The Captured Perspective

This Christmas, one of the items on my Christmas List that got no love was a Netflix subscription.  I am getting sick of driving to Blockbuster and having to pay late fees (yes even with their new-ish No Late Fees policy). Netflix has a much greater selection, will let us have a movie to watch whenever we feel like it, all without due dates. Awesome. One other thing I like about Netflix is the Netflix Prize. Not that I might win it, but that they’re putting it on.

The Netflix Prize, which is written up in this New York Times Magazine article and video, is a $1 million award to any team that can improve the Netflix movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. As a user rates movies (1-5 stars) they’ve seen, Netflix hopes to recommend other movies they might like. The algorithm predicts the rating a user would assign to movie Z from their ratings to movies A, B, …, Y. When the user, in fact, sees and rates movie Z, the accuracy of the program can be evaluated.

Watching the teams and waiting for the next big move has been water cooler talk around the academic signal processing community (or at least CSIP at Georgia Tech). A check of the leaderboard shows the top teams to be around the 9% improvement mark. That last 1% is a doozie though. The KorBell/BellKor team made up of two AT&T Labs researchers has been one of the most competetive. They won the $50,000 Progress Prize for 2007 and by joining forces with BigChaos, an Austrian group, has won the 2008 Progress Prize.

Here is what they write about the competition in the ASA Statistical and Computing Graphics Newsletter after the first year:

In a less technical regard, the Netflix Prize competition demonstrates the value of making industrial-strength data sets widely available. These data and the prize have generated unprecedented interest and advancement in the field of collaborative filtering. Many of these advances have been shared, most notably in the Netflix Prize forum (http://www.netflixprize.com/community) and in a 2007 KDD workshop.

Certainly, the money spurred a lot of people to take a look at the data, but we doubt that money was the main stimulus for progress. Most participants (ourselves included) probably realize that their chance of winning the grand prize is small, precisely because there is so much interest. However, that interest provides great opportunity to build on the advances of others and to provide a rigorous test of any new methodologies. For that, we thank Netflix and all the other competitors, especially those who have been active in the forum and other outlets.

The model here is an echo of the open-source movement that gives us Mozilla Firefox and the collaborative model that made Wikipedia. Though these algorithms aren’t open-source (I can’t download their code and replicate their results), this open-access spirit on the part of Netflix is not only great advertising, it appears to be bringing out more creativity and progress than Netflix could make through internal research.

People everywhere are looking for ways to invest their time. At least some portion of the population is uneasy spending their free waking hours taking in Monday Night Football and Seinfeld reruns. They want to be a part of something and to work on something that matters.

Does this unpaid, collaborative work fill the altruistic  space in life that might have been spent sorting cans at a food bank? Does it fill the social space that might have been spent hunting with friends? Or the constructive space that might have been spent building, sanding, and staining an end table? Every contributor has his or her own motivations, but I am curious what the opportunity cost of all this work is. If it’s just lost television viewership, the world has been done a great service. But  these projects are likely completed to the neglect other valuable efforts.

It’s been a slow week at TCP, from both the readership and writer-ship perspectives. I would like to think that gives me an excuse for having a difficult time conjuring up a economically viable account for the importance of educational reform… but that would be false.

There are two reasons I am having a difficult time coming up with the economic case for education reform.  One, I am not an economist, and two, an economics-only argument does not feel sufficient.

My original idea was to point to the way educational reform has a tangible and statistically significant impact on the downstream growth of GDP (as seen by the graph below).  I wanted to argue that we could essentially couch an investment in education as a viable low growth financial investment. Afterall, a 2007 World Bank report on the topic does argue that:

There is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population, rather than mere school enrollment, are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth.

By this approach, an increase in the DOEd funding with reallocation towards properly incentivized teaching might catalyze GDP growth, by which that investment could yield downstream return.  To the extent that return is strong, it might also be possible to attract private investment into an educational reform fund.  But, in the end I fear I have neither the time nor the economical acumen to make this case as convincing as it could be.  

The second reason I was having trouble with developing the economic argument was that I have some reservations with the underlying logic of an economics only case.  Specifically, if this financial argument fails to hold, should the entire case for funding educational reform fall apart?  If it is not financially viable, is it not worth pursuing?  I would hope not.  In the end, it is necessary to first understand the importance of funding education for the sake of those being educated first and foremost.  Perhaps this case, like Paul Farmer’s arguments for health care reform, should rely on the argument that that children should have a universal right to receive proper education.

So, its on that note that I end this short series.  I believe that the educational system needs reform, and this can best be done through finding better teachers and keeping them on board longer. Furthermore, if this is done appropriately, I think there is a good chance this reform would yield economic growth.  However, at the end of the day, I hope we could see the proper education of children as something worth pursuing regardless of whether it increases our country’s bottom line.

  

 

 

Thinking Man... 1, 2 or 3?

OK, only one more interim post before I finish up the discussion of education reform funding (I swear… and one can’t lie on Christmas Eve Eve, as it has to be illegal somewhere).

What follows will be a bit more like philosophical notes by a non-philosopher (the worst kind) than it will be a blog post. What I am interested in understanding is why people disagree on major philosophical/ worldview issues, and what generally causes us to believe different things about these major issues of life (i.e. what gives us meaning/ motivates us/ is of ultimate value).  To do this, I want to outline three potential reasons for why we might believe something: because it is true, because of the way we our mind is wired, and because of the sociological structures supporting this belief. To illustrate this, I will pull it through a topic like ‘belief in god’ because I think that this is an interesting and important question, and yet one that many people disagree on (even the various writers on this blog).  So to the point, why would someone believe in God?

1) The Truth of a Viewpoint: The primary focus of our explanation for our beliefs is that that we think something is worth believing because it is a true viewpoint.  In other words, people believe God because there is a God, or they don’t because s/he doesn’t exist.  Now, this becomes a bit tricky because it is not as empirically verifiable as something like the human head weights 8 lbs.  We can’t measure God, nor can we measure God’s (non-)existence. This is not to say that these statements can’t be true, but rather to say that they veracity of these statements are often more difficult to address (especially when it comes to addressing more complex theological ideas like saying God is beyond being, or the ground of all being, and thus doesn’t ‘exist’ like you or I exist). In this case, while something may be true, it’s truth may be more difficult to agree upon given the difficulty of understanding what is required for a philosophical/ theological idea to be true.

2) Trusting our Intuition: The argument from intuition is that believe things because they are believable to us, and that this ‘believability’ is trustable. Thus, in absence of some of the foundational agreement desired above, people have an intuitive understanding of whether there is a god or not, and that shapes their belief.  For example, Oxford neuroscientist Justin Barrett, one of the founders of the neuroscientific study of religion, has argued that the reason most people in the world believe in God is because they are cognitively wired this way, and this intuition might fairly be considered valid.  Alternatively, while other psychologists or philosophers have similarly argued that these beliefs are cognitively constructed, this might better be understood as our brain playing a trick on us.

3) Supported by our Sociological Structure: An alternative reason people might believe something is because there is significant social support for this belief.  In many ways, at a basic level, this might be one of the key underpinnings for why people tend to believe the same things that they were born growing up with.  The more nuanced explanation of this can be seen in the works of philosophers like Charles Taylor who in his work “A Secular Age” tease apart the way our cultural milieu shapes what is inherently plausible in our belief systems.

While these three systems are described separately, their explanations need not lie apart.  For example, someone who doesn’t believe in God might do so because 1) the idea isn’t true, 2) despite their cognitive tendency towards it, 3) because of being surrounded by other people who taught then the truth.  The same line of reasoning could be applied to the person who does believe in God.

Why does this all matter? I think its importance lies in the fact that we must understand why people believe what they do before people with alternative views can appropriately discuss these differences.  I have been thinking about the topic a bit in reflecting on Philip Jenkin’s interesting article on inter-faith dialogue in last week’s Boston Globe.  If our beliefs are a function of all three of these things (the truth of the belief, the way our brain is wired and how/ where we grew up and who we are surrounded with), I wonder what is the best way to approach dialogue with people of divergent views.  Jenkins offers one such view in his article, to which Alan Jacobs offer’s a counterpoint.  Maybe Dave Ellis can offer some insight on this topic based on his work with Eboo Patel and IFYC.

To take a brief break from the education policy debate, I thought I would take everyone on a brief journey through a smaller though no less important question.  Specifically, should I make a move away from my reliance on Microsoft Office?  

“Why would you ever do that?”, you may fairly ask. For one, I like to be different and EVERYONE has Microsoft Office… (How can I really feel unique when I too rely on .doc, .docx and .ppt).  Second, because that is not a legitimate reason at all for a massive change of writing approach, I have been persuaded to give it a shot for productivity reasons by the arguments of Alan Jacobs in his new blog “Text Patterns.”  Jacobs is an English professor at Wheaton College, an avid blogger and twitterer, and a phenomenal writer and cultural critic.

In analyzing the Microsoft package and his subsequent behavior change, Jacobs writes:

I think Microsoft Word (for the Mac, anyway) reached its highest level at version 5.1, released in 1991, and started sliding precipitously downhill thereafter. Long ago I came to agree with Louis Menand: “It is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program.” But unlike Menand, I not only spoke such truth, I acted on it. About four years ago I deleted Word, and indeed all Microsoft applications, from my computer. And I have been a happier man ever since. 

It seems that the major line of reasoning for a “Bare Bones” approach is its stripping away of the distractions of writing.  Given that I already have a hard time staying focused on one topic (See: this blog), I thought for my dissertation it might be a good idea to give myself as fair a shot as ever to stay focused. 

And so today, I have decided to give Jacob’s one-two punch of BBEdit **to write** and iWork **to format** a try for a month. Each has a 30 day free trials before I have to fork up any cash ($50 for the academic version of BBEdit and $79 for an individual version of iWork), so the costs of de-Microsoft Officing myself for a short period of time are minimized. As for the benefits…  Will it be worth it?  Will I have increased productivity? When will the detox start to show itself in symptoms? …stay tuned!

Over at Dave Ellis’ other blog, Holland 2002, he added the same post on education and creativity as he did over here and got a couple of interesting responses.  Specifically, his other co-blogger and friend Adam Barhamand responds in the comments:

Do we even need a US Department of Education? Besides the creation of standardized tests that create unhealthy study and competitive environments and lower the bar for schools desperate for a buck, what exactly does ED do? Does anyone know?

Adam goes onto outline his thoughts on the benefits of merit pay for teachers, and the importance of higher salaries for bringing in top tier talent.  In reading his comment, I realized that I too was similarly confused on where the DOE budget goes every year.  Good thing we have “THE INTERNET” to help find out!

In the 2009 Budget, there is approximately $64 Billion of education funding allocated across 3 primary categories, 1) elementary and secondary, 2) post secondary, and 3) other.  As seen below, approximately $36 Billion of that goes to elementary and secondary, with the rest going primarily into the post secondary fund.  In my previous post, I attempted a piggyback on Malcolm Gladwell to advocate for the necessity of better teachers across our schools, and then outlined his hiring approach. An alternative (additional?) way of approaching this problem would be to build in a more significant pay for performance reward system– a piece which he also highlights in the article.

THE MERITS OF PAY FOR PERFORMANCE:

The use of financial incentives to shape behavior is one of the key takeaways from the formal study of economics. Specifically, if one builds financial incentives into work, people are more likely to pursue this task. It’s the classic carrot bait and hungry rabbit story.  

Now, while economists have had to cede ground to the argument that people are motivated by things other than money, they do have a point that at the margin, money is a valid motivator.  So, holding all other things constant, the possibility of financial reward will often motivate some type of action towards the specified ‘carrot’ for the majority of people.  While money cannot buy happiness, it often doesn’t hurt… and to the extent that these financial rewards are desired, people will expend some energy towards attaining the goals attached to the reward.So in theory, incentivizing teachers will increase motivation. 

Despite the potential benefits of a pay for performance system, according to a 2004 Hoover Institute Policy Review piece, only 5.5% of public schools incentivize teaching performance. While the Department of Education has a Teacher Incentive Fund, it constitutes less than 1/3 of 1% of the total budget ($200,000,000– to be fair, not a drop in the bucket either). Furthermore, given a formal tenure system,incentives drop precipitously as one is locked into a job without a strong possibility of being fired.  In other words, at many schools, there are not strong incentives in place in either the negative (potential of being fired) or positive direction (reward for high performance).  

The reasons for not implementing a pay for performance system (or pain for performance, as would be the case with the removal of tenure) are compelling. Specifically, as soon as incentives are in place, there is the possibility of juking them to attain the reward… the example of a rabbit that takes steroids to get the carrot (ok… that may be pushing the analogy too far…). For example, if you implement a testing system to measure performance gain, teachers may begin teaching to the test, a behavior that, while increasing scores, may not impact the underlying ‘learning’ effect as directly.  

Proposal

While the above problems of incentivized performance are significant, the potential impact on effort and the ability to remove low performing teachers is compelling enough to warrant consideration of a PFP program given sufficient thought given to how to implement it effectively.  I outline two proposals which might make this type of system more effective.

1) Test Triangulation- Teachers ‘teach to the test’ to the extent that they see it as the most effective way to increase this incentivized performance metric.  In the worst case scenario, this means a teacher gives the students the answers to the test, demonstrating to administrators their students are ‘high performers’, and thus gets the highest reward.  In measurement theory, this problem is facilitated by a failure to triangulate measures.  While measures do get at the underlying construct (student learning or teacher performance), they do so with some error.  And in focusing on the underlying construct from 1 angle only, you fail to get the depth perception on what the construct really looks like (e.g. greater systematic error).  While more testing is never a great solution in that it takes time away from the student’s learning, getting at underlyilng performance from multiple angles with multiple measures is crucial for having an effect PFP system.  In my view, any incentive structuring must find a way to increase the ways to measure teacher performance beyond a single test (i.e. inclusion of presentation, observation, teacher evaluations, etc.), so that the underlying ‘teacher quality’ is best measured by the administrators.  If this isn’t the case, you fail to reward the good teachers and tend to retain the bad.

2) Control Variables- There are often several factors out of the teacher’s control that add undue influence on whether students are making significant academic progress.  In talking to my sister the other night (who has taught internationally, in the city and in the suburbs), she rightly noted that student learning is never only the result of the teacher’s skill.  Last year, while in a Minneapolis charter school, she clearly saw her students making less progress as compared to her suburban students this year.  Is she the same teacher?  Yes!  What accounts for this performance variability is not her teaching then, but factors like poverty, hunger, under-developed cognitive skills that varied across these contexts.  A proper pay for performance system has to find a way to control for these factors in evaluating quality so that teachers do not solely enter the high performing school systems where they too can benefit from grade/ evaluation inflation.  This point is captured in the criticisms of “No Child Left Behind” that argue that situational factors often make the goal of all students learning at the same rate an impossibility.

In essence, these two points mean that we need to use a more complex formula to measure teacher performance and properly allocate bonuses and pink slips.  Instead of a measure of teacher performance as student test improvement, it is crucial to measure teacher performance as a function of multiple metrics of improvement (triangulated), while controlling for extraneous factors outside of the control of the educator.  While it is a more complex formula, it is by no means impossibe to construct… and there should be enough data out there to do it in an empirically valid way.

The transition into a system like this would be difficult.  Tenure is notoriously difficult to remove given unions and their (understandable) attachment to security, and pay for performance systems are costly to implement. Given that the removal of tenure is rarely paired with any other performance benefits, teachers are essentially told that they will lose security and get nothing in return.  If you could remove tenure but increase a pay for performance system (a positive incentive), this change might be an easier sell.  The financial challenges however are still significant.  I will attempt to address this point in the final (and hopefully shorter) post.

First, if you haven’t spent a significant amount of time on TED.com, you need to. Technology Education and Design (TED) is an annual event in California where some of the world’s leading thinkers share ideas about practically everything. All of these talks are available for free online.

One particularly riveting and hilarious TED talk (watch here) was given by Sir Ken Robinson on the topic of how schools kill creativity. Robinson argues that public education systems were designed at the dawn of the industrial revolution and governments structured the curriculum to meet the rapidly growing needs of the industrial system. This way of thinking about the purpose of education is still with us today, as evidenced by the consistent hierarchy of priorities in public education; math and languages at the top with music, art, and dance at the bottom. In other words, the skills most useful and marketable are the ones that are prioritized and rewarded at the expense of more creative pursuits.

Robinson goes on to say that in our rapidly changing world, creativity is as important as literacy and ought to be treated that way by our institutions. He states that all children are born artists and are relentlessly educated out of their creativity. Robinson asserts that if you are afraid of being wrong, you cannot come up with an original idea, which is a basic component of creativity. Our current system is built on the stigmatization of mistakes, which slowly deteriorates our willingness and ability to take risks, be wrong, and thus think creatively. I think I prefer a “fail often, fail early” approach.

I believe Robinson is correct on two big points: 1) kids are typically not rewarded for creative endeavors early on and 2) the current education system is designed to churn out middle managers in major corporations.  I have no problem with corporations as such, they are perfectly appropriate vehicles for doing business. What I am not sure of is whether our schools should be categorically designed and structured to meet the needs of industry.

What do you think? Do we need to radically rethink the aims of education and institutionalize new priorities? Should we treat creativity as seriously as we do literacy?

Every public school classroom has a slightly different feel… some are clean and some are cluttered, some have windows some are dungeons, some have smartboards and some just have boards.  One thing that remains relatively constant across all classes however is the format of the classroom experience, and specifically the educational process of knowledge transfer from teacher to learner.  But, like the variance in classroom characteristics, this format has variance as well, namely in terms of its underlying quality. The difficult and important question is what this variability hinges on, and specifically what characteristics of a teacher make for a more productive learning environment.

In the latest New Yorker, pop psychologist/ sociologist/ economist Malcom Gladwell tackles this topic in an attempt to identify the most accurate predictors of teaching excellence.  He concludes that the most commonly used standards (test scores, grades, graduate degrees, etc.) often fail to be accurate predictors of teaching prowess.  Given this, Gladwell argues:

‘the implications are … profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

The ‘Deutschlander training camp’ approach he cites above is extracted from the world of financial planning… namely, their approach for identifying the most apt planners.  In this world, out of a glut of candidates of mixed credentials, a few are identified for their promise.  Those then move into a training and evaluation program where the best of these candidates (based on the number of potential clients they pull in) are identified and hired. In contrast to the hiring by credentials (degree, test scores, GPA) into a secure job position (because of tenure), the financial planning approach often ignores standard credentials, and keeps those who perform, where performance is a function of a variety of intangibles (charisma, charm, etc)

While Gladwell makes a compelling argument for the importance of quality teaching and the failure of the current system to cultivate this, given the current reward structure, the feasibility of implementinghis  approach is dubious.  Unless our world quickly becoming a place where a swath of people are motivated to enter the teaching with its low wages and long hours hours, the line to enter the same work with an added rigorous evaluation program and reduced security will be short.

In addressing this problem from a policy perspective, two major questions arise.  Specifically, how should one adjust the incentive structure to identify, recruit, promote and maintain high quality teachers, and where would the capital to support this system come from?  I will take up the these two questions more directly in the following post.

Justin Townes Earle

This past Wednesday night, I committed a first year Teach For America teacher sin – I headed out on a weeknight to catch a show. I know, not a course of action I recommend for any first year teacher because children (especially my fifth graders) seem to have a penchant desire to prey on the tired, unsuspecting novice. Nevertheless, the exhaustion of the following day was well worth the price to witness an incredible show the night before put on by a fast rising star in the alternative country music scene – Justin Townes Earle.

Still a novice of the country music scene in many ways, I was made aware of Justin Earle’s album – The Good Life – this past October by a close friend of mine’s blogpost. Adam’s excellent review of Justin Earle’s newest record, The Good Life, intrigued me and I followed my interest to his myspace page to take and listen. To my joy, I found out that he was scheduled to make a quick stop in Saint Louis, Missouri, before heading overseas.

My brother and I arrived a few minutes early to catch the final few songs of the local Saint Louisian who had the honor to open for Earle. Unfortunately for him, the small crowd gathered at the Deluxe Fine Foods and Spirits in Maplewood, Missouri, came to see one performer only that night. After the scattered applause, the lanky Nashville native, complete with his red trucker perched askew on his head and cigarette dangling from his mouth, detached himself from the bar and wasted no time in starting his set.

In my few limited listens to Earle’s record, I had high expectations for an incredible performance, and he did not disappoint.  A talented vocalist, Earle highlighted his full range throughout the entire set and, most importantly, brought his powerful ballads to life. Set against a backdrop of token Americana artifacts, Earle seemed at home playing to the crowd dominated by country enthusiasts. Earle’s set featured a mix of his own work with varying selections from iconic country standouts Townes Van Zandt and Hank Williams. He showcased his guitar ability on a number of blues pieces and never once lost the attention of the crowd. Truly a standout musician, Earle was never showy or flashy, and simply played from his heart throughout the entire set.

Earle’s craft and musicianship separates him from a field that is far too often awash with artists whose live performance never fully lives up to their studio albums. This past night far surpassed any expectations that I came to the show with, and I left with a newfound appreciation for alternative country. I hope you take the time to listen to Justin Townes Earle’s latest record – The Good Life – as we anxiously await his next release – Midnight at the Movies – slated for a March ’09 release.

Foreign markets are retreting, Michiganders are trembling, and I can only imagine what is going to come of Detroit.  At least we have a mayor; oh wait, he’s in Wayne County Jail.  Okay, at least our governor is still doing alright…

Two issues:

1. NO DEAL!
2. RECYCLERS BEWARE!

When married, these two stories make one heck of a lovechild.

Anyone care to speculate on the some of the ramifications of the senate’s recent decision (regarding the bail-out)?  Check out this over-dramatic possibility:

             GM files for bankruptcy → Auto parts suppliers go out of business → Ford has no parts to build their cars → Ford files for banckruptcy → Mrs. Smith looses her Ford auto-dealership → Mrs. Smith’s husband decides he better cut back on the holiday gifts this year → Retailers feel the squeeze and begin to decrease orders of merchandise that will probably not sell → The manufacturers of these items decide to stop ordering their parts and labor → Unsold and unwanted pre-recycled paper, plastic, and rubber goods that would have been used as packaging and shipping materials have to be stored in landfills or other dumpsites → Communities no longer find it financially beneficial to “reduce, reuse, recycle” → Trash accumulates → Children no longer “just say no to drugs” → humans invent a real-life WALL-E to maintain all of the previously eco-friendly waste → Everyone moves out to live in space → Will Smith is left to defend Manhattan against the zombie-dog/humans that are left behind.  He alone is immune to their sickness.

Darn you Mr. McConnell.  Darn you.

Tears flowing,

~ Andrew

I like Young Adult literature. There, I said it. I have just finished the Twilight series and I am not too ashamed to admit that I was engrossed—though the series as a whole left me troubled. Caitlin Flanagan, in her Atlantic Review, notes that the life of the main character is relatively ‘old-fashioned,’ all from the luddite teen life, where text messages and Facebook are completely absent, to the very traditional dating and courtship rituals. These foundations foreshadow the moralizing that runs throughout the series of novels.

The gist of the story is Bella Swan, a bookish and introspective teen, moves from Arizona to Forks, Washington when her scatter brained mother decides that she would rather travel around the country with her boyfriend than care for Bella. Her father, long separated from them both is the head of the police department for the small and perpetually rainy town of Forks. Throughout the course of the year, Bella falls in love with Edward Cullen, a vampire. Stephanie Meyers, the author, creates politically and religiously charged situations for her protagonists to face—then clearly demonstrates the “right” answer. In each situation, one character stands in as the token opposition straw man. This character’s behavior is then shown to be morally inferior, and in the process, the other characters are pulled over to the right side of the moral debate .

This narrative themes reoccures in three major situations throughout the series:

Teenage Marriage
The cardinal rule of Vampires is not no humans can know of their existence, so once Bella knows that Edward and his family are vampires, she realizes she must become one of them in order to live with the immortal Edward forever and to protect his family from the vampire enforcers, the Volturi. Edward refuses to make Bella a vampire until they are married. Bella’s divorced parents make her very hesitant to commit to marriage. Eventually she is won over and is ecstatically happy in her marriage at 18.

Premarital Sex
A central conflict of the series is Edward’s control of his bloodlust towards feeding on Bella. Edward is continually tempted by bad vampires who encourage him to drink Bella’s blood. Meyers’ easily recasts this desire in a carnal fashion. His self control gives him hero-like status within the vampire community.

Abortion
Once married, Edward and Bella have sex. Bella becomes pregnant with a half-vampire baby. The strength of the vampire threatens to kill Bella as it grows inside of her. Against the advice of Edward and his renown-doctor father, Bella insists on carrying the baby to term. Despite the fact that the baby does kill her (Bella is saved only by becoming a vampire herself), the perfect baby is universally loved and cherished.

Meyers’ ability to create erotic tensions is what makes the novel so riveting to readers, teenage girls in particular. Her religious-right moralizing seems particularly manipulative in that it is not central to the novel, but instead, merely cast as the right decision in the course of a teen-aged girls’ desire for romance. Her explicit and overt sexual tension however probably prevents the book from becoming part of the canon of religious-right literature.

As a male reader, I struggle to understand why the novels resonated with me. Being outside of the target demographic and politically misaligned with the morals for the novel, I didn’t expect to be engrossed with the series. If it was indeed Meyer’s goal to use her novels for a Christian-right agenda, her characterization of teen behavior more inline with Wuthering Heights19th century England, a novel and era frequently mentioned in the novels, leaves her out of touch with modern teen realities. What she is left with is simply a very engaging read that connects with readers across a broad spectrum of ages and politics—though perhaps not genders, as I have yet to met any other guys who have read the series.