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1972—More Follow Through |
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A few months into the project, Jerry and some of our USOE clients had a falling out. I don’t recall any details, but the upshot was that they asked Clark for a new project director, and I wound up with the first of several managerial repair jobs. I must possess some diplomatic capabilities, because we didn’t lose the job or the associated funding, and pretty much everybody agreed afterward that our Follow Through project was a success.
The Follow Through data, need I point out, conformed to very few of the assumptions that underlie the usual statistical approaches: the textbooks and our experience afforded us little guidance as we worked through the messiness of that analysis. We had to form understandable judgments of the absolute and comparative success of a wide range of compensatory activities, applied with varying degrees of fidelity to the implementation of prescriptions designed by distant experts with competing philosophies, by people and institutions with their own diverse objectives and abilities and scattered irregularly across the nation. Which is to say that the Office of Education had succeeded in creating the “planned variation” they wanted, without incorporating into it much of the neatly-ordered balance at which scientific research design properly aims, and which conventional statistics presupposes. The evidence we had to work with, moreover, consisted of the responses of little kids to tests of success in school on whose validity and usefulness educators differ, then and now, sometimes violently. Frankly, I think nobody particularly envied us the task we’d worked so hard to make our own. We called upon the expertise of some of the most distinguished academics around the very academic Cambridge environment, enhancing their incomes with the Federal funds at our disposal and making sure they signed on to what we did: they, at least, wouldn’t be among the detractors we knew we’d face, when our results became public. |
| The most effective consultant team we brought aboard consisted of Jacob Cohen, the inventor and developer of the concept of statistical power, and my old friend and mentor from Harvard, Richard J Light. We’d gather the project folks in our conference room in Cambridge, banging our brains against some abstruse problem of statistical inference, and Dick would move animatedly around the room, talking non-stop and filling the surrounding white-boards with formulations of its underlying logic. Meanwhile, Jack would sit with his head in his hands, absorbing the ambient wisdom. Then, after a while, Jack would stand up, walk to the board, erase a patch, write a formula or draw a diagram, and say something like, “Wait a minute—wait a minute! Isn’t this what we’re looking for? And it would be. |
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