Sarah Silverman On Fucking Voter Fucking Fraud

Thursday Cartoon Bonus Fun: The Hard Sell Of Bullshit Edition

Students First Changed Their "About"

Students First, Michelle Rhee's billion dollar, billionaire funded lobbying/propaganda machine have changed the "About" section on their Facebook page:

They claim they are a "grassroots movement" while at the same time claiming one million members (most of whom were duped into signing up with a shady Change.org petition) and a billion dollars.  Grassroots? Really? As they line up with and take money from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Broads and the hedge fund managers? Really?

In the beginning of Students First they had a blog. On their blog they allowed comments. Folks like me started pointing out their misinformation --like "teachers are the most important factor"-- when they forgot to mention they meant "in-school factor." I made them correct that, however reluctantly. Then they ended commenting on the blog.

They did allow it on their Facebook page, so I comment there now, and have created a shadow blog, Students?First where SF's blog-posts can be commented on. Nobody goes there though.

SF is NOT a grassroots organization. They are well-funded and well-connected. They don't have a million members. And they lie. Constantly.

Ignore the hype.

Why Rewards Don't Work (Neither Does Merit Pay)

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The Overjustification Effect
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In 1973, Lepper, Greene and Nisbett met with teachers of a preschool class, the sort that generates a steady output of macaroni art and paper-bag vests. They arranged for the children to have a period of free time in which the tots could choose from a variety of different fun activities. Meanwhile, the psychologists would watch from behind a one-way mirror and take notes. The teachers agreed, and the psychologists watched. To proceed, they needed children with a natural affinity for art. So as the kids played, the scientists searched for the ones who gravitated toward drawing and coloring activities. Once they identified the artists of the group, the scientists watched them during free time and measured their participation and interest in drawing for later comparison.

They then divided the children into three groups. They offered Group A a glittering certificate of awesomeness if the artists drew during the next fun time. They offered Group B nothing, but if the kids in Group B happened to draw they received an unexpected certificate of awesomeness identical to the one received by Group A. The experimenters told Group C nothing ahead of time, and later the scientists didn’t award a prize if those children went for the colored pencils and markers. The scientists then watched to see how the kids performed during a series of playtimes over three days. They awarded the prizes, stopped observations, and waited two weeks. When they returned, the researchers watched as the children faced the same the choice as before the experiment began. Three groups, three experiences, many fun activities – how do you think their feelings changed?

Source: Benedikte on Flikr

Well, Group B and Group C didn’t change at all. They went to the art supplies and created monsters and mountains and houses with curly-cue smoke streams crawling out of rectangular chimneys with just as much joy as they had before they met the psychologists. Group A, though, did not. They were different people now. The children in Group A “spent significantly less time” drawing than did the others, and they “showed a significant decrease in interest in the activity” as compared to before the experiment. Why?

The children in Group A were swept up, overpowered, their joy perverted by the overjustification effect. The story they told themselves wasn’t the same story the other groups were telling. That’s how the effect works.

Self-perception theory says you observe your own behavior and then, after the fact, make up a story to explain it. That story is sometimes close to the truth, and sometimes it is just something nice that makes you feel better about being a person. For instance, researchers at Stanford University once divided students into two groups. One received a small cash payment for turning wooden knobs round and round for an hour. The other group received a generous payment for the same task. After the hour, a researcher asked students in each group to tell the next person after them who was about to perform the same boring task that turning knobs was fun and interesting. After that, everyone filled out a survey in which they were asked to say how they truly felt. The people paid a pittance reported the study was a blast. The people paid well reported it was awful. Subjects in both groups lied to the person after them, but the people paid well had a justification, an extrinsic reward to fall back on. The other group had no safety net, no outside justification, so they invented one inside. To keep from feeling icky, they found solace in an internal justification – they thought, “you know, it really was fun when you think about.” That’s called the insufficient justification effect, the yang to overjustification’s yin. In telling themselves the story, the only difference was the size of the reward and whether or not they felt extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. You are driven at the fundamental level in most everything you choose to do by either intrinsic or extrinsic goals.

Intrinsic motivations come from within. As Daniel Pink explained in his excellent book, Drive, those motivations often include mastery, autonomy, and purpose. There are some things you do just because they fulfill you, or they make you feel like you are becoming better at a task, or that you are a master of your destiny, or that you play a role in the grand scheme of things, or that you are helping society in some way. Intrinsic rewards demonstrate to yourself and others the value of being you. They are blurry and difficult to quantify. Charted on a graph, they form long slopes stretching into infinity. You strive to become an amazing cellist, or you volunteer in the campaign of an inspiring politician, or you build the starship Enterprise in Minecraft.

Extrinsic motivations come from without. They are tangible baubles handed over for tangible deeds. They usually exist outside of you before you begin a task. These sorts of motivations include money, prizes and grades, or in the case of punishment, the promise of losing something you like or gaining something you do not. Extrinsic motivations are easy to quantify, and can be demonstrated in bar graphs or tallied on a calculator. You work a double shift for the overtime pay so you can make rent. You put in the hours to become a doctor hoping your father will finally deliver the praise for which you long. You say no to the cheesecake so you can fit into those pants at the Christmas party. If you can admit to yourself that the reward is the only reason you are doing what you are doing – the situps, the spreadsheet, the speed limit – it is probably extrinsic.

Whether a reward is intrinsic or extrinsic helps determine the setting of your narrative – the marketplace or the heart. As Dan Ariely writes in his book, Predictably Irrational, you tend to unconsciously evaluate your behavior and that of others in terms of social norms or market norms. Helping a friend move for free doesn’t feel the same as helping a friend move for $50. It feels wonderful to slip into the same bed with your date after getting to know them and staying up one night making key lime cupcakes and talking about the differences and similarities between Breaking Bad and The Wire, but if after all of that the other person tosses you a $100 bill and says, “Thanks, that was awesome,” you will feel crushed by the terrible weight of market norms. Payments in terms of social norms are intrinsic, and thus your narrative remains impervious to the overjustification effect. Those sorts of payments come as praise and respect, a feeling of mastery or camaraderie or love. Payments in terms of market norms are extrinsic, and your story becomes vulnerable to overjustification.

Marketplace payments come as something measurable, and in turn they make your motivation measurable when before it was nebulous, up for interpretation and easy to rationalize.

The deal the children struck with the experimenters ruined their love of art during playtime, not because they received a reward. After all, Group B got the same reward and kept their desire to draw. No, it wasn’t the prize but the story they told themselves about why they chose what they chose, why they did what they did. During the experiment, Group C thought, “I just drew this picture because I love to draw!” Group B thought, “I just got rewarded for doing something I love to do!” Group A thought, “I just drew this to win an award!” When all three groups were faced with the same activity, Group A was faced with a metacognition, a question, a burden unknown to the other groups. The scientists in the knob-turning study and the child artists study showed Skinner’s view was too narrow.

Thinking about thinking changes things. Extrinsic rewards can steal your narrative.

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About That School Obama Mentioned...

It's worth 3 minutes of your time to listen to this.

Arne Duncan Is A Liar, And Mike Klonsky Found Proof!

Writing in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, [Vivek] Wadhwa argues:

"Much is made of the PISA test scores and rankings, but the international differences are actually quite small. Most of the U.S. ranking lags are not even statistically significant. The U.S. falls in the second rank on some measures and into the first on others. It produces more highest-performing students in science and reading than any other country does; in mathematics, it is second only to Japan. Moreover, one has to ask what the test results actually mean in the real world. Do high PISA rankings make students more likely to invent the next iPad? Google? I don't think so."

Charters And Vouchers Are An Excuse Not To Fix Real Issues

Paul Karrer: Schools lose with Race to the Top

A letter to my president, the one I voted for.

Your Honorable President Obama:

I mean this with all respect. I'm on my knees here and there's a knife in my back and the prints on it kinda match yours.

You're righting the wrong guys with your Race to the Top program, which provides grant money that "might" go to schools if they comply with unproven, absurd draconian "reforms" such as shuffling teachers around.

You're hitting the good guys with friendly fire.

I teach in a barrio in California. It's a public school. I have 32 kids in my class. I love them to tears. They're fifth-graders. That means they're 10 years old, mostly. Six of them are 11 because they were retained. Five more are in special education and two more should have been.

I stopped using the word parents when I talk with or about my kids because so many of them don't have them.

Amanda's mom died in October. She lives with her 30-year-old brother (a thousand blessings on him). Seven kids live with their grandmothers, six with their dads. A few rotate between parents.

Fifty percent of my 10-year-olds have visited relatives in jail or prison.

Do you and Arnie Duncan understand the significance of that? I'm afraid not. It isn't bad teaching that has taken things to the current stage. It's poverty. We don't teach in failing schools. We teach in failing communities.

It's called the ZIP code quandary. If the kids live in a wealthy ZIP code, they have high test scores. If they live in a ZIP where the people are poor, guess how they do.

We also have massive teacher turnover at my school. Now, we have no money. We haven't had an art teacher or music program in 10 years. We have a nurse twice a week.

And due to No Child Left Behind, we are punished most brutally. Did you know that 100 percent of our students have to be on grade level? That's like saying you have to get along with 100 percent of your cabinet (and unlike my kids, your cabinet gets to quit).

You lived overseas, so you know what conditions are like in the rest of the world. President Obama, I swear that conditions in my school are Third World. We had a test when I taught in the Peace Corps. We had to describe a glass filled to the middle. We were supposed to say it was half full. Too many of my kids don't even have the glass.

And then, of course, there are the gangs. They are eating my kids, their parents and the neighborhood.

One of my former students stuffed an AK47 down his pants at a local bank and was shot dead. Another one of my favorites has been incarcerated since he was 13. He'll be 27 next month. I've been writing to him for 10 years and visiting him in Level 4 maximum security—he's in chains behind bullet-proof glass—in Salinas Valley State Prison.

Do you get that it's tough here? Charter schools and voucher schools aren't the solution. They are an excuse not to fix the real issues. You promised us so much and now you want to give us merit pay based on how the kids do, no matter their circumstances?

You're making it real hard to vote with enthusiasm.

Can you pull the knife out now? It really hurts.

Paul Karrer, who teaches at Castroville Elementary School, writes about education for this page.

Small Businesses Are Actually Huge (IOW, BS)

Monday Bonus Cartoon Fun: Wordplay Edition

Obama Not Swayed By Spill; Still Loves Drilling

President Obama's weekly address closer:

One of the reasons I ran for President was to put America on the path to energy independence, and I have not wavered from that commitment. To achieve that goal, we must pursue clean energy and energy efficiency, and we’ve taken significant steps to do so. And we must also pursue domestic sources of oil and gas. Because it represents 30 percent of our oil production, the Gulf of Mexico can play an important part in securing our energy future. But we can only pursue offshore oil drilling if we have assurances that a disaster like the BP oil spill will not happen again. This Commission will, I hope, help provide those assurances so we can continue to seek a secure energy future for the United States of America. [emphasis mine]

I'm sorry, but this is not the guy I voted for. More drilling, Bagram/Gitmo, DADT, Afghanistan, and Arne Duncan do not bode well for America, Democrats or Obama. What to do? Vote for real Progressives, I guess.

Clarity Is Not Shrillness

Richard Dawkins on being called shrill when he is merely being clear:

US Test Scores Are Actually Very High

When we compare student scores internationally, Americans tend to appear to be less successful than our Asian counterparts. Really? No. It's bullshit. Read on...

Bracey Offers Some Facts to Go With Obama's Stale Education Rhetoric
Posted at Assessment Reform Network listserv:

. . . .He talks about American kids being behind and his reference is obviously test scores. But then he talks about creativity in charters. But the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) studies indicate charters are behind public schools in test scores. You can't evaluate one set of schools by test scores and then another set of schools with another criterion. Public schools are just as creative (Eric Robelen, "NAEP gap continuing for charters," Education Week 21 May 2008). Duncan turned a lot of schools into charter schools in Chicago, but I don't think he ever came back to see if they were working any better.

By the way, being behind doesn't seem to matter--test scores don't related to global competitiveness. The U. S. is #1 as ranked by both the Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum.

"In 8th grade math we've fallen to 9th place." That's out of 45 nations. In TIMSS of 1996 (tests administered in 1995) 8th graders were in 23rd place out of 41. We've come a long way, baby. How come no one ever mentions that American kids do better in science than in math and no one EVER talks about how well they do in reading which is very well indeed? Various citations, too many to list and the one with the above stat is not online anyway, "Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years." It's only mentioned at the US HQ for TIMSS and PIRLS studies, http://isc.bc.edu. The reading studies, PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), CAN be found there.

"Just a third of our 13- and 14- year olds can read as well as they should." This is garbage in light of the international comparisons mentioned above. It is also garbage because the reference is obviously NAEP, and as I've shown over and over the NAEP proficiency standards are outrageously unrealistic. In fact, by the criterion Obama is using, no nation has more than a third of its students reading "as well as they should." Sweden, the top scoring nation also has about one third at NAEP's "proficient" level (Richard Rothstein et alia, "Proficiency for all: An Oxymoron"). "A Test Everyone Will Fail" shows this in an international context. I wrote that for the Post a couple of years ago. Just put title into Google. "Oh, those NAEP achievement levels." I wrote that for a publication of the National Association of Secondary School Principals for whom I write a monthly column. You can find it a bunch of places on line like www.nabe.org/press.Clips/clip110805.htm.

The Koreans might be in school a full month longer, but in PISA (Program of International Student Assessment), America has a higher proportion of top scorers than Korea. More to the point, given the size of America, America has more top scorers than any other nation. No one even comes close. We have about 67,000, Japan about 3,4000. Top scoring Finland's proportion gives them about 2,000 actual warm bodies. (Lindsay Lowell (Georgetown) and Hal Salzman (Urban Institute and Rutgers). "Making the Grade." Nature, May 1, 2008

There were some good things in the talk, but our president has bought too much of the same old crap about the state of our education, crap that has been spewed since 1957 (Sputnik), 1967 (urban riots--schools took the hit), 1977 (the SAT decline), 1983 (A Nation At Risk--followed by the longest economic expansion in history), 1998 (International test scores again), 2002 (No Child Left Behind) and 2008 (Edin08).

In his inaugural address he said two thirds of the fastest growing jobs require extra education. What he didn't say was that those jobs account for very few jobs. For every computer engineer we need, Wal Mart needs 15 or so salespeople. Today he said "By 2016, four out of every 10 new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training." That's not what the BLS says. And what does "advanced education or training mean, anyway? It's a weasel phrase. By the way, we have about 3 newly minted, home-grown scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields and 65% of them leave those fields within 2 years of graduating (Lowell & Salzman, "Into the eye of the storm: assessing the evidence on science and engineering, quality, and workforce demand." www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411562_salzman_Science.pdf).

I present a complete history of the continual and unfair criticism of schools in Education Hell--the Betrayal of American Schools which should be published next month.

Alas, the fear mongers--Bob Wise, Roy Romer, Bill Gates (who has said some REALLY dumb things), Craig Barrett, Lou Gerstner, etc., get the media attention. Guess it's cause they got the money. They certainly don't have the chops.

Richard Shelby: Moronic Dickwad

Senator Shelby is a moron. I also think he is disingenuous, and fomenting nonsense when he says he isn't sure Obama is a citizen. Here are some pictures that may help. Idiot.

Yglesias: STFU!

I love Matt. He's smart and says what he thinks. He has a post up about "personnel quality" that you should read; the comments are the best part. As usual, MY's readers tear him a new one due to his penchant for siding with the union busters and the blame-the-teachers folks. Here is the post:

By Request: Personnel Quality

I liked NS’s other question too:

Why is “finding better teachers” such a preoccupation among self-described education reformers? Of course, we’d have a better education system if our teachers were better. We’d also have a better military if our soldiers were better and a better health care system if our doctors and nurses were better. Why is education the only policy area where “find better people” is treated as a workable solution?

With regard to soldiers, I would reject the premise. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a very low level of interest in joining the United States military and consequently in order to maintain the required overall force size it was necessary to make recruiting standards quite low and to be pretty lax about who you would keep on. The rebuilding of the quality of the personnel employed by the military over the course of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the great prides of the officers who were involved. And when the Iraq War was leading to a personnel crunch and moves toward diluting recruiting standards there was, rightly, a great deal of hand-wringing over it. Concern about personnel quality is also one of, if not the, main reason why the military brass is generally very hostile to the idea of conscription and this is also why we’ve encouraged our NATO allies to abolish conscript and build smaller, higher-quality, more professionalized forces.

Quality of personnel should always be a concern across public services. Some cities, for example, have trouble offering police officers salaries that are as high as what’s offered in neighboring suburbs. This tends to lead to problems with the quality of the staff available to urban police departments which, in turn, makes it more difficult to keep crime under control.

With regard to teachers, though, it’s worth trying to be more specific since the debate has focused on a couple of particular points. In the United States, we tend to require teachers to do a lot of preemptive qualifying in terms of getting themselves certified. And then after a few years of teaching, they become eligible for tenure status. But we do have some fairly extensive experience with teachers going into the classroom without traditional certification. And the evidence suggests that such teachers are basically just as effective as the teachers who do have the traditional certification. The evidence also suggests that while teachers tend to get a lot more effective after their first couple of years of experience, they don’t get more and more and more effective as further time passes. Thus, the general shape of the teacher quality reform proposals is to (a) relax the preemptive screening so as to make it easier for anyone with a college degree to get into the classroom, (b) make the tenure decision more strictly tied to student achievement, and then (c) take advantage whatever increase in your potential labor force step (a) has given you to make it possible to in step (b) dump the bottom X% of the worst-performing teachers. To all of this I would be strongly inclined to add (d) start paying people more to further increase the size of the labor pool and make step (c) all the more effective.

But the need to have good people doing important public services is by no means unique to teaching and it certainly applies to the military.

And my favorite comment by a MY reader:

Skeptic Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

I’m sorry, that’s just utterly utterly dumb. Stupid. Pathetic.

You want good education, lower your classroom size. That means more teachers, smaller classes. Invest in your students. Invest in resources for the school - music programs, athletic, drama, shop, computers, you name it. Establish a rock solid basic curriculum and then enrich it with lots of electives. Monitor your students performance and then establish streams or programs to encourage and support the brilliant, provide remedial help for those who did a bit of a boost in certain areas, and a low end stream. Identify and remove the disruptive. All of this takes money, patience and a genuine investment. Not something that Americans have a lot of interest in these days.

Much easier to simply go for the crack fix. I mean the quick fix.

Oh, and I certainly do love the ‘break the teachers union’. Yeah, because that’s certainly going to encourage quality teachers.

Now go read it.

Update: I just checked back and Skeptic has another comment. Who is this Skeptic? I like....

Skeptic Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

Yeah, that’s it. It’s all about bad teachers. Get rid of the bad teachers, and the system will magically right itself and we’ll all be rubbing each other off in happy teddy bear land. Good for you, hope that works out for you all.

Yes, political correctness is at fault. People who are good at math and science just get sick of being told that the N*gg*r word is unacceptable and that you can’t sexually harass the prettier girl students.

Now, I don’t know if my educational experience is similar to most Americans. But here goes.

I went to elementary school, grades 1 through 6, a different teacher in year. Six teachers over six years.

Then I went to Junior High, a curriculum of 6 courses per year, with a different teacher specializing in the different subjects - math, history, etc. There was overlap, different teachers taught multiple classes, but I figure I was exposed to a minimum of 6 to 12 teachers, over three years and 18 courses.

High school, three more years, but increasing numbers of elective courses to choose from. Say 12 to 18 teachers.

All in all, I figure twelve years of schooling had me exposed for substantial periods to 24 to 36 teachers.

Were some of them awful? Sure, I remember a math teacher in high school who couldn’t find his ass with a flashlight. I remember a horiffic elementary school teacher who would pull kids pants down and spank them savagely in front of the class. Of the 24 to 36 I’d have said maybe 4 or 5 were truly terrible. Roughly 15% say, give or take.

That seems to be about average for the population. You look at any trade and the bottom fifteen per cent tend to be major league screw ups.

Were there good teachers? Yep. Not all of them. I remember a couple of really brilliant university professor level high school english teachers, a great biology teacher, a really sweet elementary school teacher. Maybe 4 or 5.

And the rest? Solidly unexceptional.

Now, let me make a few points. Were there bad teachers? Sure there were. But they were the exception, the minority, and for the most part, I was exposed to enough different teachers, we all were, that a few screw ups didn’t really affect the quality of our education. We as students could transcend them. It would have been nice to have been rid of them, but on the other hand, if they hadn’t been there, I don’t think it would have made much difference.

Simply put getting rid of all the bad teachers probably isn’t going to make all that big a difference. There likely aren’t all that many of them, no more than 15% to 20% say, and students are exposed to enough different teachers that any handicap they leave can likely be overcome. Purging the system produces at best incremental benefits rather than transformation.

What about getting better teachers? Well, like I said, there were four or five brilliant teachers and they made a real difference in my life. My education would have been so much better if there’d been eight or ten or a dozen brilliant teachers. Sure.

But on the other hand, my brother, with different skills and interests went through the same schooling and many of the same teachers that I did. Some of the ones I found brilliant made no impact on him, or he even disliked them. He found others to be gifted.

So what makes a teacher really really good for students is a highly subjective thing between the teacher and the student. It’s not like there’s some external board of education monitor who ranks the quality of a teacher. It’s the ability to reach out to students, and all teachers and students are different. It’s possible that even some of the horrific ones were able to make a big positive difference to some students.

But assume we could find some objective method to winkle out the diamonds. Sure. How do we find these diamonds and how do we keep them? More importantly, how do we keep them?

Human nature being what it is, people want two things: Money and security. There’s probably other ways to phrase it, but there you go. We like to talk about investments in stocks and bonds and land and crap like that. But skills are investments, time is an investment, a career is an investment.
A person has maybe 20 to 40 years of working life in them, and they’d like a decent standard of living and a decent retirement. The job, the career, is an investment in both the personal present and in the future, in living, in raising kids, in sickness and health, in retirement. People with options, with skill and talent, choose their careers as investments.

They want a good wage, they want to be able to make a nice living. Maybe there are other thing involved, they may not require top dollar. But on the other hand, they don’t want poverty. And they want some assurance of stability. You go to school invest four years in an education degree, you want some reasonable undertaking that you’re going to be able to recoup that investment, some likelihood that the investment over time will enable you to buy a home, raise a family, have vacations, etc. Sometimes people are prepared to trade a bit of one for a bit more of the other. More money less security is a good deal if you’re young and have options. Less money but more security is a better deal if you’re in an unstable environment. One or the other is not a good deal. Some combination is preferable. And the best is reasonably good provisions for both.

So what’s the idiots reform package - Teachers are overpaid. Uh huh. Okay, drop the compensation, or keep it stable, that will attract people like flies. Teachers have too much security, let’s make it easier to be rid of them and let’s abandon all hope of long term security. Yes, let’s make teachers vulnerable to termination from incompetent or arbitrary administrators, school board officials, angry parents, etc. Let’s strip collective bargaining and union protection rights, and have them stand like peons in the system.

Well, listen up. That sort of model isn’t going to attract the best and brightest. The best and brightest, being bestest and brightly usually have other options, or are motivated to seek out other options. And they pretty much will. Remember, the average lifespan of a teacher is five years. Most teachers leave the profession after five years. That’s a pretty high attrition rate, they’re already voting with their feet. Someone with options, they’ll go and look for a better investment.

So who does take that crap deal? The opposite of the best and brightest. The average, the dull, the plodding, the ones with fewer or no other options.

Way to go. Well meaning idiocy once again improves the American school system.