Fall From Grace

Fall from Grace is a documentary on Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, better known as "the god hates fags assholes." As a documentary, it was pretty fail. Basically, I learned that Fred Phelps and his descendants are batshit crazy assholes and that people are hurt when assholes protest their loved ones' funerals. I didn't learn anything about the funding or logistics of the operation. There was basically nothing on how it got started or how it's evolved. We get a bunch of unbelievably frightening quotes from Phelps + Co about why they think they're protesting, but nothing about how the system they've created rewards their behavior*, much less how they created that system. No one calls them on their obviously self-contradictory statements. Contrast with Bible Camp, which did a pretty good job of conveying the reality the subjects lived in.

And I would have killed to hear them ask one of the bikers that runs interference between Phelps and soldiers' funerals if they'd ever protected an AIDS victim's funeral.

*I believe everyone lives in a system that rewards their behavior, at least on a micro level.

Does tutoring work?

When I signed up to tutor at the elementary school, it was under the hazily defined belief that in doing so I would help a child learn more, and that this would improve her long term success and happiness. Post-quitting, it occurs to me that I've never seen any actual data that this is the case.

It seems obvious that tutoring would help, but there's lots of ways it could go wrong. Tutors could teach incorrect information. They could teach correct information badly, or just generally be assholes, increasing student burn out.. The only training I got was 1 hour on why we weren't allowed to hug the children and really, *really* weren't allowed to drive them home, and I was pleased with this, because I assumed any training program they offered would be a waste of time. And it would have been, but that's because they were generally fail at implementing things, not that doesn't mean a proper program wouldn't have been hugely valuable. In the worst case, the kids could be abused- something I don't think happens very often, but it is a risk, and we can't compare it against the benefits if we don't know them.

I did some googling on the subject, and what studies I found were positive, but I didn't find much at all, and they were either very old or had design flaws. I found no attempt to compare different types of tutoring, tutor training or instruction. My mom did her masters research project on Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and the big (only?) positive she found was that it gave stressed out single parents some time without their kids. That's not nothing: being poor is hard, being a single parent is hard, being both is hard^hard. A couple of hours a week to recharge or run errands will be the marginal difference between being a good or a bad parent for a few people. But I don't think that's what most people have in mind as their big value-add when they volunteer.

I find this emblematic of a lot of anti-poverty efforts: we spend a lot of resources on things that seem like they should work without ever verifying that they do. You can't properly allocate resources without knowing the payoffs