MISSISSIPPI MUDDLE: Naep scores rise in Mississippi!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2019

Information allowed to escape: On Friday morning, December 6, an opinion column in the New York Times included some actual information!

It was information of a type which is rarely allowed to appear in major American newspapers. According to Emily Hanford's opinion column, the public school kids of Mississippi have recorded substantial score gains in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep)!

The federally-run Naep is the widely-praised "gold standard" of domestic educational testing. As we've noted in the past, everyone knows to praise the Naep, and to disappear its results.

The Naep has been in existence since the street-fighting year of 1969. At present, it's administered across the nation in odd-numbered years.

That's where Hanford's forbidden information comes in. She opened her column by noting that Mississippi is generally regarded as an educational backwater. Then, she offered some surprising facts:

HANFORD (12/6/19): New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress [from 2017 to 2019] than any other state.

The state’s performance in reading was especially notable. Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test. Fourth graders in Mississippi are now on par with the national average, reading as well or better than pupils in California, Texas, Michigan and 18 other states.

[...]

For years, everyone assumed Mississippi was at the bottom in reading because it was the poorest state in the nation. Mississippi is still the poorest state, but fourth graders there now read at the national average. While every other state’s fourth graders made no significant progress in reading on this year’s test, or lost ground, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores are up by 10 points since 2013...

The information provided by Hanford was indeed surprising. Just for the record, her factual claims were almost wholly accurate, if in our view a bit limited.

On last year's Naep reading test, Mississippi's fourth graders did indeed perform at the national average. And the state's fourth-grade reading score has indeed gone up by something resembling ten points—very roughly, by one academic year—since 2013.

In fact, Hanford slightly understated the actual size of the gain over those six years. When we look a little bit closer, the score gain rounds off to eleven points—from an average score of 208.52 in 2013 to 219.34 last year.

(For all Naep data, just start here. From there, you're on your own.)

On its face, Hanford was reporting some very good news. It's the kind of news which is almost never reported in newspapers like the Times.

Over the course of the past fifty years, American public school students have recorded large scores gains in both reading and math on the Naep. These score gains have been recorded at both the fourth and eighth grade levels.

That said:

As we've noted down through the years, American newspapers seem to agree that such score gains must never be reported. Readers of the New York Times are simply never told about those very large score gains. Similarly, the Times joined the Washington Post, just last week, in disappearing all sorts of good news from the newly-released 2018 Pisa scores.

(For links to our reports on that topic, you can just click here.)

These elites today! American elites of all types have long built their education reporting around a fictitious story line. That story line goes like this:

Absolutely nothing has worked in our pitiful public schools!

The deceptions involved in this reporting has been widespread and vast. Hanford broke every rule in the book when, in her opinion column, she included some actual information about some actual test score gains—large score gains recorded by fourth graders in our poorest state.

Who the heck is Emily Hanford, and on what basis is she allowed to report such information? According to the Times' identity line, Hanford "is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports."

The APM in question is American Public Media. According to the leading authority on the organization, APM "is the second largest producer and distributor of public radio programs in the United States after NPR."

APM is a major org. As we examine Hanford's overall column, that fact may imaginably serve to bring the note of sadness in.

Again, Hanford reported accurate facts about Mississippi test scores. She even reported large score gains, and that's a type of reporting which is almost never allowed.

That said, we couldn't help noting a certain lack of technical expertise in Hanford's reporting. In fact, the score gains in Mississippi are larger, and are more widespread, than Hanford's column reported.

If you "disaggregate" Mississippi's test scores—break them apart by ethnicity, race and income level—then the state's score gains in fourth grade reading are even larger, and more impressive, than Hanford reported.

Also this:

Over the course of the past ten years, Mississipi's fourth grade score gains are even larger in math! That's an especially striking point when you consider the pair of headlines which sit atop Hanford's column:

There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It
The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why.

According to Hanford, the gain in fourth grade reading scores can be attributed to the fact that Mississippi knows "the right way to teach reading," thanks to its "reliance of cognitive science."

Those claims may be accurate in some way and to some extent. But the state shows larger gains in math, a fact which goes unreported and unexplained in Hanford's unusual column.

Tomorrow, we'll show you how large Mississippi's fourth grade score gains actually are, in both reading and math. Then, as the week proceeds, we'll consider Hanford's explanation for the rise in the state's reading score.

If those Naep scores can be trusted, they suggest that something very good has been taking place in Mississippi's schools. You'd almost think a decent nation would want to know what that is.

Trust us—you'll never see any such question pursued in the New York Times' news reporting. And in this one instance, when Hanford was allowed to report some actual facts in her surprising opinion column, she offered an explanation of Mississippi's score gains in reading which seems, at least on its face, almost impossibly childish.

According to Hanford, the state has produced these large score gains in reading because it's been teaching phonics! Can that possibly be the explanation for those (apparently large) academic gains? We'll examine the topic all week—after which, you'll never hear a single word about it ever again.

At the top of the current societal pile, no one cares about public schools or about the low-income kids within them. No fact could be more blindingly obvious. No assertion could be more safe.

Tomorrow: An overview of the gains

Hanford's earlier column: When Hanford refers to "cognitive science," is she simply referring to the need to teach phonics?

Her new column is somewhat unclear on that point. It seems to us that this column from October 2018—"Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wring Way?"—makes her meaning fairly clear.

Barbara McQuade gets it right!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2019

Three cheers for Barbara McQuade: In the past few years of impeachment and The Chase, Barbara McQuade has become one of MSNBC's go-to legal experts.

In our view, she has occasionally seemed to be sliding into the propagandistic bubble which has come close to swallowing the cable channel whole. This very day, at New York magazine, she offers a clear assessment of the problems within the FBI which Inspector General Horowitz detailed last week.

The dumbnification of MSNBC has been underway for years. It's reassuring to see a mainstay of the channel maintaining her contact with sound procedure.

Dumbnification won't serve liberal/progressive interests. Dumbnification is deeply appealing, but dumbnification is bad.

Also this: Yesterday, Chris Wallace batted Jim Comey around. Three cheers for Chris Wallace!

Whatever happened to Candidate Harris?

MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2019

A peculiar report in the Times: Whatever happened to Candidate Kamala Harris? One week ago today, a peculiar report on this basic question appeared in the New York Times.

What the heck happened to Candidate Harris? Why did she fail to catch on?

What went wrong with the Harris campaign? At one point, Lerer and Medina offer this highly unflattering overview:

LERER AND MEDINA (12/P/19): Supporters acknowledge that many of the problems faced by Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign were self-inflicted, having little to do with her race or gender. They list failings like strategic miscalculations that had her ignoring Iowa and New Hampshire for the first months of the race, a lack of leadership within her operation and an inability to articulate a consistent rationale for her candidacy. Her critics argue that those missteps suggested to voters that Ms. Harris was unprepared for the presidency, lending credence to arguments questioning her electability.

Oof! According to that assessment, Harris committed the strategic blunder of ignoring Iowa and New Hampshire for the first months of the race.

She had a lack of leadership within her operation. Also, she wasn't able to articulate a consistent rationale for her candidacy. And that's what her supporters say!

According to Harris' critics, these bungles "suggested to voters that Ms. Harris was unprepared for the presidency." Question:

If voters got that impression from that list of problems, could anyone say they were wrong?

In our view, Lerer and Medina were perhaps being overly kind. They failed to list some of the specific mistakes which may have cost Harris support.

That said, their capsule assessment is plenty harsh. How many White House candidates have been successful if they ignored the first caucus and primary states while failing to articulate a rationale for their campaign?

We can't tell you why Harris didn't catch on with Democratic voters. Since we're discussing tens of milliona of people, we'll guess there were several reasons.

On the simplest level, we'd simply say that, after an impressive kick-off rally, it just seemed, again and again, that Harris simply wasn't ready for a White House campaign.

She wasn't hugely well known coming in. Once there, she often seemed under-prepared.

For ourselves, we thought Harris' opening rally was extremely impressive. That said, we were appalled by few of her subsequent steps. That included her attack on Candidate Biden at the first debate—her attack on him for opposing a policy in the 1970s which, just to be honest, Harris herself doesn't seem to support in the present day.

We're bone weary of hopefuls like that. We'll guess that her decline started there, after reflexive bursts of praise for her bold, heartfelt, completely authentic and truth-telling attack.

For the record, we think Biden is a terrible candidate in a field of terrible candidates. That said, Lerer and Medina offered a highly unflattering summary of the Harris campaign in the paragraph we've quoted—and that's just what her supporters have said!.

According to Lerer and Medina, the Harris campaign was a mess. That brings us to the part of their report which struck us as a bit peculiar—but also as a highly instructive artifact of the times.

According to Lerer and Medina, Harris made the large mistake of ignoring New Hampshire and Iowa. There was a lack of leadership within her operation. Beyond that, the candidate was unable "to articulate a consistent rationale for her candidacy."

Especially for a relative newcomer, that sounded like a list of sins which would derail almost any White House campaign. But the paragraph we've posted above was just one small part of a full-length report, in which the Times reporters tried to determine whether the real reason for Harris' failure might lie somewhere else.

Anyone familiar with modern-day TimesThink will know where the reporters looked. Their report was an attempt to determine why Candidate Harris didn't make it. We'd also say it might help us see why the crackpot Candidate Trump has a good chance to win once again.

As we consider a possible Trump re-election, are we possibly dealing with "death by woke?" We'll examine that possibility all this week in our afternoon reports, in which we examine an endless series of valid concerns gone wild.

Tomorrow: A rare point of widespread agreement

THE "MISREPORTED PISA SCORES" FILE: Digest of last week's reports!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2019

Starting tomorrow, A Mississippi muddle: American teens outperformed from their counterparts from the vast majority of the world's nations on last year's Pisa reading test.

Indeed, if they were viewed as separate nations unto themselves, our nation's white and Asian-American kids would have rated as the highest-scoring nations in the world!

Those are remarkable facts. That said, you would have had no awareness of any such facts in reading the recent news reports on the new Pisa scores in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In accord with standard practice, the high-profile reports in those upper-end papers were conventionally gloomy. The reports were driven by factual claims which were grossly misleading and were sometimes flatly wrong.

So it has gone, for decades now, as our upper-end newspapers attempt to report, or pretend to report, on our nation's public schools and the children within them. Below, you see links to last week's reports from the "Standard Reporting on Standardized Tests" file:

Tuesday, December 10: You got to choose between gloomy and wrong! The Times and Post toyed with the PISA.

Wednesday, December 11: American kids were outscored by Macau! With other deceptions and trivia.

Thursday, December 12: (Some) American kids are the best in the world! The problem we all choose to ignore.

Friday, December 13: The Times ignores the nation's black kids! The problem we all disappear.

Tomorrow, we'll start a new set of reports on a related topic. Our reports will deal with striking score gains in the state of Mississippi, and with the peculiar reporting of same.

Here's the basic background:

Over the past ten years, Mississippi's fourth graders have recorded large score gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Naep), the widely-praised "gold standard" of domestic educational testing.

The upper-end press corps has long made a point of refusing to report the large nationwide score gains recorded on the Naep over the past fifty years. In this recent opinion column, the New York Times inched toward breaking the code of silence which has long held that such score gains must never be reported or discussed.

That said, the recent column in the Times displays the peculiar ways test scores get reported and analyzed in the American press. Our press corps works on second-grade level even when it tries to deal with such basic statistics.

Mississippi's Naep scores have gone up in the past ten years—even more than that column reports! What lies behind these large score gains?

It's a true Mississippi muddle. Our reports begin tomorrow.

The opinion column in question: Far be it from the New York Times to report score gains like these in an actual news report! The opinion column to which we refer appears beneath these headlines:

There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It
The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why.

The statewide score gains in question are real. Indeed, the score gains go far beyond what that column reports.

There's a lot to unpack in this puzzling muddle. We'll get started tomorrow.

A final observation: You'll see these topics discussed here and nowhere else. You'll see no one report or discuss the basic data from the Pisa which we presented last week.

The reason for this is blindingly obvious. No one actually cares about any of this—not Trump, not Rachel or Lawrence. When it comes to reporting on our public schools, it's fictitions all the way down.

It's preferred elite narrative all the way down. That isn't going to change. U.S. teens outscored the bulk of the world?

You aren't encouraged to know that.

The things you get told along the way!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2019

In this case, RE Carter Page: It's possible that your lizard brain won't like our topic today.

So it goes in this veil of tears! That said, we plan to continue with our rumination concerning the things you were told, along the way, concerning Carter Page.

We can't give you the full story concerning Carter Page. That said, it never seemed especially likely to us that he was part of some major intrigue. Beyond that, we often noted the way our favorite stars were spinning the facts about Page—for example, by playing brain-dead semantic games about his "meetings" with Russkie officials and about the "documents" he was said to have handed over to Russkie spies.

For various fairly obvious reasons, it never seemed real likely to us that Page was involved in a plot. That said, the report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz outlined the grotesque misbehavior in which some FBI employees engaged as they pursued surveillance on Page.

We humans! As everyone has always known, we need to learn to avoid jumping to tribally pleasing conclusions. Because our favorite TV stars kept assuring us that Page was a spy, it might be worth examining some of what we were told about Page along the way.

Let's start with this colloquy at Slate about the inspector general's report. In this exchange, Emily Bazelon and David Plotz describe what the FBI did:

BAZELON (12/13/19): The particular fact about the Carter Page FISA application that just floored me was that he had been giving information to the CIA for years, and they just left that out. This is the part that a government lawyer actually falsified in an email and could be criminally charged for. But just think about that. This guy who our government is surveilling without his knowledge, or really hardly any check on that power, it turns out was an intelligence asset for another agency, and the FBI just hid that information from the FISA court. That’s really bad. We should care about fixing those problems, and we should do something about the level of secrecy in these FISA proceedings.

PLOTZ: The fact that he was doing the CIA’s work was what allowed the FBI to gin up suspicion about him that justified the warrant. So it wasn’t just that they ignored it, it was that the actual work was the predicate for the warrant itself, which is outrageous. I’ve always assumed that the FBI has been playing fast and loose with FISA stuff, because even in legal proceedings where there two sides, the prosecutors are constantly engaged in chicanery. So when there’s only one side, and it’s secret and there’s no opponent? You knew that they were doing stuff that was shady.

Oof! Page had been a CIA informant for years (starting in 2008). According to the inspector general's report, the FBI was already aware of this fact at the time of their first application to the FISA court in October 2016 (see quote below).

The FBI already knew this, but they didn't include this information in their requests for surveillance of Page. Along the way, one Justice Department lawyer actually doctored a document in such a way that the FISA court was falsely told that Page wasn't a CIA source!

In the passage we've posted, Plotz says he isn't surprised by this conduct. He says that (some or many) prosecutors behave this way all the time.

This makes us think of the million times we saw former prosecutors tell us, on our favorite channels, that the FBI is just amazingly meticulous about the way they assemble their applications for a FISA warrant.

These former prosecutors have become TV stars in the years of The Chase. As time went along, we became increasingly unimpressed with their lock-them-up approach, in which they sift through our twenty million federal, state and local laws, looking for gimmicky ways to charge targeted persons with crimes.

In his report, Horowitz seems to say that FBI personnel did engage in deeply inappropriate conduct in their pursuit of Page. The last time we saw someone saying that, it was Devin Nunes!

How badly might the feds have behaved? At this point, we can't tell you that. For now, let's skip ahead to a front-page news report in the Washington Post.

The report appeared in April 2017. Starting with its opening paragraphs, here's part of what it said:

NAKASHIMA, BARRETT AND ENTOUS (4/11/17): The FBI obtained a secret court order in October 2016 to monitor the communications of a former adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said.

The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.

[...]

The judges who rule on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests oversee the nation’s most sensitive national security cases, and their warrants are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the world of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence gathering. Any FISA application has to be approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI.

Applications for FISA warrants, [James] Comey said, are often thicker than his wrists, and that thickness represents all the work Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents have to do to convince a judge that such surveillance is appropriate in an investigation.

The government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.

Inevitably, there was Comey—"Comey the God"—delivering a homespun version of the company line about how meticulous the gumshoes are in compiling their FISA applications.

The applications are "often thicker than his wrists," the establishment god was reported to have said. This same company line rang out from MSNBC on a regular basis.

Even back in the fall of 2016, the FBI had known about Page's background with the CIA. Despite this fact, the Post was now reporting exciting facts:

Back in October 2016, there had been "probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of Russia," unnamed officials had now said. Also, the FBI had believed at that time "that Page knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow," according to these unnamed officials.

Who knows? The FBI may even have believed such things back in 2016. After all, a person can be a CIA source and a Russkie spy at the same time.

That said, the FBI was aware of the fuller story involving Page and the CIA. But these exciting statements now appeared in the Post without any mention of same.

That night, on The One True Liberal Channel, it was "former Rhodes scholar gone wild." An unnamed cable news TV star went on and on, then on and on, about these new revelations.

On April 3, this unnamed star had already declared that Page had been "successfully recruited" by Russkie spies back in 2013. On this new occasion, she continued to mix her slippery "successfully recruited" formulation with fleeting references to the established fact that Page had been declared an "unwitting" target of those Russkies spies at that time.

Our favorite star seemed to be trying to keep her blend of insinuations and fact within the realm of what can be defended as "technical accuracy." Eventually though, interviewing one of the Post reporters, our favorite star told us this:

MADDOW (4/11/17): In that [2013] case, [Page] was described as essentially an unwitting target of those Russian spies. But what you guys are reporting tonight, I'll just quote here: “The government's application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out the basis for believing he was an agent of the Russian government and that he knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow.”

So that would say he was not someone being used unwittingly but, rather, he knew what he was doing and that he was deliberately acting as a Russian agent.

ENTOUS: Yes. So, as you know, I mean, the bar is relatively high for trying to get one of these FISA warrants. And it requires the investigators to–and the prosecutors to make a case of probable cause. And so, the officials we spoke to described some of the aspects of that case.

The unnamed star accurately quoted the Post's front-page report. The Post reporter then went into the song and dance about how meticulous those FISA applications are.

Viewers of this cable news TV show were frequently propagandized about Page's status as a fairly obvious Russkie spy. The major star to whom we've referred displayed a familiar human skill in the course of advancing these representations:

She was skilled at taking everything which made us doubt this conclusion and turning it into evidence that Page really was a Russkie spy! True believers have displayed this particular human skill down through the annals of time.

It never seemed very likely to us that Page was a Russkie spy. On cable, we liberals tended to get the more pleasing story.

Whatever the full story might turn out to be, Horowitz was a bit of a killjoy this week. On the brighter side, we won't likely be told about that on our favorite TV programs.

"Trust but verify," Reagan once said. We strongly agree with that famous old bromide, except for the part about "trust."

Killjoy speaks: From the inspector general's report (page viii):

INSPECTOR GENERAL'S REPORT: Based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first [FISA] application contained the following seven significant inaccuracies and omissions:

1. Omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an "operational contact" for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, and that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior cont acts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application...

Along the way, we liberals were told a more pleasing story—on cable news, then in the Post.

We were offered the fruits of true belief. This made our nightly cable viewing simpler and much more fun.

Why do people believe so many false claims?

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2019

What if they've heard nothing else? Why do so many people believe so many things which aren't true? We're thinking of people within our own liberal tribe, not just of the nuts Over There.

What explains so much false belief? Today, in The Atlantic's Book Briefing, Rosa Inocencio Smith offers this, early on:

SMITH (12/13/19): [W]hile modern technology may have fostered the spread of misinformation, the social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson write that our tendency as humans to convince ourselves that we’re right no matter what the evidence shows has deep psychological roots; indeed, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer writes, prioritizing beliefs over facts was part of human evolution.

"Prioritizing beliefs over facts was part of human evolution?" Why would an anthropologist be saying something like that?

Later tonight, we hope to check with the future anthropologists with whom we consult to see if they're familiar with Boyer's work. But in this "story" [sic] to which Smith links, Julie Beck offers a brief account of Boyer's thinking, as explained in his forthcoming book, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create.

You can check Beck's account of BoyerThink for yourself. For ourselves, the instinctive attraction to false belief doesn't seem especially hard to explain, at least on a theoretical "pop anthropology" basis.

(If our species evolved during the war of the all against all, agreement with the beliefs of the tribe, and the group membership thus conveyed, might have been a survival skill. But we'll check with our future experts.)

At any rate, we were struck by the highlighted claim in the passage below. We think the highlighted claim misunderstands the sweep of our current dilemma:

BECK (12/11/19): The sheer scale of the internet allows you to find evidence (if sometimes dubious evidence) for any claim you want to believe, and counterevidence against any claim you don’t want to have to believe. And because humans didn’t evolve to operate in such a large sea of people and information, Boyer says people can be fooled into thinking some ideas are more widespread than they really are.

"The sheer scale of the internet allows you to find evidence...for any claim you want to believe?" Even if we assume that's true, what if some false assertion is so ubiquitous that it never even occurs to a person that some alternative possibility could be true?

We're thinking of the ubiquity of the silly, propagandistic claim we discussed all this week:

"Nothing is working in our American public schools."

This has been a favorite claim of the right, the left and the mainstream for decades now. We'll take w wild guess—many people have heard this claim so many times, from such an array of sources, that it has never entered their heads that the claim might not be true, or might be highly misleading.

"The sheer scale of the internet" may allow you to find evidence for some claim you want to believe. But what if you've been propagandized in such a ubiquitous way that it never even enters your head that some possibility could be true?

We think today of the ubiquitous claim, "Nothing is working in our schools," and of the astounding way the Washington Post and the New York Times disappeared so many elementary facts in their "news reports" about last year's Pisa results.

We humans are widely propagandized, and that's even true of us brilliant liberals. Indeed, as our society continues to split into tribes, it seems to us that we see it happening pretty much every night of the week!

STANDARD REPORTS ABOUT STANDARDIZED TESTS: The Times erases the nation's black kids!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2019

The problem we all disappear: "If you don't have anything gloomy to say, don't say anything at all."

For decades, that's been the mandated rule of the road for our nation's "education reporters." When the New York Times reported last year's Pisa scores, this mandate still obtained.

Reading was the main focus of last year's Pisa tests, and results on that test weren't real gloomy at all. In the aggregate, American kids were outscored by their peers in four or five nations, but they had outperformed their peers in 57 others.

Let's say that again:

U.S. students outperformed 57 nations, were outperformed by maybe five! Especially given some of the challenges our nation's brutal racial history has bestowed on our public schools, that could almost be regarded as a (surprisingly) good performance.

That could almost be seen as a remarkably strong performance. But Homey doesn't play it that way!

Below, you see the way the New York Times' front-page report began. We include the newspaper's gloomy headline, which adapts a key talking-point:

GOLDSTEIN (12/3/19): ‘It Just Isn’t Working’: PISA Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.

And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency.

The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers.

Over all, American 15-year-olds who took the PISA test scored slightly above students from peer nations in reading but below the middle of the pack in math.

The disappointing results on the Pisa had recorded a stagnant performance by American students. The headline brandished the time-honored slogan which has misled and deceived the public for lo these many decades

"It just isn't working," the familiar headline familiarly said.

Please note! In that fourth paragraph, Goldstein included a remarkably underwhelming account of how well the U.S. teens had performed on the reading test. She also disappeared the results of the science test, on which American teens had also outperformed the vast majority of the world's nations.

So it goes in the New York Times when the remarkably incompetent newspaper pretends to report on the schools.

To what extent are reporters like Goldstein expected to tilt toward the gloomy? In her second paragraph, Goldstein sifted through a wide array of supporting information, landing on a disappointing fact about the nation's lowest performers.

Her subsequent remark about the National Assessment of Educational Progress—two-thirds of our kids aren't proficient readers!—is built upon a highly subjective assessment of "what the meaning of 'proficient' is." It also hides decades of major score gains on that high-profile domestic test—major score gains the New York Times has never so much as reported.

(More on that topic next week.)

A few days ago, we posted excerpts from Charles Mann's acclaimed 2005 book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Some of those excerpts described a part of Inka culture in which the mummies of past emperors were believed to speak to the present day through an array of female mediums.

The mediums who spoke for the mummies were classic "unreliable narrators." Setting the matter of gender aside, it's hard to say that our modern-day practice of relying on "education reporters" like Goldstein is any more ridiculous than this ancient Inka practice, which enabled the Spanish conquest.

Back then, mediums crazily spoke for mummies. Today, newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times perform a strikingly similar service:

They pretend to report the news and we pretend to believe it! Rather, they pretend to report the news and we pretend to care.

(Hat tip to the old joke about the economy of the Soviet Union. In the joke, a Soviet worker said this: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." AS future experts glumly report, the capacity to pretend was the most basic human skill.)

Even in the aggregate, American kids outscored the vast majority of the world in reading—but readers of the Post and the Times weren't permitted to know that. Meanwhile, Goldstein selected a detail from the statistical undercard which added to the gloom.

She was using one form of "disaggregation" provided by the National Center for Education Statistics—a form of disaggregation in which we can see how American kids performed at the higher and lower ends of the achievement scale.

This is one form of disaggregation, and what it records is important. But the New York Times and the Washington Post agreed to ignore another form of disaggregation, in which the student population is disaggregated according to ethnicity and race.

The Inkas at the New York Times love to posture, pose and preen on matters involving race. For whatever reason, they didn't choose to show you these disaggregated results from the Pisa reading test—results which help define the modern-day version of "the problem we all live with:"

Average scores, Reading Literacy
American students, 2018 Pisa
White students: 531
Black students: 448
Hispanic students: 481
Asian-American students: 556

Those average scores, and the giant achievement gaps they define, help define the modern-day version of "The Problem We All Live With." They also define the amazingly large problem the New York Times works to help readers ignore.

How large are the achievement gaps between those four different groups? Those achievement gaps are massive! To wit:

In the schools where "nothing is working," Asian-American kids outscored every "education system" in the world, even that of Singapore.

Within those same dysfunctional schools, America's white kids outscored every full-blown nation in the world, including tiny Estonia. We regard that as an astonishing fact, but it's an actual fact all the same—unless you read the Post and the Times, where such facts get disappeared.

Good lord! Our nation's white kids, such as they are, outscored every nation on earth on the Pisa reading test! They outscored tiny Estonia, this year's top-performing nation. They outscored Finland, the press corps darling to which many education reporters, Goldstein included, have taken free propaganda junkets in recent years.

They outscored the weary students of South Korea, who attend their regular schools by day and their workhouse academies by night. They even outscored Macau and Hong Kong, along with Japan and Taiwan!

We have no idea why our nation's ragtag collection of white kids are able to perform on such a high level. But that's the way those kids did score, unless you read the New York Times, where you're told, in a wonderfully pointless aside, that the kids of Peru improved their score last year.

Those disaggregated American scores contain some news which is amazingly good and some news which is horrifically bad. Just so you can see the shape of the world you won't be told about in the Times, here's a fuller list of selected scores. No high scores have been omitted:

Average scores, Reading Literacy, 2018 Pisa:

United States, Asian-American students: 556
Singapore: 549
United States, white students: 531
Macau: 525
Hong Kong: 524
Estonia: 523 (highest OECD nation)
Canada: 520
Finland: 520
(South) Korea: 514
United States, all students: 505
United Kingdom: 504
Japan: 504
Australia: 503
Taiwan: 503
Germany: 498
France: 493

All OECD nations: 487

Switzerland: 484
United States, Hispanic students: 481
Russia: 479
Italy: 476
Chile: 452
United States, black students: 448
Malta: 448
Serbia: 439

For all Pisa data, start here.

Those data describe the problem we're all living with. They also describe the problem the New York Times works extremely hard to disappear, hide and ignore.

"Nothing is working in our schools!" Over the past several decades, largely in deference to powerful interests advocating a type of "education reform," this has been the mandated cry of our Inka-reminiscent "education reporters" (and pundits) at newspapers like the Post and the Times.

That said, it's hard to claim that nothing is working when you see two of those four disaggregated scores. As to why our black kids produced that very low average score, that's the problem the New York Times refuses to report and discuss, except in the largely fantastical ways its mediums prefer.

Within the schools where nothing is working, Asian kids are performing at a higher level than any nation or education system in the world. White kids are performing at a higher level than any actual nation.

If we credit the Pisa results, black kids are performing at a level which puts them between Chile and Serbia. But you aren't allowed to know such things if you read the Post and the Times.

What explains the brutal achievement gaps defined by those disappeared data? There are many different possible explanations. Almost none of them will ever be discussed.

The truth is, there is no sign that anyone actually cares about the lives and the interests of the nation's black kids. Most specifically, we'll never see these questions discussed on our favorite TV programs.

Rachel will never report or discuss this problem; neither will Lawrence or Chris. The Times will reinforce this code of silence by refusing to report the most basic types of data from our high-profile standardized tests.

They refuse to report the gaps, but they also refuse to discuss the gains, a point we'll examine next week.

Nothing is working in our schools? In fact, two large groups of American students would, if viewed as separate nation, be the highest performing nations in the world on the Pisa reading test!

Something seems to be working for them, but you aren't encouraged to know that. So it goes as our fantasy-ridden nation, not unlike the Inka empire, moves toward external conquest.

Next week: The Times encounters the Naep

What the heck happened to Carter Page?

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2019

Information about the real world: As Kevin Drum noted three days ago, Carter Page likely played zero role within the Trump campaign.

As such, when Page was surveilled through the use of four FISA warrants, that surveillance wasn't being directed at an active part of the Trump campaign.

In Drum's formulation, "The FBI could have ordered a mob hit on Page and it would have had zero effect on Trump and his presidential campaign." If you want to think of that surveillance of Page as "spying," the FBI was likely spying on someone who was playing no role in the game.

Page was not a big deal. That said, the inspector general's damning report about the way those FISA warrants were obtained helps us learn about the way the real world really works.

Yesterday, Julian Sanchez summarized the way those FISA warrants were obtained in a report at Slate. The basic facts are ugly, as you can see by reviewing his piece. We were especially struck by this overview passage:

SANCHEZ (12/11/19): The heart of the Horowitz report deals with the Carter Page FISA application, and documents a progression that ought to sound familiar to anyone who’s studied the history of the intelligence community: An investigation begins with a kernel of reasonable suspicion, and facts are marshaled to support a theory. As it gathers momentum, those initial suspicions congeal into assumptions. New information that fits the original theory is added to pile of evidence—while a growing body of contradictory of information is overlooked. It’s possible to read the Horowitz report and think that the initial 90-day wiretap of Page was justified, but far harder to rationalize intrusive surveillance that carried on for nearly a year, through three separate renewals, even as evidence mounted that should have undermined the basis for the warrant.

In this formulation, we start with a kernel of a suspicion. Over time, the suspicion generates a theory, then turns into an assumption.

As the assumption is taken to heart, information is selected and discarded in order to sustain the prevailing theory. This is a description of so-called "motivated thinking." This is a description of the way true believers "think."

The inspector general's report lets us review our assumptions about certain figures in this long-running story. In one example, Christopher Steele seems a bit shakier than our tribe was led to believe. Then too, we seem to have learned that Carter Page, among other things, had apparently worked with the CIA in some way over the years:

SANCHEZ: [The initial FISA] application failed to mention Page’s relationship with the CIA (“another government agency” in the report), which had designated him an “operational contact,” and the fact that Page had provided the Agency with information about his previous contacts with Russian intelligence officers—contacts that were part of the basis for suspecting Page had been recruited to act as an “agent of a foreign power.”

Say what? Page "had provided the Agency with information about his previous contacts with Russian intelligence officers?" Sometimes the things you want to believe, and have perhaps been urged to believe, may turn out in ways you hadn't suspected.

For ourselves, we still don't understand the facts behind this unfortunate if inconsequential side trip, nor are we going to try to puzzle them out. That said, the inspector general's portrait of the way the FBI obtained those warrants reminds us that we humans are strongly inclined to cut corners, and play fast and loose with the truth, in almost all our activities.

We've been thinking back to the hundred ways Rachel Maddow tried to hang Page high during these exciting few years. We've tried to search back through the transcripts, but here is one example of her work, marinated in true belief:

MADDOW (2/1/18): FISA warrants have to be renewed every 90 days. In order to renew them, U.S. investigators, law enforcement—they have to show a judge that there has been continued production of useful intelligence from the existing warrant. They have to show that there's been continuing or even fresh indications that the target of the warrant is, in fact, acting as a knowing agent of a foreign power.

So that FISA warrant for Carter Page was initially granted in either the summer or the fall [of 2016]. It's hard for us to tell. We know that it was renewed multiple times. We think probably one of the times it was renewed was in January, right after Carter Page took his post-election trip to Moscow and Sean Spicer walked up to that podium and said Donald Trump definitely doesn't know him.

And we now know that in the spring of 2017, after the inauguration, once the Trump administration was sworn in, the FBI went back to the judge, went back to the FISA court judge again, with whatever evidence they had, that this warrant was continuing to be productive, there was reason to renew it again. And the judge okayed it. The judge signed off on that warrant in the spring. It was either the third time or the fourth time that a judge had looked at the evidence about Carter Page and signed off on continuing surveillance of him as a potential foreign agent.

On that occasion, Maddow viewers were being urged to believe that there had to be some very good reasons for that continuing surveillance. The inspector general's report tells a quite different tale.

On that occasion, Maddow went on to ridicule the notion that there could be anything wrong with those FISA warrants. In part, she ranted like this:

MADDOW (ironically): [Only] Clinton stooges would support a third or fourth renewal of a foreign agent surveillance warrant on the guy who's been on the FBI's counter intelligence radar since at least 2013 when he played a starring role as the enthusiastic idiot in a convicted Russian spy ring in New York who then later turned up multiple times in Moscow denouncing the United States, praising Vladimir Putin and trying to get Russian business deals for himself with Russian state-run companies, while meeting with Russian government officials.

Rachel was trying to hang the other high, as she frequently does.

For the record, Page never "turned up multiple times in Moscow denouncing the United States." But Maddow tried to get him locked up for years.

In our view, Maddow has an unbalanced desire to get the others locked up. In this case, it led her to relentlessly pimp for the obvious reliability of the FISA process.

The inspector general's report starts to remind us about the way human institutions actually tend to work. Dissembling and extremely bad judgment may exist wherever we humans go, even on cable news.

What was the full story with Page? We'll leave that to the historians. The actual story with the FISA process seems to differ from the reassuring story we were told.

So too with Comey and Mueller and Steele and all those in whom we were instructed to place our true belief. Viewers get propagandized on Fox, but we liberals have been getting propagandized on our own cable channels too.

STANDARD REPORTS ABOUT STANDARDIZED TESTS: American kids are the best in the world!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2019

The problem we choose to ignore: It would be hard to do!

It would be hard to overstate the amount of nonsense which appears when newspapers like the Post and the Times attempt to report, or pretend to report, on the state of our public schools.

Consider a bit more of what happened in last Tuesday's Washington Post. Results from the 2018 Pisa had just been released. In reading, American kids had outperformed their counterparts from such major "peer nations" as these:

Major nations the U.S. outperformed:
The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia; Japan, Taiwan; Australia

American kids had outperformed some very major nations! That said, they'd also outperformed their counterparts from a wide array of smaller boutique nations, including these:

Smaller nations the U.S. outperformed:
Denmark, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, many others

With statistical significance thrown into the mix, U.S. performance was indistinguishable from that of the Asian educational tiger South Korea. The American score was substantially higher than the average score for the 35 OECD nations.

American kids had outperformed the vast majority of the world's nations. But because the American kids had been outperformed by their counterparts in Macau and Estonia (combined population, less than 2 million), the Washington Post headlined, and led its news report, with this fantastical claim:

"Teenagers in the United States continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading..."

So it said in the Washington Post! This claim was reproduced in a banner headline which ran across the top of last Tuesday's page A3.

Truly, that was a remarkable claim, but the absurdity was just getting started. Roughly fifty percent of the Post's report (ten paragraphs out of twenty) were devoted to an absurdly speculative "explanation" for the American kids' embarrassing failure on the Pisa.

What was wrong with these teens today? Balingit and Van Dam, and their unnamed editor, introduced this ridiculous theme right in their fourth paragraph:

BALINGIT AND VAN DAM (12/3/19): [T]he exam has faced a chorus of skeptics who caution reading too deeply in to the results. Students are not penalized for performing poorly and never see their results, and students in the United States tend to be less motivated to perform well on it compared with teens in other countries, according to recent studies.

Roughly half the Post report was devoted to "mounting evidence that the gap in scores between countries reflects a gap in effort as much as it does a gap in achievement. By both measures," Balingit and Van Dam reported, "the United States lags behind."

Paragraphs 4-5 and 13-20 were devoted to this new speculation, a speculation the Post attributed to "economists." In support of this idea, the Post included a large graphic designed to show that U.S. kids respond more favorably to financial incentives—to being paid to do well on a test—than their counterparts in Shanghai.

This was all designed to explain why U.S. teens had lagged behind their peers in reading—on a reading test where U.S. teens had outperformed the substantial bulk of the world.

This is how crazy the discourse can get when newspapers like the Washington Post attempt or pretend to report on American schools. On the front page of last Tuesday's New York Times, the reporting on these Pisa results was little better.

Tomorrow, we'll return to that Times report, noting a few of its oddities. For today, let's discuss the very large canine which didn't bark in either of these scripted "news reports."

For our money, American kids did amazingly well in both reading and science on these latest Pisa tests. We discussed our reasons for saying that in yesterday's report.

In both the Post and the Times, reporters noted an undesirable fact, if only in passing. In the Post's formulation, the new results from last year's tests "show widening disparities between high- and low-performing students in the United States, adding to a growing body of evidence showing worsening inequity in public schools."

This undesirable fact was mentioned by both the Post and the Times. Neither paper attempted to say how much wider the disparity was—how much the disparity had grown since the 2015 Pisa.

Still and all, the papers were displaying a minor ability to "disaggregate" the Pisa results—to compare the average scores attained by different groups of American kids.

For whatever reason, neither newspaper managed to perform a different, highly familiar form of "disaggregation." Neither newspaper reported what the Pisa scores look like when American results are disaggregated by ethnicity and race.

Dear friends, would it surprise you if you were told that two large groups of American kids would, if viewed as nations unto themselves, actually be the highest scoring nations in the world? Especially given what you read in the Post and the Times, would such information surprise you?

Would it surprise you if you were shown something like that? Because that's what happens when you disaggregate American scores by ethnicity and race on the Pisa reading test.

Below, you see some extremely basic data. We're including two basic parts of the data which weren't permitted to bark:

Average scores, Reading Literacy, 2018 Pisa:

Singapore: 549
Estonia: 523 (highest OECD nation)
Canada: 520
Finland: 520
(South) Korea: 514
United States: 505
United Kingdom: 504
Japan: 504
Australia: 503
Taiwan: 503
Germany: 498
France: 493

All OECD nations: 487

United States, white students: 531
United States, Asian-American students: 556

For all Pisa data, start here. More information below.

Should we count Singapore as an actual nation? Technically, we probably should.

That said, no other nation in the world outperformed tiny Estonia on the Pisa reading test. But white kids in the United States outscored the brainiac Estonians—and Asian-American kids blew their Estonian counterparts away.

Does it surprise you to know that our nation's ragtag collection of white kids would, if viewed as a separate nation, be the highest-scoring nation in the OECD, perhaps in the entire world? Please understand:

These aren't white kids from private schools, or white kids from high-income families.

These are American white kids across the board, including kids in Appalachia and the Rust Belt whose families are devastated by Oxycontin. That average score even includes the fumbling efforts of white kids in Mississippi and Alabama, on whom we all know to look down.

Even including all those kids, American white kids, viewed as a group, would be the highest-scoring nation in the world! And then, along come our Asian-American kids! They blow everyone out of the water, even their peers in Singapore.

These Asian-American kids today! They massively outperformed the ballyhooed kids of South Korea. They even outperformed the kids of Finland, darlings of the American press corps for the bulk of this century.

On the Pisa reading test, our Asian-American 15-year-olds blew the whole world away! That said, let's return to our white kids for a moment—the kids whose lack of effort allegedly matches their pitiful lack of smarts:

We all can see what those basic data show once they've been un-disappeared. Our white kids outscored brainiac Finland. They outscored the Asian tigers Korea and Japan by substantially more.

If they were viewed as a separate nation, they'd be the highest scoring full-blown nation on the face of the earth! Meanwhile, the data from the Pisa science test follow this general pattern:

Average scores, Science Literacy, 2018 Pisa:

Singapore: 551
Estonia: 530 (highest OECD nation)
Japan: 529
Finland: 522
(South) Korea: 519
Canada: 518
Taiwan: 516
United Kingdom: 505
Germany: 503
Australia: 503
United States: 502
France: 493

All OECD nations: 489

United States, white students: 529
United States, Asian-American students: 551

In terms of international ranking, the United States did slightly less well in science than in reading. But even here, American white kids scored one point behind highest-performing nation Estonia, while matching Japan and outscoring Korea. Meanwhile, Asian-American kids matched Singapore and obliterated the rest of the world.

Readers of the Post and the Times aren't allowed to know such things. Instead, they're told that U.S. kids are lagging the world, possibly due to lack of effort along with a lack of smarts.

Presumably, somebody in these major newsrooms knows how to "disaggregate" test scores. Everyone has seen it done, and everyone has heard about our punishing achievement gaps. There's nothing "new" about any of this. They just don't choose to do it.

That said, two large groups of American kids are the highest-performing in the world! Each group outperforms the ballyhooed kids of Finland, kids our "press corps" has long loved.

They outperform the exhausted kids of South Korea, who go to regular schools all day, then attend their workhouse-like academies every night. At the Washington Post and the New York Times, you not only aren't permitted to know this. You are instead deliberately given a vastly different impression.

The data we're showing you are remarkable, but you aren't encouraged to see them. The reason is fairly clear:

Those data define the modern-day version of "the problem we all live with"—and the horrible folk at the Post and the Times quite simply aren't willing to go there.

Tomorrow: The problem we all disappear

Regarding Pisa data: For all Pisa data, start here. In each subject area, U.S. scores are disaggregated by ethnicity and race under "Achievement by Student Groups."

The NCES makes a point of providing these important data. The Washington Post and the New York Times simply don't want to discuss them.

Invasion of the mental capability snatchers!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2019

Science fiction, and the Inka, again: It's been quite a while since observations of cable news made us think of the science fiction film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The leading authority on the famous film describes the film as follows:

The film's storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of reproducing a duplicate replacement copy of each human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical characteristics, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion...

The slang expression "pod people" that arose in late 20th century American culture references the emotionless duplicates seen in the film. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

The pod people look like actual people, but they actually aren't. They're quasi-duplicates, "devoid of all human emotion."

In the last few days, we've thought of those famous pod people as we've watched our own liberal team performing on cable TV. In this case, the participants seem to be quasi-duplicates devoid of all capacity for human intelligence. Their inability to function in a rational way is revealed as they create conflations and confusions concerning questions of who may have meddled, intervened or interfered in the 2016 election.

These duplicates seem incapable of exercising the simplest kinds of human rationality. In particular, they seem to be incapable of grasping such basic facts as these:

Elementary facts which can no longer be grasped:
More than one country could meddle, intervene or interfere in some particular election.

One country could meddle, intervene or interfere in an election to a highly significant degree while another country meddled, intervened of interfered in a less extensive way.

Hacking emails could be one way to intervene in an election. But there could imaginably be other ways to meddle, interfere, intervene.

The question of what constitutes "meddling" is a subjective matter on which people might disagree.

It's especially jarring to see the duplicates playing tape in which people explicitly say that the Russians hacked the DNC emails even as the duplicates seem to think that something different is being said. At any rate, it's impossible to stage a sane discussion if people, or their duplicates, have lost the ability to display the simplest forms of reason or observe the simplest distinctions.

Regarding some possible duplicates:

Yesterday afternoon, was that Nicolle Wallace on our TV machine, or was that a duplicate incapable of basic rationality? This morning, was that Joe Scarborough or a replacement? How about Brian Williams, as seen on TV last night? As always, "his hair was perfect!"

They've made us think of the body snatchers, but also of the Inka.

Let's return to Charles Mann's description of the way the Inka empire fell to a small Spanish force led by Juan Pizarro in the 16th century. We're quoting from Mann's widely acclaimed 2005 book, 1491: New Revelations of The Americas Before Columbus.

This empire fell to a small Spanish force? How did that happen, and why? As with other "first contact" disasters, Mann describes the powerful role of epidemic disease in the fall of the Inka empire.

Smallpox enabled the Spanish conquest. Along the way, though, Mann sets the scene as he describes the empire's massive extent:

MANN (page 71): In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes in between.

This spectacularly competent empire was "bigger by far than any European state."

That said, it wasn't all sweetness and light in the empire's administrative behavior. In this passage, Mann describes types of behavior with obvious echoes today:

MANN (page 71): The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America—some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages—into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area's religions, economics and arts. Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient; they removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroughfares totaling 25,000 miles, and forced them to work with other hroups, using only Runa Sumi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects...So successful were the Inka at remolding their domain, according to the late John H. Rowe, an eminent archaeologist at the University of California at Berkeley, that Andean history "begins, not with the Wars of [South American] Independence or with the Spanish Conquest, but with the organizing genius of [empire founder] Pachakuti in the 15th century.

Forced removal of ethnic groups, with forced elimination of native languages? Similar practices occurred in the development of this very country. Similar practices are occurring in the world today.

This helps remind us of an important point—especially as judged by present-day standards, human behavior has been heartless and cruel all over the world, down through the annals of time. This isn't a terrible thing to remember when childish professors and hapless journalists are scolding the nation's second graders, and their parents, about the beliefs and behaviors of English settlers in New England in 1621.

Especially as judged by present-day norms, people have been heartless and cruel down through the annals of time. People have also exhibited crazy ideation. This brings us back to the question of how this powerful empire fell.

Mann stresses the role of one of the epidemics which arrived in the Americas with microbes brought by the first Europeans (and their pigs), devastating indigenous populations who lacked resistance to these European diseases.

Among the Inka, the epidemic helped create a war for power as the empire's elites took ill and died in great numbers. In describing the way this civil war unfolded, Mann describes the role of royal mummies in the empire's culture:

MANN (page 98): The ferocity of the civil war was exacerbated by the epidemic's impact on a peculiarly Andean institution: royal mummies. People in Andean societies viewed themselves as belonging to family lineages...Royal lineages, called panaqa, were special. Each new emperor was born in one panaqa but created a new one when he [ascended to power]. To the new panaqa belonged the Inka [the emperor] and his wives and children, along with his retainers and advisers. When the Inka died his panaqa mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro's companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, "seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive."

Crazy ideation has flourished wherever we humans have ventured. In a way which struck us as extremely ahistorical, Professor Silverman, an actual history professor, rolled his eyes at some of the religious ideation of English settlers in what is now New England in 1621. The childishness of these observations made his Thanksgiving Day column a natural for the New York Times.

The Europe of 1621 was possessed of crazy ideation (and barbaric conventional practices) as was the world of the Inka. As noted, crazy ideation has flourished wherever we humans have been.

Back to Mann! In this passage, he continues to describe this peculiar aspect of Inka ideation and conduct:

MANN (continuing directly): Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panaqa retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences and shrines, all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils, fingernail parings, and hair clippings, and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, "the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in the empire] were under the control of the dead." The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale which would have delighted the Medici...

"The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving courtiers or their descendants." So it went as smallpox devastated the Inka ruling class, precipitating a debilitating civil war which helped bring down the world's largest empire.

The mummies spoke through female mediums! We first compared this crackpot human culture to that of the mainstream pundit corps in 2006. The comparison has come to mind again in recent days we we've watched the established oracles of our own liberal tribe unsuccessfully attempting to function in the face of the massive disorder into which our own society has been thrown.

Their earlier conduct helped give us our Trump. In the past dew days, they've seemed a great deal like duplicates. This is where the corporate mouthpieces of our floundering tribe seem to stand today.

Sadly, it's all anthropology now. According to leading future experts who speak to us through nocturnal submissions the haters like to deride as mere dreams, this was pretty much the best our limited species could do.

We've checked with Cassandra; she's embarrassed for our tribe. In an obvious brush with greatness, the oracle of Delphi was there. Distraught, she refused to opine.

STANDARD REPORTS ABOUT STANDARDIZED TESTS: American kids outperformed by Macau!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2019

With other deceptions and points of major trivia: Last Tuesday morning, our analysts encountered a gloomy headline. It was bannered across the top of the Washington Post's page A3.

The headline filled our workers with despair. We heard them keening and wailing, then found them tearing their hair. Starting with that gloomy headline, this is what they'd read:

BALINGIT AND VAN DAM (12/3/19): U.S. teens behind global peers in reading, math, science

Teenagers in the United States continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science, according to results of an international exam that suggest U.S. schools are not doing enough to prepare young people for the competitive global economy.

That's what our analysts read in last Tuesday's Washington Post. Our teens continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science!

The Post was reporting the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment, known to its friends as the Pisa. Early on, the Post described the basics of this high-profile international program:

"The exam was first administered in 2000 to measure the performance of 15-year-olds in the 35 industrialized countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and has been administered every three years since. It has expanded beyond the 35 member countries. In 2018, 600,000 students from 79 countries took the exam."

There you have it! Kids from 79 nations took part—and U.S. kids took a dive.

Over the course of the past several decades, such gloomy assessments have virtually been mandated within the mainstream press.

In the past few decades, such assessments have been put to use in service to a type of "education reform" favored by billionaire donors. Major news orgs like the Post and the Times agreed to adopt a standard script when discussing our public schools:

Nothing has worked in our public schools, these obedient performers all said.

Last Tuesday morning's gloomy headline advanced that familiar script. Still, we decided to read the Post's report—and about a third of the way through the gloom-ridden piece, we found ourselves reading this:

BALINGIT AND VAN DAM: Reading and math scores for U.S. students have not changed significantly since the exam debuted, while there have been some improvements in science. That trend continued in 2018, when student scores across all three subjects were virtually unchanged from 2015.

Several countries lost ground, boosting the ranking of the United States, which ranked eighth in reading and 11th in science. Its math score—below the average for other countries in the OECD—put it at 30th in the world, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Say what? U.S. kids finished eighth in the world in reading? Is that what the Post now said?

As you can see, the writing in that passage was a bit unclear. Had U.S. kids finished eighth "in the world"—eighth out of the 79 countries who took the reading test? Or had they simply finished eighth out of the 35 OECD nations?

It sounded like they were eighth in the world, eighth out of 79! And sure enough! When we scanned the corresponding gloomy report in the New York Times, we were eventually permitted to read this:

GOLDSTEIN (12/3/19): The most recent PISA test was given in 2018 to 600,000 15-year-olds in 79 education systems around the world, and included both public and private school students...

Although math and science were also tested, about half of the questions were devoted to reading, the focus of the 2018 exam. Students were asked to determine when written evidence supported a particular claim and to distinguish between fact and opinion, among other tasks.

The top performers in reading were four provinces of China—Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Also outperforming the United States were Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland and Ireland. The United Kingdom, Japan and Australia performed similarly to the United States.

Ignore the part about those four provinces, which are famously unrepresentative of Chinese public education as a whole. When it comes to actual countries, or to near approximations of same, the U.S was only outscored on the Pisa reading test by this selection of international power-lifters, or so the Times now said:

Outperformed the U.S. on the reading test:
Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland and Ireland

According to the New York Times, that was the whole list! Those were the seven (7) "education systems" which outperformed U.S. teens on the Pisa reading test!

U.S. teens were outscored by those seven. Might we offer a few remarks about this list of education systems?

For better or worse, Hong Kong isn't an actual country. Neither of course is Macau—and its total population is less than 700,000.

(That's total population, not just kids.)

Estonia was the highest scoring OECD nation on the reading test. Its total population is roughly 1.3 million. That makes it smaller than Finland, a middle-class boutique nation which has permitted little immigration and boasts a total population of less than 6 million.

Taking nothing away from the performances of these nations and near-nations, are these supposed to be the "peer nations" with which the U.S. had struggled to compete? Can this list possibly explain that Post report, in which readers were told that U.S. teens "continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading?"

The gloomy headline in the Post said that U.S. teens performed behind their global peers in reading. Now, the Times was reporting that U.S. kids were indeed outperformed by the teens of Macau, but had actually matched the performance of their peers in such major nations as the United Kingdom and Japan.

Did American teens really lag behind their global peers in reading, science and math? That's what the Post headline said—and, on balance, we'd have to say that the headline was simply wrong.

As we noted yesterday, the New York Times also adopted a gloomy approach to the "stagnant performance" and "disappointing results" recorded by U.S. teens. That said, Dana Goldstein did manage to add this fourth paragraph to her gloomy opening framework, although she instantly disappeared one of the three Pisa tests:

GOLDSTEIN: Over all, American 15-year-olds who took the PISA test scored slightly above students from peer nations in reading but below the middle of the pack in math.

We're not quite sure who those "peer nations" are, but Goldstein at least reported that American kids had outscored them in reading.

That said, those same American 15-year-olds also "scored above students from peer nations" in science. Ridiculously, the Times couldn't find space to include that basic fact, even as it filled its lengthy report with oodles of silly speculations and pointless pieces of trivia.

How did U.S. teens actually do on these Pisa tests? As Goldstein noted in the Times, reading was the Pisa's principal focus last year. The National Center for Education Statistics offers these accurate bullet points about the U.S. performance:

NCES: Compared to the 76 other education systems in PISA 2018, the U.S. average reading literacy score was lower than the average in 8 education systems, higher than the average in 57 education systems, and not measurably different from the average in 11 education systems.

The U.S. average score (505) was higher than the OECD average score (487).

Compared to the 35 other OECD members, the U.S. average in reading literacy was lower than the average in 4 education systems, higher than in 21, and not measurably different than in 10.

At the Washington Post, that somehow meant that U.S. kids were lagging behind their global peers in reading. But let's not leave things there:

Ever so briefly, let's set "statistical significance" to the side. On this global reading test, U.S. teens did in fact outscore their peers in such major peer nations as the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Germany, Taiwan, France, Italy, Spain and Russia.

(For the full list of nations, click here.)

As you can see at that link, they also outscored their peers in such smaller European nations as Denmark, Norway, Belgium Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland. From this, the Washington Post somehow derived the idea that they "continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading."

With statistical significance thrown in, U.S. teens were outperfomed by virtually no one, not even Korea—until you read the gloomy headline (and report) in the Washington Post, with the gloomy framework of the New York Times lagging not far behind.

With regard to the Times, understand this:

As early as paragraph 4 of its gloomy report about the "stagnant/disappointing" results, the Times had disappeared the Pisa science test altogether. That's too bad, because U.S. kids outperformed their peers on that test as well, by a slightly lesser margin than on the reading test:

NCES: Compared to the 77 other education systems in PISA 2018, the U.S. average science literacy score was lower than the average in 11 education systems, higher than the average in 55 education systems, and not measurably different from the average in 11 education systems.

The U.S. average score (502) was higher than the OECD average score (489).

Compared to the 36 other OECD members, the U.S. average in science literacy was lower than the average in 6 education systems, higher than in 19, and not measurably different than in 11.

In our view, U.S. teens did amazingly well, in the aggregate, in reading and science on the 2018 Pisa. We say that for these reasons:

As part of our brutal racial history, the United States spent several centuries attempting to eliminate literacy from one major part of its population. We continue to suffer from the effects of that profoundly unfortunate behavior.

Also, the United States has experienced a large amount of immigration, authorized and unauthorized, involving good, deserving kids from low-income, low-literacy backgrounds. This does in fact produce a challenge within our public schools.

To their credit, most nations didn't spend centuries trying to eliminate literacy from large chunks of their populations. Also, some countries (Finland) allow very little immigration, while other countries (Canada) mainly allow immigration from high-education Asian populations, whose kids actually outperform native-born Canadian kids on international tests.

Due to our brutal racial history; due to our immigration realities; the public schools of our large continental nation face certain types of challenges not found everywhere else. With that in mind, it strikes us as amazing to think that U.S. teens, in the aggregate, perform as well as they do on Pisa reading and science tests, even with journalists constantly standing in line to misreport their performance.

U.S. teens have performed less well on the rather unusual Pisa math test. As we noted yesterday, they have performed much better on the more conventional Timss math tests, with the inevitable result that their performance on those tests tend to be unreported, even aggressively disappeared.

Might we speak frankly for once? People who read the Post and the Times last week were misled and misinformed regarding these high-profile tests. We'd say the Times report was highly misleading while the Post was simply wrong.

As is required by Press Corp Law, the papers pimped a lot of gloom concerning these high-profile tests. The Post's banner headline was just flatly wrong. The Times report wasn't a whole lot better.

Here's a guess. We'll guess that most people would be surprised to learn how well U.S. students actually did on the reading and science tests. Tomorrow, we'll show you basic data from those tests which are many times more surprising.

These basic data will help us see where our society's moral burden actually lies. But these basic data will also rock your world, and for that reason the Washington Post and the New York Times didn't, and won't, share them with you.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Our upper-end press corps frequently generates cult-like scams.

Tomorrow's data are shocking, even to us. But they tell us the actual shape of the world, and so these data are being withheld from the public's view.

Tomorrow: Would it surprise you if you were told...

For full NCES reporting: The NCES produces mountains of highly useful data about domestic and international testing programs. These data are then aggressively ignored by our slumbering "education reporters."

You can lead the reporters to the links, but you can't make them click!

We've linked you to different parts of the NCES report on the 2018 Pisa. For access to all parts of the NCES reporting, you should just click here.

Maddow and Williams and MoJoe oh my!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2019

The Inka empire and us: How extensive, how extreme, is human mental dysfunction?

Human dysfunction runs quite deep, especially at times like these. Consider the first fourteen minutes of last night's Maddow Show.

Before she got to the impending impeachment of Donald J. Trump; before she discussed the inspector's general's report about the Russia probe; before she discussed the new report which said that the public has been systematically deceived about the war in Afghanistan—

Before Maddow touched on any such matters, she devoted her first fourteen minutes to the topic she loves above all others. She devoted her first fourteen minutes to questions concerning the impending sentencing hearings for Rick Gates and Michel Flynn—hearings to help determine the length of their possible prison sentences.

Under the circumstances, this topic was amazingly tangential—but so what? Maddow began her program with this topic, and she was still discussing this topic as of 9:14. To watch the closing chunk of this absurdly tangential fourteen minutes of bafflegab, you can just click here.

(Needless to say, she will never discuss the public school issues we'll be discussing this week and next. Maddow never stoops to the level of discussing the lives and interests of the nation's low-income kids. In fairness, neither does anyone else on her corporate channel.)

We've told you this many times. As others loved the smell of napalm in the morning, Maddow loves to think about people from the other tribe being frogmarched off to jail.

She is so in love with this topic that we're inclined to regard it as a borderline sickness. Last night, this impulse took her to a place which seemed a bit amazing even to us.

That said, the craziness was all over cable last night and this morning. Brian Williams, Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough? At this point, their devotion to conflation and confusion about allegations of Ukrainian "meddling" have reached the point of total intellectual breakdown. This is especially true in the case of Williams, though Scarborough was shouting and screaming this morning from 5:59:30 on.

In our view, it's unlikely that this unfolding tribal breakdown will ever turn out well. It makes us think of Charles Mann's portrait of the Inka empire at the point of first contact with Europe.

What the heck was the Inka empire? We'll let the leading authority on the subject give you a quick overview:

The Inca Empire...was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. Its political and administrative structure is considered by most scholars to have been the most developed in the Americas before Columbus' arrival. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the Peruvian highlands sometime in the early 13th century. Its last stronghold was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.

This powerful empire fell to the Spanish, but how did that happen, and why? As with other "first contact" disasters, Mann describes the powerful role of epidemic disease in the fall of this empire, "bigger by far than any European state" at that time.

Beyond that, though, there lies a story of human cruelty, and of crazy ideation.

Pompous professors like to scold the electorate about those idiot Pilgrim settlers with their crazy ideas about being God's chosen people. In this small way, these spectacularly pompous professors work to re-elect Trump.

That said, we humans have always had crazy ideas. And especially as judged by present-day standards, we humans have always been immoral and cruel.

Around the era of first encounter, this was true of humans in Europe, and of humans in the Americas. We'll excerpt Mann's portrait of the Inka tomorrow, but we are currently watching two political tribes break down as our own failing society stages a very large fight.

Williams was out of his mind last night; Maddow spent a large chunk of her program on an amazingly tangential matter. To her credit, she didn't play the audiotape in which Governor Bentley tells his girl friend that he loves touching her body.

This is the way societies come to an end. Tomorrow, a walk with the Inka.

STANDARD REPORTS ABOUT STANDARDIZED TESTS: You get to choose between gloomy and wrong!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2019

Times, Post toy with the PISA: Last Monday, the latest international test scores were released.

The next day, the New York Times and the Washington Post presented standardized news reports about the way American kids had performed on the high-profile standardized tests.

In the Times, as if by law, the headline—and the report itself—offered a highly familiar, standardized form of gloom and despair.

Dana Goldstein's report appeared on the Times' front page. Hard-copy headline included, her report started like this:

GOLDSTEIN (12/3/19): School Reforms Fail to Lift U.S. On Global Test

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.

And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency.

The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers.

If we might briefly borrow from Joyce, gloom was general all over Goldstein's report. As has long been required by law!

According to Goldstein's front-page report, school reforms had failed to lift American students. Also, the performance of American teens has been stagnant since 2000.

The achievement gap between high and low performers is widening. And not only that! These disappointing new results follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep), which recently showed that two-thirds of American children are not proficient readers.

For the record, each of those statements can be defended as "technically accurate." We'd call the overall package grossly misleading, but the individual claims can be defended, sometimes just barely, as being technically accurate.

Can the same be said for the corresponding report in the Washington Post? On balance, we'd have to say no:

BALINGIT AND VAN DAM (12/3/19): U.S. teens behind global peers in reading, math, science

Teenagers in the United States continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science, according to results of an international exam that suggest U.S. schools are not doing enough to prepare young people for the competitive global economy.

The results of the Program for International Student Assessment—widely known as PISA—were released Tuesday and show widening disparities between high- and low-performing students in the United States, adding to a growing body of evidence showing worsening inequity in public schools.

The exam was first administered in 2000 to measure the performance of 15-year-olds in the 35 industrialized countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and has been administered every three years since. It has expanded beyond the 35 member countries. In 2018, 600,000 students from 79 countries took the exam.

Was the basic claim there true? Is it true that teenagers in the United States continue to lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science, according to the Pisa results?

Is it true, as the headline announced, that U.S. teens are behind their global peers in reading, math and science?

On balance, we'd have to say no. In our view, those statements are so absurdly misleading that, on balance, it makes most sense to regard them as simply false.

That said, let's be fair!

In fairness to the three journalists who prepared these gloomy, misleading and false reports, they were skillfully working from well-established upper-end journalistic script. Over the past decade or so, it has been a virtual requirement—all reporting about American schools must push one basic idea:

Nothing has worked in our public schools.

This standard script has shaped education reporting over the past several decades. For the most part, this gloomy story-line was peddled in support of the very type of "education reform" which has itself now failed to work, according to the gloomy headline on the front page of last Tuesday's Times.

If we might once again borrow from Joyce, this script has been general all over our flailing, benighted nation's attempts at education reporting. Consider:

We've been told that "nothing has worked" even as math and reading scores on the Naep rose and rose and rose, by what seem to be large amounts.

We've been told that "nothing has worked" even as American kids scored surprisingly well in reading and science on the international stage, as they did, once again, on the Pisa scores which were released last week.

Did American teens really "lag behind their peers in East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science" in the Pisa data which were released last week?

On balance, we'd say that claim is just wrong. And when you "disaggregate" American scores by ethnicity and race, you're confronted with results which fly in the face of conventional public understanding—results the Post and the Times omitted from their carefully culled, misleading and false reports.

Even in the aggregate, American teens scored surprisingly well in reading and science on the Pisa. As always, they scored less well on the Pisa'a somewhat unusual math test, but as everyone knows except newspaper readers, American kids score substantially better in math on the other international standardized test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (the Timss), which takes a more traditional approach.

Reading the Times and the Post last week, American citizens got to choose between gloomy, misleading and false. Points of truly amazing trivia were thrown in for good measure, producing the standardized brew of gloom and despair about the state of American schools.

Over the next few days, we're going to give you a fuller picture of what those Pisa scores seem to show. Would it surprise you to learn that two large segments of the American student population would, if viewed as separate nations, be the two highest-scoring nations in the world in both reading and science?

We know, we know—that can't be true! We all know that isn't possible. Everyone knows that can't be true because we all know that nothing has worked!

More accurately, very little has worked at the Times and the Post over the course of the decades in question. For most of those newspapers' education reporters, the only discernible skill involves recitation of standardized script, a product which has been served to the public down through these many dumb years.

Tomorrow: Where we stood among all those nations

Thursday: Now, let's disaggregate!

STARTING TOMORROW: Standard reporting on standardized testing!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2019

Fictitions all the way down: Last week, the latest international test results were released by the Program for International Student Assessment, which is known to its friends as the PISA.

The PISA is administered every three years to 15-year-old students in roughly six dozen nations. These new results come from the 2018 testing.

Here's the great thing about all such standardized testing. You know, in advance, what you'll be told in newspapers like the Post and the Times. It doesn't matter what actually happens. The reporting is preordained.

The gloomy headlines you may have seen were required by Hard Insider Upper End Mainstream Press Corps Law. In the process, some very basic information was withheld from public view.

In the area of standardized testing, there are certain basic things which, by law, you must be told. There are other extremely basic facts you aren't encouraged to think about and aren't even permitted to know.

At the Washington Post and the New York Times, it was standard reporting on standardized testing! And yes—

This is the world we all live in. We can choose to believe it or not.