On School Spending, Palin’s Palein’ Again

February 4, 2009

sarah-palin

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Back in October, I gritted my teeth and, against my inclinations, pointed out that as governor, Sarah Palin cozied up to the teachers’ unions and loved to brag about how much money she threw at schools. Never mind that the schools never got better; it played well to the media, and even more to the great “mushy middle” (in Charles Krauthammer’s wonderful phrase) that likes to make public policy based on what feels good, not on what gets results.

Then she endorsed vouchers and directly promised to push for a specified voucher plan if elected, which of course was big news. Vouchers have consistently produced academic gains whenever they’ve been tried and scientifically evaluated, and are by far the most promising reform for improving education for all students, as everyone who cares to know already knows. I tried to do justice to both sides of the story by noting that both Palin and Obama were trying to have it both ways on education.

Now she’s going back to her roots. She’s not for the stimulus, and she’s not against it (UPDATE: oops, see below). Her only position on the stimulus is that the bill doesn’t throw enough money at Alaska, and specifically that “the stimulus package rewards states for not planning when it comes to prioritizing for things like education, as Alaska has planned ahead by forward-funding 21 percent of our General Fund dollars for this very important priority. It appears only those states that did not plan ahead with education will benefit. States like Alaska should not be punished for being responsible; yet that’s what the plan means for Alaska right now” (HT Jim Geraghty).

Meanwhile, as Alaska faces a billion-dollar shortfall, she’s pushing to build a road to Nome that will cost up to $2 billion. I’m sure that has nothing to do with a desire to have “shovel ready” projects at hand, ready to shovel into the maw of the federal “stimulus” sugar daddy.

National Review‘s Greg Pollowitz was the first to dub it the “road to Nome-where.”

I hate being the designated Palin critic of the education reform movement. When I’m with my education reform comrades, I’m usually the only Republican in the room. And I’m much more Sarah Palin’s kind of Republican than, say, Mitt Romney’s, much less John McCain’s. But somebody’s got to point this stuff out.

Does anybody want to take over the job?

UPDATE: I wanted to check on this before posting it. I’ve confirmed that, in addition to usually being the only Republican in the room when I’m working on education reform, I’m also the only Republican on this blog. (Matt specifically requested that I describe him as a “disgusted former Republican.” Duly noted.)

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Wouldn’t you know it? She just put out a statement saying she agrees with the decision of Alaska’s Senators to vote “no” on the stimulus. I saw it just two hours after I posted this. But she adds that a stimulus “is needed” and plumps again for mo money, mo money, mo money!

2 Comments | economics, money myth, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Get Lost 8

January 30, 2009

110898_043

“The name is Faraday. Daniel Faraday.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

 I’m finally caught up on the new season of Lost. Some thoughts:

1) From “Libby says hi” to “Nice to meet you,” Lost is worth the investment for the humor value alone.

2) Once again, I rejoiced in the return of the real Hurley.

3) Jay is right that we shouldn’t try to suss out the “rules” of the show’s universe. Unfortunately, the show itself seems to feel the need to gesture in that direction – hence Juliet explains that “whatever you have with you” travels with you through time. That’s just asking for trouble. What counts as something you have with you? Do you have to be touching it? What about the backpacks? Their clothes touch the backpacks but they don’t – and of course if you say that anything touching your clothes also goes, why does “stuff you have with youness” traverse clothing but not other objects (say, for example, the Island itself)?

They’d have been better off taking an attitude more like this:

4) Why was Ben lighting a candle in the church?

5) Did you notice that Richard wears eyeliner? It’s pretty blatant. Maybe that’s the fashion for men some time in the future and he forgot to take it off when he came back. Or maybe he’s not really ageless at all – he just looks permanently youthful (like Dick Clark used to) because he has great makeup.

6) In the Lostverse, judges will issue court orders requiring people to give blood samples without revealing who’s asking for the sample or why – but if you walk into Oxford University off the street and ask to go through their employment records, they’ll open them right up for you.

7) Once again, for a man with unlimited cash and an army of goons who’s made tons of enemies and tampered with terrifying occult powers, Widmore’s security really bites.

But I don’t get that scene. How come Desmond thought Widmore would give him the address? How come Widmore gave it to him? I thought the whole reason Desmond and Penny were on the run was because her father was hunting them down. Why didn’t Widmore grab him and turn him over to the goons to beat Penny’s location out of him? If they’re not running from Widmore, why are they hiding? “Somebody toss me a frikkin’ bone over here!”

8 ) Forster’s Iron Law of TV Nerds: If a merely “recurring” nerdy comic relief character becomes a regular fixture of the show, he will gradually morph into a badass action hero who wins the affections of smoking hot chicks. This law derives its inexorable operation from the fact that all TV shows are written by people who are themselves nerdy comic relief characters in real life.

Mark my words, by the time Lost is over, Daniel Faraday will have killed some bad guys, and at least one other attractive female will demonstrate affection for him.

Also known as the Wesley Wyndam-Price Axiom.

nerdy-wwpwesleywyndampryce

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Feb. 1999; Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, May 2004

HT Buffy Guide and Wikipedia

6 Comments | Lost | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

School Unions Impeached, Removed

January 30, 2009

blagojevich

“At least they’re not as corrupt as I am” – Rod Blagojevich gives a dramatic last-minute speech defending the unions.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

WASHINGTON – In an unexpected turn of events, yesterday morning the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach the nation’s teacher and school-staff unions. By the end of the day, the U.S. Senate had convicted on all charges, removing the unions from office.

In the bill of impeachment, the unions were charged with the “high crime and misdemeanor” of “destroying the futures of millions of American children in order to keep the gravy trains running on time.”

“Once we all got together and decided to put our selfish desire for re-election aside and make education policy on the merits, the rest was obvious, so we said, ‘Why wait?’ ” said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D – Ca.).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D – Nv.) added that universal vouchers, merit pay, the abolition of tenure, principal control over personnel rules and decisions, and objective evaluation of curricula would all be enacted by the end of the day today.

“They’re all no-brainers,” he said. “We’ve known all along, of course, but at last we can finally say it, and do what’s right for our children.” Pelosi added, “It’s so liberating!”

The sudden change is sending shockwaves through the education policy world.

“What are we going to do with ourselves now?” asked Robert Enlow, president of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, at a press conference. “The battle’s over. I’ve just gotten word from the board that me and all my staff are fired. And nobody can get jobs in this economy.”

“I hear Wal-Mart is hiring,” said noted researcher Jay Greene at the same conference.

Congressional leaders attributed the change of direction to the accumulated power of the idealistic rhetoric of recently-inaugurated President Barack Obama.

“We’ve just heard so much about setting aside partisanship and doing the right thing for so long,” said Pelosi. “Two years of constant bombardment finally broke through our cynical shells. We all just cracked.”

The president was quick to issue a statement on the unions’ removal.

“I am committed to schools,” he announced. “We all must be committed to schools. We must hope for change without changing our hopes. We must bridge the divides without dividing the bridges.”

“Yes, we can!” the president added.

Leave a Comment » | politics, teacher union | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

All Hail!

January 29, 2009

all-hail

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I guess they heard how much money is going to be thrown at schools in the stimulus.

Hat tip to Jim Geraghty, who quips, “I would have preferred a zombie warning.”

3 Comments | civic values, economics, politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Cincinnati Enquirer on EdChoice: Good Story, Bad Headline

January 28, 2009

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

On Saturday the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a story on how Ohio is sitting on a bunch of student outcome data for the EdChoice voucher program and neither doing anything with them nor releasing them to researchers who could do something with them. I’m told it was picked up by AP.

The story is generally good. Transparency is always preferable. Student privacy concerns do limit the extent to which the state can release data to the general public, but the state ought to be able to release a lot more than it has, and it also ought to license private researchers to use more sensitive data on a restricted basis, just as NCES does.

The story’s author, naturally enough, wanted to provide what little data are available. So she provided the number of EdChoice students who failed the state test in each subject.

Readers of JPGB probably already know this, but any outcome measurement that just takes a snapshot of a student’s achievement level at a given moment in time, rather than tracking the change in a student’s achievement level over time, is not a good way to measure the effectiveness of an education policy. A student’s achievement level at any given moment in time is heavily affected by demographics, family, etc. Growth over time removes much of the influence of these extraneous factors (though obviously it doesn’t remove absolutely all the influence, and further research controls or statistical techniques to remove these influences more are preferable).

Moreover, EdChoice program is specifically targetd to students in the very worst of the worst public schools. These are students who are starting from a very low baseline. We should expect these students’ results to remain well below those of the general student population even if vouchers are having a fantastically positive effect. So the need to track students over time rather than simply take a snapshot of their achievement levels is especially acute here. Only a rigorous scientific study can examine whether the EdChoice voucher program is improving these students’ performance – and to do that we’d need the data that the state is sitting on.

Also, a binary measurement of outcomes (pass/fail) is never as good as a scale. The state is sitting on scale measurements of the students’ performance, but from the Enquirer story it appears that it won’t release them.

And the Enquirer was only able to obtain these pass/fail results for 2,911 students out of about 10,000 served by the program.

All that said, I don’t blame the Enquirer for reporting what few data were available. The story is focused on the state’s stinginess with data, not the performance of the program as such.

But what headline did the paper put on the story?

“Ed Choice Students Failing.”

Of course the story’s author doesn’t choose the headline. And the person who did choose the headline almost certainly had to do so under intense deadline pressure, without much space to work with, and with no knowledge about the issues other than what could be gleaned from a very quick and superficial reading of the story. Still, since the story clearly focuses on the issue of the state’s sitting on valuable data without using them, you would think they could come up with something like “Voucher Data Not Used.”

3 Comments | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Excavating the Little Rock

January 28, 2009

the-little-rock

HT Wall Street Journal

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Continuing the Arkasas theme, the Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story today about the little rock for which Little Rock was named.

And continuing the theme of government spending, the story notes that $650,000 is about to be spent to excavate the remains of the original little rock for public display. $350,000 of the money was privately raised, the city is kicking in $100,000 from bonds, and the county is kicking in $200,000.

My more libertarian-leaning friends may scoff at that, but I’m for it. Even Adam Smith insisted that it’s important for government to spend money to “maintain the dignity of the state.” He meant all the lavish pomp that surrounds the king and Parliament, but this is the American equivalent of that – it’s affirming the role of our shared past (even in the form of a rock we dug up out of the mud of the Arkansas River) in the foundations of our nationhood.

UPDATE: Of course, it’s not my money, so it’s easy for me to support spending it.

Leave a Comment » | civic values, economics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

UAW Creates Jobs – in Demolition

January 26, 2009

the-homer

HT Liberty Is the Middle Path

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last week the president of the UAW claimed that workers at auto companies receiving federal bailout money shouldn’t have to take a wage cut because they already make $2 per hour less than Toyota workers if you include bonuses. I was going to point out everything that’s wrong with his argument, but it looks like the contract for this particular demolition job has already gone to Mickey Kaus (possibly as part of the federal stimulus plan).

3 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Quantifying the Popcorn

January 23, 2009

scores-on-doors

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

No time to write a lengthy discussion of it (why did I waste all that time this morning composing a post on something as useless as education policy?) but don’t miss the fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal on the history of, and debates over the merits of, the practice of movie critics assigning stars, letter grades, or “thumbs” to movies as a quick and easily accessible, yet frustratingly reductive, indication of their judgment on a movie.

Among other things, the article asks some prominent movie critics to give a star ranking to the practice of ranking movies by stars. One gives the practice four stars (“It helps the reader, and it helps us”) while another gives it one and a half (“It’s not necessary to film criticism but it’s not something that undermines it”). Some people quoted in the article are actively hostile to the practice, though.

The article is by “The Numbers Guy,” Carl Bialik, who apparently has a blog under that title at the Journal‘s website. Who knew? On the blog he has a follow-up to the story with more quotes and tidbits, including one critic who complains that he doesn’t know how to give an accurate ranking to a movie that he hated, yet enjoyed watching for its awfulness:

“The toughest one for me was Gran Torino, which I think is a terrible film but nonetheless found immensely entertaining in its awfulness,” Las Vegas Weekly film critic Mike D’Angelo told me about his 100-point grading system on his personal Web site. “I wound up giving it 34/100, which includes like 20 bonus points for camp value.”

Leave a Comment » | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Jeb for National School Grades

January 23, 2009

BUSH EDUCATION SUMMIT

“Everybody do the FCAT! Yeah!”

HT Orlando Sentinel

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

This morning, Jeb Bush comes out for a national school grading system on NRO.

What he’s proposing is a federal grade A to F for each school, based on both performance level and improvement – kind of the way Florida schools are graded under the A+ system (though Jeb doesn’t propose federal sanctions for poorly performing schools, just a grading system). He justifies the move on grounds that the NCLB system encourages states to lower standards.

Jeb doesn’t discuss this in the article, but readers of JBGB know that a clash has been brewing between Florida’s A+ program and NCLB. Florida, which has had success with the A+ program (where improvement in performance is a factor alongside performance level), is going to run into the 2014 “everybody must be proficient” wall along with everyone else.

No doubt our own Matt Ladner, chronicler of the looming conflict in the posts linked above, will have more to say about this (hopefully including some more classy artistic illustrations), but just to put my own two cents in, I’m not clear on why there needs to be a national grade.

For that matter, I’m not even convinced we need a national test, since that sacrifices the merits of interstate competition. At both the state and federal levels, the test is being developed and implemented by a bureaucracy that is heavily colonized by the defenders of the status quo and thus will be looking for opportunities to dumb down the test or manipulate the scoring to make schools look better. But if one state dumbs down while another (under political pressure from reformers) stays the course and makes real improvement, that creates pressure on the dumb state to get with it.

The impetus for a single national test, it seems to me, is because federal rewards and punishments create an incentive to dumb down. If we’re not going to have rewards and punishments based on the scores, what’s the need for a single national test? Why not just require each state to maintain a transparent testing system of its own devising – or, if that’s not good enough, require each state to purchase and use one of the major privately developed national tests?

But we can leave that aside. Let’s stipulate the case for a national test. Still, if you’re not going to hold schools accountable with rewards and penalties, then why issue grades along with the test scores? Why not just give a test and report the results numerically, and let private organizations put together their own grading systems? That way people can decide for themselves what aspects of performance measurement matter most, rather than turning the job over to a federal bureaucracy that has an incentive to make schools look better.

3 Comments | NCLB, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Marcus Winters on School Choice Savings

January 21, 2009

savings

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Since we’re on a money kick this week, let’s combine that theme with education (this blog is still about education, right?) and note that our friend Marcus Winters has an article on NRO today on how vouchers save money.

For those looking to dig deeper, here’s an analysis of the fiscal impact of every school choice program from 1990 through 2006. Every program was at least fiscally neutral, and most saved money.

3 Comments | school funding, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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