Symbiotic relationships, non-aggression pacts and naked emperors

I did a post a while back arguing that Fox News was partisan rather ideological. I didn't get very far into the obvious ethical concerns associated with having a major news and entertainment conglomerate in partnership with one of our two major political parties. Fox is able to maintain this symbiotic relationship and still keep up at least a facade of independence and respectability partially because most of the mainstream press has entered into an unspoken but remarkably well-observed non-aggression pact with Fox and the Republican Party.

Writers for papers like the NYT still criticize conservatives, but only in measured and indirect ways. They won't come out and say that an emperor is naked. Instead, they come up with all sorts of ways of saying sheer and flimsy and overly revealing.

This system has worked fairly well as long as their subjects have met them halfway. Even bomb-throwers like Ted Cruz kept up at least enough pretense of seriousness that the journalists could maintain some plausible deniability.

The problem with Donald Trump is that he doesn't give journalists any cover. He isn't actually that ideologically extreme compared to the other GOP candidates on most issues (if anything, he's to the left of the field on health care, monetary policy and the Iraq war). His comments about immigrants and support of birtherism are clearly designed to appeal to racist elements in the party, but it's not like we haven't seen other racist candidates recently and the press was remarkably OK with it.

Over the past couple of decades, the press has gotten stunningly good at not noticing things they don't want to notice. You can get journalists to ignore all sorts of lies and bigotry if you just give them an out, but that's just the thing Trump refuses to do. His whole campaign up to this point has depended on being as memorable and entertaining as possible, the ultimate reality show villain in what is arguably the ultimate reality show.

There have been other naked emperors on the stage recently but they've all played it at least a little coy. Trump is basically running around, grabbing his crotch, shouting "Hey, baby, do you want a piece of this?" then skipping away singing "I'm naked, naked, naked."

The press can't ignore Trump's behavior, but if they want to maintain any credibility and consistency, they really need to stop ignoring a lot of other candidates' behavior as well.

Mark Thoma and the Sesame Street MOOC

I've been arguing for a while that we should broaden our thinking about MOOCs. Apparently some folks at NBER are thinking the same thing.

From Mark Thoma:

Interestingly, one of the first MOOCs that attempted to address the educational needs of preschoolers has hardly been studied. As economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine noted in recent research at the National Bureau of Economic Research: "In essence, Sesame Street was the first MOOC. Although MOOCs differ in what they entail, Sesame Street satisfies the basic feature of electronic transmission of online educational material. Both Sesame Street and MOOCs provide educational interventions at a fraction of the cost of more traditional classroom settings."


Their research attempts to do two things: examine whether MOOCs can improve educational outcomes, and assess the degree to which early intervention programs can promote student success later in life.


When Sesame Street was first introduced more than 40 years ago, it was broadcast on PBS stations using UHF technology. This type of transmission doesn't produce a very strong signal. As a result, reception was poor for some households, and about a third of them couldn't get the signal at all.


Thus, how far a household was from a transmission tower (this was pre-cable) determined how good the reception was. The hypothesis is that children who grew up further from transmission towers and unable to watch Sesame Street wouldn't do as well in subsequent grades, and would do worse in the job market once they finally graduated.

The results are encouraging. The researchers found a significant impact of the Sesame Street MOOC on educational attainment in the early school years. "This effect is particularly pronounced for boys and black, non-Hispanic children and those living in economically disadvantaged areas."


However, when the analysis is extended to labor market outcomes (children were tracked to see what types of jobs, etc. they eventually obtained), the researchers couldn't find evidence of "substantive improvements in ultimate educational attainment or labor market outcomes."


Although the improvements brought about by Sesame Street appear limited to the elementary school years -- eventually the effect wears off -- this research still has two important messages.


First, early childhood intervention and the availability of universal prekindergarten programs do help prepare students from disadvantaged backgrounds for elementary school education. That's a key finding.


Second, MOOCs appear to work. The cost of providing Sesame Street was "around $5 per child per year (in today's dollars)," the researchers found, far less than other means of providing the same education.

When the channeling of information goes awry

As a corporate statistician, I cut my teeth on targeted marketing and discriminatory pricing and I still tend to think in terms of different messages for different segments of the audience, particularly when I read something like this (from the New Republic). 

Conservatives have joined the fight with relish, under the not-insane assumption that Planned Parenthood’s allies would lose the ensuing public opinion battle, creating an opportunity for the right to advance pro-life causes, or (more feasibly) to punish Democrats. What they’ve done instead, using ghoulish propaganda, is convince myriad religious conservatives that Planned Parenthood is making a business of harvesting baby flesh, and that something must be done to stop them. Against the backdrop of the presidential primary, this is turning a public relations nightmare for Democrats into an intractably escalating political crisis for Republicans.

...

Anti-abortion zealots are now demanding that Republicans in Congress refuse to appropriate money for government operations unless Planned Parenthood’s funding is abolished—a new test of Republican pro-life bona fides. To force Congress’ hand, they’re admonishing Republican presidential candidates that the anti-abortion vote will only follow those who support the shutdown effort. The purpose of Erick Erickson’s above tweet, alerting the candidates to his question days in advance, is to eclipse the instinctual aversion many of them will have to promoting a government shutdown, and get as many of them on the same page as possible.

When working from a customer database, marketers frequently try to divide consumers into three basic groups:

Those will not buy your product no matter what kind of marketing you use;

Those who will always buy your product regardless of what kind of marketing you use;

And those who can be moved from the non-buying to the buying camps with the proper approach.

These distinctions become particularly important when talking about things like price cuts and coupons, but even with traditional marketing, you can see the disadvantage of spending money on either the first or second groups.

It looks like we have something similar here, albeit a bit more complex. I would argue that, in terms of political issues, a party would like its opponents to be a zero on the passion scale, but would prefer for its supporters to be an eight or nine out of ten. Eights and nines are maxed out in terms of showing up to vote and giving you money but they are less likely to demand extreme positions that cost serious political capital compared to the tens .

And obviously you want to persuade the persuadables.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).

"Since John Harvey Kellogg gave C.W. Post his first enema" [Now with working link}

Check out the new post over at the food blog that discusses an assortment of flakes ranging from the cereal kings of Battle Creek to the nuts of Silicon Valley to this guy:

On Monday, software engineer Rob Rhinehart published an account of his new life without alternating electrical current -- which he has undertaken because generating that current "produces 32 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than any other economic sector." Connection to the power grid isn’t all Rhinehart has given up. He also doesn’t drive, wash his clothes (or hire anyone else to wash them) or cook anything but coffee and tea. But he still lives in a big city (Los Angeles) and is chief executive officer of a corporation with $21.5 million in venture capital funding.

That corporation is Rosa Labs, the maker of Soylent, a “macronutritious food beverage” designed to free its buyers from the drudgery of shopping, cooking and chewing. In the 2,900-word post on his personal blog, Rhinehart worked in an extended testimonial for Soylent 2.0, a new, improved version of the drink -- algae and soy seem to be the two most important ingredients -- that will begin shipping in October.

There is nothing more dangerous than a data-driven system designed and administered by people who don't understand statistics

 From the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss

 A veteran teacher suing New York state education officials over the controversial method they used to evaluate her as “ineffective” is expected to go to New York Supreme Court in Albany this week for oral arguments in a case that could affect all public school teachers in the state and even beyond.

Sheri G. Lederman, a fourth-grade teacher in New York’s Great Neck public school district, is “highly regarded as an educator,” according to her district superintendent, Thomas Dolan, and has a “flawless record”. The standardized math and English Language Arts test scores of her students are consistently higher than the state average.

Yet her 2013-2014 evaluation, based in part on student standardized test scores, rated her as “ineffective.” How can a teacher known for excellence be rated “ineffective”? It happens — and not just in New York.

...

Testing experts have for years been warning school reformers that efforts to evaluate teachers using VAM are not reliable or valid, but school reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, have embraced the method as a “data-driven” evaluation solution championed by some economists.

Lederman’s suit against state education officials — including John King, the former state education commissioner, who now is a top adviser to Duncan at the Education Department — challenges the rationality of the VAM model used to evaluate her and, by extension, other teachers in the state. The lawsuit alleges that the New York State Growth Measures “actually punishes excellence in education through a statistical black box which no rational educator or fact finder could see as fair, accurate or reliable.”

It also, in many aspects, defies comprehension. High-stakes tests are given only in math and English language arts, so reformers have decided that all teachers (and, sometimes, principals) in a school should be evaluated by reading and math scores. Sometimes, school test averages are factored into all teachers’ evaluations. Sometimes, a certain group of teachers are attached to either reading or math scores; social studies teachers, for example, are more often attached to English Language Arts scores, while science teachers are attached to math scores. An art teacher in New York City explained in this post how he was evaluated on math standardized test scores and saw his evaluation rating drop from “effective” to “developing.”

A teacher in Florida — which is another state that uses VAM — discovered that his top-scoring students actually hurt his evaluation. How? In Indian River County, Fla., an English Language Arts middle school teacher named Luke Flynt told his school board that through VAM formulas, each student is assigned a “predicted” score — based on past performance by that student and other students — on the state-mandated standardized test. If the student exceeds the predicted score, the teacher is credited with “adding value.” If the student does not do as well as the predicted score, the teacher is held responsible and that score counts negatively toward his/her evaluation. He said he had four students whose predicted scores were “literally impossible” because they were higher than the maximum number of points that can be earned on the exam. He said:

    “One of my sixth-grade students had a predicted score of 286.34. However, the highest a sixth-grade student can earn earn is 283. The student did earn a 283, incidentally. Despite the fact that she earned a perfect score, she counted negatively toward my valuation because she was 3 points below predicted.

...

Affidavits of numerous experts supporting Lederman have been filed — including from Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond — and you can see them here. Oral arguments are scheduled to be heard Wednesday, Aug. 12. Should Lederman successfully challenge the New York teacher evaluation system, state officials might have to revamp it.

And you thought they were kidding

Comment would be superfluous. 

Joseph is unclear

This is Joseph.

There was a lot of confusion on this post.  This was my lack of recent writing practice.  So the sequence was:

~2010: Truckers have flexibility and ~$50 K salary
Micro-monitoring is introduced to improve efficiency
~2015: Truckers have constant monitoring, no flexibility, and a $50K salary

It's also the case that any monitoring system will, because it is based on general rules, be incorrect for a lot of specific situations.  For example, sitting in a traffic jam instead of having a longer rest break and then driving later (because the breaks are timed). 

Now the reason for monitoring is mostly about increasing productivity (safety improvements are also a form of productivity increase).  Either the system improves profits or it doesn't.  If it doesn't improve profits enough to increase salaries then maybe it is a bad idea?  If it is possible to increase salaries with the higher efficiency, then why is it so hard to consider sharing the benefits of increased productivity?  In particular, why is reducing the training requirements of the workers the path to increased safety?

Mark pointed out that we are seeing the same thing with UPS drivers. 

Increasing productivity is good but so are working conditions.  If there are huge gains made from this type of monitoring (like one sees in a call center) then it only makes sense to share these with the workers, who will then be able to see the monitoring as a source of higher wages.  You can imagine the "make $60 K with monitoring" versus "make 50K without" being a great way to make people decide they are willing to put up with the hassle of being tracked by devices that can't always convey complete information. 

Retirement age

I missed this issue when it was raised about a month ago but it is a rather good point:

Raising the retirement age is a strange prescription for countries suffering from mass youth unemployment. When I made that observation on twitter the other day, I got a lot of pushback from people accusing me of a "lump of labor" fallacy. But please note, I didn't say that countries suffering from mass youth unemployment should lower the retirement age. What I said is that if you have a country -- Greece, say, or France -- where youth unemployment is very high, it's strange to decide that raising the retirement age is the cure for your economic woes.

I am also always a touch mystified as to why this policy prescription is quite so popular to deal with actual economic crises.  It is not that you cannot set the retirement age too low (you sure can), but that it does seem counter-productive to always seek to increase it when there is a shortfall in demand and high unemployment.  Does it make sense to pump out money to people who can spend it (retirees) and generate new employment among the young (who produce services to the retirees). 

What I think I really want to see is some sort of evidence that the existence of retirement programs hurts national productivity in an important way.  What is the alternative?  Can people really work into their late sixties and early seventies across a wide range of professions? 

Plus, these programs allow us to have experiments in other programs -- like a 401(k) plan -- without leaving people destitute if they prove to be bad policy.  In this sense, social security acts as a sort of innovation insurance, to allow us to try and improve retirement programs.  That seems like a feature to me. 

Parking requirements

This is Joseph.

Okay, I read this article on Mike the Mad Biologist's site and I wanted to comment because I think the author is completely missing the implications of the piece.  Consider:

But at Velo Apartments—a new, 171-unit, fully leased building located at 3635 Woodland Park Avenue North in Seattle's Fremont area—just 100 out of 128 parking stalls have been rented, according to Rob Hackleman, associate development and asset manager for Mack Urban, which developed the building. Using the estimated $20,000-to-$50,000 per-stall calculation, that's about $560,000 to $1.4 million worth of unnecessary parking spaces. Ironically, Velo Apartments is marketed as "bike-friendly," with "bike-focused amenities" and close access to the Burke-Gilman Trail. The development's logo includes an old-fashioned bicycle, and its website states, "Your Ride Starts Here." Hackleman said five unused parking stalls were converted to create more bike storage because the existing bike storage wasn't enough to meet demand.

I work in Seattle with a lot of young professionals.  Many of them bike commute.  I struggle to find any without cars.  My wife and I share a single car.  This is actually the most common pattern among those with low rates of car ownership.  So why are stalls going unsold? 

Because on street parking is free.  Drive around Fremont and try to park.  I dare you.  Especially on an evening or weekend.  I avoid things I really like in Fremont because bus service is terrible and it's simply impossible to park.  Side streets tend to be three cars wide -- you can end up facing another car with no room to go around because both sides of the street are completely full of cars.  Driveways are often blocked (another reason one might not want to pay money to have one).  If many people pay > 30% of their salary on rent they may be economizing by trying not to have to pay for a parking stall.

Now Seattle wants to increase density.  But the state of Washington keeps cutting public transportation.   So how are people supposed to get around?  Biking is a nice idea, but the weather isn't always that good and many people may be elderly or disabled.  It is scary to be on a Seattle bike trail if you are not a fast rider. 

The real reason that costs are suddenly rising is a not a policy that has been in place since the 1950's.  It is that more people are moving to Seattle, often for well-paying jobs, and increasing the demand for housing.   This isn't a complicated issue.  Now, how one handles it might be.  But I would suggest that the place to start is figuring out a sensible transit policy.  But Seattle is the fastest growing city in the United States -- does it not make sense to decide how we are going to handle transit.  I would love more bike lanes (which, to be fair, is happening) and better transit services.  But I want to see a plausible way for this to happen (given it is the state that keeps cutting public transit) before I think that we should make the parking issues worse! 

As for bike lanes, the current city trick to make them work is to get rid of the on-street parking (to make it two lanes, a turn lane, and two bike lanes).  One might suspect that simply doing more of this (and making biking safer) could well lead to fewer unrented stalls. 

It is not that I think that parking requirements, as is, are necessarily optimal.  But it is worth thinking about these issues. 

Growth fetishists are an optimistic lot

The other day Marketplace did a long segment on investors' obsession with growth in the tech sector. It was well done and more balanced than most reporting in the area (financial journalists tend to get very starry-eyed on the subject), but the show's best quote on the topic was buried deep in an entirely different piece.

This growth shows no signs of slowing. This year Shake Shack made its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and was valued at $21 per share. That number has tripled since then, with even higher peaks in the interim. The company says it plans to build only 450 locations, but investors are already predicting bigger expansion.

 I really wish I had a transcript of the interview -- this summary doesn't capture the disconnect that comes through in the actual conversation -- but you can still see the problem here. The CEO (who comes off as quite sharp in the interview) says they have a hard limit on growth because expanding too quickly would severely damage the brand.

In the murky world of investing, this is the closest you will get to a clear boundary. Senior management has publicly committed to it repeatedly and it is baked into the business model, but analysts have gotten so good at creating these wishful thinking feedback loops that even
CEO of the company in question can't disrupt the flow.

Harsh Discipline and No-excuse Charters continued

[I posted this at the teaching blog a few months ago, but it's a natural follow-up to the previous post on harsh discipline.]

When discipline crosses the line


I've been meaning to write this up for a while now, but recent news about attrition (see here and here for the conversation up to now) has brought the issue back to the forefront.

When you take a close at the increasingly dominant charter model (the "no-excuses" school) and some of the highly touted success stories (such as the KIPP schools), you will soon notice how extreme some of the discipline can be.

A tiny padded room at KIPP Star Washington Heights Elementary School was a real-life nightmare for two young boys who were repeatedly detained in the tot cells, the Daily News has learned.

The students, who were enrolled in kindergarten and first grade at the highly regarded charter school, were both removed by their parents in the past two weeks after they suffered anxiety attacks as a result of their confinement.

“He was crying hysterically,” said Teneka Hall, 28, a full-time Washington Heights mom whose son, Xavier, was rushed to the hospital after he panicked and wet himself while he was holed up in the padded room. “It’s no way to treat a child.”

The school’s so-called “calm-down” room is small, about the size of a walk-in closet, said Hall, who visited it with her son at the start of the school year. It’s empty, but for a soft mat lining the floor and a single light on the ceiling.

The room’s only window is an approximately 2-foot by 3-foot panel in the single door. It’s partially covered so staffers can look inside, but children cannot. Students were placed in the room, alone, for 15 to 20 minutes at a stretch, their parents said.State law requires that children placed in a time-out setting be in a space where they can be seen and heard “continuously,” but it does not require adults to be in the room where children are stashed.

When 5-year-old Xavier was confined to the room on Dec. 3, he suffered an anxiety attack so severe that staffers called for emergency workers to take him to the hospital.

“I was scared,” said Xavier, who was taken to New York Presbyterian and released to his mom, who pulled him from the charter and enrolled him in another school immediately.

There are two points that cannot be overemphasized here.

The first is how rough, even traumatic, this and other policies of the get-tough, "no excuses" schools can be. There are kids who thrive in highly structured and disciplined environments, but there are many others who respond with varying degrees of anxiety, depression and/or anger. Then, to add injury to injury, this psychological toll is matched with an educational one. These kids are denied instruction through suspensions then forced out and sent to other generally underfunded schools, often in the middle of the year, a practice which maximizes the disruption and minimizes the chance to learn.

The second is the way the incentive system of the reform movement encourages these often brutal policies. They are an extraordinarily effective way of getting rid of kids whom you can't handle or who put a drain on you resources. The result is that the very thing that traumatizes these children produces promotions for administrators and funding increases for their schools.

Harsh Discipline and No-excuse Charters

One of the disconnects I've noticed between educators and many education researchers (particularly those who come from outside of the field) is that the educators tend to have a more complex, multivariate view of student outcomes, while the researchers are often prone to a particularly severe form of the tyranny of measurement where they ignore not only the difficult-to-measure but also the easy-to-measure if it isn't part of their small set of approved metrics.

Emotional damage is notoriously difficult to quantify, but we should all be able to agree that needlessly traumatizing students is a bad thing. Unfortunately, under the current system, the consequences of excessively harsh discipline basically serve as externalities. The schools reap numerous benefits while the kids pay the costs.

Just how big is the externality?

From the Boston Globe:

Boston charter schools are far more likely than traditional school systems to suspend students, usually for minor infractions such as violating dress codes or being disrespectful, a high-risk disciplinary action that could cause students to disengage from their classes, according to a report released Tuesday.

Of the 10 school systems in Massachusetts with the highest out-of-school suspension rates, all but one were charter schools and nearly all of them were in Boston, according to the report, which examined the rates for the 2012-2013 school year. The report was released by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, a nonpartisan legal organization in Boston.

From the Chicago Tribune:

As it continues to modify strict disciplinary policies in an effort to keep students in the classroom, Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday released data showing privately run charter schools expel students at a vastly higher rate than the rest of the district.

The data reveal that during the last school year, 307 students were kicked out of charter schools, which have a total enrollment of about 50,000. In district-run schools, there were 182 kids expelled out of a student body of more than 353,000.

From Chalkbeat

New York City charter schools suspended students at almost three times the rate of traditional public schools during the 2011-12 school year, according to a Chalkbeat analysis, though some charter schools have since begun to reduce the use of suspensions for minor infractions.
Overall, charter schools suspended at least 11 percent of their students that year, while district schools suspended 4.2 percent of their students. The charter-school suspension rate is likely an underestimate because charter schools don’t have to report suspensions that students serve in school.

Not all schools had high suspension rates. One-third of charter schools reported suspending fewer than 5 percent of their students, and many schools said they did not give out any out-of-school suspensions. But 11 charter schools suspended more than 30 percent of their students — a figure likely to draw added scrutiny amid a nationwide push to reduce suspensions and a debate over allowing more charter schools to open statewide.

Supply and demand

This is Joseph

I'm often talking about how direct supply and demand relations seem to have broken with respect to managerial salaries (why aren't we outsourcing CEOs to India?).  In these cases, I am often skeptical that the high wages paid to senior managers are really required to attract a competent candidate.  But Cathy O'Neil points out that this issue is happening in reverse with entry level workers, where raising wages is seen as a taboo:

Of course, $50K isn’t nothing. But on the other hand, truckers have to be trained, competent, and regularly spend many days on the road. Moreover, the current surveillance technology has severely degraded their quality of life, which I learned by reading about Karen Levy’s work on the industry. Also, new truckers probably make substantially less than $50K when they start.

Partly the surveillance arose from the very real risk of truckers driving too much per day – it was an attempt to make sure truckers were driving safely. But since the technology has been installed in many large-company fleets, the companies have used it to essentially harass their drivers, telling them when break is over and so on. This has worked, in the sense that larger companies with more surveillance have managed to lower costs, pushing out smaller and individual truckers. And that means that truckers who used to own their own business now reluctantly work for huge companies.

And consider:

When you make your workers lives worse, and you don’t compensate them with cash money to make up for it, you find your workers quitting. That’s what’s happening here.

In the comments we also have:

There’s no shortage of older, experienced drivers who publicly contemplate getting out of the business in response to the micromanagement of their workday. It’s not that the drivers don’t want to comply with the rules, though many of them do think many of the new rules make no sense, it’s that what they have to do to comply is often unrelated to real time conditions and circumstances and is often the wrong thing to do for both safety and efficiency. I often hear that they are blamed for not meeting schedules or other metrics even though they have no ability to do the things that would allow them to do so due to controls on both their driving and the engines of their trucks.

Taken as a whole, I think that these issues are illustrative of a complete failure of industry to pay attention to the basic rules of supply and demand.  If you offset the costs of training onto workers (get a license first), make the working conditions poor (constant surveillance), and then don't raise wages then it is unsurprising that you suddenly have worker shortages.  Raise wages and give fixed term contracts (to make sure employment covers the cost of obtaining a license) -- then you might see the worker shortage vanish instantly.

It is remarkable that companies are acting like this and not addressing shortages with wages.  It makes me suspect that there is some sort of "moral virtue" in paying workers less (or a political point about not wanting to pay people).  Part of it is likely the "something for nothing" game -- if you don't count the costs of your new system on employee retention/morale then it looks like free productivity gains.  Since people are "sticky" (it takes time to find a new job and the employees may hope that the bad plan will go away), there is a lag between the implementation and the subsequent HR issues.

The proposed solution to reduce the criterion for licenses is a short term fix that won't hold in the long run.  A sufficiently bad job (high stress, low autonomy, moderate pay, much travel) is simply going to have to pay more to be competitive.  If you don't believe me, double wages and see what happens. 

However, the big point I want to make is that is appears that these companies don't seem to believe in the market economy, except when it is helpful to them.  Otherwise they would respond to changes in worker supply by paying more for workers (essentially passing down some of the efficiency gains in the form of increased wages).  Since this approach would also improve domestic demand that the time that the economy is a bit stagnant, it would probably be good for everyone. 

When your business model depends on finding miracle workers, you learn not to check behind the curtain

[This is not a post about the suicide of Jeanene Worrell-Breeden. As Slate pointed out, Ms. Worrell-Breeden was facing a number of personal tragedies and there is no value in speculating what role the cheating scandal played.]

Andrew Gelman is perplexed (perhaps rhetorically) by the decision of Columbia University Teachers College to hire a scandal-ridden administrator to run their elementary school.

Ummm, how bout this:

    The principal of a popular elementary school in Harlem acknowledged that she forged answers on students’ state English exams in April because the students had not finished the tests . . . As a result of the cheating, the city invalidated several dozen English test results for the school’s third grade.

The school is a new public school—it opened in 2011—that is run jointly by the New York City Department of Education and Columbia University Teachers College.

So far, it just seems like an unfortunate error. According to the news article, “Nancy Streim, associate vice president for school and community partnerships at Teachers College, said Ms. Worrell-Breeden had created a ‘culture of academic excellence'” at the previous school where she was principal. Maybe Worrell-Breeden just cared too much and was under too much pressure to succeed, she cracked and helped the students cheat.

But then I kept reading:

    In 2009 and 2010, while Ms. Worrell-Breeden was at P.S. 18, she was the subject of two investigations by the special commissioner of investigation. The first found that she had participated in exercise classes while she was collecting what is known as “per session” pay, or overtime, to supervise an after-school program. The inquiry also found that she had failed to offer the overtime opportunity to others in the school, as required, before claiming it for herself.

    The second investigation found that she had inappropriately requested and obtained notarized statements from two employees at the school in which she asked them to lie and say that she had offered them the overtime opportunity.

After those findings, we learn, “She moved to P.S. 30, another school in the Bronx, where she was principal briefly before being chosen by Teachers College to run its new school.”

So, let’s get this straight: She was found to be a liar, a cheat, and a thief, and then, with that all known, she was hired to two jobs as school principal??

The news article quotes Nancy Streim of Teachers College as saying, “We felt that on balance, her recommendations were so glowing from everyone we talked to in the D.O.E. that it was something that we just were able to live with.”

On balance, huh? Whatever else you can say about Worrell-Breeden, she seems to have had the talent of conning powerful people. Or maybe just one or two powerful people in the Department of Education who had the power to get her these jobs.

This is really bad. Is it so hard to find a school principal that you have no choice but to hire someone who lies, cheats, and steals?

It just seems weird to me. I accept that all of us have character flaws, but this is ridiculous. Principal is a supervisory position. What kind of toxic environment will you have in a school where the principal is in the habit of forging documents and instructing employees to lie? How could this possibly be considered a good idea?

Before we try to answer Andrew's questions, let's fill in some context.

This 2010 piece from the NYT spells out the idea behind the school.

One of the main arguments for charter schools is that they will improve the school system as a whole by introducing innovations that traditional schools then adopt. But charter school critics charge that this is not happening — and they say that charters on the whole are weakening the schools around them by siphoning off their resources.


A new primary school proposed by Teachers College at Columbia University aims to address this issue head-on. The school’s goal, its founders say, is to transfer some of the best charter school features to a school run by the Department of Education, while showing how a primary school can benefit from a close affiliation with a college.

The new school proved enormously popular.

From the Columbia Spectator:

Though Teachers College Community School is younger than the kindergartners who are starting there this fall, the four-year-old Columbia-affiliated school on Morningside Avenue and 127th Street received more applications for its kindergarten seats this year than any other school in its district.


Applications for the school’s kindergarten have been steadily increasing since it opened in 2011, school officials say. With 469 kids vying for 50 spots this year, TCCS has become the most sought-after kindergarten in most of Northern Manhattan.


“I think we’re on a very good trajectory,” Nancy Streim, TC’s associate vice president for school and community partnerships, said.


The increase comes even as parents voiced concerns earlier this year that the New York City Department of Education’s new online application portal, Kindergarten Connect, might prevent families without Internet connections from applying.


Streim, however, said that the school hasn’t experienced any problems on that front.

And was held up as a great success.

From Susan Fuhrman, president of Teachers College [emphasis added]:

A contingent from the conference toured TCCS on a chilly April morning. The visitors got to see the 1st- and 2nd-grade classes in action, with the students working in groups and independently. They also saw the new library and the demonstration kitchen, as well as specialized art, science and music classrooms. Then they heard from the school’s dynamic principal Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, a veteran New York City school administrator and a TC Cahn Fellow who has created an inclusive culture for the school’s students and active parent community. She described TCCS to the visitors as the culmination of her dream for a true community school.


...

TCCS students have been achieving positive outcomes thus far. For example, among kindergarten students, 99 percent completed the 2012-2013 school year at or above grade level in reading and writing. Among first-grade students, 83 percent ended the year at or above grade level in reading and writing. In math, 96 percent of kindergarteners and 90 percent of first-grade students ended the year at or above grade level. Next year, we’ll have the official city test results for third-graders.


TCCS also has received high marks from teachers and parents in a NYC Department of Education’s annual school survey that rates every school on perceptions of academic expectations, communication, engagement and safety and respect.


As TCCS shows much promise to improve student achievement and well-being, we are looking beyond our neighborhood to encourage other universities and their partners across the country to adapt this model for their own public community schools.

A lot of that success was credited to principal Worrell-Breeden.

From Slate:

This tragedy seems to have come out of nowhere for the wildly popular Teachers College Community School, which is partnered with Columbia University’s Teachers College. Since opening in 2011, the school has become so sought-after that, this past year, it fielded 464 applications for just 50 kindergarten slots.


Worrell-Breeden had worked on Wall Street before starting a career in education 25 years ago. Though she’d been embroiled in scandal at her previous school—collecting overtime pay for supervising an after-school program when she was in fact working out with a personal trainer in the school gym three times a week—Worrell-Breeden landed the spot as founding principal of the Community School, where she made $138,000 a year. She was by all accounts a devoted and inspired leader of the school, and expectations were high for the school’s first year of testing. And maybe the expectations were part of the problem.

Now some answers.



I apologize for hammering this point yet again, but it is important to note how strong cultural forces are within the education reform movement. This translates to a reflexive distrust and hostility to outside critics and a comparable sense of loyalty to those perceived as insiders. The most extreme case of this circle-the-wagons mentality is may be Michelle Rhee who still has the support of liberals like Talking Points Memo's lead education writer even after years of scandals, union-busting, and alliances with standard TPM villains like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.

Worrell-Breeden appears to be a well-established insider, having put in a quarter-century in the epicenter of the education reform movement (New York City) and having worked closely with the department of education. Add to this the Wall Street background (a huge plus in the world of education reform).

Under these circumstance, I'm not surprised that the people at CUTC were "able to live with" their new principal's serious (lying, stealing, forging) but relatively brief lapses. If anything, I suspect that even those mild reservations are being retconned in due to this latest scandal.

We should also keep in mind that Worrell-Breeden combined this insider status with very real accomplishments.  Did she have a talent for conning powerful people? I don't think so, at least not in the way Andrew suggests. Rather she demonstrates one of the fundamental rules of organizational politics: if you're likable and useful, your superiors will forgive almost anything as long as you didn't do it directly to them.

As for the useful part, Worrell-Breeden looked like a possible miracle worker and that's what CUTC needed because the expectation of miracles was baked into the system. The stated mission of the school was to replicate the accomplishments of schools like the Success Academy schools, which was going to be difficult since SA largely relied on the educational equivalent of stage magic. The effect works on illusions and misdirection (if the audience's attention wanders to the wrong test the trick falls apart).   

This is not to say that you can't find charter school successes (you certainly can) or that the much-touted no-excuses model can't do some good (there is research that suggests it can, though how far these results can be generalized is very much an open question), but the truly amazing stories that you hear about so often almost never hold up to scrutiny and those miracles have become a fundamental part of the movement's mythology.

To her credit, Worrell-Breeden did manage a great deal of what was asked of her. The school was wildly popular and got great press. CUTC was always happy to associate itself with her successes while the PR was good and if she had cooked her test data instead of falsifying it (which would have produced exactly the same result), they would probably still be bragging about their "dynamic principal."

Sometimes you just need the punchline

This is a very old joke with endless variations. You've probably heard it before, but I find the punchline useful in a wide range of situations, so I'll repeat it one more time to make sure everyone catches the reference.

A pilot, Michael Jordon, Bill Gates, the Pope, and a pizza delivery man were all in a plane together traveling through stormy conditions.

Suddenly, the pilot came running back to the passengers and announced that lightning had hit the plane, and they were going to crash in a matter of minutes. "There are only enough parachutes for four of the five of us," he announced. "Since I'm the pilot, I get one!" After saying this, the pilot grabbed a parachute and jumped out of the plane.

"I'm the world's greatest athlete," proclaimed Michael Jordon. "This world needs great athletes, so I must live." Michael Jordon then grabbed a parachute and leaped out of the plane.

"I'm the smarest man in the world," bragged Bill Gates. "The world needs smart men, so I must also live!" Bill Gates grabbed a parachute and jumped out of the plane.

At this point, the Pope began to speak. "I have lived a long life compared to you, and you may take the last parachute. I will go down with the plane."

"You don't have to stay here! The world's smartest man jumped out of the plane with my backpack."