Last week thirty-five teachers in the Atlanta school system were arrested/indicted for cheating… that is, they were accused of changing and inflating students’ scores on the standardized tests that reputedly measure student achievement and thus determine teacher effectiveness… and bonuses. The district superintendent, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy, and making false statements, allegedly in order to obtain $500,000 in performance pay. She could face 45 years in prison, and prosecutors recommended a $7.5 million bond for her.  In addition to the 35 charged so far, another 143 were named in an 800 page report.  Of those named, 82 confessed to altering test scores.

 Now… I would be the last person to approve of such behavior, but, as my wife the university professor pointed out, there is a certain inconsistency, as well as tremendous hypocrisy, involved in these prosecutions, from the charges against individual teachers to the amount of the bail-bond set for the retired superintendent.

 Let me get this straight. Teachers and administrators rigged test scores to improve their salaries, and in some cases, merely to keep their jobs, because the teachers with the lowest student scores, regardless of the class composition, risked losing their jobs, and they’re being prosecuted.  That prosecution is absolutely necessary, sadly, as it should be. Over three years ago, however, mortgage bankers, investment bankers, and other financial institutions falsified the risk of trillions of dollars in mortgage securities and sent the country into the second worst economic recession in U.S. history… and not a single investment banker has even been charged.  In the case of the mortgage bankers, millions lost their homes, jobs, and savings, and entire communities were economically devastated, while in the case of the teachers, far more modest damage has occurred… damage limited to one school district in one metropolitan area…

 Well… some might say that teachers should be held to a higher standard.  But… if they should be held to a higher standard, why aren’t they being paid as well as mortgage bankers, who clearly haven’t been held to a high standard?  The average teacher doesn’t make a fraction of what those illustrious individuals who crashed the economy made… and still make.

 There’s no law against making bad economic decisions, others might claim, but there is a law against creating fraudulent test scores for economic gain.   Except… what about the fraudulent grading of bundled mortgage securities and derivatives that made the investment banks billions… money that was lost and never repaid?

 I don’t have much sympathy for the teachers, none, in fact, but I can understand why some of them did what they did.  We have a society that worships money, and little else, and in education, only the test scores and credentials, not the actual learning, seem to matter. Those teachers saw that only money, credentials, and numbers seem to count, as well as the fact that some of the highest executives in the financial industry benefited from defrauding the purchasers of bundled securities and got away with it.  Given that scale of fraud, what does it matter if test scores are fudged a bit?  Why should teachers worry about ethics and that sort of thing, if the government and the American people aren’t going to do anything about massive financial gains from fraud or even care about the lack of ethics exhibited by those financiers?

 Oh… and add to that the current mindset that teachers are absolutely and totally responsible for student learning.  Parents have no responsibility for providing a learning environment at home; communities have no responsibility for the safety of students; and students have no responsibility for trying to learn.  In fact, from what I’ve seen, only a minority of students will accept any responsibility for learning.  Oh… most will give the idea of their responsibility to learn lip service, but that vanishes with the first difficult assignment or the first novel distraction… and it becomes entirely the teacher’s problem.  Well… obviously those teachers in Atlanta decided that, if the system was rigged against them, they’d re-rig it… and they got caught.

 What will be overlooked is the fact that, in some states, almost fifty percent of classroom time will continue to be spent on testing or test preparation… and that’s an even greater corruption of education than upgrading student test scores, unwelcome as such alternations are and should be.  The other question that the Atlanta case raises is why it took so long to come to light.  If all these objective tests are so accurate, then shouldn’t it have been apparent from the start that there were obvious discrepancies between the test scores and academic performance? Oh… I forgot.  No one measures academic performance except by test scores.  Or is it that the tests aren’t that accurate?  Or that no one wants to turn away from the simplistic – and wrong – assumption that tests don’t answer all, or even a larger proportion – of the problems involved in education?

 The even greater problem is that, now, most teachers – and most of them are dedicated, honest, and hard-working – will have to live down another problematical example… and they’ll have to do it knowing that the biggest cheaters in U.S. history got away scot-free… and knowing that no one really seems to care… except to have another reason to blame teachers.

Once upon a time, baseball was the national game.  For some it still is.  Others, I suppose, would pick football… or basketball, or even NASCAR.  I doubt we have the consensus on a national pastime that existed a generation or so ago with baseball… and I happen to think that’s sad.  It’s also revealing in a way that I often don’t see discussed.

As baseball aficionados have told me, one of the most difficult tasks in any sport is hitting a baseball.  Ted Williams said something to the effect that failing to hit the ball seven times out of ten was a great success, and batting over .333 for a career is likely to put a player on the short list for the Hall of Fame.  In fact, since 1900, the highest season batting average ever was .424, by Rogers Hornsby, and he is the only hitter during that time period to bat over .400 for three separate seasons.  The last hitter to hit over .400 for a season was Bill Terry in 1930.  By comparison, the worst fielding record by an outfielder playing a full season was .842, and generally the top-fielding outfielders literally miss no catches… with an average of 1.000.  For what it’s worth, that suggests to me a certain parallel with life in that new initiatives [hits] fail most of the time, while it’s critical not to make mistakes [in other words, make every catch].

So why does any of this matter?  Because it’s indicative of how American culture and values have changed over the past century, and I have my doubts about whether those changes have been for the better.

Baseball is a game of skill, and while one can argue, as Billy Beane has done as general manager at Oakland, that certain skills are overrated and others underrated, skills do matter.  It’s also a game of timing and finesse.  Even during the “steroid scandal” period, even all those overmuscled “power hitters” couldn’t manage better batting averages, no matter how far they blasted the ball. It’s also a somewhat slower game [some would call it glacially paced] compared to the increased appeal of football, basketball, and even NASCAR racing.

More important, sadly, appears to be the increased level of mayhem or violence present in those three.  There have been so many career-ending injuries in football that the NFL has been forced to investigate and make some rule changes.  Recent medical studies indicate that a truly significant percentage of football players have brain damage from repeated impacts.  Even basketball, which was largely a non-contact sport when I played in high school all too many years ago, has become so much more violent that knee and back injuries are commonplace, and now we’re beginning to see broken bones  — as witness what happened to Kevin Ware of Louisville in the current NCAA tournament.  As for NASCAR, the crashes become more and more spectacular.

In short, in terms of the national spectator pastime, it appears that Americans have opted increasingly against skill and strategy, against a quest for perfection against the odds, and for speed and violence in all forms… and this emphasis is everywhere, in such seemingly unrelated societal changes as emails replacing letters, and then tweets replacing emails… sorter, faster, and with a higher percentage of vulgar/violent language.  Or even in the rise of mixed martial arts, even more brutal, violent, and faster than boxing or wrestling.

These days I get more and more comments from first-time readers about my “pacing” – that it’s slow. There are other long fantasy series, but more and more of them focus on action and violence, not to mention sex. Many television shows are using technology to fractionally speed up the action, by snipping pauses, making faster cuts, etc.

So as Americans turn from baseball… what’s next?  Gladiatorial contests?  The Hunger Games?  Or something even faster and more violent?

And what does it say about us?

Recently, the New Yorker had a feature article on Aaron Swartz, which featured some excerpts from his writing and interviews with people close to him.  The article/profile was both interesting and frightening, and extraordinarily sad, because it revealed a brilliant young man who never grew up, never truly understood society – any society – and, because he couldn’t understand it, found himself in a position, compounded by illness, where he simply could not cope.  What came through most clearly to me, although this was certainly not emphasized by the writer or by any of those who were interviewed, was the fact that Swartz had absolutely no understanding that society, or any organization or relationship, has limits.

He made a great deal of money very young, but failed to understand that, for most people, making money is anything but easy.  He quit jobs because he didn’t want to put up with the regimentation and requirements.  He got involved in the whole issue of copyright because he didn’t believe in limits… and then, according to the article, had actually abandoned much of that fight when it came back to bite him.

The plain truth of the matter is that any relationship, any organization, any society, any government – in fact anything that goes beyond a single isolated entity – has limits, and the more complicated the organization or group, the more limits that are required for it to function. Children who do not learn this young will always have problems; adults who have not learned this will either be hermits or anti-social outcasts, usually verging on having trouble with others and the law. As the old saying goes, your freedom stops short of hitting my nose… one of the most basic of limits.

Various societies have differing limits, and differing ways of imposing and enforcing those limits, but they have limits. Social and government conflicts are always about the types of limits, their structure, enforcement, and various other details, but not about the fact that limits are necessary.  Even extremists, such as “gun rights” types, aren’t arguing for no societal limits at all – they just don’t want limits over weapons, but most of them, I suspect, would have problems if all limits on everything were removed.  They just want a different set of limits. The same is true of religious extremists, extreme feminists, environmentalists, zealous developers, etc.

In turn, nature or the environment imposes limits.  Air-breathing creatures are not going to evolve in airless environments.  If you don’t eat, sooner or later you’re going to die.  Biology imposes limits.  Most human beings less than six feet tall are going to have a hard time being professional basketball players because smaller stature imposes limits, as does a lack of raw athletic ability.

Yet… in today’s western societies, particularly in the United States, there is less and less recognition of limits, and more and more of an attitude that anyone can do anything, especially in parenting and education.  Limits exist; saying that they don’t or acting as if they don’t is only a recipe for personal and societal disaster.  That doesn’t mean limits preclude success; it does mean that one has to understand where the limits exist and where they don’t, both in personal and in societal terms, and at times, how to find another way to success.

And that’s something that Aaron Swartz  didn’t understand that and too many people, especially young people these days, also don’t seem to understand, perhaps because too many of their parents don’t either.

Standardized objective tests appear to have become the agreed-upon criteria for evaluating the “effectiveness” of teachers and schools in educating students. Regardless of all the rhetoric, it’s fairly clear that such tests are more or less accurate in measuring the retention of selected facts and skills.  What the tests don’t measure is the ability to think or the ability to integrate and employ a wide range of knowledge and skills in resolving problems or creating something.  Beyond those shortcomings, which are considerable in themselves, the widespread and growing use of such tests raises other questions.

These so-called objective tests, implemented on a wider and wider scale, also have additional negative impacts – on the students required to take them, the teachers whose performance is evaluated by their results, and on society itself.

Several of the impacts on students don’t even seem to be recognized by either the proponents or opponents of standardized testing.  The first impact is the creation of a mindset that there is indeed a simple and objective answer to every question and problem.  The second impact is that it conditions the students to confine their thoughts and abilities to the simplistic scope of the problem presented.  The tests and the teaching to those tests create a compartmentalization of learning. There is, in my mind, a definite correlation between the continued growth of standardized testing and the growing inability of students to apply skills learned in one area in another.  The third impact is that linguistic and logical skills are suffering, in that students seldom have to marshal facts and ideas and create a logical written or verbal presentation of those ideas – especially on the spot.  What ever happened to the class essay that developed that skill?  It’s gone, in most schools, and so are the skills.  A fourth outgrowth of these combined problems is that more and more students literally require detailed step-by-step directions to accomplish various tasks, to the point where a significant percentage of those students have lost the ability to follow general directions or to look beyond the obvious for answers.

As for the teachers… first off, the increasing use of standardized tests has reduced actual classroom instructional time.  A student isn’t learning when the student is taking tests.  The second problem for teachers is that, if the teacher doesn’t spend some time teaching the students how to take the tests, as well as teaching to the tests, the students will get lower scores and in the short run, that penalizes both the teacher and the students.  But such “teaching” further reduces the amount of time available for learning other material.  The third problem is that teaching for objective tests reduces the intellectual scope of the subject matter.  This, in turn, fosters simplistic explanations, and simplistic explanations certainly contribution to social and political polarization.

In turn, the growth of simplistics and social and political polarization impedes political consensus and thus makes resolution of political and government problems increasingly difficult and contributes to simplistic mechanical/technical and short term business practices.

And, of course, there is the failure to acknowledge that it’s virtually impossible to create a truly “objective” test or presentation of facts in the first place, and this creates an illusion of objectivity that doesn’t exist in the real world. So, by all means, keep expanding the use of objective testing so that students know more facts about even less, without even the ability to recognize that… and then claim success in “reforming” and improving education.

When doing some research for the previous blog, I came across a New York Times article that cited a very reputable survey [the General Social Survey] that released data showing that the percentage of U.S. households owning firearms has decreased from fifty percent to thirty five percent over the past forty years. Needless to say, the National Rifle Association and others disputed this finding, claiming that since the number of firearms held Americans has increased from something like two hundred million to over three hundred million, there was no way that the number of households holding firearms could have decreased.

And… both the GSS and the NRA happen to be right.  Why?  Because although the percentages are correct, the U.S. population has increased by more than thirty percent, and the number of households has almost doubled [families having fewer children and more single person households are why the percentage increases in population and number of households don’t correspond].  That means that eight million more households have firearms than in 1970, but that the total percentage of households having them is less, and interestingly enough the youngest households have the lowest percentage of firearms, well under thirty percent, while older Republican households have the highest percentage (which just might suggest that Republicans either have more to steal or worry more about it being stolen, if not both).

The same kinds of claims go on in advertising as well.  One truck manufacturer asserts that it has more trucks of a certain type on the road than any other manufacturer, proving durability, while its rival asserts that its trucks stay on the road longer.  The first manufacturer produces and sells more trucks so that in fact it does have more trucks on the road, but the second manufacturer’s trucks do last longer. Assuming the statistics are correct, it does suggest that the first manufacturer is misrepresenting the meaning of accurate facts.

Inflation is measured in a number of different ways, using everything from a Gross National Product (GNP) deflator to various forms of Consumer Price Indices.  In recent years, the government has also used a Core CPI, which excludes “highly volatile” goods, such as food and energy, on the grounds that these items distort overall price patterns.  That may be, but over the last twelve months the price of food has increased [according to BLS measurements] 1.6%, while energy prices have declined.  The problem, as I see it, is that overall food prices, over time, at least over the last seventy years, seldom decline, while energy prices are currently low because the economy is depressed.  As the economy recovers energy prices will rise, and food prices certainly won’t go down, especially given the drought still pervading many U.S. agricultural regions. Likewise, a number of politicians are proposing that Social Security Cost-of-Living Adjustments [COLA] be linked to a Chained CPI instead of the current CPI-W, on the grounds that the Chained CPI is more accurate.  It likely is, but that would mean that benefits would be decreased by some 3% over the next ten years, and three percent adds up to thousands of dollars for each beneficiary. The government is doing its best to present this proposed change in terms of increased “accuracy,” but it would mean Social Security benefits over time will be lower than they would have been.  Of course, opponents claim that the change cuts benefits, stopping there, and ignoring the fact that, over time, the system cannot pay those benefits unless the benefit levels are decreased or taxes are increased.

I could go on, but it all brings to mind the observation attributed to  Mark Twain Benjamin Disraeli:  “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”