This is what a "danger to the staff" looks like

Though I will admit that those scary turtle faces are intimidating.

Tunette Powell's two young sons kept getting suspended from preschool. She couldn't figure out what she was doing wrong until she started comparing notes with other parents.

My son has been suspended five times. He’s 3.

Just like before, I tried to find excuses. I looked at myself. What was I doing wrong? My children are living a comfortable life. My husband is an amazing father to JJ and Joah. At home, they have given us very few problems; the same goes for time with babysitters.

I blamed myself, my past. And I would have continued to blame myself had I not taken the boys to a birthday party for one of JJ’s classmates. At the party, the mothers congregated to talk about everyday parenting things, including preschool. As we talked, I admitted that JJ had been suspended three times. All of the mothers were shocked at the news.

“JJ?” one mother asked.

“My son threw something at a kid on purpose and the kid had to be rushed to the hospital,” another parent said. “All I got was a phone call.”

One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse.

Most startling: None of their children had been suspended.

After that party, I read a study reflecting everything I was living.

Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but make up 48 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension, according to the study released by the  Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in March.

The one on the right is the dangerous one.

'Rigor' is the new 'wholesome.'

Anyone who has dealt extensively with major corporations knows that corporate culture does strange things to language. I've got a half-finished post sitting on my hard-drive which argues that this process is Orwellian in the sense that if you go through "Politics and the English Language" and the relevant portions of 1984, you will find them remarkably applicable to the way language is used in the business class.

As mentioned before, the education reform movement is the product of business leaders and management consultants and free-market theorists and in most areas it hasn't yet developed a distinct culture of its own. This is particularly true with language. Even the reformers who aren't former management consultants, tend to talk as if they were.

One of the defining traits of this kind of corporate language is the constant repetition of certain words and phrases that are vague but which have strong emotional connotations, especially connotations of quality and/or toughness. Excellent/excellence is the obvious example, but in many ways, rigor/rigorous is an even better one.

'Excellence' is a fairly general term; 'rigor' has a much more specific meaning. Here's what Google says:

rig·or
noun

the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.
"his analysis is lacking in rigor"

severity or strictness.
"the full rigor of the law"

demanding, difficult, or extreme conditions.
"the rigors of a harsh winter"

All three of these could reasonably be used in a number of educational contexts (though it should be noted that the third is generally something we want to reduce). They make little sense, however in places we normally see them.

At the same time, we need a frank discussion about the shortcomings of the current system. At the heart of the matter is that CTE [career and technical education] programs need to strengthen their rigor and relevance – and deliver better outcomes for students.

Arne Duncan

For the last four years, the Obama administration has provided funding and incentives for states to help build a teaching profession that is both respected and rigorous.

Duncan again.

What exactly does it mean for a program to have stronger rigor or for a profession to be more rigorous? I'm not sure and I don't think Duncan is either. I don't even think he's trying to make meaningful statements in the conventional sense. 'Rigor' and 'rigorous' are used so frequently (satirized here by Edushyster), because the speakers are trying to build an association between their proposals and the qualities associated with the words (hard work, competence, discipline).

An explicitly Orwellian part of this process is the way words with strong connotations are made increasingly vague so they can be applied to more and more situations.

From the Glossary of Education Reform.

While dictionaries define the term as rigid, inflexible, or unyielding, educators frequently apply rigor or rigorous to assignments that encourage students to think critically, creatively, and more flexibly. Likewise, they may use the term rigorous to describe learning environments that are not intended to be harsh, rigid, or overly prescriptive, but that are stimulating, engaging, and supportive.

And a bit later

One common way in which educators do use rigor to mean unyielding or rigid is when they are referring to “rigorous” learning standards and high expectations—i.e., when they are calling for all students to be held to the same challenging academic standards and expectations. In this sense, rigor may be applied to educational situations in which students are not allowed to “coast” or “slide by” because standards, requirements, or expectations are low.

To strictly adhere to a rule is one of the definitions of rigorous, so 'rigorous standards' are meaningful in the traditional sense, but even here the treatment is somewhat vague. Note the way that the more specific 'thorough, exhaustive, or accurate' are replaced with the more general 'high' and 'challenging.' More to the point, any definition that covers both paragraphs (not to mentions Duncan's usage) would be stretched to the point of nonexistence.

Most of the time, 'rigor' in an education proposal is like 'wholesome' in an ad for a snack cake. The word means almost nothing and the very fact that you're seeing it means someone is trying to sell you something.

Affinity Khan

Back in the late 90s, I produced a series to accompany a college algebra textbook. It was the most god-awful thing you've ever seen but the publisher wanted it fast and cheap and since I was able to deliver on those two metrics, so everyone but me seemed to be happy with the final product.

I was reminded of those videos recently when I reviewed a series of online lectures from the Khan Academy. Though the approaches were in many ways very different (on our tapes the author explained and worked through the problems and I then added the graphics postproduction), the content and format and style were remarkably similar. I would love to claim some kind of influence here but I can tell you with certainty that just did not happen. For starters, very few people saw our video. It was featured in a handful of schools that used this textbook and had learning labs with video equipment. More to the point, it was itself absolutely nothing new.

For a while there (and perhaps to this day is far as I know), every math textbook was expected to have a video supplement. You can find literally thousands of hours of textbook authors, many of whom were not dynamic screen presences, diligently working through problem after problem for the camera. Add to that tens of thousands of hours of taped and filmed math lessons from other sources dating back at least to the 50s and the advent of educational television. Of these, Annenberg probably did the best that I've seen and a few others stood out due to exceptionally strong instruction and clever lessons. On the whole, though, they were pretty much interchangeable and the lessons produced by the Khan Academy definitely fall right along the median.

Of course, there is more to the Khan Academy than just the few videos I've checked out but when you look at the massive amount of similar work that had been done and you consider what was already available on on YouTube and Vimeo and from MIT before Khan started the academy, it is difficult to see where the big innovation is. To be blunt, it appears that Salman Khan's main talents lie not in innovation and execution but in self-promotion and fundraising.

Khan is not a conman but he is very much a salesman. and I wonder if part of his success has to do with affinity. Khan is an MIT grad and a Harvard MBA and a former hedge fund analyst. He's at home with CEOs like Bill Gates and management consultants like David Coleman. He's smart but it's the TED-talk kind of smart that journalists find inviting rather than threatening. In other words, both the people who present the narratives and the people who sign the checks see him as one of them.

I don't want to be too harsh -- for some students, watching the Khan videos is helpful just as, for a lot of college students, watching those supplemental video tapes at home was helpful* -- but there are some bigger issues about the way we debate the issue and make policy. If we don't remember what went before and, perhaps more importantly, what failed, if we focus on the style of press releases rather than the substance of products, if we don't think seriously and clearly about these questions, we are not going to make progress.

For some more thoughts on instructional video, check out my 2012 post, the Eugen Weber Paradox over at the teaching blog and for some sharp criticisms of the Khan Academy, take a look at this article, also from 2012, which ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education.


* The university I taught at in the Nineties had a tutoring center with a set of video carrels for watching these textbook videos. They were a complete failure and the tapes went almost completely unused until we started letting students check out the tapes and watch them at home. The response and feedback were much better.

New Math: revisionist narrative watch

I've been doing some posts for the Monkey Cage. The first was a historical perspective piece on our last big educational reform initiative, the now anachronistically named 'New Math,' a post-Sputnik push for axiomatic rigor in primary and secondary mathematics education. Much of the feedback I got on the post indicated that I had gotten too deep in the weeds and spent too much time on the history lesson and not enough making my points. I'm inclined to agree.

One point I wish in retrospect I would have hammered harder was the way supporters of Common Core are pushing a convenient but false narrative about the initiative, namely that it was a noble effort that failed because most teachers lacked the training and mathematical sophistication to handle the new material. Recently, Elizabeth Green,* the chief executive of Chalkbeat (an organization that receives funding from both Bill Gates and the Walton Family), published a long piece in the New York Times that contains a perfect example.

The trouble always starts when teachers are told to put innovative ideas into practice without much guidance on how to do it. In the hands of unprepared teachers, the reforms turn to nonsense, perplexing students more than helping them. One 1965 Peanuts cartoon depicts the young blond-haired Sally struggling to understand her new-math assignment: “Sets . . . one to one matching . . . equivalent sets . . . sets of one . . . sets of two . . . renaming two. . . .” After persisting for three valiant frames, she throws back her head and bursts into tears: “All I want to know is, how much is two and two?”

Before we go on, you'll notice that the actual cartoon has nothing to do with how the material was taught. Schulz was satirizing bringing in arcane and needlessly complex methods to do simple tasks. In other words, his point was pretty much the opposite of Green's.

It is easy to see the appeal of the "unprepared teacher" narrative for many movement reformers. The reformers were the heroes here, visionary innovators who came up with great ideas but were stymied by the incompetence of the rank and file. As mentioned before, the tension between teachers and reformers is longstanding and can be traced to, among other things, a strong pro-privatization/anti-union faction in the movement and to teachers' understandable reluctance to try unproven approaches like 29-page scripted close readings of the Gettysburg Address.

Of course, the whole narrative falls apart if those 'innovative ideas' of New Math weren't actually that good or well executed to begin with (from the Monkey Cage post):

[George] Pólya was only one of many mathematicians and scientists who publicly criticized the new curriculum. Despite the common perception that “new math” failed because it was too advanced for general consumption, it was often those who understood the mathematics best who had the harshest comments.

Most notable of these may have been the physicist Richard Feynman, who eviscerated reform-era math and science texts in his essay “Judging Books by Their Covers.” Feynman mocked the confusing and overly technical language and complained about the emphasis on obscure mathematical topics, such as doing basic arithmetic in base five or seven (it is worth noting that songwriter and mathematician Tom Lehrer satirized the same topic in his song “New Math”).

Perhaps Feynman’s most cutting criticism was that, after dragging students through painfully rigorous presentations, the textbooks did not get the rigor correct:

The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for ‘sets’) which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous — they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by ‘rigor.’ They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.

One of the best summaries of these criticisms came from Pólya, who alluded to the famous, though probably apocryphal, story of Isadora Duncan suggesting to George Bernard Shaw that they should have a child because it would have her beauty and his brains, to which Shaw is supposed to have replied that it could well have her brains and his beauty.

Pólya suggested that new math was somewhat analogous to Duncan’s proposal. The intention had been to bring mathematical researchers and high school teachers together so that the new curriculum would combine the mathematical understanding of the former and the teaching skills of the latter, but the final product got it the other way around.

We could could go back and forth on the place of axiomatic rigor in mathematics education (my position is a firm "it depends"), but in the case of New Math, it is difficult to argue that the initiative was not seriously flawed before it ever got to the teachers, and the last thing reformers like David Coleman want people thinking about is a narrative that includes that inconvenient fact.

* I contacted Ms. Green shortly after the piece ran. I have yet to hear back.

Campbell's law revisited

Toby Lowe writing for the Guardian:

Payment by results is a simple idea: people and organisations should only get paid for what they deliver. Who could argue with that? If your job is to get people back to work, then find them a job dammit.

Plenty of people working in local government and public services are already starting to realise this is nonsense, and a pernicious, damaging nonsense at that. The evidence is very clear: if you pay (or otherwise manage performance) based on a set of pre-defined results, it creates poorer services for those most in need. It is the vulnerable, the marginalised, the disadvantaged who suffer most from payment by results.

Here's why: payment by results does not reward organisations for supporting people to achieve what they need; it rewards organisations for producing data about targets; it rewards organisations for the fictions their staff are able to invent about what they have achieved; it pays people for porkies.

We know that common things happen when people use payment by results, and other outcomes-based performance management systems. There have been numerous studies that show that such systems distort organisational priorities and make organisations focus on doing the wrong things – and they make people lie.

This lying takes all sorts of different forms. Some of them are subtle forms of deception: teachers who teach to the test or who only enter pupils for exams they know they are going to pass; employment support that helps only those likely to get a job and ignores those most in need; or hospitals that reclassify trolleys as beds, and keep people waiting in ambulances on the hospital doorstep until they know they can be seen within a target time. In the literature, this is known as gaming the system.

Some of the lying is less subtle. People just make up results. Last year's scandal with A4e provision of employment programmes is just one in a long line of haphazard outcome measurement.

Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood, professors of management at theLondon School of Economics and the University of Oxford respectively,looked at the impact of results targets on the NHS. They concluded that "target based performance management always creates 'gaming' ". Not sometimes. Not frequently. Always.

Two quotes

[The businessman] is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight. This we should be tolerant of--every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse.

E. B. White on Language 

Or be a ninja...

“Meditation used to have this reputation as a hippie thing for people who speak in a particularly soft tone of voice,” Michaelson says. Not so. “Samurai practiced meditation to become more effective killers,” he says. So too did kamikaze pilots. “It’s value neutral,” [Jay] Michaelson says.
...
A competitive edge, not enlightenment, seems to be driving [Ray] Dalio. “I feel like a ninja in a fight,” Dalio said of his professional equanimity, during a February panel discussion in New York on the benefits of meditation. “When it comes at you, it seems like slow motion.”

To Make a Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating

Common Core is for the common folk*

If you spend much time following the education reform debate, particularly on the counter-reformation side, you soon notice that a lot of fairly major stories get a lot of play on the state and local level but are largely ignored on the national level, at least by publications like the New York Times.

One of the recurring themes in these stories is the idea of education reform for all but the elite, which, given the make-up of the movement, often comes down to reformers exempting themselves from their own reforms.

From Nashville Public Radio

Lipscomb Academy Chief Advocates For Common Core, But Not At Her School

On an almost weekly basis, Candice McQueen is called on by the state Department of Education to beat back criticism. Last week, it was an Associated Press panel. The week before that, she advocated for Common Core as SCORE released its annual report card. McQueen testified before the Senate Education Committee during a two day hearing on the standards.

She praises the rigor and the benefits to having Tennessee kids on the same page as students in 44 states. So when McQueen assumed a new role over Lipscomb’s private K-12 academy, parents were concerned Common Core would follow her to campus, according to an open letter sent to families.

“Because of my role as the dean of the university’s College of Education some of you have expressed concerns about my appointment and the direction Lipscomb Academy will take as it relates to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).”

McQueen wrote that she Common Core has not been adopted and that she has “not been in any formal discussions” about changing standards at the school, though she has asked faculty to familiarize themselves with the math and English standards.

And McQueen doesn’t plan to stop advocating for Common Core, according to the letter.

“I will continue to be part of the ongoing CCSS conversation. However, this should not be extrapolated to indicate or predict the adoption of CCSS at Lipscomb Academy.”
...
Lipscomb would be unusual if it went to Common Core. Most of Nashville’s private schools blend state and national standards and don’t use the same standardized tests as public schools.

Lipscomb is, particularly for Nashville, a rather expensive and exclusive academy. Here's how much it costs to attend:

Tuition rates for the 2014-15 school year will be $5,000 for the 3 day-per-week Pre-kindergarten, $8,350 for the 5 day-per-week Pre-kindergarten.  In addition to the new tuition rates, Lipscomb Academy Pre-kindergarten students will receive a $1,000 discount off their kindergarten year tuition.  Elementary school tuition will be $10,440 while middle and high school tuition is set at $11,540. Multi-child discounts continue at $400 for the second child, $500 for the third and $600 for the fourth. 

To put that in context, here are some numbers from Wikipedia:

The median income for a household in the city was $46,141, and the median income for a family was $56,377. Males with a year-round, full-time job had a median income of $41,017 versus $36,292 for females. The per capita income for the city was $27,372. About 13.9% of families and 18.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 29.5% of those under age 18 and 9.9% of those age 65 or over.

* I see that Diane Ravitch beat to the punch on this joke by a big margin.

Self-defeating comment spam of the day

This is probably not the best product to pitch if you have to rely on translation software. From the just possibly pseudonymous Lerry G Leone Leone:

This usefulness of our copy writers makes it possible for us to make available along with produce many products and services along with different types connected with forms. ________  features Tell us from in this article We have now chosen accomplished copy writers from just about all fields of study, and they are efficient at finishing any kind of instructional paper you'll need. Thank you.

"Obviously, he's kept a very low profile"

From Bill Schackner and Mary Niederberger writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When Ron Tomalis stepped aside as state education secretary 14 months ago, he landed what seemed like a full-time assignment in a state struggling to boost college access and curb ever-rising tuition prices.

As special adviser to Gov. Tom Corbett for higher education, Mr. Tomalis was tasked with "overseeing, implementing and reviewing" the recommendations made by the Governor's Advisory Commission on Postsecondary Education.

Despite the state's fiscal crisis, the former secretary was allowed to keep his Cabinet-level salary of $139,542 plus benefits and -- initially, at least -- work from home. At the time, state Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller explained that the newly created job did not require an office, and Mr. Tomalis "is a professional and doesn't need to 'check in' each day."
...
The records produced included a work calendar showing weeks with little or no activity [ click here] ...  [P]hone logs averaging barely over a phone call a day over 12 months and a total of five emails produced by Mr. Tomalis. The state was not able to provide any reimbursement records suggesting Mr. Tomalis traveled the state in support of his work.

Beyond the records, a number of key players in higher education said in interviews they had little or no contact with Mr. Tomalis in his advisory role, for which the state says there is no written job description.

Jennifer Branstetter, Mr. Corbett's director of policy, said she has spoken with the governor and believes he is satisfied with Mr. Tomalis' job performance. "I think the governor is pleased overall with the advice and oversight he has been giving."
...
A copy of Mr. Tomalis' work calendar from June 1, 2013 to June 1, 2014, released by the department, shows a number of weeks and months with little scheduled activity, including 20 weeks that appear to have no work-related appointments.

Phone logs showed 406 calls, of which 57 percent were two minutes or less. The last four digits for all but a handful of the phone calls were redacted.

Asked for his work-related correspondence as adviser, the department produced five emails written by Mr. Tomalis -- the first of which was dated Feb. 24, 2014, nine months after he landed the job.

Two of the five emails involved registering for a conference. Two others dealt with an invitation for a department representative to serve on the governing board of an education and business initiative in India; and a fifth email involved a clarification the former secretary sought about the number of higher education institutions in Pennsylvania.

A brief aside: sometimes the location of the line between professional development and career advancement is debatable. This is particularly true with conferences, which many attendees treat as combination paid vacation and exclusive job fair. Tomalis' sinecure was incredibly sweet but not all that stable. He did next-to-nothing for his six figure salary and a good portion of that next-to-nothing appears to have been finding ways to have the state pay for his job search.

A number of key players in the state's higher education arena said they have not been contacted by Mr. Tomalis since he was named special adviser, including Sen. Mike Folmer a Lebanon County Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, and Rep. James Roebuck of Philadelphia, the top-ranked Democrat on the House Education Committee.
...
Among the K-12 issues that Mr. Tomalis handled were charter school matters such as arranging testing sites for cyber charter students. [Acting Education Secretary Carol Dumaresq] said Mr. Tomalis was instrumental in reviving the governor's schools.

Schackner and Niederberger did an excellent job reporting on this story, but if I had been their editor, I definitely would have immediately followed Dumaresq's comments about the governor's schools with these paragraphs which can be found toward the end of the article.

In addition to a lack of activities on his calendar, it appears Mr. Tomalis did not participate in some listed activities, including the Governor's School for the Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in July 2013.

Barry Luokkala, teaching professor of physics and the school's program director, said Mr. Tomalis was a big supporter of governor's schools but added that he had not heard from Mr. Tomalis since he stepped down as education secretary and could recall no such visit.

Luokkala wasn't alone in his "Ron who?" reaction.

"I am not able to find any information regarding Mr. Tomalis' interactions with anyone at the university in the capacity you describe," said Annemarie Mountz, a spokeswoman for Penn State University.

"There has been no contact between Tomalis and anyone here," said Ken Service, a University of Pittsburgh spokesman.
...
Elizabeth Bolden, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Commission on Community Colleges, said she was not aware of any meetings held by Mr. Tomalis that involved the commission staff.

Keith New, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, said he too was unable to find any indication Mr. Tomalis had interacted with PHEAA since becoming the governor's higher education adviser.

Ms. Dumaresq said the governor's office directed that Mr. Tomalis delay discussions with Pitt and Penn State regarding performance funding until the new leadership of both schools was in place.

When told that Pitt and Penn State -- among other key institutions -- reported no dealings whatsoever with Mr. Tomalis, she replied: "I'm not sure how to respond. ... I don't know what is sufficient. I know that none is certainly not sufficient, but again, I can tell you that he has been talking with staff here and working on programs."
...
"Obviously, he's kept a very low profile," she added. "Maybe that should change."
...
While the state could provide no written examples of Mr. Tomalis' work product, Ms. Dumaresq said the initiatives advanced are evidence of Mr. Tomalis' work. 

"The important thing is whether in fact people are working and working hard and producing," she said. "And Ron is."

Lots of familiar elements here, starting with the last line. "The important thing" is one of the standard defenses when looting of the educational till is uncovered. The very fact that you're discussing mere money suggests that you care more about your pocketbook than you do about children. No mention is made of the worthwhile programs in the system that desperately need that money and the apologist never bothers to explain why the contribution of the looter is of any special value.

For some reason, this defense seems far more acceptable in the field of education (especially among movement reformers) than it does in fields like the military, infrastructure and law enforcement. We recently had the current Michigan governor and one of his predecessors tell us that voters shouldn't care about massive looting in their state's charter school industry because those schools are doing good work (despite evidence that Michigan's charters are, on average, doing worse than its public schools).

Perhaps I'm missing some obvious recent counter-examples but I have trouble imagining a similar responses from top government officials if a military contractor or construction company was caught engaging in this level of self-dealing, overcharging, graft and fraud. In the rest of the public sector, the standard responses to scandal seem to be

"Reports are exaggerated."

"We're going to investigate this thoroughly."

"A few bad players..."

"We're really sorry and we'll see that this never happens again."

We can question their sincerity, but in most parts of the public sector, officials recognize the need to at least humor us; "You shouldn't care that you're being robbed blind." is not considered acceptable.

This story also illustrates the bizarre inconsistency of attitudes toward accountability in education. Movement reformers are pushing to deny teachers even the most basic of job security while holding them responsible for things they have almost no control over, but this accountability is inversely proportional to position. When it looked like LAUSD's John Deasy was about to lose his job (after nearly bankrupting the district but before powerful friends came to his rescue), Deasy actually suggested a consulting deal similar to the one Tomalis got.  Keep in mind, Deasy has spent most of his time in office complaining about the hardship of having to reassign certain teachers to clerical duties rather than firing them.

Accountability is for little people.

Management salary apologists need to work up some new material -- college edition

Raymond D. Cotton (a partner in the Mintz Levin law firm [who] represents higher education and other nonprofit boards of trustee and executives) assures us that college presidents deserve every penny of their generous salaries. I particularly enjoyed the third paragraph.

By and large, college presidents are not overpaid in relationship to their responsibilities and the compensation market place.

College presidents today act as chief executive officers of the institutions that they lead and serve. On a day-to-day basis, they often make decisions that affect every aspect of their organizations.

It is also important to keep in mind that presidents do not set their own compensation. Instead, their compensation packages are decided by the board of trustees, which is the highest legal authority in the institution. Such boards currently comprise many members from the corporate world, and they have brought certain business concepts with them, including performance bonuses.

I was tempted to go full snark here, but my better angels won out. I won't sarcastically point out that executive compensation in the corporate world at the very least borders on scandalous. Using this as a defense is laughably tone-deaf.

To put all of this in context, Paul Campos looks at academic salary trends.

Average salary for different categories of employees at the University of Michigan in 1979 and 2013:
Custodian
1979: $34,017
2013: $32,214

Director of Athletics
1979: $173,274
2013: $850,000 base salary (Does not include $100,000 in deferred compensation, and a possible $200,000 bonus).

Full Professor
1979: $107,493
2013: $167,260

Associate Professor
1979: $77,153
2013: $114,071

Assistant Professor
1979: $61,119
2013: $100,048

Dean of the Law School:
1979: $169,075
2013: $420,000

Administrative Assistant/Secretary
1979: $45,985
2013: $43,078

President:
1979: $216,000 salary (other compensation, if any, unknown, although it’s safe to assume use of the president’s house was included.)
2013: $603,357 base salary; $100,000 bonus in lieu of a raise; $100,000 additional annual retention bonus; $175,000 annual deferred compensation, $50,000 annual retirement pay, free use of residence and car.

This is simply remarkable

This is Joseph, the rare co-blogger.  I wanted to pass this on (h/t: Mike).  I don't think anybody will be surprised to see this type of customer service occurring:

Today one of our employees on the business side of TPM got a bill from Verizon for $3,019.95. Now, TPM's phone bill is bigger than your home phone bill because we two offices and about two dozen employees. But it's not three thousand dollars a month. But there's a bigger problem. We're not a Verizon customer.

Right, we use a different company entirely.

. . .

So after a little internal due diligence, someone on staff contacted Verizon basically to ask WTF was going on. Only they couldn't tell us because for security reasons we need to confirm our identity with a number on a recent phone bill? But we can't do that because ... right we're not a Verizon customer.

But can't they infer that we're us because we're getting billing emails to a TPM email address? No comment.

Can Verizon at least tell us whether this service was a service for a company called TPM Media LLC, incorporated in New York State? No, security reasons.

After another hour or so of a TPM staffer being on hold, Verizon comes up with seeming proof. The service was contracted by a person named "Gregory E." (I've left out the last name because Gregory E. may actually exist and he does deserve some privacy.) Only problem: no one named "Gregory E." has ever worked for TPM.

This apparently happened in early 2012. And like most utilities and service providers they totally let you not pay for a service for over two years without cutting it off.

Part of the problem here is one of "efficiency".  By creating distant call centers, you save on costs but you make issues like this one difficult to resolve.  You see the same problem with auto-dialing debt collection calls -- a robot calls a long stale phone number at minimal cost.  You might get some real leads that way that enable debts to be collected.  On the other hand, you annoy a large number of people who are completely unrelated to the debt (as telephone numbers often get reassigned to new people moving into an area).  It also makes issues like "billing the wrong customer" fantastically annoying for the person being billed. 

But it is also a question of competition and asymmetry of power/resources.  Without a regulatory framework to handle these issues, there is no cost to pushing frustration and time loss on to the "customer".  It's not like the company would be billed for the time to access customer service if the bill were proven to be incorrect. 

The standard solution to this is regulation.  This matters even for parts of the market that function well.  The need to regulate food production and sales dates back to the middle ages and remains with us today via functions like health inspectors.  Ironically, despite the potential for regulation to strangle companies with red tape, it can also be a precondition for an effective market.  It's also possible for it to be too lax in one area and too extensive in another (possibility affecting the same transaction).

So I am becoming indifferent to scale as I age, and think that all of the action should be in the efficiency of government and/or corporations.  But this conversation seem to be rarely heard these days. 

Caveats

Brad DeLong has been on a bit of a run recently. I particularly liked this:

I think that modern neoclassical economics is in fine shape as long as it is understood as the ideological and substantive legitimating doctrine of the political theory of possessive individualism. As long as we have relatively-self-interested liberal individuals who have relatively-strong beliefs that things are theirs, the competitive market in equilibrium is an absolutely wonderful mechanism for achieving truly extraordinary degree of societal coordination and productivity. We need to understand that. We need to value that. And that is what neoclassical economics does, and does well.

Of course, there are all the caveats to Arrow-Debreu-Mackenzie:

The market must be in equilibrium.
The market must be competitive.
The goods traded must be excludable.
The goods traded must be non-rival.
The quality of goods traded and of effort delivered must be known, or at least bonded, for adverse selection and moral hazard are poison.
Externalities must be corrected by successful Pigovian taxes or successful Coaseian carving of property rights at the joints.
People must be able to accurately calculate their own interests.
People must not be sadistic--the market does not work well if participating agents are either the envious or the spiteful.
The distribution of wealth must correspond to the societal consensus of need and desert.
The structure of debt and credit must be sound, or if it is not sound we need a central bank or a social-credit agency to make it sound and so make Say's Law true in practice even though we have no reason to believe Say's Law is true in theory.

Delving into the pros and cons of positive thinking over at You Do the Math

I've been working on a thread (and possibly an e-book for general audiences) on George Pólya's teaching philosophy. Recently, I've been focusing on the emotional and psychological component. Pólya was emphatic on the importance of self-reliance, and an explicit part of building that self-reliance was building a student's confidence.

The following quote from How to Solve It is indicative:

"If the student is not able to do much, the teacher should leave him at least some illusion of independent work. In order to do so, the teacher should help the student discreetly, unobtrusively." [emphasis in the original text.]

Pólya didn't elaborate that much on the emotional component here. The value of confidence and approaching material with a positive attitude probably seemed to require on defense in 1945. Self-help had not become a major industry (How to Win Friends and Influence People was less than a decade old) so positive thinking didn't trigger the smirks it does today. On the other hand, the field of education hadn't been swarmed by faux tough charlatans dismissing the importance of self-esteem.

These days, any argument for positive thinking needs to spelled out in detail. In the following three posts I work through some of the implications.

Rational students, incentives and expected returns

What role does expected likelihood of success play in the designing of incentives?


The first wall you expect is the last one you hit

Based on my experience and conversations with other teachers, I compare the real and perceived challenges faced by students struggling with math.


The Power and Peril of Positive Thinking

A few common-sense rules for deciding when to go positive (and when to proceed with caution).

More Michigan corruption and an LA-based observation

As mentioned before, the Detroit Free Press recently ran an extraordinary series on on the growing number of scandals surrounding Michigan's two decades of aggressive school privatization. I've got something bigger coming up on this and I don't want to spend too much more time nickel-and-diming the subject by posting various outrages, but I do want to take a moment and share this pattern I've come to recognize.

First devastating cuts are made to essential parts of kids' education with the rationale that things are tough all over. Then people in the same system (often the same people -- see Deasy, John) will spend extravagantly on their pet projects (see iPads, John Deasy's billion dollar), often enriching themselves, associates, friends and/or relatives. When someone criticizes the profligacy, the inevitable reply is to insist they only want kids to have the best.

Remember this story from an earlier post?

Detroit Public Schools EM shifts funds from classroom
By Dr. Thomas C. Pedroni

Many of us are shocked to learn that DPS plans to cut costs in the coming year by further increasing class sizes. Already at an unmanageable target of 38 per classroom in grades 6 through 12, Emergency Manager Jack Martin’s fiscal year 2015 budget allows class sizes in those grades to expand to 43.

With that in mind, check out this article from Jennifer Dixon, part of the Free Press series.

Glenn Clark, president of Detroit Merit Charter Academy and a founding member of the board, said he didn’t know the amount “off the top of my head.” But he said it was justified as a “made-in-heaven arrangement in that corner of the city.”

Detroit Merit subleases its building from NHA. The building is clean and orderly, but it lacks a cafeteria or gym, so students eat in their classrooms. With more than 730 students, the school is packed. Clark said “every seat is taken” and there isn’t enough classroom space for specialty areas of instruction.

On a Free Press visit to the K-8 school last year, a writing coach worked with her students at desks tucked under a school stairwell, a handful of students played their drums in another stairwell, and saxophonists practiced in a hallway.

The band room had been carved in half to make room for art classes, with filing cabinets separating the musicians from the painters. A third of the kitchen had been converted into a small math classroom, with refrigerators and other appliances dividing up the area.

Melvin Rusher, president of the board of Fortis Academy in Ypsilanti, declined to say how much the school was paying in rent — just over $1 million — until checking with the rest of his board. He did not return subsequent phone calls. Board presidents at Regent Park Scholars, Flagship Academy and Legacy Charter Academy, all in Detroit, also did not return calls.

Rent increases pushed schools into the million-dollar club in the 2013-14 school year: South Arbor in Ypsilanti, Ridge Park and River City Scholars, both in Grand Rapids. The Free Press could not reach board presidents.

Plymouth Scholars is another school in the NHA million-dollar club, but neighbors in Plymouth Township say it doesn’t look like a million.

Built in 2012, it is two stories and rectangular. Residents of the neighborhood, where some houses are on the market for upwards of $500,000, say it looks like a warehouse.
...
Charter Development Co., an affiliated company that is based in the same offices as NHA, paid $700,000 for the land, according to township assessor records. NHA declined to say how much it spent on construction costs, but told its authorizer that it would invest approximately $7 million.

The school’s annual rent is $1.16 million.

Based on those numbers, local developer Jim Jabara said NHA is getting a 16% rate of return on its investment, which he likened to the goose that lays the golden egg.

“It’s a hell of a return for the people who own it, and the school pays a premium for it,” said Jabara, who owns commercial and industrial property in the area.

William Watch, president of First Commercial Realty & Development Co., in Southfield, which owns, leases, manages, develops and builds commercial and retail projects, said the rate of return for free-standing drugstores like Walgreens and Rite Aid, with long-term leases, is typically 7%-9%.

...

Carl Berry, a member of the Plymouth Scholars board until late January, called it “an ugly building” but said, “What goes on inside is the most important.” The school is too new to be ranked by the Michigan Department of Education.

How does one evaluate evidence in complex circumstances

So this is Joseph, the rarely appearing co-blogger and I wanted to comment on an evidence question.

There has been a lot of discussion about a recent DC court of appeals case (Halbig).  The essence of the argument is that there is a sentence in the law that could be read as only allowing state exchanges to offer federal subsidies.  I think it is pretty clear everyone agree that this isn't the pinnacle of clear and artful writing.  Either it failed to make a major piece of the law obvious (people buying policies on Federal exchanges would want to know if this was intended, as would states like Oregon considering switching from a state to a federal exchange) or it was a sloppy sentence.  If that was the end of it then it probably would not be bloggable.

What was interesting is what people are holding as the standard of evidence.  Scott Lemieux argues that, due to previous federal law giving deference to how federal agencies interpret law, that the standard is:

The challengers don’t just have to show that their interpretation is plausible; they have to show that it’s the only possible reasonable interpretation.

and

We still have essentially everyone responsible for drafting, voting on and/or implementing the legislation at the federal and state levels (not to mention the Sebelius conservative joint opinion) assuming that the federally established exchanges were intended to work, and a consultant making a bare assertion with no explanation that the federally established exchanges weren’t intended to work. It’s pretty obvious which is more significant, particularly since the next decent explanation for why Congress would bother to create a federal backstop that couldn’t actually function would be the first.

Megan McArdle, whom I think it is well know is not a fan of the affordable care act, proposes a different standard.  She argues:

The thrust of this outrage is that obviously no one ever intended to restrict subsidies only to state exchanges, because that is now endangering the whole program, and obviously, the law’s architects did not mean to endanger the whole program.

But unless this is some sort of elaborate hoax, I think this definitively puts to rest the notion that none of the bill’s architects could possibly have thought or intended that the law would have this effect. Gruber thought the law would have this effect -- and if anyone would know, he would. 

Now I am not a lawyer, but I like talking about standards of evidence.  The first is a standard that you need to show that the law cannot be interpreted in the proposed flexible manner that an agency wants.  The second is to focus really tightly on the exact text of the bill and come up with the most literal interpretation.

Now these are very different ways to thinking about evidence.  McArdle's approach is very frequentist.  Here we create a specific standard of evidence based on one piece of the whole family of possible errors (e.g. random variation for the statistician, text only for the lawyer) and use that as the main decision making element (with some soft text about possible bias).  Lemieix's approach seems more Bayesian -- the analogy to priors is looking at the totality of the evidence, including but not limited to the law's text.

Ironically, I am like Noah Smith in science and kind of like frequentist approaches.  I certainly use them in 95% of my scientific papers.  But this is really highlighting, in an area (law) where the frequentist approach isn't like a second skin for me, that these differences can matter a lot.  I'm also not going to say which side I think is correct here, merely that I am seeing appeals to two very different kinds of evidence.  In real life I have a paper where I called an estimate with a p-value of 0.0504 non-significant (yes, those of us who take the rules seriously see these things happen).  But in the context of a family of associations where everything else was significant and known bias cutting against the association, I wonder if I could have been more sophisticated.  Or would that be less principled.

So now I think I have something to ponder.  But it does highlight that this type of debate about standards of evidence, like all entrenched debates, is complicated.