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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
Checking sources is a superpower--you would not believe the stuff people sneak into things. As one example: the book "Keeping Track" is by far the most influential anti–ability grouping book. Key to its argument is a claimed finding that 90% of students can master course material under the right circumstances to argue that all students should be placed into the same courses.
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Where does that footnote - footnote 7 - lead? Benjamin Bloom's "All Our Children Learning." Not to a specific page. Not to a specific note within it. The entire book.
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So let's dig in! What does Bloom say?
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He notes his belief that around 90% of people differ in rate of learning rather than the level of learning theoretically possible, but that it will take some students more time, effort, and help to reach that level than others (sometimes prohibitively so). Some, he'll note, might take several years on high school algebra, while others can do it in a fraction of a year.
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Then he provides suggestions. How do you structure a school so that students can learn at appropriate paces to meet his "90%" goal? He has a few ideas: 1. Give each student an individual tutor. 2. Let students go at their own pace. 3. Guide students towards or away from specific courses. 4. Provide different tracks for different groups of learners. Did you catch that? Bloom says: obviously kids learn at different paces, so if you want them to master the material, either let them rush ahead individually or group them by ability. If we do that, everyone's level will improve. Oakes takes that, strip-mines the entire book down to a claim she paraphrases as "under appropriate learning conditions, more than 90 percent of students can master course material," and then uses it to argue that we should not let kids rush ahead individually or group them by ability. This book has been cited more than 10000 times. It is by far the most influential single thing ever written on ability grouping. And it cites sources it knows nobody will examine to argue for the polar opposite of what those sources advocate. Check sources.
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David Watson 🥑
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
oh, for crying out loud. I meant to quote tweet this! this is what I was responding to
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Jeremiah Johnson 🌐
@JeremiahDJohns
This from @DKThomp is an extraordinary takedown of the hipster antitrust approach to housing. It starts with a crazy idea: what if you actually check all the sources they use?
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
For more educational malpractice, see our latest post at
@CenterforEdProg
, on how North Carolina schools keep many of their most capable students out of upper-level math, and how the state school board subverted the intent of law to keep it that way.
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
Thrilled to share this one with everyone. In 2009, North Carolina hired analytics firms to investigate whether students were being placed in math classes appropriately. They weren't. More than half of students ready for advanced math were left out. x.com/CenterforEdPro
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
In some fields, citing an entire book for a footnote is treated as academic malpractice. In education, it's the sort of highly respected work that gets you fast-tracked from RAND to a tenured position at UCLA.
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Colin Glassey - Author
@cglassey_author
Replying to @tracewoodgrains
That’s academics fraud. You cannot cite an entire book!
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Misha
@drethelin
It’s not really a superpower because a superpower would allow you to really affect things, but no one actually cares about these lies
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Colin Glassey - Author
@cglassey_author
A foot note which cites an entire book is academic fraud. There is no excuse for it. If someone cites an entire book they are concealing the truth. No one checked this? I feel uncomfortable when I cite multiple pages, it bothers me that I don’t have a more specific example
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lumpyboi
@maximally_great
i mean, i agree with you that her proposal is garbage, but your bloom quote directly supports her key claim that 90% of students can achieve mastery. if anything it's understated since bloom claims 95%. their recs are opposed but she presumably just needs the % possible mastery
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
when the “proper methods” are ability grouping or an equivalent, using it to imply that everyone should learn in the same classes at the same pace is wrong.
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Jouni Seppänen
@jks
A yerba mate drink container included a vague claim of "health effects" but in an unusual move, included a citation. So I looked it up, and the article linked consuming yerba mate to increased risk of throat cancer.
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Christian JB
@christianjbdev
My one (pretty weak) argument for non-selective mixed ability education in schools is that it's the one time in my life where I had to interact with people of every intellectual level. Surely there's some value to that?
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Winston Smith
@JoeDokes68
As a classroom teacher thank you. Sadly reality probably won’t be acknowledged by those who make pedagogical decisions.
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Mistake not...
@mnmcsofgp
>Give each student an individual tutor. That used to be fanciful, but now it is totally reasonable to do. But as I've discovered this summer, it relies heavily on student initiative and motivation. But that seems like a good role for human teachers
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Nition
@Nition
What really gets me is how often it's trivially easy to check but apparently nobody has. There's a thing in NZ where people say Banks' journal from the Endeavour voyage says birdsong was "deafening". Full journal is free online, searchable in plain text!
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Nition
@Nition
New Zealand PSA: I'm afraid our birdsong was never described as "deafening" by Captain Cook or his crewmate Joseph Banks or indeed anyone else. This myth seems quite persistent.
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2thegreat
@2thegreat166318
Excellent! And note that, even if Bloom did not so heavily caveat his unproven assertion it remains Bloom's unproven assertion. It would have been more appropriate to cite it as "Benjamin Bloom has claimed that under the appropriate circumstances ..."
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Ethan Kuntz
@KanizsaBoundary
Similar inversion for miller’s 1956 paper. People claim he claimed 7 chunks of working memory or whatever, he pretty clearly did not
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Allen, Allen, Allen, & Allen
@MatthewHokie
1) This type of thing is infuriating. 2) What happens when all this stuff gets scraped by AI and gets passed on as truth. Sure AI might site the source of this book, but AI is not going to go 2 levels deep on that and the people that are trusting AI aren't even going to check
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Hot Onion Juice
@HotOnionJuice
The problem is there is no consequence for this type of lying or misrepresentation in academia. Who was the Ivy League president who basically plagiarized her papers? She got a 400k/year job and lauded. I think she finally lost her job, but not for the plagiarism.
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Eric Crook
@EricCro68678634
Yeah dude. This is why you can trust nothing. It takes too long to research every claim. Everybody is doing it for the clicks, or to conform to some system they prefer. It's like everyone is a lawyer and no one seeks truth. It's annoying.
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Jaded Developer
@JadedDeveloper
When it comes to stuff that is more obvious like athletic ability and build we accept it more readily. 90% can do high school athletics with varying effort. But not college level. The same applies to academics.
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Tommaso di Maria
@tommasodi_di
Nice work. I have learned that even very good secondary sources look at things with a certain perspective, which will almost never be yours. By implication, thought becomes part of a telos which determines emphasis, observation of detail. Put differently, a thesis generally
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Pete Copekin
@polisoc2
one thing I've learned from my long journey in academia is that education researchers are basically all subhuman scum. education would be vastly better if education research did not exist.
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Shakespearean Danger Monkey
@ShksprnDngrMnky
The more relevant part is that 5 years from now the issue of learning rates being an individualized variable will fade into a non subject due to genetic manipulation potentials. The kind delivered in the equivalent of a pill to anyone at a negligible cost.
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disputāmus
@disputamus
What a great post. This is the kind of post I wish I could find more often on X. I hope the algorithm one day figures out how to filter out all the emoting and slop.
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gracefool
@gracefool
It's worse than this: it happens even within sources themselves! I found multiple papers concluding that Pfizer's mRNA covid vaccine was safe, but where the actual data of the paper showed the opposite.
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Hello Chicken
@waytoomanybirbs
My first real “aha” moment in high school with regard to academic subjects was checking sources during a friendly debate with another student. Seemed as though every other cite was wrong, and this was in a topic specific history book used at the college level. Not just a
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Rob Ferrante
@robferrante
This is really disturbing. Either the authors didn't read the referenced material, or they deliberately disguised its position.
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Ξdo
@edodreaming
Definitely but is a lot of work😅 ChatGPT can help with this by doing a lot of that drudgery for you
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Andrew Fribush
@andrewfribush
I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve followed a citation and the citation does not say what they say it says. Or how there’s common knowledge with no actual basis that when you track down was just speculation or something in the original.
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Disc Buddie #384
@TojibaFan9000
Wordcels playing wordcel games. “Words have no set meaning, so we can just redefine them at will and eventually assert the opposite of their common meaning. This is much easier if I do so with a giant set of words like a book that I’m positive you’ll never read.”
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Richard Carlucci
@RCarlucci1983
This is a consequence of a school culture that has failed. Kids are not taught to understand sources and build on them. Instead, they are taught to have an idea, then search for quotes that seem to roughly support their idea (even if the context opposes it). These are the results
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orochi235
@orochi235
This seems like the kind of thing AI could actually be good at. I've been thinking a lot lately about whether we could actually use LLMs to _combat_ disinformation, instead of just spewing it out. My conclusion is probably, but also that I'm too lazy to do it myself
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Frau Elster
@picaae
In Germany, we used to split pupils according to ability into three different schools. The two lowest tend to prepare you for working something you don't need university for, to become an apprentice and learn a trade. The trades can also be white collar.
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Au Contraire
@AuContraire9
I think it's fine given the purpose of the citation and the purpose of the book. If the citation references the overall topic of the book, where the point is repeated all throughout, then it's perfectly fine. If its a specific claim that can only be found on a few pages, then no.
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patricio Il Tasso🇺🇦
@IlTasso84592
My brother went to Navy new school. Passed the classroom section. Washed out in the reactor section where they purposely try to stress you out. My brother-in-law thought the Navy was stupid for washing people out that were clearly smart enough.
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Christopher Swoleumbus
@swoleumbus
Reminds me of a few citation chains I saw explored from feminist literature & pro-intersectional sociology articles which would ultimately lead to an assertion made in some magazine or an expression of what someone believed in a book, with no corroboration Such a telephone game
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Orthodrexler
@sdrexlerESPM42
I am reminded also of the book Arming America, which had numerous fraudulent sources hidden in the footnotes. My favorite was a survey of 19th century probate inventories in San Francisco (all records were destroyed in 1906).
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M Jenkins
@lilbbureaucracy
Ex in CASELs "Building Academic Success on SEL: What the Research Says". Ch 9 on Resolving Conflict Creatively program. The What Works Clearinghouse website says that no studies of this program met WWC standards! Per Google Scholar, this ch is cited 81 times: the 81 cited 100s.
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John Frum Boston
@JohnFrumBoston
At bottom, the whole thing has nothing to do with education theory. Papers are written, books are published, with not the slightest interest in education. It's all about race. None of it would ever have been done without the motivation provided by race.
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Zeal 🌐
@zealdrive
so much of the text I encountered in my school psychology graduate program fell victim to this. And it all becomes dogma from a poor sourcing that gets repeated ad infinitum
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hemciao
@hemciao
Might as well give up on academia, when so many academics completely miss the point, and then their colleagues cite them missing the point, and then their colleagues cite them… and before you know it, you’ve got proof the sky is green.
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𒀭
@3sot3r1c4
that's why I prefer nonfiction you can't possibly verify the sources of. usually with a fat helping of oral legend and deities intervening at convenient points
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Seth BRKV
@SethBRKV
Or just use common sense. If somebody wrote something, if they are not Nobel prize winner in real science then they might be wrong
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Luis Garcia
@cowboy082478
The phrase “factual but not truthful” is an app description of what you’re showing. Showing just some fraction of what’s in a book to then obscure or lampshade what you don’t want others to see. Academia and the media are masters of this for people who operate in bad faith.
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Spencer Ace
@SpencerAce13
Our academic class should be doing this! Book reviewers should be doing this! It’s an omen of the times that laypeople who simply wish to read an influential book should have to thoroughly check each of its sources to make sure the author isn’t deceitful/ incredibly foolish.
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Jon Snow
@JonSnow50616798
LOL this is almost exactly like the latest Russiagate documents. Footnotes that undermine the argument they're supposed to be making.
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Ragin' Moderate
@RaginModerate
I cannot even begin to complain about the sheer amount of education research that is just “spitballing disguised as fact.”
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Tim
@StatDemystic
I once read a headline “humans crave sex like cocaine”. The peer-reviewed report was not about sex or cocaine, and the subjects were rats.
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Craig McGillivary
@CraigMcGillivar
Maybe just stop reading when you notice them citing an entire book as a source! You can't always check all sources. You need to figure out who can be trusted and who can't.
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Purple Fanta
@BonesMcSpook
People have no idea how bad this is abused. It was what started my political radicalization when I realized 99.9% of arguments in main stream are literally just bullshit or hardly representative of reality.
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starets
@starets2642931
Mal-education, the intellectual crippling of the young, is the unstated goal of the Education establishment. Has been for a long time. Some quotes: zhibit.org/diemythographe
web.archive.org
Occasional Letter Number One, 2006.
"Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life...It is the business of the school to...
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Helot 🚩
@Helot_
Democrats don't care one iota about what sources or evidence supports their position against ability grouping, they hate ability grouping because it is an acknowledgement of human inequality and thus constitutes a violation of their fundamental core beliefs. If evidence doesn't
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darkness
@darknessatnite
The only reason this claim is supported is because it aligns with regime dogma. So the source said something else, so what? The source never mattered.
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