No true atheist?

Update: When I first drafted what follows, I gave substantial credence to the view that Devin P Kelley was an atheist who repeatedly expressed hostility toward religion. As it turns out, those reports were highly exaggerated and it appears that his motivation for his murder of dozens of people in a church is far more likely to be part of "a domestic situation". Kelley has a long and awful history of domestic violence, against women, children, and animals.

I leave what follows as I originally wrote it (except for fixing some typographical errors and perhaps adding some references. I believe that it is a valuable commentary even if the specific incident that motivated it isn't applicable to the point.

We already know that someone who commits mass murder isn't right in the head. This is true whether they are nominally motivated by global Jihad, defending the unborn, protecting the white race or instigating the uprising against the Fascist state. It is no more or less true when it is motivated by a hatred for religion.

So what should my fellow atheists do when one of these atrocities is committed by a self-professed atheist, who appears to have been motivated by his hostility to religion in general and Christianity in particular.

We can correctly point out atheists do not call for violence against believers and that most atheists believe in freedom of religion, and fully respect the rights of people to believe. There is no way that this killer was taking cues or hints from "the atheist movement" (to the extent that such a thing exists).

We can correctly point out all of signs of mental illness in the individual that are distinct from his atheism or atheism in general. But that applies equally well to any of these other kooks. If I criticize some aspects of religiosity for the horrors brought by the religious, I shouldn't expect to hide behind "he is a kook who doesn't represent us" even though he is a kook who doesn't represent us.

We could even try to say that no true atheist would do such a thing, as we value life, reason, and human dignity. This would be a stretch in the best of cases (as atheism and humanism are not the same things even if many atheists are humanists). But I would not accept that argument from religious people who use it to avoid looking at how their own belief system may have supported some of the craziness of the killer. So I won't accept this argument here either.

Are we (atheists) doing something wrong?

So is there anything about atheism or the atheist community that can be legitimately said to contribute to the kinds of awfulness we've seen? I'm going to say that there is a little something that we should try to correct, but that it is tiny compared to responsibility that religion and some political ideologies have to bear for what crazies do in their name.

Atheists, for the most part, do not really care what other people believe. A Christian might be highly motivated to change my mind about things in order to save me from eternal damnation, but I have no equivalent motivation to change a Christian's mind. We merely think that believers are wrong about some things. We don't believe that their error is part of some evil demonic force (because we don't believe in such things). And we certainly don't believe that we have God on our side.

It is true that most of us probably believe that the world would be a better place if people were less religious. And so there is scope there for caring about what others believe and disliking those beliefs. It is possible in these terms to imagine some sort of ideological crusade against religion. Perhaps that was part of the motivation, but on the whole, you don't see atheists even talking about trying to suppress or punish religious belief. You see us trying to persuade.

Uncomprehending insult

But despite that enormous asymmetry, I do think that there is a little something that we could be better about. There are substantial portions of the atheist community and online communities that paint believers as sheep, cowards seeking comfort, weak-minded, deluded, infantile, mentally ill, and other unpleasant things. This is because we struggle with understanding how (otherwise) reasonable people can believe things that to us are patently nuts. We really do struggle with that question.

The problem is that we genuinely do not understand this facet of the majority of our fellow humans. Now I have my theories, but this isn't the place for them, but most of guesses spouted by many of my fellow atheists to not paint a pleasant picture of believers.

It is easy to think poorly of people we disagree with, particularly if we can't really understand why they disagree with us. It's clubby to ridicule them. It makes us feel special and superior. Now this is fine to an extent. It's like what Longhorns say about Aggies. It becomes a problem if we take it too seriously. And it becomes a problem if the dangerously disturbed among us take us too seriously when we talk in those terms.

I don't know if that kind of talk played any role in this particular case, but I do think that we atheists should make an effort to remind ourselves and each other that the large majority of humans are decent and (otherwise) reasonable people just like us.

Support the Amash Amendment

I have just (July 23) sent the following to my Congresscritter, Sam Johnson (3-TX).

To the Honorable Sam Johnson, US Representative 3rd district, Texas. It is clear that the indiscriminate collection of American's telephone data goes well beyond the intent of Congress in sections 401 of FISA and 215 of the PATIOT ACT. But until those laws can be properly revised to prevent the kinds secret interpretations that the Administration has given to them, Congress can -- with the Amash Amendment to HR 2397 -- send a clear message to at least defund the most abusive operations (that we happen to be aware of). Congress must send a clear signal that spying on citizens who are suspected of no crime is unacceptable in a democracy. And make no mistake about it, collecting our phone records, lists of contacts, and locations is spying. Only by sending a strong signal can we ensure that we actually will have the open discussion on this matter that the President claims he welcomes. I spent some time in Communist Hungary, and so I have seen a country where secret courts made secret laws and where the government felt free to spy on its own citizens. It would by hyperbolic to claim that the US is doing the same, but in all appearances we do seem to be heading down that road. Sincerely, Jeffrey Goldberg
Plano, TX.

Here is some background on the Amash Amendment, and the White House response looks like a joke. The White House statement actually says,

This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process

The various secret interpretations of FISA and the PATRIOT ACT by both the Obama and Bush Administrations checked only by secret courts that have never rejected an administration claim have become the law of the land through a process that is anything but open and deliberative.

Game theory and "Stand Your Ground"

When it's best to attack first

During the Cold War, before the day of the ABM treaty, the situation between the United States and the Soviet Union was extremely dangerous, as each country was coming close to acquiring what was called "First strike capability". If you had first strike capability it meant that you could launch a surprise "first strike" on the enemy which would be so devastating that they could do little harm to you in retaliating. If the your enemy had first strike capability, that would mean that they could launch a surprise attack against you that would be so devastating that you could not effectively retaliate.

So let's consider Sam and Joe. They don't get along. And there is no sheriff in town. There is no outside force to keep the peace between them. Joe thinks that Sam is developing first strike capability. That is, Joe thinks that Sam is powerful enough to ambush and kill Joe without Sam having to suffer much. Meanwhile, Sam is thinking the same thing about Joe. Sam is worried that Joe could kill Sam without having to face any serious consequences. Sam is afraid that Joe might attack first.

Joe is a pretty scary guy. So Sam has to wonder whether it would be better for him, Sam, to attack Joe before Joe attacks Sam. Now Joe isn't stupid. He realizes that Sam might be thinking along those lines. So even if Joe wasn't initially planning to attack first; he, Joe, now has real reason to worry that Sam will attack first. Now that Joe has some real reason to suspect that Sam might attack first, Joe now has a real reason to attack first. After all, if Sam might attack first, then they only way for Joe to stay safe is for Joe to attack Sam first.

Sam isn't stupid either. Sam realizes that the situation gives Joe some real reasons to attack first. So Sam gets even more jumpy. This goes round and round so even a small conflict leads to a situation where the safest thing for both Sam and Joe is to try to attack the other first. This is extremely dangerous. It is unstable because what might start out as an irrational fear of the other spirals into perfectly rational fear that the other will attack first, for which the only defense is to launch the first, devastating strike.

This dynamic should also be familiar to anyone who's watched the Treasure of the Sierra Madres.

Bring in the sheriff

Now let's put a sheriff in town. If Joe goes out and kills Sam, Joe will be severely punished. If Sam goes out and kills Joe, Sam will be severely punished. Furthermore both Sam and Joe know this. Because Sam knows that Joe will be severely punished for killing Sam, Sam doesn't have to worry so much about what Joe might do. Joe knows that Sam doesn't have to worry so much, so Joe doesn't have to worry so much about Sam launching a pre-emptive attack.

Stand Your Ground

Now let's take a different story. Sam and Joe live in a state with a "Stand Your Ground" law. They both know the law. Sam looks like a scary dude to Joe, and Joe starts following Sam to see what Sam might be up to. Maybe Joe wants to catch Sam in the act of something. Maybe Sam really is a scary dude.

Sam notices that Joe is following him. Sam is worried. He doesn't know what Joe is up to. Maybe Sam notices that Joe has a gun. So Sam figures that Joe, with a gun, is stalking him and figures that his best chance at surviving the night would be to jump Joe before Joe can shoot.

Or maybe Sam doesn't know about the gun, but has shouted, threateningly, to Joe to back off. Sam might just try to stand his ground and try to scare Joe away. Joe now has real reasons to be afraid of Sam. And of course now Sam has a real reason to be afraid of Joe. Each at this point can legitimately fear that the other will try to kill the other first. So maybe Sam now attacks Joe, hoping to kill or injure him enough before Joe can use his gun. Sam fails. Joe uses his gun. Whoever succeeds in killing or incapacitating the other will not be punished. So both Sam and Joe are fighting for their lives with no outside constraints. Someone is going to die.

Even if the law would have applied the same...

Sam dies; Joe survives. Even if we were to believe that the law would have treated Sam the same way it treated Joe had Sam been the victor, the entire dynamic of Stand Your Ground means that even a small amount of fear (merited or not) can quickly escalate into very legitimate fear in which the rational course of action for each party is to do is to try to kill the other guy before he kills you.

The only way to win is not to play

The only way out of this dynamic is to return to the law that says that you can only fight back if you have no other choice. If you fight back when you could have run away, then you will go to jail. When both Sam and Joe Stand Their Ground, someone dies.

It's important. Parrott for SBOE District 12

It's tempting to think that votes in many parts of North Texas don't matter. The Republican candidates are bound to win locally. But I am going to argue that those in the 12th district for the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) need to take this election very seriously. Note that district boundaries have been redrawn, so you may not know which district you are in.

I particularly exhort my Republican friends to not just vote party line here. If you are worried about the extremist influences in your party, and more importantly if you care about the kind of education we have in Texas, this is where you need to draw a line.

I do not actually know very much about Lois Parrott other than what I've been reading over the past weeks. I haven't spoken with people who have worked with her. My support for Ms Parrott is based substantially on the fact that she has stated unambiguously that she opposes the Religious Rights' attempted take-over of school textbooks and curricula in Texas.

Miller has abandoned reason and the center

I've (mildly) supported her opponent, Tincy Miller, in the past, and so I need to explain why I am now unequivocally opposing Ms Miller. Tincy Miller, as the the Republican candidate will still probably win (although the 12th district also contains substantial parts of Dallas County, so there is still a fighting chance for a Democrat). Miller's experienced, and has been reasonably professional. In her previous terms she's been an odd sort of swing vote between the radical Creationist and anti-Historical faction and the professional faction. I would have preferred someone who did more to stand up to the people who make Texas a laughing stock of around the world, but I also had a certain admiration for the non-ideological, pragmatic, "good governance" Republicans that I found when I first moved to Texas seven years ago.

But pragmatic, consensual Republicans have been getting turfed out. They either get replaced by people on the Radical Right or they move dramatically to the right themselves. Miller has done the latter. I held my nose (and my tongue) as Miller courted endorsements from the Texas Eagle Forum and other very conservative groups during her primary battle with fiercely anti-intellectual the Tea Party candidate, Gail ("Pilgrims were Commies") Spurlock. I had hoped that Miller would move back to the pragmatic center after she had the GOP nomination. This has not happened.

In a recent candidate's forum (full video hosted by the Richard League of Women Voters), Miller has stated (incorrectly) that scientists agree that Creationism and Intelligent Design should be taught along with natural selection. Miller also stated some sort of endorsement for school-led prayer. She has refused to respond to the Texas Freedom Network's questionnaire.

You don't have to be on the left to fear the right-wing take over of the SBOE

Miller is displaying her unwillingness to stand up to the faction that have tried to remove Thomas Jefferson as an enlightenment thinker from textbooks, that have wanted to teach the bizarre historical theories of the discredited David Barton, that have fought at every opportunity to undermine teaching of the most fundamental principle in the biological sciences, which has led to them refusing to rely on educational and subject matter experts. This faction has not just made the Texas a laughing stock of the nation, but also of the world. The same world in which our children will be living, working, and studying.

In the past, Miller has been erratic in standing up to that faction; but over the past four months she's been signaling that she will be joining them (possibly giving then an outright majority on the board). So while Parrott may be to the left of most of the voters in the 12th District, this isn't about left/right; it is about sanity versus the ridiculous. Miller has done everything she can to indicate that she will not challenge the ridiculous.

Your vote will matter

Now I don't know whether Miller's shift reflects her genuine convictions, fear of future primary battles from the right, or a look toward an expanded political career. Either way, she shouldn't be on the board, and if she does end up on the board she should be reminded by a strong showing for Parrott that there are voters who will not tolerate an anti-intellectual ideological and deeply embarrassing and destructive board of education.

Education wrap-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Use bad, easy to remember passwords
2. Use the same password (or predictable variants of the same password) from site to site
3. 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

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

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?

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.

1. Avoid harm to others
2. Be fair
3. Support your group/tribe/community
4. Respect authority
5. 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?

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

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

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

1. Cluttered
2. Messy
3. Tumultuous
4. Geeky
5. Tangled
6. Fun
7. Crowded
8. Interesting
9. Exciting
10. Ransacked

"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.