More on Murray

The piece I wrote yesterday about Charles Murray's new book focused primarily on his higher education-related arguments that only 10 percent of people have an IQ high enough to obtain the college degrees that 35 percent of people actually do attain. I didn't really have the space to tackle the first, K-12 half of the book, other than to note that "Murray believes that half of all children are more or less uneducable in the traditional sense and thus need to be identified as such via mandatory first grade I.Q. testing so they can be shunted off into vocational education programs for their own good. This is absurd and immoral, for reasons too numerous to recount here."

Ben Wildavsky does a good job of laying out some of those reasons in today's Wall Street Journal. For example:

International tests show that students in many other nations bypass American kids in reading and math. Could such comparative results really be a function of higher raw intelligence overseas -- or are they more likely to reflect superior educational practices? It is telling that hard-headed education reformers like Eric Hanushek, Chester E. Finn and Jay Greene believe that we can do much more to boost the academic achievement of children upon whom Mr. Murray would essentially give up.

And:

In his brave new world, the bell curve of abilities is cheerfully acknowledged; students and workers gladly accept their designated places in the pecking order; and happy, well-paid electricians and plumbers go about their business while their brainy brethren read Plato and prepare for the burdens of ruling the world. It is hard to believe that a dynamic, upwardly mobile society would emerge from such an arrangement, or "dignity" either. The view outlined in "Real Education" seems far from the one that Mr. Murray put forward in "Losing Ground" (1984). In that influential book, a headlong assault on the welfare state, he called for an "infinitely forgiving" education system in which students can try over and over to succeed, even if only some will.

Well said. I'd also note that Murray's preferred educational regime of IQ testing, tracking, and limiting opportunities for advanced degrees would invest a great deal of new power in government-run schools. That seems very un-conservative to me. And dangerous, given the way such power tends to refract through underlying social biases. Several years ago, I listened to the president of Dillard University, a historically black institution, give a speech about education. When he was in high school, the school tried to put him in the vocational track, because it didn't think he was smart enough for college-level work. They wanted him to be a repairman. He wanted something more.

Another Step into the Mainstream

The Southern Regional Education Board launches its Online Teachers Web site. SREB was one of the first mainstream educational policy organizations to focus on building high quality virtual schooling options. The number of southern states with strong state virtual schools is no coincidence.

Woe, the Banana Slugs

Harvard edged ahead of Princeton this year in the annual least-meaningful-yet-most-publicized measure of higher education quality, the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This is like using advanced satellite telemetry to figure out which Himalayan peak is the world's highest--marginally interesting in a trivial way, but beside the point, which is that they're both a whole lot taller than nearly all of the other mountains. A few meters here or there at the highest altitudes doesn't matter very much. Although it's interesting to note that Harvard appears to have improved not by manipulating the admissions process as colleges like to, but rather by simply hiring more professors, driving up the percentage of classes with fewer than 20 and 50 students. There are worse ways to get ahead.

More interestingly, U.S. News has for the first time published a list of "up-and-coming" colleges, based solely on a peer survey. Some of them clearly deserve the honor -- it's nice to see the University of Maryland - Baltimore County get recognized for years of hard work and success in helping African-American students graduate and earn degrees in science and engineering fields. Elon University consistently scores in the upper ranks on the National Survey of Student Engagement, a measure that--unlike anything in the regular U.S. News rankings--actually says something about the quality of teaching at the university.

But while annual changes in the U.S. News rankings get the most attention, they're actually remarkably stable. The "First Tier" Top 50 is almost precisely the same (Yeshiva University edge up from 52 to 50, knocking out Syracuse and Tulane, which were tied for the last spot last year). Things stay the same in higher education more than they change.

There were, however, a few major movers. No college seems to have fallen farther than UC - Santa Cruz, which dropped 17 places from 79th to 96th. The Banana Slugs' peer assesment score is down a tenth of a point, graduation rates are lower, class sizes larger, the acceptance rate is up, alumni giving is down, and fewer students are enrolling with high SATs. Perhap the distractions eco-terrorist firebombings and whatnot took their toll.

Note: I originally misidentified Elon University as Elon College in this post. I've corrected the mistake.

Pass the Cash

Maybe this wasn't such a good week for DC Public Schools to release their new cash motivation scheme. We already saw that the first year of New York City's plan to pay kids for high scores on Advanced Placement tests did not go so well. Today DC releases their plan to pay kids up to $100 a month for things like attending class on time, having good manners, and earning high grades. Perhaps they could have waited a bit...

The Bell Curve Returns

With the enactment of a new GI Bill, the time has come to once again recall former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ prediction that the original 1944 legislation benefiting World War II soldiers would convert colleges and universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Perhaps it’s unfair — Hutchins, a veteran himself, was a noted legal scholar and philosopher whose influence on the university he led is still quite visible today. But that’s the price you pay for being so spectacularly (and quotably) wrong about one of the great policy issues of our time. Helping returning veterans attend college was only the beginning of the massive mid-20th century expansion of access to higher education in America. Most people see this as an unequivocal good and a job not yet done.

Yet an active strain of educational hobo-phobia remains, a persistent, largely sub rosa muttering that perhaps too many of the wrong kind of people are being allowed inside the ivy-covered walls. It’s not respectable conversation outside of conservative circles, due to its unvarnished elitism and 0-for-the-last-60-years-and-counting historical track record. But it lives on, and now has a new standard-bearer in the person of Charles Murray, author along with the late Richard Herrnstein of the hugely controversial 1994 treatise, The Bell Curve. In his new book, Real Education, Murray offers “four simple truths for bringing America’s schools back to reality.” The third is: “Too many people are going to college.”

Click here to read the rest at InsideHigherEd. 

Margins of Error

Kevin Drum wrote a good post a couple of weeks ago about statistical illiteracy in the media, viz. the widespread tendency to characterize election poll results in which one candidate's percentage point lead is equal to or less than the poll's statistical margin of error (MOE) as a "statistical tie" or "dead heat." Kevin notes:

...probability isn't a cutoff, it's a continuum: the bigger the lead, the more likely that someone is ahead and that the result isn't just a polling fluke. So instead of lazily reporting any result within the MOE as a "tie," which is statistically wrong anyway, it would be more informative to just go ahead and tell us how probable it is that a candidate is really ahead. Here's a table that gives you the answer to within a point or two:

As Kevin notes, if Obama is up by three points, and the MOE is three points, it's 84% likely that he'll be the next President of the United States. That's very different than 50% likely, i.e. an actual tie.

This is directly relevant to education because most states use precisely the same statistical techniques when deciding whether a school has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind. If, say, 65% of students need to pass the test in order to make AYP, and only 62% pass, but the state determines an MOE of 4 percentage points, then the school makes AYP because the score was "within the margin of error."

This is silly for two reasons. First, unlike opinion polls, NCLB doesn't test a sample of students. It tests all students. The only way states can even justify using MOEs in the first place is with the strange assertion that the entire population of a school is a sample, of some larger universe of imaginary children who could have taken the test, theoretically. In other words, the message to parents is "Yes, it is true that your children didn't learn very much this year, but we're pretty sure, statistically speaking, that had we instead been teaching another group of children who do not actually exist, they'd have done fine. So there's nothing to worry about."

Second, per Kevin's chart above, the idea that scores that fall below the cutoff but within the margin of error are statistically indistinguishable from actual passing scores is incorrect. This is particularly true given that, while opinion polls almost always use a 95% confidence interval to establish their MOEs, most states use a 99% confidence interval for NCLB, which results in substantially larger margins of error around the passing score. But states do it anyway, because many of them basically see NCLB accountability as a malevolent force emanating from Washington, DC from which schools need to be shielded by any means necessary.

Think of it this way: let's say your child is sick and you bring him to the doctor. After the diagnosis is complete, you and the doctor have the following conversation:

Doctor: My diagnosis is that your son has pneumonia and needs to be hospitalized.

You: That's terrible! Are you sure?

Doctor: Well, there are few absolute certainties in medicine. It's possible that he only has bronchitis. But I'm pretty sure it's pneumonia.

You: How sure?

Doctor: 84% sure.

What would you do? Would you (A) Check your son into the hospital? Or would you (B) Say "Hey, there's a 16 percent chance this whole thing will work itself out with bedrest and chicken soup. Let's go that way."

States implementing NCLB nearly always choose option (B). That's because they see the law as a process for making the lives of educators worse, not what it actually is: a process for making the lives of students better.

Fresh Signs of the Apocalypse

Over at Ed Week, David Hoff notes that the decline of intellectual standards in this country has become so precipitous that the U.S. Secretary of Education is now appointing bloggers to serve on official National Technical Advisory Committees to evaluate the implementation of state accountability systems under No Child Left Behind. 

Seriously, though, it's a privilege and I'm glad for the chance to be part of the solution, etc. 

BAD Magazine

In a time when smart people of good faith occupy both sides of many heated and complex education debates, it makes sense occasionally to pause, take a deep breath, and denounce things like the incoherent mishmash of policy juvenalia, useless sentiment, and blatant lies found in this article, published by GOOD Magazine, in which we are told that NCLB "requires all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests," Bill Gates and Eli Broad are spearheading the corporate conspiracy to privatize K-12 education, and standardized tests come with instructions about what to do if students throw up on them. It's sort of a perfect distillation of woolly-minded HuffPost-type conventional education wisdom, and in that sense is oddly valuable, because you can read it and know everything that a not-inconsequential percentage of people know (or rather, don't know) about education.

Update: The author of the article, Gary Stager, objects to the above as defamatory and insists that "my article was carefully fact-checked by Good Magazine." Yet somehow the legendary Good Magazine fact-checking department failed to notice that NCLB is not "mathematically impossible," as Stager asserts, because it does not actually "require all of the nation's schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests." That Stager, a self-proclaimed "internationally recognized educator and consultant" would display such basic ignorance of the law he's criticizing tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the quality of thinking and editing involved. Stager also says "It's not 'useless sentiment' to care about children." Well, yes it is, if you think simply saying "I care about children" represents an argument of some kind. 

Wolverines!!!!!

A North Texas school district is adopting a new policy allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons so as to protect students from attackers via gunfights in the cafeteria. But don't worry, every precaution is being taken:

In order for teachers and staff to carry a pistol, they must have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun; must be authorized to carry by the district; must receive training in crisis management and hostile situations and have to use ammunition that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls.

Look for the nation's ammunition manufacturers to begin marketing special "School Safe" non-ricocheting ammunition any day now. Of course, none of this would have been necessary if the federal government hadn't decided to, um, protect students from gun violence:

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog," [District Superintendent David] Thweatt said in Friday's online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Yes, I imagine that the nation's suicidal loners and violent paranoiacs are keenly attuned to year-by-year changes in federal criminal policy. The sad thing is that Shooty McShoot missed the obvious and far more compelling justification for arming the nation's teacher workforce, namely that the recent Russian invasion of Georgia greatly increases the odds of a Red Dawn-style North American conquest, and as we all recall the Soviet paratroopers landed directly behind the local high school.

John McCain's Higher Education Platform

John McCain quietly released his higher education platform last week. It hasn't drawn much notice, perhaps because it's only newsworthy in its lack of depth. Sure, one can't really disagree that we need to "Prepare for the 21st Century in Higher Education" or "Improve Information for Parents," but those are pretty weak platitudes for a major party candidate this late in the game. His "plan" doesn't include any numbers, dollar signs, or specific proposals. 

Update: Author edited for content.