FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013
Part 4—The myths: By his own admission, Sam Cooke “didn’t know much about a science book.” Or even about the French he took!
Cooke was only joking, creating a playful musical hook. Still, he might have felt right at home in the modern news environment. It’s amazing how much of the “news” we receive is bogus, false or misleading, often in highly standardized ways.
One result: We the people don’t know much about the public schools! Even worse, most of the things we think we know are in fact actually wrong.
Rather plainly, many of these bogus claims are offered in support of political or corporate agendas. Other times, claims may be made in good faith.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t wrong.
For many years, the Washington Post has been in the education business through its money-making subsidiary, Kaplan Inc. For some time, the Post has also dabbled in the bullroar business concerning the public schools.
The Post has tended to promote standard lines about certain types of “education reform.” Who knows? Reporters and editors may have advanced these lines in good faith.
Still, the Post has advanced a lot of bogus ideas concerning the public schools. This brings us to a regular feature in the Post—a feature which hasn’t roared.
Each Sunday, the Post offers a feature called Five Myths. Someone takes some important topic and explodes a set of myths about it. The feature appears in the high-profile Outlook section
Due to the Post’s rather sketchy habits, it’s hard to present an accurate history of this weekly feature. Some Five Myths pieces which ran in the Post do not appear in the Nexis archives. Similarly, the Post’s own archive omits some of the pieces which ran.
For no discernible reason, the Post archive goes back to March 2011, at which point it stops. This may give the false impression that the feature started then.
As best we can tell from the Nexis archives, Five Myths has been a weekly feature at least since July 2010. Before that, it had appeared at least intermittently, dating back to at least 2007.
This brings us to the way this feature has largely ignored public schools.
Granted, it would be hard to restrict oneself to just five myths about the public schools. But how strange:
These myths have become more and more deeply entrenched within our public discourse. But the Post has made little attempt to challenge these dominant myths.
The Post has challenged sets of myths on every conceivable topic. They’ve published “Five myths about healthy eating” and “Five myths About Jane Austen.”
They’ve published “Five myths about Pearl Harbor” and even “Five myths about water.” But the Post has made little attempt to challenge the myths about schools.
The public should be told the truth about the public schools. Quite a few myths have been pimped rather hard, and they play a very large role in our alleged public discourse.
If we had a more serious press corps, it would be exploring these bogus claims. For today, we’ll step in to offer an imaginary feature:
Five myths about public schools!
If someone were to present such a feature, it might go something like this. That said, there would still be lots of room for other presentations:
Five myths about public schools
Myth: American students have been losing ground, or showing no progress, in reading and math.
Americans constantly hear this gloomy refrain. There’s only one problem. According to our most reliable data, this gloomy tale just isn’t true.
Ignore the less reliable, state-devised tests which have been widely discussed in recent years. Instead, consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-praised “gold standard” of American educational testing.
This federal program has been in operation since 1971. In its most basic components, it tests fourth- and eighth-grade students in reading and math.
Education reporters routinely describe the NAEP as our most reliable testing program. In a remarkable bit of misfeasance, they almost never report what the NAEP data actually show:
In reading and math, test scores have greatly improved among all three major student groups (whites, blacks and Hispanics) over that 40-year period. The score gains have been very large in the last two decades.
One example: As of 2007, black fourth-graders were scoring higher in math than white fourth-graders scored in 1992. In a sensible world, that would be seen as extremely good, encouraging news.
In our world, it isn’t reported.
Especially in math, but also in reading, all three major student groups have shown strong gains on the NAEP. Routinely, journalists lavish praise on the NAEP but ignore these impressive score gains.
Myth: American students can’t compete with students in other nations.
In some ways, these claims have been overstated. In some ways, they’re simply untrue.
Consider the most recent international reading test, the 2011 Program in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
Only fourth-graders were tested. Among large nations which took part, only Russia outscored the United States. American students outperformed their peers in all other large nations, including Germany, England, Canada, France, Australia, Italy and Taiwan. American students also outscored the vast bulk of smaller nations, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Austria.
On the international stage, American students tend to score better in reading than in math. In both reading and math, our fourth-graders tend to score better than our eighth-graders. But even as the percentage of minority students has grown in this country, U.S. students have been gaining as compared to other nations.
How did U.S. students fare in the most recent international math tests? On the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), American scores, at fourth and eighth grades, were “not measurably different” from those of Finland, which has long been praised as an educational powerhouse (see below).
The Asian tigers—Japan, Korea and Taiwan—do outscore American students by wide margins in math. But those nations outscore everyone else in the world in math; this is not a uniquely American problem. On the 2011 TIMSS math test, U.S. fourth-graders outscored their counterparts in Germany, Canada and Australia, matched those in Russia and England.
Myth: American students were once the best in the world on international tests.
In yet another gloomy assessment, it is often said or implied that American students were once the best in the world. It is implied that we’ve only fallen from this lofty perch in recent years, as our schools have declined.
In fact, international testing is a fairly recent phenomenon. There was never a time when U.S. students were measurably the best in the world, and their standing keeps improving on the three major international measures.
Myth: The United States is constantly humbled by educational powers like Finland.
“Finland chic” has ruled the press corps for at least ten years. Reporters take the junket to Finland. Then, they praise the small middle-class nation for its alleged educational miracle.
Finland’s students do tend to score very well on international tests. No doubt, there is much to admire about the nation’s schools and about its general educational culture.
But Finland is a small, middle-class, homogeneous nation. It hasn’t confronted, let alone solved, the demographic challenges found in the public schools of larger, more heterogeneous nations. And by the way:
As noted above. American students basically matched their Finnish counterparts in math on the 2011 TIMSS. Meanwhile, students from Massachusetts outscored the Finns by substantial margins in eighth-grade math and science. (Massachusetts took part in the eighth-grade testing as if it were a free-standing nation.)
In effect, Massachusetts is our version of Finland. It’s a relatively small, demographically unusual part of North America. Similarly, Finland is a small, demographically unusual part of Europe.
On these recent tests, the students in our own Finland outscored the students in the real Finland! There’s much to admire in Finnish schools, but the obsessive focus on Finland’s performance has been silly and grossly misleading.
Myth: Our “achievement gaps” are as large as ever.
Large “achievement gaps” do exist within American schools. Many black and Hispanic students are doing very well in school. But on average, black and Hispanic students still don’t score as well as white students.
That said, the achievements gaps have been getting smaller on the NAEP. Beyond that, it’s important to understand an important reason for their continued existence.
In the past twenty years, black and Hispanic students have recorded large score gains in math and reading on the NAEP. In large part, the achievement gaps still exist, even in smaller form, because white students have been scoring higher too!
The persistence of these gaps isn’t a sign of stagnation. The gaps persist because all three demographic groups have been scoring higher.
Those are our five myths for this day. What are our conclusions?
American schools could, and should, do much better. Almost surely, they will. It’s especially important that we find ways to help children from low-income, low-literacy backgrounds.
That help must start in the first years of life. These deserving American kids are substantially “behind,” in measurable ways, on the day they start kindergarten.
Everybody loses out when these shortfalls persist.
That said, test scores have been rising among all parts of our student population. And American students tend to outscore their peers from around the world, with the exception of the high-flying Asian tigers.
Why do we hear so many bogus claims about the state of our public schools? Routinely, those bogus claims serve corporate and political agendas.
That said, Americans constantly hear these claims. They’re often directed at public school teachers. The public gets badly misled in the process.
This is a failure of our press corps, not of our public schools.
Next post: In praise of Farhi!
They’re very much like Dr. King!
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
By their own admission: From first viewing, we thought the ad bordered on the obscene.
Now, the ad can be seen on-line. We refer to the new MSBC promotional ad in which a host of on-air talent hold up white boards explaining the ways they're advancing Dr. King’s dream.
You’re right—the whiteboard turns the ad into a cross between Dr. King and the late Tim Russert, a more important figure within the NBC family. But good grief! The ad starts with a visual of Dr. King and a question: HOW ARE YOU ADVANCING THE DREAM?
The next thing you see is Alex Wagner in a fetching pose, holding up the whiteboard. She's advancing the dream by WAKING PEOPLE UP, her modest sign modestly says.
All righty then!
We’ve seen a lot of people in the past few weeks showing their disrespect for Dr. King—telling us what he would have thought, pretending that they are his heirs, dining out on the moral greatness they don't necessarily seem to share. But this new ad is really appalling.
The whole night-time lineup took part.
If any person ever deserved not to be glommed on by hacks like these, we would have thought it was Dr. King. In a word, the ad is instructive.
To see the ad, to read the transcript, brace yourselves, then click this. You will be looking into the heart of TV celebrity culture.
Warning! If you click that link, you will be taken to the Media Research Center. We think the trip is worth it.
Just so you'll know: How is Chris Matthews advancing the dream?
According to his white board, Chris is advancing the dream "by fighting for voting rights!"
By their own admission: From first viewing, we thought the ad bordered on the obscene.
Now, the ad can be seen on-line. We refer to the new MSBC promotional ad in which a host of on-air talent hold up white boards explaining the ways they're advancing Dr. King’s dream.
You’re right—the whiteboard turns the ad into a cross between Dr. King and the late Tim Russert, a more important figure within the NBC family. But good grief! The ad starts with a visual of Dr. King and a question: HOW ARE YOU ADVANCING THE DREAM?
The next thing you see is Alex Wagner in a fetching pose, holding up the whiteboard. She's advancing the dream by WAKING PEOPLE UP, her modest sign modestly says.
All righty then!
We’ve seen a lot of people in the past few weeks showing their disrespect for Dr. King—telling us what he would have thought, pretending that they are his heirs, dining out on the moral greatness they don't necessarily seem to share. But this new ad is really appalling.
The whole night-time lineup took part.
If any person ever deserved not to be glommed on by hacks like these, we would have thought it was Dr. King. In a word, the ad is instructive.
To see the ad, to read the transcript, brace yourselves, then click this. You will be looking into the heart of TV celebrity culture.
Warning! If you click that link, you will be taken to the Media Research Center. We think the trip is worth it.
Just so you'll know: How is Chris Matthews advancing the dream?
According to his white board, Chris is advancing the dream "by fighting for voting rights!"
Salon still angry at Richard Cohen!
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
Despite that, offers pointers about the ways a good person can talk: Over the last year, Salon has been transformed into a deeply instructive intellectual wreck.
Today, Katie McDonough continues to flail at Richard Cohen, who criticized Miley Cyrus this week for her now-famous VMA performance.
“[L]et me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them,” Cohen wrote near the end of his piece. “They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.”
Could fiercely independent artistic performance of a type which is quite widespread in the culture really encourage sexual exploitation and/or mean casualness among young, dumb, impressionable teen-aged boys? Might such deeply principled artistic presentations perhaps inspire teen-age males to feel and display contempt for young women? To “objectify” teen-aged girls? To perceive them as sexual objects, and perhaps as nothing else?
To say the kinds of things about teen-age girls Cohen quoted teen-aged boys saying in Steubenville?
We don’t know how to answer that question, but it doesn’t strike us as a crazy idea. Presumably, people are widely influenced by the culture around them. Presumably, that would even include young, dumb teen-aged boys surrounded by dumb-assed sleazeball culture, of the kind which is designed to separate them from their money.
Today, though, McDonough is still writing peculiar things about what Cohen said in his column. In her new piece, the endlessly helpful Salonista shares five “pointers” (that word comes from Salon’s headline) concerning the right way to talk about rape.
“Writing about sexual assault with accuracy, empathy and common sense is really about taking the time and forethought just to be a good person,” McDonough thoughtfully says. She then instructs us in “five ways to start.”
This is the way she starts explaining her second “pointer:”
This is a minor point in a much larger scheme which McDonough thoroughly manhandles. But why do writers at Salon say things which are so weird?
Did Cohen “suggest that Cyrus might be somehow responsible for the crimes committed in Steubenville?” Please. Cyrus performed at the VMA last week. The crimes in Steubenville—and the associated conduct Cohen discussed—happened in August 2012.
Why does McDonough keep writing that Cohen said the event from last week was somehow responsible for the events from last year? Whatever he did, he didn’t do that. Does McDonough know how to make sense?
We think Cohen was careless (or something more) in a few of the things he said. But he didn’t say that Cyrus somehow caused the events in Steubenville, and he also didn’t say that “female sexuality invites rape,” except inside McDonough’s head, where many people say many vile things, and where it’s perfectly A-OK to toss major bombs all around.
Sorry, kiddos! When you accuse people of saying “deeply misogynistic and racist things on the Internet,” you need to pick up your jacks and your ball for a minute and offer a few examples. Has Cohen been saying “deeply misogynistic and racist things” on the web? Our McCarthyistic culture lord needs to explain what they are.
No such luck! With her R-bombs and M-bombs at her side, McDonough’s a budding Stalinist and a rambling wreck. As she continues, she also hammers Joanne Bamberger for a “story” in USA Today:
Bamberger is asking sensible questions from a perspective most people would think of as feminist. But McDonough is one of her journal’s new Stalinistas. Such people will give us pointers about the ways, the only ways, a “good person” is able to talk. If you say one thing that rubs her wrong, she will fly into a rage and she will open her bomb bays.
McDonough doesn’t know how to paraphrase well. She tends to hear what she tends to hear. She tends to throw away the rest. In this and several other ways, Salon is becoming a wreck.
(Ironically, this is almost surely being done for commercial purposes, though we don't suggest in any way that this is McDonough's motive.)
One last point about McDonough’s Stalinism: In her first pointer about the correct way for a good person to talk, she tells us this about the two teen-agers who were convicted of digital penetration of the equally young victim in Steubenville:
“It isn’t a tragedy when people who commit crimes face consequences. It’s actually called justice when that happens.”
When McDonough gets a little older, she may even get a bit wiser. To slightly older people, it is a tragedy when dumb, impressionable young people fail to get the help they need—from their parents, from their coaches, from their community, from the rapacious institutions which peddle sexy-time candy at their slowly developing brains all across the culture.
Presumably, it’s bad for girls when Hollywood does that; presumably, it’s bad for boys too. It's bad for all people in various ways. As a general rule, it’s done to separate teens from their parents’ money, not for fiercely independent artistic purposes.
Surely we all understand that.
It is a tragedy when teenagers end up doing something which is tremendously dumb, though much less transgressive than it might have been. (They didn’t have intercourse with the victim, a more serious legal offense, an offense which can lead to the unwanted outcome called pregnancy.) Their conduct was very, very dumb—and, as Cohen writes, it was surrounded by ugly behavior on the part of some of their peers, ugly behavior which suggests a teen culture built upon very shaky values.
But they were only 16 years old, and a whole lot of people refused to guide them. Salon, with its silly declamations aimed at people who are denouncing misogyny, will only make the world worse.
McDonough makes a joke of life itself with her ridiculous junior high dicta. Let us draw one more S-bomb from our own bay:
For the most part, Bamberger and Cohen made sensible comments. Their comments were worth discussing fairly. Stalinism of this emerging type rarely helps the world.
We're sure McDonough is a good person. But good God! Let’s put bombs away!
Despite that, offers pointers about the ways a good person can talk: Over the last year, Salon has been transformed into a deeply instructive intellectual wreck.
Today, Katie McDonough continues to flail at Richard Cohen, who criticized Miley Cyrus this week for her now-famous VMA performance.
“[L]et me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them,” Cohen wrote near the end of his piece. “They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.”
Could fiercely independent artistic performance of a type which is quite widespread in the culture really encourage sexual exploitation and/or mean casualness among young, dumb, impressionable teen-aged boys? Might such deeply principled artistic presentations perhaps inspire teen-age males to feel and display contempt for young women? To “objectify” teen-aged girls? To perceive them as sexual objects, and perhaps as nothing else?
To say the kinds of things about teen-age girls Cohen quoted teen-aged boys saying in Steubenville?
We don’t know how to answer that question, but it doesn’t strike us as a crazy idea. Presumably, people are widely influenced by the culture around them. Presumably, that would even include young, dumb teen-aged boys surrounded by dumb-assed sleazeball culture, of the kind which is designed to separate them from their money.
Today, though, McDonough is still writing peculiar things about what Cohen said in his column. In her new piece, the endlessly helpful Salonista shares five “pointers” (that word comes from Salon’s headline) concerning the right way to talk about rape.
“Writing about sexual assault with accuracy, empathy and common sense is really about taking the time and forethought just to be a good person,” McDonough thoughtfully says. She then instructs us in “five ways to start.”
This is the way she starts explaining her second “pointer:”
MCDONOUGH (5/5/13): Female sexuality does not invite rape, ever (ever, ever, ever, ever, ever).We’re sorry, but the highlighted claim is just weird. Obviously, Cohen did not “suggest that Cyrus might be somehow responsible for the crimes committed in Steubenville.”
On Tuesday, the Washington Post ran a piece by Richard Cohen suggesting that Miley Cyrus might be somehow responsible for the crimes committed in Steubenville. And while it’s tempting to dismiss Cohen as an out-of-touch man with a horrible track record of saying deeply misogynistic and racist things on the Internet (all of which is also true), he’s not the only one blaming female raunch culture for sexual violence.
This is a minor point in a much larger scheme which McDonough thoroughly manhandles. But why do writers at Salon say things which are so weird?
Did Cohen “suggest that Cyrus might be somehow responsible for the crimes committed in Steubenville?” Please. Cyrus performed at the VMA last week. The crimes in Steubenville—and the associated conduct Cohen discussed—happened in August 2012.
Why does McDonough keep writing that Cohen said the event from last week was somehow responsible for the events from last year? Whatever he did, he didn’t do that. Does McDonough know how to make sense?
We think Cohen was careless (or something more) in a few of the things he said. But he didn’t say that Cyrus somehow caused the events in Steubenville, and he also didn’t say that “female sexuality invites rape,” except inside McDonough’s head, where many people say many vile things, and where it’s perfectly A-OK to toss major bombs all around.
Sorry, kiddos! When you accuse people of saying “deeply misogynistic and racist things on the Internet,” you need to pick up your jacks and your ball for a minute and offer a few examples. Has Cohen been saying “deeply misogynistic and racist things” on the web? Our McCarthyistic culture lord needs to explain what they are.
No such luck! With her R-bombs and M-bombs at her side, McDonough’s a budding Stalinist and a rambling wreck. As she continues, she also hammers Joanne Bamberger for a “story” in USA Today:
MCDONOUGH (continuing directly): In a story for USA Today, Joanne Bamberger took a similar position on Cyrus, this time blaming her, bizarrely, for gross failures of accountability from the criminal justice system. While Cohen believes Cyrus is guilty of “debasing” women and girls and effectively inviting teenagers to sexually assault other teenagers, Bamberger cites the pop star’s onstage writhing and grinding as the reason that judges like Baugh think girls like Rambold’s victim are “as much in control of the situation” as their assailants...We decided to read the “story,” which turned out to be an opinion column. We’re sorry, but Bamberger had a lot of perfectly sensible things to say about the ways creepy corporate institutions sell tricked-up images of girls, perhaps helping to build an unhealthy sexual culture:
BAMBERGER: Even outlets like New York Times have responsibility for a growing cultural view that girls entice inappropriate sexual advances. One 2011 article about an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped in a small Texas town suggested that she provoked the attack by her provocative attire.Are young girls “increasingly sexualized in the media?” If so, might that not be a problem? Might this encourage mixed-up men, of which there are some, to get stupid thoughts in their heads?
The increased media sexualization of young girls isn't just anecdotal. A recent study by The Parents Television Council found a "very real problem" of teen girls being shown in sexually exploitive ways that are often presented as humorous.
Whether there is a connection between these images and teen sexual abuse isn't clear, but according to the Department of Justice, one-third of sexual assaults victims are ages 12-17, and those ages 16-19 are three-and-a-half times more likely to be sexually assaulted or become victims of rape than the general population.
In light of these statistics and the Parents Television Council's study, it doesn't seem to be a huge leap to suggest that with young girls increasingly sexualized in the media, teen victims of sexual assault may be judged more harshly because too many see a child as being "in control."
Bamberger is asking sensible questions from a perspective most people would think of as feminist. But McDonough is one of her journal’s new Stalinistas. Such people will give us pointers about the ways, the only ways, a “good person” is able to talk. If you say one thing that rubs her wrong, she will fly into a rage and she will open her bomb bays.
McDonough doesn’t know how to paraphrase well. She tends to hear what she tends to hear. She tends to throw away the rest. In this and several other ways, Salon is becoming a wreck.
(Ironically, this is almost surely being done for commercial purposes, though we don't suggest in any way that this is McDonough's motive.)
One last point about McDonough’s Stalinism: In her first pointer about the correct way for a good person to talk, she tells us this about the two teen-agers who were convicted of digital penetration of the equally young victim in Steubenville:
“It isn’t a tragedy when people who commit crimes face consequences. It’s actually called justice when that happens.”
When McDonough gets a little older, she may even get a bit wiser. To slightly older people, it is a tragedy when dumb, impressionable young people fail to get the help they need—from their parents, from their coaches, from their community, from the rapacious institutions which peddle sexy-time candy at their slowly developing brains all across the culture.
Presumably, it’s bad for girls when Hollywood does that; presumably, it’s bad for boys too. It's bad for all people in various ways. As a general rule, it’s done to separate teens from their parents’ money, not for fiercely independent artistic purposes.
Surely we all understand that.
It is a tragedy when teenagers end up doing something which is tremendously dumb, though much less transgressive than it might have been. (They didn’t have intercourse with the victim, a more serious legal offense, an offense which can lead to the unwanted outcome called pregnancy.) Their conduct was very, very dumb—and, as Cohen writes, it was surrounded by ugly behavior on the part of some of their peers, ugly behavior which suggests a teen culture built upon very shaky values.
But they were only 16 years old, and a whole lot of people refused to guide them. Salon, with its silly declamations aimed at people who are denouncing misogyny, will only make the world worse.
McDonough makes a joke of life itself with her ridiculous junior high dicta. Let us draw one more S-bomb from our own bay:
For the most part, Bamberger and Cohen made sensible comments. Their comments were worth discussing fairly. Stalinism of this emerging type rarely helps the world.
We're sure McDonough is a good person. But good God! Let’s put bombs away!
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
Diane Ravitch to the rescue!
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
Part 3—The pretense: By the end of his playful song, Wonderful World, Sam Cooke had presented a long list of subjects he didn’t know much about.
He didn’t know much about math or science, or even about the French he took! As he playfully semi-scatted, his back-up singers recalled some of the subjects he didn’t know much about:
La ta ta ta ta ta taa-a-a-a (History)
Hmm-mm-mm (Biology)
Wo la ta ta ta ta ta ta (Science book)
Hmm-mm-mm-mm-hm (French I took)
To hear Cooke sing it, click here.
Cooke employed a playful pop hook in a song which has been remembered. Today though, it’s the American public which might sing such a song, this time concerning our lack of knowledge about the public schools.
As the old saying goes, it isn’t so much the things we don’t know; it’s the things we know which aren’t true. On August 19, Bill Keller enacted the problem in the New York Times, referring to the “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education” from which our country now hopes to emerge by adopting the Common Core standards.
As Kenneth Chang semi-noted in Tuesday’s Times, this gloomy picture of the schools is widely held. But where did Keller get that idea, which flies in the face of our best educational data?
Where did Keller, a good decent person, get that gloomy idea? Perhaps from reading op-ed columns in his own New York Times! Here are excerpts from two recent samples:
These gloomy portraits are hard to square with the actual data. Despite that, they get repeated by everyone from Obama on down, then by their crazy uncles.
Last month, Keller sang the conventional song, much as Gail Collins did last year in a gruesome book. Borrowing a hook from Whitman, we hear these journalists singing:
La ta ta ta ta ta taa-a-a-a (Texas sucks)
Hmm-mm-mm (We’re shit out of luck)
In fact, Texas is a very high-scoring state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the widely praised “gold standard” of educational testing. After disaggregation, the major groups of Texas students match or top their peers in Massachusetts—and as Chang noted, Massachusetts was outscored by only one country on the 2011 TIMSS eighth-grade science test!
Bay State students seem to know about the science they took. It’s our journalists who seem clueless about the subjects they ponder. Chang broke every rule in the book, reporting the Bay State’s striking success on that international test. If someone would tell his newspaper’s readers about the similar test scores in Texas, what a wonderful world it would be!
Someone might even praise the students and teachers of Texas! Someone might try to figure out what may be working down there!
As of this week, it looks like someone plans to spill the beans about some of these topics. (Just a guess: Texas will not be included.) Before we reveal who that person is, let’s discuss a group of people who simply don’t care about public schools or about the children within them.
In fairness, the pretense by these people is strong. Lawrence O’Donnell runs a promotional ad in which he sits in a public school classroom talking about some topic or other. Melissa Harris-Perry runs an ad in which she feeds us rubes a pleasing sandwich, saying that low-income kids do poorly in school because they haven’t had breakfast.
In some cases, that is true, of course—but that’s the lowest-calorie gruel you can feed to a pack of liberals. It makes solutions sound so easy—and it ignores the large amount of free breakfast programs which have now followed free or reduced-price lunch into the public schools.
We love the idea that it’s just lack of food! It makes things sound so simple!
Can we talk? On The One True Liberal Channel, they simply don’t care about public schools or about the children within them! You can tell that the channel doesn’t care, because these subjects never get discussed in its endless prime-time hours.
The One True Channel doesn’t care about schools! This is a remarkable fact when we consider the role played in the national discourse by the endless gloomy talk about those floundering schools.
It’s isn’t like public schools get ignored in our wider discourse—they get discussed all the time! Unfortunately, the standard tale Bill Keller told is commonly used to serve an array of regressive ends.
When we’re told about those decades of embarrassing decline, we tend to hear many other tales too. We’re told that the government can’t do anything right—that we need to privatize all sorts of functions. We’re told the decline is the fault of public school teachers with their fiendish unions.
There are also the things we don’t get told. We don’t get told about the score gains achieved by black and Hispanic kids. We don’t get to admire those kids and draw hope from the gains that are occurring.
(On the 2011 TIMSS, black eighth-graders in Massachusetts outscored Finland in math and matched it in science. Please understand: they didn’t outscore black kids in Finland; they outscored Finland as a whole! And yet, we still read, again and again, about the wonders of glorious Finland—and about our own decline.)
Progressive interests are badly harmed by the misinformation about public schools. But the children on The One True Channel would rather jump off the Eiffel Tower than stoop to the level of discussing our ratty public school students—their needs, their interests, their successes, their failures, the things that may be working to make their lives better.
On MSNBC, we discuss the real concerns—the right to get married, then go in the army! Kidding aside, those are serious issues too. But why do these exalted figures throw our black kids under the bus? What makes them so determined to ignore these children?
The pretense is great on The One True Channel; so is the disinterest. Having said that, it seems that another famous figure is about to let cats out of bags.
Yesterday, David Kirp described a new book about these topics in a piece at Slate. Kirp knows a great deal about public schools; he also cares about these topics. Here’s part of what he wrote about Diane Ravitch’s forthcoming book:
Having said that, Ravitch gets attention, despite her occasional flight from sound practice. Who knows! Her new book may start to debunk the familiar claim Keller made last month.
In the meantime, you ought to be sick, disgusted, with The One True Liberal Channel. The children won’t tell you about the way you get looted through your health care spending. Nor do they plan to speak on behalf of the nation’s teachers and kids.
Black kids can take their needs and their gains somewhere else. The exalted figures on this corporate channel have made one thing plain—they don’t care.
How complete is The One True Channel’s silence? Ravitch may be the best measure. In the past decade, Ravitch flipped. She moved from absurd overstatement in support of “education reform” to absurd overstatement in opposition.
When people flip that way in our culture, we tend to treat them as seers, not as dunces. Accordingly, the liberal world has bought Ravitch whole—except on MSNBC, where she has appeared exactly twice, according to Nexis archives.
It gets worse! One of those appearances was on Scarborough Country back in April 2003, before Ravitch flipped on reform. Promoting her new book, The Language Police, she complained to Evening Joe about this: “Across America, the term founding fathers is not used anymore. It's considered a sexist term.”
We’ll make a fairly safe bet. On the whole, people who watch The One True Channel don’t know much about public schools. They don’t know about NAEP scores, or about the strong gains found therein. They don’t know about all the major countries our students outscore on international tests.
They don’t know about the score gains recorded by the nation’s black kids. (Those gains aren’t nearly enough.) They’ve never seen those gains presented as evidence that our fiendish public school teachers really haven’t screwed everything up.
The fiery figures at MSNBC have taken a pass on the health care looting which characterizes our economy. In line with NBC’s pro-“reform” stance, they’ve taken a pass on the public schools too.
They tend to focus on the things that affect upper-end people like them. They don’t know squat about public schools.
Promotional pretense to the side, they show few signs of caring.
Tomorrow: In which we borrow a hook
Part 3—The pretense: By the end of his playful song, Wonderful World, Sam Cooke had presented a long list of subjects he didn’t know much about.
He didn’t know much about math or science, or even about the French he took! As he playfully semi-scatted, his back-up singers recalled some of the subjects he didn’t know much about:
La ta ta ta ta ta taa-a-a-a (History)
Hmm-mm-mm (Biology)
Wo la ta ta ta ta ta ta (Science book)
Hmm-mm-mm-mm-hm (French I took)
To hear Cooke sing it, click here.
Cooke employed a playful pop hook in a song which has been remembered. Today though, it’s the American public which might sing such a song, this time concerning our lack of knowledge about the public schools.
As the old saying goes, it isn’t so much the things we don’t know; it’s the things we know which aren’t true. On August 19, Bill Keller enacted the problem in the New York Times, referring to the “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education” from which our country now hopes to emerge by adopting the Common Core standards.
As Kenneth Chang semi-noted in Tuesday’s Times, this gloomy picture of the schools is widely held. But where did Keller get that idea, which flies in the face of our best educational data?
Where did Keller, a good decent person, get that gloomy idea? Perhaps from reading op-ed columns in his own New York Times! Here are excerpts from two recent samples:
BRICK (11/23/12): For the past three decades, one administration after another has sought to fix America’s troubled schools by making them compete with one another. Mr. Obama has put up billions of dollars for his Race to the Top program, a federal sweepstakes where state educational systems are judged head-to-head largely on the basis of test scores. Even here in Texas, nobody’s model for educational excellence, the state has long used complex algorithms to assign grades of Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable or Unacceptable to its schools.Brick, a Texan, snarked at his state’s public schools, then complained about the nation’s anemic international rankings, which never seem to change. Mehta lamented the lack of change over the last thirty years!
So far, such competition has achieved little more than re-segregation, long charter school waiting lists and the same anemic international rankings in science, math and literacy we’ve had for years.
MEHTA (4/13/13): In April 1983, a federal commission warned in a famous report, “A Nation at Risk,” that American education was a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The alarm it sounded about declining competitiveness touched off a tidal wave of reforms: state standards, charter schools, alternative teacher-certification programs, more money, more test-based “accountability” and, since 2001, two big federal programs, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
But while there have been pockets of improvement, particularly among children in elementary school, America’s overall performance in K-12 education remains stubbornly mediocre.
[...]
As the education scholar Charles M. Payne of the University of Chicago has put it: “So much reform, so little change.”
These gloomy portraits are hard to square with the actual data. Despite that, they get repeated by everyone from Obama on down, then by their crazy uncles.
Last month, Keller sang the conventional song, much as Gail Collins did last year in a gruesome book. Borrowing a hook from Whitman, we hear these journalists singing:
La ta ta ta ta ta taa-a-a-a (Texas sucks)
Hmm-mm-mm (We’re shit out of luck)
In fact, Texas is a very high-scoring state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the widely praised “gold standard” of educational testing. After disaggregation, the major groups of Texas students match or top their peers in Massachusetts—and as Chang noted, Massachusetts was outscored by only one country on the 2011 TIMSS eighth-grade science test!
Bay State students seem to know about the science they took. It’s our journalists who seem clueless about the subjects they ponder. Chang broke every rule in the book, reporting the Bay State’s striking success on that international test. If someone would tell his newspaper’s readers about the similar test scores in Texas, what a wonderful world it would be!
Someone might even praise the students and teachers of Texas! Someone might try to figure out what may be working down there!
As of this week, it looks like someone plans to spill the beans about some of these topics. (Just a guess: Texas will not be included.) Before we reveal who that person is, let’s discuss a group of people who simply don’t care about public schools or about the children within them.
In fairness, the pretense by these people is strong. Lawrence O’Donnell runs a promotional ad in which he sits in a public school classroom talking about some topic or other. Melissa Harris-Perry runs an ad in which she feeds us rubes a pleasing sandwich, saying that low-income kids do poorly in school because they haven’t had breakfast.
In some cases, that is true, of course—but that’s the lowest-calorie gruel you can feed to a pack of liberals. It makes solutions sound so easy—and it ignores the large amount of free breakfast programs which have now followed free or reduced-price lunch into the public schools.
We love the idea that it’s just lack of food! It makes things sound so simple!
Can we talk? On The One True Liberal Channel, they simply don’t care about public schools or about the children within them! You can tell that the channel doesn’t care, because these subjects never get discussed in its endless prime-time hours.
The One True Channel doesn’t care about schools! This is a remarkable fact when we consider the role played in the national discourse by the endless gloomy talk about those floundering schools.
It’s isn’t like public schools get ignored in our wider discourse—they get discussed all the time! Unfortunately, the standard tale Bill Keller told is commonly used to serve an array of regressive ends.
When we’re told about those decades of embarrassing decline, we tend to hear many other tales too. We’re told that the government can’t do anything right—that we need to privatize all sorts of functions. We’re told the decline is the fault of public school teachers with their fiendish unions.
There are also the things we don’t get told. We don’t get told about the score gains achieved by black and Hispanic kids. We don’t get to admire those kids and draw hope from the gains that are occurring.
(On the 2011 TIMSS, black eighth-graders in Massachusetts outscored Finland in math and matched it in science. Please understand: they didn’t outscore black kids in Finland; they outscored Finland as a whole! And yet, we still read, again and again, about the wonders of glorious Finland—and about our own decline.)
Progressive interests are badly harmed by the misinformation about public schools. But the children on The One True Channel would rather jump off the Eiffel Tower than stoop to the level of discussing our ratty public school students—their needs, their interests, their successes, their failures, the things that may be working to make their lives better.
On MSNBC, we discuss the real concerns—the right to get married, then go in the army! Kidding aside, those are serious issues too. But why do these exalted figures throw our black kids under the bus? What makes them so determined to ignore these children?
The pretense is great on The One True Channel; so is the disinterest. Having said that, it seems that another famous figure is about to let cats out of bags.
Yesterday, David Kirp described a new book about these topics in a piece at Slate. Kirp knows a great deal about public schools; he also cares about these topics. Here’s part of what he wrote about Diane Ravitch’s forthcoming book:
KIRP (9/4/13): In her new book, Reign of Error, Ravitch documents how public education’s antagonists have manufactured a crisis in order to advance their agenda. They deploy doom-and-gloom language to characterize the threat. For example, the 2012 report of a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s public schools, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warns that the failure of public education “puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety”—physical safety!—“at risk.” Similar alarms have been sounded since “A Nation at Risk,” a 1983 national commission report, insisted, to great effect, that a “rising tide of mediocrity…threatens our very future as a Nation.”Don’t worry! If Ravitch has decided to make the case, the case will be overstated. Beyond that, it will be mixed with all sorts of propaganda.
Exhibit A in the sky-is-falling argument is the claim that test scores are plummeting. Ravitch shows that, quite the contrary, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, have never been higher. (The biggest gains in NAEP scores were recorded before the No Child Left Behind Act, with its fixation on teacher accountability and high-stakes testing, was implemented.) Nor do American students perform as badly as advertised on international exams—in 2011 tests of math and science, only a handful of countries did better. There’s no new dropout problem—students are staying in high school longer, and six-year graduation rates have never been higher.
Point by point, Ravitch attacks what has become the conventional wisdom about how American schools are failing...
Having said that, Ravitch gets attention, despite her occasional flight from sound practice. Who knows! Her new book may start to debunk the familiar claim Keller made last month.
In the meantime, you ought to be sick, disgusted, with The One True Liberal Channel. The children won’t tell you about the way you get looted through your health care spending. Nor do they plan to speak on behalf of the nation’s teachers and kids.
Black kids can take their needs and their gains somewhere else. The exalted figures on this corporate channel have made one thing plain—they don’t care.
How complete is The One True Channel’s silence? Ravitch may be the best measure. In the past decade, Ravitch flipped. She moved from absurd overstatement in support of “education reform” to absurd overstatement in opposition.
When people flip that way in our culture, we tend to treat them as seers, not as dunces. Accordingly, the liberal world has bought Ravitch whole—except on MSNBC, where she has appeared exactly twice, according to Nexis archives.
It gets worse! One of those appearances was on Scarborough Country back in April 2003, before Ravitch flipped on reform. Promoting her new book, The Language Police, she complained to Evening Joe about this: “Across America, the term founding fathers is not used anymore. It's considered a sexist term.”
We’ll make a fairly safe bet. On the whole, people who watch The One True Channel don’t know much about public schools. They don’t know about NAEP scores, or about the strong gains found therein. They don’t know about all the major countries our students outscore on international tests.
They don’t know about the score gains recorded by the nation’s black kids. (Those gains aren’t nearly enough.) They’ve never seen those gains presented as evidence that our fiendish public school teachers really haven’t screwed everything up.
The fiery figures at MSNBC have taken a pass on the health care looting which characterizes our economy. In line with NBC’s pro-“reform” stance, they’ve taken a pass on the public schools too.
They tend to focus on the things that affect upper-end people like them. They don’t know squat about public schools.
Promotional pretense to the side, they show few signs of caring.
Tomorrow: In which we borrow a hook
Salon is quite angry with Richard Cohen!
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
The dueling M-bombs fly: In our view, Richard Cohen said some good things in his most recent column.
He discussed the Steubenville rape case, which was revisited by Ariel Levy in a lengthy New Yorker report. In our view, one of the good things he said is this:
By any description, the Steubenville case sounds like a free-floating nightmare. Would you want to say that the culture enacted that night was “incredibly and obliviously misogynistic?”
We’re not sure what would be wrong with that claim. For the most part, we stay away from M-, S-, R- and B-bombs here, for reasons which may be apparent below. But the conduct exhibited here was repellent. In our view, it started with the unfortunate fact that a bunch of very young people were hanging around, very drunk, with no adults around. But then it went downhill from there, in much the way Cohen describes through the use of that M-bomb.
Very young women who get very drunk will often get abused in such settings. Very young men who may be very drunk may end up going to jail. A lot of other very drunk people may exhibit very unpleasant attitudes and behavior. More often, it will be the young woman who gets slimed by the community in the weeks that follow, not the male football stars.
It’s hard to know why anyone would get mad at Cohen for complaining about these events, or for calling the culture misogynistic. But the increasingly pitiful Salon quickly swung into action, mainly complaining about other things Cohen said in his column, including some things which were at least unclear.
Who was worse, Salon or Cohen? For starters, these are the headlines under which the Salon piece ran:
Whatever you think of Cyrus’ right to express and explore her fierce and unquenchable integrity as an artist, is it possible that modern Hollywood culture might possibly “encourage a teenage culture” of the type on display that night? We’d have to say that it possibly is, which isn’t exactly the same thing as saying that it’s the fault of some fiercely independent artist whose ferocious artistic integrity can’t be curtailed or restricted.
Meanwhile, did Steubenville display a teen culture “that has set the women’s movement back on its heels?” We’re not sure why a person would disagree with the general thrust of that statement. Here’s part of the conduct Levy describes in the New Yorker:
The Salon piece was written by Katie McDonough, one of the people the magazine has hired to undermine progressive interests for the next thirty years. @We're not sure why McDonough wouldn't agree with Cohen that a bit of misogyny may have been on the scene that night, but she headed down a different path, defining a thrilling new culture.
Whose piece was worse, McDonough’s or Cohen’s? Here’s how McDonough started:
“The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse,” Cohen wrote. “The next thing you should know is that there weren’t many young men involved—just two were convicted.”
Cohen is right when he says that intercourse wasn’t involved. But, by using the word “so-called,” he seems to suggest that this was a “rape” at all. (In some jurisdictions, it wouldn’t be a “rape,” though it would still be a crime.)
He’s also right that only two young men were convicted. This may be part of what Levy meant when she explicitly rejected the claim that the victim was “brutally gang-raped.”
In our view, Cohen should have explained what he meant by the word “so-called.” But then, this is what McDonough wrote, part of her ongoing attempt to doom progressive values and interests for the next forty years:
Did Levy’s extensive reporting “uncover the same facts reached during the trial?” Yes, it did! But what Cohen said was different—he said you would have encountered bogus facts on-line or in the press.
It’s true that Mays and Richmond “penetrated” the victim. But McDonough is too piously scripted, too dogmatic and culturally pure, to specify with what. She simply asserts that a rape occurred—which is of course true. This may make her readers feel pious, though it may also leave them less than completely informed.
Now we reach the most important point:
Does Levy go to great lengths to say that rape culture “would be impossible without a culture that enables it?” Not exactly—she never specifies how the wider culture enables rape culture.
But Cohen is saying the wider culture enables rape culture through stupid shit like Cyrus does, in the course of her fierce artistic explorations. McDonough finds this notion absurd, then adds a pitiful slander:
Does Cohen seem to think that Steubenville’s young victim, in her willingness to drink to excess and follow Mays and Richmond from one party to the next, was “asking for it?” That’s really just completely inane; it's defiantly ugly and evil. It’s also completely absent from Cohen’s column, though not from McDonough’s deeply unhelpful head.
Do you mind if we make a note about Salon and about McDonough’s general writing? McDonough simply isn’t real sharp, like a lot of the scripted young ninnies to whom Salon has handed the franchise, no doubt for marketing reasons. That claim about Cohen is just inane; it comes straight from The Golden Book of Scripts. But then, this highlighted claim also seems to be bogus:
If McDonough had read Levy’s piece, she might have understood what Cohen probably meant. In this passage, Levy discusses the leading on-line Javert who helped create the misinformation about the events of that night:
We hope McDonough is very young. We say that because her overall work is very bad, this well-scripted piece included. But then, the new Salon has been handed to a very undistinguished young group, who are defining a new generational culture, as generations sometimes do.
Does Cohen think a crime was committed that night? He should have been more clear. But lord, how the M-bombs do start to fly once the M-bombs start flying! Cohen attacked the misogyny of those teens, for fairly obvious reasons. But when he did, McDonough moved to top him. In her reply, she accused Cohen of writing a column which was “deeply misogynistic.”
Can a person be deeply misogynistic, even as he accuse others of being incredibly misogynistic? You see the way the modern world gets when we pseudos let our bombs start to fly.
Starting in the late 1960s, the rise of similar trends from the pseudo-left ushered in the age of Reagan. Who knows? Salon’s impressively scripted new breed may be laying the groundwork for groaning defeat over the next fifty years!
The dueling M-bombs fly: In our view, Richard Cohen said some good things in his most recent column.
He discussed the Steubenville rape case, which was revisited by Ariel Levy in a lengthy New Yorker report. In our view, one of the good things he said is this:
COHEN (9/3/13): The New Yorker piece was done by Ariel Levy, a gifted writer. When I finished her story, I felt somewhat disconcerted—unhappily immersed in a teenage culture that was stupid, dirty and so incredibly and obliviously misogynistic that I felt like a visitor to a foreign country.Does Levy’s piece describe a teen culture, perhaps just within that one town, which was “stupid, dirty and incredibly and obliviously misogynistic?” It would be hard to say that it doesn’t! Cohen writes this about the events Levy described:
COHEN: A teenage girl, stone-drunk, was stripped and manhandled. She was photographed and the picture passed around. Obviously, she was sexually mistreated. And while many people knew about all of this, no one did anything about it. The girl was dehumanized. As Levy put it, “[T]he teens seemed largely unaware that they’d been involved in a crime.” She quoted the Jefferson County prosecutor, Jane Hanlin: “ ‘They don’t think that what they’ve seen is a rape in the classic sense. And if you were to interview a thousand teen-agers before this case started and said, “Is it illegal to take a video of another teenager naked?,” I would be astonished if you could find even one who said yes.’ ”Cohen goes on to compare what happened to the notorious Kitty Genovese case except, as he notes, that case didn’t happen in the way the New York Times falsely described.
Illegal is sort of beside the point. Right, proper, nice, respectful, decent—you choose the word—is more apt. This is what got me: a teenage culture that was brutal and unfeeling, that treated the young woman as dirt. “ ‘She’s deader than O.J.’s wife. She’s deader than Caylee Anthony,’ ” one kid exulted in a YouTube posting. “ ‘They raped her harder than that cop raped Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction.”. . . She is so raped right now.’ ”
By any description, the Steubenville case sounds like a free-floating nightmare. Would you want to say that the culture enacted that night was “incredibly and obliviously misogynistic?”
We’re not sure what would be wrong with that claim. For the most part, we stay away from M-, S-, R- and B-bombs here, for reasons which may be apparent below. But the conduct exhibited here was repellent. In our view, it started with the unfortunate fact that a bunch of very young people were hanging around, very drunk, with no adults around. But then it went downhill from there, in much the way Cohen describes through the use of that M-bomb.
Very young women who get very drunk will often get abused in such settings. Very young men who may be very drunk may end up going to jail. A lot of other very drunk people may exhibit very unpleasant attitudes and behavior. More often, it will be the young woman who gets slimed by the community in the weeks that follow, not the male football stars.
It’s hard to know why anyone would get mad at Cohen for complaining about these events, or for calling the culture misogynistic. But the increasingly pitiful Salon quickly swung into action, mainly complaining about other things Cohen said in his column, including some things which were at least unclear.
Who was worse, Salon or Cohen? For starters, these are the headlines under which the Salon piece ran:
No, Miley Cyrus did not cause SteubenvilleHeadlines are sometimes meant to attract attention. But obviously, Cohen didn’t say that Cyrus’ VMA performance caused the events in Steubenville. This is what he did say, at the end of his column
Richard Cohen draws a dubious link between Cyrus' VMA performance and the Steubenville rape case
COHEN: I run the risk of old-fogeyness for suggesting [Cyrus is] a tasteless twit—especially that bit with the foam finger. (Look it up, if you must.) But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.Cohen didn’t exactly “draw a link” between Cyrus’ performance and the Steubenville case. He did something slightly different—he pointed a finger at “acts such as hers,” “suggesting” that they “encourage” the type of teen culture which was displayed that night.
Whatever you think of Cyrus’ right to express and explore her fierce and unquenchable integrity as an artist, is it possible that modern Hollywood culture might possibly “encourage a teenage culture” of the type on display that night? We’d have to say that it possibly is, which isn’t exactly the same thing as saying that it’s the fault of some fiercely independent artist whose ferocious artistic integrity can’t be curtailed or restricted.
Meanwhile, did Steubenville display a teen culture “that has set the women’s movement back on its heels?” We’re not sure why a person would disagree with the general thrust of that statement. Here’s part of the conduct Levy describes in the New Yorker:
LEVY: Cody Saltsman, an ex-boyfriend of the girl from West Virginia, had uploaded a photograph on Instagram of her being carried by Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays. Richmond holds her ankles, Mays grips her wrists; her head droops backward, so that her hair trails on the floor. Mays is grinning. Along with the photograph, Saltsman tweeted, “Never seen anything this sloppy lol."What a great ex-boyfriend! Plainly, something is less than perfect with that Steubenville culture. We’d start with the abundance of alcohol and the absence of parents, but something like misogyny seems to be mixed in there too.
Another Steubenville student tweeted, “Whores are hilarious.” A boy named Pat Pizzoferrato—who had joked at the party that he’d give three dollars to anyone who urinated on the girl while she lay vomiting in the street—tweeted, “If they’re getting ‘raped’ and don’t resist then to me it’s not rape. I feel bad for her but still.” Another boy tweeted, “Some people deserve to be peed on,” and Trent Mays re-tweeted the line.
The Salon piece was written by Katie McDonough, one of the people the magazine has hired to undermine progressive interests for the next thirty years. @We're not sure why McDonough wouldn't agree with Cohen that a bit of misogyny may have been on the scene that night, but she headed down a different path, defining a thrilling new culture.
Whose piece was worse, McDonough’s or Cohen’s? Here’s how McDonough started:
MCDONOUGH: Richard Cohen says that he really liked Ariel Levy’s account in the New Yorker of the Steubenville rape case, which is strange because he clearly did not read it.Did Cohen read Levy’s piece? We’d have to say that he did! In that passage, McDonough quotes a poorly explained part of his column. But rather plainly, Cohen is working from this part of Levy's essay, in which Levy and the local prosecutor offer similar thoughts about the bogus information on TV and the Internet:
In a Monday column for the Washington Post, Cohen uses Levy’s piece—which examined how social media and media spectacle shaped and distorted original reports of the assault and its impact on the victim, her assailants and a small Ohio town—to argue that “just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong.”
Well, no.
LEVY: In versions of the story that spread online, the girl was lured to the party and then drugged. While she was delirious, she was transported in the trunk of a car, and then a gang of football players raped her over and over again and urinated on her body while her peers watched, transfixed. The town, desperate to protect its young princes, contrived to cover up the crime. If not for Goddard’s intercession, the police would have happily let everyone go. None of that is true.Cohen should have explained what he meant when he said that “just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong.” That said, he did cite two things he seems to have meant.
“What happened to the girl is atrocious,” [Steubenville prosecutor] Jane Hanlin told me. “But what they’re putting out there about her is worse—and false.” Nobody urinated on the victim. She was not “brutally gang-raped.” At the trial in March, Mays and Richmond were accused of putting their fingers in her vagina while she was too intoxicated to give consent. There is no evidence to support the claim that the entire football team was present when the assault occurred, or that “dozens of teens witnessed the events,” as a recent Glamour article had it. “The narrative that goes through these stories is: there are dozens of onlookers; she’s taken from party to party; she’s raped at multiple locations,” Hanlin said. “Understandably, people are outraged when they read that, because it makes it look as though there is a whole group of kids here who watched and heckled and laughed and participated. That’s not true: there are five that behaved very badly. But five is less than eighty.”
“The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse,” Cohen wrote. “The next thing you should know is that there weren’t many young men involved—just two were convicted.”
Cohen is right when he says that intercourse wasn’t involved. But, by using the word “so-called,” he seems to suggest that this was a “rape” at all. (In some jurisdictions, it wouldn’t be a “rape,” though it would still be a crime.)
He’s also right that only two young men were convicted. This may be part of what Levy meant when she explicitly rejected the claim that the victim was “brutally gang-raped.”
In our view, Cohen should have explained what he meant by the word “so-called.” But then, this is what McDonough wrote, part of her ongoing attempt to doom progressive values and interests for the next forty years:
MCDONOUGH: Levy’s piece is a thoughtful and at times controversial examination of how rumor, Internet vigilantism, the ambiguities of consent and the cultural biases and blind spots engendered by rape culture shaped the narrative around the sexual assault of an unconscious 15-year-old girl at the hands of two high school football players. While she questions how some of the facts were misrepresented early on in the case (a phenomenon not unique to sexual assault cases or the social media age) and the motivations behind some of the individuals leading the online campaign for accountability, Levy’s extensive reporting uncovers the same facts reached during the trial. Namely, that Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond penetrated a teenage girl who couldn’t consent to such an act. That a rape occurred that night.By now, McDonough is picking and choosing pretty good, especially about the things Levy said. Beyond that:
Levy also goes to great lengths to communicate that rape culture is not “an empty term or imaginary phenomenon,” and that the persistence of sexual violence against women and girls “would be impossible without a culture that enables it: a value system in which women are currency, and sex is something that men get—or take—from them.”
Did Levy’s extensive reporting “uncover the same facts reached during the trial?” Yes, it did! But what Cohen said was different—he said you would have encountered bogus facts on-line or in the press.
It’s true that Mays and Richmond “penetrated” the victim. But McDonough is too piously scripted, too dogmatic and culturally pure, to specify with what. She simply asserts that a rape occurred—which is of course true. This may make her readers feel pious, though it may also leave them less than completely informed.
Now we reach the most important point:
Does Levy go to great lengths to say that rape culture “would be impossible without a culture that enables it?” Not exactly—she never specifies how the wider culture enables rape culture.
But Cohen is saying the wider culture enables rape culture through stupid shit like Cyrus does, in the course of her fierce artistic explorations. McDonough finds this notion absurd, then adds a pitiful slander:
MCDONOUGH: The thrust of Cohen’s argument is that Cyrus’ explicitly sexual performance is the reason that men like Mays and Richmond rape unconscious teenagers, then boast about it online. Which is to say, Cohen seems to agree with Mays’ defense lawyers that Steubenville’s young victim, in her willingness to drink to excess and follow Mays and Richmond from one party to the next, was “asking for it.”Do “men” like the two teens in question put their fingers in the vaginas of unconscious teens, then boast about it on-line, because of the moronic, sexually explicit performances that are widely found in the culture? We’d have to say that’s a definite possibility, though such cultural causalities are impossible to prove. It doesn’t seem to have entered McDonough’s scripted head that this could possibly be true. And note the truly ridiculous claim she makes right after that:
Does Cohen seem to think that Steubenville’s young victim, in her willingness to drink to excess and follow Mays and Richmond from one party to the next, was “asking for it?” That’s really just completely inane; it's defiantly ugly and evil. It’s also completely absent from Cohen’s column, though not from McDonough’s deeply unhelpful head.
Do you mind if we make a note about Salon and about McDonough’s general writing? McDonough simply isn’t real sharp, like a lot of the scripted young ninnies to whom Salon has handed the franchise, no doubt for marketing reasons. That claim about Cohen is just inane; it comes straight from The Golden Book of Scripts. But then, this highlighted claim also seems to be bogus:
MCDONOUGH: More than just that, Cohen is unwilling to concede, despite a jury’s conviction, that a rape even occurred that August night in Steubenville. He bemoans the “arrest of the innocent,” and calls the rape “manhandling.” He says Mays and Richmond “treated the young woman as dirt” and “sexually mistreated” her. But he won’t say that they raped her. Because, as he notes early on, the “so-called Steubenville Rape” was not a “rape involving intercourse.”Cohen should have been more clear about his apparent questioning of the term “rape.” But when he refers to the “arrest of the innocent,” he probably doesn't mean the arrest of Richmond and Mays. Once again, this is what he wrote before McDonough stripped it down:
COHEN: The New Yorker piece was done by Ariel Levy, a gifted writer. When I finished her story, I felt somewhat disconcerted—unhappily immersed in a teenage culture that was stupid, dirty and so incredibly and obliviously misogynistic that I felt like a visitor to a foreign country. That country, such as it is, exists on the Internet—in e-mails and tweets and Facebook, which formed itself into a digital lynch mob that demanded the arrest of the innocent for a crime—gang rape—that had not been committed.Cohen goes on from there. But in that passage, he seems to be referring to the demands from on-line sleuths that other people should be arrested—arrested for the “brutal gang rape” Levy says didn’t happen.
If McDonough had read Levy’s piece, she might have understood what Cohen probably meant. In this passage, Levy discusses the leading on-line Javert who helped create the misinformation about the events of that night:
LEVY: [S]he left a message for Ed Lulla, a friend of hers who used to be a Steubenville cop and is now an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations, presenting the evidence she’d found online. “I gave him thirty-six hours to respond,” she said.This person attracted a national following. Is that what Cohen meant when he talked about the digital lynch mob demanding the arrest of the innocent for a crime that didn’t occur? We don’t know, and he should have been clearer. But McDonough is also an on-line Javert. She only considers the possibility that fits the bright shining (and very dumb) New Stalinism.
When she didn’t hear back, she gathered screenshots of all the tweets and Facebook posts she’d discovered and posted them on Prinniefied. She was outraged that only two boys had been arrested. “There were more guys there,” she told me. She estimated that fifteen people had “brutally raped” the incapacitated victim. “Do they think because they are Big Red players that the rules don’t apply to them?” Goddard wrote online. As she kept posting about the case, more people began to pay attention. Her blog, she told me, “not only is shining a light on the case. It’s shining a light on the whole little dirty football culture that exists in their town.”
We hope McDonough is very young. We say that because her overall work is very bad, this well-scripted piece included. But then, the new Salon has been handed to a very undistinguished young group, who are defining a new generational culture, as generations sometimes do.
Does Cohen think a crime was committed that night? He should have been more clear. But lord, how the M-bombs do start to fly once the M-bombs start flying! Cohen attacked the misogyny of those teens, for fairly obvious reasons. But when he did, McDonough moved to top him. In her reply, she accused Cohen of writing a column which was “deeply misogynistic.”
Can a person be deeply misogynistic, even as he accuse others of being incredibly misogynistic? You see the way the modern world gets when we pseudos let our bombs start to fly.
Starting in the late 1960s, the rise of similar trends from the pseudo-left ushered in the age of Reagan. Who knows? Salon’s impressively scripted new breed may be laying the groundwork for groaning defeat over the next fifty years!
Somebody special [HEART] someone named Otter!
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
First cousin to Mitt Romney’s dog: We were tempted to say we told you so.
Yesterday morning, Frank Bruni’s column started like this. It carried a Shanghai dateline:
The analysts told us to strike. But Bruni then said that he forced himself to venture out into the streets.
We couldn’t use Bruni’s words against him! So we decided to use his words against his colleague, Gail Collins.
You see, last weekend, she did it again! In her latest pointless column, she treated herself to the comfort of playing the Butch Otter card:
Otter served in the House for six years. He voted against the Patriot Act, a topic Collins completely ducked as editorial page editor.
That said, Collins didn’t discover Otter until he got elected governor. Her latest penchant surfaced in April 2010, when she wrote that Otter “is definitely the winner of the Most Fun Name for a Governor Award.”
For a full year, Collins did nothing with this information. Then, it hit her! Writing Butch Otter’s funny name could help kill time in her columns!
That Irish setter wasn’t enough. Starting in April 2011, Collins started her admittedly pointless citations of Otter:
Based on the Irish setter fetish, Collins can maintain such behavior for years. That's why we felt it was time to mention this new inclination.
An obvious question arises here. In how many columns has Collins killed time with Butch Otter’s name and with Mitt Romney’s dog?
Surprisingly, the answer is three. Collins has rules for herself.
First cousin to Mitt Romney’s dog: We were tempted to say we told you so.
Yesterday morning, Frank Bruni’s column started like this. It carried a Shanghai dateline:
BRUNI (9/3/13): I’m half a world from home, in a city I’ve never explored, with fresh sights and sounds around every corner. And what am I doing?It was so much like a Times columnist! Bruni had been sent to Shanghai. But once there, he had fallen back on “the comfort” of watching The Wire!
I’m watching exactly the kind of television program I might watch in my Manhattan apartment.
Before I left New York, I downloaded a season of “The Wire,” in case I wanted to binge, in case I needed the comfort. It’s on my iPad with a slew of books I’m sure to find gripping, a bunch of the music I like best, issues of favorite magazines: a portable trove of the tried and true, guaranteed to insulate me from the strange and new.
The analysts told us to strike. But Bruni then said that he forced himself to venture out into the streets.
We couldn’t use Bruni’s words against him! So we decided to use his words against his colleague, Gail Collins.
You see, last weekend, she did it again! In her latest pointless column, she treated herself to the comfort of playing the Butch Otter card:
COLLINS (8/31/13): Idaho's other Republican senator, Jim Risch, is up for re-election next year and Ferguson says he is confident there will be a candidate running against him, as well as an extremely strong nominee opposing Gov. Butch Otter. That is not really to the point of our current subject, but I always enjoy writing ''Gov. Butch Otter.''Collins had little to say again, as you can see from reading the column. But at least she wasn’t lying! She really does seem to take great pleasure from writing that funny name.
Otter served in the House for six years. He voted against the Patriot Act, a topic Collins completely ducked as editorial page editor.
That said, Collins didn’t discover Otter until he got elected governor. Her latest penchant surfaced in April 2010, when she wrote that Otter “is definitely the winner of the Most Fun Name for a Governor Award.”
For a full year, Collins did nothing with this information. Then, it hit her! Writing Butch Otter’s funny name could help kill time in her columns!
That Irish setter wasn’t enough. Starting in April 2011, Collins started her admittedly pointless citations of Otter:
COLLINS (4/23/11): Gov. Butch Otter of Idaho is so on the side of private enterprise ranchers that he just signed a law naming the gray wolf a ''disaster emergency.'' I would love to go into this, but he's actually not new in office. I just brought it up because I like being able to say ''Butch Otter.''He not only has a funny name. People! He was even on the board of the Cowboy Hall of Fame!
COLLINS (10/1/11): The Republicans are running out of governors to put up against Romney. This week the cry has been for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to get into the race, although I am personally rooting for Gov. Butch Otter of Idaho because of his strong record of fiscal conservatism and the fact that I really enjoy writing ''Butch Otter'' over and over and over.
COLLINS (10/6/11): How about Idaho Gov. Butch Otter? I have been promoting him as a possible presidential contender, mainly because I like saying ''Idaho Gov. Butch Otter.'' But there's much, much more there to recommend him. For one thing, I'm pretty sure he'd be the first president who was on the board of directors of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
COLLINS (4/11/13): Did I mention that Risch is from Idaho? The governor of Idaho is Butch Otter. He has nothing to do with this discussion. I just like writing ''Gov. Butch Otter'' as often as possible.
COLLINS (8/31/13): Idaho's other Republican senator, Jim Risch, is up for re-election next year and Ferguson says he is confident there will be a candidate running against him, as well as an extremely strong nominee opposing Gov. Butch Otter. That is not really to the point of our current subject, but I always enjoy writing ''Gov. Butch Otter.''
Based on the Irish setter fetish, Collins can maintain such behavior for years. That's why we felt it was time to mention this new inclination.
An obvious question arises here. In how many columns has Collins killed time with Butch Otter’s name and with Mitt Romney’s dog?
Surprisingly, the answer is three. Collins has rules for herself.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
It happened in Massachusetts—and in Texas too!
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
Interlude—The improvement: In theory, our country is trying to improve the math and reading skills of our public school students.
In some ways, of course, such improvement won’t matter. For example, if the reign of the one percent continues, kids may get better in reading and math, improving their productivity in the workplace.
But so what? The workplace gains which result will get looted, will be drained off by the one percent! This is the process which now obtains in our massive health care spending, a process characterized by types of looting the press corps will not discuss.
Whatever! It makes obvious sense to seek better outcomes in public schools. This brings us back to the portrait of Massachusetts schools in yesterday’s New York Times.
On the front page of the weekly Science Times section, Kenneth Chang discussed the improvement in science and math achieved in Bay State schools. And omigod!
Breaking every rule in the book, Chang even suggested that the United States hasn’t suffered “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” as Bill Keller recently declared. Can Kenneth Chang do that?
Whatever! Right at the start of his report, Chang described the Bay State’s current lofty status, and its improvement over the last twenty years:
A bit later on, Chang offered a fleeting account of Massachusetts’ degree of improvement. He refers to the state’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-praised “gold standard” of domestic educational testing:
“On tests administered by the federal Education Department, Massachusetts, which had been above average, rose to No. 1 among the 50 states in math.”
Massachusetts was always above average in math, Chang says. Now, it ranks first among the fifty states. Chang offers some fairly fuzzy accounts of the way this rise occurred—fuzzy accounts which sometimes have a familiar “feel good” journalistic appeal.
Before we look at those accounts of the way the Bay State improved, let’s get clearer on the amount of improvement the state has recorded. Let’s go back to 1996, the last year for NAEP math testing before the Bay State reforms Chang will discuss.
Chang is right! In 1996, Massachusetts was already above average in eighth-grade math, but it wasn’t the national leader. If we look at its overall score, Massachusetts ranked 11th out of 41 states in eighth grade math that year.
(Some states still weren’t participating in statewide NAEP testing.)
That’s what we see if we go by the overall score of the whole student population. If we disaggregate scores, we get a somewhat different picture of Massachusetts’ performance in 1996:
White students in Massachusetts ranked only 14th among those 41 states in 1996. Black students in Massachusetts ranked sixth among the 31 states for which the NAEP had tested a sufficient sample of students.
That was the state of play in eighth grade math in 1996. The most recent NAEP testing occurred in 2011, with Massachusetts at the top of the pack—at least, until you disaggregate.
In its overall score, the Bay State stood first in the nation in 2011, by a substantial margin. Its white students also led the nation, besting New Jersey (and Texas) by a slender margin.
Its black students ranked third among the 44 states with a significant sample size, trailing only cultural outlier Hawaii and—you guessed it!—Texas. That said, Hispanic students in Massachusetts ranked 17th out of 46 states, far behind the national leaders, Montana and (once again) Texas.
Chang’s statement was technically accurate, but it was somewhat misleading. Massachusetts is number one in eighth grade math—if you don’t disaggregate.
But in part, this reflects the demographics of the state’s student population, which is disproportionately white and middle-class. In the 2011 NAEP test to which Chang refers, black and Hispanic students in Texas outscored their peers in Massachusetts!
You are very unlikely to learn such facts by reading the New York Times. As a result, Times readers were furious just last week when Ross Douthat made an accurate reference to those high test scores in Texas.
Whatever! Bay State kids did improve their scores a great deal in those fifteen years. And their score gains were larger than those observed across the nation.
Across the nation, white students gained 12.2 points in eighth grade math over those fifteen years—years in which Bill Keller will tell you that we were experiencing an “embarrassing decline in K-12 education.” But white students in the Bay State gained a whopping 21.3 points!
(By a very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the NAEP scale is often compared to one academic year.)
Somewhat similarly: Despite the embarrassing K-12 decline, black students across the nation gained a walloping 20.5 points in eighth grade math over that 15-year period. In Massachusetts, the score gain was greater, though not by a huge amount. Black students in Massachusetts gained 25.1 points.
Across the nation, Hispanic students gained 19.1 points. In Massachusetts, the gain was 33.9 points.
Score gains were larger in Massachusetts than in the nation as a whole. That said, score gains were comparable in Texas, and the 2011 scores were higher for black and Hispanic students, essentially the same for white students.
Can we talk? By restricting himself to overall scores, Chang engaged in a bit of blue-state happy talk, a staple of Times tribal culture. If we accept the basic accuracy of NAEP scores, then whatever happened in Massachusetts was happening in Texas too.
New York Times readers will rarely be asked to encounter such tribally unpleasant facts. When such facts get mentioned in passing, angry readers rebel!
Whatever! In the bulk of his report, Chang tried to explain the reasons for the Bay State’s improvement—improvement which seems quite substantial to judge by those NAEP scores. Essentially, he was describing a state full of (unionized) public school teachers who busted their humps to improve math and science instruction, even as your nation’s ranking journalists were mortified by the “embarrassing decline” they kept hearing described at cocktail parties.
Chang tried to explain the reasons for the Bay State improvement. We’ll only note the familiar feel-goodism which tends to invade such Times reports, as if by Hard Pundit Law.
Where do the feel-good frameworks appear? For starters, note this account of what happened in working-class Chelsea down through the years after Massachusetts introduced statewide testing (the MCAS) in 1998:
Plainly, we’re supposed to be blown away by the progress. But are we reading that passage correctly? If so, doesn’t it (somewhat murkily) say that the passing rate in tenth grade has only increased from 33 percent to 54 percent over the past fifteen years?
If that’s what that passage says, that would of course represent an improvement, assuming the MCAS test hasn’t changed. But it wouldn’t be a gigantic improvement, despite the feel-good framing.
Beyond that, how many of those Chelsea kids are kept from graduating in the end, despite the chance to retake the test? That figure doesn’t appear, although it plainly should have.
We also thought we saw some familiar feel-good messaging as Chang moved on to somewhat more middle-class Braintree. In this passage, it sounds like the MCAS tests have diagnostic uses, thereby improving instruction:
Chang seems to play a familiar tune here: tests like the MCAS can be used for diagnostic purposes. But doesn’t that passage really describe something much more mundane?
Of course! Students will do better on eighth-grade chemistry questions if they’re taught chemistry topics before taking the test, instead of after (or long before). But that doesn’t mean they’re learning more, or being taught more skillfully. It just means they’re being taught at a more appropriate time.
To our ear, Dr. Feelgood is really at work in the following passage. To our ear, Chang seems to retreat one of the oldest narratives in the Big Book of Upper-Class Feel-Good Scams concerning low-income schools:
In this case, we are given the impression that the most challenged kids in the Braintree schools would do just as well as everyone else, except they are unaware of some middle-class language conventions.
Those kids aren't way behind in math! They don't know what a “start-up fee” is!
Dating to the 1960s, everybody gets to feel good after reading presentations like that! Everyone gets to settle back and feel the solutions are easy.
Back to our basic facts:
If we accept the validity of NAEP math scores, Massachusetts students and teachers have shown a lot of improvement in the last fifteen years. Bay State scores have improved even more than scores in the nation as a whole.
(If we accept the validity of TIMSS math and science scores, Massachusetts students are outscoring the vast bulk of the world!)
But why have Bay State scores improved? And will New York Times journalists ever have the skills to answer such basic questions?
To his vast credit, Chang flirted with heresy yesterday, as he has done once or twice in the past. He even suggested that U.S. schools are not in a mortifying state of decline!
That said, the tribal preference seemed to linger, along with the love of familiar feel-good tales. We were left with a boatload of questions, including these:
What happens to the kids in Chelsea who don’t pass the MCAS? And what the heck happened in Texas schools, where NAEP scores also shot up?
We were also left with these questions: How well are the lowest-income kids being served by the changes in these states? And why do you never see such questions discussed on The One Liberal Channel?
Why don’t the stars on The One True Channel ever challenge the bogus boatload of gloom which Keller picked up from the corporate-scripted zeitgeist? Why don’t they ever challenge the mountains of shit which are constantly dumped on the heads of the nation’s teachers?
Why don’t they ever report the large score gains recorded by the nation’s black kids? In all their hours of clowning and fooling, why won’t they even report that?
Manifestly, they won’t discuss the way you’re being looted through massive health care over-spending. But why do these people have so much disdain for our black and Hispanic kids? Why can’t they even make themselves care about the good people who teach them?
Tomorrow: The pretense
To review all the relevant data: Click here, then click on Data Explorer.
Click on MAIN NDE, then agree to those terms. Click on State Comparisons.
At that point, you're on your own.
Interlude—The improvement: In theory, our country is trying to improve the math and reading skills of our public school students.
In some ways, of course, such improvement won’t matter. For example, if the reign of the one percent continues, kids may get better in reading and math, improving their productivity in the workplace.
But so what? The workplace gains which result will get looted, will be drained off by the one percent! This is the process which now obtains in our massive health care spending, a process characterized by types of looting the press corps will not discuss.
Whatever! It makes obvious sense to seek better outcomes in public schools. This brings us back to the portrait of Massachusetts schools in yesterday’s New York Times.
On the front page of the weekly Science Times section, Kenneth Chang discussed the improvement in science and math achieved in Bay State schools. And omigod!
Breaking every rule in the book, Chang even suggested that the United States hasn’t suffered “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” as Bill Keller recently declared. Can Kenneth Chang do that?
Whatever! Right at the start of his report, Chang described the Bay State’s current lofty status, and its improvement over the last twenty years:
CHANG (9/3/13): If Massachusetts were a country, its eighth graders would rank second in the world in science, behind only Singapore, according to TIMSS—the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which surveys knowledge and skills of fourth and eighth graders around the world. (The most recent version, in 2011, tested more than 600,000 students in 63 nations.)“I think we are a proof point of what’s possible,” the state education commissioner was quoted saying.
Massachusetts eighth graders also did well in mathematics, coming in sixth, behind Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. The United States as a whole came in 10th in science and 9th in math, with scores that were above the international average.
Of course, TIMSS is only one test, and achievement tests are incomplete indicators of educational prowess. But behind Massachusetts’ raw numbers are two decades of sustained efforts to lift science and mathematics education. Educators and officials chose a course and held to it, even when the early results were deeply disappointing.
While Massachusetts has a richer and better-educated population than most states, it is not uniformly wealthy. The gains reflected improvement across the state, including poorer districts.
A bit later on, Chang offered a fleeting account of Massachusetts’ degree of improvement. He refers to the state’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-praised “gold standard” of domestic educational testing:
“On tests administered by the federal Education Department, Massachusetts, which had been above average, rose to No. 1 among the 50 states in math.”
Massachusetts was always above average in math, Chang says. Now, it ranks first among the fifty states. Chang offers some fairly fuzzy accounts of the way this rise occurred—fuzzy accounts which sometimes have a familiar “feel good” journalistic appeal.
Before we look at those accounts of the way the Bay State improved, let’s get clearer on the amount of improvement the state has recorded. Let’s go back to 1996, the last year for NAEP math testing before the Bay State reforms Chang will discuss.
Chang is right! In 1996, Massachusetts was already above average in eighth-grade math, but it wasn’t the national leader. If we look at its overall score, Massachusetts ranked 11th out of 41 states in eighth grade math that year.
(Some states still weren’t participating in statewide NAEP testing.)
That’s what we see if we go by the overall score of the whole student population. If we disaggregate scores, we get a somewhat different picture of Massachusetts’ performance in 1996:
White students in Massachusetts ranked only 14th among those 41 states in 1996. Black students in Massachusetts ranked sixth among the 31 states for which the NAEP had tested a sufficient sample of students.
That was the state of play in eighth grade math in 1996. The most recent NAEP testing occurred in 2011, with Massachusetts at the top of the pack—at least, until you disaggregate.
In its overall score, the Bay State stood first in the nation in 2011, by a substantial margin. Its white students also led the nation, besting New Jersey (and Texas) by a slender margin.
Its black students ranked third among the 44 states with a significant sample size, trailing only cultural outlier Hawaii and—you guessed it!—Texas. That said, Hispanic students in Massachusetts ranked 17th out of 46 states, far behind the national leaders, Montana and (once again) Texas.
Chang’s statement was technically accurate, but it was somewhat misleading. Massachusetts is number one in eighth grade math—if you don’t disaggregate.
But in part, this reflects the demographics of the state’s student population, which is disproportionately white and middle-class. In the 2011 NAEP test to which Chang refers, black and Hispanic students in Texas outscored their peers in Massachusetts!
You are very unlikely to learn such facts by reading the New York Times. As a result, Times readers were furious just last week when Ross Douthat made an accurate reference to those high test scores in Texas.
Whatever! Bay State kids did improve their scores a great deal in those fifteen years. And their score gains were larger than those observed across the nation.
Across the nation, white students gained 12.2 points in eighth grade math over those fifteen years—years in which Bill Keller will tell you that we were experiencing an “embarrassing decline in K-12 education.” But white students in the Bay State gained a whopping 21.3 points!
(By a very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the NAEP scale is often compared to one academic year.)
Somewhat similarly: Despite the embarrassing K-12 decline, black students across the nation gained a walloping 20.5 points in eighth grade math over that 15-year period. In Massachusetts, the score gain was greater, though not by a huge amount. Black students in Massachusetts gained 25.1 points.
Across the nation, Hispanic students gained 19.1 points. In Massachusetts, the gain was 33.9 points.
Score gains were larger in Massachusetts than in the nation as a whole. That said, score gains were comparable in Texas, and the 2011 scores were higher for black and Hispanic students, essentially the same for white students.
Can we talk? By restricting himself to overall scores, Chang engaged in a bit of blue-state happy talk, a staple of Times tribal culture. If we accept the basic accuracy of NAEP scores, then whatever happened in Massachusetts was happening in Texas too.
New York Times readers will rarely be asked to encounter such tribally unpleasant facts. When such facts get mentioned in passing, angry readers rebel!
Whatever! In the bulk of his report, Chang tried to explain the reasons for the Bay State’s improvement—improvement which seems quite substantial to judge by those NAEP scores. Essentially, he was describing a state full of (unionized) public school teachers who busted their humps to improve math and science instruction, even as your nation’s ranking journalists were mortified by the “embarrassing decline” they kept hearing described at cocktail parties.
Chang tried to explain the reasons for the Bay State improvement. We’ll only note the familiar feel-goodism which tends to invade such Times reports, as if by Hard Pundit Law.
Where do the feel-good frameworks appear? For starters, note this account of what happened in working-class Chelsea down through the years after Massachusetts introduced statewide testing (the MCAS) in 1998:
CHANG: In the small city of Chelsea, which borders Boston, almost 90 percent of the students come from low-income families and most did not speak English as their first language. On the first MCAS, two-thirds of Chelsea 10th graders failed math. The science scores were nearly as dismal.The Bay State stuck to its guns! Last year, 54 percent of Chelsea 10th graders were proficient or advanced on the MCAS math test!
[...]
Critics worried that when the use of MCAS as a graduation requirement kicked in, thousands of students would be deprived of their diplomas and would drop out in despair. Dr. Driscoll, who was elevated to education commissioner in 1998, kept the MCAS.
People were expecting it to go away,” Robert D. Gaudet, the lead UMass researcher, recalled in a recent interview. “He held to his guns.”
Officials did make adjustments. Students who fail the MCAS can retake it several times until they pass, and can still graduate if they otherwise demonstrate they have learned the material.
Test scores have risen markedly. Last year, 54 percent of Chelsea 10th graders were proficient or advanced on the math MCAS.
Plainly, we’re supposed to be blown away by the progress. But are we reading that passage correctly? If so, doesn’t it (somewhat murkily) say that the passing rate in tenth grade has only increased from 33 percent to 54 percent over the past fifteen years?
If that’s what that passage says, that would of course represent an improvement, assuming the MCAS test hasn’t changed. But it wouldn’t be a gigantic improvement, despite the feel-good framing.
Beyond that, how many of those Chelsea kids are kept from graduating in the end, despite the chance to retake the test? That figure doesn’t appear, although it plainly should have.
We also thought we saw some familiar feel-good messaging as Chang moved on to somewhat more middle-class Braintree. In this passage, it sounds like the MCAS tests have diagnostic uses, thereby improving instruction:
CHANG: Dr. Rees, the Braintree schools’ science director, said the [statewide] standards helped make sure that teachers across the state covered the same subjects, laying the groundwork for subsequent grades.(Full disclosure: we have no idea what “concrete science concepts” are.)
“There’s a logic to that, a progression,” she said. “You start learning about solids in kindergarten. In first grade, you learn about solids and liquids, and then in second grade, you start to learn about solids and liquids and gases.”
The MCAS has helped Braintree figure out what works and what doesn’t. Middle school students were struggling with chemistry questions on the eighth-grade MCAS. The district changed the order of instruction, covering concrete science concepts in sixth grade and moving some chemistry topics to seventh. “And it worked,” Dr. Rees said. “They’re doing better on their chemistry.”
Chang seems to play a familiar tune here: tests like the MCAS can be used for diagnostic purposes. But doesn’t that passage really describe something much more mundane?
Of course! Students will do better on eighth-grade chemistry questions if they’re taught chemistry topics before taking the test, instead of after (or long before). But that doesn’t mean they’re learning more, or being taught more skillfully. It just means they’re being taught at a more appropriate time.
To our ear, Dr. Feelgood is really at work in the following passage. To our ear, Chang seems to retreat one of the oldest narratives in the Big Book of Upper-Class Feel-Good Scams concerning low-income schools:
CHANG: At East Middle School, the elixir is Kristen Walsh, who teaches math to sixth, seventh and eighth graders with so-called special needs, a potpourri of learning disabilities that include dyslexia and autism. On this day she was introducing a lesson on variables and linear equations with a problem involving gym memberships.This narrative dates to the 1960s, when the upper-class world began to write about urban schools. Perfumed readers have always loved such tales, in which it sounds like even the most disadvantaged kids are really the same as all other kids, once you execute a few very minor tricks.
She explained the usual math concepts of beginning algebra—the slope of a line indicating the rate of change, the y intercept where the line intersects the y axis. Where she lingered was less the math concepts but the words used in the word problem, repeatedly checking that the students understood that the “start-up fee” of one health club was the same thing as the membership fee at another.
In essence, she was teaching how to interpret a math problem as much as how to solve it.
In this case, we are given the impression that the most challenged kids in the Braintree schools would do just as well as everyone else, except they are unaware of some middle-class language conventions.
Those kids aren't way behind in math! They don't know what a “start-up fee” is!
Dating to the 1960s, everybody gets to feel good after reading presentations like that! Everyone gets to settle back and feel the solutions are easy.
Back to our basic facts:
If we accept the validity of NAEP math scores, Massachusetts students and teachers have shown a lot of improvement in the last fifteen years. Bay State scores have improved even more than scores in the nation as a whole.
(If we accept the validity of TIMSS math and science scores, Massachusetts students are outscoring the vast bulk of the world!)
But why have Bay State scores improved? And will New York Times journalists ever have the skills to answer such basic questions?
To his vast credit, Chang flirted with heresy yesterday, as he has done once or twice in the past. He even suggested that U.S. schools are not in a mortifying state of decline!
That said, the tribal preference seemed to linger, along with the love of familiar feel-good tales. We were left with a boatload of questions, including these:
What happens to the kids in Chelsea who don’t pass the MCAS? And what the heck happened in Texas schools, where NAEP scores also shot up?
We were also left with these questions: How well are the lowest-income kids being served by the changes in these states? And why do you never see such questions discussed on The One Liberal Channel?
Why don’t the stars on The One True Channel ever challenge the bogus boatload of gloom which Keller picked up from the corporate-scripted zeitgeist? Why don’t they ever challenge the mountains of shit which are constantly dumped on the heads of the nation’s teachers?
Why don’t they ever report the large score gains recorded by the nation’s black kids? In all their hours of clowning and fooling, why won’t they even report that?
Manifestly, they won’t discuss the way you’re being looted through massive health care over-spending. But why do these people have so much disdain for our black and Hispanic kids? Why can’t they even make themselves care about the good people who teach them?
Tomorrow: The pretense
To review all the relevant data: Click here, then click on Data Explorer.
Click on MAIN NDE, then agree to those terms. Click on State Comparisons.
At that point, you're on your own.
Hanna Rosin corrects an inaccurate claim!
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
We liberals decide to fight back: Last Friday, Hanna Rosen corrected an inaccurate claim—an inaccurate claim that is frequently made.
Especially in this tribal era, news orgs should be doing this sort of script-checking on a regular basis. For ourselves, we were struck by some of the reactions to Rosin.
What claim was Rosin correcting? It was a bit of a Labor Day special. She defined the inaccurate claim right in her opening paragraph:
We fact-checked that claim in May 2012. Here’s why:
Rachel Maddow had made the familiar claim on Meet the Press. The next night, she said she couldn’t understand why Alex Castellanos had told her the claim was wrong.
On her own MSNBC program, Maddow said she had “spent a long time” that day trying to figure why Castellanos challenged her statement. She just couldn’t do it, she said, thereby making a second claim, one which seemed to be blatantly false.
Is it true? Are women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men? In reality, no one who works in this field actually makes that familiar assertion. Maddow interviewed an expert who explained that the real wage gap is something on the order of 5 to 10 cents on the dollar—not the walloping 23 cents Maddow had originally claimed.
(This being the Maddow show, the expert managed to say this in such a way that viewers probably wouldn't realize that Maddow had been contradicted.)
For our money, Rosin did an imperfect job explaining this situation. That said, she seemed to end up saying that experts claim a wage gap of maybe 9 cents on the dollar, not the famous 23 cents.
Rosin had corrected a familiar bogus assertion. At first, she drew complimentary comments. Then the pushback began from the pseudo left.
For our money, this produced the most interesting part of this piece.
For many years, we liberals laughed at the way the other tribe refused to accept straightforward facts which didn’t fit their tribal preconceptions. As we liberals have emerged from our decades-long naps and have begun to create our own liberal orgs, it’s sad to see the way some in our tribe rush to ape that conduct.
No, Virginia! No one claims that women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same or equal work! But once the ball got rolling, quite a few liberal commenters pushed back against Rosin for saying this.
Our tribal mates found various ways to denounce the heretical Rosin. This is exactly what we once condemned the other tribe's ditto-heads for.
Had Rosin cited data from studies? Some readers refuted those studies with comments like this, in which a reader described her daughter’s experience on one job:
The professor got angry all the same! Meanwhile, a future physician went out in the field and slaughtered a whole row of straw men. She ended by refuting a claim Rosin hadn’t made:
Also, inevitably, Rosin is racially suspect:
Rosin had made a simple point—a very familiar statement is factually false. Churning a wide range of objections, angry liberals faulted Rosin for daring to point this out.
Back in the day, we liberals laughed at the ditto-heads for doing this sort of thing. We preened and pranced about, telling the world about the other tribe's dumbness.
At long last, we have begun to create our own news orgs, where we're pampered and pandered. And wouldn’t you know it? It turns out that we can be fairly dumb too, just like all groups of humans! But these comments suggest something else beyond that:
We humans have a very shaky allegiance to facts. Indeed, we seem to have a very shaky grasp of the very concept.
Once we have a “fact” we like, we humans hate to let it go. Telling the truth will help the others! Why would we want to do that?
For more comments: On Facebook, the comments were pithier. The last two examples:
To review these sobering documents, brace yourselves, then click this.
We liberals decide to fight back: Last Friday, Hanna Rosen corrected an inaccurate claim—an inaccurate claim that is frequently made.
Especially in this tribal era, news orgs should be doing this sort of script-checking on a regular basis. For ourselves, we were struck by some of the reactions to Rosin.
What claim was Rosin correcting? It was a bit of a Labor Day special. She defined the inaccurate claim right in her opening paragraph:
ROSIN (8/31/13): How many times have you heard that “women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men”? Barack Obama said it during his last campaign. Women’s groups say it every April 9, which is Equal Pay Day. In preparation for Labor Day, a group protesting outside Macy’s this week repeated it, too, holding up signs and sending out press releases saying “women make $.77 to every dollar men make on the job.” I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true.“Women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” Rosin was saying that this familiar statement is false.
We fact-checked that claim in May 2012. Here’s why:
Rachel Maddow had made the familiar claim on Meet the Press. The next night, she said she couldn’t understand why Alex Castellanos had told her the claim was wrong.
On her own MSNBC program, Maddow said she had “spent a long time” that day trying to figure why Castellanos challenged her statement. She just couldn’t do it, she said, thereby making a second claim, one which seemed to be blatantly false.
Is it true? Are women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men? In reality, no one who works in this field actually makes that familiar assertion. Maddow interviewed an expert who explained that the real wage gap is something on the order of 5 to 10 cents on the dollar—not the walloping 23 cents Maddow had originally claimed.
(This being the Maddow show, the expert managed to say this in such a way that viewers probably wouldn't realize that Maddow had been contradicted.)
For our money, Rosin did an imperfect job explaining this situation. That said, she seemed to end up saying that experts claim a wage gap of maybe 9 cents on the dollar, not the famous 23 cents.
Rosin had corrected a familiar bogus assertion. At first, she drew complimentary comments. Then the pushback began from the pseudo left.
For our money, this produced the most interesting part of this piece.
For many years, we liberals laughed at the way the other tribe refused to accept straightforward facts which didn’t fit their tribal preconceptions. As we liberals have emerged from our decades-long naps and have begun to create our own liberal orgs, it’s sad to see the way some in our tribe rush to ape that conduct.
No, Virginia! No one claims that women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same or equal work! But once the ball got rolling, quite a few liberal commenters pushed back against Rosin for saying this.
Our tribal mates found various ways to denounce the heretical Rosin. This is exactly what we once condemned the other tribe's ditto-heads for.
Had Rosin cited data from studies? Some readers refuted those studies with comments like this, in which a reader described her daughter’s experience on one job:
COMMENTER: My daughter recently had a job where every employee did all of the same jobs. Women lifted cases alongside of men; no one was cut any slack for their gender. She had experience in the field, and tried to negotiate for a higher starting salary, and was told no, this is what we pay. A month later, a young man with no previous experience was hired, and was given $2 more per hour starting salary. At review time, everyone was tied to a percentage increase, so my daughter could never get parity. Now, what was your unresearched assertion, Ms. Rosin?You might think that was the rare dumb bunny within our liberal tribe. Even if true, her daughter’s single experience couldn’t refute what Rosin had said! But in this comment, an angry professor took the same basic approach:
COMMENTER: This makes me angry. I was a professor at a major university, yet got less, far less pay than my male colleagues. A male counterpart with a similar background (degrees, experience, etc.) earned almost twice as much as I did. Closer to 60 cents to the dollar...I'm here to say that, in some cases, the system is just plain not treating everyone fairly.Nothing in Rosin’s piece denied the claim the professor was making—the claim that, “in some cases, the system is just plain not treating everyone fairly.” Indeed, Rosin’s suggestion that there is a 9 percent gap assumes that people in some cases are not being treated fairly.
This was not just my experience by every woman I discussed this with at the university. Oh, and by the way, if you think that we all got large salaries—untrue. A friend of mine was a special education teacher in public schools and earned quite a bit more than I did. And we all know how well paid public school teachers are paid (lol).
The professor got angry all the same! Meanwhile, a future physician went out in the field and slaughtered a whole row of straw men. She ended by refuting a claim Rosin hadn’t made:
COMMENTER: Oh of course! Women just don't want the same jobs as men. It's not as if there's a societal sexism component to this "decision" that so many of our young women make about their "natural suitability" so-called "nurturing professions" like nursing or teaching…And I won't even ask about whatever disgusting pseudo-science is behind the idea that women are "worse at negotiating starting salaries" or that "women just don't want to work the same way men do".Had Rosin said that a 9 percent wage gap was OK? Many commenters seemed to think she had—or perhaps that she had said there was no wage gap at all:
Few things sadden me more than a woman who buys into sexism. I will be a working physician starting next year, and even a 91 percent wage gap for every hour I spend busting my behind in the same fashion as my male co-workers is much too much for me, thank you. And by the way, you can't refer to something as discrimination and then lay responsibility at the feet of the discriminated party and their "choices."
COMMENTER: So...87 [sic] cents on the dollar. No problem then.Other commenters simply assailed Rosin’s motives. And some could see the real problem here—even if Rosin’s claim is accurate, admitting it will only help The Other Tribe!
COMMENTER: So the fact that my COWORKERS, do the SAME WORK in the SAME PLACE for the SAME HOURS as I do what I do, probably make 10 percent more than I do, doesn't present a gender gap? Explain how you figure that, since we have (on average) the same experience, but I have more certifications in what we currently use? And they typically come to me to show them how to do what we all do?
COMMENTER: Why is even a 91 percent gap ok?? If items were priced according to the industry gap, with women paying 91 percent of the price for the same house as a man for example, that gap would disappear in a heartbeat.
Also, inevitably, Rosin is racially suspect:
COMMENTER: The author is an MRA [Men’s Rights Activists] mouthpiece and nothing more.Why should we be “technically accurate?” It will just help The Other Tribe!
COMMENTER: I enjoy reading poorly written articles that rely on a very selective choice of resources and data for very narrow sectors of society. Helps sharpen my understanding of "relevance."
COMMENTER: So I guess this study of a tiny group of privileged MBA's shows that there's no gender gap? And women "decide" to be teachers and nurses but not doctors? That women just don't "want" to earn more? This sort of reactionary nonsense isn't journalism; it's shoddy and selective anti-feminist editorializing.
COMMENTER: This article is a little dumb. It will be abused by those who want to keep women down as a justification for paying women less.
"The point here is not that there is no wage inequality:" Yeah rrright. The point is that by writing articles like this, you've given the opponents of wage equality some ammo, they will go and say: "Look! Even that liberal lady-writer says this 77 percent thing is nonsense!"
COMMENTER: People who throw around that "77 cents to the dollar" statistic are TECHNICALLY incorrect but the author of this article is being deliberately misleading to prove a dumb point. The actual fact is that white women make 91 cents to every dollar made by a white male. Black women, on the other hand, earn 77 cents for every dollar made by a white male. For Hispanic women, I think the number is somewhere around 60 cents for every dollar.
Using those facts to say that the wage gap is closed and there's no more work to be done is either wishful thinking or complete disregard for women of color.
Rosin had made a simple point—a very familiar statement is factually false. Churning a wide range of objections, angry liberals faulted Rosin for daring to point this out.
Back in the day, we liberals laughed at the ditto-heads for doing this sort of thing. We preened and pranced about, telling the world about the other tribe's dumbness.
At long last, we have begun to create our own news orgs, where we're pampered and pandered. And wouldn’t you know it? It turns out that we can be fairly dumb too, just like all groups of humans! But these comments suggest something else beyond that:
We humans have a very shaky allegiance to facts. Indeed, we seem to have a very shaky grasp of the very concept.
Once we have a “fact” we like, we humans hate to let it go. Telling the truth will help the others! Why would we want to do that?
For more comments: On Facebook, the comments were pithier. The last two examples:
FULL COMMENT: What a stupid article: Let's parse this into minutia just to wind up in the same spot. Women get paid less. Derp.Women get paid less—who cares by how much? Who cares about such minutia?
FULL COMMENT: It's so disturbing that such willful ignorance is still being published in 2013—by a woman.
To review these sobering documents, brace yourselves, then click this.
What was in John Lewis’ speech!
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
Taylor Branch reporting: Last week, we reviewed a series of reports about John Lewis’ now-famous speech—the speech he gave, at age 23, at the March of Washington.
There was much discussion of the fact that Lewis agreed to change some parts of the original speech. But every time we turned around, we seemed to get a different account of what the speech had originally said!
The analysts still weren’t satisfied! So last Friday, we took Taylor Branch to happy hour over at Penn Station. Rather, we took his book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63.
We ended up spending a good chunk of the weekend with Branch’s book. But first, here’s his account concerning that now-famous speech:
According to Branch, the original version of Lewis’ speech included contributions by several other SNCC leaders. According to Branch, this is the way the language about General Sherman came in:
According to Branch, the resolution occurred the next day, underneath the Lincoln Memorial, even as the day’s speeches were being delivered. The dispute now centered on the language about the “scorched earth” march through the South.
Branch has Dr. King serving as final mediator. In Branch’s account, Dr. King correctly surmises that the “scorched earth” language wasn’t Lewis’ own.
“John, I know you as well as anybody,” Branch quotes Dr. King saying (page 879). “That doesn’t sound like you.”
Was Dr. King this all-knowing in this particular incident? We don’t know, though Branch’s book is meticulously sourced to the voluminous oral and written histories of these life-changing events. We moved from there back to Branch’s detailed accounts of the astonishing events of the 1961 Freedom Rides, where we spent a good chunk of the weekend.
If you watch that PBS documentary we recommended last week, we will suggest that you follow it up with Branch’s deeply detailed accounts of the events that program portrays. It’s hard to believe that such events ever happened on this earth, or that they could have been so widely forgotten.
Once you start, that documentary is hard to stop watching. Branch takes you deep inside the events PBS put on the screen.
Taylor Branch reporting: Last week, we reviewed a series of reports about John Lewis’ now-famous speech—the speech he gave, at age 23, at the March of Washington.
There was much discussion of the fact that Lewis agreed to change some parts of the original speech. But every time we turned around, we seemed to get a different account of what the speech had originally said!
The analysts still weren’t satisfied! So last Friday, we took Taylor Branch to happy hour over at Penn Station. Rather, we took his book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63.
We ended up spending a good chunk of the weekend with Branch’s book. But first, here’s his account concerning that now-famous speech:
According to Branch, the original version of Lewis’ speech included contributions by several other SNCC leaders. According to Branch, this is the way the language about General Sherman came in:
BRANCH (page 873): James Forman inserted references to specific outrages, such as the caning of C.B. King by the Albany sheriff, and in his swashbuckling style contributed a vision of conquest: “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.” After polishing by Julian Bond and Eleanor Holmes, among others, the final draft of Lewis’ speech became a collective manifesto of SNCC’s early years.According to Branch, “trouble over the speech began on Tuesday afternoon, the day before the march.” It started with Cardinal O’Boyle, but spread to others, with special concern about the claim in the speech that Kennedy administration’s newly proposed civil rights bill “came ‘too little too late’ and was unworthy of SNCC support.”
According to Branch, the resolution occurred the next day, underneath the Lincoln Memorial, even as the day’s speeches were being delivered. The dispute now centered on the language about the “scorched earth” march through the South.
Branch has Dr. King serving as final mediator. In Branch’s account, Dr. King correctly surmises that the “scorched earth” language wasn’t Lewis’ own.
“John, I know you as well as anybody,” Branch quotes Dr. King saying (page 879). “That doesn’t sound like you.”
Was Dr. King this all-knowing in this particular incident? We don’t know, though Branch’s book is meticulously sourced to the voluminous oral and written histories of these life-changing events. We moved from there back to Branch’s detailed accounts of the astonishing events of the 1961 Freedom Rides, where we spent a good chunk of the weekend.
If you watch that PBS documentary we recommended last week, we will suggest that you follow it up with Branch’s deeply detailed accounts of the events that program portrays. It’s hard to believe that such events ever happened on this earth, or that they could have been so widely forgotten.
Once you start, that documentary is hard to stop watching. Branch takes you deep inside the events PBS put on the screen.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
The Kenneth Chang Challenge!
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
Part 2—The refusal to report: Way back in 1960, Sam Cooke released Wonderful World, which went to number 12 on the charts. He’s credited with the familiar lyrics, along with Adler and Alpert:
Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took...
Cooke, who was already 29, said he didn’t know much about the subjects he studied in high school. But he knew what a wonderful world this would be if his girl friend loved him too.
The song, and the lyrics, have stuck. To hear the recording, click here.
Cooke’s profession of ignorance was of course offered as innocent fun, as a pop music hook. Less innocent is the ignorance shown by the nation’s ranking journalists about the state of America’s public schools.
Cooke was playful as he confessed his lack of textbook knowledge. If we’re serious people today, we’ll take no amusement from the ignorance displayed by the men and women who tell us they are our “press corps.”
Yesterday, we recalled Bill Keller’s puzzling claim about the state of the public schools over the past several decades. Keller seemed to say that we have experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” a claim that is extremely hard to reconcile with the nation’s best educational data.
Keller is a very major figure at the Times. So is Gail Collins, the editorial page editor of the paper from 2001 through 2007.
As goes Keller, so goes Collins! Last year, we reviewed her horrendous performance in “As Texas Goes,” her new book. In the book, and then on tour, Collins grossly misrepresented the state of the data regarding the performance of students in Texas, a state where all major segments of the student population outscore their peers around the nation.
The best you can say is that Collins was lazy—too lazy to review the basic data about a subject she would discuss all over the country, data from the federal testing program she lauds in her bungled book.
Last week, we reviewed what can happen when leading journalists are so remarkably clueless:
As went Collins, so went a string of New York Times readers! They were sure that Ross Douthat just had to be wrong when he described the apparent success of the Texas schools!
Except that Douthat wasn't wrong. Those (liberal) Times readers were loudly clueless about Texas schools, like the great Collins before them.
According to his playful song, Sam Cooke didn’t even “know what a slide rule is for.” Cooke was playing, but the ignorance of these major journalists is a serious matter.
To consider the shape of the problem, consider a surprising report which appears in this morning’s Times, in the back-to-school edition of the weekly Science Times section.
The report appears on the section’s front page. And omigod! As he starts, Kenneth Chang subtly rejects the familiar claim from Keller:
(Not all nations took part in the testing. Some of the “countries” we finished behind were actually smaller regions—Northern Ireland and Flemish Belgium, to cite two examples.)
Chang’s basic assertion is correct. Overwhelmingly, conventional wisdom “holds that American students are falling further and further behind in science and math achievement.” It's constantly said and suggested.
Indeed, that is the general perception Keller advanced in his recent column. The perception may be widely held, but it’s quite hard to square with the facts.
What is the truth about American public schools? How well do American students measure up against the rest of the world? What kind of progress has been displayed in recent years and decades?
Answers to such questions are advanced all the time. Often, they’re offered by journalists who seem to have no idea what they’re talking about.
These questions form a major part of the American public discourse. But major newspapers have shown little interest in reporting the basic facts about these widely-discussed topics.
Instead, opinion is shaped by pundits like Collins and Keller, who don’t seem to know whereof they speak. And, as Chang politely observes, the drift of the familiar misstatements tends to run very strongly in a gloomy direction.
In his own piece, Chang adds to the frustration. He teases readers with a limited account of U.S. ranking on international tests, then moves on to discuss the performance by Massachusetts alone.
You can’t blame Chang for failing to do all things today. You can blame the New York Times and the Washington Post for the journalistic malfeasance they have displayed through the years—a malfeasance which issued last month in Keller’s remarkable statement.
Where did Keller get the idea that that we have suffered “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” even as domestic test scores have risen, along with our performance on international tests? In part, he probably got it from reading the press corps, which has specialized in gloomy pronouncements while failing to perform any detailed reporting about these much-discussed topics.
This failure to perform is especially striking for the following reasons:
As noted, the alleged performance of U.S. public schools is a familiar part of the public discourse. Within that discourse, our alleged “embarrassing decline” is put to all sorts of partisan uses.
Our “decades of embarrassing decline” are used to attack public school teachers. Those decades are used to attack teachers unions—to attack unions in general.
Our “decades of decline” are used to fuel the movement toward all sorts of “education reforms.” What you think of those recommended procedures, an intelligent nation would want its discussion of such proposals driven by real information.
Our big newspapers have refused to provide that service. The news about our public schools isn’t all good, but it’s dramatically different from the picture Keller advanced.
And yet, the public is constantly given variants of that gloomy picture. As Chang correctly notes, “conventional wisdom and popular perception” in this realm are extremely gloomy.
American public school teachers get trashed, even as domestic test scores are rising. Teachers unions are blamed for a problem which doesn’t even exist.
Black and Hispanic students register impressive gains—and the public isn’t allowed to take pride in their progress. And make no mistake:
As with health spending, so too here: The information which is withheld tends to serve the interests and/or policy preferences of some of the nation’s most powerful sectors. As newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times spread the gloom, the interests of certain powerful factions are served in the process.
When Cooke described his lack of knowledge, he was playing a lover’s game. The ignorance which comes from the press corps shouldn’t be viewed as a source of fun or amusement.
Will this be the year when our perfume-stained wretches take what we’ll call The Kenneth Chang Challenge? When they commission front-page reports which describe the actual data from the NAEP and from the major international tests?
Not all the news from those sources will be great, but much of it will be very surprising. That’s because many Times readers have come to believe the things Keller and Collins are saying.
They don’t know much about public schools! Isn’t it time that the Post and the Times got off their big fat ascots and put their slide rules to use?
Tomorrow: The pretense
Let's take a look at the record: Chang referred to the 2011 TIMSS, in which fourth- and eighth-graders around the world were tested in science and math.
To review the basic data, click here. Then click Tables 2-5.
Part 2—The refusal to report: Way back in 1960, Sam Cooke released Wonderful World, which went to number 12 on the charts. He’s credited with the familiar lyrics, along with Adler and Alpert:
Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took...
Cooke, who was already 29, said he didn’t know much about the subjects he studied in high school. But he knew what a wonderful world this would be if his girl friend loved him too.
The song, and the lyrics, have stuck. To hear the recording, click here.
Cooke’s profession of ignorance was of course offered as innocent fun, as a pop music hook. Less innocent is the ignorance shown by the nation’s ranking journalists about the state of America’s public schools.
Cooke was playful as he confessed his lack of textbook knowledge. If we’re serious people today, we’ll take no amusement from the ignorance displayed by the men and women who tell us they are our “press corps.”
Yesterday, we recalled Bill Keller’s puzzling claim about the state of the public schools over the past several decades. Keller seemed to say that we have experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” a claim that is extremely hard to reconcile with the nation’s best educational data.
Keller is a very major figure at the Times. So is Gail Collins, the editorial page editor of the paper from 2001 through 2007.
As goes Keller, so goes Collins! Last year, we reviewed her horrendous performance in “As Texas Goes,” her new book. In the book, and then on tour, Collins grossly misrepresented the state of the data regarding the performance of students in Texas, a state where all major segments of the student population outscore their peers around the nation.
The best you can say is that Collins was lazy—too lazy to review the basic data about a subject she would discuss all over the country, data from the federal testing program she lauds in her bungled book.
Last week, we reviewed what can happen when leading journalists are so remarkably clueless:
As went Collins, so went a string of New York Times readers! They were sure that Ross Douthat just had to be wrong when he described the apparent success of the Texas schools!
Except that Douthat wasn't wrong. Those (liberal) Times readers were loudly clueless about Texas schools, like the great Collins before them.
According to his playful song, Sam Cooke didn’t even “know what a slide rule is for.” Cooke was playing, but the ignorance of these major journalists is a serious matter.
To consider the shape of the problem, consider a surprising report which appears in this morning’s Times, in the back-to-school edition of the weekly Science Times section.
The report appears on the section’s front page. And omigod! As he starts, Kenneth Chang subtly rejects the familiar claim from Keller:
CHANG (9/3/13): Conventional wisdom and popular perception hold that American students are falling further and further behind in science and math achievement. The statistics from this state tell a different story.At the fourth grade level, the United States did somewhat better. U.S. students came in 7th in science and 11th in math, again with scores which were above the international average.
If Massachusetts were a country, its eighth graders would rank second in the world in science, behind only Singapore, according to Timss—the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which surveys knowledge and skills of fourth and eighth graders around the world. (The most recent version, in 2011, tested more than 600,000 students in 63 nations.)
Massachusetts eighth graders also did well in mathematics, coming in sixth, behind Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. The United States as a whole came in 10th in science and 9th in math, with scores that were above the international average.
(Not all nations took part in the testing. Some of the “countries” we finished behind were actually smaller regions—Northern Ireland and Flemish Belgium, to cite two examples.)
Chang’s basic assertion is correct. Overwhelmingly, conventional wisdom “holds that American students are falling further and further behind in science and math achievement.” It's constantly said and suggested.
Indeed, that is the general perception Keller advanced in his recent column. The perception may be widely held, but it’s quite hard to square with the facts.
What is the truth about American public schools? How well do American students measure up against the rest of the world? What kind of progress has been displayed in recent years and decades?
Answers to such questions are advanced all the time. Often, they’re offered by journalists who seem to have no idea what they’re talking about.
These questions form a major part of the American public discourse. But major newspapers have shown little interest in reporting the basic facts about these widely-discussed topics.
Instead, opinion is shaped by pundits like Collins and Keller, who don’t seem to know whereof they speak. And, as Chang politely observes, the drift of the familiar misstatements tends to run very strongly in a gloomy direction.
In his own piece, Chang adds to the frustration. He teases readers with a limited account of U.S. ranking on international tests, then moves on to discuss the performance by Massachusetts alone.
You can’t blame Chang for failing to do all things today. You can blame the New York Times and the Washington Post for the journalistic malfeasance they have displayed through the years—a malfeasance which issued last month in Keller’s remarkable statement.
Where did Keller get the idea that that we have suffered “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” even as domestic test scores have risen, along with our performance on international tests? In part, he probably got it from reading the press corps, which has specialized in gloomy pronouncements while failing to perform any detailed reporting about these much-discussed topics.
This failure to perform is especially striking for the following reasons:
As noted, the alleged performance of U.S. public schools is a familiar part of the public discourse. Within that discourse, our alleged “embarrassing decline” is put to all sorts of partisan uses.
Our “decades of embarrassing decline” are used to attack public school teachers. Those decades are used to attack teachers unions—to attack unions in general.
Our “decades of decline” are used to fuel the movement toward all sorts of “education reforms.” What you think of those recommended procedures, an intelligent nation would want its discussion of such proposals driven by real information.
Our big newspapers have refused to provide that service. The news about our public schools isn’t all good, but it’s dramatically different from the picture Keller advanced.
And yet, the public is constantly given variants of that gloomy picture. As Chang correctly notes, “conventional wisdom and popular perception” in this realm are extremely gloomy.
American public school teachers get trashed, even as domestic test scores are rising. Teachers unions are blamed for a problem which doesn’t even exist.
Black and Hispanic students register impressive gains—and the public isn’t allowed to take pride in their progress. And make no mistake:
As with health spending, so too here: The information which is withheld tends to serve the interests and/or policy preferences of some of the nation’s most powerful sectors. As newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times spread the gloom, the interests of certain powerful factions are served in the process.
When Cooke described his lack of knowledge, he was playing a lover’s game. The ignorance which comes from the press corps shouldn’t be viewed as a source of fun or amusement.
Will this be the year when our perfume-stained wretches take what we’ll call The Kenneth Chang Challenge? When they commission front-page reports which describe the actual data from the NAEP and from the major international tests?
Not all the news from those sources will be great, but much of it will be very surprising. That’s because many Times readers have come to believe the things Keller and Collins are saying.
They don’t know much about public schools! Isn’t it time that the Post and the Times got off their big fat ascots and put their slide rules to use?
Tomorrow: The pretense
Let's take a look at the record: Chang referred to the 2011 TIMSS, in which fourth- and eighth-graders around the world were tested in science and math.
To review the basic data, click here. Then click Tables 2-5.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
Five frameworks!
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2013
Part 1—The mystery: Bill Keller is a major American journalist, one with whom we almost share the old school system tie.
In June 1965, we graduated from Aragon High in San Mateo, California. One mile down the Alameda, Keller was a student at Serra, a Catholic high school which later gave us Barry Bonds and Tom Brady.
And Bill Keller! Despite his selection of high schools, Keller built a career which took him to the top of the American press corps. In 1989, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the breakup of the former Soviet Union.
From 1997 through 2001, he was managing editor of the New York Times. He was executive editor of the Times from 2003 through 2011. That means he was in charge!
Today, he writes a weekly column for the Times, the best known American newspaper.
Everything we’ve ever seen about Keller tells us he’s a good decent person. Full disclosure: We’re strongly biased in favor of San Mateans.
That said, Keller is also a major American journalist. But so what? Despite or because of that fact, he offered a weird assessment in a recent Times column, even as the nation’s children got ready to go back to school:
Why would a major journalist write that? As background, let’s drift back to 1969, the year we finished college.
That September, we began teaching fifth grade in the Baltimore City Schools. Two years later, the federal government initiated the testing program known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the program which is often called “America’s report card.”
At present, only a fool would trust results from the statewide testing programs conducted by the fifty states over the past dozen years. That said, the NAEP has always been regarded as a whole other critter.
The NAEP has never been a “high stakes” testing program. Until recently, no one ever had an incentive to fake its results.
Beyond that, the NAEP is run by people who are technically competent and adequately funded. Statewide testing programs? Truthfully, not so much!
In part for these reasons, reporters constantly refer to the NAEP as the “gold standard” of educational testing. But as we have often noted, those same reporters rarely report the most basic data from the NAEP, except for the so-called “achievement gaps,” which can be used to paint a gloomy picture.
In part, that’s why ranking journalists like Keller often seem to have no idea about the apparent state of the public schools.
Has this country really “suffered decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education?” Not if you go by the data produced by the widely praised “nation’s report card. To wit:
In 1971, we were in our third year of teaching fifth grade in Baltimore. In that year, the NAEP conducted its first set of tests, testing a nationwide sample of 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds in reading.
Two years later, the NAEP conducted its first nationwide math tests.
The kids we were teaching in both of those years were all “black.” Since Keller believes that we have endured “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” let’s compare the average scores of black kids in 1971 and 1973 with the average scores achieved by black kids last year.
To review the data in question, click here. Scroll to Figures 7 and 9 (page 16), then to Figures 23 and 25 (page 38).
In reading, the average score by black 9-year-old students has risen from 170 to 206 during those four decades. Allowing for a minor methodological change which occurred in 2004, scores have risen by 39 points over those 41 years.
Again in reading, the average score by black 13-year-old students has risen by 30 points during those four decades.
Is 30-39 points a lot or a little? According to a very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the NAEP scale is often said to equal one academic year. Applying that very rough rule of thumb, the score gains would seem very large.
Similar gains have been recorded in math. In math, the average score by 9-year-old black students has risen by 39 points since the first testing in 1973. The average score by black 13-year-old students has risen by 41 points during that period.
Those are the best educational data the nation possesses. But very few people have ever heard about these data. Apparently this includes Keller, a decent person who is one of our most important national journalists.
Most people, Keller apparently included, have never heard about the rise in reading and math scores on the NAEP. Instead, they have often heard stories which lead them to make gloomy statements about the embarrassing decline our pitiful nation has suffered.
Even as the scores of black kids have risen substantially, Keller thinks we have “experienced decades of embarrassing decline.” This represents an astonishing fact about our nation’s journalistic and political culture.
It represents an astonishing fact about the way our world works.
How can it be that people like Keller have never heard about the nation’s most basic educational data? We'd say there are several basic reasons, but in our view, they all boil down to one basic point:
In the end, your nation’s elites don’t seem to care about this nation’s black kids—kids who are, in the end, simply a bunch of good decent kids. Very few facts could be more plain. Few facts get discussed less often.
We’ve noted these facts for quite some times. Manifestly, nobody cares.
Manifestly, your nation’s elites don’t care about black kids, or even about elementary facts concerning topics which are widely discussed. For today, we’ll describe this state of affairs as “the mystery.”
Tomorrow, we’ll adopt a different framework. Tomorrow, we’ll explore the pretense.
Tomorrow: The pretense
Part 1—The mystery: Bill Keller is a major American journalist, one with whom we almost share the old school system tie.
In June 1965, we graduated from Aragon High in San Mateo, California. One mile down the Alameda, Keller was a student at Serra, a Catholic high school which later gave us Barry Bonds and Tom Brady.
And Bill Keller! Despite his selection of high schools, Keller built a career which took him to the top of the American press corps. In 1989, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the breakup of the former Soviet Union.
From 1997 through 2001, he was managing editor of the New York Times. He was executive editor of the Times from 2003 through 2011. That means he was in charge!
Today, he writes a weekly column for the Times, the best known American newspaper.
Everything we’ve ever seen about Keller tells us he’s a good decent person. Full disclosure: We’re strongly biased in favor of San Mateans.
That said, Keller is also a major American journalist. But so what? Despite or because of that fact, he offered a weird assessment in a recent Times column, even as the nation’s children got ready to go back to school:
KELLER (8/19/13): The Common Core, a grade-by-grade outline of what children should know to be ready for college and careers, made its debut in 2010, endorsed by 45 states. It is to be followed in the 2014-15 school year by new standardized tests that seek to measure more than the ability to cram facts or master test-taking tricks...Say what? What in the world made Keller think that we have experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education” here in the country which includes San Mateo and New York?
This is an ambitious undertaking, and there is plenty of room for debate about precisely how these standards are translated into classrooms. But the Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators, convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools accountable.
Why would a major journalist write that? As background, let’s drift back to 1969, the year we finished college.
That September, we began teaching fifth grade in the Baltimore City Schools. Two years later, the federal government initiated the testing program known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the program which is often called “America’s report card.”
At present, only a fool would trust results from the statewide testing programs conducted by the fifty states over the past dozen years. That said, the NAEP has always been regarded as a whole other critter.
The NAEP has never been a “high stakes” testing program. Until recently, no one ever had an incentive to fake its results.
Beyond that, the NAEP is run by people who are technically competent and adequately funded. Statewide testing programs? Truthfully, not so much!
In part for these reasons, reporters constantly refer to the NAEP as the “gold standard” of educational testing. But as we have often noted, those same reporters rarely report the most basic data from the NAEP, except for the so-called “achievement gaps,” which can be used to paint a gloomy picture.
In part, that’s why ranking journalists like Keller often seem to have no idea about the apparent state of the public schools.
Has this country really “suffered decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education?” Not if you go by the data produced by the widely praised “nation’s report card. To wit:
In 1971, we were in our third year of teaching fifth grade in Baltimore. In that year, the NAEP conducted its first set of tests, testing a nationwide sample of 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds in reading.
Two years later, the NAEP conducted its first nationwide math tests.
The kids we were teaching in both of those years were all “black.” Since Keller believes that we have endured “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education,” let’s compare the average scores of black kids in 1971 and 1973 with the average scores achieved by black kids last year.
To review the data in question, click here. Scroll to Figures 7 and 9 (page 16), then to Figures 23 and 25 (page 38).
In reading, the average score by black 9-year-old students has risen from 170 to 206 during those four decades. Allowing for a minor methodological change which occurred in 2004, scores have risen by 39 points over those 41 years.
Again in reading, the average score by black 13-year-old students has risen by 30 points during those four decades.
Is 30-39 points a lot or a little? According to a very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the NAEP scale is often said to equal one academic year. Applying that very rough rule of thumb, the score gains would seem very large.
Similar gains have been recorded in math. In math, the average score by 9-year-old black students has risen by 39 points since the first testing in 1973. The average score by black 13-year-old students has risen by 41 points during that period.
Those are the best educational data the nation possesses. But very few people have ever heard about these data. Apparently this includes Keller, a decent person who is one of our most important national journalists.
Most people, Keller apparently included, have never heard about the rise in reading and math scores on the NAEP. Instead, they have often heard stories which lead them to make gloomy statements about the embarrassing decline our pitiful nation has suffered.
Even as the scores of black kids have risen substantially, Keller thinks we have “experienced decades of embarrassing decline.” This represents an astonishing fact about our nation’s journalistic and political culture.
It represents an astonishing fact about the way our world works.
How can it be that people like Keller have never heard about the nation’s most basic educational data? We'd say there are several basic reasons, but in our view, they all boil down to one basic point:
In the end, your nation’s elites don’t seem to care about this nation’s black kids—kids who are, in the end, simply a bunch of good decent kids. Very few facts could be more plain. Few facts get discussed less often.
We’ve noted these facts for quite some times. Manifestly, nobody cares.
Manifestly, your nation’s elites don’t care about black kids, or even about elementary facts concerning topics which are widely discussed. For today, we’ll describe this state of affairs as “the mystery.”
Tomorrow, we’ll adopt a different framework. Tomorrow, we’ll explore the pretense.
Tomorrow: The pretense
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)