Uh Oh. The Chickens are Coming Home

 Folks, We've got a problem.  

Analogy Begins

If the US Federal budget was scaled to a family size $80K budget, here are the numbers.

1. Income ~ $80K

2. Expenses ~ $110K

Therefore $30K ain't in the checking account and goes onto the credit card.  It's like having a family member who can charge anything without the responsibility of paying for that.  IRL this is Congress who can buy a trillion dollar toilet seat without worrying about where the money comes from. This has been going on since the 1930's. 

SO.......

3. Current Credit Card Debt ~ $500,000 (yep more that half a mil on the credit card)

4. The interest payment on that debt is ~ $10,000 (13% of the budget)

Brief Analogy Intermission****************************

This will destroy the United States if allowed to continue. My grandson Bear who was born last year owed $82,000 immediately after taking his first breath. And who does he owe it to?? Well.....me for one.  I bought about 1000 in Treasury Bills last year. Who else? Well...me for one. Retirement funds are heavy investors.  Who else?  Top Five Countries are: Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, and Canada. 

Luxembourg??

HOWEVER:

Although this is an existential threat to the US, it may not be our biggest problem. 

Analogy continues.*******************************

The Head-of-Household decides the open a brokerage account/gambling account(aka Sovereign Wealth Fund) to allow speculation without family discussions.  And where, pray tell, is the money coming from??  Monetized Assets!! In our analogy, he/she is taking out a second mortgage on the house.  (house is an asset, second mortgage is a monetizing).  OK.  The HoH is an expert horse handicapper/stock analyst etc. But are they??  

IF YOU ARE HALF A MILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT, YOU DON'T

MORTGAGE THE HOUSE AND SPECULATE/GAMBLE!!! 

We're going to hear about Norway etc who have Sovereign Wealth Funds.  But they are not that deep in debt. The phrase "spend like a drunken sailor" according to a former drunken sailor (me) applies here bigtime.

If you want a real life example of all this, go to any casino

and watch people lose the rent money.  

                                      

 

I have a cunning plan!!

OK here's $0.02,  Funding education in general and student loans in particular is a train wreck.  Specifically students graduating with 5-6 figure debt in majors that pay less than minimum wage is, well, it's just wrong.  And here's how we fix it.

Thang 1: Limit the amount of financial aid based on MAJOR?!!?  Yep,  determine statistically what a major is worth and that's what a student can receive/borrow.  Theater majors can receive/borrow up to $15,000; engineering majors up to $70,000.  These figures should  be calculated on what that schools graduates are being paid.  This produces a school quality differential too.  MIT engineers may be able to receive/borrow 10 times as much as Podunk U.

Thang 2:  Adjust the tuition to reflect a courses market value.  Gen Ed courses stay with a flat tuition and are exempt from this system.  They are both too important and too vulnerable to let the major professors mess around with. This leaves roughly 70-80 hours of courses in the major.  OK, now what?

Adjust each course's hourly tuition by it's Market Value!!  Starting theater majors make 15K therefore a theater course tuition is (15K - 5K)/80 or $125/credit hour.  (The 5K is the Gen Ed set aside).  Engineering math is (60K-20K)/80 or $500. (20K is the Gen Ed set aside.)  

A theater degree would cost roughly the same as the entry level salary for, well let's face it, a McDonalds Assistant Manager.  Engineering degrees cost would be tied to the entry level salary.

Thang 3: OK Most schools already do this but: Tie faculty salaries to the major. This is a major sore spot in most faculties.  Brand new shiny finance professors make 2-3 times what 30 year full professors of English make. And brand new shiny profs make more that the prof that was hired two years ago.  Market forces are at work here.  

Thang 4: Develop a Chancellor's/Dean/Whatever slush fund.  My system would change universities into technical schools which must never happen. There are some coursers that are critical to producing a "College Graduate" that would never get funded using my system.  Fanatically guarding the Gen Ed courses will help but more help would be needed.  For example, theater courses outside the Gen Ed umbrella could easily be worth more to the University than to the student.  T'would be a poor school that never put Shakespeare on the stage.  

“And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, and asleep in dull cold marble, where no mention of me must be heard of, say, I taught thee.” 

Critical Thinking is the only way out.

Well, we can't shut them up.  And people are lead far astray by the Alex Jones' of the world.  So what is left.  In the new age of unfiltered information, where garbage is presented at the same volume level as not-garbage, we've got to become a lot more critical.  I don't mean critical in the popular sense but in the logician sense of examining information critically.

Let's start with a datum. "The sun will rise in the east."

Next apply Rule 1: Reductio ad absurdum.  This means generally to interpret the datum in its most reduced or restrictive form.

"The sun will rise every day exactly due east."

Not true. First we don't know which east, magnetic or true. Next we know from experience (if we stop and think about it) that the sun rises in different places so scrap the "every day" part.  

So this gives us the left hand side of the graph so to speak.

Now apply Rule 2: Inverse. This means reverse the truth value of the datam.

"The sun NEVER rises in the east." 

A little more thought about what we have observed will tell us that on some occasion the sun rose north of east and sometimes rose south of east.  It would then seem logical that at some point between north and south it rose directly east.  (I think they're called the equinox's.)

So now we have the right side of the curve.

Now comes the hard part.  We need to quantify the datum.  OK we do a whole bunch of observations and discover that the sun rises due east twice a year.  Therefore it rises somewhere else 363 days. 

So, the datum is mostly FALSE!!

(We are going to skip over Generalizing and other stuff to get to what I wanted to blog about.)

Let's change the datum. "Police interactions are racially biased."

Applying Rule 1: All police interactions are racially biased."

Nope.  Left side found.

Applying Rule 2: No police interactions are racially biased."

Nope again. Right side found.

Now we know the truth is somewhere in the middle.

So we are going to quantify the truth value of the datum. AND WE CAN'T BECAUSE THERE IS NO DATA!!

But that's an issue for a different blog.

Why is it important to quantify the truth value of the data.  Because in general there are two ways to solve a problem.  If the problem is an isolated occurrence, then it can be solved ad hoc. If there are only a small percentage of interactions then each can be investigated individually (and a lot better than anecdotal evidence would indicate is being done now.)  There would be no reason to invoke the 80/20 rule in which 80% of the resources are spent on 20% if the problems.

On the other hand, if it turns out that it is not an isolated instance then systemic measures must be implemented. For example one such systemic solution would be to implement a version of the West Point Honor Code (I will not cheat nor tolerate those who do.)  Change "cheat" to abuse.  This means when a bad actor does bad you fire every one who had possible knowledge the bad actor's badness.  Partners, supervisors, managers, dogs, cats etc.  

I tired of typing.  So I'll close with the thought, "In God we trust, everybody else we verify."

Yeee Haw, Ride 'Em Teacher

Welcome to the wild, wild West. "That's where we go riding into town and a-whapping and a-whooping every living thing that moves within an inch of its life!"  (Taggart, Blazing Saddles)  AKA American Schools.

There are two controlling bumper stickers here. The first is "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  The second came out of the Virginia Tech tragedy.  "When seconds count, we'll be there in minutes."

So...... How do we get good guys with guns into the schools within seconds?  Well, duh!  They have to be there all ready. 

OK but....Many people have a problem with armed personnel in schools unless they are police officers. This seems to be the only generally agreeable solution.  So either cops become teachers or teachers become cops.  Both are reasonable solutions, all things considered.

What about veterans? Hmmmm.  Dunno about that one.  My philosophy was "When in doubt, empty the clip".  In fact, I think that even police training is not exactly what we are looking for.  Police are trained and have policies and procedures to move cautiously and execute planned assaults. Their protective instincts are aligned toward each other, the public and finally the perps.

But teachers have a protective instinct that puts the kids first.  I/We have seen this time and again.  In the Moore, OK tornado, teachers put themselves between bad and kids. Over and over we see this. 

So, we need to give teachers something more that locked doors and slow responses.  I think a few bean bag shotguns scattered discretely and securely around a school with trained peace officer/teachers would help until the talking heads shut up long enough to let the people who know what they are doing solve the problem.  

Breadcrumbs

To quote Lewis Black, I don't have enough breadcrumbs to get home from here.

Just finished my taxes.  At the rate things are going, I may be the first American to have a negative Social Security Benefit.  Yep, I may have to pay the government for my SS.

Here's how this got started.

I paid Uncle Sam a premium (SS tax) for more that 20 years.  And Uncle said that when I got old and broke, he would pay me about $1400/month.  OK, I can work with that.

Uh no.  My medicare premium has to come out of that.  OK, now we're around $1300.

Uh no. Because I was covered by Teacher Retirement (mandatory) and paid no SS on those wages, I got hit with the WEP (windfall elimination provision) which says that I don't deserve the full 1300 so the basically cut in in half (down to about 600 now). OK, not what I was promised but .......

Uh no.  Because I have retirement income over a certain amount, my SS is taxable. Eighty five percent of it.  Amounts to about 900/year in additional taxes or about 75/month.  We're in the 500's now. Still I'm positive....

Uh no.  My little company (DNK Data Services, LLC) somehow miraculously turned a profit which comes into my personal income (pass through) to be taxed.  AND I HAVE TO PAY 15% of the profit to the Social Security Administration as self employment tax. Which means that if DNK makes enough money (which it hasn't), I'll have to pay more into SS that I draw out.

I already have to pay the government 13/month for my military retirement. That's not a typo. My military retirement is -$12.96 which my wife writes a check for each month.

But that's another story.

Ants, Cows and Higher Education

My favorite cockroach once wrote,

"I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization." (Archy the Cockroach from "Archy and Mehitabel" by Don Marquis)

I recall this quote every time the current Higher Education budget is discussed in Baton Rouge.

I also mumble another Archie Quote.

there is bound to be a certain amount of
trouble running any country
if you are president the trouble happens to you
but if you are a tyrant you can arrange things so
that most of the trouble happens to other people

Fixing is better that Looking

The engineering community has long since learned a lesson that educators need to be heeding. To quote Dr. Deming, “You cannot inspect quality into the product; it is already there.” When joined with the quote, “We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes.”, it becomes a methodology that can change the world.

Let me tell you how it all happened. It started with a war. World War II. (It was in all the papers.) Japan essentially was blasted back to the Stone Age. In 1947, Dr. Deming started talking to the Japanese engineers and scientist about his radical ideas about quality control. These ideas included 14 key points for quality management and 7 deadly diseases for killing a business.

And so Total Quality Management was born. The maker of cheap, junk cars (Toyota, Honda, et al) adopted Dr. Deming’s strategies and basically beat the pants off of Chevy and Ford et al. The US manufactures thought that they could inspect every car, correct all the defects and send them on their merry way.

The Japanese did it different. Every defect became a showstopper. Not another car is made until whatever caused the defect is fixed. That defect never happens again. Guess what. Soon you run out of defects. The quality is already there. They didn’t fix the car (process outcome), they fixed the process.

Which brings us to the dark and gloomy world of educational assessment (aka Institutional Effectiveness). Let’s look at a few common practices.

• Exit exams/senior portfolios: OK, this is pure inspection of a process outcome. So what do we do when a product (graduating senior) doesn’t pass inspection? Fix the defect? Fix the process? What is your guess? (None of the above may work in here somewhere, too.)
• All students must take and pass the Computer Competency Exam. Hmmm. Sounds like an inspection, a defect correction, and then hollering “Next.”

You get the idea here. What put American industry in the ditch and what is putting American education there is that the process never gets fixed. In industry, defects produce a shutdown and meeting of ALL stakeholders. No one leaves the meeting until there is a solution and, more importantly, everyone knows what the solution is.

Let’s take an example. Suppose, during a graduation audit, it is discovered that a graduating senior is missing a required course. The correct way to do this is to stop everything, and call everyone in. Faculty, staff, student, dogs, cats……Everyone. The cause of this defect is identified. It may be something as simple as an advising error or as complex as a system failure to monitor student progress between admissions and graduation. Either way, everyone will leave the meeting with a plan to prevent this from ever happening again to anyone.

What happens is an amazing evolution. (OK, not at first. The whine and cry level is phenomenal. “I’ve got stuff to fix. I can’t waste my time in these stupid meetings. “(actual quote)) Then, soon, people start realizing that they aren’t spending as much time putting out fires and are not sitting in dumb quality meetings either. Next thing you know, even new product start ups are running smooth because the quality is built into the process from the git go.

Are academics catching on? Well, the Federal government is now requiring that all online courses have proof that the person taking the test is the person registered for the course. That’s improving the inspection system.

Would it be great if there didn’t need to be a test because the person couldn’t get that far without knowing the material already. How would that work? What if we still used exams but didn’t put names on them? When 85% (or whatever) of the exams are good, the process worked, and all students advance. Test the process, not the product!