JPG Rants

Education wrap-up

2010-01-31T23:28:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow, Monday, February 1, I begin my student teaching at Vines High School in Plano. In two ways this means that this will be my last blog posting on education and education policy for a while. This post will contain a list of brief topics I had wanted to get to at some point. But first an explanation of why this will be my last posting for a while.

The most important one is time. Student teaching is a more than full-time activity. I find it hard to believe that I will have time or energy for anything else. Indeed, this will be my first full-time position since 1997 when I requested to go from full-time to part-time at the Cranfield University Computer Centre. (And, unlike in Plano which has loads of centres and theatres it's not an affectation for Cranfield, in England, to have a computer centre.) I will be less active with my Facebook presence, and I will be less active here.

The second reason for cutting down in posting about education policy was that during the Plano Student Teacher orientation we were advised to not make public statements about the school district. I suspect that if I examined the legal basis for this, I would find that as someone now affiliated with PISD I would not be allowed to say anything that could be taken as a reflection of PISD policy. So I doubt that I could be forbidden from blogging if I included appropriate disclaimers. But instead of trying to cut close to what is allowed, I will steer clear of anything that might conflict with policy. Only a few of my postings have specifically addressed PISD, and in those postings I think I've been very positive about the school district. It was my first choice for student teaching and will be my first choice when I hit the job market.

Once I am fully settled into a teaching position I will explore what kind of public posting would be acceptable. As I've said before I have absolutely no desire to stir up trouble. I should also point out that by refraining from commenting on education, I am much less likely to accidentally violate any confidentiality concerns. (Not that I think I am likely to make that mistake, it may be a concern of others I work with.)

So now I'll just produce a brief list of things that I wanted to address at some point.

In praise of Arne Duncan

I really like US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. I like his commitment to finding solutions that work. From his ideas about longer school days and years to his attempts to get usable data that enables us to see what (and who) works well and what (and who) doesn't. He's not making friends with many teachers' unions, but they aren't protesting too much because he does have a lot of money to through around.

There was an interesting profile of Duncan in the New Yorker recently. I didn't feel that it was fully up to the standards I usually see in the New Yorker, but it was still a worthwhile read.

Incentives to cheat

Cheating on the high stakes tests is something that has been going on for a while and has been excellently described in the first chapter of Freakonomics. And there are more reports coming in. The set of rules in place to present cheating is enormous. Administering and document these tests has become a huge undertaking, not least of all to prevent teacher and administrator cheating.

Instead of adding more rules to deal with particular avenues of cheating, we need to correct a fundamental design flaw. The people who have the most to lose by poor test scores are exactly the people who administer these tests. The teachers and school principals have much more at stake than the actual students. In some cases their jobs are at stake. Yet these are the same people who administer the tests. No matter how much we like to think about the integrity of teachers and school administrators, this is a terrible position to put them in.

I don't know exactly how it should be done, but this kind of testing should be administered by outsiders. Maybe contract with something like ETS or other organizations whose business depends on their reputation for fair administration of tests. Maybe use teachers for a different school district. What ever we do, we should not have the people who have most at stake with these test scores administer the tests.

Statistics, Not pre-pre-Calculus

Arthur Benjamin has proposed something that in a three minute video of his TED talk changed my view about math curriculum. It is a simple point that he makes better than I could summarize.

I haven't thought through this in detail, but as I watch kids, most of whom will not go on to calculus, learn how to factor or divide polynomials, I can't help thinking that Arthur Benjamin is on to something. One problem in changing things is that most people like me (math geeks who go into teaching) like algebra and analysis more than we like statistics. Although I would enjoy learning a branch of mathematics that I have no formal training in, it would certainly involve retraining, not to mention entirely new curriculum development.

A gripe about relevance

I have been told in my teacher training that I should try to make a connection between everything I teach and the lives of my students. I've been told that students don't like or do well in math because they don't see the relevance. I feel that math is being held to a higher standard than other fields. When in English students are taught the difference between a metaphor and a simile there is no demand that it be made relevant. In history it is great to teach about the Roman Empire, but exaggerating its relevance for most students is probably seen as a sham. In so many subjects we are teaching kids how to think about the world and ideas. Yet when it comes to math, people seem to feel that we need to pretend that all of the skills are immediately relevant for their lives.

It's good to learn mathematics because by studying it makes people smarter. It is about learning how to think in a particular way. Being able to think mathematically is very useful even if the particular skills taught are not. I believe that this is also true of the study of other fields as well. Each opens up a way of thinking that will benefit students for the rest of their lives. Insisting that it is practical and constructing contrived applications only communicates that we are lying about the need to study math. We need to tell our students the truth: Learning math makes your brain work better.

And finally, my résumé.

My student teaching is the last requirement before I can receive my Texas Mathematics 8–12 Mathematics Certification. So I will be looking for a job soon. Thus, I link to my résumé (PDF).

How to count and compare

2010-01-28T13:40:00.001-06:00

The bottom line of this rant is that being ranked 4th out of 16 in graduation rates is perfectly respectable, but it is misleading to present this in a way would lead people to infer a ranking of 4th out of 51.

I've complained before that there is often no good way to compare education results from state to state. And I've stated my suspicion that this is deliberate.

Some good news is that Texas is joining an effort to provide comparable information on graduation rates, even though the state is ducking out of an effort to develop ways to compare student performance. And this is summarized in a report (PDF) titled, The National Governors Association Compact Rate: A Comprehensive Approach to Improved Accuracy and Consistency in High School Graduation Rates. This report extolls the virtues of having a consistent measure that allows one state's results to be compared with another. I wish that the people, (well Governor Perry) who want to withdraw from efforts to have comparable data for student achievement would apply the same thinking that they've used for reporting graduation rates.

If anyone doubts that politicians and officials try to spin results to make things look good for them, it is instructive to read the one sentence announcement of the graduation report on the TEA website.

A new report shows Texas has the fourth highest graduation rate among states using National Governors Association methodology.

Reading that announcement you might think that Texas ranked 4th out of 51 (50 states, plus the District of Columbia). This would certainly put a very positive light on Texas education. You have to read through the report to find so far only 16 states are using this measure; so Texas ranks a respectable 4th out of 16 instead of the implicated 4th out of 51.

Note that the announcement is perfectly true. But without including the fact that only 16 states were involved instead of 50, it invites readers to draw an incorrect conclusion.

I applaud the effort to provide a consistent metric for calculating graduation rates across states. And I am gratified that Texas does well among the 16 states that have reported this way. (More states are coming on board according to the report.). More transparent reporting is in the public interest. Now let's do this (as most other states are committed to) for achievement as well.

All teachers need math

2010-01-26T13:49:00.000-06:00

Scientific American has an article, Observations: Little girls are made of sugar and spice, and learn that math is not nice, pointing out research by Susan Levine that math anxiety can be passed from female 1st and 2nd grade teachers to their female students. This ends of propagating the myth that boys are better at math than girls.

College students majoring in early elementary education in the U.S., of whom 90 percent are female, hold the highest level of math anxiety compared to students majoring in other subjects. And elementary students emulate the behavior of same-gender adults more than opposite-gender adults.

The study appears to have been carefully conducted. The recommendation is that math training be a larger part of the education of those going into early elementary teaching.

Points off for efficiency

2010-01-25T19:35:00.001-06:00

It is not all that common for me to defend Texas against some national or interstate education evaluation. But there is one thing in Education Week's report, Quality Counts 2010 that is grossly unfair to Texas, and it reflects what I consider to be an unhelpful way of thinking: Their overall scoring system actually penalizes efficiency.

If Alice gets result X by spending $1000 and Bob one gets the same result, X, by spending just $500 who is doing a better job? I would think that most people would agree that Bob is doing a better job. Bob is being more efficient by getting the same results as Alice, but he is using only half of the resources that Alice uses.

Apparently the editors over at Education Week doesn't see it that way. They take points off for those states that spend less money per student even if those states reach the same results in terms of achievement as higher spending states. Here are the report's ratings for Texas against the national average

	Texas	Rank	US
Chance for Success	C	39	C+
Standards & accountability	A	6	B
Teaching profession	C	24	C
School finance	D+	42	C
Transitions & alignment	B	6	C
K–12 achievement	C	13	D+

While there is little here for Texas to brag about, being dinged (D+) for being more efficient at reaching a better than average achievement (C) is just silly. But thinking that way is a natural consequence of people valuing what they do.

What's good for GM …

It is perfectly natural for people who dedicate their lives to education to believe that what is good for the education establishment is good for education; and for the most part they are correct. It is perfectly natural for members of the fire fighters and police associations to believe that what is good for their members is good for public safety; and for the most part they are correct. It is perfectly natural for those in the air travel industry to believe that what is good for them is good for the traveling public; and for the most part they are correct. But getting into the habit of thinking that way can sometimes lead people to hold spectacularly wrong mistaken views.

It will be an interesting to observe, as I move deeper and deeper into this world, how much my thinking will be turned this way. Maybe if I'd read this article a year from now instead of today (just a week before I begin my student teaching) I would have noticed the problem I point out. But being married to someone trained in economics has a way of permanently changing the way one thinks (and for the better). So I hope that I will still be able to recognize when the interests of my group don't correspond to the public good.

On the other hand I probably am already ensnared by this way of thinking. I very highly value public education (otherwise I wouldn't be going into the field), and naturally I think that society should value it just as highly and should dedicate more resources to it. So while I am in it enough to want more money for public education, I am not in it so deeply that I fail to recognize the absurdity of penalizing efficiency.

A wrinkle in defense of Education Week scoring

I do need to acknowledge that the Finance and Spending category isn't entirely based on the amount spent. Texas also was correctly marked down in this category for its unequal spending around the state. None-the-less a component of the measure that did takes points away from Texas was its efficiency.

On Leadership and Arrogance

2010-01-23T11:46:00.001-06:00

Several years ago, I came up with a way to sort out various labels that we use when we talk about politicians and political parties. And being married to a management scholar makes the 2X2 grid come naturally. We have a two binary distinctions. The first is whether the position taken is popular or unpopular. The second division is whether I like the position taken.

When a politician does something popular which I dislike, it is called pandering to the public, while when I agree with it it is called representing the will of the people. When a politician does something that I like but is unpopular, it is an example of leadership; but if it is something that I disagree with, then it is arrogance.

	Popular	Unpopular
I agree	Will of the people	Leadership
I disagree	Pandering	Arrogance

Now that it has become clear that the Democratic party is trying to push through things for which there is not a great deal of public support, it is up to you whether this is to be called leadership or arrogance.

Replace the people!

What particularly prompted me to post this note is a discussion I had with my wife about Charles Blow's opinion piece Mob Rules in the New York Times today (January 23, 2101). When my wife read it, she said that it reminded her of old joke when the Hungarian Communist Party did some polling and discovered that they were fiercely unpopular people. Their response, as the jokes goes, was a call to replace the people.

I have spent most of my life holding minority opinions (and so has my wife). So I was reminded of this distinction between arrogance and leadership that I've made before.

Change the combination on your luggage

2010-01-21T10:16:00.001-06:00

After Dark Helmut extorts the code needed to suck out the atmosphere and learns it is 1-2-3-4-5 he declares that That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard of in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage! A few minutes later Mel Brooks is in the scene:

Well, folks, there are a lot of people who need to change the combination on their luggage. Or less metaphorically, there are a lot of people who need to change their password management practices.

A good password is hard to remember

Because of spectacularly bad security practices by Rockyou.com, 32 million passwords have been made public. There's a detailed report (PDF) by iMPERVA and a summary article at net-security.org.

What we know is that the number of distinct good passwords that people can remember can be counted on our fingers (maybe just the fingers of one hand). Good passwords are hard to remember. This means that people will either

Use bad, easy to remember passwords
Use the same password (or predictable variants of the same password) from site to site
Some combination of the two

This makes passwords very easy to compromise. If one site gets compromised (like RockYou), and your banking password is predictable from your RockYou password, then it isn't hard to gain access to your bank account.

Password management software is the solution

This problem is not new. Security experts have known for a long time that human psychology is the limit on good passwords. Fortunately there is a solution. Password management software. I only have a few minutes to write this post, so I won't go into detail. But for Mac OS X, I strongly recommend 1Password. For everyone else I recommend KeePass. And if you are the kind of person who sticks with the same web browser, than you could get by with the password management system that is built into all modern browsers. Those aren't as good or as flexible as 1Password or KeePass, but the are better than nothing.

With those tools, you only need to remember your master password, and let the software provide strong, distinct passwords for each site you visit. You never need to know what those individual passwords are.

Update: After finally getting a chance this afternoon to look at the morning news paper, I see that there is a front page article in the New York Times about this. Unfortunately that article (at least the print version) does not mention password management systems.

Regarding the software I've recommended, I have no vested interest in either KeePass or 1Password or any particular password management system. I am a happy and enthusiastic customer of 1Password and an active participant on their support forums. Like every user of the Internet, I do benefit from others behaving more securely.

Google Attack Vectors

2010-01-13T14:28:00.001-06:00

It is no news by this point that Google is reconsidering its China operations after an attack on their systems from China aiming that the Gmail accounts of Chinese Human Rights activists. One of the many interesting things about this is the nature of the attack and what it says about computer security.

A recent report in Computer World gives us some things to think about if they are eventually confirmed. The first is that the limited success the attackers had at getting Gmail account information was not by breaking into Google proper, but by gaining some access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users. So there we have it. It shouldn't be surprising that the easiest way to collect information about Gmail users is to co-opt the same system that our government uses. Indeed this data interception system wouldn't even be in place if it weren't for law enforcement requirements.

[A] source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. Right before Christmas, it was, Holy s***, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems].

The second thing is how the attackers got access to the systems that they did. Apparently they first worked to compromise uses who might have access to those systems.

There is an attack exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in one of the major document types, [Eli] Jellenc said. They infect whichever users they can, and leverage any contact information or any access information on the victim's computer to misrepresent themselves as that victim." The goal is to "infect someone with administrative access to the systems that hold the intellectual property that they're trying to obtain.

This is a scary lesson for anyone concerned about computer security within an institution. People who work there have legitimate access, but they may not have the best security practices at home (or work). Spies are targeting those individuals (people like you and me) to get some access to the kinds of things we have access to for our work.

The trouble with Adobe Reader

Now when I hear Autumn 2009 and zero-day vulnerability in one of the major document types my mind jumps immediately to problems with Adobe's PDF readers. PDFs are great. PDFs are in principle much more secure that word processing documents. PDFs are ideal for certain kinds of document exchange. So it is with real bitterness that I acknowledge that there are problems with PDFs. The trouble with PDFs however all have a single source and there is a very simple work-around. The origin of problems lie in the marketing department of Adobe.

The solution is to use other PDF readers. PDF is an (relatively) open standard. Anyone can create and distribute software that can read and create PDFs. And many people have. Mac OS X users should just use the Preview.app that comes with their system for reading PDFs. For Windows users I recommend Sumatra PDF. There are more sophisticated PDF viewers available, but these lightweight, high quality, free PDF readers are where to start. For other Unix users, you probably aren't using Adobe's PDF reader in the first place.

If you feel you must use Abobe's PDF Readers, disable Javascript. Adobe's attempt to add JavaScript to PDF in one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas in tech design.

The Sky is Falling: First Y2010 bug discovered

2010-01-01T13:37:00.001-06:00

Well for everyone with apocalyptic fears that aren't being satisfied by climate change or asteroids, we have a real life Y2010 computer bug. This Earth shattering bug affects the widely used spam filtering system, SpamAssassin. Even if you have never heard of this, there is a very good chance that your email provider uses SpamAssassin as part of its arsenal in limiting the spam that lands in your inbox.

Spammers want to have their messages to you seen, so they would like to have their messages at the top (or bottom, depending on how you view your mail) of your inbox. That is, they would like their messages to be viewed as the most recent message in your inbox. Many mail programs will sort the messages in your mailbox by (apparent) send date. Personally, I prefer to have my mail sorted by arrival time which I trust my system to know instead of using unreliable values in the sender created Date field of the message header.

But there are programs and people who do display messages by the easily faked sender date. And so for a time, spammers produced spam sending software that gave dates in the future so that these messages would listed in your inbox where you look for most recent messages. Naturally, spam filtering tools, like SpamAssassin, added rules that tried to detect message with dates that were far in the future. At the time that some of these filtering rules were put in place, 2010 was, in fact, far in the future. But the future is now, and messages with perfectly honest and legitimate Date information are being incorrectly flagged as spam.

The filtering rule in question in the default SpamAssassin distribution is in the file 72_active.cf and reads

##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
header   FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]
describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      The date is grossly in the future.
##} FH_DATE_PAST_20XX

Solutions

Fortunately these rules are designed to be easily modified by system administrators (but not by end users). There are three option that I can see.

The first option is to tell your system to not use this rule. That is, tell your system to assign zero points for a hit against that rule. This can be done in your local configuration file, typically local.cf in the SpamAssassin configuration directory, with something like
score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0

The second solution is the modify or replace the rule with something that looks further into the future. That is change the regular expression in the rule from matching /20[1-9][0-9]/ to matching /20[2-9][0-9]/. This way the rule is safe for another 10 years, after which you may hope that it becomes Somebody Else's Problem.

Of course an ideal solution would be to have the system look at the current date. Unfortunately this undermines some of the effectiveness of SpamAssassin which is to have lots of rules that are quick and easy to check. Of the top of my head, I can see a number of approaches to this, but I haven't yet joined the discussion among the SpamAssassin community. My recommendation for email administrators is to use the first fix (disable the rule) until we work out a robust solution.

Ordinary users

If you find that a bunch of non-spam is suddenly being treated as spam by your email system, please report the problem to your email provider immediately with a link to either this posting or some of the ones I've linked to.

Credit

Thanks to Paul Haldane of Information Systems and Services, Newcastle University (England) who posted on a mailing list I read a link and summery of Mike Cardwell's post on this issue.

How do the unchurched give?

2010-01-01T09:32:00.001-06:00

Much has been made of Arthur Brooks' careful study showing that the religious and conservatives give substantially more to charity than atheists and liberals.

Note: This particular posting is really about a New Year's launch of the Foundation Beyond Belief, but I've buried the lead so deeply in this posting, that I figured I should put this note up here near the top.

I haven't read Brook's research myself, and so I don't know how much of these findings could be explained away. For example, it may be the case that a major source of data is income tax filings and that conservatives are more likely to itemize charitable giving than liberals. (In my case, I know that I don't itemize.)

But even if some portion of the findings can be explained away the results appear to be too overwhelming and Arthur Brooks too credible and competent for there not to be something very real and (speaking as a liberal) disturbing going on here. And so this leaves us with two questions. What is the cause of this disparity? And how can we fix this?

Personality

There may very well be personality differences that lead to things. Jonathan Haidt has dedicated much of his career to studying people's moral choices and what underly them. Roughly speaking, Haidt identifies five foundations of moral judgement.

Avoid harm to others
Be fair
Support your group/tribe/community
Respect authority
Remain pure

Haidt finds that liberals (and western moral philosophy) focuses on the first two of these. While conservatives and traditionalists tend to give more equal weight to all five. See his paper on the moral foundations of politics (PDF) to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for the background and evidence for this. What is relevant here is the communitarian foundation of supporting your in-group. The same thing that leads conservatives the world over to be more nationalistic may very well make them far more generous to their local communities.

If I am correct that liberals deemphasis of in-group support plays a role in charitable contributions, then we should predict that the charities that liberals give to are less local than the ones that conservatives contribute to. (As anecdotal support for this, my favorite charity is CamFed which focuses on educating girls in Africa.) This, as they say, is an empirical question.

Church as a charitable community

Atheists, for the most part, don't belong to church communities. And conservatives are far more likely to be active members of a church community than liberals. Church communities provide a conduit for giving (and not just to the church). Groups of church members will volunteer at a soup kitchen or organize a canned food drive or travel together to build homes for people. While individuals outside of such a community can do any of those things, it is far easier to do them when you are part of a group that regularly engages in those activities.

In short, I spend my Sunday mornings reading the New York Times over orange juice and bagels bemoaning the state of the world, while conservatives are interacting with their church communities and planning how they can do good. Giving becomes a social and community activity of church goers, while for people like me it is something that I do privately (and apparently less frequently) through a web-browser. For me, it is often to assuage guilt; for them, it is a positive social activity.

What do we do about this

Atheists and humanists need to make charity part of our culture. We may have certain personality and institutional handicaps to over come to be as charitable as our religious and conservative neighbors, but we (like to think) that we have reason and a sense of fairness on our side. So let's play to our strengths, but also try to address our limitations.

The Foundation Beyond Belief is an attempt to provide an institutional structure to help make up for our lack of church communities. And today, January 1, 2010 is its official public launch. Indeed, at least the fact that the website is responding exceedingly poorly at the moment suggests that the public launch is successful.

There is a great deal to say about the Foundation Beyond Belief and its founder. But I will be brief. Beneficiaries supported by FBB may be founded on any worldview so long as they don't proselytize. The details of how the ten charities per quarter are nominated and selected are detailed on the (currently unresponsive) website.

The founder of the FBB, Dale McGowan, is the author of the outstanding book, Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion, and so the second part of the mission of the Foundation is to provide support and communities for families that wish to raise ethical and caring kids. The mission of the Foundation Beyond Belief is

To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts.

I will be writing more about the FBB in the weeks to come.

Whence the Relativism of the Right?

2009-11-29T14:15:00.001-06:00

It is not usual for me to find myself in agreement with Rod Dreher, editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News, but today's Op-Ed piece is one of the exceptions.

Dreher correctly bemoans the role relativism in political discussion. An example is that the question of where President Obama was born isn't a matter of fact but opinion, with all opinions being legitimate. Dreher suggests that this kind of relativism has been a part of the rhetoric on the Left in American politics over the past few decades, but that it is appears to be growing on the Right and in the culture at large. Although I share his impression, it would be worthwhile for someone (not me) to undertake an investigation of whether there really is an increase in this kind of thinking.

But for the sake of my brief comments here, I will temporarily assume that the phenomenon we perceive is, indeed, real. It is clear where the relativism on the Left comes from. When explicit Marxism became discredited in academia, post-modernism came to the rescue of every social science charlatan. Its rise in the late 1980s gave ex-Marxists just the cover that they needed. It makes a virtue out of incoherence; It elevates opinion above independently verifiable fact; and it provides you with the ability to call anyone who disagrees with you racist or sexist.

But what I'd like to speculate about here is how the Right managed to adopt the relativism that they correctly scorned for so long. It may just be a consequence of long standing anti-elitist populism. But I'm going to add to the mix of possible sources.

Fundamentalist revival as a source of Relativism

Fundamentalists have always treated relativism as the enemy. Indeed, both Fundamentalists and Relativists need each other as bogeymen. Each say that the alternatives to their own positions is the evil of the other position. In this light it seems more than a bit silly to propose what I'm suggesting. I recognize that I have an uphill struggle in making my case. Also, I still have a lot of homework to do today; so I will have to be brief.

The first time that I heard someone on the Right launch into the rhetoric of Relativism I was both amused and horrified. He spoke of paradigm shifts and that scientific truth only made sense with respect to a specific paradigm, which in turn was a social construct. It was the usual line that I'd heard many times before, but I was surprised by the source. So why was this person on the Right trying to undermine science and facts? Because he was also a Young Earth Creationist. Creationism only works if you deny, destroy, or lie about science. And apparently Creationists of the day had adopted the same attacks on science and scientific reasoning that had been developed by the Left.

Just as post-modernist thinking tried to make a virtue out of incoherence and inconsistency just listen to any Christian try to explain the Trinity or any religious person talk about the mysteries within their belief system. Science has plenty of mysteries, but they are seen as problems to solve and demystify. Religion, on the other hand, treats mystery as supporting evidence.

Just as post-modernism elevated opinion above fact, many religions treat personal revelation as the best (often only) way to establish truth. My personal revelation is as good as yours, and it certainly trumps your facts.

And just as post-modern social science somehow enabled participants to dismiss their opponents as sexists or racists whose arguments and evidence don't need to be considered, fundamentalists know not to debate with the Devil. They explicitly won't consider the arguments of opponents because it might corrupt them.

Religious fundamentalism is a system of thought that (a) attempts to undermine science and scientific thinking, (b) treats its own mysteries as virtues instead of as embarrassments, (c) places unverifiable beliefs above facts, (d) and justifies covering your ears when confronted with opposing views. I'm suggesting that it this system of thought that legitimates relativism exactly among people who should abhor it.

A large grain of salt

What I've said here is highly speculative. It really is more of a plausibility argument than mustering evidence and argument for my suggestion. Furthermore we don't even know if the phenomenon I'm attempting to explain is real. Is relativism growing, and in particular is it growing on the Right? I don't know. But this is a blog, not a research paper.

[Update 2009-12-15: I've corrected many typos and grammatical and punctuation errors. I'm sure many more remain]

In Praise of the TAKS

2009-11-27T18:14:00.001-06:00

A few days ago I had an eye-opening experience. I took the 2009 Exit level Math TAKS and have come to the conclusion that it is a far better designed test than I'd anticipated. Below I will explain both my initial pessimism and what impressed me about the test.

Before that, just some questions to get out of the way. I took the TAKS as part of a course assignment in my teacher training program. I missed one (out of 60) questions on an easy question due to a silly oversight. I didn't take the test under normal test taking conditions. On the one hand, I was free to make myself a fresh cup of tea every now and then; on the other hand, I had to put up with the dogs barking at the gardeners. I recommend that anyone – like me – who gripes about Texas standards and teaching to the test should try taking these exit level tests. Past tests are available from the Texas Education Agency for all levels and subjects for which the TAKS is administered.

Why I was pessimistic

I had not expected the TAKS exit level test to be as interesting as it turned out to be. There were several reasons for my pessimism. First was experience with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade math TAKS that my daughter took. They didn't really seem to involve any problem solving or mathematical reasoning; instead they were about the ability to apply memorized techniques to clear instances. In retrospect this was probably because educators take Piaget too seriously and (incorrectly) believe that grade school kids are incapable of formal reasoning. Whatever the cause, there is a large difference in approach between the grade school TAKS and the exit exam.

The second reason for my pessimism was based on my impression that in high school math education very little time is given to developing mathematical reasoning skills, and most of the time is on specific techniques to solve specific kinds of problems. Real understanding and creative problem solving rarely seemed to be emphasized. I had (incorrectly) attributed this to teaching to the test. I had thought what I had disliked about the curriculum was a consequence of the test.

Liking the test

Many problems on the test had multiple ways of getting at the solution. One method would be mindlessly applying the right set of procedures, plugging away at it (typically using a calculator), and eventually coming to an answer. But these problems were also set up as little mathematical puzzles. There was often a key insight which could lead one quickly, easily, and without a calculator to the right answer. Grasping the key to these problems not only saved time, effort, and tedium; but it also was less error prone. Many of the incorrect answer options were exactly the kinds of things one might arrive at for making a minor error (as I did in the question I got wrong). The more steps involved in computing an answer, the more opportunity there is to slip up on one of those common errors. If one had a good grasp of the meaning of the various mathematical concepts then the key was usually available.

Other questions were explicitly about concepts. These questions were not merely testing knowledge of technical vocabulary, but did require an understanding of the concepts to answer correctly. I don't think I have the skill to come up with questions of that nature, but I can recognize them when I see them.

As a minor anecdote that nicely illustrates how wrong I was about this test there was a question on the test that I had previously claimed would not be on a TAKS test. During my teacher training, I've taught some sample lessons to my fellow teachers-in-training. In one of them, I had students develop a model for an instances of n(n-1)/2 growth. I said at the time that this was an activity that would help them think mathematically but would not be on the TAKS. It was a dig at the TAKS and a completely unfounded one. Imagine my surprise when I hit question 6 on last year's test and discovered it to be exactly the kind of problem I said would not be on the TAKS.

I'm hoping that I will find time over the next few days to try exit exams in English, Science and Social Studies as well. Although high school teachers are specialists, we should – at a minimum – understand what is being expected of our students in all areas. (Now all I have to do is find someone who will grade the ELA writing sample if I do take that portion of that test.)

Decisions and Revisions

I was wrong in my expectations of the TAKS. Alternatively, I may have been correct in my expectations and wrong about my current evaluation of the TAKS. In either case I've been far off the mark at least once. While I certainly don't like being wrong, I actually enjoy the experience of discovering that I've been wrong. It is eye-opening in the best sense. I see things that I previously did not see, and I am forced to reevaluate both the reasoning that led up to the incorrect view and the consequences of that view.

But the big lesson in discovering that I've been spectacularly wrong about something is the heightened awareness that other positions that I currently hold firmly may also be wrong. Caveat lector.

Ten adjectives that describe my office

2009-11-19T17:28:00.001-06:00

Apparently some of my daughter's classmates are struggling with parts of speech. (We've been playing Mad-Libs since she was seven; it's not a problem for us). Anyway her class was given an assignment to go into three rooms at home and find ten adjectives in each room and write them down. They were allowed to find adjectives that described objects in each room

Tímea decided to make the assignment slightly less boring by finding ten adjectives that apply to the room as a whole. This is her list for my office

Cluttered
Messy
Tumultuous
Geeky
Tangled
Fun
Crowded
Interesting
Exciting
Ransacked

"We will have no more marriages"

2009-11-18T15:29:00.001-06:00

Apparently in Texans' zeal to rule out marriage for one group of people back in 2005, voters adopted an amendment to the State Constitution that rules out state authorized marriage for anyone. Read clause (b) of the amendment carefully.

(a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. (b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

This observation is now making news, but it appears that this was also brought up during the campaign as well.

Post hoc dots

2009-11-14T21:46:00.001-06:00

It is easy to spot warning signs after the fact. But it is important that we do investigate them. After the murderous treason at Fort Hood on November 5, we need to develop as a complete an understanding what of what information was available prior to the attack and what information processing failures may have allowed it to happen. I don't think that anyone disputes this.

As more and more facts come to light, it is natural to ask how we could have failed to connect the dots. What appears to have happened is that in several separate instances warning signs about Major Hasan were noted, but in no instance were they considered serious enough to escalate the case to a more comprehensive investigation of him. People will naturally think that this means that there was some flaw in the system.

There very well be flaws in the system, but that we won't know until we have more comprehensive understanding of the system itself. (And that understanding will probably not be made public in all its details.) But I do want to make clear is that when it comes to noting warning signs we need to look probabilities and false positives.

If a few innocent people get investigated due to false positives in our system that is not a problem. It is normal and to be expected. But we need to remember that we simply don't have the resources to properly investigate hundreds of thousands of people.

With that in mind, let's run some hypothetical numbers. Suppose, extremely optimistically, we have a tool that can correctly identify terrorists living in the US with an accuracy of 99.9%. Let's also suppose that there are about 1000 terrorists living in the US. Our tool would catch 999 of them and miss only one terrorist. That sounds excellent.

But now consider what happens with non-terrorists. With about three hundred million non-terrorists living in the US, our hypothetical tool would correctly identify 99.9% of them as non-terrorists. Unfortunately it would incorrectly identify three hundred thousand people as terrorists needing careful investigation. So even with a tool as accurate as only one error in 1000 we would have 300,000 false positives.

Three hundred thousand innocent people would need to be carefully investigated even if our screening tool were wrong only one out of 1000 times. Even if we were willing to accept the civil liberties implications of having the government undertake careful followup investigations of the political, religious, and psychological motives of that many innocent people, we don't have the resources.

If we can't perform the that many investigations (and here we are considering best case), then do we deprive 300,000 innocent people of working in sensitive positions? One doesn't have to be a card carrying member of the ACLU to recognize that that would be truly un-American. And such a practice would certainly lead to a backlash that could harm security more than help it.

I do not have a solution to this problem. I don't know how we can effectively screen against domestic terrorists. I expect that the DHS has people who are a lot smarter than I am working on these problems. Those people will also have real numbers to work with instead of my made up ones. But I do know that the inevitable calls we will hear over the next few weeks to follow-up every lead are failing to understand the implications of such a policy.

Religion doesn't make you crazy, but …

2009-11-10T17:07:00.001-06:00

Speculating about motives

In the immediate aftermath of the killing rampage at Fort Hood, I find it remarkable the extent to which the public was reminded not to speculate about any religious motivation of the apparent shooter, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan. Even as recently as November 8, General George Casey added his voice to the many along these lines. According to an AP report, Casey has urged the country not to get caught up in speculation about the Muslim faith of the Fort Hood gunman.

It is one thing to advise us not to jump to conclusions as the President has correctly warned us about, but quiet another to suggest that we shouldn't speculate. And the same people who wish to discourage speculation of religious or political motives are more than happy to speculate about psychological stress. Indeed, there has a been a collective grasping at straws speculation about anything other than religious or political motivations.

The conservative blog Red State nailed things perfectly in their November 6 Morning Briefing with a brief titled, The Media Will Downplay His Religion, But God Help Us if His Car Had a Talk Radio Station On. [Yes, I'm one of those strange liberals who follows a few conservative blogs and news sources.]

By today, November 10, the evidence really has mounted that the killer's motivations were deeply connected to his religious identification. Exact details of his thinking may never be known, but it is becoming clear that he saw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a war against Islam. He, as a Muslim, couldn't participate in such a war on the side of the US. And thus he committed the bloody treason that he did.

He most likely was also crazy. His actions speak for themselves on that front. But when insanity has a religious dimension we all too often downplay the way that religious beliefs may have contributed to the insanity.

Religion doesn't make people crazy, but …

The world is populated by a large majority of sane religious people. Religion didn't make Hasan crazy. But I believe that religion enables people to take their craziness further than it otherwise would go.

When a woman kills her child because she believes it is possessed by the Devil she is clearly crazy. But if she weren't part of a religious community that accepted things like demonic possession she may have been more likely to question her own beliefs and sanity before acting.

When a man kills his wife and children and then himself with the hopes of sending them straight to heaven, the newspapers report on how he was a very religious man only before the facts make it clear that he was the shooter. Later, after it becomes clear that it was a murder-suicide, does the obvious clue to the killer's thinking get listed only in the very last paragraph of the newspaper reports. If he hadn't been steeped in the belief that the innocent are rewarded in the next life, would he have killed his children?

These sorts of cases rarely make national news. But they may happen very frequently but only hit local news. If anyone knows a manageable way to get national data on these kinds of infanticide or murder-suicides, please let me know.

What does get national news is something like the treason at Fort Hood and, of course, the attacks of September 11, 2001. And this reflects a different kind of religiously enabled insanity. In these cases, the perpetrator has a political cause that they feel passionately about. But on top of that, they believe that their particular political cause is also the Will of God. They have come to believe that they know the master plan of the Creator of the Universe, the Final Judge of all men. Their absolute faith in their religion gives them absolute faith in their cause. And when one is certain that advancing a cause is the will of God, then pretty much any action becomes justified or even sanctified.

As long as religions support the notion that it is possible be know the will of God they are enabling this kind of terrorism. Whether it is blowing up school children in Pakistan or murdering abortion doctors in the US, this confidence that one is acting in God's will is pernicious.

It is all very easy to say, Well my religion teaches peace and the dignity of all humans. All religions are pretty much the same in that respect. Remember most forms of most religions legitimate the idea of demonic possession, a reward in the after-life, and that it is possible to have God's will revealed to you. Those last three ideas are irrational and dangerous. And I believe that they are responsible for enabling more horror than people like to admit.

When someone does something good, the world seems quick to point out the connection between their religious beliefs and their good deed. We need to be just as willing to do that when someone does something bad. Only then will we see the extent to which religious ideas enable crazy people to act on their insanity.

Measuring the Race to the Bottom

2009-10-29T14:27:00.001-05:00

I've written extensively about the Race to the Bottom that is created by aspects of NCLB where states' performance is measured by how well each state meets its own targets. I've also pointed out that individual states participating in this race to the bottom are not particularly keen on having transparent ways to compare their standards with other states.

The National Center for Education Statistics (part of the Department of Education) has found a way to use data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress along side state accountability reports to actually examine and quantify any Race to the Bottom. In a new report, Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007, they have looked at changes from 2005 to 2007 in state scores and how they compare with the national measure. The report looks at reading and math in the 4th and 8th grades.

A word about proficiency

The NEAP makes a distinction between a basic level and a proficient level of performance. For the NEAP proficient means competency over challenging subject matter and not merely grade-level performance. Most (all?) states also make a distinction on their state accountability tests. When talking about the TAKS test in Texas, the word proficient is often used to refer to the minimum passing requirement and the term commended is used to describe the higher level.

In Texas, parents will hear the word proficient to refer to the minimum standard of passing the TAKS. That is not how the word is used nationally. And it is not how I will use it here. I will try to avoid confusion where I can. But I suspect that the Texan use of the word proficiency is a form of grade inflation attempting to make families feel that, as in Lake Wobegon, in Texas all children are above average.

Comparison among states

The report compares state standards for the proficiency level (not the basic level). That is, this report, when it comes to Texas is looked at the level needed to score a commended TAKS result. It worked to determine what the NEAP cut-off would be for getting a commended result on the 4th and 8th grade math and reading TAKS. It did this for each state for which there was sufficient data. This allows us to compare the proficiency levels from state to state.

In 2007 data Texas falls below the national average in its commended levels for 4th and 8th grade math and reading. For Texas is fourth from the bottom in 8th grade reading, beating out only North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. (Note that DC, Nebraska and Utah weren't included in this measure due to insufficient data.) For 8th grade math, Texas is near the middle of the pack. For 4th grade reading and math, Texas falls near the top of the bottom third.

States with higher proficiency (commended) standards have few students meeting those standards. There should be no surprise there. This leads to the question of whether it matters at all where states set their proficiency standards. Remember that proficiency standards are higher than the basic standards which all students are expected to meet. It turns out that states that set their own higher proficiency standards appear to get better results on the national NAEP exams. Whether the setting of higher standards is the cause of those higher scores is unknown. It should be noted that this relationship is much less pronounced for 8th grade reading, where it is not statistically significant.

Comparison over time

The question we asked with respect to any race to the bottom is whether states are lowering their own standards over time. The rest of the report concerns comparing 2005 and 2007 data. Getting the comparisons is mathematically tricky and so is the statistical inferencing. The report discusses their techniques in great detail, which I have yet to carefully review.

For each of 4th and 8th grade math and reading, they did two kinds of comparisons. The first is simply looking at the NEAP scores corresponding to the commended cut-offs has changed from 2005 to 2007. In this, Texas had no real change in 4th or 8th grade reading or 4th grade math (there was a decline in NEAP points, but that was within the margin of error for the analysis). But for 8th grade math there was a statistically meaningful decline of 4.2 points on the NEAP scale.

The report also looked at change in state standards in another way. If a state had a large increase in the number of students reaching the commended (proficient) level from 2005 to 2007 but did not have such a large (or any) increase in numbers of students improving on the NEAP.

Using this measure Texas students showed significantly more improvement on the Texas tests than on the national tests in 4th grade reading, 4th grade math, and 8th grade math.

Are the state standards getting easier

The pattern of change describe for Texas can be seen in many states (while other states are going in other directions). But does this means that states are lowering their standards in a race to the bottom? It certainly could mean that, but I suspect that this is more a consequence of schools getting better at preparing students for the state tests.

Schools are teaching test taking skills that are geared to the state tests. They are providing hot breakfasts on test days, they are perfecting their ways of motivating students and families to perform well on these tests. And with the actual teaching of content, there may be an increase in teaching to the test. A great deal of these efforts to improve state test scores will not carry over to the NEAP tests. The state accountability tests are very high stakes tests for the schools, while the NEAP tests have little direct consequence for the students, teachers or schools.

So schools will be engaging in activities that improve state test performance but do little for NEAP tests. This way we can see the results reported without it meaning that states are formally lowering their standards. Of course, if I am right about this, it means that we should be even more skeptical of improvements in state test results. It doesn't reflect a real increase in learning, but instead improvements in taking the state tests.

Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan road show: Longer school days

2009-09-28T22:15:00.001-05:00

The idea of Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton going on tour together boggles the mind. (Though I do recall having seen Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary do a psycho/schizo duet back in the 80s.). But apparently this is serious and includes Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education.

Well the first stop on the tour is in Philadelphia tomorrow (September 29, 2009); and Duncan, possibly prompted by being surrounded with people who don't hesitate to speak their minds, has advocated for longer school days. As a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer states

Six hours a day just doesn't cut it, said Duncan, who comes to town tomorrow to tour two city schools and meet with local education officials. Our school calendar's based on a 19th century agrarian economy. I'm sure there weren't too many kids in Philadelphia working in their parents' fields this summer.

This simple truth points to one of the most obvious things we can do to improve education in the US. We know that children spend more time in school each year in other OECD countries. And we know that children (particular poor children) are helped by longer school days and a longer school year. And if I didn't have to work on my homework, I would look up the sources for my assertions here.

As a prospective teacher, it is not in my personal interest to have longer school days and a longer school year. I'd love to come up with an excuse to advocate against these; but I can't. The facts (which I really will try to cite in an update) are clear. When so many ideas for improving education in America have mixed research behind them, it is nice to have something that is so clear cut.

I need to return to my teacher training homework now; so this posting stops here.

Promising noises from the Secretary of Education

2009-09-24T22:58:00.001-05:00

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor and made some very promising remarks regarding NCLB in my opinion. There was nothing even approximating specifics, but I think that he hit on a key insight:

[Duncan] hopes to essentially turn the law on its head. The Bush administration’s legislation, he says, kept the goals loose but the steps tight. He hopes instead to see a law that keeps the goals tight but the steps loose.

Here Duncan is referring to the fact that NCLB very tightly monitors how each state meets its own (loose) standards. These can lead to what I and others have called a race to the bottom between states, particularly when states work to avoid comparison of their education standards.

Exactly how an overhaul of NCLB will tighten or provide some uniformity of the goals is not something I know. I can imagine a range of mechanisms each with their own advantages and problems.

Set a national curriculum: The problems with this are legion. I won't dwell on them other than to say there is little reason to believe that the federal government would do a better job at this than even the worst of our fifty states.
Provide interstate comparisons to parents: When parents get accountability information about their child's school and their child's test scores, simply have these compared to national norms. If state officials can no longer hide their state's performance from parents, that might be enough to get states to start racing to the top. A difficulty with this is that it may require even more testing of students using a nationally normed test. There may be technical ways to get comparable data that won't involve more testing, but it will take some thinking about. Another difficulty with this approach is that it the parental pressure it generates will be insufficient to do the job. Finally, we know that it is parents in the upper middle class who exert the most political pressure, but even in lagging states their children will probably be performing above the national norm.

Some combination of those and other things may be part of what gets proposed. I eagerly await the plan. As for loosening the controls on exactly how states meet the (tighter) goals I can't even begin to speculate. From the philosophical point of view, Duncan's remarks seem very promising and sensible. Although I have no idea of how to achieve this, I am looking forward to more specific announcement.

Thinking about assessment

2009-09-17T00:39:00.001-05:00

The education literature likes to make a distinction between assessment for learning and assessment of learning. The distinction is, in my view, a necessary insight, but the way that it is conceived is both too limiting and prone to confusion. In this rant I am going present a somewhat richer framework for discussing different types of assessment for different purposes.

Where I'm coming from

As I've mentioned before, I am training to be a high school math teacher, and I am enrolled in what I consider to be an outstanding program through Collin College. I must confess that when I signed up for the program, I, in my arrogance, did not think that I would learn much. I am pleased to report that I was dead wrong. I won't go into why I was wrong, but I will say that I go to bed thinking about the ideas that come up from class discussion and readings and I wake up thinking about them. I remain (very) critical of some of the argumentation and scholarship in the readings, but it is extremely helpful for me to read them. I'm gobbling them up and loving it.

I have been, and remain, highly critical of the kinds of testing and incentive systems that have been set up by NCLB even though I fully support the goal of keeping schools and districts accountable for how well they serve all students, particularly the ones who are at risk of being left behind. Please see my previous posts on the matter (and more to come). NCLB does appear to be reaching that stated goal but it distorts the educational system as a whole and hinders progress in other important areas. But this essay is about assessment (testing and similar things). Whether you are a critic or supporter of NCLB you will agree that it is has greatly intensified the amount and importance of (standardized) testing in schools.

The Educators' Complaint

The education literature makes a distinction between assessment of learning and assessment for learning. A similar distinction is also called summative assessment and formative assessment. I will not attempt to give a full definition of these here. I don't think that the definitions in the literature bear up under close inspection, and the fuller the definition the less enlightening it is. Instead here is the rough idea through examples. Assessment of includes things like the TAKS, end of term exams, and major examinations that determine a student's grade. Assessment for learning is the on-going assessment that teachers engage while teaching. These include asking questions of the class, seeing what sorts of questions students ask. These are considered for learning because they help the teacher adapt teaching to the particular student.

The problem with our increased emphasis on assessment of learning is that most of that assessment isn't pedagogically useful. Some even argue that it is harmful in and of itself beyond the misdirection of resources (although I have my doubts about that claim). NCLB is a reality (which really does appear to be meeting its narrow, but important, goals), but the concern among educators is that it leads to too much pedagogically useless assessment. I agree, but I think that we are talking about assessment in a far too limiting framework.

Distinguishing distinctions

When we look at assessment, and try to categorize it, I think that we need to be looking at two dimensions, instead of the one-dimensional approach in the of-for distinction. We need to ask

What is the form of the assessment?
What is the purpose of the assessment?

The current discussion seems to think that all standardized tests (form) serve only to assess what a student has learned and not to adjust teaching (purpose), while all of the less formal (form) assessments are only used to adjust teaching (purpose). Certainly there is a strong connection between form and function, but when looking at assessment it will be useful to look at these along these two not-quite-independent dimensions.

Three purposes

When it comes to considering the various purposes of assessment I think that it is helpful to consider three separate purposes, not just the two in the existing conceptualization.

Adjusting: to help adjust teaching to the needs of the particular student
Grading: to provide feedback to student and family, to assign grades and work as an incentive
Accounting: to evaluate the teaching of the teacher, school, district.

Accounting is what we see in the testing that follows from NCLB. It is about rating and evaluating schools and districts (and within districts it will be used to evaluate teachers). It is the school administrators who have the most to gain or lose by these test results. And they are typically done at the end of the school year. Although students who fail the test will be intensively tutored so that they will pass a retake, these tests are not used to help students directly.

Grading is typically the assessments that a course grade is based upon. These are presented to parents and students. These become part of a student's record and are intended to indicate how much the student learned. Of course these will also feed back on how a particular student is taught. A teacher can learn from these that a student is not meeting expectations and so can look for ways to help the student. One characteristic of grading assessment is that it (almost) never goes beyond what has been taught in class.

Adjusting is used primarily to help determine how to teach a particular student. These can range from everyday queries while teaching to see if students are getting it or not. But at the other extreme these can be the kinds of evaluations that are used to determine whether a student should be in a gifted and talented program or in special education. Those typically involve highly formalized exams, but are used exclusively for determining how best to teach an individual student. Homework may be part of a student's grade (usually to get them to do it), but is used primarily as a frequent check of whether something needs to be retaught.

Any particular assessment can (and often) will serve multiple purposes. But when looking at any particular assessment it is useful to keep those three purposes in mind.

Form follows function except for when it doesn't

If you've been talking about the differences between similes and metaphors in class you may ask for examples to help with the learning that day (adjusting). But you may also ask for examples of each on an end of term examination (grading). So the same form can be used for different purposes in different contexts. I've praised the MAP testing that PISD does. But I honestly don't know what they use it for. I would hope that they use it to help differentiate teaching (adjusting), but it may be used primarily to track teacher performance (accounting). So here is a particular standardized test administered exactly the same way could be used for entirely different purposes.

Some forms of assessment really are single purpose. Some like the Texas TAKS tests can't be used for much other than accounting, and then only a limited type. The test is designed to distinguish between students who have acquired the basic knowledge expected for the grade level from those who have not. It doesn't do a very good job of discriminating between students at the high end or very low end. It is hard for me to imagine a set of exams that is more narrowly focused on one purpose.

With understanding come solutions

This understanding of purposes can bring real, practical, recommendations. The TAKS serves little direct pedagogical purpose other than accounting, we could save a great deal of time and money (that could then go to actually improving education) by sampling. Not every student needs to take the TAKS in every subject. Consider fifth grade TAKS requirements. Students take Reading, Math and Science. Not counting make-ups and such, that takes three full days for the students' to complete. But if the goal is to measure a schools' performance, then have one third of the students take Reading, one third Math, and one third Science. Students would be randomly assigned with neither student nor school staff knowing which student gets which test until test day. All of the tests can then be given on the same day.

I believe that the framework I've introduced above, first separating form from purpose and then distinguishing three separate purposes for assessment, allows for a more useful discussion of assessment than is common. At least it helps me think about these things more carefully, and I hope it does the same for any readers I might have.

The Murder of James Poullion

2009-09-14T16:42:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reports on the murder of an abortion opponent. Yes, that's right an abortion opponent was murdered, apparently because of his protests. This is news in the man bites dog sense. We are not surprised when an abortion supporter is murdered for position, but I was gobsmacked to read of this case.

Although this goes without saying, I will say it anyway. I absolutely condemn this murder and anything like it. The man charged with the murder should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for his terrible crime.

With that said, it is unclear the extent to which James Poullion was murdered for his views on abortion or because he made a persistent nuisance of himself. Of course the latter doesn't justify murder, but it might help us understand the motives of the killer.

Like many protesters for any cause, Poullion sought attention and controversy. He would occasionally stake out a position at a Farmer's Market and cuss customers out. Poullion's protests were loud, gory, and generally obnoxious. He appeared to be getting more provocative as time went on, but always staying (just) within the law. The assistant prosecutor is reported by the Times to have said that the suspect was annoyed by Mr. Pouillion's protests, especially when they were near schools.

So while I unequivocally condemn the murder, I don't think that he was so much murdered because of his views, but because of his protesting style. Neither is any justification for murder, but we should be cautious about concluding that abortion supporters are just as like to murder their opposition as abortion opponents are.

Asymmetry of passion

We need to recognize that there is a fundamental asymmetry between supporters of legalized abortion and opponents. Abortion opponents (at least in their rhetoric) treat abortion as murder. For them the legal system and the courts have enabled mass systematic murder with no recourse within the legal system to stop or bring those perceived murderers to justice. While I'm offering no justification, it is not too difficult to imagine how a few people with those beliefs could turn to violence.

For supporters of legalized abortion (like me), there is no heinous crime that our opponents are involved in. We think that our opponents are wrong, and that much harm would be done if they got their way. But only though the most elastic stretches of hyperbole could we consider them as supporters of systematic murder. To me, opponents of legal abortion are not evil or criminal. They are not sinful or inhuman monsters. They are merely mistaken. It is this asymmetry that makes it so hard for me to belive that Pouillion was murdered because of his views on abortion.

Congratulations: I may be wrong

2009-09-11T18:37:00.001-05:00

I have been ranting (particularly here and here) that Texas' implementation of NCLB is doing a disservice to above average students. I am perplexed, but delighted, to report evidence that I have been wrong. Apparently, Texas students have been making remarkable gains in passing Advanced Placement exams.

The TEA has reported strong gains in AP pass rates, and the gains among some minority groups are truly spectacular. Being the cynic that I am, I had first assumed that the results were a consequence of fewer students taking the exams. But, according to the report, these gains while the number of students taking the exams has increased. So this positive result does not (immediately) look like the result of statistical manipulation.

My skepticism remains, and there are a few things to check out. But at the moment we have some good news, and I will take it as such.

It will be interesting to learn how these gains were distributed throughout the State. Do they come from a few school districts, and are those districts doing something unusual? If anyone knows where I can get this data, please let me know.

Schools are not a battleground

2009-09-09T20:12:00.001-05:00

I have expressed in my posts here numerous criticisms of parts of our public education system. I have also expressed views about religion (I'm an atheist) that many people in my community would find anathema. At the same time, I am training to be a high school math teacher here in north Texas. Naturally, this can raise some legitimate concerns among potential colleagues, employers and student families when I start working. The goal of this post is the persuade even those who oppose everything I've stood for here that they have nothing to worry about with me in the classroom.

Why I want to teach

First of all my reasons for going into teaching are that I love explaining things and transferring knowledge. I believe that education is important in our society to help deliver on the promise of equal opportunity. Slightly more controversially I believe that for democracy to work the public needs to be educated to at least the point where they can meaningfully participate in the decisions we face. And even more controversially, I believe that public education plays an assimilatory role, preventing extreme fragmentation of society along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines. But if one sentence could sum up the feelings that drive me to be a teacher it would be a line from an old song:

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow, they will learn more than I'll ever know. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. —Louis Armstrong

But stepping down from those lofty reasons, my job as a math teacher will be to teach math. I am one of those weirdos who really loves math. But I also love history, science and language and literature. I love thinking and ideas. But given my skills and what needs there are to fill, I can make the biggest contribution by teaching math. Teaching math will be my job and my mission.

Make things easier, not harder

Anyone who cares deeply about education, and I hope that that is true of every teacher, will have strong opinions about how we do things. Some of those opinions will include disagreements. But it helps no one to stir up trouble just to make a point. It only makes it harder for everyone to do their job.

A few individuals with their own political or religious agendas like to fight their battles in the schools. Whether it is people who object to the addition of under God to the Pledge of Allegiance or people who want school led prayer, they oughtn't make things harder for schools to do their jobs. I have little sympathy for those people, even where I might agree with their cause in principle. Ideally, I would like to see the Pledge restored to its original form, but I'm not going to make a fuss about it. Forcing school districts to spend real time and real money fighting a largely symbolic battle is destructive to our educational goals, angers people, and needlessly divides our community.

My concerns about the impacts of accountability requirements will not stop me from doing my job and focusing my efforts where state law and policy tell me to focus my efforts. Forgive me for waxing philosophical again, but there is much to learn from understanding where various policies come from. The policies come from people who were elected to make those policies or from people who were appointed by those elected. I may, on occasion, think that I know better then those people, but my conceit does not entitle me to defy those policies with which I disagree. Just as nobody should pick and choose which laws they obey based on whether they like those laws (otherwise why have laws?), I won't cherrie pick those policies which I like.

If I sign a contract with a school or a school district, I do so willingly and see it as a commitment to upholding my end of the contract. That means following their rules. It would be dishonest to sign a contract with the intention of doing anything other than accepting their policies. This point is point is very important. It is actually something that I thought about a great deal before enrolling in a teacher training program, but by seeking to be a teacher I have firmly decided that the value of doing so greatly outweighs the distaste for implementing a few policies I may not like.

In and out of the classroom

I can see no reason to ever mention my religious or political views in the classroom or to students. There are some things about myself that if expressed in the capacity as a teacher would be inappropriate. My religious and political views certainly fall into that category. However, anyone reading these blog postings (if anyone actually is) will realize that my political, social, and religious views are emphatically not secret. I am happy to share them with anyone (outside of my role as a teacher) who asks.

By seeking out my postings or searching for my musings you are asking me what I think. I am not pushing or advertising my views. I am not addressing a captive audience, and I am absolutely not using a school, classroom, or any authority I might have as a teacher to express my views. By coming here, you have asked me what I think.

Student discovery

I cannot prevent my students from doing the same sort of search or link following that brought you to my postings. I will do nothing whatsoever to encourage them to find this, but that won't stop the student who decides to google all their teachers. So some students will learn my views on politics, social matters and religion. This isn't the problem it might seem.

First of all, I like math, and that will be made known to all of my students. This already makes me a kook in the eyes of many of them. So if I have other kooky ideas, that should come as no surprise. And having one kooky teacher who is an atheist will be balanced out by having a dozen others who have more conventional views. I would be over-estimating my status and influence if I thought that students discovering what my views are would change their views.

I also don't think that I should be singled out for making my opinions available on line. If you are active in your church or a civic organization, if you have ever contributed to a political campaign or are registered to vote for a particular party, then your religious and political views are available to anyone who knows how to search the Internet. You may not have gone into detail about your views, but much will be guessed from your affiliations. Should everyone who works for the public schools try to eradicate all public traces of their views on religion or politics? That would be both unwise and impossible.

Deletion and pseudonyms

Should I remove my postings on controversial matters from the sites I control (this blog and goldmark.org? Well, I could, but I have a posting history that goes back to 1986, and I do not have the ability to have everything I've said over the decades removed from where they can be searched. And given how my views, approaches, and spelling have changed over the past 20 years, I would much rather have someone read my more recent comments than my older ones. So if I attempt to remove what I can, then what is left paints a very distorted picture of my views. In truth there is no delete button on the Internet.

I should also make it clear that when I first became active on the Internet, we didn't use pseudonyms. The usernames under which we posted were the usernames that we had on some mainframe computer and were not under our control. Pseudonyms were possible, with effort and resources, but rare. So from the beginning I've posted under my own name. The other problem with pseudonyms is that they are very rarely anonymous. It is possible to operate truly anonymously on the net, but it is difficult. (Most people who think that they are operating anonymously are not.)

It is also not my style to hide from what I say. It would feel dishonest writing under a pseudonym. I should not feel embarrassed by what I say in a public arena. Of course over the decades I've said plenty of things that I'm embarrassed by, and maybe years from now I'll be embarrassed by what I write now. Nonetheless, I hope that my openness about my views and the explanation I've given above should make it clear that my various musings on the Internet will not interfere with my teaching.

No Child Gets Ahead - The evidence

2009-09-08T00:32:00.003-05:00

In April I wrote a piece No Child Gets Ahead in which I argued that current implementations (and particularly in Texas) of the No Child Left Behind program is detrimental to the interests of the above average student. Let me also remind everyone that I consider the goals of NCLB laudable and important. Again, see that earlier rant for a defense of those goals.

Now there is increasing evidence that I am correct. Brighter students are not advancing at the rate one might normally expect of them. This was discussed in a New York Times opinion piece titled Smart Child Left Behind on August 28, 2009. The authors, Tom Loveless and Micheal Petrilli, refer at first to report by the Center for Educational Policy published in June 2009.

The Rosy CEP report

The CEP report asks the question in its title, Is the emphasis on proficiency shortchanging higher- and lower-achieving students? Their answer is no. But Loveless and Petrilli argue that the CEP's report is deeply flawed. After reading the report, I entirely agree that it is broken beyond repair. The most egregious error in that study is the exclusive use of state proficiency test scores. State proficiency tests are designed to measure skill at the grade proficiency level. They never test anything above grade level (which is where advanced students are). My anecdotal experience is that pretty much everyone in my daughter's gifted and talented program hit the ceiling (score 100%) of the state TAKS tests. State proficiency tests are not designed to measure learning beyond the grade level proficiency levels, and simply don't work to measure learning for the high level students. The CEP report pretty much spells out the flaw without realizing it

The main measure of student achievement for this study consists of data from the state tests in reading (or English language arts) and mathematics used for NCLB accountability. Although no large-scale test provides a complete picture of student achievement, we have analyzed state test results because these tests are given to nearly all students in a state, are intended to reflect each state’s academic content standards, and are designed to assess whether students have met their states’ expectations for performance at a particular grade level. [Emphasis mine.]

It appears that the CEP report measures success in a state by looking at state results in terms of the percentage of students (with each state) scoring proficient or above. This notion of counting the number of students who exceed a certain (minimal) standard as a way of seeing whether you are serving the higher performing students is entirely missing the point of the exercise. The question we are asking is Does the way we measure school success shortchange the top students?. The CEP's answer appears to be, Well if we count success according to the way NCLB measure it, then we have success..

Another astounding flaw in the CEP analysis is their use of states as their level of analysis. For them, a gain in a small state completely off sets a lose in a large state, even if it means a decline for millions of more students than there is a gain for. This is truly blushworthy error. even though they fully acknowledge it (on page 18). I could go on. These are not minor technical quibbles. These problems completely and utterly undermine the CEP conclusions.

Why worry

Before I go on to cite the evidence for my assertion that NCLB does shortchange the better students, let me spell out why I and so many others worry that it would do exactly that. I've outlined these reasons in my earlier rant and when combined with the actual level of these proficiency standards (see my rants, Race to the Bottom and No Comparison) there really is a concern. As I said before, people and systems do respond to incentive systems, so we should look very clearly at what we incentivize.

Two Scenarios

The NCLB incentive system rewards schools and districts for the number of students who pass (minimal) proficiency tests. The margin of passing or failing (how high above or below the passing cut-off) counts for nothing. Imagine a class with three students: Alice, Bob, and Charlie. And suppose that the proficiency level is considered met if a student scores a 70 on the crucial test. (Obviously I'm grossly simplifying the examples for the purposes of illustration.)

Now consider scenario 1: Alice scores a 78 and passes. Bob scores and 70 and passes, Charlie scores a 50 and fails. In this scenario, the class has two passes and one failure. That is what will be counted in determining the school's, district's, and (probably) teacher's rating.

Now consider scenario 2: Alice scores a 95 and passes, Bob scores a 69 and fails, Charlie scores a 62 and fails. This class has one pass and two failures. The school, district, and teacher will be marked down severely for this.

All of the incentives (and they are powerful incentives) of NCLB push for scenario 2 above scenario 1. But let's look which class is serving the students better. Both Alice and Charlie do much better in scenario 1 than they do in scenario 2. While Bob does slightly worse in scenario 1 then in 2.

Of course you may object that I could have set up an example where the class that did better on NCLB criteria would also be the one that we would all agree better served the students. But my example illustrates real choices that schools and teachers make every day.

Suppose that you are a teacher and you are confident that Alice will pass the exam with little extra effort from you. With more effort from you, she might learn a great deal, but she is already on a clear target to pass the exam. And suppose that Bob is a student who looks like he will pass the exam, but only if you put extra effort into preparing him. Finally, as a teacher, with all of your pre-tests and such, you determine that even with an extraordinary effort on your part, Charlie is unlikely to pass the exam. If you want to keep your job, and the school wants to keep property values high in its district, then you will focus your effort on Bob.

Response to Response to Intervention

In the excellent teacher training program that I am currently enrolled in, we have been studying the mechanisms by which we identify and help the struggling student, Bob, before he falls too far behind. It is a program (or framework) called Response to Intervention (RtI). It really looks like it should be effective at identifying students like Bob earlier and getting the teacher to devote more time to Bob's needs. But of course any additional time spent on Bob will be time taken away from Alice and Charlie (unless additional staff are provided or the school day is lengthened).

This is one thing that people always seem to forget. Anyone who says that we need to spend more time doing X (where X is "with struggling students", "in the library", "teaching math", "practicing bus evacuations", "taking tests", etc) needs to remember that that means spending less time doing something else. This applies to money as well as time. An additional dollar spent on X is a dollar taken away from something else. It's easy to say what we should spend more time or money on, but it's very hard to answer the question of where that time or money comes from.

How to find out

I've already explained that if we want to test whether the incentives set up by NCLB create a disservice to above average students, we can't measure that by counting how many states have an increase in the number of students reaching the proficient level in that state. So how do we check? First of all we will need to use measures that are (a) comparable across states, and (b) which accurately measure the skills of the above average student. Ideally, we would like to have (c) where the progress of individual students from year to year is measured.

Getting data that is comparable across states is difficult. NCLB allows each state to set its own minimum and proficient standards. Because both politicians and educators like to be able to boast about how well their students are doing, there is pressure to set these standards low. (There are also some good reasons to set them low.) As a consequence of this, there is an incentive to shy away from mechanisms that allow state standards to be compared with one another or have students from one state compared with those of another. (See my earlier rant, No Comparison.)

We also need achievement results that don't suffer from a ceiling effect. That is, it should assess the full range of student achievement including those students near the top. This can be difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, the state assessments for NCLB are completely unsuited for this; so any tests would need to be in addition to those required for NCLB. Secondly, most testing to see whether students have learned the material presented in class; thus they rarely can test students who are above grade level.

Fortunately, there have been an number of attempts to collect such data. In an earlier post, I discussed the Measure of Academic Progress produced by the Northwest Evaluation Association. This time, I will be looking at The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2007 produced by the National Center for Education Statistics (part of the US Department of Education). They developed a scale which should include most advanced students, and sampled school children from across the country. Details of their method can be found in the report. For our purposes, merely showing a chart on page 9 of their report should make the point.

Before NCLB went into effect nation wide (2002) there was no growth in 8th grade writing skills at the lowest levels, while there were gains at the highest level. After NCLB went into effect, there were gains significant at the lowest levels and stagnation at the upper levels. Now I admit that I did troll through reports to find the most dramatic example. But for all grades studied and in all areas we find that NCLB has led wonderful gains at the lower levels. These are important and valued achievements. At the same time, it has lead to a flattening of growth at the higher levels.

In all fairness?

As I've said elsewhere, gains in one place often have costs elsewhere. If we have to have a trade off of improvements for the top students or improvements for the bottom students, maybe we are redressing a prior imbalance by focussing on the struggling student. I will address this issue in a later post. Here I will say that the situation before NCLB was destructive and unjust, with the below average abandoned. NCLB needs to be credited with fixing that. But the current situation, in which the above average student is ignored by the educational system, is little better. But whether you think that the current situation is right or wrong, I hope that everyone realizes that it does shortchange the above average students. In future posts, I will try to elaborate on how I think we can develop an accountability system that establishes incentives which serve all students.

Call Me Uppity

2009-08-16T15:36:00.001-05:00

Once again there is a complaint about "militant atheists". The latest to reach my door step was an opinion piece in today's (August 16, 2009) Dallas Morning News by Rod Dreher. (Note that the on-line version doesn't have the subheading that exists in the print edition Militant atheists think replacing religion with science will solve everything. But the title does talk about atheist fundamentalists)

The article itself is mostly arguing that science and religion don't need to conflict, just as long as each stays within its proper domain. I do not intend to deal with that here. It's something that I've been wanting to write about for a while, but here I want to write about the phrases militant atheism and atheist fundamentalist.

Let's look at what it takes to be a militant for any other cause or belief system. Environmentalists usually have to engage in or actively endorse violence or, at the very least, vandalism to earn the title. Racial supremacists often need to actually try to kill someone before they are called militants. Merely rehearsing race war in the woods with your friends on the weekends doesn't quality. Anti-capitalists have to riot to get called militants. As for religionists, in this country they can withdraw from the public school system, go door to door telling you you are damned to Hell, demand special holidays, prevent the sale of alcohol on their sabbath, disregard parts of the Constitution; and we call this business as usual. To be a militant, they actually need to kill someone. But when they do they are still not called militants religionists unless they are Muslim. They are just called crazy individuals acting alone. When a women kills her child because she believes it is possessed by demons we call her crazy (as she is), even if the belief in demon possession is reinforced in her church. When preachers and politicians talk about placing Jesus and the Bible at the heart of government or suggest that they are on a mission from God to transform the nation, we don't even bat an eye.

But what does it take for an atheist to be called militant? Well, openly declaring that you are an atheist (say wearing a t-shirt) might do the trick. If that doesn't do it then maybe taking the extreme step of encouraging other atheists to come out of the closet must be militant activism.

But the thing that will really get you labelled as a militant is stating that you find many religious beliefs silly. Let's be clear, we are not talking about go door to door ridiculing people's beliefs. We are not talking about putting up billboards making fun of their beliefs. We are talking about writing books and posting blogs. Maybe there is the occasional letter to the editor. The mere fact that we are now feeling free to openly challenge religious beliefs gets us called militant.

I try to respect people. And if their beliefs were private matters, I would have no reason to fuss about them. But we all know that religious beliefs have played a major role in history and are likely to continue to do so. They are influential ideas in the public sphere. Like any beliefs that matter, they must be open to criticism and even ridicule.

This is why we get called militant. People like me no longer bow to the taboo of criticizing religious beliefs. But please face up to what bothers you about that, and use the right word. Call me uppity.

Kool Aid is the answer

2009-07-07T17:45:00.001-05:00

For some time now I'd been considering a question — not exactly an earth shattering one — which I've only just realized has been answered since long before I was born. The answer is Kool-Aid. You may think that any question whose answer is "Kool-Aid" would be a silly question, but it's merely a geeky question.

I am a fan of flavored water. In our house we drink filtered tap water, bottled flavored water (usually store brand), coffee, and a few juices. After going through a bout of intensive cola drinking after moving from Hungary to Britain in 1994, I simply stopped drinking the stuff in 1998 when my daughter was born. As a household we simply shifted to plain old ordinary water.

A few years ago I discovered unsweetened flavored bottled water. The flavoring (particularly any citrus-like flavoring) made the water seem more refreshing. So each time we go shopping, we pick up a dozen or so plastic bottles of flavored water. It is a regular staple of our household, and the only reason that I don't go through dozens of bottles of it a day is that I don't want to buy that many.

Now let me make it clear that I am not a particular fan of bottled water. I like water in a bottle, but the idea of buying water that gets hauled around in trucks for 1000 times the price of the built-in water delivery system that is in my house just offends my sense of efficiency. (I have neither training as an engineer nor as an economist, but I share their distaste for waste. So I like to think that I think like an engineer or economist.) You can think of this inefficiency in terms of money it costs you or in terms of environmental damage. In this, as in other cases, it works out to be the same.

So, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to just be able to purchase the distilled flavoring that is used for flavored water. It would be much cheaper/efficient to transport and store, and the water I would mix it with would be much fresher than that in a purchased bottle of water. So why doesn't someone go into the business of selling just unsweetened flavoring that I could add to the water at home? Well, Kool-Aid has been around since 1927 doing exactly that. Of course they add food coloring, which I could do with out. But I can live with a little food coloring to save on consuming stall transported water.

So on my next shopping trip, I'll be picking up a few ounces of Kool-Aid instead of a few pounds of water. It will take some experimentation to get the mixture right, and there is always the possibility that no Kool-Aid flavor does the trick, but I suspect that the flavoring that is used in Kool-Aid is pretty much the same flavoring that is used for flavored water.

Voters do need an explanation

2009-07-05T21:14:00.001-05:00

One of the many astounding things that Governor Palin said when she announced that she would not be completing her term as Governor of Alaska was,

I think of the saying on my parents' refrigerator that says Don't explain: your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe you anyway.

What Palin seems to have failed to grasp is that the world is not divided up simply into enemies and friends of Sarah Palin. There are people who voted for her as governor who may not fall into either category. They, along with every other citizen of Alaska, need an explanation. And more importantly to her future, everyone who will face a ballot with her name on it deserves an explanation.

This failure to try to address people who don't initially agree with her, but aren't (yet) dead set against her will, in my view, be her political undoing. She has a substantial and extremely committed group of supporters. But they are in a minority. She needs to stop insulting east coast elites or everything that isn't part of her vision of the real America if she hopes to win any votes there. Todd Purdum's profile of Palin in Vanity Fair includes many suggestions that she takes an if you're not with me, you are against me approach to people.

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy — and thought it fit her perfectly.

I am not for a moment saying that I agree with these anonymous interviewees. People have a strong inclination to attribute kookiness to those we end up in conflict with, particularly if they have strong personalities. But I do quote that text to suggest that Palin has tendencies in those directions. She tends to divide people up into enemies and friends more than most of us do; and she is lacking in a kind of intellectual empathy, the ability to understand how a reasonable person could hold a different view.

We must remember that she is the person who took an innocent question of where do you get your news from? to be an attack on the remoteness of Alaskans. Righteous indignation is not the appropriate response to questions like that, yet that appears to be how she responds to anyone how offers any kind of challenge to her. Yet that is exactly what we would expect to someone who sees enemies everywhere and can't understand that some challenges to her are in good faith.

I believe that unless she learns to overcome these habits of thinking, her political career is doomed. She may count on a strong base of support from people who don't have to work with her, but she lacks what it takes to build a broader coalition beyond that base of support. And she will find fewer and fewer people willing to work closely with her. Please keep in mind that I am not talking about her successfully reaching out to people like me. We are too far apart in too many ways for anything like that to happen, but she needs to reach out within the GOP. Her no explanations stand will not help her with that.

No Comparison

2009-06-24T13:05:00.001-05:00

Texas is refusing to join an effort to develop national standards for Math and English education. Texas, Alaska, Missouri, and South Carolina are the only states to decline. The stated reasons for refusing to participate and declining these Race to the Top Funds is cost and maintaining independence. The cost excuse doesn't hold water since a cost that is currently borne entirely within the state would be shared among many. The second reason, distaste for adopting any idea that wasn't developed in Texas, may well be sincere but is hardly helpful. My contention is that the real reason for refusing to participate is something else altogether: Texan politicians don't want a transparent comparison of our schools' achievements with those of other states.

What many people fail to recognize about the current No Child Left Behind program is that is measures how well schools and districts meet their own state standards. So states which set low proficiency standards will find that they perform better on NCLB measures than states that set a higher bar. And because each state develops its own testing, there is no easy way to see which states set the bar lower than others. This makes it possible for politicians in states to tout their achievements with the federal NCLB (making it seem to voters that this is a real national comparison) even as standards and results remain low. People in the state, wanting to believe that their state is holding their own, are eager to believe their politicians. This leads to a Lake Wobegon effect, where every state is above average.

I have argued earlier that there is nothing wrong with low minimum standards as long as they used as minimum standards instead of as targets. But the current system, in which each states sets its own target and then is judged on how well it meets that, just encourages a race to the bottom. What we have now obfuscates comparison among states, but we are going to break out of this race to the bottom, we need relatively easy and reliable ways for the public to compare education in the various states. So let's not let the State of Texas' pride and independence stand in the way of creating an education system that we can honestly be proud of.

Tor for Windows: Easy!

2009-06-22T18:23:00.002-05:00

In my previous post, I put in a big plug for people setting up tor relays to help those in Iran browse the web anonymously and evade censorship. What I didn't mention is that installing Tor on a Windows desktop machine is apparently very easy.

There is a very nice blog post describing exactly how to do this over at Ian's Brain.

Update: Ian Souter's site is down at the moment. The information he posted about Tor is cached on google.

Tor or Squid for Iran proxies?

2009-06-22T13:50:00.003-05:00

The short answer is do both.

Please note that the people (Austin Heap and Helpful American) who are working to safely pass on information from Iran the rest of the world via twitter are recommending that people set up HTTP proxies. So the people who are in contact with the Iranians who are working to pass messages on have their recommendations. Obviously they know better the needs of the people in Iran than I do. Nonetheless, I am going to recommend another approach that can be pursued along side the use of squid.

As I've mentioned earlier, Squid and other HTTP proxy servers were not designed for the purpose we are putting them to. Squid is a powerful tool which can be configured to do what is needed, but even properly configured it has some limitations. Also squid is very easy to configure for those who are familiar with Unix configuration files, but configuration may be daunting to others.

I am far from the first to recommend tor for this purpose, but I do wish to provide a description of why in the long run tor will be the safer and more effective approach to providing online anonymity and evading censorship. However, running a tor really does have one very substantial drawback which I will get to later.

Logging connections

Squid knows the source IP address of the machine that using it, and it knows what website people are connecting to. This information, in the hands of the bad guys, could be very dangerous to the people we are trying to help. We are therefore given instructions to turn of logging. Or at least to anonymize the information that is logged as I described in my previous post. But there are two problems with this,

The people using your proxy can't know for certain that you have anonymized logging
Even if you do disable or anonymize logging, your machine still receives this information; and so if your machine is compromised, that information can be captured

Tor provides a peer-to-peer anonymized network and so only when your machine is used as an entry point will it know the IP address of the source and only when it is used as an exit point will it know the destination information. For most transactions, your machine will have no information whatsoever about either source or destination, and for no transaction will it have information about both. Thus no one can steal information from you that you don't have. And end users can trust that you are neither accidently or deliberately collecting sensitive information.

Anonymizing and abuse

This true anonymizing that tor allows leads to its biggest drawback. You have no control whatsoever of who uses it. Because your system can't know what networks the originator is from you can't, say, allow Iran and block Russia. If you run a tor relay that allows exit you should inform the abuse desk of your ISP of your intentions. Note that you can run tor as a relay only, meaning that it only passes on connections to other tor peers, but what is most needed are people that are willing to run exits.

Protection from snooping

[This section is an update. I had forgotten to mention this very important point until someone reminded me in the comments.] HTTP traffic from a source in Iran to your HTTP proxy is unencrypted. This means that the operators of bits of the network (the government of Iran) will be able to eavesdrop on the communication. Secure web traffic, HTTPS, is already blocked from Iran, which strongly suggests that the government is listening in to HTTP traffic. With tor, on the other hand, the traffic from the source and throughout the network of tor relays is encrypted. It is only when the traffic exits the the tor network that HTTP traffic will be unencrypted. Furthermore, tor will allow people in Iran to evade the filters that block HTTPS, thus enabling them to have end to end encryption

No central administration

With the Squid proxies, someone has to pass on the IP addresses and port numbers to the good guys without them being seen by the bad guys. Once the bad guys know the address they can add that proxy to a list of addresses to block and the proxy thus becomes useless. I stupidly listed my proxy's IP address publicly and it became useless before it given got distributed to the right people.

Tor's peer-to-peer and automatic discovery processes makes this problem irrelevant. While it may be cool to think of your IP address being passed on clandestinely among protestors in Iran, it is hardly the most secure and effective way to do things. People in Iran will need to run a Tor client, but once they've set that up, they won't need to be fiddling with ever changing lists of IP addresses in browser proxy configurations.

Blocking proxies

The government of Iran is almost certainly blocking access to my proxy server. I have no way to test for certain without having access to a machine in Iran, but I have every reason to suspect that my HTTP proxy server is blocked and therefore useless. My tor relay can still provide help no matter what the authorities in Iran block.

Static server vs dynamic home machines

Squid was designed to run on a server (often one dedicated to running squid) on its own permanent IP address on a machine that never gets turned off. Although home machines with dynamic IP address can still be useful as HTTP proxies, it is not an ideal situation. Tor, however, was designed for the purpose. And while the more stable the machine is the better, with tor downtime or a change of IP address isn't a big problem.

In Sum

There is no reason not to run a squid proxy if you can. But running a tor relay will probably be of greater help in providing anonymous web browsing to those who need it. The only concern with running a typical tor relay is that people doing malicious things on the network may use your network connection to do that. However, most of that nasty stuff is done through various botnets, and chances are that if you inform your ISP that you are running a tor relay they will at least know what is going on if they see network abuse from your machine.

Squid proxies for Iran part 2

2009-06-22T07:41:00.001-05:00

This is a followup to my previous posting. And it is worth repeating something that I've said there:

in a few places my advice goes against those of Austin Heap and by http://twitter.com/ProtesterHelp. Keep in mind that those individuals are much more connected to people in Iran and most certainly have a better sense of what they need than I do ... In terms of helping people in Iran you should certainly consider Austin Heap and Helpful American more trustworthy than I am. I am perfectly trustworthy, but you have no way to know that. They have established reputations at the center of efforts to help Iranians evade censorship. I merely disagree with some of the security and technical advice they offer.

New proxy submission and testing methods

The big news is that Austin Heap has set up a form for submitting proxy information and a mechanism for testing your proxies. In order to use either of these (and thus have your proxy submitted and distributed to those who need it) you need to allow access to your proxies from the hosts that are used for testing. So you need to add an ACL (Access Control List) for the proxy testing sources in the section of you squid configuration where ACLs are defined.

# The proxyheap validation servers 
acl proxyheap src 208.116.53.210 
acl proxyheap src 208.116.53.211

And later, where you access policy is defined you need the line

# Allow the proxyheap validation servers
http_access allow proxyheap

Austin Heap posts a complete squid configuration for Iran proxies.

Blocking the Government

Austin Heap and others have recommended that people running these proxies block access from bits of network operated by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a point on which I disagree, but please see my caveat above for how you take disagreements.

To my (very limited) knowledge there have been no attacks (other than blocking) on any of these proxy servers
I suspect (again with no real information) that there are plenty of good people who's internet access is from government nets. This may be particularly true of networks operated by the ministry of education.

Therefore, I think that little good, and some real harm, might come from blocking access until we have evidence of targeted attacks from those networks on our proxies. Furthermore, the most obvious attack that comes to my mind would not be prevented by blocking access to the government networks within Squid. The only way to prevent attacks of that nature would be at your firewall.

Anonymizing logging

Here is another point of disagreement. Austin Heap recommend turning off logging of your squid cache. The (very good) reasons for this is that if your host is compromised by the bad guys, you don't want the logs with the various IP addresses of those using your proxy to fall into the wrong hands. I fully concur with the goals. But it is also important to know that your proxy is working. Disabling logs makes that impossible to tell.

I recommend changing the log format to not include the source IP address or the details of the HTTP request.

logformat squidanon %ts.%03tu %6tr X.X.X.X  %Ss/%03Hs %<st %rm XXX %un %Sh/%<A %mt

And then specifying your access log to use that format.

access_log /usr/local/squid/logs/access.log squidanon

Note that you should set the patch to the log for what is normal on your system.

It is possible to have different logging for different ACLs. That is, you can have anonymized logging for connections from iran-net, while having regular logging for all other connections. That would be useful identifying attacks or attempted abuse of your proxy. But I haven't tested those yet, and I am meeting a friend for coffee in a few minutes. So this is all for now.

Squid configuration notes for Iran proxies

2009-06-20T13:28:00.001-05:00

According to a twitter post by Austin Heap there are now more than 2000 HTTP proxies set up outside of Iran to help people in Iran evade various forms of censorship. In various blog posts, he's provided instructions for setting up a proxy. That page also includes links to installation instructions for various operating systems.

In this post, I'll comment and elaborate on some of the Squid proxy configuration details. Keep in mind that that using an HTTP proxy is only one of the ways to help keep people in Iran anonymously connected. Two other tools of note are Tor and FreeGate. I hope to write about Tor in a later post; I do not know enough about Freegate to really comment on it.

Once you have your proxy up and running send email or a twitter Direct Message to Austin Heap or Helpful American with the IP address and ports your system is listening on. Do not post the details of your proxy publicly. For those new to Twitter, as I am, an "reply" is listed publicly, a Direct Message is not, so only use the latter to tell them the IP addresses and ports of your proxy. Posting it publicly will just get it blocked. I committed that blunder with my own, and so now my proxy is useless.

What is say here is supplementary material. These aren't complete instructions. You must first look at the stuff I've liked to above.

A Caveat and Caution

For the most part, I elaborate on some aspects of squid configuration, but in a few places my advice goes against those of Austin Heap and by @ProsterHelp (AKA Helpful American). Keep in mind that those individuals are much more connected to people in Iran and most certainly have a better sense of what they need than I do. What I offer is technical experience with squid. Although I haven't used it recently, I've used it and its predecessor (harvest) extensively in the 1990s. In the few places where I disagree with those who've been coordinating things, I will try to explain my reasons.

In terms of helping people in Iran you should certainly consider Austin Heap and Helpful American more trustworthy than I am. I am perfectly trustworthy, but you have no way to know that. They have established reputations at the center of efforts to help Iranians evade censorship. I merely disagree with some of the security and technical advice they offer.

Proxy background

HTTP proxy systems like Squid were designed to for other purposes than to enable anonymous web browsing. ironically enough, these tools are often used as part of web filtering systems for households and businesses. However, web proxies can easily be configured for this purpose. Squid is big, and does lots of things, and so you will see that it has a very large configuration file with many complicated options and settings. Fortunately, you only need to set a few of them to make squid work as an anonymizing proxy.

Squid originated as a Unix program, intended to run on servers. I did not know until a few days ago that there was a Windows version. As a typical Unix service, its configuration file is a text file which needs to be edited with a plain text editor.

Alternative ports

Under its default configuration, Squid listens for requests from the network on port 3128. For days now, the Iranian government has been blocking outbound traffic to that port, so you will need to configure squid to listen on alternative ports. This is done with the http_port configuration item. You list this item multiple times, one for each port you want your system to listen on. Here is an excerpt from my configuration, which sets my system to listen on parts 70, 2831, and 3128:

# Iran is blocking 3128.  Use gopher port instead (70)
http_port 3128
http_port 2831
http_port 70

You can use as many ports as you like, and don't just pick the ones that I've done. We want to mix things up so that it will be harder for the Iranian government to block. Also you don't want to conflict with the ports that other services on your system are listening on. For example, if you are already running a web server on port 80, don't use that for squid. To find out what ports things on your Unix-like machine are already listening on run the command

$ netstat -na -f inet | grep LISTEN

And look at the last number in the 4th column. For those of you on BSD Unix, you will probably find that the sockstat command provides nicer output; look at its manual page for details. If someone knows a useful incantation for Windows systems, please let me know. The Unix instructions apply to OS X.

If you wish to use a privileged port (one less than 1024) then squid will need to start as root. From what I've seen, that is the default situation on most Unix installations. But if you are using FreeBSD and squid version 3, you will need to set

squid_user=root

in /etc/rc.conf.

Keeping connected

If you run an HTTP proxy it is important to keep your machine running all the time. Also if you have a dynamic IP address, it is particularly useful to keep your machine running as your IP address may change the next time you connect to your ISP. Note that with running a Tor service, this isn't an issue.

More to come ...

I will write a second part of this latter, which will include notes about blocking IRI government sites and logging. It's there where I disagree with what's been advised, but I found that so far this took more more time to write than I'd anticipated.

Lucky dog!

2009-06-01T21:19:00.001-05:00

After learning about my car accident, a friend and very kind and thoughtful person sent me a very solicitous email which included this:

I am thanking God for your safety, because that is the only way you and Tímea came out of that accident unscathed.

Another friend sent me a story of someone who was unbelievably lucky to survive a dramatic wreck. I, too, have the feeling that Tímea and I were extremely lucky to come out unscathed. But simple fact of the matter is that we were extremely unlucky to have been in the accident at all. This way of thinking is best illustrated through a probably apocryphal story of a neighborhood dog:

Some friends down the street have a dog named Lucky. The dog got the name, so the story goes, because he was hit by a car three times and survived each time. It seems to be an almost automatic reaction to consider how lucky the dog was. But a little reflection suggests that this is one of the most unlucky dogs around to manage to get hit three times.

The kind of thinking illustrated here is common, compelling, and irrational. It doesn't seem to come from religious teachings, since this this kind of thinking seems prevalent among the non-religious as well. I, along with some of my fellow atheists, have probably been too hard on some religious people by failing to recognize the near universality of this way of thinking.

It's easy to ridicule the tsunami survivor who attributes their (good?) fortune to the grace of God yet does not at the same time hold God responsible for the death and suffering of those less fortunate. The sportsmen who credit Jesus for their victory don't really believe that the Lord abandoned their competitors. Certainly the logic in their declarations are twisted, but it doesn't originate from being religious; it comes from being human.

But as long as the rest of us feel that dog Lucky is lucky, we should be looking at this as a human irrationality. Although I intellectually know that I was unlucky to have that accident and that Lucky is an unfortunate animal, the feeling that I and Lucky are lucky to be alive is very hard to shake. As with many optical illusions, knowledge that something is an illusion doesn't make the experience go away.

With optical illusions, it is fairly well understood why most of them occur. Cognitive scientists have a pretty good accounts of what sorts of heuristics our visual perception system uses and how those can be fooled. Here we have an illusion of fortune, and this suggests that there are some heuristics used in our perception of chance. Indeed, there is an entire stream of extremely well conducted research in cognitive psychology on this. But I do not know if the phenomenon that I've described here has been addressed.

Exceptional driver

2009-06-01T11:10:00.001-05:00

According to one survey 88% of respondents consider themselves to be above average drivers. I am an exception. This makes me an exceptional driver, right? As an exception it may mean that I don't suffer the same levels of self-deception as many people, or it may mean that my driving is so atrocious that no amount of delusion can mask it. However, I had thought that what I lack in skill I make up for with good judgement. This had kept me accident free for my entire life until Saturday, May 23, when a lapse of judgement combined with poor skills left my car totaled and someone's minivan badly damaged in the middle of north bound US75 between Park and Parker. (No injuries).

Tímea's piano teacher usually comes to the house, but he recently had a hip replacement (he's recovering nicely), so I was taking Timea to his house in McKinney on Saturday. We entered US 75 at the George H. Bush Turnpike, and I decided that I wanted to take the HOV lane. I was able to make it to the number 2 lane, but there was a large truck in the fast lane between myself and the HOV lane. I waited for the truck to pass before going over, but once the truck did so, I saw that I had only moments to get in the HOV lane before the entrance closed off. In an act of very poor judgement, I decided to go for it anyway. I missed.

I hit the first of the plastic posts separating the HOV lane from the rest of the traffic. I over-corrected for that and scrapped the concrete median divider. From there I over-corrected again and went into the plastic posts, over correcting again I hit the concrete barrier again after which I completely lost control of the car and went spinning into the main traffic where I went right into the driver's side of the minivan. It was at this point that Tímea, who'd been engrossed in her DS in the back seat, noticed that something was amiss. [Update: I have since been informed that she noticed there was a problem when I began swearing. Although I have no recollection of saying anything, I have no doubt that her report is accurate.]

After the impact I smelled and saw smoke from the dashboard. Only later did I realize that this was from the explosive charge used to deploy the airbag, instead I thought something was on fire. So I quickly got Timea and me out of the car and across two lanes of traffic to safety. The driver of the minivan had pulled off the road, and although the driver side door was smashed she said she was unhurt and asked about me and Tímea. She was also already calling the police.

A police car arrived almost immediately, and then the full emergency squad who gave Tímea and I the once over (Pulse, blood pressure). Everyone looking at the remains of our car was a bit surprised that we needed no medical treatment. The paramedics insisted on checking us out anyway. Mostly talking to us and taking our pulse and blood pressure. I must say that they have some pretty cool gear inside those vehicles. I was a bit shaky, and my glasses had been seriously bent out of shape by the airbag, but that was about it.

I am also pleased that I managed to hold my tongue when asked for what seemed like the tenth time to describe the accident. When asked whether I was wearing a seatbelt, I refrained from responding, "we'll I'm here talking to you aren't I?" Apparently for the official accident report there is a standard list of questions that the police ask. This included, "where you wearing a helmet?" When I asked the police officer to repeat the question, he did so and told me that they use the same set of questions for motorcycle accidents.

I had also been asked early on where I wanted the remains of the car towed. I had no idea, but said that there was a Subaru place on Plano Parkway. Later the same police officer told me that the Subaru dealership doesn't do body work and so wouldn't accept the vehicle, so I had to select some other destination. Having never needed body work before, I had no idea of what to do. I said to the officer, "you probably aren't allowed to recommend a place." This was indeed the case, but he very helpfully told me that the other vehicle was being towed to Caliber Collision Center right across the highway, and he pointed to a big sign in plain view.

Without going into the tedious part of the story, I would just like to say that I am extremely happy with the safety features on a 2005 Subaru Legacy, the performance of the Plano Police and Emergency Fire and Rescue Services, Caliber Collision Center, and particularly with GEICO Insurance. I would also like to thank the anonymous women whose vehicle I crashed into for her courtesy, concern and cool headedness.

The only people I'm miffed with (other than myself) would be the designers of this particular HOV lane. My complaint doesn't take away form my responsibility for my judgement error, but one is left with the feeling that this HOV lane is designed to fail. This is Texas and one of our leading industries would be hurt by real gasoline conservation. The other folks I'm annoyed at is Wells Fargo, my bank, for putting a long hold on the check from the insurance company.

Now from Tímea's point of view the excitement of the day was twelve hours after the accident when Molly (our larger dog) brought a possum into the house to play with. We at first thought it was dead, but true to its nature it was just playing, well, possum. After a confused scene (with me wearing oven mitts) of capturing it, it too seemed uninjured from the days events. I released it down by the creek.

PISD Board Candidates

2009-04-25T13:08:00.001-05:00

This short post will just list the candidates for the Plano ISD Board of Trustees candidates seeking election to the board in the May 9, 2009 elections.

There are two seats open on the Board, Place 6 and Place 7. Voters vote for both seats, although candidates stand for only one seat.

Place 6

Place 7

I have already endorsed Missy Bender for Place 7 where the choice is clear and easy. For place 6, I find it difficult to choose between Marilyn Hinton and Nathan Barbara. They both seem equally good, and they are far better choices than their opponents. I hope to post a more thoughtful recommendation for Place 6 in the next few days.

Updated 2009-05-07 17:26CDT: I added link to my opposition to some candidates, and I corrected the link to Nathan Barbera's website.

Missy Bender for PISD place 7

2009-04-24T10:28:00.001-05:00

I unequivocally and enthusiastically support Missy Bender for a second term on the Plano Independent School District Board of trustees. Usually when deciding who to vote for, I end up searching for the candidate that I find least objectionable. This case is different. Bender is exactly who I want to see on the school board.

Serving all children

Missy Bender appears to share my contention that certain aspects of the Texas implementation of No Child Left Behind is not fully compatible with PISD's mission of providing the best education to each child. She is an advocate of using annual progress for each child as a more meaningful measure than merely counting how many children meet some minimum standard. As she says on her website she is especially proud of the school district's approach to tailoring instruction to each child.. This means that the gifted child and the child with learning disabilities will get the education that is appropriate for them.

This position is not as uncontroversial as it may seem when stated this way. We must remember that resources (time and money) is finite, and every dollar and hour spent one way is not spent some other way. Every resource that goes into providing the best for children who are not near the cusp of passing the TAKS diminishes PISD's chances of receiving higher state accountability ratings. To a significant degree, PISD is faced with a choice between concentrating on accountability ratings and providing the best education to all children.

Ideally there would be no conflict, but there is. Ms. Bender and the present board have been working to improve the accountability system so that it will not punish districts like Plano for doing what is right for our children. Some candidates may begrudge the effort that the school board puts into lobbying the Texas legislature, but both budget constraints and concerns as well as accountability issues cannot be addressed without working to prevent Austin from doing even more damage.

Competence, intelligence, and professionalism

The combination of legal, regulatory, financial and management issues that the Board has to cope with is daunting. A board member needs not only a solid grasp of the facts, but an understanding of how they interact. Bender demonstrates obvious intelligence and a deep understanding of the subtleties of the issues, and she simply radiates competence. Finally, she is not ideologically driven. Her passion is for solving the real problems the district faces in workable pragmatic ways.

So for those eligible to vote in the May 9, 2009 PISD elections, please vote for Missy Bender for place 7. In a posting that I am still working on, I will have a recommendation for Place 6, where the choice between the candidates is not so clear.

No votes for the spammer

2009-04-18T23:41:00.001-05:00

Before I go into detail about why I am encouraging people to vote against Steve Navarre for Plano Independent School District board of trustees, place 6 in the May 9, 2009 elections, I would like to state what I find admirable about him.

Some things to admire

Steve is working hard to get people who don't normally pay attention to the PISD Board to care about these elections. People should care and learn about the candidates and what the school board does and has been doing. Steve's campaign is getting people to pay attention and so is a success for democracy.

Mostly I admire Steve's readiness to inform voters about how he feels and things about many of the issues facing the school board. The websites of the other candidates contain little more that biographical information and statements of a few truisms. Steve, on the other hand has been been publicly taking positions on issues that may lose him votes (as he has lost mine) as well as win him some. This is an an extremely admirable and courageous thing to do.

The simple fact of the matter is that when we look at what an office seeker stands for we find reasons to vote against the person. So on the whole, the more explicit someone is about positions on real issues that distinguish them from others, the more votes they lose. This is why such great programs like Project vote Smart face an uphill struggle with their political courage test.

Am I being fair?

What all this means is that when I urge people to vote against Steve Navarre, I need to take extra care in determining whether I'm being fair to him or whether I'm falling into the trap of opposing the candidate who's been most forthright in his views. Of course this is not something I can objectively say about my own judgment, but I have gone to great lengths to give Steve the benefit of the doubt.

My first contact with Steve was when I saw his blog post in which he gives all of the expected answers to the Eagle Forum questionnaire. Those answers showed every sign of being an ideologue who is more concerned with doctrine and litmus tests than with dealing with the real issues that face Plano. (I'll say more about why some of those answers not only bother me, but should bother everyone no matter where they are on the political spectrum later.) I told him politely that I very much appreciate his openness about his positions, but that I would not be voting for him based on them. Steve offered to meet with me, and he gave me a great deal of time. We had a very pleasant and useful conversation. I greatly appreciate that. With respect to that particular questionnaire he tried to reassure me that he wasn't the knee-jerk ideologue those answers make him appear. Indeed, he told me things that would be anathema to the Eagle Forum and similar groups. Whether he would like to say those publicly, I will leave to him.

The Steve Navarre that I had coffee with back on March 9 was probably not going to get my vote, but he wasn't going to have me vocally oppose him either. But I have been following his blog and press reports and have come to feel that his way of thinking and approaching issues would be destructive to education in Plano.

Political divisiveness

Plano is a conservative city and Steve is a conservative candidate; there is nothing wrong with that. But Steve has latched on to issues that have little to do with managing a top-rank school district to bolster his conservative credentials. Whether it is tea parties or comments about fiscal conservatism he is trying to communicate to voters that he is a true conservative instead of addressing the real issues that face PISD. It is as if he is running in a Republican primary instead of running for school board. I, for one, would much rather see Steve in the state legislature than on the school board.

This makes me suspect Steve's political ambitions. I strongly get the impression that he is shooting for the state legislature and that the PISD board is nothing more than a stepping stone. It's fine to have ambitions, but this all suggests to me that he would use a position on the school board to grab attention and play populist. We wouldn't see him sweating over the details to work out policies in the face of complex and conflicting constraints. This is what he's done in the campaign, but I fear that if is on the board he would continue in the manner of his campaign.

Stirring things up

Those who know me, would consider it extremely hypocritical of me to criticize anyone for rocking the boat. But Steve's campaign, to the extent that it's addressed school board issues, has been a campaign against the current school board. Although I certainly don't agree with everything that the board has done, and I certainly think that it is fully proper for a candidate to raise those issues, he is going beyond just criticizing specific decisions to suggesting that the board has been systematically fouling up. Could Steve work with the rest of the board if he really believes what is implied by his campaign?

It is routine for people to campaign as political outsiders and then manage to work with the insiders once elected, but Steve has not shown the capacity for the detail oriented, collaborative work that will be required. Furthermore, the suspicion that he is a partisan candidate in what should be a non-partisan race makes him more of a political insider than is good for Plano Schools.

Spamming and integrity

Because I personally like Steve and appreciate what he's done to raise interest in this election, I was originally going to stay relatively quiet about my reasons for not voting for him. But what sparked me to write this posting was when I learned that he spammed teacher at pisd.edu. And he topped that of by giving the thoroughly discredited free speech argument for spam.

From an April 12 article in the Dallas Morning News.

Navarre's complaint is the second salvo he has fired at the district in the past week. He previously claimed that district officials tried to bully him and restrict his free speech rights when they told him to cease sending e-mails to teachers at work. Last week, Navarre sent e-mails to hundreds of Plano teachers about an upcoming campaign rally. E-mail addresses for Plano ISD teachers are available on the district's Web site.

Let me digress slightly to clarify this point. Spam is not like junk postal mail. This is because for junk postal mail, the sender bears most of the cost, and sending to 100,000,000 recipients is nearly a thousand times more expensive than sending to 1,000 recipients. With spam, that isn't the case. The recipients' systems bear most of the cost of the spam, and the sending costs are not really constrained by the number of recipients. These seemingly pedantic differences make all of the difference. To provide an exaggerated example, my right to free speech does not grant me the right to wrap this message around a brick and throw it through your window. Likewise it does not grant me the right to spam you with it.

This also makes a difference in how things scale to use the geeky parlance. When Steve spammed, he did so because he thought he had a good cause and felt he had trouble getting his message out. Now imagine if everyone who thought that they had a good cause (whether saving your soul or saving the whales) felt free to send everyone email enlightening them about the good cause. If a sizable fraction of the population behaved that way, email would become entirely unusable. Even just a few dozen spamming operations on the planet account for a majority of the email sent; imagine if everyone felt free to advertise their cause that way. A good place to start in judging whether some behavior is appropriate or not is to ask yourself what would happen if everyone (or a lot of other people) acted the same way.

Ten years ago, someone might could be forgiven for spamming out of such naiveté. But not any more. This spamming is a major character issues, and the free speech defense of it shows a lack of understanding of issues ranging from free speech to economics to what's been happening on the Internet. This is not the reason that most people should vote against Steve Navarre, and it is not why I am voting against him; but it is what brought me to the point of going public with my opposition.

What to cut? Lobbying?

Like so many candidates, Steve is shy about saying what he would actually cut in the budget. I've complained about this before. The one thing that he does mention is junkets to Austin. As a budget item, this is an odd thing to attack for reasons that I'll get to, but mostly it seems designed to paint a picture of the current board living high off of taxpayers' money. As if school board members enjoy lobbying Texas legislators.

There are two big problems facing Plano schools. One is budgetary. The other is with academic accountability ratings. To a very substantial extent the sources of these problems lie in Austin.

In addition to the peculiarities of school financing in Texas, the ever increasing tide of unfunded requirements flowing from the state capital is exceedingly costly. If lobbying efforts by the PISD board makes even a small dent in that, it is money very well spent. Unfortunately, we can't really know which bills were prevented by lobbying efforts (they may have failed anyway), but given the over all numbers that get proposed, get through, and what they cost us it is well worth the effort to lobby in Austin.

Every school board candidate says that they believe school districts should have more local control. We'll if you are going to fight against interference from the state capital, that is where you need to do it. I should also mention that Steve's support for a group that would put curriculum constraints on districts state wide that really ought to be locally decided.

The other big problem is that state academic accountability measures are very poorly suited to a large district with above average students. Let me mention just one way Plano is poorly served by these measures.

In rating a district, a great deal of weight goes on measuring lowest performers in the district. But statistically if you have two districts, say Bigcity and Smalltown, which have the same intrinsic quality in every respect and the same average measures, the bigger school district will have a much higher change of having an outlier fall below the minimum.

Plano has more children score perfectly (100%) on the TAKS tests than it has children failing it. But those top scores play no role other than be be listed "commended". Statistically speaking, a system with a low ceiling and largely based on numbers passing minimum standards will punish large districts that attempt to provide an excellent education to all students.

As I argued in my endorsement of Missy Bender there is a conflict between working toward improving our accountability ratings and actually providing the best education to all students. The path to eliminating that conflict goes through Austin.

So the one things that Steve goes on record for saying he'd cut are things that, unfortunate as the case may be, the district really does need to be doing to address our biggest problems. My fear is that Steve actually knows this, but is doing whatever he can to try to make the current board look bad so that he can run as the outsider candidate.

The other Place 6 Candidates

I have yet to make up my mind whether to support Marilyn Hinton or Nathan Barbera for Place 6 on the PISD board. In another post I have links to everyone's campaign sites.

I reject Rama Lavu for a few of the reasons I've mentioned about Steve Navarre. What little we know about Rama Lavu makes him look like a partisan operative (this time a Democrat) who has no real interest in PISD but is presumably just running so that he gets some name recognition for a future run for some other elective office. As far as I've been able to tell, Rama Lavu has not seriously campaigned. I am sorry that I'm forced to speculate on his motives based on so little information, but what else can I do when so little information is provided.

Liars, guts and money

2009-04-10T13:37:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time conservatives believed in fiscal responsibility. Maybe that time was never real and is only a myth, but it is a nice myth. If those days ever really did exist, it was before Ronald Reagan became President. Ever since then, conservatives have shifted from fiscal responsibility to cutting taxes. For some odd reason, they seem to think that those two are the same. But they would rather see whopping deficits than to ever publicly support a tax increase. They seem to think that cutting taxes will lead to budget sanity by magic.

What has sparked this particular rant at this particular time is that I've received yet another communication from a local politician running for Plano City Council. And yet again, I was told that what set this guy apart was that he was a true conservative who would deal with the city's budget problems without raising taxes. This, of course, doesn't set any candidate apart. They all say the same thing.

What would you cut?

Just as all of these candidates say the same things about themselves, I ask them the same question: What would you cut? With the exception of Susan Plonka, the answers have all been the same. They have all said that they will work to eliminate waste in the current budget. Each candidate it happy to tell you what they won't cut, as exemplified by this report of a candidate forum.

Correcting a $13 million budget shortfall is going to require noticeable cuts in several city departments. Anyone who genuinely believes that trimming waste in unspecified areas is going to solve this problem is someone I would consider unsuitable to be managing such a budget.

Vote for liars

When these people (and this goes for people on the left as well as on the right) claim that they can deal with a major budget shortfall by eliminating wasteful spending here or there, they are either lying or they believe that budget problems can be solved by magic. If faced with a choice between the two, I would have to vote for the cowardly liars. The liars may lack the guts to tell voters the truth, but at least once they are safely in office, they will support real spending cuts and taxes as needed to address the problem. The magical thinkers will just dig us deeper into the hole.

Self deception and delusion about spending, budgets and taxes is not a good starting point. Yet that is the starting point of candidate after candidate. Even the candidates who will privately admit to supporting some cuts (or taxes) do their best to conceal this virtue. Of course voters are largely to blame here. Candidates who tell the truth don't last long. And that is why we are stuck with trying to sort out the liars (for whom we should vote) from the delusional ideologues (whom we should avoid).

In defense of low standards

2009-04-01T19:40:00.001-05:00

I have in several places pointed out that what Texan's seem to think are high standards in education are typically very low when compared to the standards used by other states in the USA. And I will continue to do this for as long as I feel that people in Texas don't grasp how low the standards really are. But my argument here is that for some purposes, low standards are absolutely appropriate.

If we want to set some educational proficiency standard that we seriously expect all (or the overwhelming majority of) children to meet then we have to recognize that there are real differences in capabilities among individuals. That minimum standard should be well below what the average individual can achieve. The crucial fact about education is that one size does not fit all, but we do have to ensure that every child achieves some minimal proficiency. For this we need to allow minimum standards to be minimum.

Of course we should expect much more than the minimum from most children. A school in which every child meets a true minimum but little more is certainly failing to serve its students. Unfortunately the incentives in the current implementation of the No Child Left Behind program largely do direct schools to try to achieve the minimum for most students and provide little incentive to go beyond that. The temptation among many reformers is to raise the minimum standards. Unfortunately that will just have the consequence of leaving more children far behind, either through drop-outs or reclassification of children into exempt categories. Let's keep minimum standards as minimum standards.

If we want to establish incentives for schools to help all children, not just those near the minimum then we need to add something to the mix. We should measure schools by the year-on improvement of all children. If a high achieving student (who already meets the minimum standard) improves greatly, that should be to the school's credit. Likewise, a low achieving student (who doesn't meet the minimum standard) improves greatly than that should also be the the school's credit. Likewise, lack of improvement for either should count against the school. With incentives like these, then every child will be most improved irrespective of whether they also reach the minimum standard.

So the bottom line is that it is a good idea to keep the minimum standards minimum as long as those standards don't become the primary standards by which schools are judged.

Working around blogger interface

2009-03-30T12:48:00.001-05:00

This message is just a test. I've found that I truly despise the blogger composition interface. Even in HTML mode it adds paragraphs around any line break. And its previews don't really look like the published posts.

So today, I'm testing out MarsEdit. I'm happy to write raw HTML as long as there is decent template that allows for reasonable structural mark-up.

"weaknesses" of the Holocaust theory

2009-03-28T22:40:00.003-05:00

To all of you shocked and apprehensive about the title of this post, don't worry. For any Holocaust deniers that might stumble across this, you will be disappointed that I use you as a point of ridicule.

When trying to figure out what to write to members of the Texas State Board of Education I wanted to write something short, and possibly unique. An argument framed in a way that they may not have encountered before. This is what I wrote

Dear SBOE board members.

My 10 year old daughter in in the Texas public schools (Plano ISD). I know that she will get a proper science education no matter what you decide, because my wife and I will make sure of that. But I am concerned about the children of families that do not have the background in science that my wife and I have.

Let's be absolutely clear that although every scientific theory has some unsolved problems, those who talk about the "weaknesses" of evolution are talking about fabricated and discredited weaknesses. Those alleged weaknesses of evolution by natural selection are on par with the sorts of weaknesses that holocaust deniers regurgitate when they try to undermine evidence for the holocaust. Indeed any argument presented for teaching "weaknesses" of evolution apply equally as well (or badly) as arguments for teaching weaknesses of the Holocaust theory in history classes.

So please don't undermine the teaching of real science by giving in to those who present lies and distortions for non-scientific ideological views.

With best wishes, Jeffrey Goldberg Plano TX

An imperfect fit

2009-03-28T20:34:00.010-05:00

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' — Dougles Adams

While we hear creationists make the same mistake as the puddle in the above quote, we should expect better from serious, respected scientists. And this is why I am particularly disappointed with the first episode of Earth: The Biography. The geologist Iain Stewart is certainly no creationist, but he does he does help feed their hunger for quotes that they can misrepresent by, well, talking like a puddle.

Stewart is selling the coolness of volcanos by telling us how important they have been and continue to be for life on Earth. Personally, I think that they are cool enough without someone having to show how they're personally relevant to me, but that is one of the many reasons I'm not a television producer. And of course he is trying to make a point about the importance of maintaining a healthy amount – not too much, not too little – of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. But in the process he talks about the dynamic of plankton sucking CO₂ out and certain volcanos pumping it back in as keeping "just the right amount" of carbon dioxide in the air for life.

But what an extremely self-centered view that is. If the global temperatures were different than they have been for the past few million years, then clearly life would still exist. But it would be different than what it is today. I'm assuming that most people reading this (are there any) don't need this point spelled out. Under different conditions life would evolve differently, but would fit just as snugly to its environment.

Why is this mistake so easy to make?

I offer a question with no answers. But I think that the question is important. Why is it so easy for smart people like Stewart to make this mistake? I think that there is something more interesting than an ordinary little fallacy here. Just as people like to attach great meaning to accounts of our origins (after all religious people attack evolution much more than they attack astronomy, although both are incompatible inerrant scripture) there is great meaning ascribed to what it took for us to be here. My simple guess is that teleological thinking about evolution is not just limited to the religious. We think of things in terms of the process that led to us. It is the story of us.

This inclination to see the development of life on Earth as the story of us can seep into the thinking of those who really do know better. In many cases this tendency is harmless, but in other cases in can be very misleading. So we should be on our guard to do things like call Iain Stewart in the BBC to task for falling pray to this.

Stopping the Race to the Bottom

2009-03-14T20:18:00.026-05:00

In his March 10, 2009 speech on education, President Obama called on states to stop the "race to the bottom" with respect to educational proficiency standards. I will be proposing here a simple, inexpensive measure which will help stop that race to the bottom.

Race to the bottom

The race to the bottom is a simple consequence of the fact that politicians want parents to be happy about their children's achievements and these same politicians directly or indirectly control the proficiency standards. Setting standards low allows parents to be truthfully told that their children are exceeding standards. Furthermore, the national No Child Left Behind program specifically penalizes schools and districts which fail to meet their state standards, so again states are given a financial incentives to keep standards low.

I've argued elsewhere that there is a place for minimum standards, but those minimum standards should not be the reference point by which we measure our children's academic growth and achievements. So in this post I will make one small proposal that a district like PISD can do to meet the President's challenge and help families and the community focus on achievement beyond the minimum standard.

Some MAP background

In the elementary grades, the Plano Independent School District (Texas) uses the excellent MAP testing system developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). This test has many virtues which I will try to discuss in more detail other posts. But one virtue is that it is scored on an "equal interval scale" which means that a 5 point gain one year is comparable to a 5 point gain in another year. This makes the system ideal for measuring progress and changes in progress over time. Plano helpfully provides these charts (which they call "Learning Growth Charts" to parents during parent-teacher conferences on through the parent information system website. Here is a sample The orange line is the student's scores for the tests taken at different times. The band below it is what Plano ISD calls a "proficiency range." The MAP test can be given in the Fall, Winter and/or Spring during each school year, and the time marks along the bottom of the graph are the grade and season testing dates Most parents will see their children's lines well above the proficiency range and be pleased with the school and the district.

The problem

What parents aren't told very clearly is that the proficiency range is really just the range of scores near the TAKS passing estimates, and so in Texas, it is a very low range indeed. (More on just how low that is later). The whole system is rigged to conceal just how low the proficiency range really is, and to make (most) parents happy by exaggerating how well their children are doing.

But by making a (legitimate) minimum standard the reference point by which our kids' achievements and progress are measured we lower our goals and become satisfied with things that we really shouldn't be satisfied with.

A solution

One very simple solution to this very specific problem is to include the national (not state) norms for student scores on the same chart. This would allow parents to see how their child's achievements compare nationally and also show how the state proficiency level compares to the national average performance.

So there I propose a simple approach that could be implemented cheaply and easily for districts that already provide scores for tests with national data. Other districts, when the report students' performance against their own states proficiency measures can find ways to make clear where those standards stand against other state's standards and against national performance data.

Despite the simplicity and affordability of this proposal, I anticipate that people will find ways to resist this proposal. I intend to ask all of the candidates running for the PISD school board to comment on this. It will be interesting to see responses.

For comparison

The NWEA publishes national norm data (PDF) for the MAP, but I haven't been able to find information on the variance. They've also looked at scores on the MAP and seen which students passed the TAKS, thus being able to estimate just how hard or easy the TAKS is. I haven't been able to find the full report for Texas, but the summary (PDF) show that for many tests, a passing score on the TAKS puts the student around the 30th percentile nationally. For third grade reading, the apparent TAKS cut-off puts the child at the 12th percentile nationally.

Again, let me make it clear that I do think that there is a real role for (low) minimum standards which every child should meet. My proposal here isn't to raise those minimum standards, but to encourage parents, schools, politicians and children to focus on higher standards as well.

No child gets ahead

2009-02-09T17:29:00.012-06:00

Before I begin my rant about the No Child Left Behind program, let me state clearly four views that I enthusiastically share with the program.

Every child should become at least minimally proficient in certain essential skills
It is import to provide a way of comparing how well schools and districts achieve educational goals
Incentives to schools and districts do affect school policies.
Standard tests are the least subjective way of measuring students' progress

Looking at that list, you might think that I was also an enthusiastic supporter of NCLB. But you would be wrong.

What the above leads to is a system where incentives to schools, school districts, property owners and so on is the portion of students in a school who meet a minimum standard. The overwhelming portion of what goes into a school's rating is whether a sufficient portion of the children reach a minimum standard.

Now let's look at the consequence of this

Effort going to serve the educational needs of children who will comfortably exceed the minimum standard will be wasted. That is, improvement among students who would meet the minimum standard in the first place will not be reflected in school ratings.
Effort going to serve students who are unlikely to meet the minimum standard is also wasted in that improvements there are not reflected in the ratings.
Success of a school, district or state becomes measured in terms of minimal standards, thus curriculum will be geared toward the minimum standard.

As mentioned in my points of agreement above, incentives do work. Therefore, we need to check very carefully what kind of incentives we establishes. All of the negative consequences that I've listed are the result of the incentive system that NCLB creates.

How not to fix the system.

The system that we have in place provides us (at best) with measures of how well schools have students meet minimum standards. The worst thing that we could do is to treat that measure as anything other than what it is. It is not a measure of how well the school educates students on average; it is not a measure in any real sense of how "good" a school is. The only thing that this measure tells us is whether or not a school is failing to get most of its students to meet a minimal standard.

But because this is the only measure that we have for comparing schools and districts within a state, it gets used for purposes that it was never designed to serve. A test of how many students meet a minimal standard can only be used to identify failing schools. It is entirely useless at distinguishing decent schools from excellent schools. For example, in a successful district like Plano Independent School District, more students hit the ceiling (reach the maximum score possible on the test) than actually fail it [get source for this. It was buried in one of the NWEA documents]. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) completely fails to provide a measure that can be used to compare those who well exceed its minimum standard.

A natural reaction and proposed solution is to raise the tests' standards: Make the test harder. But that would actually make matters worse. If we raise the standards of the test to a degree where it would be meaningful for schools that are doing well within the state, then it no longer works as ensuring that all students reach a minimum standard. It will place the higher standard out of reach of some students. The fact of the matter is that not all students are alike. Not all students are college bound. And when we establish truly minimum standards we need to take that into account. If our "minimum" is no longer truly minimum and so become out of reach for some children, then those children will be left behind.

Of course we should set high goals for everyone so that we get the best from each, but we shouldn't insist that everyone reach high goals.

Possible fixes

I have several ideas for how to improve the system. I will sketch a few of them below, but will need to expand on them at some later date.

Make every score count

Instead of reporting just the number of students who merely pass the test, also report the average score. This way an improvement for any student (whether well below passing or well above passing) gets credited to the school. A simple average may not be the best number because of how outliers affect the results, but some statistic or set of statistics that makes every child's performance count will help motivate schools to help each and every child whether they are near the passing threshold or not.

But this can't be done with the test as it stands (at least in Texas). As I mentioned, the Texas test has a very low ceiling. In my district more students score 100% on each test than fail it. This means that the test is providing absolutely no useful measurement for those students. Also when scores reach a ceiling they have a perverse affect on averages. Developing a test which has the appropriate scoring system is difficult, but achievable. But I will leave that for another post as well.

Distinguish between pedagogically useful and useless tests

Tests like the TAKS provide little information to the teacher about how to help an individual child. The tests are not pedagogically useful. That's fine because that is not their intent. They are designed to help us compare schools and districts. Unfortunately a great deal of school, teacher, and student effort goes into pedagogically useless activity. There are several ideas of how to deal with this, all involve less individual testing. One would be to test less frequently, and another would be to test only a sample of the students in a school instead of testing the entire school population.

Simplify administration of tests by eliminating the conflict of interest

The rules and procedures that schools have to follow for administering the tests are beyond belief. Visit your local school and ask to see the printed guidelines. You won't have time to read them, and you may not even have time to count the pages. Just weigh them on a bathroom scale.

The reason for many of these rules is because there is a truly awful design decision in the administration of the tests. The people who have the most at stake (the teachers and the school officials) are the ones who are asked to administer the test. This is a massive conflict of interest. And if you believe, as I do, that incentive systems do affect how people behave, then you see that there is a terrible opportunity for test administrators helping students cheat on the tests.

Of course I believe that most teachers are honest, but I also lock my car even though I think that most people wouldn't steal it. If you ask any teacher about cheating on these tests they will of course tell you that it doesn't happen in their school, but they will also be familiar with some terrible abuses in other schools or districts. We have set up a systematic administrative conflict of interest and so add boatloads of Band-Aids to cover a wound that is wider than a church door and deeper than a well.

The entire administration of these non-pedagogical exams could be simplified if we had them administered by some third party.

I will try to expand on these thoughts and fill in many of the blanks in further posts. But at this point, I should just upload this one even though it fall far short of what I had hoped for it.

A very nice response: Reasonable use update

2007-11-08T10:19:00.000-06:00

My quest to get permission for my daughter to add a bit of one of her favorite songs as a sound track to a home video continues. The details are in my earlier posting, Reasonable use for a reasonable fee. On October 29, I received a very nice and friendly response to my request from Rob Hinton of Mesa Records. A response at all was a surprise, and a friendly response (one not written by lawyers) was an even bigger surprise. Unfortunately, it doesn't really advance my quest one way or another. Rob very nicely and helpfully informed me that I had written to the wrong music publisher. Here is his letter.

From: Rob Hinton

Subject: Re: Request to use "Dog Walk" in home video

Date: October 29, 2007 6:31:44 PM CDT

To: Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey,

 How are you?  Sorry it has taken us so long to get back to you, it's been a crazy few months here.

 The song you are referring to must have been under a now defunct or non legitimate Mesa Records.  That was/is not us, so we don't have any rights to the song or music.

 It's pretty funny though, as i have worked with Scott Henderson before in L.A. as a recording engineer.  However, unfortunately i don't have his contact info or know how to get a hold of him.  Maybe you should try getting a hold of him personally.

 Thanks and we wish you luck!  If you have any more questions, please feel free to e-mail us.

 Sincerely,

 Rob Hinton
 Mesa Records
 Austin, Texas
www.mesarecords.com

The publication information I have for this comes from iTunes where I purchased the song in the first place, simply says "Dog Walk (5:38), Scott Henderson, Dog Party, (p) 1994 Mesa Blue Moon." I realize that it's been a while since I updated this, so I don't know whether I will get back to pursuing this any time soon.

Reasonable use for a reasonable fee

2007-10-27T19:34:00.000-05:00

So far all of my rants have been about religion. But a recent posting I made on Slashdot has prompted a couple of people to ask me to blog about it so that they could be kept informed about what I seem to have gotten into. My daughter made her first movie with iMovie 06. She wanted to the soundtrack an excerpt from one of her favorite songs, Dog Walk by Scott Henderson from his Mesa Records album Dog Party. I share my daughter's enthusiasm for the song. But she also wants her friends and relatives to see her movie. I suspected that adding a minute or so of the tune to the movie and distributing copies to a few friends and relatives, may well violate our license to use the song (which I purchased via iTunes some years ago). Most normal people – even if they suspected that there might be a copyright issue here – would ignore the issue, add on the music, and be done with it. The likelihood that representatives of the copyright holders, the RIAA would notice or bother about such an issue. But I am not a normal person. This, I realized was a tremendous opportunity to be obnoxious in an excruciatingly lawful way. I decided to write to the music publisher seeking permission to use the song in this way. On October 8, 2007 I sent this email to Mesa Records.

From: jeffrey@goldmark.org
Subject: Request to use "Dog Walk" in home video
Date: October 8, 2007 12:22:51 PM CDT
To:   info@mesarecords.com

My nine year old daughter wishes to add parts of

Song:  Dog Walk
Artist: Scott Henderson

from the album "Dog Party" (Mesa records 1994)

in a short (two minute) home video of our dogs playing.

It is one of my daughter's favorite songs.

The video, probably as a Quick Time movie, will be distributed to maybe a dozen friends and family.

We would like to know whether we can get permission to use about 1 minute of the song this way, and how you would like to be credited if permission is granted.

Additionally, she may wish to upload the video to youtube.  Please keep in mind that this is a first video made by a nine year old.  It is far from professional.  Would you grant permission for that as well? And if so, what additional conditions may apply.

I can send you a copy of the current draft of the video if you wish.

I am trying to teach my daughter to respect copyrights, and I hope that we can find a way to use the song in the home video in an reasonably convenient way while respecting your copyright.

If you have some established procedure for individuals making these kinds of requests, please let me know.  I couldn't find anything on your website.

Thank you.

-j

Jeffrey P Goldberg
1909 Edgewater Dr
Plano, TX 75075
972 XXX XXXX

Lessons to learn

I have received no response (October 27). My next step is to send the (slightly modified) request by snail mail. As I stated in my slashdot posting.

All the while I am keeping my daughter informed of progress on this, so that when she grows to the point where she will be making choices regarding intellectual property, she will develop an appropriate respect for how the music publishers handle these things.

The question remains whether Mesa records will respond in a way that will earn the appropriate respect that they would be happy with.

A few more notes

In my postal letter, I will add (following a suggestion made in the slashdot discussion) that I am willing to pay a small fee for the permission I seek.
Here's a copy of video (without the music)
iMovie 08 is less capable than iMovie 06. This is one of my few disappointments from Apple.

Is God a crybaby?

2007-07-12T12:10:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine recently pointed me to an outstanding blog, The Meming of Life. There the author describes issues that come up with raising a freethinking child. He also manage to use each enjoyable anecdote as an illustration of some interesting point, whether it be about the accusation of relativism to understanding when it might be acceptable to take things on authority.

Old news: A memetic view of blasphemy

At any rate, reading the The Meming of Life reminded me of some of the conversations we've had with our daughter, in particular I recalled a discussion I had with her about blasphemy when she was five years old. I had never really thought much about blasphemy before that conversation. That isn't exactly true. I had thought about blasphemy. It is the perfect example of a meme which exists to defend the meme complex it is part of. I am not a great fan of memetics, although I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins. But in this case a memetic point of view appears to be exactly the way to look a blasphemy. It's been described before, far better than I could do it, so I won't repeat that aspect of it.

I would like to invite comments with links to such memetic analyses. (See how lazy I am?)

A child's view of blasphemy

Here is a slightly modified version of an email message I sent to a friend in May 2004.

T and I had an interesting conversation in the car today.

T: Oh my Gosh!  I said "Oh my Gosh" because God doesn't like it when you say "Oh my God".

J: He doesn't?

T: No, he doesn't, and it makes him upset.

J: Well, if he doesn't like it when I say "Oh my God" he is welcome to ask me to stop saying it.  But so far, he hasn't complained to me at all about it.

T: That is because he is way up in the sky and you can't hear him.

J: Well, if he is way up in the sky where I can't hear him then I'm sure that he won't be bothered if I say "Oh my God".

T: But he watches everything.

J: So he is so far up in the sky that I can't hear him, but he can still be bothered by me saying "Oh my God".

T: Yes.

J: Isn't that a bit strange?

T: He is magical.

J: Then if he is so magical, I'm sure he can figure out a way to tell me clearly if I am bothering him.  So far he hasn't asked me to stop.  But I will stop as soon as he does ask me.

T: God *really* doesn't like to hear people say that he doesn't exist.

J: Oh dear.  I guess he will have to cover his ears a lot.

T: [agitated] And God doesn't like it when people tease him.

J: Really?  I would have thought that if he were so powerful and magical he wouldn't really be bothered.

T: He really gets upset when people tease him.

J: So he is a cry-baby?

T: Daddy, [tearfully] don't tease God! You'll make him upset.

J: You know what I think?  I think that if God is real then he probably isn't a cry baby, so won't get so upset at a little teasing.

T: And in heaven, people aren't allowed to cry.

J: OK.  I'll be sure to remember that.

T: Heaven is where God makes people come back alive.

[long break for other conversation (in which I'd learned where she acquired all of this wisdom)]

J: You know what I think?  I don't think that God is bothered by what anyone says.  But there are a lot of people who get upset when you tease God.  So it is best not to tease God when those people are around.

So is God a crybaby? Does He really get upset when people say bad things about Him? Is this really the concept of blasphemy among believers? Why does God care about blasphemy? Why are half of the Ten Commandments about how God and religion should be treated?

I don't mean those as rhetorical questions. I would like to hear opinion on these.

Goodness before God

2007-06-18T07:59:00.000-05:00

Over at Atheist Alley columnist Sarah Laimbeer has posted an essay We Don’t Need a Higher Power to Know it’s Wrong to Harm Our Fellow Man with which I agree. I suppose that I shouldn't be so shocked that so many theists believe that it is only through some belief in God that a person can wish to do good instead of evil. After all, theists are experienced at firmly holding onto beliefs which go against all available evidence.

Evil Atheists?

Certainly there have been some some evil atheists, Joseph Stalin being the most extreme example. But the fact of the matter is that criminal behavior just isn't a prevalent characteristic of atheists. What little evidence exists suggests that atheists are less likely to be criminals [a citation will go here to prison studies], but that result is probably better explained by the fact that atheists tend to have above average levels of education and intelligence [cite will go here], while it is exactly the opposite for the prison population [citation will go here]. At worst atheists are just like everyone else with respect to ethical questions.

More than an argument from ignorance

It is easy to say that the theists are just being silly when they claim that true atheists can't have morals. But I think it is more interesting to explore what might underlie such silliness. At first it looks like our accusers' reasoning goes something like this:

I don't see where atheists gets their moral imperatives from, therefore they must not have any.

When stated this way the logical flaw is obvious. It would be like me saying, "I don't understand how microwaves heat water, therefore microwave ovens don't work." But our accusers can be more subtle and less stupid. Theists, they say, get their moral imperatives from faith in God, while atheists, without such faith must either not have them or get them from somewhere else. "Atheists," they may go on to say, "need a separate explanation for a moral sense." So for the theists the existence of God explains our moral sense in a way that atheism can't. And so by Occam's Razor (which atheists like to quote so much) this is presented as evidence for God. There are two approaches I could take in answering this challenge. One would be to present all of the naturalistic explanations for morality. And without a doubt I would recommend the book Good Natured and other sources. I would also point out that the two great moral philosophies, utilitarianism and Kantianism make no reference to any supernatural God. But that is not the approach I'm taking in this essay. All of those points have been argued well by others, and I doubt I'd have anything useful to add.

God is not the answer

Instead I wish to argue that the theist and the atheist are in exactly the same boat when it comes to explaining the origins of good and evil. The God hypothesis doesn't help the theist at all once the argument is examined closely. Again, let me digress and briefly mention an argument that I will not be making in this essay. Most religions provide erratic moral guidance. The Old Testament fully endorses slavery (and that is echoed in the New Testament). The God of Abraham is prone to arbitrary judgment, temper tantrums, and is a crybaby who lashes out at all who don't worship Him properly. (I realized that God was a crybaby when my daughter, then in preschool told me that God gets very upset when people say He doesn't exist.) Only through cherry picking the nice bits can most religions be said to provide anything resembling moral guidance.

Good can't come from God

Now to the argument that I did set out to make in this essay. Let me start with a hypothetical question to a hypothetical theist. Suppose I say that God told me to skin you alive. The theist's response would be that I was either a liar or psychotic (or possibly hearing the voice of Satan posing as God). Now suppose that I had said that God told me to feed the hungry and spread His word. What would the theist's response be to that? In the latter case the theist may well be ready to believe that God really did speak to me. Let's look at what is happening in these two cases. The theist is making a judgment about which message really comes from God based on the morality of the message. And Jesus tells Christians that this is exactly how it should be in Mathew 7:15-20. "Beware of the false prophets, ... You will know them by their fruits." Theologians may try to develop a metaphysical argument about God and good and evil in which something is good because it comes from God. But that metaphysics isn't driving anyone's moral behavior. The theist who thinks skinning people alive is bad and feeding the hungry is good is using their own notion of good and evil to judge what is God. So to the theist who asks where does good and evil come from, I answer that I don't know. But neither does the theist. For the theist good can't come from God because the theist must use their knowledge of good to judge what is God.

(Almost) First Post and Introduction

2007-06-14T14:38:00.000-05:00

This is my second post to this blog which I started in June 2007. It is, I suppose, a late introduction to a late adopter of blogging. This is where I self-indulgently introduce myself, my hopes and my intentions with this blog. I've never been known for my brevity, particularly when trying to explain my motivations and intentions. But I'll try to be brief. First of all, I want the actual content of what I post to act as a better introduction and explanation of what I am up to than any self statement. That is one of the reasons why I've left this introductory post to be my second post, making my first blog entry one of content. Although I am new to actually using the blog technology, I've been posting my thoughts and comments on a wide range of issues (many of which I know little about) to the Internet for literally decades. My earliest Usenet posting archived by Google Groups is from 1986, though there clear were earlier ones that weren't archived. I've also been active on number of email discussion lists, where I've occasionally presented arguments that I would have liked to refer to later. When I finally got around to getting my own domain name, goldmark.org, and corresponding website I sometimes would get it together enough to write up some technical rants and political rants to host there. And of course, I've posted a number of comments, a few of them worth keeping, to other people's blogs or other message boards such as slashdot. Those who know me, or those who have read my promises follow up my writings with further details, will know that I can be extremely slow to follow through with something I've started in the best case, and never get started in the worst case. So it took me years to actually start using blogging technology. The event that finally tipped the balance was an attempt to post a text response to The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See on YouTube. Its author asks anyone who can spot a fault with the logic to let him know. There is a whopping great logical flaw, which I tried to outline in a text response to the video. Only after putting some effort into composing my response and hitting the "post reply" button did I learn that text responses were limited to 500 characters. That experience appears to have been the tipping point. Finally, there is the question of why someone like me, who's had a web presence since late 1994 and hosts his own web server, is using Blogspot instead of hosting my own blog on my own site with a tool like Wordpress. The answer is simply laziness in not wanting to have to deal directly with handling user registration. I hope that this gives some answers to some mundane questions about why I am doing this. I could elaborate on every single point here but won't. With luck, this "almost first post" will be the most boring of all I will post here. If not, than please read when suffering insomnia.

Preaching Prevention and Family Values

2007-06-12T13:18:00.000-05:00

Below is a letter I wrote to the Dallas Morning News. Unfortunately I sent it to the wrong email address so that they didn't even have a proper opportunity to decline it. I was responding to an opinion piece by Star Parker titled "Social Distortion". The version in the Dallas Morning News (Saturday, June 9, page 21A) was a slightly abbreviated form of Parker's full essay. Anyway, here is my letter.

Although I am no friend of the religious right, I largely agree with Star Parker's ("Social Distortion" June 10, page 21A) essay pointing out that poverty in America is substantially a consequence of family breakdown. But Ms Parker goes on to say that "Christians like to stay home can care for their families." The simple facts of the matter is that divorce, teen age pregnancy and out of wedlock births are strongly correlated with being religious. The US states with the highest rates of religiosity have the highest rates of family breakdown. And among the rich democracies of the West those countries with the most religious populations also have the highest rates of family breakdown. If religious leaders wish to consider whether their message is contributing to the problem, a good place to start would be to ask whether futile preaching against premarital sex (at a time when age at first marriage is rising) might be better refocused on preaching against premarital pregnancy. Jeffrey Goldberg

A letter to the the editor needs to be short, but blogs can ramble on endlessly, so at some point I'll add in actual references. I've looked it all up before, but don't have it at my finger tips now. But there is a very clear pattern that within the US the more religious a region (as measured by church attendance and self-descriptions) the higher the teen pregnancy rates along with higher divorce rates. The pattern with abortion rates is less clear. All this can be checked by looking at US Census data. We see exactly the same pattern across "Western" countries. The higher the religiosity the higher the rates of teen pregnancy and divorce. Again, a case could be made that abortion rates also follow the same pattern, but that case is harder to make due to a number of notable exceptions to the pattern (particularly in former Soviet bloc countries). There certainly can be many reasons for this. We know that religiosity declines with level of education and we know that the more educated women are the longer they wait to have children (and the latter is a world wide trend), so the relationship between early pregnancy and religiosity may merely be a consequence of female education level. But I suspect that it is more. Many Christians in the US have attempted to combat early pregnancy through abstinence training. They have opposed the secular sex education in school if it informs children about contraceptives. On the whole the philosophy is that making contraceptives easily available encourages pre-marital sex. An analogy would be to the fact that automobile airbags encourage faster driving (for which there is some evidence). Even if the anti-contraceptive crowd is correct in this to some degree, it does matter to what degree and what the negative effects of discouraging contraception can be. First of all, the efficacy of abstinence training at having any positive effect is disputed. (I know that I should add a source for this). Studies range from saying that it has no effect on delaying sex to delaying sex for a few months on average. To my knowledge, no serious study has shown that it has a substantial effect. People who blame teen and young-adult sex on TV or other aspects of popular culture are simply ignoring the facts of life. If we are seeing a rise in premarital sex it is because people are getting married later. A century ago an unmarried 25 year-old women was definitely an "old maid." Again studies (which again I should cite) show that those who wait to get married and have children have more successful marriages and children. So the Christian "family values" people have a difficult choice to make. They can continue to fight against pre-marital sex and contraception outside of marriage. To do that they either have to try to change human nature or reverse get girls marrying young again (mid to late teens). Neither approach seems to very appealing. Or if they really want to strengthen families, they can promote the use of contraceptives to prevent not premarital sex, but prevent pregnancies until the couple are prepared to properly support a family. The bottom line is that the religious opposition to contraception outside of marriage is contributing substantially to family breakdown. I hope they take action to truly promote healthy families.