Bruce Baker has this habit of introducing facts, evidence, and sharp analysis–as well as humor–to controversial issues.
Here is take on PISA Day (drum roll, please). It begins like this:
“With today’s release of PISA data it is once again time for wild punditry, mass condemnation of U.S. public schools and a renewed sense of urgency to ram through ill-conceived, destructive policies that will make our school system even more different from those breaking the curve on PISA.
“With that out of the way, here’s my little graphic contribution to what has become affectionately known to edu-pundit class as PISA-Palooza. Yep… it’s the ol’ poverty as an excuse graph – well, really it’s just the ol’ poverty in the aggregate just so happens to be pretty strongly associated with test scores in the aggregate – graph… but that’s nowhere near as catchy.”
Read the whole post.
Today, he posted again, this time to chide Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for discounting the importance of poverty. Petrilli referred to Occam’s Razor to explain relatively poor math performance by U.S. students. Occam’s Razor is the proposition that ““among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”
Relying on Occam’s Razor, Petrilli writes:
“So what’s an alternative hypothesis for the lackluster math performance of our fifteen-year-olds? One in line with Occam’s Razor?
Maybe we’re just not very good at teaching math, especially in high school.”
Baker invents a new principle: Petrilli’s Hammer. Or in other words, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Read the post. It is vintage Bruce Baker.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Correlation == Causation. Yes?
Petrilli and his reform-bent cronies certainly did not apply Occam’s razor when attempting to connect the United States’ established presence as a world power to international student test scores.
If international test scores predicted world power, we’d have hit close to bottom decades ago.
Enough already!
The issue is the role of publishing companies and their monopoly on nonsense practices.
Let all nations use the same publishers on a level playing field. Enough with Occams’s razor already. This is not an issue of philosophy, but marketing of crappy text books. Who publishes the books in Shanghai? Let’s all use the same text and let the chips fall where they will.
From the first two lines re Michael J. Petrilli on the website of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (subtitle “Advancing Educational Excellence”):
“Mike Petrilli is an award-winning writer and one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts. As executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Petrilli helps to lead the country’s most influential education-policy think tank and contributes to its Flypaper blog and weekly Education Gadfly newsletter. ”
Link: http://www.edexcellence.net/about-us/fordham-staff/michael-j-petrilli
Is being “one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts” the same as Dr. Steve Perry being “America’s Most Trusted Educator” [it’s on his website’s home page, in big letters, and big letters—like numbers—don’t lie]?
I don’t know about Occam’s Razor but I do know that just because your last name starts with a “P” and you turn up the volume when you engage in proof by assertion, well, Mark Twain said it best:
“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.”
😎
KrazyTA, your Twain quote is great. 🙂
When I taught stats, I used to teach about Occam’s Razor. “The simplest explanation is often the best.” However, ed reform makes nothing “simple.” It hides the truth in an endless maze of nonsense.
How can it “hide the truth in an endless maze of nonsense” when there is no truth in the edudeformers’ rhetoric to hide???
Señor Swacker: if you and la Doctora Scheider would allow me the presumption of engaging in a little interpretative exercise—
When KrazyMathLady, er, Dra. Schneider wrote “ed reform makes nothing ‘simple.’ It hides the truth in an endless maze of nonsense” the “truth” she was talking about was that when it comes to the essence or core or essential point of “ed reform”—
“There is no there there.”
Now how did Gertrude Stein get that so right so far ahead of her time?
Perhaps the simplest answer—Petrilli’s Hammer!—is that she was [is?] a time-traveling member of the Tea Party opposition to Common Core, plying her mischief through time along with Rocky and Bullwinkle in the Wayback Machine.
Hey, I took my CCSS standards test. I can critical think along with the best of ‘em.
So there.
😎
Talk about a misuse of Occam’s Razor! Michael Petrilli establishes a hypothesis based on a statement made by Dennis Van Roekel –
“The United States’ standings haven’t improved dramatically because we as a nation haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance — the effects of poverty on students,”
[In my mind this can be supported simply by looking at the average US PISA scores for students in schools at different levels of free and reduced lunch (poverty levels). These scores show obviously less poverty produces higher average scores!]
Michael Petrilli goes off on a tangent about Math scores vs other scores in an attempt to discredit Van Roekel’s statement! Does anyone see the word Math mentioned in Van Roekel’s statement? In trying to follow his illogical article, he seems to attempt to show that since US scores are lower in Math than the other scores, it must be something other than poverty? Now that is a s t r e t c h!
Thanks to Bruce Baker for countering Petrilli’s stupid distraction, but why are America’s children and teachers being made to defend ourselves against the hired punditry’s PISA-score-based attacks, anyway?
I had a very detailed post to introduce this link, but I lost it. Please open it and read it anyway, everybody. It’s an update on the seventh edition of UCSC Prof. William domhoff’s Who Rules America, and it’s more important that Petrilli.
These are the Feb 2013 extensive updated analyses, clear as crystal. He’s been tracking the whole assault.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
I have to go to work. Can somebody open the link and write a synopsis?
I’ve said this multiple times on this blog previously, but it bears repeating. Michael Petrilli is a charlatan, a huckster. He has absolutely no shame. In that sense, he’s no different than Michelle Rhee or Wendy Kopp, or even Amanda Ripley, who claims to be an “investigative journalist” but spews the essentials of corporate-style “reform.”
Petrilli too makes outrageous claims, in addition to the nonsense he writes. For example, he says he’s ““one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts.” That’s an obvious lie. Sort of like saying that John Stossel and Sean Hannity are “trusted” sources.
Petrilli prescribes more “rigorous academic standards and tests” for the public schools. He says that we “should rate schools on an easy-to-understand scale, ideally from A to F, as Florida started doing under Governor Jeb Bush.” Yeah. Sure. Let’s rely on Jeb Bush. But of course Petrilli would cite Bush. They believe in the same conservative dogma. However, as a parent active in opposing the Bush agenda in Florida noted, “People are starting to realize that Jeb and his reforms are not good for children and not good for schools. They are meant to privatize public education.”
This should be no surprise. Petrilli is a strong advocate of school vouchers. He writes that “Republican governors like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, and Scott Walker are demonstrating real reform.” Huh? Mitch Daniels in Indiana, he of the A-F school grading scandal? Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who hates public servants, including teachers, with a passion? John Kasich of Ohio? Even his Republican colleagues don’t like his education ideas. And Christ Christie of New Jersey? Christie opposes equitable school funding in favor of “closing low performing schools, adding more charter schools and introducing merit pay for teachers.”
It should be no surprise that Petrilli favors (at least) a two-tiered education system. One for the “elite.” And one for the commoners.
Petrilli has plenty of company. Some of them –– like Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee,Wendy Kopp, and the Arnold, Broad, and Walton Foundations –– are overt about their “reform” intentions. Others like Amanda Ripley use more nuanced language.
Sadly in American public education, there are also those who won’t acquiesce openly to Petrilli’s nonsense, but who go along with it implicitly. For example, administrators (and teachers) push the ACT and the SAT, and Advanced Placement (AP) courses. But they are mostly hype. They don’t do anything helpful. Colleges use them for their own nefarious practices: to “lure good students” with promises of financial aid, and to target and eliminate other students on the basis of family income, all to make themselves “look good” in rankings published by US News & World Report. And AP? A comprehensive examination of AP courses and tests by the National Research Council (NRC), for example, found them to be a mile wide and an inch deep, and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
The NRC study was explicit: “Until the College Board makes a concerted effort to educate the media, policymakers, and the public about correct and incorrect interpretations and uses of its examination results…abuses and the consequences associated with them, will almost certainly continue and will probably increase.”
Has the College Board made any such effort? No. In fact, under David Coleman it has doubled down on its faulty products, which it now claims are “aligned” with the more “rigorous” Common Core standards. And Common Core is tied tightly to corporate-style “reformers” who misinform the public about PISA scores and the quality of American public schools while simultaneously shifting the blame to those schools (and teachers) for the economic inequalities and declining “competitiveness” that they caused.
Might we improve public education? Absolutely. But not with the “reforms” advocated by the likes of Michael Petrilli and his brethren. And not without engaging in some very serious reflection on and about the purpose(s) of public schooling in a democratic republic.
“If Petrilli had a hammer/he’d hammer in the mo-ooor-nin’/he’d hammer in the evenin’/all over public education/he’d hammer out data!/he’d hammer out logic!/he’d hammer out the relationship between poverty and learning a-all over this land…”
Extending on democracy’s points, like all hucksters and charlatans (and ignoramuses), Petrilli doesn’t mention The principle is based on the assumption that the competing hypotheses have roughly equivalent explanatory power. The more complex hypothesis is chosen when it clearly has more explanatory power. In short, in science we move from simpler explanations to more complex explanations as the latter demonstrate their usefulness at explaining current and predicting furture observations.
What Petrilli’s inanity demonstrates is that he is not interested in reality; otherwise he would have to abandon the simplistic (moralistic) explanations for the more complex explanations that include poverty in the face of the data. This is just world-building and utopian thinking to justify the greed and indifference of the élites.
The Petrilli Hammer. Priceless.
I simply am unable to read anything he writes without my blood pressure going up.
In his latest Bridging Differences exchange with Deb Meier he even went so far as to say he wanted to write a book on “anti-poverty efforts.” http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2013/10/how_to_fight_poverty_and_win.html His doublespeak is just mind-boggling.
To Mike Petrilli and all the other numb minded nimrods on the standardization bandwagon, I give you this quote from none other than Elvis Presley:
“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.”
Of course he was talking about the record company, eh!!
Petrilli wouldn’t know Occam’s Razor if it jumped up and cut his nose off to spite his face, which is exactly what it would do if it was capable of feeling outrage at being slandered by the likes of Mike.
On a more serious note, I’ve never been able to understand how deformers think, even in their wildest flights of taxpayer cash induced fantasy, that education will cure poverty. Do they mean just for the few outliers who rise above the crushing weight of it and find employment outside their communities, or are they actually delusional enough to think that educating the kids will cure all poverty in their communities by magically creating jobs for and better decision making in all the adults, among all the other toxic factors requiring relief such that poverty might be ended? Do they believe that all these charter school successes will return home after college and start thriving businesses in neighborhoods that have been generational food deserts, economically unable to even support the most basic necessity of a supermarket? Yes, that is an over simplification, but the point about the abject lack of most all ‘out of school resources’ in impoverished communities needs to be addressed by deformers who themselves take such things for granted. Deformers have never bothered to explain exactly how education curing poverty will transpire. Even more telling is that in Petrilli’s attempt at a solution for poverty, (thanks for the link crunchydeb) he gets many things right which to me proves that he does know the truth about real education and the lie of deform, truths he assiduously avoids when he glues his paid troll hat back on for the duration. Petrilli is all about defending the deformer market position.