On Affirmative Action

Now that McCain is flip-flopping on affirmative action, let me go ahead and make my in-principle defense of those sorts of racial preferences.

I think there's an instinctive resistance to the idea of "racial preferences" since, in this country, such preferences have tended to be horrifically unjust. Realistically, though, pointing to a long legacy of institutionalized and informal racism to show that affirmative action is, ipso facto, wrong is a "Hitler was a vegetarian" kind of an argument, a lazy non-sequitur.

The right way to think about the issue, I think, is to imagine yourself as the dean of admissions to a college or university. You have made most of your admissions decisions for the coming school year, but you have one more spot to fill, one more student you can accept. Complicating things, however, is the fact that the two best candidates left in your applicant pool are, on paper, identical in every way. That is, they have the same SAT scores, the same high school GPA, the same extra-curricular involvement, etc. Perhaps they even have the same economic background. They appear to be totally the same, except that one is white, and one is black.

Who do you admit?

It seems to me there's a very, very plausible argument to the effect that, even if your only goal is recruiting the strongest possible student body, you should prefer the black student. The reasoning is pretty simple: by stipulation, the two students have accomplished precisely the same things, but one has done it in spite of what were probably non-negligible obstacles due to his race, the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racism in America.

If high school for these students was a race, they both reached the finish line at the same time, but odds are good the white student had a head start. It is therefore likely that the black student ran faster. It is therefore reasonable to prefer to admit the black applicant. Note that this is true even if you do not care about "diversity" in your student body.

Now, you might object that this argument is too probabilistic: maybe the black student faced more difficulties than the white student, but maybe not. And this is true; race, here, is serving as a proxy for factors we cannot evaluate directly. But so what? The same can be said for an SAT score or a GPA. The goal for an admissions committee is to acquire as much relevant information about the applicants as is practical. Information about race is both relevant and easy to obtain.

The upshot of all of this, I think, is that if it makes sense for a university to prefer a black student to an otherwise identical white student - and my argument is that it does make sense - then I think the case in favor of affirmative action in general is very strong. Of course, particular affirmative action policies might, say, give too much weight to race, but I do not find it plausible that race should have no weight at all.

P.S. - If information about race is, in fact, relevant, then it shouldn't surprise us that when affirmative action policies are challenged in court, selective organizations like universities, businesses, and the military rise to their defense.

P.P.S. - Note that analogous arguments can be mustered to consider other possible factors in admission. My sense is that, in addition to race, factors like SAT scores, GPA, and economic status hold up pretty well to the "hypothetical committee" test, but that things like volunteerism, extra-curricular participation, and athleticism hold up more poorly.

I Know What I Know

Gregg Primo Ventello, Associate Professor of English at Kansas City, Kansas Community College, has written an essay complaining that his administration's requirement that he "document how [he assesses his] teaching methods and [his] students' learning" leaves him feeling "mildly violated". It's one of the absolute worst set of arguments I have ever seen. And as a graduate student in the field of education, and as a teacher of middle school students, I've seen a lot of lousy arguments.

Ventello's essay contains precisely one correct claim, namely that "[r]equiring documentation of assessment is a failed attempt to hold educators 'accountable.'" This is basically true, since assessing learning is notoriously difficult and administrators don't like to admit that they're not holding people accountable.

So let it be said that the paperwork Ventello despises is, in fact, essentially a waste of time and energy. The rest of the reasoning offered in the piece, however, isn't just wrong, but patently absurd. Consider whether the following argument would hold water in any other professional context:

Before the mandate for documentation, we assessed ourselves and our students because we love our content, and how well we convey that content to our students deeply concerns us. Assessment, for a teacher, is an internal requirement.


The origin of this internal requirement is what the Greeks called “eros.” Socrates speaks of this in the Symposium. Eros can be defined as passion for work, any work -- whether it’s teaching calculus, playing the saxophone, or plumbing a house. It depends on the individual. Eros is the reason I fill with unabated joy when doing the work that I love. It is what causes time to fly while engaged, and what also causes time to stop when forced to do work that is, as Audre Lorde put it, “a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread” (Lorde, 1984, p. 55).

...

Eros is why we assess our teaching on some level at every moment of our professional day, and why we often cannot stop assessing at the “end” of our day. Teachers will do what they must to process their successes and failures. If there is a need to write it down, we will, but often the most productive plan of action emerges through a conversation with a colleague or mentor who shares your passion for the content and its pedagogy.

(Keep in mind, this horribly sophomoric argument is coming from a college-level professor.)

The confusion here is so basic that I actually had to contemplate for several minutes exactly how to articulate it. The best I can do is: We do not take it for granted that individuals are fulfilling their responsibilities on the assumption that they would not have taken on those responsibilities if they were not passionate about fulfilling them.

(But imagine how awesome it would be to be Prof. Ventello's financial planner! "No sir, we don't provide regular statements regarding the status and progress of your investments, because we are deeply passionate about maximizing your wealth. That sort of paperwork would be totally redundant.")

Not only are the empirical assumptions wildly absurd, though, there are also very serious issues of internal coherence. Remember, Ventello argues - correctly, I think! - that "what we do [as teachers] doesn’t lend itself easily to any perfect quantitative measure", and that therefore documentation of assessment in education is bound to be pointless. At the same time, however, he seems to have no doubts about his own ability to pursue "excellence" in teaching:

When we achieve eros, we settle for nothing short of excellence. We continually push ourselves to be better at what we do, and this is why we are concerned with how we use our time. In our pursuit of excellence, we know that our time is best spent engaged in the work that we love. We demand from others what we demand of ourselves. This means that we expect other people to put forth their best efforts because this is what we put forth. Incompetence, carelessness, ineptitude will not go unchecked. We know it exists; we’re not crazy. However, we expect better and will almost always ask for it. Because we care so much for how we use our time, we are forced to assess every minute and every aspect of our lives.

The question is naturally raised: if assessment in education is easily performed by close practitioners, why on earth would it be so inscrutable to a supervisor? There's a deeply unfortunate tendency among many educators to want to have this issue both ways such that they can be supremely confident of their own abilities as a teacher without conceding that other people might be able to evaluate the evidence as well. Ventello's essay illustrates that tendency almost perfectly.

Obviously, assessment in education really is hard, but that's a fact that cuts both ways. It's both the hardest part of being a teacher, and the part of the job teachers tend to deal with least seriously. I think that reality is made all too clear, here.

Breaking: Girls Can Do Math!

I actually got word of this yesterday - you know, from my "sources" - but it was "embargoed" until today:

A new study comparing the math scores of 7 million students across the country shows what the five female university researchers already knew: Girls are just as good as boys at math.

The research seems to settle a long-running debate over the existence of a math gene that gives boys an edge over girls in advanced coursework and ultimately in the workforce.

...

The study found no difference between boys and girls in performance on math tests given in grades two through 11.

Decades ago, that wasn't the case. Girls took fewer advanced math and science courses and those who did posted lower scores.

And yes, I really do get emails about information that isn't supposed to be totally public yet. Most of them are not this interesting. I'd actually prefer not to receive any of them, but I'm not allowed to unsubscribe from the relevant list.

Craptastic

California's first true count of high school dropouts shows that one in four kids quit school last year - 127,292 - which is far more than state educators estimated before they began using a new student-tracking system.

The statewide 24-percent dropout rate also shows African American and Latino students leaving school at much higher rates than other ethnic groups, according to data released today by state schools chief Jack O'Connell.

The dropout rate is well above the 13 percent (67,107 students) that educators had earlier estimated using a less sophisticated counting method relied on for years.

More here. Note that the number for black students was 42%.

How Parents Choose Schools

Andrew Coulson thinks that this study out of Georgetown "finds that families (overwhelmingly low-income and African-American) participating in D.C.’s school voucher program are making rational, informed choices and are becoming more astute consumers the longer they participate in the program."

In reality, the results are somewhat underwhelming. Certainly, there is a high level of parent satisfaction with the program, and the program's retention rate is at 90%. But education isn't about parental satisfaction, it's about helping children. Coulson, like many libertarian and school choice types, assumes blithely that families are making well-informed decisions, an assumption for which the evidence is rather thin.

For example, in DC, what criteria are parents using to make their school placement decisions? There's a table in the report I'll summarize:

Criterion	Prevalence
Class Size	All families
International/Global Focus	Small number
Location	Small number
Rigorous Academics	Most families
Religious/Moral Curriculum	Small number
Safety	All families
School Directory/Brochure	All families
School Visits	All families
Student Input	Small number
Test Results	A very small number
Word Of Mouth	A very small number

That's not terribly encouraging. The criteria that are probably most important - the ones that best indicate the added educational value of attending the school - are given relatively little weight. The closest parents come to looking for specific educational outcomes is with the "rigorous academics" thing, but as long as that's divorced from test results, it's not clear what the content of that requirement really is. (I think the other under-weighted criterion is word of mouth.)

At the same time, families are giving far too much consideration to things like the school brochure - essentially a commercial for the school. And then there's class size, which was important to all of the participating families. A few years ago, Coulson's Cato-buddy Dominick Armentano explained that class size isn't actually important:

Most of the public policy world is ruled by warm and fuzzy myths. Take the important issue of class size and student achievement. Florida is in the process of mandating smaller class size on the assumption, presumably, that students will learn more in smaller classes with more teacher attention. Sounds good, but is it generally true?

There have been close to 300 separate studies nation-wide on the relationship between class size and student achievement. Professor Eric Hanushek, an economist at the University of Rochester, reviewed these studies and discovered that only 15% of them suggest that reducing class size improves student learning as measured by standardized tests. Indeed, in 72% of the studies reviewed, there was no statistically significant effect on measurable student achievement associated with smaller classes. Even more surprisingly, in 13% of the studies reviewed, student test scores actually declined as class size was reduced. In sum, a full 85% of all of the studies on class size and student achievement found that reducing class size did not improve student performance.

This really points at the crux of the school choice issue for libertarians. When the government makes poor decisions about educational policy, this is viewed as a shortcoming of the system. For private schools, the libertarian standard is different: the very same poor decisions, when made by private actors, are features of the system to be applauded, rather than regrettable bugs.

It could very well be that the DC voucher program will promote improved student achievement. The folks at Cato, though, clearly do not care about student achievement in any fundamental way. What matters to them is choice as such. Unfortunately, they go so far as to conflate customer satisfaction with quality of outcome. That's a pity, because I think choice is an important element in school reform. I just try not to mistake it for an end in itself.

The big lesson that we should take away from the Georgetown report is that families are very clearly invested in finding quality educational settings for their children, and that investment should be leveraged. But families also apparently make these decisions on the basis of the information that is most readily available to them - paid advertisements, class size statistics, etc. The problem is that the most easily-observable features of a school often do not correlate strongly with school quality (measured in terms of educational outcomes.) The trick is defining standards by which schools can be measured and presenting those measurements in a way that is useful for parents as they make choices for their students.

Part Of The Civil War In Four Minutes

Leo Casey thinks that this video is a good visual summary of the Civil War because, as he puts it,

Histories of the Civil War, especially for the high school student, tend to lose the forest of the war in the trees of particular campaigns and battles; this little video provides a context for all of those details. One can see how the first years of the war were largely a bloody stalemate, look at how the war in the West and Gettysburg broke that stalemate, understand how Sherman’s March to the Sea broke the back of the Confederacy and grasp the strategic logic of campaigns designed to split the South and the North.

Yes and no.

Yes, because it's basically true that many of the details of the Civil War - or any war, for that matter - that students are forced to learn in their history classes are essentially unimportant. There's no need to spend student time and brain power memorizing any but a few of the 10,000 or so instances of hostilities between the North and the South. What's important about the military history of the American Civil War, in a high school education, is the general phenomena that gave each side its relative advantages and the way in which those advantages were used (or underutilized) so as to lead to the result that actually occurred. Except as an indicator that he or she has spent a great deal of time studying, knowledge of the Battle of Brentwood is of no significant importance to a high school student. They call it "trivia" for a reason.

At the same time, though, the military history of the Civil War is not, in fact, "the forest of the war" at all; the military trends themselves require context. Watching this video, one has no sense as to why there was any fighting in the first place. On some level, of course, the level of violence in question is completely senseless, because in a sensible world, the war never would have happened. On another level, though, the outcome of the military conflict was going to have tremendous consequences for basically the entire world, and this video, as cool as it is, just doesn't capture that in any way.

Your Child's Education, Sponsored By Haliburton

Andrew Coulson explains why he thinks you can make an education tax credit scheme universal, such that it includes even those individuals who have no net income tax liability, without actually issuing checks from the government:

Under a scholarship donation tax credit, it is far easier for taxpayers to avoid being compelled to fund instruction that violates their convictions. Not only is making a donation under a tax credit program optional, but in the case where a taxpayer does decide to make a donation, the taxpayer chooses the scholarship granting organization that will receive the money. Because many different SGOs arise under well designed scholarship tax credit programs, it is easy for both low income families AND taxpayers to associate with ones that comport with their own values. This element of taxpayer/donor choice does not exist under either voucher or government monopoly school programs.

Non-refundable scholarship donation tax credit programs do not eliminate compulsion entirely — anyone who chooses not to participate is still taxed to pay for the status quo monopoly system — but it dramatically reduces the likelihood that anyone will be forced to pay for schooling he or she finds morally objectionable.

Yes, because it's a well-known fact that the interests and ideologies of corporations and wealthy individuals align cleanly with those of low-income families.

Thinking Seriously About Coercion

Daniel Klein at CATO and Brian Doherty at Reason complain that, in Doherty's words, "You can't force economists to think seriously about coercion." Apparently you can't get libertarians to do it either. From Andrew Coulson, as part of his on-going war with Sara Mead:

The Ed Sector’s Sara Mead made a passing comment recently that, “yes, vouchers or tax expenditures in the form of tax credits are public funding.” The problem with this statement is not just that it’s wrong in general, or even that it has repeatedly been found to be wrong with specific regard to education tax credit programs, but that its wrongness has been a matter of court record for long enough that anyone working in education policy can reasonably be expected to be aware of it.

The most notable relevant case is Kotterman v. Killian, in which opponents of Arizona’s education tax credit program challenged it on the grounds that public money was being used to pay for religious instruction. Writing for the majority, Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas A. Zlaket observed that

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “public money” is “[r]evenue received from federal, state, and local governments from taxes, fees, fines, etc.” …. As respondents note, however, no money ever enters the state’s control as a result of this tax credit. Nothing is deposited in the state treasury or other accounts under the management or possession of governmental agencies or public officials. Thus, under any common understanding of the words, we are not here dealing with “public money.”

I guess he's conceding the point about vouchers, but his counter-argument on tax credits is pretty weak sauce. What's supposed to be the difference, in terms of coercion, between the government garnishing a portion of your income upfront before cutting you a check to pay for school, and the government exempting a portion of your income from garnishment, but only on the condition that you use that exempted income to pay for school? Coulson's just bringing up the narrow issue of legal semantics, but law isn't ethics and I don't see a significant ethical objection to Mead's point.

Also, let's keep in mind that if education tax credit schemes are going to be universal, they're also going to have to be plainly redistributive. In 1999 - that's just the set of data I found most quickly - income tax filers with AGIs of $20K or less represented 35% of all filers and $16.8 billion in negative income tax liability. Millions of other filers paid less in income taxes than the cost of private school tuition (on average about $4,000 for a parochial school and upwards of $10,000 for a non-sectarian private school in 1999). Providing those people with an income tax "credit" just amounts to giving them extra money, presumably from the government's coffers. So even if Coulson was right about tax credits in general not being "public money", his distinction breaks down when we look at cases where a tax break per se wouldn't actually buy anybody an education. (These are federal tax figures; the situation is obviously different at the state level, but to the extent that the quantities of money changing hands through state or local taxation is less than at the federal level, Coulson's coercion problem becomes greater still. How many people pay enough in state income taxes - or even all state and local taxes combined - to cover the cost of a private school education?)

Update: Sara Mead has more along the same lines here, including the entertaining finding that CATO's former director of fiscal policy studies considers tax credits for companies making ethanol to be "subsidies" and "blatant corporate welfare".

Apparently none of the 4,232 black students in Tucson Unified School District was available for a photograph

Hey, notice anything funny about this picture?

It would be amusing if it weren't so true.

Defining Wonkery Down

This post from the AFT's NCLBlog reminded me of something I found vaguely annoying about The Education Wonks back when I regularly read the site. My issue is this: no actual wonkery takes place there. There's just nothing wonkish about it, no evidence that the author is, in fact, a wonk of any kind. There is a lot of snide demagoguery, but I suppose "The Snide Education Demagogue" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

An illustrative contrast is with the other "eduwonk", Andrew Rotherham. He uses, like, charts and numbers and stuff.

The Word You're Looking For Is "Cherry-Picked"

Thomas Toch and Kevin Carey complain that "it's an open secret that many of our colleges and universities aren't challenging their students academically or doing a good job of teaching them." I think the Education Sector folks overplay this particular canard in general, but the specific evidence offered in this editorial I find especially unimpressive:

In the latest findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement, about 30 percent of college students reported being assigned to read four or fewer books in their entire senior year, while nearly half (48 percent) of seniors were assigned to write no papers of 20 pages or more.

That report is here. I'm not sure what the big deal is about half of seniors not being required to write 20 page reports. Obviously, it's harder to sustain one's topical focus over 20 pages than over 2 pages, but it's not as though the great majority of college graduates go on to write lots of 20 page reports in the work force either. Besides, if you scroll down just one more page in that same report, you find that 91% of seniors were required to write at least one report of 5-19 pages in length.

For that matter, I don't quite get the big deal about the number of assigned books, either. I think if Toch and Carey had broken the numbers down by academic major, I think it would be somewhat clearer what was going on. So, for example, even though 27% of seniors were assigned 4 or fewer books, engineering majors were twice as likely to fit that description (38%) as social sciences majors (18%). It's not obvious to me that these numbers are evidence of some ominous scandal.

If the objection is just supposed to be that kids in college aren't being adequately challenged, that might very well be the case, but it's certainly not obvious to me that the NSSE report as a whole backs up that claim. Some results that go conspicuously unmentioned by Toch & Carey:

• When asked to judge the extent to which their exams had "challenged you to do your best work" on a scale of 1-7, with 7 being the most challenging, 81% of seniors answered with a 5 or higher, and very nearly half (49%) responded with a 6 or a 7.
  
  
• 66% of respondents said that over the course of their senior year they "often" or "very often" "learned something that changed the way you understand an issue or concept". Only 3% of seniors said that never happened.
  
  
• One-third had had a "culminating senior experience" like writing a thesis, and roughly another third were planning to do so.

All in all, there's just not a lot here to suggest that seniors weren't busy and challenged. So no, I don't think that Kevin Carey and Tom Toch punk American higher ed this time around. I think they do kind of a lame job, really.

Update: And way to feed the right-wing nonsense machine, guys.

An APLE A Day Keeps The Teachers Away

Via Andrew Rotherham, I see that the Center on Teacher Quality recommends, among other things, the following:

Offer incentives to teachers who want to teach in high-needs, low-performing schools, but only if they’re qualified. Limit these incentives to teachers who can demonstrate that they are effective with high-needs students and will be able to address the school’s specific learning needs. Sending a willing but unqualified or underprepared teacher to such a school could do more harm than good.

One thing I've never understood about incentives offered to teachers to work in high-needs schools is that they're almost always aimed at brand new teachers. California's APLE program, for instance, will make payments on your student loans for you for each year you spend teaching at a high-needs school. In practice, that means many enrolled students will go straight from their credential program to a high-needs school, and then leave once they've exhausted their APLE benefits (four years later).

But this is exactly backwards. Teachers make their biggest gains in effectiveness in their first 1-5 years teaching. APLE gives them a reason to stick around the high-needs schools just long enough to work through their learning curve, and then they're off to easier gigs in the suburbs. It would make significantly more sense if APLE offered some kind of loan suspension while the new teachers taught wherever they wanted for a few years, and then offered the financial incentive of loan assumption payments to teachers who spent, say, their 3rd through 6th years at a high-needs school.

Longer School Days vs. Longer School Years

Well, whattaya know, a lot of schools are trying to extend the school day, and they seem to be generally pleased with the results. (I advocated doing just that a few weeks ago.) The biggest hangup, unsurprisingly, is funding, and there's some grumbling from various interests (parents, teachers, etc.), but that's more or less inevitable in the field of education policy. The article makes it sound like the people involved are generally happy about the changes they're seeing.

That being said, I would have liked the article to distinguish a little more clearly between extending the school day and adding days to the school year, which are really two very different policy changes with very different purposes, costs, and complications. Very roughly, the primary merits of extending the school day have to do with increasing the amount of time kids, especially those in the lower income brackets, spend being supervised by adults. The educational benefits probably aren't that tremendous, but the sociological advantages are considerable. (Even the article acknowledges this in an off-hand sort of way, saying that "adding hours alone may not do much" "unless the time students are engaged in active learning — mastering academic subjects - is increased".)

Extending the school year, by contrast, has the potential to seriously reduce the amount of knowledge that students lose over their summer vacations - an amount that is currently the equivalent of over a year's worth of school by the time kids finish elementary school. Yes, that's right: kids waste about a school-year's worth of their lives because of poorly-planned vacation periods. (And people say I'm inconsiderate of kids' time!) Unfortunately, the article makes it sound like what most schools are doing is just tacking on another week or two to either end of the school year, which really doesn't do much to address the summer brain drain. What really needs to be happening is a rearrangement of the school year so that students don't have more than two weeks or so off at a time.

When Being at School isn't Being at School

Some sociologists in Ohio are advocating for "a longer school year and more after-school programs to keep children active" because kids' body-mass indexes tend to jump up over the summer. That sounds like a good reason to stretch out the school year. An even better reason, though, is the skill loss kids suffer over the summer. Kids, especially poorer kids, lose something like 2-3 months worth of education time over their summer vacations.

There's also a lot of talk about after-school programs, but it seems to me it makes more sense to just make the school day longer. Setting up a whole new system to put the kids through seems much less efficient than just adding a couple of hours to the already-existing school day. This seems especially obvious if the after-school programs in question keep the kids on the school site anyway. And much like extending the school year, making the school day longer would be especially beneficial for poorer students, who are less likely to be supervised at home in the afternoons. In any case, if you're going to keep the kids on campus and teach them stuff, that sounds an awfully lot like "school", and I think it makes sense to treat it that way.

I'm not all about locking kids up in schools, though. I'd be willing to make a few concessions to students, including putting less of an emphasis on homework and creating a vacation system similar to those offered to working adults. Actually, I imagine those would be the sorts of concessions parents would be looking for, too, if they weren't already pleased to have somebody looking after their kids while they're at work.

Not Just Not Bad For You

Via Julian Sanchez, it looks like there's not actually much evidence that playing violent video games leads to violent behavior:

According to a new study by a researcher at Texas A&M International University, studies that see a connection between video games and violent behavior usually suffer from shoddy research techniques. Dr. Christopher Ferguson studied the results of a number of recent studies linking violent video games to aggressive behavior with an eye not just to individual results, but also to overall trends in the studies as a whole.

Wait, but I thought we knew that virtual violence made players nastier and more aggressive!

Ferguson found that the connection between violence and gaming had more to do with publication bias than it did with any actual correlation. In other words, journals were more likely to publish studies that supported the hypothesis that playing violent games made a subject more prone to violent behavior.

I, for one, am not surprised, but this did remind me of an article I read a few days ago about the benefits of playing video games:

Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique, a study said Monday.

There was a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon's capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published in the February issue of Archives of Surgery.

...
It supports previous research that video games can improve "fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, visual attention, depth perception and computer competency," the study said.

The sample size involved was actually pretty small, but I've got first-hand experience using video games to help students with visual processing or sensory-motor skill disorders. It turns out that experts actually recommend video games for those purposes, and I see no obvious reason why similar sorts of benefits wouldn't be seen more generally.

What's more, one of my girlfriend's pet theories is that computer science offers a medium in which one can be a comfortable, confident learner because mistakes are neither embarrassing nor dangerous; you can always just start over if you screw up, and nobody has to be the wiser. Students are therefore more likely to take risks and push the limits of what they know. They can also look forward to immediate feedback, which is definitely gratifying. My girlfriend typically emphasizes those potential benefits of programming, but I see very similar phenomena with even the fairly primitive computer games I give my students to, say, study for geography quizzes.

None of which is to say that kids ought to be playing Grand Theft Auto at school, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that 1) it would be nice to see computers better integrated into the school day and 2) that kids deserve leisure time and there are certainly worse, less-productive ways to spend it than on video games. They could be blogging, for instance.

Where's Clarence Darrow When You Need Him?

This is an old news story, but it's starting to feel like an even older one. Last month, Frosty Hardison, a father of a high school student in a Seattle suburb, managed to get "An Inconvenient Truth" barred from his daughter's district by writing a letter accusing her teacher of telling just one side of the supposedly multi-sided issue of global warming.

As if to deliberately create an aesthetic, as well as rhetorical, parallel between the creationists and global warming deniers, chew on this tasty treat:

The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

-----

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

Uh. Uh huh. Hardison is also a patriot. Check it:

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board.

-----

"From what I've seen (of the movie) and what my husband has expressed to me, if (the movie) is going to take the approach of 'bad America, bad America,' I don't think it should be shown at all," [Frosty's wife] Gayle Hardison said. "If you're going to come in and just say America is creating the rotten ruin of the world, I don't think the video should be shown."

Scientists say that Americans, with about 5 percent of the world's population, emit about 25 percent of the globe-warming gases.

Clearly, Al Gore hates America. He's probably emboldening terrorists as we speak.

On a more substantive note, global warming deniers have taken a cue from creationists in insisting that a "balanced" presentation of a "controversial" issue be given to public school students. Why is anyone humoring these people? Why do nincompoops continue to buy into the idea that global warming, like evolution, is "just a theory"? Since when does championing diversity of opinion mean we have to let ignorance reign supreme? Why does superstition keep beating fact? Teaching global warming and evolution already is balanced; in fact, it's better than balanced: it's correct.

Subsequent to these two articles, the Federal Way school board has lifted the ban on the film. But I can't help myself in reprinting this nugget of comedy gold:

In the end, though, the board opted for an abundance of balance.

That means that "An Inconvenient Truth" may be shown only with the written permission of a principal -- and only when it is balanced by alternative views that are approved by both a principal and the superintendent of schools.

Hardison was pleased.

"I am happy they are giving the kids as much information as possible," he said.
His daughter's science teacher, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the information in the Gore documentary.

"The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,' " Walls said.

It was written 32 years ago.

Awesome.

Purity, abstience, agency, and the Woman's Burden of Virginity

In the holy name of accuracy, why does the nefarious world of abstinence-only sex education make cozy bedfellows with the equally vomit-inducing community of offensive gender stereotyping? It was documented in the Waxman Report that sex education programs that promote abstinence until marriage also "treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact." Now come more examples in some Washington state sex education curricula, specifically from a program called SHARE.

[Cally Leighton, SHARE instructor] tells the students about a class of all boys she taught last year in Kent. When asked how many of them wanted to marry virgins, "100 percent of those boys flew their hands up," says Leighton. ...

"Women and men are wired very differently," she tells the class again and again. "Men are kind of like a lightbulb. You turn a lightbulb on—ta dah!—it's on. Women are like a curling iron. You plug a curling iron in . . . it takes a while to warm up."

To illustrate the "progression of sexual expression," as it is labeled on the overhead projector, she tells an elaborate story about a hypothetical Billy Joe Bob and Mary Sue, who run through all the stages. First they meet, spend time together, hold hands, and engage in a simple kiss. Then they move into a prolonged kiss (nicknamed "prune" by SHARE because you pucker you lips together as you say the word) and French kissing (nicknamed "alfalfa" because you use your tongue to pronounce it).

At this stage, she says, Billy Joe Bob is aroused, though Mary Sue is not yet. They start petting. Now Mary Sue is aroused. The inevitable result, she says: intercourse.

Leighton then asks the class: If you've made the decision to be abstinent, at what stage do you think you should draw the line? There's a brief silence. "Prolonged kissing?" ventures one boy. "Does that seem about right?" she asks the students. She notes that her daughter used to draw the line at French kissing—until she almost got raped after doing so on a date.

There are multiple disturbing themes in this part of SHARE's instructional curriculum. This program perpetuates the notion that girls and women are naturally passive (like a slow-heating curling iron), while boys and men are innately aggressive (like a fast-heating light bulb). This leads to the idea that females are slower to arouse and, implicitly, less sexual than are males. The extension of this principle is that if women aren't supposed to be sexual then only "sluts" have sex, whereas it's acceptable for men to want sex and thus sexually active men are "normal."

This slutty female/normal male dichotomy is made explicit by SHARE when its instructor asks a classroom full of boys how many of them want to grow up and marry virgins. Naturally she would never ask a group of girls if they want to grow up and marry virgin men; it's a cultural expectation that a woman isn't supposed to care about her partner's sexual past (lest she have sexual agency in the relationship) and that, even if she did care, she'd be hard-pressed to find a man who hadn't already fulfilled his "normal" social role and had sex. Furthermore, girls are groomed to feel that their value is inextricably tied up in their sexual purity; no such burden is placed on boys.

The most troubling element of the SHARE curriculum, more troubling even than its grossly ineffective focus on abstinence, is the burden it places on girls and women to prevent sexual violence. It's shocking and nauseating that paid professionals are telling children that by choosing to French kiss a girl is inviting intercourse and even rape. That is absolutely inexcusable. At no point does the instructor suggest that boys are responsible for drawing the line during kissing or even controlling their behavior; boys are yet again being told that they have no obligation to prevent sexual assault, except instead of hearing just from their uncles and cable TV, now they're hearing it in their classroom.

You Do the Math

My sweet old grandma (as opposed to my bipolar Vicidan-popping grandma) once said, "I think most people are better than average looking!" Hearing this, even at the age of six, I knew her math was off. But that's because I'm of siginificantly above average intelligence.

I hear a lot of folks complaining that only half of people have an IQ above 100, implying that our species is facing an epidemic that warrants correction. Unfortunately, we can't pull more people above the 100 mark if, by definition, 100 marks the median IQ, and if, by definition, the median marks the 50th percentile rank. Try as we may, half of all people will always below the median of intelligence (and looks, and dancing ability, and fitness, and income, and "Futurama" fast-action recall quoting ability).

Of course when people suggest life would be better if more people had IQs above 100, they don't literally expect the basic principles of statistics to bend to their will. Instead, they're imagining a utopia of an absolute, rather than relative, IQ jump within the population. These critics are treating IQ like fixed-value dollars, like when you see charts comparing skilled labor wages from 1890 to 1990, and in the bottom there's a little note that says "All figures in 1990 dollars." Ideally, the average IQ would go up in fixed "2007 IQ dollars."

But, not surprisingly, the world average IQ is continually going up in fixed 2007 IQ dollars! It's called the Flynn Effect, and its causes are highly logical. It's like inflation for the population's brain. You can tell your kids, "Back when I took the IQ test, a 148 actually meant something. You could take the SAT, solve one of those Sudoku puzzles, buy a pop, and still have 38 IQ points left over to put toward your M.A."

I don't get too worked up when folks talk about IQ in casual terms, either complaining about how stupid everyone is or about how stupid everyone isn't. I do get worked up, however, when the quest for higher fixed-value scores on intelligence measurements negatively affects policy or prompt society to dismiss the value of entire groups of citizens. The IQ test is a severely flawed measurement of individuals' intelligence--it's riddled with cultural biases that favor wealthy white males--and neither the IQ test nor any other single measurement tool should sway policy.

This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal disappointed me in its conclusions. The author, unlike many, displays a proper understanding of the math behind IQ distribution (what a relief!), but he persists in treating IQs as a reliable measurement of individuals' base educational potential:

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

He ultimately falls for the abysmal "you're poor because you're dumb" argument so popular among many conservatives.

It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

If this were true, as fixed-value IQs increased, fixed-value wealth would also increase, which simply isn't happening. We're damned to live in a world where, for any given population, half of all members will sit below the median level of wealth, just as they do for intelligence. And even my sweet old grandma isn't stupid enough to say that being dumb makes you poor.

A Tremendous What?

Given that I've knocked Right on the Left Coast for ranting rather than arguing in the past, I think it's only fair to mention that I think this is basically right.

It turns out that the teacher who also happens to paint stuff with his butt in his spare time has been fired. As Darren says, "when doing something entirely legal, completely outside of school, becomes a cause to fire a teacher, we've gone too far." One wonders why we shouldn't just outlaw butt painting altogether.

Darren inexplicably fails, however, to mention this quote, from the teacher's attorney:

Chesterfield [County public schools] lost a tremendous asset today.

Butt it's art!

The Education Wonks are showing their prudish side:

TipWonk KauiMark has pointed us to the incredible story of Virginia art teacher Stephen Murmer. It seems as though Mr. Murmer has been suspended from his classroom because of his somewhat...er...ah.. peculiar habit of painting pictures with his backside and/or his genitals. (We didn't make this up---- honest!) Of course it goes without saying that the American Civil Liberties Union couldn't wait to get itself involved.

Reading that, you'd think Murmer was dropping his drawers in the classroom. (Crazy ACLU!) But as they say, always follow the link:

To hear the students tell it, Stephen Murmer is a fun, popular art teacher who is always quick to crack a joke. But there is another side to Murmer...Outside of class and under an alter ego, the self-proclaimed "butt-printing artist" creates floral and abstract art by plastering his posterior and genitals with paint and pressing them against canvas. His cheeky creations sell for hundreds of dollars.

This has not gone over well with Chesterfield County school officials, who placed Murmer on administrative leave from his job at Monacan High School.

...

Murmer went to great lengths to keep his work life separate from his activities as an artist, said ACLU executive director Kent Willis. As a butt-printing artist, he goes by the name "Stan Murmur," and appears in disguise in photographs and videos promoting his art.

"As a public employee, he has constitutional rights, and he certainly has the right to engage in private legal activities protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution," Willis said.

The students seem to agree. As do I. The school district wants to say that Murmer is "expected to set an example for students through their personal conduct" and "that teachers, like parents, are role models." All of which is correct, and none of which provides a reason to kick Murmer out of the classroom. Unless Virginia has some law against painting with your butt that I don't know about, it's not obvious what's supposed to be the poor example being set. Are we expected to worry that a cohort of kids will grow up to be butt painters?

I don't understand old people.