Charter schools in Boston score higher on key tests

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media, SteveG's Posts

The Boston Globe has the article Charter schools in Boston score higher on key tests. If you are not a Globe subscriber, the only text you get to see is:

Boston charter schools outperform other public schools on three popular barometers of achievement — the MCAS, the SAT, and the Advanced Placement exams — but tend to have lower four-year graduation rates, according to a study being released Wednesday.

If you read the newspaper or have full access to the site, you will see the following about half way through the article:

In Boston, there are 25 charter schools.

The study examined 3,400 students who sought admission to one of the six charter high schools in Boston between fall 2002 and 2008. (The study excluded two charter high schools that closed during that period because of low performance.)

I commented on the article which reported on a study done at MIT.

If there had been more room, the headline might have said “Charter schools score higher on key tests except for the ones that don’t” It is convenient how two schools that would have lowered the averages for the Charter schools were taken out of the study. Perhaps the people conducting the study and doing the statistical analysis could have excluded a similar proportion of low performing public schools from the study.

With MIT accepting huge amounts of funds to build buildings named after the infamous Koch brothers and then this story, perhaps it is true that MIT is selling its soul to the devil in order to raise funds. Now when MIT calls me for an alumnus donation, I just tell them to put it on the Koch brothers’ tab.

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State Fails To Measure Effect Of Voter ID Law

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media

The Boston Globe story State reports few problems with voter ID law is a good example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media.

The overwhelming majority of voters who cast ballots this year in Rhode Island had no problems complying with a new voter identification law. Secretary of State Ralph Mollis’s office reported Friday that of 560,000 ballots cast in this year’s elections fewer than 190 provisional ballots were submitted because the voter failed to present a driver’s license, bus pass, or other form of ID. Lawmakers passed the law last year to prevent voter fraud.

This proves that 190 people who had no ID still attempted to vote despite the law. It does not tell you how many people decided not to vote because they did not have the required ID. If these people without ID who did not vote were otherwise legally eligible to vote, then I would say that these were problems. We have no idea of how many such people there were. So while the story appears to be true that the state reported few problems, that does not mean that there were only a few problems. In fact there is no report of the state trying to measure how many problems there were. It is very likely that you will not find what you do not seek.

I predict that the “information” published in this article will be used as a means to justify the continuation of the voter ID law. Perhaps a better headline would be the one I used for this article.

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More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You “Rape Can’t Get You Pregnant”

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media

The New Republic has the article More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You “Rape Can’t Get You Pregnant”.

It’s fine for magazines to debunk the pseudo-science of people in the news, but they shouldn’t use pseudo-science in one of their arguments.

In the section titled “Legalizing abortion didn’t make abortion safer” they quoted Dr. Willke as saying:

“If, in fact, the elimination of illegal abortion eliminated back alleys, there should have been a perceptible drop in the number of women dying. That didn’t happen. The line didn’t even blip from 1967 to 1973 and 1974. … It just kept going down at the same slow rate. There was no evidence of a decline in mortality from legalization.”

Then to disprove what he said the article posits:

In any event, evidence that his claim was totally bunk was readily available by 1989. In March of 1987, the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study which read, in part, “Between 1972 and 1982 … [t]he overall death rate resulting from legal abortion dropped nearly fivefold, from 4.1 per 100,000 abortions in 1972 to 0.8 in 1982.”

In one case, Dr. Willke talks about the number of women dying. In the other case they quote the death rate per 100,000 abortions. Now if the death rate went down, but the number of abortions went up, then it is quite possible that the total number of deaths of women did not go down.

I am not saying that this is true. I am just saying that people should not use arguments that are so easily ripped apart. The New Republic is trying to show that Dr. Willke doesn’t know science, but they don’t show a great grasp of science themselves, or at least not statistics, math, or even numbers.

Chalk up another example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”

You might find the rest of the article more enlightening. Too bad they had to spoil it with this blunder.

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Doctors dispute Akin’s claim, but some supporters say it was misunderstood

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media

The Kansas City Star has the generally good article Doctors dispute Akin’s claim, but some supporters say it was misunderstood.

If you are wondering about the supporters’ claims to a misunderstanding,

But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.

“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.

Wildmon adds a new wrinkle, but then goes back to repeat the same stupid statement that got Akin in trouble in the first place.

The part of the article that gets my goat is the statement:

A 1996 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, generally considered one of the few peer-reviewed research efforts on this subject, estimated that 5 percent of rapes result in pregnancy.

The above statement tells you nothing about the truth or falsity of the claims of either side. To complete the above half a statistic, there would need to be a statement like, “and it is estimated that X percent of incidents of consensual intercourse result in pregnancy.” If X is significantly higher than 5%, then there could conceivably (no pun intended) be some truth to Akin’s claim. If X is significantly lower than 5%, then it might be true that rape has an enhanced rate of causing pregnancy. If X is not significantly different from 5%, then it might be tru that rape versus consensual sex has no affect on the rate of pregnancy after the act.

So the half statistic has shown that rape may lead to enhanced rates of pregnancy, or it might lead to lowered rates of pregnancy, or it might have no effect at all. In other words, you don’t know anymore about the effect of rape on pregnancy than you did before you read that statistic. You don’t even learn anything about the claim to rarity. Without knowing the number X, you can’t say whether 5% means rare or frequent.

For this reason, I give the article a 5 star rating for proving Greenberg’s Law of the Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”

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The CEO Plan to Steal Your Social Security and Medicare

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media, SteveG's Posts

The Nation Of Change has the article The CEO Plan to Steal Your Social Security and Medicare.

Many of the same folks who brought the economy to ruin just a few years ago are now going to come up with a plan that is supposed to set the budget and the economy on a forward path. At the center of their proposal are big cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

It is an interesting article even if I do classify this as an example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media. He talks about an 0.3% change per year in the COLA adjustment for Social Security, aggregates this to 3% over ten years and then compares this to the 3% change in upper income tax rate. 3% is 3%, right? Well 0.3% a year is not the same as 3% a year and 3% over 10 years is also not the same as 3% over 1 year. Putting this aside, the rest of the article might supply you with some information you didn’t know.

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Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: The AP Releases Misleading Analysis of Obama’s Tax Plan

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media

Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: The AP Releases Misleading Analysis of Obama’s Tax Plan says the following:

As Hanlon noted, “AP’s ‘fact check’ misses the point of the Buffett rule. The point is not to ensure that rich people on average pay higher taxes than middle-class people on average,” but “to ensure that all households with incomes above $1 million pay at least what middle-class families are paying.”

This is not the first time this month that the AP’s “fact-checkers” have bungled the facts regarding Obama’s economic plans. At this rate, they should think about opening a new division to fact-check the fact-checkers.

This is no surprise to me. When I saw the headline for the AP story, I didn’t even bother to read the story. I knew that it would be a distortion.

After reading the exposé, I decided to follow the link to the AP story, FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries? Here is the red-flag.

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

What does that even mean? How did they take the average? Did they average the percentages of all the included taxpayers? Did they weight the averages by the amount of income earned by each tax payer? When the income of people making more than $1 million ranges from that $1 million to several billion dollars, then the average weighted by income is quite skewed from the average weighted by the numbers of taxpayers in each category.

When the article uses such imprecise terms, you know the article is an example covered by Greenberg’s Law Of The Media.

Another of the many red flags in the article include:

The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That is what I call half a statistic. They don’t say it, but they obviously want you to infer that 10% of the households paying 70% of the federal income taxes is too much taxation. To know if this inference is correct, you’d have to know what fraction of the income these 10% of households make, but they don’t tell you that. Even if they did tell you about the declared income, they would be leaving out the unrealized capital gains of these wealthy people which may dwarf the income the IRS requires them to report as income. So to paraphrase Bill Clinton “It all depends on what the meaning of income is.”

Of course the quote is not going to emphasize that paying only 50% of federal taxes while paying 70% of all federal income taxes means that there are other hefty federal taxes other than income taxes that the less wealthy pay in larger percentages than the wealthy.

To use these tricks in their article, you would almost have to conclude that the article is purposely distorting the facts or the authors are totally ignorant of how they are misusing the numbers. Personally, I don’t need people to report the news who know less about it than I do. I certainly don’t need reporters who tell lies in their reports.

Click on the link under categories at the right side of this window for Greenberg’s Law Of The Media to see other articles in that category. In the set of articles that come up, you might notice Associated Press the Faux Noise of the Print Media.

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Republican’s Refusal On Raising Taxes Costs The Wealthy $7.8 Trillion

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media

The article Global Bonds Gain $132 Billion as Stock Rout Cuts $7.8 Trillion says (among other things),

… yesterday’s stock rout wiped out about $2.5 trillion in global equity values, extending total losses since July 26 to $7.8 trillion.

Put this together with the words in the Standard & Poors downgrade of the US credit rating:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

I think that S & P is only looking for a couple of trillion dollars more of deficit reduction. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper even for the wealthy to have raised their taxes instead of making them lose trillions of dollars in the stock market?

My friend JohnK said the following:

I think any increase in consumer interest rates as a result of the downgrade should be called the “Tea Party Tax Increase, or, in Washington parlance, the “TPTI”.

I would just change that to say that this loss of wealth could be dubbed the TPTI.

Notice that I classify this post under the category of Greenberg’s Law of The Media which states that “if a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”

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S & P – Decide Answer, Then Look For Evidence

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media, SteveG's Posts

I find the following from the Bloomberg News report as published in The Boston Globe article, Treasury official faults credit rating downgrade:

S&P made a $2 trillion calculating mistake and then changed the rationale for its decision, raising “fundamental questions about the credibility and integrity of S&P’s ratings action,’’ John Bellows, acting assistant secretary for economic policy, wrote in a Treasury blog post.

The dispute stems from how S&P used figures from the Congressional Budget Office. The discrepancy didn’t change the downgrade decision, S&P officials said, because Treasury’s $2 trillion figure was derived by calculating government debt over a 10-year period while S&P’s ratings are determined using a three- to five-year timetable.

It appears that S & P may have come to the conclusion that it needed to downgrade the US credit rating and then went searching for the evidence that would justify the foregone conclusion.

In making hypotheses, I suppose there can be circumstances where your gut tells you what the hypothesis should be before you find the evidence to support it. However, especially in this case where the hypothesis came before a formal search for evidence, you must be extremely diligent to not look only for supporting evidence. You must be as diligent in searching for any evidence that would contradict your hypothesis.

As pointed out by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, it doesn’t make any difference how many swans that you see that are white, seeing just one black swan is enough to convince you that not all swans are white. Even before you see the black swan, you ought to be cautious about claiming all swans are white.

Yes, I know, if I am to follow my own logic, I should look for evidence that S & P did not make its decision to stick by its original conclusion because of confirmation bias. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. After all, I don’t get paid millions of dollars for writing these blog posts. I would say millions of dollars may be at stake for S & P if they should lose their reputation, what reputation they have left, for making good calls on the creditworthiness of investments. Remember their investment grade rating of banks’ mortgage backed securities.

August 8, 2011 9:00 AM

As mentioned in the post Resistance To Revenue Increase Causes S & P Downgrade, I was able to read the full S&P report.

I can’t tell if I was reading the original report or the corrected one, but it does look to me as if the quote mentioned above from John Bellows on the Treasury blog may have been very self-serving.

Perhaps S & P didn’t so much as make a mistake as they did use different assumptions from the CBO report from which they took their numbers. I don’t know if this difference was mentioned in the original report, but it is very clearly stated in the report that I read.

I think this shows that you cannot trust what either political side has to say about the report. You have to read the report and decide for yourself what you think it says and what you think it means.

Here is the link where you can read the full 8 page S & P Report.

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Resistance To Revenue Increase Causes S & P Downgrade

Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media, SteveG's Posts

According to the article Mainstream Media Ignores S&P Attack On Republicans:

Page 4 of the official Standard & Poors “Research Update”

…

We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

I did a Google search and could find no mention of this except in a comment on an article on one newspaper web site. Of course, I only checked the first few of the 33,600 entries from the search S & P Downgrade “raise revenue”. I had hoped for a link to the actual report so I could read it myself.

See if you can do any better finding this information.

I did a Google search on Reason US Downgrade. Again I only found the reason in comments on news stories. One of the comments cited the same article as I cited above.

In the article from Bloomberg News that I read in The Boston Globe, Treasury official faults credit rating downgrade, I did find the following paragraphs:

S&P reduced the US rating one grade to AA+ while keeping the outlook at “negative,’’ saying it was less confident that Congress would end Bush-era tax cuts or tackle spending on entitlements.
…
S&P was looking for $4 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years. The deal that passed Congress Tuesday would bring $2.1 trillion to $2.4 trillion in cuts over that time.

It is concerned that lawmakers and the administration might fail to make those cuts because Democrats and Republicans are divided over how to implement them. Republicans are refusing to raise taxes in any deficit-cutting deal while Democrats are fighting to protect entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

August 7, 2011, 11:03 PM.

I have now read the full 8 page S & P Report as have millions of other investors.

The original article from which I quoted left out an important sentence that makes the quote even more damaging in my opinion. In the quote below, I put in the missing sentence along with the original.

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Putting the missing sentence together with the original extracted quote makes it clear that S & P does not believe that President Obama will be able to prevent the Republics from making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy a permanent fixture of our tax laws. All Congressional Budget Office analyses assume a base line scenario that the Bush tax cuts will expire. The CBO analysis of any proposed congressional legislation only rates what that legislation will do when compared to existing law. The existing law says that the Bush tax cuts will expire in their entirety. Even President Obama wants to keep the tax cuts for the middle class.

I am not faulting the CBO for their assumptions. The job of the CBO is to make objective analyses without introducing any political speculations. So the best thing they can do is to to not second guess the political process and clearly state their assumptions. With the assumptions clearly stated, the reader can then make whatever different assumptions they want to make and then adjust the results as appropriate. This seems to be exactly what S & P did.

No wonder the S & P is so upset with the prospects for our getting control of the budgeting process and appropriately adjusting the results of the CBO report.

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