Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Three cheers for George Will’s column today calling upon the Supreme Court to strike down Blaine Amendments:

Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming president when, in 1884, hoping his anti-Catholicism would propel him to victory, he lost New York by that margin to Grover Cleveland. A large multiple of that number of New York’s Irish and other Catholic immigrants had become incensed when a prominent Protestant minister, speaking at a rally in New York City with Blaine present, said the Democratic party’s antecedents were “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”

Blaine paid a steep price for his bigotry. More than 13 decades later, schoolchildren in Montana and elsewhere should not have to pay for it.

I reach the conclusion by different legal reasoning (I think the key point is that Blaine Amendments inevitably create unconstitutional government discrimination against religious organizations, not that they would have been understood to do so in the 19th century). But it rounds up to three cheers!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Institute of Labor Economics brings you a highly scholarly study entitled: “Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?”

You see, PISA 2012 included a very interesting test item designed to discover which students would claim to know more than they did. The item listed 16 mathematical concepts (e.g. “exponential function”) and asked test-takers to indicate how familiar they were with those concepts. The catch? Three of the concepts – proper number, subjunctive scaling and declarative fraction – were fictional. (“Subjunctive scaling” is my favorite.)

The ILE researchers coded test-takers who claimed to be highly familiar with these concepts as “bullshitters” and proceeded to analyze their characteristics. The analysis was limited to the nine English-speaking countries in PISA, but that still left them with 40,000 test subjects.

The U.S. and Canada rule the roost as the nations with the most dishonest teenagers. Meanwhile, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland were clustered at the bottom. Apparently the Celts are trustworthy after all – who knew?

Other findings:

• Teenage boys, you will not be shocked to learn, were more likely to puff themselves up than teenage girls in all nine countries. However, the gender gap was substantially smaller in North America than in Europe.
• Socioeconomic advantage is also associated with self-fabrication in all nine countries, but with variations in size that follow no obvious pattern (larger differences in Scotland and New Zealand, smaller in England, Canada and the U.S.).
• There was greater variation in the results for immigrants v. native residents. In Europe, immigrants were more likely to feign expertise; they were less so elsewhere, and there was no visible difference in the U.S.
• No summary could do this one justice, so I will simply quote: “Finally, in additional analysis, we have also estimated the within versus between school variation of the bullshit scale within each country. Our motivation was to establish whether bullshitters tend to cluster together within the same school, or if bullshitters are fairly equally distributed across schools. We find that the ICCs tend to be very low; in most countries less than three percent of the variance in the bullshit scale occurs between schools. This perhaps helps to explain why everyone knows a bullshitter; these individuals seem to be relatively evenly spread across schools (and thus peer groups).”

Also of interest in ILE’s study is the extensive literature review on the subject, undoubtedly a helpful service in this emerging field of study. The authors point to Harry B. Frankfurt’s pathbreaking inquiry On Bullshit as the reigning theoretical account of the phenomenon.

Hopefully we can expect to see more research on this important topic soon!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA has published a new policy brief by yours truly, summarizing the research on school choice. For example, on academic effects:

Academic effects may be the most important empirical question we ask about school choice. At one time, it was by far the most hotly debated, whereas today it is much less frequently mentioned by opponents of choice. Having been in the school choice movement since 2002, I can remember when we constantly heard claims that “there’s no evidence school choice actually helps kids learn” or “the research on outcomes is mixed.” Such claims were a primary focus in the 2005 book Education Myths, which I co-wrote. We almost never hear that kind of thing now, because the research on academic outcomes is so consistently positive.

Readers of JPGB will recognize the concern in this paragraph:

Most of these studies examine test scores, although a handful look at other metrics such as high-school graduation rates and college attendance rates. Recent research has called into question the value of test scores as a measurement of academic outcomes. This research finds little or no connection between improvements in K-12 test scores and improvements in long-term life outcomes, in contrast to high-school graduation and college enrollment (which do seem to be more strongly associated with long-term life outcomes). This limitation is worth keeping in mind.

The brief also looks at the research on fiscal effects and civic concerns (segregation and good citizenship).

You may recall there was some, er, confusion recently in Oklahoma when some local academics published a summary of the research on choice that was, er, less than fully accurate.

Let me know what you think!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA carries my article fisking an especially sloppy smear job attacking school choice:

I call it a strange document because it’s trying to present itself as some sort of scholarly press release. It’s published by something calling itself Scholars Strategy Network, and the byline is from two academics, with their academic affiliations and emails listed at the top. But it’s not a work of scholarship, nor is it informed by scholarship. It’s two pages of emotive bullet points, unsubstantiated bumper-sticker assertions, shoddy reasoning, and deceptive characterizations of the empirical research. An impressively long list of “sources,” formatted to look like scholarly citations, is supplied at the end in the desperate hope of simulating gravitas.

Come for the blatant dishonesty about easily checkable facts:

Assaulting private school choice, the authors appear to be afraid to make their own assertions, but quote someone else’s claim that no “independent studies” have ever found that students using private school choice in Milwaukee, Cleveland, or Washington, D.C. performed better than children who remained in public schools. But the official study in Washington, D.C. looked at exactly this question, using random-assignment methods (the gold standard), and found huge increases in high school graduation and college attendance rates. No doubt the report being cited here doesn’t count this study as “independent,” because it was a federal program and the study was federally funded as part of the program. That’s blatantly dishonest cherry-picking. And what is their excuse for leaving out the two—two!—gold-standard studies of this question finding academic improvements in Milwaukee?

Not to mention that it’s cherry-picking to include only selected cities. Across all private-choice programs, there have been a total of 18 gold-standard studies (no cherry-picking). Of these, 14 found academic improvements, two found no visible effect, and two (both examining a poorly designed program in Louisiana) found negative results.

Stay for the outrageous ideological claptrap!

The authors complain that schools in choice programs are not “transparent.” But parents have the power to demand whatever information they think important, or not attend the school. This is why private schools are already more transparent, by orders of magnitude, than organizations are typically required to be when participating in other kinds of government programs. Look at the reams of hard data on named, particular private schools on GreatSchools.org or in the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data. Then try getting comparable data on apartment buildings that take Section 8 housing vouchers, or grocery stores that take food stamps.

Send me a scholarly press release letting me know what you think!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA carries my article on class sizes:

California enacted a big class-size reduction policy in 1996. It sounded easy when it was pitched to voters, but it ended up costing the state billions of dollars. And it produced no measurable improvement in any education outcomes—not test scores, not graduation rates, nothing.

Alas, the lesson was not learned. Florida enacted an even more ambitious class-size reduction policy in 2002. It cost the state $20 billion to implement as it was scaled up over eight years, and costs between $4 billion and $5 billion to maintain every year. And it produced no positive effect on education outcomes.

Let me know what you think!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Rand reports that a big randomized trial of super-lax discipline policies in Pittsburgh schools had negative effects on student achievement and big negative effects on African-American student achievement. Of course, Rand buries the negative finding under mountains of politically palatable pablum, but if you dig (search for “not all PERC impacts were positive”) you can find it just barely acknowledged. Or, if you grok geek, check out Table 6.7 on p. 56.

Via this thread, which reviews other studies with similar findings in LA and Philly. Backfill from Max Eden at (sigh) Fordham.

As I’ve written before on JPGB, the most destructive aspect here is that advocates have chosen to label the loosey-goosey discipline policy “restorative justice.” They accept a false and outrageous distinction between “restorative” and “retributive” justice, and cling to the absolutely unsupported prejudice that lax policies will be more restorative, while it is the desire for retributive justice that produces harsher policies. The reality is that in most cases, justice must be both retributive in intention and strict in application to be truly restorative. There is a place for mercy, but not too much and not too often. Nothing ruins young people more effectively, or prevents their “restoration” more completely, than lax discipline.

This is destructive because the lesson most people will take from their failures is that justice should not be restorative if we want it to be either retributive or effective:

The increasing tendency of some to dehumanize criminals and demand harsher and harsher treatment of them cannot be fought by advocacy of lax punishments in the name of “restorative justice.” It is directly caused by advocacy of lax punishments in the name of “restorative justice.”

Only retributive justice, which affirms that punishment is not an arbitrary tool of social control but a just and necessary consequence of the crime that the criminal is morally obligated to suffer, can be effective in restraining the abuse of criminals – and promoting their genuine restoration.

As C.S. Lewis once said, I plead for retributive justice not primarily for the sake of society, or for the sake of crime victims, but for the sake of the criminal.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Oklahoman carries my op-ed on why collective bargaining is a bad deal for teachers:

Teachers are like doctors and lawyers. Standardizing the work they do into a one-size-fits-all mold creates major headaches. But collective bargaining demands standardization, so processes and outputs can be negotiated.

The standardization demanded by collective bargaining is a major factor in all the complaints we’re accustomed to hearing from public school teachers — useless paperwork, unreasonable rules, rigid systems, dysfunctional bureaucracy. In a 2009 study of national data from the U.S. Department of Education, I compared public and private school teachers. The difference in teacher working conditions was dramatic.

Remember, you read it here first!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA carries my article on why collective bargaining hasn’t been a good bargain for K-12 teachers:

I’m not against unions. My wife worked for a union for years, volunteering long hours as an employee advocate in company dispute resolution. She signed up to work for the union when she saw managers mistreating workers, and the company violating its contractual obligations to them. The union was the only effective protection those workers had.

But collective bargaining and representation simply isn’t a good fit for K-12 teachers. Not all types of workers are well-served by unionizing. Doctors and lawyers don’t unionize. The nature of the work they do just doesn’t permit the standardization, controlled processes, and highly specified work outputs that are necessary for collective bargaining to be effective.

Let me know what you think!

Update: Also worth noticing: “our regression results indicate that unionization has a powerful negative influence on educational outcomes.”