Jay P. Greene’s Blog



Everyone involved in education policy understands that the Gates Foundation is the octopus with many arms (and even more dollars) pushing the national standards and assessment movement forward.  In a recent report in the Lowell Sun we learn:

The Gates Foundation since January 2008 has awarded more than $35 million to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the two main organizations charged with drafting and promoting common standards.

In the run-up to his recommendation, [MA school chief] Chester told the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that he would base his decision on analysis being done by his staff, as well as independent reports prepared by three state and national education research firms — Achieve, Inc., The Fordham Institute, and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education-reform organization, received $12.6 million from the Gates Foundation in February 2008, according to data provided to the Washington Post by the foundation.

The Fordham Institute has accepted more than $1.4 million from the Gates Foundation, including nearly $960,000 to conduct Common Core reviews.

Checker Finn, the head of the Fordham Foundation, oddly felt the need to tell Business Week in their profile of the Gates push for national standards that: “The Gates folks are well aware of our independence and, I think, incorruptibility.”

This sounds like Nixon declaring that he is not a crook.  If it’s true, there is usually no need to announce it.

I’ve long argued that in education policy debates we should focus on the merits of the arguments rather than the motives of the people involved in the argument.  Whatever Fordham’s motives I think their arguments have to be addressed and I have done so here, among other places.

But let me go further.  I strongly doubt that Gates money has had any serious effect on Fordham’s stance on national standards.  Fordham has always been in support of the idea, although it has often opposed specific proposals for standards that it thought were counter-productive.  Gates decided to pour a mountain of money on Fordham because Fordham was already on board for the idea of national standards.  The money would just help improve the efficacy of Fordham to advocate the view they already held.  There was the danger that Fordham would have opposed the specific national standards backed by Gates, but Fordham has decided that these are good enough standards for them.  Of course, Fordham may still change its mind (and is known for strategic reversals on policies, such as NCLB), but I have no doubt that Fordham is completely sincere in its support for national standards and assessment.

I just think they are wrong.

Anyone who follows print and broadcast news knows that journalists make a ton of mistakes.  I don’t mean factual errors, although there are also plenty of those.  I mean reporting mistakes, like failing to frame the question properly, failing to put the issue in context, failing to gather information from the right sources, failing to treat received information with the proper skepticism, focusing on an analysis of motives rather than of facts, etc…  You especially notice this when the news is about something with which you are more familiar.

In case you have any doubts about the astounding frequency and magnitude of journalist errors, consider the claims that Toyota cars automatically and uncontrollably accelerate.  There were hundreds of news reports that repeated these claims as if they were credible, promoting a mass hysteria about runaway cars.  Toyota sales plummeted, they became the target of SNL ridicule, etc…

Now we hear that the Department of Transportation has investigated more than 2,000 cases of alleged automatic acceleration and could not find evidence to support any one of these claims.  In these cases the throttle remained fully open and the brakes were not engaged.  In other words, people were mistakenly pressing the accelerator while thinking it was the brake.

Anyone with half a brain and a reasonable amount of skepticism would have suspected that the driver was likely the least reliable part of a modern car and would have guessed that people were mistakenly pressing the gas.  But very, very few of the news reports on this issue emphasized this likely explanation.  Instead, most acted as if we lived in a John Grisham novel where evil corporations knowingly hide the defects of their products as they killand maime their customers to maximize profits.  This does happen, but it is very, very rare.  To treat these claims as evidence of real safety issues with cars was simply mistaken reporting.

This raises the question why reporters make so many mistakes like this.  Is it that reporters:

a) lack the necessary critical faculties

b) are more interested in sensational stories than reliable information

c) have an ideology that makes them irrationally inclined to a John Grisham view of corporations

d) all of the above

(correction:  Toyota was the one to investigate more than 2,000 cases, but their findings are so far the same as the US DOT from a smaller set of cases, which found: “The U.S. Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of data recorders from Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration and found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren’t engaged at the time of the crash, people familiar with the findings said.” )

Over at the EdNext blog, Paul Peterson has a very thoughtful piece about the good news found in the recently released evaluation of the DC voucher program.  You can read Peterson’s article here.  Here is an excerpt, where Peterson explains how it is possible that the Program had such a strong effect on students’ ability to graduate, yet still showed no “conclusive” achievement effects.

“But how were such high graduation rates achieved, when voucher students learned no more than the other students?  The answer to that riddle is that the study shows exactly the opposite: Those who went to private school scored 4.75 points higher on the reading test, an effect size of 0.13 standard deviations.

Admittedly, that is not as big an effect as is the voucher impact on graduation rates, and it is only fair to point out that statistician purists insist that any finding, before it can be declared undeniably true, must have only 5 chances in 100 of being wrong. The chances that the reading impact is in fact phony are greater than 5—in fact they are 6 in 100–and so it must be declared—by the statistician purists who supervise reports by government agencies—that “there is no conclusive evidence that [the vouchers] affected student achievement (p. xv).”

But notice the wording—there is “no conclusive evidence.” That is quite  different language from saying there is “no evidence” that vouchers raised achievement.  Indeed, if you invested $1,000 every time you had 94 chances in 100 of picking the right stock—and only 6 chances of getting it wrong–as is the case here, then, with modern technology, you could become richer than Bill Gates by sundown.”

This is an especially interesting perspective when you consider that Congress is insisting that DC vouchers be killed, and that students should be returned to the DC public schools that have only 6 in 100 chances of doing better in terms of reading achievement.

And, in case you missed them, you can read the editorial that appeared in the Washington Post about the study here, Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post had an article about the study which can be found here, and you can see Ed Week’s coverage here.   None of these observers, however, provided the insight that Peterson’s analysis did.

(Guest post by Brian Kisida)

My colleague, Bob Maranto, has an op-ed in the Philadelphia Daily News about sexual misconduct by teachers and priests.  He references one of my earliest blog posts that compares the rate of sexual misconduct by priests and male teachers and finds that the rates in each case are very low and roughly the same.

It’s a very good piece except that he describes me as his “very un-Catholic colleague.”  It’s true that I am not Catholic but I don’t think that makes me “un-Catholic.”  In any event, here is what Bob wrote:

As a teen, I spent years in a large, hierarchical institution bound by ancient rituals, which often proclaimed its high ideals. Alas, not all of its adults lived up to those ideals.

There is simply no gentle way to put this. In this particular institution, some adults made sexual advances toward the young people they were responsible for guiding. Many of us kids knew that this sort of behavior went on. Many grown-ups knew it, too, and did nothing to stop it. One teenager reported being groped to higher-ups who warned of dire consequences for her were she to go public.

Besides, the “groper” was a man who took boys on “camping trips.” A third perpetrator eventually married one of his charges.

Yet, despite what I saw in my own high school, I support public education. My own kids attend public schools.

I recalled my decades-old school days recently on reading a brief news item reporting that over the last five years, more than 175 Florida teachers had their licenses revoked because of sexual behavior toward students that was inappropriate, immoral and just plain creepy.

In one case, a 55-year-old middle-school teacher sent amorous e-mails to a 14-year-old former student, declaring, “You don’t have to say you love me; I feel it when we hug.”

USA Today relegated the story to the bottom of Page 3, a 28-line summary of a Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel piece. The New York Times, which publishes “All the news that’s fit to print,” saw no reason to print this story at all.

Yet, on that same day, the Times had two separate pieces about the horrendous child sexual-abuse scandals bedeviling the Catholic Church. Just as the scandal of the American church seemed to run its course, the media discovered new outbreaks in Ireland and Germany. Assuming that no clergy have molested Antarctic penguins, that leaves four more continents to go.

The funny thing is that all the time I attended public school, I also attended Catholic mass and Sunday school, and never heard of any priest preying on kids.

Statistics suggest that my experience is typical. As my very un-Catholic colleague Jay Greene wrote in a wonderful blog, in the average year just under one (0.76) out of 1,000 priests is alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct with minors. A statistically identical 0.77 of every 1,000 male teachers lose their license each year for sexual misconduct.

As Jay points out, “Given that we are comparing license revocations for teachers to allegations for priests, the rate of misconduct among male teachers may be considerably higher than among male priests.”

Even worse, some prominent intellectuals in the field of education maintain that it’s OK for schools to cover up abuse.

In explaining why traditional public schools handle scandals better than relatively transparent charter schools, Arizona State University Regents Professor Gene Glass, one of the leaders in my field, writes that “poor performance and illegal behavior exist in the traditional public school sector, and they are frequently dealt with. But they are usually dealt with in subtle ways that protect the dignity of the individuals involved while protecting the integrity of the school.”

It seems to me that this is just the sort of thinking that got the Catholic Church in trouble, yet reporters are silent. What gives?

In part, the notion of a priest propositioning minors simply ranks higher on the creepiness scale than that of a teacher doing so. And well it should. We expect more from our priests.

But that’s not the whole story.

As Penn State professor Philip Jenkins argues in “The New Anti-Catholicism,” the secular media and cultural elites hate the Catholic Church’s teachings on matters like abortion and marriage, and so are only too happy to take down what they see as a puritanical, regressive institution. Selective reporting is a front in the broader culture war.

To me, the answer is not to begin an attack on public schools any more than it is to continually denigrate the church.

Rather, those on all sides of this particular social conflict should ground their views in data rather than prejudice.

That would represent a real victory for the children.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. With Richard E. Redding and Frederick M. Hess, he co-edited “The Politically Correct University” (AEI, 2009).