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Cargo Cult Science is alive and well in Niagara
The Niagara Public School Board plans to open a school for low-income students whose parents don't have a college or university education. Read all about it here. As the (appallingly-misspelled) comments show, there are plenty of objections in terms of élitism, segregation, discrimination, and so on. However, no one has picked up on the really bad aspect of the scheme - namely, that it is unlikely to work.
According to the article at least, the new school will provide all the trappings of success - tutoring, mentoring, parent involvement, nutrition programs, a stable environment, after-school activities, etc. But there is no talk of a switch to the kind of direct, sequential instruction that disadvantaged students need if they are to succeed. Project Follow-Through, a 20-year study involving more than 350,000 children, definitively proved that the best programs for disadvantaged students - in terms of both academic success and positive self-concept, are programs that use direct, sequential instruction and emphasize basic skills. These findings have never been challenged.
Yet the Niagara Board is silent on the vital question of instructional methodology. This is Cargo Cult Science in action. Here's Richard Feynmann on the subject (excerpted from a Caltech commencement address).
"In the South Seas, there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
"Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school - we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty - a kind of leaning over backwards."
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