Run to the Hills!

September 30, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

From Education Week:

After five years of providing critical reviews of education-related reports by nonacademic think tanks, education professors Alex Molnar and Kevin G. Welner hope to expand their own reach with a new, broader research center.
 

The new National Education Policy Center, based at Mr. Welner’s academic home, the University of Colorado at Boulder, will consolidate his Education and the Public Interest Center and Mr. Molnar’s Education Policy Research Unit, previously at Arizona State University. It will review existing research, conduct new research, and, for the first time for both groups, make policy recommendations.

The story goes on to print claims from these guys that they are independent from the unions, quotes Little Ramona taking pot shots at think-tanks, etc.

It’s would be easy to cry foul that the NEA is simply renting the credibility of academic institutions to produce propaganda. They gave Molnar’s outfit a quarter of million dollars a year at Arizona State. Overall, however, I don’t really have a problem with them doing so. Think-tanks always face scrutiny when releasing reports, and more scrutiny is better than less. As Rick Hess notes in the story:

“It’s a free country; it’s fine for them to look at research produced by think tanks that hold other views and try to critique them,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, and the author of a blog for Education Week’s website. “It’s only problematic when they try to pass themselves off as objective, even-handed arbiters of good research.”

The story goes on to say:

Washington think tankers, from Mr. Hess of the AEI to Jack Jennings, the founder of the CEP, and Kevin Carey, the policy director for the center-left think tank Education Sector, said the Think Tank Review Project’s analysis has been a mix of “valid observations” and “conclusions flawed to the point of being nonsensical.”

There is a reason why think-tanks, political scientists and economists do a great deal of the relevant education research these days: we walked into a vacuum left by the Colleges of Education. Don’t take my word for it: Arthur Levine, former President of the Columbia University Teachers College,  issued a no-holds barred critique of doctoral-level research in the nations colleges of education. Levine surveyed deans, faculty, education school alumni, K-12 school principals, and reviewed 1,300 doctoral dissertations and finds the research seriously lacking. Just how bad is the quality of doctoral-level research in colleges of education? Levine doesn’t pull any punches:

In general, the research questions were unworthy of a doctoral dissertation, literature reviews were dated and cursory, study designs were seriously flawed, samples were small and particularistic, confounding variables were not taken into account, perceptions were commonly used as proxies for reality, statistical analyses were performed frequently on meaningless data, and conclusions and recommendations were often superficial and without merit.

Cleaning this up would be a task for Hercules, so Welner and company may be making a rational decision to try to diminish those who replaced them in serious policy discussions.  Think tank research is always subject to criticism and Welner and company are free to join in the fun.

1 Comment | research reports | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

We Won!

September 29, 2010

I have no idea why a bunch of ed reformers are so gloomy.  Matt has already observed how Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli can’t seem to enjoy the moment when ed reform ideas go mainstream.  Now Liam Julian is joining the poopy parade, lamenting that the new crop of naive reformers are doomed to fail just as past ones have, and “it never works out.” And continuing the gloomy theme, Rick is worrying that school choice (in the form of vouchers) over-promised and under-delivered, losing the support of people like Sol Stern.

That may be, but as a graduate student observed to me today, choice (in the form of vouchers) may have lost Sol Stern, but choice (in the form of charters) just gained Oprah, the Today Show, and the Democratic Party platform.    Overall, he thought that was a pretty good trade, especially since he had to look up who Sol Stern was.

Let’s review.  It is now commonly accepted among mainstream elites — from Oprah to Matt Lauer to Arne Duncan — that simply pouring more money into the public school system will not produce the results we want.  It is now commonly accepted that the teacher unions have been a significant barrier to school improvement by protecting ineffective teachers and opposing meaningful reforms.  It is now commonly accepted that parents should have a say in where their children go to school and this choice will push traditional public schools to improve.  It is now commonly accepted that we have to address the incentives in the school system to recruit, retain, and motivate the best educators.

These reform ideas were barely a twinkle in Ronald Reagan’s eye three decades ago and are now broadly accepted across both parties and across the ideological spectrum.  This is a huge accomplishment and rather than being all bummed out that everyone else now likes the band that I thought was cool before anyone ever heard of it, we should be amazed at how much good music there is out there.

We won!  At least we’ve won the war of ideas.  Our ideas for school reform are now the ones that elites and politicians are considering and they have soundly rejected the old ideas of more money, more money, and more money.

Now that I’ve said that, I have to acknowledge that winning the war of ideas is nowhere close to winning the policy war.  As I’ve written before, the teacher unions are becoming like the tobacco industry.  No one accepts their primary claims anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t continue to be powerful and that people don’t continue to smoke.  The battle is turning into a struggle over the correct design and implementation of the reform ideas that are now commonly accepted.  And the unions have shown that they are extremely good at blocking, diluting, or co-opting the correct design and implementation of reforms.

Rick Hess correctly demonstrated how important design and implementation are almost two decades ago in his books, Spinning Wheels and Revolution at the Margins.   And it is always useful for him and others to remind reformers of the dangers that lurk in those union-infested waters.  But for a moment can’t we just bask in the glow of our intellectual victory — even if our allies are a new crop of naive reformers?

(edited for typos)

6 Comments | money myth, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Slam Dunk by Jonah Goldberg

September 28, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jonah Goldberg lets fly today on NRO with an absolute slam dunk:

And yet when you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.

Largely because of the Iraq war,  Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity,  a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”

HT Jeff Reed @ FEC

6 Comments | money myth, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Yes, School Choice Works

September 28, 2010

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” – John Adams

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I love Rick Hess for being pissed off that voucher advocates promised the moon and stars back in the 1990s, setting us up for the appearance of disappointment. Inevitably, when we got actual programs enacted, we got tiny, cramped, ridiculously overregulated and sabotaged-by-educrats programs, not the universal vouchers that have defined the gold standard for school choice for fifty years. Unsurprisingly, the modest and heavily limited programs we have enacted have failed to deliver the moon and stars.

Of course I love him for that; we’ve been making much the same point for a while now. Welcome to the party, Rick!

And I love Rick Hess for demanding that we reboot the movement with a focus on “making markets,” on “deregulation and re-invention.” Advocates of school choice to improve public schools have been in hock to the private school status quo for too long. As Milton Friedman said, education is the only thing we still do exactly the same way we did it a hundred years ago. We don’t even know what a good school looks like; we have to set the market free to find out.

Again, welcome to the party!

But Rick doesn’t get the facts right on the question of whether vouchers “work.” He jumbles together respectable scholars (ahem) with breathtakingly shameless professional con artists who happen to have Ivy League credentials (ahem) as though they all had equal credibility. Obviously if you’re going to do that, you can create the appearance of uncertainty no matter how clear the facts are.

Don’t listen to the experts – including me. And don’t listen to experts who decide what’s true – or what’s certain or uncertain – by weighing how many alleged “experts” are on each side.

Find out the facts for yourself. Here’s a fact you can start with: there have been 19 high-quality empirical studies of how school vouchers (and in one case tax-credit scholarships) impact public schools. Of those, 18 find that vouchers improve public schools, one found no visible difference, and none found that vouchers do harm. And that one stray study finding no difference was . . . guess where? In D.C., where the voucher program intentionally insulates public schools from the effects of competition. So even the exception proves the rule.

Vouchers work. Facts are stubborn things. No matter how many “experts” you quote against them.

It’s imperative to look at the high-quality empirical studies and not anecdotes or people’s claims. That’s the only way you can reliably disentangle the impact of vouchers specifically from the impact of hundreds of other factors that affect school performance.

This matters because you can’t reboot the movement with a focus on building markets, as Rick and I both want to do, if you start by ignoring the facts about all the good vouchers have already accomplished. The effect is more likely to be despair and abandonment – if you’ve fought for 20 years and haven’t accomplished anything, why keep fighting?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the clever intellectual elites thought they could reboot America to pursue a new vision of greatness by pooh-poohing and downplaying the importance of all the great things America had accomplished in its past up to that point. They were hoping to inspire the rising generation to aim higher and achive a more glorious society.

What they got instead was a generation of dirty, smelly dopehead dropouts who wouldn’t fight for their country or make any contribution to society. After all, why should they? What good was it?

Anything that produces hippies is a bad thing. (Just ask anyone who’s made fun of “peace, love and understanding” in front of Matt.)

I want the same thing Rick wants. I just want him to see that when he advocates rebooting the movement around liberating real educational markets, the facts are on his side.

8 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Oprah Strikes Again

September 26, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Oprah went back to the Waiting for Superman theme on Friday.

Geoffrey Canada is on fire, Cory Booker is too: “We cannot have a superior democracy with an inferior education system.”

Gov. Christie is giving control over the Newark school system to Cory, and Zuckerberg made a $100 million donation to help make it work.

2 Comments | journalism, politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Determined Pessimism of Rick and Mike

September 23, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

My friends Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess have been either (a) cautioning people about becoming overly optimistic about Waiting for Superman  and our ability to improve K-12 outcomes or (b) ridiculing the idea completely.

Hmmmm…

Let me begin by saying that I am no starry-eyed naif when it comes to the possible impact of the film. I wrote the other day that I am starting to entertain the idea that it might be a big deal. Union reactionaries do find themselves increasingly isolated in K-12 policy discussions, and many of their catspaws will be turned out of office in November.

Let me say in advance however that the unions are not going anywhere. They still control hundreds of millions of dollars, legions of organized activists and all the lobbyists that they care to employ. I’m not claiming that a tipping point has been achieved and it is all downhill from here for them, merely that they are in for what could prove to be a sizeable rough patch.

Where I seem to differ with Mike and Rick is with their seeming determined pessimism regarding the realm of the possible for improvement. Rick and I appeared on a panel together at the State Policy Network a couple of weeks ago, and discussed the same issue.

Readers of this blog find themselves subjected to my battering away with Florida’s NAEP scores on a regular basis. I won’t bother going into the litany because you already know it, so let’s take a couple of other examples where real reform agendas have been instituted, and what has been going on with their NAEP scores.

I pick a couple because, well, only a few exist. You have to be in a position to roll the establishment to do these things, and keep them rolled. Very few have pulled that off. However, the results are encouraging.

I am encouraged that New York City now outscores some statewide averages on NAEP, despite a student body that is 84 percent minority and 85% FRL eligible. NYC kids scored 217 on 4th grade reading in 2009, only 206 in 2002. That’s a meaningful difference, and should embolden Chancellor Klein.

Likewise, DCPS is still an academic blight, but has made substantial progress since the mid 1990s. When my coauthors and I tracked the learning gains of general education low-income students for the 50 states and DC from 2003 to 2009 in all four main NAEP subjects, Florida came in with the biggest gains and DC came in with the second largest gains. Coincidence? I doubt it- both Florida and DC have engaged in far-reaching reforms.

MA is justifiably proud of having the nation’s highest NAEP scores accompanying their standards-led reforms. It has been mentioned before that the usual suspects fiercely opposed their adoption.

Notice that there is no one path up the mountain here-but there are some common threads to the reforms: testing, accountability, choice. So maybe I’m like Ronald Reagan and I just think that there has got to be a pony somewhere in all that manure. It seems to me, however, that there is a pattern here: in the limited number of instances when jurisdictions take control of policy away from the reactionaries, keep it away from them for a sustained period, and implement reforms that they hate, NAEP scores make substantial improvement.

My own experience in interacting with lawmakers, candidates and philanthropists around the country is that they almost all like substantial improvement in NAEP scores. It doesn’t matter whether they are on the right or left or center. The funny thing is that everyone but those directly benefiting from the status-quo seem to not only want improvement, many of them are willing to fight for it.

So have we “cracked the code.” Yes, as a matter of fact, I think a few places have done so. Yes with fantastic difficulty and always imperiled sustainability. The success of reformers is limited and fragile, but very real. If the third largest state in the union doesn’t represent “results at scale” then what pray tell does? 

We have learned a great deal over the past 20 years. Our decisions are being guided less by theory and more by experience. Less and less this is less about “Assume a can opener” and more and more about “You know, they did something like that in X, let’s see what we can learn about the results.”

If throwing money at schools, lowering class sizes, expanding preschool, open classrooms, whole language or <fill in the blank here> had produced these types of results, this blog would not exist. There would be no need for an education reform cottage industry, and no one would donate to it. They failed. It’s too bad, because I would much rather be spending my life an executive at Rhino Records putting together compliation CD’s of punk rock bands covering all of Dean Martin’s greatest hits. The cover would have a guy in a tux holding up a martini above a violent mosh pit.

A’int Love a Kick in the Head? Oi….let me demonstrate! But I digress…

Our ideas have barely been tried, and very rarely in sustained concert with each other. Unless someone is able to demonstrate the Florida NAEP, the DCPS NAEP, and the Trial Urban District Assessment NAEP for NYC and Miami have all been cooked, the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that unions hate policies that succeed in substantially improving the education of children.

There have been and will continue to be misteps. There will be gains and losses along the way. This is a war, and war is hell. The unions are not going away, but neither are we nor the evidence of our successes. As Dino’s pally Frank used to say, the best is yet to come.

7 Comments | blogging, competitive effects, instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Sweet are the Uses of Adversity

September 23, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Jay has lost that loving feeling after the failure of the merit pay plan in Nashville. Mike Antonucci quite rightly points out that “If we want to evaluate teachers on their performance, we should be prepared for performance pay programs to be evaluated on their performance.”

It was worth trying, but it merit pay didn’t work, so should move on to more promising reform strategies, right?

WRONG MOR-TONE!!!!!

What this study seems to show is that the Nashville program didn’t work. That’s valuable information, and we might want to figure out why a program in Little Rock found positive results, while the one in Nashville did not. Inch by inch, we just might figure something out.

Greg and I have each noted in different ways that getting this figured out is a very tricky business. We agree that maximizing competition within the system is key to sorting out the incentives properly. The Nashville study seems to reinforce the view that this about drawing the right people into the teaching profession rather than dangling a carrot out in front of your current teachers. This subject however deserves careful study across multiple programs over a long period of time.

When results by teacher vary so profoundly, it strikes me as inconceivable that we cannot develop a system to treat teachers like professionals. A profession that offers summers off and high job security but has a union negotiated pay scale that incrementally rewards you for getting old doesn’t seem likely to garner as many highly capable people as needed into the profession.

A Nashville pilot program dangling out a $15,000 carrot doesn’t seem likely to get the best and the brightest out of Vanderbilt to forego that MBA and go into teaching. It didn’t seem to motivate the teachers who were already there either.

I don’t know the answers. I do know that we need a lot of people trying a lot of different things and sharing their results and experiences-that’s the primordial soup of innovation. Schools run by the teachers like law firms, parent and student satisfaction measurement models, hybrid model schools with rolling thunder value added assessment systems, and whatever else we can come up with- bring it on.

How about a 33 year old hedge fund manager turning out killer content from a closet? Yes please!

The same logic applies for merit pay- we need experimentation and study. There were many failed attempts to build a plane before the Wright Brothers, and even the Wright Brother plane was more likely to get you killed than fly you to another city, state or country.

We all need to take a deep breath, keep our expectations reasonable, and learn from failures like the Nashville program.

11 Comments | research reports, teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Merit Pay Bust

September 22, 2010

For some time now I have expressed disillusionment with merit pay as an ed reform strategy. In a paper Stuart Buck and I produced last spring for a Harvard conference on performance incentives we wrote:

All of this leads us to measured skepticism about the merit of merit pay, unless coupled with other reforms such as competition between schools. After all, merit pay boils down to an attempt to recreate a market system within a tightly controlled state monopoly. This is an objective fraught with peril. Even if wise and benevolent state actors manage to get the incentives right at a particular moment in time in a particular place, their actions can always be undone by immediate successors. Those successors may well be more influenced by the powerful special interests that want to block merit pay, loosen the standards, or even to call a system “merit pay” while rewarding behavior that has no relation to actual achievement.

Now we have additional reasons for skepticism.  A well-designed random-assignment experiment led by Vanderbilt’s Matt Springer found:

While the general trend in middle school mathematics performance was upward over the period of the project, students of teachers randomly assigned to the treatment group (eligible for bonuses) did not outperform students whose teachers were assigned to the control group (not eligible for bonuses).

Keep in mind that this experiment only tests whether financial incentives increase teacher motivation, resulting in higher student achievement.  It does not address whether merit pay might change the composition of the teacher labor force, attracting and retaining more effective teachers.

Still, color me even more skeptical about the promise of merit pay as an ed reform strategy.  It may well be that the current crop of teachers we have believe that they are doing their best, so offering them money for trying harder doesn’t result in a significant change in effort.  And given the political and organizational barriers to merit pay, I hold out little hope that a well-designed program can be sustained long enough to effect the composition of the teacher labor market.

In the last week, I hope ed reformers have learned that we can’t really improve the school system by maintaining the same centralized system while trying to sneak a reformer into the control-room (a la Michelle Rhee).  And I also hope we’ve learned that we can’t tinker with the incentives within that same centralized system ( a la merit pay).  The key to effective reform is decentralization of control via school choice, including charters, vouchers, tax credits, weighted student funding, etc…
(edited for typos)

7 Comments | competitive effects, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

You Heard It Here First!

September 22, 2010

“Why Hitler Lost the War”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Reviewing Oprah’s segment on Waiting for Superman, Jay Matt [oops] just announced that the war of ideas is over and the unions have lost.

Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, that’s right – I’ve been saying it for a year and a half.

Permission to come aboard, granted!

The unions are primed for a major defeat. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear the voice-over from Mortal Kombat crying out “FINISH HIM!”

What the movement needs now is a fearless, dynamic organizational leader with a smart plan to get a truly universal voucher program (no more watering it down) enacted in a state in the next, say, three years, and who’s determined to spend the next three years doing nothing but putting that plan into action. There are states where that can happen. But it won’t happen unless somebody picks up the ball.

Or am I just waiting for Superman?

3 Comments | charter schools, journalism, money myth, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Oprah on Waiting for Superman

September 21, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

HT: Whitney Tilson

Are the stars lining up against the teacher union reactionaries? Four years ago, Oprah felt the need to allow the Savage Inequalities guy babble out his cartoon for purposes of cover, but she didn’t bother with any of that this time.  I’m starting to entertain the notion that Waiting for Superman might be a very big deal. The unions have lost the war of ideas, this film powerfully makes that point in an incredibly poignant fashion, and many union puppets will be looking for a new line of work in a few weeks.

6 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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