"Acting Student" and the issue of "Confirmation Bias"

I got into a couple of battles with Stuart Buck on Twitter recently. Stuart is the author of Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, but when we first clashed, I did not know that. He was arguing that not teaching students what I'd call "traditional skills" was wrong.

It was a heated conversation, but when I paused to think, I thought, "Who is this guy?" So I Googled him, and I found his book, and I bought it. I tend to think this is an important "academic" idea - the close reading of those you disagree with. Sometimes it changes your mind in important ways - I know that, for example, my thoughts on Horace Mann changed dramatically as I really read his words when I began writing my thesis. Sometimes, certainly, it doesn't. But either way, you need to try.

Lincoln School, New Rochelle, NY - the evidence might suggest that when integration
has not been undone, there are differing results.

I don't think he bought mine. Right, but I'm a curious sort of person.

Life Magazine, 1966
Having lived through a big part of this era, I might begin with different questions.

Buck's book, published by the Yale University Press, claims to be a deep reading of the school desegregation experience in the United States and its long term impacts on African-American attitudes toward success in school. He can be an entertaining writer, and at times he writes a good story. And it is not a "one-note" story either, as Richard Thompson Ford wrote in Slate, Buck, "tiptoes through the minefield with nuance and compassion. He credibly (and repeatedly) insists that he supports school desegregation but wants to be forthright about its unintended consequences, so we can find ways to contain them."

And yet, as Ford says (and I have attempted to say to Buck via angry Twitter argument), "But Buck's focus on schools neglects the bigger picture. The power of the epithet "acting white" is just one manifestation of a belligerent youth subculture among poor blacks that rejects mainstream institutions generally. "Acting white" is to education as "stop snitching" is to law enforcement: an attitude of aimless and self-destructive opposition, borne of deprivation, alienation, and despair. The root cause lies in the depth and pervasiveness of inner-city poverty. Buck argues that poverty can't be the cause of "acting white" because "blacks in the Jim Crow era … pursued education eagerly even in the presence of far more dire poverty. If poverty … caused the 'acting white' criticism, it surely would have shown up long before the 1960s." But the problem isn't just objective poverty. It's also social isolation, which worsened dramatically at precisely the time Buck says the acting-white problem emerged."

Buck does not, in my mind, see the big picture precisely because he fails, at the start, to ask the right questions. And perhaps - and I know I'm treading into dangerous assumption territory here - he doesn't ask the right questions because he knew what he wanted to write before he began his research.

What leads me to believe this begins with Buck's casually negative characterizations of people he clearly sees as opponents, those who, "argue that that many of the things learned in school - ways of thinking, writing, or problem-solving, for example - are "white" or "Eurocentric" (p. 19)," as political and sloppy (he quotes William Darity as describing his research as "warfare in the academy" (p. 20) in an attempt to discredit his work at the start).

Obviously, though, Buck's book is essentially a political, not an academic, argument. This is a free-market, America "as it is" declaration, insisting that African-American students and African-American communities must change, because we don't want to (or cannot) make any changes in America's socio-economic or educational structure. Ford again, "Buck endorses everything from vouchers to exclusively black-male charter schools to the novel idea of replacing individual grades in integrated schools with academic competitions between teams of students."

Thus, it is not really a surprise that Buck thinks that when I suggest that we rely on student strengths, and adapt curriculum and especially communication methods to student strengths, we are cheating kids. Or that he gets angry when I suggest that our schools are "white," "Eurocentric," places obsessed with creating "norms." I say these things in a way which suggests problems, and Buck, the white adoptive father of two Black children (book flap), has a very large personal and cultural stake in cultural conversion and moving all toward "a norm."

My experience - and politics - differ. Having watched school desegregation proceed clumsily and badly in New Rochelle, NY, I have also seen what happens when integration has continued in a single public high school city with consistent support for educational institutions and facilities. So, seeing differing results in differing circumstances I might begin from a less certain place.

And thus I might ask different questions up front, including the questions Buck has told me - via Twitter - that he had no interest in asking. Questions about the purpose of the American education system, questions about cognitive theories, questions about learning theories. Even questions about term definitions - how, as an example, might one define, "thinking, writing, [and] problem-solving"? What, I might ask, is, "Acting Student"? And if "Acting Student" is "Acting White," what does that suggest? Because I would ask, can you really discuss these issues if you do not begin by making sure that everyone understands what you mean when you say something?

I think you do. Unless your goal is to confirm what you thought in the first place. Perhaps if your solution is 'changing the students' - your research will lead you to believe that is necessary.

And Buck's book suggests to me that he "neglects the bigger picture" because the bigger picture clashed with the hypothesis - and perhaps a very personal hypothesis - he began with. And not just his book, in a later "battle" we argued over the definition of "private school" - and whether the US definition was the same as the European definition. Buck showed little understanding of the concept of state religion or the differing social structures - perhaps (again, that dangerous assumption) because admitting that Catholic schools in the Republic of Ireland are not really equivalent to for profit charter schools in the United State would challenge the political narrative (defunding American public education) embraced by both himself and his Ivy League sponsors.


Confirmation Bias is a huge problem in research, especially social science research. We too often begin with an 'uneducated guess' which we call a hypothesis. And then we search the internet for information which supports that. We acknowledge challenges but dismiss them. We may even limit observation to ensure that our case studies don't blow up our hypothesis.

So, when I observe differing cultures learning differently, I wonder,  and I try not to generalize. When I see a blind person reading Braille or anyone reading an audiobook, or even (to quote from a Twitter argument with Buck), a telegrapher in an old film reading Morse Code, I wonder about what those things - cognitively - have in common and what separates them. If I see Canadian or European school policy I look at the entirety of the difference, and I, yes, it's the leftist in me, look at who seems to be "winning" and "losing" in the resultant society. I can even look at French laïcité and be both strongly supportive of the goal and deeply troubled by the personal freedom implications.

Now Stuart Buck's interests ("historical" as he says) and mine may not seem to clash. We're both, I suspect, historians by nature, and deeply political historians (is there any other kind?). But I'm a post-modernist and he is not. I doubt truths and he hunts for truths. Still, the biggest separation is that I never begin research with a hypothesis. I am a Grounded Theory guy ("Rather than beginning by researching and developing a hypothesis, the first step is data collection, through a variety of methods."). I begin instead with an interest in a topic, but I refuse to make predictions as to what I will discover.

This does not eliminate bias. Nothing eliminates bias in human learning. But it tends to limit "confirmation bias" because there is nothing to confirm. And it tends to limit confirmation bias because Grounded Theory requires you to define terms. I think of geologist William Smith in Simon Winchester's book The Map That Changed the Worldneeding to begin his work with a definition of "rock." What he was seeing in those coal mines and canal digs of the 1790s couldn't begin to be classified until he determined that definition.

So, I think Buck is wrong about many things. But that's not a problem. Many of us disagree about many things. That's what makes the world an interesting place.

But in why I think he gets it wrong is a cautionary tale for all of us.

- Ira Socol

Answering questions with questions...

Do we teach our students to answer questions with questions?

Why not?

On Sunday morning @courosa asked on Twitter, "how many countries can you name in 5 minutes? http://is.gd/60P5G"

"What do you mean by country?" I asked in return, "UN, FIFA, other?"

A little later @AltEdAdventures asked, "I named 41. Am I blind, or was England/Great Britan not an accepted country?"

Is Wales a country? Scotland? England? Somaliland? Puerto Rico? Great Britain? Catalonia? Northern Ireland? Palestine?

"FIFA," says Wikipedia, "has 208 member associations, which is 16 more than the United Nations and three more than the International Olympic Committee, though five fewer than the International Association of Athletics Federations."

According to the United Nations - or the US State Department - there is a nation off the northwest coast of Europe called "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." Nearby is a nation called "The Republic of Ireland." According to FIFA, the international soccer organizing group, there are at least five nations there: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland, each of whom compete under their own national flag, play their own national anthems. If you ask the Irish government, constitutionally, they will tell you that there are two nations: Great Britain and Ireland, with part of Ireland being occupied by Great Britain and still awaiting the re-unification plebiscite scheduled for 1925. If you ask the Irish government, officially, the answer will leave you baffled as they try to describe something both unacceptable yet fully accepted.

And what of Somaliland? An independent, functioning, self-governing nation since 1991 that no one officially recognizes.

What of Catalonia? A "nation" with its own language, culture, very distinct history, even a "not-recognized-by-FIFA-but-they-can-play" national soccer team?

Of course, then, there's Palestine.

So the child faced with the "name the countries" question or the "fill out the map" worksheet needs to ask, not answer. That new question - "What do we mean when we say "country" or "nation"?" is the really valuable topic, in a way a list of memorized names will never be. And it will introduce students to the vast differences in the ways of human thinking. The child in London understands "country" quite differently than the child in Kansas City, and neither is right. Just as "democracy" is different for the child in Dublin than the child in Boise. Just as "border" means one thing in Texas and something else in Pakistan or Yemen. Even when we start adding 2+2 different cultural rules come into play. If we ignore this, we are training our students in ignorance.

This isn't post-modernism run amok. Rather, it is training our students to understand the complexities of the world. It is essential. Hell, even business schools now understand this.

So next time you ask a question, don't look for an answer, look for the questions which challenge our knowledge of our world. That's real education.

- Ira Socol

Re-imagining Ability

When I taught my class last semester (“Special Education Students in the Regular Education Classroom”), I ran across a roadblock. The future “Special Education” teachers who filled the room clearly saw a bright line between “able” and “disabled.”

This is not surprising. The field they are entering exists because of this perceived difference.

Early in the course I suggested that I could “disable” any of them. That I might speak in a language they did not know (I asked them to read and pronounce Irish, for example), or that I might speak using words they did not know, using, for example, British educational jargon rather than American, or that I might ask them to choreograph and perform an interpretive dance as their second paper.

For some these concepts got the point across, but not for most.

So I decided to try to get them to “re-imagine ability.” I gave them a series of possible “tasks” and asked what “assistive technologies” they would need to complete them. One was getting from a neighborhood on the Atlantic coast of Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan (near the United Nations). Another was bringing a refrigerator from a store into their kitchen. A third was getting from the street to a meeting on the 88th floor of the Sears Tower.

View Larger Map

Many of the students responded with comments about maps and map reading, about reading directories, about measuring doorways, but none understood the basic concept. They were all completely unable to perform any of these tasks without massive technological and human assistance. And the amount of assistance needed varied greatly across the student group.

But I pointed out to them even those they probably at least needed some kind of shoes/clothing to cross Brooklyn, at least some kind of assistance or at least a strongly woven cloth strap to carry the refrigerator, and if not the elevator, at least the stairs (a vary early assistive technology) to climb the Sears Tower. Not to mention a bridge to avoid swimming more than half a mile across a wild tidal strait in New York, or a truck for the refrigerator. Some, I'm sure, could have swum the river. At least two or three might have been able to, given enough time, have jumped and pulled and climbed up 88 floors without stairs. One guy might have been able to lug at least a fairly small (full-size) refrigerator from Sears to his house, and yet...

If they needed help would they be "disabled"? And what of the other four dozen?

This began to work on their thinking. Yet, every day they spend in our College of Education reinforces their traditional thinking about “ability.” “Ability” is everything “they” (the kind of students who go into education) do well. Reading, writing, speaking like a middle class protestant white person, answering questions with definite answers. “Ability” is not being able to attend to 25 things in a simultaneous mode, or entertain a class with jokes and stunts, or dream up really exciting fictional worlds, or a million other things that kids can be great at. No one is sent to the Resource Room because they throw a ball badly or can’t tune a violin or are unable to navigate an urban street scene effectively. I need special permission to turn some paper documents into electronic versions but the Dean of the College prints out her emails for reading without having to declare herself “disabled.

I'm not suggesting that individual differences in capabilities don't exist. I'm not very tall. That makes some things more difficult than if I was. Tom Shakespeare is right. It is not "all social" - we are born different, we end up different. Some of us struggle with things in ways others don't. Reading sucks for me. I wish it was easier. This month so does walking. And I sure wish that was easier. Still, I can fix my own computer (some of the time), and if you can not, do you need a government affixed label?

Back in May 2008 (on "Blogging Against Disablism Day") I suggested on my blog that we not allow anyone into an elevator without a note from a doctor, that we require that people with eyeglasses get special permission to use them, that we not let anyone ever convert digital text to paper, just to expand the realm of disability. Because as long as we think “disability” exists, it does indeed exist, and it limits who we are and what we can achieve

- Ira Socol