Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: David McCullough, 'Don't Know Much About History'

I think the culture's changed so much. I'm not sure the same measures of education should be applied to today's younger generations. Yeah, I wish kids read more, and took interest in engagement. Especially kids of diverse or disadvantaged backgrounds. Overall though, it is indeed blank stares in the classroom when checking for just basic historical knowledge. It can be real drag sometimes.

Check it out, at the link:

Boston

'We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people—even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."

He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.

Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"

Answer: We've been teaching history poorly. And Mr. McCullough wants us to amend our ways ...

RTWT.

Back to Teaching at California State Universities

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Los Angeles Times, "Cal State system: It's time to get back to teaching."

There's no quick quote to capture the essence here. Full-time faculty don't do much teaching, it turns out, or at least not "the bulk" of it. Mostly adjuncts nowadays. It's weird, though, because I had the best professors at Fresno State. I think I had one grad student TA, in math. And the professor referred all questions to him, and while the TA was a good guy, proficient, etc., that's probably not the best example of cutting-edge teaching. The Political Science Department was great though. So much better than the University of California, in terms of access to the professors. I mentioned previously that the more hands on attention professors provide, the more they'll help their students. That's what happening in my classes, and I still can't do enough to overcome the skills deficits kids bring to college. So yeah, focus on teaching at Cal State. (And check that link: Schaefer Riley notes that Cal State's at risk of closing ten campuses and turning away 100,000 students --- seems unreal.)

Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: David McCullough, 'Don't Know Much About History'

I think the culture's changed so much. I'm not sure the same measures of education should be applied to today's younger generations. Yeah, I wish kids read more, and took interest in engagement. Especially kids of diverse or disadvantaged backgrounds. Overall though, it is indeed blank stares in the classroom when checking for just basic historical knowledge. It can be real drag sometimes.

Check it out, at the link:

Boston

'We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people—even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."

He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.

Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"

Answer: We've been teaching history poorly. And Mr. McCullough wants us to amend our ways ...

RTWT.

Back to Teaching at California State Universities

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Los Angeles Times, "Cal State system: It's time to get back to teaching."

There's no quick quote to capture the essence here. Full-time faculty don't do much teaching, it turns out, or at least not "the bulk" of it. Mostly adjuncts nowadays. It's weird, though, because I had the best professors at Fresno State. I think I had one grad student TA, in math. And the professor referred all questions to him, and while the TA was a good guy, proficient, etc., that's probably not the best example of cutting-edge teaching. The Political Science Department was great though. So much better than the University of California, in terms of access to the professors. I mentioned previously that the more hands on attention professors provide, the more they'll help their students. That's what happening in my classes, and I still can't do enough to overcome the skills deficits kids bring to college. So yeah, focus on teaching at Cal State. (And check that link: Schaefer Riley notes that Cal State's at risk of closing ten campuses and turning away 100,000 students --- seems unreal.)

The forever war over tracking

People are always getting mad at me for talking about race and IQ. Why do you obsess over race and IQ when nobody else in the entire world ever thinks about it? Well, as Trotsky might have said, you may not be interested in race and IQ, but race and IQ are interested in you. Thus, the endless stream of newspaper articles obsessing over my obsessions, just more obtusely. 

For example, I've long pointed out the never-ending struggle between parents (and the better sort of teachers) and educrats over tracking within schools. The educartel hates tracking because it makes clear racial differences in intelligence. 

Here's an article from the Washington Post that illustrates a lot of iSteve themes.  And, allow me to compliment reporter Kevin Sieff for doing a good job of laying out the facts honestly and intelligently.

School districts move away from honors classes in favor of AP courses
By Kevin Sieff, Published: May 22 

Not long ago, honors courses were considered a hallmark of student achievement, a designation that impressed colleges and made parents beam. 

Now, those courses are vanishing from public schools nationwide as administrators move toward a more inclusive curriculum designed to encourage underrepresented minority students to join their high-achieving peers in college-level Advanced Placement classes. 

Fairfax County’s public schools are at the forefront of the movement, nudging would-be honors students toward more-rigorous AP courses, despite criticism from some parents that eliminating honors will have the reverse effect and lead some students to choose less-demanding “standard education” classes instead of AP.

A little background: the Washington D.C. suburbs have some of the smartest kids and most educationally ambitious parents in the country. The suburban public schools are also pretty diverse racially, so not everybody is so motivated.

High schools used to offer regular and honors tracks, but then ambitious parents demanded an even higher track of Advanced Placement courses. So, three tracks became standard, which seemed to make these hard-charging parents happy. Say you have a 120 IQ kid and a 100 IQ kid. The first one goes into AP and the second one goes into the middle track, Honors, where he'll be with the more average whites and the smarter blacks and Latinos, but he won't be pushed beyond his capabilities. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? What parents of average kids fear is a two track system where their kid either is in over his head in AP or is in with the 80 IQ kids in the only other track.

Honors courses are generally taught from the same lesson plan as regular classes but at a faster pace and in greater depth. An AP course contains altogether more-challenging material — charting a path that coheres to national standards, which are heavily endorsed by the Fairfax school system. 

This fall, Fairfax will discontinue honors-level courses in subjects where an AP class is offered, drawing the ire of parents who want to restore what they call an academic middle ground. They have formed a group called Restore Honors Courses.  ...

Considerable opposition from Fairfax parents has prompted the school board to review its decision to do away with high school honors courses that for years served as an alternative to basic and AP courses. But it remains unclear whether local advocates of honors courses can resist a national trend to reduce the number of “tracks” for students.

“Honors courses are drying up in many districts across the country because of the push to democratize Advanced Placement classes,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some schools in Illinois, New York, Oregon and several other states have begun phasing out the distinction. 

But, this reasonable system drives educrats crazy for PC reasons, who want to go back to two tracks to push lots of NAMs into AP by not letting them take mere Honors.

The good news about educrats is that they aren't very bright and aren't very good at predicting the effects of policies. So, if a trend comes along like Advanced Placement that increases tracking, Ed-school educated educrats seldom notice ahead of time that AP will have massive disparate impact. They drink their own Kool-Aid. Who could have known that AP classes were actually tracking in disguise and that whites and Asians would wind up in AP classes more than blacks and Mexicans? To predict requires prejudice and that's the worst thing in the whole world.

So, the educrats didn't organize effectively to put up a fight against parents' and the better teachers' demands for AP. But, now, the truth has finally dawned on them so they are fighting back by trying to fill AP courses with NAMs.

But the problem is that a lot of the smarter NAMs are smart enough to know they aren't smart enough to take a lot of AP courses. So, if the AP carrot isn't working, the educrats are going to wield the stick by taking away mid-range Honors courses, making the bottom of the barrel the only alternative to AP. The plan is to scare the 100 IQ NAMs into AP courses with 120 IQ Asians and whites.

That trend has reduced the number of levels available in a given subject area. A decade ago, nearly all school systems offered at least three tracks in high school — usually regular, honors and Advanced Placement. Now, many have shifted to two options, as Fairfax will in the fall. Some have gone even further, placing all students in a single track. 

“We’ve found that traditionally underrepresented minorities do not access the most-rigorous track when three tracks are offered. But when two tracks are offered, they do,” said Peter Noonan, Fairfax’s assistant superintendent for instructional services. 

Increasingly, educators are using AP test data to measure the disparity between white students and their black and Hispanic peers, revealing a profound achievement gap in high-level courses. 

African Americans, for example, represented 14.6 percent of the total high school graduating class last year, but they made up less than 4 percent of the AP student population who earned a score of three or higher on at least one exam, each of which is weighted on a five-point scale. 

Many underrepresented minority students are able to handle college-level coursework but are intimidated by the AP label, Noonan says. In Fairfax, where students choose their own course schedule with guidance from teachers and counselors, administrators are eager to give students incentives to take AP classes. 

But in reducing the hierarchy of available courses, Fairfax has left students such as W.T. Woodson High School’s Conor Wade unsatisfied. 

Wade is now taking 11th-grade basic — or standard education — English, which he says is “not at all challenging.” He’s enrolled in two AP courses and is not ready to take a third. “It’s like choosing between two extremes,” he said. “An honors class would be perfect — something in the middle.” 

“It is the position of Fairfax County Public Schools that AP and IB courses, where available, provide the best education opportunity for our students,” district officials wrote in a recent memo to parents, using the acronym for International Baccalaureate. ... 

But concerned Fairfax parents have analyzed enrollment data at Woodson, which show that a significant number of students who took honors classes in 10th grade dropped to standard education, instead of elevating to AP courses, once the honors option was eliminated in 11th grade. 

“Instead of encouraging them to take more-advanced courses, eliminating honors pushes students backward, to less-challenging courses,” said Megan McLaughlin, a member of Restore Honors Courses. 

Other parents and analysts worry that students will be coaxed into taking AP courses even if they are unprepared for college-level rigor, slowing the pace of learning and setting up some students to fail. 

Officials at some low-income urban schools point to encouraging minority students to take AP courses as a critical element in closing the achievement gap. But in suburbs nationwide, parents of high-achieving students have threatened to leave school districts that are eliminating honors courses and reducing the number of tracks available, a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “bright flight.” 

In Fairfax, school board members call the issue one of the most divisive they’ve discussed. In response to parent opposition, they have announced a work session in July to reevaluate it. 

“Parents want more choices for their children, not fewer choices,” said Sandy Evans, a school board member representing Mason. “Eliminating the middle ground forces students to choose between being bored and being overwhelmed.” If Evans has her way, honors courses will be restored as soon as possible.

So, by now, AP is sacrosanct. The educrats can't get rid of AP classes. So, to reduce tracking they are trying to get rid of the mid-level Honors courses.

If educrats were smarter, they'd be more dangerous. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A retired teacher speaks out

From the Boston Globe:

A lesson in Advanced mis-Placement 

By Junia Yearwood 

THE AP English test in May, 2009 marked the end of a tortuous journey. We teachers served breakfast, gave a rousing pep talk, and the students trooped into the English High School auditorium to battle the exam. 

“What the hell am I doing in AP?’’ Veronica (all students’ names have been changed) cried the next day when the class reconvened. 

The outburst shattered the stillness of my 12th grade classroom, and all heads turned in Veronica’s direction at the back of the class. Her eyes blazing red and her face taut with anger, she continued to vent her frustration at her forced retention in an assigned Advanced Placement class despite her repeated requests for a transfer. ... 

Nevertheless, the majority voiced varying degrees of Veronica’s anger. She railed against the injustice of being denied a transfer from the class and her total lack of preparation for the academically rigorous course. She believed that the D for English on her last report card in 11th grade was a clear indication of her ongoing struggle to achieve proficiency in standard English. Haitian Creole was her first language. 

For the four years I taught the AP English and composition course at English High, many of my students were victims of the AP mania that had invaded the system. Suddenly, officials had recognized the dearth of faces of color in AP classes and the drive to augment the AP minority population went into high gear. 

The College Board and sympathetic philanthropic rescuers rushed in to solve the problem by dangling the carrot of grant money, and the feeding frenzy was on. AP classes sprouted and multiplied across all disciplines. AP scouts scoured students’ report cards hunting for qualifying scores; teacher recommendations were solicited for students with the “potential’’ to do AP work, and the nominees were summarily conscripted. 

Even though students had marked deficiencies in basic reading and writing skills, and little desire to work hard, and even though they made repeated requests for transfers, the dragooning of students into my AP course persisted. 

... I often wondered what parents would say if they knew that many of my AP graduates were placed in no-credit, remedial reading and writing courses their freshman year in college, and that, in spite of our school’s “underperforming status,’’ as designated by the state Department of Education, our AP enrollment was second only to our city’s prestigious exam schools. 

I wonder if an impartial jury would hold me, the teacher, solely responsible for my students’ failure to conquer the AP test and side with one of my colleagues who said that, if my students were not performing well in my course and on the test, then I needed to check my classroom practice. 

But mostly I worry about Veronica’s rage at being used in an AP numbers game. 

Junia Yearwood is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher. 

I looked into AP trends a couple of years ago in VDARE. Among Asians, 64% scored 3 (out of 5) or higher on 2008 AP tests. Among whites, 62%. Among Hispanics (excluding the Spanish AP test), 35%. Among blacks, 26%. (Hmmmhhmm, Asians > whites > Hispanics > blacks ... where have we seen that pattern before?)

But Asians take almost three times as many AP tests as whites. Judging from the regional differences in white AP test-taking, I suspect whites could double the number of tests they take and still stay above 50% passing.

My general impression is that in Red States where there aren't many Asians to get the AP ball rolling, more whites should take more AP tests. And Red States haven't hit complete diminishing returns among Non-Asian Minorities yet, either.

Advanced Placement tests are College Board product. Not surprisingly, they are more popular where the College Board's SAT college entrance test is more popular than the ACT college entrance test, a gap that matches up pretty well with the Blue and Red states. But there's no ACT competitor for the APs, so Red State kids are simply less likely to take AP tests.

On the other hand, in Boston, of all places, pretty much everybody who could pass an AP test has heard all about AP by now, so these kind of programs to shove even more NAMs into AP classes and tests are predictably just a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hypocrisy in a good cause?

David Bornstein writes in the New York Times in "A Better Way to Teach Math:"

Is it possible to eliminate the bell curve in math class? 

Imagine if someone at a dinner party casually announced, “I’m illiterate.” It would never happen, of course; the shame would be too great. But it’s not unusual to hear a successful adult say, “I can’t do math.” That’s because we think of math ability as something we’re born with, as if there’s a “math gene” that you either inherit or you don’t. 

School experiences appear to bear this out. In every math class I’ve taken, there have been slow kids, average kids and whiz kids. It never occurred to me that this hierarchy might be avoidable. No doubt, math comes more easily to some people than to others. But the question is: Can we improve the methods we use to teach math in schools — so that everyone develops proficiency? 

Looking at current math achievement levels in the United States, this goal might seem out of reach. But the experience of some educators in Canada and England, using a curriculum called Jump Math, suggests that we seriously underestimate the potential of most students and teachers. 

“Almost every kid — and I mean virtually every kid — can learn math at a very high level, to the point where they could do university level math courses,” explains John Mighton, the founder of Jump Math, a nonprofit organization whose curriculum is in use in classrooms serving 65,000 children from grades one through eight, and by 20,000 children at home. “If you ask why that’s not happening, it’s because very early in school many kids get the idea that they’re not in the smart group, especially in math. We kind of force a choice on them: to decide that either they’re dumb or math is dumb.” 

Children come into school with differences in background knowledge, confidence, ability to stay on task and, in the case of math, quickness. In school, those advantages can get multiplied rather than evened out. One reason, says Mighton, is that teaching methods are not aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens. 

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything. Children who struggle in math usually have difficulty remembering math facts, handling word problems and doing multi-step arithmetic (pdf). Despite the widespread support for “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning, studies indicate that current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord. ... 

Take the example of positive and negative integers, which confuse many kids. Given a seemingly straightforward question like, “What is -7 + 5?”, many will end up guessing. One way to break it down, explains Mighton, would be to say: “Imagine you’re playing a game for money and you lost seven dollars and gained five. Don’t give me a number. Just tell me: Is that a good day or a bad day?” 

Separating this step from the calculation makes it easier for kids to understand what the numbers mean. Teachers tell me that when they begin using Jump they are surprised to discover that what they were teaching as one step may contain as many as seven micro steps. Breaking things down this finely allows a teacher to identify the specific point at which a student may need help. “No step is too small to ignore,” Mighton says. “Math is like a ladder. If you miss a step, sometimes you can’t go on. And then you start losing your confidence and then the hierarchies develop. It’s all interconnected.”

In other words, the secret to better math education is to Have the slow kids go slower. Don't introduce the Pythagorean Theorem to everybody in second grade, as is common lately. Instead, make the not so bright kids chant their times tables until they're burned into their memories. Use educational tricks on the dumb kids like "Imagine you’re playing a game for money and you lost seven dollars and gained five. Don’t give me a number. Is that a good day or a bad day?" that would put smarter kids to sleep.

Of course, these methods would be disastrous for the smarter kids, so the bottom-line macro implication is: Track, track, track.

(A second order implication is that individual tutoring, which tends to work better than less labor-intensive ways of teaching math, should be handed off to computers that can customize each lesson and quiz for the individual student. On the other hand, notice that Steve Jobs's Apple products were heavily aimed at the educational market 30 years ago, but almost ignore schools today. Most educational software in 2011, sadly, comes from small firms that deserve to be small.)

Of course, all this subversive wisdom about not ignoring cognitive differences has to be phrased as being part of the Holy War on Charles Murray.

I suppose this kind of subterfuge is, on the whole, better than the current orthodoxy, which is to accelerate everybody in math to avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations, which leads to lots of kids who could have mastered arithmetic counting on their fingers as they fail algebra. Arithmetic really, really matters in real life: arithmetic skills are an important hurdle in determining who moves up from carpenter's helper to carpenter and from carpenter to contractor. But elementary and middle schools put less relative emphasis arithmetic today and more on "rigorous" math because Studies Have Shown that kids who aced Algebra I in 7th grade are more likely to graduate from college. (It might also be useful to teach more people how to Think About Statistics.)

Still, the need to lie all the time, especially about bell curves, means that practically nobody in the Education Biz ever learns any broadly applicable lessons even from success stories. How many readers of this story will figure out the real message? Two percent? Check the comments on the NYT and see what percentage of readers motivated enough to write a comment got the secret, coded Big Picture message.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A prediction

Over the last few decades, our society has made impressive progress on solving one of the two main hurdles -- crime and schools -- to raising a middle class family in dense urban neighborhood. We reduced the crime rate through a variety of means, the most obvious of which has been by throwing a huge number of guys in jail, most of them minorities. 

In 1974, Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson published a little book called Thinking About Crime in which he said that the best way to fight crime is lock more criminals up for longer periods. You see, he explained, when they're in prison, they can't victimize people who aren't in prison. This concept was very controversial at the time. Wilson's plan to fight crime by locking up criminals would obviously inflict disparate impact discrimination upon minorities, and that was just inconceivable to most advanced thinkers in 1974. 

Eventually, however, that's exactly what we started doing. And, in the long run, it worked. 

Today, you aren't supposed to remember this or think about it, but very few people are much bothered by it. Between 1981 and the early 1990s, I had my car windows smashed four or five times by criminals. I bought a new car in 1988 without a radio so that the bastards wouldn't smash my windows to steal it. So my wife bought a $10 transistor radio so she could listen to tinny-sounding music while she was driving. And they smashed my window and stole her radio and fenced it for about a buck. 

But I haven't had that happen to me since the mid-1990s. Why not? Well, for one reason is that a lot of these bastards got caught and locked up. Some of the criminals who did this to me may well be still in prison for other stuff they did.

Guess what? I sure don't miss that aspect of The Old Days: walking to my car and finding its windows smashed. Most people don't.

What about schools? How will today's well-educated young white urbanites figure out a way to educate their kids in public schools in urban neighborhoods? 

I don't know, but I suspect the SWPLs will eventually solve this problem. There is simply too much talent that wants to live downtown and, eventually, raise their kids there for this problem to go unsolved forever. I suspect the solutions will turn out to be about as racially insensitive as the solutions for crime turned out to be. 

My guess is that smart white urbanites will figure out ways to keep most non-Asian minority children out of their own kids' urban public schools. Sure, it sounds inconceivable today, but the real estate is so valuable that tomorrow's SWPLs will figure out ways to do it. 

And, at some point, they'll just do it. 

After it's done, it will be considered in as bad taste for any uncouth person to point out that the reason Ansel Jr.'s public high school school in the city in 2031 is almost all white or Asian is because white people pushed through reforms that had massive disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics as it is considered uncouth today to point out that Park Slope or Silver Lake or wherever is now full of white people because white people a few decades ago pushed through reforms that locked up lots of black and Hispanic people. 

But, it will happen.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

L.A. Schools Boss Uncovers Baffling Mystery

John Deasy, formerly of the Gates Foundation, took command yesterday as Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The LA Daily News reports on today's front page:

Speeding from one campus to another on Friday, Deasy peppered teachers and principals with questions about their strategies to improve academic programs, taking breaks between classroom stops to check his iPhone - admittedly his one addiction. 

At Castelar Elementary in Chinatown, Deasy congratulated administrators on their high state test scores and their clean campus. Then he questioned staff on how they were addressing the achievement of Latino students on campus, who are underperforming compared to their Asian peers. "I read the data before coming ... tell me what you're doing about it," he asked. 

Castelar's school coordinator, Sal Sandoval, said he appreciated the tough questions. "Of course it's a little intimidating, I mean he is our boss, but it's great to see how much he knows about our school," Sandoval said.

I'm as stumped as John Deasy is. Whoever heard of a school where Asians outscore Latinos on average? Clearly, it can't have anything to do with, say, the Latino students' parents. As we read in that new bestseller, Battle Hymn of the Jaguar Mother by Harvard Law professor Amy Chavez, Latino parents are notorious for relentlessly pushing their children to study.

At first, I was going to recommend that Superintendent Deasy drop everything else to investigate the Castelar Conundrum But, on second thought, perhaps some mysteries are not meant for human minds to unravel. This school's unique results could even be the result of a sinister conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, a plot far too deep and dangerous for John Deasy to probe.

Forget it, Jack. It's Chinatown.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Do private schools assess teachers by value added testing?

Measuring teachers by how much value they add to their students' tests scores is an idea that I advocated back in the last millennium, and has since become the state of the art conventional wisdom, and, now, it is being implemented into universal law in Colorado, all without anybody actually showing it does a whole lot of good. Dana Goldstein has a funny article in the American Prospect, "The Test Generation," about what that actually means in the classroom:

On exam day in Sabina Trombetta's Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant -- almost neon -- greens, bluish purples, and yellows. ... 

The test asked the first-graders to look at "Weeping Woman" and "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, "In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting. 

Trombetta, 38, a 10-year teaching veteran and winner of distinguished teaching awards from both her school district, Harrison District 2, and Pikes Peak County, would have rather been handing out glue sticks and finger paints. The kids would have preferred that, too. But the test wasn't really about them. It was about their teacher. 

Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers -- even those in art, music, and physical education -- according to how much they "grow" student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape -- bullet points on Colorado's new fine-art curriculum standards.

Studies prove that Yale graduates with high-paying jobs tend to have stronger opinions on the merits of Picasso v. Matisse than do high school dropouts in prison, so, logically, that proves that we can't start lecturing children too young on Matisse and Picasso, because if they don't go to Yale, they're bound to go to jail.

Anyway, the question I have about measuring public school teachers through value-added testing is this: How many private schools do that? We have thousands of private schools in America, but I can't recall ever hearing of one that regularly uses these now fashionable value-added assessments to measure teachers. Why not?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Deserving Dumb

From the Washington Post:

Requiring Algebra II in high school gains momentum nationwide
By Peter Whoriskey, Sunday, April , 7:57 PM 

With its intricate mysteries of quadratics, logarithms and imaginary numbers, Algebra II often provokes a lament from high-schoolers. What exactly does this have to do with real life? 

The answer: maybe more than anyone could have guessed. 

Of all of the classes offered in high school, Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates. In recent years, 20 states and the District have moved to raise graduation requirements to include Algebra II, and its complexities are being demanded of more and more students. 

The effort has been led by Achieve, a group organized by governors and business leaders and funded by corporations and their foundations, to improve the skills of the workforce. Although U.S. economic strength has been attributed in part to high levels of education, the workforce is lagging in the percentage of younger workers with college degrees, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

But exactly how to raise the education levels of the U.S. workforce is a matter of debate. And whether learning Algebra II causes students to fare better in life, or whether it is merely correlated with them doing better — because smart, motivated kids take Algebra II — isn’t clear. Meanwhile, some worry that Algebra II requirements are leading some young people to quit school.

The childishness of elite thinking today ...

You'd kind of hope that state governors and business titans like Bill Gates would form an Inner Party where, like O'Brien in 1984, they discuss policy more realistically than they do in public. But, is there any evidence for that? The education policy recommendations that Inner Party organizations like Achieve come up with sound like they were based in private on the same Oprahtastic thinking that is used to justify them in public.

Granted, if you demand more of young people, you will get somewhat more of what you demand, although probably not as much as you hoped. 

But there are predictable side effects. One problem is that credible demands include sticks as well as carrots, and the stick being talked about here is a big one: going through life as a high school dropout. 

I want to introduce a concept to public discussion based on the old Victorian concept of the Deserving Poor: the Deserving Dumb. There are many millions of children in America who, at least when it comes to passing a non-watered down version of Algebra II, are truly the Deserving Dumb. If you force them to take Algebra II, they will come to class, not disrupt the teacher, ask questions, try to do their homework, maybe get some afterschool tutoring. And they will still bomb the final and, thus, fail to graduate. They'll probably get GEDs later, but they still go through life as high school dropouts. They simply don't have the powers of abstraction necessary for Algebra II. 

In fact, under this system, the cleverer members of the Deserving Dumb will tend to drop out of high school earlier because they can read the handwriting on the wall. 

Moreover, the kids who should be taking Algebra II in public schools are likely to find their classes crammed with kids who just don't get it, thus bogging down the classes and boring the bright kids.

Overall, this Algebra II requirement to graduate has been talked about endlessly, frequently officially approved, but its actual implementation is usually repeatedly postponed at the last moment as the reality of the Deserving Dumb becomes manifest down in the trenches, and thus the Outer Party (e.g., school teachers) pushes back. But that doesn't stop the Inner Party from continuing to issue pronunciamentos about how Come Next Year we will require Algebra II to graduate. The Inner Party never learns.

By the way, very little thought has been devoted to developing carrots for the huge numbers of high school students who aren't going to get into selective colleges. The top quarter or so of teens are motivated to pile up an impressive Permanent Record to get into a fancy college and the bottom quarter or so of teens drop out of high school. But the middle 50 percent, especially the second quartile up from the bottom (roughly, kids with IQs in the 90s), doesn't have much motivation other than fear of not graduating from high school and thus not "walking the stage." Their plans are generally, "Well, I think I'll take some classes at the community college, or maybe get a job." So, they don't face many incentives in high school to try harder than the minimum to keep from flunking out. They know employers like high school grads over dropouts, but the usual entry level employers don't care much whether you got a 2.75 gpa or a 2.25 gpa as long as you graduated it, so why sweat it?

One thing that could be done is to make clear to high school students that they can't begin taking community college classes for credit if they get stuck in remedial courses, so expose them to the JC's test that gets you past remedial math and into the real stuff. That might encourage some to study harder in high school and discourage others from bothering with community college, which seems like a win-win to me, but not to the Obama Administration, which wants everybody to take a year of education after high school.

I don't have many other practical suggestions, but it would make sense for the Inner Party to think hard about problems like this rather than about how to sprinkle magic Algebra II dust on everybody.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama tosses value added assessments under the bus

From a transcript of Obama being interviewed by blue-eyed Jorge Ramos on Spanish-language Univision (Obama was getting an English translation in his ear piece -- he speaks only English, which has obviously slowed his career immensely):

What is true, though, is, is that we have piled on a lot of standardized tests on our kids. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a standardized test being given occasionally just to give a baseline of where kids are at. Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn’t a high-stakes test. It wasn’t a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn’t even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn’t study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize. 

Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. 

And so what we've said is let’s find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let’s apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let’s figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let’s make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well. 

Because there are other criteria: What’s the attendance rate? How are young people performing in terms of basic competency on projects? There are other ways of us measuring whether students are doing well or not.

Look, if you don't have a standardized test every year, you can't measure how much value that year's teacher added. It's still not easy to do right, but you can't do it at all if you don't test annually. That's not that complicated, but Obama doesn't get it.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Kids these days

Yesterday, Barack Obama and Melinda Gates visited TechBoston Academy, a public school founded with Gates Foundation money:

“You guys are a pretty impressive bunch,” Mr. Obama said to a science class of juniors and seniors, quizzing them on where they were applying to college and what they wanted to do after that.

Mr. Obama had some fun at Mr. Gates’s expense, noting that both of them had attended school in Boston — he at Harvard Law School, Mr. Gates at Harvard College. But Mr. Gates, he said, “couldn’t hack it in school here, so he dropped out. Then he started a modestly successful computer company.”

When nobody laughed, Mr. Obama said, “That was a joke, guys,” adding that he had actually started a big computer company. 

Reminds me of a story a high school teacher emailed me in 2008:

Student Named Yesenia: ""Mr. X, Mr. X! I have a question."

Teacher: "Yes, what is it?"

Yesenia: "Who is Son of Aladdin? Why are they always looking for him in a cave?"

Teacher: "Huh?"

Yesenia: "What's so bad about Son of Aladdin? Why are they trying to catch him?

Teacher: "Oh, you mean … Osama bin Laden?"

Yesenia: "Yeah, Son of Aladdin."

Teacher: "He's a terrorist."

Yesenia: "Oh."

Teacher [trying to make this into a Teachable Moment]: "But don't confuse Osama with Obama."

Yesenia: "Who's that?"

Teacher: "Barack Obama. He's running for President. The African-American candidate."

Yesenia:

Teacher: "You know, the black guy?"

Yesenia [Eyes widening]: "He's black?"

Teacher: "Yes."

Yesenia: "And he's running for President?"

Teacher: "Yes."

Yesenia: [With wide-eyed alarm:] "That's bad."

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Basketball stats and teaching stats

Here's an article by Dave Johns in Slate about NBA statistics. A huge amount of intellectual effort has been expended in recent years to bring basketball up to speed statistically with baseball. There has been a lot of progress, but the Holy Grail goal of coming up with a foolproof system for ranking players still has no consensus. 

For example, how good is Kevin Love (the 22-year-old Minnesota center who is an offshoot of the extended clan of Loves and Wilsons famous for the Beach Boys)? For example, Offensive Win Shares rates him as the best offensive player in the league and fifth best overall in total Win Shares.  Offensive Rating sees him as the fifth best offensive player in the league. Player Efficiency Rating says he's the third best player in the league. Other rating systems don't see him in the top ten.

Johns likes to disparage Love to show the problems being dealt with by the sophisticated statistics:

Rebounds also suffer from so-called "diminishing returns"—the idea that players on the same team effectively compete with one another for boards. Often a particular player—say, Minnesota Timberwolves center Kevin Love—serves as his team's designated glass-cleaner, and he scoops up balls that his teammates might well have grabbed anyway.

Okay, but, presumably, coach Kurt Rambis tells his players to let Love grab the easy rebounds (such as missed free throws by the other team) because he has such a good outlet pass, which ought to count for something in an overall ranking, right? Moreover, Love's offensive rebounding statistics are stellar, and there aren't all that many easy offensive rebounds.

The [plus-minus] technique can also examine the impact of top rebounders: Kevin Love consistently rebounds in double digits, but his contribution to his team's total boards is only about two to three per game, according to one analysis.

But the analysis Johns links to shows Love as being the best rebounder in the league by a margin of about 20% over the second best rebounder.

But, old fashioned stats can give a more well-rounded picture of Love than advanced rankings. This year, Love is on track to become the first player since Moses Malone's last MVP season in 1983 to average over 20 points and 15 rebounds per game (He's currently at 20.9 and 15.8). He's making 42.7% of three pointers and 86.2% of free throws, which are outstanding percentages for a center.

On the other hand, Love is under 6'8" in his bare feet and is a white guy who can't jump all that great: he doesn't block shots (only 0.4 per game, which is really low for somebody with so many rebounds).

(By the way, my impression is that rebounding correlates better with being a good all-around basketball player than does shot-blocking. The all-time bjg men like Russell, Chamberlain, Kareem, and Walton tended to be great at both rebounding and shot-blocking, but lots of guys are only good at one or the other. In general, the guys who are only good at shot-blocking are more often the weird Manute Bol-type talents. For example, on the playground, I was a pretty good shot blocker but I was an all-time awful rebounder. Partly it was getting pushed around by less skinny guys, but much of my rebounding deficit was cognitive: I never had the slightest clue where the ball was going to bounce. In contrast, I had a pretty good idea when somebody was going to shoot, so shot-blocking strikes me as pretty obvious while rebounding seems like a Dark Art. Your mileage may vary.)

Moreover, despite his superb hand-eye coordination, Love doesn't create much offensively down low (making only 48.3% of two pointers). His team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, has a very bad won-loss record, 15-50, and gives up a lot of points.

The more I look at it, the more I come around to middlebrow sportswriter Bill Simmons's convenient conclusion that basketball's old-fashioned box score stats are quite useful and Holy Grail one-number ranking statistics haven't yet gotten there. Looking at his non-advanced stats, Love's unusual combination of bulk and touch makes him look like a guy who could be extremely useful on a good team (like, say, Bill Laimbeer on the Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s) but who (at least not yet in his quickly evolving career) can't be expected to carry a bad team the way, say, Kobe Bryant carried an awful Lakers team with Smush Parker at point guard to a winning record a half decade ago.

On the other hand, there's a lot of learning available from advanced stats that don't try to rank everybody, but just try to look at elements of performance, such as a player's shooting percentage from the left or right sides of the court.

Much less intelligence has been devoted to analyzing teacher performance. Much of the recent work has been devoted to, yes, the Holy Grail of ranking teachers on Value Added so that bad teachers can be fired and good teachers rewarded.

The New York Times has an article on a hard-working NYC 7th grade English teacher at a prestigious public school. She has two Ivy League degrees and is much admired by her students, many of whom qualify for Stuyvesant. Yet, she only ranks at the 7th percentile among all NYC teachers. The article shows the complex formula used in the calculation, which appears to baffle most teachers. My guess would be that her students arrive so far above average that there's almost nowhere for them to go but down.

I'm always looking for sports analogies for social science statistics, since Americans think harder about sports. Being a teacher isn't really like being a player, it's more like being a coach. Probably the closest analogy is being a coach in a big high school with separate Freshman, Sophomore, and Varsity football teams. If you are the Sophomore team's coach, you more or less inherit the Freshman team's players (although the best will be sent up to the Varsity). So, if your Sophomore team consistently winds up with a worse record than the same players achieved on the Freshman team, your job will be in trouble.

For example, say the Freshman coach is great and routinely goes 9-0. All you can do as Sophomore coach is match his record or do worse, which might be an analogy for this New York teacher.

Similarly, the search for a super-sophisticated single number ranking system for teachers can overlook the advantages of less ambitious statistics at pointing out particular strengths and weaknesses, which would be of use both to teacher looking to improve and to administrators looking to maximize the usefulness of a teacher's talents.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Onion: "Community college overwhelmed by dumb students"

From The Onion:

The City University of New York has long spent much of its energy and resources just teaching new students what they need to begin taking college-level courses. 

But that tide of remedial students has now swelled so large that ... about three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000.

The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.

Many of those graduates end up at CUNY, one of the nation’s largest urban higher-education systems, which requires its community colleges to take every applicant with a high school diploma or equivalency degree.

“It takes a lot of our time and energy and money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things, but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them, too.” ...

“Most students have serious challenges remembering the basic rules of arithmetic,” Dr. Ianni said of his remedial math class. “The course is really a refresher, but they aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.”

On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen students in that class prepared for a test, called a Compass exam, that would allow those who passed to start studying college-level math. Without college math skills, students cannot graduate. Seventeen others in the class had not even qualified to take the test; they will have to repeat the course until they qualify or they give up, as history shows many have done....

On Monday, the Obama administration began a series of “community college summits” at campuses across the country to gather ideas on how the schools can produce more graduates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged up to $110 million to improve remedial programs at community colleges. ...

The university’s biggest concern is those students who lag furthest behind in the three subjects. “These students have a really low probability of success, and it’s hard to know how to work with them,” said Dr. Logue, the provost. “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”

Students are often surprised to learn that they still have hurdles to clear before they can begin college-level work. As a freshman at LaGuardia, Angel Payero, 18, took the necessary assessment tests in August and discovered that he was deficient in reading, writing and math.

“Throughout high school, I was a good math student, and to find out that it was my lowest grade of all three was really surprising,” said Mr. Payero, who graduated from the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry.

Neither of his parents, who are from the Dominican Republic, attended high school, he said. Yet Mr. Payero yearns for a career in psychology. “I feel like I can really understand people and where they come from,” he said.

Read the whole thing at The Onion.

For more, see here.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Getting cynical in my old age

For the last dozen years, I've listened to Bill Gates explain how to improve education. First, it was small learning communities (which he now says the Gates Foundation wasted $2 billion upon), then it was making everybody pass Algebra II to graduate from high school, then it was something else, now it's giving the best teachers bigger classes (see Gates's latest op-ed: "How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools").

The weird thing is that the Way to Fix the Schools has basically never been, according to Gates, about the main way the rest of economy gets more productive -- and also the one thing Bill Gates definitely knows a lot about: information technology. 

And yet, common sense says that information technology offers the main hope of us ever being able to afford on a mass scale the one educational tool that works more often than anything else, especially with math: individualized tutoring. It often doesn't work, but over thousands of years it's tended to work enough that that's what rich people get for their kids. And it's a lot more likely to work than the latest fad.

Unfortunately, assigning one human tutor with patience, insight, and communications skills per student is mind-bogglingly expensive. 

So, the standard Ed School solution is "differentiated instruction:" i.e., the teacher should be every student's personal tutor. The teacher is supposed to walk around the classroom instantly diagnosing why each individual student is screwing up and giving the exact help he or she needs. Thus, the need for Superman.

Yet, assigning one computer per student is getting cheaper all the time. And computers have all the patience in the world. It's easy for a program like Aleks to generate math problems adapted on the fly to the exact level of the student -- if you miss a question, the next one is easier, if you get it right, the next one is harder. That's how big tests like the GRE and the ASVAB work today. 

What's harder is getting the computer to figure out why the student gets wrong a problem at his appropriate level. Yet, that's not an impossible task in math, where there are a finite number of ways to screw up. 

Folks, it's 2011. Way back in 1998, my Palm Pilot could humiliate me in chess. We're not talking about beating Gary Kasparov or Ken Jennings here, we're talking about reminding a kid who thinks that -3 times -3 equals -9 that a negative number times a negative number is a positive number. 

So, what would have happened if instead of investing billions naively chasing social theory fads, Bill Gates had invested billions over the last 12 years in something he knows about: software.

Would that have done more good than investing billions in the Ayres Brothers' small learning communities idea? Maybe not, even probably not. But would it have done less good?

So, why not? 

Sometimes I wonder if all of Gates's interventions in American education aren't a sideshow to distract from Microsoft Windows' unsuitability for integrating into classrooms. Lots of schools have Computer Classrooms where the students file in and do stuff on computers under the eye of the Computer Teacher who comes around and fixes stuff when it breaks.

What hasn't worked well, at least up through Windows Vista (I have no experience with Windows 7) is integrating PCs into regular classroom work. When the solution to hangups it to reboot and wait ten minutes for the PC reload Windows, well, as Glaivester pointed out a few years ago, when he was teaching and the whole school was given laptops, learning dropped precipitously because he spent half his time fixing kids' computer problems.

That's why Steve Jobs' Winston-Smith-loved-Big-Brother approach to limiting what you can do on Apple products (e.g., no Flash) to what Steve thinks you should do may be more promising for classrooms. 

(By the way, here's Ridley Scott's "1984" Apple commercial announcing the Mac during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast -- talk about irony.)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hoist by their own petard in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker's plan to take away the collective bargaining power of the teacher's union follows years of attacks by white liberals on teachers and teachers unions for failing to Close the Gap.

Consider the beginning of the media-celebrated documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman.'" Davis Guggenheim, white liberal dad, winner of an Oscar for the Al Gore documentary, drives past three public schools in Venice every morning to get to a private school in Santa Monica. He muses on the narration that he felt he was “betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.”

Why, then, doesn't he send them to public school? Well, the obvious reason is because public schools in Venice are full of Hispanics and blacks (one of them is 95 percent Non-Asian Minority), and, privately, Guggenheim doesn't think his kids will get as good an education in a classroom that has to cater to NAM needs. But, no way no how is he ever going to say that in public. He'd never get another Oscar.

So, Guggenheim makes a well-publicized documentary to blame his private decision on what's best for his kids on the horrible, evil teachers unions who prevent America from Closing the Gap. See, if only the teachers unions weren't screwing up black and Hispanic students so bad, Davis Guggenheim and his wife, movie star Elizabeth Shue, would be happy to put their kids in a 95 percent NAM school! But until America decides to Fix the Schools and Close the Gap by firing bad teachers, they'll just have to continue to drive past all those public schools to their private school.

Can you blame Republican politicians for taking advantage of liberal logic? 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Testing-Media-Industrial Complex

It seems weird that we live in a boom time for testing, but we do. The science of testing was mostly perfected in the middle of the 20th Century and not much has changed since then. It would seem like it ought to be a sleepy business. Moreover, very few people defend testing in public. 

Yet the media climate keeps pressing the vast education system toward policies requiring ever more new and improved tests and test prep materials.

Commenter gb at The American Scene says:

New York State’s entire “Race to the Top” grant will be used to pay for assessment tools, and the testing companies are in it for the money in a way that teachers certainly aren’t. Kaplan, which owns the Washington Post Company, owns the very lucrative contract to provide test prep materials for the New York City schools, and Joel Klein, great champion of testing, has just moved from the Chancellor of the city schools to the News Corporation, where he will work in educational publishing. In many ways, assessment is a mechanism whereby federal, state, and city education dollars get moved to large media conglomerates—meanwhile arts education and foreign language instruction get cut.

When you stop to think about we really have the perfect intellectual climate for well-placed firms to make money off testing: when your tests don't give the right results (perfect equality), then your writers demand both more tests and new tests. And nobody is allowed to point out in your pages that it's all pretty futile. It's a perpetual motion money-making machine.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Advanced Advanced Placement

The spread of Advanced Placement tests has been mostly a success story in recent decades (e.g., they provide a fashionable rationalization for tracking), but Advanced Placement classes tend to be forced marches to try to get high school students to more or less memorize a lot of material: lots of worksheets, little time for class discussion.

From the NYT:

Rethinking Advance Placement

by Christopher Drew

As A.P. [testing] has proliferated, spreading to more than 30 subjects with 1.8 million [high school] students taking 3.2 million tests, the program has won praise for giving students an early chance at more challenging work. But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics....

All that, says the College Board, is about to change.

Next month, the board, the nonprofit organization that owns the A.P. exams as well as the SAT, will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history — with 387,000 test-takers the most popular A.P. subject. A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. ...

The changes, which are to take effect in the 2012-13 school year, are part of a sweeping redesign of the entire A.P. program.

Instead of just providing teachers with a list of points that need to be covered for the exams, the College Board will create these detailed standards for each subject and create new exams to match. ...

The new approach is important because critical thinking skills are considered essential for advanced college courses and jobs in today’s information-based economy. ..

WHEN A.P. testing began in 1956, memorization was not yet a dirty word, and it was O.K. if history classes ran out of time just after they finished World War II.
 
... And it did not take long for instructors to start teaching to the test, treating the board’s outline as the holy grail for helping students achieve the scores of 3 or higher, out of 5, that might earn credit from a college.
That obviously became harder to do as breakthroughs in genetic research and cellular organization, and momentous events like the cold war, the civil rights movement, Watergate and the war on terror, began to elbow their way onto the lists. College professors could pick and choose what to cover in their introductory survey classes. But because the A.P. test can touch on almost anything, high school juniors and seniors must now absorb more material than most college freshmen.

So perhaps it is no surprise that while the number of students taking the A.P. biology test has more than doubled since 1997, the median score has dropped to 2.63, from 3.18.

One critical thinking skill that should be taught in schools is "selection."

I doubt if the increase in the amount of biological knowledge in the world between 1997 and 2010 is the main cause of the decline in average AP score. Instead, the expansion of the number of test-takers would be a much more plausible candidate for primary reason.

On the other hand, I've spent a lot of time looking into this, and it appears to me that diminishing returns have not yet badly hit AP testing. As I wrote in VDARE.com in 2009:

Although the quantity of AP tests taken by whites grew 155 percent over the last decade, their mean score dropped merely from 3.04 to 2.96. The fall-off for Asians was even less, from 3.10 to 3.08. ... The “pass rate” (the percent of test takers scoring 3 or higher) is almost the same for whites (62 percent) and Asians (64 percent). But Asians are much more aggressive about signing up for AP tests, taking almost three times as many per year (1.79 per capita per year versus 0.63 among whites). 

There has been a big push to get more NAMs to take AP tests, with predictable results:

The tremendous growth from 1998 to 2008 in Hispanics taking AP tests drove down their average score on the 1 to 5 scale from 2.99 to 2.42. Their passing rate dipped from 60 percent 42 percent.

(And keep in mind that Hispanic mean scores are exaggerated because so many native Spanish-speakers take the Spanish Language test, which ought to be, but isn’t always, a free throw for them. Indeed, 56 percent of all 5s earned by Hispanics in 2008 came on the Spanish Language exam. Excluding it, Latinos in 2008 averaged a 2.17 score with a 35 percent passing rate.) ...

Black scores fell a comparable amount over the last decade, from a mean of 2.21 to 1.91 (with the passing rate dropping from 35 percent to 26 percent).

Still, despite depressingly diminishing returns, more than quadrupling the number of AP tests taken by blacks from 1998 to 2008 helped the absolute number of tests passed by blacks to triple.

So, even with blacks, the number of passing scores is still rising rapidly, so we don't seem to have topped out yet.

In general, there's a big blue state - red state divide in AP testing that goes back, in part, to the regional divide between states on taking the SAT (which, like the AP, is sponsored by the College Board -- and is most popular on the coasts) and the ACT (run out of Iowa and most popular in the middle of the country). The ACT part of the country could probably try taking more AP tests without much harm.

Back to the NYT article:

For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution “drives the diversity and unity of life.” The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61-page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb. 

This seems reasonable at first glance. What do you think?

However, I suspect there's a lurking ethnic agenda that's one motivation for this change: there's a common assumption that a shift away from memorization toward critical thinking will narrow the racial gaps that currently exist between Asians and whites and between blacks/ Hispanics and Asians / whites.

But, is there much evidence for this widespread assumption?

I don't know. Asians do well on the AP tests, but they also do well on the Ravens Progressive Matrices, too.

In general, educationalists tend to assume that because they are for (at least in theory) critical thinking skills and against (at least in theory) disparate impact, that, therefore, upping the critical thinking demands of a test will lower the disparate impact. This often turns out to be untrue.

Another questions is whether memorization shouldn't be a dirty work in high school. Maybe that's a better age for memorizing, while grasping the big picture best waits until college. I don't know...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Does spending more on education improve test scores?

Conservatives have been saying for a long time that spending more on schools doesn't raise test scores: just look at how much D.C. spends per student or how much the U.S. spends versus Finland.

But Tino at Super-Economy crunches the test scores (PISA internationally and NAEP in the U.S.) after adjusting for demographics, and finds positive correlations between spending and test scores:

However the left in the United States doesn't use this argument, because they are ideologically averse to demographic adjustments having to do with race and ethnicity (most of them consider all statistical generalizations about race and ethnicity somehow offensive, regardless of why you are doing it).

The result of liberals' political correctness is that they are depriving themselves of a very important argument in a very important debate.

True, but there are other adjustments that need to be made, such as for cost-of-living and/or wealth. Compared to Mississippi, New Jersey has expensive public schools, but then it's an expensive place to live full of expensive people. In Tino's comments, I suggest a few methodological wrinkles he should add.

In general, Americans spend a lot of money on schools. The architecture and landscaping of American colleges, for example, is often absurdly lavish. Do expensive buildings raise, say, LSAT scores among individual undergrads, as opposed to attracting better applicants? 

Probably not much. Other reasons are more important, such as social climbing, monument building, regional pride, and so forth. One reason that's often overlooked is that school isn't just preparation for life, it is part of life. For example, Rice has a lavish campus due to the generosity of some rich people and I appreciated my four years admiring the aesthetics that they had arranged for my edification. Similarly, one point of hiring high quality teachers is to have your kids talked to by high quality people.

A reader writes:

http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0910_guide_extended_table4.pdf

Of the 8,320 people who took the GRE between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2008, and indicated that Secondary Education was their chosen field of graduate study, exactly *zero* scored an 800 on the verbal test.

Of the 5,901 people who indicated that Elementary Education was their chosen field of study, *zero* scored an 800 on the verbal test.

And of the 1,521 people who indicated that Early Childhood Education was their chosen field of study, *zero* scored an 800 on the verbal test. 

If you widen the net to catch those in the 700-790 range, the results aren't much better. I think this supports the conventional wisdom (or is it the conventional unconventional wisdom?) that teaching in the U.S. is low-status and low-pay, so it inevitably attracts the low performers among the college-educated. Improving the quality of our public schools is contingent upon changing the composition of the teaching pool.

I scored an 800 on the GRE verbal section, but I attend, however improbably, a mid-tier education school in a master's program. Most classes are a waste of time, and insulting to my intelligence, to boot. I was dismayed enough last fall to send off a fusillade of applications to law schools and PhD programs in history. I will do a round of student teaching at a Chicago public magnet school, and then probably bolt.  

I think this is a big, unspoken problem: teacher indoctrination in  Ed Schools and in professional development can be painful to self-respecting intelligent, independent minded people. It's hard to get first rate people to be teachers when they have to put up with so much inanity to earn their credentials.

My publishe articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer