[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] Goodhart's Law in Education

[Jon Dreyer]

Don't get me started on how stupid this is. It doesn't sound exactly 
like Goodhart's law, since it's not really about the disparity between 
what is measured and what is valued, but rather, as you suggest, the law 
of unintended consequences.

Educators are giving up on finding ways to bring poor kids up, so 
they're trying to bring the rich kids' educations down to the poor kids' 
levels.

It is my (unpopular) view that education can probably never overcome the 
disparities caused by poverty and racism. In Massachusetts, kids spend 
about 17% of their waking hours in "structured learning time" in 
schools. There are huge disparities in what happens in the other 83%, 
where of course education also happens, between rich and poor, and white 
and black. I have worked with poor kids in the inner city and mostly 
privileged kids in Lexington, and there is a huge disparity in what they 
are ready to learn (what Vygotsky called the "zone of proximal 
development"). The way to combat the inequities caused by poverty and 
racism is to attack those problems directly, rather than under-educating 
the privileged.

Under-educating the privileged is exactly the wrong thing. Society needs 
highly educated people in some fields, like law, medicine, engineering, 
government, and of course education. Under-educating those folks without 
improving the educations of those whose lives require less education 
ultimately harms not just those people, but all of us, who depend on 
those highly-educated people. Next time you see a doctor, or drive over 
a bridge, ask yourself whether you want the doctor or bridge designer to 
have been under-educated. And of course policies like these will also 
encourage those who can afford it to either leave districts with those 
policies, or leave the public school system entirely, in either case 
demotivating the more privileged from wanting to pay taxes to support 
public schools.

Another unintended consequence of this policy is to screw those poor 
kids who, with an extra dose of grit, intelligence, and luck, could 
otherwise have started their way out of poverty by excelling in advanced 
courses.

-- 

Jon "Next Up: Lobotomies For The Privileged" Dreyer
Math Tutor/Computer Science Tutor <http://www.passionatelycurious.com>
Jon Dreyer Music <http://music.jondreyer.com>

On 7/15/23 8:11 AM, JOHN M BROWN wrote:
> This item, "Cambridge schools are divided over middle school algebra, 
> <https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schools-divided-over-middle-school-math/?et_rid=696624770&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter>” 
> in the Globe may be an illustration of the strong form of Goodhart’s 
> Law (… or, at any rate, of the law of unintended consequences) as 
> applied to education -
>
> /"The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income 
> children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and 
> their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the 
> decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to 
> students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the 
> popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for 
> their kids, like Udengaard is doing." /
>
> Regardless, the response to the measured problem was a cop out. 
>  Having detected a racial disparity statistically, rather than taking 
> steps to help poor kids move up, they sought to correct the statistic 
> by keeping affluent kids down.
>
>    John B
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 10, 2023, at 1:29 PM, Jon Dreyer <jon at jondreyer.org> wrote:
>
> By the time I got through the first few paragraphs, I remembered that, 
> over a decade ago, I saw the danger of what he calls "overfitting" in 
> education and coined what I called "the implicit motto of education 
> reform":
>
>     /If you can't measure what you value, value what you can measure./
>
> So I was not surprised to see education as the first on the list of 
> examples of the the danger of overfitting in section 3.
>
> I'd not read of Goodhart's Law, either the weak or strong forms, but I 
> had discovered the idea. It seems increasingly important to keep in 
> mind as technology makes it ever easier to measure things. A few 
> examples I don't think I saw in the article are measuring executive 
> performance by measuring quarterly financials or measuring software 
> engineers by lines of code.
>
> -- 
>
> Jon "Measure Twice, Gut Once" Dreyer
> Math Tutor/Computer Science Tutor <http://www.passionatelycurious.com/>
> Jon Dreyer Music <http://music.jondreyer.com/>
>
>
>
>
> On 7/10/23 8:40 AM, Harry Forsdick wrote:
>> Interesting use of ML/AI:
>>
>>     Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the
>>     strong version of Goodhart's law
>>
>>   * https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html
>>
>> -- Harry
>
>
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