Jay P. Greene's Blog

I started the JPGB four yeas ago in part out of frustration with the inability of the Manhattan Institute to place and promote my work and in part out of recognition that one no longer needed to go through traditional media outlets to engage in policy discussions.  I figured I could do this myself and on my own terms by blogging.

But I quickly realized I couldn’t do this all by myself.  People advised me that blogs needed regular postings of fresh content, about once every weekday, and I knew that I was not up to writing five posts per week.  So I asked Greg and Matt if they would be willing to post once a week as guest bloggers to ease my burden and keep the blog active and enticing.  Little did I realize how long-running and important their involvement would be.  I feel like they are full partners in this effort and blogging with them has deepened and strengthened our friendship more than I can say.

Very early on it was Greg who proposed the Prime Directive that guides us in this enterprise:  The purpose of the blog is to amuse ourselves.  I started the blog with grand thoughts that it would promote my work and influence policy discussions, but once we adopted the Prime Directive we lowered our ambitions.  How could a crappy little blog change the world?  So we just decided to write whatever we felt like, with no agenda, no inhibitions, and no delusions of influence.

The irony is that perhaps because of our devil-may-care approach, we have probably had more impact on policy discussions than if we were trying to do so.  Our blog posts have spawned news articles, editorials, internet debates, reactions from public officials, and — most importantly from our perspective — a whole lot of fun.

All of this is especially amusing given that all we have is  a domain name, some computers, and a few people devoting their spare time.  Other organizations have paid bloggers working full time, expensive web-designs, and carefully orchestrated PR campaigns and still  can’t gain traction.  Matt, Greg, and I have regular jobs for which we receive no credit or pay for blogging.  We do it because we believe in what we write and enjoy describing the truth as best as we can see it.  The moment this blog becomes affiliated with an organization seeking to advance a particular agenda is the moment it will suck.

Greg and Matt have already done an excellent job of picking some of the best posts from the last four years.  Rather than repeat their good taste, I’d like to use this occasion to describe some of the different types of posts we have on JPGB and illustrate each type with some excellent examples.

Over the last four years we’ve had posts in almost all shapes, sizes, and flavors.  In total we’ve had 1,576 posts, which works out to a little more than one per day.  I’ve written about 642 of them, Matt has written 527, and Greg has 383, with a smattering written by others.  These posts have been viewed more than 718,379 times by readers and have elicited 7,512 comments.  I think I could categorize most of these posts into 7 types:

1) Mocking — I think we are often at our best when we are mocking the sloppy language, sloppy thinking, and herd-like behavior of advocacy groups, bloggers, and journalists.  Some excellent examples of mocking sloppy language include The Fordham Report Drinking Game, Famous Steakholders, Bloggers Shouldn’t Have Rapper Names, Fordham and the Use of Passive Voice, and Buzzword Bingo.  Some excellent examples of mocking sloppy thinking include Hemisphere Fallacy Sighting, Little Ramona’s Gone Hillbilly Nuts, and Gates Foundation Follies (Parts 1 and 2).  And my favorite mocking of faddish herd-behavior includes The Heathers Think-Tanks,  Kevin Carey’s Too Cool for Vouchers… and Cooler Than You, and Valerie Strauss is the Lou Dobbs of Education.

2) Pop Culture — I don’t think I’ve ever seen better and more entertaining analyses of movies, music, and TV than the posts by Matt and Greg on this blog.  In particular, Greg’s marathon examination of the Batman movie, Pass the Popcorn: City of the Dark Knight (Issue #0 through #5) is a masterpiece.  And who could forget his write-up of great summer movies and sequels?  Matt has made his contributions to the movie discussion, notably with his praise of Inglourious Basterds (which I agreed was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen).  But Matt’s bigger pop culture contribution has been in the area of music and kitsch, with posts like Random Pop Culture Apocalypse: Cover Songs,  Random Pop Culture Apocalypse: The Decade in Pop Music and this mashup.  And our pop culture post list couldn’t be complete without mentioning our running commentary on the TV show, Lost.  If only a new series could take its place.  Oh, and then there are lightsabers.  Simply. Awesome.

3) Original Empirical Analyses —  Obviously, a blog is not a place for serious empirical work.  But blogs can feature some interesting facts derived from simple analyses that reveal patterns about the world that were not obvious.  Newspapers used to do this type of simple descriptive work, but now reporters are too busy covering government and Gates Foundation press releases when they aren’t working on their resumes in anticipation of the next round of layoffs.  I did more of these quick and dirty empirical analyses early in the history of the blog and am especially proud of Proximity and Power and Priest and Teacher Sex Scandals in Perspective, which were the two first posts on JPGB.  I was wrote Political Donations from Academia and Arabian Gulf Money and US Universities in the first month of the blog.  More recently I analyzed patterns in school mascot names in a series of Mascot Mania posts.  Matt has also made very very good use of simple charts to illustrate issues we should consider, including on edujobs, alternative certification, teacher quality, and progress in Florida.

4) Recognizing the Unrecognized —  This category can be summed up in two words: Al Copeland.  My favorite winner was Greg’s nomination of Wim Nottroth. But Brian’s nomination of Mary Quant, who did not win, also nicely captures the spirit of The Al.

5) Summarizing Research Findings — We’ve had a number of very useful posts that summarize the research literature, such as this one on participant effects from vouchers, this one and this one on systemic effects, this one on vouchers effects in general, and this one on charter participant effects.  We’ve also highlighted a number of important individual studies, including this one on Head Start, this one on small schools, this one and this one on the Gates Measuring Effective Teachers study, this one on merit pay, and this one on administrative bloat in higher education.  We’ve also notes the foolishness of having a government effort, like the What Works Clearinghouse, attempt to summarize the research literature.

6) Big Think Visions for the Future — Greg and Matt have really excelled in these Big Think pieces.  Matt has a running series on The Way of the Future in American Schooling that describes how digital learning could fundamentally alter (and improve) our system of education.  Matt also has a series of Big Think posts applying Rawls’ ideas of justice to the education system as well as a series advocating Rock Star Pay for excellent teachers (while getting rid of bad teachers and increasing average student teacher ratios).  Greg has some Big Think series that address the philosophical underpinnings of reform strategies, including his series on Command v. Choice and his analysis of incentives and motivation, as well as on the role of science in education policy, such as Vouchers: Evidence and Ideology and The Value-Add Map Is Not the Teaching Territory, But You’ll Still Get Lost without It.   I have my own effort at Big Think pieces, with posts like Build New, Don’t Reform Old, The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism, and Replication, The True Test of Research Quality.

7) Rile Up and Cool Down — This last category consists of two opposite types of posts: those that rile us up against some outrage and those that cool us down to put issues in perspective.  I put them together because they blog really needs both in an appropriate balance.  I tend to get riled up and Matt tends to cool things down (and Greg does some of both, although he tends to do more riling up than cooling down).  For example, I’ve led the blog’s charge against Common Core national standards, lamented the inability of DC folks to generalize beyond their immediate experience, and puzzled over the inability of reporters to accurately summarize research.  Matt, on the other hand, takes a more positive approach, praising the progress that Florida has made and recognizing gains made under Michelle Rhee in DC (while acknowledging the limitations of the  heroic reformer approach).  Greg helps bring balance to The Force by joining the riling up or cooling down side as is necessary.

————————————————————————————-

I want to thank you readers for coming along on this ride.  But I have to tell you that I would be happy to keep blogging even if my only readers were Greg and Matt.  They are the audience I usually imagine when I write a post.  And after posting the first thing I do, quite often, is pick up the phone to ask them, “Did you see what I wrote on the blog?”

It has been an honor blogging with Matt and Greg over the last four years.  And I look forward to keep on doing so as long as the Prime Directive continues to be satisfied.

Late last year there was a big brouhaha about misconduct in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program, which allows disabled students to use public funds to choose a private school if they prefer.  At that time the Miami New Times, a free weekly newspaper that features investigative reporting that sometimes hits the spot and sometimes just provides the filler between naughty personal ads and club listings, repeated claims about incompetence and fraud among some operators of private schools participating in McKay.

Even though the Miami New Times article was just a re-hash of an article they had run during the summer before, critics of special ed vouchers seized upon the piece as proof of the need to stop the rapid expansion of that type of program to other states, impose heavy regulations on Florida’s program to ensure that nothing bad could ever happen, or just shut down special ed programs because only public provision of services to disabled students could be trusted.

Diane Ravitch, in her usual scholarly and measured way, responded to the article by tweeting “Legalized child abuse in Florida?” Sara Mead, Andy Rotherham, and Ed Sector all circulated the New Times piece as proof of their earlier criticisms of McKay.  When I attempted to put the scandal in perspective relative to misconduct and incompetence that is all too common in traditional public schools, Sara Mead clucked that I was like a child trying to excuse misbehavior by crying “he did it first!”

Well, I wonder if a story out of Alabama might help put things in perspective without sounding like an unreasonable child.  It’s a story about a boy named Jose Salinas, or Little Joe, who has cerebral palsy.  His mother wondered why he was acting unusually and repeatedly claiming that he couldn’t go to school because he wasn’t feeling well.  So, she decided to attached a secret audio recording device to his wheelchair to find out what was going on at school.

Here is what she discovered:

“You drooled on the paper,” teacher’s aide Drew Faircloth could be heard saying impatiently. “That’s disgusting.”

“Keep your mouth closed and don’t drool on my paper,” teacher Alicia Brown said on the tape. “I do not want to touch your drool. Do you understand that? Obviously, you don’t.”

Over the three days of recordings, Salinas said Jose received about 20 minutes of actual instruction and spent almost the entire day sitting in silence with no one speaking to him.

“I could not believe someone would treat a child that way, much less a special needs child,” Melisha Salinas told ABCNews.com. “The anger in his voices … and the thing he was getting angry about, [Jose] just can’t help.”

“Why is my paper wet?” Brown demanded. “Look at me and answer. That’s not an answer. That’s not even a word.”

“Do you seen anybody else at this table drooling? Then, stop,” she said. “You have got drool all over your face and it is gross.”

Little Joe’s mom took the recording to school officials who suspended the teachers with pay.  But within days the teachers were back working in the school, although no longer assigned to Little Joe.  Angry parents protested the return of the teachers, who were then once again placed on administrative leave with pay.

Houston County Schools superintendent Tim Pitchford helped explain:

“I made a poor decision and re-assigned them back to school,” he said. “It was the wrong decision and I accept full responsibility.”

Alabama state law does not allow superintendents to fire teachers on the spot, Pitchford said. He has to make a recommendation to the board, which makes the final decision.

“From day one, it was obvious where this was going to end with the employees,” he said. “We knew where this process was going to end, but the process does not allow it to be immediate.”

Salinas was shocked to hear the teacher and aide were back at school.

“They were back at the school and my children were there so I got them out of school and so did several angry parents,” Salinas said. “I just lost all hope. Nobody was listening to me.”

Of course, if Alabama had a special ed voucher program, like McKay, Mrs. Salinas would not have had to secretly record misconduct, prove it to school officials, and then organize a protest to ensure that those teachers were not still in the school with her son.  She could have just followed her good mother’s perception that things were going very badly and switched her child to another school with the same amount of public funding.  How many Little Joe’s are out there without having their mistreatment recorded or protests organized?

Of course, examples of misconduct in traditional public schools is no more proof of the merits of McKay-like programs than examples of misconduct are proof of the need to regulate or eliminate special ed vouchers.  For more systematic evidence on the merits of McKay, readers may wish to read the article that Marcus Winters and I published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the leading AERA empirical journal, which finds that McKay competition increases student achievement for disabled students who remain in traditional public schools and lowers the rate at which students are newly identified as disabled.

But some people prefer mindless tweets over systematic evidence.  And somehow I don’t expect Diane Ravitch, Sara Mead, or Andy Rotherham now to tweet that Little Joe proves the wisdom of McKay or that traditional public schools are equivalent to child abuse.  They prefer to be selective in the anecdotes they tweet.

UPDATE — Andy Rotherham sent me a link to a Time Magazine piece he wrote last year  in which he indicated a shift in views on McKay.  He and Sara Mead once thought the program would skim less disabled students, but in the Time piece her writes:

So while vouchers don’t generally serve the absolute poorest of the poor, they do not skim off the most affluent or easiest-to-educate students either. Policymakers are learning as they go and these programs haven’t always operated as analysts assume. For example, in 2003, educational analyst Sara Mead and I wrote a paper outlining potential problems with vouchers for special education students in Florida. Largely, those issues, like skimming the easiest to serve students, have not come to pass.

Andy deserves credit for changing his mind based on empirical evidence and saying so publicly.

And while Andy did tweet the New Times reports of scandals (“And here @saramead and I thought the problem with McKay Scholarships in FL would be bad policy incentives…how quaint!”) I did not mean to suggest that tweeting selective anecdotes is his standard communication tactic.  Andy is hardly a Diane Ravitch.  I was disappointed by his tweet on the New Times piece but it is definitely not emblematic of his policy analysis.

(edited)