The Mulford Act

Charles P. Pierce provides an interesting and timely look at how the politics of gun control have changed.

Once upon a time in California, the police were knocking off black folks with an alarming regularity. In 1967, a black man named Denzil Dowell was blown away by a shotgun wielded by the police in North Richmond, an impoverished, largely black suburban community outside Oakland. According to the official police account, Dowell had been caught while breaking into a liquor store. He had then refused a command to stop and, therefore, was riddled by police who considered themselves threatened by him. Members of the community believed, with some justification, that Dowell had been killed while raising his hands to surrender. At the same time, the Black Panther Party in Oakland had been operating what it called Black Panther Police Patrols. The members of the patrol would listen to police scanners and then hustle to the scene of an arrest, where they would remind the suspect of his legal rights. They also showed up armed, because California then was an open-carry state because, of course, freedom.

This scared the bejesus out of white people, and the cops weren't too enthusiastic about it, either. So along came a Republican state assemblyman named Don Mulford, and he proposed a bill that would ban the carrying of loaded weapons in public throughout California. The Panthers enlivened the debate by showing up at the state capitol in Sacramento while exercising their god-given right to bear arms, which again scared the bejesus out of people. (I think it was the shades and the berets myself.) Speaking in language that today would make Wayne LaPierre cry like a child -- the NRA of the time was curiously supportive of the Act in question -- Don Mulford said he was proposing his law to keep us safe from "nuts with guns," especially the ones who lived in "urban environments." (No, you don't need the Enigma machine to decode that one.) The law passed. Governor Reagan signed it, and that's how history was made.

Well, I'm glad it's not a dispute

A bit more background on the Michigan charter school scandals. As mentioned before both here and in the Monkey Cage, for-profit charter school operators have been caught gouging the state's taxpayers in pretty much every way imaginable. The response from the governor's office has basically been that people shouldn't care about graft and overcharging as long as they are getting quality schools (They aren't -- Check out the Monkey Cage link -- but that's a topic for another day).

It's hard to imagine the "So there's graft. Get over it." political slogan being effective in any context, it seems particularly tone deaf in Michigan these days, in a period of brutal budget cuts on the state and local level. Class sizes in traditional public schools are nearing the breaking point. Even a relatively small unpaid water bill in Detroit can result in a shutoff (an especially heartless policy given the city's unemployment rate).

There are, however, certain clients with very large unpaid bills who have been allowed to skate for quite a while.

From the Detroit Free Press:

So we called DWSD spokesperson Gregory Eno, who tried explaining the discrepancy.

“First of all, the commercial accounts that we’re talking about here are in dispute with … what they believe they should be paying for stormwater runoff,” Eno says. “It’s not about traditional water usage like you and I would use, water in our home.”

Come again?

Eno says: “We have a number of commercial accounts that are in dispute — well, not a dispute — we say they owe such [an amount], they say” they owe a different figure.

Off by just a quarter century

I realize this is a trivial thing, but this paragraph from an article by Thomas Mentel bothers me for a couple of not-so-trivial reasons.

One of Showtime’s very first forays into original programming, it’s hard to believe that Californication only just concluded after a run of seven years and seven seasons. First premiering in 2007, Californication tells the story of troubled New York writer Hank Moody who moves to California and suffers from severe writer’s block. Additionally, his issues with hedonism push his relationship with longtime lover Karen and their daughter to the brink while he attempts change his self-destructive ways.

Even with the wiggle room that comes with "one of," this is still dead wrong. Showtime got into original programming early in the game, starting with Faerie Tale Theatre in 1982. The channel ran literally dozens of dramas and comedies before debuting Californication in 2007 (see for yourself), including some fairly notable titles like Queer as Folk and Gary Shandling's first sitcom.

This is a small mistake in possibly the least important journalistic genre imaginable, but even by that standard, shouldn't we expect at least a little research? It took me all of three minutes to find a list of Showtime's original programs. How can anyone put his name on an article for the whole world to see and not bother to spend five minutes checking his facts.

The other thing that bothers me about this is that it's another reminder of how PR creates reality in the 21st Century. In 2005, there was a major restructuring at Viacom that resulted in, among other things, Showtime becoming to CBS what HBO is to Time Warner. Shortly after that there was a massive publicity push behind the network's shows. When Mentel calls Californication "[o]ne of Showtime’s very first forays into original programming," he means one of the first that a PR department told him about.

Another excerpt from the upcoming ebook

Another education thread that started in March of 2010 and is still going strong is the magic-of-the-markets/power-of-MBA-thinking line. This is one of those issues where I got the direction right but the magnitude wrong (I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize how bad).

The problem was two-fold: for starters, many perfectly sound business methods don’t work well when moved to an educational setting. The conditions, the culture, the objectives and the consequences are simply too different; to make matters even worse, Ben Wildavsky and many of the other reform advocates pushing the markets/MBAs line had a stunningly weak grasp of how business and economic incentives worked. The result was ‘business-based’ approaches that no well-run business would ever try. For example, if you follow the link you’ll find Wildavsky mocking Ravitch’s concerns that unscrupulous operators might use charters to extract “vast riches” from taxpayers.  For the record, competent business people constantly worry about being taken advantage of by contractors. Those who share Wildavsky’s attitude don’t stay in business very long.

To see what happens to Wildavsky’s ideas in the actual marketplace, take a look at my last Monkey Cage post.

Ben Wildavsky writing for the New Republic in 2010.

As for  claim that entrepreneurs see charter schools “as a gateway to the vast riches of the education industry,” that hardly jibes with reality at the most admired charter organizations. As far as I know, nobody at Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, or KIPP, all non-profits, is getting rich from those organizations’ notably successful efforts to help low-income kids learn. But if--if--for-profit charter operators are able to operate good schools, why shouldn’t those educational entrepreneurs get rich? Isn’t the point to make sure kids learn? It is not as if profit is an alien notion in the world of public schools. As Ravitch knows well, a vast industry of contractors, curriculum specialists, and the like was getting rich off public schools long before charters came along. (Ravitch also missed important aspects of the charter movement: its relentless self-examination, eagerness to weed out poor performers, and desire to take to scale those approaches that are really helping kids.)

Addressing Pólya's list

When I first started really digging into the education reform movement a few years ago, it quickly became obvious that, with remarkably few exceptions, my educational philosophy (which was heavily influenced the eminent 20th Century mathematician George Pólya) was sharply different from the prevailing ideas of the movement. I  initially assumed this was just me being out of the loop. After all, it's been a long time since I've taken an education class and even back then Pólya's pedagogical work had been around for decades. I thought that those on the other side of the debate either weren't familiar with Pólya's work on teaching or had examined and rejected the ideas.

The truth seems to be more complicated. As I spend more time in the reform world, I keep seeing ideas and techniques that either seemed to be or explicitly were derived from Pólya's How to Solve It. Normally, I would be pleased to see this but almost invariably there's something off about these examples, as if they had lost something important in translation.  Perhaps even worse, the Pólya-derived ideas never really meshed with the other concepts being presented and often directly contradicted them (try reconciling the methods of How to Solve It with deliberate practice).

After a while, I realized part of the problem: virtually all of these lessons were derived from a tiny sliver of the man's writing, not just a single one of his books but from the inside cover of that one book.

"The list" is one of the best and best-known features of How to Solve It. It is also one of the most problematic. On the plus side, it provides in concise form both Pólya's four phases of problem-solving and a useful collection of "questions and suggestions" that instructors may use either as comments while solving a problem for a class or as hints while helping students individually. Pólya's approach relied heavily on Socratic dialogues. These could be teacher/student, teacher/self (as a running commentary when doing a problem for a class) or student/self (because the end goal is an internalized process). This list can be enormously helpful for teachers when first learning these techniques.

On the minus side, for those who didn't go past the inside cover, the list looked like something it very much wasn't: an algorithm, a series of instructions to be followed in a well-defined manner which would reliably lead to the desired outcome.

Pólya explained explicitly and repeatedly that these were questions and suggestions that could be helpful if used in situations where they fit well and arose naturally.

He made these points frequently and emphatically enough that anyone who actually read How to Solve It (and it is neither a long nor difficult read) could hardly miss them..

Instead of providing a step-by-step approach, the primary purpose of these questions was to shift the focus of mathematics instruction less toward what and more toward why. Pólya wanted the steps we showed students to be not only right but reasonable.

I'll come back to this topic later with some examples of just how completely the reasonable part has been lost in translation.

Checking in with two thousand and ten

As part of a bigger project, I've been going through the first year's worth of posts at the blog (at least the first year after it became a joint venture). I was unhappy with the writing on quite a few but I was reasonably satisfied with analyses and a few actually seem more topical now than they did in 2010.

For example, this was my reaction to a paragraph defending charter schools from the threat of regulation. The passage, not surprisingly, occurs in a Michelle Rhee hagiography that appeared in the New Republic.

This post by Joseph got me thinking. Charter schools are private contractors providing services that were previously provided by the government. Any statement that's true about charter schools should still be true if you substitute in the phrase "some private contractors."

But if you actually make the substitution, you often end up with statements the author would never think of making. Statements like this:

But Mead says ... she’s seen Gray hint that he’d like to more tightly regulate [private contractors]. “We have a law that gives a tremendous amount of autonomy to the [private contractors] but enables them to implement programs that can be effective. If you try to put more regulation on that, if can dissuade people from [privatizing],” Mead says.

Would Seyward Darby normally describe a push for tighter regulation of private contractors as "disappointing"? Would the New Republic normally endorse a candidate because he was against stricter regulation of private contractors? Would everyone take a moment and see if Rod Serling is taking a smoke break in the vicinity?

I strongly believe that there is a place for charter schools in our system, but those schools have to meet exactly the same criteria as other contractors. Two of those criteria are transparency and openness to regulation, and given recent history, it's safe to say that some charter schools are failing these tests.

As noted in this Monkey Cage post, the charter school systems in the states that most pushed deregulation (Michigan and Florida) have devolved a writhing mass of scandals, particularly involving for-profit schools. Things are arguably worse in Sweden where the entire country fully embraced the charter and market forces model.

In 2010, reformers loved Sweden:

Matthew Yglesias again steps up to defend the honor of charter schools with a post on Anders Böhlmark and Mikael Lindahl's paper “Does School Privatization Improve Educational Achievement? Evidence from Sweden’s Voucher Reform” (PDF) from which he concludes:

In effect, Swedish practice is like what exists in American states (Arizona, for example) with lots of charter schools and it’s quite similar to what the Obama administration (and I) are pushing. The big difference is that for-profit operators are allowed to run schools in Sweden, which I’d be for allowing.

There is, however, an asterisk next to the name of the paper. The footnote is easy to miss (you have to click on the 'More>>' button to find it), but it's worth the effort. It reads:

* Their answer? It does in the short-term, but the gains fade. All else being equal I favor more choice, so I’d regard the reform as a good thing but I assume the architects of the reform were hoping for something more.

To see just how badly this turned out, take a look at Ray Fisman's excellent piece in Slate.

Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you're winning

One of the advantages and disadvantages of being an independent blogger is that you can take the quixotic side in as many debates as you want. The good side of this is that, if you find a rich vein of conventional stupidity, it's relatively easy to make valid yet original points and you will never go wanting for a flawed argument to dismantle. The bad side is that this kind of fight can wear you down. Every day you going looking for something stupid to write about and every day you find it. After a while a sense of futility will start to creep up on you.

Under those circumstances, it's easy to miss signs of progress. For example, if you were following the free TV story five years ago, you couldn't help noticing what almost amounted to a press blackout on the subject. Even in stories advising consumers on options to pay-TV, over-the-air television somehow went unmentioned. This was true in the stories themselves. The comment sections invariably had readers pointing out they got their TV through an antenna and were getting more channels in higher definition than they would have gotten from basic cable. The result was a strange situation where the comments were more informative than the articles.

There is still a lot of misinformation about over-the-air television out there, but it is now more or less standard for stories about consumer TV options to have a paragraph like this:

For sports, news and syndicated shows, an indoor HD antenna is a great choice. It will bring you high-definition over-the-air broadcasts from local networks for less than the cost of one month of cable. And you can keep it for years.

What explains the shift? No doubt the showdown between Viacom and Time Warner played a role but cracks were appearing even before then. It could have been word of mouth or information seeping up from the comment section or even journalistic curiosity. Whatever the cause, it's still a sign of progress.

Can ConnCan con Conn?

I apologize for the title -- I just couldn't help myself.

In this Monkey Cage piece (Vergara vs. California: Are the top 0.1% buying their version of education reform?), I talked about how a few CEOs and ex-CEOs influenced that highly publicized trial through subsidized research, cozy relationships with officials and high-priced PR and legal teams. The case provided an interesting and very topical look into the relationship between big money and the education reform movement but it was a small part of the picture.

ConnCAN (Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now) is a powerful movement advocacy group. Their priorities closely follow the big three: privatization; scientific management; and elimination of pretty much all job protections for teachers. After Vergara, they pushed for similar moves in Connecticut despite the fact that, unlike California, Connecticut already has a  tough tenure granting process and dismissal procedures that both teachers and administrators seem to be happy with.

Danbury's Deputy Superintendent of Schools William Glass also said the California ruling won't have an effect on the educational community in Connecticut.

"We have a very effective process for dismissing a teacher with cause," Glass said.

"It takes time and we provide support for a teacher to see if they can improve. But if they can't, we are now down to a 10-month process for dismissal," he said, referring to the new reduction in due process.

Glass also said most teachers who are not a good fit will voluntarily resign.

No one wants an ineffective teacher because the principal, the school and the district all are held responsible for that teacher's ineffectiveness in teaching students, Glass said.

"Accountability has never been as clear as it is now," Glass said. "The days of hiding are gone. It's all very visible."

In California, tenure can be earned after only two years in front of a classroom. In Connecticut, it takes four years to earn employment protection.

Connecticut also recently added language to its tenure laws that allow ineffectiveness -- as determined by new teacher evaluation procedures -- to be a cause for dismissal.

Just to be clear, California's tenure system was, by almost universal agreement, deeply flawed. One of the most pervasive defenses of the Vergara decision was that something needed to be done. Connecticut is, by almost every measure, on the other end of the spectrum. When an organization makes reducing teachers job protections in Connecticut a priority, you have to suspect it's not really about the students.

To get a better fix on ConnCAN's priorities, it helps to look at where the organization came from. Jonathan Pelto, guest blogging for Diane Ravitch, fills in the details:

Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, Inc. (ConnCAN) was formed in 2004 by Jonathan Sackler, who served as the founding chair. However, the role of ConnCAN’s Board Chairman was then transferred to Brian Olson, the co-founder of Viking Global Investors. Viking Global Investors is a hedge fund which currently manages over $10 billion. In addition to being a long-time member of ConnCAN, Olsen presently serves on the Leadership Council of the Newschools Venture Fund.

Following Olson’s tenure as the Chairman of ConnCAN, the position was given to Will Heins, the former Senior Vice President of Greenwich Capital Markets.

Of the twelve present members of ConnCAN’s Board of Directors, at least nine are or were “hedge fund managers,” including Art Reimers, a former partner and managing director of Goldman Sachs.

Three months after Sackler and his allies formed ConnCAN, they also incorporated Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Advocacy, Inc. (ConnAD), which was originally designed to be the lobbying and public relations arm of ConnCAN. The number two spot at ConnAD went to Alexander Troy, who lists his occupation as “private investor.” Troy worked for the hedge fund, Perry Partners during the 1990s and eventually created his own hedge fund company called Troy Capital in 2003.

There's a particularly rich vein of chutzpah in having a group of hedge fund managers calling for more accountability and performance-based pay. Here's Barry Ritholtz spelling out the context:

The numbers cited above are eye-popping: The average hedge fund is underperforming the S&P 500 by more than 2000 basis points this year alone. That is an astonishingly poor showing. As Saijel Kishan & Kelly Bit point out in the Bloomberg News article, hedge funds have “underperformed the S&P 500 by 97 percentage points since the end of 2008.” The last time the fund industry outperformed U.S. stocks was in 2008. That year, they lost (depending on what industry data you use) somewhere between 19 and 29 percent; the S&P 500 declined 37 percent. Prior to 2008, you need to go back to 1993 to find similar outperformance, when they were up 31 percent versus a 10 percent increase for the S&P.

And how much accountability have we seen? Catherine Mulbrandon of Visualizing Economics (also via Ritholtz) has a handy chart.

Add to that the myriad tricks that these managers use to cook their books, tricks that, not coincidentally, have been showing up in the charter school sector.

Pearl on Pólya

Recently, I've been discussing George Pólya from a pedagogical standpoint. For a philosophical take, check out this paper by Judea Pearl. It's not all that relevant to the the education debate we've been having but it's definitely worth reading just to put things in their historical context.

A How to Solve It primer

I've been mentioning George Pólya a bit recently -- he fits naturally in the education debate and he's a regular fixture of my teaching blog -- so I thought I should provide some background, starting with Pólya's best known book.

How to Solve It is the key work in the two initiatives that, so for as I can tell, occupied the second half of Pólya's remarkable career. The first was to create a practical guide for teaching reasoning and problem-solving, focusing on mathematics. The second was to reintroduce the field of heuristics. From the glossary:

Pólya's intention was to build on the work of Pappus, Descartes, Leibnitz and Bolzano while, in some cases, scaling back their ambition (Descartes and Leibnitz both tended to think big). He was attempting to lay out a framework for a discussion that could be productive but was unlikely to be resolved.

The primary focus was something Pólya called plausible reasoning (a term he used in the title of his first two follow-up volumes). The idea was that while the final product in mathematics is based on rigorously proven statements, the process of getting there is usually a messy combination of induction, analogy and intuition, propped up with informal and incomplete proofs until something rigorous can be erected. In order to be good at their profession, mathematicians need to be (or become) skilled at coming up plausible conjectures.

Pólya's prose is plain-spoken and direct, which has sometimes caused trouble for less careful readers because, though the style may be simple, the ideas are not. Pólya often makes fine distinctions and his assertions often are only valid in their carefully laid out context.

With its heavy reliance on Socratic dialogues and its extensive discussions of philosophy and the history of mathematics (all of which are directly relevant to the main points), How to Solve It does not lend itself to bullet points and executive summaries. Unfortunately those have become very much the language of education today. I have seen a lot of education proposals -- particularly those promising to teach critical thinking and problem solving -- that appear to come from people who saw the bullet points but never read the book. That leads to bad things.

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.