Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Following up on my previous post on how lack of competition causes government schools to have no incentive to improve, we learn that Chicago Public Schools has a big problem with faculty abusing children and they have done next to nothing:

An exclusive CBS 2 investigation discovered Treveon Martin is one of at least 818 Chicago Public School students, since 2003, to allege being battered by a teacher or an aide, coach, security guard, or even a principal. In most of those cases – 568 of them – Chicago Public School investigators determined the children were telling the truth.

…

The 2 Investigators found reports of students beaten with broomsticks, whipped with belts, yard sticks, struck with staplers, choked, stomped on and pushed down stairs. One substitute teacher even fractured a student’s neck.

But even more alarming, in the vast majority of cases, teachers found guilty were only given a slap on the wrist.

…

Of the 568 verified cases, only 24 led to termination. Records show one teacher who quote “battered students for several years” was simply given a “warning” by the Board of Education.

And another student was given “100 licks with a belt.” The abuse was substantiated, but the records show the teacher was not terminated.

Arne Duncan was the Chief of Chicago Public Schools during this time period and when asked, he said, “Any founded allegation where an adult is hitting a child, hitting a student – they’re going to be gone.”

Duncan only managed to fire 24 of the 568 adults that beat students. In the real world, he would be fired. But instead President Obama promoted him to Secretary of Education where he plans “to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington”.

Here’s the bottom line. In the real world, if a private school or day care was found to have staff beating children and knowingly doing nothing about it, the school would go out of business and the criminal teachers tossed in jail for child abuse.

In government schools, people who beat children get a “slap on the wrist”.

Of course there are lots of fine educators in government schools, but we’re looking at systemic problems with the institution as a whole. The incentives for improvement, let alone incentives to not beat children, don’t exist.

So if government schools institutionally don’t care when students are “beaten with broomsticks, whipped with belts, yard sticks, struck with staplers, choked, stomped on and pushed down stairs”, what makes you think they even care about educating?

Earlier I wrote about how government schools have no incentive to improve quality of education and that’s why we shouldn’t be surprised that their quality is awful. I also proposed that a voucher system would allow competition and choice, resulting in parents getting to choose from a plethora of government schools.

The main argument I heard against vouchers is how handicapped kids are really expensive to educate and the voucher would not be sufficient for them. Well, there’s a simple answer for that: give those kids a larger voucher valued at whatever the actual cost of the government school is.

I’m positive that someone can provide a better education for handicapped children at the same price point as a bureacracy-laden, government-provided service. In fact, I bet they could provide it for even cheaper.

Another indication of the lack of incentive to improve in government schools, is demonstrated by Obama’s choice for Education Secretary, Arne Duncan:

Duncan, hailed by Obama as a reformer, said he would like to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington. “I’m also eager to apply some of the lessons we have learned here in Chicago to help school districts all across our country,” Duncan said after Obama formally named him to the job in Chicago (source).

Duncan “The Reformer” has been the Chief of the Chicago Public School for the past 8 years. Under his tenure, he’s collected an impressive set of stats:

• 17% of eighth graders tested at or above grade level in reading
• 13% scored at or above grade level in math
• 23% scored at or above grade level in writing

And when compared to the nation at large:

In math, Chicago Public Schools’ average score increased from 254 in 2003 to 260 in 2007. The national average for 2007 was 280. Seventy-five percent of Chicago students scored below 283 in the math assessment.

In writing, the average score for students in Chicago Public Schools increased from 136 out of 300 in 2002 to 146 in 2007. The national average in 2007 was 154. Approximately 50 percent of Chicago students scored below 148 in the writing assessment.

In science, the Chicago Public Schools average score was 124 out of 300; the national average was 147. Three-quarters of Chicago students scored below 146 on the science assessment.

In terms of funding, Duncan had a budget of $10,555 per student, which is over twice the cost of the average private school ($4,689 per year).

Given an immense budget and nearly a decade at the helm, Duncan was unable to improve any scores in a statistically significant way.

Now he gets a huge promotion and will be running the country’s schools.

In the real world, the inability to do your job gets you fired. In the government world, you get promoted.

When Duncan applies his management style to all our schools, we can expect waste and incompetence to increase. Apparently, the Chicago public school system bureaucrats decided they needed cappuccino machines and ordered 30 of them for $67,000. And in order to avoid getting competitive bids, they split the order into several pieces. In the end they paid 20% too much for the machines.

The amount they overpaid is the equivalent of the tuition to sending 3 kids to private school. The total cost of the machines was enough to send 14 kids to private school.

And in the end, it turns out that “most of the machines [are] going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them”.

Competition is good. It forces people to improve their product (quality, price, etc) or risk losing their business to someone else. As a result, the existence of competition is a major driver of progress.

On the other hand, lack of competition is a detriment to progress. In the past few weeks, I’ve said the following numerous times:

Do you really want the same folks that run the DMV, Post Office, TSA and the IRS to run things (e.g. hospitals, car companies)?

That statement resonates with people. And fundamentally when we think about it, we realize that the DMV, TSA, and IRS have no incentive to improve quality. Where else are you going to go to get a driver’s license or get on a commercial flight? And for the IRS, they have guys with guns to make sure you do business with them.

In the few cases when they do improve things, it’s because they need to cut costs or add a new technology mandated by Congress. This, however, is a much smaller impetus compared to losing all your customers to a competitor and going out of business.

So how does this apply to schools and vouchers?

Let’s start by looking at some startling data. We’ve all heard that public school teachers send their kids to private school at a much higher rate than the general public. But how much? Here are some numbers:

• Overall:
  • General Public – 10%
  • Public School teachers – 22%
• In Chicago
  • General Public – 22.6%
  • Public School teachers – 38.7%
• In Washington DC
  • General Public – 19.8%
  • Public School teachers – 26.8%

Now let’s put these numbers in perspective, suppose I told you the following (borrowed from Carpe Diem and modified):

Employees at Company X make around $35,000 year. They are offered free Company X products for their children. However, 22% of the employees spend $10,000 to $20,000 of dollars to buy competitors products for their children and pass up on the free products.

When you say it that way, it’s pretty clear. Teachers know what quality of education public schools offer and don’t want their kids to suffer it.

Now it gets interesting. Obama will be sending his daughters to a very prestigious private school, Sidwell Friends, for an annual cost of about $29,000 per year.

But if we do the research we learn that Washington DC public schools spend about $25,000 per student per year.

So why don’t DC public schools have the same quality as Sidwell Friends? After all, they have the same budget.

If Sidwell had the same horrible quality as DC public schools, no parents will send their kids there, and Sidwell will go out of business.

DC public schools, though, get their money regardless of quality. So there is no incentive to provide a quality product. Their customers are not allowed to take their money and leave. There is no consequence for their horrible quality, so there is no incentive to fix it. Just like the DMV, TSA, and IRS.

Here’s where vouchers come in. Instead of the government running failed schools, they could give each kid a $25,000 voucher to go to the school of their choice! Even Sidwell!

Suddenly, parents can pick where to send their kids to school and have the same advantages of the super-rich and connected when it comes to education. Parents and kids have choice and this leads to competition.

By fixing the incentive model, we create an ecosystem of schools competing to provide the highest quality service. And since we have vouchers, each kid has the opportunity to get a quality education.

I think you’d be amazed at how quickly new quality schools would be created if we went to a voucher system. There are literally thousands of amazing teachers toiling in the horrible bureaucracy of government schools, we need to have a system to set them free.

Personally, I want to start, run, and teach at my own charter school one day. I know that today I could quickly find quality teachers and get lots of interested parents. The main thing blocking me is money; I need a big pile of money to finance this and offer scholarships.

Suppose that starting tomorrow parents were allowed to choose where the $25,000 for their kids education was spent. If that happened I bet I could have my school up and running by the start of next school year.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about education, and reading a bunch of papers and books on the topic. And it occurred to me that there is a simple metric we could use to see if an “educational system” is useful or harmful: how many “aha!” moments do the kids have?

I think that everyone will agree with the goal of instilling children with a “desire for learning” so that they go through life actively and continually learning.

On that metric, we’re failing as a nation. One third of the adult population in American is functionally illiterate. Over 40% of college graduates never read a book after school. And 80% of American families didn’t buy a book last year (the source doesn’t attribute their sources, but, from my experience and observation, these numbers seem to be in the ballpark).

So we’re obviously not instilling a desire for learning in our country.

Now everyone says, “we have to make learning fun.” While true, this statement is misleading. Learning is fun, the creative insight from a “Aha!” moment is a very positive experience. The problem is that our education system is built on memorization, not on learning. And memorization is boring.

Let’s take simple geometry as an example. What’s the area of a rectangle? That’s easy, it’s the base times the height (or, if you prefer, “length times width”).

Now, what’s the area of a triangle? Most people know that it’s “one half of base times height”. But, here’s the better question, why is that the area of a triangle?

Most people will say “It just is.” Well, if you say that, it means you memorized what the area of a triangle is, you never learned it. If you want to learn it, you should draw a triangle and then draw a rectangular box around it. Do a few of those and you’ll say “Aha!” as you learn why the area of the triangle is one half of base times height.

Now take this example and apply it to all the curriculum in math, physics, chemistry, biology, history, economics, and everything. As you think about it, you start to wonder, what exactly are we teaching kids? Are they memorizing facts or learning concepts?

What’s the derivative of “x^2″? Why?

Oil and water don’t mix. Why?

The sky is blue. Why?

Trivia is trivial.

When we add in standardized testing, we make the problem with education even worse:

• We now teach “to the test”. Since the test only tests basic understanding, all we teach is basic understanding. Advanced material isn’t on the test, so we don’t bother teaching it.
• Since the test just measures whether the answer is right or wrong, we just teach the minimum and make the kid memorize how to figure the area of the triangle. Once the test is over, the kid forgets it.
• The school is measured on how many kids pass. So as long as the kid doesn’t fail, it’s a “success”. There’s no incentive for the kids to achieve, rather they just need to do the bare minimum.

We need to teach things as an art, not as a system of rules that you just blindly follow. Math and science are really amazing. Once you get down to it, learning and experiencing these subjects require as much creativity as painting or music does.

In the end, when we look at curriculum and teaching we need to think about whether kids are learning or memorizing? If they are learning, they are constantly having the creative insights and “Aha!” moments that make learning fun and rewarding.

On the other hand, if they are saying “school is stupid and boring”, they are probably just memorizing stuff.

It is really stupid and really boring to memorize stuff without ever discussing the why.

A friend sent me links to these two great YouTube videos

• Calculus in 20 Minutes, Part 1
• Calculus in 20 Minutes, Part 2

(I wanted to embed the videos, but for some reason the owner of the videos disabled that option.)

I really liked watching these. I was surprised at how many calculus I didn’t forget; while I forgot some memorizable facts (like the derivative of ln(x)), I did remember most of the concepts.

I also had a few moments during the conceptual discussion where things “clicked” in my head (also known as a “Aha!” moment). Unfortunately now that I’m not in school and not learning new conceptual stuff full-time, these moments occur a lot less often than I’d like.

Forget working for Detroit or Wall Street, I need a job where someone pays me to sit around and learn new stuff. Perhaps I should consider becoming, as Professor Richards says, a “gradual student”. :-)

Google is one of the corporate sponsors of Impact on Education, an advocacy group for Public Education in Colorado. As a sponsor, Google was given a table at Friday’s “Education Matters” breakfast forum. Despite the early hour (7 am!), I attended the event.

I found it very interesting and a little disappointing. Obviously as an advocacy group for public education, they are very much in favor of higher funding (e.g. taxes) for public schools. Yet much of the data they presented seemed to not support their desire.

Here are two of the facts that stood out:

• Colorado is near the bottom of states in educational funding. Yet Colorado is one of the best states for education in the country.
• All schools in Colorado (by law) have the same amount of funding (except for a small window of allowed private fundraising). Yet there is a wide discrepancy in the quality of schools, as some of the school districts in Colorado are the among the best in the nation, while other are among the worst.

The conclusion they said? We need more money for schools.

Huh?

Both of these points show that (1) money is one of many factors and (2) at the current level of funding, you can have high achieving schools.

This is where the irony comes in; the organization is unable to separate “ends” and means”.

What they want is the “ends”, namely good public education. However, they no longer separate the “means” (funding) from the ends. So even though evidence may suggest that they should concentrate on other factors, funding is what they will blindly support. While funding is, of course, important, we need to step back and look at the big picture.

Whenever education and funding comes up, I’m reminded by something my dad told me once. Consider schools in 3rd world countries like India, the school doesn’t have a roof or electricity, kids don’t have paper and pencils, and teachers are paid basically nothing. Yet, how is it these kids can read and write, but our kids, with all the wealth, facilities and curriculum, can’t?

I think the big factor is the student’s attitude and their desire to learn. And most of this attitude comes from the parents and their peers. Do the parents value education? Does the student peer set support kids that get good grades?

This is of course very important. And is likely to explain a good deal of the difference between the high achieving and low achieving districts in Colorado.

Desire is also a big part of this. And that’s tied to the return on investment of an education. In many 3rd world countries, an education is a matter of life or death. If you can get a job, you get paid and can buy food. If you don’t, you won’t have anything.

In America, between our social programs and the fact that anyone with a pulse can get tons of credit, the return on investment of an education is less drastic. If you goof off in school, life may be tough, but you won’t starve to death.

(And just to be clear, I’m not against social programs…)

In conclusion, I think it’d be good if organizations spent less time lobbying and pushing for more funding. Funding is important, but some of their resources should be used to address the other factors that impact our students’ success.

I figure it’s time to stop ranting about politics for a bit and talk about education again. Education is something I’m very passionate about and “when I grow up” I’d really like to run my own charter school, set my own curriculum, and recruit the best teachers possible.

Of course, to do this, I need a big pile of money. So for now, I’m trying to figure out how to get a big pile of money. Perhaps, those Gnomes on South Park could help me…

(Hyper-observant readers will notice I added a new category of blog posts named “Education”).

One of the things that really, really bothers me is when someone says, “But no one ever taught me that!” It’s surprising how often you hear this and it’s a clear indication of an educational system that is failing.

Let’s analyze that statement for a second. When someone doesn’t know something, what does it mean if their response is “But no one ever taught me that!”?

This phrases implies a frame of mind where one’s education is the responsibility of someone else.

The person who says this is really saying, “It’s not my job to learn, it’s someone else’s job to teach me.” This means our educational system is not teaching people to be critical thinkers who are always learning.

Rather, the system is creating a generation of people who sit passively and try to absorb “knowledge” through osmosis.

There’s a lot of things wrong with this. First of all, people are less likely to learn concepts and more likely to just memorize facts. Science is now reduced from the art of the scientific method and the beauty self-discovery to just memorizing facts. Mathematics is reduced from the mind-opening language of physics to just a set of instructions on how to solve for X, without ever understanding why.

Under this system, learning is not engaging nor rewarding, it’s boring and painful.

Futhermore, by teaching a generation of kids that it’s someone else’s responsibility to educate them, you give them a convenient crutch to lean on the rest of their lives.

As people are losing their house to foreclosure, we hear endless stories of how people were targeted with predatory loans. Unless there was a gun to their head, the loans weren’t predatory. As an adult, you have the responsibility to read and understand what you are signing. If it’s too hard to understand, don’t sign it!

Just because your real estate agent told you it was fine is not sufficient. Notice again, people are conditioned to be told what to do, not figure it out themselves.

The biggest problem I have with this way of thinking, it that over time, society loses knowledge. If knowledge is exclusively “taught to you” and you have no responsibilty to seek it out yourself, then the most any given generation can know is the set of the knowledge the previous generation had!

And if some knowledge isn’t past on, it’s lost. Forever.

British humor is freakin’ hilarious. :-)

I’ve been thinking about how to explain stocks to people who don’t know anything about them and I think I’ve come up with something.

Strictly speaking owning a stock is owning a small piece of a company. As a co-owner of the company, you technically get to help decide what the company does. But in reality, since a company like Google has around 315 million shares, and you own on the order of 10′s or 100′s, you don’t get any real power. Occasionally you may get to do something like vote things like who sits on the board.

Some stocks have a regular dividend they pay out. Take Microsoft, they have an annual dividend that’s about 50 cents per share. With the current share price, you’re looking at 2%. Not bad, but you can easily get a CD from 2.5 to 5% without any risk in your capital (after all a stock can lose value, but a CD can’t).

So the “ownership rights” and dividends are essentially worthless. So why do people hold stocks? Because they think they will appreciate.

And why would a stock appreciate? The ownership rights and dividends rarely change. The stock only goes up in value because people think it’s more valuable.

So, in a nutshell, here’s how you explain stocks: “Stocks are just like beanie babies.”

Why? Their value is based on market perception. Take the dot come bubble: everyone thought internet companies were great and their demand drove the price up and up. Then they realized that the internet companies were stupid. So demand fell, and prices fell.

Now, notice that you can replace the words “internet companies” with “beanie babies” and it reads the same. Both dot com companies and beanie babies were stupid in the first place, but popular perception said otherwise.

In the case of dot com companies, they had no business model and were losing tons of money. In the case of beanie babies, they were just stupid stuffed animals.

So, stocks are just like beanie babies. It sounds weird and oddly incorrect, but I can’t figure out why. Maybe it’s just the truth — no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel. :-)

Everyone has been abuzz about the latest research which shows that boys and girls in the US are as good as each other in math. After decades of “girls can’t do math”, it really nice that we’re dispelling this horrible myth.

This news got tons of coverage from the news media. And rightly so. But in their haste to cover the story, almost all the outlets omitted something rather important, which the ScienceNow did pick up on:

Neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests now required to measure a school district’s progress under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. Using a four-level rating scale, with level one being easiest, the authors said that they found no challenging level-three or -four questions on most state tests. The authors worry that means that teachers may start dropping harder math from their curriculums, because “more teachers are gearing their instruction to the test.”

There are two very important points here:

1. Today’s tests are mostly easy questions.
2. Students aren’t being taught to answer average or above average difficult questions.

Keeping this in mind, let’s revisit the conclusion that boys and girls are getting the same test results. It’s possible there’s a big, important point missing from the study.

Let’s invent a scale of 1 to 10 with which to measure mathematical ability. And for sake of argument, let’s say that the scores used to be as follows, with the boys scoring better than the girls:

• Boys – 8 out of 10
• Girls – 6 out of 10

Now, what if these are the new scores?

• Boys – 3 out of 10
• Girls – 3 out of 10

In this case, boys and girls are equal. Unfortunately, they are equally stupid. :-(

Now re-read the two important points above about students not being tested with hard questions and not be even being taught hard math. Whoa.

So, could this be what happened? Did boys and girls just score worse?

The problem here is that the reporting is relative, not absolute. We were asking, “how good are girls at math compared to boys?”; instead we should be ask “how good are girls at math?”. It’s not like K-12 math has changed that much in the past 100 years. You’d think we could figure out a way to do this objectively.

This reminds me of how SAT scores were re-balanced. The SAT is designed to have a mean score of 500 with a standard deviation of 100. Over time the median started to drop and the SAT was re-centered in 1995.

My older sister took the SAT before the rebalancing and I took it afterward. As a result, my scores are “higher” than hers; though if you convert them to the same base, we scored roughly the same. Yeah for grade inflation! :-)

Speaking of grade inflation, did you know that for a while at Princeton 46% of the grades given were A’s? Now the policy has changed so that “35% of grades in classroom work, and 55% of grades in independent work” are A’s. Yes, this seems more reasonable. :-P