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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.”
As one commenter stated, it will always be known as the poor school.
“I agree with dfknox. It’s a method of helping raise other schools’ scores. A friend of mine put it best - “This way they can go to school with poor kids, go home to poor parents in their poor neighborhood, and then grow up poor!” Way to reinforce generational poverty. And to the grandmother in the article - don’t kid yourself. This won’t open any doors. These kids will forever be targeted as “from that poor school” and the smart ones will have to battle even harder to drag themselves up and out of poverty. Hey, at least this way it’s even easier for the other kids to figure out who to pick on! I probably would have qualified for this as a kid, and I am horrified about it. TERRIBLE IDEA!! “
Especially when curriculum and teaching methods are not change. It is like putting a target on these kids, without thinking of the ramifications of the wider society.
Here is another comment.
“School Test Scores
Our EQAO and Literacy Test scores all show that the greatest indicator of success on these tests is family income and parent level of education achieved. And of course, schools have to live with these results. This seems like a not-very-subtle strategy to gather all these kids together from places where they are dragging the scores down and put them in a place where no one will care too much what the scores are because of the demographic. Poor kids. Screwed before they were born. Why don’t people think before they have kids? Oh yeah…”
I wonder what kind of tactics will be used to convince low-income parents to send their children to the school? From the reaction I have received from a few low-income people, this is nuts, and than they list their various reasons why. Much like the reasons in the comments.
Also note there is inaccuracies in the article. The big one being, “The area has the second highest unemployment rate in the country and the proportion of low income families is now 14 per cent.”
Perhaps for Southern Ontario, but not Canada. And is still no reason for using this fact to promote a low-income school, in the light of falling enrollment. The educrats will used anything to promote their theories on SEC factors, but in this case it is rather appalling to used their high unemployment rate in this way, to justified the gathering of low income students.Their high unemployment rate is directly related to job loss in the typical middle-class manufacturing and service sector, and it is highly doubtful this group of people who have seen their income drop, will enroll their children in a school for low-income students. They do not see themselves in the same way, nor having the same needs as those who are below them.