Dominic Cummings - In his own words

[sheldrake]

And you sound like someone trying to create public support for your position out of thin air. Why bother?

What's the point in a discussion group where everybody has to agree on all philosophical principles and the broad shape of 'correct' answers at the start?

Maybe there's a part of me that wishes the liberal left was better at winning. And actually, you know, liberal.

[Gentleman Jim]

And you sound like someone trying to create public support for your position out of thin air. Why bother?

Cummings is a shrewd operator, and understands that most parents don't have a clue about educational theory or even care about it. What they want is for their children to come home from school looking like they've had a good day, grown up a bit and learned something useful.

This weird nitpicking about manifestos and the like is pretty excruciating point scoring and I'm thinking of keeping you all in after class to help tidy the stationary cupboard.

Can't afford stationary - all the money goes on new books to follow new guidelines

[Allo V Psycho]

At the risk of prolonging a derail:

It is important to distinguish between research on one hand, and service improvement/audit on the other. The former is done to gain generalisable knowledge, and requires ethical approval and informed consent. The latter is done for local purposes, and does not require ethical approval or informed consent.

Intentionality is therefore key here, as it often is in ethical issues. I have two scars, of about the same size, and both caused by edged weapons. One was made by a surgeon, and the other by a member of a Glasgow street gang. One of these had altruistic intentions: the other, not so much.

RCTs are tricky in educational settings, since there are so many uncontrollable variables. One solution is to recruit volunteers, who can then be allocated to different 'equipoised'* arms of a study. This obviously raises a sampling issue, regarding who volunteers, and stratified sampling or some other sampling approach may be necessary. Small incentives may also be helpful. A cross-over design may be helpful to address equipoise. In this, the study cohort is divided into, say, Groups A and B, and Group A is exposed to Condition 1 for half the time, then to Condition 2, while Group B experiences the opposite.

Observational studies analysed by methods such as multi-level modelling (Wikipaedia is helpful) are useful in education, where many variables can be treated separately.

It may emerge that an audit of service change suggests a generalisable conclusion, even though it was intended for a local purpose only. There might then be an ethical desire to publish it, even though it wasn't originally badged as research, and did not receive prior ethical approval. In these circumstances, it may be appropriate to seek retrospective approval from an ethics committee, to confirm that publication does not breach Helsinki principles. https://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/79(4)373.pdf

Ethically-approved studies need not require informed consent either. Under particular circumstances, as long as participants are anonymised and can suffer no possible harms, a study can be carried out without consent (on blood samples, for instance, obtained for other purposes). In the extreme, a deception study can receive ethical approval, where the expressed aim is not the true aim, but it is hard to persuade ethics committees of the necessity for this.

Changes to teaching practices in schools generally come under the heading of 'service improvement', and parents may or may not subscribe to these. There may be a body of research evidence in support of the change. There may be the opportunity to withdraw a child from one setting and send them to another (frying pan/fire), but this is not always a realistic option. The best strategy for individual parents, perhaps, is involvement through School Boards etc.

As an aside, as someone whose first degree was in physics, and who worked in lab research for many years before moving into social sciences research, I would not speak slightly of social sciences research in general. Indeed, often the problems are more difficult and require more sophisticated means of study design and analysis than those of the physical sciences.

*equipoise, roughly speaking, is the requirement that one experimental condition should not be known to be better than the other.

[raven]

...most parents don't have a clue about educational theory or even care about it. What they want is for their children to come home from school looking like they've had a good day, grown up a bit and learned something useful.

This.

I don't know what the consent standards are for educational research, but I'd guess that they're a more relaxed than those for medicine. And I imagine the type of trials that get done have to be different anyway -- it's difficult to adminster a reading programe blind for a start, and there's outside factors like parents teaching kids at home that might be hard to monitor.

I thought the Clackmannanshire study made a pretty good case for synthetic phonics, though. Or did I miss something?

[Little waster]

I thought the Clackmannanshire study made a pretty good case for synthetic phonics, though. Or did I miss something?

As we used to say in the old country ITYFIALBMCTT.

This Clackmannanshire study, in which SSP was used with the whole age cohort of one small Scottish Education Authority, yielded large gains
in word recognition, and more modest gains in comprehension tests (Johnston and Watson, 2005). But in Scotland’s National Tests of reading, taken at the end of primary school, this experimental cohort did not score significantly better than its predecessors (Ellis and Moss, 2014). Devastatingly, after the conclusion of the study, the Scottish HMI observed that performance in reading in Clackmannanshire was “below the average for comparator authorities” (HMIE, 2006, p. 4).

I think the boring answer is phonics is fine as part of a broader literacy strategy, as one of a number of tools teachers should be allowed to use as they see fit and depending on the kids in front of them.

Dictating it to be the One True Way solution to all literacy issues is just asking for trouble.

ETA: Or to put it another way

Analysis of the wider context of the Clackmannanshire initiative supports Moss and Huxford's (2007) argument that literacy problems cannot be couched within a single paradigm's field of reference, and that policy makers need to consider evidence from different paradigms if they are to make robust decisions.

[El Pollo Diablo]

At the risk of prolonging a derail:

It is important to distinguish between research on one hand, and service improvement/audit on the other. The former is done to gain generalisable knowledge, and requires ethical approval and informed consent. The latter is done for local purposes, and does not require ethical approval or informed consent.

Intentionality is therefore key here, as it often is in ethical issues. I have two scars, of about the same size, and both caused by edged weapons. One was made by a surgeon, and the other by a member of a Glasgow street gang. One of these had altruistic intentions: the other, not so much.

RCTs are tricky in educational settings, since there are so many uncontrollable variables. One solution is to recruit volunteers, who can then be allocated to different 'equipoised'* arms of a study. This obviously raises a sampling issue, regarding who volunteers, and stratified sampling or some other sampling approach may be necessary. Small incentives may also be helpful. A cross-over design may be helpful to address equipoise. In this, the study cohort is divided into, say, Groups A and B, and Group A is exposed to Condition 1 for half the time, then to Condition 2, while Group B experiences the opposite.

Observational studies analysed by methods such as multi-level modelling (Wikipaedia is helpful) are useful in education, where many variables can be treated separately.

It may emerge that an audit of service change suggests a generalisable conclusion, even though it was intended for a local purpose only. There might then be an ethical desire to publish it, even though it wasn't originally badged as research, and did not receive prior ethical approval. In these circumstances, it may be appropriate to seek retrospective approval from an ethics committee, to confirm that publication does not breach Helsinki principles. https://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/79(4)373.pdf

Ethically-approved studies need not require informed consent either. Under particular circumstances, as long as participants are anonymised and can suffer no possible harms, a study can be carried out without consent (on blood samples, for instance, obtained for other purposes). In the extreme, a deception study can receive ethical approval, where the expressed aim is not the true aim, but it is hard to persuade ethics committees of the necessity for this.

Changes to teaching practices in schools generally come under the heading of 'service improvement', and parents may or may not subscribe to these. There may be a body of research evidence in support of the change. There may be the opportunity to withdraw a child from one setting and send them to another (frying pan/fire), but this is not always a realistic option. The best strategy for individual parents, perhaps, is involvement through School Boards etc.

As an aside, as someone whose first degree was in physics, and who worked in lab research for many years before moving into social sciences research, I would not speak slightly of social sciences research in general. Indeed, often the problems are more difficult and require more sophisticated means of study design and analysis than those of the physical sciences.

*equipoise, roughly speaking, is the requirement that one experimental condition should not be known to be better than the other.

Thank you for this.

[raven]

Thanks Little waster. It's a while since I was keeping up with it all & I've forgotten most of the finer details of the reading debates. Like the difference between analytic and synthetic phonics...

I sent my twopenneth into the Rose report at the time though, which iirc was mostly a suggestion to look at something like the Dibels assesments that you could use to target help for kids who were struggling & then monitor their progress. I really like Dibels because it looked at fluency & I hadn't come across anything like it in English schools.

Being curious, I found this interesting piece yesterday on why Soctland didn't roll out synthetic phonics with the same fervour that England did. There's certainly been some big changes in early literacy teaching since mine were that age - my neice (reception this year) knows what graphemes, phonemes and diagraphs are at barely 5. I'm not sure that level of technical vocabulary is helpful, but it was the same in the US school my kids attended late primary -- they didn't learn about questions, statements and commands; they learnt about interogatives, declaratives and imperatives.

ETA: Great minds have the same google-fu. I'd found the same paper you linked to.

[GeenDienst]

My early learning was mainly being battered around the head by nuns, which isn't something I think is ready for the mainstream. Probably explains a lot about me, though. And my habits.

[Gfamily]

My early learning was mainly being battered around the head by nuns, which isn't something I think is ready for the mainstream. Probably explains a lot about me, though. And my habits.

<baddum tish!>

[Fishnut]

I've just spend an excruciating few minutes reading over this thread and, in the words of my mother, I just want to bang all your heads together. The way people here are talking I'm not sure you realise that the left lost. Labour has lost every election since 2010 (I've lost count how many that actually was). The LibDems did such a sh.t job in a coalition they should never have been a part of that they became more hated than the tories, managed to use their Remain stance to rise to semi-relevance again which then spectacularly imploded during an almost comically bad campaign and now are seen as much a single-issue party as the brexit party with just as much relevance.

The Leave side won. You can say it was because they spent more money or did nefarious things but the fact is they won. They also were loads better at messaging and targeting that messaging where it would be most effective than the Remain side could ever hope to be.

I know I'm completely out of sync with the country at large. In the last few elections - national, local, EU - my facebook and twitter have been swamped with people extolling others to go out and vote and the perils of another Conservative government. If my social media was reflective of the country then we'd have a majority Labour government with the Tories in disarray and the LibDems celebrating their best ever election. But that's not the case, not at all.

Sheldrake is trying to explain why this is the case. You may not like the answers, you may be able to counter his arguments but he's clearly more in tune with the general population than most forumites. I know you don't believe this but it seems to me he's trying to help. The left can't possibly win again unless they acknowledge that they have lost and work out why. Going on about how more people voted for remain parties or whatever is just our version of "Hillary won the popular vote" - true but irrelevant. We look like sore losers. The simple fact is we lost. And until we are willing to accept that and have some humility and acknowledge that there are other points of view that may be just as valid as our own we will keep losing.

[sheldrake]

It's impossible to form a government in a democracy when you only appeal to activists and the bohemian intelligentsia of a country.
If your answer to this is to try to thwart democracy itself, you deserve to lose.

Engrave this on your hearts.

[sheldrake]

Constructive Advice: Clarify your goals and priorities.

The implicit priorities for the new left that much of the former labour vote (and almost all Tories) perceive are something like this (they may be wrong, but this is the perception): -

1) Defend sexual, religious & ethnic minorities from bigotry (unless they're jewish or Christian)

2) Work towards a borderless world. Nation States are redundant and there's something regressive about supporting them too vigorously

3) Increase incomes for public sector workers

4) The profit motive can't be trusted in the private sphere (but we'll pretend it doesn't exist in the public sphere). It's to be distrusted and extremely strict regulation on employment rights and environmental law is necessary.

5) Improve the lot of the unemployed, the low-waged private sector workers the elderly poor and the sick/disabled.


My suggestions

Make number 5) priority number 1)

Keep the old number 1) a high priority (but look out for Christian and Jewish interests too. In particular ask hard questions about perspecution of Christians and Jews in the middle east)

Drop number 2). Most people hate it and it makes you look exactly like the unpatriotic intellectuals George Orwell described. Love of country is not fascism unless it makes you fail at the last priority.

4) Matters but it is also the thing which generates the revenue for everything else. Be balanced about it, and be seen to be balanced (Blair got this right sort of, but was too nice to financial services and not nice enough to real innovators and wealth creators)

Increasing incomes for public sector workers is a means, not an end. There are places where it is warranted and places where it is not. Keep in mind that they still have powerful unions arguing for them and exerting influence in the Labour party when private sector employees don't so much. Be honest about what happened to the economy last time unions got too powerful before suggesting that private sector employees get re-unionised to that degree.

[nekomatic]

I mostly agree with Fishnut, but there is also a place for pushing back against the narrative that ‘the Tories won therefore everything they do is popular and right’. Also specifically re Sheldrake, if he’s here to contribute to a discussion of all this then I do wonder why it took him three pages of bickering and baiting about education to get to

It's not more ethical or democratic, it will just be perceived as fairer by much of the electorate because many people will react against the idea that their children are getting different treatment by being 'experimented on'.

which I don’t think anyone would have disagreed with had he just said so on page one.

Specifically re educational methods and reforms, I would be very interested to hear of actual research into parents’ and teachers’ attitudes to the Gove-and-later changes, because I suspect it’s a lot more complicated than either of the anecdotal pictures that have been painted above. I say this both as a parent and as someone whose other half has spent the last seven years qualifying as a primary teacher then teaching supply around south Manchester, in other words pretty much elbow deep in curriculum standards and how to try and deliver them.

[sheldrake]

I mostly agree with Fishnut, but there is also a place for pushing back against the narrative that ‘the Tories won therefore everything they do is popular and right’. Also specifically re Sheldrake, if he’s here to contribute to a discussion of all this then I do wonder why it took him three pages of bickering and baiting about education to get to

It's a thread about why Cummings, the political advisor, does what he does, not really a thread about correct methods for educational progress.

[nekomatic]

Constructive Advice.

In so far as anyone actually does have priorities matching your list, this is fair advice.

If you can accept that most people here don’t actually have those priorities in that order, you may get a better reception if you don’t claim that they do.

[sheldrake]

If you can accept that most people here don’t actually have those priorities in that order, you may get a better reception if you don’t claim that they do.

I can't tell what individual people's priorities here are unless they tell me. I'm describing how the priorities of the liberal-left as a political group appear to outsiders.

However, sometimes people behave one way, and swear blind that was not their intention when it's spelled out in black and white. Repeatedly.

[Little waster]

I mostly agree with Fishnut, but there is also a place for pushing back against the narrative that ‘the Tories won therefore everything they do is popular and right’. Also specifically re Sheldrake, if he’s here to contribute to a discussion of all this then I do wonder why it took him three pages of bickering and baiting about education to get to

It's a thread about why Cummings, the political advisor, does what he does, not really a thread about correct methods for educational progress.

Actually the OP was:-

So lots of people have views on Dominic Cummings. I thought it was interesting to see what he actually says himself. I only found two lectures but both are interesting I think.

It's interesting how much of the first lecture includes ideas I expect this community agrees with. Despite the fact that on the whole it's on a very different part of the political spectrum. For example the need for evidence based policy and greater use of scientific methods in government and policy making.

The second lecture is just a huge challenge I think for those of us who like to think we're influencing the political conversation by sharing our opinions with other people in our social circles.

Thoughts on the Civil Service (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNaWPV5l4j4

Why leave won the referendum (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDbRxH9Kiy4

Contrasting the bolded part with what he actually did at the DoE, indicates whether or not Cummings is sincere in his stated ideas or whether he's just paying lip-service, and gives an indication of how a Cummings-orchestrated government is likely to act going forward.

[sheldrake]

The talk he gave, vs his advice not to use RCT in education, is best explained by him understanding the public perception of 'my children are being experimented on'. It's very important he manage that, given his job. There are just some areas where govt. cannot behave so easily in the way a good scientist would like.

That's what I tried to explain ad nauseum.

[Stephanie]

The talk he gave, vs his advice not to use RCT in education, is best explained by him understanding the public perception of 'my children are being experimented on'. It's very important he manage that, given his job. There are just some areas where govt. cannot behave so easily in the way a good scientist would like.

That's what I tried to explain ad nauseum.

tbh, that's how i read it, I too was a bit surprised at the tone of the thread.

[nekomatic]

I can't tell what individual people's priorities here are unless they tell me. I'm describing how the priorities of the liberal-left as a political group appear to outsiders.

Ok, so don’t address everyone as if you know they belong to that version of the liberal left.

The talk he gave, vs his advice not to use RCT in education, is best explained by him understanding the public perception of 'my children are being experimented on'. It's very important he manage that, given his job. There are just some areas where govt. cannot behave so easily in the way a good scientist would like.

Well based on what we’ve seen so far ‘manage’ appears to mean ‘pay lip service to, then ignore’ then. Forgive us our scepticism.

Do you think there are any issues on which he’ll find ways of actually resolving problems like this?

[sheldrake]

Ok, so don’t address everyone as if you know they belong to that version of the liberal left.

I don't think I've actually accused anybody of holding a position they don't hold, have I?

Well based on what we’ve seen so far ‘manage’ appears to mean ‘pay lip service to, then ignore’ then. Forgive us our scepticism.

Do you think there are any issues on which he’ll find ways of actually resolving problems like this?

He's managing the perception of the public who might be persuaded to vote Tory. So far, he's doing a pretty good job. The people he's alienating are generally people who would not vote Conservative I think.

I think the conflict here between his claimed love of science vs how he appears to behave is a deep one. Some of the time, he's just being pragmatic even though he accepts the scientific method would be better. But there is an increasing conflict between the conclusions of modern social science espoused on the left and the historical precedents the right tends to trust more, and I think this was at the heart of statements like 'we've had enough of experts'.

One of the things I repeatedly do here is pick away at the conclusions of social & environmental science and I think some people find that instinctively repellent because this is almost like picking a side in a tribal battle.

[sTeamTraen]

I'm really looking forward to the arrival of the latest issue of Private Eye, in which the spoof "Diary" (written by Craig Brown) features Dominic Cummings.

[plodder]

Oh, that’s not what’s repellent. What’s repellent is being “skeptical” of “left wing” or “liberal” findings, and promoting some cynical nasty nonsense in an attempt to stir up trouble amongst people who would rather just have an interesting conversation.

[plodder]

I'm really looking forward to the arrival of the latest issue of Private Eye, in which the spoof "Diary" (written by Craig Brown) features Dominic Cummings.

That’s wonderful

[sheldrake]

Oh, that’s not what’s repellent. What’s repellent is being “skeptical” of “left wing” or “liberal” findings, and promoting some cynical nasty nonsense in an attempt to stir up trouble amongst people who would rather just have an interesting conversation.

It's not nonsense though. That's your biggest problem, it's always at least true enough to win elections and sometimes it's outright true.