Public school watch: What the new study is said to have said!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2016

Familiar script, possible problems:
The web site of The Atlantic maintains an education section.

In this recent post at that site, Melinda Anderson discusses a familiar literary genre—the book or film about the "savior teacher" in the urban school.

In its modern form, this genre stretches back at least to the early 1960s. In the 1955 film, Blackboard Jungle, Glenn Ford was cast in the role of the hero teacher, but his unruly students were mostly white. In the genre's more common modern form, the hero teacher is supposed to work his or her magic with a group of black kids.

Anderson's review of the history of this unhelpful genre is rather sketchy. That said, her account of the problems with this genre is basically right on point.

For the most part, Anderson avoids noting that the savior teacher is typically white. That said, she sagely quotes a Miami teacher saying this about these inspiring tales, in which the savior teacher has little experience but spills with good intentions:

“In real life, that’s not a recipe for great teaching."

Later, Anderson joins an academic in noting the racial context which often obtains with the inspiring hero myth:
ANDERSON (4/4/16): While the mythology surrounding the teaching profession is strong and pervasive, most striking may be the messages that are amplified about white teachers in predominately non-white schools—and the qualities that are necessary to educate children in urban school districts.

This breed of books and films “hold up...white people as exceptionally brave or exceptionally self-sacrificing or just exceptional and heroic for doing the same work educators have done for years without fanfare,” said [Loyola University's Camika] Royal, whose work with preservice teachers brings this sharply into focus. “I debunk this idea with my students before we begin field experience in Baltimore City schools each semester,” she said, stressing that “white saviors aren't bringing light and hope. The hope is already in our students and in our schools and communities. Our job is to cultivate it, to bring out what already exists.”
In our view, Professor Royal is getting it right. The savior teacher myth is generally unhelpful. When the savior teacher is white, an additional unhelpful element is thrown into the mix.

Especially in low-income settings, there are no perfect public school teachers; there are also no perfect groups of teachers. That said, there are also very few savior teachers, although Hollywood and the publishing business have frequently said different.

Anderson's assessment strikes us as correct. The story of the morally pure savior teacher is a largely unhelpful tale. This is especially true when the story is peddled by individuals like Michelle Rhee, or by groups like Teach For America, who are bearing bogus statistical claims.

Having said that, let us also say this:

In our view, another familiar figure tends to be unhelpful in the realm of low-income education. We refer to the achingly pure but inexperienced "savior journalist."

Based on her latest report for The Atlantic, an unkind person could throw Emily DeRuy into that mix. Even as Anderson notes the problem with the tale of the savior teacher, her colleague DeRuy may be displaying the problems which often attend the work of the savior reporter.

In her report, DeRuy writes about a new study by some Johns Hopkins professors. The professors have found an extremely familiar problem in their study of some urban high school teachers. Headlines included, DeRuy summarizes their findings like this:
DERUY (4/1/16): White Teachers Expect Less Than Black Teachers From Black Students/
A new study suggests that low expectations from some teachers might engender low performance from students.

In yet another sign that the lack of teacher diversity is a pressing issue, a new study suggests that white teachers expect less academic success from black students than black teachers do from the same students.

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University, found that when a white teacher and a black teacher consider the same black student, the white teacher is 30 percent less likely to think the student will graduate from a four-year college. White teachers, the researchers also found, are nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students will graduate from high school.

“One of [the teachers] has to be wrong,”
Nicholas Papageorge, a co-author and economist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement.
From there, DeRuy proceeds to a strikingly selective account of the problems affecting the academic achievement of the nation's black students.

We'll review that part of DeRuy's report on Friday. For today, let's quickly scan her account of this study, which seems to have found a very familiar problem, with a slightly villainized air.

(For yesterday's post on this topic, click here.)

Uh-oh! According to DeRuy, the new study has found a very familiar problem. It has found that "white teachers expect less academic success from black students than black teachers do."

Indeed, the gap in expectations seems to be rather large. According to the study, white teachers "are nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students will graduate from high school," DeRuy says.

“One of the teachers has to be wrong,” one of the co-authors (somewhat misleadingly) says.

Right at the start of her report, DeRuy draws the familiar conclusion. The study provides "yet another sign that the lack of teacher diversity is a pressing issue," she writes.

DeRuy is writing from script, and also from good motives. But she's an inexperienced education reporter, and this lack of experience is often unhelpful in savior reporters, as in savior teachers like the widely-loathed Rhee.

Uh-oh! To a slightly more experienced eye, possible problems seem to appear all over DeRuy's brief account:

That co-author's enigmatic statement is perhaps a bit misleading, but DeRuy didn't seem to notice.

The statistic we cited may be a bit misleading too, a point we'll review tomorrow. DeRuy didn't notice that either. Nor did she tell you which group of teachers apparently offered the most pessimistic predictions about the students under review.

An unkind person might say that DeRuy writes like an inexperienced savior reporter. That said, we the liberals love such familiar work.

Kevin Drum even swallowed it whole in this puzzling post. Our questions, as the analysts squeal:

Where have they taken the real Kevin Drum? And when are they bringing him back?

Tomorrow: A misleading quotation, the real statistics, and the obvious question not asked.

Also, the harshest predictions of all! Savior reporters, like savior teachers, may tend to blow past such facts.

26 comments:

  1. Kevin Drum doesn't understand statistics very well. That is a liability for someone who considers himself a wonk.

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    1. @ 11:11 tragically uses no facts, much less statistics, to back up his/her point. That is an asset for someone who parrots this blog.

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    2. You would have to spend time in the comments section on Drum's blog. He routinely gets things wrong about interpreting and critiquing methods in research studies. He has some entrenched ideas about sample sizes, for example, that ignore the literature on sampling. His readers point these things out to him but he stubbornly refuses to change his opinions and that makes him kind of an idiot about certain kinds of research. I would trust him on polling and survey research but not on experimental studies.

      This blog never talks about that stuff -- just testing. There is a fair amount of crossover of people who read this blog and also read and comment at Drum's site.

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    3. According to an often cited rough rule of thumb you are at least one academic year behind in addressing the comment to which you responded.

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    4. Drum doesn't understand the relationships between variability, power, effect size and sample size. He doesn't understand that some studies with small n's (small sample sizes) involve repeated measurement and thus many observations per subject. He doesn't understand that when a strong effect exists, it may not require a large sample to demonstrate that effect. He doesn't know that variability is larger in small samples and that inferential parametric statistics compare effects against that variability, so that when a statistically significant difference exists with small samples, it suggests a stronger effect not an anomalous result. He thinks that only studies with hundreds or thousands of subjects are valid, because that would be true in polling or surveys. He doesn't know where the data comes from in experimental studies and applies the same rules he learned for survey research to experiments, condemning them all because of insufficient sample size. That makes him a doofus. When people try to explain to him, he doesn't listen and doesn't follow up to educate himself about this. Yet he continues to mock research that doesn't meet his personal criterion for sample size -- even though it has been published in peer reviewed journals that surely would have caught the problem is that were really a criticism. That makes him a double-doofus.

      He is a smart guy within his area of expertise but he has no respect for other fields where he doesn't know as much. I hate it that one of those fields is psychology. He could benefit by reading Keith Stanovich's excellent book "How to Think Straight About Psychology."

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    5. Psychology is a doofus discipline. I am sure with proper application of Somerbian technique, we could demonstrate "How to Think Straight About Psychology" is as worthy of Attorney General actions for fraud and scam as any "Einstein Made Easy" book.

      That said, you have cited no examples proving your accusations about Drum to be valid. We prefer Somerby's excellent "straight thinking" analyst's explanation.
      Someone has taken the real Drum!

      Free Drum! Free Drum!

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    6. Go to Drum's blog and google chocolate chip cookies. You'll find a great example.

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    7. Today Drum tries to discuss why studies with null findings are rarely published. First he confuses "negative results" with "null findings". Then he suggests editors want strong findings because they are exciting. He never mentions that null findings are not published because they are inherently ambiguous. The purpose of an experiment is to demonstrate causality. With a null finding there are alternative explanations for the results. It could be because there is no effect (a negative result) or it could be because the effect exists but the study was too poorly done to get the result. Since you cannot know which is true, the study is worthless, a waste of journal space.

      This is basic. It is taught in every introductory inferential statistics and methods course. Drum clearly doesn't understand or he wouldn't have written what he did.

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  2. "Where have they taken the real Kevin Drum? And when are they bringing him back?"

    Look who's talking.

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    1. Wish they would take you instead.

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    2. What is with these people who take every opportunity - no matter how small - to take potshots at Bob Somerby?

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    3. They are the one and only true Somerby fans...which they demonstrate by mimickery.

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  3. Analyzing percents of percents is not good communication. Drum wrote: the baseline expectation of dropping out was 31 percent for black students, a change of 12 percentage points represents a whopping 39 percent increase. Likewise, the baseline expectation of a college degree was 37 percent for black students, so a change of 9 percentage points represents 24 percent decrease.

    Many people will have to read this more than once to understand what Drum is saying. Those who do understand his point know that a percent is larger if a figure is compared to a smaller base, and will say, "So what?"

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    1. It also inflates the extent of the difference and thus is propagandistic when the narrative is to show that white teachers underestimate the potential of black students. It is a biased presentation.

      I don't want to waste time looking at the original article to see whether they ever relate the expectations back to actual performance at any point.

      Years about Robert Rosenthal did some studies proposing a "Pygmalion Effect" in which teacher expectations resulted in biased grading. This was mostly in lower grades in which subjective teacher evaluations were the basis for grading. There have since been numerous critiques of that work but the word may not have filtered down to journalists. Equating expectations with bias in grading is now inappropriate, without empirical evidence.

      With all the focus on the struggles of minority kids in substandard schools, the existence of a real gap in test scores, why would lower expectations about high school and college graduation reflect racism and not greater familiarity with education statistics (or less unrealistic hopes for different outcomes)? One benefit of using more objective measures of student performance is that teacher expectations have less impact on achievement. Because most students want to see their own students succeed (at the very least because it validates their ability as a teacher), it seeks unlikely individual teachers would have lower expectations of individual students in their classes. So, the general estimates need to be related to specific interactions with kids, too.

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    2. Typo: "most students want to see" should be "most teachers want to see their own students succeed..."

      Sorry

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    3. Correcting "teacher" for "student" does not compensate for the complete lack of empirical evidence justifying the use of "most."

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    4. You think it is controversial that teachers want their students to succeed? Have you missed the whole testing movement whereby teachers are evaluated, hired and fired based on the test scores of their students?

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    5. Nothing in the comment to which you responded indicates what its author thinks. Which is consistent with the amount of empirical evidence associated with your use of the word "more."

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  4. There's always a problem, when a study looks at one thing and assumes that that thing studied measures some other item, which is the item of actual interest. And, frequently, that assumption isn't even explicitly stated.

    In this case, the item of interest is how efectively a teacher does her/his day in day out teaching chores. If a teacher thinks a higher of black students will graduate, does that mean that this teacher does a better job of teaching black students? Maybe, but that needs to be proved, not just assumed.

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  5. Assuming savior teachers existed, if you really wanted to get enough of them to make a difference you would pay them a decent salary, not beat teacher pay down to a low level and expect them to perform impossible tasks or get fired.

    The idea that school personnel - administrators and teachers - are responsible for the poor performance in some areas has never been backed by any evidence. To go further and think that expectations are critical is adding further absurdity.

    The problem is societal - kids spend only a small fraction of their time in school and it is obvious from many lines of evidence that out-of-school influences are dominant.

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    1. We pay only enough to acquire Blame Dodgers and Buck Passers? And of course they are abnormal as well. It is ovbious normal kids are dominated by out of school influences and thus would not want to become teachers.

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  6. Kevin Drum doesn't discuss relativity theory, so I assume he doesn't understand that, either. Just remember, kids, if one observer says two events are simultaneous, a second observer, moving relative to the first, will say, no, they are not simultaneous.

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    1. He did spend a day discussing it.

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