Comments on Mark Stegeman’s constituent letter

by David Safier

Mark Stegeman sent a constituent letter out today, and he was good enough to send me a copy. (NOTE: Though our disagreements about MAS have been pretty extreme, Mark and I have been casual friends for a number of years. We have talked about TUSD related issues since he has been on the Board, sometimes in amicable agreement, sometimes in heated disagreement, but always respectfully. I consider my posts on Mark's positions on MAS to be continuations of our face-to-face discussions — frank but not disrespectful.)

Stegeman's constituent letter is 13 single-spaced pages — the man is an academic, so it's not surprising he writes at length. I'm just going to focus on a few issues which, for me, show his general antipathy for the MAS program which leads him to make seemingly logical arguments which fall apart on closer inspection.

Stegeman is concerned TUSD didn't follow proper procedures or exercise due diligence when the MAS program was established. Therefore, he wants to wipe out MAS and start from scratch.

After receiving this information from the board office [about lack of proper procedures and oversight], in late spring, my viewpoint toward the MAS program changed. Because the process which created it seemed so procedurally incomplete, I decided that it was best simply to end the current program and start over, following proper procedures. This was the major reason for my vote against TUSD’s current appeal.

You don't end a valuable program because proper procedures haven't been followed. You go back and pick up the procedural threads you've missed. You don't even end a valuable-but-flawed program because proper procedures haven't been followed. As you go back and pick up the procedural threads, you try and correct as many of the flaws as you can. You only use "poor procedures" as an excuse to end a program you don't like. If we ended every government-funded program where procedures weren't followed properly, how many ships, planes and weapons would have to be withdrawn from use by the military? How many government buildings would have to be torn down because some drawings weren't completed and some inspections were fudged? How many government programs would have to be ended because they were created without full procedural oversight?

Moving on, Stegeman calls on his academic credentials to neutralize the data which suggests MAS students achieve at higher levels than comparable students not in the program. (Would that he were as academically thorough when he called the courses "cults" at Friday's hearing and referred to a book written half a century ago as his sole scholarly resource!) He writes at length about why the data is less than conclusive, but this sums up his argument pretty nicely.

My view of the data which TUSD has produced is that it is what economists might call suggestive but inconclusive. This means that there is enough to suggest that positive achievement effects exist, but the current data and analysis would be insufficient to publish that conclusion in a peer-reviewed economics journal.

For the data to satisfy Stegeman, it would have to be sufficient "to publish that conclusion in a peer-reviewed economics journal" — an impossibly high bar to leap over. He even admits there is not enough data to complete the kind of study he would trust. I also know, from taking many, many graduate education courses and reading a hell of a lot on my own, there is no such thing as a statistically conclusive educational study, unless someone creates a topic defined so narrowly it is conclusive but useless.

Again, only someone who has a grudge against the program would brush aside highly suggestive data on student achievement because it doesn't meet his impossibly high standards.

Stegeman is also concerned the MAS courses don't provide "adequate core coverage." Why is he concerned? Because he hasn't received enough information to show the courses have "adequate core coverage." Stegeman, by his own admission, is setting a standard which he isn't holding other courses to, as he says in the parenthetical statement at the end of the passage below.

On paper, the MAS courses do provide adequate core coverage, but the board has never received any information which provides clear evidence on actual practice, one way or the other. I think that is partly because it has been difficult for district staff to obtain exams and other information which could provide better information about what happens in the MAS classrooms. (The same could probably be said for much of TUSD’s core curriculum, not just MAS.)

These three arguments against MAS can be summed up as follows. Since (1)The board didn't use proper procedures setting up the program; (2)We can't be 100% sure MAS students achieve at a higher level than comparable students; and (3)We don't know if MAS courses "provide adequate core coverage" (something we also don't know about other core classes): Therefore, we should throw out MAS.

Stegeman says other things in the 13 pages, of course, but these three arguments are the kind of faux logic used by someone with an ax to grind, not by someone trying to construct a logical argument. To me, this demonstrates that this intelligent academic has let his animus toward MAS distort his normally logical thought processes into self-serving arguments of questionable value.