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Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

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Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#101

Post by Symmetry »

ok_craig wrote: post #75
Symmetry wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norman Borlaug is probably a greater humanitarian than Bill Gates, but I'm not aware of him doing any philanthropy. Now, you probably come up with metric of philanthropy where, say, Rockefeller beat him (Percentage of then existing human wealth donated?). But most of the measures that come to mind put Bill Gates on top, so while "clearly objectively true" would be going too far, "probably objectively true" is quite r…

What's the difference between philanthropy and humanitarianism? Just donating wealth vs developing it? Is that really a significant thing to distinguish?

A philanthropist is someone who gives a lot of money to charitable causes, with a connotation of noble motives. A humanitarian is someone who acts on their strong desire to help their fellow humans, with a connotation of successfully helping many people. These have a broad area of overlap, but a person can be one without being the other.

One can be a philanthropist without being a humanitarian by, for example, donating large amounts of money to creating wildlife refuges. Charitable giving, but not to humans.

From the other direction, people like Norman Borlaug who devote their careers to helping other people are excellent examples of people who are humanitarians without necessarily being philanthropists.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#102

Post by yummyfajitas »

ivansavz wrote: post #51

I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}. Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher bec…

The author uses a bad graph to convince the reader that there is no correlation, even when (by his own admission, see the comments) one is present.

The year to year correlation is 0.3. The correlation across percentile groups is much higher because that increases the sample size and thereby reduces statistical noise.

The conclusion we can draw here is that measuring the performance of a single teacher based on a single class will yield a very large confidence interval. That's not the same as "bullshit".

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#103

Post by ChuckMcM »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #89
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can never guess what is going to be projected into one's writing. Tokenadult pointed out some things that MET figured out were highly correlated with effective teaching, he quoted them with : "Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward: My wife and I home schooled our kids through "8th" grade, they went to the local high sc…

You are confusing cause and effect, the factors are already present in families who are dedicated/resourceful enough to consider homeschooling, so homeschooling simply has no effect in that case. It is already known that the most important factor in whether a kid learns or not is their home situation. These studies are on the effectiveness of schools assuming the home factor can't be changed easily by society.

Hmm, that wasn't my experience. There is a huge variation in the family types who are home schooling in the Bay Area, it runs the gamut. Two of the kids in the Reikes class were homeless, their Mom was doing this because while she was homeless she did not want here kids to get behind in their education, and California has some really strict rules about letting your kids go to a public school if you don't have an address in the district. Perhaps the biggest cohort were kids where the parents had an issue[1] with the public schools but didn't have the resources or desire to send their kids to private school. I do know that there was a group who leaned more toward the creationist side of things but that wasn't the groups in our circle so I can't say much about them other than that you could find them if you wanted to.

"It is already known that the most important factor in whether a kid learns or not is their home situation."

My experience would support that hypothesis. Of all the kids I've known over my life those who had parents that were supportive of their educational goals did better than those whose parents were absent or destructive. That said though, it didn't change the fact that for kids who were otherwise nominal (reasonable support from parents, no major mental health issues) learned a lot (and I believe more) in their home school environment than they would have had they gone to public school.

[1] Issues ranged from teachers who were 'bad', district policies (no pocket knives allowed), school choice in their district (gang issues), and 'bad influences' (drug use or sexual experimentation).

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#104

Post by ChuckMcM »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #98
andreasvc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right that the background of homeschooled children may be a confounding factor, you are overreaching when you (seem to) claim that this rules out the possibility that being homeschooled contributes as well.

Perhaps. Separating out the home factor of homeschooling to get some useful truth seems quite impossible.

Can you say more about this? Or can you talk about your reasoning that makes 'home factor' the dominant factor?

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#105

Post by stch2 »

ivansavz wrote: post #51

I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}. Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher bec…

The author explicitly states there is a 24% correlation, and then says there is no correlation. Can he or she not make up their mind?

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#107

Post by MarkMc »

Irregardless wrote: post #20

> “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused" – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work. Stude…

> Students are notoriusly bad at rating their professors

I wonder whether this was because they weren't asked the right questions.

The Air Force survey [1] seemed to have more broad, abstract questions like "The instructor's effectiveness in facilitating my learning in the course was good/bad/etc." or "Value of questions and problems raised by instructor was good/bad/etc." or "Amount you learned in the course was lots/little/etc."

The Gates survey [2] seemed to have more fine-grained, specific questions like "My teacher knows when the class understands." and "My classmates behave the way the teacher wants them to." and "The comments I get help me know how to improve."

[1] http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/staiger/files/carre...

[2] http://www.metproject.org/downloads/Asking_Students_Practiti...

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#108

Post by spikels »

lordofmoria wrote: post #68

To avoid the needlessly vague allusions to schools going on in this thread: I went to Princeton University for undergrad. I'm sure Bill Gates has a more nuanced view on college ratings than this article suggests. Welcome to media. We all know why the college rankings are the way they are. Frankly, no one cares who the "most improved" olympic athlete was in London. People generally want the unambiguity of an outright…

What? "Improving", that is educating, students is the primary purpose of colleges. Seems perfectly reasonable to want to measure how effectivly they do their job.

The quality of the graduates of a college depend on a number of factors but probably the two most important are the quality incoming students and the college's ability to improve their quality. In effect colleges perform two functions: sorting and educating.

Sorting people based on standardized testing, high school grades, essays, recommendations, interviews and application details is a useful service in itself. However most of the value and almost all of the cost of colleges comes from educating not sorting.

The current college rating "system" can't possibly separate these two sources of quality. Clearly it would be something useful to know as within any group of similarly ranked colleges there will be differences in the quality of the education component.

All else being equal prospective students would choose the school that offered a best education. More applicants would to schools that were better at their primary mission, educating their students. In turn these schools could be more selective.

Building such a system will not be easy but should be very valuable. Please continue working on this Mr Gates.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#109

Post by spikels »

ivansavz wrote: post #51

I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}. Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher bec…

If you want to understand this issue please take the time to look at the actual MET project report as well as other well done research. Gary Rubinstein's analysis seems very misleading (see comments to prior HN story). Apparently is is very controversial to even try to measure teacher effectiveness.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#110

Post by andreasvc »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #98
andreasvc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right that the background of homeschooled children may be a confounding factor, you are overreaching when you (seem to) claim that this rules out the possibility that being homeschooled contributes as well.

Perhaps. Separating out the home factor of homeschooling to get some useful truth seems quite impossible.

I don't know what you mean by 'home factor' but my idea would be to take children from similar backgrounds who are homeschooled or not and see if that variable correlates with some measure of performance. It's not perfect of course because homeschooling parents are self-selecting, but a fully controlled experiment is not going to be feasible; however, this does not make the hypothesis any less likely, just less testable.
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