More Editorial Nonsense in the Major NYC Newspapers

Can it be that a couple of major NYC newspapers have quietly been acquired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg and turned over to the DOE’s relentless PR machine?

Hard on the heels of recent editorials attacking the integrity of Diane Ravitch (NY Post) and proclaiming the wonders of charter schools (NY Daily News) now comes the latest barrage in these two newspapers' relentlessly right wing editorial assaults on public education. This time, the perpetrator is one Kevin Carey, identified as a research and policy manager at an education think tank called Education Sector.

In an outlandish and mathematically inept Daily News editorial, Mr. Carey regales Chancellor Klein as the education field’s revolutionary counterpart to professional baseball’s number-crunching hero, Billy Beane. To champion the Chancellor’s pilot program of evaluating individual classroom teachers through “value-added analysis,” Carey compares this data driven approach to the one successfully used by the Oakland Athletics’ general manager for assessing and acquiring baseball players. This comparison is fallacious on so many levels, one hardly knows where to begin.

As all baseball fans know, every pitch, swing of the bat, fielding play, and stolen base is a measurable event, now routinely cataloged and amassed in gigantic statistical databases that allow for ready comparison with other players (or with that same player himself) in similar game situations. What aspects of education can be so measured? A child’s asked question, an idea or answer ventured, a reading assignment completed and understood, a new fact integrated into a broader context, an “Aha!” moment of new understanding, a quiz or test passed, a lesson in tolerance, empathy, or social development achieved, an original homework submitted? Of course not. Learning – that is, integrating and imprinting intellectual information in the human mind – is not a visible activity in even the best circumstances. As Einstein reportedly observed, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

True baseball aficionados -- those familiar with the work of Bill James, for example -- also understand that these now-famous analytical models are almost exclusively multivariate regression models. In other words, baseball general managers like Billy Beane use mathematical models that predict a player’s value or performance from many different variables simultaneously, each variable clearly measurable and each contributing a portion of the total “value added.” These models are mathematically complex, fraught with issues of relevance, cross-interference among variables, and time series interdependencies (respectively called statistical significance, multicollinearity, and autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) that must be carefully considered in their formation and use.

Contrast this approach with the DOE’s under Chancellor Klein, where a teacher’s ostensible “value added” is derived entirely from a single variable, standardized test scores, that is itself an arguably spurious measure. Imagine baseball owners paying their players on the basis of just one variable, such as number of home runs. Within a few years, it would hard to tell the New York Yankees from the New York Giants – every Yankee would be 6’6”, weigh 275 pounds, bench press 500 pounds, and hit 40+ home runs per year. With players judged and rewarded on any single variable, the game of baseball would be rendered unrecognizable, grossly perverted from the multiple-skill game it is today.

No less is true in NYC public schools, where absurdly disingenuous arguments by faceless “experts” are routinely being foisted upon an unsuspecting public by dressing them in pseudo-intellectual clothing. In reality, such notions merely support the gradual perversion of public education into a form few of us would recognize from our school days. Instead of oversized, home run swatting baseball players, our teachers and schools are increasingly being pressured by this Mayor and Chancellor to produce one-dimensional, steroid-charged test takers otherwise devoid of the broad skills, experiences, and enthusiasms we used to recognize as desired products of public education. Worse, what teacher (in the classic, Socratic sense of the term) is willing to commit to a 20- or 30-year career in such a stultifying environment?

Note also that on the very same day (February 6) of Mr. Carey’s editorial, the Daily News ran a separate piece lionizing the accomplishments of P.S. 62 in Richmond Hill. The secret of Principal Angela O’Dowd’s success? The Daily News knows the answer, and they feature it right up front, in just the story’s third paragraph where it will most likely be read. “We teach them the tricks and the tips of test-taking,” says Ms. O’Dowd.

As if that wasn't already enough, another Daily News piece, also on the same day, described how students at 23 Brooklyn schools are now being "paid to perform" on Citywide reading and math exams -- "up to $500 for seventh-graders and up to $250 for fourth-graders."

Would somebody please pass me the steroids?