Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday I did a short and sweet radio interview in Oklahoma (well, they were in Oklahoma) on my recent article about religious leaders and school choice. Roman Catholics and Jews were praised for maintaining their traditions in the face of great pressure to homogenize; evangelical skepticism of choice as entanglement with the state was both sympathized and respectfully disagreed with. Choice programs, as I pointed out, have actually created political constituencies that turn out and rally at state capitals to defend private school autonomy when it is threatened!

As always, your comments are very welcome.

I’ve written before about the Character Assessment Initiative (Charassein) at the University of Arkansas, headed by my colleague Gema Zamarro.  This post provides an update about the strong progress they are making with their research.

First, the paper by Collin Hitt, Julie Trivitt, and Albert Cheng that I’ve been telling you about for more than two years is now being published in the Economics of Education Review.  Getting into a top journal takes time, but this paper certainly deserves high placement.  In this paper, Hitt, Trivvit, and Cheng demonstrate across several longitudinal data sets that students who are more non-responsive to survey questions (skipping items or saying “don’t know”) have significantly lower educational attainment and fare less well in the labor market, even after controlling for a broad set of background characteristics and cognitive measures.  Essentially, this paper validates that item non-response is a useful proxy for character skills (probably conscientiousness) and is predictive of later life outcomes.

Second, Albert Cheng and Gema Zamarro have a new paper that demonstrates that teachers actually alter student character skills.  In particular, they look at data from the MET Project in which students were randomly assigned to teachers in the second year of the study.  They find that teachers who themselves have weaker character skills during the first year of the study, as measured by non-responsiveness or careless responses on surveys, weaken the character skills of the students experimentally assigned to them during the second year of the study.  Conversely, teachers who model higher levels of conscientiousness improve the character skills of their students.

This teacher ability to affect student character skills in not related to their ability to improve math and reading test performance.  So teachers who are great at building character skills may not be the same ones who are great at conveying math and reading.  Students are more successful when they learn both cognitive and non-cognitive skills.  If we focus only on retaining and rewarding teachers or schools that do one, students may miss out on having teachers or schools that are good at the other.

I hope it’s not another two years until you see this new Cheng and Zamarro paper in a top journal.  Now that their measure has been validated by the EER piece, future publications should come more quickly.  And Albert is himself headed to great things as he completes his Ph.D. and begins a post-doc at Harvard next year.  Keep you eye on him and this line of research on using survey responsiveness and carelessness as measures of character skills with strong predictive power for student success.

One of the banes of education reform is its obsession with producing uniform reforms at scale.  Donors and policymakers tend to prefer standards and testing reforms that affect all students at once.  And if they are willing to entertain the messiness of school choice, donors and policymakers tend to prefer large chains, like KIPP, over mom and pop charters or the diverse assortment of small private schools.  They want to achieve what they imagine are the economies of scale in education by having the same reform affect large numbers of students at the same time and in roughly the same way.

Unfortunately, there do not appear to be many economies of scale in education.  In fact, the nature of education, like other aspects of human development, appear to be more effectively conducted at small scale.  Education, like child-rearing, relies for success on personal interactions among people with authentic relationships.

We’ve tried a variety of arrangements throughout history for raising children.  People have experimented with all sorts of collective child-rearing approaches but have gravitated back in almost all cultures across long-periods of time to raising children within small family groups.  Despite the allure of economies of scale, we’ve almost universally rejected communal child-rearing.  Even though we could house more children and would require fewer adults in giant, orphanage-like settings, we rightly recognize that proper human development involves the close interaction of caring adults with children.  It’s just not something that is produced well at scale.

We should no more prefer scale in education than desire collective child-rearing.  Children are sufficiently diverse in their interests and needs that uniformly imposed solutions tend not to serve them very well.  Instead, it takes caring adults with an understanding of each child to customize (at least partially) how each child should be educated.  In addition, education requires motivating children to exert effort to learn.  That motivation is much more easily produced by an adult with whom children have an authentic relationship.

So the next time you hear reformers ask if a reform is scalable, remind them that orphanages are scalable — but that doesn’t mean we want them.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

Today, the Library of Law and Liberty is carrying my review of Dale Russakoff’s book, The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?, which explored the impact of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark’s district school system. Years later, it had little to show for it. At times The Prize reads like a comedy of errors, but given what was at stake, it was really a tragedy. But it didn’t have to be.

Zuckerberg’s gift was matched by other philanthropists and foundations, but even $200 million wasn’t enough to bring the “transformational” changes that reformers desired. The bureaucracy was just too good at impeding reform and sucking up resources:

The new labor agreement was also pricier than initially anticipated: it consumed nearly half of the $200 million of the philanthropic package. The teachers’ contract itself cost $50 million, including $31 million in back pay to cover the raises that teachers hadn’t received over the previous two years.

The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, made the back pay a condition for even holding the negotiations. “We had an opportunity to get Zuckerberg’s money,” Del Grosso later explained, “Otherwise, it would go to the charter schools. I decided I shouldn’t feed and clothe the enemy.” The contract also included merit bonuses and financial incentives for teachers to switch to a universal pay scale.

On top of that, [Newark Superintendent Cami] Anderson asked for $20 million in “buyout” funds to incentivize low-performing teachers, principals, and support staff to leave; $8.5 million in tuition support for teachers to earn graduate degrees relevant to their subject area; and $15 million for a new contract with the principals’ union (which didn’t actually happen during Anderson’s term because the principals refused to negotiate).

The high cost of the agreement meant eliminating plans to invest in community organizing, early-childhood programs, and vocational programs for Newark’s thousands of recent dropouts, which had been one of [Newark Mayor Cory] Booker’s priorities.

Then, too, the teachers’ contract contained fine print that raised its cost even higher. Teachers received 15 paid sick days and three paid personal days (in a less than year-round job, that is, a school year of 180 days), meaning that the district had to pay for both regular and substitute teachers for up to one out of every 10 school days—a particularly large expense given that at least 560 teachers earned more than $92,000 a year. The seniority pay bumps also remained in place, so the district couldn’t afford the performance incentives that they had wanted to give promising young teachers to persuade them to stay.

The great expense was deemed necessary to get greater flexibility and accountability, but it was never clear how permanent those features would be. Asked if the union would continue the accountability reforms after the contract expired in three years, Del Grosso replied: “Let’s pray there’s another Zuckerberg.”

Four years after Zuckerberg’s announcement on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the reforms had not lived up to expectations. The 2014 state test results showed that proficiency in both math and English had declined in every tested grade since 2011. Moreover, the ACT college admission test, which all high school juniors had taken, revealed that only 2 to 5 percent of non-magnet school students in the district were ready for college. Anderson resigned the following year. By then, Booker had already moved on to the U.S. Senate, and his successor, Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka, was elected largely because of his opposition to the Booker/Anderson reforms. Soon after, [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie turned his attention to his (ultimately failed) presidential bid.

If anything, Newark’s education reform debacle is further evidence of the wisdom of Jay Greene’s advice: Build New, Don’t Reform Old.

[Cross-posted at Cato-at-Liberty.]

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management just published an article by Sass, et al that I’ve mentioned in a number of previous posts.

This is a very important study using a rigorous causal research design that shows long-term benefits to attending charters in FL on college persistence and later life earnings.  Importantly, these benefits are produced despite the fact that there seems to be little or no test score gain associated with FL charter schools and despite the fact that these are mostly Mom and Pop schools rather than the preferred “no excuses” model of charter school.

So, building our entire education reform strategy around the idea that short-term changes in test scores correspond with long-term changes in life outcomes is inconsistent with a growing body of evidence.  Choice reforms in particular have demonstrated that long term gains in educational attainment (and now earnings) can be produced without seeing short term gains in test scores (and vice versa). Trying to pick the winners among schools of choice based on test scores could lead to horribly wrong policy decisions.  Parents appear to know more than portfolio managers, choice regulators, and other central planners.

Here is the abstract from the now published study:

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,800 nationally, serving nearly three million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate charter schools’ effects on earnings in adulthood, alongside effects on educational attainment. Using data from Florida, we first confirm previous research (Booker et al., 2011) that students attending charter high schools are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. We then examine two longer-term outcomes not previously studied in research on charter schools—college persistence and earnings. We find that students attending charter high schools are more likely to persist in college, and that in their mid-20s they experience higher earnings.