Nominees for the 2010 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award

September 21, 2010

It’s time again to consider nominees for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  The award is meant to honor a person who has made a significant contribution to improving the human condition.

The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”

Last year’s winner was Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag, beating out Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing,  Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban,  Ralp Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

This year I would like to nominate The Most Interesting Man in the World.

The Most Interesting Man has improved the human condition by modeling “the good life.”  In an age that lionizes anti-heroes, slackers, and losers, it is nice to be reminded of what masculine virtue can look like (even if Harvey Mansfield would find that redundant).

Yes, The Most Interesting Man is fictional, but the award is for a “person,” which I believe could include a fictional person.  In the past we have focused on entrepreneurs as nominees for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, with the purpose of emphasizing how inventors and business people can improve the human condition much more than the politicians and activists who more typically receive such awards.

But I think we should expand our set to include the idea of a person.  The creation of that idea — whoever developed the ad campaign — could be at least as important for improving the human condition as the creation of a business or product.

The floor is now open for other nominations.

7 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Would You Want These People Making Ed Policy?

September 19, 2010

12 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Heritage Brief on the Racial Achievement Gap

September 18, 2010

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Back in 1997, Professor Lawrence Stedman wrote:

Twelfth-grade black students are performing at the level of middle school white students. These students are about to graduate, yet they lag four or more years behind in every area including math, science, writing, history, and geography. Latino seniors do somewhat better than 8th-grade white students in math and writing but, in other areas, are also four years behind white 12th graders…. Schools and society remains divided into two different worlds, one black, one white, separate and unequal.

Thirteen years later, sadly not much has changed with the national numbers, but some states have proven that far-reaching policy changes can reduce achievement gaps.

Lindsey Burke and I sing a new duet celebrating Florida’s reduction of the racial achievement gap  in a new Heritage brief.  Let’s just say the evidence from Florida is fairly compelling:

From the brief:

If trends since 1998 were to hold nationally, it would be about 33 years before we could expect Hispanics to close the gap with their white peers. In Florida, however, black students could catch up in half that time, and Hispanics could exceed the national average for white students as early as 2011.

This is just the sort of progress that the “Broader-Bolder” crowd would like us to believe is not possible without a vast expansion of the welfare state.

OOOOOOOOPS! Do you think we’re stupid Hans? It is accountability with teeth, real transparency and expanded parental choice that is making this happen. Cue the slo-mo fall scene-and please try not to make too big of a mess on the sidewalk.

 

2 Comments | competitive effects, research reports | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Foundation for Excellence in Education Video

September 15, 2010

BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

1 Comment | school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Heroic Reformer Theory Fails

September 15, 2010

Yesterday’s defeat of Adrian Fenty in DC and the likely ouster of heroic school reform superintendent, Michelle Rhee, should remind all of us of the very real limits of the heroic reformer theory of school reform.  That theory holds that we just need to place the right people in positions of power in the school system and then support their heroic efforts with supplemental funding and political support.

The main problem with maintaining centralized government control over schooling and just changing who controls that centralized system is that the forces of the status quo have enormous incentives and even stronger ability to recapture control even if they temporarily lose it.

Rhee was probably pushing for the many good reforms, but the more she pushed for them the more incentive the edublob had to win the next election, remove her from office, and undo her efforts.  And eventually they did.

Happily, DC is also decentralizing control over the school system, especially with its large and growing charter sector.  Whoever is in charge of the  DC public school district, that person will be in charge of a shrinking organization.  The right way to reform DC is to make it easy for everyone who wants to leave a failing school to do so.  That can’t be as easily reversed as changing the person who is charge of a centralized system.

12 Comments | politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

How Mission Creep Adds to Administrative Bloat

September 14, 2010

In case you need any examples of how mission creep in higher education contributes to administrative bloat, check out this story about the University of Central Arkansas.  UCA decided to contract with a company, called Snoozester, to provide a wake-up and reminder phone call service for students.  Students, at no additional cost to themselves, can arrange to have Snoozester call their cell phone to make sure they wake-up on time in the morning or to remind them of a test or appointment.  Never mind that almost all cell phones already have alarm functions.  We need the university to pay $11,000 to a company to make phone calls to students.

This doesn’t just contribute to administrative bloat by causing UCA to spend $11,000.  There also have to be administrators who write and approve the contract with Snoozester.  Administrators have to monitor the performance of the company.  Some administrator had to dream up the idea (perhaps his dream was interrupted by a sales call from Snoozester).

Of course, we have highly trained professionals recommonding the addition of this service.  From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Dr. Lynn Taylor, chief of psychiatry at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, said UCA’s program is “a great idea,” especially for freshmen, if the calls wake students up better than alarm clocks.

“That is a really hard time – the transition to college and being on your own,” she said.

This is a small example of mission creep contributing to bloat, but eventually all of this adds up.  And it reflects an attitude that there is no limit to the services students need.  And since students only pay for a fraction of the cost of all of these services, given high rates of public subsidy, and only do so indirectly, of course students don’t mind getting these extra services.

When will universities start offering the butt-wiping service?

For more on the administrative bloat report that I wrote with Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills, see this post.

4 Comments | higher education | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Mark Your Calendars

September 13, 2010

Mark your calendars.  September 9 was the date that Checker Finn and the Fordham Institute began to turn against the national standards movement they so enthusiastically championed.  We’ve been predicting this reversal on JPGB, but who knew it would happen so soon?

Last week Checker noticed that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), which directs the current national standards push fueled by Gates Foundation money and financial rewards and threats from the U.S. Department of Education, is merging with P-21, the 21st century skills nonsense organization.  Checker noted that the incorporation of P-21 into CCSSO could provide “additional traction for the organization’s current agenda [which] would be bad for the country, bad for the new ‘Common Core’ standards and the assessments being developed around them, and possibly bad for CCSSO as well.”

Checker also suddenly became aware that even good standards may well be undermined by bad assessments:

Indeed, P-21 isn’t the only risk here. At least one of the two new assessment-development consortia could—probably in the name of “performance assessment” and “career readiness”—easily drown in the soft stuff, in which case the tests it is building may not do justice to the academic standards with which they are meant to be aligned. Which would also mean that implementation of the Common Core by states and districts could be distorted in the direction of the soft stuff that will be on the tests and for which schools and educators will be held to account.

And Checker has finally focused on the fact that the federal government might make mischief with the national standards machinery for which he and Fordham provided right-wing cover:

One hopes that Secretary Duncan is mindful of this risk, but his big assessment speech last week wandered all over the 21st century terrain. And those straying off the cognitive reservation can also invoke Duncan’s boss, whose March 2009 denunciation of “bubble tests” called for a new generation of assessments that would address not only “problem-solving and critical thinking” but also “entrepreneurship and creativity.” Yes, there is reason to believe that President Obama has drained more than a few steins of P-21 propaganda. Maybe his education secretary has, too.

Of course, Checker still holds out hope that vigilance could keep these negative forces at bay.  But he is clearly laying the groundwork for his complete reversal, which will come as these negative forces gain control over the national standards infrastructure that Checker and Fordham helped create by down-playing these very dangers.

3 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

RTTT Scoring is Distorted by Politics

September 12, 2010

No one should be shocked that the “peer-review” process for Race to the Top is distorted by political considerations, especially since we at JPGB (among others) have been warning about it for months.  But it is nice to see someone actually document the existence and magnitude of the distortion.

One of my students at the University of Arkansas, Dan Bowen, conducted an analysis that was featured in AEI’s Education Stimulus Watch.  It predicted each state’s RTTT “peer-review” score based on independent ratings of state reform efforts by Education Week’s Quality Counts and others.  It then also considered whether political considerations were systematically related to a state doing significantly better or worse in the “peer-review” process than would be predicted by those independent ratings.  Dan found that states with hotly contested Senate or gubernatorial contests received significantly higher scores:

…having a contested seat for the 2010 election increases round-one RTT scores by at least thirty-five points, and up to seventy-seven points (15 percent of the total available points) if a state has contested races for both governor and Senate. Second, the inclusion of a state’s political circumstances, along with its education-reform record, improves the model’s capacity to explain and predict round-one RTT scores.
Dan does not mean to suggest that the peer-reviewers consciously changed their scores to advance the Administration’s political agenda.  Political distortions can and do creep into these processes in subtle ways, such as the weighting of different criteria in the scoring rubric, the selection of who is a reviewer, the informal signals sent to the reviewers about what factors should be considered, etc…
Be sure to check out the full report.

2 Comments | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Gov. Christie Gone Wild

September 10, 2010

BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

7 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Pass the Popcorn: Machete

September 10, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So the Rodriguez-Tarrantino Grindhouse double feature included some fake movie trailers before and between the two movies.  One of them was for a fake movie called Machete which looked like a Hispanic version of a 1970s Blaxploitation flick.

I know all of this because I was one of the 88 people who went to see Grindhouse in the theater. Okay, so I was the only person to see it twice. There- I admitted it- are you happy now?

Anyway, the Machete trailer was so over the top that Robert Rodriquez decided to make it into a full-fledged movie.  Of course, I was morally obligated to go see it.

My reaction: meh.

Oh, there are some very funny scenes, especially for someone living in Arizona. The theater laughed out loud when Robert DeNiro’s Senator McLaughlin character was introduced. The film was set in Texas, but there was some obvious spoofing of Arizona pols included (e.g. John McLaughlin for John McCain).

The standard Blaxploitation/James Bond formula of a protagonist who only takes brief breaks from being a killing machine to serve as a babe magnet is in full swing, sprinkled with an occasional explosion and/or observation about the illegal immigration issue. This is not Shakespeare, it is not even Black Dynamite.

It is however entertaining if you are willing to check your brain at the ticket booth. Even then, it runs out of steam.

2 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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