Archive for September, 2007

Crowing about test results

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

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.

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Column: Health disinformation

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

In August, having just retired, I moved into a senior-living residence in Northfield, Minn. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that health, good and bad, is a major topic of conversation at a place like this. It was surprising, though, to hear so many people stating as incontestable facts about health and medicine beliefs that were at best ill-supported opinions and at worst incontestably false.

One resident confidently assured us that replacing ordinary salt with sea salt would not only prevent the ill effects of excessive salt in the diet, but actually reverse them.

I should have thought to ask, does that mean that drinking sea water instead of fresh would be good for one’s health? But never mind; she’ll say it again another day and I’ll ask her then.

Another resident offered her contribution to children’s health, a little jingle she taught her own children.

“The more white bread, the sooner dead,” she said. “They remembered that.”

I’ll bet they did.

An article in the Sept. 16 New York Times Magazine offers a whisper of explanation for why different people hold conflicting views about what’s good for your health; at different times, the medical establishment does too.

In “Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?” Gary Taubes explains why the answer is often “No.”

His marquee example is hormone replacement therapy, prescribed not merely to alleviate the symptoms of menopause, but for long-term use as a way to decrease the risks of heart disease and osteoporosis. A report released in 1985 by the long-running and eminently respectable Nurses’ Health Study said that women in the study who were taking estrogen had only a third as many heart attacks as those who had never taken it.

That was good enough reason for many doctors, including mine, to prescribe it even for women who didn’t have symptoms associated with menopause.

But the nurses’ health study was an observational study, that is, one that enrolls thousands of people and surveys and measures them regularly for information about anything anyone can think of that might be relevant to their health. If something possibly significant pops out of the data, such as a two-thirds reduction in heart attacks, then other researchers go and set up clinical trials, with two groups of people, one of which gets the treatment being tested and the other does not, and neither the patients nor their doctors know which group a patient is in.

Clinical trials take a long time to do, and though there were indications along the way that something was wrong, in 2002 a study by the Women’s Health Initiative concluded that hormone replacement therapy “constituted a potential health risk for all postmenopausal women. While it might protect them against osteoporosis and perhaps colorectal cancer, these benefits would be outweighed by increased risks of heart disease, stroke, blood clots, breast cancer and perhaps even dementia,” Taubes says.

Hormone replacement therapy is not the only medical practice whose supposed benefits, as suggested by the nurses’ study, were not confirmed in clinical trials. Others are antioxidants, vitamins, low-dose aspirin and folic acid (see the article for more specific detail).

It’s not only the residents of Millstream Commons who believe things about their health that aren’t so. Sometimes their doctors do too.

Linda Seebach is an online columnist who blogs at www.lindaseebach.net

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Larry Summers: Dissed again

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

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.

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Political brain research — background

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

Source:

abstract:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn1979.html

Supplementary information:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/suppinfo/nn1979_S1.html

Newspaper coverage:

Denise Gellene, LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story

Judy Peres, Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-politicalbrain_bothsep10,0,7031258.story

Seattle Times (a selective pastiche of the two stories preceding)

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003877213_brain10.html

Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=F0523796-E7F2-99DF-3E8D8124159365B3

Agence France Presse, posted by Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070909/hl_afp/scienceneuroscience

Blogs — and do check out the comments:

Dave Munger, Cognitive Daily

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/09/the_claim_politically_liberal.php

Megan McArdle, The Atlantic:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/09/this_just_in_research_finds_we.php

Chris Mooney, Mixing Memory

http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/#polbrain1

The Panda’s Thumb:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/09/politics_on_you.html#comment-207547

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Column: Political brain research

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

Searching for reasons why liberals and conservatives view the world differently is a popular academic sport, and the results, especially if they can be interpreted as unfavorable to conservatives, are likely to be widely reported.

So the attention paid to a paper titled “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism,” announced online by the journal Nature Neuroscience Sep. 9 (abstract) is unsurprising. Two authors, including the lead author, David Amodio, are in the Department of Psychology at New York University, and the two others are from UCLA.

The paper’s abstract points to a body of research indicating that “conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty.” The authors tested this on a group of undergraduates by measuring what happened in a specific region of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex, if you must know) while they performed a simple “Go/No-Go” task. They were supposed to respond “Go” to one symbol, presented 80 percent of the time in 500 trials, and “No-Go” to the other.

The whole process took about 15 minutes, and because the “Go” symbol was so much more common, participants quickly came to treat it as the default option, and were more likely to make errors on the relatively few times they should have responded “No-Go.”

If you’ve ever used a spell-check program where the default option is “replace” you know exactly how easy it is to make errors of that kind.

Students who self-identified as “conservative” on a questionnaire they filled out before doing the task made more such errors than those who said they were “liberal.”

Thing is, the symbols the researchers chose were “M” and “W.” Perhaps it had escaped their notice, but “W” has a political resonance that “M” does not. Roughly half of the participants (not exactly, because there were 43 of them) had the political W as the Go symbol, and half had the political W as the No-Go symbol. If the goal is to tease out a connection between political orientation and measurements of electrical currents on the scalp, these are not equivalent tasks.

Also, 43 is not a large number of subjects in any case, and according to one reader only seven of them called themselves conservatives. That’s a rather skimpy sample from which to infer anything about conservatives in general. (The paper is apparently available online only to subscribers, although Dave Munger worked up a test version of the task you can try at home. He says it’s harder than you think.)

Asking undergraduates about their political views generally elicits answers about policy issues. It’s a stretch to go from that to judgments about flexibility and openness to change; the students probably weren’t thinking about that. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, it was common to hear those who wanted to preserve Soviet communism referred to as conservatives, although Soviet communism is about as far as you can get from conservative ideas about economic policy and the proper role of government.

It’s a stretch, though, that the researchers seem prepared to make.

“Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there’s a detour and you need to override your autopilot,” Amodio said, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. “Most people function just fine. But there’s a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course.”

Anyone want to bet how long it took for this research to be applied to President Bush and the war in Iraq?

Linda Seebach is an online columnist who blogs at www.lindaseebach.net.

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Column: Closing the learning gap — not!

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Both Twin Cities papers in recent days have run editorials about closing “the learning gap,” the difference in academic performance between children from low-income families and those who are better off, and between black or Hispanic children on the one hand and whites or Asians on the other.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis wrote Sept. 4 about the opening of a new Cristo Rey school, one of a network of private Jesuit high schools for low-income students that combine demanding academic standards with part-time jobs that allow students to earn most of their tuition. The headline read, “A new school to help close the learning gap.”

The Pioneer Press in St Paul wrote about a new initiative focused on African American and African immigrant students, the two groups that have the worst outcomes on Minnesota state tests, and headlined it, “Closing that gap.”

The Cristo Rey model is very effective, but it is also very small – 19 schools this year, in various cities, with about 4,400 students total. Students don’t need to be academic standouts when they apply – more than a third are required to participate in academic assistance programs to help them catch up – but they have to commit themselves to a lot of hard work.

Almost all of those who stick with the program for four years will graduate and go on to college well prepared to succeed. But many decide that 10-hour school days are not for them, and leave for less demanding academic environments. No program like this, no matter how successful it is with the students who seek it out, can do much to close the learning gap overall.

The Pioneer Press editorial assumes that unequal outcomes “represent a crisis in the opportunity department,” and goes on to say, “If large numbers of our young learners aren’t learning, our commitment to fairness and equality requires us to take action. Either that or get rid of that ‘All men are created equal’ business.”

But that’s begging the question. People aren’t created equal in their desire to take advantage of opportunities, or in their ability to do so.

In athletics, where the lifetime stakes are not so high and the individual differences in performance are less clearly linked to socially significant groupings of race, class and gender, people generally accept this and it isn’t even particularly controversial. A good school athletic program encourages all children to strive for their personal best, provides coaching appropriate to their level of performance whatever it is, and still recognizes and celebrates truly outstanding athletes.

In academics, many schools fall far short of those goals. The effects may be more apparent in groups with larger numbers of disadvantaged students, but focusing on the groups rather than the individuals in them puts the spotlight on reducing inequality rather than increasing success.

Reducing inequality would be a welcome outcome, but making it a primary goal tends to deflect attention from strategies that might raise achievement in general.

Creating a learning environment that demands and rewards hard work is one such strategy. Students at schools like Cristo Rey would likely do just as well elsewhere if they worked just as hard, but the problem is that elsewhere they probably wouldn’t work as hard because doing so is not really expected or effectively encouraged.

Having more such schools would be a good thing. There’s just no reason to expect them to “close that gap.”

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Imaginary Eden

Thursday, September 6th, 2007

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.

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Middle school math

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

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.

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For sale online . . .

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

I followed a link from Instapundit to a Strategy Page post about Japan’s new class of aircraft carriers, and at the end of the comments there’s an eBay ad, under the heading “Aircraft Carrier,” that says, “Browse a huge selection now. Find exactly what you want today.”

D’you suppose that’s like J. P. Morgan’s yacht — if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it?

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Column: Honesty about law-school admissions

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

People who believe that racial discrimination is a legitimate means to a desirable political end (at least if your heart is pure and you mean well) are all in a swivet over a report just released by the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights on affirmative action in law school admissions.

The report recommends that law schools “voluntarily provide disclosure to the public and, at the very least, to potential applicants on student academic performance, attrition, graduation, bar passage, student loan default, and future income disaggregated by academic credentials.”

If it isn’t immediately obvious why this should be controversial, you perhaps don’t understand that “disaggregated by academic credentials” is polite politician-speak that really means accounting for the fact that law schools admit black students with far weaker credentials, on average, than they require of white and Asian students.

That’s not just what critics say about law-school admission policies; it’s what university officials themselves claim in defense of their policies. “Defense,” mind you. Officials at the University of Michigan, arguing the benefits of “diversity” in the case Grutter v. Bollinger, conceded that if they evaluated students from “underrepresented” minority groups by the same criteria they used for whites and Asians, three of every four would not have been admitted.

One consequence is distressingly high failure rates on the bar exam. According to a study by the Law School Admission Council, 96.7 percent of white law grads who take the bar exam eventually pass it, that is, 3.3 percent never do no matter how many times they take it. The comparable failure rate for blacks is 22.4 percent (cited by John Rosenberg on his blog www.discriminations.us, which has multiple posts and links).

Gail Heriot, who joined the commission just this year, said in an Aug. 26 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (subscription, but there’s a Google cache) that the prospects for eventual success for those entering law school are really even worse than that.

Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?

She discusses a study released by UCLA law professor Richard Sander in 2004 and published the following year in the Stanford Law Review. He attributes the high failure rate in part to the mismatch between black law students and the institutions they attend. Because the top schools dip further into the pool of black applicants, law schools in every tier find the pool depleted of applicants comparable to the white students they admit, and black law students cluster disproportionately at the bottom of their class. As a result, Sander believes, there are actually fewer black lawyers than there would be without racial preferences in admissions.

Sander’s explanation for the disparity in outcomes has been angrily rebuffed (though not, in my view, successfully refuted) by supporters of preferential admissions policies. If Sander is right all justifications for such policies are beside the point. They don’t accomplish what they are supposed to, and moreover can do harm to students who don’t know before they choose a law school how likely they are to succeed there.

More research might settle the question, but Sander’s request for data on bar passage rates has been denied by the California State Bar. Rosenberg points out that exactly the kind of data Sander requested has been obtained, and used, by some of the very same people who are now trying to prevent him from getting it.

If the commission’s recommendations were followed, Sander and anybody else who wanted to could do the research. That’s why the demand for transparency and honesty is a threat to people who believe that racial discrimination in pursuit of equal outcomes is no vice, and colorblindness in pursuit of equal opportunity is no virtue.

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