California moves to silence Stanford researchers who got data to study education

https://edsource.org/2023/california-moves-to-silence-stanford-researchers-who-got-state-data-to-study-education-issues/694920

by nradov • 3 years ago

423 269 3 years ago

edsource.org

mcpackieh5• 3 years ago

The truth does not fear investigation.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

Yes, but narratives do.

asdajksah21232• 3 years ago

There's a long history of nearly every major freedom supporter or civil rights supporter being investigated and wrongly imprisoned and even killed across the world. And that's just the famous ones we've heard of. There are an order of magnitude more who were done with well before they became historically famous and no one even knows about them.

This bumper sticker quote doesn't really track in the real world.

mcpackieh5• 3 years ago

So are you meaning to say that California is afraid these Stanford researchers are going to imprison people, wrongly or otherwise? Come on. This isn't the police, these are academic researchers.

hex4def6• 3 years ago

"The truth does not fear investigation."

I don't think you'd feel the same if you were the defendant in a lawsuit, even if you had a rock solid case.

You might be completely vindicated, but bankrupted. Or, perhaps your lawyer is a dud, and fumbled the ball. Or perhaps the jury were idiots. Or perhaps the law has some unknown (to you) technicality that you end up hanging for. Or perhaps during the investigation you honestly misremember something or misspeak and the police / investigators become convinced you're guilty and spend all their time and resources trying to pin it on you. Or maybe they're just lazy, and you end up being an easy target. Don't worry, if you plead guilty you'll avoid a lengthy court battle that you can ill afford, and potential prison time if found guilty (are you that confident in your lawyer, your finances, the jury, and the legal system?). If you plead no-contest, you avoid jail, weeks or months of time off work defending yourself, and just do probation. But wait, I thought you had the Truth on your side?

throwaway290• 3 years ago

Tell that to Alan Turing

downWidOutaFite• 3 years ago

Desantis was doing the same thing in Florida, preventing proffesors from testifying in a voting rights case against the state. https://apnews.com/article/lawsuits-florida-ron-desantis-vot...

justrealist• 3 years ago

That's also questionable, but it's not the same thing.

PartiallyTyped2• 3 years ago

Is that not a first amendment violation?

mcpackieh5• 3 years ago

Yes, both are and one does not justify the other.

appplication• 3 years ago

If I could wear a tin foil hat for a minute: it could be plausible that CA could fight this to allow it to escalate to the Supreme Court and establish a judicial standard for these types of cases.

I don’t really understand why, of all the CA government institutions, the CDE finds this to be appropriate stance though. An educational office should absolutely be held to a much higher standard than this, and should at its core value openness of information and freedom of speech. The fact that this lawsuit exists at all is an indication of deeply problematic internal values within CDE that are completely misaligned with its mission and governmental function.

jeremyjh• 3 years ago

CDE is trying to protect itself from the consequences of poor policy decisions made at the highest levels of the department and state government.

jimbob452• 3 years ago

Florida has the Sunshine laws which would likely preclude this from being a problem in the first place.

Florida bad though upvotes to the left.

ironmagma• 3 years ago

Sunshine laws have nothing to do with court testimony.

LexiMax3• 3 years ago

Previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29065265

spamizbad2• 3 years ago

At issue is a restriction that CDE requires researchers to sign as a condition for their gaining access to nonpublic K-12 data. The clause, which CDE is interpreting broadly, prohibits the researcher from participating in any litigation against the department, even in cases unrelated to the research they were doing through CDE.

That's an unreasonable restriction and I expect the ACLU to win this.

ww520• 3 years ago

Why are the K-12 data non-public? Aren't they from publicly funded institutes?

spamizbad2• 3 years ago

I'm guessing detailed information on individual students, anonymized - that's not something that any edu department will make public.

kayodelycaon3• 3 years ago

There’s a law protecting individual student records: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_an...

It also goes beyond K-12. Quite a few parents try to get their children’s college grades and run smack into this law.

edgyquant• 3 years ago

Things involving minors tend to have stricter regulations.

jimhefferon• 3 years ago

Might it bump against privacy? If you do a search on third graders receiving speech services in towns of pop less than 3000 in county... at some point you have private information.

tmpX7dMeXU3• 3 years ago

How would you feel if data pertaining to your interactions with government were made public just because the government is taxpayer-funded?

How about data pertaining to your kids?

Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department. That’s entirely entirely reasonable. Anonymising data isn’t nearly as easy as a passer-by with “faker.fake_name()” may think it is.

ke88y8• 3 years ago

Totally unreasonable, but that doesn't mean it's not legally enforceable :(

Why do you expect the ACLU to win?

(not arguing. Genuinely curious.)

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think there's a case for optimism based on this being something which seems unreasonable, and not is thoroughly established by precedent. Especially since the organization challenging it exists to make exactly this kind of argument, and has a decent track record of doing it in the past. /shrug

hodgesrm• 3 years ago

That's an unreasonable restriction and I expect the ACLU to win this.

Looking at the details, it seems that this cannot be a blanket restriction, since a judge could compell you to provide testimony. [0] At that point it would not matter what the contract said.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/43/30.224

pacbard• 3 years ago

When you work with state level education data, you do so under a research agreement. That means you outline your research agenda and the state agrees to provide data to you to answer your research questions.

You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data.

It looks like the state is interpreting that use of student data as part of the lawsuit to ve outside the scope of the prior approvals, therefore they are preventing Sean and Tom from using the data during the their testimony.

Nothing prevents the defense to subpoena the same data and have them use it for their testimony.

arcticfox2• 3 years ago

As I understand it, this is the government saying that data it provided cannot be used as the basis for supporting litigation against the government.

I am not a crazy disciple of the 1A but that seems pretty clearly to be something the government should not be able to do. Couldn't the government just slip that language into any of their FOIA agreements etc?

It would be a very different situation for a non-government actor to have the clause.

Very scummy by government.

jahewson• 3 years ago

True but they are preventing Sean and Tom from speaking in court on behalf of the defence and preventing the defence from speaking by quoting Sean and Tom. In the context of petitioning the government, no less.

kahirsch• 3 years ago

You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data.

That's not what this case is about. The California Department of Education is not claiming that Thomas Dee misused confidential data. The CDE said that their contract with Dee means that he cannot testify against them or participate in an unrelated case against them.

remote_phone• 3 years ago

How can data collected by the government be private? That should all be available to the public since it was gathered with public funds. Has no one issued a freedom of information request?

IronWolve• 3 years ago

IMHO,Making the public pay for records, at high expense in a digital age is how the government limit information. Police arrest\crime data, Court data, Zoning Data, Meeting transcripts, Budget Data, etc, and yes, Education data.

Society shouldnt accept this data should be behind paywalls or accept high costs to access it. Or paper only releases to stop release restrictions for costs and size.

codyb• 3 years ago

Zoning data and meeting transcripts generally are public? At least in NY that's been my experience.

A lot of the rest I'd rather was private. Although it'd be nice to get aggregated data for certain crimes which currently are tracked at each individual department level and not in any sort of national manner.

civilitty• 3 years ago

How can data collected by the government be private? That should all be available to the public since it was gathered with public funds. Has no one issued a freedom of information request?

Agreed. What gives the government the right to reject my FOIA requests for the exact specification and design files for gaseous centrifuges, implosion devices, and nerve gas?

Extreme natsec examples aside, there are a thousand reasons to keep government data private, not the least of which is constituent privacy. Deanonymizing data is far easier than preparing it for release and the data schools keep on students is particularly sensitive (I'm not claiming that that's the case with this data, just making a general observation).

kayodelycaon3• 3 years ago

Student records are protected by federal law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_an...

Personally, I think an individual’s privacy should take precedence here.

deathanatos• 3 years ago

Personally, I think an individual’s privacy should take precedence here.

There's no individual's privacy even at stake here. None of the data that's non-public is even material or relevant to the dispute here, beyond that the professors in question signed an agreement to access the data for unrelated matters.

MisterBastahrd• 3 years ago

Please provide us with your contact information, date of birth, social security number, height, weight, hair color, and eye color.

eesmith• 3 years ago

Just about every accepts that it's reasonable for some government collected information to be kept private. FOIA requests exclude "personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy". https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-A...

In this case it was for "student-level data that detail the demographic information and the performance records over time of California’s 5.8 million students but without any names or identifying information. That data is the gold standard for accurate research. A partnership contract details the department’s commitments and researchers’ responsibilities, including strong assurances they will have security protections in place to protect students’ privacy and anonymity."

The thing about this sort of data is, removing PII from the dataset doesn't make it fully or even sufficiently anonymous. If there's only one Pacific Islander student in the Shasta Union High School District then it's easy to figure out who that is by coming it with other public data.

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy :

] Statistical organizations have long collected information under a promise of confidentiality that the information provided will be used for statistical purposes, but that the publications will not produce information that can be traced back to a specific individual or establishment. To accomplish this goal, statistical organizations have long suppressed information in their publications. For example, in a table presenting the sales of each business in a town grouped by business category, a cell that has information from only one company might be suppressed, in order to maintain the confidentiality of that company's specific sales.

The clear justification for keeping this information private is that the government won't get sufficiently useful data without this promise. The United States Census Bureau released "confidential" information about draft evaders and Japanese-Americans; if you think they might do that again, perhaps you'll lie about some of the questions.

People who receive this sort of information are required to take special care to maintain the needed level of anonymity.

There's of course no reason why this should be used to muzzle researchers for completely unrelated fields.

themitigating6• 3 years ago

Tax information is also collected by the government, should that be public? What about publicly funded hospital records?

verteu• 3 years ago

Requiring more education/outcome data to be public would help prevent this. If education researchers are forced to get data from California's Department of Education, there's tacit pressure to find results that make DoE look good.

troupe2• 3 years ago

It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable that if a school system gives a researcher access to data that isn't shared with the public, the researcher agrees not to use that information to sue the school system. Such agreements would allow the school system to be more free to share information.

The issue here seems to be that the school system is saying that the researchers aren't allowed to be a witness in any lawsuit against the school system regardless of whether it has to do with the data that was shared with the researchers.

I think a bigger issue is whether the school system should be allowed to keep any information private in the first place. If the information can safely be shared with a particular researcher then it seems like there is minimal benefit to society in letting the school system pick and choose who gets access and who doesn't.

heliodor• 3 years ago

What information does a school system possibly need to keep away from the public? This smells.

amalcon2• 3 years ago

Most obviously, personal information about students.

troupe2• 3 years ago

There might be some information that could be combined with other data in ways that would violate the privacy of students and their families. Obviously discipline records with student names shouldn't be public, but what about records without names where the students name could be found by linking it with other data.

AOL released a bunch of search queries in 2006 with they idea that they were anonymous, but it turned out you could get quite a bit of personal information from them by linking searches together.

nend• 3 years ago

If you're curious, read up on FERPA.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

Presumably all data about student educational outcomes, which are protected by FERPA. The school system doesn't have the option to just ignore the law and make this information public.

darth_avocado2• 3 years ago

If the institution is public, data should be public as long as individual PII is removed. No exceptions. And FOIA requests should be able to make this data available to anyone filing for an access within a reasonable amount of time. Period.

kayodelycaon3• 3 years ago

Not when there is an existing law limiting it. FERPA specifically protects student records.

tmpz22• 3 years ago

as long as individual PII is removed

The devil is in the details. These records were likely not designed to be shared and I'd assume the entire system contains vulnerabilities that could create leakage. Leakage that could be used to harm individuals in a variety of ways - from discriminating future prospects to harassment and much much more.

I agree in principle to what you're saying but we need to be truthful about what these current systems are capable of.

maximinus_thrax• 3 years ago

data should be public as long as individual PII is removed

This is one of those things when ideology doesn't match the real world. If the amount of data is large enough and with enough parameters, removing PII doesn't do anything to protect privacy.

What about medical records? What about protected classes? What about data about vulnerable people or victims?

Student data is protected by another layer of regulation and for good reason. Also, the judiciary is a 'public' institution in general. Should we not seal records for minors? 'No exceptions' - year right..

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Removing PII would probably also involve removing individual grades and other information that's necessary for any research to be effective. Thanks to predatory data collection practices on the internet, we know how little information you actually need to deanonimize someone. The problem only becomes worse when we're talking about kids.

That said, research that cannot be reproduced is useless. There's a balance to be struck here, and it's somewhere between "make all data public" and "lock the data in a vault".

dragonwriter9• 3 years ago

If the institution is public, data should be public as long as individual PII is removed.

PII is much broader than most people understand because reidentification of what amateurs would see as deidentified data is easy (often trivial), and, as a consequence, to be useful for research data is often not fully deidentified.

EDIT: As an example, the HIPAA safe harbor deidentification standard requires removing 18 kinds of identifiers, including, as one of them:

All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP code, and their equivalent geocodes, except for the initial three digits of the ZIP code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: (1) The geographic unit formed by combining all ZIP codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and (2) The initial three digits of a ZIP code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000

nineplay• 3 years ago

You'd have to remove so much PII as to make any examination worthless "A student of age <redacted> and gender <redacted> at school <redacted> has a GPA of <redacted>". As little information as "a 16 year old black male at Main Street High School" can be narrowed down to a handful of possible candidates at a lot of CA schools.

ke88y8• 3 years ago

I did some consulting on this WAAAAY back in the day.

In the case of education, good enough anonymization often isn't really possible. A lot of information about school students is public -- yearbooks are gold mines, as are results from extra-curricular activities such as sports, class notes about whether/where they went to college or first jobs after college, etc. Still more can be purchased. As yet more can be inferred from public data (eg home address, rough estimates at parental income, etc.). This was back in the day. I'm sure now it's much worse.

Most of the questions you want to ask about education are about treatments and outcomes. If these treatments (eg extra-curriculars) and outcomes (eg attended college, graduated HS, etc) are public then you can often figure out which student corresponds to each supposedly anonymous data-point.

Maybe not perfectly. But way more than you would think. It's like the statistics version of those little logic puzzles from grade school -- "Four people have red hair. Five are girls and two are boys. Billy and Sally are chewing gum. Boy gum chewers have brown hair. No one over 5 has red hair. Sally is 4. etc. etc. etc. Match each person's name with their hair color.". You sort of figure out a small set of data points, then look at the results of the paper and reverse engineer some statistical calculations, and then a surprising amount of the others start falling into place.

We didn't have a name for it when I did this work, but the basic point was "if you publish the dataset everyone will know little Johnny Table's test scores and GPA". Today this is called a reidentification attack.

(I don't really know enough about the topic to have an opinion on the article per se, but "just publish everything" is definitely not a workable solution :))

tensor• 3 years ago

I very very strongly disagree. It's important that researchers get access to diverse data and industry collaboration is often crucial for this. If companies are required to make all their data public they will be far less willing to collaborate with research. It's already hard enough as is to convince corporations that it's worth their time.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

In theory this makes sense, and I agree with the spirit. In practice, you can often re-identify individuals even in an anonymized dataset. For example, if you're dealing with a very rare disease, or a small minority group, you can usually figure out an anonymized row of data is referring to if you really try. So, it's not so simple, and the responsible thing to do is not have a blanket policy that takes human judgment and accountability out of the loop.

next_xibalba• 3 years ago

The issue here seems to be that the school system is saying that the researchers aren't allowed to be a witness in any lawsuit against the school system

Exactly. With this bit being particularly outrageous:

“Also, be aware,” wrote Cindy Kazanis, the director of CDE’s Analysis, Measurement, and Accountability Reporting Division, “that your actions have adversely impacted your working relationship with CDE, and your response to this letter is critically important to existing and future collaborations between us.”

asdajksah21232• 3 years ago

I think you've described the salient issues here very well.

chaps10• 3 years ago

  I think a bigger issue is whether the school system should be allowed to keep any information private in the first place.

Are you genuinely suggesting that the public should have access to all attendance records, grades, test scores, etc etc of all students everywhere? That's the sort of information these researchers have.

nvy2• 3 years ago

So long as the data cannot identify specific students (i.e. it's sufficiently anonymized) what's the issue?

goatlover• 3 years ago

For researchers who follow the guidelines, yes it's necessary to do the kind of independent studies needed to assess educational development.

jrochkind12• 3 years ago

While not _as_ "entirely unreasonable" as what the state is actually doing -- and I think we should be clear, that, as you say, the state is doing way worse and trying to prevent researchers from testifying on any matters at all...

I'm not totally sure it's actually reasonable for a government to withhold data from researchers because they think it might be used against them in a lawsuit either. Is that a valid reason for a government institution to withhold data?

Perhaps a court case will end up establishing that the broader thing is in fact unreasonable under the first ammendment too, perhaps this is a good "test case" being even so much more egregious, you always want an especially egregious case.

dragonwriter9• 3 years ago

The issue here seems to be that the school system is saying that the researchers aren't allowed to be a witness in any lawsuit against the school system regardless of whether it has to do with the data that was shared with the researchers

I think the issue isn't being a witness in the general sense, but an expert witness which is either a paid gig or one which payment is waived because of other alignment of interests. Being an expert witness against someone you are in any kind of working relationship with is a clear and obvious conflict on interest.

If the information can safely be shared with a particular researcher then it seems like there is minimal benefit to society in letting the school system pick and choose who gets access and who doesn't.

So HIPAA-protected data that meets the standards for research sharing should instead be made public? (And if you say, “well, its different, this is the government”—government holds lots of data protected by HIPAA.

lowbloodsugar2• 3 years ago

expert witness against someone

The state is not a "someone". The state is in an extremely privileged position legally, and as such is bound by the First Amendment which you and I are not.

nickff• 3 years ago

Wouldn't a more reasonable position be a prohibition on researchers acting as paid expert witnesses in cases against the school system? I can imagine that might disincentivize 'gold-digging' behavior by researchers.

The complete ban on researchers engaging in any litigation seems over-broad, and designed to keep potential litigants from having access to anyone 'in-the-know'.

jjk166• 3 years ago

The issue here seems to be that the school system is saying that the researchers aren't allowed to be a witness in any lawsuit against the school system regardless of whether it has to do with the data that was shared with the researchers.

While that does seem overbroad, if the restriction were only on cases related to the data shared by the researchers, then for many cases there would need to be a demonstration that it did or didn't relate to the data, and there isn't really a way to do that without disclosing the data.

BenGuz• 3 years ago

What data do you want to see? Most of it exists publicly but is very messy. You can get basic financial information here,[1] but data on student outcomes and school climate is very siloed - if there's a specific school/state you're interested in, I could help you find information.

Even if you're a researcher, good quality data rarely exists. In NYC, which collects more data than any other school district, you're mostly relying on a (publicly available) 100 question survey sent to every student. The survey author must have never talked to a child because the questions are worded like a clinical psychology paper. At low income schools the survey has a 20-30% response rate.[2]

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/index.asp?ID=2512750020... [2] https://tools.nycenet.edu/snapshot/2022/

prepend10• 3 years ago

It seems unreasonable to me. Public institutions have a duty to the public that should be above any “self preservation” to protect itself.

I expect that they actually owe more to people actively suing them to prevent any shenanigans.

I think this is different from private instructions who have no, or very different, duty to private citizens.

polygamous_bat• 3 years ago

Public institutions have a duty to the public that should be above any “self preservation” to protect itself.

Do you hold the same beliefs for publicly traded companies? Or do you just have unreasonable bars for government institutions only?

indymike• 3 years ago

It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable that if a school system gives a researcher access to data that isn't shared with the public, the researcher agrees not to use that information to sue the school system. Such agreements would allow the school system to be more free to share information.

That is not what is going on here. The research is being asked to testify against the school system by someone who is suing them.

bluGill• 3 years ago

If you discover evidence of wrongdoing, then you are ethically obliged to act on it regardless of any other contract. We have whistle blower laws for this reason.

Even if the wrongdoing is not a criminal matter, if you discover a reason that someone can be sued, then you have an obligation to inform those who could sue and act as a witness for them in court. The only exception to this is if you are the lawyer for the party you discover the data - and then you have an obligation to inform them they can be sued so here is how to fix the problem in good faith (good faith meaning if it is discovered you as a lawyer will argue that when the problem was discovered they fixed it, and thus court should dismiss the problem as an honest mistake that was corrected - the courts should in turn if not dismiss the case at least award minimal damages)

The above needs to take precedence over all contracts.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

Professor Dee was one of the authors of some excellent research regarding SFUSD’s math detracting experiment: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/san-francisco-insis...

TheMagicHorsey3• 3 years ago

One of the weird things about America is that we all know Asian kids are better at math than other kids on average. Its pretty obvious to anyone that's been in a class with Asians or taught Asians. I've done both.

But nobody can actually say this. Instead we have to pretend like this isn't the case. Just look at math Olympiad teams. I coached one years ago. My entire team was Asian except for two alternates. One who was Russian, and the other Indian.

Yes, environment can change outcomes ... but maybe it can't change outcomes to a point where everyone is going to perform the same. Are we going to try to get everyone's 100M sprint into the same range too? People are different.

We should give every individual the same shot at opportunities but I don't think we are ever going to make Asian kids perform at the level of other kids in math or vice versa. Its not environment. Every one of us that has taught an engineering or math course knows this. Even if we don't talk about it.

dragonwriter9• 3 years ago

One of the weird things about America is that we all know Asian kids are better at math than other kids on average. Its pretty obvious to anyone that's been in a class with Asians or taught Asians. I've done both.
But nobody can actually say this.

“Asian kids in the US are, on average, better at math and, furthermore, this effect is stronger the fewer generations removed from immigration they are, and is in large part due to well-established general familial impacts on performance and the selective filter of immigration.”

moosey• 3 years ago

To sum up another comment: it's cultural, not biological.

Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study. For example: there is as much biological diversity in sub Saharan Africa as the rest of the world, but racially, the best we can do is "Black", or "African". It's a useless, dated concept that we, as species, find it difficult to work past because our brains are categorical engines.

I'm as politically "leftist" as anyone you'll ever meet, but we have to be able to do better than "Asians are good at math" to make effective decisions about education, amongst other problems. This is of course impossible with the current world and thinking. Even though I know race isn't real, I still see it. It still has an impact on my day to day actions, because my stupid brain is all too happy to categorize people on how they appear.

Taking another route: to say that Asians are good at math is categorical error. The word "Asians" represents something abstract, and abstract things cannot take action. Categorical error is basically the starting point for the various "isms" like misogyny, misandry, racism, etc.

tmpX7dMeXU3• 3 years ago

This is absurd cable news pundit-level commentary. It doesn’t sound like you’ve actually looked into this. More that you’ve taken some snippets of your life experience and explained it using your preconceived worldview. Nothing empirical about it. Nothing scientific. And the cherry on top is the implication that you’re “saying what we are all thinking”. Your experience teaching engineering or maths courses doesn’t qualify your baseless intuition as to causality, especially when the stakes are so high as to typecast such large groups of people.

This is a classic case of a misplaced assumption of transferable expertise.

nitwit0053• 3 years ago

we all know Asian kids are better at math than other kids on average.

Mostly because of who immigrates to the US. Those Asian and Russian kids you mention probably have software engineers as parents. The Hispanic kids probably do not.

If we got the poorest and least educated immigrants from the same places, we'd be seeing rather different results.

johnnyanmac• 3 years ago

I think the problem is more about skill floors than skill ceilings. I never really cared that much about Asian's positive stereotypes, but the same arguments have been used to propose arguments that hispanic/black students are inherently inferior. Despite the face that much of that, was and is environmental issues.

Once you hit a certain point, sure. There will simply be people who's brains work differently and efficiently, similar to runners who have different pique physiques for their respective category (I don't think we even tap into half of that in classical public teaching but I digress). But it's a much bigger sale to say that some people simply can't pass high school level acedemics and use that against them.

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

This has everything to do with demographics and science that presents findings contrary to ideology/politics. The same kinds of people pressure police to omit demographics data in police reports.

anon848736283• 3 years ago

Interestingly, the article states that the data sharing agreements do not limit what the researchers can publish. They can share results/conclusions critical of the state, which could then serve as a basis for litigation.

What's weird is that they are being prevented from voluntary testimony on cases unrelated to the specific shared data, thus unnecessarily removing many experts from the pool.

yttribium• 3 years ago

There's a distinction between a fact witness and an "expert witness". A private agreement can't prevent a court from subpoenaing a fact witness to testify. "Expert witnesses" are overwhelmingly hired guns paid to come in and voluntarily spin a narrative, and I'm not sure why they shouldn't be able to make that a provision of a contract just like any other commercial arrangement.

mcpackieh5• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why they shouldn't be able to make that a provision of a contract just like any other commercial arrangement.

Because we're talking about part of the government.

phpisthebest3• 3 years ago

Mainly because it is a government agency, and government agency do and should have lots of restrictions on them that are not like "any other commercial arrangement"

One of the biggest things I disagree with republican on is that "government should be run like a business" no... it should not

themitigating6• 3 years ago

Seems pretty obvious because the main/sole purpose of business is to make money. Why would you want a government to act like that?

GCA10• 3 years ago

There's a lot more going on here than the initial story reports.

For more than a few academics, making big $$$ as an expert witness is a magnificent source of side income. (Fees of $1,000/hour, including lots of open-ended prep time, can be found.) That begs the question: Did the research lead to the desire to be an expert witness? Or did the desire to be an expert witness define the nature of the research project?

We'd need to know a lot more about the origins of this project before being able to referee this one. But if the state of California is worried about litigants using "researchers" to find and filter data that ordinarily would be available only through legal discovery processes, that's not a crazy worry.

AlbertCory12• 3 years ago

I went to the Apple v. Samsung trial in 2016 or so, and the highest paid expert witness that day was $850. The other two were $450 and $350. Where are you getting this number?

The prep time is included in your hours. The $850 guy said he'd put in 900 hours.

(btw, it IS excruciatingly boring work. But of course, the money.)

angrais• 3 years ago

So the $850 guy got $850×900? So $765k? How many months were the 900 hours split over? This sounds absolutely ridiculous

vasco• 3 years ago

One month of work for $765k. I was expecting one or two orders of magnitude lower payouts for a single expert witness in a single case. Who can afford to pay this?

coding123• 3 years ago

not sure if $850 is an hourly, but $850 after 2016->2023 inflation is $1095 per hour

HWR_145• 3 years ago

The witness you are talking about was Martin Rinard.

peyton3• 3 years ago

Inflation easily puts $850 over the $1k mark today.

Fezzik• 3 years ago

I litigated mesothelioma cases and our experts were paid $600-$1,100/hr, depending on the expert. $1,000 is high but not unheard of. What’s really wild is, in addition to prep time, they get paid that from the second they cross the threshold of their front door through when the return; many of our experts were flown in from the middle of the country to Oregon so they sure pocketed hefty sums.

johndhi3• 3 years ago

I worked on that trial! Maybe I saw you there :)

foolfoolz• 3 years ago

a friend of my is a full time expert witness. he went to school for an engineering degree and did 1 year of industry work. he now provides expert testimony on technical cases all over the country. they fly him out to nice hotels with a generous per diem. he gets paid very well. they give him the materials to present in court. it’s a very well paying position

l33t233372• 3 years ago

850 in 2016 dollars is almost 1100 in 2023 dollars.

Zigurd• 3 years ago

It's not a "crazy worry" but defendants in civil suits have all kinds of worries. Regarding impugning Stanford researchers (N.b. no scare quotes) as being motivated by a consulting fee, that's what those fees are for: to get the best possible expert witnesses.

I don't begrudge a good defense attempting to block a litigant's experts, either. However, everyone is better off for expert witnesses being motivated by fees to provide the best expert testimony. If there was something untoward about their motivation, it would be Stanford's problem.

anon848736283• 3 years ago

Is there a reason not to take TFA at it's word, which says that the litigation in progress (for which expert testimony was requested) does not relate to the research those experts were conducting through agreements signed with CDE?

The whole problem here is that as a soon as a researcher signs the contract, they are barred from participating in any litigation against the department even if it doesn't involve the private data they were working with. So you have a large population of experts removed from the pool, because all the experts are likely to be involved in some type of research.

ChurchillsLlama• 3 years ago

The main point of the article is that the CDE is preventing those who partner with them from testifying about anything, even what's unrelated to the data CDE provides - 'Viewpoint discrimination'.

That begs the question: Did the research lead to the desire to be an expert witness? Or did the desire to be an expert witness define the nature of the research project?

I don't think these questions are productive. You can't truly know why someone does what they do. And making the suggestion that the researchers tainted their research because of the money is purely speculative and unfair.

timcavel• 3 years ago

California has the strictest Science Denial laws on Earth, so HN must censor everyone reading this for 180 days.

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

A huge part of the civil litigation metagame is just finding ways to legally exempt yourself from being sued. It used to be the case that only sovereign states could declare themselves immune from litigation, but now that power has been delegated to anyone who can convince someone else to sign a binding contract. Which is literally everyone because almost every business relationship requires contracts. And now we're going to "you can't testify against us because you had an NDA" which seems even more abusable.

By $NEAR_FUTURE_YEAR the only people who wind up in civil court will be victims of extortion.

onionisafruit2• 3 years ago

Has anybody found a link to the contract in question or a quote from the relevant part of it? I'm curious how it seemed ok for the researchers to sign a contract with this provision.

anon848736283• 3 years ago

Probably because they didn't have any other choice if they wanted to do the research. Redlining won't get you anywhere, so need to wait for a situation like this to argue the unconstitutionality.

themitigating6• 3 years ago

So they did have a choice. I don't like the notion that if you want something then you don't have a choice on the actions you take to aquire it

jdkee• 3 years ago

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; . . . "

-Louis Brandeis

themitigating6• 3 years ago

That's an oversimplification of the real world as a metaphor and if taken literally, also not true

s1artibartfast2• 3 years ago

If we're being literal and pedantic, Sunshine probably does more disinfection then every man-made method put together.

1024core• 3 years ago

Years ago, there was a site which had photos of people, and asked you to guess: murderer or software engineer? (I'm going from memory here, so let's not get sidetracked by the details).

In a similar vein, we need a site that lists actions taken by a state government and asks: was this in Ron DeSantis' Florida or California?

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

or chicago, in general (where i'm originally from)

zeroCalories• 3 years ago

Which one is the swe, and which one is the murderer?

rufus_foreman• 3 years ago

Programming language inventor or serial killer? https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/

ilikehurdles• 3 years ago

Or similarly, one listing low-rank in performance and quality of social programs and asking: was this Oregon or Mississippi?

pocketsand• 3 years ago

Just for context. I'm a PhD trained in education research who has met Sean Reardon a handful of times, had a meal with him, gone through methods training with him. He sits at the top of the field and has the unconditional respect of nearly everyone for his methodological rigor.

This is not a guy who shoots from the hip.

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

these schools are horrendously insidious, nothing should be kept secret, and all this [tax-payer funded] data should be public to begin with

tomohawk• 3 years ago

California has over 900 school districts. That's over 900 highly paid executive staffs plus associated bureaucracies.

That's a lot to protect.

By way of comparison, Florida has 69 school districts, and does measurably better across the board in providing education.

roody15• 3 years ago

I am a bit confused by the case that is wanting to use the researchers data.

So there was measurable learning loss from remote learning and during the pandemic.

Ok this is known in education.

The state has only relied on individual districts to make up the learning loss.

Ok so that makes sense. There is no magic bullet on fixing the learning loss issue. The state relying on individual districts taking a multi approach to learning loss .. seems reasonable.

I don’t understand the merits of the lawsuit. The state of California is already aware of learning loss and is looking at ways to address.

To be sued because the state of California didn’t do x,y,z by the paintings seems incredible short sided and unrealistic. We are still learning how to best address learning loss from 2020.

Just my two cents

s1artibartfast2• 3 years ago

This article doesn't talk about the case itself, so we would have to find a different source discuss that.

I don't find it implausible that the state could have been negligent or knowingly inequitable in its learning deficit response.

A simple example would be if it suppressed internal reports about the impacts and needs, or ignored them when structuring its response.

AlbertCory12• 3 years ago

There are a lot of comments on my answer about expert witnesses, so I'll collect it all here:

Martin Rinard is a star. They pay him $850/hour because he testifies well, and he's done it before. He's got the credentials from MIT so juries tend to listen to him. I remember this exchange:

Apple lawyer: So that was a lot of money! Martin: It was a lot of work.

People seem to be doing some object inheritance from an ancestor post's "one month" but I didn't say that. His work would have gone over many months.

They interview him, and he writes something. Then the lawyers rewrite it. Then they all go over it, line by line. It's excruciatingly boring. I sat in on two days of the review of a different expert witness' 300-page declaration, and they had another day planned after me! They probably have a mock trial, where he practices his testimony (I'm not sure how prevalent that is).

I didn't work on Apple v. Samsung; I was just a spectator.

I don't know what an expert witness would get in this Stanford thing, but it doesn't seem to me like the spending would quite so wild.

sproketboy• 3 years ago

Leftists always do that. SCUMS.

michaelmrose• 3 years ago

Why do you keep posting this malarky here? Your account has been active for over a decade but most of your stuff ends up dead because you post crap like this for basically nobody to read.

bhk• 3 years ago

"Ah, it looks like you have a nice academic career going here. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."

summonerlf• 3 years ago

It's heartening to see efforts being made to address the isolation that incarcerated individuals often face and promote better communication with their loved ones. Improving access to communication could have significant positive effects on inmates' mental health, family relationships, and potential for rehabilitation. It's essential to continue exploring ways to support and uplift those within the prison system to create a more humane and effective approach to criminal justice.

California moves to silence Stanford researchers who got data to study education

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