He was three years older than me, Jackie. And in the vernacular of my childhood time and place, Colored. I'm thinking about Jackie tonight because the elementary school I attended and where 30 years later, I found myself principal, is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Jackie's school experience and mine could not have been more different. Let me get you up to speed.
A few weeks ago, my brother, John, still living in the town of our birth, saw and informed me of a piece in the local newspaper inviting former students, teachers, and parents both to contribute to and attend a celebration of the longest-continuing school in the district. Naturally, I contacted the writer.
This past Sunday, my wife and I attended a meeting of parents and former students who were planning the big event. Except for current PTA officers, we were the "babies" of the bunch. One gentleman was, in fact, among the first students of the school, having begun 1st grade in 1937. He is a former mayor of the city and a testament to everything I remember as both student and principal about the school. Park Street School created leaders, all without the help of End-of-Grade tests. Imagine that.
Park Street School was then and now set off a tree-lined street of middle- to upper-middle-class homes only a few blocks from the center of town. The street and school was named for the grassy five-acre, oak-treed park across the street from the school and linked to the school by a pedestrian tunnel. It was then our playground. If those tunnel walls could talk, they would tell of chewing tobacco, first kisses, and childhood dreams in technicolor.
There was no way I could have known then that my classmates and I had the best of everything. The best textbooks, the best lunches, the best facilities, the best teachers. At Jackie's crosstown school on the "Hill," not so much. There was a certain adjective that prefaced "Hill," that I will not repeat.
So you know, Jackie was the son of our domestic housekeeper, Ellen. Jackie was big and strong for his age, and I remember he loved baseball. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jackie had no Little League team, no Kiwanis or Rotary Club sponsor. Jackie had only his sandlot friends with whom to play. With the "Whites Only" water fountains and restrooms downtown and the "Balcony Reserved for Coloreds" signs in the local theater, that was just the way it was.
Years later, education historian, Diane Ravitch, would write that public school Black students in the Carolinas routinely used the hand-me-down textbooks of the White schools and enjoyed only one-fourth the fiscal resources. Moreover, the state spent only 1/100 of the cost to transport Blacks as it did Whites. Neither Jackie nor I knew it at the time. That was just the way it was.
So now I find myself at the end of my career in public education and at the beginning of the next chapter of my life enjoying an opportunity to revisit the way it was in my childhood. I will locate in my attic all the artifacts I can find that may bring life to who we were then to a new generation. They will marvel at how we looked, how we wrote, how we measured success, and they will know nothing of our experience. And that is just the way it is.
Me, well, I went on to earn an academic doctorate and enjoyed a successful career as an educational innovator. I have been an award-winning high school band director, a professional musician, a principal and assistant principal, a director in a regional education research and development laboratory, a graduate school professor, an author, and director and executive director of an organization building leadership capacity in the highest-performing school districts in North Carolina.
Jackie? He never lived to see fifty, in part I am convinced, because he, except for the abiding love of his family, had the worst of everything. The worst education, the worst diet, the worst access to health care, the worst career opportunities. I am humble enough to know that who I am is as much a product of chance as of my own effort. To some extent, the same holds true for Jackie. Jackie chose neither his skin color nor the place and time of his birth. He played the cards he was dealt.
On the other hand, where Jackie went to school, how his school and adult life were resourced was more a matter of policy and practice than of chance. The way it was was not an accident.
When I attend the 75th anniversary of my elementary school, I want to talk about Jackie and me, good luck and bad luck. But most of all, I want to underscore how policy and practice favored me and not Jackie. That is not my fault but it is my opportunity.
So I hope Jackie's grandchildren will be there. I hope to tell them the story of their grandfather, my friendship with him, and the way it was then. I intend to leave them with a message of hope and a vision of how it may be. And that is just the way it is.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
The Law of Regression
"Hiding in plain sight," says Daniel Kahneman. According to the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, regression effects are so common that we do not even see them. Like the air we breath, regression is invisible. I hope to show why leaders need to work harder to make the invisible visible.
As you may remember, regression to the mean is the statistical phenomenon that explains why children whose parents are extraordinarily tall tend to be shorter. For any set of quantifiable characteristics, there is an arithmetic average of the observed characteristic. Successive measures of the observed characteristic tend to approximate the average, not the extreme. This is the Law of Regression.
Why is increased awareness of the regression effect important to leaders generally and school leaders in particular? There are several good reasons, but I will confine my thoughts to one.
We know that human performance is a characteristic subject to observation and measurement. And we know that we've spent a king's ransom on instruments specifically designed to measure observed performances, for example, North Carolina End-of-Course and End-of-Grade Tests for students.
Normally-matriculated students take a particular EOG or EOC test only once, yet from this sample, the public makes inferences about the student population as a whole and the impact of teachers on those students from one year to the next. In fact, we have included progress on these tests in the evaluation of teachers and principals. Whether fair or not, you may infer for yourself aided by this text.
Here's the thing: The Law of Regression cares not that different students took the tests. Nor does it care whom or what got better or worse. The Law of Regression does one thing. It aggregates the blob of bodies to whom the tests are administered, year after year, and with steely logic demands that variation around some floating average results in a mean to which all successive scores will tend.
Someone check me on my own logic, but is it not the case that, given the Law of Regression, we might err when we attribute improved scores to improved teaching and identify the former as causing the latter? Equally, is it not the case that we may err when we attribute a decline in test scores to something gone horribly wrong at school when, in fact, it is simply random variation? These are the stories we tell ourselves because we must make sense of things. Honestly, we must. Luck is for losers, right?
Undoubtedly, the Law of Regression applies to organizations and organizational results far beyond public education. Rather than reflect on the Law of Regression when it favors us, however, we leaders pat ourselves on the back for our contribution to building a better employee. Of course, if performance declines, it was the employee's fault. Isn't it grand to be human?
As you may remember, regression to the mean is the statistical phenomenon that explains why children whose parents are extraordinarily tall tend to be shorter. For any set of quantifiable characteristics, there is an arithmetic average of the observed characteristic. Successive measures of the observed characteristic tend to approximate the average, not the extreme. This is the Law of Regression.
Why is increased awareness of the regression effect important to leaders generally and school leaders in particular? There are several good reasons, but I will confine my thoughts to one.
We know that human performance is a characteristic subject to observation and measurement. And we know that we've spent a king's ransom on instruments specifically designed to measure observed performances, for example, North Carolina End-of-Course and End-of-Grade Tests for students.
Normally-matriculated students take a particular EOG or EOC test only once, yet from this sample, the public makes inferences about the student population as a whole and the impact of teachers on those students from one year to the next. In fact, we have included progress on these tests in the evaluation of teachers and principals. Whether fair or not, you may infer for yourself aided by this text.
Here's the thing: The Law of Regression cares not that different students took the tests. Nor does it care whom or what got better or worse. The Law of Regression does one thing. It aggregates the blob of bodies to whom the tests are administered, year after year, and with steely logic demands that variation around some floating average results in a mean to which all successive scores will tend.
Someone check me on my own logic, but is it not the case that, given the Law of Regression, we might err when we attribute improved scores to improved teaching and identify the former as causing the latter? Equally, is it not the case that we may err when we attribute a decline in test scores to something gone horribly wrong at school when, in fact, it is simply random variation? These are the stories we tell ourselves because we must make sense of things. Honestly, we must. Luck is for losers, right?
Undoubtedly, the Law of Regression applies to organizations and organizational results far beyond public education. Rather than reflect on the Law of Regression when it favors us, however, we leaders pat ourselves on the back for our contribution to building a better employee. Of course, if performance declines, it was the employee's fault. Isn't it grand to be human?
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Red Flags for Leaders
Obsessed? No, but I'm pretty sure I could spend every day for the next year writing about my latest read, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Nobel Prize in Economics winner, Daniel Kahneman. Regular readers of this blog know that my first commentary was last week.
Knowing how our two systems of thinking--one fast and intuitive, the other slow and analytical--shape our judgments and decisions, says Kahneman, is the key to minimizing the aversive impact of cognitive biases, illusions, and inattention to statistical laws.
Arguably, the impact of failing to act on what we know would be most aversive for those individuals responsible for others' well-being. I am talking, of course, about people in leadership positions. People like you. I have distilled from my reading then a few simple lessons I call, Red Flags for Leaders. My hope is that when you see the flag, you will think--fast and slow--before you act.
The first red flag is ignoring the Law of Small Numbers. It is particularly timely inasmuch as I teach a unit on statistical sampling to my aspiring school leaders in the Gardner-Webb University Master of Executive Leadership in Schools program in a couple of days. If principals are not taught to be reflective practitioners, there is little hope that their teaching staff will be either.
Kahneman broaches the subject by describing that research has found that the highest incidence of kidney cancer in the United States is found in sparsely-populated, rural counties of the South, Midwest, and West whose citizens vote predominantly Republican. As an intelligent reader, you may quickly and accurately dispense with political affiliation as a related factor. You may remember, however, that the rural lifestyle is often characterized by a high-fat diet, lack of access to quality health care, and tobacco and alcohol abuse.
Momentarily bracketing further thoughts about the story you are telling yourself, you need to know that research has also found that the lowest incidence of kidney cancer is found in sparsely-populated, rural counties of the South, Midwest, and West whose citizens vote predominantly Republican. What?
If you had been told the last research finding first, you may again rightly assess that being a Republican is inconsequential. You remember, however, that with country-living comes clean air and water, reduced stress, access to fresh food, and greater social cohesion. Of course folk there have less kidney cancer, you tell yourself. It's the lifestyle.
Would you believe that the statical Law of Small Numbers makes both findings true? In any small sample, such as rural counties with small populations, extremes will be found. Not convinced? Let's do an experiment:
From an urn filled with equal numbers of red and white marbles, you draw 4 marbles and have a friend draw 7 marbles. Over repeated drawings, the chance that you will obtain all red or all white marbles--the extreme--is exactly eight times greater than that of your friend drawing the larger sample. It works out to expected percentages of 12.5% and 1.56%, respectively.
It's simple math really, but we ignore it. Why? It's just how we think. System 1, the intuitive, associative, story-telling mind strives mightily to create a causal narrative from any set of observations, even if the story ignores statistical law. You probably found yourself caught up in System 1 thinking as you read about the incidence of kidney cancer in rural counties. System 2 is more deliberate and analytical but it's also lazy.
So leaders, here is your Red Flag of the Week: When you have only a few data points to work from, do not fall prey to the Law of Small Numbers. Whether it is assessing human performance or evaluating an intervention, the pressure to tell yourself a potentially inaccurate story will be great. Dismiss the pressure. As Quality advocates say, "Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast." Put lazy System 2 to work and then decide. We will talk about the Law of Regression next week.
Knowing how our two systems of thinking--one fast and intuitive, the other slow and analytical--shape our judgments and decisions, says Kahneman, is the key to minimizing the aversive impact of cognitive biases, illusions, and inattention to statistical laws.
Arguably, the impact of failing to act on what we know would be most aversive for those individuals responsible for others' well-being. I am talking, of course, about people in leadership positions. People like you. I have distilled from my reading then a few simple lessons I call, Red Flags for Leaders. My hope is that when you see the flag, you will think--fast and slow--before you act.
The first red flag is ignoring the Law of Small Numbers. It is particularly timely inasmuch as I teach a unit on statistical sampling to my aspiring school leaders in the Gardner-Webb University Master of Executive Leadership in Schools program in a couple of days. If principals are not taught to be reflective practitioners, there is little hope that their teaching staff will be either.
Kahneman broaches the subject by describing that research has found that the highest incidence of kidney cancer in the United States is found in sparsely-populated, rural counties of the South, Midwest, and West whose citizens vote predominantly Republican. As an intelligent reader, you may quickly and accurately dispense with political affiliation as a related factor. You may remember, however, that the rural lifestyle is often characterized by a high-fat diet, lack of access to quality health care, and tobacco and alcohol abuse.
Momentarily bracketing further thoughts about the story you are telling yourself, you need to know that research has also found that the lowest incidence of kidney cancer is found in sparsely-populated, rural counties of the South, Midwest, and West whose citizens vote predominantly Republican. What?
If you had been told the last research finding first, you may again rightly assess that being a Republican is inconsequential. You remember, however, that with country-living comes clean air and water, reduced stress, access to fresh food, and greater social cohesion. Of course folk there have less kidney cancer, you tell yourself. It's the lifestyle.
Would you believe that the statical Law of Small Numbers makes both findings true? In any small sample, such as rural counties with small populations, extremes will be found. Not convinced? Let's do an experiment:
From an urn filled with equal numbers of red and white marbles, you draw 4 marbles and have a friend draw 7 marbles. Over repeated drawings, the chance that you will obtain all red or all white marbles--the extreme--is exactly eight times greater than that of your friend drawing the larger sample. It works out to expected percentages of 12.5% and 1.56%, respectively.
It's simple math really, but we ignore it. Why? It's just how we think. System 1, the intuitive, associative, story-telling mind strives mightily to create a causal narrative from any set of observations, even if the story ignores statistical law. You probably found yourself caught up in System 1 thinking as you read about the incidence of kidney cancer in rural counties. System 2 is more deliberate and analytical but it's also lazy.
So leaders, here is your Red Flag of the Week: When you have only a few data points to work from, do not fall prey to the Law of Small Numbers. Whether it is assessing human performance or evaluating an intervention, the pressure to tell yourself a potentially inaccurate story will be great. Dismiss the pressure. As Quality advocates say, "Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast." Put lazy System 2 to work and then decide. We will talk about the Law of Regression next week.
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