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Re: "Marginal" Awards - Trade-offs
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From: Charles Bayless <charles.bayless_at_ttmd.com>
Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2014 14:42:42 -0500
I don't want to argue at all that any of the awards are marginal. They all serve a purpose. I do have two observations, both related to challenging but subtle and consequential trade-offs.
New awards have been implemented over the past forty years to bring attention to particular categories of books whether by race or topic or genre or geographical location or some other attribute. All are well intended and all serve some purpose. As long as there are only one award or two awards, those get a lot of attention. What we have had in the past forty years is a wave of award proliferation and award specialization. It is not that any individual award is in some ways marginal or undeserving, it is that they are now competing with many others for attention. The oldest awards tend to have the best established brand (and also are the most open/general) and therefore stand more securely above the newer awards. What I am getting at is there is a difference between being marginal (which implies being irrelevant) and being crowded out. The more other awards that emerge, the more crowding out occurs.
This is essentially a marketing issue. Awards were meant to bring attention of particular books to the scattered reading public. They worked. Therefore more rewards were created and they worked as well but to a lesser degree of effectiveness. And the cycle continues. As long as awards work as a marketing tool, there will be continued proliferation and consequently reduced effectiveness of the existing awards. Eventually the marginal effectiveness of new awards versus decreasing attention because of proliferation will reach some equilibrium. That's the trade-off or the paradox. Awards work, but the more successful they are the more they sow the seeds of their own ineffectiveness. It has nothing to do with the particular award, it is simply a function of the market.
The second point is perhaps pedantic but I think important. As discussed, the CSK suffers from at least two constraints. It is constrained by topic AND by participants. In other words, it has to focus on African American experience/history AND it can only be by African Americans. To see the magnitude of the impact, look at the CCBC numbers for 2013.
. 93 books had significant African or African American content
. 67 books were by Black authors and/or illustrators
Assume that half of AA authors wrote about the AA experience (I don't know what the actual proportion is, just picking half for the calculations). This means there were 127 books that were either about African Americans
(93) OR by AA but not about AA (0.5 X 67=33.5). From a judging perspective therefore, with relaxed criteria, you have 127 books from among which to choose a best winner. But per the CSK criteria, you only have 34 books (0.5 X 67) from among which to choose (it was both about AA AND by AA).
It is a general truism that the larger your sample size, the greater the range of quality. In other words, the best from among 127 books is going to be on average better than the best among 34. Every now and then, the quality distribution curves between the two different samples will overlap and it is statistically possible that over a stretch of time, you will have a year where the quality of the best among the small sample of 34 is better than the quality among the best of the 127 sample. It just doesn't happen often.
One of the questions that arises periodically over the years is why no CSK book winner has ever won a Caldecott Medal. I looked at this two or three years ago and mocked up a rudimentary statistical model to estimate the probability of how often the very small sample size of CSK would likely generate a book of Newbery or Caldecott quality, given their immensely larger candidate pools. I looked at two different questions. 1) How often would an author/illustrator win both CSK and either Caldecott or Newbery for any title? and 2) How often would an author win for the same title? There have been a small handful who have won both awards for different titles but only one who has won for both. Christopher Paul Curtis won both the Newbery Medal and CSK for Bud, Not Buddy in 1999. I am working from recollection but I don't recall an illustrator winning both the Caldecott and CSK for the same title, yet.
The upshot from the model was that the probability of an author winning both medals for the same title was only something like once every 70 years or so. I am writing from recollection and the model was rudimentary, but I think it makes the point that there is a trade-off between sample size and quality and that is a statistical issue not a race or social justice issue. This consequence has nothing to do with which two criteria by which CSK restricts its pool (as it happens, race and topic), it is that there are two restricting variables which have the consequence of dramatically small pools of candidates. This conceptual issue is true of any specialized award.
The consequence is that bringing attention to a very tightly defined market is challenging and awards make sense to do so. But the smaller the defined market, the lower average (emphasis on average) quality there will be owing to small sample size. It is like being tasked with picking the best athlete. Depending on the size of the pool of candidates, you will have different answers. If your pool is your household, it will be different than from your neighborhood, your district, your city, your state. It is possible that the best athlete in the state also happens to be in your own home, just statistically improbable.
That explains why the Caldecott and Newbery will always get more attention than any of the more specific prizes. Since both are relatively unrestricted, their average quality is statistically always going to be equal to or much higher than any specialized prize drawing from a smaller pool of candidates, just like the average athletic prowess in my home is statistically always going to at best be equal to but likely much lower than that of the state.
Two trade-offs, nether necessarily bad but both with different consequences. The first tradeoff is between increasing number of awards and reduced marginal effectiveness and the second trade-off is between average quality and inclusiveness.
CB
Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2014 14:42:42 -0500
I don't want to argue at all that any of the awards are marginal. They all serve a purpose. I do have two observations, both related to challenging but subtle and consequential trade-offs.
New awards have been implemented over the past forty years to bring attention to particular categories of books whether by race or topic or genre or geographical location or some other attribute. All are well intended and all serve some purpose. As long as there are only one award or two awards, those get a lot of attention. What we have had in the past forty years is a wave of award proliferation and award specialization. It is not that any individual award is in some ways marginal or undeserving, it is that they are now competing with many others for attention. The oldest awards tend to have the best established brand (and also are the most open/general) and therefore stand more securely above the newer awards. What I am getting at is there is a difference between being marginal (which implies being irrelevant) and being crowded out. The more other awards that emerge, the more crowding out occurs.
This is essentially a marketing issue. Awards were meant to bring attention of particular books to the scattered reading public. They worked. Therefore more rewards were created and they worked as well but to a lesser degree of effectiveness. And the cycle continues. As long as awards work as a marketing tool, there will be continued proliferation and consequently reduced effectiveness of the existing awards. Eventually the marginal effectiveness of new awards versus decreasing attention because of proliferation will reach some equilibrium. That's the trade-off or the paradox. Awards work, but the more successful they are the more they sow the seeds of their own ineffectiveness. It has nothing to do with the particular award, it is simply a function of the market.
The second point is perhaps pedantic but I think important. As discussed, the CSK suffers from at least two constraints. It is constrained by topic AND by participants. In other words, it has to focus on African American experience/history AND it can only be by African Americans. To see the magnitude of the impact, look at the CCBC numbers for 2013.
. 93 books had significant African or African American content
. 67 books were by Black authors and/or illustrators
Assume that half of AA authors wrote about the AA experience (I don't know what the actual proportion is, just picking half for the calculations). This means there were 127 books that were either about African Americans
(93) OR by AA but not about AA (0.5 X 67=33.5). From a judging perspective therefore, with relaxed criteria, you have 127 books from among which to choose a best winner. But per the CSK criteria, you only have 34 books (0.5 X 67) from among which to choose (it was both about AA AND by AA).
It is a general truism that the larger your sample size, the greater the range of quality. In other words, the best from among 127 books is going to be on average better than the best among 34. Every now and then, the quality distribution curves between the two different samples will overlap and it is statistically possible that over a stretch of time, you will have a year where the quality of the best among the small sample of 34 is better than the quality among the best of the 127 sample. It just doesn't happen often.
One of the questions that arises periodically over the years is why no CSK book winner has ever won a Caldecott Medal. I looked at this two or three years ago and mocked up a rudimentary statistical model to estimate the probability of how often the very small sample size of CSK would likely generate a book of Newbery or Caldecott quality, given their immensely larger candidate pools. I looked at two different questions. 1) How often would an author/illustrator win both CSK and either Caldecott or Newbery for any title? and 2) How often would an author win for the same title? There have been a small handful who have won both awards for different titles but only one who has won for both. Christopher Paul Curtis won both the Newbery Medal and CSK for Bud, Not Buddy in 1999. I am working from recollection but I don't recall an illustrator winning both the Caldecott and CSK for the same title, yet.
The upshot from the model was that the probability of an author winning both medals for the same title was only something like once every 70 years or so. I am writing from recollection and the model was rudimentary, but I think it makes the point that there is a trade-off between sample size and quality and that is a statistical issue not a race or social justice issue. This consequence has nothing to do with which two criteria by which CSK restricts its pool (as it happens, race and topic), it is that there are two restricting variables which have the consequence of dramatically small pools of candidates. This conceptual issue is true of any specialized award.
The consequence is that bringing attention to a very tightly defined market is challenging and awards make sense to do so. But the smaller the defined market, the lower average (emphasis on average) quality there will be owing to small sample size. It is like being tasked with picking the best athlete. Depending on the size of the pool of candidates, you will have different answers. If your pool is your household, it will be different than from your neighborhood, your district, your city, your state. It is possible that the best athlete in the state also happens to be in your own home, just statistically improbable.
That explains why the Caldecott and Newbery will always get more attention than any of the more specific prizes. Since both are relatively unrestricted, their average quality is statistically always going to be equal to or much higher than any specialized prize drawing from a smaller pool of candidates, just like the average athletic prowess in my home is statistically always going to at best be equal to but likely much lower than that of the state.
Two trade-offs, nether necessarily bad but both with different consequences. The first tradeoff is between increasing number of awards and reduced marginal effectiveness and the second trade-off is between average quality and inclusiveness.
CB
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Received on Thu 06 Feb 2014 01:43:44 PM CST
