Jay P. Greene's Blog

It was bad enough that Marlins fans had to suffer under previous team owner Jeff Loria’s inept management of the team (after impressively winning the World Series twice in the first ten years of the team’s existence).  And it’s even worse that a new ownership group led by former Yankee star, Derek Jeter, has dismantled what may have been the best outfield in baseball to conserve cash since the new owners seem financially exhausted immediately after having made the purchase. But the action that has significantly detracted from the human condition and made Jeter worthy of a nomination for the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award is his decision to cancel The Great Sea Race.

Since 2012 the Marlins have held a race among mascots dressed in sea creature outfits during the 6th inning of home games.  This contest between Bob the Shark, Julio the Octopus, Angel the Stone Crab, and Spike the Sea Dragon, however, has come to a halt under the new ownership led by Jeter.  The exact reasons have not been given, but it appears that the new ownership group seems to view baseball as a serious enterprise, deserving of reverence.  As one commentator put it: “[Jeter] doesn’t want fans to have anything to smile about this year.”

The late, great Bill Veeck understood what baseball was really about — fun.  As owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox he packed the games with bread and circuses to make the experience entertaining.  He hired Max Patkin, the “Clown Price of Baseball,” to coach the Indians.  Patkin “had a face seemingly made of rubber that could make many shapes. He was rail thin and wore a baggy uniform with a question mark (?) on the back in place of a number, and a ballcap that was always askew. While some derided his act as corny, he became a beloved figure in baseball circles…”

In St. Louis, “some of Veeck’s most memorable publicity stunts occurred during his tenure with the Browns, including the appearance on August 19, 1951, by Eddie Gaedel, who stood 3 feet 7 inches tall and is the shortest person to appear in a Major League Baseball game. Veeck sent Gaedel to pinch hit in the bottom of the first of the game. Wearing elf like shoes and ‘1/8’ as his uniform number, Gaedel was walked on four straight pitches and then was pulled for a pinch runner.  Shortly afterwards ‘Grandstand Manager’s Day’ – involving Veeck, Connie Mack, and thousands of regular fans, enabled the crowd to vote on various in-game strategic decisions by holding up placards: the Browns won, 5–3, snapping a four-game losing streak.”

And in Chicago, Veeck was the first to introduce an electronic scoreboard that lit up, made noises, and shot fireworks when the White Sox hit a home run.  And in one of my greatest childhood memories, Veeck organized Disco Demolition Night, in which local DJ, Steve Dahl, dressed in a military uniform, drove a Jeep into center field, and blew up a pile of disco records during the middle of a double-header.  Dahl got the crowd so riled up that they stormed the field, causing enough damage that the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.  It was hilarious!  Veeck was also the one to convince Harry Caray, who was the announcer for the White Sox at that time, to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to the crowd during the 7th inning stretch.  Caray tried to refuse but Veeck said that he had a recording of Caray singing and would play it over the audio if Caray refused to perform it live.  Caray continued this practice of singing to the crowd when he moved to the Northside to become the announcer for the Cubs.  Thus was a much-loved baseball tradition born.

Veeck’s teams also played very well.  Under Veeck’s leadership, the Indians won their first pennant in 20 years in 1948.  In 1959, Veeck’s White Sox won their first pennant in 40 years. But Veeck understood that most teams fall short most years, so they have to offer their fans something other than victory to keep everyone entertained.  Yes, they should offer quality play, but sometimes even that is beyond the reach of most teams.  As we Marlins fans (can I use the plural for that?) wait for the team to rebuild with only moderate chances of being successful for many years, can’t we at least watch some frickin’ fish run around the outfield?

Jeter seems to represent the type of baseball fan who has watched Field of Dreams a few too many times.  The game is not a sacred ritual, deserving of church-like propriety.  It’s entertainment. It should be fun. For trying to make us all eat our baseball vegetables and taking away The Great Sea Race, Derek Jeter is worthy of The Higgy.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In NRO today, Rick Hess and Sofia Gallo accuse the school choice movement of using “overheated” and “alarmist” rhetoric. They assert that since school choice is the opposite of neighborhood schooling (which all smart people know to be true, since we say it and we’re the smart people), choice advocates need a new, toned-down rhetoric to convince jumpy soccer moms that choice is no big deal and won’t have any big effects on anything.

How is this wrong? Let me count the ways:

1) “School choice advocates are wild-eyed ideological extremists” is a timeworn smear used by the Blob to demonize reformers, and anyone paying attention should have seen through it by now. For Hess and Gallo to resort to this lazy stereotype is offensive. The examples they bring to justify their claim that choice advocates are overheated and alarmist (choice is like Uber for schools!) redefine the whole concept of “weak tea.”

It is Hess and Gallo whose rhetoric is overheated and alarmist, in claiming that choice advocates are overheated and alarmist.

2) Hess and Gallo admit that choice is not only increasingly successful politically, it is growing more popular over time. Their efforts to create the impression that choice has a public perception problem (choice underperforms when compared to pie-in-the-sky hypothetical utopian alternatives in heavily biased survey questions formulated by the servants of the Blob at PDK!) don’t change the basic facts.

By Hess and Gallo’s own showing, choice is winning in statehouses, winning in governors’ mansions, and winning in public opinion polls. No doubt that success will ebb and flow in the future, as it has in the past. But choice has better public perception today than at any time in its history.

3) School choice is not in tension with local control, it is local control. For half a century, governance of district schools has moved further and further out of the local neighborhood and up the bureaucratic ladder, from the building to the district to the state and federal levels. There is no plausible plan for reversing that movement, other than school choice.

The only possible future of “neighborhood schools” is neighborhood schools of choice. Nothing else but choice will return governance of schools to the neighborhood level.

Because guess what neighborhoods are made up of? Parents. And parents who are given school choice exercise that choice as members of their local communities, gathering information and forming relationships in neighborhoods.

4) Parents tend to like their own schools, so Hess and Gallo recommend that choice advocates adopt a message along the lines of “choice won’t change schools.” Because that’s how you sell a reform – argue that it doesn’t matter and won’t change anything.

Or perhaps the message will be, “choice won’t change schools for people like you, it will only change schools for those other people. You know the ones we mean.”

Jay has been pointing out for years that the biggest mistake education reformers have been making is to argue that their policies will benefit a small and relatively powerless portion of the population, and offer no benefits to larger and more powerful constituencies. Hess and Gallo want choice to double down on that strategy.

5) To the extent that choice advocates could do better in framing their rhetoric, the problem is not that choice is percieved as a threat but that choice is percieved as of limited value because it is disconnected from moral imperatives like justice, equal opportunity, diversity and freedom. School choice advocates often assume that when they talk about markets they are affirming those imperatives, but in fact the language of markets does not and will not invoke those commitments for most people. A new language of school accountability through choice is needed to connect school choice to the things that matter most.

We shouldn’t talk as if choice should matter less, but as if it should matter more. Because it does.

Museums and theaters should stop telling me what to think about art.  I know that the folks who run museums and theaters think they are just providing context and facilitating discussion, but too often they are actually attempting to control what their patrons think about art works and plays with excessive gallery text and after show “talkbacks.”

I have no expertise in curating galleries or presenting plays, but I can speak as a frequent consumer of the arts that this well-intentioned, but ultimately bossy, deluge of information interferes with my direct experience and enjoyment of the art.  And I’m not the only one who feels this way.  Last year the playwright, David Mamet, forbid talkbacks following his plays.  He was mocked by some in the theater community for this, but I understand what drove his action.  Too many theaters were hosting talkbacks after his plays in which the theater staff or an expert they selected were obviously steering the audience toward particular and simplified interpretations of his work that might make it less controversial.  As another playwright, Christopher Shinn put it: “Broadly speaking, theaters use talkbacks to protect the audience from uncomfortable feelings the play may have aroused.”

I’m all for discussing plays after you see them, but that’s why you should go for dinner or drinks afterwards. When theaters host the discussion they cannot help but use their authority to drive the discussion in certain directions.  I don’t want my theater to tell me what to think about the play I just saw.  I want to develop my own thoughts and talk to others without the mediation of self-appointed experts on its meaning.

Shaping what people think about a play is especially likely if the theater-facilitated discussion immediately follows the performance.  That’s why some theaters hold events at separate time or in separate locations, more clearly demarcating the interpretation from the performance itself.  This seems like a reasonable compromise for theaters concerned about expanding audience engagement without being too controlling.

Some art museums have also drifted away from excessive gallery text.  The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, for example emphasizes: “Isabella created her installations to evoke an emotional response in visitors. That’s why, unlike at other institutions, there aren’t conventional labels in this museum. She wanted you to find your own meanings.”  But other museums, while trying to avoid “the priestly voice of absolute authority,” still feel obliged to cover their walls in verbiage about the social and historical context of the works they display.

I sympathize with the impulses of museum staff to try to help their patrons, but I fear that they have too little trust in the ability of the art to communicate without mediation.  In addition, social and historical contexts are complicated and often disputed, so when museums try to convey that context they are inevitably making choices about what the correct understanding of history and sociology should be.  I am no more interested in having my museum tell me what to think about the world than having it tell me what to think about art.

Also posted on the University of Arkansas’ NEA Research Lab Blog.

NAEP results are being released next week, but state departments of education have already been briefed on their results.  State education officials are leaking like sieves, so many edu-pundits have at least some inkling of what’s coming.  Rumors from multiple sources suggest that the results generally look bad — with a decline nationally.  Aware that they may be blamed for declines, a number of folks are anticipating the release by placing their own spin on the soon-to-be-released results.

Exhibit A in this pre-spinning is John White, who is the superintendent of education in Lousiana.  According to Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat White sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education on March 23 raising concerns about the comparability of NAEP results over time given the transition to computer-administered testing.  Although he acknowledges that NCES made adjustments to ensure the comparability of paper and pencil and computer administered tests and found insignificant differential effects by sub-group, White still raises questions about whether differential effects may distort results for certain states.  Barnum notes: “Even though researchers warn that it is inappropriate to judge specific policies by raw NAEP results, if White’s letter is a signal that Louisiana’s scores have fallen, that could deal a blow to his controversial tenure, where he’s pushed for vouchers and charter schools, the Common Core, letter grades for schools, and an overhaul of curriculum.  White said his state’s results are not what’s driving his concerns.”  Hmmm.  Maybe it’s just a remarkable coincidence that White has suddenly developed these technical concerns about the validity of NAEP at about the same time that he was briefed on his state’s results.  How much do you want to bet that there is a decline in LA?

Exhibit B is Arne Duncan taking to the pages of the Washington Post to defend the idea that ed reform has contributed to significant improvement.  He focuses on trends over the last few decades.  That would be a smart move to focus on long-term gains if recent trends — you know, in the wake of Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education — have been taking a nose-dive.  NAEP results slipped for the first time when 2015 results were released.  How much do you want to bet that national results have declined again?

Barnum is right to warn people away from inferring too much from changes in NAEP as an indicator of the success of any particular policy or education leader, but these folks live in a political, not a research, world.  Both White and Duncan’s political standing in education policy was built on over-claiming from NAEP results, and those who live by the NAEP sword may die by it.  That’s why they better start spinning.