America the Start-Up

I was reading William Goetzmann’s Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism, when I came across this:

Thanks to [the American revolutionary thinkers’] efforts, certain Enlightenment qualities or habits of mind became traditional American values. Among these were a reverence for principles, particularly individual liberty, a dedication to reason and the rational solution, a belief in order and at the same time constant change, a talent for practicality and down-to-earth political organization, a faith in learning, a sense of world responsibility and mission, and perhaps most important of all, an extreme and sensitive receptivity to new ideas, and a confidence in intellect.

Don’t those values seem similar to the best traits of great start-up companies?

Grading Teachers Based on Their Students’ Test Scores

In a tour de force of investigative journalism, The Los Angeles Times analyzed thousands of teachers’ performance over seven years, based on their students’ progress on standardized tests. Here are some key findings, quoted from the excellent lead article of a series:

• Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year’s end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.
• Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.
• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.
• Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.
• Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers’ effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students’ performance.

The analytical technique used is called a value-added analysis, explained in the article this way:

In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the “value” that the teacher added or subtracted.

For example, if a third-grade student ranked in the 60th percentile among all district third-graders, he would be expected to rank similarly in fourth grade. If he fell to the 40th percentile, it would suggest that his teacher had not been very effective, at least for him. If he sprang into the 80th percentile, his teacher would appear to have been highly effective.

Any single student’s performance in a given year could be due to other factors — a child’s attention could suffer during a divorce, for example. But when the performance of dozens of a teacher’s students is averaged — often over several years — the value-added score becomes more reliable, statisticians say.

The Times quoted experts who said students’ test performance should not be the only way a teacher is evaluated, especially in high-stakes decisions like firing. Academic and government supporters of value-added analysis in education, including the Obama Administration, suggest that it comprise half a teacher’s evaluation.

Nevertheless, the president of the local teachers’ union responded, “You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by...a test.” The teachers’ union launched a boycott of The Times, asking the union’s members to cancel their subscriptions.

Bad response. Better would have been to respond like two low-scoring teachers did when interviewed by The Times. They said they want to use the data to help them improve. The Los Angeles Unified school district has always had the data, but never used it for teacher feedback.

That said, there are legitimate questions to be asked when teachers are rated largely by students’ scores on standardized tests. I know too many good teachers who say it forces teaching to the test, which leads to standardized, least-common-denominator teaching—not what comes to mind when you think “great teacher.” And of course no one wins if we create a generation of ace test-takers who lack any deeper understanding or motivation.

Acknowledging those concerns, I’d still say the lesson of The Los Angeles Times investigation is that its type of teacher-targeted analysis has merit. The questions are how to maximize such an analysis’ fairness, how to integrate it into a larger evaluation of a teacher, and how to avoid undesirable side effects like teaching only to the test.

In other words, we can argue about issues like how to choose the data, how to analyze it, and what decisions it should affect. But please let’s have those arguments rather than the one about whether test data should be used at all. If you ever had doubts, The Times series should put those to rest.

The Fates of Wristwatches and Email

Earlier this week The New York Times had an article about Beloit College’s Mindset List for the Class of 2014: a set of observations about how college kids’ lifestyles and worldviews are changing.

Among the observations were, “With cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch,” and “Email is just too slow.” (The observations came from a professor and a former public-affairs professional who divined and distilled the incoming class’s zeitgeist into statements like these.)

For me, the main point of interest was how the Times’ headline writer spun the story. The headline said, “For the Class of 2014, No E-Mail or Wristwatches,” as if email and wristwatches were fast becoming things of the past. Do you see the potential fallacy?

It is true that fewer people are wearing wristwatches for functional purposes, as opposed to fashion purposes. Because many college kids never wore a watch to begin with, their generation exemplifies this change. Fair enough.

But can we say the same for email? College and younger kids communicate primarily with family and friends. This type of informal communication has trended toward texting, instant messages, and quick updates via social networks. But when the Class of 2014 hits the working world, its members will find that, unlike a wristwatch, email is still a necessity. For many types of communications with customers and co-workers, email is not just expected but is still the best way to connect.

That said, instant messaging and social networking are finding places in the working world. In some cases, they are relieving email of duties it was never suited for, like rapid back-and-forth exchanges or quick updates. That is a real trend, but it does not amount to email going away any time soon.

So, the fact that the Class of 2014 isn’t into wristwatches and email is true on the surface, but leaving it at that is misleading. The reasons why—and the implications for the future of wristwatches and email—are different.

Lessons from “Million-Dollar Murray”

Million-Dollar Murray is a Malcolm Gladwell essay from 2006. The title character, Murray, was an actual homeless man whose alcoholism landed him in jail or the emergency room so often that he cost Nevada taxpayers one million dollars over ten years.

Murray was an extreme case, but that is Gladwell’s point: What would happen if we attacked a seemingly intractable problem like homelessness at the extremes, where the cost/benefit is obvious? That is, if taxpayers are paying $100,000 per year for the state to react to Murray’s problems, what could be done proactively for, say, $50,000? Rent him an apartment, pay for treatment, and get him close monitoring?

Gladwell recognizes the moral hazard: The worse Murray screws up his life, the more the state can justify spending on him. Although economically rational for the state, solutions like this...

...have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness [targeting only the part of the problem that is cost-effective to address] suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis.

Gladwell explores this dilemma with his usual mix of masterful storytelling and data-mongering. The kicker is, the dilemma is not necessarily about the morality of homelessness. It’s about societal problems that are concentrated in a relatively small percentage of extreme cases. For homelessness, Gladwell cites research that only 10% of homeless people are chronically so, and a subset of those approach Murray’s level. Gladwell finds similar concentrations of extreme cases in police brutality and auto emissions. These issues have less moral complexity than homelessness, yet targeting the concentrated part of the problem is still the exception, not the norm. For auto emissions, it’s common to test all cars the same even when the vast majority, especially newer ones, are near-certain to pass. With police brutality, the tendency is to spread an even dose of reform across an entire police force rather than focus strong medicine on the relatively few offenders.

So, Million-Dollar Murray is less about Murray’s problems than about society’s dealing with a class of problems that Murray represents.

It’s Gladwell at his best. Check it out.

Two By David Grann

David Grann is a writer for The New Yorker. I like his work a lot. Here are a couple worthy reads:

• “The Mark of a Masterpiece” is a New Yorker piece about the world of art authentication: the people and processes that determine whether an old painting is a lost Leonardo or a worthless pretender. The difference may only be discernible by a small group of self-appointed experts—art historians, scientists, and others aspirants—who don’t necessarily agree. With millions of dollars riding on some judgments, the field is rife with intrigue, so much so that Grann’s survey evolves into a real-world detective story. By magazine standards, it’s a long read (maybe an hour’s worth), but it has the richness of an entire book.
• The Lost City of Z is about a British explorer’s quest for the ruins of “Z,” an Atlantis of the Amazon. Circa the early 1900s, Percy Fawcett had superhuman survival abilities in uncharted jungles that routinely claimed those who entered. Yet even he eventually disappeared, searching for Z. Almost one hundred years later, Grann follows Fawcett’s life path, culminating in Grann’s own Amazonian search for Z and Fawcett’s fate. The book’s preface is here, so sample away.