Today, I worked with science teachers on their performance tasks. Actually, I’ve been doing a lot of consulting this year on performance tasks, which is the hot new trend in assessment.

A performance task is an opportunity for students to demonstrate that they can independently apply the skills they’ve learned in a real-world context. So it’s like a post-test, only instead of multiple-choice questions, students have to do an authentic activity. Teachers examine the resulting student work with a rubric to measure whether or not students have learned the skills, and they can then use this information to plan future instruction. It’s much more effective than standardized-testing data in diagnosing student needs, though I do admit it is much more time-consuming.

This year, I’ve been working a lot with social studies and science teachers. Because of the Common Core shifts, these teachers are now required to teach literacy skills. There are no actual content standards in social studies or science in the Common Core; all of the standards for these subject areas are literacy standards. There are science content standards currently under development by Next Generation. When they are completed, states will have the option of adopting them in the same way they adopted Common Core. But until then, science content standards come from the states, and literacy standards from the Common Core are applied across the curriculum.

Now, I actually like the idea of literacy across the curriculum, but it is a big adjustment for science and social studies teachers, and so the schools where I consult have asked me to work with these teachers to help them infuse literacy skills into their curriculum and their assessments, particularly the performance tasks that New York City is requiring them to administer this year.

I have had a lot of experience working with social studies teachers in the past, but I’m probably working more with science teachers this year than I ever have before. And that’s fantastic, because I get the opportunity to learn a lot of new things. I also get the chance to yell “Science!” like Magnus Pyke a lot. No, I don’t really do that, but it would be fun.

One of the science teachers I worked with today swears by a website for an organization called Urban Advantage. It has some great resources for teaching middle-school science with an inquiry-based approach. I like the way that their materials scaffold scientific writing, which is my focus this year.

Another science teacher I worked with today showed me the PhET website, which has some really compelling interactive simulations in the sciences. I watched 7th-grade students run a simulation on density, in which they had to determine the mass and volume of various mystery substances and identify them from a list of materials and their densities.

Science!

Across the United States, education is undergoing a sea-change (into something rich and strange) surrounding the adoption of something called the Common Core State Standards.

Standards are simply a list of what students should be able to do by the end of each grade. Traditionally, these have been defined by states, with a requirement for them to do so by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. States still define their own standards, but, in an unprecedented act of coordination, 45 states (plus the District of Columbia and a few of the territories) have adopted the Common Core as their state standards. Full adoption has been targeted for next year, though New York has started phasing in significant portions of it this year.

Love it or hate it, the Common Core represents a new direction in pedagogical thinking, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Personally, I think the Common Core standards are a lot better than the existing New York State Standards, but we’re going to have to suffer through a difficult transition period before we can reap the benefits of that improvement. Right now is probably the most difficult time, as we have to deal with students who are not starting on what the new structure defines as grade-level, a lack of Common Core-aligned teaching materials, and uncertainty surrounding precisely how these new standards will be assessed. May you live in interesting times.

As with anything new and complex, there are going to be a number of misconceptions floating around about it. One of the most prevalent I’ve seen is that the Common Core eliminates (or at least de-emphasizes) literature, in favor of informational texts. In particular, many are convinced that Shakespeare will be replaced entirely by non-fiction, as public education descends into a Dickensian nightmare of Shakespeare-deprived conformity and standardization.

In fact, Shakespeare is mandated by the Common Core.

The confusion seems to stem from a chart that appears on page 5 of the English Language Arts Standards document, outlining the percentages of literary vs. informational texts included in the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

(Click for a larger image.)

The Common Core is explicit about aligning curricula with this framework, but it is just as explicit about how that alignment should be distributed:

Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional. Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes if the NAEP assessment framework is to be matched instructionally.

So, despite the canard that high-school English classes will only be allowed to teach literature 30% of the time, the 70% informational text requirement refers to the entirety of student reading across the curriculum. Given that one of the major shifts is an increase in reading and writing in the content areas, the ratio makes sense.

Let’s say that, over the course of a particular unit, a high-school English teacher is assigning 3 literary texts and 1 informational text. That means that (text length aside) students are reading 75% literature in English class. And if this is the only reading the students are doing, then they are reading 75% literature overall. But now imagine that, during the same timeframe, they are also reading 2 informational texts in social studies, 2 informational texts in science, and 2 informational texts in all of their other classes combined. They are still reading 75% literature in English class, but this now represents 30% of their reading overall.

And, far from being lost in the informational-text shuffle, Shakespeare now becomes the man of the hour. As the only author explicitly required by the Common Core, Shakespeare must be taught in grades 11 and 12 (see page 38, right column, Standards 4 and 7). Shakespeare is also included in the recommended texts for grades 9 and 10 (see page 58, left column, center). And Shakespeare is not excluded for younger students either, as the standards outline only the minimum of what must be taught in each grade. The Common Core does stress using authentic texts, so updated language versions of Shakespeare would be frowned upon, but that’s actually an adjustment I can get behind.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the Common Core, and a lot of objections surrounding the new changes. Some of these objections are legitimate, and some are not. I look forward to continuing that conversation as the implementation develops. But rest assured that Shakespeare isn’t going anywhere.

I wanted to address a question that isn’t Frequently Asked, but one that is often raised in more subtle ways: Why would a blog dedicated to the teaching of Shakespeare talk so much about politics? Why risk alienating Shakespeare fans that may not agree with my viewpoints? Wouldn’t it be better to build a community of Shakespeare teachers without venturing into the socially impolite topic of partisan politics?

First of all, allow me to clarify that this blog isn’t entirely dedicated to teaching Shakespeare, as you may have noticed. “Shakespeare Teacher” is simply meant to be my blogger handle. The blog has always been about whatever I happen to find interesting at the moment, which often includes education and Shakespeare, but it also will include politics from time to time. But the question does lead to a more interesting question about how contemporary politics and Shakespeare are related in the roles they play in our lives.

In The Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal tells us that “all theater is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theater is one of them.” What’s the point of studying Shakespeare if we’re not going to learn from him? And what’s the point of learning from him if we’re not going to apply what we’ve learned to build a better world? People who study that other great work of literature never hesitate to cite passages from it to imply an endorsement of their political views. We should not be timid to bring Shakespeare into the discussion when his insights would add a vital perspective.

I sometimes try to do this with the anagram, and this example from King Lear is perhaps illustrative. Lear is looking at the helpless victims of a storm and recognizing that he is partly responsible for their plight. “O! I have ta’en/ Too little care of this.” And if we can be moved by his words, it’s only fair to ask: moved to what? If we can be moved to tears, we can be moved to action. Because what moves us in that line is our recognition of the things in the world that we ourselves have ta’en too little care of. Like, for example, the helpless victims of a storm, and our responsibility to them.

We venerate Shakespeare for his wisdom about the human condition. Some go so far as to say that he teaches us what it means to be human. But how does this understanding manifest itself in our society if not in the decisions we make as public policy? How do we define ourselves? How do we treat each other? How can we meet our most fundamental human needs? How do we deal with the unexpected? What are our priorities? What is our responsibility to one another? How we answer these questions for ourselves determines how we make the big decisions about the kind of society we want to be and the kind of world we want to live in. These decisions are swayed by policy, policy is swayed by elections, and elections are swayed by public opinion. Can Shakespeare be a voice in that discussion?

I talk about Shakespeare. I talk about politics. I welcome you to the conversation.

Taking quotes out of context is a peculiar breed of dishonesty. It carries a sense of credibility, as the person actually said the words, but that only makes the lie more powerful when the meaning isn’t preserved. Lately, we’ve seen a number of instances of a particularly virulent strain of the practice, one in which the out-of-context quote conveniently fits an existing narrative about the speaker. The liar is comforted that his lie is meant to convey a deeper truth.

For example, a while back, Mitt Romney offered the statement “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Now, anyone watching the original speech in context understood that he was talking about his preference to retain the ability to change health insurance companies. But because the left had already characterized him as someone who had built his fortune destroying jobs, it became very easy to shorten the quote to “I like being able to fire people,” or simply “I like… to fire people.” It doesn’t really feel like lying if we believe it to be an accurate portrayal of how he really feels deep down, right?

So when Barack Obama uttered the now-famous sentence “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Republicans didn’t care that he was referring to roads and bridges. They knew that he really believed in his heart that business owners didn’t deserve credit for their own success, so taking him out of context seemed to be fair game. In a way, it felt even more honest than leaving the quote in context. They went so far as to base their entire convention around the misleading reference, shouting back at their fictionalized idea of the president’s intentions with righteous fervor. By the end of the convention, the imaginary Barack Obama seemed so real that Clint Eastwood even tried to have a conversation with it.

Now, a video has surfaced which has raised some questions about what Mitt Romney meant when he said that it’s not his job to worry about the 47% of Americans that don’t pay federal income taxes:

Well, there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement and government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49 … I mean, he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax; 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. He’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years.

And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center, that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what he looks like.

He was talking about his job as a candidate, not as a future president. So a response of “Well, Barack Obama is president to ALL of the people” is an unfair non-sequitur. All he’s saying is that it would be a waste of his time to court the votes of the non-taxpayer, because to do so would require getting them to vote against their own entitlements, thus taking responsibility and caring for their lives.

In fact, a President Romney would indeed convince the 47% to take personal responsibility and care for their lives by helpfully removing the safety net, their dependence on which has caused them so much detriment. You’re welcome. Added to which, we are to believe that a Romney presidency will lead to an immediate American Renaissance in military strength, traditional family values, and economic prosperity for all Americans rich and poor alike. The statement just doesn’t make any sense, from Romney’s point of view, if he’s talking about himself as president.

Now, I have to admit that there’s a part of me that is a bit amused by Romney’s complaint that he’s being taken out of context. Sorry, Mitt. You built that.

But I actually think it’s important to look at what he said in context, because that in itself is disturbing enough without having to distort it. And yes, the 47% does include soldiers and seniors, but I am willing to give Governor Romney the benefit of the doubt and say that he probably wasn’t talking about them. I want to focus on what he really meant, not what we want him to have meant.

If you look at what he is saying and who he is saying it to, you can see that he is painting a very broad picture of people who pay no federal income taxes as lazy freeloaders – not just the people who receive government aid, but also people who simply pay no taxes because they don’t earn enough to tax. That would be the poor, many of whom do harder work every day than Mitt Romney or I could even imagine. Now, these people never asked for a government handout; they just benefit from a tax code that doesn’t take food off of their table. Like everyone else, they’ll pay the lowest rate possible and certainly won’t volunteer to pay more. If anyone can appreciate that, it should be Mitt Romney.

When a man who owns a car elevator bemoans at a $50,000-a-plate dinner how the working class believes that they are entitled to food, we really have to consider what that means for us as a nation. Marie Antoinette, at least, offered cake.

Now that Mitt Romney has chosen his running mate, I’d like to return to a comment he made earlier in the campaign.

“I think this is a land of opportunity for every single person, every single citizen of this great nation. And I want to make sure that we keep America a place of opportunity, where everyone has a fair shot. They get as much education as they can afford and with their time they’re able to get and if they have a willingness to work hard and the right values, they ought to be able to provide for their family and have a shot of realizing their dreams.”

The key phrase is “as much education as they can afford.” Right now, our taxes provide a K-12 education to all children in this country free of charge. This drives conservatives crazy. Their fantasy is a free-market education system where schools have to compete for learner dollars. If a school isn’t making the grade, well, parents just won’t send their kids there and, bang, the education crisis is over.

And I have to admit that the position is consistent with their other ideals. Liberals believe that the government can be a force for good in people’s lives. Conservatives believe that it cannot be, that government interference is always unwelcome. So getting rid of government services like education and Social Security and Medicaid makes perfect sense to them.

Even their lopsided tax values make sense, in an odd sort of way. For you see, Romney tells us in the quote above that the ingredients of success are hard work and the right values. If you don’t have a job, that’s your fault. (Unless the president is a Democrat, in which case it’s his fault.) So the wealthy are a special class of people who deserve special consideration. They should get as much influence in government as they can afford.

It’s not surprising that Romney believes that his immense wealth is a direct function of his hard work and correct values. And it explains his cringe-worthy comments about the economic disparities between nations being due to culture. This is his worldview. The free market is a just God, and doles out rewards and punishments appropriately.

For obvious reasons, he doesn’t like to talk about this worldview very much. We only get the occasional glimpse of it through these “education” and “culture” slips when Romney commits the ultimate gaffe of speaking from the heart.

But with the selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, he is signaling that this is not an accident, not a coincidence, not an occasional gaffe. Paul Ryan is the human embodiment of this philosophy. And it’s not just his adoration of Ayn Rand; his actions speak much louder than her words.

Paul Ryan’s plan phases out Medicare. It phases out Medicare. You hear that, PolitiFact? It phases out Medicare. Over the past few days, Republicans have been quick to point out that, under their plan, current seniors would not have their benefits affected. But after that, they phase out Medicare. Really. Under their plan, Medicare would be replaced by a voucher system which – just like their voucher proposal for education – would be underfunded and ultimately targeted for elimination.

And then seniors will get all of the health care they can afford.

I’ve been asked by the good folks at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to participate in a project with other bloggers in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday. The idea is to describe in a blog post how Shakespeare has influenced my life. My first impulse was to decline. First of all, it would require providing a name and bio, and I blog anonymously. Though I’ve linked to it several times, I’ve never posted my full name on the blog. More importantly, Shakespeare’s influence is an aspect of my life I don’t usually like to talk about. But perhaps this is an opportunity. By speaking out now, I can help others avoid the nightmare I have lived through. Because you see, my friends, Shakespeare has completely destroyed my life.

As a high school student, I showed a modicum of potential to become a productive member of society. I went into college as an undeclared major, with an array of exciting career options ahead of me. I took classes in a variety of disciplines, with the naive hope of discovering my passions. I took an acting class on a whim, and the professor suggested that I audition for her play. I was ready to do it, until I found that the play was by Shakespeare. Now, I was always taught to stay away from Shakespeare, but the professor was persuasive and I figured there wouldn’t be any harm in trying it just that once.

I was cast as Sebastian in Twelfth Night. I memorized my difficult lines by rote and went through the rehearsal process. One night, while I was waiting backstage and listening to the play, a single line caught in my ear and made me smile. “Hey, that’s pretty clever,” I admitted. A bit later, another line stuck in my head. “I see what he’s doing there.” Like popcorn popping, the revelations began to gradually speed up. Each weave of imagery, each implied metaphor, each beat of the iamb was like a jolt of adrenaline to my young brain. I was converted into a card-carrying Shakespeare fan.

I continued with acting as well, and in my junior year I had the opportunity to play Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That was the experience that first sent me down the rabbit hole. No longer just a casual Shakespeare fan, I had become a full-blown addict. And of course the comedies proved to be merely a gateway drug to the harder stuff. My senior year, I discovered Hamlet, and what should have been a year of personal exploration and maturation was completely lost to that play. I would read it over and over, fascinated by the experience of making new discoveries every time, no matter how many times I had read it. Any thoughts I may have ever had of doing anything else were drowned in that play.

I needed more… Masters degree… Ph.D… My dissertation was on teaching Shakespeare to elementary school students. No longer content to be merely a user, I had become a dealer. A pusher. Could I decrease my own misery by dragging down others with me? I was determined to find out. I started teaching graduate-level Shakespeare courses at NYU – first a beginner, than an advanced class. I was completely out of control. I founded a Shakespeare reading group. I started a Shakespeare-themed blog. I taught for the Folger’s summer Teaching Shakespeare Institute for teachers. Conferences. Lectures. Seminars. Nothing was ever enough. When life threw me a curve ball, I went looking for answers at the bottom of a Riverside Complete Works anthology. I re-read Midsummer, and hit Bottom.

And what has it all gotten me? I am forty years old, and I have never held a full-time job. I support myself by working part-time, training teachers, administrators, school-based data teams, graduate students… anyone, as long as it will pay for that next Caedmon audio production of As You Like It. Had I never discovered Shakespeare, never developed that unquenchable thirst, who knows where I’d be today? But I know where I’ll be tonight. There’s an off-off-Broadway production of Measure for Measure in the West Village. Picture it. I walk the mean streets of Manhattan, desperate for a fix. I turn down a dark alley where I see a non-descript door propped open with a piece of plywood. I slip twenty dollars to a kid with purple hair who hands me a program and waves me in. And I know that, tonight, I will get what I need. And for a junkie, tonight is all that matters.

My name is Bill Heller. And I am a Shakespeare addict.

There is so much wrong with this article by Eric Hanushek that I fear that anything less than a line-for-line rebuttal will be woefully inadequate as a response. Out of consideration for my readers, I will refrain from providing one, and will rather try to focus on the most important points. Hanushek, of course, is the Stanford economist whose lurch into the field of education has driven much of the recent misguided effort towards “Reform” in today’s educational system. His article does a good job of summarizing his most crucial arguments, so it’s worth some time examining.

The title of the piece is “Valuing Teachers” and a brilliantly disingenuous title it is. Rather than using the word as we might use it (placing a high value on teachers), he is using it as an economist might (assessing the value of teachers). He is measuring how much teachers are worth. According to Hanushek, better teachers result in higher incomes for their students later in life. To make his case, he uses a series of unscientific leaps of logic that will yield easily to a few moments of rationality.

He notes that “a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.” I have no reason to doubt his numbers.

But Hanushek is making the classic blunder of confusing correlation with causation. Do higher test scores in school directly cause higher incomes? Or is it possible that they may have common contributing factors? What about factors that the student brings in, such as intelligence, stamina, and motivation? Is it possible that parental income can be a factor in both standardized testing scores and future income? Hanushek’s famous value-added study attempted to isolate these factors, but he seems content to ignore them when citing this achievement/income connection.

And, as Diana Senechal points out, “there is no evidence (as far as I know) that students in the highest percentiles in high school are those who made the greatest gains on their standardized tests over the years. In fact, I suspect that most of them did pretty well on those tests all along.”

Using future income as a measure of teacher quality is even more outrageous than using test scores. How much does a Stanford professor make compared to a Wall Street hedge fund manager? Is that a function of the quality of education they received? In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I make significantly less than LeBron James. Did he have better teachers?

Hanushek’s solution is to “contemplate asking 5 to 10 percent of teachers to find a job at which they are more effective so they can be replaced by teachers of average productivity.” (Note to my boss: if it should ever become necessary to fire me, I would request that you instead contemplate asking me to find a job at which I am more effective.)

Hanushek’s solution – fire the bad teachers – is very simple, but it requires several assumptions that I don’t think we should be so quick to grant.

Assumptions

1. Standardized tests accurately measure student achievement.
2. The teachers whose students don’t make progress on the tests are the bad teachers.
3. There is a line of average teachers at the door waiting to be hired.
4. No factors other than teacher quality are significant.

Peruse this list, and note that Hanushek’s plan falls apart if even one of these assumptions is false. In fact, they all are.

Assumption: Standardized tests accurately measure student achievement.

False. The tests that students are given are deeply flawed indeed. Many of the questions do not test what they purport to test, and test-taking itself has become it’s own skill set that schools ignore at their own peril. If we’re careful, we can use some the results to identify areas in need of improvement. But the tests on the whole are way too idiosyncratic to use the overall scores as a basis for high-stakes decision making.

Assumption: The teachers whose students don’t make progress on the tests are the bad teachers.

False. In an August 2010 paper for the Economic Policy Institute, a team of highly distinguished education researchers laid out the case against the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. Bottom line: It doesn’t work. Test scores are simply an ineffective statistical measure for identifying bad teachers. If you don’t find twenty pages of research from a panel of experts compelling, then you can read about this well-respected hard-working teacher who got slammed by a statistical formula.

Assumption: There is a line of average teachers at the door waiting to be hired.

False. In fact, teacher recruitment and retention is becoming a serious problem. A McKinsey study, Closing the Talent Gap, describes the decline in the teaching profession’s ability to compete in the labor market.

However, I suspect there is a bit of condescension towards the profession of teaching when we assume we can just go out and hire average teachers. The implication is that the average person would make an average teacher, rather than acknowledging that teaching requires a particular set of qualities (e.g., diligence, patience, intelligence, and a calling to want to do it) for someone to even be an average teacher. To glibly say that we can just fire the bad teachers and hire average ones is unintentionally insulting.

Assumption: No factors other than teacher quality are significant.

False. Hanushek anticipates this rebuttal, and is kind enough to provide examples of other factors that are not significant:

The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Costly? I thought we were discussing what is most effective. Aren’t we having a national education crisis? Hanushek has moved past his role as researcher and now is making policy judgements. Danny Westneat argues effectively against the idea that class size is irrelevant, so I don’t have to. Teachers already know the importance of class size, and I suspect that the Reformers do as well. Similarly, other initiatives we take to improve education, costly or no, are based on research and accumulation of best practices. Even if we let Hanushek fire all of the bad teachers, we would still want to implement successful education initiatives. Sorry.

Neither side is happy with our current educational system. But Reformers seem to offer nothing but slapdash solutions that keep expenses low but ignore the facts on the ground. It seems, then, we have a choice to make. Do we want to have a public education system in this country? Many do not, and would rather see the free market take over education. Charter schools seem to be a first step in that direction, and I think the Reformers who tout them have become, wittingly or unwittingly, somewhat of a stalking horse for the movement against public education. Diane Ravitch, in her eloquent response to Waiting for Superman, discusses why charter schools aren’t the panacea they’re often held up as. She also discusses the impact of poverty on student achievement, and the dangers of ignoring it in the national discussion. Paying teachers more? Keeping class size down? Addressing the needs of high-poverty schools? It all seems so… costly.

That’s what it’s going to take, though. If we want a high-quality public education system, we’re going to have to pay for it. These may be troubled economic times, but really it’s just a question of priorities. If we’re going to have public education at all, we need to increase, not decrease, funding for it. We need to increase it by a lot. Reformer “solutions” only distract from the real issue. They want us to look at charter schools, but if we look closely enough, we’ll see that the most successful charter schools are able to spend much more per student than the public schools who are expected to emulate them.

And so, we must choose between abolishing public education and funding it adequately. Abolishing it is not really a choice at all, and would lead to an even worse crisis than we have now. But, if we can adjust our priorities and give our students the schools they deserve, then, as Dan Quayle said, “We are going to have the best educated American people in the world.” (Should we be blaming his teachers?)

Last week, an IBM computer named Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two greatest Jeopardy! players of all time, in a nationally televised event. The Man vs. Machine construct is a powerful one (I’ve even used it myself), as these contests have always captured progressive imaginations. Are humans powerful enough to build a rock so heavy, not even we can lift it?

Watson was named for Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president. But he could just as easily have been named after John B. Watson, the American psychologist who is considered to be the father of behaviorism. Behaviorism is a view of psychology that disregards the inner workings of the mind and focuses only on stimuli and responses. This input leads to that output. Watson was heavily influenced by the salivating dog experiments of Ivan Pavlov, and was himself influential in the operant conditioning experiments of B.F. Skinner. Though there are few strict behaviorists today, the movement was quite dominant in the early 20th century.

The behaviorists would have loved the idea of a computer playing Jeopardy! as well as a human. They would have considered it a validation of their theory that the mind could be viewed as merely generating a series of predictable outputs when given a specific set of inputs. Playing Jeopardy! is qualitatively different from playing chess. The rules of chess are discrete and unambiguous, and the possibilities are ultimately finite. As Noam Chomsky argues, language possibilities are infinite. Chess may one day be solved, but Jeopardy! never will be. So Watson’s victory here is a significant milestone.

Much has been made of whether or not the contest was “fair.” Well, of course it wasn’t fair. How could that word possibly have any meaning in this context. There are things computers naturally do much better than humans, and vice versa. The question instead should have been in which direction would the unfairness be decisive. Some complained that the computer’s superior buzzer speed gave it the advantage, but buzzer speed is the whole point.

Watson has to do three things before buzzing in: 1) understand what question the clue is asking, 2) retrieve that information from its database, and 3) develop a sufficient confidence level for its top answer. In order to achieve a win, IBM had to build a machine that could do those things fast enough to beat the humans to the buzzer. Quick reflexes are an important part of the game to be sure, but if that were the whole story, computers would have dominated quiz shows decades ago.

To my way of thinking, it’s actually the comprehensive database of information that gives Watson the real edge. We may think of Ken and Brad as walking encyclopedias, but that status was hard earned. Think of the hours upon hours they must have spent studying classical composers, vice-presidential nicknames, and foods that start with the letter Q. Even a prepared human might temporarily forget the Best Picture Oscar winner for 1959 when the moment comes, but Watson never will. (It was Ben-Hur.)

In fact, given what I could see, Watson’s biggest challenge seemed to be understanding what the clue was asking. To avoid the complications introduced by Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiement, we’ll adopt a behaviorist, pragmatic definition of “understanding” and take it to mean that Watson is able to give the correct response to a clue, or at least a reasonable guess. (After all, you can understand a question and still get it wrong.) Watching the show on television, we are able to see Watson’s top three responses, and his confidence level for each. This gives us remarkable insight into the machine’s process, allowing us a deeper level of analysis.

A lot of my own work lately has been in training school-based data inquiry teams how to examine testing data to learn where students need extra help, and that work involves examining individual testing items. So naturally, when I see three responses to a prompt, I want to figure out what they mean. In this case, Watson was generating the choices rather than simply choosing among them, but that actually makes them more helpful in sifting through his method.

One problem I see a lot in schools is that students are often unable to correctly identify what kind of answer the question is asking for. In as much as Watson has what we would call a student learning problem, this is it. When a human is asked to come up with three responses to a clue, all of the responses would presumably be of the correct answer type. See if you can come up with three possible responses to this clue:

Category: Hedgehog-Pogde
Clue: Hedgehogs are covered with quills or spines, which are hollow hairs made stiff by this protein

Watson correctly answered Keratin with a confidence rating of 99%, but his other two answers were Porcupine (36%) and Fur (8%). I would have expected all three candidate answers to be proteins, especially since the words “this protein” ended the clue. In many cases, the three potential responses seemed to reflect three possible questions being asked rather than three possible answers to a correct question, for example:

Category: One Buck or Less
Clue: In 2002, Eminem signed this rapper to a 7-figure deal, obviously worth a lot more than his name implies

Ken was first to the buzzer on this one and Alex confirmed the correct response, both men pronouncing 50 Cent as “Fiddy Cent” to the delight of humans everywhere. Watson’s top three responses were 50 Cent (39%), Marshall Mathers (20%), and Dr. Dre (14%). This time, the words “this rapper” prompted Watson to consider three rappers, but not three potential rappers that could have been signed by Eminem in 2002. It was Dr. Dre who signed Eminem, and Marshall Mathers is Eminem’s real name. So again, Watson wasn’t considering three possible answers to a question; he was considering three possible questions. And alas, we will never know if Watson would have said “Fiddy.”

It seemed as though the more confident Watson was in his first guess, the more likely the second and third guesses would be way off base:

Category: Familiar Sayings
Clue: It’s a poor workman who blames these

Watson’s first answer Tools (84%) was correct, but his other answer candidates were Yogi Berra (10%) and Explorer (3%). However Watson is processing these clues, it isn’t the way humans do it. The confidence levels seemed to be a pretty good predictor of whether or not a response was correct, which is why we can forgive Watson his occassional lapses into the bizarre. Yeah, he put down Toronto when the category was US Cities, but it was a Final Jeopardy, where answers are forced, and his multiple question marks were an indicator that his confidence was low. Similarly cornered in a Daily Double, he prefaced his answer with “I’ll take a guess.” That time, he got it right. I’m just looking into how the program works, not making excuses for Watson. After all, it’s a poor workman who blames Yogi Berra.

But the fact that Watson interpreted so many clues accurately was impressive, especially since Jeopardy! clues sometimes contain so much wordplay that even the sharpest of humans need an extra moment to unpack what’s being asked, and understanding language is our thing. Watson can’t hear the the other players, which means he can’t eliminate their incorrect responses when he buzzes in second. It also means that he doesn’t learn the correct answer unless he gives it, which makes it difficult for him to catch on to category themes. He managed it pretty well, though. After stumbling blindly through the category “Also on Your Computer Keys,” Watson finally caught on for the last clue:

Category: Also on Your Computer Keys
Clue: Proverbially, it’s “where the heart is”

Watson’s answers were Home is where the heart is (20%), Delete Key (11%), and Elvis Presley quickly changed to Encryption (8%). The fact that Watson was considering “Delete Key” as an option means that he was starting to understand that all of the correct responses in the category were also names of keys on the keyboard.

Watson also is not emotionally affected by game play. After giving the embarrassingly wrong answer “Dorothy Parker” when the Daily Double clue was clearly asking for the title of a book, Watson just jumped right back in like nothing had happened. A human would likely have been thrown by that. And while Alex and the audience may have laughed at Watson’s precise wagers, that was a cultural expectation on their part. There’s no reason a wager needs to be rounded off to the nearest hundred, other than the limitations of human mental calculation under pressure. This wasn’t a Turing test. Watson was trying to beat the humans, not emulate them. And he did.

So where does that leave us? Computers that can understand natural language requests and retrieve information accurately could make for a very interesting decade to come. As speech recognition improves, we might start to see computers who can hold up their end of a conversation. Watson wasn’t hooked up to the Internet, but developing technologies could be. The day may come when I have a bluetooth headset hooked up to my smart phone and I can just ask it questions like the computer on Star Trek. As programs get smarter about interpreting language, it may be easier to make connections across ideas, creating a new kind of Web. One day, we may even say “Thank you, Autocorrect.”

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that these will be human achievements. Humans are amazing. Humans can organize into complex societies. Humans can form research teams and develop awesome technologies. Humans can program computers to understand natural language clues and access a comprehensive database of knowledge. Who won here? Humanity did.

Ken Jennings can do things beyond any computer’s ability. He can tie his shoes, ride a bicycle, develop a witty blog post comparing Proust translations, appreciate a sunset, write a trivia book, raise two children, and so on. At the end of the tournament, he walked behind Watson and waved his arms around to make it look like they were Watson’s arms. That still takes a human.

UPDATE: I’m told (by no less of an authority than Millionaire winner Ed Toutant) that Watson was given the correct answer at the end of every clue, after it was out of play. I had been going crazy wondering where “Delete Key” came from, and now it makes a lot more sense. Thanks, Ed!

Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary about the need for reform in the American school system is one of the most important films of the year and everyone should go see it. Although I have a number of significant problems with the movie (which – rest assured – will be inventoried below), I think there are a lot of dark truths that Guggenheim brings to light, and even if we don’t all agree on what the solutions are, we can agree on what’s at stake in getting it right.

Waiting for “Superman” follows the journey of five students, and their individual quests to improve their educational opportunities. I’d say the movie gets about 75% of it right: the system is failing these students, and millions like them. But while it might make a good movie narrative to divide the issue into good guys (charter schools) and bad guys (teachers unions), the real issues surrounding education in this country are much more complicated than Guggenheim suggests.

I came out of the movie disappointed about many of the factual inaccuracies and glaring omissions that Guggenheim uses to make his case, but I found that these were well addressed by this piece in the Washington Post. Even better is this excellent article in The Nation, which digs much deeper into the issues surrounding the debate. I strongly recommend these two articles, as they cover a lot of ground that I consequently won’t need to cover.

I do believe that Guggenheim is sincere in his desire to reform education, and that’s important to say, because many participants in this discussion are not. Their goal is to end taxpayer-funded education entirely, and they tend to support measures that move the nation closer to this ultimate goal. The problem with this is that the free market will do an excellent job of educating some of our students, while a great number of children in this country will be starkly left behind. So I’m on my guard when I hear arguments about how charter schools have solved all of the problems faced by public education. But despite some of the darker connections behind Waiting for “Superman”, I do believe that the filmmaker is earnest and I can counter his points secure in the belief that we share the common goal of educating all of our students.

Not only does Guggenheim omit important details, but he often doesn’t even draw the correct conclusions from the evidence actually presented in the movie. What was most striking to me was how powerfully the film showed how the lack of economic opportunities for parents in these inner-city communities directly impacts the education of their children. That alone was worth the price of the surprisingly expensive ticket. But then, we’re told that “many experts” (who?) now believe that failing schools are responsible for failing communities, not the other way around.

Each of the five children depicted has a parent or guardian who is hell-bent on making sure the child has the best education possible. They enter their children into a lottery for the local high-performing charter schools. Presumably, all of the children in the lottery have similarly committed parents. That makes for a pretty good head start for the charter school. Public schools tend to have a more varied range of parent commitment. Also, did you notice how few students are accepted each year? What does that do for class size? And I have to mention, even though it’s well covered in the articles linked above, the large amounts of private funding that the high-performing charter schools depicted in the movie enjoy.

So yes, the charter schools in the film are doing very well, and that’s great news for the students who attend them. But if, as it is admitted in the movie, only one in five charter schools are showing results, that’s a dismal record indeed. And despite the emotionally manipulative scenes where each student’s “fate” was decided by random lottery, I felt myself more concerned for the students who were never in the lottery.

So perhaps the real lesson we can learn from the successful charter schools is that, if the school has a clear and progressive vision, then increased funding can actually make a difference in student achievement. And if we take a closer look at what Geoffrey Canada is really doing for the students in the Harlem Children’s Zone, we might realize that student achievement isn’t only impacted within the school building. He may have even created a microcosm of the society we would have if we could make the connection between our nation’s social fabric and the way our children are educated.

But “firing all the bad teachers” is a much more digestible solution.

And yes, there are bad teachers, and I agree that it should be easier to get rid of them. But in truth, this represents a very small part of the problem, and blaming teachers unions for the decline in educational quality is seriously misguided. Teachers unions have been and should be a partner in education reform, but they also have the task of protecting the rights of their members. Teachers have the same rights to collective bargaining as any other labor force in the country. To frame the issue as children vs. adults is a dangerous distraction, especially when our goal should be to attract the very best people to the profession, and retain them once they’re in. The movie makes the point that great schools start with great teachers. I agree! So let’s make teaching the most desirable profession in America. You can read more about teacher recruitment and retention issues in this Washington Post article. Because once we’ve fired all the bad teachers, who will we get to replace them?

By the way, nobody is actually waiting for Superman to come and save our children. It’s a classic rhetorical trick to frame the sides of the debate as the people who agree with the solutions provided and the people who would rather do nothing. But smart and passionate people are already implementing solutions within public education that resonate with the solutions presented by Guggenheim. Here in New York City, we’ve increased educational accountability enormously, and with the cooperation of the teachers union. Nationally, we’re moving towards Common Core Standards for student achievement. We’re not there yet, not by a longshot, but nobody in the system is complacent about that.

Still, despite all the movie gets wrong, it should be praised for shining a spotlight on issues that have been festering in the darkness. This movie has the potential to spark a national conversation about the problems in American education, and how we can best address them. If it does that, despite the film’s flaws, its ultimate effect will be a net positive. If it does that, it will be my very favorite of all of the Superman films.

UPDATE: An anagram review.

With rumors of an Arrested Development movie in the works, contrary to earlier rumors that it was not, it seems like a good time to look back at the amazing TV series America discovered just a bit too late. As critics and fans appropriately sing the praises of the brilliant creative team being reassembled, I thought I’d say a few words about the spiritual grandfather of the series, without whom none of this would have been possible: Sigmund Freud. My intent here will not be to add a layer of Freudian analysis on top of the show, but rather to demonstrate the strong Freudian currents that already run throughout the series. If that appeals to you, just lie back on the couch, and read on!

Michael Bluth is established as the central character in the opening credits, and all of the other characters are defined by their relationship to him. The family, therefore, represents Michael’s psyche in all of its facets. Michael has three siblings, who represent his id, ego, and superego. Older brother G.O.B. is the id, seeking pleasure and avoiding responsibility at every turn. He often wins the things Michael wants by pursuing them without any of Michael’s second-guessing. Sister Lindsay represents the ego, constantly refashioning her definition of self to gain the attention and approval of others. It is no coincidence that she is framed as Michael’s twin. Younger brother Buster is the superego, living his life by others’ rules and in constant fear of his own independence. His obvious issues reflect Michael’s more subtle inability to break free from his family. But Michael can no more escape them than he can distance himself from his own psyche; they are a part of him.

Even in the series finale, when Michael finally fulfills his wish to be free of them, he winds up face to face with the one person he most wants to avoid, his father. Michael’s number one driving force throughout the series is the very Freudian desire to supplant his father: he wants to replace his father as the president of the Bluth Company, and he wants to be a better father to his son George-Michael than George Sr. was to him. (The names here are no coincidence; George-Michael combines the names of his father and grandfather, and they are to live on through him. Does George Sr. have another grandchild who can carry on his legacy? Maeby.) George Sr. is a very dominant figure to this family – powerful, controlling, sexually voracious. He also has an alter ego in his identical twin brother Oscar, who is carefree and nurturing. Note that Oscar is George Sr.’s middle name as well. It is built into the show’s premise that one of them must be imprisoned at all times. In one episode, they are both out of prison, and they fight. Being twins, neither is able to defeat the other. This represents the duality of Michael’s father image.

Just as George Sr. is an archetypical father figure, Lucille is a controlling mother right out of the Freudian playbook. She is the one who pulls all of the strings, and she’s not above pitting her children against each other as a power play. When Buster (Michael’s superego) disobeys her just once, he literally has a body part bitten off by a “loose seal,” a deliberate play on Mom’s name, justifying his castration anxiety. When Buster first dates, it’s a mature woman named Lucille. Again, Buster’s obvious issues highlight the dynamics of the family as a whole. A recurring theme with Buster is having borderline-incestuous overtones in his relationship with his mother. In fact, incest is much more of a theme on this show than one would normally expect on network television, particularly the tension between George-Michael and his cousin Maeby, but in several other places as well. Lucille has an affair with her brother-in-law. George Sr. and G.O.B. independently see a prostitute that Michael suspects might be his sister (and who is conspicuously played by the actor’s sister). When Lindsay finds out she’s adopted, the first thing she does is make a pass at Michael.

Tobias, as an in-law, is outside of this system of Michael’s psyche, but is close enough to it to provide commentary. He serves as the voice of the analyst (or therapist, or… whatever), and his tidbits of psychoanalysis are all Freud. But Tobias himself is the most overtly Freudian character of them all, as he constantly expresses his repressed homosexual desires through his layered speech patterns. Barry Zuckercorn, who (unlike Tobias) acts on his desires and lies about it, often makes Freudian slips revealing his activity, due to a subconscious desire to be found out. More subtle examples of subconscious feelings revealing themselves through language patterns are found throughout the series, as with Michael’s inability to remember Anne’s name masking his hostility towards her or with George-Michael’s talking about Maeby and inadvertently revealing his lustful thoughts.

One of Freud’s major contributions was in demonstrating how early experiences in our lives can affect the people we will later become, and Arrested Development keeps coming back to this theme. The “lessons” George Sr. teaches his children return to them repeatedly later in life. Michael’s affinity for playacting the role of a lawyer can be traced back to a role he had in a school play. One can only imagine the memories being formed by the kids who acted in the warden’s play. The “Boyfights” that Michael and G.O.B. engaged in as children helped form the relationship they have as adults… to the degree that they have become adults.

And here we have one of the most important themes of the series, found in the very title. Freud originated the concept of stage-based development, which would later influence such thinkers as Erikson and Piaget. If one’s development is “arrested” it means that he or she does not normally move into the next stage at the appropriate time. In the series Arrested Development, adult characters often display juvenile characteristics and continue to play out family dynamics they should have long outgrown, again demonstrating how early experiences can be formative in deciding who we will be later in life. Freud would have been proud.

You may notice that, in all of my discussion of Freud, I have avoided discussing some of the more phallic imagery in the show. But sometimes a banana stand is just a banana stand.