Gates Gets Groovy, Invests in Mood Rings

June 19, 2012

Building on their earlier $1.4 million investment in bracelets to measure skin conductivity (sweating) as a proxy for student engagement, the Gates Foundation has decided to embark on a multi-million dollar investment in mood rings.

As you can see from their research results pictured above, the mood ring is capable of identifying a variety of student emotional states that could affect the learning environment.  Teachers need to be particularly wary of the “hungry for waffles” mood because it is sometimes followed by the “flatulence” or “full bladder” mood.

Besides, mood rings are pretty groovy.  And they can’t be any dumber than these Q Sensor bracelets.

2 Comments | methodology, teacher quality | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Gates Goes Wild

June 19, 2012

Gates researchers using science to enhance student learning

Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn.  Well, Diane Ravitch, Susan Ohanion, Leonie Haimson, and their tinfoil hat crew have stumbled upon some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever heard in ed reform.  It appears the Gates Foundation has spent more than $1 million to develop Galvanic Skin Response bracelets to gauge student response to instruction as part of their Measuring Effective Teachers project.  The Galvanic Skin Response measures the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies largely due to the moisture from people’s sweat.

Stephanie Simon, a Reuters reporter, summarizes the Gates effort:

The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall.

The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.

Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.

Um, OK.  We’ve already written about how unreliable the Gates Foundation is in describing their own research, here and here.  And we’ve already written about how the entire project of using science to discover the best way to teach is a fool’s enterprise.

And now the Gates Foundation is extending that foolish enterprise to include measuring Galvanic Skin Response as a proxy for student engagement.  This simply will not work.  The extent to which students sweat is not a proxy for engagement or for learning.  It is probably a better proxy for whether they are seated near the heater or next to a really pretty girl (or handsome boy).

Galvanic Skin Response has already been widely used as part of the “scientific” effort to detect lying.  And as any person who actually cares about science knows — lie detectors do not work.  Sweating is no more a sign of lying than it is of student engagement.

I’m worried that the Gates Foundation is turning into a Big Bucket of Crazy.  Anyone who works for Gates should be worried about this.  Anyone who is funded by Gates should be worried about this.  If people don’t stand up and tell Gates that they are off the rails, the reputation of everyone associated with Gates will be tainted.

7 Comments | methodology, teacher quality | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Banality of School Reform Org Names

June 19, 2012

School reform organizations are often doing some great work but I have to tell you than many have some of the worst names I’ve ever heard.  They often look like lyrics from an old Prince album (e.g. Educators 4 Excellence, 50CAN, i3, E3).  Others are just an alphabet soup, randomly spelling words, acronyms, or just jargony gibberish (e.g. PIE Network, DFER, PEPG, NCTQ, CAP).

But the worst of all are the organizations with aspirational names, emphasizing obvious truths akin to the motto of Animal House’s Faber College: Knowledge is Good. Knowledge is Power Program is a great network of schools but it has a truly lousy name.  It’s slightly more tolerable as an acronym, KIPP, but do we really have to tell students that it is good to acquire knowledge?  Is it necessary to name a school YES Prep to remind students to have a positive attitude?  Charter schools are awash in these power of positive thinking names (e.g. Excel Academy, Achievement Prep, Ideal Academy, Options PCS, Youth Build —    and these are just from looking at a list of DC charter schools).

Maybe schools really do have to remind students of the obvious.  Maybe the greater energy devoted to marketing advocacy groups’ names and agendas than to developing solid evidence is actually time well spent.  But I wonder whether students, their families, and the policymaking community are really so susceptible to 1984 Newspeak.

Besides, if reform organizations could move beyond shallow marketing, maybe they could use their names to honor people who exemplified desirable values, so that students and communities could learn from actual examples of how ideals could be made real.  It’s shallow to name the virtue of hard work and sacrifice, but it is much more powerful to name people, whatever their flaws, who are models of hard work and sacrifice.

And for all you advocacy organizations inspired by Prince lyrics or the sub-literacy of  texting teenagers — Nothing Compares 2 U.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Putting the Shoe on the Other Foot

June 18, 2012

I’m struck by how regularly I come across reporting in the media that contains obvious and unquestioned prejudice.  My mental test to detect this kind of prejudice is to switch the named group to see if we would find the same phrasing acceptable if it were applied to another group.  Since the truth of the claim is usually irrelevant to the prohibition of certain phrasings as offensive, the test is not whether the claim is true for another group but whether it would be unacceptable regardless of its truth.

I thought of this recently when the CBS Sunday Morning show had a segment on how boys were doing significantly worse in school.  Kenyon College’s Dean Jennifer Delahunty was asked to help explain this phenomenon and here is what she said: “There’s a kind of anti-intellectualism of young men that really bothers me, that it’s not cool to be smart. That it’s not cool to be engaged. That it’s not cool to do your homework. That bothers me.”

Sociologist Michael Kimmel offered this: “Boys think that academic disengagement is a sign of masculinity. The less you can do in school, the less connected you are, the less interested you are, the more manly you are.”

For all I know these are true explanations and boys really are suffering academically because of a cultural mindset that associates masculinity with anti-intellectualism and opposition to academic effort or engagement.

But let’s apply my little test to see if we might find this phrasing acceptable if it were applied to explaining why girls do worse on some academic outcome.  Let’s just switch the words so that the experts said: “There’s a kind of anti-intellectualism of young women that really bothers me that it’s not cool to be smart. That it’s not cool to be engaged. That it’s not cool to do your homework. That bothers me.” or “Girls think that academic disengagement is a sign of femininity. The less you can do in school, the less connected you are, the less interested you are, the more feminine you are.”

A CBS reporter would never quote experts saying this as a plausible explanation for why girls were doing worse academically.  That would have to be explained by discrimination — factors outside of the control of girls.  But for boys saying that the problem is their masculinity is perfectly fine.

Obviously, there are acceptable prejudices in our society.  The problem is not the existence of those prejudices, since some may in fact be supported by evidence, but that there is a wide-spread dogma about which prejudices are acceptable based on nothing having to do with evidence.  I guess I would say that there is a kind of anti-intellectualism among reporters that really bothers me, that it’s not cool to think critically about their prejudices.

5 Comments | journalism | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Reform School: Parts 4 and 5

June 12, 2012

The folks at ChoiceMedia.TV have developed a new PBS series focused on education reform issues called “Reform School.”  Below you can see part 4 of the show.  You can see two earlier clips here.

UPDATE:  And here is part 5:

5 Comments | National Standards, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The 100 Year Reich

June 11, 2012

Russian courts have affirmed the decision of the Moscow municipal government to ban gay pride parades for the next 100 years.  Something tells me that like the 1,000 Year Reich proclaimed by the Nazis and the New Scientific Man unveiled by the Soviets, this 100 year ban will crumble well before its stated expiration date.

Meanwhile, it is Gay Pride Week in Israel with thousands marching in the 14th Annual Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv on Friday.

Photo by: Hadar Cohen

According to the AP coverage:

Gays serve openly in Israel’s military. The parliament and Supreme Court have granted gays a variety of family rights, such as inheritance and survivor’s benefits.

Earlier this year, Tel Aviv was picked by readers of the travel website Gaycities as the top gay destination, ahead of Amsterdam and San Francisco.

 So, which country do the UN and the leftist intelligentsia repeatedly condemn as a violator of human rights?

3 Comments | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Never Having to Say You’re Wrong

June 9, 2012

Some of you may remember the brouhaha caused by Sol Stern’s denunciation of vouchers in the pages of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal — an event which I suppose eventually led to my departure from the Manhattan Institute.  Sol Stern made a series of arguments that I argued were mistaken at that time, but subsequent events have further confirmed Stern’s errors.

In particular, Sol, like Jay Mathews more recently, declared that the political prospects for expanding private school choice were bleak: “taxpayer-funded voucher programs for poor children… have hit a wall….  Proposals for voucher programs have suffered five straight crushing defeats in state referenda.”  But with the Year of School Choice just completed, we’ve never seen so much growth in private school choice.

And another incredibly wrong claim that Sol made was that the demise of urban Catholic schools was pretty much inevitable, which would prevent students with vouchers from having quality options: “Even more discouraging, vouchers may not be enough to save the Catholic schools” and “Greene says that the school choice movement has little reason to be concerned about the closing of thousands of urban Catholic schools, a problem that can be alleviated, he believes, by pushing for more vouchers and tuition tax credits. This reflects precisely the approach that leads some school choice reformers to ignore reality. As I have previously written in City Journal, the demise of inner-city Catholic schools is the result of long-term and seemingly irreversible demographic and economic trends…”

Who exactly was ignoring reality?  The Wall Street Journal has an article in today’s paper that describes the resurgence in Catholic schooling as a result of voucher and tax credit programs.  The WSJ reports:

For the first time in decades, Catholic education is showing signs of life. Driven by expanding voucher programs, outreach to Hispanic Catholics and donations by business leaders, Catholic schools in several major cities are swinging back from closures and declining enrollment…. Catholic schools are showing signs of growth even in cities without vouchers. But they are benefiting disproportionately from the rise of vouchers, available in 10 states and Washington, D.C., and tax credit programs that provide tax relief to individuals or businesses that donate to scholarships for low-income students.

Does Sol Stern or the folks at City Journal and the Manhattan Institute feel any obligation to admit that Sol’s 2008 article was a huge mistake?  And I’m not saying it was a mistake because it was politically hurtful (although it really was); but it was a huge mistake because the claims in it were grossly mistaken, which subsequent events have helped confirm.

(edited for typos)

6 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

More Evidence that Teacher Unions = The Tobacco Institute

June 6, 2012

Events this week help provide more support for my argument that the teacher unions are rapidly turning into the Tobacco Institute.  The defeat (again) of the unions in Wisconsin and the article by Paul Peterson, William Howell, and Marty West showing the sharply declining popularity of teacher unions — even among teachers — support this post I wrote almost 3 years ago:

I want to add a little to my post the other day about how the teacher unions lie and so should not be treated as credible players in policy discussions.

The unions don’t have to lie.  The NEA didn’t have to falsely claim that the DC voucher program “yielded no evidence of positive impact on student achievement.”  They could have said something about the effects not being large or that there are other harms to vouchers that are greater than the benefits.  A pattern of lying fundamentally undermines the credibility of the teacher unions so that they will increasingly be shunned in policy discussions and lose in policy debates.

You may think that the unions are so powerful that they can just lie and get away with it, but you’d be wrong.  Remember the fate of the tobacco industry.  They created the Tobacco Institute, which produced “research” claiming to be unable to find links between smoking and cancer.

The tobacco companies didn’t have to do this.  They could have just said that people should be free to choose whether they smoke or not regardless of health risks.  They didn’t have to lie about health effects, they could have just said that it was none of the public’s business whether people chose to smoke or not.

At the time it was conventional political wisdom that the Tobacco Institute could get away with lying because the tobacco lobby was so powerful and rich that they could do almost anything.  But eventually lying destroys one’s credibility in a way that no amount of money can restore.  And the teacher unions may suffer the same fate as the Tobacco Institute.  They may seem all-powerful right now, but over time it is hard to sustain dumb ideas, especially when lying.

11 Comments | teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Silly Season

June 4, 2012

With the approaching presidential elections we enter the Silly Season, when otherwise sensible and knowledgeable people abandon all reason to make some of the most ridiculous arguments to advance the interests of one candidate or another.  I completely understand why smart people make these really dumb remarks — they love hearing themselves talk, the are indulging fantasies of being able to influence events over which they have virtually no actual influence, it is part of their job, etc…

But that raises something that I don’t understand at all: why does anyone pay these people to spout nonsense?  I can’t see that it does anyone any good.  I don’t believe that raving on Twitter makes any difference to how anyone will vote.  I find it hard to believe that anyone derives entertainment value from their dribble.  So why does someone voluntarily hand money to individuals or organizations that revel in the Silly Season?

I think I may have discovered an answer while watching a production of Twelfth Night the other day.  I noticed that everyone keeps handing Feste, the fool, money even though he almost never does what they want.  In fact, he mostly makes fun of his patrons for which they hand him gold.  They often do so just to make him go away.  Andy maybe that is the solution to the mystery of why anyone pays the babbling idiots of Silly Season.  It isn’t because they benefit from the nonsense; it is just that they wish the fools will spout nonsense about someone else.

Of course, the babbling idiots of Silly Season are not nearly as insightful and clever as Feste, so perhaps another example might better illustrate why they are paid.  I was recently walking on Bourbon Street and saw the world’s oldest profession.  As the saying goes, they aren’t paid for their services; they are paid to leave.

And in case you need some examples of the nonsense spouted during the Silly Season here are some:

New York Times blogger, Nate Silver, recently tweeted this spin to the abysmal job numbers: “This jobs report is no big deal. Every economy has a few bad decades.”  Um, OK.  And he also tweeted this: “Per capita global GDP did not grow AT ALL between 2000 B.C. and the Industrial Revolution. We’re just reverting to the mean!”  Unless this was meant to be satire, these are remarkably stupid things for a smart guy to say.

Slate columnist and perpetual windbag, Matt Yglesias, provided this spin: “Impressed by conservatives ability to pretend to believe that Obama is 100% responsible for events 1.5 years into divided government.”  One can just imagine how he would crow about Obama’s genius if the circumstances were opposite.

And Kevin Carey, who is somehow considered an expert despite never having conducted a rigorous study or had any significant experience, offers this talking point: “Romney’s education platform is a sign of how swiftly the consensus Republican position on education has been overwhelmed by… the economic interests of big business.”  I didn’t see anything in his piece showing that Romney’s education proposal served the interests of big business, but he just needed to throw that in there to keep the meme going.

I apologize for citing only only pro-Obama examples because I could just as easily find a steady stream of silliness from the pro-Romney side.  These were just the first few to catch my eye and I’m too lazy to dig up more.  Unlike these ladies of the night, I don’t get paid for blogging and spouting nonsense.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Walmart Shareholder Meeting 2012

June 1, 2012

It was another excellent Walmart shareholder meeting this year.  The musical acts were not exactly to my taste, but it’s just impressive to see Celine Dion, Lionel Ritchie, Taylor Swift, Zac Brown, and Juanes perform.  And Justin Timberlake did an excellent job as MC.

There wasn’t really much exciting news to report during the meeting.  It was another year of steady growth in profits.  It was another year of Walmart emphasizing how they provide people with opportunities and keep the cost of goods low so that people — especially poor people — can live better.  But I’ve already written about this in the past (see for example this).

As I’ve said before, if Walmart were a government program designed to help poor people by providing them with low cost, basic goods and job opportunities, academics would be holding conferences to identify just how it was so successful, the New York Times would write editorials to laud its accomplishments (like they do for the ineffective Head Start program), and politicians would be tripping over each other to take credit for it.  But because they help provide people, especially poor people, really low cost basic goods and make a profit at it, they are demonized.  Little do these haters realize that Walmart’s success at innovating to keep costs down is entirely made possible by the profit motive.  These folks fail to understand the lesson of Al Copeland — entrepreneurs are often among the greatest humanitarians.

There was some excitement at this year’s shareholder meeting surrounding the Mexican bribery allegations.  But the only people I heard mention it were the Walmart officials, who several times directly addressed the topic by pledging to conduct a full investigation and emphasizing Walmart’s commitment to do what is right and uphold integrity, and the reporters covering those comments.  None of the associates or shareholders seemed to care much.  And I saw no protesters of any sort.

A reporter for the Huffington Post, Alice Hines,  tried to manufacture some news by claiming to detect signs of rebellion among Walmart associates.  She even alleged that she was manhandled by a cop at a Walmart event the other night because she was mistaken for a protester.  Ms. Hines may have an active imagination because I did not see the same things she alleged.  She tweeted “Walmart secretary booed by a few in the audience after shareholder proposal on exec incentive report.”  I didn’t hear any booing.  She tweeted “Lots of applause from UK & Canada section for shareholder proposal on political transparency; scattered claps elsewhere.”  I didn’t hear that either.  She was accurate in tweeting “Presenting exec incentive proposal, Jackie Goebel says Walmart stores are understaffed. gets big applause.”  And her claim to have been mistaken for a protester and threatened with arrest by a police officer at an earlier Walmart event sounds fishy given that there were virtually no protesters for whom she could have been mistaken.

The anti-Walmart folks may love retweeting these reports suggesting discord and strife at the Walmart shareholder meeting, but the image her “reporting” conveys is completely misleading.  The Walmart shareholder meeting is basically a giant cheer-leading event that went perfectly smoothly this year just as it has in the past.  You can criticize the meeting for feeling like a Disney show, as some did, but you can’t suggest that it was Chicago in the summer of ’68.  It was just another well-choreographed event and the associates, many of whom were visiting the US for the first time or had just flown on an airplane for the first time in their life, just seemed thrilled to be there.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

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