Since the post never came back (much less with "citations galore"), here's a mirror.

I don't suppose anyone saved the original version of this before it was edited?

What would be the point of the hoax?

Ha ha, people believed a story about a fucked up bureaucracy! How foolish they are! Bureaucracies are the perfect will of God here on earth!

A fictional account of a screwed up bureaucracy, or a screwed up school district, would hardly prove that they don't exist.

The post seemed a little strange at some points, and a little like spam for "bayesian predictive models for mathematics placement". Maybe some company has a patent on that?

Whatever. Hoax or no hoax, lots of good stories and good times.

Currently, my firm and its allies are trying to push the government into forcing the schools to use a Bayesian prediction model, in which you feed an individual student's test scores for the past 5 years and it spits out their probability of success in the advanced classes, and you keep putting the students with the highest probability of success in the top classes until you run out of teachers.

This is good, and I hope that such models are implemented. However, when I hear the phrase "problems in education," these sorts of placement problems are not what comes to mind first.

Having personally taught at a massively failing inner city high school for several years (where only 2% of students were white, and only 10% met state goals for education), the few "advanced classes" that my school offered were, indeed, filled by students who had achieved top scores in a variety of metrics (top, as compared to the other students at the school). I taught such an advanced class, as well as several general placement classes. The administration assigned students to each class without using a Bayesian model, but I honestly don't think the resulting student distributions would have changed much if they had used one.

The problem was never making sure that the students with the highest probability of success made it into the advanced classes; my administration, for whatever its other failings, had mostly solved that one. The consuming, stultifying problem was that in my advanced 10th grade classes, only a few of my students could read even at an 8th grade level. The situation was even worse in my general classes, where most students read at a 6th grade level.

I saw an example of exactly this today from an independent sports program that partnered with the county public schools, repeating that the outcome measure was that they "provided this opportunity"; that "meetings were held"; that "students received flyers", etc. etc.

Now I understand that which confused me thanks to this article. Kudos!

I live in Arkansas (you may remember us as the state that threw a fit over desegregation roughly a Jesus-lifetime ago), in a region that is pretty economically strong but still has distinct socioeconomic classes. I'm pretty confident that this post describes reality pretty well, based on 1, my direct observations as a student, 2, what I've heard from other students, past and present, and 3, what I've heard from teachers and principles, retired and practicing.

[edit] To be more clear, I think there's almost certainly a county or several in the United States where the article could apply, but not necessarily a majority. Whether or not the OP is being completely honest, on the other hand, I don't know (the username seems designed with emotional impact in mind, which is rarely a good sign).[/edit]

However, this process yields sheer lunacy, mostly because of the ridiculous ineptitude of every single person involved. ... she was flabbergasted, and explained that the evaluators job was to collude with the grant proposal submitter...

I think you're mistaken, and that most of the people involved in this process are, in fact, acting quite rationally and efficiently. They are merely solving a different problem. Your goal is to improve education; their goal is to channel as much money as possible into the pockets of everyone involved. The system you describe works quite well for that purpose.

You could argue that such a system is immoral, but it is eminently rational (at least in the short term), since it provides a way to acquire significant resources at very low risk. This is better than, for example, betting on the stock market or creating a startup.

I wish I had computer acess to write out a longer reply to this, for now see educationrealists response and his blog in general. I was torn wether to upvote or downvote the article as I don't know whether it was exploiting or exposing key weaknesses of community rationality here.

Did some research. The claim that the proposals are poorly written leaps out at me as immediately true. Here's a website with successful grant applications, to be used as models to write them:

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/samples_index.htm

This is the first grant I pulled up (it's not the first, but it -was- the first I felt competent to evaluate, concerning primarily technology):

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/grantkay.pdf

First, the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation leap out at me immediately. Second, the claim in the post that grant proposals are written to describe what they're doing, rather than what they're intending to achieve, holds up, for this grant at least.

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/MH%20grant.pdf

This proposal is the best-written I encountered. It describes the specific problems it intends to resolve and the specific solutions it intends to use. Unfortunately, the only evidence it introduces is the evidence that there is a problem. It doesn't provide any evidence that its solutions work. Its stated "Method of Evaluation", moreover, exactly mirrors the claims made in this post - it evaluates whether or not its solutions are implemented, NOT whether or not the problem is solved. (Goal #5 seems like an exception, but remember the stated problem is mental health issues.

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/TARGET.pdf

This proposal is the best I've encountered. It is horribly written, however. (You can skip past the pages and pages of documentation about how exactly the money will be spent to read the goals.) The accountability section has this (this is a proposal, essentially, to buy more modern computers for students and teachers, and to hire support staff):

We will begin by taking benchmarks of our current situation with regard to number of computers per student (including the capability of that equipment), number of teachers and students currently using the PLATO or other learning systems, number of teachers using the Web as a training and communication tool, and student scores on the TABE and PLATO assessment tests. On a quarterly basis, we will review computer ratios and teachers/students using PLATO. Every semester we will use questionnaires and surveys, as well as observation, of staff to get feedback on the impact of professional development activities. Student scores will be reviewed after every semester. Results will be tabulated and communicated to school staff, superintendents, Advisory Boards and Texans Can! staff annually. Where indicated, adjustments in curriculum and instruction will be made to ensure that student performance continues to improve

Note that the accountability, as it pertains to this grant, is - wait for it - to make sure the grant money is spent as expected. You can change curriculum and instruction -without- the computers, remember. (I think this is a pretty sensible grant request, but the accountability measures it proposes provide no actual accountability. "Did we say what we were going to do? Yes? Then our grant was a success!")

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/FLAP%20Narrative.pdf

Setting aside the fact that I've seen better writing from middle school students, this is actually a decently written grant. It has specific goals, implementations, and even has accountability. (Although it does seem confused about who or what is accountable to who or what; the accountability section reads rather like the author's understanding of accountability meant the ability of students to measure their own improvements in performance. Notably omitted is a suggestion that the program's success/improvement rate be compared to non-program success/improvement rates.)

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/2003_Library&Literacy.pdf

A well-written grant I can't find fault with. (Except maybe its questionable notion of scientific evidence.)

So - some of the grants here definitely show symptoms of the problems indicated in the post. Some don't. A couple of these had no business being granted. ALL of these grants were successful applications - that is, the grants were granted.

After this exercise, my position shifted from "This post is credible" to "This post exaggerates the extent of the problem to some degree, but remains a valid criticism of the grant system as it exists."

And I tried to find a grant similar to the iPod/Makeover grant, and found this:

http://www.msmagiera.com/ipad-grant

Okay, not exactly analogous, as it at least pertains to education. However, given the grant's self-evaluation criteria, student scores could plummet and the project could still call itself an overall success. (Actual improvement in student abilities only accounts for a fourth of their apparently unweighted criteria.)

This post is popular not because it is accurate, but because it repeats the popular misconceptions about the US education system, and tells both left and right what they want to hear:

Of course, the biggest myth that the media reporting of PISA scores propagates is that the American public school system is horrible. The liberal left in U.S and in Europe loves this myth, because they get to demand more government spending, and at the same time get to gloat about how much smarter Europeans are than Americans. The right also kind of likes the myth, because they get to blame social problems on the government, and scare the public about Chinese competitiveness. We all know that Asian students beat Americans students, which "proves" that they must have a better education system. This inference is considered common sense among public intellectuals. Well, expect for the fact that Asian kids in the American school system actually score slightly better than Asian kids in North-East-Asia!

American students generally outperform their racial group in other countries. White Americans have higher PISA scores than any European country except statistical outlier Finland. Asian Americans beat every Asian country, and are second only to the wealthy, elite Chinese city of Shanghai (another statistical outlier).

Hispanic Americans are mostly Mexican-Americans, but outscore Mexico by a healthy 41 points. They are only 15 points behind Spain--and note that many Hispanic-Americans are recent immigrants and don't speak English as a first language (but had to take the test in English), while Spaniards take the test in Spanish.

African-Americans outperform Trinidad (Trinidad is a developed country with a high per capita GDP, and has a substantially African population, which makes them perhaps the most comparable group.)

This really seems to disconfirm both the liberal and conservative talking points. The US education system is not underfunded, as liberals say, nor is it underperforming, as conservatives say. It also is not correct that the US is systematically failing racial minorities due to institutionalized racism (as the OP claims).

The picture I have of the US education system is that there are a large number of smart, dedicated, people spending a lot of money trying get the best outcomes they can with the students they have to work with. This is all irreconcilable with the claims the OP makes.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but this fails entirely to be surprising [eta: given the region of the country I grew up in, Texas]. My family has seen too much shit go on in schools.

The most egregious case that happened -to us- was a school that put one of my siblings in a fucked-up experiment (paid for by a grant!) without my parents' consent, and indeed told all the children involved not to tell their parents or bad things would happen to them (we grew up being taught very firmly to question authority, so of course my parents found out, and a shitstorm was raised - with nothing ultimately happening. One of several reasons we moved out of that school district.). The experiment involved shit like telling the (extremely young) children to imagine they were in a crashing airplane, and there's nothing they could do, they were going to die, and how did they feel about this?

Some of it seems exaggerated, but the basics - half-assed school grants funding ridiculous shit - ring a little too true to me to outright reject the post. I've seen too many things happen in schools that remain completely unreported on, like prayer in school, to think that the scarcity of information on the internet means anything, as well.

I'm torn between thinking that if this is a hoax, the hoaxer should be banned with extreme prejudice, and hoping that there will be another hoax designed to appeal to right-wingers.

I believe you're posting this because you want the problems fixed; but in order for that to happen, you need to make it happen. There are a variety of escalation strategies to consider: you might go to your state's secretary of education; you might go to your state's attorney general; you might go to the press. Note that NDAs usually do not hold up when you're making accusations of criminal activity, and some of the accusations you have made are criminal in nature. There are "whistleblower protection" laws, which vary from state to state. Also note that if someone is your lawyer, then you have the absolute iron-clad right to tell them everything ("attorney-client privilege") regardless of what you may have signed. And if what you say is true, then there are probably quite a few groups that would happy to provide you with a lawyer, or lawyers that would work on contingency. In any case, talking to a lawyer should be your next step before taking any major action; it's just a question of which one.

Your career as an auditor that people pay to evaluate themselves is completely doomed and you should sacrifice it before it explodes. Your career as an auditor that people pay to evaluate others has promise.

Also, you should realize that having a scandal ready to release in a controlled fashion gives you some powers, and you should think carefully about what your objectives are. Depending on the location, size, spin and time of release, you can take out any one person of authority, possibly (but not necessarily) as high as the state governor. If you have political savvy, you might maneuver into a position of authority yourself.

(To all the other commenters in this thread: this is one of those cases where you should be providing actionable options to the original poster, not going meta, not expressing outrage, not trying to collect the information to act in his place. Comment as a consequentialist, not as a conversationalist.)

My top candidates for what is up here are: 1) fabrication as part of a social experiment on how credulous we are 2) fabrication by a sociopath with a very odd idea of self-entertainment 3) incredibly erroneous interpretation of what is going on by a crank

But it is SO full of red flags that I would be surprised if it is not intentional. Call it 66% chance it is intentional hoax.

And it is so far from the mark of a true post that I would be very surprised if it had more than a glancing connection to the truth, call it 95% that it is barely connected to actual facts.

I have kids in California public schools. I have read, over the years, many critiques of public schools and public funding generally. As bad as things are, they are quite obviously nowhere near as bad as this article suggests in the schools my kids have gone to and are now going to. Further, I am quite good friends with a long time teacher, administrator, and union officer in NYC. I by no means share her respect for the union and DO believe documented horror stories of "turkey farms" where truly impossibly bad teachers are stored while being paid rather than following the more expensive process of firing them. I do believe other horror stories. But I can tell you for sure, while things are not amazingly wonderful in California public schools, they are simply not even vaguely close to that bad in many real Calfifornia schools I am exposed to.

So at bare minimum, if there is any truth to the allegations in the original post, the idea that these things are universal, or at least pervasive in American public schools is wrong.

Next argument: many of us reading this board, and even being taken in by this post, went through the American public school system ourselves, and by my standards, (I'm 55) many of you went through quite recently. Many of us, I dare say, were in advanced classes. Does the OP fit even vaguely with what you saw with your own eyes? It is miles from my 40 year old experiences.

Next, there is a thriving critique of publicschools in this country. With the amount of negative attention public education has drawn, is it really plausible that NONE of this critique has discovered the depths of waste and stupidity described as routine by this post? It is not plausible to me.

Next, public spending and public education tends to be a pretty open process. If these are Government grants, there is a crap load of information that has to be public.

Finally, to make such extreme claims with absolutely NO linkage to any source other than the post itself, would require remarkable naivete about how an intelligent audience should perceive claims like this, an innocence which is belied by the beautiful craftsmanship of the post itself. Really, EVERY program discussed needs to be obfuscated? No agency involved can be mentioned?

I googled "black men ipad education grant" hit nothing similar to the OP claimed program.

The real question is how long before the trap is sprung and we are told we were naive to believe this at all and we are really no better than birthers and creationists when the story fits our fears. I think it is better than 50% we will get such a message, but we'll see.

The specific project I was evaluating had only gotten $800,000 out of the maximum $2m. Its strategy was to purchase the male students iPod Touches, the female students makeovers, manicures, and pedicures at a local beauty parlor, and all students were offered an additional iPod Touch or Makeover, respectively, if they passed the exam at the end of the current year.

Besides everything else, the iPod touch doesn't sound exactly like the kind of thing that already having one makes you more likely to want another. What the heck should I do with a second iPod touch if already have one? (Beside selling it or giving it to my sister, that is.)

Nice article (as usual, if true). Minor nitpick:

Anyway, this is an important problem that I'm working on, but literally I can only make a difference for my county in my state, and it's clear that the problem is everywhere.

I think you mean "in the US" - things are different in France, or in Finland, or in Japan, or in China. You may see some similar patterns, but I think the whole "black/white" thing is pretty specific to the US; you get complicated relationships between ethnic groups in many countries, but they work differently (look at Belgium, or Ireland, or Canada, or China, or Rwanda, or Egypt, or Singapore - though Australia seems to be one of the rare countries comparable to the US).

I think taking a more international perspective is useful not only to be more accessible to non-US readers, but also to detach the issue from local politics (especially with examples from countries whose politics are quite different), and get a larger sample size in which it's easier to see which theories hold water.

Man, I registered just so I could vote and then it turns out there's something called karma.

This post is almost entirely nonsense. I give it "almost" simply because in certain all-URM school districts the corruption level is high. It's within the realm of possibility that "fake grants" to "fake grant programs" that are nothing more than chump change doled out by large employers who can wave the program in front of Jesse Jackson and his ilk--look! We're providing gravy!--so I won't call it an outright lie. But it's certainly not the norm. Did you notice that this guy acts like the education world is comprised solely of blacks and whites? If any element of his story is true, it's because he lives or works in an all black school district that is, indeed, corrupt. Detroit, New Jersey somewhere, or the like. And that's a generous interpretation.

The second half of his post is so risible I'm amazed anyone takes it seriously. We live in a world where, as I write this, federal settlements are forced on schools that suspend or expel minorities at a higher rate, never mind the details, and anyone believes that schools assign classes by race? It's not just wrong. It's an outright LIE. Even in very rich schools that have low income URM students (and I can think of five within 20 miles of my home), the pressure to integrate classes when the kids are unprepared is huge. Principals are at risk for losing AP classes if they don't put enough URMs in them. They face lawsuits if they do use tests to assign kids to advanced classes, much less if they assigned by race. As for the idea that black students do well if the teachers like them there? Please. Teachers have next to no say as to their assignments---it's one area in which principals have a great deal of control.

Every word beginning with "unfortunately" is such a lie I'm astonished anyone would credit it.

I voted credible/outsider so that I could see the poll results. I'd have gone for plausible/outsider or preferably "no strong opinion, but I want to see the results" if either had been available.

The specific project I was evaluating had only gotten $800,000 out of the maximum $2m. Its strategy was to purchase the male students iPod Touches, the female students makeovers, manicures, and pedicures at a local beauty parlor, and all students were offered an additional iPod Touch or Makeover, respectively, if they passed the exam at the end of the current year.... only 25% (14/56) of the students targeted by the program had failed the reading exam in the first place.

$800,000/56 students = $14,000 per student. Those are some expensive iPod touches!

make sure the criteria for math placement is based on achievement data

Make sure you collect achievement data. Bayesian calculations are fine and dandy, but I'd declare victory if they collected the data and let people see it.

Even an effective program that actually, verifiably works would have its problems: It would (as it stands) target standardized test scores of some sort, which then automatically lose some of their previous reliability as surrogate parameters. That effect has a name, which eludes me, can anyone supply it? (Loss of reliability when a variable is targetted directly and thus becomes subject to manipulations.)

If you could prove this stuff you could become a hero to a lot of people.

Edit: I now think this post is probably a hoax. As EY writes "Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality."

I'd be very interested in a citation on

the evidence shows that teacher recommendations have zero correlation with aptitude in a field

Wow.

Good data on the disparate racial outcomes for some advanced math teachers. What's the relative prevalence of the bigoted? Is this across other subjects as well? What region of the country are we talking about?

There were math teachers who absolutely refused to allow blacks/poors in their classroom, or worse, treated them in such a way as to cause them to fail, thus confirming their worldview.

They can't be fired/fined/reprimanded, or is there no will to do it?

If you are a decision maker in education in your area, please, please, please look into the various Bayesian predictive models used for math placement;

Bayesian methods still can (and in practice, will) use race and the like as evidence, meaning, if you're black you need higher test scores and grades to qualify - they just don't entirely stone-wall you from qualifying, which is a step forward I guess.

The fair approach is to have an entrance exam for better math classes, blind to the race.

I would dearly like citations for everything - I would really like to know if I am still terrible at estimating how awful the world is.

There were math teachers who absolutely refused to allow blacks/poors in their classroom, or worse, treated them in such a way as to cause them to fail, thus confirming their worldview.

This is now? Not 100 years ago?

Technical person meets a bureaucracy. Good clean fun, like the Mr. Bill show. I wish I had been there when Thomas Sowell interned for the Department of Labor.

The only things about your story that surprised me was that you weren't shit canned within a month, and that an actual company exists that would hire you. You, and by extension them, rocked the boat and survived. That's not what anyone is paying you for. You're there to validate that they're doing the right thing. I don't know how you and your company have survived this long, but I'd like to thank you all for saving some students from the regularly scheduled destruction of their lives.

As for your conversations with the bureaucracy, do you really think their confusion was in not understanding your point? I'd guess that any confusion they had was in how you had a job there at all, while you were busy saying things that shouldn't be said. I think you were the one not "getting it".

Every so often someone says something that opens a new world to me. I'll pass on the new world to you.

The purpose of a bureaucracy is to further the interests of the bureaucracy, whatever goals they give lip service to. But even theoretically, you don't have the lip service goal right. That goal is not to help students. It's to remake society so that it looks right, primarily as measured by equality of outcomes for groups. Helping a white child is helping the white group, thereby making group inequality worse.

If you think in racial groups, everything makes sense. Blacks are more likely to have poor achievement, therefore you help blacks, regardless of achievement. But also, if you judge them by group, then you conclude they aren't ready for the advanced math classes either.

Why not use test scores? Because test scores are objective measurements. Can't allow those into the school system. Then the bureaucracy's performance can be judged, as you demonstrate. Can't have that.

And of course the proposal's execution is the goal of the proposal. Well, it's really the grant itself which is the goal, but they couldn't write "receive check" as the goal, so they write what they plan to do, something entirely in their power. If they wrote that the goal was the delivery of some objective measurement, someone crazy person might measure it and determine that they had failed. Can't have that. Who in the system would possibly want that? Only people like you who just don't "get it".

An anecdote from corporate bureaucracy. I was in a meeting with two managers, where they were describing back and forth what some other woman did. Except their story was completely false. And we all knew it was false. Having the foolishness of youth, if not the years and health, I came out and said "But she didn't really do that, right?" Silence. For a moment. Then the subject was changed and they moved on. People in bureaucracies spend much of the day telling each other social truths that are epistemically false. I don't say lying, because as George Constanza would say, it's not a lie, if you believe it. Their standard of truth is the socially useful. They forgot they had let a fool into the room whose standard was epistemic truth. That buffoon just doesn't get it. We won't invite him to more of these meetings.

The specific project I was evaluating had only gotten $800,000 out of the maximum $2m. Its strategy was to purchase the male students iPod Touches, the female students makeovers, manicures, and pedicures at a local beauty parlor, and all students were offered an additional iPod Touch or Makeover, respectively, if they passed the exam at the end of the current year. The grant proposal had specifically listed these actions as being the goal of the proposal. If the iPods and makeovers were purchased, that constituted success.

If true and documentable, I think there's a large section of the Internet which would be very, very interested and very, very loud about this because the males got iPods and the females got makeovers. (And justly so.)