Scary, if true, but not too surprising.

(It seemed to me that my high school used an algorithm that amounted to "students who asked for honors classes got them", although apparently there was a lot going on behind the scenes that I didn't see...)

I can provide citations for any statements I've made, but since nearly everything I said is NDA'd I'd like to be careful to anonymize my citations, making sure to find national studies instead of state or county specific studies.

It's probably too late, based on what you've said already. Anonymity is hard.

Is there a way that we can just give you money and you can expand to more counties? I think this is a super-important issue but it's not in my area of focus (and I suspect my particular county is actually doing pretty well.)

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

Seems like you have worse problems than not using Bayesian predictive models. Like racism and corruption in the school system, and inability to tell means from goals.

For comparison, the first two don't seem to be a significant issue up here in BC, Canada, what with more than half of the students being Asian (and often ESL) and a reasonably strong tradition of integrity in the teacher's union. From what I know, there are few issues with assigning children into classes by ability, not by profiling.The main problem is the steadily declining financing, resulting in fewer and weaker programs. Another issue is that there is virtually no way to affect or even get rid of a bad teacher (union, remember?), and some teachers suck big time. I am not even aware of any targeted programs to "raise literacy" except for ESL classes, or to "raise basic math skills". Well, there are some which target the local native population, not sure how successful they are.

the evaluators job was to collude with the grant proposal submitter, so that we got more evaluation jobs from them in the future.

The grantee, not the grantor, hires the evaluator? What the hell?

Can you see where the politics might come in? There were rich whites who got upset when the data told the schools to put some blacks in their son's advanced math class. 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.

More what the hell. Was this a long time ago, or am I just really naive about what certain parts of the US outside the bay area look like?

I'd like to see the citations on the importance of 8th grade Algebra as critical predictor of future success.

Also, since you're professionally aware of the ins and outs of US education systems, can you give us some general advice for contacting local school/school board officials or the like--how we should go about getting involved in ameliorating such issues in our communities?

Has anyone published data on the effectiveness of Bayesian prediction models as an educational intervention? It seems like that would be very helpful in terms of being able to convince school districts to give them a shot.

Most of the money/resources schools receive comes in the form of grants.

Could you provide a source for that?

If you "know that there isn't actually any way to fix the problems," why do you care if the grants are scored in insane ways, or the interventions targeted demographically, or that 98% of the money is embezzled?

(Incidentally, a reason to give away incentives demographically rather than by test score is that they become an incentive to sandbag the early scores. Which could then produce the illusion that the program improved scores.)

What did the guy claim to have spent the $800,000 on?

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

How much predictive value do you lose if you just use 1 year? Using a single test is transparent. Is that politically good or bad?
(I guess I'm assuming that "test" means a standardized test. If it means comparing students across different tests written by different teachers, it might not seem fair to use them naively, but sometimes transparency is more important.)

Luckily, my firm started collecting data on teacher aptitude some time ago, and basically you can separate all advanced math teachers easily into two categories: Okay with blacks in their classroom. Blacks and whites both end up succeeding at equal rates. Not okay with blacks in their classroom. Whites end up succeeding, blacks end up failing.

There are a number of research groups tracking teachers and student test scores. If such results had been released anywhere, wouldn't they be front page national news? And this seems like something that, e.g. the Gates Foundation would want known: if true, it's a magic bullet.

Why haven't academics and foundations studying teacher quality and value-added metrics reported such results?

A certain principle...remember that as principle of a school

The word is "principal."

P.S. I was going to ask about the terms of your NDA. While I agree with greater transparency, I (perhaps idealistically) hope it can be done without breaking promises.

However, I also have a principle, showing honour to honourless dogs is worse than useless.

He couldn't understand why he had needed to do this, and indeed, refused.

I have to disagree that this is ineptitude. He knows which evidence he has to conceal from you, and is doing so effectively. Of course by doing so he only confirms that it is harmful to his case, but it nevertheless grants plausible deniability. Especially as I expect anyone who can fire him will collude in the concealment.

When I submitted this to my boss for approval, she was flabbergasted, and explained that the evaluators job was to collude with the grant proposal submitter,

Sadly I cannot prove this, but I read this after writing the above paragraph. I wasn't primed on 'collude.' I'ma go ahead and conclude nothing happened to the poor bastard sideswiped by a thoroughly unexpected honest appraisal.

every single project I evaluated listed their 'process' and then said that their 'goal' was to enact the process.

Pays the piper, etc... Whoever informed you about the grant application was probably hoping you'd pick up that they were not to be taken seriously. The point of the grant program is to give goodies to certain demographics. The process was indeed the goal, no matter what anyone else said.

There's a limit to how incompetent the rich and/or powerful can be. A single spot check would have caught this, if it wasn't what was intended.

A third. This is, of course, absolutely unacceptable.

I wonder how many of the 2/3rds could have but understood that wasn't the point of the program and didn't bother.

--

I can also explain the parent/teacher/math class thing, but you won't like it. But, very short form: you can't say 'racism' and then just stop thinking.

--

Edit: I should mention I'm surprised that such overt racism still exists, and I'm going to update a few theories accordingly. Especially, that you can have lily white AP classes without instantly dying under a rockslide of disparate-impact lawsuits. I can't help but wonder if the gadgetry is related.

So what criteria are necessary to apply for these grants? I have a feeling there are a lot of smart people working on startups in the ed tech space. If you could get in contact with them, you might have more competent grant applicants, and those startups would find more revenue to pursue their (potentially workable) ideas for improving education.

Here are some ed tech incubators I found on Google. If you get in contact with the people behind the incubators, they'll probably tell all of their startups about the ease of getting funding this way. Their startups will have to work on one of the problems that there exists a grant for, but there should be a decent number that find this workable.

• http://www.quora.com/Startup-Incubators-and-Seed-Programs/What-incubator-and-accelerator-programs-focus-only-on-education-technology-startups

• http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/startup-veterans-launch-imagine-k12-a-y-combinator-for-education-startups/

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Wow.

I'd be very interested in a citation on

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

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."

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.)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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 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.

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.