"We will have no more marriages"

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

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 …

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

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.