Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Education

  • Failures in Leadership – Schrodinger’s Government

    This column is dedicated to our elected leaders who couldn’t lead a fraternity party to a free kegger. People who couldn’t lead a liberty party from the gangplank to the nearest saloon. People who are elected to a position and decide that gives them the power to insist on their own chosen illegalities.

    They range from school board members to the President of these United States. If you like Trump, then take a moment to remember the four years of Joe Biden “leadership.” Even if you don’t like Trump, think back on Slow Joe. The man kept being elected by Delaware – 2 years on the county council, then 36 years in the US Senate, 8 years as Vice-President, culminating in a 4 year debacle as President. He epitomized the Peter Principle – he spent 48 years in elected offices that were above his level of competence. Being elected so many times, with so little ability, is a testimony to his drive for power and personality.

    While Biden found that the small state of Delaware matched his limited talents and boundless ego, we have other spots that match irresponsible voters with incompetent or unmotivated candidates. In some cases, we limit the candidate pool – I’ll mention the County School Superintendent position, only because I spent 5 years with the Soup’s office next to mine. There were varying degrees of competence in the three that I knew from our proximity and the two I worked with as a board member. Those five examples are enough to give me some ideas.

    I’ve seen a new phrase – “Schrodinger’s Government” that describes a system caught between competence and incompetence, between legitimate and illegitimate, between authoritative and incompetent. Those that are in power support “Schrodinger’s Government” as representative and democratic. Those who are out of power see moral flaws and illegitimacy that deserve only protest and resistance. The term “Schrodinger’s Government” is a takeoff on Schrodinger’s Cat – a quantum physics experiment where the cat has an equal probability of being alive or dead until the box that contains it is opened.

    Back to the County Soup – the position requires a teaching certificate and three years experience teaching public schools. That requirement leads to a shallow pool of candidates – much like Delaware where the state is a little over half the size of Lincoln County. Limiting the candidate pool limits the potential for excellence, and leads to “Schrodinger’s Government.” There are some damn poor teachers who have three years experience and a license.

    Minneapolis has been a case study in “Schrodinger’s Government,” showing the man who was the candidate for VP just 15 months ago crossing political swords with the man who was duly elected President. Thing is, Minneapolis is more the norm than the exception – let me describe “Schrodinger’s Government” in Lincoln County, where it has existed for years.

    First, let’s look at the county’s geography: when Lincoln County was carved out of Flathead County, the idea was to develop a geographically connected county – where all of the communities were in the same (Kootenai) watershed, and all save two were served by the railroad (and those two had some creative school district boundaries that allowed them some railroad tax base). But good and equitable ideas only last so long as our elected representatives vote to maintain them. And Libby Dam came along to play hell with the county’s planned geographic integrity.

    If we look at Lincoln County’s three largest towns (and high schools) we see that the Libby area has almost half the population but about a third of the tax base. Small wonder why the north county folks, with nearly half the tax base but only a third of the population view Libby much like Alberta’s separatist movement sees Ottawa. Our founding fathers were bothered by taxation without representation – here we see the problems of taxation by the representatives from a more populous area, compounded with the fact that the location of the county seat means most of the elected officials live in that district. It’s a geographically smaller version of the “Game of Thrones.” Schrodinger’s Government.

    In the north county, the County High School was located in Eureka. Eureka’s elementary board saw that, by unifying the high school district with their own elementary district they would be able to tax an area that they had no intention of serving. In 1988, the Eureka and Rexford school districts voted to unify the districts. They were unified, and the County Superintendent told them to change the name of Lincoln County High School (and she left the office and the county, with no successor who would enforce that). They didn’t change the name, but they did take over the high school district – and added taxable land (mostly railroad) that they had no intention of serving. Schrodinger’s Government by design. To be in keeping with the laws, they could have named it Eureka Unified, or even Lincoln Not a County High School. I suppose they figure that they stole it fair and square. With the County Soup absent, they created Schrodinger’s Government.

    Iran shows Schrodinger’s Government at work. 47 years ago, 98 percent of the population voted to have an Islamic Republic. Now, that Islamic Republic has lost nearly all connection with the Iranian people – well over half of the mosques have been burned, some of the vocal Iranians are calling themselves Persians and calling for a return to Zoroastrianism. And their Supreme Leader is announcing the protestors as “Enemies of God.” Schrodinger’s Government. I give thanks that I have never lived under a theocracy. Even if the regime is overthrown, Iran will have decades of quiet murders as old scores are settled under a new regime.

    To our north – Alberta and Quebec both have separatist movements that, if successful, will scuttle Canada. You don’t get secessionist movements this visible without Schrodinger’s Government.

    One of my grad students enjoyed telling me that libertarians should never be elected because they believe that government doesn’t work. That may have been an indictment for seeing things as they are.

  • What Ph.D. Means

    I can, and occasionally do, put the letters Ph.D. behind my name. I know what the letters signify – and I just saw a commentary that Canada and Mexico have both elected leaders with Ph.D. behind their names, while the US has Trump.

    So let’s look at what the letters Ph.D. actually imply – that I have done original research in a satisfactory manner while supervised by a Ph.D. holding faculty member. That’s all the title actually tells of what I, or anyone else who holds the Ph.D. has accomplished. I take some quiet pride in the fact that current researchers are still citing my dissertation – but that isn’t a necessary part of getting the letters behind your name. And, despite the fact I feel good about those citations, there aren’t nearly so many people citing the dissertation as read this blog. Most dissertations are filed away and never cited.

    Einstein’s dissertation was “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.” In his thesis, he developed a methodology for calculating Avogadro’s number from the Brownian motion in sugar water. It was original research – which means that nobody had done it before. It was good quality research. But when we associate Einstein with research, we tend to recall his later research – the spot where he quantified Energy as equal to mass times the square of light speed. The point being, we don’t recall Einstein because of his first piece of original research.

    Generally speaking, whenever someone tells you “If you want to know about X you should read my dissertation.” you probably don’t want to read it. The document represents several years work, and we tend to think of our dissertations as important – but most are not.

    Research for a Master’s degree doesn’t need to be original. It doesn’t even need to be done – a Master’s can be awarded just for coursework. If there’s no thesis, the degree is called a terminal masters, not qualifying for admission into a Ph.D. program. (My M.Ed. was a non-thesis masters, so I had to research and write a separate thesis to make up for the lack of a thesis.)

    Jill Biden’s Ed.D. thesis is available online (all 137 pages) at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20407101-jill-jacobsbiden_dissertation/ and can be downloaded without cost – the title is Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs. It is nice to have this available to help people understand what can go into a doctorate.

    We (the United States) elected a guy with a Ph.D. to the office of President once – well, actually twice, over a century ago. Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D. Once he was elected, he segregated the federal work force. I don’t have any evidence that he belonged to the KKK – but they missed a great prospect if they didn’t recruit him. His dissertation – from back in 1885 – it titled “Congressional Government” and describes the government of the United States. There is nothing in Woodrow Wilson’s dissertation that you can’t get out of a high school government text.

  • Thoughts on Schooling

    I read these statistics, posted in response to a New York Times article: Public School: 40% of kids bullied, 30% sexually harassed, 34% read at grade level, $18K a year.

    Homeschoolers: 0% bullied, 0% sexually harassed, 99% read above grade level, $1000 a year. I don’t know how solid his statistics were – but it got me pondering on the problems of education.

    About the same time, I read Joel Graves’ commentary on Home School – and Joel’s thoughts were not a lot different than mine when we first started publishing the Ear. Still, I was younger then – I had 4 years experience teaching and heading the ag department at a junior college. As I moved to different experiences teaching – the next six years were in the Academic Reinforcement Center, followed by years of Extension education, and culminating in time as graduate faculty, I gained a lot of experience with people whom their education system had failed. Emphasize that phrase: Their Education System had failed them. These weren’t people who had failed – most were high school graduates. Some held a bachelor’s degree. The problem is that, often, public education needs the support of other forms of education – Extension education, such as 4-H is one example, while education at home is another. Vocational education is another form. Back to my point: at a number of different levels of post-secondary education, I dealt with students who had been failed by their education systems.

    I recall a young woman – a high school graduate with a tested IQ of 108 – who read at the beginning third-grade level. That 108 IQ says she was ahead of 70% of the population – yet the public school from which she graduated failed her for at least ten years (third grade through twelfth). She hadn’t failed – she walked through the high school graduation.

    I remember Gerald – my student for over a year – he had graduated high school (to be fair, not in Montana) but was unable to do math without a calculator, and even with a calculator couldn’t get the order of operations correct. I failed at correcting the problem.

    My list could go on – but when students graduate high school without being able to read or do simple algebra, the educational system has failed them. I recall a carpenter, a dropout, who used his framing square to perform his mathematical calculations. It seems fairly obvious that he found a way of compensating for his math weaknesses through Vocational education – whether shop class or on job – that Gerald never found in a math class. On the other hand, Ray has a BS in animal science – but his Extension education experience in 4-H rounded it out so that over a lifetime he could retire with a respectable herd of beef cattle and a decent-sized ranch. He needed both the formal training at the Land Grant plus the 4-H experience.

    I recall taking my GRE test – the woman seated next to me (a teacher) needed to score at the 25th percentile to be admitted to her graduate program. She had already taken the GRE twice without achieving that score, and had completed all of her coursework. Obviously, her schooling had failed her.

    So I fully understand that public school can fail to educate students while going on to graduate them. One of the problems I see with Extension education occurs when the market sale becomes more important than the 4-H education. Home school can be bloody awful – what can you learn if your teacher is an ignorant idiot and you keep that same teacher for a dozen years? On the other hand, Home schooling can be fantastic – it depends on the parent and the kid. Vocational education offers a second way to support the classic 3 R’s as well as a potential career for kids who aren’t on an academic track.

    I spent 4 years teaching Freshman and Sophomore classes – some vocational, some academic. I spent 6 years in academic reinforcement at a community college – that’s teaching college students what they didn’t learn in high school. I don’t know how to break down my Extension career – I served as an agent, administrator and a specialist, and everything crossed over. And I ended a career as a specialized sociologist usually teaching senior and graduate classes. I did work a bit with a variant on home school – my daughter was interested in quantum physics and couldn’t get the information she wanted from the high school. I checked out books and read, so that we could discuss quantum as we drove.

    During those many years, I met more students who had been failed by the system than failed at the local high school. I’ve seen parents make a decision to pull a kid out of school and do a bad, or at least incomplete, job of teaching at home. I’ve seen high schools that graduate students and never worry that their students’ ACT scores leave their school ranked in the bottom third. The system and parents combine to fail the kids more frequently than the kids fail on their own.

    In my perfect world, every kid would have the opportunity for Vocational education. I had planned to finish high school with 4 vocational classes taught by Harry Donaldson. It didn’t work that way – I finished with 3 or 4 academic classes taught in the morning, and working every afternoon. The first Fall semester I took a drafting class – and was acing the tests and flunking the homework. The only constructive criticism I received was “WRONG SCALE!” written in red. I dropped the class. Years later, when I was looking at my drafting equipment, I realized the bookstore had included an architect’s scale in the package for an engineering class. My instructor didn’t explain the difference. If I had taken Harry Donaldson’s mechanical drawing class, I would have been trained to catch the problem myself. I dropped a class to avoid an F – and taking Harry’s class would have made me successful.

    So I see a lot of point-source opportunities to fail students. I’ve described an intelligent young woman whose reading teachers spent ten of her twelve years of school failing to teach her to read, but she still graduated on schedule. I’ve watched Connie Malyevac teach others the math that they missed in high school – and every student deserves a Connie to help fill the potholes in their education. I’ve learned that a parent can read incomprehensible physics books, and stay 15 minutes (or less) ahead of his daughter, and see the success of her graduation with a Phi Beta Kappa pin. I’ve seen students from Dave Peterson’s “slow class” go on to graduate from college and move on to a career of teaching high school. The standard expectation of Vocational education – that academics aren’t for everyone – provides an alternative.

    My prescription? I have seen our public schools fail too many students. Despite that, I believe our public schools should be education’s foundation. (I do believe that there is a staffing problem that needs resolution when a school is below the mean for years and years – and that does need to be addressed instead of ignored.) I want parents to be active in their kids’ education (I recall that the teachers had other parents than Renata and I that they felt could have benefitted more from parent/teacher conferences; and I recall one who was stymied by Renata’s question, “Exactly which part of your math class won’t she need when she goes on to college?”

    I believe in 4-H – yet I think that there is a lot more Extension education in an entomology project than in selling a market steer. Same thing for sewing and cooking projects.

    Every youngster deserves to learn by doing – which is the big part of vocational education.

    I want remedial education – early. I am less than impressed by special education that is prescribed late and relies on paraprofessionals to put in a certain amount of hours on the weakness. We measure success in touchdowns, not practice yardage.

    To sum it up – we do not need to look at education as public education or home school. We need public education, supported by home education, supported by Extension education, plus Vocational education, plus other forms of education (formal or informal) that are available in the communities. To focus on just one form of education is to provide a situation where that single education system can, and frequently will, fail the students.

  • A Matter of Degrees

    A while back I listened to a woman explain that she holds three college degrees. I’m fairly certain that meant associate’s, associate’s, associate’s. My own three are bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate. Generally speaking, under our American system, we only refer to the highest degree held, so the lower two degrees are kind of assumed to exist. Jane Goodall holds a Ph.D. (from Cambridge) but no lower degrees – the British system is a bit different than ours. Dr. Goodall’s researched and published books on chimpanzees were, essentially, all of her college career. I know that her Ph.D. is more prestigious than mine – and that her single degree is a lot more than three associate’s might be.

    The Russians have a degree above the Ph.D. – but it is granted upon successful defense of the dissertation. Under our system, the dissertation and its defense are the final part of the Ph.D. A student who has completed all the coursework for a Ph.D. but has not submitted and successfully defended a dissertation is termed ABD – all but dissertation. ABD is not a degree, and in many ways can be kind of a bad thing. In order to start the dissertation, I had to have substantially completed my coursework, and passed my comps (comprehensive exams). If you don’t pass the comps, you have invested several years in education that you won’t get credit for. Had I failed my comps, I would have walked away with a second non-thesis masters. That’s kind of like having 2 heads – unusual, but not generally helpful to a career. I would like to have a quiet beer with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and learn exactly how he came to have his second Masters.

    Doctorates aren’t equal – the order in which they are given at a University graduation is the only spot where I know you can see the difference in status. Generally speaking, the Ph.D is an academic research degree, while the MD, Juris Doctorate, and Ed.D. are professional degrees. Only time I got to observe this was when my daughter got her Bachelors – the new Ph.D holders went through the line first. The next week, the MDs and JDs began a lifetime of larger paychecks.

    Then we can go to the Associates’s degrees – an Associate of Applied Sciences is a vocational degree, while the Associate of Arts or Associate of Science is generally the first two years of a bachelor’s program. It is quite possible to have 3 separate Associate’s degrees and never take a class with a 300 or 400 number.

  • Village Idiot or Village Midwit

    Time was when our phraseology suggests a belief in one idiot per village. Then came the internet and Facebook. The postings bring suggestions that we have more than one idiot per village. Fortunately, the internet is available, so we can hopefully download a measurable definition, and then use the old bell curve to find out if idiots are actually so common.

    So a search for ‘clinical definition idiot’ led me to this website: https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-is-the-difference-between-a-moron-imbecile-and-idiot.htm This is the fourth sentence (emphasis added):   “Those with an IQ of 0 to 25 (an IQ of 100 is average) were called idiots, 26 to 50 were called imbeciles and 51 to 70 were called morons. “

    That makes idiots pretty darned rare – the likelihood of encountering an idiot is the same as that of encountering someone with an IQ of 175 or more. Using a 15 point standard deviation, the chance of encountering an idiot is 0.0000287105%. ( https://iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx )

    So, taking the definition and the probability, it doesn’t look like idiots are something we encounter daily, or even monthly. We don’t have a great increase in village idiots. I think the problem has to be village midwits – so here’s what I get for a definition of midwit: “Noun. midwit (plural midwits) (neologism, chiefly Internet slang, mildly derogatory) A person of middling intellect; someone who is neither particularly dumb nor notably intelligent, especially if they act as if they are smarter than they are.” Again the emphasis is added. I think the problem is that we have a lot more people who “act as if they are smarter than they are.“

    So I assume midwittery begins with an IQ of 108 (half a standard deviation above the norm) the chart tells me that 30% of the population will score above 108. If I arbitrarily put the cap on at 115, I have a group that includes 14% of humanity – and that’s basically one out of every 7 people I encounter.

    I don’t believe we have more village idiots than ever before – but we do have more opportunities for education. According to the Census:

    “In 2022, the highest level of education of the population age 25 and older in the United States ranged from less than high school to advanced degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree.

    9% had less than a high school diploma or equivalent.

    28% had high school as their highest level of school completed. 

    15% had completed some college but not a degree.

    10% had an associate degree as their highest level of school completed.

    23% had a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree.

    14% had completed advanced education such as a master’s degree, professional degree or doctorate. 

    When we add those numbers – 15, 10, 23 and 14 – we come up with a total between 62 and 63% of Americans (over 25) who have attended college. That’s five out of every eight people.

    When 5/8ths of the adult population has attended college – and 47% hold one level of college degree or another – perhaps there is nothing particularly elite about attending college. Sometimes we’re just one more village midwit. I’m not certain that village idiots aren’t less harmful than village midwits.

  • What Happens to Credentialism?

    Colleges – and even high schools – exist to provide credentials. Probably the highest example of credentialism is the MD or DO – but most of our programs boil down to taking the correct group of classes, achieving a certain minimum score, and acquiring a credential. You pretty much have to get the credential to get the interview that gets you the job. In this simplification, there isn’t a lot of difference between the bachelors, masters and doctorates in the academy and the classifications of apprentice, journeyman and master in the skilled trades (take plumbing or electricity for examples).

    There are a whole lot of jobs where I lack the credentials to even apply. We’ve developed a credentialed society, and sometimes the benefits of the credential seem hard to find. Sometimes the requirements in terms of work experience seem like gatekeepers. And more frequently, people are asking what is the value of the credential.

    My credential is a Ph.D. in sociology. If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people who recommend against getting a degree in sociology. I suppose I’m lucky – I got a job in the subject, and retired working at the same topic that interested me as an undergrad. Other folks have other credentials. I’m reading Neil Howe’s book about the fourth turning – and his jacket blurb identifies him as a demographer holding graduate degrees in history and economics from Yale. There are a lot of ways to get the title of demographer – his was, obviously, different than mine.

    After retiring, I’ve spent a few years on the local school board – and teaching jobs are open only to the certified. I started with the belief that certification in special education brought with it some incredible teaching skills – yet as I left the board, I left with a strong suspicion that we had hired people with the credential to evaluate our students, but once the evaluation was complete we wound up with teacher’s aides who did most of the actual teaching. I knew Dave Peterson – and saw more than one of his students go on to graduate and become teachers. But those years of closer observation showed me that Dave was a special teacher – but that wasn’t directly related to a special education certificate. At the Libby Campus of FVCC, I worked in the Academic Reinforcement Center with Connie Malyevac. Connie was a better teacher than I – I watched her reach out and find ways to get students on track, students who were beyond my reach. I was good – Connie was great. It wasn’t a question of credentials – she simply had more ability to reach out and bring students back onto the path.

    Remembering those days when I Worked with Connie makes me understand why we need to be moving into some different forms of credentials that reflect ability. I’m looking at the SAT – the Scholastic Aptitude Test is now reducing the length and complexity of statements to which students respond and from which they determine the correct information. These are the questions my students referred to as “story questions.” The real world has too much information – much of the problem of thinking is just deciding the data that is relevant to the problem.

    I’m glad to have had the University system as a place to work – but I could see how it was breaking down and no longer providing valid credentials. I think on Howe’s work – where his credentials are more the Ivy League degrees than the topic – and I recall the Whorfian Hypothesis. Benjamin Whorf was a Chemical Engineer (MIT BS and MS) who studied the Hopi language and came up with the idea that people experience the world based on the structure of their language. This link shows that MIT still remembers (web.mit.edu.allanmc.www.whorf.scienceandlinguistics.pdf )

    Benjamin Whorf’s name moved into social science fields because of his competence in linguistics, while his credentials were degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT. Perhaps it’s time for us to start looking at developing competence over credentialing?