"You cannot ignore the facts"

a priori (adj.): Based on a hypothesis or theory rather than on experiment or experience.

—American Heritage Dictionary

“Let’s get empirical.” As a citizen of a college community, I find myself saying that a lot. “Let’s get empirical” means: let’s take a look at what actually happens in the world.

As opposed to what? As opposed to appealing to unverified theories and our sense of the facts.

People, especially teachers, really love their sense of things, their intuitions. They trust ‘em—just like W trusted his "gut."

Screw that. Gotta look at the facts. Unfortunately, one can’t always get the facts. Getting reliable data can be difficult.

But sometimes one can get them. If relevant data (experiments, studies, surveys, etc.) are available, we need to look at all that before making decisions. That’s why I’ve been keen to monitor good studies (no, not instructor and administrator anecdotes) regarding the viability of “online instruction.” OI looks like a classic case of something shiny and new that some will embrace without bothering to ask whether it works.

Let’s give this general fallacy a name: “inappropriate a prioriism.” It is the fallacy of making decisions on the basis of theory or our sense of things—when relevant empirical data are available and have not yet been examined.

Incidentally, so far, there are strong indications that OI does work for at least some kinds of learning. But, really, not enough is known about it to justify a wholehearted embrace. (It is possible that OI works well, not because of anything intrinsic to OI, but because of the circumstance that OI students spend more time studying. My “sense” of things [oops!] is that study time is more important than “mode of instruction.”)

PRESIDENT EMPIRICUS

One thing that has impressed me about President Obama is his apparent tendency to get empirical.

A couple of days ago, Paul Krugman offered a defense of Obama’s efforts with regard to health care reform (Costs and Compassion). At one point, he stated:

I don’t know how many people understand the significance of Mr. Obama’s proposal to give MedPAC, the expert advisory board to Medicare, real power. But it’s a major step toward reducing the useless spending — the proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs.

And both the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have also been emphasizing the importance of “comparative effectiveness research” — seeing which medical procedures actually work.

If ever there were an area of human thought and action afflicted by “inappropriate a prioriism” it is health and medicine. Here, the affliction is widespread and system-wide. It’s the perfect place to “get empirical.” That’s what Obama wants to do.

Perhaps another example of Obama’s “appropriate empiricism” concerns reform of K-12 education. In the LA Times this morning (Obama chides California for not using test scores to evaluate teachers), we learn that

President Obama singled out California on Friday for failing to use education data to distinguish poor teachers from good ones, a situation that his administration said must change for the state to receive competitive, federal school dollars.

Obama's comments echo recent criticisms by his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, who warned that states that bar the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, as California does, are risking those funds. In an announcement Friday at the Education Department in Washington, Obama and Duncan said the "Race to the Top" awards will be allocated to school districts that institute reforms using data-driven analysis, among other things.

"You cannot ignore facts," Obama said. "That is why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways."

Obama recently announced that considerable federal funds will be made available for instruction in the states, but it is largely tied to recipients' efforts at determining what actually works.

THE IRRATIONAL EGOIST

Now, as it turns out, emphasizing “the facts” in education is an approach that can be abused, a fact illustrated by eight years of George W. Bush and his right-wing “learning outcomes” crowd.

Whether the subject was education or foreign policy, Bush was consistently factually challenged. Not only did he and his people commit the fallacy of inappropriate a prioriism, they dove still deeper into irrationality, routinely proceeding as though the truth is somehow “known” (by the righteous? the God-fearing?) independent of the evidence and the “evidence” is something that one manufactures or exploits to sell this “knowledge.”

I do hope that the era of Presidential anti-rationality is over. Looks like it is.

Prima facie, it should be possible to determine whether a teacher teaches well or not. At the very least, we should be able to identify the very bad teachers. Getting rid of them would be a great help.

EDUCATIONIST ANTI-RATIONALISM

There’s one problem though. The California K-12 educational establishment rivals the Bush Administration for systematic anti-rationality. Remember California's absurd embrace of “whole language” reading instruction? (Empirical evidence did not support the "whole language" approach. It did support the "phonetic" approach that WL eschewed.) Remember the emphasis on “self-esteem”? (There were no studies supporting the idea that encouraging high self-regard prevents problems like teen pregnancy, criminality, and drug use. No matter!)

If we leave the matter of evaluating teachers up to them, we’re in big trouble.

I say we get Penn and Teller. (Nobody's perfect: read this.)