Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Formal Learning: Data, Big Data and Statistics.


The first challenge we can call an input problem.  Developmental disabilities are defined statistically for the most part.  In statistics

This will start what I hope will be a series on formal learning in individualized services.  Because I sometimes read, and all the writing these days is about big data (100.5%.)  There are corners of the system (almost vacant of service providers and probably of families) that hope that collecting outcomes data will lead to better services.  I think that hope should live on, but that people understand that the benefit will be much less direct than in other sections of the economy.

To give a quick overview of "big data" and its benefits, now that so much of what we interact with generates information and the capacity to store and analyze it so much vaster than it had been, that humans have grown much much abler to discern patterns that had escaped us in the past.  The opportunity to make change comes when we are able to see those patterns in context.  Using statistics, we can find what factors affect the patterns we are concerned with the most.  The term of art for the factor most relatable to changing a pattern is "the big coefficient."  Terms of art in statistics are still pretty arcane and prosaic.

From my spot on the spectrum, individualized services ought to include the search for, identification and exploitation of patterns along with respect, protection and kindness.  And math, particularly statistics, are the handiest tools we have with which to do that.  And the rest of this series, if and when it emerges, will be about why I think professional caregivers should do math.  But there are reasons to question whether big data can have the same impact in this field that it already has in medicine, marketing, science, politics or engineering.

One reason why big data will have trouble helping us help the people we serve might be called an input problem.  Just to clarify nomenclature, to the left is what is called a "normal distribution."  Of any given naturally occurring trait, there is a central tendency where any random individual is most likely to fall.  That is called the mean and can be pictured as a line through the highest part of the curve.  Where the curve flattens out to the left and right is called "the tails."  I bring this up just because the word "tails" can give either the sense of disparaging or adorable and I wouldn't want to be thought to mean either.

But most disabilities are defined at least in part by a trait being found in an individual to occur in the tail of the distribution.  You can imagine a stone dropped in still water.  Where the stone strikes, you get the most information and further along in the eddy you get less.  Not only are the people we serve rare, but it is easier using statistics to learn about commoner individuals than about rarer ones.  Which is just to say that coca-cola will still know more about refreshment-seekers than DDS will about people with developmental disabilities even after the latter starts really trying.

The other problem we can call an output problem.  When KFC wants people to eat more chicken, it is easy to find factors that correlate with the sought behavior.  If the state wants fewer people to be poor, it is relatively easy to use large data sets to figure out which factors have the profoundest impact (largest coefficient) on poverty and proliferate them.  But the Lanterman Act and those of us who serve it, wants people to live the lives they choose, not to behave according to a standard.  And that makes it much harder to find the large coefficient independent variables.

So now I hope to write upcoming posts about why measurement and math belong in the complex of tools states and their agents use in pursuit of our mission.  But I hope this post set some boundaries on how much we can hope to accomplish this way.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Why a "cost-based funding model" required a team of smarties to promote.

It should be an axiom of policy discussion that any words joining "model" in a phrase are euphemistic.  The Lanterman Coalition put forward an 8-or-so point platform together which is sadly circulating.  Of the points on their platform, in all likelihood, restoration of Early Start was the most meritorious and the most inevitable.   

In part I turn my attention to the plank advocating a "cost-based funding model" to partly offset the shrugs and nods likely to greet the proposal but more because I think that proposal is emblematic of the worst habits of advocates.  It is the south pole of advocacy, the place from which every direction is up. 

To translate "cost-based funding model" into English, the policy proposed is that the correct cost of services is determined by what the service provider spends.  Greybeards like me will recall this policy as the predominant one in 2002 at the dawn of a dozen catastrophic years.  Advocates like me and many of my friends on the Lanterman Coalition spent a great deal of time in Sacramento arguing that the model was unsustainable without an enormous increase in state funding.  Those of us who are eager to try the case that a $5 billion system needs to be a $12 billion system, which is to say, those of us eager to revisit 2002-2013 have their agenda and a coalition of statewide agencies for partners.

Another problem with the cost-plus model, other than that it quickly becomes a cost-minus model, is that true costs are hard to discover.  Translating the specific term "cost-based" from the original euphemism is "spending-based," a quantity that is not dependably related to necessary or constructive expenditures.

I will post soon about some reasonable alternatives, but the point I would get across in this post, is that anyone ready and willing to learn from experience, after the last dozen years and with the next dozen in prospect, should include sustainability as a principle of any system for which we would or should advocate.  I agree with my friends that the system is underfunded to do what it is meant to do the way it currently does it.  At least some of our advocacy needs to focus on sources of waste, potential sources of formal intelligence and engineering resilience into the system.

It isn't clear that a fully funded status quo would sensibly improve lives for people with developmental disabilities, but taxpayers surely would notice.