The Overton Window.

Glenn Beck (first and last time he'll be mentioned here, I figure) wrote a novel in 2010 called "The Overton Window." I haven't read it, and don't intend to -- it's #30,293 on Amazon, and this review should discourage anyone tempted to pick it up.

But Beck's choice of title broadened knowledge of the eponymous concept. It's named after Joe Overton, the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan. Overton thought that policy debates are usually limited by a "window" of public acceptance, and that ideas outside the window are rejected without examination. Overton argued that advocating "unthinkable" ideas could "move" the window, thus making slightly less radical ideas seem more acceptable.

Which is where I turn in trying to understand why the Sonoma Index-Tribune published this piece by Roger Hartley.

The paper's decision seems forgivable at first. Roger looks like a Sonoma kind of a guy -- his LinkedIn profile suggests he's a silver-haired outdoorsy engineer. His appearance and background would make most people give him a +1 on  credibility.  But I offer that more as an excuse for the paper than as a reason --  because publishing his piece is the equivalent of the Index-Tribune forwarding the "5¢ surcharge on every e-mail" urban legend to thousands of inboxes.

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Hartley alleges that the Bay Area Air Quality Management District is "[a]n uncontrolled bureaucracy [that] has criminalized our quiet enjoyment of life and in true Orwellian fashion has turned neighbor against neighbor with an anonymous tip hotline to report any suspected criminal activity. From a Constitutional point of view, the real criminals are BAAQMD and the 22 politicians that sit on its board."

"Q40a. There needs to be stricter laws and
regulations to protect the environment?"
Time series, 1987-2012, The Pew Research Center
available online at http://tinyurl.com/l7u3z32

That's a pretty remarkable charge. I mean, clean air's kind of a big deal -- since 1987, essentially every Democrat in America, and even half of all Republicans, have agreed that we need stricter laws to protect the environment.  The San Francisco Bay Area is something of a Democratic stronghold, so finding strong environmental protection here should be akin to discovering that water is wet, or there's coal in Newcastle.  Claiming that local politicians and government officials acting to protect the environment are breaking the law means there'd have to be some pretty remarkable evidence of malfeasance to prove that, let alone credibly charge it.

And Mr. Hartley duly provides a certain amount of innuendo to support his allegation -- specifically, that the location of the BAAQMD air quality monitoring station in Napa, California was deliberately chosen to create, in effect, "false positives" concerning air pollution, in an effort by government officials to justify the existence of their jobs.  However, Mr. Hartley doesn't actually include the evidence -- instead, he suggests his readers do the research themselves:

"a former employee of BAAQM has alleged that the system for monitoring air quality is intentionally rigged to produce more alerts. For example, the air sensor in Napa is on top of a Mexican bakery a few feet downwind from a BBQ restaurant ... (Google 'whistleblower BAAQMD')."

So, the readers of this blog will be familiar with my taking such claims and running down the evidence to support them.  Sure enough, I followed Mr. Hartley's advice, and ran the Google search.  The first result that popped up was from a Patch.com site -- the one in San Bruno, California.  The Patch.com article was helpful for a lot of reasons, but the key one is that the Patch.com article gave the address of the monitoring station.  

It's at 2552 Jefferson.

Now, that address doesn't mean much to most people, but it rang a bell for me.  Following the hunch, I opened up Google Maps and took a look. And I immediately discovered that there are 2,158 reasons why that's exactly the place the BAAQMD should locate its air quality monitoring station -- because the site is across the street from Napa High.

I have a hard time imagining a better place to monitor air quality in Napa County than across from the flagship high school of the largest city.  I mean, there are a lot of kids there, pretty much all the time, and protecting the air that kids breathe seems like it's probably priority number one.  Hell, I'm just going to toss the mediated speech at this point.  It's so obviously priority number one I can't believe the point would be seriously challenged by anyone.

But, of course, I wanted to make sure that I really did have this issue pinned down, and so I went and checked the Patch.com site's citation to the evidence in support of the "malfeasance" argument.  As seems to be the case from time to time, the link didn't work (I have no idea why newspapers have so many problems with getting hyperlinks right, but it comes up frequently).  After some sleuthing, I managed to track down the "evidence" the anonymous Napa source cites -- it's this PDF, starting at page 265.

Don't worry, I'm not going to make anyone download a 13.64 MB file just to see a page buried in the middle -- I pulled out the relevant documents.  There are two letters, the first of which is a 21-page request from Eric Stevenson (B.S., Chemical Engineering, UC Davis, 1986), the Director of Technical Services at BAAQMD, which was sent to the EPA.  The second is a 3-page response from Matt Lakin (Ph.D., Atmospheric Chemistry, thesis from UC Irvine, 2000), granting the request.

Even casual perusal of the correspondence (I'm talking about page 2 of the request) makes clear that the Napa monitoring station has been in the same location since 1972. Further, the point of the request from BAAQMD to EPA was that the station, as sited, would understate pollution due to scrubbing effects from ozone reacting with nitrogen monoxide emitted from vehicles on Jefferson Street.

OK.  For anyone that really wants to knock themselves out with the science behind this, and impress themselves with the extraordinarily careful work our government officials undertake when protecting the environment, reading these documents should substantially bolster your trust in your government. These are guys with top-notch educations in hard sciences doing the work necessary to justify their procedures to, well, everyone.  And along comes this editorial writer, Roger Hartley, and he accuses them of being criminals.  

Now, I can see that work being criticized by another chemical engineer, or another Ph.D. in chemistry, sure. Such a criticism would probably thoroughly engage the technical analysis of Mr. Stevenson, and point out some issue or another missed by Dr. Lakin.  But Hartley's neither a chemical engineer nor a Ph.D. in chemistry -- he's a civil engineer.  And Hartley doesn't engage the evidence at all.

It doesn't stop there. Hartley takes the crazy and puts it on stilts, and accuses Shirlee Zane and Susan Gorin of being criminals.  Presumably this is because they sit on the board of the BAAQMD, and they therefore supervised (!) Mr. Stevenson's request to the EPA ... that the BAAQMD be allowed to continue operating a station that's existed for forty years in the same location? Across from a high school.  Where children study. Because the air kids breathe is, like, not relevant to Napa's air quality or something.

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Trust in government is the ball game.  I blogged about that last summer, fairly extensively.  If you decide to go after the public's trust, you better be right.  And we count on our newspaper to require a basic level of evidentiary support before allowing anyone to use its pages to start calling elected officials and dedicated scientists criminals.

"Confidence in Institutions"
Gallup, June 1-4, 2013,
available at http://tinyurl.com/m8dl5vg

To me, this piece looks like nothing more than an attempt to move the Overton window, to suggest that, well, hey, of course, the claim that Susan Gorin is a criminal is wrong, but perhaps we just shouldn't vote for her because of her misconduct as a member of BAAQMD. Or because she's anti-growth, or some other specious, trumped up charge.  And pieces written for that reason, to game the public's trust, without any evidence, have no place in a newspaper of record.

It may very well be that the response to this piece is nothing at all (or, perhaps a half-hearted nod to editorial "balance"). But our newspaper is an institution we all should be able to trust, even if, in practice, as the graph to the right shows, most people do not. But where, as here, a piece is published that is fairly characterized as a hit piece on a sitting supervisor, to justify calling her a "criminal" without any, any basis whatsoever, well, that just doesn't help the political process at all.

I really think the Index-Tribune should be ashamed. 

Do UC What I See?

Infogram available at http://infogr.am/2aa57a935bfc-7797?src=web.

A brief post today, mostly because end-of-the-year tasks are taking up a great deal of time.  I'd like to give a big "thank-you" to Ryan Chen of the University of California's Office of the President for retrieving the data for this graph, which is set up as closely as possible to the CSU graph posted last month (for instance, the same schools are included).

Marin Academy again does well; while Sonoma Valley comes in at a 3.11, Marin Academy comes in at a 3.182.  But for perspective, Montgomery High in Santa Rosa comes in at a 3.186 on the same measure.

As you might suspect, I will have more to say about this data ...

Authentic Sonoma.

5th Street West, Looking North From Sassarini
Image available at http://tinyurl.com/k672zm9

5th Street West carries the heartbeat of Sonoma on a daily basis. Running North from the Leveroni Ranch, its side streets contain the homes of our firefighters and police officers, our teachers and nurses. Past Sassarini School, Safeway, and Sonoma Market, its homes and apartments are inhabited by the people who run our restaurants and fix our power lines. They are our EMTs, our soccer coaches, and our supermarket clerks. These neighborhoods are the middle and working class of Sonoma—and they are the keepers of our authenticity.

Sonoma recently held a special election, ostensibly to decide whether to, effectively, ban more hotel construction (a “yes” vote). Measure B had interesting beginnings; its organizing committee was liberal, environmentally oriented, and if anything, seemed prone to criticism that they were elitist. The “No on B” campaign materials indirectly emphasized that fact, arguing the Measure would jeopardize public safety and worsen traffic. The measure failed narrowly at the polls — the election was a 51-48 decision, the difference being slightly more than a hundred votes.

Precinct Map, City of Sonoma
("Yes" precincts Green, "No" Silver.)
Unshaded Map courtesy of
Registrar of Voters, County of Sonoma

available at http://tinyurl.com/kaykmr

While the result leaves the door open to development, it is the pattern of voting that I find more interesting. Sonoma is divided into precincts, and the County Registrar of Voters breaks down the votes in each one. While there are eight precincts in total, the major precincts are 1802 (essentially, the “East Side”, entirely south of Napa Street), and 1805 (both sides of 5th Street West, again, south of Napa Street). These two precincts have nearly 60% of the voters, and constituted a similar percentage of the turnout on November 19th. 

Infogram available at

http://tinyurl.com/n7ou5xr

While Measure B lost by eighteen points on the East Side, it won by fifteen points along 5th Street West. If you draw a line through the town running from the Leveroni homestead to the Cherryblock vineyard, Measure B lost in every precinct to the east of that line, and won every precinct to the west.  That line divides the wealthier East Side from the middle-to-working class remainder of the City. And it is very close to the line between Prestwood Elementary and Sassarini Elementary. 

I am hesitant to speculate as to why the middle and working class of Sonoma effectively voted to ban more hotels (and I think pretty much everyone on the East Side of Sonoma should be cautious in doing so, too). I suspect, though, that there are a number of East Side voters who, had they been aware of the broad support of middle and working class Sonoma for Measure B, would have found voting against Measure B troubling as a matter of distributive justice.

Perhaps the renamed Sonoma Hotel Project will proceed successfully through planning, the assorted commission hearings, and even ultimately review by the City Council. But the volunteers sitting on those commissions, and the elected council members, as well as a number of our leading citizens, will likely continue to be concerned by the de facto rejection of the project by Sonoma’s keepers of authenticity, and their de jure vote of no confidence in the City's planning process. The City has work to do to restore the public trust amongst those who have been, should be, and hopefully will be its natural and normal supporters along 5th Street West.

"Similar Schools" And CSU.

I've been spending some time working with Google's Public Data Explorer and the CSU data for California's high schools.  As I was tweaking the XML, a question popped into my head -- I wonder how the kids at the highest ranked "Similar Schools"  to Sonoma Valley do at CSU?

Infogram available at http://tinyurl.com/ldwo45y

By way of explanation, back when the Similar Schools rankings came out in May, I did a bit of digging into the California Department of Education's database to find out which schools are considered most "similar" to Sonoma Valley High, that also happened to receive high rankings.

Two schools within 20 places of Sonoma on the School Characteristic Index had 10's on the Similar Schools ranking, but both have less than 200 students.  So, I instead turned to those that were ranked a 9, that had a demographic profile roughly similar to Sonoma. There were three -- Etiwanda High, Eleanor Roosevelt High, and Paloma Valley High. All three are located in Southern California.  They all have ~2,000 students.  And they all do well on the Statewide ranking as well as the Similar Schools ranking -- they're 8's on the first, and 9's on the second.

At this point, I shouldn't have been surprised by the data, and I suspect my regular readers won't be, either.  Sonoma Valley's kids were the lowest ranked in the group in 1995.  But by 2004, Sonoma Valley's performance surpassed all of the highest ranked "Similar Schools." (Sonoma Valley would go on to pass all the nearby private high schools the following year.)

Since 2005, Sonoma Valley's graduates aren't just outcompeting the students from the neighboring private high schools. They're also outcompeting the students from the highest ranked "similar" public high schools.

Image available at http://tinyurl.com/qh8ww2f

The more I look at the data, the more I wonder about the applicability of James Scott's concept of legibility to our community's understanding of its school system. It can be hard to appreciate all the subtleties of the social dynamics of a diverse district like Sonoma Valley. The understandable inclination may be to come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what the schools ought to be.  But our public schools seem to produce students that are gritty and resilient --  that have the vitality of a natural forest.  It may be that there are benefits to be had from the walled gardens of "elite" private high schools, and the orderly monocultures of shiny big-box megaschools in exurban Riverside or San Bernardino County can be superficially appealing. But the "scientific forests" James Scott studied eventually underwent ecological collapse, while the complex and confusing reality of the "illegible," natural forests produced pretty good results -- worth remembering when considering the performances being turned out by the graduates of Sonoma's school district ...

One Year Anniversary.

"Westonbirt Arboretum in Fall"

(The background image for this blog...)

Image available at http://tinyurl.com/lnue2es

The first blog post here was one year ago today, talking about Manchester United. For those of you just joining us (for example, the readers who have visited us this week from Hyderabad, Guwahati, Ho Chi Minh City, Seoul, Melbourne, Tallinn, Delmenhorst, Stockholm, and last but certainly not least Nairobi), I'd thought I point out some noteworthy posts from the last twelve months.  However, if you just want to jump right to the data on private school performance, it's here.

There have been 70 posts in the last year; there are another 23 drafts that haven't yet seen the light of day. By far, the most visited posts have been those concerning education in Sonoma Valley.  The ones that someone would probably want to read who's coming into the story a bit late are as follows:

Jan. 4: Sonoma Valley's Elementary Schools Are Better Than Ever?  ("Sonoma's elementary schools are doing OK.")
Jan. 7: Coronagraphs and SVUSD ("The demographics of the elementary schools have changed.")
Jan. 25: The Streets Should Fit the Trees. ("Careful economic development's a great way to help increase school funding.")
Feb. 5: So How Are Things At Sonoma Valley High? ("Sonoma High's doing pretty well by its students.")
Feb. 13: The Philosophy of Data and Sonoma's SAT Scores. ("Sonoma High has cause to be proud of its SAT scores.")
June 11: Similar Schools, eh?  ("So, California's Similar Schools ranking is completely broken.")
Sept. 9: It's the Economy ("The Sonoma I-T's reporter kinda doesn't get how API scores work.")
Sept. 10: Hanlon's Razor ("No, really, I meant it, the reporter doesn't get it, it's even worse than it seems.")
Nov. 5: Private School Performance ("Wow, Sonoma High's kids get better grades in college than private high schoolers.")

There are a series of posts that relate generally to the issues that come up in the foregoing, but they're not exclusively about education.  One post concerns safety in schools ("Big Data," regarding Newtown), and another concerns how California, and Sonoma's schools are funded ("34 cents" ...).  The other popular posts concern transportation in Sonoma County, California's prison system, and Santa Rosa's local newspaper.

Nov. 18: So what was the Press Democrat's sale price? ("The Press Democrat's value fell by over 90%.")
Nov. 27: Sonoma County vs. Welwyn Garden City. ("When given two bad choices, Sonoma County picks both.")
Dec. 18 Obama: It's Time To Use Big Data To Protect Our Children. ("Newtown's Target knew about Adam Lanza.")

Jan. 20: A Society Can Be Judged By Entering Its Prisons. ("California's prisons are a disgrace.")

July 22: 34 Cents of Your Property Tax Dollar Goes To Our Schools. ("Development or higher taxes, pick ...")

Malala Yousafzai

Image available at http://tinyurl.com/m4g8s6g

The hardest set of posts to write was the group I did this summer concerning California's future. They grew out of a set of very fruitful conversations with the members of a family summering in the Sonoma Valley, a group of dedicated public school teachers, one rather remarkable philanthropist, a particularly dynamic public official, a few fellow lawyers, and a set of very organized soccer parents. Those posts are:

Aug. 28: Nordic Success. ("It's all about public trust.")

Sept. 7: Beikoku and Eikoku. ("You need to empower women.")

Sept. 9: Glass Ceiling, Iron Lady. ("Consensus matters.")
Oct. 15: California, where Malala Yousafzai becomes Janet Yellen. ("Education, equal rights, & public trust.")

In the coming weeks, because of the very significant amounts of data I've managed to collect from the California State University system, I will probably upload and complete a Google Public Data Explorer site for all of the high schools in California illustrating their students' performance at CSU over the last 18 years.  If possible, I'll probably also cross-reference that with the historical API data and SAT score data on the same schools.  It will be interesting to see if the trends hold up statewide that are apparent in Marin, Napa and Sonoma Counties.  

Plus, a group of public officials in Redding have confirmed they are the test site for Anne Fernald's study discussed here, and I'm putting together a piece on that too.  

And there will certainly be further posts concerning data on local schools -- the overwhelmingly positive response (and thanks) from so many people has been particularly gratifying because, of course, this blog is a labor of love, and I always enjoy talking about it with readers and commenters (even when, yes, people sometimes disagree). 

And finally, I want to give a shout out to my wife, who is incredibly supportive, and whose fantastic food blog can be visited here. She's doing a series on Thanksgiving, and the dishes look awesome! 

Private School Performance?

Infographic available at https://infogr.am/selected-schools-gpa/

In speaking with friends recently, we started puzzling over a question we all share: how do we know what the benefits are of a private school over public school? Clearly, many families see the benefit of substantial expenditures on private education, and surely there must be some return on that investment?  In essence, the consensus amongst the group was that the marketing of such schools leads parents to believe that the students that attend those schools would be expected, test scores and grades in high school being equal, to outperform public school students when the public and private school students arrive together at college.

In general, I have always thought that there is no way to determine the truth of that proposition -- that there is no useful data concerning performance in the first year of college.  Grades issued by different institutions are generally not comparable, even if they were available.  We tend to instead retask predictive measures of college success, such as the SAT, as a proxy for that data -- but such measures are always second best to the grades themselves.

But it looks like there's a way to answer the question after all.  The California State University system accepts students from virtually every high school in California (1,590 different ones in the last 18 years). While CSU is not the most elite part of California's Education Master Plan (that would be the UC, which accepts only the top 12.5% of high school students), CSU generally accepts the top third of California's students. While these students are not typically those who have accumulated many advanced placement units, and while these students tend to have test scores within one standard deviation of the norm, the students that attend CSU from private and public schools, at least as a matter of general consensus, are believed to have similar if not the same test scores and grades.  Thus, the performance of such students is perhaps the best example of head-to-head, apples-to-apples performance of public and private school students, after arriving at college, in California (if not in America).

I was surprised to discover last week that CSU makes those grades available on the web, sorted by high school and by year.  It was a relatively straightforward task to script cURL to pull CSU's data for 31 high schools in Marin, Napa, and Sonoma County from 1996-2012 (527 requests, which took the bash script less than 60 seconds), and I have zipped those files and made them available here, for anyone interested in examining the raw data. 

At the top of this post is a graph of the average freshman year college GPAs of students who have graduated from Sonoma Valley High School, Justin Siena, Sonoma Academy, Cardinal Newman, St. Vincent's, and Marin Catholic in that time period. While in 1996 every private school's college freshmen performed better than those from Sonoma Valley, the reverse has been true since 2005.  Sonoma Valley's students outperform every one of the private schools, and by a significant amount.

I've excluded Marin Academy, because they don't have enough data to graph.  Marin Academy sent six students to CSU in 2012, but before that Marin Academy fell below the threshold for reporting (5 students) every year -- so there's only one year's worth of data.  It's a good result for them, though -- in 2012, Marin Academy posted a 3.22, but their difference from Sonoma Valley (.17 of a grade point, 3.05 versus 3.22) is significantly smaller than the difference between Sonoma Valley and the next private school on the list (a .27 difference, between Sonoma Valley at 3.05 and Cardinal Newman, at 2.78).

Elizabeth Warren
Image available at http://tinyurl.com/ml4sw9g

This strongly suggests that those pursuing private education, with the exception of the very expensive Marin Academy (tuition $37,430 yearly), are perhaps subject to the phenomenon uncovered by Elizabeth Warren in her early research.  In "The Two Income Trap," Warren and her co-author (and daughter!) Amelia Tyagi pointed out that middle class families drive themselves into bankruptcy to buy homes they cannot afford in order to live in a neighborhood with better schools. As Warren and Tyagi argued, the actual "benefits" such parents obtained for their children were slim at best, and were more likely than not illusory in truth.

Yet the problem in Sonoma may be even worse.  Many parents are sending their children to private schools in the belief that they are obtaining an academic advantage.  This is not to discount other reasons for sending children, for instance, to religious schools -- educating one's children regarding deep religious convictions, shared by an organized group, and intimately related to daily living is a right protected by the First Amendment. However, to the extent that parents are financially straining themselves to obtain a perceived academic advantage, they should know that the evidence shows no increase in the children's later academic success, and instead shows that the opposite may in fact be true ...

"Bringing Up Baby Bilingual"

image available at http://tinyurl.com/m693ucz

The Prospero blog on Economist.com today examines bilingual education, and the data it presents is dramatic:

"The benefits ... are both strong and long-lasting. Bilingual children as young as seven months outperform monolinguals at tasks requiring “executive function”: prioritising and planning complex tasks and switching mental gears ... [s]uch studies control for socio-economic status, and in fact the same beneficial effects have been shown in bilingual children of poor families. Finally, the effects appear to be lifelong: bilinguals have later onset of Alzheimer’s disease, on average, than do monolinguals ..."

"Many parents once believed that a second language was a bad idea, as it would interfere with developing the first and more important one. But such beliefs are woefully out of date today. Some studies (such as this one) seem to show that bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language (at early stages) than monolinguals do. But other studies (such as this one) find no vocabulary shortfall in either language. In any case, the influence of mono- or bilingualism on vocabulary size is later overtaken by the importance of education, socio-economic status, reading and writing habits. In short, there is little evidence that raising a child bilingual will hurt their primary language."

The columnist speculates that the benefit of the second language comes from monitoring the use of two languages (which is itself an exercise of the executive function), and that seems to make a certain amount of sense.  Interestingly, the author also notes that the benefits of bilingualism wither unless the student must use the language in certain circumstances -- either at home, work, or school -- which explains a lot about the power of dual immersion ...