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on the non-normativity of value-added analysis

pamela — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:44:27 +0000

As you are likely to have heard by now, the Los Angeles Times recently conducted and published a value-added analysis of some of the city’s elementary school teachers, using data that had been collected by the school district but never previously analyzed in this way. There was a nice summary of the value-added analysis and the ensuing controversy in the New York Times this week.

And here’s a quick but thoughtful critique of that summary over at the Quick and the Ed. Its author dispels two common criticisms of the value-added analysis:

We shouldn’t criticize value-added analysis simply on the basis that it shows many teachers’ effectiveness as shifting substantially from year to year. It’s possible that teacher effectiveness *does* shift from year to year, for whatever reason.
Because this particular method of value-added analysis uses individual students’ own previous scores as a baseline for measuring progress, it does not penalize teachers for having slower students in their classes (at least, the criticism must be more subtle, as a commenter suggests).

Still, the most interesting thing I’ve read on the subject remains cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham’s “3 key factors in teacher evaluation (beyond the hype of value added).” According to him, the key factors are:

Figuring out the goals of schooling, and only then crafting assessments to measure teachers’ success at attaining those goals. It’s backwards to assume that whatever we are able to test or assess must be the goal of schooling.
Taking into account the ages of students, recognizing that responsibility for students’ learning probably falls more fully on teachers of early elementary schoolers than on those of high schoolers.
Remaining cognizant of the limitations of any evaluation system in thoughtfully choosing criteria for firing teachers that balance the costs of keeping bad teachers with the costs of firing good ones.

Each of Willingham’s three key factors gets at what is essentially the major problem with value-added analysis: its results, even if accurate, lead us away from philosophical questions about education and teaching, the answers to which have important practical and policy implications. So I want to elaborate on them, with that in mind.

The goals of schooling are far from noncontroversial. Although most people would agree that proficiency in math and reading are amongst its goals, there is significant disagreement as to what constitutes proficiency and how it ranks in importance as compared to other goals of schooling (character development, socialization, preparation for the workforce — which may or may not require proficiency in math and reading, etc). It’s a mistake to establish teacher evaluation policy based on value-added analyses without having clarified at least some of the goals of schooling and their relative importances. As should be obvious, this value judgment can’t be generated from the value-added analysis itself. Rather, it will be outcome of philosophical discussion regarding the moral value of character development/socialization/preparation for the workforce, the best kind of life for a human to lead, how these responsibilities should be shared between schools and families, etc.

Willingham’s second point, about the ages of students and their respective levels of responsibility for their own learning, also raises moral questions. The discourse surrounding value-added analysis has seemingly taken entirely for granted that teachers ought to be doing all that they can to raise students’ test scores, regardless of their ages. This stands in need of defense. While we may be reluctant to blame 7 or 8 year old students for failing to learn math and reading, it may be appropriate to blame 16 and 17 year olds for failing to progress in those subjects. Some high school teachers may manage to raise teenagers’ test scores significantly, and they will come out looking better than other teachers in the value-added analysis. But, even if raising students’ test scores were of the most pressing importance in their early years, other functions may be more important for teachers to engage in at the high school level — maybe helping students to think about their future educational and career plans, and taking a more laissez faire approach in order to begin acclimating them to the “real world.”

So this ties back into the previous point, about the goals of schooling. If raising math and reading test scores is, literally, the one and only proper goal of schooling, then all teachers should be expected to do so each year. However, there may be many other goals of schooling that are more difficult to test. Teachers will need to make tradeoffs in pursuing these various goals, depending not only on their relative importances but based on what their students are like. Maybe, in some particular class, some of the students are ok at math but have social difficulties. Assuming that social development is one of the goals of schooling, the teacher might reasonably decide to devote more time to group work than to math drills. As a result, the students might progress more slowly in math than in previous years, while having made strides socially that do not show up on any test.

The third key factor, about criteria for firing teachers, raises even more moral questions. There are costs associated both with keeping bad teachers and with firing good teachers. If you keep a bad teacher, many students in his or her classes will fail to learn as much as they could have learned with a better teacher, negatively impacting their future educational outcomes and maybe even significantly harming their life prospects. If you fire a good (or at least adequate) teacher, you unduly harm that teacher and demoralize her colleagues (and the replacement teacher might be an unknown quantity who turns out to be worse). We might privilege students’ well-being over teachers, erring on the side of firing, or we might privilege teachers’ well-being in order to show respect to what many consider one of the most important professions. The methods of economics may tell us how to set teacher firing criteria so as to be financially cost effective, but that’s not necessarily the end of the story from the moral perspective.

None of this to say that value-added analysis is “bad,” or has no legitimate purpose. Its results might be quite accurate and useful to some degree, as is perhaps the case in this Los Angeles situation. But we need to realize how it does — or doesn’t — square with our conception of what education, and teaching, ought to be (and, if we lack such a conception, we need first to develop one). At the end of the day, value-added analysis is a descriptive/evaluative tool, and not a normative one.

new school year's resolutions

pamela — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:51:10 +0000

Here we are again, at the start of another school year. This seems like a more appropriate time for students to make resolutions than at the beginning of the calendar year, and it is especially important to form good study habits at the beginning of a new program. So, just for the record, here are mine:

More reading! — This has two parts. First, I resolve never to attend a class meeting this semester without having read the assigned material in its entirety. We’ve all failed to do so before, for whatever reason — we’re too busy, it’s too many pages or too boring, or whatever. But now I’m in a program that I am totally interested in, and without teaching responsibilities on top of my coursework. As such, there is really no excuse for not doing the assigned reading. Which brings us to the second part of the reading resolution: I should also have plenty of time to read at least two books per month (either fiction or nonfiction) in addition to the assigned reading for courses. I’d really like to increase that to one extra book per week, but I guess I’ll work up to it. Will be tracking this with Goodreads.
More writing! — I’ve heard it time and time again: to become a good writer, you must write regularly and copiously, even if noncommittally. I believe that this is good advice, and yet I have never taken it… until this semester. From now on, I’m going to write blog posts of ideas as I have them, instead of stashing them away in Evernote, never to see the light of day. Or, if I have a term paper idea, I plan to test it out with a few pages instead of with a few sentences. It’s not as if I’m going to run out of ink or something.
Less internet! — I’m mildly concerned with the possibility that the internet is decreasing our attention spans, and so on. More importantly, though, it sucks up too much of my time and, although I learn some stuff from surfing around and reading blogs, it never gives me a sense of accomplishment. So Google Reader needs to shift from being my main source of reading to a minor one. And I will use it at night, instead of in the morning when catching up on the blogs can easily derail my plans for the entire day.
More socializing! — I am kind of a loner, especially academically. I basically avoid engaging with my colleagues outside of class, hate sharing papers in progress, and have begun even to avoid discussing academic stuff on social sites. But to be an academic loner is bad for you - it deprives you of exposure to new ideas, practice in critiquing and being critiqued, and networking opportunities. So, I plan to stop being so academically antisocial.

Best wishes for a successful school year to all my fellow students. Or, enjoy not being in school, as the case may be :-)

plagiarism, etiquette, and morality

pamela — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:06:52 +0000

Plagiarism by college students has gotten some attention in the New York Times lately, and it occurs to me that I have dropped the ball on a series of posts about plagiarism that I started earlier this summer. Although I had planned to write other stuff next, I’m instead going to allow myself to be sidetracked by Stanley Fish’s Opinionator post, “Plagiarism is Not a Big Moral Deal,” which I found perplexing.

Fish makes two main claims:

Plagiarism is a learned sin
Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue (more specifically, I think he means it’s not a moral issue)

Regarding point 1, Fish writes:

The concept of plagiarism, however, is learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him. The rule that you not use words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like the rules of golf.

Regarding point 2:

Now if plagiarism is an idea that makes sense only in the precincts of certain specialized practices and is not a normative philosophical notion, inquiries into its philosophical underpinnings are of no practical interest or import… Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.

It seems to me that point 1 doesn’t have any important implications for understanding plagiarism. While Fish admits that, in some sense, every sin is learned, he implies that what’s interesting in the plagiarism case is that rules regarding attribution of work to others are not “culturally universal.” That is, while some rules are shared across all cultures (for example, rules against gratuitous harms to others, presumably), other rules, like those against plagiarism, are not. Rather, plagiarism rules belong to specific sub-cultures (journalism, philosophy, science), and not to others.

Fair enough. But Fish seems to take the non-universality of plagiarism rules as evidence that they are not a moral matter. However, a rule’s not being shared across cultures is insufficient to show that it is not a moral rule, and must instead be one of professional etiquette (or whatever else). A rule’s non-universality is in fact perfectly consistent with a variety of moral theories, even besides cultural relativism. That’s because many moral philosophers hold that morality is sensitive to circumstances. An act that is permissible for a culture living in a very harsh environment might not be permissible for a culture living in a more favorable environment, for instance.

Plagiarism rules can be understood as a response to the circumstances of people working in particular professions. They seem to be a moral response, and not merely one of etiquette or prudence, because plagiarism rules are about limiting harms and facilitating collaboration amongst community members. Are these not the hallmarks of other moral rules, such as those against shooting your neighbors and stealing their stuff?

So, notice that point 2 doesn’t follow from point 1, and seems false besides. Plagiarism rules do not “rest on a foundation of themselves,” as perhaps do silly etiquette matters such as using one’s forks in a particular order so as to signal classiness to one’s dining companions. Rather, plagiarism rules originate from, and are justified by, the circumstances of certain professionals that make plagiarism potentially harmful to individuals and deleterious to communities of inquiry. As moral practices, they are indeed a proper subject of philosophical scrutiny. If the plagiarism rules adopted by professional communities were somehow unfair in principle or in their effects, then philosophers might indict them on moral grounds.

What then of college students who plagiarize? It’s true that they are not full-fledged members of the ingroup to which plagiarism rules apply. Yet, even plagiarism by students has significant potential to harm individuals and damage communities. So, plagiarism by students is wrong for the same types of reasons as plagiarism by professionals is wrong — although not necessarily to the same extent, because the stakes in the former case are lower. However, as in many other moral cases, students’ lack of knowledge of the wrongness of plagiarism, their failure to understand what constitutes it, and/or their lack of intent to commit it may go some ways towards mitigating their blameworthiness.

Teachers College & social justice

pamela — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:55:00 +0000

Recently, Adam Kissel of FIRE (who I recently started following on Twitter) asked me: “What do you think about Teachers College’s idea that one isn’t qualified to be a teacher without believing in social justice?” I had previously seen FIRE’s roundup on free speech issues with TC, I think before I had even accepted my offer there. Their findings regarding TC’s guiding documents (“Conceptual Framework”) are somewhat disconcerting. A quick summary of the situation from FIRE:

Columbia University’s Teachers College requires students to demonstrate a “commitment to social justice” and employs “dispositions,” which it defines as “observable behaviors that fall within the law and involve the use of certain skills,” to evaluate students. These dispositions, “expected of Teachers College candidates and graduates” and “assessed at each transition point,” include “Respect for Diversity and Commitment to Social Justice.”

Basically I agree with FIRE’s assessment of the situation. Teachers College would not necessarily be wrong to require students’ “commitment to social justice” *if* “social justice” were not an ideologically loaded term. I can at least imagine a community of inquiry approaching topics relating to social justice without any preconceived notions about what social justice requires. But that is surely not the case. Rather, “social justice” is often used as the not-so-secret term for a very liberal/progressive/redistributive/egalitarian-ish perspective on the role of the state. Since the TC documents do not go on to specify what the mysterious “social justice” requirement really consists in, we have to assume the worst — that it is indeed an ideological litmus test, or could function as one in the hands of the administration. And, this social justice requirement will have potentially pervasive effects because education policy is seen as one important way of furthering “social justice” so conceived (e.g., closing the achievement gap, equitably funding schools, providing social services to schoolchildren, discouraging or disallowing the privatization of education, etc).

So, there is reason to object to the document on principle. Free speech is of the utmost importance (don’t hold me to this, but I am even inclined towards a totally exceptionless reading of the first amendment). Institutions of higher education are supposed to serve as marketplaces for ideas. They should promote, not stifle, intellectual discourse — regarding what constitutes social justice in education, and anything else. Official positions on what academics can and cannot say have an undesirable chilling effect (academic social norms, such as “political correctness” for instance, restrain discourse enough as it is). Ideas should win intellectual wars by being good, not by being privileged within the academy. I agree with FIRE that it is objectionable for private universities to advertise themselves as being bastions of free thought while maintaining policies of this kind (see a relevant article from FIRE here). If colleges and universities would prefer to change their institutional objectives (e.g., towards ideological teacher training, towards fundamentalist religious education, or whatever), they should be upfront about this, and not keep talking the talk of intellectual activity for its own sake.

More importantly, though, I have prudential concerns about TC’s policy because (as Mr. Kissel probably saw) I am about to begin a PhD program there. Although I am something of a leftish libertarian, I have no doubt that my political views will differ radically from those of most of my classmates and professors. I knew that this was bound to be the case at almost any school of education that I chose to attend, and am prepared for the (hopefully minimal) conflicts that will ensue. However, there is a big difference between having one’s political beliefs scrutinized by one’s classmates and having them scrutinized by the administration. My classmates can’t keep me from graduating or from receiving awards and scholarships, while the administration definitely can. This extreme imbalance of power, combined with the Conceptual Framework tenets in question, is threatening.

I neither concealed nor advertised my political beliefs on my admissions application, but my writing sample was somewhat sympathetic to school choice. My future adviser knows that I have received a Humane Studies Fellowship from the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies; although he is supportive and pleased I am not sure whether everyone in a position of power at TC would feel the same way. In any case, there probably won’t be a whole lot of evidence in my academic work that I am committed to social justice in the way that the Conceptual Framework suggests that I ought to be. Although I remain cautiously optimistic that this will not become a problem during my time at TC (I haven’t heard of any attempts to enforce the requirements), it would of course be better if the suspect requirements were eliminated altogether.

education, the state, and protecting children from ignorance

pamela — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:54:33 +0000

The other day, I started Education and the State by E.G. West. It is sometimes argued that state funded, state regulated, and state provided education is justified by the necessity of protecting children from ignorance. So, West begins with two chapters exploring this argument philosophically and assessing how well this “protection” works in practice. These chapters hooked me right away, because I have always believed that protecting children from various harms is one of the more legitimate functions of the state.

I want to share with you what I found to be the most important point made between the two chapters:

“If the funds now spent by the local authorities were not in the first place taken away from the general public via taxes… it is possible that in many areas much more would be spent on the education of every child. To the extent that this is true there is a new need for the ‘protection of minors’ principle to come into operation, but in the opposite direction to that which is so often invoked. The relevant protection in this case is directed not against the negligence of parents but against the negligence of the local authority and its officials.” (emphasis added, West p. 22–23)

An objection to this argument immediately comes to mind. You might question the speculation that parents would ever actually choose to spend more money on their children’s education that the state does, even if they were paying less in taxes.

Notice that people don’t believe that education is important because the government tells them so. They thought that education was important before the state became so involved, and they would keep thinking it is important even if state involvement in education were reduced. There is interesting work in this area, such as “Market Education: The Unknown History” and “The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How The World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.” Also, keep in mind that spending on education doesn’t necessarily track educational outcomes.

But, assuming that spending really matters, and even if it were true that parents wouldn’t fork out for education in the absence of coercive taxes for educational purposes, that leaves untouched the theoretical point that a principle about protecting children can count not only for but also against state intervention in education. Here are some other possible applications:

State schools’ failure to teach students basic civics may constitute a failure to protect them from ignorance of their rights and responsibilities as citizens. (See this shocking report from the Goldwater Institute).
State schools’ refusal to teach students about evolution may constitute a failure to protect them from ignorance of the basic principles of contemporary science. (An example from my hometown)
Protecting children from ignorance is a specific aspect of the more general duty of states (and persons) to protect children in general. The most obvious and least controversial harms from which children need to be protected are physical harms. And it’s a well-known fact that many public schools in the United States just aren’t that safe. State schools’ refusal (or maybe inability) to maintain decently safe learning environments runs seriously afoul of the more general Protecting Children principle.

So basically, parents are not the only potential violators of the Protecting Children From Ignorance principle (and its parent principle, the Protecting Children principle). State schools can and do fail to protect children in a variety of ways, not limited to those dealing with equitable funding. As such, the principles cut both ways. Sometimes Protecting Children From Ignorance will weigh in favor of measures taken by the government to protect children from the ignorance that would have been imposed on them by their parents. But, other times, Protecting Children From Ignorance — or even just Protecting Children — will weigh in favor of reducing the government’s role in education, or withdrawing students from the system, when public education itself threatens to harm children, intellectually or otherwise.

book review: Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"

pamela — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:48:24 +0000

I recently finished Diane Ravitch’s book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.” This book has been getting quite a bit of attention even outside of educational circles so I figured I should read it.

Ravitch is an historian of education and, viewed as a history, I think the book is really great. It concisely traces a few important strands of recent education history: how the school standards movement got turned into the testing movement, the rise of the business model of education and “accountability,” the segregation-tainted past of “schools of choice,” the conception and effects of No Child Left Behind. If you don’t feel like reading the book, though, Ravitch covers most of these topics ( maybe less comprehensively) on the Education Week Bridging Difference blog she co-writes with another influential educator, Deborah Meier.

Ravitch’s conclusions in this book are particularly notable because they represent a significant departure from her former views. While she used to approve of standardized testing and support market-based education reform, she has come to reject them pretty much entirely. Testing is bad because the tests are often unreliable and invalid, and provide strong incentives for people in control of education to game the system, cheat, or at very least to narrow the curriculum to just the tested subjects. Market-based education reform is bad because there isn’t much evidence that choice and charters actually get any results. (She cites a ton of studies on both of these points).

In the end, Ravitch recommends a strengthening of public education. This can be best achieved by doing away with the high-stakes testing, establishing rigorous and coherent curriculums in all subjects (not just reading and math), making sure that teachers are not only trained in pedagogy but are also experts in their subject material, treating teachers as autonomous professionals, and helping struggling schools rather than closing them down, etc. They’re all pretty conservative recommendations — nothing radical here.

But I’m not as happy with the book’s prescriptions for education as I am with its historical sections, for two main reasons:

Having explained how easily the movement for curriculum standards was disrupted in the 9os, why would Ravitch then go on to put so much stock for future reform in strengthening standards? This is at best idealistic, possibly naive. There is no reason to think that political consensus on what should be taught will be easier to reach now than 15 years ago. Maybe this is ideally the best thing we could do for school reform. But, if it’s exceedingly unlikely to happen, then we need to start looking at next best options, and how to move forward without such curriculum.
Ravitch’s disapproval of school choice and charter schools is based upon their disappointing results in terms of raising test scores. But, she disapproves of the tests, so why should their inability to raise tests scores itself be an indictment against them? And, more importantly, many people support school choice and charter schools at least partly independently of their ability to raise test scores. School choice and charter schools might be valuable simply insofar as they afford parents and students additional freedom. Or, they might be good because they achieve the same mediocre results but at a lower cost. Furthermore, just because school choice and charter schools haven’t yet produced astounding results doesn’t show that they won’t in the future — most programs are in their infancies. An education market, with its increased flexibility, may still have a better chance of innovating to students’ benefit than the current public school system. And anyway, none of the choice or charter programs studied are what the staunchest, most free market of reformers really have in mind. They could still maintain that market-based education *done their way* will work. So Ravitch’s condemnation of choice and charters is maybe a bit hasty, although I think she’s right that the evidence to date is not fantastic and that it is being overblown or ignored by ideological proponents of choice.

So, basically a solid book. I’m definitely still chewing it over. While I’m pretty sympathetic to the market-based education reforms that Ravitch has come to reject, my faith in them is by no means unlimited. I think that the arguments for and against school choice/charter schools are usually pretty tired, and I plan to explore some of the finer points of the issue in the coming months and years. This timely book serves as a solid starting point for understanding school choice/charter school (and testing) skepticism.

learning styles, individual differences, and responsibility

pamela — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:34:15 +0000

Recently, I came across this video: “Learning Styles Don’t Exist,” by psychologist Daniel T. Willingham of the University of Virginia. Willingham argues that learning style theories fail to predict the differences in learning that we would expect to see if they were correct (you should go watch, he explains it better than I could). Learning styles theories entail that teachers should figure out students’ learning styles (auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc) and modify their teaching methods to fit them. If learning styles don’t exist, then demanding that teachers do this doesn’t make sense.

There’s also an important followup to the first video: “Re: Learning Styles Don’t Exist.” Here, Willingham emphasizes that there are in fact plenty of individual differences that are relevant to education, such as differences in students’ interests and motivation. Teachers can and should take these legitimate differences into account, just not the mythical “learning style.”

But why do so many people think that there are learning styles, when there aren’t? First of all, the theory has popular opinion on its side. Willingham reports that 90% of University of Virginia students believe that they exist, for instance. Second, although the theory’s applications to the classroom are misguided in the way the first video suggests, it’s actually true that people can learn things in different ways. Third, and maybe most importantly, confirmation bias leads us to inappropriately interpret ambiguous education situations as confirming the theory.

I’m interested in two further reasons why learning styles theory may have become so popular:

It could allow students to deny the existence of genuine individual differences in intelligence ;
It could allow students to externalize responsibility for learning failures.

Sometimes teaching is described as if, were the teacher to say or do something magical, it would unleash the immense learning potential of even the least apparently intelligent student. This student allegedly just has some special, particular learning style, a style that is not currently being acknowledged by the teacher. But all this is wrong. Sometimes people are just not good at certain types of activities or at learning certain types of content (we can leave open whether the cause of these differences is nature or nurture).

For example, I am pretty good at learning content from lectures (in fact, I often ignore talk handouts, which I often find distracting). I am not so good at spatial tasks (maps & directions). It is not the case that, had only my geography teachers verbally described the maps to me, I would have learned that spatial information more easily. Rather, there is a genuine individual difference between me and my classmate who has great spatial skills.

But who really wants to hear that they are just kind of bad at something? It can be psychologically more comfortable for a student to externalize responsibility for failures in learning and blame the teacher instead. Learning styles theory facilitates this, because it purports to provide a scientific basis to justify the demand that we receive an education customized just for us. When no such custom education is forthcoming, we can point to learning style theory and complain that the system has failed us.

These are not good reasons to accept learning style theory. Like it or not, there are cognitive individual differences. Like it or not, some of the responsibility for learning lies with you. Learning style theory fails, in that it represents not only apparently sketchy science but also a reification of wishful thinking.

PS — It seems that I have a bad habit of titling posts with a three word list. I have decided not to resist this tendency, and to add an Oxford comma. I hope I don’t lose readers over this :-)

ta-da!

pamela — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:01:54 +0000

Well, it took me most of the weekend, but I finally have TFIR satisfactorily re-setup using WordPress.org, Laughing Squid hosting, and Soma Design’s lovely theme, The Erudite. Please do let me know if you find something that doesn’t work. Blogging will recommence shortly!

moving on up

pamela — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:36:41 +0000

Hi friends. This weekend, I’ll be attempting a move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. I may be getting way in over my head, but what’s a summer without some challenging, up-all-night, independent learning opportunities? Presumably, the move will involve some site downtime, and P approaches 1.0 that I will break stuff. I also have no idea if the RSS feed will be in the same place. So please stay tuned on Twitter. Only time will tell whether I will come out on the other side of this successfully, or whether I will go crawling back to WordPress.com with my tail between my legs :-)

what's in a name? - labels and tracking

pamela — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:10:12 +0000

Yesterday, I discussed the issue of whether work-related language is appropriate for describing learning. Here’s another language in education controversy that has made it into the news lately:

‘At hope’ kids better than ‘at risk’?: Washington state lawmaker wants to banish negative labels

The bill is motivated by the good-hearted desire for disadvantaged children to see themselves more positively, and for their teachers and others to focus on the children’s potential instead of on their deficits. This change would probably have not merely symbolic importance: psychological experiments provide some reason to believe that the labels we use to describe people actually have effects on their behavior. From a recent Psychology Today blog post:

The long-term consequences of labeling a child like Hannah “smart” or “slow” are profound. In another classic study, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers at an elementary school that some of their students had scored in the top 20% of a test designed to identify “academic bloomers”–students who were expected to enter a period of intense intellectual development over the following year. In fact, the students were selected randomly, and they performed no differently from their unselected peers on a genuine academic test. A year after convincing the teachers that some of their students were due to bloom, Rosenthal and Jacobson returned to the school and administered the same test. The results were astonishing among the younger children: the “bloomers,” who were no different from their peers a year ago, now outperformed their unselected peers by 10–15 IQ points. The teachers fostered the intellectual development of the “bloomers,” producing a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the students who were baselessly expected to bloom actually outperformed their peers.

Opponents to the bill object to spending money and time changing just the language of education policy. Rather, they stress the importance of actual reforms, expenditures, programs, etc. for the benefit of these children, whatever we call them. There is also the predictable charge of this being a manifestation of excessive “political correctness.”

I think that everyone’s sort of correct. The “at hope” language could really prevent children from thinking as badly of themselves as the “at risk” label might. However, it would almost certainly fail to bring about the “paradigm shift” in education that its proposer has in mind. So the bill’s opponents are right that the label change in itself won’t revolutionize the treatment of the children, and they’re also right that there might be more important places to spend money than on passing the bill and changing the label. But, at the same time, it would cost relatively so little to make the change that it may well be worth it — such a small amount of money would be unlikely to do as much good elsewhere in the education budget.

At the end of the day, though, this raises what is essentially a question about the “tracking” of students, which is just what it sounds like — placing them on different academic paths based on their abilities or apparent potential. There are plenty of problems with tracking, and this case gets at an important one: even when implemented with the best of intentions, dividing up student in this way may have negative social and academic consequences, possibly even to the point of outweighing the advantages. Part of the negative social and academic consequences could arise on account of the particular label used, such as “at risk.” But it seems to me that many of the negative consequences are inherent to the practice of tracking, and cannot be eradicated by renaming the groups. Kids aren’t stupid — they will very quickly figure out who are the smart or privileged ones among them, and begin behaving accordingly. And teachers will, of course, still know who the smart and/or privileged kids are. This will tend to affect their behavior towards the groups students (if subconsciously), which can very easily lead to self-fulfilling prophecies about the “at risk” or “at hope” children doing poorly.

Therefore, the apparently benevolent legislators behind programs for “at risk” or “at hope” children are fighting against powerful human psychological tendencies. They need for children to be separated into groups so that some of them can be given special attention, instruction and resources. Maybe that is theoretically just and good. But, in forming the requisite groups, one also nearly unavoidably forms a hierarchy and opens the door for the marginalization of groups with low status. It will be difficult to decide in advance whether any particular educational enrichment program’s actual effects will further the goals that its crafters had in mind.