Debunking miracle schools

Diane Ravitch addresses the phenomenon of miracle schools succinctly:

The subtext [of the concept of 'miracle schools'] is that poverty and resources are not actually problems for urban schools; if they could just test more often and fire more teachers, the corporate reformers imply, then test scores would soar. This analysis suggests that schools enrolling the neediest students do not need more resources, and it rationalizes the current trend of draconian budget cuts for public education.

Apparently there is a blog evaluating the claims of miracle schools and finding that really they aren't.

Americans like the idea of "miracle schools" for the same reason that we like movies about the underdog baseball team winning or the guy in the mail room running the company. Probably not unrelated is how appealing Americans find the concept of achievement without hard work. In reality, resources matter. Giving too much credence to the ideas of miracle schools because we like the narrative could end up depriving >99% of disadvantaged children of the chance to learn and advance, just because we like the narrative of the <1% who succeed despite the bad odds. And it's way cheaper in the short run, even if more expensive in the long run.

Turning the tables on survey research

Just got off the phone with the Gallup pollster. I am one of their ~1000 person sample on their current health survey. When they asked my profession, I said that I was a survey researcher with health topics, and we both laughed. The coincidence was uncanny.

They ask important questions like approval of the president towards the beginning, along with the 1 question health assessment. They asked if I felt like I was treated with respect at work yesterday, a couple of other working conditions questions, income, and hours, personal stock market investment, as well as pessimism/optimism about economic growth, stock market, personal investment, employment, inflation. Also asked contextual questions such as satisfaction with neighborhood quality, safety, commute time to work.

The questions were of course cursory, such as giving only 2 or 3 option answers (satisfied or not, sometimes a neutral option). No questions had branching options, so every question was asked to every respondent, so only missing data should be due to people hanging up in the middle. The stock market investment quantity was phrased on a logarithmic scale, so above or below 10k, and then presumably other questions.

A couple of the questions were surprisingly badly worded, such as this double-barreled question, "Are you satisfied with the price and availability of fresh fruits and vegetables in your neighborhood?" Lots of availability but high prices here in Dupont Circle.

Short questions require respondents to define the categories themselves. For instance, they asked how many days out of the last 7 days have I exercised. I don't consider walking to be exercise, even walking for 5 miles. I haven't lifted weights or swam in the past week, so I said that I haven't exercised at all. In retrospect, probably it would have been more accurate to say a few days since I have walked more than 5 miles a few times this week.

Two questions I would have been interested in is whether people have a pet, since that goes with the health theme --- people with pets may have better health situation, and everyone likes to hear about pets. Another question is whether single people have a steady romantic relationship since "single" is a big and diverse category, and having a romantic partner could affect health and health outcomes. Of course I would have also liked to know whether people had sex recently, and whether they have safe sex, but I know that Gallup wouldn't do that.

Altogether, it was a 14 minute survey, and they are gathering a dataset that could furnish many papers on the connection between working conditions, attitudes towards the broader economy, political attitudes, and both mental and physical health. I wonder whether they will use the data for that purpose, or if they will just do the univariate and basic bivariate summaries. For sure, I'd appreciate the chance to analyze the data, if I could ever find the time.

The Chicago Tribune is unprepared for college

The Chicago Tribune published today an article with a plausible headline --- public high school students are unprepared for college --- but their logic is suspect. A state law required public universities to publish the average freshman year GPAs for students from each high school, and the Tribune has published their interpretation of the data. For each university, the Tribune plotted the high school grade point averages (GPAs) of incoming students versus their average GPA in colleges. They conclude that if students have a lower GPA in freshman year of college than high school, that implies that students were unprepared.

It seems obvious to me that college GPAs are lower than high school GPAs. About 50% of Harvard students were ranked 1 or 2 in their high school graduating class, and probably over 80% had a GPA of 4.0, and yet college GPAs are way lower. Further, college GPAs come from a wide variety of courses, so they're even harder to interpret than high school GPAs. Engineering students have lower GPAs than humanities majors, so a really good high school that sends most of its students to major in engineering might look worse than a mediocre high school that sends most of its students to major in humanities. If college GPAs weren't lower than high school GPA, I would think that the students weren't challenging themselves enough. Finally, high schools with disadvantaged students can be expected to have lower college GPAs not because the students are poorly prepared by their high schools but because the students were disadvantaged.


The report itself is more useful, and it provides a good comparison of the students from each high school that tend to attend each school. Not a comparison of the high schools themselves, of course: enormously confounded by the which students from each school tend to attend the state universities. It does break down GPA by subject. A high school that sends its best students to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will look like a better high school who sends its best students out of state. Still interesting.

The Tribune's assumption that having a lower GPA in freshman year of college than high school implies that students weren't prepared conflates many issues in an illusion that a few numbers can summarize a high school without any statistical assistance. Is this a reminder that a weak attempt at evidence-based decision-making is worse than none at all?

College students in sex work

It's not new for college students to engage in allied sex work fields: in the late 1960s or early 70s, my father had a student who was a Harvard student working as a stripper. I wonder if the economy has made this work more common or has increased attention.

This article seems to be in a U Penn publication on 3 Penn students: 2 women who worked in fetishist contexts (foot fetish and dominatrix) and a gay man engaging in traditional sex work. The three students say that they find their work empowering, which isn't surprising especially for the two women who are both acting as dominatrices of older accomplished men. (Who exactly is in charge in a dominatrix scenario --- the man who pays and dictates terms or the woman who executes the scenario --- is an interesting question, which I assume has already been discussed in the women's studies literature.) Whether or not they truly feel empowered by their sex work, their sexualities and maturation seem tied to their work. At least one student describes the sex work as empowering not for the experience of domination but because they know they can support themselves, and it's surprising not to see them engaging in any reflection about whether that ability to earn money from sex is truly economically empowering. No mention of STI or health risks.

This article on the larger context: many women with Harvard and other Ivy email addresses seem to be seeking sugar daddies. The women they interview don't even find as much money as they expected: one just gets some money for a one-time rendez-vous that was never repeated, so basically they're just doing old-fashioned high-risk sex work rather than the "arrangements" publicized on the websites. A huge contrast with the Penn article, which paints a rosier picture.

Both articles are about educated Americans, mostly women, but they seem to have similar tropes to less educated Americans and women from developing countries: only some participants in these relationships call them what they are, and only some acknowledge the coercion and how much they may give up by participating in these exchanges.

MSM sugar daddies in India

This article covers Indian male college students who are part-time sex workers with upper class clients. The narrative is like that in the more educated classes Africa (female university students in Zimbabwe) or the US (a recent Huffington post article.)

To me, the remarkable part is how frankly these students call themselves sex workers. While normally pejorative, that sex worker label may serve an important role for males who consider themselves heterosexual and want to distance themselves from their "work." Unfortunately, engaging in more likely than not unprotected receptive sex that they're being paid for doesn't mitigate the disease risks to their female partners who will likely never know about their part-time jobs.

Let everyone serve in the military

With the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell, it turns out that there is one group of adolescents and young adults barred from serving in the US military: d/Deaf and disabled. I had no idea that the US barred them and that most countries allowed. I would ask why there is not more awareness, except I know the answer: disabled issues are often invisible. When will disabled rights acquire the same cachet as minority or gay rights?

Is parents' aversion to teens' sexuality an extension of incest norms?

Amy Schalet has an op-ed today about parents allowing a teen to have their boyfriend/girlfriend sleep over. I think she's right that it's partially related to sex education, but I think that answer is too facile.

Another issue that she doesn't mention in her op-ed: parents' aversion to thinking about teens' sexuality may also be about incest norms. I have known Dutch young adults who had their opposite sex parent sleep with them when the parent came to visit, and that would never be done in the US as well. Many Americans would find this unusual, at minimum.

Even the most liberal parents are comfortable with their teens' having premarital sex but hope that won't be until after the teens go away to college, and they are uncomfortable teaching their teens about condoms because they're afraid that sends the wrong message that sex now is okay. One question is whether the key ingredient there is the developmental stage represented by being 18 and at college, or whether the key is being AWAY at college. Are parents of boarding school teens relatively accepting with their teens having sex at age 16 since they're out of the house?

Conversely, what many Americans find strange about virginity pledges is how they violate incest norms by drawing the wrong kind of parental attention to teens' sexuality, such as this piece also this week in the NYT. (As an aside, the author also exhibits an all/nothing view about her "purity ring", saying that for awhile she felt that she had to take it off once she had sex, thus making her sexuality even less private than it would have been in a more liberal setting.)

Certainly in some cases, there's a prudery element, but I think it's a broader cultural phenomenon about whom Americans are comfortable talking about sex with, possibly relating to incest norms, which seem to differ between here and the Netherlands.