Jay P. Greene's Blog

The Edu-Pundit Industry loves faux-business-like measures of their effectiveness, so here’s one for you — the Return on Tweets.

In my first “Narcissus” post about Twitter I suggested that Twitter encourages some people to talk much more than people actually want to listen.  So I developed my first faux measure of the ratio of Tweets to Followers to capture that.

In my second “Narcissus” post I suggested that there is perhaps an unhealthy compulsive nature to high-frequency Tweeting.  So I developed another faux measure of the number of minutes on average during people’s waking lives between each tweet.  I identified “The Lost Threshold” to highlight folks who Tweet more often, on average, than once every 108 minutes of their waking lives.  As with the characters in Lost who believe they must enter The Numbers into a computer every 108 minutes, it is ambiguous whether they are engaged in an incredibly important activity (like saving the world) that is worthy of this compulsive behavior or maybe suffering from a manic delusion.

In this third post I calculate how many tweets people have sent between April 2, 2013 and March 27, 2014 as well as the change in “Followers” each person has experienced during that period.  Dividing the number of new tweets by the change in followers, I get the Return on Tweets.  If tweeting is influencing the world, rather than just enjoying listening to oneself talk, then more people should be attracted to listen, or follow, as people talk, or tweet.  People who have to issue more tweets for each new follower have a lower Return on Tweets.

I’m constrained to use the same list of people as I used in my initial post because they are the only ones for whom I have historical information on the number of tweets and followers.  The list for the initial post was identified from Mike Petrilli’s ranking of the most influential education policy Tweeters.  In addition, recent tweet and follower counts have sometimes become less precise when they are large numbers because Twitter has rounded that information to the closest hundred or thousand.  But this is good enough for a faux measure in a dumb blog post about a dumb activity.

As you can see, Alfie Kohn, Michelle Rhee, Vicki Phillips, Wendy Kopp, Sara Mead, and Diane Ravitch have a very high Return on Tweets.  Kohn gets almost 50 new followers for every tweet.  Diane Ravitch may tweet on a near-constant basis, but she attracts new followers even faster — almost three new followers for every one of her 11,102 tweets over the last 359 days.

On the other end of the spectrum are some folks with a very low Return on Tweets.  They send many tweets for each new follower. Sherman Dorn issues almost 17 tweets for each new follower; Morgan Polikoff almost 13; RiShawn Biddle almost 11; Sara Goldrick-Rab more than 9; and Neal McClusky more than 7.  I actually enjoy “following” many of these folks, but that may be an acquired taste.

It is no accident that “powerful people” with money to dispense or popular programs to trumpet show better Returns on Tweets than do scholars.  Maybe Twitter just isn’t the right place for scholarly exchange.  It’s fine for telling a joke, sharing a link, or following breaking news, but as a place for serious policy discussion Twitter seems to have a very low return on investment.

Dude.  You should check out Pat Wolf’s review of Chris and Sarah Lubienki’s new book claiming that public schools academically outperform private schools.  Despite decades of research, including rigorous experiments showing the opposite, the Lubienksis discover a public school advantage by 1) restricting their analysis to standardized math scores (reading, graduation rates, college attendance, incomes, etc…don’t fit their story so they ignore those measures),  2) controlling for participation in government programs, like free lunch and special ed, which are not comparable across public and private schools because privates participate and identify students for those programs at much lower rates, even when dealing with the same exact students, 3) arbitrarily excluding from their longitudinal analysis students who switch sectors.

The net effect of these three methodological choices, plus the fact that standardized math results are more closely aligned with how the subject is taught in public than private schools, strongly skew the results in favor of public schools.  The beauty of randomized experiments is that their results are not so easily manipulated by bizarre choices of what is controlled.  But the Lubienski’s don’t like randomized experiments.  Advocates for quack medicine also tend not to like randomized experiments.  They don’t let you selectively control for things until you get the answer you want.

Dude, let’s go bowling.

One of my personal heroes, Kinky Friedman, appears poised to win the Democratic nomination to be the party’s candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner.  According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Friedman knocked out the party establishment’s candidate and is facing a run-off against a little-known cattle rancher who has no plans to raise money or campaign for the office.  Kinky’s prospects in the general election may be weak, but it looks like he has a good shot at the nomination.  And Texas Agriculture Commissioner is no small job.  The WSJ describes it as “a powerful position that oversees an agency with 700 employees and a $550 million annual budget.”

Kinky’s likely nomination warrants national news coverage for two reasons.  First and foremost, he’s a very atypical political candidate.  He’s primarily known as a musician, comedian, and general rascal.  According to Wikipedia, his band,  Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, “toured with Bob Dylan in 1975-6. His repertoire mixed social commentary (“We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You”) and maudlin ballads (“Western Union Wire”) with raucous humor (such as “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed”). His “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” was an extended tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. One of his most famous numbers is “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” a song in which Kinky verbally and physically beats up a drunken white racist who berates blacks, Jews, Greeks, and Sigma Nus in a bar.”

His political views are also eccentric.  Again, according to Wikipedia: “On capital punishment, he previously summed up his position, ‘I am not anti-death penalty, but I’m damn sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed…. The system is not perfect. Until it’s perfect, let’s do away with the death penalty.'”  On gay marriage: “I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.”  And: “According to Cigar Aficionado magazine, Friedman plans to roll back ‘any and all smoking bans’ if elected. One of his favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain: ‘If smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go.’ Friedman supports the decriminalization of marijuana, though he doesn’t advocate making its sale legal. ‘I’m not talking about like Amsterdam,’ he noted, ‘We’ve got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.'”

But beneath Kinky’s politically incorrect music and public pronouncements is a serious agenda.  Watch the video above and you’ll learn that Kinky was an early Peace Corps volunteer in Indonesia.  And he’s concerned about President Obama’s lack of leadership in the Middle East and failure to connect with the “common man.”  He admires Winston Churchill and Harry Truman.  He’s a champion of the little guy.  Sure, his ideas are not carefully crafted, but that’s the point.  He’s a Jewish cowboy who pokes fun at everyone, including himself.

The second reason Kinky’s likely nomination is making news is that it’s posing problems for other Democratic candidates in Texas who had hoped to present a unified front in the coming general election.  How will they handle a candidate who has used campaign slogans such as “How Hard Could It Be?” and “Why The Hell Not?”

At the very least it will be very entertaining.  And if you’d like some entertainment in the meantime, enjoy this live performance from Ireland of Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys performing “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.”  Remember, he’s joking, but he’s also making a serious attack on racism.