Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Oklahoman has run a quasi-response to my recent op-ed on whether Pre-K is worth the investment. I say “quasi-response” because the author, Craig Knutson, says he’s not trying to refute what I wrote, just putting his own two cents on the table – which is fair enough.

I appreciate that Knutson agrees Pre-K has to produce an “ROI” (his term) sufficient to justify the investment. Unfortunately, the evidence he provides doesn’t establish how large the ROI of Pre-K is:

• He says he looked at “five distinct reports and programs,” but doesn’t tell us what they are, so we can’t evaluate either his characterization of their findings or the quality of their methods.
• He says “all of the studies concluded that returns on investment were greatest among high-risk demographics,” which doesn’t tell us how great the returns were.
• He says “Oklahoma certainly has a disproportionately large number of high-risk families and children.” This admittedly would depend on how those terms are defined, but it’s hard to think of any reasonable definition by which this assertion would be true – assuming “disproportionately” means “disproportionately compared to other U.S. states,” and I don’t know what other basis of comparison would be relevant. Oklahoma has plenty of struggling people, but not a “disproportionate” number of them as compared with, say, New York or Mississippi.
• He says “another aspect of these programs was that each was voluntary.” He stresses that this means the programs were selected by parents because they’re valuable and produce returns. He thinks this supports his argument, because it’s evidence these programs are valuable. But if the parents themselves aren’t paying for the programs, then their choice by itself doesn’t establish ROI on a cost basis. More importantly, the public question in Oklahoma right now is whether Pre-K should be expanded. ROI will inevitably go down (as costs go up and benefits go down) when we stretch beyond families who have chosen Pre-K proactively, to rope in families that have to be goaded – or perhaps forced – into attending.
• He quotes James Heckman saying that “high quality” programs produce benefits, without defining “high quality” or telling us how large the benefits are.
• The only specific study Knutson cites is this one, which studies a highly targeted program for a specific population that doesn’t represent what Pre-K looks like for the general population. Knutson not only does not inform the reader that the study is looking at a targeted program, he actually protrays it as if it were a study of “high quality” Pre-K programs generally, serving the general population: “But Heckman’s latest research, ‘The Lifecycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program,’ shows that high-quality programs can deliver a return on investment of 13 percent per year.”

Other than that, there were no problems with it.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

That’s the question in my new policy brief from OCPA.

Today the Oklahoman ran an op-ed adapted from that policy brief:

Policymakers shouldn’t spend big money expanding pre-K when the benefits are so uncertain. They should also take pre-K off Oklahoma’s automatic-funding conveyor belt; it should have to make a case for itself like every other discretionary expense.

Moreover, Oklahoma should consider introducing school choice design in existing pre-K programs, to strengthen the freedom and power of parents. Oklahoma’s existing program permits schools to partner with community organizations; why not allow community organizations to serve parents directly?

Let me know what you think!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Max Eden’s outstanding piece, which Jay extols here, shows not only how lax discipline leads to bullying, chaos and death, but also how the language of “restorative justice” has been corrupted in ways that are already having terrible consequences.

Justice ought to be restorative. The purpose of justice is not revenge. It is to restore offenders to society – debt paid and ready to try again.

But the debt must be paid. With some exceptions, in general an offender is not really “restored” on a moral, psychological or social level until they have suffered just punishment. That is the only reason punishments exist. And people are ruined if they are raised up learning the lesson that there will be no consequences for bad behavior.

In other words, retributive justice is a necessary element of genuinely restorative justice.

Unfortunately, people whose goal is not to do justice but to reduce the severity of punishments have hijacked the concept of restoration. We are now trapped in a terminological system in which “restorative justice” means the opposite of “retributive justice.” People think they are helping restore kids when they are actually destroying them.

The really terrifying result of this change is not that it gives unearned rhetorical credibility to advocates of lax discipline. It is the response from the other side.

The overwhelming majority of people can see the destructiveness of lax discipline. They are therefore concluding that “restorative justice” is dangerous and destructive. Therefore they are rejecting restoration as a goal of justice. And when you do that, all that’s left is the limitless cruelty of revenge.

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)

EdChoice carries my post using the new NAEP results to bring us back to our earlier discussion of Ian Kingsbury’s finding about what our condescending friends at NACSA do to minority charter operators:

If you’re wondering why the education status quo wants heavy regulation, ask yourself why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked Congress to regulate social media: Regulation cements the power of dominant providers, shutting out smaller and less powerful rivals. That’s why heavy regulation does so much damage to minority communities. They have less political power to influence the content of regulations — which more powerful providers can shape in their own favor — and less ability to afford the enormous cost of compliance.

Borrowing Matt’s graphic above to make the point about Louisiana, land of the overregulated NACSA dream.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

My latest in OCPA’s Perspective is on ed schools as barriers to entry in the teaching profession:

Arne Duncan, the Obama administration education secretary, said in 2009 that “by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.” He said education schools are “cash cows,” and he’s right. Teachers who need credentials are hostages to the ed school system, so universities create ed schools in order to collect the ransom money.

In addition to economic rent-seeking, I also cover the ideological side of the problem:

Gregg Garn, the dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Education, lists “politics of education” as his first area of research interest. On his web page, a document full of left-wing political and policy posturing is listed more prominently than his curriculum vitae. I suppose since education schools seem to exist for political propaganda, it’s fair enough that he considers his political platform a more relevant credential to establish his qualifications than his academic track record.

School me on what you think!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I have a post at OCPAThink on the lack of alignment between short-term test score changes and long-term life outcomes:

As an education researcher, I feel a little like an engineer hearing that the coefficient of gravitation has been cut in half as an energy-saving measure, or a mathematician getting the news that for the sake of simplicity, Pi will henceforth be rounded down to 3. We’ve spent a generation building our discipline—and education reform ideas—on the assumption that rising scores mean better education. If they don’t, we have to rethink everything.

We’ll have to look beyond tests for the next accountability – school choice and other forms of local control.

We won’t set high standards with the narrow tool of test scores alone. It takes a broad vision to know what education is, and qualitative human judgment to know when schools are providing it. The future of school accountability is the people at large—not a specialist expert class—empowered to use their full human judgment to evaluate schools that they know personally. In other words, school choice and other forms of local control.

The post contains tons of links to Jay’s writing on this, natch!

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1862

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Without a doubt, the biggest shock in years in the world of “social conservative” intellectuals was the publication, this February, of Romanus Cessario’s defense of Pius IX for forcibly removing six-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish parents in 1858, and raising him as a Christian. Cessario defends Pius not on “it was a different time” grounds, but absolutely, affirming the general principle.

Serious doubts about religious freedom and liberal democracy have been growing for some time among some people in the insular and deeply self-satisfied intellectual world of what used to be social conservatism. As doubts about religious freedom and liberal democracy have grown, the aptness of the label “conservative” has shrunk, for no one who wants to induce a catastrophic social revolution in order to overturn the 700 year political tradition that provides all our public moral language and shared moral universe ought to be called conservative.

Cessario’s folly has brought matters to a head by revealing what is really at stake in these growing doubts. Centuries ago, it was possible to govern out of authoritative traditions because social worlds were by and large epistemically isolated from one another. As a result, traditions were not much recognized as the social conventions they were. Traditions were not “traditions,” they were simply the wisdom of elders.

But once modernity makes us aware of how socially contingent traditions are – makes us aware of them as traditions – they are no longer authoritative. To impose them on the recalcitrant is merely an act of brute force. Today there is no governing out of traditions, there is only one social group ruling another.

There is no space to enter here into the details of how Cessario’s choice to pick this particular fight in this particular way smacks strongly of anti-Semitism or, for that matter, how the Mortara case can be related to the perfectly legitimate general debate over the validity of religious freedom and constitutional democracy. Of all political forms, liberal democracy has the least right to avoid responsibility for making a case for itself or tell its critics to shut up and go away. As I remarked to a friend during the Cessario blowup, every liberal’s business card should say “Justify Your Social Order – Ask Me How!”

The real Higgyworthiness of Cessario’s article is the desire it reveals, on his part and that of his allies, to eat their cake and have it, too – to defend the enforcement of religious laws on those of other religions, and then pose as champions of the downtrodden whose opponents are the real oppressors. Cessario emphasizes the global opprobrium heaped on Pius IX and on Catholics, especially traditionalists, today, comparing both to the Diocletian martyrs. Steven Spielberg is apparently working on a Mortara film, which Cessario expects to be anti-Catholic; hence the need to instruct the faithful about the Mortara case preemptively.

Cessario has attracted some defenders, but also a much, much larger number of sympathetic commentators who might be described as anti-anti-Cessario (links here). They’re not yet prepared to admit that their position logically entails Cessario’s, but the one thing they do know is that Cessario’s critics are defenders of “bourgeois society,” which is to them a sort of Anselmic being than which nothing worse can be conceived.

There is no question that Catholics continue to face widespread bigotry; readers of JPGB may recall some of the many occasions we’ve had to discuss that bigotry. But you can’t have it both ways. If you ought to be protected, so should everyone else. To take Jewish children by force and raise them as Christians is BSDD; to defend such acts and then paint yourself as the oppressed party is paradigmatic PLDD.

Image HT

(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.