Super Crunchers (20 page)

Most readers of this book probably couldn't abide the idea of having to follow a script hour after hour. Still, there is a joy is seeing your students learn. And a public school teacher confided in me that some of her colleagues liked it for a very mundane reason: “Zero prep,” she said. That's right, instead of having to plan your own class lesson day after day, DI instructors can walk into class, open the book, and read, “Good morning, class…”

Engelmann's website is clear, if somewhat diplomatic, in emphasizing that teacher discretion is reduced by the Direct Instruction method. “The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed instructional practices,” reads the DI website. Engelmann puts the matter more bluntly: “We don't give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels,” he said. “On the teachers' own time they can hate it. We don't care, as long as they do it.”

The Empire Strikes Back

Engelmann also faces resistance from the academic establishment. The education community is largely unified in their opposition to Direct Instruction. Ignoring the data, they argue that DI doesn't teach high-order thinking, thwarts creativity, and is not consistent with developmental practices.

Opponents argue that DI's strict methodology does not promote learning so much as prompting students to robotically repeat stock answers to scripted questions. They contend that while students learn to memorize responses to questions they expect, students are not prepared to apply this base knowledge to new situations. DI's critics also express concern that its structured approach, with tedious drills and repetition, stifles both student and teacher creativity. They argue that the method treats students as automatons leaving little room for individual thinking. These criticisms, however, ignore the possibility—supported by evidence from standardized tests—that DI equips students who have acquired a stronger set of basic skills with a greater capacity to build and develop creativity. Teachers interviewed after implementation of DI in Broward County, Florida, said the “approach actually allowed more creativity, because a framework was in place within which to innovate,” and added that classroom innovation and experimentation were a lot easier once DI had helped students acquire the necessary skills.

Lastly, critics try to discredit DI by arguing that DI causes antisocial behavior. At public meetings, whenever the possibility of switching to DI is mentioned, someone is sure to bring up a Michigan study claiming that students who are taught with DI are more likely to be arrested in their adolescent years. Here's evidence, they say, that DI is dangerous. The problem is that this randomized study was based on the experience of just sixty-eight students. And the students in the DI and the control groups were not similar.

In the end, the Michigan study is just window dressing. The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says. Education theorist and developer of the
Success for All
teaching model Robert Slavin puts it this way: “Research or no research, many schools would say that's just not a program that fits with their philosophy.” For many in the education establishment, philosophy trumps results.

The Bush administration, however, begs to differ. The 2001 “No Child Left Behind” law (NCLB) mandates that only “scientifically based” educational programs are eligible for federal funding. The NCLB statute uses the term “scientifically based research” more than one hundred times. To qualify as “scientifically based,” research must “draw on observation or experiment” and “involve rigorous data analyses that are adequate to test the stated hypotheses.” This is the kind of stuff that would make any Super Cruncher salivate. Finally a fair fight, where the education model that teaches the best will prevail.

Bush's education advisors have been taking the mandate quite seriously. The Department of Education has taken the lead, spending more than $5 billion in funding randomized testing and funding evidence-based literature reviews to assess the state of knowledge of “what works.” As
Fahrenheit 9/11
shows, Bush is personally flogging the effectiveness of Direct Instruction.

On the ground, however, the requirement that states adopt scientifically based methods has not worked a sea change on the education environment. State education boards currently tend to require textbooks and materials to be a mishmash of elements that individually are supposed to be scientifically based. A “balanced literacy” approach, which mixes elements of phonetic awareness as well as holistic experiences in reading and writing, is now in the ascendancy. California requires that primary reading materials contain a mixture of broad features.

Ironically, NCLB's requirement of “scientifically based” methods has become the catalyst for
excluding
Direct Instruction from many states' approved lists because it does not contain some holistic elements. There are no good studies indicating that “balanced learning” materials perform as well as Direct Instruction, but that doesn't keep states from disqualifying DI as even an option for local school adoption. At the moment, Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market. Will this share rise as the empirical commands of NCLB are more fully realized? In the immortal words of “The Pet Goat,” “more to come.”

The Status Squeeze

The story of Engelmann's struggle with the educational establishment raises once again the core themes of this book. We see the struggle of intuition, personal experience, and philosophical inclination waging war against the brute force of numbers. Engelmann for decades has staked out the leading edge of the Super Cruncher's camp. “Intuition is perhaps your worst enemy,” Engelmann said, “if you want to be smart in the instructional arena. You have to look at the kid's performance.”

In part, the struggle in education is a struggle over power. The education establishment and the teacher on the line want to keep their authority to decide what happens in the classroom. Engelmann and the mandate of “scientifically based” research are a direct threat to that power. Teachers in the classroom realize that their freedom and discretion to innovate is threatened. Under Direct Instruction, it is Zig who runs the show, who sets up the algorithm, who tests which script works best.

It's not just the teacher's power and discretion that is at stake. Status and power often go hand in hand. The rise of Super Crunching threatens the status and respectability of many traditional jobs.

Take the lowly loan officer. Once, being a loan officer for a bank was a moderately high status position. Loan officers were well paid and had real power to decide who did and did not qualify for loans. They were disproportionately white and male.

Today, loan decisions are instead made at a central office based on the results of a statistical algorithm. Banks started learning that giving loan officers discretion was bad business. It's not just that officers used this discretion to help their friends, or to unconsciously (or consciously) discriminate against minorities. It turns out that looking a customer in the eye and establishing a relationship doesn't help predict whether or not the customer will really repay the loan.

Bank loan officers, stripped of their discretion, have become nothing more than glorified secretaries. They literally just type in applicant data and click send. It's little wonder that their status and salaries have plummeted (and officers are much less likely to be white men). In education, the struggle between the intuitivists and the Super Crunchers is ongoing, but in consumer lending the battle ended long ago.

Following some other guy's script or algorithm may not make for the most interesting job, but time and time again it leads to a more effective business model. We are living in an age where dispersed discretion is on the wane. This is not the end of discretion; it's the shift of discretion from line employees to the much more centralized staff of Super Crunching higher-ups. Line employees increasingly feel like “potted plant” functionaries who are literally told to follow a script. Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but through a Super Crunching lens, he looks downright prescient when he said that the development of capitalism would increasingly alienate workers from their work-product.

These algorithm-driven scripts have even played a role in the outsourcing movement. Once discretion is stripped from line employees, they don't need to be as skilled. A pretested script is a cheaper way to lead customers through a service problem or to upsell related products—and it's even cheaper if the script is read by someone sitting in a Third-World call center. Some individual salespeople using their intuition and experience may in fact be legitimately outstanding, but if you're running a large-scale operation selling relatively homogenous products, you're going to do a heck of a lot better if you can just get your staff to stick with a tried-and-true script.

The shift of discretion and status from traditional experts to database oracles is also happening in medicine. Physicians report that patients now often treat them merely as alternative sources of information. Patients demand, “Show me the study.” They want to see the study that says chemo is better than radiation for stage-three lung cancer. Savvy patients are treating their doctors less like 1970s television icon Marcus Welby, and more like a human substitute for a web portal. The physician is merely the conduit of information.

The rise of evidence-based medicine is changing our very conception of what doctors are. “It is a signal that in medicine,” Canadian internist Kevin Patterson laments, “ours is a less heroic age.”

“So the warriors are being replaced by the accountants,” Patterson said. “Accountants know the whole world thinks their lives are gray—demeaned by all that addition. Doctors aren't used to thinking of themselves that way. But in the real world, where numbers matter, accountants know how powerful they are.”

Physician status is in decline. People are looking past the M.D.s, who merely disseminate information, and toward the Ph.D.s, who create the database to discover information. While a graduate student in sciences has to actually create information in his or her thesis to get a Ph.D., med students only have to memorize other people's information (including how to do certain procedures). In a world where information is sovereign, there may come a time when we ask, “Are you a real doctor, or just a physician?”

Or maybe not. Respect doesn't necessarily come with power. Society is used to revering sage intuitivists. It can bow down to the theoretical genius of an Einstein or a Salk, but it is harder to revere the number-crunching “accountants” who tell us the probability that our cancer will respond to chemotherapy is 37.8 percent. In the movie
Along Came Polly,
Ben Stiller plays your typical actuarial gearhead. He's the kind of guy who's afraid to eat bar peanuts because “on average only one out of every six people wash their hands when they go to the bathroom.” His character leads a small, circumscribed life that is devoid of passion. He may wield power, but he doesn't claim our respect. Power and discretion are definitely shifting from the periphery to the Super Crunching center. But that doesn't mean Super Crunchers are going to find they have an easier time dating.

Would You Buy a Used Car from a Super Cruncher?

Even in areas where number crunching improves the quality of advice, it can sometimes perversely undermine the public's confidence. The heroic conception of expertise was that of an expert giving settled answers. People are more likely to think of statistics as infinitely malleable and subject to manipulation. (Think of the “Lies, damn lies and statistics!” warning.)

This is a more precise, but less certain world. The classical conception of probability is a world of absolutes. To the classicist, the probability of my currently having prostate cancer is either 0 or 100 percent. But we are all frequentists now. Experts used to say “yes” or “no.” Now we have to contend with estimates and probabilities.

Super Crunching thus affects us not just as employees but also as consumers and clients as well. We are the patients who demand to see the study. We are the students who are forced to learn
The…Fast…Way
.
^™
We are the customers who are upsold by a statistically validated (outsourced) script.

Many of the Super Crunching stories are examples of unmitigated consumer progress. Offermatica helps improve your surfing experience by figuring out what websites work the best. Thanks to Super Crunching we now know that targeted job search assistance is a lot more effective than financial incentives in getting unemployed workers back on the job. Physicians may dislike the reduction in their status and power, but at the end of the day medicine should be about saving lives. And for many serious medical risks, it is the database analysis of scientists that points toward progress.

Super Crunching approaches are winning the day and driving out intuition and experience-based expertise because Super Crunching improves firms' bottom-line profitability—usually by enhancing the consumer's experience. A seller that can predict what you want to buy can make life easier. Whether it's Amazon's “Customers who bought this, also bought this” feature or Capital One's validated upselling, or Google's heavily crunched Gmail ads, the bottom line is an improvement in quality. Statistical software is even in place to tell you what not to buy. Peapod, the online grocery store, will interrupt my online session to ask, “Do you really want to buy twelve lemons?” because they know that's unusual and they'd prefer to catch mistakes early and keep me a happy customer.

Epagogix Agonistes

Notwithstanding these benefits, there persists a lingering concern that the Super Crunching of product attributes will lead to a grinding uniformity. The scripted performances of Direct Instruction teachers and CapOne sales reps are not just wearing on the employees; they can wear on the audience as well. Epagogix's meddling with movie scripts is even more troubling.