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,...
First, the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation leap out at me immediately.
Me too. Good thing they're not trying to improve writing ability!
I just read that grant in its entirety. I noticed one possible typo, but did not find other bad grammar or spelling.
The VERY FIRST SENTENCE has minor punctuation issues and refers to "Excellence in Leaning (sp) Through Technology" - I refuse to believe that the original Senate bill being referred to failed to spell the word "Learning" correctly in its title. :-)
The second sentence puts a space before the colon for no apparent reason.
"The moneys this school is requesting" => should probably be "money", though I'd accept argument to the contrary. "With request to ..." => should probably be "With RESPECT to"
"This shows community support for improvement and a move forward with the support of a technology plan." => You can tell what the writer is trying to say, but the writer is not actually saying it; the sentence is just broken.
"Teachers will...learn ho to integrate this technology" => should be "learn HOW to integrate..."
That's ju...
I'll put it this way: in the average GRE scores by intended field, education ranks below philosophy & STEM in every subtest, and various forms of education rank very low (early childhood education is, out of 50 groups, second from the bottom in 2 subtests and fifth from the bottom in the last subtest).
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."
There are three types of lies in the world: lies, damn lies, and people falsely claiming that their incentives are aligned with yours.
There are three types of lies in the world: lies, damn lies, and mnemonics.
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.)
Generating drama over inconsequential bullshit while the world burns is not justifiable. "One can lie by omission just by neglecting to choose a sufficiently important subject matter." — @aristosophy
It wouldn't be a more effective program if it had iPods for both genders. Up in arms over different gender incentives would target an en vogue failure point that isn't relevant over the one relevant criticism: That the program doesn't work.
Banning by IP is useless at best and harmful in most cases (where hapless customers of an ISP get the old IP address of a troll). There is no way to prevent attempts to test how gullible we are; therefore we need to be generally immune to all attempts and not only to specific cases or instigators.
I'd estimate a 30% probability (but with a fairly large variance) that at least some elements of this article are inaccurate and an attempt at trolling. The "best" trolls are 90% truth with one or two outrageous elements using the halo effect to gain belief.
CarlShulman's comment has no satisfactory replies yet. What is the probability that the article's profound accusations are a) completely true, b) otherwise unreported, and c) first reported on lesswrong? It seems more likely that an actual whistle-blower would choose a more widely read media outlet (Wikileaks even?), and probably more than one. b) and c) could just be my inability to find similar information reported elsewhere. It seems to be fairly common knowledge that the education system is broken but not with the specific detail in the article.
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 peopl...
Pulling a bunch of money out of the system with a lawsuit is not a winning outcome if it leaves the existing corrupt power structure in place. Be warned that for many lawyers, the goal will be money, not improvement. Do not use a lawyer whose goals are different than your own.
You should be collecting evidence. If you are ever alone with an incriminating document, photograph every page. You may later wish to allow these documents a chance to go missing (eg, by making a FOIA request) before you reveal that you've copied them. If you are in a state where it is legal to do so without telling anyone, record every interesting conversation. A recorded statement like "the evaluator's job is to collude with the submitter" is a political instakill if given to the press, and the threat of releasing it is significant leverage.
Pay attention to the specific people involved, especially the ones who are higher up, and the ones who are keeping themselves hidden. Try to figure out who's good, who's evil, who's smart, and who's dumb. Try to predict how each will react to scandal. Assume that by default, the evildoers will successfully deflect blame onto the stupid, unless you have specific incriminating evidence.
In particular, if any of the children evaluated are in special education, parents have fairly strong leverage to punish school districts who are doing stuff that no one could think would work. Attorneys and non-attorney advocates in all 50 US states are available to help the parents, who often have no idea what their rights are or that the school district is being foolish.
Separately, the American's with Disabilities Act prohibits retaliation against anyone who acts to protect a disabled individual's rights. Alas, proving this is a difficult matter. You might consider looking at my post on one way to document verbal statements in writing.
And for clarity, disabled in this context is a broader label than cognitively impaired, blind, or deaf. If a child has a medical condition that impairs their ability to learn, they are a "child with a disability" under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Disclaimer: This is a general statement of the law, not legal advice. Consult your own attorney, because reading this does not create an attorney-client relationship.
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...
Not to lower signal-to-noise, but - I really liked this comment. It shows of a fine mind made cynical, a delicate sarcasm born of an impinging upon by a horrific, Cthulhian reality.
"People are crazy, the world is mad."
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.
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....
I upvoted this comment, because I'm interested in hearing a dissenting view on this, but ... I find this to be pretty poor dissent.
You should tone down your accusations, and especially make them more precise - on the face of it, I'm not sure to what extent the things that you're saying (like "the pressure to integrate classes when the kids are unprepared is huge") actually contradict the OP, as opposed to merely being evidence that supports a different interpretation (and you'll find arguments for both sides on any disagreement).
Mostly, from my French point of view, I'm seeing American politics cloud up issues here, and I would much rather see a dispassionate discussion of the facts rather than flinging accusations back and forth. Too much "THIS IS A LIE AND YOU ARE ALL IDIOTS", not enough "this particular specific statement appears to be false, and here is why".
Is it possible that different parts of USA have different situation, because of a different state, different county, or just depending on whether the parents in the specific school are politically savvy, know their rights and fight for them?
Sometimes the official rules are the same for everyone, and yet what actually happens, depends more on the local culture. Maybe the lawsuits get big media attention, but in reality they happen rarely and require a lot of effort on parents' side (or a coincidence that some political group decides to push this cause), so most parents don't even try.
Is it possible that different parts of USA have different situation, because of a different state, different county, or just depending on whether the parents in the specific school are politically savvy, know their rights and fight for them?
In a country where some school districts have higher college acceptance rates than others have high school graduation rates, I would say this is a near-certainty.
I actually think there's a decent chance this story is a hoax, but not because it is remotely implausible. It sounds exactly like everything I've heard about the NYC school system.
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...
The variation in educational standards and practices between districts in America is too large to make generalizing from one's own experience very useful except insofar as it demonstrates that the critiques given in the article cannot be universal.
When I talk to friends who went to decent schools (which is pretty much all of my friends,) their experiences, cynical though they might be about them, don't reflect the sort of scandal the OP describes. When I talk to acquaintances who work as teachers for seriously disadvantaged schools through programs like Teach For America, the general consensus appears to be "No matter how bad you think it is, it's always worse."
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.
Every scandal was at some point not yet known. Consider an apropos contemporary news event: the Memphis cheating ring, which embraced an entire school district in cheating far worse than merely sustained incompetence and racism. It apparently may have started as early as 1995, and only began coming out in 2009.
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...
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.
Not so irreconcilable, if you don't suppose that "a lot" means "most."
The current average likelihood of a high school freshman in America making it to graduation is about 78%, and that's the best it's been in quite a while.
At the public high school I went to, it was a pretty big deal if a year passed where someone failed to graduate, and students would ask each other, not if they were planning to go to college, but what college they planned to go to. The only student I ever asked or heard asked that question who said they weren't planning to go to college, went to college. And not a two-year or community college, but a pretty decent state college.
That was a good high school, but it wasn't by any means renowned. With schools like that bringing up the national average, consider the state of the schools dragging down the national average.
Just imagine...there are countries where education can be discussed without bringing in race at all...
The U.S. educational system can be better than most other countries' (assuming higher performance is not due to some other factor) and yet have much room for improvement. The U.S. economy has higher GDP per capita than almost all other countries, and yet it keeps growing, and there are many areas where policy is clearly forsaking GDP.
If you follow my first link, you can see the author's analysis is demographically neutralized (it excludes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants in European countries, and compares to white Americans). In this ranking, American whites substantially outperform the European average, and only 2 small European countries (Switzerland and Finland) noticeably outrank American whites. US whites are outscoring the EU-15 (basically the core nations of the EU, before it expanded into Eastern Europe), by a substantial amount.
The second image is not demographically neutralized, but European countries have far, far lower non-white percentages than the United States. For example, Germany is about 10% non-white as of 2010.
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.
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.
You might have seen some of those sketchy advertisements, similar to the "Google will Pay YOU!!! To Work From Home!" ads, which say stuff like "Get Grant Money Here!". At least, I associate those two kinds of ads as being similar.
In any case, the process of finding grants to apply for is very simple. The Department of Education grants are all on http://www.grants.gov/. Pretty much every university's Research and Evaluation Department gives out grants to the local community; check out your local Uni's website. Sometimes large corporations give out grants, sometimes individual people. In general, get in touch with the education department of your county government to find out which grants are being offered nearby and how to apply for them.
Now that I think of it, this is the main request I should have of lesswrongers. I bet anyone on this website could write a damn good proposal for any grant they come across, and I bet their project would be better than the shit I evaluate.
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?
Most things in general are broken to a degree that the average reasonable person would find completely shocking. There are absolutely comic book levels of incompetence, grift, discrimination, and vice, within most bureaucratic organizations if you know where to look.
Other country, other situation, but I think this meta observation works for both:
If the educational system is broken too much, the society loses an ability to rationally discuss how to fix it, because the "unbelievable" facts you report are taken as an evidence against your sanity or honesty, not against the system. And of course there are some people who benefit from the system remaining as it is, and they are happy to confirm that you are wrong.
On some level, yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But people have their priors seriously wrong here -- sanity waterline is generally low, incompetence is not so rare in the absence of feedback, and there are lot of money to make by abusing the school system. Also the prior probabilities are counted repeatedly. (If one teacher complains, he is probabably just an incompetent lunatic. If another teacher complains, she is also an incompetent lunatic. If thousands of teachers complain... well, by the same logic, they are all incompetent lunatics. There is never a point where there is enough evidence to start suspecting that they might actually be right. It also does not promote honest communication if it is wid...
I attended Rutgers part time when I was a full time employee of bell labs. The graduate physics classes were excellent, rigorous, well taught, well designed, and hard. I have no particular recollection of any parking fees or atheletic activity. Since that time, I proceeded to get a PhD from Caltech and teach for 8 years at University of Rochester. In my opinion, informed by my experience, Rutgers is categorically NOT an educational scam.
The company I work for has hired many engineers who have been educated at Rutgers. There is no evidence that Rutgers is a scam, either in the interview process for these engineers, or their subsequent performance on the job.
The quality of undergraduate and graduate experiences at the same university can be dramatically different, since their funding sources (and thus their incentive structures) are separate. It's possible that Rutgers is broken as an undergrad institution, but not as a graduate one.
(Rutgers also has a good reputation as a graduate math department.)
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?
Outside view suggests the latter. Also, it's probably more parts than you think. The Bay Area is pretty weird along several dimensions.
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.
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 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?
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.
For something like this, security through obscurity is probably good enough, as long as the information isn't presented in a way that shows up in Google searches for the actual context.
I'd be very interested in a citation on
the evidence shows that teacher recommendations have zero correlation with aptitude in a field
Since OP's clearly a bit venting, I'd give him some charitable leeway and interpret 'zero' as 'so small as to not be relevant'.
This is as much effort as I'm willing to put in, but you were probably right to be sceptical; it seems unlikely to be zero.
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 ...
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.
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.
The sign of a good Usenet troll post is that it is a mirror held up to as many groups as possible.
I'm surprised you think the appeal of the OP is confined to left-wingers. The bad guys are all government beaurocrats, the current boogey men of the right and a group championed by the left.
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...
Most of the money/resources schools receive comes in the form of grants.
Could you provide a source for that?
This claim definitely conflicts with my understanding, although perhaps it's true for that portion of resources that is actually up for grabs and not already committed through the normal funding (government) process.
This link is more in line with my understanding, that is, that most resources come from state and local government, and most of those resources are not awarded through "grants," but rather that local resources generally stay with local schools and state resources are divided in other ways but not usually through award of a grant. But I'd be interested in hearing if my (not heavily researched/sourced) understanding is incorrect either generally or at least for some portion of schools.
Some quotes from the link:
...States rely primarily on income and sales taxes to fund elementary and secondary education. State legislatures generally determine the level and distribution of funding, following different rules and procedures depending on the state.
State funding for elementary and secondary education is generally distributed by formula. Many states use fun
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.)
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.)
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.)
You are thinking of Goodhart's Law.
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.
That depends very much to specific priors and correlations.
If you're looking for the expected score on a re-test, you should apply regression towards the mean, and for a lower mean, that's more regression. A school may be interested in the probability of student success on a course, which is not a measure of inherent ability either but very much depends to the same disadvantages that lower the test score.
edit: that is to say, if you made a programming contest where the contestants write programs to predict re-test scores from score and a profile photo, given huge enough database of US students (split in two, one available to our contestants, one for the final test), winner code will literally measure skin albedo, and in some cases maybe also try to detect eyeglasses. Of course, the morale of the story is not that racism is good but that socially sometimes we don't want the most accurate guess.
edit2: Subtler measures may correlate too, besides the racial ones. E.g. angle between line connecting pupils of the eyes, and horizontal, the pupil dilation in the photo, use/non use of flash, strength of red eye effect, and who knows what else (how busy does the background look, maybe?). I don't think many people here want to have their math scores be adjusted depending to how they held their head in a photograph. edit3: ohh, and the image metadata, or noise signatures, that'd be a big one - is the image taken by an expensive camera? Get free points on your math test. And a free tip: squint. It will think you're asian or smart enough to squint.
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 ...
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.
Some people have expressed some doubts about this story, and because it is anonymous, we can't verify it directly. I would like to use this opportunity to explore our models of the school system, and especially the difference between the models of insiders and outsiders.
This poll asks a pair of questions. The first question is about how the story fits your model of educational system. The second question is whether you are an "school system insider". That means whether you ever had a full-time job or a part-time job related to the school system; ...
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 a...
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?
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.
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!
See this part of the post:
I described in rigorous detail everything the man had done wrong, put in a strong recommendation to not award him grant money in the future, and suggested that some sort of corruption investigation be conducted to see if he had committed any crimes (23 iPods + 23 Makeovers does not total to $800,000, after all).
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.
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...)
in fact, if you were to rank all of the factors possible in determining a person's lifetime earnings, the factor at the top would be whether you took Algebra in 8th grade
Citation needed, especially for a claim of causality.
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?
This should probably be promoted to Main immediately.
Plausible yet pseudonymously provided & unverifiable info should not be promoted to Main, IMO. If he was willing to own his claims and at least his bio of working for a corporation that did something similar to what he indicates, that would be one thing, but he didn't.
(I'm not going to criticize him for not being willing to risk the NDAs, but that doesn't mean we should endorse the post and try to spread this post as far and wide as possible.)
While I read this post, and before I got to the grandparent comment, my reaction was "Wow, this is enough of a surprise to my current model (and most of the evidence is the personal statement of an unverified person on the Internet) that my probability of it being a fabrication is significant". I don't usually get that from a LW post.
Furthermore, the effect of promoting a fabrication is way worse for accusations of major malfeasance and racism than for most minor personal anecdotes.
(This is not saying that I think the post is probably a fabrication! I give it about a 2/3 probability of being true.)
Most posts make arguments that readers can assess using public sources: if the argument and citations are good, they can stand separately from the poster. This post is personal testimony.
Second what gwern said, but more politely. This is an excellent post, and if it substantiated its claims (in general, not in NDA-violating specifics) it would definitely belong in Main, but as it stands it's unverified (and perhaps unverifiable for good reasons), and thus I think we should leave it on Discussion (but I'm upvoting the post).
Promotion implies some significant level of endorsement (of the quality of evidence if not necessarily of the conclusions), and LW should be careful not to abuse the trust reposed in it by many readers.
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.)
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!
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 desc...
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 (loo...
Post will be returning in Main, after a rewrite by the company's writing staff. Citations Galore.