CA Re-rewrites Textbooks to Eliminate Propaganda By Plastics Industry

Portions of an 11^th grade science textbook in California had been lifted directly from comments submitted by the American Chemistry Council that were very favorable to the Plastics Industry, according to a new report by California Watch. While this is hardly new or unusual (private industry has always been a major influence on curricula and textbooks), what is unusual is that the state of California has stepped in to fix the biased chapter.

Last year, a California Watch investigation found that whole sections of the 11th-grade teachers’ edition guide had been copied almost exactly from comments submitted by the American Chemistry Council. Soon after, the head of state schools Tom Torlakson issued a statement saying his office would work with CalEPA to examine and review the material.

The new chapter fixes problems with a section that was originally titled, “The Advantages of Plastic Shopping Bags.” Overall it incorporates 33 changes, including more recent and accurate recycling statistics and other changes to the text. One example from the original version suggested that Californians recycled their plastic bags at a rate of 12%, a number high enough that it should have raised eyebrows. The new version provides state estimates that are closer to 3%.

Recession Caused Increase in Child Abuse?

According to a new report, an increase in child abuse, primarily in infants, is linked with the recent recession, the Daily Mail reported today. The study examined 422 abused children from mostly lower-income families, in 74 counties in four states. According to lead author Dr. Rachel Berger of Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, the results confirm an increase in the number of shaken baby cases and other forms of brain-injuring abuse.

According to the report, the number of traumatic brain injury cases in the counties studied increased from about 9 cases per 100,000 children in pre-recession years to nearly 15 per 100,000 kids during the recession. Unemployment rates in the counties studied also rose during the five-year study, as did the number of children on Medicaid. Therefore, they conclude, increases in child abuse are linked to the recession.

Hold the Press—Recession Does Not Necessarily Cause Child Abuse

The problem is that the increase is only correlated with the recession and could be coincidental. Insurance and employment information was not reported for the abused children in the study. Those who were abused may very well have lived in economically stable families who still had jobs and insurance, but who happened to live in economically depressed counties. Furthermore, the study did not look at relatively prosperous counties to see if they also had increases in child abuse. It may be that child abuse is on the rise throughout the country, among all income groups.

Another problem is the assumption that poor people are more likely to abuse their children. The sad fact is that child abuse occurs among all income groups, including sexual, physical and emotional abuse. It may turn out that affluent parents are just better at covering their tracks. The fact that the study looked only at economically stressed communities belies this bias, and it undermines its credibility. Likewise, its author undertook the study in response to anecdotal evidence from her hospital, in order to confirm her suspicions that poor, unemployed, stressed out people were increasingly abusing their kids. Thus, there was also a confirmation bias inherent in the study.

One might also question the assumption that stress somehow causes otherwise gentle parents to suddenly go ape shit on their kids. Traumatic brain injuries do result from spankings that have gone awry. If a parent is morally opposed to corporal punishment and diligent about avoiding it, why would they suddenly start hitting when their finances got bad? Certainly stress could weaken one’s resolve and self-control, but if hitting wasn’t already in their repertoire to begin with, why would it suddenly appear under stress?

Of course child abuse is a terrible tragedy, especially traumatic brain injury (TBI) abuse, which comes primarily from shaking babies or swinging, dropping or throwing them, and often leads to death or permanent brain damage. The increase, however, may have nothing at all to do with the recession. There is a greater public awareness of TBI, particularly in light of considerable recent media coverage of school sports-related concussions among teenagers and TBI in Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. It may be that hospitals are paying closer attention to TBI as a result of the heightened public awareness and they may be keeping better records of TBI cases than they did in the past.

Gutting Regulation Sickens Your Guts

By now, with the regularity of food recalls and epidemics of food-borne illness in the U.S., one might have good reason to agree with Der Spiegel’s reclassification of the U.S. as a third world banana republic. After all, everyone knows you shouldn’t eat unwashed fresh produce in Honduras and Guatemala.

Of course the difference between poor countries and the U.S. is that we actually have the infrastructure to deliver clean food and water. However, with the growing percentage of agricultural land being gobbled up by corporate factory farms that cram together tens of thousands of hogs, chickens or cattle along with speedups and lax oversight and cleanliness at processing plants, it is inevitable that illness provoking germs would increasingly find their way into our foods.

The problem has only been worsened by the gutting of federal oversight, which has reduced the number of available agents to inspect food producing and processing sites.

Giving Corporate Crooks A Free Pass

According to Democracy Now, federal officials have now acknowledged that they knew about the dangerous bacteria found in Cargill ground turkey products well before this month’s recall, one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history. This is no trivial blunder, as one person has already died from Salmonella, and 76 others were sickened from turkey products traced to Cargill’s processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas.

A dangerous form of Salmonella was discovered by the USDA in Cargill turkey at least once last year and another four times this year. Despite the risk to the public, the USDA allowed Cargill to continue to sell potentially tainted meat until the recent outbreak occurred.

Our Product is Sowing Doubt

Big Tobacco was caught with their pants down when a memo was leaked suggesting they were in the business of sowing doubt about their product’s safety. Many industries, however, have been engaged in a similar game. For example, they hire their own scientists to do biased studies that appear to draw into question accepted scientific facts. Their lobbyists then use this data to gain watered down regulations and allow them to sell dangerous products.

It would appear that poultry producers have done the same. According to Democracy Now, the USDA claims that according to their own rules they do not consider Salmonella contamination as a health risk until the meat actually sickens or kills someone.

Data Driven Dribble (Statistics by Idiots)

Over the past decade there has been a growing obsession with using data to inform our decision-making, in everything from medicine to education. While this sounds scientific and superior to guessing or continuing to do things a particular way because “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” if the data is not collected and interpreted correctly, it ends up being just another way for the bosses to get what they want and to get us to go along with it.

GamesWithWords posted the following on Field of Science Blog: 

“Congressman Jack Kingston explains that the nation's food supply is  "99.99 percent safe." Politifact says, "That sounds great, but is it true?"

“Actually, it doesn't sound that good to me. Suppose Kingston means that you only have a 0.01% chance of getting ill any particular time you eat (which seems to be the case). And let's say people eat 3 times a day. That gives you a 10.4% chance of getting sick any given year. I'd rather not get sick at all, particularly when many of the illnesses are easily preventable.”

99.99% does sound great, which is precisely why people love to say it, despite the fact that they rarely have any evidence to support this number. They say it to convince us they are right, that everything is okay. How can one argue against odds like that? Yet GamesWithWords cleverly points out that even a percentage as high as 99.99% is not necessarily so good. It is not just that you still have a 10.4% chance of getting sick, which is relatively high, but that the consequences of getting sick can be so terrible. The consequences of losing a bet are just as important as the odds. A 10% chance of winning $2 from a $1 wager seems like a good bet in part because the consequences of losing are trivial. On the other hand, the chances of having a child with Down syndrome is 0.8% for mothers age 40-44, and 3.6% for mothers over the age of 45. The odds seem low, but the consequences are significant. 

There is also the issue of whether a particular statistic is even possible for a given variable. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates that 100% of students become proficient in math and reading. On the surface this seems both desirable and achievable. However, when you consider that “proficient” is measured relative to other students, rather than as a benchmark, it becomes clear that this statistic is not achievable. If every student makes some improvement, the “proficient” mark keeps getting higher. Therefore, students who were below proficient, but who are still improving, will still be seen as failing under NCLB. Schools are required to make “adequate yearly progress” for all subgroups (e.g., ethnicity, ELD, special education, socioeconomic status) of students. Therefore, if all subgroups improve but one, the school may be deemed a failure.

How the data is acquired is also important. In education and other social science studies, researchers often use surveys to acquire data. There are numerous ways surveys can be abused, biased or manipulated to yield inaccurate interpretations of reality. For example, a random sample of subjects who are similar in age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and health will usually yield more accurate results than one in which these and other variables are not controlled. Likewise, self-selecting surveys (i.e., participants choose whether to participate or not) tend to be more biased than simple random sampling surveys, in which all members of a group have an equal random chance of being selected for the survey. This is because certain groups may select themselves out of a self-selecting survey, thus removing their responses and beliefs from the results.

In a school I taught at, the administration gave a self-selecting survey to determine how the staff viewed them. There was already considerable mistrust of the administration and the survey was not entirely anonymous. Many teachers refused to participate in the survey. If these teachers felt abused, slighted or frightened, then the survey results would likely be skewed toward approval of the administration, giving the administrators a false sense that everything was okay.

Another way statistics can be abused is to read more into them than they really say. For example, a student survey at a school I taught at indicated that students felt rushed and harried by the frenetic pace of the school day. The administration used this statistic to justify changing the bell schedule. However, there are numerous ways to parse the data and not all of them would benefit from a change in bell schedule. For example, maybe students were fine with the existing bell schedule, but wanted their teachers to build in more time for review and questions and to process what they had learned. Maybe they wanted less homework, a longer lunch and longer passing periods.

The idea of using data to assess teachers has become particularly popular recently. It seems much more objective than having an administrator make subjective observations after a cursory classroom visit. However, what kind of data is available that could accurately and objectively assess a teacher’s ability. The one most often proposed is student test scores. If a teacher is doing a good job, then students’ scores should improve, right?

The problem with this is that student test scores do not measure teachers. They measure students. And students can do well or poorly on tests for numerous reasons that have nothing at all to do with their teachers. In fact, the most significant influence on student test scores is their family’s socioeconomic status. Wealth not only influences how well students do on tests and in school, in general, but also how much they will benefit from a given teacher. A student with low self-efficacy, malnourishment, physical discomfort from untreated maladies, a lack of a quiet place to study and no one to monitor and assist with studying, may have trouble in school regardless of a teacher’s skill. A teacher who has exceptional talent, but a lot of low income students who come to class sporadically, read far below grade level and who seldom study, could easily see stagnant student test scores and consequently appear to be a terrible teacher.

Performance Evaluations: Inherently Biased and Not Good for Students

Among the favorite attacks on teachers lately is the claim that union protections such as tenure and seniority protect bad teachers. As with most occupations, we want the best quality possible. Seniority-based layoffs seem to undermine this goal. However, performance is in fact the primary criterion used for determining who gets tenure AND who gets hired in the first place. Student test scores can only tell us what students know and possibly how much they have improved. Contrary to common belief, they cannot tell us why the students improved, although we do know there is a much stronger correlation between test scores and students’ socioeconomic background than to the quality of their teachers and schools. Therefore, using test scores to evaluate teachers is unlikely to lead to any significant improvements in educational outcomes, while it is very likely to cause the demotion or firing of many excellent teachers.

In contrast to student test scores, which are objective, but only a proxy, and therefore an unreliable measure of teacher performance, evaluations by administrators are entirely subjective, even when informed by state standards and rubrics, and are therefore subject to bias and manipulation. The Shanker Blog had an interesting post on this topic on Friday: In Performance Evaluations, Subjectivity Is Not Random.

They argue that employment protections like tenure are still necessary since discrimination is still a problem at work, despite federal laws, and because “performance-based” evaluations often assess things that have little or nothing to do with performance. They point out that biases are not simply the product of individual idiosyncrasies. Rather, systemic stereotypes and biases become internalized by entire social groups. For example, teachers are often stereotyped as being whiners and complainers, a generalization that allows administrators and policy makers to discount their concerns and criticisms as being unfounded or trivial when in fact they are in the best position, both through their professional training and their day to day interactions with students, to understand if a particular reform is likely to work. Such a stereotype could have profound implications during a standards-based evaluation by an administrator. For example, a teacher who is seen as a complainer for questioning the efficacy of a particular reform during a faculty meeting could be given a poor evaluation and be accused of being a bad collaborator, when in reality they were simply advocating for their students’ best interests. Likewise, internalized racial and gender biases are quite common and can influence subjective evaluations.

The Shanker blog also correctly points out that tenure and seniority systems have been very effective at minimizing differences in pay and benefits based on gender, race, and sexual orientation. Contrary to the common misperception that seniority and tenure place teachers’ interests above the needs of children, they argue that minimizing discrimination in the workplace actually helps students by creating an environment in which teachers can perform at their best, without the uncertainty and distraction created under prejudicial working conditions.

Many administrators support performance reviews because they provide a framework for professional development. However, according to Samuel Culbert (see Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You, NY Times), evaluations are an intimidating process in which the employee’s future is at stake. Consequently, many employees are afraid to speak openly and honestly, thus reducing the chances for any meaningful feedback or professional development. Culbert argues that performance reviews corrupt the system by encouraging employees to focus on pleasing the boss instead of personal growth. “Under such a system, in which one’s livelihood can be destroyed by a self-serving boss trying to meet a budget or please the higher-ups, what employee would ever speak his mind?”

Culbert has a solution he calls the Performance Preview in which both bosses and subordinates are held accountable for goals and results. Under this system, the boss supposedly learns how to manage by acknowledging and listening to the employee’s concerns and by being responsible for ensuring that all employees earn A’s. Unfortunately, as long as bosses have the monopoly on hiring and firing, there is still an intimidating and adversarial relationship, and if employees cannot fire or discipline their bosses, where is the pressure for the boss to listen to them?

Culbert provides Wisconsin as an example, suggesting that its public sector unions’ willingness to impose pay and benefits cuts on their members in exchange for maintaining collective bargaining rights is somehow indicative of workers’ desire to collaborate with bosses on other things, too, like performance reviews. Culbert is wrong on several levels. The union bosses made these concessions without consulting their members and there is considerable evidence that their members are not willing to give up pay and benefits OR collective bargaining. More to the point, even if there was a consensus that this was a good trade off, it says nothing about the potential for effective performance review collaboration. Simply agreeing to or desiring such a setup does not protect workers or ensure that the collaboration will be mutually respectful and beneficial.