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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Bill Caughey
Sent: February 17, 2002 11:56 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Selection Effects versus Treatment Effects
TOCFolks,
A week from tomorrow, Monday the 25th. I'm going to start a
self contained special day class (SDC) special education class
with a dozen 9th and 10th grade students. The students in the
class are being hand picked because they cannot even function
in our lower classes and need more specialized instruction and
a lower student to teacher ration. Some of these kids
are barely
reading, and at least one does not know the alphabet in either
English or his native language, Spanish.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of the
selection effect
versus the treatment effect and wonder if it might work in an
environment like this. What if I tell the children
that they have
been hand picked to test an idea about education where the
the education itself is more important than the
abilities of the
students. What if we immediately begin to work at a "higher"
level and gently push/pull the children along at that
same higher
rate? What if we can convince them that they can do "normal or
advanced" work is long is it is presented better?
What would/will
happen?
I don't know either, I don't have a clue, but what I
do know is that
the expectations for this class are so very low that
no one's going
to pay any attention to what we do as long is I don't
have classroom
management problems that require help from the office. In other
words when I close the classroom door I'm pretty much on my own
unless I have severe disciplen problems. These kids
are those who
"out of sight is out of mind" is the order of the day.
I'm going to try and see what happens if I gently
"raise the bar" while
simultaneously raising expectations as well. I have
no idea whatsoever
how to really do this, and no idea what the outcomes
will be, but the
idea of just following the status quo really bothers me.
Any comments, suggestions, warnings, caveats, resources and/or
prayers would be greatly appreciated, as I know we'll
need all of'
the help you can provide.
Blessings,
-b-
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/magazine/17WWLN.html?page wanted=print
February 17, 2002
Nothing Personal
By BRUCE HEADLAM
Can anybody get into Harvard? If you're one of the thousands of
students who have just completed the grueling college admissions
process and are awaiting the results from selective universities, the
answer is no, of course. But if you have been to the movies in the
past few months, you might think anyone could. In ''Legally Blonde,''
Reese Witherspoon plays a ditzy sorority girl who lands at Harvard
Law School thanks to a video resume with generous footage of her in a
bikini; in ''How High,'' Method Man and Redman play two small-time
pot dealers who light up Cambridge; and in ''Orange County,'' a West
Coast variation on the theme, a Stanford reject shows up on campus to
plead his case.
In their own ways, the films provoke a much more interesting
question: can anybody succeed at Harvard? In other words, what if
what it takes to get into an elite college and what it takes to
prosper there are two entirely separate things? The only way to truly
test the admissions process would be to accept enough homecoming
queens and homeboys to make a meaningful comparison. And not many
schools are willing to take that risk.
But it has happened. In 1979, the University of Texas Medical School
selected 150 first-year students from a pool of 800 interviewees. The
State Legislature then mandated that the class size be increased by
50 students, who had to be pulled from the bottom of the original
pool. The initially rejected students came in with inferior marks,
poorer test scores and lower personal evaluations. Yet at every
measurable step during their medical education, from term marks to
residency, their performance as a group was indistinguishable not
just from the rest of their peers but also from the top 50 students
in the class.
What the Texas case illustrates is the distinction between what
social psychologists call selection effects and treatment effects. It
wasn't the students' qualifications (the selection effect) that
determined performance; it was the four years spent in the classroom
(the treatment effect) that was transcendent. In other words, the
students did well because they were in a good school, not because
they were inherently good students.
Freed from the lab, the terms selection and treatment provide a handy
division for categorizing all kinds of institutions, those that hire
the employees with the best credentials (selection) and those that
would rather train their own (treatment). In business, new-economy
Enron was a selection company: you either got it or you didn't, as
its former C.E.O. Jeffrey Skilling liked to say. G.E., which did as
much for Jack Welch as Jack Welch did for G.E. (even if his
autobiography doesn't always read that way), is a classic treatment
company. In sports, the New York Yankees are the all-selection team,
skimming off the best from the rest of the league. The Oakland
Athletics are a treatment franchise, developing their own talent,
which they invariably lose to the Yankees. In pop music, the Beatles
were a selection band: you couldn't just replace Paul McCartney. The
Temptations? Pure treatment: they sounded the same no matter who was
singing, a lesson not lost on every boy band since.
In addition to making for a great little sociological parlor game,
the selection-treatment scheme is a useful one for examining another
instance of under qualified students at elite institutions:
affirmative action, which once again finds itself under a microscope
in the courts. Since the Bakke decision in 1978, the debate has
revolved largely around the means of preferential admissions -- the
displacement of deserving white candidates by minority applicants --
and less around their outcomes. But the biggest study of
race-conscious admissions at selective colleges, ''The Shape of the
River'' (1998), found that students admitted with the benefit of
affirmative action performed only slightly below class average and,
after graduation, outgained many of their peers. As was the case in
Texas, what happened to students after frosh week mattered more than
how they were ranked by the admissions office.
Why, then, does affirmative action remain an embarrassing phrase even
among some of its supporters? Perhaps part of the problem is that an
individualistic society, after all, is predicated on the belief in
personal characteristics. We like to believe that Great Men (and
Women) shape events and not the other way around. Even the thriving
self-help movement emphasizes the recovery of our ''authentic
selves.'' Part of this belief is vanity: we all like to think we're
irreplaceable. It's difficult to accept that many people could
perform equally well if given a seat in the front row. But the
evidence is that they can, and not just in the classroom. Over the
past few months, some of George Bush's harshest critics have
reluctantly conceded that given the right circumstances, even a chief
executive with shaky credentials can grow on the job. Is it so hard
to believe the same thing about a 17-year-old? Or do we cheer
underdogs only when they look like Reese Witherspoon?
Bruce Headlam is an editor for the Circuits section of The New York Times.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
Bill Caughey (COY)
Resource Specialist Teacher
Arroyo Valley High School
San Bernardino, SoCal
Phone: (909) 381-4295 Extension 3156
If you think public education is too expensive,
then clearly you haven't priced ignorance lately.
