Why Eureka (and implementation in general) belongs in the Common Core debate

Clyde Schechter had an extended reply to a recent post.

Let's follow the lead of the mathematicians here and first be clear about our definitions. Common Core is a set of standards: it is a list of behaviors that students are supposed to achieve at each grade level. And it is the intention that those who attain those standards will, at the end of high school, be prepared for college or for certain non-college-degree-requiring careers.

That is quite a separate matter from issues of textbooks and teacher-training. These are key for successful implementation of the Common Core standards, and I do not deny the importance of these things. But unless you want to argue (and perhaps you do) that the Common Core standards are inherently impossible to implement, you cannot rationally attack the standards by criticizing specific textbooks, or even the present lack of any adequate textbooks.

I think it would be helpful to your readers if you would make it clear whether you disagree in any substantial way with the Common Core Math Standards. I personally have read them and they strike me as quite appropriate. Do you agree or not? If not, what are your concerns?

Then if you want to blog about the inadequacies of Eureka math or other textbooks, do so--but don't cast it as a problem with the Common Core standards. My own daughter is learning math under the new Common Core standards--and, in plain English, her textbook sucks! So I'm with you on this.

But let's be clear what we're talking about: the standards themselves, the implementation of the standards in the classroom, or the assessments of achievement of those standards, or the utilization of those assessments to evaluate students, teachers, and schools. These are all separate issues and nobody is truly served by conflating them.

I'd take the opposite position that the issues involving the standards and those involving implementation are so tightly intertwined that they can and should be discussed as a unit.

1. Virtually no one discusses Common Core in narrowly defined terms. Not Wu. Not Coleman. Nobody. This is largely because the standards have no direct impact on the students. Their effect is felt only through their influence on curriculum and assessment. Pretty much everything you've read about the impact of Common Core was defining the initiative broadly. (Add to this the fact that, to anyone but another math teacher, actual math standards are as boring as dirt.)

2. Nor does treating the standards and their implementation separately make sense from an institutional point of view. Many of the same people and processes are behind both, and all phases were presumably approached with an eye to what would come next. This yet another reason for treating the standards, the lessons and the tests as an integrated unit.

3. If we are going to consider implementation when discussing Common Core, we will have to talk about Eureka Math. Not only is it held up as the gold standard by supporters; its success and wide acceptance make it the default template for other publishers. Barring big changes, this is the form Common Core is likely to take in the classroom.

4. All of this leaves open the hypothetical question: how much of the Eureka debacle could've been avoided had someone else handled this stage of the implementation of the Core math standards? The big problem with that question is that the education reform establishment still sees Eureka as a great success. That indicates a systemic failure. Unless you could find someone with sufficient distance from the establishment, I don't see any potential for a better outcome.

5. Finally, speed kills. The backers of Common Core have pushed a narrative of urgency and dire consequences so hard for so long that I am sure they now believe it themselves. The result is a hurried and unrealistic timeline that is certain to be massively expensive and generate tons of avoidable errors, particularly when combined with processes that lack adequate mechanisms for self-correction and a culture that tends to dismiss external criticism. On the whole, my impression is that the Common Core standards are generally slightly worse than the system of state standards and de facto national standards which they are replacing, but the difference, frankly, is not that great. However, even if the standards represented a big step forward, that would not justify implementing them at a breakneck speed that all but guarantees shoddy work (not to mention being massively expensive).


And as a footnote, the phrase "And it is the intention that those who attain those standards will, at the end of high school, be prepared for college or for certain non-college-degree-requiring careers" is deeply problematic on at least two levels:

First, we already have standards in place with basically these same objectives and which aren't all that different from CCS (the fact that we still have an unacceptable number of unprepared students is just another reminder of the limited impact of standards). If we were just interested in improving college and career readiness, it would be far easier and cheaper to simply tweak what we have (cover this earlier, spend more time on this, raise the test cut-off for this);

We don't see this because these reforms are about more. In a classic case of not letting a crisis go to waste, Coleman et al are looking to make sweeping administrative and pedagogical changes to the educational system and while I'm sure that they believe those changes will improve readiness, that's not the focus. If this were just a get-kids-through-college conversation, we would not be talking about mathematical formalism and close reading.

Godzilla vs. Rodan -- digital media edition

When giant, hideous monsters clash it's difficult deciding who to root for. 

Questions of team loyalty aside, this Slate article by Will Oremus raises interesting questions about attitudes toward and incentives for copyright infringement.

Last year on his podcast Hello Internet, the Australian filmmaker Brady Haran coined the term freebooting to describe the act of taking someone’s YouTube video and re-uploading it on a different platform for your own benefit....

Unlike sea pirates, Facebook freebooters don’t directly profit from their plundering. That’s because, unlike YouTube, Facebook doesn’t run commercials before its native videos—not yet, at least. That’s part of why they spread like wildfire. What the freebooter gains is attention, whether in the form of likes, shares, or new followers for its Facebook page. That can be valuable, sure, especially for brands and media outlets. But it might seem like a relatively small booty compared with the legal risk involved. Sandlin’s lawyer, Stephen Heninger, told me he believes Facebook freebooting amounts to copyright infringement, though he also said the phenomenon is new enough that the legal precedent is limited.
...
Freebooting, to be clear, is not the same as simply sharing a link to someone’s YouTube video on Facebook. When you do that, Facebook embeds the YouTube video, and all the views—and advertising revenues—are properly credited to its original publisher. No one has a problem with that, including Sandlin. It’s how the system is supposed to work.

But it doesn’t work that way anymore—not well, anyway. That’s because, over the past year, Facebook has decided it’s no longer content to be a venue for sharing links to articles and videos found elsewhere on the Internet. Facebook now wants to host the content itself—and, in so doing, control the advertising revenue that flows from it....

To that end, Facebook has built its own video platform and given it a decisive home-field advantage in the News Feed. Share a YouTube video on Facebook, and it will appear in your friends’ feeds as a small, static preview image with a “play” button on it—that is, if it appears in your friends’ News Feeds at all. Those who do see it will be hesitant to click on it, because they know it’s likely to be preceded by an ad. But take that same video and upload it directly to Facebook, and it will appear in your friends’ feeds as a full-size video that starts playing automatically as they scroll past it. (That’s less annoying than it sounds.) Oh, and it will appear in a lot of your friends’ feeds. Anecdotal evidence—and guidance from Facebook itself—suggests native videos perform orders of magnitude better on Facebook than those shared from other platforms.

Facebook’s video push has produced stunning results. In September, the company announced that its users were watching 1 billion videos a day on the social network. By April, that number had quadrupled to 4 billion. An in-depth Fortune story in June on “Facebook’s Video-Traffic Explosion” reported that publishers such as BuzzFeed have seen their Facebook video views grow tenfold in the past year. One caveat is that a view of a Facebook video might not mean quite the same thing as a view of a YouTube video, because Facebook videos play in your feed whether you click on them or not.

That caveat might be worth a post of it own on apples-to-oranges data comparisons. Maybe next time

On the plus side, a holographic instant replay machine would be really cool

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a story of profitable businesses operating under a monopoly and owned by the fantastically rich taking billions of dollars of tax-payer money. This ties in with all sorts of our ongoing threads.




(Not to mention the fact that some of that money eventually goes to this guy.)

Over at the Monkey Cage...

I wrap up the Eureka Math thread.

Sentence of the day: constructive critcism

This is Joseph.

Mark Evanier:

He strikes a chord with me when he writes, "In life, what matters most isn't how a decision compares to your ideal outcome. It's how it compares to the alternative at hand."

I'm a big believer in that. Increasingly as I get older, I get annoyed by harsh criticisms that are unaccompanied by alternatives. It's fine to say, "I don't think this will work but I don't have anything better to offer at the moment." It's not fine, at least with me, to say, "This idea stinks and it will be an utter and total disaster and whoever thought of it is a moron…" and then to not have at least some of a better plan to offer in its stead. Or to offer an impossible, impractical alternative. Anyone can say, "That sucks."

I rather like this point, because it really does run through a lot of themes on this blog.  When I am an active blogger, I often find that many of my topics don't consider what would be the alternative to the current policy.  So they note that something is inefficient.  But if you can't come up with a good alternative (that is scalable) then it isn't all that exciting to point out that there are a lot of limitations in life and much that is not perfect. 

P.S. Anyone have any idea if Evanier is Evan-yah (French) or Evan-yer (English)? 

From the ashes of New Math

[Previously posted at the teaching blog]

One of my big concerns with the education reform debate, particularly as it regards mathematics, is that a great deal of the debate consist of words being thrown around that have a positive emotional connotation, but which are either vague or worse yet mean different things to different participants in the discussion.

As a result, you have a large number of "supporters" of common core who are, in fact, promoting entirely different agendas and probably not realizing it (you might be able to say the same about common core opponents but, by nature, opposition is better able to handle a lack of coherence) . I strongly suspect this is one of the causes behind the many problems we've seen in Eureka math and related programs. The various contributors were working from different and incompatible blueprints.

There's been a great deal of talk about improving mathematics education, raising standards, teaching problem-solving, and being more rigorous. All of this certainly sounds wonderful, but it is also undeniably vague. When you drill down, you learn that different supporters are using the same words in radically different senses .

For David Coleman and most of the non-content specialists, these words mean that all kids graduating high school should be college and career-ready, especially when it comes to the STEM fields which are seen as being essential to future economic growth.

(We should probably stop here and make a distinction between STEM and STEAM – science technology engineering applied mathematics. Coleman and Company are definitely talking about steam)

Professor Wu (and I suspect many of the other mathematicians who have joined into the initiative) is defining rigor much more rigorously. For him, the objective is to teach mathematics in a pure form, an axiomatic system where theorems build upon theorems using rules of formal logic. This is not the kind of math class that most engineers advocate; rather it is the kind of math class that most engineers complain about. (Professor Wu is definitely not a STEAM guy.)

In the following list taken from this essay from Professor Wu, you can get a feel for just how different his philosophy is from David Coleman's. The real tip-off is part 3. The suggestion that every formula or algorithm be logically derived before it can be used has huge implications, particularly as we move into more applied topics. (Who here remembers calculus? Okay, and who here remembers how to prove the fundamental theorem of calculus?)

All of Professor Wu's arguments are familiar to anyone who has studied the history of New Math in the 60s. There is no noticeable daylight between the two approaches.

I don't necessarily mean this as a pejorative. Lots of smart people thought that new math was a good idea in the late 50s and early 60s; I'm sure that quite a few smart people still think so today. I personally think it's a very bad idea but that's a topic for another post. For now though, the more immediate priority is just understand exactly what we're arguing about.

The Fundamental Principles of Mathematics

I believe there are five interrelated, fundamental principles of mathematics.
They are routinely violated in school textbooks and in the math education
literature, so teachers have to be aware of them to teach well.

1.  Every concept is precisely defined, and definitions furnish the basis for logical
deductions. At the moment, the neglect of definitions in school mathematics has reached the point at which many teachers no longer know the difference between a definition and a theorem. The general perception among the hundreds of teachers I have worked with is that a definition is “one more thing to memorize.” Many bread-and-butter concepts of K–12 mathematics are not correctly defined or, if defined, are not put to use as integral parts of reasoning. These include number, rational number (in middle school), decimal (as a fraction in upper elementary school), ordering of fractions, product of fractions, division of fractions, length-area-volume (for different grade levels), slope of a line, half-plane of a line, equation, graph of an equation, inequality between functions, rational exponents of a positive number, polygon, congruence, similarity, parabola, inverse function, and polynomial.

2.  Mathematical statements are precise. At any moment, it is clear what is known and what is not known. There are too many places in school mathematics in which textbooks and other education materials fudge the boundary between what is true and what is not. Often a heuristic argument is conflated with correct logical reasoning. For example, the identity √a√b = √ab for positive numbers a and b is often explained by assigning a few specific values to a and b and then checking for these values with a calculator. Such an approach is a poor substitute for mathematics because it leaves open the possibility that there are other values for a and b for which the identity is not true.

3.  Every assertion can be backed by logical reasoning. Reasoning is the lifeblood of mathematics and the platform that launches problem solving. For example, the rules of place value are logical consequences of the way we choose to count. By choosing to use 10 symbols (i.e., 0 to 9), we are forced to use no more than one position (place) to be able to count to large numbers. Given the too frequent absence of reasoning in school mathematics, how can we ask students to solve problems if teachers have not been prepared to engage students in logical reasoning on a consistent basis?

4.  Mathematics is coherent; it is a tapestry in which all the concepts and skills are logically interwoven to form a single piece. The professional development of math teachers usually emphasizes either procedures (in days of yore) or intuition (in modern times), but not the coherent structure of mathematics. This may be the one aspect of mathematics that most teachers (and, dare I say, also math education professors) find most elusive. For instance, the lack of awareness of the coherence of the number systems in K–12 (whole numbers, integers, fractions, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers) may account for teaching fractions as “different from” whole numbers such that the learning of fractions becomes almost divorced from the learning of whole numbers. Likewise, the resistance that some math educators (and therefore teachers) have to explicitly teaching children the standard algorithms may arise from not knowing the coherent structure that underlies these algorithms: the essence of all four standard algorithms is the reduction of any whole number computation to the computation of single-digit numbers.

5.  Mathematics is goal oriented, and every concept or skill has a purpose. Teachers who recognize the purposefulness of mathematics gain an extra tool to make their lessons more compelling. For example, when students see the technique of completing the square merely as a trick to get the quadratic formula, rather than as the central idea underlying the study of quadratic functions, their understanding of the technique is superficial. Mathematics is a collection of interconnecting chains in which each concept or skill appears as a link in a chain, so that each concept or skill serves the purpose of supporting another one down the line. Students should get to see for themselves that the mathematics curriculum moves forward with a purpose.

At the risk of putting too fine of a point on it, this approach tends to produce extremely formal and dense prose such the following (from a company Professor Wu was involved with):

Dilation: A transformation of the plane with center O and scale factor r(r > 0). If
D(O) = O and if P ≠ O, then the point D(P), to be denoted by Q, is the point on the ray OP so that |OQ| = r|OP|. If the scale factor r ≠ 1, then a dilation in the coordinate plane is a transformation that shrinks or magnifies a figure by multiplying each coordinate of the figure by the scale factor.

Congruence: A finite composition of basic rigid motions—reflections, rotations,
translations—of the plane. Two figures in a plane are congruent if there is a congruence that maps one figure onto the other figure.

Similar: Two figures in the plane are similar if a similarity transformation exists, taking one figure to the other.

Similarity Transformation: A similarity transformation, or similarity, is a composition of a finite number of basic rigid motions or dilations. The scale factor of a similarity transformation is the product of the scale factors of the dilations in the composition; if there are no dilations in the composition, the scale factor is defined to be 1.

Similarity: A similarity is an example of a transformation.

Sentence of the day: Greece edition

This is Joseph.

The recent Eurozone stuff requires a bit more blogging than I am prepared for.  But I think that this comment from Ezra Klein puts in perspective just how wrong it all went:

Syriza's strategy, insofar as there was one, uncovered a method of failing that was much more complete and all-encompassing than anyone had thought possible at the start of the process.

The reason that this is bad news is the the European Union has been sold as a partnership.  In a partnership, it is actually bad for one side to lose very, very badly in negotiations.  Not because the person that won will not be objectively better off.  But because a partnership requires mutual benefit, and so a bad deal undermines the strength of the partnership.

Opposite day at the Common Core debate

{previously posted at the teaching blog]

I recently came across this defense of Common Core by two Berkeley mathematicians, Edward Frenkel and Hung-Hsi Wu. Both are sharp and highly respected and when you hear about serious mathematicians supporting the initiative, there's a good chance these two names will be on the list that follows.

Except they don't support it. They support something they call Common Core, but what they describe is radically different than what the people behind the program are talking about. The disconnect is truly amazing. Wu and Frenkel's description of common core doesn't just disagree with that used by David Coleman and pretty much everyone else involved with the enterprise; it openly contradicts it.

The case that Coleman made to Bill Gates and stuck with since then is that "academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning". Furthermore, Coleman argued that having a uniform set of national standards would allow us to use a powerful set of administrative tools. We could create metrics, track progress, set up incentive systems, and generally tackle the problem like management consultants.

Compare that to this excerpt from Wu and Frenkel's essay [emphasis added]:

Before the CCSSM were adopted, we already had a de facto national curriculum in math because the same collection of textbooks was (and still is) widely used across the country. The deficiencies of this de facto national curriculum of "Textbook School Mathematics" are staggering. The CCSSM were developed precisely to eliminate those deficiencies, but for CCSSM to come to life we must have new textbooks written in accordance with CCSSM. So far, this has not happened and, unfortunately, the system is set up in such a way that the private companies writing textbooks have more incentive to preserve the existing status quo maximizing their market share than to get their math right. The big elephant in the room is that as of today, less than a year before the CCSSM are to be fully implemented, we still have no viable textbooks to use for teaching mathematics according to CCSSM!

The situation is further aggravated by the rush to implement CCSSM in student assessment. A case in point is the recent fiasco in New York State, which does not yet have a solid program for teaching CCSSM, but decided to test students according to CCSSM anyway. The result: students failed miserably. One of the teachers wrote to us about her regrets that "the kids were not taught Common Core" and that it was "tragic" how low their scores were. How could it be otherwise? Why are we testing students on material they haven't been taught? Of course, it is much easier and more fun, in lieu of writing good CCSSM textbooks, to make up CCSSM tests and then pat each other on the back and wave a big banner: "We have implemented Common Core -- Mission accomplished." But no one benefits from this. Are we competing to create a Potemkin village, or do we actually care about the welfare of the next generation? What happened in New York State will happen next year across the country if we don't get our act together.

[As a side remark, we note that even in the best of circumstances, it's a big question how to effectively test students in math on a large scale. Developing such tests is an art form still waiting to be perfected, and in any case, it's not clear how accurately students' scores on these tests can reflect students' learning. Unfortunately, our national obsession with the test scores has forced teachers to teach to the test rather than teach the material for learning. While we consider some form of standardized assessment to be necessary (just as driver's license tests are necessary), we deplore this obsession. It is time to put the emphasis back on student learning inside the classroom.]

These misguided practices give a bad name to CCSSM, which is being exploited by the standards' opponents. They misinform the public by equating CCSSM with ill-fated assessments, such as the one in New York State, when in fact the problem is caused mostly by the disconnect between the current Textbook School Mathematics and CCSSM. It is for this reason that having the CCSSM is crucial, because this is what will ensure that students are taught correct mathematics rather than the deficient and obsolete Textbook School Mathematics.

It is possible and necessary to create mathematics textbooks that do better than Textbook School Mathematics. One such effort by commoncore.org holds promise: its Eureka Math series will make online courses in K-12 math available at a modest cost. The series will be completed sometime in 2014. [Full disclosure: one of us is an author of the 8th grade textbook in that series.]

The authors have contradicted both major components of Coleman's argument. They insist that we already have a relatively consistent national system of mathematics standards and furthermore they question the reliability of the metrics which Coleman's entire system is based upon.

How can proponents of common core hold such mutually exclusive use and yet be largely unaware of the contradictions?

I suspect it is some combination of poor communication and wishful thinking on both sides. As spelled out in this essay by Wu, the authors desperately want to see mathematics education returned to some kind of Euclidean ideal. A rigorous axiomatic approach where all lessons start with precise definitions and proceed through a series of logical deductions. They have convinced themselves that the rest of the Common Core establishment is in sympathy with them just as they have convinced themselves that the lessons being produced by Eureka math are rigorous and accurate.

I'm trying to make a point about executive compensation (and perhaps implicitly about anti-trust laws)

So I'm going to post this video from Keith Olbermann (I know he can be divisive, but I think he nails this 

Then refer you to this Slate article (you can draw your own conclusions from there):

In a largely symbolic move, the NFL is giving up its nearly 50-year-old tax-exempt status, league officials announced Tuesday. The move extends to the league itself, which had been listed as a nonprofit trade group under Section 501(c)(6) of the tax code since 1966, and not the 32 teams that make up pro football, which are already taxed.

The vast majority of the NFL’s $9.5 billion revenues go to those teams, as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell noted in a letter to owners and members of Congress announcing the move that was reported by Bloomberg.

“Every dollar of income generated through television rights fees, licensing agreements, sponsorships, ticket sales, and other means is earned by the 32 clubs and is taxable there,” Goodell wrote. “This will remain the case even when the league office and Management Council file returns as taxable entities, and the change in filing status will make no material difference to our business.”

As several commentators have noted, though, the move means that Goodell will not have to report his salary—he made $44 million in 2012 and $35 million in 2013—which invariably gets brought up every time he screws something up, which is quite often.

Video accompaniment

This post on class attitudes has been getting quite a bit of attention, which got me thinking about this sketch from the College Humor spin-off CH2.

Perhaps "secrets" isn't exactly the right word

At least according to Wikipedia, it seems to involve hiring people to write books, That doesn't seem like it would take up an entire MOOC.

Maybe he can fill in the rest of the time telling about how he created New York's first "great detective hero."

David Brooks -- wrong in the right way

Charles Pierce (writing in the canine persona of Moral Hazard) brings us another dose of godawful from David Brooks

Here's Pierce/Hazard:

"He's writing today about this amazing story of survival told by a woman who escaped the horrific slaughter in Rwanda back in the 1990s. What a saga! Of course, it wasn't enough just to tell a tale of genocide and the indomitable human spirit There had to be something in there that connected to the perilous life of a wealthy member of the American opinion elite, beset as he is by the metaphorical machetes of daily life."

And here's Brooks:

Clemantine is now an amazing young woman. Her superb and artful essay reminded me that while the genocide was horrific, the constant mystery of life is how loved ones get along with one another. We work hard to cram our lives into legible narratives. But we live in the fog of reality. Whether you have survived a trauma or not, the psyche is still a dark forest of scars and tender spots. Each relationship is intricacy piled upon intricacy, fertile ground for misunderstanding and mistreatment.

Take a moment to appreciate the metaphors as they mix. We cram lives into legible narratives despite living in a fog of reality in a dark but fertile forest of scars, tender spots, misunderstanding and mistreatment... or something like that. To be perfectly honest, I zoned out for a moment there.

Brooks is capable of extraordinarily sharp and elegant writing, but just as often his prose is abysmal. Sloppy, grandiose and badly argued. He is forgiven these stylistic offenses for the same reason that he is forgiven his substantive ones: because he's wrong in the right way. He plays to the pretensions and class prejudices of the New York Times (and, to a large extent, of the national press in general) while letting the paper congratulate itself for being open to conservative views.

Andrew Gelman recently asked how many uncorrected mistakes would it take for Brooks to be discredited? The answer is, as long Brooks makes his employers and colleagues feel good about themselves, anything up to and possibly including a bodies-in-the-crawlspace incident will be overlooked.

I do not have time to heap an appropriate amount of scorn on this...

But the New York Times is excited to report (at great length) that now a slightly larger small minority of the super rich have come to agree with most social scientists and 60% of the American public that income inequality is a problem.

This is considered newsworthy because the NYT's attitude toward CEOs and hedge fund managers is disturbingly similar to a 14-year-old fan's attitude toward Justin Bieber. The fascination is just as all-consuming and just as annoying.

One of these days, I want to do a serious thread on the paper's increasingly bizarre combination of class insularity and old-school liberalism, and how it creates fertile ground for silly narratives, distorted coverage, and roughly every third column from David Brooks. For now though, I'm just keeping a tally.

"Welcome to Devonian Park"

As mentioned before, during the school year, I keep an eye out for entertaining STEM videos I can post at the teaching blog. Here are a couple in the queue.





This is a really pretty song.

In the great halls of Ithuvania, all of the banquets are catered by Whole Foods

[In case you've forgotten about Ithuvania...]

I'm working on a couple of Whole Foods related threads for the food blog, and I keep coming across these remarkable John Mackey facts. He isn't just your standard crazy CEO; he actually manages to be an ideological chimera, somehow combining the most annoying traits of the left and of the right.  A flaky new-ager and dyed-in-the-wool Randian (“The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.” [I was going to make a joke about Walmart and sex here, but it just seems like overkill].  An anti-GMO vegan who calls global warming "perfectly natural."

He's also kind of a jerk.

From Nick Paumgarten's profile in the New Yorker:

Two years ago, Mackey passed through one of the roughest stretches of his life. The Bush Administration, in an uncharacteristic spasm of antitrust vigilance, was fighting Whole Foods’ purchase of a competitor, Wild Oats, contending that the merged company would unfairly corner what the Federal Trade Commission called the “premium natural and organic supermarket” sector. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Mackey: for nearly eight years, he had been secretly logging onto an Internet message board devoted to Whole Foods stock under the sock puppet, or pseudonym, “rahodeb” (an anagram of Deborah, his wife’s name), praising his own company, disparaging Wild Oats, and throwing in a flattering remark about his hair (“I think he looks cute!”). Mackey, for years a media and stock-market sweetheart, was suddenly recast as a monopolist, a fruitcake, and a sneak. The share price fell, and, even though the government eventually let the deal stand (with a few concessions from Whole Foods) and gave the sock puppetry a pass, many wondered how Mackey managed to hold on to his job.

During this period, Mackey sought succor in spiritual practice. He engaged a friend, a follower of the Czech transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof, to guide him through a therapeutic session of holotropic breathing. “I had this very powerful session, very powerful. It lasted about two hours,” Mackey said in an inspirational CD set he released last year called “Passion and Purpose: The Power of Conscious Capitalism.” “I was having a dialogue with what I would define as my deeper self, or my higher self.” He had a pair of epiphanies, one having to do with severed relationships that needed healing. The other was that “if I wanted to continue to do Whole Foods, there couldn’t be any part of my life that was secretive or hidden or that I’d be embarrassed [about] if people found out about it. I had to let go of all of that,” he said. “I’m this public figure now.”

All of which would be easier to forgive if Whole Foods wasn't profiting from and aggressively contributing to the pseudo-science and general bullshit of the foodie culture.

From Michael Schulson

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.

Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics—live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: “Stay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer’s.” A sample opening sentence: “We like to think that medicine works.”

Schulson's piece includes a link to What Doctors Don’t Tell You, but I decided to leave it out. I clicked on it and, trust me, this is not a rabbit hole you want to go down.