Jeb Bush's Florida Miracle

Here are two quotes from that WashPost article that I found informative:

In his first term, most of Jeb Bush’s efforts in education came in three areas: test-based accountability, private-school vouchers, and support for improved reading instruction. In 1999, Bush signed legislation that required annual testing of all children in grades 3-10, tied test scores to annual “A” through “F” labels assigned to local public and charter schools, and required retention of children in third grade if they did not meet critical scores in the state reading test or provide other evidence of reading skill. In the same year, the Florida legislature created two voucher programs, one tied to the state labeling of local public schools and the other available to children with disabilities. Bush also created the Florida Center for Reading Research in 1999, which used both state and federal funding to support classroom teachers and reading coaches.

 and this one:

Governor Bush and his allies generally point to fourth-grade reading as the most important story, and that is where one can see large increases in average scale scores, not only across cohorts of fourth-grade students but in comparison with the national sample of fourth-grade students. Between 1998 and 2013, Florida’s fourth graders rose from being quite a bit below the national average on the NAEP testing program to being well above the national average. You can quibble with testing samples and comparison issues, but this is an unambiguous good.

To which I say, "Really?"

Let me pull out one phrase from that first paragraph. "and required retention of children in third grade if they did not meet critical scores in the state reading test".

I sure can quibble with testing samples, especially when you throw a whopper of a lipstick-covered pig out there and pretend it's a gold-plated truffle.

I am not surprised that his fourth-grade scores rose after he retained kids in third grade if they weren't up to snuff. Every kid at that age will do better with one more year of reading training (and that FCRR was definitely a good idea) and one more year of maturity. Remember that, too, many of these retained kids were probably on the young side of the cut-off to enter first grade.

Later in the article, the researcher, Sherman Dorn, admits, "NAEP reading scores for Florida eighth graders slowly converged to the national average, with large bounces up and down across the years."

What bothers me is this line:

"The bottom line: Bush is correct that Florida’s children benefited from his time in office if children graduated high school at the end of fourth grade, and only evidence of general reading skills mattered. For most other independent test-score measures, the picture is less impressive."

 "Benefited from his time in office." And yet he immediately qualified it. Then there was this Q & A:

Q) So what was responsible for the fourth-grade rise in reading?
A) The most likely explanation is a combination of reading coaches hired in the boom years in Florida and the creation of the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR)."

To me, the evidence points to retention as a much larger factor. To the credit of the article author, she does add an important caveat in the last paragraph:

An important caveat: Looking at achievement gaps in NAEP and changes in those gaps is harder than you might think because some category definitions change, the demographics of children change (a higher proportion of children are eligible for free and reduced lunches than in the late 1990s), and once you look at differences in scores (gaps) and changes in those differences, the standard errors of those measures expand from the standard errors in the mean scale scores. The numbers above are far less precise than one might assume; for example, while the changes in achievement gaps by lunch-program eligibility and disability status are meaningful, take the specific numbers with more than a few grains of salt.

Especially when the demographics change by "force", eliminating all of those below a 3rd grade cut-off point.

Here are a couple of graphs from the article:

Here you see the immediate effect of retention policies and the long-term effect of the FCRR.

Math scores, grade 8

After all is said and done, the change in teacher-training and the change in retention rules ... 12th graders (18year-olds) are pretty much the same as they ever were.

How did that slip in there?

Data Point #934 Showing Why Teacher Education is Problematic

I was perusing the blog feed and I come across my favorite source for "interesting" teacher education issues. Okay, most of what he writes seems flawed, but at least he's advocating to "Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math", but I digress.

Click to enlarge that image.

It's measures of central tendency from a stack of pennies. How far down the list of values can you get before you reach an inconsistency in the numbers?

How is this a sample of what you, as a real math teacher, would want to show the world as exemplar of your students' work? Why would this page be the one that you put out to the world ... unless you were deliberately showing how you gave feedback, a la @mpersham's mathmistakes.org.

The project itself is a fine one ... I did the same thing when learning to use Fathom, and I plan on using it with my class this year.  But, really, if showing teachers "cool" or useful projects, wouldn't you want to display ones that are at least mostly (>50%) correct?

While this page would be great to show the relationship between sample statistics and population statistics, it's not at all clear to me whether our blogger noticed any of the problems.

Here is the population, if anyone is interested:

The trouble with False positives.

From Slahdot:
"In many ways finding the small amount of terrorists within the United States is like screening a population of people for a rare disease. A physician explains why collecting excessive data is actually dangerous. Each time a test is run, the number of people incorrectly identified quickly dwarfs the correct matches. Just like in medicine, being incorrectly labelled has serious consequences."

Okay, Students. This is one place you will have to use this in real life.

Cause of Death Statistics

Click to See Full-Size.

from: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/02/daily-chart-7

Research in Education - Dan Willingham

I really like the way he thinks.

Samples must be numerically significant or else conclusions are worthless.

Parents Against Tired Truckers is losing it's religion over the results of a new study on an experiment up here in Vermont. Just as in education, small sample sizes and incomplete data are being misunderstood and misrepresented to further a viewpoint that may do more harm than good. PATT has it's heart in the right place, but it's brains are sorely lacking.

Vermont asked the Feds to study whether allowing 100,000 lb rigs on major highways would be more dangerous than having them travel the back roads.

The study results came out. PATT shouted

The Trucking Industry Is Wrong on the Maine and Vermont 100,000 lb. Truck Pilot Program – DEAD Wrong 

Wow. That must be some study. "Dead wrong" isn't mincing words.

" .. the Truck Safety Coalition (TSC) released startling information revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sent to the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans)."

Impressive. "Startling", you say? Took a FOIA request, huh? I must read further. "Catastrohic results" "People needlessly died." Damn.

The number is SO BIG.

Documents show that during the 100,000 lb. truck pilot project in 2010, Vermont’s commercial motor vehicle fatal crash rate tripled from .49 fatal crashes per 100 million miles traveled in 2009 to 1.44 fatal crashes (“Vermont Truck Interstate Pilot Study- Report to Congress (State of Vermont Version for Review) – Summary Report (Draft)” prepared for FHWA by Cambridge Systematics, Inc, hereinafter “Vermont Report”).

What does that mean Regis? The Death rate tripled.  Holy Batman, mackerel.  They're quoting Government documents and it sounds so official.

Well, actually, it doesn't mean much at all. You see, Vermont had one death involving trucks on its roads in 2009 and three in 2010. Yeah, the death rate "tripled" but you need to have a bigger sample size before you can claim that trucks are making things more dangerous.

You also need to look at the reality of those crashes. In the one crash, two trucks and a car were involved in an accident that was blamed on icy roads and bad conditions. One of the truck drivers and the car's driver were killed. In the other accident, the car (probably drunk) crossed the 50-foot median and hit the truck head-on. Again, hardly the fault of the truck driver.

As in education, there's always some fool trumpeting results based on small sample sizes and assuming the study will scale up. Remember when Bill Gates spent nearly a billion dollars to create the Small Schools Initiative? The smaller schools that did better than the large public schools were showcased until the next year when the same school would do worse, at which point the deformers would shout about some other school which HAD done well that year. Variation of the small groups, not the inevitable superiority of the charter school, small-school, voucher school, Catholic School, whatever.

To give you another example, consider Daisuke Matsusaka (RedSox). He had four starts. Two were terrible and then two were decent. Can we say that trend is positive? Yes, but I'm not giving him a contract based on that.

Still another comes from here:
Last week I tossed a coin a hundred times. 49 heads. Then I changed into a red t-shirt and tossed the same coin another hundred times. 51 heads. From this, I conclude that wearing a red shirt gives a 4.1% increase in conversion in throwing heads.

Pretty foolish.  Besides, everyone knows that wearing a red shirt is tantamount to a death sentence anyway, so I'm not sure what can be made from this "study" either.

Ray Allen wins again.

Funny guys, those Boston Celtics. Winning on an awesome Ray Allen shot and immense Shaquille O'Neal shoulders.

And yes, that tweet makes total sense.

BTW,
Reggie Miller: 2560 three-pointers.
Ray Allen: 2533 three-pointers. 13-21 shooting threes for the last five games. When's the record gonna be?
Data below the jump.

Driving While Impaired.

Not to mention how ridiculous you look.

It's funny (meh) what the reality is:

Several studies, such as a 2005 paper in the British Medical Journal, have found that talking on a cell phone, even with a hands-free device, causes more driver impairment than a 0.08 BAC. A 2001 American Automobile Association study found several other in-car distractions that also caused more impairment, including eating, adjusting a radio or CD player, and having kids in the backseat.
h/t - Reason magazine

And then there is having a baby in the front seat, safely protecting you from a collision with the steering wheel and the airbag. Of course the airbag will kill your kid when it impacts his face at >100 mph. (There's the equivalent of three shotgun shell loads inside it to make it inflate fast enough.)  If it doesn't inflate fast enough, then your body will crush your child through the steering wheel. Of course, that's not something that would EVER happen to our BrittBritt.

You can't fix stupid.

The Further You Extrapolate, the Sillier You Look

I'm always bemused by graphs that try to extrapolate too far.  Case in point at right (found by Darren).  The numbers previous to today are obviously known well but the future is a little cloudier.  Nevertheless, this graph claims to see a trend going rather upward, even though the trend for the next few years is downward.

Like the "population bomb" scare stories of the recent past, this one is just silly.

Why silly? Because it assumes that "given no change in policy, the numbers will do this."

Given no change? This is America.  We can't stop changing. The one thing that will never happen is steady state.  Somebody will introduce a bill to change this or that and your whole projection becomes worthless ... as if it meant much to begin with. We adapt in this country.  When the deficits were spiraling out of control under Reagan/Bush I, the country adapted, we nearly balanced the budget and we were starting to work on the debt.  Clinton's policies were less of a driver than the tech boom but, c'est la guerre. I'm frankly surprised that the National Review published it because it shows the sharpest drop under Obama's second term.


I had to tweak Darren, since he's a staunch conservative:

"Come on. Extrapolating a possibly exponential curve out to 2082? You really shouldn't, as a math teacher, have let that go without some comment. 

But I'll play along ... let's read the graph. The percentage surges upward in 1980-1984 when Reagan was doing those enormous deficit budgets -- to drive the Russians to bankruptcy, yes, but it still increases.

Then the economy recovered and those percentages dropped under Clinton (not that he was totally responsible for that, but it does make a good way to tweak conservatives!).  Likewise, the percentages rises under GWB, hits a peak in 2010 under Obama, and then shows a tremendous downward slope under the remaining years of Obama's term (and into his next?). Then, in 2016 (when the Republican presumably gets elected), the percentage starts to climb again.

I'm not sure that's exactly what you had in mind."

Darren responded later ...

"It's when the health care costs really start to kick in. Of course extrapolations that far out are silly, which is one of the reasons why I love the global warmers so much. Still, I don't see anyone arguing that our interest payments are going to go *down* any time soon."

No. But why is that graph any less ridiculous? The spending by Government is totally under the control of the Legislature and can be adjusted yearly as the political winds blow. If they wanted to, the Afgan war could cease in days, the bailouts could stop, the contracts could be ended and penalties paid.

Global warming isn't quite up to a vote by the House Ways and Means Committee. Natural processes don't stop on a whim.

I don't particularly care about the gloom and doom part of the debate anyway, so I'm probably not a good person to argue this with. I don't care about global climate as such, but I do care about MY air. If NYCity goes under water, it'd be turned into a modern Venice pretty quickly and Mankind would adapt. Florida would build dikes like Holland and Mankind would adapt. Ideal croplands would be found further north and, well, you get the idea.

One-percent of a Standard Deviation

... is quite a bit smaller than a one-percent increase. In fact, 1% of a standard deviation is pretty damned small. It seems somebody needs a Statistics course:

Public schools located near private schools increased reading and math scores more than public schools that had little competition.

Huge, I tells ya.

For every 1.1 miles closer to the nearest private school, public school math and reading performance increases by 1.5 percent of a standard deviation in the first year following the announcement of the scholarship program. Likewise, having 12 additional private schools nearby boosts public school test scores by almost 3 percent of a standard deviation. The presence of two additional types of private schools nearby raises test scores by about 2 percent of a standard deviation. Finally, an increase of one standard deviation in the concentration of private schools nearby is associated with an increase of about 1 percent of a standard deviation in test scores.

Test scores rose more for elementary and middle schools than for high schools, perhaps because the scholarship made K-8 private schools affordable but didn’t cover as much of the tuition at private high schools.

Hummmm ...

Did the scores of the private schools drop at the same time as the public school rose?  If the public school scores rose, was it because the parents of weaker kids took the money and ran? Was it because Florida is investing heavily in on-line learning and told certain kids that their behavior was unacceptable IN school so they had to switch to the private school or take courses online? We'll never know but this is an equally valid interpretation of the facts as presented.

I find the "1.5 percent of SD per mile" statistic interesting but pretty meaningless. That's not a standard deviation, it's one-one hundredth of a standard deviation. That's the equivalent of SAT scores rising 1 point. Read the collegeboard's take on significance.

Just because you can see something in your educational microscope doesn't mean there's anything worth looking at.
The quote also says that this happens only in the first year following the announcement. So the average SAT scores went up about 1 pt.
Once.

Here are Florida's average SAT scores for the last couple years. Notice the yearly fluctuations larger than that touted by the article. Note, the standard deviation for SAT scores is typically 100 - 110 points. So 1.5% of a standard deviation would be 1.5 points.

The timeline is also interesting. The idea that the mere announcement of a private school makes a difference in the first year (but only in the first year) indicates that it's got nothing to do with the education provided since it takes some time for a kid to get an education. Statistically insignificant.

I'd be looking for information on who paid for this study and who has the most to gain by falsely trumpeting miniscule gains and falsely attributing them to the glorious private schools.

Polls may be hitting a wall.

Slashdot has a thought:

"The 'cellphone effect.' In 2003, just 3.2% of households were cell-only, while in the 2010 election one-quarter of American adults have ditched their landlines and rely exclusively on their mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don't call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied."

This will make the "science" of polling even more suspect.  It's a factor I hadn't really considered until now, but everyone that I know who has dropped their landline for a cell-only life is definitely in the Democratic profile. 

On the other hand, those people most likely to skip voting entirely are also in the exact same demographic.

TFA Studies Shouldn't Lie or Obfuscate

Joanne has a short piece on ‘Study laundering’ on TFA and I'll quote a few things here. The gist is that Studies on TFA are cherry-picking data to promote a predetermined viewpoint ... ya think?

I'm no fan of TFA in that I don't like the overall attitude of "I'm so incredible because I went to HA-VAAD and therefore everyone at one of those poor, low class schools - public schools, mind you - should welcome me in my magnificence and install me in a classroom of my choosing. The five-week summer training session is all I need to become a teacher, whether math or science or social studies - it doesn't matter because I'm so wonderful. I can even change from a math teacher to a social studies teacher at will."

I'm sure that there are some good teachers in the making at TFA. But many don't want to be teachers in the long run. They just want a temporary job and to feel good about themselves for a while before they take a real job in their chosen profession. What's not good about that is that an experienced veteran who is planning on staying, or someone who wants to be a teacher long-term, is moved aside for the temp. That's not good for the long-term health of a system.

Anyway, back to the study.

“Weaponized” education research and “study laundering” are illustrated by a Great Lakes Center study knocking Teach for America for high turnover and “mixed” performance, writes Eduwonk. Half of TFA teachers leave after two years and 80 percent leave after three, the study says. However, the researchers use data from studies that conflate TFA teachers who leave their original school placement after two years with those who leave the teaching profession, Eduwonk charges. A 2008 Harvard study (pdf), found that 61 percent of TFA teachers stay in teaching beyond the two-year commitment.

Definitions of terms are so important, aren't they? That conflation might be appropriate if the study noted it. Of course, TFA itself says: "These teachers, called corps members, commit to teach for two years in one of 39 urban and rural regions across the country." It's not like the study hasn't taken TFA at its word but it should have been more specific.

Teach For America surveys its alumni regularly and the most recent survey found that 65 percent of Teacher For America’s 20,000 alumni remain in education, with 32 percent continuing as teachers. And remember, that’s a survey of alums going back almost two decades now so that one in three figure should be viewed in that context as well as the larger context of TFA’s mission.

So 65 percent remain in teaching after two years but only half of those as teachers? Sounds like the original press release had the information correct and TFA is blustering its own spin. This is not a point in their favor.

Teacher churn is bad for a school, despite the supposed "wonderfulness of a TFA teacher." Teachers don't "Go bad" in the last few minutes of the school year. Those 70 percent of TFA people who didn't continue after 2 years were probably very clear about their desires soon after starting year 2 and the students knew it. This is a bad situation all around as the TFA are just filling out their time - I've never seen a lame duck teacher who was successful.

Then we look at the 32% - how long did they last? According to the study, a third of this later group left after the third year - who are these? Maybe only those TFAs who were unable to get a real job and just hung on for another year - bad news. I can't think those schools are well served by these long-term subs. It takes at least two years to get your feet under you and get your classes "right."

On the performance issue, studies that use rigorous methodology find that “Teach For America teachers perform as well or better than other teachers, not only emergency certified teachers but traditionally trained ones and veterans,” Eduwonk writes, including lots of link to research studies. The results are not mixed.

Debatable. I'd want to delve more deeply before I took a different set of studies as gospel. Wouldn't you? Which performance measures are they talking about? The ones that nobody can find any merit for? Probably just a test score comparison between a temp teacher or unlicensed one and the TFA. Hardly telling.

How about this little graphic. Talk about playing with statistics and implied information. Is it 10% of the 4510 are Black (450) and therefore 12% of the group is Asian, or is it that Blacks are 10% of the 33% (150)? Is a small percentage of blacks a problem because TFA is staffing black schools?  I figure it's written this way so that we infer that 33% are people of color and then add 10% Black and 8.5% Latino to get 52% minority?  Who's fudging the definitions now?

Those pesky nongraduating basketball players

I'm sure you've all read that Arne Duncan wants to prevent schools from joining the NCAA Basketball tournament if they don't graduate enough of their players.

I had a long rant thing going about data selection and narrow-minded politicians, coupled with a healthy dose of "Why hold black players to different standards than black non-players" and "What would you do about the players who don't want to graduate from college. What if they really want to be in the NBA but the NBA won't allow them to join, which has to be discrimination of some kind because white and Asian tennis players and golfers join their professional leagues at 16 and no one says a word."

But I decided that I'd just show these two graphs and ask Arne to explain the obvious problems:

Statewide College Graduation Rates from IPEDS Graduation Rate Survey

Humm, those seem to be aligning with red-state, blue-state demographics, too. Is that the real goal here? Or is Arne just a DUKE / Vermont fan like me? He wants to see all their competition eliminated by fiat instead of by a last-second three? You think Murray State, Northern Iowa and St. Mary's wanted anything less than the best competition, Arne? Get out of the way, Dude. Your mouth and that hole-in-the ground are getting confused again.

Yes, thank you, my bracket is getting CREAMED!
ESPN: 340 points * PCT(%)42.0% * RNK 2,773,415
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!

Monday Morning Update:
ESPN: 380 points * PCT(%)55.4% * RNK 2,132,140

Credit Scores and Correlations, with a little Politics

Yahoo News has a story about loans and credit scores. It starts with the typical hook of misstating the case and then appeal to pity:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some homeowners who sign up for the government's mortgage assistance program are getting a nasty surprise: Lower credit scores. For borrowers who are making their payments on time but are on the verge of default, the Obama administration's loan modification program can reduce their credit score as much as 100 points. That makes it harder to get a loan and can present a problem when applying for a new job. Housing counselors say it's unfair, especially because the news often comes as a surprise to homeowners.

Doesn't anyone notice that the whole idea of credit score is Character, Capital, Capacity? If you need the credit modification, you are implying that you are having trouble paying off your current obligations. If so, why would you expect that your credit score wouldn't reflect that? If your capacity isn't up to your current loans, why is anyone surprised that the credit rating drops to reflect that and make it harder for you to borrow even more?

Here's the "correlation does not imply causation" part:

"Why should people's credit be hurt even worse when they're trying to do the right thing?" said Eileen Anderson,

And many homeowners are angry that a program designed to help carries such a penalty, said Kathy Conley. "It's a feeling of being duped,"

Interesting how the President's program is blamed for the drop, not the credit agencies who change the score or the homeowner whose financial situation does not warrant a high credit rating.

Dude wanted a car.

"[he] had to apply for the loan. He was shocked to learn that, after signing up for the Obama plan, he was denied. "I should have been told," that this might happen, Owens said. "Without credit, you can't do a whole lot in life."

Dude is a moron.

Colleges makes kids Liberal apparently.

The Chronicle quotes a study that college makes students more liberal but not smarter about civics.

I have so many questions, starting with basic methodology, below the fold:

Polls, Damned Polls and Statistics.

From NYCeducator, who got it from Miss Cellania, who got it from PHDComics.com.

which brings to mind this gem from The Register

Since I'm in that sort of mood, I note that Pols (politicians) and Polls (the surveys) always seem to be liars of convenience. Go figure.

Juxtaposition, Graphics, Lying Like a Rug

It's amazing what you can do with statistics. ("Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.") Here's a sample:



Funny how the addition of a graph makes a point stronger, while not necessarily making anything clearer or more correct.

The problem with this graph is its simplicity - those are not the only pertinent bits of information at play.

Teachers often can be incredibly one-sided and have too much effect on students by asking questions that require agreement with a false premise before answering. I have heard variations of all of these questions as I have passed by open classroom doors ...

• Did Clinton cause that improvement on his own or did the computer age have more of an effect on the economy?
• Did Bush really destroy the economy or were these events out of his control?
• Did Bush know that his failures, including "Mission Accomplished", would come back to haunt him and his legacy?
• What should Bush have done differently in the last six months of his Presidency?
• Why didn't Bush do something while the economy imploded?
  
• Is it a coincidence that Democrats have grown the economy while Republicans have not?
• Since Democrats grow the economy,as seen in the graph above, why shouldn't we pass Health Care reform and save the lives of those less fortunate?

Why is this okay? Is it just because too many people are innumerate (to use Paulos's word for it) that this kind of thing is promoted and passed on?

Just sayin'.

Percentage or Points?

This may seem like a minor point, but the implications are not. I have to give the people credit for using the phrase "12% drop" correctly but it doesn't excuse the conclusion.

Sandra Stotsky and Ze'ev Wurman say

"Yet, is it really the case that low-performing high school students would drop out if high school diploma requirements were ratcheted up? That doesn't seem to be the case in Massachusetts, which in 2008 reduced its dropout rate by 12% from the previous year."

You figure this to be an amazing drop worthy of Gates money. Then you follow the link and find that the dropout rate in Massachusetts went from 3.8% to 3.4%. Not only that, but this "proof" of their theory is further shaken by the clauses supplied -- a new way of counting who is which class, new definitions, new SIS system. This is another case of the random lucky bounce being taken as an incontrovertible law of nature that happens to be in your favor ... until the next unlucky bounce demands a new law of nature in your favor.

Did the ratcheting up cause the drop? Can't say. Correlation with two data points is not quite good enough to show cause.

Vaccines do not cause autism.

I'm not a fan of those such as Jenny McCarthy who run around trying to scare people into forsaking vaccines and known cures in favor of holistic medicine and other proven-to-be-pointless non-working treatments. The polio vaccine has saved countless children but Jenny is certain that it caused autism in her child so she campaigns against it. Not that she has any scientific evidence for that, of course. Not that she doesn't constantly rail against "scientific evidence" as if repeating the words will somehow turn them into blasphemy.

“I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it's their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They're making a product that's shit. If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.”
Jenny McCarthy in Time Magazine, April 2009

Learn science, people. Do proper research. Trust logic.

I have had students tell me that the government is just trying to make money off the swine flu vaccine, that it'll just make you sick, that it'll cause all kinds of things. Then, of course, they get in a car and drive like idiots so I'm not terribly surprised that they can't take this seriously. At least the vast majority of the students in our school have gotten the shot a couple weeks ago.

Preventable Illnesses	Preventable Deaths

You can keep up to date with the Jenny McCarthy Body Count.

You can check this data at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Reports, if you trust those **scientists**

Of Valedictorians and Significant Figures.

Not to change the topic, but why is education a horse-race? How can averages be any real measurement of or comparison between two students, when they are taking different courses from different teachers at (probably) different levels of difficulty?

I have always been at schools with valedictorians chosen after semester 7 and I HATE it. The only thing worse would be if we had chosen them after 8 semesters because then the two or three kids would be driven batty for their entire HS careers rather than for most of it.

We're not measuring them in a vacuum. We're measuring availability of a GOOD algebra in the eighth grade, not the BS that most eighth grade teachers are pawning off on their kids.

We're measuring the amount of constant worry about grades, rather than a more measured balance between doing your best and trying a course that might not be a slam-dunk but might be interesting or challenging.

We're measuring placement, too. My classes tend to be different from the guy across the hall. I have a different homework policy. He grades homework but I don't. His tests were hand-written for many years. I always typed. For some, this makes a difference. We grade differently as well. I use an overhead, he uses a blackboard.

We're measuring placement - will the schedule allow you to take AP English and AP Biology at the same time? Is your French 4 conflicting with your AP Physics? Why are you taking AP courses anyway (for the percentage push or for the knowledge and enjoyment)

We're measuring their lives. The kids who win are rarely the three-sport athlete-scholar, even though that kid at #8 on the list is far superior in almost any measure except GPA. Who are we rewarding? The kid who drops out of nearly everything but the academic grind.

From the first day they show up in the high school, their entire focus is on grubbing points so they can be #1 four years later. They choose courses based on whether it "helps" their average, not whether it is something they're interested in. Every test is an exercise in brown-nosing.

A couple of years ago I had two students who were on the "track". One took pre-calc as a sophomore and got a 97, the other took it as a junior and got a 96. The difference between the two grades could have been as little as 5 points on the final exam and rounding by GradeQuick. They finished within 0.003 points of one another. All other courses being equal (as silly as that statement is) means that the difference in difficulty between two of my finals might have been all that distinguished one from the other. One got the UVM full scholarship, the other didn't. Guess which one wanted to go to UVM. You're right, the other one. The valedictorian wanted to go to RPI and didn't use the money. #2 needed the money badly, but didn't get it. Interestingly, this scenario is repeated in one of the comments on Scheiss Weekly, here. It happens far too often to be tolerated.

In engineering and science, we would deride this as excessive use of accuracy pretending to be significant figures. Only in education can we imagine that we can judge that accurately with numbers that fluctuate constantly.

The center circle in a soccer field may 10 yards radius but we drew the line with a spray can tied to a string that wound around the center post and shortened it and we were walking around hunched over and weaving back and forth a bit. You can't say the area is 314.15926535897 yds² and pretend you know it to one-hundred billionth of a square yard just because there's a π key is on your calculator. GradeQuick does the same kind of thing. The precision is fantasy.

When you look at your teachers' grades, as I have, you find that grade inflation is rampant, but not consistent. There are far more 60s, 61s, 62s than there are 67s, 68s. Why? Because of the "bump". Inconsistency is a bitch if you are trying to be ultra-precise. The same happens at the top end. 95s get pushed to 99s or 100s by the "curve." Wherever your school has cut-offs, you find this shifting occurring. Pass-fail, eligibility minimums, honor-roll minimums, NHS reqs, whatever. The distribution is NOT correct. The dips below the cut-off points and the bumps above them are noticeable, if you look. Of course, guidance would never allow you to look if you ever let them know what was going on.

Try searching for correlations between SAT scores and grades in math - there's a real eye-opener in many cases. Are those As really As? Are those top kids really that good? When the kid gets an A in math all the way up to Calculus, but can only get 480 in 3 tries at the SAT, do you still have the same confidence in your grading system, it's fairness and your valedictorian?

There are other kids also making 100s, not because they are perfect and can solve anything in the course but because they are in a class that they outshine and the teacher can't give 105s. If you put them in with their peers, they might only get a 97. If you put them in the class that would be most beneficial, they might get a B, but would work their butts off and really learn everything trying to keep up. Why should placement be a part of the kid's worth?

Why should an IEP kid who gets 100s all time be the valedictorian if she cannot write a paragraph-long speech, or deliver it? (True story. The school quickly changed its mind. Ruined at least 7 rants for this blog.)

We need a change here, people.

You can pretend that a photo-finish is appropriate but it isn't. It certainly isn't if you consider all the ways in which parents and school can affect the situation out of the control of the kid. Think of all the shifting around that I've mentioned and you can come up with a bunch more.

How can we say that Alphonse is better than Gaston?

I'm in favor of identifying the "bunch" at the top and having them all participate - call it the TRUE Honor Society.

Having just one may be more satisfying to the ONE, but it's not education and it isn't real.

Just sayin'.