We're Almost There

The weekly saturation of educational doom from David Coffey has become so commonplace that I scarcely read them anymore. But alas, I just couldn’t resist a title like “Searching for the Best.” Here is exactly what needs to happen for me to take it seriously:

1.   I need to ignore the frequent references to the ACT. Feel free to look up the data yourself if you like, but the truth is that historical ACT composite scores in the United States have moved less than ½ of one point in thirty years. (They’ve moved up, not down despite one million additional students thrown into the mix, which ought to provide more than enough evidence of a bell curve, but whatever.)

2.   I have to ignore the “No Dentist Left Behind” fallacy of testing, which fails to acknowledge comorbidity factors in measuring anything. The “No Dentist Left Behind” fallacy was a satirical piece where dentist effectiveness is determined by the “absolute certain data measurements” of patient cavities. The more cavities the dentist fixed, the worse the data said he was. It’s absurd, but that’s what we do to teachers when we fail to acknowledge a myriad of features contributing to any problem.

3.   I have to accept that it is OK to teach to a test and manipulate a better outcome (Hawthorne effect, he says), which we all know is true. In fact, should the State determine that torture is an effective means of producing a desired outcome, then this is a logic we’d need to accept regardless of how we may feel about torture if we accept that “outcome” is the goal.

4.   Coupled with the above, I would need to accept that we’ve been given a test worthy of teaching to (which I don’t) and that somehow my seventh grade daughter’s future success as a human being is directly tied to her ability to use words like “feckless” or “sagacious” in a complete sentence. While it’s nice to know that she is sagacious enough to avoid fecklessness, I can promise you she’d be this way even if she had only an “amorphous” understanding of what I am ranting about as she “meanders” her way through “litigious” requirements to become proficient in the State’s “voracious pseudonyms” that replace real communication and supposedly measure her worth as a productive human being.

5.   I would need to ignore the basics of genomic diversity (there’s a reason we don’t use dunking a basketball or playing the harp as a litmus test for all humans) and further still, I would have to ignore the reality that a standardized test is specifically designed to give the “same” questions, in the “same” format, in the “same” amount of time to children who are not and NOR WILL THEY EVER BE the “same.” Anyone with two children knows you have change tactics to reach one or the other and that what worked for one, seldom worked for the other. Standardized testing refuses to acknowledge this basic reality of genetic diversity.

I could go on for hours, but I won’t. We could talk about how it was not the herds of unwashed Americans who gave us Enron, the housing bubble, or the big bank exploitation that nearly killed the world economy; rather it was our Harvard educated, “college-ready” standardized test-takers who pulled that number on us. Or we could talk about how JFK’s IQ was a solid 30 points below Nixon’s and yet he still managed to be twice the leader Nixon was. On and on and on, history screams at us. None of that matters much when there’s data to worship.

The only reason I am even bothering to reply (yet again) is because Coffey mentioned the Hawthorne effect. I am peculiar like that.

By mentioning it, he has opened up a real can of worms (that’s a metaphor -- just in case you were one of the ACT test takers thirty years ago scoring the same as the doomed and ignorant kids today are) … (PS: that’s satire).

The Hawthorne effect is not always discussed in favorable terms among data analysts. It is very often seen as a manipulation point that interferes with gaining an objective view of what is really going on. So to put it as simply as I possibly can, if measuring a student’s performance has a direct correlation to increasing that performance (and it does to an extent) then what we’ve measured is performance. We’ve not measured how well our kids can think and that’s at least half the problem.

Beyond this, again as clearly as I can put it, if the Hawthorne effect is to be taken as legitimate, then we could just as easily apply it to the test-makers themselves and increase their test creation performance by observing and measuring them. Until recently, that was not even an option, meaning no one could measure the effectiveness of the test-maker (which is criminal when you think tax payers fronted millions for a test we couldn’t test for effectiveness).

Surely you see the problem now. By applying the Hawthorne effect to the test-makers we’ve entered into “Achilles and the Tortoise” territory (if you know Zeno and Lewis Carroll) where the rulers by which we measure improvement can themselves be measured for improvement. This philosophically begs the question about what we are measuring at all.

All of this is of course a ridiculous conversation when we know outright that there have been numerous studies that reveal the opposite of the Hawthorne effect: that in fact measuring a control group produced WORSE results. One of them, quite disturbingly, involved surgeons who when measured for skill and effectiveness had higher patient mortality rates than when they were left alone.

Again, why does it matter? I guess it matters because we keep getting fish-slapped every week with the same old “We’re getting closer” nonsense, which incidentally, this week pointed us to a new product. And those of us who have a genuine education (not a standardized one) know something all too well: “Behind every measurement is a ruler for sale.” Clip that for your Facebook page and just owe me one.

I guess I’m done responding to the saturation of columns for a while. I don’t know why the Oak Ridger keeps giving space for the same shallow material that is clearly agenda driven, but…

Here’s a final thought before I go: Anyone who has seen Schindler's List where the Nazi soldier stands over the Jewish ammunition worker to measure productivity knows that the Hawthorne effect is real. But is that really the kind of world we want? Do we want it for our children?

Well, to use Mr. Coffey’s words… “we’re almost there.”

Reading vs. Writing Proficiency

Questions of Reading and Writing Proficiency

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with David Coffey on education, but in his April 7 “spotlight” submission, he raises what probably should be a given in education: strong leadership produces results. I am not sure we need 100 million dollars or a slate of longitudinal studies to demonstrate this as it is “conventional wisdom,” but filling in the knowledge gaps with evidence is hardly ever a bad thing.

That’s why I went and looked up the test scores for Quitman County Elementary School. Assuming that the scores I looked at were accurately presented on the school report card website (and in today’s world that tends to be a scary assumption to make), I found that indeed test scores rose significantly with the implementation of the reading initiatives described in the Wall Street Journal op-ed submitted by Richard Grant and referenced at length by Mr. Coffey. (Incidentally, scores have declined since then, which would make for an interesting value-added discussion, but we can save that for another day!)

What struck my fancy in the Quitman raw data was a fascinating comparison of the language arts scores to the scores of its kindred cousin: writing proficiency.  Fourth grade language arts scores did in fact reveal that only 18% of the student population was proficient in 2010 and only 22% were proficient the next year in 2011. No one questions that this is an abysmal failure in either education or motivation, or perhaps both.

But what about writing? Fourth grade writing scores in 2010 for Quitman County Elementary stood at 79% proficient and in 2011 they recording a whopping 93% proficient.

The data leaves us with what I will refer to as a “first things first” question. Simply put, as adults interested in the education of our children, we need to ask how a cohort of students who are 93% proficient in writing manages to see only 1 in every 5 of these exact same students pass a language arts test?

Here are the possible answers to that question and before we take even the first step into upending education or spending bucket-loads of money on solutions, we need to determine which answer is correct:

#1  Some students can write very well, but still can’t read for comprehension. We need look no further than master satirist Lewis Carroll and his poem “Jabberwocky” to see the idea of this principle in effect.

#2  The language arts test was either flawed or using a bad rubric. If they truly can write proficiently, isn’t this possible? Perhaps the reading portions were poorly constructed or graded much more harshly than deserved.

#3  The writing test was either flawed or using a bad rubric. Perhaps the students did not write nearly as “proficiently” as the test let on. It could be their writing submissions were graded on some kind of a curve.

#4  Students were less interested in the language arts test and in their utter boredom starting choosing random answers to be done faster. (This was me in school.)

I don’t know which of the above, or what combination of the above, is the correct answer. What I do know is that we owe it to ourselves and to our children to find out before we begin talking about “solutions” to problems that we do not fully understand.

If the rubrics of either test were flawed, then that is information parents and school systems should be made aware of immediately. If our standards are too high for reading comprehension or too low for writing proficiently, we owe it to ourselves to know which of these is true.

I am probably one of the few parents who actually took the sample portions our State elementary reading tests and can wholeheartedly say that if I were one of the students who passed writing, but not language arts, it would be 100% due to answer #4. The sample test that I took was ridiculously tedious and boring. So much so, that I found the sixth grade sample practically unreadable. I doubt my scores as a college educated adult would be all that much better than my sixth-grade counterpart who sat marveling over a spider webs in the window when faced with monotony in the classroom.

There may be other answers than the four I listed here. There may also be teams of “experts” out there who actually know the answer outright and can respond without batting an eye. Nevertheless, until we have had conversations such as the one I am suggesting here (and many more like them… let’s do math next!) then we can claim neither clarity nor sincerity with regards to what will work and what won’t work in education.

No one denies that we can raise test scores and there are many ways to do that. Many of these “methods” have significant trade-offs (just ask South Korea and look at the youth suicide rate). At issue though is whether or not we’ve educated our children in the process of raising their test scores and there aren’t too many ways to measure that snafu. But we can start by better educating ourselves. We need to determine why five times more kids in Quitman County Elementary can apparently write proficiently, but seemingly can’t read.

We need to decide if we are bringing the right ruler to the desk and whether or not we are measuring the right things because the raw data here suggests that maybe we aren’t.

340 Pound Hand-Checks in Basketball

Our local sports radio station had brief but interesting debate about stricter rule enforcement enacted this year with regards to defensive hand-checking in NCAA basketball play. It seems there’s quite a push (no pun intended) to tighten up defenses with regards to applying contact to your opponent during play.

I have mixed feelings about it at the NCAA level. I understand why we don’t see a ton of hand-checking or interference at the NBA level. Fans want to see a lot of shooting and quick cutting penetration to the basket. Allowing too much contact, hampers the speed of play and dampens scoring opportunities. On top of that, the skill levels are much more equalized among players such that expending that kind of energy on defense isn’t typically worth it over the course of a game. “They’re going to get theirs” is the mindset, so saving energy for faster transitions and offense only makes sense so that “we can get ours.”

I have to confess a pretty unpopular opinion though at high school, and most definitely at middle school levels of play. Size differences being what they are, hand-checks matter.

As the parent of a very tiny middle school basketball player, I feel pretty confident in saying at a 70-pound hand-check from a girl who hasn’t hit maturity going up against a 140-pound girl who matured very early, won’t be that disruptive to their dribbling, shooting, or just motion in general.

But when you turn the tables and have that same 140-pound girl hand-checking a 70-pound dribbler, you better believe it hinders motion. By comparison, I am a grown man weighing a meager 165 pounds. I can hardly imagine having to endure dozens and dozens of hand-checks and defensive obstructions from a 340 pound man over the course of a game.

I suspect that if I had to play basketball the way my daughter has to play the game now, I would come home at night with a smattering of purple and black across my entire body – as she often does now.

I will forgo making any “size matters” jokes and stick to the facts—size does matter in basketball. It matters less at higher levels because there is sort of a “break-even” point where too much size hinders player speed. But at the early stages, it is very common to see young players who have fully matured to adult sizes bring double the body mass of their opponents every week on the court.

No one likes seeing their bigs hampered by whistle happy refs. Taking size out of the game due to officiating seems downright criminal. But so does watching 150 pounds swat mercilessly at an 80 pound point guard.

Personally, I’d like to see post play stay as physical as possible while getting tighter calls made up top in middle and high school ball. Here are my top three reasons:

#1   Safety of the athletes.  The human body isn’t built to withstand too many collisions with objects that double its size. So Steph Curry weighs 185 pounds and Lebron tops out at 250 pounds… imagine giving Lebron an extra 50% in body weight and taking him to a solid 375. Now imagine that he was given mostly free license to reach, swat, and otherwise body up on Steph….

Steph is going to get around him, no doubt. He’s Steph freaking Curry! But I would bet that over time, Steph’s body isn’t going to keep up. That much of a size differential hammering on his hands, arms, and shoulders is going to greatly increase the risk of injury, as well as rapidly accelerate the general wear and tear to Curry’s smaller frame.

Given that 11-12 year-old girls haven’t developed safe-falling techniques, it’s going to be worse at lower levels and injuries will be more frequent. To back that statement up consider this quick fact --

According to a 2008 National Sport’s Medicine review of basketball, teenage GIRLS ages 12-15 comprised 50% of all post-game concussions.

Think about that… half of all sports concussions in basketball weren’t just girls, but middle school girls.

That’s 100% due to size differentials between pre / post maturity players.

#2   Most late bloomers don’t get to develop at the same pace in the sport. Because they are slower to mature, it is impossible to know for sure whether or not you’re dealing with a perpetual five-footer; or if you have a potential six-footer on your hands. Either way, nine times out of ten, the small kid will be on the bench, or worse – won’t bother trying out.

My sixth grade year, I was the smallest kid in the school. My nickname was even “Little Allred.” By mid-way through my 8^th grade year, I was the 3^rd tallest kid in my school. It happened that fast. I didn’t even try to play basketball until the 8^th grade because I believed I would never have a chance to play or contribute.

Calling a tighter game gives smaller players an opportunity to hone their dribbling and shooting skills on the off chance they do grow into a larger player. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve passed a big high school kid and asked, “Do you play basketball?” only to have them respond, “I would have but I didn’t know I was going to be this tall. I can’t even dribble because I never thought I would be big.”

Size matters… but maybe it shouldn’t matter as much as we allow it to matter when kids are young and still growing.

#3   Calling a loose game helps the bigs reach amazing success – but only in the short term. The older the opposition gets, the more the growth charts start to level out. By the 10^th grade, that 110-pound post player they pushed around in the 8^th grade weighs almost as much as they do… unless they learned to play correctly and learned to find success by doing things in good form, the bigs at lower levels find themselves hurting in big ways as the opposition catches up to them in weight.

Many of players of decent size find they have to actually JUMP for the first time in their basketball careers. They realize the fundamentals of boxing out weren’t just wasted ideas that their coach was always on about. As the rest of the players on the court grow and size gets closer to balanced, fundamentals matter more and more.

So many kids that found great success at earlier stages become team liabilities when size gaps begin to close. Teaching them fundamentals and calling tighter games better prepares them for what they will face at the next level.

So that’s my position on it… I say tighten the games up a lot at the secondary level. Let kids learn the sport, develop sound shooting, and quick, unobstructed transition play. It will reduce injuries, give smaller players a little more incentive to try out for the team while they grow, and it will ultimately make our team’s bigs that much better at what they are there to accomplish.