The Eclectic Linda

An article in the magazine New Humanist offers a lovely example of the ability to discover support for what one already believes amid a mountain of overwhelmingly contrary evidence.Writer Sally Feldman says, in relation to Daniel Johnson’s discussion of the extraordinary prominence of Jews among the highest levels of chess grandmasters (in White King and Red Queen: A History of Chess During the Cold War):

Most commentators, though, deny that an aptitude for chess is inherent or genetic. There are plenty of examples of the teachability of brilliance – not least the massive Soviet investment in training which between the ’40s and ’60s created a pool of millions and produced literally hundreds of grandmasters. And then there is the phenomenon of pushy parents who have driven their children to become über-champions. Susan Polgar, the first female chess grandmaster, was schooled from the age of four by her Hungarian father, a psychologist who used his daughters as an experiment to show how genius could be induced. Susan, who has played with all the major grandmasters, is able to conduct five games at once – without a board. Her two sisters appear to be equally skilled.

So if such abilities can be acquired through training, what can account for the consistent superiority of the Jews? One explanation might be that chess is a remarkably adaptable, portable game, and therefore well suited to the dispossessed, the exile, the refugee, the prisoner.

This is not evidence for the teachability of brilliance; it’s more like the opposite. Training millions of obedient Soviet children in chess produced “literally hundreds of grandmasters.” Oh. And millions of mediocre players who would never win a single game against a grandmaster.

Training may be necessary, but it is not sufficient.

The Polgar sisters are a counterexample of a different sort. Yes, their father seems to have made them into exceptional chess players from a very early age, but we’ve heard of him only because he succeeded. Who knows how many millions of other equally determined fathers tried and failed?

Also, they were after all his children, and quite likely shared in his abilities. If he’d accomplished the same feat with the three little daughters of the grocery clerk in the apartment next door, that would be interesting.

The pianist Ruth Slenczynska was the victim of just such a brutal scheme to make her a child prodigy. We know about it only because her father succeeded with her. But in her autobiography, Forbidden Childhood (which I read many years ago) I recall she wrote that he tried the same regimen with a younger sister, and had to give up because the child simply would not comply.

Commentators do, generally, prefer to deny that aptitudes (of all kinds, not just for chess) might be inherent, let alone that they might be genetic. But they have to overlook the plain facts in order to indulge their preferences.

An editorial in the Strib Nov. 2 swallowed whole the correlation-proves-causation premise:

A recent Alliance for Excellent Education study documented the state-by-state economic impact of high school dropouts. Researchers at the Washington-based school change advocacy group determined that if all Minnesota 2003 freshmen had received their diplomas in 2007, the state would have an additional $3.9 billion to work with over the students’ lifetimes. Nationally, $330 billion in wages would be added to the economy, the group’s study estimated.

Right. And since married men are healthier than single men, we could save billions on health care if we just mandated stadium-scale mass marriages.

No, the reality is that students who do graduate from high school are different in significant ways from students who do not, and those differences, on average over an adult lifetime, translate into higher earnings. Awarding high school diplomas to people who otherwise resemble high schoool dropouts — as the GED program has amply demonstrated — does essentially nothing to change their lifetime income.

Yes, it’s true that if students learn in high school how to perform at the top of their abilities, whatever that happens to be, they are more likely to graduate and also to earn more than if they drop out after a well-established record of ditching. But graduation is an effect, not a cause.

You want anecdote? I have anecdote. My son Peter didn’t graduate from high school, and it didn’t hurt him a bit.

Well, to be more informative, he started taking college courses the summer after ninth grade (Intensive Chinese at the University of Minnesota) and then we dragged him off to Shanghai for a sabbatical year, and when we came back he enrolled in college, and graduated in three years. He shoulda spent three years in high school instead?

Given that Minnesota is home to Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, results announced this week by the National Assessment for Educational Progress were only to be expected — or so you would think, judging by the lyrical response from the local press.

“Minnesota’s kids really are above average,” warbled the Star-Tribune in its headline Wednesday morning. All right, I know reporters don’t write their own headlines, but the story was scarcely less gushy.

“When it comes to math and reading, Minnesota students are way above the national average. . . . Results released Tuesday show Minnesota ranks second nationwide for eighth-grade math, fifth for fourth-grade math, tied for sixth in eighth-grade reading and tied for ninth in fourth-grade reading.”

How can I break the news to them gently? NAEP’s lovely interactive maps show that the crucial fact is that Minnesota students are . . . way whiter than average.

Every two years, the NAEP tests a national sample of fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and mathematics (see http://nationsreportcard.gov/ for details). White and Asian students score significantly higher on this and similar tests, and so do more affluent students. The reasons are hotly debated, as are the potential solutions, but that is a different debate.

Results are reported as scaled scores on a single yardstick, so that, for instance, the average score for fourth grade reading is 220 and for eighth grade reading 261 (math, 239 and 280, respectively).

Scaled scores for black and Hispanic students are 25 to 30 points lower than for white students, depending on the test. Those are big differences, the equivalent of two to three grades — the visible sign of the achievement gap you hear so much about.

NAEP’s charts show states as green if they’re above average, yellow if they are not statistically different from average, and red if they are below average. Overall, Minnesota is refreshingly green on all four tests.

But look at black students separately, and Minnesota is dull yellow average on all four tests. Likewise, it is average for Hispanic students on all four tests. For white students, it is above average statistically on three of the four, but by only a few points. The state owes its high ranking primarily to the fact that it draws a larger proportion of its students from groups that on average score higher.

The preening of officials notwithstanding, the weather probably deserves more credit for state outcomes than they do.

Former Harvard President Larry Summers, hounded from that position by a pack of feminists, has just been disinvited from a dinner meeting of the University of California regents after more shrill baying from a similar pack. (From the Corner at National Review, via Instapundit.)

In a 2005 column, I wrote:

At a Jan. 14 conference devoted to the topic “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” Summers gave a long, thoughtful presentation outlining several possible reasons why women are underrepresented in technical fields – math, computer science, physics, chemistry and engineering – including, as he said, “some questions asked and some attempts at provocation.”

Provocation indeed.

“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes – height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means – which can be debated – there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.”

And further, “in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”

He might be wrong, though in my experience as a wannabe mathematician, he’s more likely to be right, but he is surely worth listening to and UC ought to be ashamed of itself for rescinding an invitation, once issued, because of political pressure.

And that goes for Erwin Chemerinsky, too.

In the current issue of Commentary, Terry Teachout quotes from Dana Gioia’s commencement speech at Stanford, the same passage that struck me when I read it.

Gioia is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and his speech pays tribute to the many ways in which culture, especially the arts, enriches life. He also laments the way in which commercial entertainment has crowded out and debased the kinds of culture he appreciates.

Well, I’m an elitist too, and I don’t entirely disagree with his thesis. But then there’s this, from the prepared text for the speech

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.

I think he’s old enough to be remembering times that never were — leaving aside, that is, the logical question of how anyone could “remember” circumstances at “every public high school in this country” when as a high school student he could have been familiar with at most a handful out of thousands.

I’m 67, and I remember the times quite differently. I graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1957 (my graduating class, which had about 400 students, just held its 50th reunion. I was sorry to miss it). Valley Stream is in Nassau County, on Long Island. It borders Queens County, which is a borough of New York City. When I was growing up, Valley Stream was really more of an exurb than a suburb. There were people who commuted into the city, but that wasn’t the dominant pattern.

All this is to set the stage; Valley Stream was a comfortable, safe place that ought to exemplify the rosy past Gioia claims to remember. And he couldn’t be more wrong.

Yes, there was a choir. I sang in it. But it was 80 voices, by audition. So at most 5 percent of the class, on average, could be in choir. There was a marching band, an adjunct to the football team, but that was even smaller. Concert band, jazz band, orchestra? I don’t remember, but even if there were, the number of participants was small. I did take a course in music theory, the only “arts” thing that wasn’t entirely extracurricular, and it was excellent, but there were fewer than 10 students enrolled.

Drama? There was a club that put on an annual musical. Maybe 20 people, max. Dance? No.

Writing opportunities? Yes, you could write for the school paper, but you had to be in with the popular kids to get on staff. I applied, and was set to selling ads along Merrick Ave. toward Lynbrook, which didn’t suit me. A friend and I tried to start a literary magazine, which lasted all of two painfully mimeographed issues.

Studio arts? You’ve got to be kidding. We had shop and home economics.

And by today’s standards, this school had very favorable demographics. Almost no poor children (few rich ones either), almost no children being raised by a single parent — unless she was a war widow, which is not exactly the same thing — and almost no children of color. Which latter should not make any difference, except that there is that persistent anomaly called the achievement gap, and Valley Stream was on the fortunate side of it.

So if Valley Stream did not enjoy Gioia’s imaginary Eden, who did? Surely not black kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant or Watts. Or Hempstead, for that matter. Surely not white kids in an Appalachian holler, or Hispanic kids in border schools along the Rio Grande or any-color kids in rural schools across the windswept Great Plains where the graduating class numbered 10.

“Every public high school”? Not hardly.

And it’s not a matter of money, because the schools Gioia condemns today have several times as much money, after adjusting for inflation, as Valley Stream had 50 years ago.

I guess you have to allow poets license.

Catherine Johnson, the mainstay of the education blog kitchen table math, has a
post about the dismal results of the school district she lives in — Irvington, in New York — which spends $21,000 a year and has only 25 percent of its eighth graders taking algebra, compared with a KIPP school that spends less than $10,000 (on a much less advantaged student population) and has had 80 percent of its students pass the Regents algebra exam.

Joanne Jacobs comments on a new study of the much overrated Perry Preschool project .

In the greatest expansion of public education since kindergarten became the norm after World War I, state leaders are pushing tax-funded pre-kindergarten as a way to narrow the learning gap between middle-class and low-income children, reports the Wall Street Journal.
. . .
On This Week in Education, Alexander Russo wonders why, if universal pre-K is “such a great and transformative idea . . . how come Head Start hasn’t done the trick and is being bypassed?” Good question.

Russo also notes the Journal’s reporting on the role of the Pew Charitable Trust, which has bankrolled research and advocacy for universal pre-K. The Hechinger Institute at Columbia Teachers College is a Pew grantee, notes Richard Colvin of Early Stories.

I’d like to see very good — and therefore expensive — preschool and pre-K for very poor children, who aren’t learning social or academic skills at home. Let’s do that right first.

I said in the comments:

If you look up the data on the Perry Preschool you will find many things of interest.

It was very small — around 60 children in each of the intervention and control groups.

It was 40 years ago; families, neighborhoods, schools are all very different now, and likely the experiment could not be replicated (and apparently has not been, despite the long period).

The High Scope/Perry Preschool program, which is still selling its materials based on these results, claims that the Perry results depend specifically on their materials used in their entirely, and should not be expected from other preschool experiences.

But the biggest factor is that the children in the study were in the most deprived circumstances imaginable. Though there were some small gains in additional education and increased income (especially for the girls) the most significant factor in the large payoff claimed was that it reduced the percentage of of children who went on to have more than five lifetime arrests from something around 55 percent to 39 percent, a matter of 11 or 12 fewer adults in that category.

If services are expanded to much larger groups of children, most of whom who are unlikely to have five lifetime arrests anyway, the payoff rapidly turns negative.

Denver voters recently approved an increase in the sales tax to fund additional pre-school slots, sold to them by politicians who believed in the Perry Preschool fairy tale and had no clue they’d been duped by advocates.

July 10, 2007

Filed under: Higher ed

Students at San Francisco State University are suing the school for its attempt to prosecute them for stepping on paper copies of a flag during a demonstration in October. How’s that again? Don’t administrators defend students’ right to burn actual flags, let alone step on imitation ones? A press release from Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education , explains:

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the SFSU College Republicans and two of the group’s members, undergraduates Leigh Wolf and Trent Downes. SFSU’s College Republicans were put on trial by a campus tribunal this past spring for stepping on makeshift Hamas and Hezbollah flags as part of an anti-terrorism rally they held in October, 2006. FIRE wrote twice to SFSU President Robert A. Corrigan to stress that no American public university can lawfully prosecute students for engaging in peaceful protest or for “desecrating” flags of any kind. The university ignored this warning, with a university spokesperson telling the San Francisco Chronicle that the issue was not flag desecration but rather “the desecration of Allah.” Despite having the power to dismiss the charges at any time, SFSU dragged the plaintiffs through a five-month investigation and hearing before ultimately clearing the group of “harassment” charges.

 “The Supreme Court ruled long ago that the First Amendment protects the right to burn even an American flag in political protest. There are no special protections for Hamas and Hezbollah flags. SFSU knew this, and there is no excuse for putting these students through a five-month ordeal. We hope the lawsuit will stop the university from committing future abuses,” Lukianoff said.

FIRE is supporting the plaintiffs as part of its Speech Codes Litigation Project, with legal assistance from the Alliance Defense Fund, a Phoenix-based non-profit primarily dedicated to protecting religious liberties.