regardless of class -- had electric lights, phones, refrigerators, television or automobiles at the turn of the 20th century.  At the turn of the 21st century it is had to find anyone who does not have all of those luxuries.  Since automobiles, phones and electric light bulbs didn't even exist 110 years ago, the economy must have grown as these products and industries to create them arose.

Liberals must ignore history and economy though.  A static economy is necessary to demonize the wealthy class and "defend" the poor.  They further twist the words of our Declaration of Independence -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . ." -- to imply that all people should be given equal outcomes.  Economic equity, absent the proof that such a human right exists, becomes an imperative and inequity is evidence of theft.

Weighed on the balance of social(ist) justice, the wealthy are guilty and the poor are victims of greedy capitalists.[9]   In light of such crimes, the impotent poor must have a social champion; someone to set things right!  A government bent toward social justice and filled with socialists completes the picture.

Ignoring the common sense that a camel is a horse by committee, liberals conclude that a large group of bureaucrats in Washington can better decide who should be wealthy and who should be poor and even how capital should be redistributed. 

Of course, Washington defines redistribution as increased taxes.  But increased taxes do not guarantee reduced poverty.  Indeed, the top ONE percent of taxpayers now pay more than one-third of the taxes and the bottom 20 percent have an effective tax rate of MINUS 6.8 percent.[10]   It appears that redistribution is nearing comical levels and still there are the poor.

Reviewing the line of government program failures -- the war on drugs, social security, centralized federal education standards, airline security, and, of course, the war on poverty -- instills confidence that the federal government is the very last recourse for good management and success.  The only federal government program that has succeeded is the steady growth of the federal government.

The poor do not need a champion; especially not a millionaire, Washington, D.C. politician champion [11] who benefits from class warfare and would lose were poverty eliminated.  The poor need motivation, intellectual or spiritual regeneration (and there is no government program for that), or the time to recover from bad decisions.

A culture that punishes wealth generators and job creators will decline.  A culture that devalues the acquisition of wealth and elevates the position of poverty cannot sustain itself.  It will eventually stop producing and die.  You'll never get a job from a poor man.

~ Dexter

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[1] "The Communist Manifesto,"  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

[2] According to a joint project between the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census, for every person in poverty in 2003, there were more than 100 people in America who were not., Annual Demographic Survey, March Supplement,  2003

[3] According to Global Rich List, the $9,600 cutoff used by the U.S. Census places Americans in poverty among the 14 percent richest people in the world.

[4] NPR Online Poll, Poverty In America, NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School Poll

[5] Millions languish in poverty, US report shows, wsws.org, World Socialist Web Site, Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, September 1998

[6] Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, October 25, 1999, National Center for Policy Analysis

[7] Income Inequality, Walter Williams, September 13, 2004

[8] Mark Chapter 14,  verse 7, New Testament, Bible:  "For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you wish you can do good to them; but you do not always have Me.

[9] No one has ever explained, though, how the greedy wealthy have taken something from the poor if the poor were poor to start and therefore had nothing of value to take.

[10] The Political Art of Divide and Conquer, Linda Bowles, April 4, 2000, TownHall.Com

[11] Millionaires fill US Congress halls, Jean-Luis Santini, Information Clearing House