Evanston - an inadvertent experiment in racial math

Hat tip for this to @DanProft on Twitter:

AP Calculus at Evanston Township H.S.

"...the course is restricted to students who identify as Black, all genders."

"...the course is restricted to students who identify as Latinx, all genders."

Neo-segregation is the absurdity of identitarianism taken to its logical end. pic.twitter.com/Jo8I9yzZCa

— Dan Proft (@DanProft) April 30, 2023

Note: I'll be giving references throughout these blog posts, but I have high confidence that they will soon be wiped out, so I'm preserving as much relevant text as possible.

Evanston Township high school in Illinois (1600 Dodge Avenue, Evanston, Illinois, 60201), is in the suburbs of Chicago, about 7 miles north of Chicago city center. It has just achieved notoriety by racially segregating its math classes. For background, Evanston's population demographics are 16.1% Black, 11% Hispanic or Latino - not far off the USA average.

In case you think I'm indulging in hyperbole, here is the curriculum:

• AP Calculus AB - MA0515: Students will study the equivalent of one semester of college calculus... This code for the course is restricted to students who identify as Black, all genders
• AP Calculus AB - MA0555: Students will study the equivalent of one semester of college calculus... [No racial restriction]
• AP Calculus AB - MA0565: Students will study the equivalent of one semester of college calculus... This code for the course is restricted to students who identify as Latinx, all genders.

The same pattern is repeated for the Pre-Calculus course, which is a precursor to AP Calculus, and in the case of Latinx for 2 Algebra, which is the precursor for Pre-Calculus.

Note: I looked at the Science courses, and they did not have any kind of racial restriction.

Some background: the "AP" classes are usually taken at ages 16-18, though can theoretically be taken any time in the four years of high school. They are 1 year long, have a well-defined national curriculum, and culminate in an exam which is marked completely separately from the coursework and other scoring for the class; so, for a 1 year AP course you get a regular grade (0.0 to 4.0, approximately, higher being better) and also the final exam grade (integers 1 to 5, 5 being best). You could in theory get a 1.0 in class (terrible) and 5 in final exam (amazing) - or 4.0 in class (great!) and 1 in final exam (did you even spell your name correctly?). They are notorious, especially in mathematics topics, for needing coaching to do well.

In UK terms, AP Calculus AB is something around A-level Mathematics. The separate course AP Calculus BC - which is offered here but not racially segregated is more like A-level Further Mathematics, and only for hard-core nerds.

The obvious question: why is the school doing this, and what are the implications?

A tempting answer is: "to cheat!" Why else would you split out by race? You give the Latinx and Black students a teacher who marks easy, say about +1.0 on the curve, and the rest of the students a teacher who marks hard, say -0.5 on the curve. That way, a Latinx student who is actually 1 whole grade point behind a white/Asian student, would show up in final results as 0.5 points ahead, and therefore tempting material for a college recruitment.

Problem! The AP final exam is hard to cheat on. All students in the school should be taking it at the same time, under the same conditions, and probably in the same room. It would be very hard - though not impossible - to give the Black/Latinx students an advantage by writing down or correcting answers. If a school took this route, it would show up for any sample size other than tiny, by the white/Asian students having much higher final AP exam scores than their course grades would predict, relevant to Black/Latinx.

What I think might be going on instead: the school assigns the Black/Latinx classes their best teacher in the area, and a time-serving loser for the white/Asian class. This will muddy the waters in the scoring differentials. With a good teacher, Black/Latinx will achieve their maximum potential in both class and final exam, whereas white/Asians will depend heavily on external coaching - or high innate ability - to do well, since the teacher is useless. And, as an explanation for why they're not doing it for AP Calculus BC, they probably only have one teacher who can lead this subject, and in any case lots of external parental help / tuition ends up being important, which Black/Latinx students are less likely to get in any case.

Short version: in my opinion, this school wants to boost Black/Latinx student achievement in mid-level math, at the expense of white/Asian students. If you're one of the latter, consider identifying as Black.

I'm really looking forward to how this experiment works out, and I sincerely hope that legal action doesn't kill this segregation - as it well might - because getting this relative performance data would be fascinating.

Jill Biden is no Doctor

I posted something like the following at SDA but thought it worth a repost here for posterity.

I read through Jill Biden's Ed.D thesis. Short version: she's no Doctor. She's probably not even a Master.

Some facts:

• Jill's actual content (introduction up to but not including references) is 80 pages, double-spaced. Interestingly, her table of contents doesn’t properly line up with the page count, but whatever.
• Typical page (her introduction) is about 250 words, so that’s about a 20,000 word thesis excluding references and appendices.
• a PhD thesis in the arts typically has a 80K upper word limit, Masters a 60K upper word limit. Good ones are probably half that, maybe a bit more. So Jill has written a bit more than half of a typical Masters thesis.
• the text is significantly bulked out with e.g. material that seems like what you'd find in a Delaware Tech+Community College brochure, the full text of a student survey, and a faculty interview that should probably have been relegated to an appendix.
• the thesis has 39 references by my count, which is what you’d expect from a medium length conference / journal paper. A Masters thesis should have more than that. A doctorate (which is supposed to advance the state of research) should have a lot more.
• she has a boring writing style (this is technically an opinion, but I’m right) and it’s hard to figure out what she’s trying to argue. Her conclusions seem rather trite.

Opinion: if I was one of the people who signed off on this (pages 3 and 4) I would be very quiet about it if someone at a party started spouting off that Jill Biden deserves to be called “Doctor”. For the record, these are:

• Barbara Curry, Ed.D. (Professor in charge of dissertation (executive position paper)
• James Broomall, Ed.D. Member of dissertation committee (executive position paper)
• Frances Leach, Ed.D. Member of dissertation committee (executive position paper)
• Eugene Matusov, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee (executive position paper)

Deconstructing Dr Rachel McKinnon

Those of my readers who are keen followers of trans rights issues - likely none - may be aware of the controversy surrounding Dr Rachel McKinnon (person's preferred Twitter handle) who is a man who identifies as a woman ("trans woman"). McKinnon was previously an OK-but-far-from-top-tier cyclist in the men's arena. Upon "becoming" a woman, McKinnon quickly powered to the top ranking, including a win in the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championship in the 35-44 age group (female), and if you click through to that link you might have an inkling why.

McKinnon has been assiduous on chasing down (and blocking) anyone on Twitter who questions the fairness of a physiological man competing with physiological females. I can't imagine why, unless there's a certain element of feeling guilty about sudden un-earned success.

Luckily, the golden fountain of academic publishing has provided a definitive voice on the subject^[1]. McKinnon has published a paper (co-authored with Dr. Aryn Conrad) in PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS, VOL. 46, NO. 2, FALL 2018 which settles the issue once and for all. [Rachel, FYI, I've squirrelled away a copy of this in case you delete it.]

Aryn Conrad, if you were wondering, also appears not to have been born in the same gender to which they now identify. Apparently Aryn is "the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants" though I wonder whether that's exactly the same relationship that the grandparents would state.

Let's take a walk through this article. The abstract sets out their goal:

We argue that the inclusion of trans athletes in competition commensurate with their legal gender is the most consistent position with these principles of fair and equitable sport.

Gosh, that's not something we could have predicted, at all. But perhaps we're being unfair, what's the actual argument? Well:

We suggest that the justificatory burden for such prima facie discrimination [endogenous testosterone limits] is unlikely to be met. Thus, in place of a limit on endogenous testosterone for women (whether cisgender, transgender, or intersex), we argue that ‘legally recognized gender’ is most fully in line with IOC and CAS principles.

In other words, it doesn't matter if trans athletes have a material physiological advantage over women, the paper wants to talk about whether the existing regulations are fully consistent with respect to the issues of male-to-female athletes. This approach is certain to win over female athletes on the lower steps of the podium, of course.

It's a poor quality "paper", by the way; 61 double-spaced pages without diagrams before you get to the appendices, so about 30 normal pages. Contrary to what aspiring academics might think, length is generally inversely proportional to quality. If you can't make the core argument in 10 pages, you're probably relying on length to cover up plot holes. It also doesn't follow the usual structure of "tell 'em what you're going to say, say it, tell them that you've said it" - perhaps because that would make it much easier to check their claims.

Reading through the paper, the key claims are:

1. Internation sport regulations, and their legal effect and scope, are complicated;
2. There are some edge cases of people born as women with high testosterone, which have not been handled consistently;
3. Sport regs say we must not discriminate on various grounds - is "gender identity" (as opposed to biological sex) one of those grounds? (you'll be shocked to learn that the authors think that it is);
4. Apparently not clear that biological women with excess testosterone have a significant physiological advantage over other women;
5. What is the meaning of "fairness / level playing field" in sport? There's a huge amount of waffle here, but seems to boil down to "gender identity is intrinsic, so you can't base fairness on it in the same way that you can't say that a 7 foot tall person has an unfair advantage in the high jump". (I'm doing some serious editing here, the text is sprawling and terribly structured and summarised).

At this point I'd like to pull out the quote:

So if trans women are female, we ask, why would 'male' physiological data be relevant to the question of fairness? We know this won’t be convincing. But it is an important question to confront.

Well, there's the tiny matter that male physiology is hugely relevant to performance in sport."We know this won't be convincing" - yes, because it is not at all convincing. It is, if you excuse the phrase in this context, bollocks.

Continuing, we have:

6. Placing upper limits on testosterone in "women" is totes unfair;
7. Trans women's physiological advantage is not that big, in fact men and women almost completely overlap in physiology (I swear, that's what they say);
8. Trans women are actually just like regular hi-testosterone women in sports performance;
9. Indeed, setting testosterone limits on women in sport is probably unfair and unreasonable;
10. Bodies are complex and testosterone levels are not the whole story by a long chalk;
11. Testosterone levels don't seem correlated with performance by elite men;
12. Actually, just don't use testosterone to judge who's a man and who's a woman - just take their word for it;
13. Let's look at Caster Semenya as an edge case of high-performing woman with testosterone, trans women are totes the same as her
14. If you don't let men identifying as women compete in women-only events, it's just not fair dammit.

My goodness me. I'm glad I only had to read that once. If I were designing a paper structure to bury the facts and specific arguments, I don't think I could have done better. Props to McKinnon and Conrad. Of course, if they were actually trying to convince rather than write an obscure scrawl to point to as "academic validation of our argument, baby!" they'd have written it differently.

I don't know who the reviewers were for this paper, but if they got any remuneration then I'd recommend clawing it back, sharp-ish.

Rachel and Aryn: if you want to submit a more compact version of the paper to a journal with standards on conciseness, you're welcome to build from the above structure. I don't want any co-author credit because I think your arguments are ludicrous, but I'd like to see them at least argued clearly.

Rachel McKinnon and Aryn Conrad appear to be desperate to get external validation for their lifestyle choices. I'm reminded at this point of Robert Pirsig's comment in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance":

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

[1] No, not really.

Teachers vs engineers

"If we paid teachers like we paid engineers, just think how far ahead we would be!"

If we assessed teachers on the results of their work like we did for engineers, just imagine the outcry from the California Teachers Association.

"Class X results in Maths have plummeted year-on-year compared to equivalent classes Y, Z taught by other teachers; class X's Maths teacher objectively sucks and should be demoted/fired."
"How dare you! Won't you think of the children?"

I've met some great teachers in California, but The System is very clearly working against them.

Whoda thunk? An actual piece of journalism on the University of Virginia "frat house gang rape" story

It seems as if the wheels are coming off Sabrina Rubin Erdely's story in Rolling Stone of gang rape on the University of Virginia's campus.

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her [my italics] was misplaced. [...] We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

That's certainly a novel way of writing "our unquestioning acceptance of her decidedly dodgy tale" and "had their reputations dragged through the dirt in the national media".

My favourite wonk, Megan McArdle, has a must-read piece on how this happened and how the crazy rush to publish a decidedly dodgy and unverified story has been one of the worst things to happen to real campus rape victims in a long time:

So now the next time a rape victim tells her story to a journalist, they will both be trying to reach an audience that remembers the problems with this article, and the Duke lacrosse case, and wonders if any of these stories are ever true. That inference will be grotesquely false, but it is the predictable result of accepting sensational stories without carefully checking. The greatest damage this article has done is not to journalism, or even to Rolling Stone. It is to the righteous fight for rape victims everywhere.

Go read the whole thing, and despair at the media environment that splashed Erdely's story over the national news but will fail to discuss the points in McArdle's article in anything but the most oblique terms.

Signs that the terrorism threat might be overblown

Or maybe just a sign that the US education system is a pool of sharks...

Modern terrorism getting you down? Don't worry, it's an opportunity for you! Sign up for a certificate in Terrorism Studies!

In the program, you will develop an understanding of terrorism and counter-terrorism. The online program is suitable for students interested in pursuing a career in homeland security at local, state, or federal levels; joining national and international counter-terrorism agencies; conducting research on terrorism in academia; or seeking opportunities in relevant industries.

Presumably it's also suitable for students interested in pursuing a career in terrorism? Or maybe this is an elaborate honey trap by the FBI, but I suspect that a) they don't have the motivation and b) they can't afford to fund the course.

SELECT, JOIN and a bit of Perl? $10K

Database nerds will like this one. The state of Nevada has a database system for the permanent records of children in the state education system. One parent, an opponent of the Common Core national curriculum which is sweeping the US public education, wanted to know what his childrens' permanent record said. He asked for a copy, but it wasn't available for free:

Because the SAIN system is not designed to create reports that display individual student data in a readable format, the parent was initially told that the requested reports do not exist and cannot be produced
[...]
[Nevada Department of Education] staff determined that it would take at least 3 weeks (120 hours) of dedicated programming time to fulfill the parent's request. At the applicable wage rate of $84.95/hour, the requested work resulted in a $10,194 price tag.

Not designed to create reports that "display individual student data in a readable format"? That's a new one on me. So when education officials threaten to put a student's trangression on their permanent record, that actually means "a place that no-one will look because it's not readable"?

The really shocking aspect is that Nevada is employing IT experts at $85/hour who can't knock up an appropriate couple of SQL statements like:

SELECT GradeReport.Grade, GradeReport.Text, Students.StudentName, GradeReport.ReportDate
FROM GradeReport INNER JOIN Students
ON GradeReport.StudentID=Students.StudentID
WHERE Students.StudentName = "Fred Eppolito" AND 
 Students.SchoolID = 12345;
 -- choose whatever fields are needed to uniquely identify a student

I'm fairly sure that writing the query, testing it, dumping that data out in CSV format, eyeballing it to check that nothing's bad and then sending on the file can be done in the space of an hour.

If the Department of Education IT staff can't do this for $85 per hour, which is about $175K per year, perhaps they shouldn't be paid so much. Otherwise, one might think that the state of Nevada can't be trusted to spend taxpayer money at all...

Don't give the guests power over the residents

Top legal blog "The Volokh Conspiracy", now at the Washington Post, analyses the recent California 9th Circuit decision that wearing American flag shirts at high school can legally be prohibited. Eugene Volokh notes that the actions of the principal (Mr. Rodriguez) in banning wearing of American flag clothing in fear of it causing violent disruption may be constitutional but not at all a good idea:

This is a classic "heckler's veto" — thugs threatening to attack the speaker, and government officials suppressing the speech to prevent such violence. "Heckler's vetoes" are generally not allowed under First Amendment law; the government should generally protect the speaker and threaten to arrest the thugs, not suppress the speaker’s speech. But under Tinker's "forecast substantial disruption" test, such a heckler's veto is indeed allowed.

I have to confess sympathy for Mr. Rodriguez in his predicament - his job is to ensure order and prevent disruption at his school, and students who wear the American flag did seem very prone to be correlated with disruption:

At least one party to this appeal, student M.D., wore American flag clothing to school on Cinco de Mayo 2009. M.D. was approached by a male student who, in the words of the district court, "shoved a Mexican flag at him and said something in Spanish expressing anger at [M.D.;s] clothing."

Now there are plenty of legal Mexican immigrants in the USA, so we shouldn't assume anything about the angry student's immigration status, but if (for instance) a student of Scottish heritage took offense to a Live Oak student wearing an American flag on St. Andrew's Day and threatened him "I'll cae the pins o' ye!" I can't imagine Mr. Rodriguez reacting the same way. The principal does seem to be bowing to the opinions of a category of "guest" students in preference to those who are citizens of the country. (Irish students aren't likely to cause problems on St Patrick's Day because it's celebrated in the USA as much if not more than in Ireland).

If you want to know more about what Live Oak High School is like, take a look at the California department of education stats for the school. It's about 50-50 demographic split between white and Hispanic/Latino students. The standardised scoring indicates that white, Asian and black students improved significantly in the past academic year but the Hispanic/Latino students went backwards. It seems that pandering to them isn't doing them any favours academically. Incidentally, I'm dubious about the "Two or more races" stats - only 1 student of mixed heritage out of 858? My arse.

I can do no better than quote Volokh's takeaway:

The school taught its students a simple lesson: If you dislike speech and want it suppressed, then you can get what you want by threatening violence against the speakers. The school will cave in, the speakers will be shut up, and you and your ideology will win. When thuggery pays, the result is more thuggery. Is that the education we want our students to be getting?

If Live Oak High School really wants to help its Hispanic/Latino students, it should insist that they meet the standards expected of all other students.

A plan for school absence

So it's regarded as an extremely serious matter for a child to miss school for even one unauthorized day, but it's perfectly fine to ban them from school for four days for eating Mini Cheddars?

Riley Pearson, from Colnbrook, near Slough, was excluded from Colnbrook C of E Primary School after teachers discovered the snack and called in his parents.
After a meeting with headmaster Jeremy Meek, they were sent a letter telling them Riley would be excluded from Wednesday until Monday because he had been 'continuously breaking school rules'.

"Consistency: we've heard of it."

An avenue for parents suggests itself: book your holiday, wait until a couple of days before and then get your child to take a few packets of Monster Munch to school. Profit!

Supply and demand - it's a bitch

Pity Mr. Cookson who wants to take his kids to Center Parcs during the school holiday and is paying 40% extra for the privilege:

Posting a screengrab of the online booking form showing the price leaping from £699 to £999 in consecutive weeks, he wrote: 'For exactly the same villa the week before the school holiday, it's £300 cheaper!
'Do you get anything extra? NO. Same villa, end of.'

He is of course, completely right at the same time as being completely wrong. Center Parcs has been running for about 20 years and has great data on how demand fluctuates over the year. They've built the optimum number of villas to serve customers year-round; the marginal cost of an occupied villa for a week probably isn't huge, but the construction cost and maintenance probably is, and they have constrained space. They want to get the place as full as possible, and will hence increase the daily occupancy cost to a point where 99.9% or so of villas are occupied. The one or two families who will pay £969 but not £999 will be the unlucky ones.

Center Parcs put a good spin on this:

'We reduce our prices significantly during off-peak periods to reflect the lower demand at these times,' a spokesman said.

I like that: they reduced their prices off-peak, rather than increasing the prices during peak. The spokesman clearly is earning his pay.

Mr. Cookson is of course complaining to precisely the wrong people. If he wants to fix the problem, he shouldn't be talking to Center Parcs - there's no way in hell that they're going to sacrifice £300 times five holiday weeks times a few hundred villas times five sites just to get a small amount of good publicity. There are two ways to reduce the cost; the most feasible approach is to make different schools stagger the vacation weeks. Do this on a per-district basis so you don't have the problem of different vacations for kids in the same family of different ages, and randomise the choice for each district, and you've halved the effect of the holiday surge. Now you're still going to pay a premium for Center Parcs during the two weeks, but it should reduce demand and hence price - maybe £840 instead of £999 for the week. ABTA reports that Germany uses this approach, which is eminently sensible.

The more effective approach is to remove this stupid restriction in state schools that children cannot take holidays during term at all. Give each child in primary education a couple of weeks per year to take off with no penalty, and a week per year in secondary education, then price a couple of additional weeks by a sane amount - say, £15 per day per child.

Of course, this will cause all the businesses catering to families to lose money since they can no longer charge a hefty premium for those vacation weeks; demand might increase a little for the average non-vacation week, but I suspect they'll still lose overall.

Let's contrast this with a post on the subject by the Guardian's education editor Richard Adams:

Is it really that big a problem?
Yes. According to Bradford metropolitan council, between September 2012 and Easter 2013 more than 41,000 days of education were lost owing to parents in the city taking their children out of school for holidays during term time.

How many pupils in Bradford? The population of the city is about 520,000. If we assume (very conservatively) that about 10% of the population is between 5 and 16, that's 52,000 students. So that's less than 1 day of education per student per year - I assume that after Easter the marginal cost compared to waiting for the summer holidays means that not many more days are taken. That statistic is stupid - they are clearly not putting it in context because it is so small.

Does a week make that much difference?
A child who takes a week's extra holiday each year at school will have missed at least 70 days – or the equivalent of more than three months of teaching – by the end of their time at school.

Wow, 70 days. That's quite the statistic. 5 days per year implies 14 years, so they are including students from age 4 through to the end of A-levels. Schools have to be open for at least 190 days (38 weeks) per year so that's 2660 days over 14 years. A child taking a week's extra holiday per year is missing less than 3% of the school week.

If schools really thought that 1 week of school made such a marginal difference, they'd be paying for supply teachers to cover the 2-3 inset days per year which affect all pupils. At 2 inset days per year, 104,000 days of education are lost to parents in Bradford as a result of inset days.

Any long-term solutions?
Parents could accept that their child's classroom education is far more important than a week in Europe, no matter how many museums they visit. That's especially true for young children: the evidence is unanimous that early-years education is vital for future attainment.

Really? I can believe that having a year of education for a 5 year old, compared to having no education, has some benefit - still, many countries don't start formal education for children until a year later than Britain does. But missing a week of sounding out words, painting and listening to stories compared to travel, hearing and learning words in a foreign language, trying new foods, seeing different sights and meeting new friends doesn't seem to be to be the slam-dunk that Richard Adams suggests.

Regular vs frequent

The recent explosion in parents being fined for their children failing to attend school has been a bugbear of mine for a while. I can see that taking a 15 year old out of school for two weeks during their final few months of study before GCSEs is not a great idea, and schools who care about exam results should put a certain amount of pressure on parents to keep their kids in school as much as possible.

Then we have this: trying to fine parents £720 for their children failing to attend school:

Before they went away, the couple were warned they each risked a £60 fine for taking their six-year-old son, Keane, and their daughters Sian, 13, and Rhiannan, 15, on the break.

Keane is six years old. Precisely what negative impact occurs from him missing six days of school? Missing out on how to spell "squirrel"? Any scheme that imposes exactly the same financial penalty for six year olds and fifteen year olds missing a school day is clearly blissfully unrelated to the impact of the behaviour in question, and is primarily intended as either a political or revenue-raising scheme. Don't try to sell this as "educational".

I went off to read the legislation quoted: section 444 of the Education Act 1996:

(1)If a child of compulsory school age who is a registered pupil at a school fails to attend regularly [my italics] at the school, his parent is guilty of an offence.

Ah, "regularly". I assume that the well-paid lawyer drafting this text meant "five days per week during school terms". Except, regularly can mean many different things:

1. Customary, usual, or normal: "the train's regular schedule."
2. Orderly, even, or symmetrical: regular teeth.
3. In conformity with a fixed procedure, principle, or discipline.
4. Well-ordered; methodical: regular habits.
5. Occurring at fixed intervals; periodic: regular payments.
6. a. Occurring with normal or healthy frequency. b. Having bowel movements or menstrual periods with normal or healthy frequency.
7. Not varying; constant.

If a child attends school every Monday, that's "regular" according to definitions 2, 3, 4, 5. Only definition 1 even arguably applies to a week out school term as opposed to a once-a-week attendance. I don't know who drew up this law, but we should find out and take back their payment. Perhaps we could give the money to this family...

A sensible policy that aimed to satisfy the tradeoff between the marginal benefits of education and the unarguable benefits of vacation and family together-time would allocate an allowance of X days to each pupil (X maybe rising in inverse proportion to the child's age) that they could take off school with parental permission; only unauthorised absence above this limit would attract fines, and such fines would decrease in earlier stages of schooling. Since the law does not behave this way, one is led to the inevitable conclusion that it does not attempt to benefit the child; rather, it is a mechanism of control for the school and education authority.

(If I were a parent of a child at state primary school, I'd be tempted to send my child to school only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday); when the inevitable letter from school arrived, I'd point out the law in question and the definition of "regular". I wonder what would happen?)

Licensing for control of a profession

I must admit to mixed emotions when reading about Labour's plans to introduce professional licensing for teachers:

Teachers would have to show they are meeting the high standards and would be required to undergo training to update their skills.
Under Hunt's plans, teachers would have their lessons assessed by other teachers in a system overseen by a new Royal College of Teaching.

Conceptually, this might be a good idea. The million dollar question, of course, is: a) who actually assesses the teachers and how they picked and b) what happens when (not it) a large number of existing teachers fail to meet the standards?

This strikes me as a classic example of a good idea in principle which will nevertheless be holed beneath the waterline by the jagged rocks of practicality. What we actually want from this project is to prevent poor teachers entering the profession, improve slacking teachers who are no longer doing a good job teaching - and there's no shortage of these - while not significantly disrupting or interfering with teachers who are doing a good job. Make no mistake, this kind of assessment scheme has a cost beyond the headline figure of paying for assessors and their organisation. The additional cost includes time taken from a teacher's regular teaching schedule to be assessed, reduced productivity in the run-up to assessment as they try to prepare for it, plus the impact of mis-rating good teachers and requiring their retraining.

Assuming that you aim to assess a teacher every 2 years, given 120 school days on which a given assessor can run assessments, you'll need at least an hour of seeing a teacher teach, and maybe another hour if you have any doubts, plus at least that time again writing up the results. Figure that each assessor can reasonably assess two teachers per day, that's 240 teachers per year. But you may need to have a couple of assessors (from different regions) to get a reasonable diversity of observation and opinion. So figure 120 teachers assessed per assessor per year, and so for every 240 teachers you need at least one assessor. Given 480K teachers in England that's 2000 assessors. Where are you going to get them from? How are you going to judge whether they are actually any good at assessing teachers?

Let's assume that you can make these assessments in some way and flag the teachers who are objectively not good enough at teaching. (In fact, in most schools you could do a straw poll of the teachers and they would quickly flag the poor teachers to you - but there's no way they'd do this in practice). How do you fix them? You can do all the retraining you like, but you have to have some way of follow-up to see if they've stuck with the improvements or have just lapsed back into their old ways. And if they do lapse back, what do you do? Can you fire them? I bet the unions would have a fit if you tried.

So what do the unions think?

Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, told the Times:  "We would need to see the details of the Labour party's proposals, but the NUT is heartened to see that Labour recognises the value of investing in teachers' skills, knowledge and confidence in a fast-changing world. If these proposals are a continuation of the Michael Gove's years of top-down judgmental prescription of how teachers teach, that would be very negative."

"Talk is cheap: show me the money". I find it interesting that neither the NUT nor ATL reps decided to touch on what would happen if a teacher failed to meet the standards even after retraining....

Honestly, if you want to fix the problem of bad teachers, you have to make it easier for the schools to send them for retraining or eventually fire them. This is not a problem you can fix centrally. Of course, this runs the risk of the less honourable headteachers or governors firing the teachers they don't like rather than the ones which aren't any good, and the children are still stuck with the bad teachers.

Boys being boys

An opinion column at USA Today caught my eye: law prof blogger Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds noting that American public schools have a demented "zero tolerance" approach to boy games:

At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., for example, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow. That's right - - not a real bow and arrow, but an imaginary bow and arrow. A female classmate saw this infraction, tattled to a teacher, and the principal gave Jones a one-day suspension for making a "threat" in class.

It seems that even the vaguest gesture towards projectile weaponry causes public (state) school teachers and administrators to panic and threaten / punish / suspend children - nearly all boys - in the name of "zero tolerance", otherwise known as "the death of common sense and discretion".

The article was rather well timed, as only today I was buttonholed by a fellow engineer who had received an admonitory email from her son's teacher: during playtime he had made a "gun" hand shape with the traditional index finger and thumb, and pretended to fire it at his playmate's imaginary space ship. Apparently this caused the (female) teacher "serious concern" and she instructed my colleague to stop this kind of nihilistic behaviour in her son forthwith.

This young man is six years old. SIX YEARS OLD. If he wasn't indulging in this kind of play, I'd be worried. He's a perfectly pleasant, well behaved credit to his parents; and yet it seems that behaving like a regular boy without causing any harm or worry to other children makes him eligible for admonishment at best, and potential punishment if he does it again.

As Glenn Reynolds notes:

This is a serious PR problem for the American education establishment, but underlying the bad publicity is a serious substantive problem: When your kids attend schools like these, they are under the thumb of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who see no problem blotting your kid's permanent record for reasons of bureaucratic convenience or political correctness.
At some point, voluntarily putting your kid in such a situation looks a bit like parental malpractice -- especially if your kid is a boy, since boys seem to do worse in today's nearly-all-female K-12 environment.

I wish that his first assertion were true - it seems that this immensely stupid and blockheaded behaviour by school administrators is free of consequence. Since parents have to send their children to the nearest public school unless they can afford private education or have the time and ability to homeschool, what action can the parents take to even inconvenience the offending school?

I can't believe that this oppressive environment is making it any less likely that boys will perpetrate violence at school. Rather, those who previously had a play outlet for their natural male aggression will now have it bottled up. It's like pushing down on a balloon - the air you displace has to pop up again somewhere else, and if you're holding down too much of the balloon then eventually it's going to pop. Unless you start lacing school food with tranquilizers, you're not going to reduce male aggression. Actually, forget I said that - perhaps I shouldn't give ideas to these idiots.

I suspect the real reason behind this is the (illusion) of control - these teachers and administrators see behaviour which jars with their sensibilities, and can indulge themselves in controlling and "suppressing" it without any consequence. The more they do this, the more bold and far-reaching their actions will be - and if a child finally snaps and commits a crime of violence at a public school, it will be used as a reason to extend their control.

Sympathising with Rachel Jeantel

Watching the video of Trayvon Martin's girlfriend Rachel Jeantel on the witness stand at George Zimmerman's trial, my overwhelming emotion is sympathy. She's the prosecution's star witness and she was dreadful. Surely, George Zimmerman's defence attorneys can't have believed their luck. The prosecution opened with a witness who was illiterate, lied about any number of small things ("writing" a letter that it turns out she couldn't read, attending Trayvon's wake) and who tweeted a trail of destruction about drinking, getting high and driving under the influence before someone deleted the worst offending tweets just before her testimony.

Rachel has clearly been coached and steered by the prosecution team (and possibly hangers-on) on what to say, how to say it and how to present herself. This is part of the game of trials, and everyone does it. But she doesn't really understand what she's been brought into - the personal risk she's bearing with every falsehood she admits to. She's 19 years old, and boys and girls of that age do dumb things. Most of the time no-one's really looking at their acts apart from their mates, but now everyone in the USA has a laser focus on this case and Rachel looks untrustworthy, unreliable, lacking self control and generally everything that a court witness cannot afford to be.

My heart aches that a 19 year old woman can't read - or, presumably, write - cursive script. It's not surprising that Rachel was embarrassed about this, and lied about it. Unfortunately (for the prosecution) this blows a hole a mile wide in the case - reasonable doubt must be a slam-dunk at this point, unless something unexpected crops up in the forensics.

This case should never have been brought to trial. It wasn't headed for trial until political pressure (with cries of "racist killing!") forced the state to prosecute. Political influence on prosecution stops at the courtroom door, and this jury will find George Zimmerman not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin. It may even be that at the conclusion of the prosecution case the defence will successfully move for a dismissal, showing that the state has not proved its case; honestly, though, it would be a very brave judge to let that motion pass. In the mean time Zimmerman has been jailed, forced to spend huge sums on a legal defence, and in effect had his life ruined.

One article I read posed a very interesting (if unprovable) proposition that this case was never intended to succeed. Six months before the 2012 elections in the USA, it was a cause celebre demonstrating homicidal racism in modern America, a rallying point for Al Sharpton and co. The fact that Zimmerman was more Hispanic than white was glossed over, and US media organisations did their part in editing 911 tapes to make Zimmerman appear racist. The elections now over, the race-baiters don't particularly care what happens to Zimmerman; indeed, for them perhaps it's better that he's acquitted so that in 2016 they can rage about that acquittal and "Justice for Trayvon" as another rallying point.

If anyone is serious about improving the lot of black teenagers in the USA - and they damned well should be - they should start by exploring the deficits of the education system that left 19 year old Rachel Jeantel functionally illiterate.

Getting what you pay for in education

In the category of "consequences that anyone with a brain could have predicted", the Toronto District school board's decision to stop teachers being able to carry over their allowance of sick days from one year to the next (and cash them out for money on retirement) has worked out approximately as you'd expect:

New figures from the Toronto District School Board show a 22% spike in teachers reporting in sick last month compared to the previous year, and a 53% jump from three years ago.

Teachers get an allowance of 20 sick days a year - presumably if you take more then they will be unpaid - and up to now if they had any remaining at the end of the year they could add them on to next year's allowance. With no limit on carry-over, it was quite feasible to have 200 days of leave on retirement:

But some school boards — the Ontario government says 40% — also allowed teachers to cash the unused days out, up to 200 days, on retirement. The practice resulted in teachers leaving with a golden handshake worth up to half a year's pay.

What's more, I'm guessing that the days would be paid based on their final salary rather than the salary for the year in which they were allocated.

You'll note that in the old system if a teacher was feeling a bit under the weather they would be incentivised to struggle in to work (thereby infecting their pupils and colleagues); the sick day they avoided taking would be a future source of cash. Now, of course, if they are sick they'll stay at home. This is an improvement, except that there is a view among some teachers that if they have the allocation they might as well take it, as commentator marilynsouth remarks:

When I had 20 sick days and could bank them I hardly took any days off and only when I was really sick, as banking was an incentive. Now you take that away, give me 10 days with no banking, Im taking all 10 days because there is no longer an incentive. I take them or lose them now, So Im taking them, good luck trying to prove if im sick or not....

It's a tricky one to manage. On one hand teachers are exposed to tidal waves of germs as part of their job, you expect them to get sick (especially as they get older) and you shouldn't penalise them for it. On the other hand, setting out a fixed allocation of sick days doesn't seem to be optimal.

What does seem unarguable is that rolling over sick days and allowing them to be taken as cash only really benefits the moderately healthy teachers, and screws over students and less healthy teachers when the sick teacher struggles in to school to recuperate on the taxpayer's dime. While private sector practices vary, I don't know of any major firm who's taken this approach, and probably for a very good reason.

Training is overrated

I've taught and lectured quite a bit here and there on various subjects in my time and so today's news that Labour intend to "sack" "untrained" teachers in free schools made my eyebrow twitch:

"It is shocking that this government is allowing unqualified teachers into the classroom," Twigg said. "High-quality teaching is the most important factor in improving education. We need to drive up the quality of teaching, not undermine it."

Just a quick question here, Stevie. Isn't the whole idea of school inspections and regular exams to ensure that objective observers outside the school can determine whether the school is failing to provide either good quality teaching or help its pupils attain the required level of performance. If this is the case, what does it matter whether a teacher is trained (by which they usually mean the 1-year Post-Graduate Certificate in Education, if not a full B.Ed) or not? How exactly has Mr. Twigg leapt from "unqualified" to "poor quality"?

I note in passing that Stephen Twigg doesn't seem to have much if any experience in teaching so one wonders where this idea of eliminating "unqualified" teachers has come from. Perhaps the teaching unions who don't like the idea of the free or independent schools where some of these teachers are found? Perhaps the lifer educrats in the Department for Education, who would prefer that all teachers be directly subjected to their influence. Perhaps those in the profession of education of educators are concerned about their waning influence and job security. I'd love to know.

Outside the formal education system I've met some fantastic teachers, in and out of the classroom. For sure, some of them had previous teaching qualifications before they branched out - but by no means all. The ability to connect with a class, to deeply understand your subject and be able to explain and convey it in an interesting way, are all a) learned over time and b) strongly rooted in personality and ability. I'm sure PGCE gives you useful insight into methods of education, but the most useful part of it is the practice teaching time - this lets students know whether or not they're really cut out for teaching.

I'd be a lot more impressed if Labour promised to fire bad teachers whereever they were found, whether trained or untrained, state or independent schools, union or non-union. But I think we all know how likely that is.

You can't be too careful

At least, that's the opinion of the head teacher of Haybrook College in Slough, and apparently Thames Valley Police too. A teacher overhears a 15 year old ADHD sufferer with learning difficulties talking about "buying a gun" with a friend and calls the firearms squad:

Helen Huntley, headteacher of Haybrook College, which Millside is linked to, said: "We apologise if the boy's mother is upset. But we have a duty of care and, although there was no weapon, if we hadn't taken action and there had been, the consequences could have been devastating."

The boys in question were fans of playing the video game "Call of Duty" on their Xboxes, where as you gain more credits you can spend them on firearms of increasing potency.

Thames Valley police saw fit to obtain two warrants to search the boys' homes, descending on them with six officers and a dog and arresting both boys before releasing them without charge. It's nice that they have such resources on hand to waste on a pointless exercise. I'd also be fascinated to read the warrant applications, and compare them with the log of the original report from the school, though I'd bet they'll be locked away for decades to come in order to prevent embarrassment.

Is it too much to ask for teachers and police to exercise just the tiniest amount of common sense? A 15 year old boy with ADHD and learning difficulty is rather unlikely to be able to wander in to a gun shop, plonk down several thousand in cash and walk away with a high-powered rifle or assault weapon. Wouldn't it have been just a tiny bit easier, should concerns arise, to call the boy's mother and ask for some context to the conversation? Where was common sense in all of this? What the hell kind of society do we have where a laughably implausible possibility is considered sufficient to trigger an all-arms police raid on two houses without anyone asking if there's not a lower-key way to go about this?

Helen Huntley's "but we have a duty of care..." excuse was a pathetic, mealy-mouthed attempt to disguise a gross error of judgement by both the school and police, and they should both be strongly admonished for such abuse of the public trust in them. Now, had the boy been saying "I'm going to shoot (name of friend)", and had he come from an area where boys of that age were known to have access to guns and use them on other boys, a certain concern may have been understandable. As it was, though, the magic word "gun" seems to trigger a complete abandonment of common sense. This is not as bad as suspending a 7 year old from school for nibbling a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun but it's on the path to that level of stupidity and dogma.

This is, by the way, not giving a free pass to the teen's mother; CoD games generally have an 18 rating, and for a good reason. Letting a 15 year old with ADHD play the game does not strike me as the finest bit of parenting.

[Hat tip: keen hunteress JuliaM]

Be careful whom you shoot

Last year, a 15 year old schoolgirl from Swat in Pakistan was shot in the head while returning home from school on the school bus. It seems that certain people objected to the subversive messages she was spreading:

In early 2009, at the age of 11/12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls.

Dear Lord, we can't have girls being educated. Who knows what thoughts might enter their heads? So a gentleman from the local Taliban franchise put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.

This is the story of Malala Yousafzai (the top Google hit for "malala") and if the Taliban spent any time educating their followers on human biology, the bullet would have killed her right there in October 2012. Unfortunately for their cause, the hitman was chosen more for his pseudo-Islamic zeal than actual shooting talent. Malala was hit in the head but survived, thanks (by my reading between the lines) to a combination of Heaven-sent fortune, personal will to survive, and some top-notch emergency care by the local and national medics. Flown to Britain for surgery to repair her skull, she recovered and is now attending school in Birmingham. I rather suspect that the school has surreptitiously taken additional security measures since unfortunately the UK is still home to too many misogynistic and violent gentlemen from South Asia who might take exception to Malala's very public survival.

Now, Malala has signed a $3M book deal to write about her life and her cause. Given the international outcry over the attack, and support for her cause, I fully expect it to hit the top of the autobiography bestseller charts. As a result, millions of people who would only have heard of Malala in a cursory news story about another fatal shooting in Pakistan will be reading about her life and the state of female education in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled areas. We can only expect more international support and money for such education as a result.

I'm somewhat hoping that the Taliban hitman avoided capture and will spend the next few months being slowly tortured to death by his compatriots for failing spectacularly in his assassination attempt.

What needs fixing in UK education, in one tweet

“You cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed,” says Michael Gove #bbcqt

— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) March 21, 2013

THIS.

I hate the trend towards "creativity" in schools. It seemed to start with the introduction of the National Curriculum, which presaged a greater influence by the Department of Education and its favoured academics on what was taught in schools and exactly how it was taught. I'm all for children embracing their creativity, but it should be made very plain to them that there is a standard for grammar and spelling in written communication which they are expected to exceed before they can expect their creativity to be respected by readers.

I can do no better than quote Emily Postnews on the subject:

Q: I cant spell worth a dam. I hope your going too tell me what to do?
A: Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience.

Lies, damn lies and entrance statistics

Shock! Horror! Oxford University appears to be discriminating in favour of white students and against ethnic minorities:

In medicine, 43 per cent of white students who went on to receive three or more A* grades at A-level got offers, compared with 22.1 per cent of minority students with the same grades, according to data obtained by The Guardian newspaper.

Now, let's bear in mind that as A-level grade inflation has taken hold, three A* grades is no longer the talent indicator that even three A grades might have been 25 years ago:

In a 2007 report Robert Coe compared students scores in the ALIS ability test with equivalent grades achieved in A level exams between 1988 and 2006. He found that students of similar ability were achieving on average about 2 grades higher in 2006 than they were in 1988. In the case of maths it was nearer to 3.5 grades higher.[24]

i.e. an 'A' in 2006, which is presumably near an A* in 2013, was a 'C' in 1988. But that 43% vs 22% relative percentage seems to be damning, surely?

Assuming, just for the moment, that Oxford University medical professors aren't rampant racists, what could be the explanation? An Oxford University spokesperson hints:

"We do know that a tendency by students from certain ethnic groups to apply disproportionately for the most competitive subjects reduces the success rate of those ethnic groups overall."

Chinese and South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) students are disproportionately likely to apply to become doctors; you can tell this because they are disproportionately (compared to % of UK population) likely to be medical students. This is inversely true for Afro-Caribbean students who are rarely found in the professional medicine track. What the Daily Mail fails to supply is the raw stats on applicant and successful applicant numbers broken down by ethnic group, which could then be analysed based on the ethnic distribution of 18 year old students. I would be very interested in those numbers, which I suspect would tell a very different story to the DM's angle.

I invite the reader to inspect the list of Oxford University physiology lecturers. It's not obvious that they are prejudiced against South Asian or Oriental medical experts. Out of 53 staff, 6 match that ethnic background (11%) which is much greater than the 5% you'd expect even given the most favourable reading of the UK ethnic breakdown.