Of fraction of what were told we should be spending. More than 30 years after the creation of the u. S. Department of education, students taxpayers and the country are not better off. But we can be. After decades of waving the constitutional barrier to a federal role in education, under the guides of partnering with state government, it is time to dissolve that partnership. And abolish u. S. Department of education once and for all. You can watch this and other programs onlines at booktv. Org. [inaudible] hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming out tonight my name is davis. Part of the policy honored to welcome you here hills out for a new book weapons of mass destruction. Really excited to get into this conversation, but i do have a few housekeeping notes. I want to let you know before we get startedded, if you will attack a moment of to silence your cell phone and no interruptions or otherwise. And also i want to mention that format of this event and youll have the opportunity to ask questions. And we have cspan recording the event tonight i was really appreciated if you raise your hand if you have a question and i can bring this to you so we can have all of the questions recorded and everyone can hear and get in in on the conversation thank you very much for that. Well be doing a book signing after the event is over and right here with where the white table cloth is there shell be there to sign a book you cant pay for it here but you can pay for it at the front in the bookstore so either head out to kick out and come back to the copy or get it signed here before you go out. I also want to make mention that this is a publish event great and developing over the past year and a half, were located here as well as if you at the calendar you can see where they are throughout the city. So you know, i first will learn what it was when i solve a rue rubiks cube but we live in an age of the all gore rhode island increasingly the decision that affect our lives, where we go to school get a car loan and pay for our Health Insurance are dismaid by humans but by mathematical moldses everybody does courting the same rule and bias is eliminated but kathy oneal reveals in urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The model used today are unregulated whefn theyre young. Most trouble aring they reinfluence the discrimination. So bank of america and land reviews oneal is io deem person to write this book. An academic who turned wall street and scientist, who has been involved in occupy wall street and recently started auditing company. He was one of the strongest book was speaking out for limiting ways to allow algorithm and against notion that because it is implemented by unemotional gene cannot have justice. Review said it is an unusually reasonable book adopting governing aspects of our life. So m. I. T. Department and the college switch over to private sector working for the hedge fund, and metrics of a Software Company he left in 2011 and started working as a native science in the new york startup and reviewing in 2013 and lost lead program and Data Journalism in 2014. Hes a weekly guest on slate money podcast and may know her for her blog oneal was with the conversation by doing pullback Computer Science and university of maryland so join me in welcoming kathy joe. [applause] so yeah Computer Science professor so algorithm leak out here for yall. [laughter] so maybe we can actually jump right in and get some like definition and ideas out there and also talk about one of the examples in your book because we were chatting in the back aside you always were coming in and saying one of the propghts ive done in my lab is to take data from twitter and facebook to use that to predict your personality trait. How many of you have done a i. N. T. Personality test . Businesses want you to take those and you dont need to because we have algorithms to look at what you leave behind and find them out automatically and use ways that you may or may not like. I wouldnt like that. [laughter] yeah so were going to talk about what a weapon of mass destruction is and then we thought might start with an example. Just then we can sort of like draw out the characteristics that make it a weapon of mass destruction and by that i mean like theres some all gore risms that i care about and most i dont care about. Ones that i care about i think are potentially really destructive i call them weapons of mass destruction but start with an example to make it real. So the example if you dont mind me starting there so theres this guy named kyle beam he was a College Student in atlanta and he wanted to get a parttime job at clovers Grocery Store and he had a friend who worked there and his friend it was leaving so he was like if i talk to my manager. Youve got any job. You have to fill out the paperwork online. And so he started to fill out paperwork and 50 of the job applicants in this country required to take a Personality Test. Online before he got the interview. So if he failed this Personality Test which he did then he wouldnt get to the interview process and this was a standard procedure for lots of mnl minimum wage jobs especially and luckily people dont find out that they failed it but they never get called out but his friend told him that he got red lighted thats what it is called and then unusual in a second way which was that his father is a lawyer. And you know most applying to minimum wage doesnt have a father who is a lawyer and father asked him what kind of questions were there on this test because youre very, very qualified to get a job at the grocery bagger at a Grocery Store straight as in high school. Whats the problem . And he said welled dad the questions were a lot like the ones i got at the hospital when i was being treated for bipolar a Mental Health assessment. Do you know about it . It is actually what we could predict. So it looks at are you an introvert and that measures how emotionally stable are you. So if you get anxious or anger easily a high score. I do. Or if youre supermellow and nothing both rs you then you score low on that. And easy to find that out through a test but those signals also show up in all kind of other data we leave behind too. Oh, my god thats so frightening. So what happened was he talked to his father so glad to meet you and glad that you dont have to take this test to get this about someone. But what happens is his father was like thats illegal. You can you cant make them take a health exam including a Mental Health exam. And thats the american disability act thats trying to prevent this sort of creation of an underclass of people with disabilities and Mental Health problems. So his father is suing on behalf a lawsuit on anyone who ever took this test and add by the way that kite kyle went ahead to get a job at six other Large Companies in the atlanta area and got the same Personality Test and red lighted for all of them and prevented from getting a job in his in his area. So thats the first example i want to talk about. Do you want to add anything . See if that takes us towards this definition question because this you were talking about a test. But, in fact, a lot of these kinds of insights about people come from these moldses that are built on algorithm and bunch of data and they work opaquely and the fact that they can hammer people or have bias even though on the surface it looks like they dont have bias that is from the nature of your weapon of mass destruction concept. And apply. Go ahead and define weapon of mass disruption with three Properties First is that it is widespread and impactful. So it matters like algorithms the there like i built in any basement because im a Data Scientist i build them all of the time. Nobody cares about ones that dont listen. They start caring they should start caring when it aivetses a lot of people in important ways because it was widely used. People who built this all gore rhode island located in bos son and sold it to people, companies to use instead of their hr people so widespread and impactful. Second is that it is secret. So kite kyle did not understand how he was being scored and people who took this Personality Test is is not understanding that they were being scored. They didnt know this was a hoop they have to jump through and finally it is destructive. So it destroyed kyles chances of getting a job. But it is actually descriskt in a largeer sense characteristic of weapon of mass destruction is and terribling gore risms to create and reenforce a feedback loop which is destructive to the society as a whole. Here it is destructive larger feedback loop is like systemically refusing to influence people with certain disorders. I think you one of the examples of like both like most in the book is when you open with which was a local one. And it highlight it is the really secretive black box nature of the algorithms including if by the way, the Computer Scientist really crappy ways of validating them a and that was their use in the Dc School System for getting teachers fire sod talk a little about nap second example so michelle was school is chancellor for some time and she instituted this policy where by some people would get fired if they had bad teacher assessments and some people would get bonuses they got really good teacher assessments now assessments are complicated but short version is that most of the ways that a teacher are assessed is like not very they dont have a lot of spread so most people get acceptable or very good. And those people who really want to discriminate between bad and good are frustrated with that. They want more spread in their scoring system. They want like more people who are terrible and then eminent, goods, fair, better and very good. So theyre frustrated by the fact that have few of the ways that we could we now aseis teachers have any kind of spread which thng of information. So they instituted this this assessment this new kind of assessment called growth score or the value added score of a teacher web and i wont go into it too technically but the very broadway of just thinking about this is the idea is that the teacher the teacher is on the hook for the difference between what their students should have gotten versus what they actually got. So theres an underline model that estimates what each student in a class should get so if youre all in my class like im teaching you fifth grades youre all fifth graders right now. Each of you got at the end of fourth grade you each got a score for your standardized test right,let say you got a 75 out of 100. Then you should be and expected to got a 75 for a fifth grade test. Now, lets say you actually got an 80 then i would be given credit for five points that you got more than you were expected. Okay, does that make sense now as to not declare how expected score is actually determined per student. And it is really complicated and its a source of uncertainty. And its also another uncertainty what you actually got at the end of fifth grade or what youll get at the end of fifth grade because afterall like tests vary every year, and kids get different scores depending on morning or afternoon or whether they have breakfast before the test so that kind of thing. So theres leak two uncertainty and the teacher again, remind you teacher is on the book with a difference between two things. Okay. Now, actually if you think about this this original expected score that each of you got, the difference between the expected score and the actual score is called error term, specific, also sometimes called noise. So the teachers are being assessed based on these error terms which is if youre not a dont be confused we in statistics call this stuff essentially pretty meaningless and, in fact, this way, the scores actually came out with almost meaningless. Pnt so anyway going back to washington, d. C. , i interviewed this woman who got fired because her assessments were too low. Again it wasnt entirely due to the valued at its corporate it was 50 of the but the other 50 with these things that dont have any spread. Most of the information her score was this terrible value added score. Okay, one more thing to tell the about this, her score is that a lot of her, she was a fifth grade teacher. A lot of of fourth graders have gotten good scores at the end of fourth grade. A lot of the kids come into a class had gotten actual fourth grade scores but they couldnt read and they couldnt write. And so she was suspicious of there really very good scores. And, in fact, she is every reason to believe that the teachers of those kids cheated on the test at the end of the year in order to get better value added model scores for themselves. Because then their kids got better than expected so they can good scores. So they set her up to get worse than expected. Does that make sense of . She has good reason to believe this. All sorts of unusual erasures. I dont know if you remove that the scandal that industry but unusual erasures which never lick a systematically investigated. They got hushed basically. In any case she got fired. Lets go back over the three characteristics of the weapons of mass destruction to its widespread. The scores are being used in more than half the states mostly in urban school districts. Its secret. Sarah didnt understand her scores and she was suspicious of it but when she appealed that they said you know, no, its there because its mathematical. And finally destructive. Not only did it destroy sarahs life because she got fired. Like, i should say she got rehired like the following week and sort of affluent suburb where they dont use the scoring system. Thats going to the final think which was destructive. I think youll be surprised if you know about Michelle Rhee and why she was brought income which is theres a nationwide kind of are on teachers going on which is fine but that teachers, get rid of them and then we will fix education. Its been like a bunch of president s who want to be the president that fixed education. We can talk about whether that even make sense but in any case the idea was to get rid of the bad teachers. In a Larger Destructive feedback loop engendered by the valued added model is it hasnt gotten rid of bad teachers. Its been getting rid of good teachers because good teachers have been quitting, retiring early and most of all they been moving to affluent suburbs that dont have this scoring system. Right now we have a nationwide shortage of teachers. I would argue this regime of this ill take value added model has been very, very bad. At i think something that is especially in cities about this, we talk about algorithms and they can sound tacky and four, things we dont interact with, but another the algorithms that were talking about that we both work on have tons of some letters, sometimes are identical under date the algorithms like the netflix that recommend shows for you or amazon that recommend books to buy. We totally know how to handle those. Amazon or most of the time it superb or and not insightful. You bought a stephen king book and how about these other stephen king books . Youre right but not helpful right . Sometimes its totally wrong and you just go like where did this come from . Sometimes you get these beautiful glimmers of insight. So bad bought this Survival Guide and recommend i buy this 18inch knife that folds out at the handle. I never wouldve thought of that. That was a great insight. You dont just by having amazon recommends. You dont watch every show netflix tells you to watch but the algorithms you are talking about, people dont treat him as one area in a human decisionmaking process. They treat them like this oracle of truth even when theyre poorly validated, even when the people who use them to understand. That makes them more destructive because you override all of our great human intuition with this little bit of math. Gradepoint. I would argue this worse than what you just said. You know how, let me give you two examples. You know how the facebook drinking stories has been messing up lately, weird fake stories . Guess what. We noticed that ever give feedback to facebook site thats not a real story. Right . That something that doesnt happen to the teacher value added model. There was no ground truth for those teachers. There was no secondary assessment of those teachers to compare their scores to. They were told this is your score. The guy who got six out of 100 was shamed. An excuse to get 96 out of 100 he was like what, that means i went from being a terrible teacher to a great teacher . Theres no feedback mechanism. Teachers cant say actually im a really good teacher so please update your model. That would be the equivalent of like saying netflix, i do want to see that movie because its awful. Please dont show that to me. They need a rock button. Please dont recommend that. Teachers do not have access to that way. So parent or administration knew they were good, they could go in and override. Exactly. The thing i want to agree with is that people really did just trust the scores because they were mathematical. The way i came about, across this algorithm is my friend who is a principal in brooklyn under high school in new york city, and she started complaining to me about her teachers getting scores. I just said can you tell me how theyre being escorted . What is the algorithm . She said i asked a contract at the apartment of education and they told me, you wouldnt understand. Its math. And i was like, thats not good enough. As a mathematician let me just say asthmatics as both to clarify, not confuse. Thats not a thing to do with math. Thats recognizing math, right . Its not okay. I asked her to keep pushing and she got through three different layers, each later sang to her you wouldnt understand it, its math. Three times. She finally got this white paper which was unreadable to me. I cannot understand what this white paper sing. What i did was i filed for a freedom of information act request to get the source code for the algorithm. It was denied. And by the way, i should say that the reason i thought of that is because the New York Post had filed a freedom of information act and request and gotten, successfully gotten all the teachers at scores and teachers names and scores and they published it as an act of public shaming for the teachers. Really awful. I was like if they can get the scores than i should be able to get the way the scores are made. Makes sense. I was denied. That i contacted some