Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
I have mixed feelings about criticizing Thomas Friedman. For one thing, it's been done. For another, he did some really impressive reporting on the Middle East and I suspect that, if he stuck to that topic, he would still be adding a great deal to the conversation.
In the role of public intellectual, though, he's pretty much been a disaster (insert Peter Principle digression here), and he keeps coming up with passages that are simply too representative not to use as examples of bad punditry.
Which brings us to the roommate effect. The roommate effect is one of the reasons that people who go to elite schools to tend do well professionally.
Imagine a small town populated predominately by people in their early 20s with similar backgrounds who are new to the area. Young people are good at making friends and this scenario is almost perfect for forming new relationships. You have roommates and friends and friends of roommates and roommates of friends. You meet people in the cafeteria and in the coffee houses and in the bars. You find people with common interests in music or movies or art or sports. These people tend to form much of the base of a social network that you will rely on for the rest of your life.
This part of the experience is common to anyone who has gone to a traditional college. But in an elite school, there is a fairly good chance that a new friends will be someone who is or is connected to someone who is rich/famous/powerful. Playing in a college pool league with the son of a Fortune 500 CEO is likely to be a good career move.
And that brings us to this recent Friedman column (mercilessly but not inaccurately satirized by Timothy Burke). The column is basically an unpaid advertorial for the job placement firm HireArt. The weaknesses of the column are a subject for another post; Friedman's lack of understanding of education and the job market is genuinely profound. However he does manage, quite unintentionally, to make an important point about the way things actually work (emphasis added for those who like to skim):
One of the best ways to understand the changing labor market is to talk to the co-founders of HireArt (www.hireart.com): Eleonora Sharef, 27, a veteran of McKinsey; and Nick Sedlet, 28, a math whiz who left Goldman Sachs. Their start-up was designed to bridge the divide between job-seekers and job-creators. ...
The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.
Over at the better-than-it-ought-to-be Cracked.com, columnist John Cheese has a very good piece called "5 Things Nobody Tells You about Being Poor" which includes this sharp observation:
Because having a checking account while poor doesn't just mean you have to be responsible and good at math -- you have to be perfect. Meticulous, flawless record keeping is the difference between surviving and having the bank seize your next paycheck.
It turns out things are even worse than Cheese thought according to this excellent article by Denise Grollmus:
In May, she wrote a check for $91 at an Albertson's grocery store. A few days later, while reviewing her bank account, she noticed that the check had bounced. Orr headed back to Albertson's to make good on her payment. But she was told that the store had already placed her in collections. It was out of the grocer's hands.
A month later, Orr received a letter from the district attorney's office. It inexplicably accused her of intent to commit fraud, noting that she was now eligible for "up to one year in the county jail." The only way to avoid criminal charges: participate in the county's "voluntary" bad-check restitution program.
"The letter really made me think I'd go to jail if I didn't," she says.
But the DA wanted more than $91 back. Though California law restricts the penalty on bad checks to $25, the letter demanded $333.51, which included $175 for a "voluntary" financial accountability class she'd have to take.
Orr didn't even consider arguing her innocence. She just wanted the problem solved. So she called the phone number on the letter to make arrangements to pay in cash at the sheriff's department. When she was told she could only send a check to a P.O. box, Orr grew suspicious.
"That's when I asked if I was actually talking to someone in the DA's office," she says. "And they said no, that they were a company being paid to represent the DA."
In fact, Orr had contacted Corrective Solutions, a private company from San Clemente. According to its website, it handles bad-check cases for 140 district attorneys nationwide — jurisdictions that oversee 65 million people, from Colorado to Florida, Michigan to Washington.
Consider it the privatizing of justice. Instead of investigating bad-check complaints, prosecutors simply pass them along to Corrective Solutions. The company then uses official DA letterhead to threaten jail time if consumers don't pay up. Corrective Solutions also runs the "voluntary" financial-accountability classes, and prosecutors get a cut of the profits while barely lifting a finger.
The entire system runs on a one-size-fits-all presumption of guilt. No one's bothering to investigate whether the check-writer was working a scam or merely suffering from a momentary lapse of mathematics.
Orr e-mailed Corrective Solutions, saying she'd be happy to repay the $91 plus a $50 fee, though she wanted to skip the "voluntary" class, which she couldn't afford.
Corrective Solutions didn't respond — but the threatening letters kept coming.
...
"That's what they do," Arons says. "Whenever we win one of these cases, they declare bankruptcy in order to avoid paying out damages. It's absolutely maddening."
The same thing had happened a year earlier, when Arons won a similar suit against American Corrective Counseling Services. A federal court ruled that, despite the company's claims of immunity, it had misrepresented itself, made false threats of prosecution and charged exorbitant penalties.
Once again, Arons's clients were unable to collect on their victory. American Corrective also declared bankruptcy, saying it couldn't repay investors — despite having collected $47 million in fees over the previous four years.
A few months later it was back in business, re-formed as Corrective Solutions and "free and clear" of all liability, according to court records.
Today it's the biggest bad-check collector of them all.
...
Consumer-rights lawyers estimate the company sends out around 2 million letters annually. (The company did not respond to repeated interview requests.)
The Corrective Solutions website does its best to imply that it's an arm of law enforcement. A slide show gently fades in and out with statements about "holding offenders accountable for their actions." An interactive map shows its 140 contracts with DAs nationwide.
Nowhere does it say that most of these "offenders" have never been investigated or formally charged with a crime.
The site boasts dozens of quotes from pleased prosecutors, who sing praises of reduced caseloads and crime rates. Contra Costa District Attorney Robert Kochly offers the most telling endorsement, noting he's grateful for "more revenue to my office."
District attorneys don't pay a cent for Corrective Solutions' services. Instead, the company pays them to run their bad-check programs. All a prosecutor must do is hand over official letterhead, along with a list of bad-check writers and a bit of "case criteria."
Between 2005 and 2008, Los Angeles County raked in more than $1 million. Miami-Dade made over $375,000.
On to education: Among ALEC’s 2013 legislative priorities is a call for “improving education” — a goal that, conveniently, can also improve corporate bottom lines. In 2011, Tennessee passed an ALEC-inspired bill allowing taxpayer money to be spent on for-profit education. K12 Inc., an online education company, pounced immediately — and landed a multi-million dollar deal to provide online education to Tennessee students. K12 is one of ALEC’s corporate members and a member of its education task force. The company helped to craft the ALEC model bill that inspired Tennessee’s for-profit education law. And the legislators responsible for introducing the bill? That’s right: they’re ALEC members too.
Fast forward to February 2013, when Nashville’s News Channel 5 conducted an investigation into K12’s Tennessee Virtual Academy and found what appears to be evidence of grade-fixing. An internal school e-mail reads: “After looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes… [Each] teacher needs to take out the October and September progress; delete it so that all is showing is November.” If, as the email suggests, student progress reports for September and October included “so many failing grades,” then simply excluding them might mislead parents — and K12 investors — into thinking that the school is succeeding — even if it’s not. Is this the kind of “educational improvement” ALEC was striving for when it published its 2013 priorities?
I came across this as part of a good piece by Charles Pierce arguing that the political press needs to focus on events outside of DC.
If you have the stomach for more on the topic, both the New York Times and Nashville's CBS affiliate have done good reporting on the story. Here's a taste of the NYT story:
Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them. State auditors found that the K12-run Colorado Virtual Academy counted about 120 students for state reimbursement whose enrollment could not be verified or who did not meet Colorado residency requirements. Some had never logged in.
p.s. I've got a thread on charter schools in the pipeline prompted by this generally well-balanced article by Ray Fisman. That makes this a good time to emphasis something about these looting stories. These incidents represent an existential threat to the reform movement. If you believe in choice, competition and accountability, then your biggest obstacle isn't unions or reform skeptics; it's the people who cheat and game the reforms. As long as we have widespread issues like test answers being changed, results being suppressed, and extensive student-dumping, then none of our data will be trustworthy enough for data-driven strategies.
When much more lavish conferences are held by private sector US corporations or professional associations (including academic associations, if your university doesn’t pay for it), they cost the US government lots of money too. Within various rules and strictures, they’re considered legitimate tax deductible expenses which people and (as best as I understand it) businesses can declare against earnings. You can make the case, obviously, that these conferences and events are mostly useless boondoggles. You can equally well make the case, if you want to, that they’re useful opportunities for social networking, building up esprit de corps and all of that good stuff. What you can’t make the case for, unless there’s some very subtle argument which escapes me, is a distinction under which conferences (for government employees) that cost the US government lots of money are obvious cases of abuse and waste, while more lavish conferences (for non-government employees) that cost the US government lots of money, are perfectly legitimate business expenses that we shouldn’t be bothering our pretty little heads with.
While this argument does gloss over some important distinctions (in theory, corporations can do all sorts of sub-optimal things if their owners agree), it does point out that the modern economy is deeply interconnected and all sorts of demarcation points miss just how interconnected it is. It is true that we see a difference between reducing a bill and giving money. But if charitable deductions are tax deductible then we have made the decision to subsidize things that people who give money value. This may be a completely sane and wise decision -- I am not going to take a side on that point -- but it is a reduction of government revenue under the current social structure that we have.
This sort of thing is common in all sorts of ways -- governments are also customers and act as important service providers in a number of contexts (I think it is reasonably non-controversial that purely private armies has tended to result in sub-optimal outcomes whenever it has been tried).
As for the conference piece -- it is a big country and personal relationships improve the operation of any organization. It seems to me that we pay a lot for government and it makes sense to have it run smoothly.
[*Probably not -- as with chess, fresh variants on poker are rare]
I've been thinking that some of our recent threads come down to how information flows or fails to flow through a system and sometimes when trying to find a new way of thinking about a problem, I find it useful to find an analogous situation in a game, or, failing that, to tweak a game to get an appropriate analogy out of it.
Here's what I came up with. I'm not sure it's all that playable (and I'm open to improvements), but it does raise some of the right questions.
This is a variant of seven card stud with one major addition.
Start by dealing the cards, three up, four down. Players check their cards then complete a normal round of betting.
Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, the bidding round starts. The bidder indicates another player and offers a certain amount to see a certain card* (for example "five dollars for the second hole card from the left"). If the offer is accepted, the card is shown to the bidder. A bid can be extended even if the other player has folded. Each accepted offer starts another round of betting. Additional bidding rounds continue until there is a round with no offers accepted.
Would this work? I'm not sure, but it does give one a chance to think through different situations involving the exchange of information in a zero sum game. For example, the information of what's in your hand is almost certainly worth more than what you'd be offered if you intended to play out the hand but is of almost no value (other than giving some insight to your playing style) if you intend to fold. I believe that bids should run the highest with seven players, a large pot and a small number of folds.
I believe there are other games with negotiated exchanges of information but I'm drawing blank on what they are.
*Unlike roll-your-own games where the player chooses which card to reveal.
Drug policy is really complicated. Drugs that are essential for helping people cope with acute pain can become problematic with long term use. The incredible efficacy of opioids at reducing short term pain has led to less assessment of the efficacy for long term use for chronic pain. Ironically, these sorts of dilemmas can lead to both under use and over use of the same medications.
I wish I had a happy and optimistic solution. I remain interested in the experiments in Washington and Colorado in hopes that this might show some evidence of harm reduction. But no path forward is without tough compromises.
While on the subject of corporate competence, this recent story seems like a good excuse to do a post on on one of the most consistently incompetent companies on the business landscape.
One of the most intriguing and for those inclined toward schadenfreude entertaining things about Burger King is the way that for about the past thirty years, with a variety of managers and owners, the company has been so bad at so many things.
Their PR is often clumsy (you generally want to avoid headlines about you copying your competitor's products).
Relations became so antagonistic that last year the [franchisees'] association took the extraordinary step of filing two class-action lawsuits challenging management decisions. One suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Diego, came after the company sought to divert to national advertising millions of rebate dollars that franchisees get from Coca-Cola Co. and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. for selling their beverages. That suit was dropped after the company agreed to augment its ad budget by other means.
The other association suit opposed a company mandate that franchisees sell a double cheeseburger for $1. That suit, still pending in federal district court in Miami, contends that management can only suggest prices franchisees charge. Franchisees had voted down the proposed sandwich, arguing they would lose money at $1, but Burger King introduced it anyway. In court papers, the company argued that an appeals-court ruling in another suit involving pricing gave it the right to make the move. Since the filing, Burger King has taken the double cheeseburger off its $1 Value Menu, and raised its suggested price, but announced plans to add more items to that menu.
Burger King also faces a suit brought by three franchisees—two are in the company's Hall of Fame for exceptional franchisees—challenging a mandate that they keep their restaurants open late at night. It "costs franchisees $100 an hour, but they gross only $25 to $30 an hour," says Robert Zarco, a Miami attorney representing the plaintiffs. The two sides are awaiting a hearing on the company's motion to dismiss that litigation, which was filed in Dade County Circuit Court in Florida in December 2008.
The dealings with the franchisees demonstrates another reason why BK schadenfreude is so satisfying. The incompetence often comes mixed with a curious nastiness.
Here's Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, writing for the New York Times:
In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.
...
Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company’s good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.
And then there are the ad campaigns. You would be hard pressed to find a comparable company with a worse run of advertising. You have to go back to the Seventies and early Eighties to find effective BK commercials. Since then a variety of agencies have produced a steady stream of mediocre ads ranging from forgettable to off-putting (try Googling "creepy Burger King").
Actually, there is at least one BK campaign that people in the advertising industry are still talking about, but not in a good way. In response to the proto-viral success of Joe Sedelmaier's "Where the Beef" ads, BK engaged J Walter Thompson (who were and are kind of a big deal) to set up a massive nation wide campaign of ads and cash prizes for people who spotted "Herb."
The promotion met with some positive reviews. Time called it "clever", and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune stated that Herb was "one of the most famous men in America". Ultimately, however, the Herb promotion has been described as a flop. The advertising campaign lasted three months before it was discontinued. One Burger King franchise owner stated that the problem was that "there was absolutely no relevant message". Although some initial results were positive, the mystique was lost after Herb's appearance was revealed during the Super Bowl. Burger King's profits fell 40% in 1986. As a result of the poorly-received campaign, Burger King dropped J. Walter Thompson from their future advertising. The US$200 million account was given to N. W. Ayer.
Recently, an MSNBC article listed this as the second worst Superbowl ad of all time.
Burger King has little competition for worst managed large fast food company and absolutely for worst marketed. McDonald's, Wendy's, Subway, Hardee's/Carl's Jr, and the Yum brands have all had better campaigns, but my vote for best (at least for the past 18 years) is the smart and innovative regional chain Jack-in-the-Box.
The commercials come from the aptly named ad agency, Secret Weapon which has an interesting policy.
We will never take on more than three clients at a time. This means our clients get hands-on attention from the principals of the agency. You may have been promised this before by other agencies, but it’s tough to give 25% of your time to 18 different accounts.
Our three client rule means you get to work with the people you meet in the pitch. And since we rarely pitch we’re able to keep our attention on existing clients, not potential ones. As it should be.
The ads are sharp and funny (sometimes too sharp -- certain competitors were decidedly unamused by an ad for a sirloin burger that pointed at a diagram of beef cuts and asked "where's the angus?"). More importantly, they're good ads; they focus on the product.
Check out Jack's expressions on this one.
The following comment appeared on the site where I found the following mini sirloin burgers ad. Could say something about the cultural impact of advertising but I'll just leave you with the image.
"Shit you not, guard controlled TV for the cell block, most of 128 inmates singing along to this. Almost magical except for the whole incarceration thing."
And in the did-they-just-say-that-? category.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Interesting article in the New York Times by Motoko Rich on why it seems to be more difficult to raise reading scores than it is to raise math scores. I don't have time to discuss this in depth, but I will say that having taught math, English and reading, I always found math to be the easiest subject to teach. By comparison I never felt I had a handle on the best way to teach language (or even if there is a best way).
That said, these are all excellent points:
Teachers and administrators who work with children from low-income families say one reason teachers struggle to help these students improve reading comprehension is that deficits start at such a young age: in the 1980s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that by the time they are 4 years old, children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children with professional parents.
By contrast, children learn math predominantly in school.
“Your mother or father doesn’t come up and tuck you in at night and read you equations,” said Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin. “But parents do read kids bedtime stories, and kids do engage in discussions around literacy, and kids are exposed to literacy in all walks of life outside of school.”
Reading also requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references. Math is a more universal language of equations and rules.
“Math is really culturally neutral in so many ways,” said Scott Shirey, executive director of KIPP Delta Public Schools in Arkansas. “For a child who’s had a vast array of experiences around the world, the Pythagorean theorem is just as difficult or daunting as it would be to a child who has led a relatively insular life.”
Education experts also say reading development simply requires that students spend so much more time practicing.
And while reading has been the subject of fierce pedagogical battles, “the ideological divisions are not as great on the math side as they are on the literacy side,” said Linda Chen, deputy chief academic officer in the Boston Public Schools. In 2011, 29 percent of eighth graders eligible for free lunch in Boston scored at proficient or advanced levels on federal math exams, compared with just 17 percent in reading.
One bill, introduced in the House by Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, would effectively end all surveys by the bureau, except for the decennial census, and even that would be limited to counting noses — a silly interpretation of the census’s mandate. Banning the surveys would make it impossible to compile reliable data on employment, productivity, health, housing, poverty, crime and the environment, to name a few of the affected fields.
This bill would be too wacky to worry about, but its lunacy makes the other know-nothing bill look moderate. That bill, introduced in the House by Ted Poe of Texas and in the Senate by Rand Paul of Kentucky, targets the American Community Survey. Started in 2005 to replace the long-form census, the survey is the indispensable source of information on factors that define American life, including family configurations, education levels, work and living arrangements, income and insurance coverage. Credible information is the basis for a responsive government, an efficient economy and, by extension, a functional society. It also gives American policy makers and businesses a competitive edge, because it encourages decisions based on hard data as opposed to guesses or other faulty rationales that dominate in the absence of credible data.
About three million people receive the survey every year, and, as with the census, answering it is required by law. Mr. Poe and Mr. Rand want to make it voluntary, which would make the results less reliable, and potentially worthless, because fewer people would answer and those who did would not be a representative sample.
Canada recently replaced its mandatory long-form census with a voluntary survey — and now lives with the sorry results. To try to get an adequate level of response, the voluntary survey was sent to one in three Canadians instead of one in five, which increased costs. The response rate plunged anyway, from 94 percent to 68 percent. In a staggering one-fourth of Canadian communities, not enough people responded to make the data usable.
8:00AM / Take a Hard Ride
10:10AM / House of Bamboo
12:20PM / Backlash
2:25PM / Michael Shayne: Private Detective
4:10PM / The Man Who Wouldn't Die
5:45PM / Jumpin' Jack Flash
8:00PM / High Anxiety
10:05PM / Silent Movie
The channel is a collaboration with Weigel Broadcasting and there's definitely a Neal Sabin touch with lots of dog whistles for movie lovers (Goldsmith, Fuller, Sturges, Brooks), widescreen format and an emphasis on the pretty-good but hard-to-catch (Emperor of the North is playing muted as I write this). The channel also introduces the welcome practice of not editing for length.
Looking through the schedule for the next few days, I see a number of interesting titles, more than I'll have time to watch. I also see indications that a great deal thought went into scheduling, making NBC's COZI secure in its position as worstrun terrestrial superstation.
When I rescanned my channels to pick up Movies!, four other new channels also showed up, including what appears to be a new subchannel from the CBS affiliate. At present, it simply rebroadcasts the same programming as the main channel, but if they really have gone from broadcasting one channel to broadcasting two, it would seem to indicate that CBS is at least considering jumping into the terrestrial market (which would mean that all four of the big four networks would have terrestrial-only channels).
In the past week I also noticed an LA company that sells and installs outdoor antennas has launched a fairly sizable ad campaign. Along similar lines, I recently started seeing store windows in East and Central LA carrying a wide selection of motorized and/or amplified indoor antennas.
As we've mentioned before, there are two wildly divergent pictures of the state of over-the-air television: healthy and growing according to the 2012 Ownership Survey and Trend Report; or small and shrinking according to Nielsen. It appears that pretty much everybody with first hand knowledge and skin in the game (networks, broadcasters, regional media players, retailers, manufacturers) are putting their money on the first scenario, while the only prominent backers of Nielsen appear to be reporters for the New York Times and Reuters.
The difference in rates of suspension between suburban and urban districts is substantial, with West Hartford and Farmington having five or fewer incidents of suspensions in this age group in 2012, while Bridgeport had 293 and Hartford had 238.
In some cases, the rates of suspension are quite different even between somewhat similar districts and schools.
For instance, Hartford has only about 240 more children enrolled in kindergarten and first grade than New Haven, but had 238 instances of suspension compared to 89 incidents in New Haven.
Amistad Academy in New Haven and Achievement First Hartford Academy are both public charter schools run by Achievement First, with very similar enrollment numbers in the early grades. But while Amistad had 38 instances of suspension during the last school year among children age 6 and younger, Achievement First Hartford Academy had 114 in the same age group.*
An even more dramatic comparison: The incidence of suspension of kindergartners and first graders at Achievement First Hartford Academy last year was an estimated nine times the rate in Hartford public schools.
...
Marc Michaelson, regional superintendent for Achievement First, said the school, where students annually out-perform their Hartford peers by significant margins on state standardized tests, has "a very high bar for the conduct of our students and that's because we've made a promise to our scholars and our families that we are going to prepare them for college."
For the 2012-13 year, the state is spending about $67.7 million on 17 charters with 6,451 students, including Achievement First's network of schools in New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford, said Jim Polites, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. Last fall, the state budget was $52.8 million for nearly 6,100 charter school students.
State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor is a former board member and co-founder of Amistad Academy, Achievement First's flagship school in New Haven.
A few points:
1. There is a great deal of money changing hands, often with little scrutiny...
2. And despite decidedly mixed results, the money seems to be increasing.
3. Selection effects matter.
4. These effects can be amplified by social dynamics.
5. Add to that the natural extremes of childhood and you get certain kids who are 80/20 for experienced teachers and 95/5 for the newbies.
6. Thus even a small change in class roster can cause a big change in class behavior and performance.
7. Under movement reforms, one of the best ways to get ahead financially and politically, is to find a way to dump certain students.
8. If you repeated suspend five-year-olds, their parents will take them elsewhere.
9. The hardest-to-reach kids should be the ones you care about the most.
10. If you don't feel that way, you shouldn't be working with kids.
* In case I haven't mentioned it lately, there is a huge range in quality and professional ethics among different charters.
Having watched the rise and fall (?) of the education reform movement for years now, I often find my attention split the story and the metastory. The story is what's being done in education, how it's working and what should be done differently. The metastory is about the way the reform narrative grew and entrenched itself (particularly with parts of the left) and about the way movement reformers (again, particularly on the left) failed to deal with certain longstanding concerns.
Putting aside the question of political agendas (which really shouldn't be considered when assessing arguments -- bad motives don't preclude good reasoning), the concerns fell into three broad categories:
1. The underlying pedagogical and economic assumptions were flawed;
2. There were intractable data issues that were being overlooked;
3. The system was vulnerable to (and had huge incentives for) gaming at a level that could undo any of the benefits that might come from the proposed reforms.
It is the third concern that prompted me to speculate about affinity effects (a point disputed here). Though evidence supporting all three has been accumulating for years, discussions of the first two got very technical very quickly. Support for the third, though, was obvious on a common sense level.
When a group repeatedly fails to notice something as it becomes increasingly obvious, you can legitimately start looking for some external influence, and the problem with gaming has become increasingly obvious. We started with clear vulnerabilities, then saw the rise of charismatic figures who asked us to trust them with tremendous amounts of money and power based on extravagant but questionable claims. Almost immediately after this, reports starting flowing in of suspicious test results, extensive student dumping and other signs of aggressive data manipulation.
How were so many otherwise alert and skeptical movement reformers caught off guard by problems anyone could have seen coming? I believe part of the answer lies in the culture and narratives of the reform movement. Cultural affinity meant that reformers (who generally had good intentions themselves) tended to project similar values on those who displayed the correct cultural signifiers while hero/villain narratives made it difficult to accept the idea that some of those cast in heroic role might be corrupt while some of those cast in the villainous parts might be right.
Though overt cheating has been getting most of the press lately, larger, more systemic data manipulation is potentially the bigger concern. Mike the Mad Biologist has been on this beat and sends us to this depressing data point.[emphasis added]
One of the first things a visitor sees when stepping into Kipp Academy is a graph that shows how Kipp is outperforming Metro schools in every subject.
However, Kipp Academy is also one of the leaders in another stat that is not something to crow about.
When it comes to the net loss of students this year, charter schools are the top eight losers of students. In fact, the only schools that have net losses of 10 to 33 percent are charter schools.
"We look at that attrition. We keep an eye on it, and we actually think about how we can bring that back in line with where we've been historically," said Kipp Principal Randy Dowell.
Dowell said Kipp's 18 percent attrition is unacceptable.
MNPS feels it's unacceptable as well, because not only are they getting kids from charter schools, but they are also getting troubled kids and then getting them right before testing time.
"That's also a frustration for the zoned-school principals. They are getting clearly challenging kids back in their schools just prior to accountability testing," said MNPS Chief Operating Officer Fred Carr.
Nineteen of the last 20 children to leave Kipp Academy had multiple out-of-school suspensions. Eleven of the 19 are classified as special needs, and all of them took their TCAPs at Metro zoned schools, so their scores won't count against Kipp.
"We won't know how they perform until we receive results and we see. We would be happy to take their results, frankly. The goal is getting kids ready for college. The goal is not having shiny results for me or for anyone on the team," Dowell said.
There's a surreal quality to Dowell's responses here. The kind of attrition we're talking about in this case is almost entirely at the administrator's discretion. What's more, it generally takes a great deal of time and paperwork to make it happen.
As mentioned before, these schools already have selection bias and social norming working in their favor. If, on top of that, a principal like Dowell selectively gets rid of almost one out of five students based on behavior and performance, it is difficult for a school not to look good.
That's the message from the U.S. Geological Survey's evaluation of how the U.S. is managing its aquifers. Or mismanaging. For example: water levels in the aquifer that underlies the nation's bread basket have dropped in some places by as much as 160 feet.
The rest of the world isn't doing any better. A conference of water scientists just issued the so-called Bonn Declaration, which declares that this lack of foresight will cause the majority of people alive in 2050 to face "severe" freshwater shortages.
This idea is obviously echoed in Ayn Rand’s novels, which celebrate the individual genius standing out against the backdrop of collectivist mediocrity. It has also trickled into the contemporary conservative worship of the ultra-rich. The phrase today is “job creators” (whatever that means), but it has the same moralistic overtones as in Nietzsche and Hayek—a class of people who are better than the rest of us, on whom we depend for our salvation and prosperity, and whom we should not presume to question or constrain through, say, safety regulation or higher taxes (“penalizing success,” in the jargon).
This really has been one of the more insidious ideas of the twenty-first century-- that wealth and success are evidence of moral character. One problem with this philosophy is that it replaces a creed of "it isn't whether you win or lose, it is how you play the game" with an unfortunate alignment between moral virtue and business success. Under these conditions, how do you restrain the quest for wealth to within a code of ethics?
Instead we have a purely outcomes based ethic, that talks about the good that comes from the wealthy without asking hard questions -- like would things be better if wealth were more equal? In particular, the logical connection between rich people becoming more rich and more employment opportunities being created are less than completely clear. I don't want to say that the effect size is actually zero, but rather that it seems odd to neglect other possible sources of variation.
Joseph and I have been going back and forth on the best way to get the most out of the tidal wave of open data of which we are only seeing the beginning.
Joseph tends to be more skeptical on this subject. He almost has to be. He's approaching this both as an epidemiologist (where privacy and ethical issues create huge headaches) and an academician (where open data can create tremendous perverse incentives to rush out mediocre work in order to beat out other researchers looking at the same data). The promise of open data is very much field specific.
I tend to be more optimistic about the subject. I'm more the data miner of the blog and to find myself living in an age when anyone with a refurbished desktop computer, a copy of R and Python and a decent internet connection can do real, interesting research is tremendously exciting.
There is at least one area, though, where I am possibly more skeptical than Joseph and that's in the chances of these huge data initiatives self-organizing along anything near an optimal configuration...
I started to write something here about market forces in research and incentives and non-rival goods but then the phone rang and by the time I got off I realized that would be a lot of work (at least it would if I did enough research to make sure I wasn't making an idiot of myself). Chances are, that discussion would just be a long winded way of saying if we want to effectively coordinate all these researchers so that information flows where it needs to flow and data is fully explored and we can keep track of what's going on, we need to think this thing through.
Which brings me to the Project Gutenberg Project. Project Gutenberg has, of course, a huge and growing database. It's set up to be researcher-friendly and the system readily lends itself to automated approaches. The possibilities for text-mining are endless and a tremendous number of interesting research questions can be addressed with nothing more than a reasonably up-to-date computer and some free software (I previously posted a couple of examples here).
This would seem to be an ideal test case for setting up procedures and sites for dealing with large, open databases . Here are a few possibilities:
A place to submit and comment on proposed hypotheses;
A place to report preliminary findings;
A place to report negative findings;
A place to report confirmation of previous findings;
A database connecting approaches, hypotheses and data points;
Multiple ranking systems;
A way of identifying under-explored parts of the data.
Obviously this is a first pass and I'm just throwing out some ideas. Some might be impractical. Others, as Joseph would point out, will not be applicable to other data sets. And I have a nagging feeling that I've left something obvious out.
But that, of course, is the nature of a blog post.
