Palin

I agree with this:

Then there’s the Associated Press, putting 11 reporters on the task of “fact checking” her book.  I put the words in quotes because the CJR notes that much of this herculean feat is not checking facts, but quibbling with interpretations or sentimental boilerplate about the hearts and minds of Alaskans.  But the deeper question is how come Palin’s book gets a team of fact checkers, when books by other politicians get the standard gloss?

There seems to be an unhealthy obsession with tearing her down.  And really, guys, if you’ll just back off a little, she’ll do the job for you.  Have you seen that resignation speech?  How about we all act like she’s a former governor and vice presidential candidate, rather than Public Enemy #1?

and this:

Sarah Palin may well have been the worst candidate in presidential/vice presidential history. She was grossly unprepared to discuss national issues. She misrepresented her Alaska career in ways which set new world records.That said, all good pseudo-liberals know what to say when asked about Palin’s vile new book. Palin’s a mean girl, we know we must say, using oddly gender-tinged language even as we complain about Newsweek’s sexist new cover. After that, we feign indignation about Palin’s assaults on the “little people” in McCain’s campaign. In particular, we shed big tears over poor Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. We boo-hoo about their mistreatment.

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Let’s get clear: Salon lets people “fact-check” books they haven’t even seen. They trash the author for “bizarre passages” which they completely misconstrue.

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As we’ve noted, Palin was a horrible candidate. In our view, she remains a person with very poor judgment about the nation’s problems. But inside the pseudo-liberal world, this week has brought a set of screeching complaints about all manner of pointless trivia—including complaints by “book reviewers” who haven’t seen the book they’re critiquing!

My complaints are:  the media give her more attention than is warranted (compare with other former vice presidential candidates, for example); and despite the fact that she gives the media plenty of valid things to criticize her about (her policy statements), the media hold her to a completely different standard.    Giving her too much attention and making a victim out of her is not going to help the progressive cause.

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Current events

Did you know Sarah Palin has a book coming out and Carrie Prejean has a sex tape?  If you didn’t know that, you must not pay attention to mainstream left-leaning media.  For example, Prejean and Palin occupy significant space on Huffington Post everyday.  On Countdown with Keith Olbermann, not much else is discussed.  Take last Thursday’s show for example (transcript).  Here’s how he starts the show:

Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?

…The House Democrat pushing an anti-abortion agenda, threatens the majority who aren‘t, threatens Senate Democrats—as Bart Stupak risks the lives of 44,000 Americans who die each year for want of insurance.

…

George W. Bush finally found something he may have done wrong: the bank bailout.

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That president is surprisingly silent on Afghanistan.  This one insists none of the options his military has given him are satisfactory—demands a new set.Sarah Palin on “Oprah Winfrey,” and here come the tease sound bites—the Katie Couric interview, McCain‘s advisers told her it was a good interview and she should do more, she, of course, knew better.

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“Worsts”:  Lou Dobbs says he was the victim of a vast conspiracy—by invisible aliens; a Colorado state senator compares the president to a 9/11 hijacker, and the senator hasn‘t even resigned yet.And the self destruction of Carrie Prejean, part eleventy billion.  The solo sex tape, she was 20 when she made it, says the guy she made it for.  And it was one of many tapes.

Take a look at his list of topics that we might talk about tomorrow.  Some are important, such as Afghanistan and health care reform.  Others are just tabloid stories.

If you go through the transcript, what you’ll see is that he did spend some time talking about each of these issues.  When he talked about health care, he made sure to keep reminding viewers that Palin and Prejean talk was coming up.  He was most excited about the possibility of more than one Prejean sex tape:

And, just as Carrie Prejean announced she regrets silencing herself during the latest interview with liberal bias media trying to silence her -  to say nothing of all of those sex tapes, plural.  OK, I made the last part up.

…

Carrie Prejean, back on autopilot, appearing in front of another camera, and self-circumscribing her First Amendment rights.

HA HA HA HA.  Get it?  Autopilot?  Camera?  HA HA HA.

And then he had long segments on Palin and Prejean.

Let’s recall that Carrie Prejean was in some beauty pageant and became a target of criticism because of her answer to a question about same sex marriage by judge Perez Hilton (yes, Perez Hilton, which should tell you how seriously to take the competition):

Well I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.

I don’t have the same opinion as she does, but what she said didn’t offend me in any way.

She’s 22 years old and is not some influential figure on the national scene.  There is no reason to discuss her, ever.  Yet, every night Olbermann mocks her and excites his viewer with bikini pictures and sex tape talk.  Huffington Post can’t get enough of her either.

I understand that making fun of the intelligence of attractive women, while showing them in a bikini or in short-shorts, might increase ratings and web site hits.  Nevertheless, I am disturbed that the most influential left-leaning news web sites and shows give these topics so much attention.

Not to mention that we are engaging in a cultural war when we attack a young, Christian woman on a personal level, just because we don’t agree with her opinion on same sex marriage.   While we sneer at people with less education and/or stronger religious views than us, we fail to make a case for a progressive agenda. As Bob Somerby put it:

We love the idea that we’re the smart ones—although it’s clear that we aren’t. We love the idea that we’re the moral ones—that the other tribe spills with racists. And in part because we love this war, we have been wholly unable, in the past fifty years, to build a case for health care reform. We’re the smart ones, we love to insist—and yet, our latest plan for health reform is melting down into a joke.

(We didn’t see the abortion fight coming! How strange, since we’re so smart!)

We live with a cosmically awful health system—a system characterized by needless deaths and comical levels of looting. But despite our brilliance and our moral grandeur, we can’t figure out how to make voters understand the need for large-scale reform. For fifty years, The Interests have spread their false messaging all around. (European health care is a disaster! They have to wait in lines!) Despite our own acknowledged brilliance, they have beaten us blue in the process.

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Men are confused

They don’t seem to understand why it’s not okay to use words like “slutty” or “knocked up” aimed at women. 

Keith Olbermann even asked “Is it in fact appropriate to use that one word, ‘slutty,’ in any joke about a woman politician, or should that be out of bounds?”

This really confuses men.  They are surprised to hear that it might not be okay to make jokes like that.   Well, at least about respected female politicians (it’s of course okay to joke about other women being sluts).

Sam Seder didn’t even think the joke was sexist!  From The Daily Howler:

SEDER: I mean, she—it’s like T-ball with her. It’s not even softball. I mean, she just literally holds it out there. And frankly, I don’t even think that joke was sexist, per se. Letterman has—

TOOBIN: Look, there are certain rules, I think. Look, we are talking about jokes. But I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s just a joke. You can have offensive jokes. It’s not a free range. Just— If you say, “it’s just a joke,” you can say anything. It just seems to me that referring to a public figure, a woman, as a slut, it just— You know, that’s a line you shouldn’t cross.

SEDER: But he, but he didn’t do that! He said—he talked about her slutty makeup!

TOOBIN: “Slutty flight attendant.”

SEDER: Well, no, but he—

He didn’t call Palin a slut, Seder said. He was talking about her slutty appearance! There really is a big difference there, the gentleman thoughtfully said.

The cluelessness there is just stunning. Presumably, this resembles the way most white people “reasoned” in 1935. In that era’s majority entertainment, it was routine to subject African-Americans to standard forms of ridicule. People like Seder couldn’t see the problem with that. The jokes weren’t “racist, per se”—and everyone laughed! What was the fuss all about?

Of course, these are the same people who spent weeks beating up on Miss California for saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman.  You know, essentially the same stated position that Obama, the Clintons, John Kerry and most Democrats have.  But they’re not young and pretty!  The more attractive the woman, the more men like to show off how sexist they are.

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Cohen on education reform

Columnists from our nation’s largest newspapers and magazines love to write about education reform.  Even though they apparently know nothing about it, they are very quick to not only propose solutions, but to make it clear that these solutions would work.  They imply (or directly state) that the only barriers to implementation are teacher’s unions or people who have too low of expectations for underprivileged kids.  I’ve written about this before (link), and will do so again. 

A good example is from Richard Cohen’s column in the Washington Post (link).  I’ll let Bob Somerby do the dirty work for me (link): 

COHEN (2/3/09): Do your reading on education and you will find an emerging consensus. Abolish tenure. There are other ways to ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept. (Cops don’t have tenure, and neither do columnists.) Ensure that the best teachers teach at the most challenging schools and ensure also that they get paid lavishly for doing so.

“Abolish tenure,” Cohen advises, assuring us that columnists lack it. In fact, Cohen has lasted so long at the Post, through so many comical blunders, that his career seems to stand as clear proof that big pundits simply don’t need it. “Ensure that teachers teach at the most challenging schools,” he further lectures Obama—without explaining how we can “ensure” such a thing, especially once we’ve removed their tenure. After all: For decades, “the best teachers” have been leaving urban systems in favor of suburban districts. Question: Might that exodus increase if these “best teachers” are forced to teach in schools they’d rather avoid?Further question: Could Obama possibly deal with a problem like that as part of an emergency measure, one he hopes to complete in two weeks? And by the way: Are “the best teachers” in one school setting necessarily “the best teachers” somewhere else? If Teacher X is great in an upper-end AP program, will he necessarily be “the best” when it comes to teaching low-income kids who are years below grade level? Such questions have never occurred to Cohen—yet he somehow thinks they can be addressed as part of the two-week stimulus effort. Just a guess: Because his columns take fifteen minutes, he may believe that quandries like this can be settled by this time next week.

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Achievement gap narrowed!

Or so proclaimed Maria Glod and Daniel de Vise of the Washington Post (link):

Since enactment of the No Child Left Behind law, students from poor families in the Washington area have made major gains on reading and math tests and are starting to catch up with those from middle-class and affluent backgrounds, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The achievement gap between economic groups, long a major frustration for educators, has narrowed in the region’s suburban schools since President Bush signed the law in 2002, according to Maryland and Virginia test data.

Isn’t that wonderful?  Students from poor families are catching up to students from more affluent backgrounds.   Or are they?  Let’s take a look at their data.

The astute viewer might notice that they are comparing ‘economically disadvantaged’ students with ‘all students’.  The latter category includes students who are in the former category.  If interest is in comparing ‘economically disadvantaged’ students with middle or upper income students, then your graph should reflect that.  By including low income students in both curves, you’re necessarily reducing the gap between them.  Standard practice is to use mutually exclusive groups when stratifying.

There is a larger problem, however.  Notice that they are not graphing test scores; rather, they are graphing the percentage of students who ‘passed’ the exam.  The majority of upper income students passed the exam in 2003 (it was close to 100% in some counties).  So, there wasn’t much room for upper income students to improve (since the outcome is pass/fail). There was a lot more opportunity for lower income students to improve, as their pass rate in 2003 was much lower.  In statistics, this is known as a ceiling effect.  The Post analysts didn’t seem to notice this problem.

Bob Somerby discussed both of these problems on Saturday here. Today, he posted an email from a very wise statistician (me!) here. 

From the graphs, it’s clear that pass rates are going up.  Well, it is safe to say that there is less of a gap in pass rates between lower and upper income students. 

Does that mean achievement gaps have narrowed?  Are students from poor families in the Washington area really “starting to catch up with those from middle-class and affluent backgrounds”?

Let’s consider some possibilities:

1.  The test has gotten easier.  If the test has gotten easier, then we would likely see graphs like the ones above, even if students don’t know more now than students did in 2003.  The typical upper income student could pass either exam, while the lower income students might have failed the 2003 exam, but passed the 2007 exam.  Did the Post even consider this (likely) possibility?  As I mentioned in my email to Somerby, “if you make the test easy enough (where everyone can pass) there will be no achievement gap at all!” (based on Post logic)

2.  Both upper and lower income students are testing better now than they were in 2003.  Because the graphs are pass/fail, it would look like lower income students have narrowed the gap.  In fact, it’s entirely possible that upper income students have improved even more during that time, widening the gap, but a pass/fail test cannot capture such an effect.

3.  Lower income students really are catching up with upper income students.  It’s possible, but there is not more evidence for this than for options 1 or 2.

Is it even desirable to narrow achievement gaps?

That depends.  Again, quoting myself:  ”There are ways to close achievement gaps that are not necessarily good. For example, schools could decide to use all of their resources on kids who are not meeting minimal standards, and ignore kids who are. Certainly achievement gaps could be narrowed, but at the expense of kids who started out ahead.”

There is no question that some kids enter school way behind other children.  The school’s job is to teach those kids as much as possible.  If they maximize learning from all children, will these gaps narrow?  I have no idea.

Somerby mentioned an interesting theory: 

When I was a teacher, we were taught a naughty theory (I think it was conventional wisdom at the time): Good teaching increases achievement gaps. If you miraculously create a situation where everyone grows at his or her maximum potential, everyone will have advanced by the end of the year. But the smarter kids will be farther ahead of the less gifted kids than they were at the start of the year.

Now, some of the most talented kids will be in the lower SES group, and therefore might make some gains on less talented kids who got a head start (due to higher SES). But, on average, will the optimal teaching situation narrow the gaps?  I don’t think we know the answer to that.

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