The Buck Stops Here

Don't Believe the "Defenders" of Teachers: Teachers Do Matter

2012-01-28T17:49:00.001-06:00

You often see education commentators trying to suggest that bad school performance is almost entirely the fault of poverty and other external factors, not the fault of poor teaching. In making this claim, commentators often point to the level of variation in student test scores that is allegedly "explained" by teachers. For example, Anthony Cody says, "Even Eric Hanushek, the economist who has done more to advance these evaluation systems than anyone, admits that teachers only account for around ten percent of the variability in student test scores."

Family and income are surely important, but the "10% of variance" argument is wrong for at least two reasons:

First, in statistical terms, saying that teachers account for 10% of the variance in student test scores does NOT mean that teachers are unimportant. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (At the end of the blog post, I say more about what explaining variance means.)

The eminent Harvard professors Rosenthal and Rubin explained this in a 1982 article, "A Simple, General Purpose Display of Magnitude of Experimental Effect," Journal of Educational Psychology 74 no. 2: 166-69 (that article isn't available online, but is described here).

As luck would have it, Rosenthal and Rubin address the precise example of a case wherein 10% of the variance was explained:

We found experienced behavioral researchers and experienced statisticians quitesurprised when we showed them that the Pearson r of .32 associated with a coefficient of determination (r²) of only .10 was the correlational equivalent of increasing a success rate from 34% to 66% by means of an experimental treatment procedure; for example, these values could mean that adeath rate under the control condition is 66% but is only 34% under the experimental condition. We believe . . . that there may be a widespread tendency to underestimate the importance of the effects of behavioral (and biomedical) interventions . . . simply because they are often associated with what arethought to be low values of r².

By analogy, saying that teacher quality explains 10% of the variance would be equivalent to saying that teachers can raise the passing rate from 34% to 66%. That's nothing to sneeze at, and it certainly isn't a reason for teachers to throw up their hands in dismay at the hopelessness of their task.

Second, the fact that teachers account for 10% of variance NOW, given a particular set of data points, tells us little or nothing about the true causal importance of teachers. 10% isn't a Platonic ceiling on what teachers can accomplish, and the proportion of variance explained tells us very little about how much impact teachers really do have.

A simple hypothetical example makes this clear: Imagine that all teachers in a school were of equal quality. Given equal teachers, any variation in student test scores would automatically have to arise from something other than differing quality of teaching. So a regression equation in that context might tell us that demographics explain a huge amount of the variation in test scores, while teaching quality explains nothing. But it would be completely wrong to conclude that demographics are inherently more important than teaching quality, or even that teaching quality doesn't matter. The exact opposite might be the case, for all that such a regression could tell us.

Moreover, if all teachers became twice as effective as they are now, there would still be variance among teachers and variance among student test scores, and teachers collectively might still "account" for a "small" amount of variance, but student performance might be much higher. The fact that teachers account for 10% of variance today (as large as that actually is) simply does not give us any sort of limit on how much student achievement could rise if the mean teacher effectiveness shifted sharply to the right.

So the would-be defenders of teachers can breathe a sigh of relief: value-added modeling might still be a shaky idea for several other reasons, but there's no need to denigrate the potential of teachers.

* * *

A more detailed statistical explanation:

The proportion of variance explained means is that if you take the Pearson product-moment correlation, and square it, you end up (after some algebra) with the following:

What does this mean? The denominator is calculated by taking all the individual Y's (in the education context, all of the student test scores that you're trying to explain), subtracting the average Y value, squaring all of the differences, and adding up all of the squared values. In the context of the following graph, the denominator gives us a measure of the total squared distance (in the vertical direction) that all of the red dots deviate from the average Y value.

The numerator tells us how far the regression line deviates from the average Y value. The regression line predicts that the Y values will be along the line itself, which obviously isn't exactly true. So the predicted Y values (that's what the little ^ sign over the Y means) have the average Y value subtracted, the difference is squared, and then all the squared differences are added up.

All in all, the "proportion of variance explained" figure is just a way to represent how close a regression line based on X will come to the actual red dots in the graph, compared to how close a line based on just the average red dot will come.

For the same reason that correlation is not causation, accounting for variance does not provide an upper limit for the true causal importance of a variable. As noted above, the level of variance "explained" is a bad way to determine how important X actually is. See D'Andrade and Hart, for example.

Jeff Buckley's "Corpus Christi Carol"

2012-01-25T19:39:00.001-06:00

Just lovely:

Also this:

The New Groupthink

2012-01-17T15:05:00.000-06:00

From a New York Times article titled "The New Groupthink":

Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.

I'm not sure why group seating in classrooms seems to have caught on so strongly. As a parent, I know that children are better behaved (if only by necessity) when they're not sitting close enough to bother someone else, mark on the other child's paper, etc.

A Case Study in Bias

2012-01-07T18:18:00.002-06:00

Two studies came out comparing the performance of schools or teachers. In the first case, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff came up with just about the most extensive and sophisticated study of teachers' value-added that I've ever seen. As highlighted in the New York Times, the study includes estimates for how much high-quality teachers improve their students' income years later, and also (see pp. 29 ff.) includes a new way to check for bias by looking at how cohorts of students change performance when a high or low value-added teacher arrives from somewhere else. Very cool.

But such a study, implying that some teachers are better than others, and that teacher quality can be revealed by how well their students do on tests (conditioning on prior achievement and student demographics), is disturbing to some people. Diane Ravitch tweeted at least 67 times the day the study came out, trying to undermine the study by questioning its lack of peer review (so far), the way in which it was conducted, and the very project of looking at test scores in the first place.

In the second case, there's a group called Educate Now in Louisiana that released a PDF chart (available here) that merely lists the schools in New Orleans identified by whether they are Recovery School District schools or voucher-accepting private schools, and then listing what percentage of students score above basic on English and Math in grades 3-5. That's all. No attempt to control for the individual students' prior achievement, no attempt to control for any student demographic variables such as poverty, no attempt to control for the fact that students are eligible for vouchers only if they had been attending a failing public school, no statistical analysis whatsoever.

This is as primitive as it gets, and is a horrible way to judge the merit of voucher schools (as I explained here).

Did Diane Ravitch tweet 67 times criticizing this purported attempt to compare voucher schools to public schools? No: right in the midst of her incessant criticism of an immeasurably superior study, she sent out one tweet that said, "How did voucher schools in New Orleans do?" followed by a link.

Ravitch here displays the worst sort of intellectual bias: when what looks like one of the best studies out there doesn't fit her ideology, she acts as if it is far more questionable than the baloney that she otherwise is happy to plug. To be sure, it's OK to ask questions about the new value-added study, what it means, how it was done, and whether it was oversold in the media. But it's not OK to pass along a worthless analysis of the merits of vouchers.

Anti-reformers need to think a bit more carefully about whether they want someone as their standard-bearer who doesn't know the difference between good and bad research (or, worse, who doesn't care).

"Starch Consumption Raises Risk Of Breast Cancer Coming Back"

2011-12-18T14:49:00.000-06:00

So read the headline on a news story recently. A new study found as follows:

Breast cancer survivors whose starch intake is above average have a greater risk of cancer recurrence compared to other breast cancer survivors, researchers from the University of California, San Diego explained at the 2011 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Dec. 6-10, 2011. The researchers added that it is in particular starch that raises the risk, and not just overall carbohydrates.

Plausible. But it turned out that all the researchers did was interview the women once a year about their diet, and women whose breast cancer came back were eating 2.3 GRAMS of carbohydrates more than the average per day, only half of which was starch. As far as I can tell, that's about as much as is in 1 tablespoon of cooked rice. So the headline was based on women claiming to have eaten an additional 1 tablespoon of cooked rice (or some equivalent) per day.

This does not strike me as a useful finding. There is no way that a once-a-year interview can pinpoint women’s carbohydrate consumption down to the tablespoon, and such a miniscule amount of starch surely can't be making a clinical difference anyway.

Charter Schools and Segregation

2011-11-24T17:49:00.006-06:00

Charter schools are often accused of "segregation" merely for serving too many black kids. One recent example of this criticism comes from Zoe Burkholder of Montclair State University in New Jersey, who has an article in Teachers College Record lamenting the fact that DC Prep Charter School is 98% black.

She does concede that black parents have a good reason to choose DC Prep: "parents in D.C. can choose between a traditional public school racked with violence and high dropout rates, or a charter school that is safe and promises to teach at least two of the '3 Rs.'" She even admits that "maybe anyone would prefer a charter school like DC Prep under these conditions."

But she immediately backs away from agreeing that black parents ought to have the option of choosing such a school:

But that doesn’t make it okay, and here is why. When you step back from DC Prep, and successful charter schools like it, what you see is a public school that is racially and socio-economically segregated and inherently very different from the form and function of the majority of public schools in America. . . . Since Horace Mann first rode horseback through New England to sell the idea of tax-supported “common schools” for all children, Americans have dared to dream that public education will instill in our citizenry the many capacities necessary for self-government: critical thinking, civic engagement, tolerance for diversity, an appreciation for the arts and sciences, a knowledge of global affairs, a critical understanding of American history, and the capacity for civil debate.

I've said this about Diane Ravitch before: If you're going to oppose the so-called "segregation" of charter schools, even though it arises from the completely voluntary choices of black parents, you should think twice before waxing so eloquent about Horace Mann's day, when it was often illegal for black people to attend school anywhere. Nor is it historically correct that "Americans" wanted "tolerance of diversity" in public schools during the 100+ years of officially-mandated segregation.

In any event, Burkholder makes the same mistake that the highly publicized Civil Rights Project (headed by Gary Orfield) made: she compares DC Prep Charter School to "the majority of public schools in America."

That comparison is completely meaningless. We know that charter schools are much more likely to be located in inner-city neighborhoods where the demographics are much different from the national average. Indeed, if an inner-city DC or Atlanta charter school had demographics that resembled the broader United States, that school would instantly be accused of promoting segregation by gathering too many white students in one place.

What Burkholder should have done is compare DC Prep to nearby traditional public schools. On that ground, it turns out that a 98% black charter school in a heavily black area of northeastern D.C. isn't that unusual. The closest traditional public school to DC Prep is Noyes Elementary, which is 96% black, 3% Hispanic, and all of zero percent white.

Yes, racial imbalance still exists. But attacking charter schools does nothing to get rid of it.

Momentum in Sports

2011-11-20T14:32:00.002-06:00

The Freakonomics blog makes a point that I think is wrong:

The best place to start is with a famous (for academia) paper from several years ago, called “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” As you can glean from that snazzy subtitle, the authors come down against momentum, arguing that a “hot streak” is really just a random sequence that we misperceive to be more meaningful than it is.

Ever try flipping a coin 100 times? You’ll be surprised at how many long, unbroken sequences of heads or tails you get. It’s easy to mistake that for a pattern, suggesting some kind of meaning or momentum, but it’s really just a pure illustration of randomness itself. The fact is that if you get 10 heads in a row, the next flip is no more likely to be heads (or tails, for that matter).

And so it is, for the most part, with hot hands and hot streaks and hot quarterbacks. In our Momentum video, you’ll hear Toby Moscowitz, the academic co-author of Scorecasting, discuss how pretty much everyone in football believes in momentum. But, having looked at a lot of NFL data, Moscowitz reaches a sobering conclusion: “There is a much stronger belief in momentum than is warranted by what we see in the data.”
* * *

Consider one example in our video, the Buffalo Bills’ redonkulous 32-point comeback against the Houston Oilers in 1993. As Chris “Mad Dog” Russo puts it: “You’re gonna tell me momentum had nothing to do with that game?!”

Okay, Chris, I’ll take a shot at telling you exactly that. You know why we’re still talking about that game? Because it was a massive anomaly – the kind of comeback that almost never happens. It was so rare that our brains have an easy time recalling it. (We do this with all anomalies – dramatic plane crashes, mass murders, and so on.) And when we recall something so easily, we tend to believe it’s far more common that it actually is.

The truth is that you’re bound to get a wild 32-point-comeback once in a while, just as you’re bound to get a streak of 10 or 12 heads too.

Here's the thing: a 32-point comeback might indeed be so rare that it fits within a statistically normal distribution as several standard deviations above the mean. This does NOT mean, however, that a 32-point comeback was itself a matter of random chance -- the 32-point comeback happened because of how a bunch of human beings performed on a given day, and their performance was not random at all. Their performance was affected non-randomly by their preparation and skills, their coaching, their choices of plays, and their confidence level (the latter of which would be dramatically affected if either team started to think that the "momentum" was heading in a particular direction).

Try an analogy: A 7-foot-tall man is a rarity, and if human height falls into a normal distribution, someone might make the following claim, akin to the dismissal of sports momentum: "This 7-foot-tall man's height might seem to have sprung from some genetic factor, but in fact, you find 7-foot-tall men in nature only as often as would be expected by chance. Therefore his height is just a matter of random chance, not genetics."

Well, the fact that this particular guy got the genes to be 7 feet tall might be random chance from the point of view of a statistician looking at all of humanity, but that in no way proves that his height was unrelated to genes. Similarly, the fact that one particular sports team had a huge amount of momentum on a particular day might be described as random chance, but that doesn't disprove the claim that it did have momentum then.

Songs I Like

2011-11-09T09:57:00.011-06:00

UPDATE: Here's a Spotify list of most of the songs below.

Deas Vail, “Desire.”

The National, “Exile, Vilify.”

Eisley, "One Day I Slowly Floated Away."

Eisley, "Memories."

Deas Vail, "Shoreline."

Jeff Buckley, "Corpus Christi Carol."

Copeland, “Should You Return.”

With Lions, “Our Great Rise.”

The Future of Forestry, “If You Find Her.”

Jonsi, “Tornado.”

Gotye with Kimbra, “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

The Honey Trees, “To Be With You.”

Eric Whitacre, “Lux Arumque.”

Espen Lind, “Scared of Heights.”

Kimbra, “Settle Down.”

The Reign of Kindo, “The Moments In Between.”

Peter Groenwald, “Wreckage.”
<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://petergroenwald.bandcamp.com/track/wreckage"&amp;gt;Wreckage by Peter Groenwald&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>

Yael Naim, “New Soul.”

Bat for Lashes, “Sleep Alone.”

Civil Twilight, “Human.”

Digital Daggers, “Surrender.”

Shiny Toy Guns, "You Are the One."

Dubstar, "Stars."

Muse, Undisclosed Desires.

Erin McCarley, "Pitter-Pat."

Deadmau5 and Kaskade, “I Remember.”

Marc Martel, "Somebody to Love."

Dredg, "Information."

Eden's Edge, "Blue Moon of Kentucky."

Lo-Pro, "Reach."

George Michael, "I Can't Make You Love Me."

And just for fun: George Michael, “1, 2, 3.”

What Causes Student Achievement?

2011-11-04T12:36:00.003-05:00

Dana Goldstein addresses that question:

As you can see, by estimating teacher effects at 20 percent, I've interpreted the research consensus quite generously. Matthew DiCarlo, a sociologist with the Shanker Institute, has looked at this same body of research and concluded that another 20 percent of the causes of student achievement gaps are "unobservable" (ex; differences in innate intelligence, statistical error, other mystery causes); and that the rest, about 60 percent, can likely be explained by all the myriad factors associated with socioeconomic status.

The parsing out of what causes student achievement seems very dubious. What if part of the way that socioeconomic status leads to higher achievement is that parents use it to buy houses in school zones with . . . better teachers? Seems very likely, but there's no way to tell with the usual models.

One way we could figure out how to divvy up responsibility would be to get 500 rich kids and randomly assign half to attend a school with teachers identified as horrible (but otherwise keeping everything else about the school the same, such as peers or school spending), and then compare them to the other rich kids who got to attend their regular school. Then you'd really be able to see how much rich kids were benefiting from being able to buy access to good teachers.

But you'd never be able to do such a study -- no one would sign up.

Memory and the Law

2011-10-19T14:29:00.001-05:00

All of the studies on the fallibility of memory should make us question the weight given to eyewitness testimony.

Good collection of essays

2011-10-16T08:15:00.003-05:00

From 52 prominent economists:

This is a compendium of fifty-four papers written by distinguished economists in response to an invitation by the National Science Foundation's Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (NSF/SBE) to economists and relevant research communities in August 2010 to write white papers that describe grand challenge questions in their sciences that transcend near-term funding cycles and are "likely to drive next generation research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences." These papers offer a number of exciting and at times provocative ideas about future research agendas in economics. The papers could also generate compelling ideas for infrastructure projects, new methodologies and important research topics.

Contributors include James Heckman, Daron Acemoglu,
David Cutler, Esther Duflo, and Hal Varian.

Addicted to Running

2011-10-11T16:48:00.001-05:00

Someone who qualifies: "Woman Completes Chicago Marathon and Delivers Baby."

Interesting article on Steve Jobs

2011-10-10T17:47:00.001-05:00

Here.

Charter School Research

2011-08-20T21:52:00.008-05:00

One often sees the claim that there is no evidence that charter schools are particularly effective. Some studies, to be sure, do show that charter schools look pretty similar to other public schools (see RAND 2009).

But there are many recent well-designed studies that give the advantage to charter schools.

1. Booker et al., RAND 2009 :

We find that charter high schools in Florida and in Chicago have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, univariate probit estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college. Using the proximity of charters and other types of high schools as exogenous instruments for charter high school attendance, we find even stronger effects in bivariate probit models of charter attendance and educational attainment. While large, our estimates are in line with previous studies of the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.

2. Mathematica report for U.S. Department of Education (2010) (numerous jurisdictions):

We found that study charter schools serving more low income or low achieving students had statistically significant positive effects on math test scores, while charter schools serving more advantaged students—those with higher income and prior achievement—had significant negative effects on math test scores.

3. Mathematica study of KIPP middle schools nationwide (2010):

We find that students entering these 22 KIPP schools typically had prior achievement levels that were lower than average achievement in their local school districts. For the vast majority of KIPP schools studied, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in mathematics and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial. Estimated impacts are frequently large enough to substantially reduce race/and income/based achievement gaps within three years of entering KIPP.

4. CREDO national study (2009), which, despite misleading reports, actually found that students improve more the longer they stay in charter schools.

As displayed in Figure 10, students generally experience a significant negative impact on learning in reading in their first year of charter enrollment, in the range of ‐.06 standard deviations. By the second year of charter school enrollment, students get a positive and significant impact on learning, but the magnitude is quite small at .01 standard deviations. Greater gains in reading are realized after three years; the average student with three years of charter schooling has a .02 standard deviation gain in learning. . . .

When looking at math learning gains the effects are more pronounced. Students in their first year of charter enrollment had gains that were ‐.09 standard deviations behind a typical TPS gain. The second year of enrollment produced no difference in the degree of learning gains. Mildly positive but significant impacts on learning gains are realized if a student remains in a charter school for three years or more, about .03 standard deviations in the third.

5. CREDO study of New York City (2010):

Overall the results found that the typical student in a New York City charter school learns more than their virtual counterparts in their feeder pool in reading and mathematics. In school-by-school comparisons New York City charters perform relatively better in math than in reading. In math, more than half the charter schools are showing academic growth that is statistically larger than their students would have achieved in their regular public schools. A third of charter schools show no difference, and 16 percent were found to have significantly lower learning. In reading, the numbers are not as strong, but show that nearly 30 percent outperform their local alternatives, 12 percent deliver worse results and about 60 percent are producing learning that is equivalent to their regular public school counterparts.

6. Hoxby, Murarky, and Kang (2009) (New York City):

On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the "Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap" in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English. . . . A student who attends a charter high school is about 7 percent more likely to earn a Regents diploma by age 20 for each year he spends in that school. For instance, a student who spent grades ten through twelve in charter high school would have about a 21 percent higher probability of getting a Regents diploma.

7. Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2009) (Boston):

Among other key findings of the report: the impact of charter schools was particularly dramatic in middle school math.The effect of a single year spent in a charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achievement gap. Performance in English Language Arts also significantly increased for charter middle school students, though less dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger performance scores in high school, in English Language Arts, math, writing topic development, and writing composition.

8. CREDO study of Indiana (2011):

Compared to the educational gains the charter students would have had in their traditional public schools, the analysis shows that students in Indiana charter schools make dramatically larger learning gains. While there are a small number of schools with inferior performance in reading, nearly half the charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their traditional public school counterparts. In math, none of the charter schools studied performs worse than the traditional public schools and nearly one quarter out-perform them.

9. Nisar (2010) (Milwaukee):

Charter schools with higher level of autonomy from the district in terms of ﬁnancial budget, academic program, and hiring decisions, are effective. I show that students in these charter schools would read at a grade level higher than similar students who attend a traditional public school in three years. Irrespective of the type and the age of the charter school, race of the student, or grade level, attending a charter school has a positive effect on low achieving students. I show that these effects on low achieving students are substantial and are more than enough to eliminate the achievement gap in two years.

10. Hoxby and Rockoff (2004) (Chicago):

We ﬁnd positive and statistically signiﬁcant charter school eﬀects for students who applied for Kindergarten through 3rd grade. For students applying to kindergarten or 1st grade, we ﬁnd that charter school enrollment raised reading test scores by approximately 8 percentile points. For students applying to 2nd or 3rd grade, we ﬁnd that enrollment raised math scores by approximately 10 percentile points and reading scores by approximately 4 percentile points.

Does this mean that all charter schools are good? Not by any means. CREDO's 2011 study of Pennsylvania, for example, found that students do less well in charter schools (primarily in virtual charters). And there are plenty of similar studies.

The point, rather, is that trying to prove "which one is better" on any kind of generalized basis is a fool's errand. Anyone who claims nationwide inferiority, parity, or superiority for charter schools is grossly oversimplifying what could be an interesting debate about why charter schools in some states or neighborhoods seem to be doing so much better while others are doing the same or worse. The education debate has to move beyond simplistic bromides for us to find out what sorts of state charter laws work, what sorts of charter school behavior are helpful, and the like.

For example, here's an August 2011 study from MIT analyzing what makes certain urban charter schools more successful than others: Angrist, Pathak, and Walters (2011):

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond ambient non-charter levels (that is, the average achievement level for urban non-charter students), and beyond non-urban achievement in math. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity in the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban schools with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. We link the magnitude of charter impacts to distinctive pedagogical features of urban charters such as the length of the school day and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by over-subscribed urban schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to education.

Family Photo

2011-08-12T22:16:00.002-05:00

Around the piano:

Productivity Tips

2011-08-07T15:55:00.000-05:00

Good observations from Richard Hamming’s classic talk You and Your Research:

``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. . . . `````

On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere. I've often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn't have so much to show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

. . .

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

Then there’s this on changing your field:

Question: You mentioned the problem of the Nobel Prize and the subsequent notoriety of what was done to some of the careers. Isn't that kind of a much more broad problem of fame? What can one do?

Hamming: Some things you could do are the following. Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field. Thus, I shifted from numerical analysis, to hardware, to software, and so on, periodically, because you tend to use up your ideas. When you go to a new field, you have to start over as a baby. You are no longer the big mukity muk and you can start back there and you can start planting those acorns which will become the giant oaks. Shannon, I believe, ruined himself. In fact when he left Bell Labs, I said, ``That's the end of Shannon's scientific career.'' I received a lot of flak from my friends who said that Shannon was just as smart as ever. I said, ``Yes, he'll be just as smart, but that's the end of his scientific career,'' and I truly believe it was.

You have to change. You get tired after a while; you use up your originality in one field. You need to get something nearby. I'm not saying that you shift from music to theoretical physics to English literature; I mean within your field you should shift areas so that you don't go stale. You couldn't get away with forcing a change every seven years, but if you could, I would require a condition for doing research, being that you will change your field of research every seven years with a reasonable definition of what it means, or at the end of 10 years, management has the right to compel you to change. I would insist on a change because I'm serious. What happens to the old fellows is that they get a technique going; they keep on using it. They were marching in that direction which was right then, but the world changes. There's the new direction; but the old fellows are still marching in their former direction.

Does KIPP Have Extracurriculars?

2011-07-03T12:36:00.015-05:00

In a NY Times op-ed, David Brooks said:

As the education blogger Whitney Tilson has pointed out, the schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these schools are also the places where students are most likely to participate in chess and dance. They are the places where they are most likely to read Shakespeare and argue about philosophy and physics.

In response, Jim Horn, a sharp-tongued education blogger who hates KIPP schools with a good deal more passion than reason, says this:

Jay Mathews is corporate media's expert on KIPP, and not even Mathews, in all his fawning over Levin and Feinberg in his book and in his endless promotion at WaPo or in interviews, even mentions chess programs, Shakepeare, philosophy, or physics in a KIPP school. Not even chief hedge fund KIPPster propagandist, Whitney Tilson, would make up such an obvious lie.

The amount of argument, on anything, in a KIPP school or one of KIPP's knock-offs, is between negligible and none, and if Shakespeare or philosophy is ever mentioned, it is most likely on one of the thousands of worksheets these children fill out every year. Has KIPP ever fielded a chess team or dance team? Not even a mention on any of KIPP's websites, much less in a news article.

Not a mention of chess or dance on any of KIPP's websites? How about the following:

1. KIPP's mainpage:

After a long day of hard work, KIPPsters enjoy the chance to express themselves in creative ways. Music, art, sports and dance are just a few examples of the programs available in KIPP schools across the country. Many KIPP schools have activities such as basketball, track, lacrosse, step teams and chess clubs. These extracurricular opportunities work together with our academic programs to create a well-rounded experience for our students.

A look inside the music program at KIPP Academy in New York City demonstrates the benefits of KIPP's strong arts curriculum. KIPP Academy students play everything from classical pieces to modern R&B and pop music, and the orchestra has performed across the nation. In New Orleans, KIPP McDonogh 15 has an incredible jazz band, while in Los Angeles KIPP Academy of Opportunity has an extraordinary, high-energy drum line. These KIPP schools exemplify KIPP's commitment that students will work hard while still having fun.

2. From KIPP Delta's website:

On April 17th, engineering students competed in an electric
car race in Pensacola, Florida and won.
There were many different participants in high school and college level.
Also on April 17th, a group of students
competed in the state chess
tournament.

3. Part of a list of activities on the KIPP TEAM (New Jersey) website:

Drumline
Chess Club
Film Club
Yoga Club
Fight Club
Step Team

4. From KIPP Colorado's website:

Volunteer instructors are needed to help students engage in a variety of activities, including but not limited to yoga, chess, distance running, intuitive thinking, architecture, robotics, computer programming, dance, art, and music.

5. From KIPP Philadelphia's website:

On 16 Saturdays a year all KIPP Philadelphia Schools hold Saturday School, a fun time for our students to learn about subjects not covered in a traditional school curriculum. Past classes have included mural arts, Latin dance, cooking, chess, leadership, and Tae Kwon Do.

6. From the KIPP Memphis website:

By extending the school day until 5 pm, two Saturdays per month, plus summer school, and having teachers available for homework help by cell phone, KIPP is proving what is possible in public education. We offer extracurricular activities, such as student government, art, music, chess, basketball, dance, cheerleading, and track.

7. From the KIPP Tulsa website:

The first 2 hours of Saturday school is dedicated to study hall and tutoring in the areas of Math, Reading, and English. The last 3 hours of the day, students participate in structured, extracurricular activities such as Art, Volleyball, Leadership, Chess and African Dance & Drumming.

8. From a KIPP Los Angeles website:

Other Enrichment classes include:

Mock Trial
Dance
Chess
Basketball
Math Overdrive
Korean
ELA Overdrive
Yoga
Choir
Band

I could keep going, but suffice it to say that anyone with access to Google can easily find many more KIPP websites that mention chess or dance. Indeed, the whole reason that KIPP schools have longer hours is so they won't have to sacrifice interesting extracurricular activities just to get kids caught up in reading and math.

UPDATE: Jim Horn has responded, in a way. Among other things, he says, "An impressive list of five schools out of 100 with at least an example of extracurriculars for KIPPsters 'after a long day of hard work,' as the KIPP Home Office likes to put it."

Actually, it's 8 schools, not 5, and I stopped at 8 merely because going any further seemed boring. I didn't make any attempt whatsoever to be exhaustive.

Horn adds, "Still nothing curricular has turned up on Shakespeare, physics, philosophy, or argument."

I'm not sure that "argument," whatever Horn thinks that means, or Shakespeare, would be mentioned specifically on a website. But physics certainly is. Again, a few seconds of googling suffices to demonstrate that Horn does not know what he is talking about.

1. KIPP Lynn's ad seeking a physics teacher.

2. KIPP King Collegiate's ad seeking teachers of physics and Mandarin.

3. KIPP San Antonio's ad seeking a physics teacher.

4. KIPP Austin's ad seeking a physics teacher.

5. KIPP San Jose's test results in physics.

New Video from Deas Vail

2011-06-22T15:34:00.006-05:00

One of my favorite bands, Deas Vail, has a creative new video that just came out. The song, "Summer Forgets Me," is a bittersweet tune from their forthcoming third album.
The video is available here or below:

Summer Forgets Me - Deas Vail (Official Video) from Mono Vs Stereo on Vimeo.

One of the Best Education Books I've Read

2011-06-13T15:13:00.007-05:00

And I've read quite a few. The book is Barker Bausell's "Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change", which just came out from Oxford University Press. Bausell was a biostatistician and professor for many years at the University of Maryland, but he started out in graduate school doing some fascinating educational experiments that showed the irrelevance of teacher training. He brings the perspective of a brilliant outsider.

His main thesis: that the only thing that improves education is spending more time on instruction at a given child's level. In his words:

All school learning is explained in terms of the amount of relevant instructional time provided to a student.

That's it: more time + suitability for a child's level.

This may seem too simplistic at first glance, but Bausell marshalls evidence that his theory explains, well, a lot. Possibly even the achievement gap. Studies of home behavior have shown that middle-class families spend much more time talking and reading to their children at a high level. This is the most elegant explanation for why those children do better in school -- they have had much more time devoted to their learning.

Consider too the success of KIPP schools. This is almost surely because KIPP has kids spend much more time in class. And reducing class size works for many kids (all else being equal, which isn't always true), because teachers are able to 1) keep classroom discipline better, and/or 2) give more personal attention, both of which boil down to kids having more time being instructed at their own level.

Bausell also looks at historical studies on teacher quality. From a NY Times op-ed based on the book:

Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.

There was no secret to their success: the efficient teachers hewed closely to the curriculum, maintained strict discipline and minimized non-instructional activities, like conducting unessential classroom business when they should have been focused on the curriculum.

And both studies found that the teachers who taught more were also the teachers who produced students who performed well on standardized tests.

So spending more classroom time actually teaching helped the kids learn more. Common sense, really, but common sense often gets lost in the heat of education debates.

In the book, he describes a fascinating study he did early in his career: designing an elementary math lesson based on a few number theory topics and a test based on the lesson, and then having 15 accredited teachers and 15 undergraduates teach the same lessons for a week to children. It turned out that "there was absolutely no difference . . . between the amount the children learned in the 15 classrooms taught by experienced elementary school teachers and the amount the children learned in the 15 classrooms taught by inexperienced untrained undergraduates" (p. 29). As long as kids were taught the material for the same amount of time, it didn't matter who was doing the teaching.

Bausell also has a provocative chapter ripping apart the entire industry of standardized tests. He contends that there should be no such thing as tests that aren't matched perfectly to the curriculum. That is, if time is being spent teaching a certain curriculum, then any test should be based on that curriculum and nothing else. Whenever tests include anything outside of the curriculum (let's say, a reading passage about snowboarding, as was the case on one recent Arkansas test), they end up measuring something other than what was learned in school -- such as a student's experience with snowboarding.

Bausell is scathing in his assessment of what standardized tests tell us:

This would be comparable to receiving a bank statement that tells you only that you have more money in your account than 52% of all U.S. citizens who have a checking account. Although perhaps an interesting piece of trivia, you might want to know a few more details. So, let's pretend that you decided to call your local bank, which resulted in the following conversation with a help-center employee:

You: I'm glad to know that I have more money than the average person in the country, but what I'd like to know is what my balance is. You see, I have a more pressing concern. What I need to know is how much money I have in my account because I want to buy a mattress.

Help Center: I'm sorry, but we don't keep records in that manner. We can provide you with an age-equivalent financial score, and we can predict what that score will be upon your retirement. We can even predict what your percentile rank is in terms of property and stocks, based upon your account. If I may be allowed to put you on hold for 45 seconds, I will provide you with all this information.

You: But I need to know how much money I have in my account. I don't need to know all of this other information. . . .

Now as absurd as this conversation may sound, this is the only type of information that a standardized test is capable of providing. And what does it profit you (or a teacher for that matter) to know how well your child stacked up against other third-graders from Washington State or Florida . . . ?

For one thing, even this odd level of information can be quite misleading if our public schools as a whole are drastically underperforming -- which they are. Wouldn't it make more sense to you and your daughter's teacher to know what percentage of the curriculum she had mastered? Even better, to inform the two of you exactly what your daughter hadn't yet learned and how much additional instructional time would be required for her to correct this deficit? (pp. 133-34).

What are his policy prescriptions? Here are most of them; they're all geared towards increasing the amount of relevant instructional time delivered to each child.

1. Pre-K, using direct instruction rather than constructivist principles (for which Bausell has contempt).

2. Increase the length of the school day, and devote the entire day to relevant instruction (not 'candy sales, worthless school assemblies, loudspeaker announcements, sports activities, ad nauseam").

3. Increase the length of the school year.

4. No tolerance for any behavior that prevents or distracts students from learning. ("If this means that we have to leave certain children behind because they can't meet behavioral expectations (or we don't know how to enable them to conform), so be it. . . . Schools exist to teach, not to be law enforcement agencies.").

5. The entire curriculum should be exhaustive and detailed, and computerized tests should be based exclusively on the curriculum.

6. Grades and classrooms should be largely irrelevant, because students should each be learning material at their own level, whatever that happens to be.

7. Teacher behavior should be "monitored constantly to ensure the delivery of sufficient instruction, as well as satisfactory coverage of (and minimal departures from) the established curriculum."

Bausell adds that the view of the teacher as an autonomous professional is "woefully outdated. Professions such as medicine have largely abandoned this intuition-laced mode of operation for a more evidence-based approach accompanied by practice guidelines. Thoracic surgeons, for example, perform the vast majority of their professional tasks according to rigidly prescribed protocols. Of course, they also don't have tenure, and they can be sued if their outcomes are substandard, following divergence from these protocols."

8. Use efficient instructional methods. Bausell points to an example of inefficiency: "my son once had a teacher who had an elaborate class project involving building a medieval castle out of popsicle sticks that stretched over a period of several months. Regardless of what the teacher thought she was accomplishing, this is valuable time wasted . . . unless there is an instructional objective in the curriculum mandating the 'construction of medieval structures out of popsicle sticks.'" (Here are my own examples of time-wasting activities in school.)

9. Find lots of free tutors from the ranks of parents, older students, retired persons, or welfare recipients. A high school diploma "isn't required to give children (a) practice reading sight words or (b) learning simple mathematical operations via a set of flash cards."

* * *

All in all, a great and thought-provoking read. Highly recommended.

Dumb Advice

2011-06-13T10:53:00.004-05:00

From Parade magazine this week:

No one recommends starting every day with a doughnut, but it's better to eat a sugary snack than to fast until lunch, says dietitian Karen Ansel, spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. "A doughnut provides enough glucose to switch your body into gear -- at least for an hour or two, before your blood sugar plummets again."

She should be the spokesperson for the American Society for Promoting Diabetes. The advice to eat a doughnut for breakfast is a bad idea on many levels:

1) The body does not need glucose to start the day;

2) Doughnuts are not nutritious in any way (they lack protein and vitamins and good fats);

3) In fact, as highly processed carbohydrates with a high glycemic load, doughnuts are far worse for your heart than meat, eggs, and milk (see also this).

4) Occasional fasting is affirmatively good for you in many ways.

Poor Economics

2011-05-29T15:55:00.003-05:00

I loved the new book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both renowned economists at MIT, and both of whom are pioneers in using randomized experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-poverty interventions in developing countries.

I was intrigued by their analyses of Pratham, an NGO in India that focuses on remediation and tutoring of children who are woefully behind (p. 75). One program run by Pratham is called "Balsakhi," which means "children's friend" (p. 84). The program takes children "who most needed help [in school] and sent them to work with the balsakhi, a young woman from the community, on their specific areas of weakness. Despite an earthquake and communal riots, the program generated very large gains in test scores for these children . . . . Yet these balsakhis were much less educated than the average private (or public) school teacher -- many of them had barely ten years of schooling, plus a week's training by Pratham" (pp 84-85). "By the end of the program, all the participating children who could not read before the program could at least recognize letters (in contrast, only 40 percent of those in the comparison villages could read letters by the end of the year). Those who could read only letters at the beginning were 26 percent more likely, by the end, to be able to read a short story if they had participated than if they had not" (p. 85).

In addition to education, Banerjee and Duflo discuss a wide variety of issues, from how to improve public health (which involves the difficulty of convincing people to go along with medical advice in countries where doctors have traditionally been quacks), whether micro-finance is all it's cracked up to be, how insurance often fails to work in developing countries, and how to improve political institutions.

It's a wonderful book, full of thought-provoking insights and surprising advice about how to improve life for the world's poorest people.

Sheldon Vanauken Letters

2011-05-24T17:56:00.002-05:00

I used to love the book "A Severe Mercy," by Sheldon Vanauken. I first came across it at age 13 or so; I was browsing through a bookstore and found a book with the words "18 letters by C.S. Lewis" blazoned across the front. I was trying to read everything that Lewis ever wrote (a goal that I still have not fully met), and hence bought the book. I loved the romance and the descriptions of the intellectual and artistic atmosphere at Oxford in the 1950s. (I'm a bit more dubious about the notion that it was an act of God's mercy for Vanauken's wife to die tragically at a young age, although I imagine that Vanauken found it comforting to believe that.)

When I was a 17-year-old college freshman in 1991, I started writing letters to Vanauken, mostly about his books and theology, but occasionally about other topics such as Bach, art, and Neil Postman (whose "Amusing Ourselves to Death" I had recently read). He kindly wrote back, typing or writing on postcards in all instances except one.

It's one of my greatest regrets that I never made a trip up to Lynchburg, VA to visit him before he died in 1996 (he welcomed visitors, so I heard, and I could have chatted with someone who knew C.S. Lewis . . . ).

Here are his letters to me. Click to enlarge the images.

1. November 1991 (two images):

2. December 1991:

3. March 1992 (two images):

4. April 1992:

5. May 1992 (3 images):

6. October 1992 (two images):

7. February 1993:

8. October 1993:

9. November 1993:

New Book

2011-05-23T15:43:00.004-05:00

I look forward to reading The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God, a new book edited by Michael Pakaluk about his late wife Ruth, who died of breast cancer leaving him with six children.

The book comes highly recommended from several of my good friends, and I was especially impressed with Michael Novak's blurb:

“I have never read a more beautiful and touching book – a book about a joyous life and overpowering death, and grief and joy. Michael and Ruth Pakaluk’s account of love and grief towers head and shoulders above the justly acclaimed accounts of C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed and Sheldon Vanauken in A Severe Mercy. Throughout, I felt in my heart that Ruth is a marvelous saint for our times.”

I'm not sure that it's even possible for a book to "tower" above Lewis and Vanauken, but it's surely a good addition to that genre.

Here's an article about her life and death; I was struck by this:

In a network of friends that now stretched across at least three continents, hundreds of people were now praying for a miracle cure. But Ruth, who had packed so much activity into her 41 years, had a different perspective. "Why would I want a cure?" she asked Mary Mullaney. "Why would I trade the face of God for life on this earth?"

Interesting Quote

2011-05-18T21:18:00.003-05:00

From Frank Chalk's memoir of teaching in a British school ("It's Your Time You're Wasting"):

Exercise is a major key to solving behavioural problems, I think, as I watch them hare around the field having fun. Nowadays, they do far less physical activity than the children of the past. Labour-saving devices are everywhere to enable more time to be spent in front of the television. Kids are driven to school because parents have got it into their heads that child molesters lurk behind every hedge.

But our bodies have not evolved to be sedentary and need regular exercise; kids have loads of energy and they can either use it up through running around or they can use it up in your lesson, causing mayhem. Young men, especially, need an outlet for their natural physical aggression to prevent it bubbling over at an inappropriate time.

Ask any teacher who has taken kids on a walking holiday, or has been on a school ski trip abroad; they are no trouble after the first three days. They burn it all off during the day and are pleasantly tired in the evening. I've seen kids with the most awful records and every fashionable acronym complaint under the sun sit still and listen for the first time in years, simply because they doing what their bodies have evolved to do, often for the first time in their lives. When they return home they immediately revert to their former behaviour.

Are Schools Teaching Too Much Math and Reading?

2011-05-14T13:11:00.010-05:00

One of the objections often heard to No Child Left Behind and state accountability testing of schools is that schools spend too much time focusing on math and reading, compared to the good old days when they could spend more time on science, social studies, the arts, etc.

Here's what the Center for Education Policy said a few years ago:

“In 2005-06, as shown in table 4-C, our survey found that 71% of districts reported reducing instructional time in elementary schools for one or more subjects in order to make more time for reading and/or math. On average, districts in our survey spent about an hour and a half on reading and a little over an hour on math. Urban districts, however, spent significantly more time on reading than suburban and rural districts: 113 minutes or almost two hours” (p. 95).

One might wonder how that compares to what schools did long before accountability testing or NCLB. By chance, I recently came across evidence on that very point. It's from a book published by the National Institute of Education in 1980, reviewing a large classroom observation study from California called the "Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study."*

Here's a page summarizing how much time the observed California classrooms in the 1970s spent on math, reading, and other subjects: (Click to enlarge.)

The chart says that 2nd grade classrooms in 1970s California spent 1.5 hours per day on reading, 35 minutes on math, and all of 8 minutes on other academic subjects (which included social studies and science, but not music or art). Fifth grade classrooms spent an hour and 50 minutes on reading, 45 minutes on math, and 17 minutes on social studies and science. (Note that activities within other classes could be counted as reading or math time.)

How about even further back? Here's a chart from the same book reviewing previous studies from the 1860s, 1904, 1914, and 1926, respectively:

(Click to enlarge.)

In all of the previous studies from the 1860s to the 1920s, 2nd grade classrooms were spending well over 2 hours per day on reading -- more than the amount of time that is today cited as a "narrowing" of the curriculum. Fifth grade classrooms spent between 108 and 146 minutes per day on reading. In math, the classrooms spent between 29 and 61 minutes per day. Classrooms spent between 15 and 63 minutes per day on other academic subjects such as geography, history, and science.

Thus, it seems that long before anyone had thought of testing math and reading on a standardized basis, a lot of schools were still spending the bulk of their academic time on those subjects (especially reading).

* The full citation: Carolyn Denham and Ann Lieberman, eds. "Time to Learn." National Institute of Education, 1980.

Testimony for US Civil Rights Commission

2011-05-14T11:22:00.001-05:00

I testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights yesterday about the "acting white" problem. (See the video here, with my testimony starting at about 16:15.) It was part of a day-long session on bullying in the nation's schools. I also had a nice lunch with Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School, whom I hadn't seen a long time.

The Nature of Education Debates

2011-05-06T20:50:00.009-05:00

Some bloggers are debating what sort of pegagogy and curriculum should be used in schools that serve poor inner-city children.

Whenever this sort of debate arises, I think there may be some miscommunication going on, and that what both sides want to see in the classroom may not be all that different. Here's how each side is interpreting the other side's position:

What “Progressives” Say: “I want the best education for all children, just like what rich children receive at Sidwell Friends or Phillips Exeter. Instead of focusing so much on math and reading, I want schools to teach the love of learning, critical thinking, and democratic values.”	What Traditionalists Hear: "I don't care if kids are illiterate, lack basic math skills, and are at high risk of dropping out -- as long as teachers have the chance to live out their lifelong ‘Dead Poets’ Society’ fantasy, the kids will probably be fine.”
What Traditionalists Say: “Poor children are being ill-served by the schools today – many of them drop out and those who remain often are years behind in basic academic skills. In order for them to function in modern society, they may often need extra time and attention (such as KIPP provides) in order to catch up on essential math and reading skills.”	What “Progressives” Hear: "I want poor kids to be taught by modern day Gradgrinds, who make them spend all day doing rote memorization and multiple choice worksheets in math and reading. Kids should never be taught any other subject at all.”

Educational Waste

2011-04-18T09:44:00.004-05:00

I'm mostly cribbing from the blog Kitchen Table Math, but here are a few items I found troubling:

1. A comment about elementary math classes:

In the last few months, I visited over a dozen elementary schools. Mostly I visited kindergartens, but whenever possible, I visited the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades as well.

Over and over I saw schools where "math class" was the same template: children doing activities from Everyday Math on their own in chaotic, loud classrooms where students didn't have individual desks but had to sit at group tables (sometimes putting up their books and folders to act as little cubicle walls) while they waited for a teacher or an aide to interact with them. Uniformly, I saw half a dozen kids doing nothing at all in those times; another half a dozen chatting or playing but obviously not doing anything, and a precious few trying to block out the stimulus. Some read cheap fiction books.

No one could have learned anything in such a room even before you find out that the task at hand is some bizarre manipulative task in Everyday Math that had no goal or explained purpose anyway.

2. A New York Times story about the vacuity of some collegiate work:

"IN “Academically Adrift,” Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa looked at the performance of students at 24 colleges and universities. At the beginning of freshman year and end of sophomore year, students in the study took the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a national essay test that assesses students’ writing and reasoning skills. During those first two years of college, business students’ scores improved less than any other group’s. Communication, education and social-work majors had slightly better gains; humanities, social science, and science and engineering students saw much stronger improvement.

What accounts for those gaps? Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa point to sheer time on task. Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.

Group assignments are a staple of management and marketing education. In dorm lounges and library basements around the country, small cells of 20-year-olds are analyzing why a company has succeeded or failed (Drexel University); team-writing 15-page digital marketing plans (James Madison University); or preparing 45-minute PowerPoint presentations on one of the three primary functions of management (Tulane University).

The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.

Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.

3. This 2006 article (Richard Elmore, "Three Thousand Missing Hours," Harvard Education Letter):

One of the most remarkable things about American classrooms is how little real teaching goes on there. Over the past five years or so, I have spent at least three or four days a month in schools studying the relationship between classroom practice and school organization. I observe classrooms at all levels—primary, middle, and secondary grades—and in all subjects. One of the most striking patterns to emerge is that teachers spend a great deal of classroom time getting ready to teach, reviewing and reaching things that have already been taught, giving instructions to students, overseeing student seatwork, orchestrating administrative tasks, listening to announcements on the intercom, or presiding over dead air — and relatively little time actually teaching new content.

When my fellow researchers and I code our observations for teaching new content, it is not unusual to find that it occupies somewhere between zero and 40 percent of scheduled instructional time.

[He describes videos of American and Japanese lessons.] When American educators watch these two lessons they are shocked by the difference. Students in the Japanese lesson are fully engaged in new content for the entire class, while in the American lesson it is difficult to discern what the new content actually is, much less how much time is dedicated to it.

4. My son is in what seems to be a well-regarded public middle school. In the past few weeks, here are the assignments I've seen him working on at home: making a video about Edwin Hubble (it had very little information about Hubble in it, but the teacher said his was one of the best videos in the class); making a fake Facebook page about Edwin Hubble (same); and writing up a description of a fake dinosaur that he had imagined. I'm not too worried about his science knowledge (when he was 9, he demanded that I subscribe to Scientific American for him to read), but I'm not confident that the school is doing as much as it could to instill knowledge in its students.

Value-Added Has Errors . . . Which Means What?

2011-03-12T12:22:00.005-06:00

A recent New York Times article profiled a dedicated and well-reviewed middle school teacher who may not get tenure thanks to the New York City value-added model that places her at the 7th percentile (judging by how much growth her students showed on tests).

Assuming that the article is correct, and that the value-added model here is being unfairly applied for any number of reasons, that means that value-added models can make Type II errors (false negatives).

OK, so we should ditch value-added models and keep on with the "last in, first out" system in which the newest teachers get laid off first (in the case of layoffs). No messing around with incomprehensible math that could be wrong.

But wait, the "last in, first out" model can make Type II errors too. Look at what happened last year in Wisconsin, where the zero-deductible health insurance plan was so expensive (note: this is one reason why Governor Walker wanted to strip collective bargaining over such benefits) that it required Milwaukee to lay off some new teachers acknowledged as good:

Megan Sampson was named outstanding first-year teacher by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English last week.

Second-year social studies teacher Kevin Condon, also at Bradley Tech High School, has four licenses and can command the attention of 40 students in an open-concept classroom.

Both are among 482 educators - more than 12% of the full-time teachers in the district - who have received layoff notices from Milwaukee Public Schools.

On Monday - the last day of the year for schools in MPS and the first day teachers reunited after hearing the news of the layoffs - some teachers expressed frustration at losing their jobs because of experience, not performance. . . .

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee School Board president and the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association leadership continued to disagree on how to handle the tightened $1.3 billion district budget, and whether teachers should accept a lower-cost health-care plan to avoid layoffs. . . .

Bonds said if all teachers switched to the lower-cost plan, about $48 million could be saved, enough to pay for 480 educators.

"I'm not aware of any place in the nation that pays 100% of teachers' health-care benefits and doesn't require a contribution from those who choose to take a more expensive plan," Bonds said.
. . .

Sampson and her laid-off colleagues, all who have less than three years of teaching experience, also expressed frustration that their jobs would be filled by more veteran, but not necessarily better, educators.

Sampson and Emily Kaphaem, a world geography and citizenship teacher at Tech, said they have received exemplary performance reviews.

"I feel kind of let down by my city today," said Kaphaem, 25, as she lost the fight to hold back tears in Principal Ed Kupka's office.

Kupka is equally frustrated. He hand-selected the new teachers because of their talent and enthusiasm for turning around Tech, recently designated as one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.

"Based on the pressures we're under as a low-performing school, I absolutely would have chosen a different nine (for layoffs)," Kupka said.

So now what? Well, for one thing, it's silly for ideological advocates on either side to act as if they have a perfect system that will preserve the best teachers, either by 1) improperly equating quality with years of experience or 2) improperly assuming that each teacher can be given an exact number that represents her quality. It's equally silly for ideological advocates to act as if they've proven the opposite side's system to be some horrible inequity just because it results in an occasional good teacher getting fired. Unless God is running the system, there are going to be errors.

What we need to know is which system makes more errors. But what constitutes an "error"? One way to think about this would be to assume, for the sake of argument, that teachers really are good teachers when they have received outstanding (not merely adequate) performance reviews from their principals. So then, if layoffs are going to occur, would more teachers deemed outstanding by their principals be laid off under 1) a value-added model, or 2) the "last in, first out" standard?

Charter Schools and Averages

2011-03-09T14:30:00.008-06:00

We often hear that something has no overall effect on something else -- education, health, whatever -- but it seems to me that in a world with widely varying individuals and situations, the overall mean effect isn't very interesting or useful. At least not as often as some people seem to think.

For example, we might hear that a certain kind of medicine has no overall survival benefit, which is the reason that the FDA moved to block to approval of Avastin to treat metastatic breast cancer. But even if there is little overall mean effect, Avastin could still cause a remission in a few people:

Christi Turnage of Madison, Miss., said her cancer has been undetectable for more than two years since starting therapy with Avastin. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2006 and began taking the drug in 2008 after the tumors spread, or metastized, to her lungs. Breast cancer that spreads to other parts of the body is generally considered incurable.

If it turns out that you're one of the few people for whom the medicine works, it's no comfort to be told that you can't take it because not enough other people would benefit if they took the medicine.

The same is true for charter schools. We've heard about several studies indicating that charter schools don't have a higher average effect than regular public schools. Take, for example, this Mathematica study of charter schools in 15 different states. It found no overall impact on the students. But this masks an important variation in who benefited and who didn't:

We found that study charter schools serving more low income or low achieving students had statistically significant positive effects on math test scores, while charter schools serving more advantaged students—those with higher income and prior achievement—had significant negative effects on math test scores.

In other words, charter schools were doing very different things for different students — raising up low income and poor-scoring students while actually harming richer and higher-scoring students' test scores.

Average them all together, and you find no effect. But if you want to expand charter schools in impoverished urban areas, the “no overall average benefit” finding would be completely beside the point.

Consider as well this very recent study of charter schools in Milwaukee. The author (Hiren Nisar) says that "charter schools on average have no significant effect on student achievement." An opponent of charter schools (say, a Diane Ravitch) would cite that finding as if it represented the entirety of the study.

But Nisar goes on to find that the overall average is hiding a critically important distinction:

Charter schools with higher level of autonomy from the district in terms of ﬁnancial budget, academic program, and hiring decisions, are effective. I show that students in these charter schools would read at a grade level higher than similar students who attend a traditional public school in three years. Irrespective of the type and the age of the charter school, race of the student, or grade level, attending a charter school has a positive effect on low achieving students. I show that these effects on low achieving students are substantial and are more than enough to eliminate the achievement gap in two years.

Once again, the overall average is completely meaningless if you are interested in expanding the very charter schools that are most likely to work, i.e., the ones that serve low-achieving students and that have more autonomy from their competition (the school district).

The Law of Conservation of Mathematical Symbols

2011-02-14T08:51:00.004-06:00

One of the frustrating things about math is that some symbols are reused again and again, as if someone was afraid of running out of symbols.

For example:

1. ' can mean a derivative of a function, or the transpose of a matrix or vector. This is confusing when a book refers to the derivative of a vector. Hmm, which is it?
2. | | can mean the absolute value of something, or the determinant of a matrix. This is confusing when transforming random variables and you need to refer to the absolute value of a Jacobian determinant.
3. ~ can mean "scales as" or "is distributed as."
4. Σ can mean the operation "sum the following" or the item "covariance matrix."

I'm reminded of Demetri Martin's line about vitamins: "When they were naming vitamins they must have thought there were going to be way more vitamins than there ended up being. OK let's name these: Vitamin A, Vitamin B...ok man slow down we've got a lot to cover here. B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, B12. Then they got to E and they were like 'We're pretty much done. We've got all those damn B's. This is embarrassing. Let's just skip to K and get the hell out of here."

Good article

2011-02-05T20:55:00.003-06:00

My good friend and law school classmate Mark Rienzi (of Catholic Univ. School of Law) has a new article on the horizon. It argues as follows:

The Fourteenth Amendment rights of various parties in the abortion context – the pregnant woman, the fetus, the fetus’ father, the state – have been discussed at length by commentators and the courts. Surprisingly, the Fourteenth Amendment rights of the healthcare provider asked to provide the abortion have not. Roe and Casey establish a pregnant woman’s Fourteenth Amendment right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion. Do those same precedents also protect her doctor’s right to decide whether to participate in abortion procedures?

The Court’s substantive due process analysis typically looks for rights that are “deeply rooted” in our history and traditions. Accordingly, this article addresses the historical basis for finding that providers do indeed have a Fourteenth Amendment right to refuse to perform abortions. This historical analysis shows that the right to refuse passes the Court’s stated test for Fourteenth Amendment protection. In fact, the right to refuse actually has better historical support, and better satisfies the Court’s stated tests, than the abortion right itself.

Beyond this historical case, a healthcare provider’s right to make this decision also fits squarely within the zone of individual decision-making protected by the Court’s opinions in Casey and Lawrence v. Texas, and protects providers from the types of psychological harm that the Court recognized in Roe and Casey. For these reasons, under Roe and Casey, a healthcare provider has a Fourteenth Amendment right to refuse to participate in abortions.

Worth checking out.

C.S. Lewis on 16th Century English

2011-02-02T16:08:00.004-06:00

I've been slogging my way through C.S. Lewis's book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, which is the only Lewis book that I haven't yet managed to read. It's been slow going, and I now understand why Lewis sarcastically referred to the book as OHEL (i.e., the Oxford History of English Literature), pronounced "O Hell."

The book is, of course, immensely learned, as one might expect (Alan Jacobs notes that “Lewis read every single sixteenth-century book in Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of Oxford’s great Bodleian Library”). But that's what makes it so difficult. The book is written as if you, the reader, are already familiar with all of the authors, political movements, theological and philosophical developments, etc., from the 16th century, and therefore don't need much explanation. Thus, nearly every page has numerous sentences that throw out names and terms in passing that are left undefined and unexplained, as Lewis immediately moves on to something else. (An example: "Wilder and more 'eldritch' even than this is the Dreme of 'Lichtoun Minocus' (Bannatyne CLXV); a dream, which has, for once, no allegorical significance.")

The book is nonetheless enjoyable if only for those flashes of insight that I do understand.

For example, this passage:

It may or may not have been noticed that the word Renaissance has not yet occurred in this book. I hope that this abstinence, which is forced on me by necessity, will not have been attributed to affectation. The word has sometimes been used merely to mean the 'revival of learning,' the recovery of Greek, and the 'classicizing' of Latin. If it still bore that clear and useful sense, I should of course have employed it.

Unfortunately, it has, for many years, been widening its meaning, till now 'the Renaissance' can hardly be defined except as 'an imaginary entity responsible for everything the speaker likes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries'. If it were merely a chronological label, like 'pre-Dynastic' or 'Caroline' it might be harmless. But words, said Bacon, shoot back upon the understandings of the mightiest. Where we have a noun we tend to imagine a thing. The word Renaissance helps to impose a factitious unity on all the untidy and heterogeneous events which were going on in those centuries as in any others.

Thus the 'imaginary entity' creeps in. Renaissance becomes the name for some character or quality supposed to be immanent in all the events, and collects very serious emotional overtones in the process. Then, as every attempt to define this mysterious character or quality turns out to cover all sorts of things that were there before the chosen period, a curious procedure is adopted. Instead of admitting that our definition has broken down, we adopt the desperate expedient of saying that 'the Renaissance' must have begun earlier than we had thought. Thus Chaucer, Dante, and presently St. Francis of Assisi, became 'Renaissance' men. A word of such wide and fluctuating meaning is of no value. Meanwhile, it has been ruined for its proper purpose. No one can now use the word Renaissance to mean the recovery of Greek and the classicizing of Latin with any assurance that his hearers will understand him. Bad money drives out good.

It should also be remembered that the word Renaissance is in a curiously different position from the general run of historical terms. Most of these, when not merely chronological, designate periods in the past by characteristics which we have come, in the course of our historical studies, to think distinctive or at least convenient. The ancients were not ancient, nor the men of the Middle Ages middle, from their own point of view. Gothic architecture was not 'Gothic' at the time, it was merely architecture. No one thought of himself as a Bronze Age man.

But the humanists were very conscious of living in a renascentia. They claimed vociferously to be restoring all good learning, liberating the world from barbarism, and breaking with the past. Our legend of the Renaissance is a Renaissance legend. We have not arrived at this conception as a result of our studies but simply inherited it from the very people we were studying.

If the earlier modern scholars had not themselves been bred in the humanist tradition it may be doubted whether they would have chosen so lofty a name as 'rebirth' to describe the humanist achievement. The event, objectively seen, would perhaps have appeared not quite so important nor so wholly beneficent.

But, once established, this glowing term inevitably linked itself in the minds of English scholars with those two other processes which they highly approved in the sixteenth century -- the birth of Protestantism and the birth of the physical sciences. Hence arose, as it seems to me, that strong prejudice, already more than once alluded to, which predisposed our fathers to see in this period almost nothing but liberation and enlightenment; hence, too, by reaction, and among scholars of anti-Protestant sympathies, the opposite tendency to see in it little else than the destruction of a humane and Christian culture by kill-joys and capitalists. Both views perhaps exaggerate the breach with the past; both are too simple and diagrammatic. Both thrust into the background things which were, at the time, important.

Better yet, consider this passage on discerning the "spirit" of historical periods:

Some think it the historian's business to penetrate beyond this apparent confusion and heterogeneity, and to grasp in a single intuition the 'spirit' or 'meaning' of his period. With some hesitation, and with much respect for the great men who have thought otherwise, I submit that this is exactly what we must refrain from doing. I cannot convince myself that such 'spirits' or 'meanings' have much more reality than the pictures we see in the fire.

Whether the actual content of the past or (less plausibly) of some artificially isolated period in the past has a significance is a question that need not here be raised. The point is that we can never know that content. The greater part of the life actually lived in any century, any week, or any day consists of minute particulars and uncommunicated, even incommunicable, experiences which escape all record. What survives, survives largely by chance. On such a basis it seems to me impossible to reach the sort of knowledge which is implied in the very idea of a 'philosophy' of history. There is also this to be said of all the 'spirits', 'meanings', or 'qualities' attributed to historical periods; they are always most visible in the periods we have studied least. The 'canals' on Mars vanished when we got stronger lenses.

And this was even better:

It is impossible not to wonder at this sudden extinction of a poetical literature which, for its technical brilliance, its vigour and variety, its equal mastery over homely fact and high imagination, seemed 'so fair, so fresshe, so liklie to endure'. . . . But however we explain the phenomenon, it forces on our minds a truth which the incurably evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought is always urging us to forget. What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. Arts as well as men are subject to accident and violent death. . . .

We ask too often why cultures perish and too seldom why they survive; as though their conservation were the normal and obvious fact and their death the abnormality for which special causes must be found. It is not so. An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes.

On a lighter note, some of the original sources that Lewis describes seem humorous, intentionally or unintentionally. Consider the following Scottish comic poetry from some time prior to 1501:

It relates (in rough four-beat couplets) the creation of the first Highlander. God and St. Peter were out for a walk in Argyll one day when St. Peter, observing a certain unsavoury object on the path, jokingly suggested that God might like to create something from it. One stir of the almighty 'Pykit staff' and "vp start a helandman, blak as ony draff'. Questioned about his plans, the new creature announced that he would be a cattle-thief. God laughed heartily, but even while He was doing so (it is like Mercury and Apollo in Horace's ode) the Highlander had contrived to steal His pen-knife.

Or this:

Indeed it is impossible to read Mulcaster long without smiling. Sometimes he meant us to smile. He recalls innumerable scenes in headmasters' studies when he writes of the father who will 'very carefully commend his silly poor boy at his first entry, to his maisters charge, not omitting euen how much his mother makes of him, if she come not her selfe and do her owne commendation' (Positions, IV). But he is quite serious when he recommends holding the breath as a beneficial physical exercise 'though all men can tell what a singular benefit breathing is' (ibid. XV) or writes 'Consider but the vse of our legges, how necessarie they be (ibid. XX).

In other Lewis news, I see that someone finally reissued Lewis's co-authored 1939 book The Personal Heresy: A Controversy, which had long been out of print. In fact, I corresponded a few times with Douglas Gresham (Lewis's stepson) several years ago to lament that very fact.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

2011-01-23T08:50:00.004-06:00

Yale law professor Amy Chua has certainly raised a firestorm with her new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which shot to fame with this Wall Street Journal preview. A sample:

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

So far, so good, it seems to me. (OK, mostly good, and often just in theory as to my own family . . .) Nonetheless, many reactions to the book/article are very hostile, primarily because of vignettes in which she calls her daughter "garbage" for being terribly disrespectful, or threatening to burn another daughter's stuffed animals.

I got the book one afternoon last week, and devoured the whole thing by that evening, which is unusual for me only in that I don't usually have enough spare time to do that anymore. I was surprised to find myself constantly laughing over her self-deprecating and ironic remarks. I later saw that Chua herself told the Wall Street Journal that "much of my book is tongue-in-cheek, making fun of myself."

To take just a few examples:

Chua explaining why she made one daughter learn the piano:

I wanted her to be well rounded and to have hobbies and activities. Not just any activity, like "crafts," which can lead nowhere -- or even worse, playing the drums, which leads to drugs -- but rather a hobby that was meaningful and highly difficult with the potential for depth and virtuosity. And that's where the piano came in.
Chua explaining why third-generation Chinese Americans turn out poorly:

Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice.
Chua explaining why she ultimately decided not to focus too heavily on her dog:

I had finally come to see that Coco was an animal, with intrinsically far less potential than Sophia and Lulu. Although it is true that some dogs are on bomb squads or drug-sniffing teams, it is perfectly fine for most dogs not to have a profession or even any special skills.
Chua explaining why she didn't fit in at Harvard Law School:

But I always worried that law really wasn't my calling. I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did.

That last line was especially hilarious to me. I'll never forget one of the women I knew (and was actually good friends with) at Harvard Law School: She got into a heated argument with me once over her contention that rape was a systematic patriarchal tool that benefited all men, but then she would spend her spare time working for the Prison Legal Assistance Project (known as "PLAP") where one of her projects -- I kid you not -- was helping a local rapist to get out on parole.

Anyway, because the Wall Street Journal selected the most seemingly outrageous portions of the book in a way that made the self-deprecating tone less obvious, most of the reviewers seem to be completely missing out on Chua's real theme: that she ultimately had to transform her own ideas of motherhood when faced with a daughter who simply refused to comply. (One clue, from the book's very front cover: "This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year old.")

One non-ironic line that I liked very much, and that partially explains my visceral hostility to most children's television, was this:

America seems to convey something to kids that Chinese culture doesn't. In Chinese culture, it just wouldn't occur to children to question, disobey, or talk back to their parents. In American culture, kids in books, TV shows, and movies constantly score points with their snappy backtalk and independent streaks. Typically, it's the parents who need to be taught a life lesson -- by their children.

Should a Teacher's Value-Added Last Forever?

2011-01-20T09:45:00.001-06:00

In the middle of a review of a recent Gates Foundation report on teacher value-added scores, economist Jesse Rothstein writes this:

An extensive literature makes clear that students assigned to high-value-added teachers see higher test scores in the year of that assignment, but that this benefit evaporates very quickly.

He cites, among other things, a Jacob/Lefgren/Sims paper arguing that:

the vast majority of the contemporary test score effect attributed to teacher value-added is transitory. This suggests that the teacher value-added literature overstates the effect of teachers on longrun learning and, therefore, the ability of policies that target teacher value-added to change ultimate student outcomes.

For some reason, the short-lived effect of teacher value-added scores is seen as somehow disproving their worth, and the worth of policies that would "target teacher value-added."

But to what other realm of human endeavor would such a standard be applied?

Consider another aspect of human development: physical fitness. Would anyone suggest that the value of vigorous exercise is somehow discredited because a vigorous exercise program has the most effect only in the year that it is actually followed, but its effects mostly disappear after the individual stops exercising? Of course not. Everyone who has ever exercised knows that if you stop for even a few months, you will lose much or most of your conditioning. Does that mean that vigorous exercise wasn't effective? No: it was effective as long as you kept exercising.

The same is true for medicines and vitamins. Would anyone find it important to observe that the effectiveness of medicines and vitamins disappears after you stop taking them for a year or more?

Or take weight loss. Would anyone be surprised to find that a healthy diet enabled people to lose weight only when they actually followed the diet, but didn't have permanent effects that allowed people to quit the diet and eat whatever they wanted therafter?

Shouldn't the same logic apply to teachers? A great teacher can have a powerful effect on your learning of a specific subject. If the effect of good teaching fades out over time, that may simply mean that teaching is like nearly everything else in life: it doesn't magically guarantee permanent improvement.

But it can still be important to figure out what good teachers are doing and who the good teachers are, just as it's important to know which weightlifting coaches produce Olympic champions and which ones are incompetent -- even if the effect of good teaching in either field fades out once an individual moves on and does other things.

Indeed, the fadeout of high value-added teachers may actually mean that it's all the more important to implement well-thought-out policies that encourage such teachers. Why would a 5th grade math teacher's effect fade out in 6th and 7th grade? Yes, it could be because the 5th grade teacher was artificially gaming her scores by teaching topics or problems that are completely idiosyncratic to the 5th grade math test in a particular state (although the blame really would lie with the state standards and tests in such a case). But it could well be because a great 5th grade math teacher was followed by mediocre 6th and 7th grade math teachers who failed to capitalize on the 5th grade teacher's accomplishments, and students' performance -- no surprise! -- wasn't magically and permanently raised.

In other words, the fadeout of high-value added teachers might just mean that we need to be finding the mediocre 6th and 7th grade teachers who are managing to erase their students' prior knowledge and achievement, and either helping those teachers to improve or else gently moving them into other professions for which they are better suited.

UPDATE: I'd apply the same logic to all of the other educational interventions whose effect fades out or disappears over time -- Head Start, class size reduction, rewarding students for reading books (Roland Fryer's experiment). In all these cases, why would anyone ever have expected a one-time treatment to have a permanent effect? Nothing about our bodies or minds works that way.

Statistical Architecture

2011-01-20T08:41:00.002-06:00

I liked this passage from a 2008 article by Gary King and Eleanor Neff Powell:

There are ﬁelds of study that have not yet been revolutionized by increasing quantiﬁcation and modern statistics, but its an easy prediction that this will eventually happen given enough enterprising scholars, wherever it would be useful (and unfortunately, at other times too!). Certainly the opportunities for intellectual arbitrage are enormous.

To take one example, for clarity outside our ﬁeld, consider architecture. By far, the most expensive decisions universities make are about buildings and their physical plant. Yet architecture as a ﬁeld is composed primarily of engineers who keep buildings up and qualitative creative types who invent new designs: quantitative social scientists do not frequently get jobs in schools of design.

Imagine instead how much progress could be made by even simple data collection and straightforward statistical analysis. Some relevant questions, with associated explanatory variables might be: Do corridors or suites make the faculty and students produce and learn more? Does vertical circulation work as well as horizontal? Should we put faculty in close proximity to others working on the same projects or should we maximize interdisciplinary adjacencies? (Do graduate students learn more when they are prevented for lack of windows from seeing the outside world during the day?) And if the purpose of a university is roughly to maximize the number of units of knowledge created, disseminated, and preserved, then collecting measures would not be diﬃcult, such as citation counts, the number of new faculty hired or degrees conferred, the quality of student placements upon graduation, etc. A little quantitative social analysis in architecture could go a long way in putting these most expensive decisions on a sound scientiﬁc footing.

2010-12-27T18:35:00.004-06:00

Pasi Sahlberg has an op-ed in the Boston Globe making the following claim:

What could the United States learn from the Finns? First, reconsider those policies that advocate choice and competition as the key drivers of educational improvement. None of the best-performing education systems relies primarily on them. Indeed, the Finnish experience shows that consistent focus on equity and cooperation — not choice and competition — can lead to an education system where all children learn well.

The weasel word (or term) in the above is "relies primarily," because it certainly isn't true that none of the best-performing education systems offer school choice. Many of them do.

Consider Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Belgium, all of which are significantly above the OECD average for the most recent PISA scores in reading, math, and science. Hong Kong is at about the same level as Finland (and ahead in math); the Netherlands and Belgium are somewhat below Finland, but are still among the world's top performers.

These nations all have extensive school choice.

Netherlands: "Almost 70 percent of schools in the Netherlands are administered by private school boards, and all schools are government funded equally." (Source.)

Belgium: All schools in Belgium, including privately-operated schools, are publicly funded. (Source.)

Hong Kong:

Hong Kong’s educational system, although dominated by the Education Bureau, certainly does offer genuine choices. In fact, compared with many western countries, the range of choices is quite broad. Just to recap, there are:

* a surprisingly small number of purely government-funded and operated schools;
* a very large number of schools that are government-funded and supervised, but that are run by private organizations, mostly religious ones;
* an increasing number of what are essentially charter or magnet schools, e.g. the Direct Subsidy Scheme schools; and
* genuinely private schools that receive no government funding.
(Source.)

In addition, consider New Zealand, also one of the world's top performers on all subjects in PISA. Although it has a checkered history, New Zealand has most definitely had school choice, including funding for private schools.

What Does the Ruling Against the Health Care Mandate Actually Accomplish?

2010-12-14T08:40:00.005-06:00

A federal district judge in Virginia recently issued an order declaring unconstitutional that portion of Obama's health care plan that required individuals to purchase health insurance. This decision is unsurprisingly controversial, and has already been the subject of much commentary.

What I don't see anyone mentioning is the fact that the judge's ruling applies only to the specific plaintiff -- the Commonwealth of Virginia -- not to anyone else nationwide. Indeed, it's not clear to me that the judge's ruling would apply to any of the private citizens of Virginia.

Why do I say this?

First, the district court did not issue an injunction here that would purport to prevent the federal government from enforcing the statute elsewhere.

Second, it seems very questionable to me whether the district court would have had the power to issue such an injunction in the first place. As the Ninth Circuit has noted in a case involving the INS, district courts are not supposed to issue injunctions that protect non-plaintiffs, absent a class action:

We must vacate and remand, however, because the scope of the injunction is too broad. On remand, the injunction must be limited to apply only to the individual plaintiffs unless the district judge certifies a class of plaintiffs. National Center for Immigrants Rights, Inc. v. INS, 743 F.2d 1365, 1371 (9th Cir.1984). A federal court may issue an injunction if it has personal jurisdiction over the parties and subject matter jurisdiction over the claim; it may not attempt to determine the rights of persons not before the court. . . . The district court must, therefore, tailor the injunction to affect only those persons over which it has power.

In another case, the Ninth Circuit similarly held:

In addition to rescinding Meinhold's discharge, the district court permanently enjoined DOD from "discharging, changing [the] enlistment status of or denying enlistment to any person," from maintaining files, and from "taking any actions" against gay or lesbian servicemembers based on sexual orientation in the absence of sexual conduct which interferes with the military's mission. The Navy argues that even if the district court did not err on the constitutional issue, its nation-wide injunction cannot stand. We agree.

An injunction "should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs." Califano v. Yamasaki, 442 U.S. 682, 702, 99 S.Ct. 2545, 2558, 61 L.Ed.2d 176 (1979); see also Bresgal v. Brock, 843 F.2d 1163, 1170-71 (9th Cir.1987). This is not a class action, and Meinhold sought only to have his discharge voided and to be reinstated. Effective relief can be obtained by directing the Navy not to apply its regulation to Meinhold . . . .

Third, federal district judges do not have the power to issue binding precedential orders, even within their own district. As the Third Circuit has noted:

First, it is clear that there is no such thing as "the law of the district." Even where the facts of a prior district court case are, for all practical purposes, the same as those presented to a different district court in the same district, the prior "resolution of those claims does not bar reconsideration by this Court of similar contentions. The doctrine of stare decisis does not compel one district court judge to follow the decision of another."

Given this lack of precedential power, it would be startling if a federal district judge could nonetheless issue an order preventing the federal government from enforcing a federal law as to anyone in the entire country. Put it this way: if a private citizen had filed a lawsuit against the federal government in the same district court (the Eastern District of Virginia), there could be another ruling tomorrow that went the opposite way: upholding the individual mandate. Whatever federal district judge happens to be the first to issue a ruling shouldn't have the effective power to make all future rulings by other courts a nullity.

Tax Disclosures

2010-12-05T14:20:00.003-06:00

Sherman Dorn says the following:

There are legitimate criticisms I find of teachers unions, but then there are regular examples of foolish, illogical digs. . . .

Fordham's Chris Irvine tries to take a flying (or Flypaper) dig at various NEA expenditures, forgetting that the reason why he has access to this information is that union expenditures are reported publicly. Does Fordham report all of its staff salaries? What is the position of Fordham (or the anti-union source of the information) on disclosure of corporate campaign contributions? Hmmn…

The Fordham Foundation is required under section 501(c)(3) to file Form 990s with the IRS. Here's the 990-PF form for 2008, where you can see what the top employees, the directors, and even independent contractors at Fordham earned that year.

Charter School Students

2010-10-09T08:22:00.001-05:00

There are at least three types of people who choose charter schools:

1. Students who are motivated to seek academic success, but who aren't satisfied with the low quality of their traditional public school, and who seek out perceived better quality elsewhere.

2. Students who just want something different and more to their tastes -- an arts-based or science-based curriculum, or a smaller school, or joining a good friend, or any number of other things.

3. Students who just aren't doing very well or who are falling into the wrong crowd, and whose parents think that maybe their child will somehow improve somewhere else.

If the question is whether charter school performance is better than traditional public school performance, students from category 1 would be a charter school advantage, category 2 would probably be neutral, and category 3 would be a charter school DISadvantage.

I don't know why some people (such as Diane Ravitch) act as if all or most charter school students are in category 1. There's zero evidence for that. To the contrary, a RAND study last year found that in most locations nationwide, charter school students are entering with the same or lower test scores than their peers. This suggests to me that those students on average probably aren't coming from highly motivated successful families -- or if they are, the supposed benefits of motivation aren't that powerful after all (not powerful enough to make their test scores higher than their public school peers).

Review of my book

2010-10-05T17:39:00.001-05:00

The current (Oct. 4) issue of National Review has a review of my book on pages 44 and 46. Not available online, though.

Latest Publicity

2010-09-03T14:52:00.000-05:00

Naomi Schaefer Riley has a warm review of the book in the most recent edition of Commentary. Available only to subscribers.

I recorded a segment for the Michael Eric Dyson show today. I don't yet know exactly when it will air. Dyson -- a prominent African-American public intellectual and scholar -- seemed to like the book quite a bit, even though I criticize one of his books on the first page of chapter 1.

Latest Publicity

2010-08-17T10:34:00.000-05:00

Educator Steve Peha liked the book, as seen by his list of book recommendations at the National Journal:

Stuart Buck’s Acting White is powerful and provides a reasonably original theory that can be said to at least partly explain the achievement gap. If you were around in the 1960s to remember desegregation, this is your book. But even if you were born in 1963, like me, you’ll still find it just as powerful. My big takeaway: little has changed. Buck quotes people from the 60s who lived through desegregation and whose grand children still attend our the local schools in the town where I currently live. I hear exactly the same comments about our schools today that folks were making a half century earlier. We are integrating but we are still not educating, and in some ways we are educating some people worse than ever.

Peha earlier had a long review of the book at Dropout Nation.

Book News

2010-08-11T07:36:00.001-05:00

I have a blog post published at the Washington Post discussing the theme of my book.

The Washington Times has a nice review here.

Charter School Achievement

2010-07-28T13:23:00.004-05:00

Mike Petrilli makes a good point about charter school studies:

[C]harters serving lots of poor or low-performing kids made a significant positive impact on math achievement, while “middle class” charter schools had a negative effect on both math and reading. You could joke that this is evidence that charters are closing the achievement gap: they are helping low-performing poor kids make gains and affluent kids lose ground.

So what’s going on? If you know a little bit about the charter school movement, these findings make a ton of sense. While the media mostly pay attention to inner-city charter schools—think KIPP, Achievement First, Harlem Success, etc.—several of the early-adopter states (like Minnesota, California, and Colorado) are also home to suburban charter schools. And many of those schools were created by progressive educators or parents as an alternative to the traditional public schools nearby. Schools like Minnesota New Country School, whose mission is to “explore the world through project-based learning.”

As far as I can tell, lots of these uber-progressive schools are quite good, and achieve excellent results in terms of student success in college and beyond. There’s a strong argument to be made—and Education Evolving makes it here—that there should be room within public education for these kinds of schools and their innovative approaches. But these institutions sure aren’t focused on getting kids ready to pass the state standardized test. So, compared to their traditional school counterparts, their test scores suffer.

This is why Diane Ravitch's view of charter schools is so utterly incoherent -- she manages to criticize NCLB for making schools focus too much on test scores even while criticizing charters and vouchers for failing to produce high enough test scores. And it turns out that charter schools (on average) aren't producing high enough test scores in part because some charter schools are doing exactly what Ravitch purports to favor -- offering an interesting curriculum that isn't as focused on test scores.

It's hard to square that circle.

Latest Publicity

2010-07-28T07:55:00.004-05:00

Luther Spoehr of Brown gives the book a nice review at the History News Network.

The Atlantic Wire covers the book here.

John McWhorter pens another nice article defending the book at The Root.

TAPPED post on the book

2010-07-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

At TAPPED (the blog of The American Prospect), Jamelle Bouie has a post disagreeing with my book. He says:

By and large, this exchange is almost entirely anecdotal; if you set aside personal childhood memories, there simply isn't much broad empirical evidence for the claim that black students in integrated settings have a racialized antipathy toward educational achievement.

There's a lot more evidence for "acting white" than personal childhood memories. Out of the many studies on the issue, the best is Roland Fryer's empirical study of a nationally representative database in which students had been asked (among other things) to list out a certain number of friends. It turned out that after controlling for other variables that affect popularity, black students above a 3.5 GPA became significantly less popular. This was true mostly in integrated schools, and particularly in schools with internal integration:

I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity. . . .

Unfortunately, internal integration only aggravates the problem. Blacks in less-integrated schools (places with fewer than expected cross-ethnic friendships) encounter less of a trade-off between popularity and achievement. In fact, the effect of acting white on popularity appears to be twice as large in the more-integrated (racially mixed) schools as in the less-integrated ones.Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark,with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!

This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line.

Bouie continues:

Even Buck, whose book is the focus of the discussion, leaves room for alternative explanations. From the beginning, he concedes that the evidence for his claim isn't conclusive and that to some degree, he is relying on the "absence of evidence" against it.

This is a mistaken interpretation.

The only thing that Bouie could be referring to is a single passage of the book, wherein I offer an admittedly speculative theory that the true effect of "acting white" is probably greater than could ever be empirically measured, because young adolescents often may be unaware of (or unable or unwilling to articulate) how deeply they have been influenced by peer pressure. Indeed, we are all affected by peer pressure in ways that we don't normally think about. For example, no one wears a swimsuit to an important business meeting -- not because of express peer pressure, but because we don't even imagine doing so. We just instinctively know that to do so would upset our peers. Thus, perhaps peer pressure is the most powerful where people aren't even consciously thinking about it.

In that context, I admitted that this particular argument -- that acting white could be far more powerful than we realize -- was possibly making too much of the absence of evidence. I do this sort of thing throughout the book; that is, I expressly raise and address counterarguments, while admitting the limitations of my own data and arguments. But I never suggest that the "acting white" phenomenon itself is characterized by the "absence of evidence." Far from it.

My Book on Bloggingheads.TV

2010-07-19T11:34:00.002-05:00

John McWhorter and Richard Thompson Ford discuss my book here:

The Takeaway

2010-07-14T07:49:00.001-05:00

I was interviewed early this morning by The Takeaway, a national morning news program jointly produced by WNYC, the New York Times, the BBC, Public Radio International, and WGBH. The host of this morning's radio show has a nice blog post about the book.

The audio is here:

Has Desegregation Had an Overall Negative Effect?

2010-07-07T11:29:00.000-05:00

No. That's not what the book argues. It's more like this: segregation was a cancer on American society, and desegregation was like a powerful drug that combatted the cancer. Powerful drugs can have side effects that need to be addressed, but that doesn't mean that it was better to have cancer.

Two recent blog posts (by Matthew Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie at Tapped) make the mistake of assuming that my book argues that desegregation was an overall negative. They then point to statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showing that the black-white test score gap has moderately decreased since 1978. They then conclude that "the resources made available by desegregation have done a lot to improve educational outcomes among African Americans" (Bouie) and that "desegregation probably has had some ironic effects, but the main effects of African-Americans’ greater economic, social, and cultural equality have been about what you would expect" (Yglesias).

Yes, but this is missing the point. I expressly point out in the book that desegregation had lots of benefits — the fact that it arguably had one ironic side effect doesn’t imply that it had an overall negative effect. Moreover, Roland Fryer’s empirical work suggested that the “acting white” effect (that is, the popularity penalty suffered by blacks with high grades, which he found mostly in well-integrated schools) “explain[s] 11.3% of the black-white test score gap.” In other words, absent this effect, the benefits of desegregation could have been greater, and black kids would be doing even better today.

Review in Slate

2010-07-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

Stanford's Richard Thompson Ford has a review of my book in Slate today. Even though he ultimately disagrees with my book's thesis, the review is as fair and thoughtful as an author could hope.

He ascribes the "acting white" phenomenon not to school desegregation, but to the social isolation that often occurred as an unfortunate byproduct of the civil rights movement more broadly:

Today's black underclass may not be as poor as many blacks were in the 1950s, but its isolation from the mainstream and from positive role models is actually worse. As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has shown, the concentration of poverty in inner cities became a crisis in the decades after the civil rights movement, as suburbanization and the decline of manufacturing hollowed out inner cities and as the most successful and talented blacks pursued newly available opportunities outside segregated ghettoes. The inadvertent result was a "brain drain" and a diversion of resources away from many black neighborhoods and black institutions. Those blacks left behind in inner cities faced anemic local economies, weakened social networks, withered institutions, and failing schools. These larger economic and demographic shifts disrupted black communities and displaced black role models, creating "super ghettos" of unprecedented isolation, joblessness, and social dysfunction.

So even if school desegregation hadn't shuttered many promising black schools, the rest of the civil rights revolution would still have undermined them. In the segregated job markets, many of the most talented blacks became school teachers and principals in black schools; after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, they moved into more lucrative jobs in racially integrated firms and businesses. The costs of school desegregation that Buck identifies—the disruption of nurturing all-black institutions and communities, racial antagonism, mutual distrust, and black alienation in white dominated settings—are among the unintended consequences of desegregation generally. If many children growing up in these neighborhoods think of education as the exclusive domain of whites, that's because they think of almost every mainstream aspiration as the exclusive domain of whites.

This is a compelling argument. Nonetheless it still seems hard for me to see how social isolation would necessarily cause some children to think that high achievement in school is somehow "white." For that to happen, I think you need a situation where most of the teachers are white and/or where the advanced classes are mostly white. Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli's empirical work did find that the "acting white" effect (that is, the popularity penalty experienced by black students with high grades) is "non-existent" in all-black inner city schools -- which, to be sure, remain disadvantaged for many other reasons.

Book Review

2010-06-24T09:33:00.002-05:00

John McWhorter has a nice review of my book in The New Republic. A highlight:

Buck’s terrific book is longer on analysis than prescription; but its analysis comprises such invaluable history, and so deftly counters any fears underlying the pretense that the “acting white” charge is fictitious, that I cannot imagine we will soon see another book so utterly necessary on what used to be called the Race Question. Buck has cleared the ground of many illusions and innuendos, and this can only help us to get closer to a solution for the vast problem that still remains.

Home Computers Hurt Students

2010-06-21T08:49:00.002-05:00

Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor have a new CALDER Center/NBER working paper looking at how home computers and broadband access help students. (Interestingly, an earlier version of the same paper listed Charles Clotfelter as a third author.)

Turns out that home computers harm students:

Do students' basic academic skills improve when they have access to a computer at home? Has the introduction of high‐speed internet access, which expands the set of productive tasks for which home computers might be used, caused further improvements? This paper addresses these questions by studying administrative data covering the population of North Carolina public school students between 2000 and 2005, a period when home computer access expanded noticeably, and the availability of home high‐speed internet rose dramatically.

. . .

Models with student fixed effects, which restrict identification to within‐student variation, by contrast, show modest but statistically significant negative impacts. In these models, we can trace the impact of home computer introduction for periods of up to three years; there is no indication that the negative effect of access diminishes over this time period. . . .

Similarly, the introduction of high‐speed internet service is associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades. Moreover, student fixed‐effect specifications reveal that increased availability of high speed internet is associated with less frequent self‐reported computer use for homework. On the margin, then, access to broadband internet appears to crowd out studying effort, presumably by introducing new options for recreational use by students and other family members. In addition, we find that the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

Lars Katz

2010-06-18T21:48:00.004-05:00

So I was listening to Lars Katz' song "The Pawn" in the car today, and the following conversation ensued:

Helena (5): "Is that guy dead?"

Me, somewhat hesitantly: "No." [Note: I later realized that since I often play classical music or old big band music in the car, there have been previous conversations like this: "Can I meet that guy?" "No, he died a long time ago."]

Helena: "Will he be dead when I grow up?"

Me: "No, why?"

Helena: "Because I want to marry him."

Me: "Really, why?"

Helena: "Because he sings good. I won't marry anyone else."

Dennis Prager show and an email

2010-06-14T09:22:00.002-05:00

I appeared on the Dennis Prager radio show the other day to talk about the new book out from Yale University Press. The interview was congenial, and I thought it went well.

Afterwards, I received this interesting email from a listener:

Mr. Buck,

Your appearance on the Dennis Prager show was an epiphany for me. I am a white female who taught in the all black high school in Petersburg, Virginia in 1969-1970. The schools were under court-ordered desegregation, but it was not implemented until the next year. I was amazed at the high skill level of the students I taught, since they had all come up through what most of us considered to be an "inferior" segregated system. I have often wondered how the enthusiasm for learning and the intelligence of the students I taught devolved into "acting white." Since I was in favor of the greater good of integrating the schools, I never thought to question the methods being used to do so. You have supplied an important piece of information. Thank you.

My students were being forced to integrate the year after I taught them. Many of them were angry about it---so angry that I took a class period to allow them to vent. One female student kept looking apologetically at me and saying, "I don't mean any disrespect to you but . . . .", and then she would launch into an angry, profanity filled diatribe about her distaste of being forced to go to school with whites.

Now I teach high school in South Central, Los Angeles. My black students for the most part are unmotivated and uninterested in school, performing well below their Latino classmates, many of whose original language is not English. I had one very promising black student in my Advanced Placement United States History class several years ago, and he was shunned by his classmates, both black and Latino, because they said he "wasn't black." He was an outsider through four years of high school.

Memories of Christian, another male black student still haunt me. He had loving and supportive parents, who came by school the first week just to get acquainted with his teachers and tell them they were very involved in Christian's education. Their commitment showed. Christian was a well-behaved young man with skills far superior to his classmates. He read at a 12th grade level (in the 10th grade) and was an excellent writer. He was in an academically enriched program Los Angeles Unified runs with the University of Southern California which would have guaranteed him a four year scholarship to U.S.C. if he had kept up his grades and done well on the SATs. Yet, within the two years I had him, I saw Christian degenerate into a "gangsta wannabe" whose main purpose in life was to emulate his unmotivated and unskilled black male classmates. His parents were horrified and did everything within their power to stop his decline, but the allure of "acting black" was no match for loving parents who lacked the funds to send their son to private school.

Again, thank you for your illuminating study. I have ordered your book and look forward to reading it.

Media Coverage for the Book

2010-06-05T07:47:00.001-05:00

The Fordham Institute's review of the new book is here, and an EdWeek blog covers the book here.

Education blogger extraordinaire Joanne Jacobs writes about the new book here, while Phil of Brandywine Books posts about it here.

My good friend Rod Dreher of the Templeton Foundation had a three-part interview with me here, here, and here.

More of Rod Dreher's interview

2010-05-19T15:25:00.002-05:00

Parts II and III of Rod Dreher's interview with me about the new book are here and here.

Rod Dreher's coverage of the book

2010-05-18T08:10:00.001-05:00

My good friend Rod Dreher, formerly of the Dallas Morning News and now of the Templeton Foundation, is going to run a three-part interview with me about the book. The first part is available here.

New Classical Guitar Album

2010-05-10T15:35:00.002-05:00

I have a new classical guitar album that is now available. The title: "From Mozart to Tchaikovsky: A Classical Guitar Collection for Children." It features several classical tunes written for children (or by a child, in the case of Mozart), as well as several popular folk tunes that children love.

It is available for purchase here or here.

New Book

2010-04-14T10:06:00.000-05:00

I have a book coming out next month from Yale University Press. It's called Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. For more information about it, see my personal website here. The book is available on Amazon here. (I'm going to leave this post on top for a while, so scroll down for any new content.)

New Report on Teacher Pensions

2010-04-14T08:21:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choice released a report written by me and Josh Barro. The title: "Unfunded Teacher Pension Plans: It's Worse Than You Think." The main finding:

According to the fifty-nine funds’ own financial statements, total unfunded liabilities to teachers—i.e., the gap between existing plan assets and the present value of benefits accrued by plan participants—are $332 billion. But according to our more conservative calculations, these plans’ unfunded liabilities total about $933 billion.

In addition, we have found that only $116 billion, or less than one quarter, of this $600 billion discrepancy is attributable to the stock market drop precipitated by the 2007 financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to nearly double overnight to make up for the present underfunding of these plans.

The meat of what we did is this: Most state plans assume that their current investments will get about an 8% rate of return in perpetuity. So that means that they set aside less money now to cover the pensions that will be paid in 2015, 2020, 2025, etc. But the 8% assumption is wrong, we argue, for two reasons: First, recent history shows that it may be too optimistic. Second, investments that have an 8% expected rate of return necessarily carry some risk -- risk that the plan will actually fall short in a given year or even decade. And when a plan falls short, the burden falls to the taxpayer to make up the difference.

So we reanalyzed the teacher pension plans using the same interest rate that private plans are allowed to use -- about 6%, based on corporate bond rates. When we do that, it turns out that pension plans are way more underfunded than they are publicly admitting.

Over at The Quick and Ed, Chad Aldeman has a response to our study:

States, unlike private companies, do not fold under. Indiana, which according to the authors has a DB pension plan for teachers that is only 42% funded, is not likely to go out of business and take its workers down with it. The state of Indiana can assume a riskier investment return for its pension fund than an employer like those mentioned above or any other modern private firm (and, just for good measure, it’s worth pointing out that Indiana assumes only a 3 percent real rate of return).

All this is lost on the report’s authors, who would prefer states lower their assumptions on stock market returns from about 8 percent down to 6, the standard rate used by corporations in their calculations. This would mean telling a state like Pennsylvania, which has accumulated a 9.23 percent return in the stock market over the last 25 years (as of February 2010), that its 8 percent investment assumption is too high.

This is all irrelevant. We're not saying that when states engage in risky investments, teachers then are at risk of not being paid their pensions. The problem is precisely the opposite: Teacher pensions are guaranteed by states that don't go out of business. But that doesn't make the risk magically go away. The risk just ends up being borne by the taxpayer. So if a state decides to blow all of its pension money gambling at a horse race, the teachers will still get their pensions, but taxpayers will suddenly find themselves paying higher taxes to make up the shortfall (or else seeing huge budget cuts to other important state services).

In the last sentence, Aldeman cites a document put out by the Pennsylvania pension system, but that document actually proves our point. The Pennsylvania pension system may have made an average of 9.23% per year for the past 25 years, but you just have to read a bit further to see the prediction that looking forward, there will still have to be "significant and perhaps prohibitive tax increases at the State and/or Local levels."

Moreover, to focus on the 25-year rate of return, as Aldeman does, ignores three things: 1) Past performance is no guarantee of future success; 2) the PA pension system now has less assets on Dec. 31, 2009 than on June 30, 2004, which means it lost money over a 5.5 year period; and 3) this kind of variability (i.e., risk) requires taxpayers to pay extra when investments are disappointing for years on end.

The problem with Pennsylvania, as with many other states, is that when times were flush (the late 1990s or the mid-2000s), legislators did not have the foresight to let pension systems accumulate some savings for possible tough times ahead. Instead, they decided to lower contributions to pension systems and increase pension benefits, all on the assumption that high stock market returns would magically pay for it all. But when the stock market falls, the pension systems are left with extra liabilities that no one ever paid for, and the risk ultimately rests with the taxpayer.

It's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose system. That's why taxpayers need state pension systems to use an accounting method that more properly and honestly accounts for all of the risk that they're shifting onto us.

10 Most Influential Books

2010-04-04T17:07:00.005-05:00

Lots of bloggers are listing their 10 most influential books. Keeping in mind that influence is something that's difficult to quantify, here are 10 books or authors that affected my thinking in some way:

1. C.S. Lewis, Miracles. I find Lewis's refutation of philosophical naturalism convincing.

2. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. A fantastical depiction of a resident of hell who takes a tour of heaven.

3. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy. This book shaped my thinking on love and marriage as an impressionable young adolescent. It tells the tale of an American couple who fall in love and attempt to build the perfect marriage, who travel to Yale and Oxford together (befriending C.S. Lewis along the way), and who return to America only to find that the wife has a fatal disease and will soon perish. It's almost unbearably moving. (I have several letters that Vanauken wrote to me; we corresponded for a while before he died in 1996.)

4. Sheldon Vanauken, Under the Mercy. This book probably started me on the journey to becoming a Catholic. It's a sort of sequel to A Severe Mercy, telling what Vanauken did after his wife died.

5. The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton. I couldn't pick a single work here, but I spent a good deal of time in college reading through most of the Chesterton books on a couple of shelves in the library. (Chesterton was quite prolific.)

6. Pascal's Pensees. This collection of observations and sayings makes the list even if limited to one line alone: "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." (I guess you have to read that in context for it to make sense . . . .)

7. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I liked all of Postman's books, including those he wrote as a 1960s radical, but this one struck me as a perfect description of American pop culture. The cover of the old paperback -- with the headless people watching TV -- was perfect. (I say this as something of a hypocrite, of course; despite canceling cable 4 years ago, I'm still an avid watcher of Lost and 24 online.)

8. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics. I like the observation that virtue consists of forming the right habits by acting in the right way: "we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." I'm reminded of the modern psychological evidence that how you act affects your emotions.

9. The novels and fairy tales of George MacDonald, the 19th century Scottish writer.

10. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Full of trenchant and wise observations about what makes for a successful polis. (Runners-up here: City Comforts, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred, and The Geography of Nowhere.)

Diane Ravitch on Mayoral Control

2010-03-24T21:16:00.008-05:00

If Diane Ravitch insists that there's no evidence on a particular point, you can be almost certain that there is. Here's her piece on mayoral control, from a recent issue of Phi Delta Kappan:

Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress . . . argued that local control and local school boards are the basic cause of poor student performance. . . . In an ideal world, he wrote, we would scrap local boards and replace them with mayoral control, especially in urban districts. This one act of removing all democratic governance, he claimed, would lead to better education. . . . There is not a shred of evidence in Miller’s article or in the research literature that schools improve when democratic governance ends.

Once again, Ravitch misrepresents the literature. For example, there's Kenneth Wong's study of mayoral control, which found that "mayoral control has a statistically significant, positive effect on student achievement." Granted, Wong's study may be imperfect and it may be difficult to properly measure something as nebulous and potentially endogenous as mayoral control. But trying to refute Wong would be more defensible than claiming definitively that studies like his don't even exist.

P.S. If you're going to discuss scholarly literature with which you're not familiar, the wiser approach is to say, "I've never seen convincing evidence that such-and-such," which leaves you two easy outs: if anyone points out a study, all you have to do is note that you hadn't personally seen it, and/or that you don't find it convincing.

P.P.S. The Wong article above appeared in a book to which Ravitch herself contributed an article. So Ravitch had to know that her "not a shred of evidence" comment was false.

Testing is Bad Because People Cheat?

2010-03-12T14:25:00.003-06:00

There's an . . . interesting argument being circulated in the education world, to the effect that because a handful of schools or teachers are motivated to cheat on standardized tests, the real blame should be laid on the fact that we have tests in the first place.

Here's Diane Ravitch (formerly a staunch defender of testing), speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on March 10:

There's a front page story in the Chicago Sun-Times Today about thousands of test scores being erased and altered to raise them. This is what the pressure for proficiency has created: institutionalized fraud.

Similarly, there's this from a March 5 article on possible cheating in Houston:

“Cheating on tests has been rampant,” said Tom Haladyna, professor emeritus in the College of Teacher Education and Leadership at Arizona State University. “Many of us think the culprit is tying accountability to a single test score. It is a bad policy. It motivates a few to cheat so they can look good.”

By this logic, such as it is, we should abolish medical boards for potential doctors, tests for commercial pilots to get licensed, bar exams for attorneys, and tests to be licensed as a nuclear engineer, if it turns out that cheating ever occurs. After all, if any of these poor souls are so stressed out that they cheat on an important test, it's really our fault for asking them to meet performance standards in the first place.

Needless to say, this is one of the weaker arguments against testing.

Some Teachers Like Testing

2010-03-10T08:02:00.001-06:00

On the heels of the much-publicized change of heart by Diane Ravitch and the accompanying joyful outbursts by anti-testing and anti-accountability people everywhere, we can provide a bit of a reality check from right here in Arkansas. Hot off the presses of the popular teacher magazine Phi Delta Kappan is an article by a few University of Arkansas colleagues and me. The article is available here.

We visited several schools last year to talk with teachers about standardized testing and the "teaching to the test" concept. The surprising results can be seen on page 51:

In the end, teachers said many good things about various aspects of the testing process and, overall, gave a very positive impression of the effects of the annual assessments on classroom teaching. After we sifted through all of the comments from all of the teachers at all of the school sites, five positive themes emerged. The consensus of teachers with whom we spoke was that the tests provide useful data, that the testing regime helps create a road map for the year’s instruction, that the standards and tests don’t sap creativity or hinder collaboration, and, perhaps most surprising, that the accountability imposed by the testing regime is useful.

Here's just one example of the pro-testing sentiments we uncovered:

Many teachers noted that before testing, it was easy to teach idiosyncratically — perhaps spending “six weeks on the dinosaur unit and just totally ignor[ing]” other topics. With increased focus on testing, however, teachers have focused on matching their instruction to a coherent set of standards. Thus, one math teacher said that while she had initially “hated” the Arkansas benchmark tests, she has since changed her mind: “I’m OK with it now, to be honest; I see where knowing the standards and knowing what’s going to be tested can help me plan the whole year and make sure I’ve covered everything.”

Lars Katz

2010-03-08T19:47:00.003-06:00

Lars Katz's album is the best thing I've gotten since Deas Vail's new album came out. Absolute Punk perfectly describes why:

A prime example of why some producer/engineers absolutely SHOULD step out from behind the soundboard, Katz’ atmospheric vocals alone are enough of a reason to stand up and take notice. Add to that his ability to write massive songs decked in strings, cymbals, and beautiful harmonies, and you’ve got an album that makes skin shiver and heads nod.

Stewart Brand quotes

2010-03-04T08:28:00.003-06:00

Some interesting quotes from Steward Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto Brand has obviously shifted his beliefs since the 1960s; in fact, I was strongly reminded of Peter Huber's Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. From Brand:

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear. I was part of that too, and I apologize.

And:

An enlightened environmental program on population should now focus, I suggest, on softening the impact of the depopulation implosion. . . . The most effective environmental population program in this century is gently pronatal.

And:

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool. . . . It's worth knowing and remembering who was leading Greenpeace International . . .and Friends of the Earth International . . . when those two organizations went to great lengths to persuade Africans that, in the service of ideology, starvation was good for them.

Taleb quote

2010-03-04T08:24:00.001-06:00

A quote from Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan":

But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! . . . The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth -- unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.

. . . Is insurance against your peers' demoralizing success possible? Should the Nobel Prize be banned?

Update on Cert. Petition in Massachusetts Free Speech Case

2010-02-23T13:18:00.006-06:00

In an earlier post, I discussed a cert petition filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in a First Amendment case -- McCullen v. Coakley, No. 09-592.

A few developments in that case:

First, a group of distinguished law professors, including Lillian BeVier (UVA), Rick Garnett (ND), Michael Stokes Paulsen (St. Thomas), Lee Strang (Toledo), Kevin Walsh (Richmond), and Eugene Volokh (UCLA) (disclosure: three personal friends in the above list) filed an amicus brief in support of the free speech claim in the case. The brief argued that:

The First Circuit’s decision below stretched Hill to uphold a Massachusetts law that creates a public-forum no-speech zone with a 35-foot radius that (i) applies only at free-standing clinics that perform abortions, (ii) does not apply to employees and agents of these clinics, and (iii) prohibits speech directed toward willing and unwilling listeners alike in a wide swath of the public forum, rather than remaining limited to a prohibition of close, unwanted physical approaches. . . . This expansion of Hill threatens to multiply the damage to First Amendment jurisprudence that results when free-speech decisions track ideological divides over the subject-matter of the underlying speech.

Second, lead counsel Mark Rienzi of Catholic Univ. Law School (disclosure: a close personal friend of mine) has filed a reply brief. As it turns out, the state of Massachusetts' response to the cert. petition essentially switched arguments, and claimed that the buffer zone law was supported by injunction cases like Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, Inc., 512 U.S. 753 (1994), and Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York, Inc., 519 U.S. 357 (1997). In so doing, the state apparently realized the futility of claiming that its expansive buffer zone law was supported by Hill v. Colorado -- despite having made that very argument for about a decade.

But the new "injunction" argument is, if anything, worse. The state now argues something like this: 1) in a few cases, injunctions against abortion protestors were upheld, along with language noting that injunctions are more dangerous to the First Amendment than general statutes; 2) any general statute less onerous than the injunctions in those cases must therefore be upheld as consistent with free speech.

The reply brief makes short work of that argument:

Simply because courts are particularly cautious about speech-restrictive injunctions does not mean that any restriction a court could constitutionally tailor to an individual is, ipso facto, a permissible statutory restriction against all citizens. Indeed, if Respondent’s analysis were correct, statutes requiring all speakers to remain at least 100 feet away from actress Halle Berry, and at least ten feet from all Church of Scientology buildings, would also be a fortiori constitutional because injunctions against particular individuals have issued with those terms.

. . . Similarly, Hill would have been an open-and-shut case unworthy of certiorari review because its 8-foot separation zone is far less than the 36 feet approved in Madsen.

The cert. petition has been re-distributed to the Supreme Court for consideration at their March 5 conference.

The Obama Bully Pulpit

2010-02-19T08:22:00.001-06:00

As someone who canceled cable television about 4 years ago and who has the above bumper sticker on his car, I loved Obama's advice to parents:

President Barack Obama, who is spending billions of dollars to overhaul the U.S. public education system, says there's one sure thing parents can do to help their kids learn, regardless of financial means: Forbid them from watching television on school nights.

Of his own daughters, Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, Obama told Essence magazine: "The girls don't watch TV during the week. Period."

So are we going to see an overall drop in Nielsen ratings? Probably not, but aspirational advice like this is still useful.

Memorization is Important

2010-01-22T10:18:00.003-06:00

I've dealt with this topic before (see here and here), but people keep coming up with the odd notion that thanks to the Internet, you no longer need to know things. From The Edge's (superlative) annual "World Question Center":

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is.

Wrong. Focus is important, but no job above the level of, say, raking leaves could be performed with even minimal competency by an ignorant person who merely has access to Google. If you know nothing of automobiles, can you rebuild an engine just by Googling the answer? If you know nothing about nuclear physics, can you help design a nuclear power plant by Googling the answer? If you haven't been to medical school (and believe me, this involves gargantuan amounts of memorization of tedious facts), can you perform heart surgery by Googling the answer? If you haven't been to law school (more tedious memorization), can you argue a Supreme Court case by using Google?

To be sure, the Internet can make someone who already has a broad base of memorized knowledge slightly more competent, by reminding them of a forgotten fact or enlightening them as to a new fact that they can fit into their pre-existing base of memorized knowledge. But it's absurd to suggest that the need for a "large body of knowledge" has disappeared and been replaced by Google along with "critical thinking skills."

Human Capital Misallocation

2009-12-28T11:12:00.004-06:00

Tyler Cowen's recent post touches on a topic that I think one of the chief problems of the human race: human capital misallocation. Cowen is much more sanguine than I am:

My view is that people who are born into a reasonably good educational infrastructure get exposed repeatedly -- albeit briefly -- to lots of the activities which might intrigue them. If the activity is going to click with them, it has the chance. To borrow the initial example, most high schools and junior high schools have chess clubs and not just in the wealthiest countries. Virtually everyone is put in touch with math, music, kite-flying, poetry, and so on at relatively young ages.

But those are only a minuscule handful of the possible occupations and activities that human beings engage in. Take a look at the U.S. Census, which lists "over 21,000 industry and 31,000 occupation titles in alphabetical order." I have little doubt that no one on earth is meaningfully exposed to more than a minute percentage of all of the possible things one can do with one's life.

Nor do I think there's any conceivable system in which people could be meaningfully exposed to more than a handful of possible careers. In most cases, you simply don't know whether you'll like a career or activity until you've put in at least several months to get acclimated to it and to build up some basic competence. This is true in either direction: plenty of people go to law school but end up years later disliking the practice of law, while plenty of people (I'd bet) fail to explore some activity that they'd actually like simply because it appears uninteresting or daunting at first glance. In any event, it's just not possible to give someone six months' exposure to 1,000 different careers.

As a result, there's an inestimably large amount of human capital misallocation and misinvestment. Countless lawyers and doctors and bankers who complain about their work might have been perfectly happy as a lawn mower mechanic or as a beekeeper or as a chemist specializing in laundry detergent, but never had any inkling that they should have explored those careers.

Note: this post is only about the limitations of personal knowledge compared to the vast number of possible careers/activities. I'm not even touching on the issue of equal opportunity, i.e., the inner-city child who wasn't given enough intellectual stimulation in school to become qualified for many careers.

P.S. You might consider applying this same analysis to the question of whether a given individual is likely to end up marrying the (a) right person for him or her.

Diane Ravitch -- Wrong on Charter Schools

2009-11-28T16:12:00.002-06:00

Diane Ravitch has a new post full of criticisms of charter schools. Unfortunately, the arguments are unsupportable and contradictory.

1. Ravitch has gone to the NAEP website and downloaded snapshots of how students in public charter schools scored compared to students in other public schools. She then concludes, "Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools."

No, no, no. You cannot tell anything about how a given type of school is "performing" just by looking at a cross-section of its students' test scores -- without even attempting to take into account the students' backgrounds and previous test scores. And as I point out below, charter school students tend to arrive with somewhat lower test scores than average.

2. Immediately after having praised other public schools for supposedly outperforming charters in student test scores, Ravitch pivots 180 degrees and criticizes charter schools for drawing off the "most successful" students and "disabl[ing]" the public schools!

My beef with charter schools is that most skim the most motivated students out of the poorest communities, and many have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners. The typical charter, operating in this way, increases the burden on the regular public schools, while privileging the lucky few. Continuing on this path will further disable public education in the cities and hand over the most successful students to private entrepreneurs.

It's just not convincing to say with one breath that public schools are "outperform[ing]" and in the next breath that they're being "disable[d]," or to criticize charter schools for serving the "most successful" students just after having claimed that charter students don't score well on national exams.

3. Besides being contradictory, Ravitch's argument is wrong. Charter school students may be "motivated" in some sense, but that certainly doesn't mean that they are all academically successful. Quite the contrary: parents whose children are doing well in the public schools often tend to stay put, while it is precisely the parents whose children are struggling who may tend to seek alternative schools (whether through vouchers or charters). Painting with a broad brush, many charter school and voucher parents have said, "Gee, little Johnny isn't doing so well, maybe I should check into a different school." Such "motivation" doesn't give rise to some sort of huge charter school advantage.

Some evidence for this point: Zimmer et al.'s October 2009 paper analyzing data from locations representing 45% of the charter schools in the nation. They find NO evidence that charter schools are cream-skimming. To the contrary, "in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages."

For another example, take Texas, which is home to over 450 charter campuses, about 10% of all the charter campuses nationwide. In Texas, charter schools that serve predominantly students identified as “at risk” can be rated under an alternative accountability system. In 2007-08, 43.3% of charter schools in Texas qualified to be rated under that system, compared to a mere 3.3% of public school district campuses in Texas (see page 147 here). No doubt, most of the parents of these "at-risk" youth could be described as "motivated" -- motivated to find something, anything, that would help their children learn and stay in school. But this is not obviously an advantage for the charter schools' academic performance.

Incidentally, people often make the same accusation about private schools generally, i.e., that they just skim off all the best students. To the contrary, Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger found that “there is evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. Relative to their public-school counterparts, urban whites who attend these schools appear to possess unmeasured traits that inhibit attainment.” They add this footnote: “Evidence of negative selection is common in this literature. Coleman and Hoffer (1987), Evans and Schwab (1995), and Neal (1997) all report evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. A common hypothesis concerning this result is that some parents send their children to Catholic schools seeking a remedy for existing problems with discipline and motivation.”

The Possibility of Social Science Fakery

2009-11-26T09:51:00.006-06:00

There are many scandalous cases of physical scientists or medical researchers faking their data. E.g., Schon's plastics research, Ninov's "discovery" of element 118, Scott Reuben's faked medical trials, and many more.

For anyone contemplating inventing their own data, it's a risk-reward calculation: The risk of being discovered and drummed out of a profession versus the reward of whatever fame accrues to new scientific discoveries or publications. But it's amazing that physical scientists would ever fake data, given the high risk of being discovered when other scientists are unable to replicate their findings.

But some do it anyway. Which makes me wonder about social science, where the risk would be far lower. There's no general expectation that social science "discoveries" are going to be replicable 100% of the time in any new dataset or research that comes along. For example, if one psychologist does a psychological experiment of some sort, and someone else does a similar experiment with different results, that can always be explained by the fact that the experiment happened at a different time and place involving different people as subjects, or maybe there was some seemingly minor difference in the experimental conditions, etc.

So if people are willing to fake results even when they surely know of the high risk of being caught, how much more willing would they be to fake results when the risk is far lower? How much social science fakery is there?

Peer Review

2009-11-22T22:59:00.006-06:00

Out of all the recent emails that were apparently hacked or leaked from a prominent laboratory in England ("Climategate," some are calling it), this one bothers me. It shows how "peer review" worked from the inside:

From: Keith ***
To: Edward ***
Subject: Re: Review- confidential REALLY URGENT
Date: Wed Jun 4 16:02:09 2003

[OMITTED]

At 09:50 AM 6/4/03 -0400, you wrote:

Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper. Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims.

If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced. Your assistance here is greatly appreciated.

Assuming that this email is valid -- and no one seems to be claiming that any emails were altered -- this guy is being asked to peer review a manuscript. Does he think the manuscript is actually wrong? No -- he admits that it's full of math that "appears to be correct" (to be sure, he implies that he finds the math hard to understand). The only thing he can find wrong with the paper is that it's too theoretical, but he obviously isn't content recommending rejection on that basis. So he's worried that the paper "could really do some damage" to another paper by Keith Briffa. Unable to determine the paper's merits quite yet, but also without any doubts about trying his best to get the paper rejected anyway, he seeks help from the very person being criticized as to how to ding the article.

Is this any way for the peer review mechanism to work? I could hardly imagine anything more directly opposite to the ideal of giving manuscripts on a blinded basis to independent and unbiased reviewers who have sufficient expertise to judge an article's merit for themselves.

Cert petition in Massachusetts free speech case

2009-11-22T18:44:00.005-06:00

My good friend and classmate Mark Rienzi, now of Catholic Univ. Law School, has just filed a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in a First Amendment case -- McCullen v. Coakley, No. 09-592. The Supreme Court should grant cert, given the important issues at stake.

The case involves a Massachusetts law penalizing people who engage in speech near abortion clinics -- including peaceful speech, or even holding a sign silently. (Keep in mind: Your position on abortion shouldn't affect how you think of the free speech issue here, any more than the Klan's or Greenpeace's right to free speech depends on whether their message is agreeable to everyone.)

Now many people may think immediately that such a challenge is hopeless. After all, didn't the Supreme Court uphold speech restrictions outside abortion clinics in the case of Hill v. Colorado?

There are three responses to this.

First, the Massachusetts law is worse -- far worse -- in First Amendment terms than the Colorado law at issue in Hill. Here are three stark differences:

(A) The Colorado law applied to all medical facilities. But the Massachusetts law applies only to abortion clinics (not even to hospitals where some abortions may be performed). This is more worrisome in terms of the legislature's intent to focus on abortion-related speech.

(B) The Colorado law applied to all speakers -- which is "the level of neutrality that the Constitution demands," in the Supreme Court's express words. But the Massachusetts law applies only to abortion protestors, with exemptions for all “persons entering or leaving” an abortion clinic or all “employees or agents of [a clinic] acting within the scope of their employment.” In other words, an anti-abortion protestor could go to jail for silently and peacefully offering someone a leaflet on a public sidewalk, while the clinic employee would be exempt for saying, "Ignore that leaflet."

(C) The Colorado law applied only to unwanted speech -- speech directed at an unwilling listener. But the Massachusetts law prohibits offering leaflets, displaying signs, engaging in conversation with even willing listeners, speaking with others at a “normal conversational distance,” or even merely remaining stationary and silently holding signs on public streets and sidewalks, whether or not any listeners (let alone unwilling listeners) are present.

Indeed, the Supreme Court's Hill decision expressly relied on these aspects of the Colorado law in upholding it. Yet the Massachusetts law thumbs its nose at all three.

Second -- and this is a bit of legal inside baseball -- the First Circuit's decision uses a ridiculous version of the Salerno doctrine, which has been read to suggest that in a facial challenge, a plaintiff must show that all applications of the statute are unconstitutional. As I and other legal scholars have shown, that doctrine does not and should not mean that, say, in a First Amendment or equal protection case, the plaintiff has the responsibility of affirmatively proving something about all specific applications, both real and hypothetical. Instead, the only thing the doctrine can mean is that where the plaintiff shows content or viewpoint discrimination (for example), all applications of the statute are in fact unconstitutional.

But the First Circuit, like some other courts, has been misusing Salerno such that a First Amendment content- and viewpoint-discrimination case is now being judged using a rational basis test. As long as the court can imagine just one hypothetical reason for the statute, the state wins against a facial challenge.

This is a stunning and dangerous development. Rational basis has no place in these types of cases.

Third, the Supreme Court's decision in Hill was wrong, and should be overruled. Commentators and scholars from Michael McConnell to Laurence Tribe have said that Hill was inconsistent with the First Amendment's protection of free speech ("slam-dunk simple and slam-dunk wrong," is how Tribe put it).

* * *

As of now, Massachusetts has waived its right to respond to the petition. The Supreme Court likely wouldn't grant cert without having a response. Thus, the next step is for the Court to consider whether to require Massachusetts to respond, or to reject the petition outright. Given that the law is much more egregious than Hill -- such that even the three remaining members of the Hill majority (Justices Breyer, Stevens, and Ginsburg) might oppose it because it is so much more targeted and restrictive -- a call for response by someone seems likely. Time will tell.

UPDATE: See this update on the case.

Krugman on Education

2009-11-16T11:21:00.004-06:00

A recent Paul Krugman column made a puzzling assertion about education:

The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

It's hard to know what precisely he's saying here, but he seems to be trying to imply that education has "inevitably suffered" because of a lack of government spending.

Any such implication would be difficult to defend. As you can see in the above graph (from an Education Next article by Arthur Peng and James Guthrie), education spending has skyrocketed in real terms precisely during the period during which, according to Krugman, our politics were "dominated" by an anti-government-spending view. So what's the counterfactual here -- how much more does Krugman think we should have been spending?

Can Anybody Be A Genius? A Combined Book Review

2009-11-14T08:47:00.004-06:00

This is a combined book review that I shopped around a while back:

Anders Ericcson is now one of the most famous cognitive psychologists in the nation. Currently teaching at Florida State, Ericcson has spent his career pioneering the study of how experts become experts. He is particularly known for his research supporting the finding (originally due to polymath Herbert Simon) that expertise in any subject -- whether it be music, science, golf, or darts, to quote his webpage -- comes only after 10,000 or so hours of deliberate practice.

Ericcson's scholarly work is considerable (in addition to publishing numerous articles in scholarly journals, Ericcson has edited and contributed to four books on expertise, including the magisterial "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance"). But his recent fame is due to his prominence in several popularizations: Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success," Daniel Coyle's "The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown: Here's How," Geoff Colvin's "Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else," and I suspect David Shenk's optimistically-titled "The Genius in All of Us" (due to be released in 2010).

Following Ericcson's research, a running theme of all these books is that innate talent is heavily overrated, and that what we think of as a natural genius is actually the result of many hours of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means not just mindlessly running through musical scales or hitting golf balls on the range while chatting with friends about the stock market, but deliberately and intensely focusing on every aspect of what you are doing, carefully monitoring for errors and analyzing how to improve, and doing so ad nauseam.

The importance of practice is not new, of course. That is why we have jokes about how to get to Carnegie Hall ("practice, practice, practice"), and why we so often quote Thomas Edison's famous saying that "genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Still, it is worth being reminded that great talents almost never spring out of the blue; instead, they turn out to have had many years of deliberate practice before they emerged into greatness. Tiger Woods, for example, didn't just spontaneously become the world's best golfer; his father was an obsessive golf addict, and started having Tiger practice by age 2. Neither was Mozart (who is discussed in all three books) as effortless a genius as is often believed; his father was an accomplished musician and teacher, and drilled Mozart in piano and music theory from an early age.

Indeed, at times, these authors seem to dismiss the very possibility of innate talents and abilities. Says Colvin, "when it comes to innate, unalterable limits on what healthy adults can achieve, anything beyond [] physical constraints is in dispute." Or in the words of Gladwell, "the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play." In this sentiment, they are indebted to Ericcson, who writes that expert performance is not "due to innate talent."

The actual evidence against innate talent turns out to be rather unclear. Both Gladwell and Colvin highlight ("Exhibit A," says Gladwell) one of Ericcson's studies, in which he and two colleagues studied 30 violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. After the students were divided into three ability-based groups (potential concert soloists, merely good violinists, and a group of students studying to be music teachers), it turned out that the groups had differing estimates of the total amount of time spent practicing before age 18: 7,410 hours for the best violinists, 5,301 hours for the good violinists, and 3,420 hours for the would-be music teachers.

But this sort of study doesn't prove that innate talent is irrelevant or non-existent. These students all already had enough ability to get into a music school in the first place, and the study therefore ignores all of the people who might have given up the violin because they had so little aptitude for it that practice never paid off. Then there are selection effects that may have affected who was in which program: perhaps the students with the least innate ability all applied to the music education program, which demanded less practice, while those with the most innate talent applied to study for a solo career.

On top of that, innate talent could itself cause students to spend more time practicing, because it's pleasurable to spend time mastering something at which you have the ability to excel. As Ericcson and his colleagues briefly concede, “heritable individual differences might influence processes related to motivation and the original enjoyment of the activities in the domain and, even more important, affect the inevitable differences in the capacity to engage in hard work.”

Now, if researchers were able to do a random assignment study -- say, assigning a random group of 7-year-olds to spend 20 hours a week practicing the violin for the next 10 years, and another random group of 7-year-olds to serve as a control group by not playing the violin -- then, and only then, would we be able to see whether anyone who practices 10,000 hours is virtually assured of turning into the next Itzhak Perlman. Needless to say, no one has ever carried out any such study, and no one ever will.

Moreover, it seems intuitively obvious that even if genius arises out of years of intense training, there was often some innate ability to start with. Take, for example, Bart Conner, the gold-medal Olympic gymnast, who startled his parents when he suddenly started walking on his hands at age 6 (as Ken Peterson notes in a recent book). Although Conner didn't rise to Olympic status until spending many hours in training, his sudden ability to walk on his hands in childhood was neither typical (as most parents could tell you), nor was it preceded by 10,000 hours of deliberate practice at handstands.

Indeed, while the fact that Michael Jordan excelled at basketball and Bill Gates excelled at computer programming is inexorably tied to the many hours each of them practiced their respective fields, it's still rather dubious to imply that it could just as easily have been Jordan who founded Microsoft and Gates who dunked from the free throw line, had they only switched what they chose to practice.

* * *

As for the merits of each book standing alone, Coyle's book is perhaps the most intellectually satisfying. Although it's very much a book for non-scientist readers, it delves into the neuroscience behind expertise. The key to expertise, from a physical perspective, is a substance known as myelin, a sort of fatty "insulation" that wraps around neuronal fibers in the brain in proportion to how often that brain circuit is fired. When you engage in deliberate practice -- or any repeated activity at all -- your brain responds by focusing more myelin on the brain circuits involved in that activity. The key role of myelin sheds light on why deliberate practice develops good habits, and conversely why bad habits are so hard to break: once myelinated, a brain circuit doesn't easily lose that myelination. Thus, "the only way to change [habits] is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors -- by myelinating new circuits."

Given that Colvin is a senior editor at Fortune Magazine, it is unsurprising that his book is aimed at delivering lessons for the time-pressed businessman looking to get an edge on the competition. Some of the lessons are no doubt useful (practice giving a presentation beforehand), but some don't seem to have much to do with the expertise research. One chapter ("Applying the Principles in Our Organizations") consists mostly of advice such as "deliberately putting managers" into new jobs that will force them to learn new areas, or avoiding "picking the wrong team members," or trying to build "trust" among fellow business associates, or trying to block "the inevitable personal agendas." All of this may be good business advice, but the citations to expertise research are rather thin.

Moreover, in many areas that businesses worry most about -- such as forecasting market developments, or making good strategic decisions -- there may not be any such thing as "expertise" in the first place. Philip Tetlock's superb book "Expert Political Judgment" collected some 80,000 predictions from people reputed to be political or economic "experts," and then waited to see if the predictions came true; the so-called "experts" turned out to be little more accurate than random chance.

Business is likely no different. Because the world is so complex, and because so many intervening events can arise, it is extraordinarily easy for managers, economists, and politicians to fool themselves into believing that their preferred course of action really was a good idea at the time. Moreover, it may be years or decades between a manager's or politician's decision, and the ultimate results of that decision. All of this, in turn, prevents them from receiving instantaneous and unambiguous feedback on their performance -- something that is absolutely necessary to deliberate practice. When you miss a golf shot, you instantly know that you've missed, by how much, and in what direction. None of that is true as to many business or political decisions.

Gladwell broadens his focus far beyond the expertise research, discussing the way in which extreme outcomes are due to communities (he opens by discussing a community of Italian immigrants that was abnormally healthy, apparently due to its small town atmosphere), culture (one chapter analyzes how Korean pilots are more likely to crash since co-pilots feel too timid to point out when the pilot is in error), and sheer luck in timing (one chapter notes that many current giants of the computer industry were born around 1955, just in time to be college-age when computers became more widely usable in the mid-1970s, but not so old that they were already safely esconced in corporate jobs). From these motley collection of these fascinating stories -- Gladwell has clearly spent 10,000 hours practicing the art of storytelling -- Gladwell draws the conclusion that we get too caught up "in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made," whereas success really depends heavily on circumstances or cultural backgrounds.

That conclusion is true enough, but Gladwell immediately veers in an odd direction with his policy prescription: "To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success -- the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history -- with a society that provides opportunities for all."

What? Gladwell has just spent pages and pages telling us that Asian children do well at math because they come from a cultural heritage "where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants [were] slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year," and that to be a "great New York lawyer," the perfect combination is someone born in the 1930s to Jewish immigrant parents who worked in the garment district. All of that may be true, but these advantages, such as they are, are impossible to confer on anybody, let alone all of society.

Even the advantage that Bill Gates had -- Gladwell points out that "our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968" -- doesn't provide a useful guide. In 1968, no one had any clue that personal computers would one day become as common as telephones (IBM's Thomas Watson once said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," an infamous example of the impossibility of predicting future business developments). No one could possibly have known that Gates's teenage hobby of programming was actually a huge headstart on an industry that would one day be worth billions. Similarly, it makes no sense to suggest that we need a national policy of giving "all" children a headstart on whatever will be a brand-new multi-billion dollar industry in the year 2040. No one knows how to do such a thing.

More on Deas Vail

2009-11-01T14:02:00.010-06:00

I've been a huge fan of Deas Vail since discovering them nearly 2 years ago. The best way to describe them would be this: indie pop-infused rock with soaring and haunting melodies sung by one of the best vocalists in rock. Having seen them three times in concert, I can say that they're far better live than most bands are in the studio with the benefit of editing, autotune, etc.

As of October 27, their new album "Birds and Cages" is available on Amazon, or Itunes, or through their new record label Mono vs. Stereo (for only $7.00!).

I have to admit, even as much as I loved their first album "All The Houses Look the Same," I was a little bit nervous last year when they announced that they were recording both a 5-song EP ("White Lights") and a full-length album, all at the same time. I wondered if maybe they would be stretched too thin.

Boy was I ever wrong. To my ears, it's one of the best albums I've ever bought, let alone in 2009. If anything, they've taken their music to a new level. Wes Blaylock (the lead singer) is just as jaw-dropping with his soaring vocal pyrotechnics, and his wife Laura (keyboardist) is featured more often in some quite lovely vocal duos. Andy Moore (guitar) is constantly pushing the envelope with different sounds and effects. Kelsey Harelson's drumming rarely just keeps a steady beat; instead, he manages, in song after song, to use the offbeats in a way that propels the music forward and gives it a sense of mission and urgency. Finally, Justin Froning's energetic bass playing rounds out the band nicely.

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The tunes are just as full of earworms (i.e., melodic hooks that you can't get out of your head) as ever, but the music is often adventurous and arresting. "Sunlight" has a progressive rock sound that is hard to place in a single key, and the verses are in 7/8 time. The intro to "The Great Physician" has a really nice chord progression that is far different from your traditional I-IV-V. The verses in "Atlantis" are in 5/4 time. "Puzzles and Pieces" is just beautiful -- I could easily hear this song featured in one of the many television shows that run out the clock by playing a poignant song while the various characters look pensive.

As another reviewer put it, "Deas Vail is one of the few bands who can take pop/rock music and force the listener to apply 'beautiful' to it as an adjective." If that sounds appealing to you, "Birds and Cages" should be the first thing you purchase.

Deas Vail

2009-10-29T13:42:00.002-05:00

One of my very favorite bands -- Deas Vail -- has a new album out, "Birds and Cages." Just got a CD in the mail yesterday. Lots of wonderfully melodic tunes sung by one of the best vocalists in all of rock. Buy it here, here, or here.

UPDATE: Much longer post on Deas Vail here.

Great Blog

2009-10-24T13:02:00.004-05:00

"The Last Psychiatrist." Lots of long thought-provoking essays on medical and conceptual topics. It's good enough that I'm gradually reading through the entire archives (the fact that it avoids short links to yesterday's news helps). Lots of posts are worth pointing to; a few examples would be The Bubble in Academic Research, Off Label Prescribing, Which is Worse, and Where Does a Tree Get Its Mass.

UPDATE: See also Are Drug Companies Hiding Negative Studies?.

White House Communications Director and Mao

2009-10-19T17:11:00.004-05:00

By now, many people have heard about the White House Communications Director who gave a speech including praise of Mao as one of her favorite political philosophers.

The odd thing is that what seems to have impressed her as a deep political thought was this saying of Mao's: "you fight your war, and I'll fight mine." She emphasizes it: "And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don't have to follow other people's choices and paths. OK? It is about your choices and your paths."

That's it? That's her idea of profound political advice? Something so anodyne and banal ("follow your own path") that it has been featured in any number of after-school specials, pop songs, and so on ad nauseam? For that bit of triteness she had to look up one of history's most notorious mass murderers? A word of advice to would-be fans of political philosophy: you're probably better off citing the wisdom of Sammy Davis, Jr..

Two Dietary Studies on Heart Disease

2009-10-14T21:05:00.003-05:00

Both are opposed to the usual advice to avoid dietary fat. Not random experiments, mind you, but still interesting:

Sara Holmberg, Anders Thelin and Eva-Lena Stiernström. Food Choices and Coronary Heart Disease: A Population Based Cohort Study of Rural Swedish Men with 12 Years of Follow-up. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6, 2626-2638.

Nutritional recommendations are frequently provided, but few long term studies on the effect of food choices on heart disease are available. We followed coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality in a cohort of rural men (N = 1,752) participating in a prospective observational study. Dietary choices were assessed at baseline with a 15-item food questionnaire. 138 men were hospitalized or deceased owing to coronary heart disease during the 12 year follow-up. Daily intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease when combined with a high dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 0.39, 95% CI 0.21-0.73), but not when combined with a low dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 1.70, 95% CI 0.97-2.98). Choosing wholemeal bread or eating fish at least twice a week showed no association with the outcome.

In other words, eating fruit and vegetables was associated with a 70% higher risk of heart disease if not accompanied by dairy fat.

Leosdottir, Margret; Nilsson, Peter M.; Nilsson, Jan-Åke; Berglund, Göran. Cardiovascular event risk in relation to dietary fat intake in middle-aged individuals: data from the Malmo Diet and Cancer Study. European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention & Rehabilitation, October 2007, 14 no. 5, 701-706.

The hypothesis that diets rich in total and saturated fat and poor in unsaturated fats increase the risk for cardiovascular disease is still vividly debated. The aim of this study was to examine whether total fat, saturated fat, or unsaturated fat intakes are independent risk factors for cardiovascular events in a large population-based cohort.

Methods: 28 098 middle-aged individuals (61% women) participated in the Malmö Diet and Cancer Study between 1991 and 1996. In this analysis, individuals with an earlier history of cardiovascular disease were excluded. With adjustments made for confounding by age and various anthropometric, social, dietary, and life-style factors, hazard ratios (HR) were estimated for individuals categorized by quartiles of fat intake [HR (95% confidence interval, CI), Cox's regression model].

Results: No trend towards higher cardiovascular event risk for women or men with higher total or saturated fat intakes, was observed. Total fat: HR (95% CI) for fourth quartile was 0.98 (0.77-1.25) for women, 1.02 (0.84-1.23) for men; saturated fat: 0.98 (0.71-1.33) for women and 1.05 (0.83-1.34) for men. Inverse associations between unsaturated fat intake and cardiovascular event risk were not observed.

Conclusions: In relation to risks of cardiovascular events, our results do not suggest any benefit from a limited total or saturated fat intake, nor from relatively high intake of unsaturated fat.

Swiss Health Care

2009-10-01T18:33:00.002-05:00

I like the sound of the Swiss health care system, judging from this New York Times article (which may, of course, be missing all sorts of relevant information).

New Jersey ≠ Arkansas

2009-09-26T10:03:00.001-05:00

There has been some controversy over a video from a New Jersey school wherein third graders were led in chants of praise to Barack Obama. The New Jersey school is named B. Bernice Young Elementary, which is quite similar in name to Bernice Young Elementary in my Arkansas hometown. Unfortunately some people aren't quite able to figure out the difference between New Jersey and Arkansas:

Officials at an elementary school in northwest Arkansas say they're getting angry calls over a You Tube video by students at a New Jersey school with a similar name.

Bernice Young Elementary School in Springdale is getting calls from across the nation and Canada from people mad about students shown singing about President Barack Obama. Principal Debbie Flora says the callers claim the school is teaching political opinion and that some "did not use very kind language."
. . .

Flora says that, so far, she has received no calls from Arkansas.

As a public service announcement, I would like to remind Americans and Canadians that New Jersey ≠ Arkansas.

People Who Don't Believe in Their Beliefs

2009-09-22T12:59:00.002-05:00

So I was reading Reading Beyond Race, by Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines (Harv. Univ. Press, 1997), which analyzes a bunch of survey work about racial attitudes.

In an initial chapter, they point out that white opposition to affirmative action was overwhelming even among "the most racially tolerant 1 percent of whites." My immediate reaction was, "So then how did affirmative action ever come about, if almost no one supported it?"

A subsequent chapter had the answer. The researchers came up with a very clever idea that they called the "List Experiment," which consisted of giving people a survey in which the interviewer reads a list of things that could possibly upset people (pollution, an increase in gas taxes, etc.), and then asks simply to know how many of the listed items (not which particular items) upset the person being interviewed. But some of the interviewees got an extra item in the list: affirmative action. This allowed the researchers to know that if the average number goes up when affirmative action is included in the list, some number of people are picking affirmative action in addition to the other items.

What were the results? Here's where things get interesting. When liberals are asked directly about their attitude toward affirmative action, they largely support it. But this is "a result of liberals saying what they think they should say, not what they really think. . . . it turns out that about 57 percent of white liberals include 'black leaders asking the government for affirmative action' among the things that make them angry or upset, compared with 50 percent of conservatives (and 55 percent of moderates . . .). These three figures are statistically indistinguishable."

I wonder how much of politics (and religion?) is a matter of people saying what they think others want to hear, not what they really believe. But by the same token, how much of the very fact that we have civilized society at all is because we squelch our true feelings and say what other people will find acceptable? (Witness the difference between the vast majority of face-to-face conversations vs. the sorts of things that anonymous Internet commenters will say when unencumbered by the social pressure to hide their true feelings.)

Charter Schools and Merit Pay

2009-09-21T11:39:00.001-05:00

In a new post, educational historian Diane Ravitch says, among other things:

As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power.

* * *

There is also no research that justifies the Obama administration’s belief that tying teacher evaluations to student scores will improve schools.

No research?

Take the charter school point first. In a study that Ravitch herself cites, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that "states that have limits on the number of charter schools permitted to operate, known as caps, realize significantly lower academic growth than states without caps, around .03 standard deviations."

To be sure, .03 standard deviations isn't huge. But it's something. And it's a "credible basis" for the Obama administration to give states a financial incentive to eliminate charter school caps. I am aware of no studies finding any benefit whatsoever from state laws restricting the number of charter schools that can open. Incidentally, Arkansas currently restricts the number of charter schools statewide to 24. There is no basis for this limit.

Second, take the merit pay issue. No research? Consider David N. Figlio and Lawrence W. Kenny, "Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance," Journal of Public Economics 91 no. 5-6 (2007): 901-14. Looking at national data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, they find that "test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance." To be sure, Figlio and Kenny concede that their cross-sectional study can't tell definitively whether it was better schools that adopted performance pay, rather than vice versa.

But here are a few studies that weren't cross-sectional:

1) Gary Ritter and Josh Barnett, "When Merit Pay is Worth Pursuing," Educational Leadership 66 no. 2 (2008). Ritter and Barnett studied a Little Rock merit pay program. After two years, "schools implementing the program achieved average gains of approximately seven percentile points for students in mathematics and reading. Scores of students in the pilot schools improved, whereas those of students in comparison schools decreased."

2) Adele Atkinson, Simon Burgess, Bronwyn Croxson, Paul Gregg, Carol Propper, Helen Slater and Deborah Wilson, "Evaluating the impact of performance-related pay for teachers in England", Labour Economics 16 no. 3 (June 2009): 251-261 (a working version is available here). Atkinson et al. use a sophisticated methodology to evaluate a merit pay scheme in Englnad, controlling for pupil effects, school effects, and teacher effects. They find that "the scheme did improve test scores and value added increased on average by about 40% of a grade per pupil."

3) Victor Lavy, "Performance Pay and Teachers' Effort, Productivity, and Grading Ethics," NBER Working Paper 10622. Lavy evaluates a merit pay program in Israel that gave cash bonuses to teachers whose students earned more "credits" on national graduation exams. He used two sophisticated methods: regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching. His results are substantively significant: As to one estimation, he notes that "the effect of treatment on credits earned in math is 0.256, a 18 percent improvement relative to the mean of the control schools (1.46). The effect of treatment on awarded credits in English is 0.361, a 17 percent improvement relative to the mean of the control schools (2.11)."

These aren't the only studies, of course, and incentive schemes sometimes don't show much benefit. Still, to claim that there is no evidence in their favor isn't accurate. Once again, the position that lacks evidence here is the position that Obama and Duncan are trying to combat, i.e., that it should be illegal to use test score data to assess a teacher's performance (as is the case in several states). These states might as well have passed a law stating that because so much of a patient's health depends on factors outside a doctor's control, it should therefore be illegal to consider whether a doctor's patients were killed by incompetence.

On the bright side, I applaud Diane Ravitch's announcement of the Partnership for 19th Century Skills.

Fallibility of Eyewitness Testimony

2009-09-15T12:46:00.002-05:00

If the legal system ever started to take into account studies like this, there would be drastic changes.

My Investing Advice

2009-09-13T22:27:00.002-05:00

If you took my investment advice 11 months ago, you'd have earned about 13.65% since that time.

The Broken Windows Theory of Schools

2009-09-12T13:34:00.000-05:00

In a famous article in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued that a good way to prevent serious crime would be for police to intervene as to seemingly low-level crimes or misdemeanors:

[D]isorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.
* * *

We suggest that "untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly. . . . Such an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes' customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently. That muggings will occur.

Via the New York Times' Idea Blog, Folwell Dunbar (Louisiana's academic adviser for charter schools) describes his very similar rules of thumb for guessing whether a school is any good. The title: "You don't always need a standardized test to know a school is in trouble. Just look in the boys' john." In other words, just as broken windows are a sign of a bad neighborhood, a school bathroom with graffiti, trash, and unflushed toilets is a good sign that the academic achievement level isn't too hot. That is, the fact that school administrators are incapable of monitoring bad behavior is a sign that students are probably being hampered from learning.

To be sure, Dunbar's theory doesn't rest solely on bathrooms. He lists many other conditions that, in his experience, indicate a poorly run school, such as:

Administrators are unwilling to let credentialed visitors roam. Instead, they insist on "giving a tour" of the usual, safe suspects.

Teachers read newspapers and take cell phone calls during professional development events.

Teachers play solitaire on their computers during planning periods (or class). Or: the Web sites most visited by teachers include eBay, ESPN and Monster.com.

Teachers and staff talk more about their latest degree or certification program than what they are doing with the kids.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Meaningless Polls

2009-09-11T11:07:00.004-05:00

Gallup Poll, yesterday:

A new Gallup poll finds half of Americans believe the court is “about right” ideologically, an all-time high and an increase of 7 percentage points over last year.

Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed approve of the job done by the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest level since 2001, when the court had an approval rating of 62 percent, Gallup reports.

Given this Zogby poll, which famously found that 3 times as many Americans could name two of Snow White's dwarfs as could name two Supreme Court Justices, asking Americans to rate the Supreme Court's performance is a meaningless exercise. It's like asking people who have never heard of any physicists at all, other than maybe Stephen Hawking, to rate the world's top 10 physicists.

Obama's speech

2009-09-09T10:57:00.001-05:00

For all of the controversy over Obama's speech to schoolchildren, the actual speech turned out to have some valuable advice. The following sounds like something that I've said many times, almost verbatim:

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

Education reformers usually focus on all of the supply-side questions: how to spend money on schools, how to get good principals and teachers, how to inject competition and choice, what are the right standards and curricula, what are the right pedagogical techniques, what are the best accountability systems and merit pay, etc.

But all of that leaves out the demand-side: the students' willingness (or not) to learn. We can deliver the perfect curriculum via perfect teachers led by perfect principals in perfect schools operating under perfect accountability standards and choice, but if the students have the attitude that "I refuse to learn, because it's not cool, or it's acting white," they won't learn very much. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

In fact, I might classify the cultural factors -- whatever affects a student's willingness to learn -- as more important than anything we do with the schools themselves. A motivated child can learn a lot on his or her own (say, by checking out books from the library) even if the school system is poorly run from top to bottom.

On the other hand, consider this alternative speech that Obama could have delivered.

The Evolution of God

2009-09-06T19:54:00.002-05:00

Robert Wright's new book The Evolution of God sounds like an interesting read, although I can't help but be reminded of this passage from G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man:

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.' * * *

The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

Muscles and Mortality

2009-09-04T21:42:00.003-05:00

Several of the studies showing a relationship between muscle strength or mass and mortality:

1. Metter, Talbot, Schrager, and Conwit, "Skeletal Muscle Strength as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality in Healthy Men," Journals of Gerontology Series A 57 (2002): B359-B365.

2. Newman et al., "Strength, but not Muscle Mass, Is Associated With Mortality in the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study Cohort," Journals of Gerontology Series A 61 (2006): 72-77.

3. Wannamethee et al., "Decreased Muscle and Increased Central Adiposity are Independently Related to Mortality in Older Men," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 86 no. 5 (Nov. 2007): 1339-1346.

4. Marquis et al., "Midthigh Muscle Cross-Sectional Area Is a Better Predictor of Mortality than Body Mass Index in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 166 (2002): 809-13.

5. Mador, "Muscle Mass, Not Body Weight, Predicts Outcome in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 166 (2002): 787-89. A key passage:

Correlation, however, does not prove causation.Thus, we cannot say whether a reduction in muscle mass causes an increase in mortality or whether a reduction in muscle mass is merely a reflection of severity of disease. If a reduction in muscle mass is responsible for the increased mortality, then interventions that successfully increase muscle mass should lead to improvement in mortality. No study addressing this issue has been performed.

Words of Wisdom from Seth Roberts

2009-08-30T21:22:00.001-05:00

Here:

Professors teach how to be professors. Most students don’t want to be professors. Every Berkeley prof I ever met was extremely good at research; a few were extremely good lecturers. And every one of them sounded like an idiot the moment they started talking about how they taught “critical thinking” or whatever grand-sounding term they had for it. “Teaching students to think” was a common way to describe teaching students how to be professors. To say such a thing to a psychology professor is like saying to a chemistry professor that the world consists of four elements (earth, air, fire, water). “Are you aware how stupid you sound?” I felt like saying. But instead I would say that there are many kinds of thinking.

Cancer

2009-08-26T10:35:00.001-05:00

This may be good news, if it pans out.

Atul Gawande

2009-08-25T19:16:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed this Harvard Magazine profile of surgeon and medical writer Atul Gawawnde.

My Qualm about Universal Health Insurance

2009-08-11T14:00:00.002-05:00

Just going by personal interest, I should be wildly in favor of universal health insurance. But as to the country at large, I worry about the rationing issue.

To be clear, I'm not worried that there will be too much rationing, I'm worried that there won't be enough. For a wide variety of reasons, I'm suspicious of the value of a lot of so-called "healthcare." Healthcare (not the lack of it) is one of the leading causes of death in America (doctor error, risks of surgery, hospital-borne infections, etc., etc.). And many treatments lack valid evidence that they even work.

Will there be enough rationing in a universal system? Probably not. Many people are frantic that there might be rationing (in the form of a refusal to pay for any requested service whatsoever), and the response of liberals is usually to proclaim that there will be less rationing under a government program than in the private market. So both sides will be on board for trying to limit rationing.

Thus, a universal system in America would, thanks to the political forces at work, serve to increase the total amount of healthcare consumed. Even though some people would benefit from more healthcare, that wouldn't be an average effect: lots of people would be harmed by having more healthcare. Thus, the American population would probably become less healthier on average, while paying more.

Not a good deal. There's got to be a better way to subsidize catastrophic insurance for the means-tested portion of the population that is most likely to need help there.

1950 Childhood vs. Today

2009-08-07T20:21:00.003-05:00

In an excellent post, Bryan Caplan points out that childhood is far safer in many ways today compared to 1950, a supposedly idyllic time of "Leave it to Beaver," etc. I suspect that the availability heuristic may play some role here. As childhood risks become lower, they ironically become better fodder for the news media, which tends to focus on rare sensational stories. In turn, the average person tends to overestimate risks that have been the subject of news coverage, and that are readily called to mind.

Cost of Raising a Child

2009-08-05T09:11:00.003-05:00

Journalists seem to love the recurring story about how much money it takes to raise a child to age 18 (currently $221,000). Reducing the cost of a child to such a figure, however, misses the fact that expenses are lumpy and that this affects marginal costs. If you live in a small apartment, and having children makes you decide to move to an house that costs 3 times as much, then that's an expense of raising children. But if you already live in a house and having a child merely means using the spare bedroom or putting two kids in a bedroom, then the marginal cost of having a child is much, much lower. Also: if you have one child, and buy new clothes and shoes for every age, that's a lot of expense. But if you have a second child who can wear the same clothes and shoes as hand-me-downs, the marginal cost drops much lower again.

It's not meaningful to talk about the "average" cost of a child . . . it all depends on your family's pre-existing circumstances.