A few days ago, Stanford University received an anonymous complaint against Jo Boaler, the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education at Stanford. The complaint, which was first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, consists of a 100 page document, a compilation of Boaler’s alleged transgressions. The story was then picked up by Stephanie Lee at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The inspiration for the complaint, and a good deal of its substance, appears to be Brian Conrad‘s critique of citations in the California Mathematic Framework (and see also this), in which Boaler and her work played a significant role. The “Executive Summary” of the complaint summarises it,
This complaint alleges that Dr. Jo Boaler has engaged in reckless disregard for accuracy through citation misrepresentation, asks that Stanford investigate, and if the allegations are confirmed, take appropriate disciplinary action.
What to make of it all? To be honest, I don’t much care.
To begin, there is something decidedly odd about the complaint against Boaler being anonymous, for which there seems no good argument. The WFB report claims that the complaint is “backed by a California-based group of math-and-science focused professionals”, which is weird in its framing and meaningless in its content. (It seems very unlikely that the complaint is due to either Conrad or Jelani Nelson, with whom Boaler also had a run-in over the CMF.)
Secondly, the Washington Free Beacon is hardly a neutral player. WFB were obviously handed the story exactly because they tend to, and largely exist to, go to war against excesses of liberalism. That doesn’t mean that the accusations are meritless or that WSB, here or in general, doesn’t have value. But the origin of this story should give one pause. Whatever the substance of the story, Stephanie Lee is likely a much better guide. (A year ago, Lee wrote a strong but balanced article on Boaler, which Boaler pre-countered with one of her classic victimhood whines.)
Thirdly, the nature of the complaint seems pretty thin, even if Boaler’s conduct is systemic. A reckless disregard for accuracy through citation misrepresentation? Colour me shocked. I am much less concerned if Boaler misrepresents the scholarly support of her ideas than that her ideas are shit.
I cannot stand Boaler, and I cannot stand the thoughtless, gullible cult that she inspires. But this new, more accurately renewed, attack on Boaler seems pretty lame. I’ll stick with the Railside business (here, here, here, here and here), to which Boaler has never properly responded, and which had Boaler leaving Stanford previously, for murky reasons that have never been unmurked.
UPDATE (10/04/24)
Jo Boaler, the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education at Stanford University, has just posted a response to the new accusations against her. Greg Ashman, who has a small but growing part in this dispute, has promptly written on Boaler’s response. With a quick reading, I think Greg has done a great job of torpedoing Boaler’s arguments and accusations, but I don’t plan to ponder further.
UPDATE (30/04/24)
I’m sick of the Boaler business but it seems worthwhile pointing out a few updates. First of all, most directly and most predictably, Stanford has closed the Boaler matter and won’t formally investigate. Boaler takes a victory lap, including the longer history, here, and a more objective report is here.
Secondly, an occasional commenter alerted me to a pair of recent blog posts on Boaler written by Andrew Old, here and here. I know little of Old, except that he seems to get into Ashman-like Twitter battles; he appears to have a knack of pissing people off by being measured and intelligent. Old’s posts, substantially written in 2013, are interesting and worth reading, although it seems to me a little forced. The posts are framed around a chapter in a book by Boaler, which Old considers in his first post, and which he describes as “really awful”. The chapter is certainly not good and the golden ratio content in the chapter is painfully bad and wrong, but I’m not sure the chapter is particularly bad for the reliably bad Joy of Mathematics genre. This then leads into Old’s second post, on Boaler’s research, and on Boaler’s history of deflecting rather than addressing criticisms of her work. I don’t see that the first post leads naturally to the second, but the second post is interesting in and of itself. Old refers briefly to Boaler’s Railside business and also to her earlier research in the UK. Old suggests that this earlier research is also highly dubious, linking to critiques, here and here. I know nothing of this earlier research and have not read the critiques. My bet is that it’s worthwhile doing so.
Having read some of the document I can clearly see what the anonymous author(s) are trying for here.
An academic version of the Al Capone prosecution; Capone for many years avoided going to jail for murder, racketeering, extortion but prosecutors finally caught him on the relatively minor crime of tax evasion.
In Boaler’s case many academic heavy hitters have come off second best (or been sued/demoted/forced to retire) when they accused her of academic fraud, p-value hacking and misuse of citations.
But she has not had a systematic case put against her on the last charge of citation misrepresentation and it is here that the document is focused. It may seem a relatively minor thing but if Boaler alleges in a paper that teaching method Z results in effect Y and cites paper M to back up her conclusion then it is problematic if paper M is at best ambiguous at confirming effect Y ( or in fact contradicts it!). It should be the job of the journal to spot it and disallow it- but education journals are well…that is another article in itself.
Often Boaler has had things like this alleged against her but it has been deflected as a personal attack, sexism or a minor infraction. But a large document that accurately and diligently demonstrates widespread use of this practice could be a “Capone moment” .
The language of the document is very neutral and does not court any rebuttal on the grounds of personal animosity towards Boaler, Stanford or education academics.
I’m not sure why the authors are anonymous unless they are fearful of their futures being compromised by the inevitable backlash. Boaler has many influential supporters and going against her publicly can result in unfortunate consequences
Thanks, Simon. The Capone analogy also occurred to me. I’m not sure it’s going to work here, however. There was something underhanded about getting Capone on tax evasion, and I think plenty of people saw it that way, even if they recognised Capone for the gangster he was. Here, opinion is all that really matters: if the accusations against Boaler are seen to be unfair, I don’t think Stanford will feel much pressure to engage in any substantial review.
You wrote,
“In Boaler’s case many academic heavy hitters have come off second best (or been sued/demoted/forced to retire).”
Can you give examples of this? Of course I am well aware that Boaler typically deflects any such accusations with her own charges of sexism or racism or whatever, and I am aware that Boaler always has plenty of people willing to come to her defence. But I am not aware of anyone who has been sued or demoted or forced to retire or anything of the sort because they had levelled criticism against Boaler or her work.
> It seems very unlikely that the complaint is due to either Conrad or Jelani Nelson
I confirm that I did not file this complaint, and have no idea who did. I asked Conrad, and he said the same.
Thanks, Jelani.
What an uncitely mess.
I suppose one could say that Boaler is blind to all this since she’s has no cite.
No fucking puns.
I wrote one of the articles you linked in (that’s what brought me here). I’m pseudonymous (not anonymous) but not because of Boaler. I wrote two articles on her work back in 2012, one on her Amber Hill/Phoenix Park work, which she did before Railside back in 2002, and then on Railside.
The Amber Hill/Phoenix Park work is just offensive on its face for reasons I wrote in this piece (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/boalers-bias-or-bs/). I looked into the charges and eh.
The Railside work, on the other hand, is clear misrepresentation. I talked to Milford about it and know the actual names of the schools (one of which I mention in my article). She literally flipped the description of two of the schools, probably to make it harder to identify them, or possibly just carelessness. She also uses the scores from the wrong cohort, and neglects to mention that the two schools with “low” scores have only their low achievers in algebra, while her school puts everyone into freshman algebra.
I can’t stand Boaler and I’m not unhappy to see her get reamed for taking credit for the SF “miracle”, but three things are pretty clear:
1) While scores and achievement did not improve dramatically, as SF claimed, neither did they drop. The one exception seems to be Hispanics, but that drop was almost exclusively recorded in the first year and seems to be because of an influx of low achieving Hispanics. Which is pretty revealing of high school math in low achieving schools: all the brouhaha about raising or lowering standards is bullshit. Teachers are going to teach what students can absorb. So all the yap about kids need more challenging math in high school is just that. It’s yap. Sorry. No kids were harmed by not getting to calculus, which most of them only learn by rote anyway. Colleges should be offering lower level courses (trig, second year algebra, trig, analytic geometry/precalc) rather than engaging in the pretense that they are requiring calculus readiness.
2) What SF did was about reducing the achievement gap of *transcripts*. They are right to do so given their priorities. They long ago realized that colleges need active co-conspirators in committing affirmative action despite the law, so they just need to put black and Hispanic kids in courses they *call* algebra 2 and precalc. This was true even before colleges did away with admissions tests and it’s even worse now. they did so by deliberately stunting white and Asian students ability to increase that gap. That was the harm of the SF policy. Because whites and Asians are being compared against whites and Asians, not blacks and Hispanics. So SFUSD black and Hispanic kids with some form of a2/precalc on their transcripts, accepted by UC or not, were going to look better than black and Hispanic kids with just a2 and also give colleges more cover. Meanwhile, whites and Asians making it only to precalc were being compared to those taking calc. Scores and math knowledge don’t matter in that environment. I personally know a number of kids who made it to precalc with better math achievement scores than many who made it to calc (obviously on average the latter group does better).
It was the white and Asian parents, many of whom decamped to private school *not* for better instruction or more opportunities but better *transcripts*, who forced SF back. Not all this brouhaha, although certainly the profs getting publicity helped their cause. SF already has huge problems maintaining some sort of tax base for their public schools because of they expressly prevent local neighborhood schools in favor of forced integration.
3) Blaming Boaler for low achievement in SF or for the Framework is just….wrong. SF wanted to do this and would have done it with or without her. Hence the humorous part here is Boaler jumping in to take credit. California policy makers want to likewise eliminate the transcript gap. Boaler isn’t giving them ideas or persuading them. They want transcript equity because *colleges* want it.
The only real fix that should come out of this is to force the UC and CSU system back into not only requiring admissions scores but setting a minimum score for eligibility regardless of grades. That won’t happen, and anything short of that is largely irrelevant.
Thanks very much, E R. After updating the post with the links, I read your post on Phoenix/Amber and it’s excellent. You give a very clear picture of what you regard as Boaler’s gaming of the school comparison. (I’m not doubting that you are being fair and accurate, just making clear that I haven’t read anything to be able to make an independent judgment.)
I’m rushing now, but I’ll give your comments on SF-Boaler a careful read.
(Arggh. James Milgram, not Milford.)
And thanks! I just realized you linked in my Amber Hill/Phoenix Park article and not my Railside one, so here’s that one:
I wrote this one as a sort of process article, because I wanted to focus on the finding of it–at the time, people were interested in knowing about the schools, and I wanted to let them know what a pain in the ass it was to find them. But this allows me to actually include the images from the CA STAR records at the time, showing their match. The analysis is at the end.
Ah, I was wondering who Milford was. Thanks, E R.
Thanks again, E R. Very interesting to read. it is obviously difficult from Australia to have any good sense of what’s going on. I honestly try not to pay attention to Boaler, but she has a cultish following (also) in Australia, and I cannot stand the idolatry she receives, particularly when she’s on one of her whiny victimhood shticks. She always seems manipulative, always advocating stupid ideas on the basis of dodgy and manipulated research. But I try to ignore her, and I know really nothing about either SF or the CMF.
Regarding US schools and gaming the system generally, that is again very difficult to understand from the Anitpodes. I spent about ten years in America, in elite institutions, and so talked to thousand of but very select students, although including many college athletes and affirmative action students. I also lived in East Palo Alto for five years during the crack era, and in Houston, so I’m not totally unaware of the other world. The US is clearly very different from Australia; here, external exams in each State determine selection to the majority public universities, of broadly similar and reasonable standards (but getting much less similar and much less reasonable). The US seems unanchored except, for better or worse, by the SATs, which it seems many people are also wishing to remove.
I honestly don’t know what you do. I take your point that the inclusion or not of algebra in SF was much more about transcripts than genuine offerings. But I want genuine offerings. Here in Australia, public school kids are getting screwed, and screweder, because of an LCD “equity” curriculum, and because of the flight of anyone with money or sense to the private schools. It wasn’t like that in Australia when I was a kid, when Melbourne was much poorer than now, and I refuse to accept it has to be like that now. And the main reason why it is like that is the destruction of the education system by child-centred twats, who have zero sense of what it is to school or to learn.
As for Asian students, in Australia they are not just getting better transcripts. They are earning /i> better transcripts, they are way overrepresented at the top end, because they work harder.
“The US seems unanchored except, for better or worse, by the SATs, which it seems many people are also wishing to remove.”
They were removed during the pandemic. A few have reinstated them.
I’m a teacher.
“As for Asian students, in Australia they are not just getting better transcripts. They are earning better transcripts, they are way overrepresented at the top end, because they work harder.”
The same “equity curriculum” and equity grading that’s designed to game the gap help Asians more than white Americans, because Asians care more about grades (as opposed to achievement) than Americans do. And I doubt it’s work so much as the fact that on average, Asians have slightly higher IQs than whites. The gap is exacerbated by the gaming though.