The Battle Hymn of the Whack Mom

A couple of months ago I was having coffee with an old acquaintance, a woman of Chinese descent and mother to two daughters. She asked if I had read the recent op-ed in the WSJ about Asian methods of mothering. She blushed as she asked me. I said I hadn't. She said that if I did, please understand that it had nothing to do with how Chinese women behave toward their children. She was very embarrassed about the stereotype conveyed in that op-ed.

The op-ed piece was written by Amy Chua to promote her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom. It worked like a charm. As a result of the outrageous 1000 or so words in the Wall Street Journal, the book took off and became an instant bestseller.

Now I've read the book. It was entertaining, but I have no idea what the fuss is about. The Battle Hymn is maybe a 60,000 word thing, not a book really, about a very whack woman who has decided to write a long essay rationalizing her crazy behavior with her children (and her dog). It's inadvertently funny as hell and some of it is undoubtedly exaggerated; maybe more than a bit is just plain made up. There is no doubt about one thing: Ms. Chua is nuts. She's a functioning lunatic sure, but she's still a lunatic. She tries in paragraph after paragraph to put a smiley face on her behavior, but this book is sociopathy dressed up as a parenting guide.

The main conceit of this book is that Amy Chua's behavior with her children, her pet and her husband are normal for her culture. That's just not right. As my friend warned me, Ms. Chua has taken the cultural stereotypes of Asian upbringing and upped them to the 18th power. Along the way, she seems proud to display her bigotry and her consistent pathologic efforts to stereotype the behavior of others. There really is not a lot of difference between Mommy Dearest and this book except that here Ms. Chua tries to couch her dreadful behavior as being something necessary for the advancement of one's children.

There is a big fallacy in this book: children can be molded like pieces of clay into whatever form a parent wants. Ms. Chua believes in this fallacy fervently. She also believes she is behind every success that her children experience. The woman is more than a bit delusional.

It's ironic that Ms. Chua's father is one of the leaders in the science of chaos theory, a field that examines order in nature and physical systems that is essentially unpredictable. That's how children are. You can influence children certainly. But your actions as a parent have an inherently unpredictable component that grows as the child gets older.

The Battle Hymn is a fun read for the inadvertent one liners sprinkled throughout. I laughed out loud at the rationalizations Ms. Chua makes time and time again. It's quick to get through, not particularly well written, and is funny for all the wrong reasons.

The degree to which Ms. Chua pushes her children seems to be what has made this book a lightning rod. How much pushing is too much? I certainly have no idea. Early on in my efforts at parenting, I met someone like Ms. Chua. He wasn't Chinese. He was a European math professor. We had him over for dinner. He kept looking at our daughter the whole time. Afterwards, he talked to me in our living room.

"Your daughter has great math aptitude. She could be a prodigy," he said with all seriousness. How did he determine this by just watching her at dinner? I didn't ask.

"Well she is very bright," I said. I note my daughter was all of three at the time.

"Are you teaching her math?"

"Like what? Counting, yes."

"No, no, not that. A girl like that. She could know calculus by six."

"No, I haven't gone beyond counting."

"You have to! You owe it to your child. You owe it to the world!"

Mr. Math Professor was nuts. I was not going to teach my daughter algebra when she was five and calculus when she was six. Could she have handled it? Who knows? Maybe. But why would I want to do that? I guess I could have done it. Then I could have written a book about it, The Battle Hymn of the Jewish Father. And I would be just as crazy as that math professor and...Amy Chua.

Instead, that one event eventually made me start to write what I'm working on right now, a novel about a math prodigy and her family. Sure there is some mental torture that takes place in the novel. If there wasn't there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? But it's all made up. Made up torture is fun. Really torturing your child with calculus at six is, on the other hand, a very bad idea.

My talk at UNC-Chapel Hill, March 28th, for those interested in such things. 4:00 PM. 265 Phillips Hall.

The Great Dilution: The Decreasing Component of Academics in the Undergraduate Experience.

Abstract: American undergraduate education has been subject to a “great dilution” in academic content for the past 50 years. This dilution has been caused by several factors, but the principal drivers are a nationwide emphasis on making higher education available to all and trying to maintain reasonable retention rates for the many poorly prepared students that increasingly enter the academy. Curiously, this dilution has also taken place at the 300 to 400 colleges and universities of high merit in the U.S. even though their students are, on paper, often of better quality than in the recent past. This change has significantly altered the nature of educational achievement in the nation, creating both an increasingly more educated citizenry and a poorly educated intellectual elite. An effort to claw back rigor for the nation’s best and brightest would be difficult, but highly desirable.

Academically Adrift: Much Ado About Some Things But Not Others

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I like to cite evidence that we do a lousy job with undergraduate education in the U.S. I have my own data - that grades have been rising for the last 25 years - but there are several other lines of evidence that show clearly just how undergraduate education has degraded.

Last January, a book came out that summarized many of those lines of evidence (but didn't reference my work with Chris Healy and had other important omissions on adolescent development that would have been even more apt given the subject matter of the book), Academically Adrift. It has been called the most important book on higher education in years.

Academically Adrift's big take home message - the one that has been stated I don't know how many times in the press - is that a large percentage of students aren't learning key critical reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college. Supposedly, almost one half of the 2300 students tested at 24 schools show no improvement in the higher kinds of learning we expect college to provide.

That's a damning indictment of the undergraduate experience if it is to be believed. You'd think that just about anyone with some curiosity would improve his or her critical assessment and communication skills at least a little bit (with or without college) between the ages of 18 and 20.

One rule I've learned over the years that I've looked at scientific papers is that if someone comes up with a counterintuitive result, it's usually a whack paper. Another rule I've learned is that if someone needs to invoke weird mechanisms to explain results, those results must have significant measurement error. I think both rules are sometimes at play with Academically Adrift. Here I want to focus on rule number one. Maybe I'll talk about rule number two and this book in another post, but probably not.

The take home message of the study is based on taking the difference between two test results, one test taken by students as freshmen, the other when they are sophomores. The test used, the CLA, has unknown measurement error. As far as I can tell (reading the text and appendix), the authors essentially assume no measurement error in the tests. The CLA is supposedly like measuring someone's temperature with a good thermometer. Then they use a student's t test to determine the percentage of students who scored significant gains.

But the student's t test is generally used to determine whether two sets of populations are statistically different. The assumption is that the meter used for your measurements of the populations is highly accurate. You want to examine the hypothesis that the two populations are not identical. It's not designed to be used with an error filled measure like the CLA and estimate the percentage of the population that exceeds a certain threshold and is "significant".

The approach the authors use would be applicable to testing something like whether aspirin reduces fever in patients. You'd take a group's temperature before they took aspirin. You'd take it after. You'd test whether aspirin works by testing whether there is a statistically significant difference between the temperatures collected before and after aspirin was used. The authors have apparently decided to extend this test by using the two sigma "error" in the differences in the CLA test to estimate the percentage of students who have had no "statistically significant gains" in their scores.

I don't know why they do this. It has no basis. The authors in the appendix state that other measures give them even a higher percentage of students with no statistically significant improvement. But the measures they mention are arbitrary as well.

If the CLA test was a perfect assessment of critical thinking and communication skills, all changes - plus and minus - would be significant. If it was a completely random assessment, obviously none would be significant. The CLA test undoubtedly measures something about learning, but how much error is in the test and, since the test is different each time, how much does the difference between two test scores over time simply represent differences in what is being tested? Who knows? Alexander Astin, the dean of higher education analysis, says much the same thing here.

What is apparently true is that, statistically speaking, the test scores are significantly higher in the aggregate for sophomores in comparison to the aggregate scores for freshmen. What this means in terms of overall learning is anyone's guess. Somewhere between 0 and 100 percent of students have learned something significant over two years. What percentage exactly? I have no idea. Neither do the authors at this point in time. They're just guessing. A guess is not a scientific result.

This is a blog, not a research paper or a formal response to the book, so I'm not going to go into depth here about what the results of Academic Adrift mean and don't mean. Here's a figure that at least at face value would indicate something about assessing the "value added" by a college education that tends to show up in CLA friendly publications:

I don't know where these numbers come from (given the numbers and the quantity of datapoints, it looks like a one school dataset for a big satellite or state flagship school, but that's just a guess), but numbers like these could be used to assess approximately the noise in each test and noise in the difference between each test. I don't know why that wasn't done in Academically Adrift.

Regardless, (unlike the graph here which shows results when the same test was administered to freshmen and seniors in the same year) you'd still have the mystery as to whether one test was more difficult than the other. CLA tests just might not be suitable for studies that try to identify changes over time.

The above graph does indicate that CLA scores are highly correlated with SAT/ACT scores at least in the aggregate (the correlation is more modest at the individual student level). So to some extent there is likely some overlap in what these tests all measure. The authors in Academically Adrift note that GPA's explain about 12 percent of the variance in CLA scores (.35 correlation) and seem to think this buttresses their argument that the CLA tests are measuring real learning. They don't show the data (I asked for the data and they said no), though, and an r2 of 0.1 isn't exactly anything to hang your hat on. Here are some data from one school, Kalamazoo, that I found from an online publication:

This is not exactly an impressive correlation. I'm a critic, certainly, of what today's inflated grades measure in terms of learning. There is noise in grades, but over the course of 35 classes, one would think that better students - those with superior critical thinking and communications skills - at a decent liberal arts college would do better than others. Knock out the one stray data point in the lower left and the relationship between CLA and GPA would be almost random. If the CLA is measuring well what it says it's measuring, one would expect better correlation.

There is a good deal of interesting and useful material in Academically Adrift. The results of their survey on grades correspond to the work that Chris Healy and I have done and their survey on study hours corresponds to the work of Babcock and Marks. Their survey questions indicate that student work loads (in particular the expected amount of required writing) are light as well. But the results of Academically Adrift on the value added of college education are cloudy in some cases and not even worth noting in others.

Why all the hullabaloo about this book? Two words. Confirmation bias. Many, including me, believe that colleges are doing a bad job. So they, not including me except on first read of this book, are uncritical of works that agree with their beliefs. Add in the fact that Academically Adrift purports to quantify the bad job colleges perform, and you have a perfect device for media attention.

Toward Better Social Networking

Recently, I read that Facebook will be getting rid of its Share button. Like will be the new Share. One less button doesn't seem like a good idea to me. In fact, I'd like to see many more buttons besides Like and Share.

I've been on Facebook for about a year or so. I've read posts of my friends and there are some common responses I've had, but rarely type. I'd like to have a button for each one. Here are just a few.

Bigoted button. People tend to say things on the internet and expose their hearts and minds in ways they never do in real life. It can be wonderful to read those thoughts. It can also be very disturbing. I think I've managed to get rid of all my Facebook friends who turned out to be bigots. But even the nicest people sometimes end up with nasty comments from their "friends". An official "that's a bigoted comment" button would help immensely.

Racist button. See the discussion on Bigoted button.

Very Cute button. Sometimes I'm in the mood for one of those "my dog/boy friend/cat/hippo/etc. is so cute" photos and comments. I just want to hit a button that says that.

Funny button. I don't want to type out haha. I'm too busy laughing. Just give me a button please.

Brilliant button. Brains should be lauded. It's too embarrassing to be gooey with praise in text. Just let me click on brilliant.

Unoriginal Left/Right Wing Tripe button. You get a lot of rants on Facebook. People type derivative thoughts whose origins come from Ayn Rand/Karl Marx/Frank Rich/Glenn Beck/wherever. Yuck. A simple click to call them out on it would be useful.

Boring button. No I don't care that you got your haircut or your car is in the shop. We need a little button to warn of clutter.

Congrats button. People do something good or get some award or have a kid or bowl 300. They deserve a quick huzzah huzzah click.

Enough With the Self Promotion button. Yes, you're trying to get ahead in this world. But I don't care. I'm not going to buy your book or see your movie or go to your show just because you ask me. We need a button to put these self promoters in their place.

I Wish I Had Your Brains button. Some people are just plain brilliant not only occasionally, but most of the time. They deserve their own button.

Off the Meds Again Are You button. When someone goes postal and pulls a Charlie Sheen, a flood of people hitting this button might bring them back to reality.

Now that I'm in the swing of things talking about improvements, there is also the issue of "friends". I'm having a hard time with this friends business. I have some real friends and relatives on Facebook. But most of the people aren't and never will be real friends. It's doubtful that I'll never meet them. Some, even though they are "friends", seem more than a little scary to me and I know, while they are interesting, I'd never want to meet them in person unless I had a flack jacket and a bodyguard. We ought to be able to make real distinctions.

Friends - these are people you know personally and like.

Enemies - these are people you know, don't like, but somehow ended up as a Facebook friend.

Frenemies - if you're on the fence about someone you know, you ought to be able to declare it.

I've Never Met You But You Seem Interesting - there is a supreme difference between knowing someone personally and having internet based exchanges with someone. This category is for someone who seems cool, but you've never met before.

I've Never Met You And Never Want To - sometimes you do wonder if this person you have as a Facebook friend is a potential axe murderer. It should be duly noted.

You're a Hero of Mine - I like this better than just Fan. Nelson Mandela deserves more than fandom, for instance.

I'm sure that if you've read this far you can think of your own improvements. I imagine that Facebook - given that it is not very versatile - will die in the next couple of years and be replaced by something else. Who knows, maybe you and I can work together and make the next Facebook. If our "new Facebook" takes off, I know just the person who should play me in the movie version, too.

No, not Jesse Eisenberg. We've been there, done that. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up.