"Judging Books by Their Covers" by Richard P. Feynman

Andrew Gelman has a heated discussion going on this Answer Sheet post (previously discussed here). One of the comments on Gelman's post quoted an amazing anecdote from Richard Feynman about his experiences with a curriculum committee in the Sixties. Given the striking parallels between the Sputnik/New Math and PISA/Common Core relationships, I decided to dig up a copy. It makes for fascinating reading.


Judging Books by Their Covers

Richard P. Feynman

I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures [in 1964], and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, "You oughta see what's happening to mathematics in schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!"
I didn't pay much attention to what he said.

But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission, which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them advice on which books to take.

It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called "new math," and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we're trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.

I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.

Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from schoolbook publishers. They said things like, "We're very glad to hear you're on the committee because we really wanted a scientific guy . . ." and "It's wonderful to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically oriented . . ." But they also said things like, "We'd like to explain to you what our book is about . . ." and "We'll be very glad to help you in any way we can to judge our books . . ." That seemed to me kind of crazy. I'm an objective scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher's manual, which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a distortion. So I didn't want to speak to any of the publishers and always replied, "You don't have to explain; I'm sure the books will speak for themselves."

I represented a certain district, which comprised most of the Los Angeles area except for the city of Los Angeles, which was represented by a very nice lady from the L.A. school system named Mrs. Whitehouse. Mr. Norris suggested that I meet her and find out what the committee did and how it worked.

Mrs. Whitehouse started out telling me about the stuff they were going to talk about in the next meeting (they had already had one meeting; I was appointed late). "They're going to talk about the counting numbers." I didn't know what that was, but it turned out they were what I used to call integers. [Actually, they're non-negative integers but that's a minor point -- MP] They had different names for everything, so I had a lot of trouble right from the start.

She told me how the members of the commission normally rated the new schoolbooks. They would get a relatively large number of copies of each book and would give them to various teachers and administrators in their district. Then they would get reports back on what these people thought about the books. Since I didn't know a lot of teachers or administrators, and since I felt that I could, by reading the books myself, make up my mind as to how they looked to me, I chose to read all the books myself. . . .

•

A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, "We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds."
I was overwhelmed.

"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."

I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks.

It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden, "BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!" -- there would be a big explosion from the "volcano" below.

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.

I understood what they were trying to do. Many [Americans] thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.

I'll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of numbers -- five, six, and so on -- to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten -- something to entertain his mind. But what they turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: "Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five." Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it. There's no point to it.

Anyhow, I'm looking at all these books, all these books, and none of them has said anything about using arithmetic in science. If there are any examples on the use of arithmetic at all (most of the time it's this abstract new modern nonsense), they are about things like buying stamps.

Finally I come to a book that says, "Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars." I turn the page, and it says, "Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees . . ." -- so far, so good. It continues: "Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of . . . (some big number)." There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It's vaguely right -- but already, trouble! That's the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don't quite understand what they're talking about, I cannot understand. I don't know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!

Anyway, I'm happy with this book, because it's the first example of applying arithmetic to science. I'm a bit unhappy when I read about the stars' temperatures, but I'm not very unhappy because it's more or less right -- it's just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It says, "John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?" -- and I would explode in horror.

My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That's only an example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There's no purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it was was a game to get you to add, and they didn't understand what they were talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!

Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, "Why did you rate that book low?" I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so -- I had my notes.

They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.

I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, "Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book." I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.

We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.

I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."

Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"

"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."

The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late."

It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.

I believe the reason for all this is that the system works this way: When you give books all over the place to people, they're busy; they're careless; they think, "Well, a lot of people are reading this book, so it doesn't make any difference." And they put in some kind of number -- some of them, at least; not all of them, but some of them. Then when you receive your reports, you don't know why this particular book has fewer reports than the other books -- that is, perhaps one book has ten, and this one only has six people reporting -- so you average the rating of those who reported; you don't average the ones who didn't report, so you get a reasonable number. This process of averaging all the time misses the fact that there is absolutely nothing between the covers of the book!

I made that theory up because I saw what happened in the curriculum commission: For the blank book, only six out of the ten members were reporting, whereas with the other books, eight or nine out of the ten were reporting. And when they averaged the six, they got as good an average as when they averaged with eight or nine. They were very embarrassed to discover they were giving ratings to that book, and it gave me a little bit more confidence. It turned out the other members of the committee had done a lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to sessions in which the book publishers would explain the books before they read them; I was the only guy on that commission who read all the books and didn't get any information from the book publishers except what was in the books themselves, the things that would ultimately go to the schools.

This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.

At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another. The most serious failures were in the "new math" books: there were no applications; not enough word problems. There was no talk of selling stamps; instead there was too much talk about commutation and abstract things and not enough translation to situations in the world. What do you do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide? So we suggested some books which had some of that as supplementary -- one or two for each classroom -- in addition to a textbook for each student. We had it all worked out to balance everything, after much discussion.

When we took our recommendations to the Board of Education, they told us they didn't have as much money as they had thought, so we'd have to go over the whole thing and cut out this and that, . . . . When the senate budget committee got to it, the program was emasculated still further. Now it was really lousy! I was asked to appear before the state senators when the issue was being discussed, but I declined: By that time, having argued this stuff so much, I was tired. We had prepared our recommendations for the Board of Education, and I figured it was their job to present it to the state -- which was legally right, but not politically sound. I shouldn't have given up so soon, but to have worked so hard and discussed so much about all these books to make a fairly balanced program, and then to have the whole thing scrapped at the end -- that was discouraging! The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books, and buy what you can afford.

What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign, was that the following year we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the science would be different, so I looked at a few of them.

The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then turn out to be horrifying. For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a windup toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, "What makes it go?"

I thought, "I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work."

It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have fun discussing it:

"No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up," I would say. "How did the spring get wound up?" he would ask.

"I wound it up."

"And how did you get moving?"

"From eating."

"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the sun is shining that all these things are moving." That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.

I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything, "Energy makes it go."

Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go." There's no knowledge coming in. The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word!

What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy." Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.

It's also not even true that "energy makes it go," because if it stops, you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well. What they're talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it's just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.

But that's the way all the books were: They said things that were useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn science from these books, I don't know, because it's not science.

So when I saw all these horrifying books with the same kind of trouble as the math books had, I saw my volcano process starting again. Since I was exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all being a wasted effort, I couldn't face another year of that, and had to resign.

Sometime later I heard that the energy-makes-it-go book was going to be recommended by the curriculum commission to the Board of Education, so I made one last effort. At each meeting of the commission the public was allowed to make comments, so I got up and said why I thought the book was bad.

The man who replaced me on the commission said, "That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!"

I didn't doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability -- and to necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of averaging the length of the emperor's nose, or the ratings on a book with nothing between the covers. . . .

I couldn't get through to him, and the book was approved by the board. . . .

•

[During my time on the commission,] there were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Then the question came up, "Will the schools be getting the books at the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time for the coming term?"

One publisher's representative got up and said, "We are happy that you accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term."

A representative of the publisher that lost out was also there, and he got up and said, "Since our bids were submitted based on the later deadline, I think we should have a chance a bid again for the earlier deadline, because we too can meet the earlier deadline."

Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?"

And he gave a number: It was less!

The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!

Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's cheaper?"

"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't normally use . . ." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper. The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"

That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.

What happened, of course, was that the uncertainty about the date had opened the possibility that these guys could bid against each other. Normally, when books were supposed to be chosen without taking the cost into consideration, there was no reason to lower the price; the book publishers could put the prices at any place they wanted to. There was no advantage in competing by lowering the price; the way you competed was to impress the members of the curriculum commission.

By the way, whenever our commission had a meeting, there were book publishers entertaining curriculum commission members by taking them to lunch and talking to them about their books. I never went.

It seems obvious now, but I didn't know what was happening the time I got a package of dried fruit and whatnot delivered by Western Union with a message that read, "From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving -- The Pamilios."

It was from a family I had never heard of in Long Beach, obviously someone wanting to send this to his friend's family who got the name and address wrong, so I thought I'd better straighten it out. I called up Western Union, got the telephone number of the people who sent the stuff, and I called them.

"Hello, my name is Mr. Feynman. I received a package . . ."

"Oh, hello, Mr. Feynman, this is Pete Pamilio" and he says it in such a friendly way that I think I'm supposed to know who he is! I'm normally such a dunce that I can't remember who anyone is.

So I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Pamilio, but I don't quite remember who you are . . ."

It turned out he was a representative of one of the publishers whose books I had to judge on the curriculum commission.

"I see. But this could be misunderstood."

"It's only family to family."

"Yes, but I'm judging a book that you're publishing, and maybe someone might misinterpret your kindness!" I knew what was happening, but I made it sound like I was a complete idiot.

Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the same stuff: "I can't accept it; I'm judging some of the books you're publishing. I don't think you understand that!"

One commissioner, who had been there for the greatest length of time, said, "I never accept the stuff; it makes me very upset. But it just goes on."

But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough, I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day, and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who jumped up and said, "Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is there something we can show you in San Francisco?" They were from a publishing company, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.

"I'm going out to eat."

"We can take you out to dinner."

"No, I want to be alone."

"Well, whatever you want, we can help you."

I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I'm going out to get myself in trouble."

"I think we can help you in that, too."

"No, I think I'll take care of that myself." Then I thought, "What an error! I should have let all that stuff operate and [kept] a diary, so the people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will go!". . . .

Silcon Valley collusion

Dean Baker:

The real news here is how the Silicon Valley barons allegedly broke the law. The charge is that they actively colluded to stifle market forces. They collectively acted to prevent their workers from receiving the market-clearing wage. This means not only that they broke the law, and that they acted to undermine the market, but that they really don't think about the market the way libertarians claim to think about the market.

This is a big deal.  After all, if collective action can be used to improve economic outcomes then why are we against unions?  Furthermore, if the tech industry doesn't believe in free markets then who does?  I am suspicious if the argument is the financial services industry.  Instead, it suggests that extreme views of market forces don't necessarily line up with how business works in practice.  And that has huge implications for the moral interpretation of market outcomes as a pure measure of merit in a free and open market. 

I think Matt should be sad

Yglesias:

Personally, it would make me very sad to have a job that was more about explaining who was perceived to be right about important arguments than a job that's about trying to explain who is in fact right

 I really do have to agree with this sentiment.  It is true that there has never been an ideal world of informed voters.  But to raise the idea that perception trumps reality as a defense of reporting seems to be a new low.  I'd almost rather hear "I was taken in by the Democratic/Republication/Your choice of Party spin" as an explanation.  It happens from me as well, and it at least keeps the goal of the activity clear. 

“I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”

Still on limited bandwidth blogging. I was planning on weaving this pair of quotes into a couple of our ongoing threads (particularly this one), but that will have to wait. For now I'm just going to present them without comment and let you very capable readers draw your own conclusions:

From a Rick Perlstein piece on Mitt Romney and the conservative movement:

M. Stanton Evans, a legendary movement godfather, stood up. He said my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Richard Nixon had never been a conservative. He proceeded, though, to make a striking admission: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”—at which point, apparently, Nixon finally convinced conservatives he could be one of them.

And from a recent (February 2nd -- post-scandal) story on Governor Christie:

“We are very excited to announce that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will speak at CPAC 2014," American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas told Yahoo News. "At this year's CPAC — and through our theme 'ACU's Golden Anniversary: Getting It Right for 50 Years' — we will celebrate how conservatism has shaped our past and look to the future with excitement. This will be the year that conservatives begin pulling the nation back from the brink of Barack Obama's disaster with a movement that inspires, unites and discovers new solutions to our current challenges.”

An invitation to speak at the conference, held near Washington each spring, is traditionally a prime opportunity for aspiring Republican presidential candidates to make an impression on some of the party’s most active supporters, as well as the national media.

Last year, the ACU, which organizes the three-day confab, made the controversial decision not to invite the rising GOP star. The group withheld its invitation as punishment for what some in the movement viewed as Christie’s insufficiently conservative record the year prior, Cardenas said. Christie lost favor with some Republicans when he gushed over President Barack Obama’s response to Superstorm Sandy just weeks before the November presidential election. His sharp criticism of House Republican leaders who delayed recovery funding after the storm also created tension at the time.

Talking Points Memo misrepresents the Washington Post's Answer Sheet

As mentioned before, this is the busy season here at West Coast Stat Views so a full discussion of the problems with Conor P. Williams' recent TPM post on charter schools but this one point is worth addressing separately.

The upshot: it’s unproductive to treat charters as the source of public education’s problems or as the answer to its prayers. Instead of asking “Are Charter Schools Making a Difference?” we should be asking what charters’ heterogeneity tells us about improving schools’ effectiveness. If charters in some states work much better than others, we should be looking to scale the policies that support this success.

And there’s no reason to limit this reflection to the sector itself. Ask teachers and administrators in traditional public schools what they think about a new district oversight program and you’ll hear plenty of hunger for more professional freedom. Ask them about charters, and you’ll often hear that traditional public schools are often hamstrung by needless conformity, that so much of its problems would be solved if we got out of the way and “let teachers teach.”

There's something really odd about that last sentence. Given that the biggest and best known charter chains are known for requiring both students and teachers to conform to extremely specific standards, why would teachers single out the "needless conformity" of public schools when asked about charters?

When a quote seems to be a non sequitur, it's usually a good idea to click on the link. In this case, that click takes us to a rather surprising place, Valerie Strauss's Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet. Strauss is one of the best reporters working the education beat but she's a bit of a muckraker and a considerable amount of her time is spent uncovering questionable practices in the education reform movement.

So is this Answer Sheet article, a guest post by LouAnne Johnson, a teacher's response to being asked about charter schools? No.

Does the post suggest that we should be looking for ways to "scale the policies" of successful charter schools (particularly, as Williams suggests earlier, of making those schools more accountable)? Hell, no.

Here's the opening of Johnson's piece:

We don’t have to wait for Superman to save our public schools. We can save our schools ourselves. Right now. Without firing the teachers or disbanding their unions. Without creating more standardized tests. Without pitting schools against each other in a race for dollars which should rightfully be divided equally among the school-age children of this country.

As with many complex problems, the answer is a simple one -- so simple that it is overlooked.

The answer can be stated in seven words that even a child could understand: Train teachers well -- then let them teach.

The problem with public schools isn’t lack of parental support or computers or equipment. It isn’t an overabundance of television or junk food or violence. Those things contribute to the problem. No argument. And money is helpful. But throughout the world, there always have been students who learned to think and read and write with very limited supplies, sometimes without a classroom or textbooks, without standardized tests, without merit pay for their teachers. Those students learned because their teachers were permitted to teach.

Most American teachers are good at their jobs -- when they are allowed to do their jobs. And that is the primary problem with our public schools. Teachers are not allowed to teach.

Or rather, they are told how to teach in such great detail and required to document what they are teaching in such great detail and expected to spend so much time teaching students to pass the tests that will prove the teachers have paid such great attention to detail that the teachers don’t have time to teach the information and skills their students need.

First, you'll notice that charters are only alluded to tangentially in the 'Superman' reference. In no real sense is this what a teacher said when asked about charters. More importantly, though, Johnson pretty much says the opposite of what Williams implies. She proposes fewer tests, less standardization, less focus on accountability for schools and carrot/stick approaches to motivating teachers, in other words, moving 180 degrees from the standard charter school model.

There are numerous other problems with Williams' piece, some more substantial than this from a policy and statistics standpoint, but for a piece that decries the lack of "productive conversations." this sort of misrepresentation deserves special mention.

Inequality

The issue of inequality has been around for a long time:

James Madison, the Constitution's main author, described inequality as an evil, saying government should prevent "an immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches." He favored "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigents towards a state of comfort."

There really does seem to be some intellectual confusion about disliking inequality versus disliking private ownership.  The classical model of a healthy society had small farmers and wealth concentration has been an issue going back to Rome:

The system of small estates developed during the Republic gave way to the system of the great imperial private estates. The growth of the large estate was a catalyst to the general decline of Rome as a symptom.

So I don't think it was an accident that classically trained men worried about the issue of inequality and how it could be poisonous.  But I think that a confusion arose between "confiscate everything" (aka 20th century totalitarian communism) and "redistribute" (aka 20th century Sweden or Denmark).  It's like conflating surgery with lethal duels, because both involve a blade.  There are real differences of scale.

In the same sense, a healthy system is balanced and this point of balance is unobservable with the macroeconomic data we have.  I do not think that it is even predictable in theory (happy to be proven wrong).  But difficulty in finding the optimal point of leverage doesn't mean we should lose sight of the goal of balancing competing objectives (incentives versus equality) nor does it suggest either extreme is optimal. 

Andrew Gelman opens a couple of cans of worms

Over at the Monkey Cage, Andrew Gelman has some kind words for West Coast Stat Views and our recent post on nepotism. I have to admit I was less pleased with this comment (though for a somewhat perverse reason):

Good question. As a political scientist, my question is: Can this be studied empirically in some way? I’m not quite sure how, but I think it could be worth looking into. It fits into some of our general questions about political discourse and economic perceptions.

It's not the topic I object to. Quite the opposite, this opens up a couple of big questions that I've been wanting to discuss in depth for a long time:

Are we adequately tracking the attitude and perceptions that need to be in our models?;

Are the standard technique of data collection and analysis up to the job?

For example, in the 2012 election, we spent a lot of time asking whether Obama had successfully painted Romney as a plutocrat but perhaps not enough asking how people felt about plutocrats and, possibly more importantly, how those attitudes have shifted over the years (and whether attitudes in the media have stayed in alignment).  We analytic types also relied heavily on polling data rather than other sources like text mining, non-verbal response data and implicit association tests, to name a few, Of course, the standard approaches proved more than adequate for the purpose of prediction but did they give us what we needed to understand the underlying dynamics? And will these standard approaches continue to provide reliable data in the future?

So what was my problem with Gelman's comment? It was the timing. I've set aside most of January and February for other projects and now I don't have the bandwidth to jump into this debate in a serious way.

So much to blog about, so little time.

Legal uncertainties

It is well known that in any functional justice system there will be problems.  It is a sad truth that false positives are inversely correlated with false negatives.  Fewer of one will get you more of the other, and in any system with actual uncertainty there will be plenty of both.  A traditional approach has been:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer

The modern approach has drifted more in the direction of public safety, but the general principle of there being an unpleasant trade-off remains intact. 

So the Amanda Knox case has been in the news and it is a perfect example of when these principles come into conflict.  What seems clear is that that there was at least one killer, Rudy Guede, who left a lot of forensic evidence (bloody handprint, for example).  So the real question is whether this was a group killing or the act of a lone killer. 

But here the evidence gets tough.  She clearly lied to the police, was convicted of this crime, and spent three years in prison for it.  Witnesses, of possibly dubious reliability, seem to contradict her story which isn't good but also doesn't prove much, either.  The evidence seems mixed, with the question of additional weapons needing to be raised to make the case work and the lack of a motive for Knox and Sollecito to work with a complete stranger is ambiguous.

The latest comments from the judge also worried me:

Judge Alessandro Nencini also suggested in an interview with Corriere della Sera published Saturday that the decision of Knox's ex-boyfriend and co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, not to testify may have worked against him.

"It's the defendant's right, but it certainly deprived the process of a voice," Nencini was quoted as saying. "He limited himself to spontaneous declarations. He said only what he wanted to say without letting himself be cross-examined." Knox did not appear at the trial, but sent a letter to the court saying she feared wrongful conviction.

This is getting awfully close to forcing testimony, which is a deadly game when open-ended questions can be asked, people are nervous, and perjury is a crime.  Or this:

"At the moment I can say that up until 8:15 of that evening, the kids had other plans, but they skipped them and an opportunity was created," Nencini was quoted as saying. "If Amanda had gone to work, probably we wouldn't be here."

Which I am hoping is a bad translation from Italian, or that it means that Kercher would still be alive and thus there would be no case. 

So obviously I am not an expert on this case nor have I followed it in great detail.  But I remain confused by why the prosecution isn't putting forth their best case.  As it is we have ambiguous DNA evidence (with the girls being housemates), another party clearly involved in the crime (at some level) with every reason to lie, and a lot of complex theories. 

So far, what I see, is pretty good evidence that Amanda lied to police and that she served time for that offence.  I am a little unclear why the better evidence isn't being presented publicly, as the public nature of criminal proceedings are a great way to inspire confidence in the justice system.  The courts appear to be very worried about false negatives in this case, and perhaps they should re-evaluate just what trade-offs they are willing to make. 

Principles?

Matt Yglesias has a great reframing of a key political issue in modern America.  Zachery Goldfarb pointed out:

As they cast about for ideas, Republicans are struggling to find policies that match the simplicity and gut appeal of such Democratic proposals as raising the minimum wage without violating core conservative principles by increasing spending or interfering with market forces. Many lawmakers are turning to conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Matt then applied this thinking to another area of modern life:

Many of us in America are struggling to find weight loss strategies that don't require us to spend more time at the gym or eat less food. It turns out to be challenging.

I think this analogy is even more penetrating than pithy.  For example, I personally have never lost a lot of weight without exercise.  But exercise is unpleasant.  Still, it would be a mistake to have a personal policy that I will never, ever increase my amount of exercise.  That would be foolish.

It makes a lot more sense when you realize that an economy is a constructed object.  The rules seem so fundamental that we forget that there is a lot of social consensus that goes into it.  Other cultures have organized economic activity differently.  So it is an odd thinking that we just happened to get it all correct around the end of the twentieth century and there is no optimization left . . .

 

DON'T SEND FLOWERS -- NOT DEAD YET

Apologies for the silence. I've got a big project wrapping up while, based on the word from Seattle (via a bad cell connection), Joseph is experiencing some of the more vivid aspects of business travel.

Draft posts are accumulating at an alarming rate. Here are some of the topics:

A marketing statistician's take on on these two articles on the rise of direct marketing in the conservative media bubble (the first is worth reading just for the quotes “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate” and "An Oilfield in the Placenta");

The important but little discussed question of intellectual property in agriculture;

Resegregation;

The ways that the social circles of elite journalism inhibit the profession from honest self-criticism;

More on how Katrina was the best thing to happen to the schools of New Orleans.

And much more soon.

Take care and thanks for the patience.

Mark

33 freaking degrees

[As you might guess, I wrote this post this summer and never got around to posting it.]

Today while driving from my home in North Hollywood to Santa Monica, I experienced either a 30 or 33° drop in temperatures. (There was a brief pocket of 110° temperature according to my car's thermometer but I have more confidence in the 107°).

A 30° change is admittedly very rare, however a 20° drop is not that unusual. Furthermore, you can get those 20° to 30° deltas without even leaving the Los Angeles city limits, let alone leaving the county.

All of this goes back, though admittedly in a roundabout way, to our long-standing thread about the difficulty of generalizing from city to city and the danger of having one region dominate the pool of journalists and pundits.

Not only are there sacrifices that are relatively minor in Los Angeles but which would be devastating in some other parts of the country (like making do with space heaters), there are sacrifices that would be devastating in one part of town but not that big a deal in another part of town (like doing with air conditioning).

[postscript: I was in Santa Monica a few weeks ago. It was 79° -- four degrees warmer than it was in North Hollywood.]

Are we becoming more tolerant of nepotism (and other perks of privilege)?

The New Republic has a very good profile by Julia Iofee of  Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. The whole thing is worth reading, but there's one paragraph I'd like to single out both because of its content and its placement deep in the article.

After [Michael] Needham graduated from Williams in 2004, Bill Simon Jr., a former California Republican gubernatorial candidate and fellow Williams alum, helped Needham secure the introductions that got him a job at the foundation. Ambitious and hard-working, he was promoted, in six months, to be Feulner’s chief of staff. According to a former veteran Heritage staffer, Needham is intelligent but “very aggressive”: “He is the bull in the china closet, and he feels very comfortable doing that.” (“I consider him a friend,” says the college classmate, “but he’s a huge asshole.”) In 2007, Needham, whose father has given generous donations to both Rudy Giuliani and the Heritage Foundation, went to work for Giuliani’s presidential campaign. When the campaign folded, Needham followed his father’s footsteps to Stanford Business School and then came back, at Feulner’s bequest, to run Heritage Action.

You'll notice Iofee goes out of her way to suggest that Needham got his first rapid promotion by being "ambitious and hard-working," and there is, no doubt, some truth in that, but pretty much everybody who goes to work for a big-time D.C. think tank is ambitious and hard-working. These are not traits that would have set Needham apart while being the socially well-connected son of a major donor very well might have.

My question is: would this angle have been handled differently a few years ago? Obviously nepotism and advancement through connection have always been with us, but until recently I get the impression that this career path was seen as somewhat suspect; people who obviously got their positions thanks to string-pulling were put on a kind of public probation until they had proven themselves.

Now, the public (or at least the press) seems to me much less likely to discount the accomplishments of the well-connected children of the rich and powerful. Along similar lines, though you can certainly still find jokes about the boss's son/nephew/brother-in-law, but they don't seem nearly as pervasive as they were through most of the 20th Century. Anyone else see a trend here?

Second order effects

There has been a lot of discussion about inequality lately, some of which could use some careful thinking about distributions and effect order.

I think the easiest way to describe what I am thinking about is an example.  Consider two groups, call them A and B.  At the beginning A and B have the same number of people and the same average share of some sort of measure of wealth.  So A has 50 people and 50 income units, as does B. 

Now consider a policy that added 20 wealth units to B and subtracted 10 wealth units from A.  Call it free trade.  Now the size of the wealth pool is 110 units (higher) but group B is 50% wealthier than group A.  This could happen if you opened up competition for factory workers but no lawyers (as a random example). 

The good outcome has group B giving between 10 and 20 units of wealth to group A (redistribution) so everyone is better off.  But imagine group B thinks they worked hard for their 60 units of wealth?  So they argue for letting people keep what they earn.  But they also think opposition to these policies by group A is an anti-growth stance.  Yet group A is worse off.  They also lose political power (less wealth) and so have less opportunity to fight for redistribution, making a "trust me, we'll share" argument less than convincing. 

Now any real example will not have these simple inference available.  But it does make a big difference when you think about why people might oppose a policy that increase aggregate wealth for the society as a whole. 

Now consider first versus second order effects.  Let us pretend that Group B grows wealth faster than group A.  Under the old system (even division), the pool would grow by 5 wealth units per decade.  In the new system, wealth grows by 6 units, but it is proportional to the pool of wealth that the group has.  This is the efficiency harvested by the new policy (it increased wealth and increased the growth rate). 

So under the old system, groups A and B grow at 5 wealth units and end up with 55 units.  In the new system, Group A has 42.4 units and group B has 63.6 units.  The gap between A and B is actually larger even if both groups grew by a faster rate.  For group A to reach 55 units, this fast growth rate would have to be sustained for many iterations (4 or 5, by my calculations).  So just speeding up the growth rate doesn't mean that everyone is better off, if the intervention has distributional effects.

So I think that this leads to two important policy conclusions.  In any ordered society, the rules will help some groups and hurt others groups (even a lack of rules will have a differential impact).  Just saying that a policy increases average wealth can be quite misleading.  The second is that second order, like higher growth, have to be really large to overcome first order effects.  Now, if you are completely neutral as to distribution (the size of the pool is all that matters) then okay -- but is anybody really neutral given they will be advantaged or disadvantaged by any actual policy?

Now, I re-emphasize that you can't actually get clean numbers in the real world.  Macroeconomics has measurement error, noise, confounding, and many groups with a vested interest in obscuring actual associations.  But it does mean that very simple narratives may not fully engage with the complexity involved in real world problems.  These are very simple thought experiments and they already make ideas like "target the maximum growth rate" seem to be less deadly obvious than you might expect them to be. 

The often dubious "not" in not-for-profit

I previously suggested that the education reform movement was unusually vulnerable to conflicts of interest. This would be an example:

The Pearson Foundation, the charitable arm of one of the nation’s largest educational publishers, will pay $7.7 million to settle accusations that it repeatedly broke New York State law by assisting in for-profit ventures. 

An inquiry by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, found that the foundation had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software. The investigation also showed that the foundation had helped woo clients to Pearson’s business side by paying their way to education conferences that were attended by its employees.
...
“The fact is that Pearson is a for-profit corporation, and they are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit products,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement. “I’m pleased that this settlement will direct millions of dollars back to where they belong.”

...
The inquiry by the attorney general focused on Pearson’s attempts to develop a suite of products around the Common Core, a new and more rigorous set of academic standards that has been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Around 2010, Pearson began financing an effort through its foundation to develop courses based on the Common Core. The attorney general’s report said Pearson had hoped to use its charity to win endorsements and donations from a “prominent foundation.” That group appears to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Pearson Inc. executives believed that branding their courses by association with the prominent foundation would enhance Pearson’s reputation with policy makers and the education community,” a release accompanying the attorney general’s report said.

Indeed, in April 2011, the Pearson Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced they would work together to create 24 new online reading and math courses aligned with the Common Core.

Pearson executives believed the courses could later be sold commercially, the report said, and predicted potential profits of tens of millions of dollars. After Mr. Schneiderman’s office began its investigation, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to Pearson for $15.1 million.

The attorney general’s office also examined a series of education conferences sponsored by the Pearson Foundation, which paid for school officials to meet their foreign counterparts in places like Helsinki and Singapore.

The trips were made public after a series of columns in The New York Times, which detailed the expensive hotels and meetings with corporate executives that were staples of the experience.

Several school officials who went on the trips represented education departments that had contracts with Pearson. The investigation did not determine whether those officials had awarded any new contracts based on any improper influence. But the report found that executives from other companies were not invited to attend, giving Pearson’s corporate side a clear advantage.

The attorney general portrayed a culture at Pearson in which the lines between business and charity were often blurred. Pearson remains the largest donor to the Pearson Foundation, and the staff of the foundation included several Pearson employees. The board was made up entirely of Pearson executives until 2012.

As part of the agreement, the foundation said it would alter its governing structure by appointing three board members to review any financial transactions that might benefit the business side. The foundation also pledged to bar Pearson executives, in most instances, from attending its education conferences, and said it would not feature Pearson products at such meetings.

Mercedes Schneider does some more digging here.

An optimistic take on Netflix

Megan McArdle:

That’s both good and bad for Netflix. On the one hand, all those warehouses are expensive to maintain and staff, compared with a website. On the other hand, they have a phenomenally high barrier to entry. You can imagine an upstart coming in and beating Netflix at streaming. But it’s hard to imagine another movie rental company building a parallel network of massive distribution centers on the off chance that it might be able to knock out the incumbent.

This is basically the "copyright issues are so bad they might strangle an emerging new industry that would otherwise greatly enhance consumer surplus making the outdated warehouses suddenly look valuable".  It seems implausible, but it is true that if streaming video falls apart then those DVD warehouses are going to look awful clever. 

It would also be a case where the success business strategy was the one that the owners completely ignored until success happened by mistake.  I wonder how often that has actually happened?

A slightly creepy letter from the CEO of Exxon Mobil

The education reform movement and Common Core in particular have never had a lack of corporate friends for a variety of reasons, but even in that crowded field, Exxon Mobil has always stood out. We'll spend more time later on why the company would line up so strongly behind standards which, according to their chief mathematical architect, aren't really designed to prepare kids for STEM (at least one possibility being that the CEO hasn't actually read the standards).

This post is concerned with just how far the company will go to promote this position. Here's a letter the CEO recently sent to the governor of Pennsylvania:

Dear Governor Corbett:

Exxon Mobil applauds and shares your commitment to ensuring that every child in Pennsylvania is prepared with the skills to compete in today’s workforce.  I also appreciate your strong support for the Common Core, including changes to reflect a “Pennsylvania Common Core,” and the potential it has to help your state’s students and teachers.  Your counterparts in New Jersey and Wisconsin, Governors Christie and Walker, and many other leading policymakers have been equally supportive.  However, I was disappointed to learn of the misinformation opponents of this critical effort are advancing, which subsequently led your administration to delay its implementation.  I urge you to make the necessary clarifications quickly and move forward with the Pennsylvania Common Core.

Like you, I believe the Common core will help ensure our students develop the skills and knowledge they need for success in college and careers.  This voluntary state-led effort developed by educators, parents and business leaders [actually, not so much -- MP] has the potential to turn around our underperforming public education system and produce the workforce that businesses need to remain competitive in the global marketplace.  The standards stipulate what all students should know, but leave it up to Pennsylvania to determine how it teaches its students.

Exxon Mobil has significant operations in Pennsylvania, and we are committed to enhancing the quality of life for all your citizens.  Last year, we contributed $3.3 million to Pennsylvania universities, hospitals, environmental research efforts and arts and civic organizations, but I believe there is nothing more important than improving the quality of education.  The Pennsylvania Common Core will go a long way to achieving that goal, and it gives Exxon Mobil the confidence that the educational standards we require for employment will be met by your state’s graduates.  Furthermore, it sets the groundwork for students to be prepared to compete globally for 21st century careers and help Pennsylvania prosper.

Sincerely,

Rex Tillerson

Of course, businesses are constantly trying to pressure state governments, but there's something about that line about Exxon Mobil's contribution that sounds a bit like "Nice little charitable institutions you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to them."

A belated fact check of an old Felix Salmon Netflix post

In the course of researching an upcoming post replying to this piece by Felix Salmon on Netflix, I followed this link to an earlier post and came across something that slipped past me the first time, probably because I was just starting to dig into the Netflix story.

But what Ball misses, I think, is that Netflix is playing a very, very long game here — not one measured in months or quarters, and certainly not one where original content pays for itself within a year. Netflix doesn’t particularly want or need the content it produces in-house to make a profit on a short-term basis. Instead, it wants “to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix,” in the words of its chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

Most importantly, the thing that Netflix aspires to, and which HBO already has, is an exclusive library of shows. If everything goes according to plan, then the Netflix of the future will be something people feel that they have to subscribe to, on the grounds that it’s the only place where they can find shows A, B, C, and D. That’s what it means to become HBO — and Netflix is fully cognizant that this is a process which takes many years and billions of dollars.

If Netflix gets there, then it becomes a license to print money, just as HBO is today. Shows like Arrested Development and House of Cards may or may not pay for themselves over the short term — in fact, they almost certainly won’t. But that doesn’t matter. In the long term, they will become part of a library which has massive value on two fronts: the shows can be licensed out in jurisdictions where Netflix doesn’t want to compete, and they will also help make Netflix a service that can guarantee you a great show that you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it.

The "Netflix is the new HBO" narrative has resonated powerfully with both investors and financial journalists, but it has always been shaky and the part you see here about Netflix building a content library around shows like House of Cards is simply, factually wrong. Despite the huge checks being paid to producers, Netflix doesn't own these shows.

 Rocco Pendola fills in the details:

First, Netflix guarantees 13 episodes right off the bat. Sometimes it will even give you a two-season commitment before the first season even airs. And, in terms of rights, it doesn't demand exclusivity. Outside of the first-run window, you are free to place your show anywhere you wish and, unless it cuts another deal with you, Netflix doesn't receive a cut of this action. Plus, there's very little, if any, creative development from Netflix.

In other words, the folks who output the content -- in this case, Sony -- are simply robbing Netflix blind. It's the type of deal that's too good to pass up.

Put another way, Sony doesn't care how many subscribers watch these shows on Netflix. They're more than happy to collect a fat (likely way too big) check, which subsidizes their risk, as they retain rights to sell the programming in markets where Netflix doesn't operate and in all other markets -- geographic and delivery -- after whatever the relatively short first-run window happens to be.

That's not how HBO, for example, plays the game. Never has been. And HBO sees no reason to start, given the franchise it has built and the enormous success it continues to have.

HBO doesn't give the world to studios and creators because it's not so desperate that it has to. It maintains exclusive rights to the programming it licenses. Unlike Netflix, it routinely produces programming in-house. And it almost always involves itself in the creative process. From what I understand, producers and directors actually appreciate this input, as HBO has a track record of making stars and producing huge hits.

You can find me covering similar ground here and here. Particularly in the second post, I go into quite a bit of detail about the HBO2.0 narrative. The only point I'd like to add: when one of these narratives takes hold, things that should be true according to the narrative start being treated like facts and even the smartest and most clear-eyed observers (like Felix Salmon) may not be immune to the effects.

The irony is that, in principle, Salmon's analysis is entirely sound. There are points I might disagree with -- I'd be more likely to advise Netflix to license out its content more freely. Licensing not only brings in money but also keeps your product in the public eye and cultivates new fans (welcome to the strange world of non-rival goods). I think it's safe to say that syndicating Sex in the City didn't hurt its revenue stream -- but on the whole, Salmon pretty much nails it. If Netflix really wanted to become a major, stable, free-standing media company, it would probably have done pretty much of all of what Salmon suggests.*

The only trouble with the analysis is that the company isn't doing what Salmon thinks it's doing.

*  Of course, there is always the possibility of being acquired by a company that doesn't mind having subsidiaries that lose money.

Felix Salmon hits a home run

Thomas Lumley directs his readers to this piece by Felix Salmon.  I think he (Thomas) stops his quote a paragraph early:

After disruption, though, there comes at least some version of stage three: over­shoot. The most common problem is that all these new systems—metrics, algo­rithms, automated decision making processes—result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

On a managerial level, once the quants come into an industry and disrupt it, they often don’t know when to stop. They tend not to have decades of institutional knowledge about the field in which they have found themselves. And once they’re empowered, quants tend to create systems that favor something pretty close to cheating. As soon as managers pick a numerical metric as a way to measure whether they’re achieving their desired outcome, everybody starts maximizing that metric rather than doing the rest of their job—just as Campbell’s law predicts.

This really explains two phenomenon that are tightly linked.  One, how quants can initially get really great results.  But, over time, when people understand how the derived numbers come from we get the second part: these system seem to crash rather badly.  After all, initially, a metric like number of arrests for police officers might be a proxy for diligence.  But, if it is all that one uses, it may end up being the reverse of what is intended (a shirker could focus on that metric, figuring if they are rated as a top performer then other performance issues won't matter).

The link between this phenomenon and high stakes teacher testing should be rather obvious. 

As an aside, I think the blogger team here continues to disagree with Felix on media issues.  But sometimes it is worth remembering that he is worth engaging because the median post is so good that the others stand out.  The price of good work? 

 

A challenge for the math historians in the audience

I came across this while working on a Pólya project. The following is a standard collection of word problems but the first five share a notable attribute while the last has a different but similar one.

Any guesses?

A mule and an ass were carrying burdens amounting to some hundred weight. The ass complained of his, and said to the mule: “I need only one hundred weight of your load, to make mine twice as heavy as yours.” The mule answered: “Yes, but if you gave me a hundred weight of yours, I should be loaded three times as much as you would be.”
How many hundred weight did each carry ?

A father who has three sons leaves them 1600 crowns. The will precises, that the eldest shall have 200 crowns more than the second, and the second shall have 100 crowns more than the youngest. Required the share of each.

A father leaves four sons, who share his property in the following manner:
The first takes the half of the fortune, minus 3000 livres.
The second takes the third, minus 1000 livres.
The third takes exactly the fourth of the property.
The fourth takes 600 livres and the fifth part of the property.
What was the whole fortune, and how much did each son receive?

A father leaves at his death several children, who share his property in the following manner:
The first receives a hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains.
The second receives two hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains.
The third takes three hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains.
The fourth takes four hundred crowns and the tenth part of what remains, and so on.
Now it is found at the end that the property has been divided among all the children. Required, how much it was, how many children. there were, and how much each received.

Three persons play together; in the first game, the first loses to each of the other two as much money as each of them has. In the next, the second person loses to each of the other two as much money as they have already. Lastly, in the third game, the first and second person gain each from the third as much money as they had before. They then. leave oil and find that they have all an equal sum, namely, 24 louis each. Required, with how much money each sat down to play.

Three Workmen can do a Piece of Work in certain Times, viz. A once in 3 Weeks, B thrice in 8 Weeks, and C five Times in 12 Weeks. It is desired to know in what Time they can finish it jointly. 

The great pedagogical end run

For at least the past thirty years, the education reform movement has been a strange alliance of advocates for very different agendas coming from all points of what we over-simplistically call the political spectrum along with a small but non-trivial number of operators looking for a share of the astonishing amounts of money that education initiatives have put into play.

Most of the people who support the reform movement have no hidden agenda. They simply want to improve education and have become convinced that the tenets of the movement are the best way of achieving those aims. Their influence, however, does not match their numbers. If you look reform initiatives in depth you'll find a disproportionate number can be traced back to three groups, often working in concert.

(We're not talking about a grand conspiracy here. The agendas of these three are hidden only in the sense that they use aggressive PR techniques to associate themselves with popular causes and divert attention from their much less popular positions and goals. By this standard, most businesses, all successful politicians and quite a few charities would fall in this category. The ed reform case just happens to be more worrisome because the stakes are so high.)

We've done endless posts on the operators (just do a search on 'looting') and perhaps even more on people using reform to promote privatization and reduce the influence of unions (Michelle Rhee is probably the definitive example). Both these groups, often combining forces, have spent an extraordinary amount of money on PR and lobbying, generally to great effect, but it is a third group, the pedagogical reformers, though less well-funded than the first two, that in many ways wields the greatest influence.

Pedagogical reformers sincerely believe they have found a better way to teach and to teach teachers. They are sure that, given a chance, their methods would revolutionize education. Under normal circumstances, pushing these changes though the school system would be difficult for at least a couple of reasons;

First, because, pedagogically, the system has a reactionary bias, made worse by the fact that the most effective teachers, the ones you would want in your corner, are also the ones who are most reluctant to trade their methods in for something new and unproven;

And, second, because many of these new methods can come across to outsiders as either over-hyped or, to be hammer-blunt, flaky as your grandmother's best biscuits.

Consider the following example from Valerie Strauss (previously discussed here):

The unit — “A Close Reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address“ — is designed for students to do a “close reading” of the address “with text-dependent questions” — but without historical context. Teachers are given a detailed 29-page script of how to teach the unit, with the following explanation:

The idea here is to plunge students into an independent encounter with this short text. Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset. It may make sense to notify students that the short text is thought to be difficult and they are not expected to understand it fully on a first reading — that they can expect to struggle. Some students may be frustrated, but all students need practice in doing their best to stay with something they do not initially understand. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.

The Gettysburg Address unit can be found on the Web site of Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit organization founded by three people described as “lead authors of the Common Core State Standards.” They are David Coleman,  now president of the College Board who worked on the English Language Arts standards; Jason Zimba, who worked on the math standards; and Susan Pimental, who worked on the ELA standards. The organization’s Linked In biography also describes the three as the “lead writers of the Common Core State Standards.”

Make a quick note of the name David Coleman. We'll be coming back to him and to his background (management consulting) in future posts.

There are also plenty of examples of mathematics instruction that would strike most people and, in some cases, most math people, as strange. This is a marked change from the "new math" of the Sixties which was famous for bewildering parents helping kids with their homework but which generally covered familiar ground for mathematicians (especially set theory).

Check out veteran math teacher Gary Rubinstein's reaction to his daughter's kindergarten workbook. I think most people would find his concerns valid. If I have time, I'd add a few more of my own.

Along similar lines, check out this principal's reaction to her daughter's elementary school homework (with additional comments here).

I've been digging into the background of these lessons, trying to reverse engineer the processes and assumptions behind them. The search leads to some strange places (including, I kid you not, deconstructionist critical theory) that I'll be spelling out later, along with my problems with these approaches but that's not actually that pertinent for this post.

For the purposes of this discussion, it's not the weirdness or even the quality of the ideas that concerns me. It is entirely possible that, given fair chance, many if not most of these ideas might turn out to be significant improvements over what we do now.

It's the part about the fair chance that worries me. The pedagogical reformers have been extremely aggressive in using the reform movement to get around the normal process that proposed methods are supposed to go through. Those vetting processes may be overly difficult but they are still there for a reason. Under the current setup, certain pedagogical methods are winning not because they are better supported by research or because they have a better track record or because they make more sense to people, but because the people promoting them have the right connections and because they've been skillful at navigating the culture of the reform movement.

One of the primary strengths of the movement has been its ability to present a united front. Once a position makes it into the movement tenets, it can count on close to universal support. This is especially true when it comes to curricula, at least in part because the topic can get fairly technical and most members have not actually gone any deeper than the uplifting rhetoric of raising standards and teaching critical thinking. The result has been to give those who do care about about curricula a free hand.

Unfortunately, caring and having the right connections does not necessarily translate to having the best ideas.

Catching up on the education beat

More Duncan charm, reported here by WP's Valerie Strauss

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and at least one other Education Department official urged New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and his team not to choose Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr as the city’s next schools chancellor, according to several people knowledgable about the selection process. It was an unusual move by the nation’s top education official and came in the wake of Starr’s vocal criticism of some of the Obama administration’s school reform policies.

Teach for America appears to be growing more controversial in the Ivy League (see here, here and here for starters).


Are a professor's emails part of the public record?


Another (apparent) billionaire enters the fray:

Financier Rex Sinquefield, Missouri’s largest political donor, has given $750,000 to jumpstart the initiative petition drive for a ballot measure to end teacher tenure.

According to the Missouri Ethics Commission, the money was donated on Christmas Eve to “Teachgreat.org,” the campaign committee set up to oversee the effort.

Some passages from a must-read Texas Observer piece on superstar superintendents:

And when you hire someone promising miracles, you pay them the miracle-worker rate. Klein earned $250,000 a year as New York Schools chancellor—just a fraction of the $2 million he makes as a “senior advisor” at News Corp. today. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was known in Cleveland as the “$300,000 wonder” by the end of her tenure running a 70,000-student district. In Texas, a handful of superintendents make more than $300,000 a year, including Spring Branch ISD’s Duncan Klussman, whose board bumped his pay to $305,000 earlier this year to run the fast-growing district of 35,000 students.

and

Rod Paige, Houston’s superintendent in the mid-1990s, was one of the first to sell the public on his ability to raise test scores even without more money. The former college football coach trumpeted huge test-score gains and better graduation rates thanks to his leadership and the pressure of high-stakes tests. On the strength of those results, Houston won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2002, the award’s first year.

Paige’s “Houston Miracle” became George W. Bush’s “Texas Miracle” on the presidential campaign trail, and Paige parlayed his apparent success into an appointment as Bush’s education secretary. But after Paige left for D.C., academics picked apart his record, showing Houston had undercounted its dropouts and exempted low-scoring kids from taking the test, and even underreported crime and fighting in the schools. By then Paige was long gone, guiding national school policy.

and

Mayor Mike Rawlings, who promised in his campaign to support bold improvement in the schools, told the Morning News, “You already have some momentum for change and have a school board taking reform-minded actions, and the city and business community is supportive of this, and whoever comes in will have a lot of support. For that reason, and if it succeeds, you’re going to be a hero.” 

Rawlings, a former Pizza Hut CEO, said he was looking for a new superintendent who could be a “real change agent.  It’s less important to me if they’re a mathematician or a businessperson or a military type. Their background is less important than their leadership ability.” 

The business world’s interest in remaking public education is nothing new—calling school leaders “superintendents” became popular a century ago, when factory efficiency experts took a first pass at redesigning public schools.

America is enjoying another such moment today. Popular business literature is suffused with the idea that strong leadership has the power to improve even the most massive bureaucracy, and the education world has fallen in line. The George W. Bush Institute, the think tank tied to the presidential library at Southern Methodist University, is home to an “Alliance to Reform Education Leadership.” The Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles is one of the most polarizing institutions of the current school-reform movement, grooming “exceptional leaders and managers to help transform America’s education systems, raise student achievement and create a brighter future,” according to its website.

“I think there’s been something of an infatuation with business management in education,” says Young, the University of Virginia scholar. “Schools are not businesses. We don’t necessarily have the same moral obligations to the community and to kids that you have to stakeholders that are investing their money.”

“The reason it works in business is you do have a bottom line,” Brewer says. “In order to do that in education, they had to find one indicator of success. That’s not necessarily compatible with the complexity of education.”

New superintendents who focused on “quick wins” in the “first 90 days”—that’s all straight out of popular business literature. So is the focus on transformational change, the faith that we’re capable of rapid improvement in society if only we’ll shake off the old ways and dismantle the status quo. No business concept has been more contentious in schools than the tech-inspired enthusiasm for “disruption.”

On a related note, Diane Ravitch recently had an interesting post about an executive turned educator.

Beth Goldberg is a Middle School Mathematics Teacher at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, NY in the Mid-Hudson Valley.  Beth has been teaching for eight years since obtaining her Masters of Arts in Teaching at Bard College.  Prior to earning her MAT, Beth was a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase where she had global responsibility for a suite a payment services products.  Beth holds an MS in business from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA in Mathematics from Wellesley College.

Not surprisingly, Goldberg has some interesting things to say about the problems with the reform movement's attempt to apply management consulting approaches to education:

After a twenty year career in business, I decided to become a mathematics teacher. I returned to school to obtain another master’s degree in adolescent education. I was convinced that my management expertise would be readily transferable to teaching. I had managed an international staff, how hard would it be to manage a classroom of thirty or less students? Needless to say, I quickly learned that teaching students was far more complicated than managing adults. Why, you may ask? There are three simple reasons that I would like to share with the business intelligentsia.

1. Your employees are paid to listen to you, your students are not.

2. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and interview process. Teachers do not select their students.

3. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.

To judge the effectiveness of teachers based upon an annual high stakes test would be comparable to judging the effectiveness of a business leader based upon one meeting or one memo. A business leader may have an ineffective meeting because of a variety of reasons. Similarly, students’ test scores on a particulate day are influenced by a host factors including their home life and social interactions.

Today’s education policy appears to missing the mark. Vilifying all teachers will not rectify the problems which plague a subset of this country’s education system. The current ineffective policies have been developed by individuals who lack experience teaching and are removed from students.

Nonetheless I do recognize that there are certainly lessons from business which are applicable to education. Here are a few for the NYS Education Commissioner and his colleagues to consider:

1. Those who are closest to the customer should provide the necessary feedback and market information so that sound strategies can be formed. Using business terminology, teachers with years of experience working with students are your best source of market intelligence.

2. Any large scale implementation requires a detailed project plan. It must be effectively managed as demonstrated by adhering to published deadlines and commitments. Releasing thousands of pages of curriculum materials for teachers days before teachers need to use the information is unacceptable.

3. Communicate clearly and effectively to all your customers,  colleagues and staff. Listen to their concerns.

When I left the business arena to become a teacher, I naively had no  idea of the complexities and challenges faced by teachers each day. Teaching is one of the most rewarding and challenging endeavors I have undertaken. Even though the career is much more demanding and complicated than I anticipated, the satisfaction I receive from a job well done more than compensates me for the effort I invest in teaching my students. I hope that the numerous problems accompanying the education reforms now underway in New York and across the country will be acknowledged and appropriately addressed before the education system is bankrupt.

And any post on management consultants in the education reform movement has got to be followed by a David Coleman link.

The strange bedfellows of the education reform movement

Mercedes Schneider has a post that beautifully illustrates some of the complexities and contradictions of the reform movement using the example of this big-budget campaign:

On December 10, 2013, the Center for Union Facts (CUF) (don’t believe the name) sponsored a full-page ad in the New York Times attributing the “high school slip in global rankings” to a single issue: The failure of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to promote merit pay for teachers.

The ad reads,

We have fallen behind Latvia, Estonia, and Vietnam in science and math. The teachers union continues to protect incompetent teachers and refuses to reward outstanding teachers with merit-based pay. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, fights against reforms that would help fix our failing schools.

Later in the post, Schneider provides some background on CUF:

The Center for Union Facts is one of five nonprofit “front groups” run by lobbyist Rick Berman of Berman and Company:

American Beverage Institute

Center for Consumer Freedom

Center for Union Facts

Employment Policies Institute Foundation

Enterprise Freedom Action Committee

These “front groups” offer mission statements that disguise the agenda of hidden supporters. CUF is Berman’s front for union bashing.

(Schneider's follow-up is also worth checking out.)

For more on Berman, here are the first few lines of his Wikipedia page:

Richard B. Berman (born 1942) is a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, public relations executive, and lobbyist. Through his public affairs firm Berman and Company, Berman runs several industry-funded non-profit organizations such as the Center for Consumer Freedom[1] and the Center for Union Facts.[2] Berman's organizations have run numerous media campaigns on the issues of obesity, smoking, mad cow disease, taxes, the national debt, drinking and driving, as well as the minimum wage.[3][4][5] 60 Minutes has called him "the booze and food industries' weapon of mass destruction,"[4] labor union activist Richard Bensinger gave him the nickname "Dr. Evil,"[3][4] and Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe has dubbed him a “pioneer” in the “realm of opinion molding.”[6]

In September 2013, the Huffington Post included Berman on its “list of the 20 most influential members of the power elite.[7]

Just to be clear, most people in the reform movement are motivated by a sincere desire to improve education, particularly among the disadvantaged, but that doesn't mean we can dismiss the influence of groups with other agendas. There is no part of the movement that has not gotten significant support from some group hostile to unions (such as the Walton family) and, because of the highly interconnected social structure of the movement and the lack of firewalls, almost every major player in the movement is at best one or two degrees of separation from an anti-union activist (for example, David Coleman, the father of the Common Core initiative, was a founding member on the board of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst, which is pretty ground zero for the anti-labor wing of the movement).

This doesn't mean that we should look at most movement initiatives as covert attempts at union busting; that's not how influence works. Very seldom do you buy people outright. Instead you generally plant a bias that's subtle enough to go unnoticed by those affected. People like Jonathan Chait are not anti-labor but they've been nudged into some extremely anti-labor positions and have generally remained unaware of the process.

Weekend blogging -- Starring the writer...

Except for someone like Keaton or Chaplin (who else could they cast?), I've always found the notion of actor/director rather odd. It seems like a cumbersome way of making a movie, particularly in the pre-video era.

So why do we see so many actors directing themselves? Perhaps there's something about the craft of screen acting that naturally develops a director's eye, bu it's far more likely that movie stars have lots of power and directing has a high glamour to work ratio.

Screenwriting, by comparison, has a notoriously low glamour to work ratio. Nonetheless there are examples. W.C. Fields wrote most of his own films. So did Mae West. (For their one collaboration, My Little Chickadee, West wrote the screenplay while Fields contributed one scene. Notably, though the film made a ton of money, the two stars never made another movie together.) Mel Gibson co-wrote his semi-comeback, Get the Gringo (Yeah, I know... but if you can get past off-screen Gibson and you enjoyed Payback you'll probably like this one better).

All of which is an excuse to link to another freebie from the Criterion Collection, The Horse's Mouth, written by and starring Alec Guinness.

Before Michael Lewis, there was George Goodman and "The Money Game"

George "Jerry" Goodman (a.k.a. the other Adam Smith) just passed away. Goodman is best remembered today for the long running show Adam Smith’s Money World, which is a shame because as good and as influential as that show was, Goodman's biggest impact was on the business and economics beat of the New Journalism of the Sixties and Seventies.

Paul Krugman, a friend of Goodman, has this to say:

First, about how innovative Jerry was: when he began writing urbane, witty accounts of Wall Street’s doings, he was blazing new trails. The Money Game was published in 1967 — the same year as the release of the movie The Graduate, which famously portrayed the world of business — plastics! — as a nightmare from which anyone free-spirited had to flee. Yet the Age of Acquarius was also the age of the first great postwar bull market. Jerry rescued business journalism — part of it, anyway — from boring men talking earnings reports; this stuff, he realized, was every bit as interesting as the counterculture, and he conveyed that interest to his readers.

Today's long-form business journalism pretty much all comes out of Goodman's overcoat. Goodman was a successful novelist and screenwriter before trying his hand at Wall Street. Very much in keeping with the New Journalism school, he brought these literary skills to previously dry and stuffy topics, combining powerful insights with Dickensian character sketches and resonant imagery. Here's a passage from the Money Game that has stuck with me over the years describing investor mentality in the final days of a bubble:

“We are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air. We know at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking – what time is it? But, none of the clocks have hands.”

With the exception of Michael Lewis, I can't think of another writer in the field with comparable literary gifts, and it's very much an open question if Lewis could have been Lewis if Goodman hadn't become Smith more than two decades earlier.

Identity politics

This is the introduction to a nice article on the perils of Social Darwinism:

That’s a satisfying worldview for someone who is successful and considers himself unusually bright. But a quick look at the data shows the limitations of raw smarts and stick-to-itiveness as an explanation for inequality. The income distribution in the United States provides a good example. In 2012 the top 0.01 percent of households earned an average of $10.25 million, while the mean household income for the country overall was $51,000. Are top earners 200 times as smart as the rest of the field? Doubtful. Do they have the capacity to work 200 times more hours in the week? Even more doubtful. Many forces out of their control, including sheer luck, are at play.

But say you’re in that top 0.01 percent—or even the top 50 percent. Would you want to admit happenstance as a benefactor? Wouldn’t you rather believe that you earned your wealth, that you truly deserve it? Wouldn’t you like to think that any resources you inherited are rightfully yours, as the descendant of fundamentally exceptional people? Of course you would. New research indicates that in order to justify your lifestyle, you might even adjust your ideas about the power of genes. The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior.

It's rather a complex problem.  I look at it as being the case that luck, hard work, and ability are each likely to be necessary conditions for being in a top income bracket (conditional on not being there entirely due to wealth alone), but that none of them (alone or together) are sufficient. 

Under these circumstances it can be hard to really ask hard questions like "what is fair".  It even attacks approaches like the "veil of ignorance", because hard work is seen as a decision that you can make.  But coal miners also work hard and rarely become exceedingly well off.  It can be hard to realize that some people work hard and succeed while other work hard and do not. 

But I think it is a needed realization to moving forward on really handling inequality. 

When Common Core is not Common Core (and more importantly, vice versa)

One commenter said in response to this video:

Go to the standards and see if you see the requirement for this kind of deadening scripted teaching strategy. I’ll save you the trouble: you won’t find it.

Many other states have not found this necessary. And, as someone else pointed out, this is a strategy used in many charter schools much before CCSS.

A state like NY is reduced to this kind of scripting when it is running the good teachers out with punitive testing and privatization and replacing them with TFA and other inexperienced teachers who don’t know any better.

This brings up a serious point. Lots of us, myself included, have discussed Common Core in fairly broad terms. Others, like this fellow, would argue that CC is just the list bare-bones topics listed in the actual curriculum. Who's right? We both are, or, put another way, some questions work better with the first definition; others work better with the second.

When is "not Common Core" Common Core?

Though the dividing lines aren't always clear, what we refer to as "Common Core" is generally a relatively coherent set of proposed changes to the topics we teach, the way we teach them and the standardized test we use to measure them. These changes tend to have common origins, objectives and underlying assumptions. More importantly, the topics, methods and metrics were designed to compliment each other and there is considerable pressure to adopt the lot.