The New Crisis: Teacher Obesity

May 29, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Check out Michael Petrilli’s great article in the new Gadfly. If major media outlets are going to act like the sky is falling because of student obesity, why is nobody worried about teacher obesity – which imposes much more direct costs on the school system than student obesity?

Health insurance costs associated with treating overweight teachers and other school staff are taking a major bite out of public education budgets. I estimate that these costs come to at least $2.5 billion annually–more than Maine spends on its entire k-12 system in a year.

This calculation assumes that the obesity rate among people who work in k-12 education is the same as that for the population as a whole: about one-third of all adults. (I can’t think of any reason why it would be lower–and if you’ve been to many educator gatherings lately, you wouldn’t think so, either.)

Why is teacher obesity so expensive? Petrilli blames gold-plated health benefits thanks to “over-generous collective bargain agreements.”

It’s hard to tell just how far into his cheek Petrilli’s tongue is planted here, but the article’s worth a read.

11 Comments | journalism, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Speed Racer Is Better than Iron Man. Deal with It.

May 26, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

With no Get Lost feature this week – the episode was postponed on account of soap opera – I figure this blog is a week shy on geekdom and it needs some ballast. So I’m going to pull on my flameproof shorts, put my affairs in order, kiss my wife and daughter good-bye, and tell the world what it needs to know:

Speed Racer is better than Iron Man.

(I don’t intend to spoil anything big here, but in deference to the prime directive of geekdom, I hereby warn you that if you want to be absolutely unspoiled for these movies, you’d be a moron to even start reading a post entitled “Speed Racer Is Better than Iron Man.”)

Don’t get me wrong; Iron Man is a good movie. But it’s missing something.

John Podhoretz (in the May 19 Weekly Standard) is right – Iron Man is not a superhero movie, it’s a 1930s screwball comedy about the wacky hijinks of a billionaire playboy. Flying around in a tin can is just another of his wacky hijinks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I love “Cold Comfort Farm,” “Amelie” and “Down with Love,” so nobody can accuse me of screwball snobbery. And Iron Man works very well for what it is. (Which is a dignified way of saying that I laughed my pants off – and that’s saying a lot for a movie.)

It even manages to rise above the level of screwball in its evocation of the complex relationship between the male and female leads. Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow earned every cent of the millions they’re going to make on this franchise. I went away thinking, “This is what that lousy Superman movie could have been like if they had hired an actor instead of a mannequin to play Lois Lane.”

But the tin man at the center of this movie has no heart – the psychology of the main character, which the structure of the movie intentionally draws our attention to, is never developed. The plot hinges on Tony Stark having a traumatic change of heart about his profession. But what exactly was this change? Does he repent of making weapons altogether? Some of the dialogue hints a little in this direction. But his first act of pennance is to make a big weapon and fly around using it to kill people.

So what then does he really repent of? I can see at least two other possibilities. He repents of making weapons for the US government, or perhaps making them for government (any government), or perhaps making them for anyone at all but himself. Again, a few lines of dialogue seem to point in this direction, but then the subject is dropped. Or, on the other hand, he repents of not keeping an eye on the weapons he makes and allowing them to fall into the wrong hands – but not of making weapons in itself. His actions after his repentance – making a big weapon and flying around killing people with it – seem to point toward this interpretation.

You can see why the movie never tells you which it is. If the first, then the movie is implicitly anti-war, and the conservative half of the audience is alienated. If the second, then the movie is implicitly pro-war, and the liberal half is alienated. You get bigger ticket sales by just letting each moviegoer mentally supply his or her own preferred interpretation of Stark’s psychology.

Trouble is, this turns Stark into a cipher. His motivation, his whole psychology, is truncated. That might not matter in a lot of superhero movies; Michael Keaton is a cipher in Tim Burton’s Batman, and it’s still a great movie. But the whole structure of this particular movie demands more psychology than the studio’s marketing suits are willing to permit. Iron Man could have been a tormented anti-war warrior, battling to undo the damage his life’s work has done to the world by enabling war. Or he could have been a warrior plain and simple, waging a just and noble personal war to put right the deadly consequences of his own arrogance. As it is, he falls between two stools and is . . . nothing in particular.

Winner of the 2008 Vaguest Midlife Crisis Award

OK, you might say, but do you really prefer a brainless light-show movie? Come on.

If you said, that, you’d clearly be in good company. The critics seem to agree that it’s a stupid movie. But I think the critics went into Speed Racer determined to dislike it, or at least not to like it unless it conformed to their preconcieved notion of what a “good” light-show movie is like, which it obviously doesn’t.

Critics don’t like what computer graphics have done to the movie business. And with the enormous number of lousy movies where the story is nothing but a lame excuse to show you a bunch of computer graphics, who can blame them?

To someone who sees things through that lens, if a movie has a lot of computer graphics, it had better also have a complicated plot, brilliant dialogue, gay cowboys eating pudding – something that could pass muster in an arthouse movie. If so, they get to look high-minded by praising the movie in spite of its having a lot of special effects. (“The effects serve the story” is the universal code phrase for “All of us snobs have permission to like this movie.”) Otherwise it goes in the “light show” trash bin.

Speed Racer doesn’t have anything you would ever see in a theater where the coffee at the concession stand is brewed fresh every hour. The plot is simple to the point of melodrama, and the dialogue does its job in advancing the plot, but no more.

But that doesn’t make it dumb! Simple is not the same as stupid. Melodramatic plot devices are cheap and tacky when they appear in narratives that are not otherwise melodramatic. But that’s not because melodrama itself is bad. It’s because melodramatic plot devices don’t belong in narratives that aren’t melodramas.

A well constructed melodrama satisfies a deeply rooted need in human nature. Anyone who denies this is kidding himself. Much of what passes as “serious” drama is really melodrama, but isn’t called that because the people who like it are too snobbish to think that anything they enjoy could be melodrama. And how else do we explain the near-universal popularity of melodrama? Why, for example, does practically every TV news outlet turn practically every story it covers into a melodrama?

And ultimately this same function – satisfying a universal human need – is the only claim that the allegedly more serious forms of drama have on our attention. Augustine, caught up in a violent overreaction against his own youthful obscession with “serious” drama, wrote that he understood the appeal of comedy but thought that tragedy was disgusting and perverse. Why go to the theater to intentionally make yourself miserable? In ethics and metaphysics I’ll take Augustine over Aristotle any day, but here, Aristotle knew better. We go because we must. Our spirits demand tragedy (and comedy) as our bodies demand food. That’s just how we’re built. And it’s the same with melodrama.

Speed Racer is the best melodrama I’ve seen in years. No doubt you already know the plot: Speed is a young racing prodigy who looks set to become the greatest racer of his time. But as soon as he wins his way into the big leagues, he discovers that the outcomes of the major races are fixed. He’s too clean to be bought and too good to be beaten, so the only way the fixers can ensure that their chosen racers win is by cheating – attaching hidden weapons to their cars. So Speed has to be twice as good to win. Cue fantastic racing-battle scenes.

Honestly, what more do you need? No doubt you could make a lousy movie out of that story. But you could also make a terrific movie out of it. And that’s what Speed Racer is.

If you want to know why it’s suddenly snowing horizontally, you’re missing the point.

Another reason people probably think Speed Racer is stupid when they shouldn’t is because it demands a full surrender to the narrative world. In the speedracerverse, everybody drives racecars, even to go shopping; monkeys are semi-intelligent; the hero’s actual, legal name is “Speed Racer” and his mother and father are named “Mom Racer” and “Pops Racer”; even the incorruptible Eliot Ness figure who helps Speed bring down the bad guys is named Inspector Detector. And no explanation is offered. The movie says, in effect: Here is the world where our story takes place; you can come in and join the party or you can go see some other movie.

Which is exactly as it should be. Every story must show you how its narrative universe differs from the real world, but trying to explain why its narrative universe differs from the real world is a fool’s errand.

And then there are the brazen plot devices. For instance, Speed is attacked while racing across a desert. Giant hammers and morningstars pop out of the cars. And just as you’re wondering how all this could be going on without the race officials noticing these giant honking weapons flying around, we cut to the TV announcer saying, “Wow, with all that sand being kicked up, it sure is hard to see what’s going on out there.”

Cheap? Stupid? It would be if it happened in an ordinary narrative, because it wouldn’t belong there. But in Speed Racer, that kind of thing is the narrative. “Stupid” stuff happens all the time in Monty Python, but nobody complains – because the stupid stuff is the whole point of Monty Python. And so, in that context, it’s not stupid at all; it’s brilliant comedy. Same here.

Or if Monty Python is too lowbrow for you, consider the point Dorothy Sayers makes, in another context, in The Mind of the Maker. If you’re writing a novel and you can’t figure out how to get your hero out of the jam he’s in, it would be stupid and wrong to end the novel by writing “Joe suddenly inherited a fortune from a wealthy relative he didn’t know he had, and he used the money to solve all his problems.” On the other hand, you could write a really great novel that opens with the same sentence – a novel about a man who suddenly inherits a fortune. If something brazen and outrageous is stuck on arbitrarily to resolve a problem because you’re too lazy to resolve it in a way that’s organic to the plot, that’s poor storytelling. But there’s nothing wrong with having something brazen and outrageous in your story if that’s what the story is about.

Finally, there is the innovation in the way the digital effects are used. The filmmakers decisively abandon visual realism to an extent that is probably unprescedented for a mainstream movie. During moments of intense conflict, the background fades away, leaving only the main characters surrounded by lights and colors. Things children imagine become momentarily real. A scene will suddenly become a visual montage (complete with people floating randomly across the screen, delivering dialogue) and then return to the scene. And in the final race, once Speed has dispatched the main villain, the rest of the race goes by in a chaotic blur. I think this last scene must be what the critics are thinking of when they complain that the effects are so heavy-handed you can’t tell what’s going on; at least it was the only scene where I couldn’t tell what was going on. But that’s clearly intentional. Once Speed has beaten the bad guy, it’s a given that he’ll win the race. So the fimmakers spare us the tedium of watching it.

To a critic worried about the negative effect of computer effects on filmmaking, all this must come across as reductive – effects intruding into scenes where they don’t belong. But the surreal visual style serves the melodramatic narrative very well. The whole point of melodrama is to clear away all the inevitable complexities of the real world in order to isolate and focus our attention on the stark, even painfully simple moral realities that always lie behind those complexities. People are always a complex blend of good and bad, but good and bad themselves are always simple. The point of melodrama is to tap into that simpler level of truth so that we can experience it, in narrative form, free of the complexities that always cloud it in the real world. What better way to visualize that experience than to have the background fade away as Speed struggles to overcome a thug sent to kill him?

Obviously all this explication is negative – an explanation of why Speed Racer is not dumb. None of that establishes that it is any good.

Fortunately, the producers have spared me a lot of effort by releasing the first seven minutes of the movie for free on the web:

If that doesn’t sell you on the movie, nothing I write will. Do yourself a favor and give it a chance.

But don’t miss Iron Man, either.

11 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Teacher Quality Illustrated

May 21, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

No, that title does not refer to a new glossy magazine for education wonks. It’s the title I’m giving to the following totally unscientific (N=2) but really amazing story that happened to my mother last week.

My mother is a retired teacher living in a mid-size Indiana exurb, where she does volunteer work at the local museum and art center. Last week she was tapped to take a couple of third grade classes around the town and talk about the town’s history.

The first group was out of control and spent the entire trip picking up leaves and throwing them at each other. Their teacher did nothing either to address their behavior or get them to pay attention to the historical talk. She was essentially on vacation.

“This is Lincoln Park,” said my mother as they entered Lincoln Park. “Does anyone know who Lincoln was?”

Silence.

“Abraham Lincoln?”

More silence.

And then, a hand goes up.

“Does he live here in [name of town]?”

My mother comes back exhausted and demoralized. She announces to the head of the art center that she’s through dealing with kids whose teachers can’t even be bothered to keep them in line on a field trip – or to teach them who Abraham Lincoln is.

“But you have another group you’re supposed to take today.”

Out my mother trudges to take the next group, which is already romping around on the lawn outside. This is another third grade class from the same school, serving the same population. The only difference is their room assignment, which is probably close to random.

Seeing my mother appraoch, the teacher claps her hands once.

The entire class falls silent, stops what they’re doing and pays attention. When asked, they organize to set out on the trip. They pay attention at every stop on the trip, and throw no leaves.

“This is Lincoln Park,” said my mother as they enetered Lincoln Park. “Does anyone know who Lincoln was?”

Not only do they know, but – with no prompting from the teacher – they begin to rattle off everything they’ve absorbed about Abraham Lincoln.

“He came through our town once on the back of a train.”

“Yeah, they say he wasn’t planning to stop, but there were so many people he stopped and made a speech.”

Then one child says:

“Every year on President’s Day, my father brings us to Lincoln Park so we can say ‘thank you’ for Abraham Lincoln because he did so much for us.”

On the way back, my mother compliments the teacher and tells her she has a real gift.

“It’s my first year,” she responds.

Taken aback, my mother can only respond that she hopes it’s the first of many.

It later transpired that it was only her first year of teaching in public school; she had two years of experience in private school before that. But under the state’s teacher-union contract, her two years in private school aren’t recognized (as is the case for some private schools in some states), so she’s paid like a first-year teacher.

I do not suggest that we can generalize anything from this story, or from any other story, or even from any number of stories (the plural of anecdote is not data). But I insist that we can, and ought to, generalize from scientific studies, especially when we have a large number of them and the findings are fairly consistent.

The studies on teacher quality find:

  1. While demographics matter for student outcomes, other things also matter – a great deal – and teacher quality is one of the most important things that matter.
  2. Years of experience, which are one of the two primary determinants of teacher pay, are not strongly associated with improved student outcomes, particularly after the first few years. (Neither are teaching credentials, the other major determinant of teacher pay.)

Yes, I know that the kid whose father takes him to Lincoln Park every year has a good family environment. But the kids in the other class have good family environments, too – this is a high-income exurb in Indiana we’re talking about.

I just thought that, in addition to being a lot of fun (“Abraham Lincoln? Does he live here in town?” Yeah, he and Tom Jefferson own the big antiques store on Main Street, right next to Billy Shakespeare’s used book shop), the story illustrated what we know from the science about teacher quality in a striking way.

Oh, and here’s another point worth making: Now that America’s public school system has apparently decided not to name schools after important civic figures any more, it’s all the more important that we hire teachers who will make sure their students know who Abraham Lincoln was. Either that, or public schools will continue to lag behind private schools in teaching students good democratic values.

5 Comments | civic values, teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Ask Reid Lyon – Reading First Implementation

May 19, 2008

(Guest post by Reid Lyon)

“The implementation of Reading First has been a hot topic, especially since the release of the recent impact study. Has the implementation of the program been successful?  What were the most important issues that arose regarding the implementation of Reading First? What lessons have been learned?”

 

With respect to whether the implementation of the program has been successful, the short answer is it depends.  Amber Winkler, the research director for the Fordham Foundation, recently reported in the Gadfly that Reading First is “perhaps the best-implemented education program in federal history.”  This may be true in some states, but not in others.  Dr. Winkler highlights Georgia, Oregon, and California as states that got the implementation process right.

 

On the other hand, Texas and several other states made successful implementation unbearably difficult.  In Texas, for example, a process was initially in place to award districts Reading First funding if their proposals were rated above a particular score by the grant review group.  Proposals from districts scoring below a threshold value were to be resubmitted following technical assistance to equip the district with in depth understanding of Scientifically Based Reading Research (SBRR) and to incorporate those concepts in their resubmission along with assessment and accountability requirements.  For some reason, a decision was made to award all districts Reading First funding irrespective of the quality of their applications.  Moreover, eligible districts received Reading First funding before any technical assistance was in place and before any baseline reading assessments could be administered for program evaluation purposes.  Not good.

 

But there is a great deal more involved in the implementation of a complex program beyond ensuring the quality of grant applications, and few states and districts had their hands around all of the essential conditions that must be in place to embed and bring to scale an initiative as intricate as Reading First.  At first blush, it would seem that the existence of a converging body of evidence relevant to reading development, reading difficulties, and reading instruction would have facilitated implementation fidelity.  But a substantial research base, bipartisan political support, and hefty funding only go so far.  The devil is in the details, and strategies for implementation at the federal level and in many states either were not appraised of the details or simply felt, as in Texas, that the money had to flow immediately no matter what, reflecting education’s love affair with entitlement programs.

 

One detail that gets right in your face immediately when you are implementing a program as complex as Reading First is that you have to manage coordinated systems change at federal, state, district, school and classroom levels.  Complexity theorists like W.L. Miller and his team use the metaphor of a jazz band when discussing how individuals within an effective system perform their own tasks in concert with others in achieving a desired goal.  Each contributor is responsible for certain tasks, but always listening to the other members of the orchestra to determine how their own actions contribute to the whole. This is tough to do when the band members come from different generations and different musical perspectives.  Getting into the groove takes a good deal of practice and a willingness to expand one’s thinking.  These are not features that characterize public education.   Basically, any evaluation of a program like Reading First must drill down into how this coordination played out and how long it took.  

 

Another common-sense detail that was not planned for in the implementation schedule was the fact that many hard-working folks in schools and classrooms who have gotten used to doing things in a certain way were being asked to change their routines and to try something new. In some cases this meant a decision was made to stop certain programs and replace them with others that many were unfamiliar with. When this occurs, teachers and leaders must have confidence that what is being implemented provides advantages to students over existing practices – and, in many instances, the case for this was not made prior to implementation.  While this may seem a bit fluffy, it is important to understand that public-school educators are under a constant barrage of new magic bullets, fads, and aggressive textbook company representatives all selling materials “based on SBRR.”  Implementation experts will tell you that without teacher and leader buy-in, any program, no matter how effective, will not realize its potential.  Fortunately, the majority of those leading and teaching in Reading First districts and schools saw the clear advantages offered students by the program as they observed poor readers become good readers.  But this took a while. 

 

In my interactions with many Reading First programs over the past six years, I did notice some common conditions that were in place when implementation fidelity was strong.  In addition to the details noted above, strong implementers embraced data and accountability for results.  States like Alabama integrated robust professional development with continuous coaching and feedback for both teachers and leaders.  Instructional programs were selected not only on the basis of their alignment with SBRR but because they were practical, useful, and beneficial to students.  Teachers were treated as self-determined professionals and responded by taking ownership and responsibility for their parts in the jazz band.  And building-level leadership ensured that teachers and coaches had the necessary time to plan, review student data, and collaborate in differentiating instruction for individual students based on their performance data.

 

The lessons learned are many, but I can think of three big ones.  Let’s start with the way Congress and the feds typically expect complex programs to be in place, in full operation, as soon legislation is passed.  Reading First embodied so many new concepts and requirements that, in my view, the first year should have been spent in providing technical assistance and professional development to states and districts even prior to the submission of Reading First grants.  I can’t tell you the number of times I saw the thousand-yard stare following my mention of SBRR, progress monitoring, data-driven instruction, or comprehensive reading programs.  We are talking significant mismatch between the requirements of the legislation and the background knowledge of many grant applicants; not to mention that the grants were competitive – a novel concept in education formula funding.

 

And if you were on the ground during the first two years of the program, this is what you would typically observe:  Teachers were first learning to understand, administer and use the results of assessments to inform instruction.  As they were learning these new concepts, they were also taking part in state reading academies to learn more about  the foundation of SBRR (in 5 areas of reading in k-1, in 4 areas  of reading in 2-3). In addition, as they were learning and using new assessments and taking part in professional development academies and workshops, they were simultaneously learning how to use a new approach to instruction and how to integrate core program instruction with additional interventions when required to meet individual student needs. This was done at the same time they were learning about center activities, grouping students for instruction and aligning and using supported classroom libraries.

 

It is important to ask whether any program that has added this amount of new learning to a teacher’s other responsibilities – including going to IEP meetings, attending parent conferences, preparing for their instruction in math, social studies and science, serving on school-wide committees and a host of other tasks – could demonstrate substantial gains after three years.  Give me a break.  What is amazing is that despite this unbelievable load, Reading First coordinators, teachers and their leaders rose to the occasion and have done and are doing a superb job.

 

Lesson Number One: Take a year to develop the infrastructure essential for program implementation. 

 

Lesson Number Two: During this first year,  make sure that all involved at every level understand the essential conditions that have to be in place to coordinate and implement a massive and unique program and to anticipate the need to customize some of its features based on individual district and school characteristics.

 

Lesson Number Three – and this is for the Department of Education: The next time Congress gives you $25 million dollars a year for six years to carry out an ongoing evaluation of a program, for God’s sake design and implement the evaluation commensurate with the initiation of the program.  This was no time to carry out a delayed and abbreviated evaluation when the complexity and uniqueness of a program demanded comprehensive, continuous and systematic feedback to ensure improvements in implementation where needed.

Leave a Comment » | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Get Lost 4

May 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

While Jay’s travelling, I’ll be providing your weekly descent into Lost geekdom.

This may seem like a strange thing to single out, but what I liked most about this episode was the return of the real Hurley. Last week I was a little miffed when Hurley decided not to go into the cabin. That’s not the Hurley I know: the one who’s driven to find answers about the malevolent force that’s killed his grandfather and ruined his life – and who has consistently shown himself to be physically brave in his pursuit of his quest. (“I can make it. I can get out of the way. I’m spry.”) This week I felt like we saw the return of the real Hurley.

This Hurley!

Okay, that thing in the woods – maybe it’s a monster. Maybe it’s a pissed-off giraffe. I don’t know! The fact that no one is even looking for us? Yeah, that’s weird. But I just go along with it, because I’m along for the ride. Good old fun time Hurley. Well guess what?

NOW I WANT SOME FRIGGIN’ ANSWERS!

(HT LostTalk.net; you can see the original in all its glory at 6:00 here)

The really great thing about Lost is the amazing character portrayal. They’re not stereotypes. You feel like you know these people. Think about how hard that must be for the writers given the number of characters they’re juggling.

Second order of business. I believe this was the first time that the “flash backward/forward” storyline followed more than one character (or two closely related characters like Jin and Sun or Boone and Shannon – remember them?). I spent most of the episode thinking, “this isn’t working.” They were trying to do too many things, and the narrative didn’t gel.

Of course, at the end we saw why they were doing it. They were trying to set up the season finale with a feeling of epic scope – half a dozen plotlines all coming to a head at the same time and in the same place. Focusing on one character’s story would undermine the big closing montage of everyone trudging through the jungle towards The Orchid (it felt kind of like the Lost version of the “One Day More” number in Les Mis, or “Tonight” in West Side Story). So by the end I wasn’t disappointed with it, but on the other hand I don’t think they achieved what they were going for.

A side point that occurred to me: Earlier in the season, we established that the Oceanic Six cover story claims that eight people survived the crash and two never made it off the island. At the time I assumed that Claire had to be one of them, in order to explain the presence of her baby, Aaron. But now it transpires that the cover story claims Aaron is Kate’s. So now we don’t know the identities of both of the people who (according to the cover story) survived the crash but not the island.

On the other hand, the mystery of why Jack was reluctant to pursue Kate on account of Aaron has been resolved. Aaron is a constant reminder of his father’s failings, and as the show’s producers put it in a season 1 episode title, all the best cowboys have daddy issues.

Final note: the preview of the season finale claims (or perphas suggests, I don’t remember the exact words) that we will see the rescue of the Oceanic Six. Lost previews have lied many times before. But if this one’s accurate, does that imply that seasons five and six will take place in “the future,” i.e. 2005? Or will we see the rescue in a flash-forward?

See you in two weeks!

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

The Real Case for NCLB

May 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

My column on NCLB is on Pajamas Media this morning. A sample:

When you set aside all the implausible multi-year plans, toothless sanctions, easily evaded school choice requirements, and other window dressing, NCLB boils down to one simple commercial transaction: the system got a big cash payoff, in exchange for which it agreed to give standardized tests and release up-to-date information on how students are performing.

Before NCLB, many states didn’t give standardized tests at all, or didn’t release the results in a timely and publicly useable format. Now they all do. And all 50 states now participate in the Nation’s Report Card, a single national test of a representative sample of students, which allows researchers to conduct cross-state comparisons.

This transparency represents an incredible boon. The amount of empirical research done on education has been growing at a breathtaking rate. Before NCLB, education was a fringe element at best in economics, political science, and other social science disciplines. Now it’s everywhere. A lot of that research is due to the data made available by NCLB.

4 Comments | NCLB | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

That “Wizardry” Teacher Firing – There’s More to the Story

May 15, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Recently, a lot of people linked to this story:

A substitute teacher in Pasco County has lost his job after being accused of wizardry. Teacher Jim Piculas does a magic trick where a toothpick disappears and then reappears. Piculas recently did the 30-second trick in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes. Piculas said he then got a call from the supervisor of teachers, saying he’d been accused of wizardry. “I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'” he said. Piculas said he did not know of any other accusations that would have led to the action. The teacher said he is concerned that the incident may prevent him from getting future jobs.

Quite a few bloggers and (especially) their commenters used this as an opportunity to bash their favorite targets: Parents are stupid, conservatives are stupid, Christians are stupid, stupid people are stupid, etc. A handful of people even managed to ask whether maybe the school officials bear just a tiny fraction of the responsibility.

Unfortunately, when describing the story, most bloggers and even most media outlets failed to include this information:

Local education officials, however, deny that Piculas was sacked for wizardry, citing a number of other complaints made against the teacher, such as not sticking to lesson plans and allowing students to use school computers.

Oops.

His dismissal form and the formal letter informing him that he would not be hired again also state that he used inappropriate language in class and put a student in charge of the class. And that reference to letting students “use school computers” turns out to mean that he allegedly let kids wander away from class and use the computers when they were supposed to be at their desks working.

Always click through those links before posting!

Nor did many people mention that the same school district that allegedly fired a substitute teacher for performing one magic trick has been hiring a professional magician to come in and perform for the kids for years, and after this story broke, they’ve reassured him that they still want him to come do his show. That tends to discredit the storyline some are peddling that Pasco County has been taken over by crazy right-wing extremists.

It’s not even clear whether any parental complaint about wizardry was actually filed. Most media reports I’ve seen have reported as fact that a parent complained to the school about wizardry, but the only evidence for this “fact” seems to be the claims of the fired substitute himself.

Tampa Channel 10 initially reported that the district claimed that the reason for the firing wasn’t “just” wizardry. That’s better than most media outlets, which didn’t report the district’s side of the story at all. But the claim that the problem wasn’t “just” wizardry didn’t come from a quote; the reporter put that word into the district’s mouth. As noted above, other outlets reported simply that that district denied wizardry was an issue. All the direct quotes and documents from the district seem to back that interpretation rather than the characterization in the initial Channel 10 report. And when Channel 10 did a follow-up report, the district said performing magic tricks is not against school policy, and the teacher’s magic trick was “insignificant.”

It is, of course, theoretically possible that there really was a parental complaint about wizardry, and that a dim-witted local school official decided to fire a substitute based on one parent’s crazy complaint, and that the district made up a bunch of accusations against the substitute after the fact in order to cover up what had happened (all of which is alleged by the fired substitute).

If so, I can only say that the schools in Pasco County are amazingly responsive to their parents. Do you suppose they have a big phone bank to call every parent at home every night and get approval for the next day’s lesson plan and lunch menu?

Kudos to Tampa Channel 10, which seems to have done the most follow-up work on this story, and to the few other media outlets doing their jobs.

2 Comments | civic values, journalism, scandal, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Georgia Enacts Nation’s 23rd School Choice Program

May 14, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has signed the legislation sent to him last month creating a tax-credit scholarship program in Georgia. It’s the nation’s 23rd school choice program.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Further proof, if further proof were necessary, that school choice is politically more successful than ever.

One thing that’s really gratifying about this program is that it has no demographic restrictions at all. Any student enrolled in Georgia public schools (K-12) is eligible for a private school scholarship. The days of limited choice are numbered.

Having swung from a win in Louisiana to a win in Georgia, all eyes now swing back to Louisiana, where a legislative vote today will determine whether a voucher bill moves forward. Gov. Bobby Jindal recently signed into law an education tax credit in the state.

Details on the new Georgia program, as they will soon appear on the Friedman Foundation’s online program guide:

GEORGIA

Tax Credits for Student Scholarship Organizations

Enacted 2008

Georgia provides a credit on both personal and corporate income taxes for donations to Student Scholarship Organizations (SSOs), privately run non-profit organizations that support private-school scholarships. Individual taxpayers contributing to SSOs may claim a dollar-for-dollar credit of up to $1,000, and married couples filing jointly may claim up to $2,500.  Corporate taxpayers may claim a dollar-for-dollar credit worth up to 75 percent of the taxpayer’s total tax liability. The program is capped at $50 million in tax credits per year.

FAST FACTS

·         All Georgia public school students eligible

·         Both individual and corporate taxpayers may donate

·         Program capped at $50 million

Scholarship or Voucher Value:

SSOs may determine the amount of each scholarship, as in most other states with tax-credit scholarship programs.

Student or School Participation:

No information on participation is available yet.

Student Eligibility:

All Georgia students enrolled in public schools are eligible to receive scholarships. SSOs may set their own eligibility guidelines. Taxpayers may not make contributions earmarked for a particular child.

Legal Status of Program:

No legal challenges have been filed against the program.

Regulations on the Program:

SSOs are required to be non-profit organizations that allocate at least 90 percent of their revenue to private-school scholarships. No more than 25 percent of an SSO’s revenue may be carried forward into the next year before it is spent. SSOs must undergo annual audits by certified public accountants, file audits and fiscal reports with the Department of Revenue, may not use a donor’s money to support that donor’s child and may not restrict their scholarships to a single school. Participating private schools must obey anti-discrimination laws.

Research on Program:

Currently no research items tied to this program.

 

News on Program:

Currently no news items are tied to this program.

 

Governing Statutes:

Georgia Code, 20-2A and 48-7-29.13.

3 Comments | tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Correction on Tax Credits

May 9, 2008

(Guest Post by Greg Forster)

In this post a while back, I wrote that the potential for enacting school choice by giving families tax credits for their education expenditures would be strictly limited “until some state enacts a refundable credit.”

George Clowes wrote me to point out that the tax credit in Minnesota is already refundable. And since I’ve already pointed out that you don’t want to get on George Clowes’s bad side, I hasten to correct my error.

This doesn’t really affect my point much, since the Minnesota credit just happens to be the only one that doesn’t include tuition (only other education expenses like books and fees are eligible) and this is an even bigger limitation than the “unrefundability” (to use a totally real and not-made-up word) of the credits in other states. Tax credits for private school families won’t provide much choice until we get one that 1) is refundable, 2) isn’t restricted to a small amount of money, and 3) includes tution.

Nonetheless, I apologize for the error, and I thank George for bringing it to my attention.

Leave a Comment » | personal tax credits/deductions | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Vouchers: Evidence and Ideology

May 8, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

 

Lately, Robert Enlow and I at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice have had to spend a lot of time responding to the erroneous claims Sol Stern has been making about school choice. I honestly hate to be going up against Sol Stern right at the moment when he’s doing important work in other areas. America owes Stern a debt for doing the basic journalistic work on Bill Ayers that most journalists covering the presidential race didn’t seem interested in doing.

 

But what can we do? We didn’t choose this fight. If Stern is going to make a bunch of false claims about school choice, it’s our responsibility to make sure people have access to the facts and the evidence that show he’s wrong.

 

That’s why Enlow and I have focused primarily on using data and evidence to demonstrate that Stern’s claims are directly contrary to the known facts. It’s been interesting to see how Stern and his defenders are responding.

 

I’ve been saddened at how little effort Stern and his many defenders are devoting to seriously addressing the evidence we present. For example, all the studies of the effects of vouchers on public schools that were conducted outside the city of Milwaukee have been completely ignored both by Stern and by every one of his defenders I’ve seen so far. Does evidence outside Milwaukee not count for some reason? Since most of the studies on this subject have been outside Milwaukee, this arbitrary focus on Milwaukee is hard to swallow.

 

And what about the studies in Milwaukee? All of them had positive findings: vouchers improve public schools. Unfortunately, Stern and his critics fail to engage with these studies seriously.

 

Stern had argued in his original article that school choice doesn’t improve public schools, on grounds that the aggregate performance of schools in Milwaukee is still bad. His critics pointed out that a large body of high quality empirical research found that vouchers have a positive effect on public schools, both in Milwaukee and elsewhere. If Milwaukee schools are still bad, that doesn’t prove vouchers aren’t helping; and since a large body of high quality empirical research says they do help, the obvious conclusion to reach – if we are going to be guided by the data – is that other factors are dragging down Milwaukee school performance at the same time vouchers are pulling it upward.

 

If an asthma patient starts using medicine, and at the same time takes up smoking, his overall health may not improve. But that doesn’t mean the medicine is no good. I also think that there may be a “neighborhood effect” in Milwaukee, since eligibility for the program isn’t spread evenly over the whole city.

 

There’s new research forthcoming in Milwaukee that I hope will shed more light on the particular reasons the city’s aggregate performance hasn’t improved while vouchers have exerted a positive influence on it. The important point is that all the science on this subject (with one exception, in D.C., which I’ve been careful to take note of when discussing the evidence) finds in favor of vouchers.

 

In Stern’s follow-up defense of his original article, his “response,” if you can call it that, is to repeat his original point – that the aggregate performance of schools in Milwaukee citywide are still generally bad.

 

He disguises his failure to respond to his critics’ argument by making a big deal out of dates. He says that all the studies in Milwaukee are at least six years old (which is actually not very old by the standards of education research), and then provides some more recent data on the citywide aggregate performance of Milwaukee schools. But this obviously has nothing to do with the question; Stern’s critics agree that the aggregate data show Milwaukee schools are still bad. The question is whether vouchers exert a positive or negative effect. Aggregate data are irrelevant; only causal studies can address the question.

 

Of course it’s easy to produce more up-to-date data if you’re not going to use scientific methods to distinguish the influence of different factors and ensure the accuracy of your analysis. If you don’t care about all that science stuff, there’s no need to wait for studies to be conducted; last year’s raw data will do fine.

 

Weak as this is, at least it talks about the evidence. The response to our use of facts and evidence has overwhelmingly been to accuse school choice supporters of ideological closed-mindedness. Although we are appealing to facts and evidence, we are accused of being unwilling to confront the facts and evidence – accused by people who themselves do not engage with the facts and evidence to which we appeal.

 

Stern, for example, complains at length that “school choice had become a secular faith, requiring enforced discipline” and “unity through an enforced code of silence.” Apparently when we demonstrate that his assertions are factually false, we are enforcing silence upon him. (We’ve been so successful in silencing Stern that he is now a darling of the New York Times. If he thinks this is silence, he should get his hearing checked.)

 

Similarly, when Stern’s claims received uncritical coverage from Daniel Casse in the Weekly Standard, Enlow and Neal McCluskey wrote in to correct the record. Casse responded by claiming, erroneously, that Stern had already addressed their arguments in his rebuttal.

 

Casse also repeated, in an abbreviated form, Stern’s non-response on the subject of the empirical studies in Milwaukee – and in so doing he changed it from a non-response to an error. He erroneously claims that Stern responded to our studies by citing the “most recent studies.” But Stern cites no studies; he just cites raw data. It’s not a study until you conduct a statistical analysis to distinguish the influence of particular factors (like vouchers) from the raw aggregate results – kind of like the analyses conducted in the studies that we cite and that Stern and Casse dismiss without serious discussion.

 

Casse then praised Stern’s article because “it dealt with the facts on the ground” and accused school choice supporters of “reciting the school choice catechism.”

 

Greg Anrig, in this Washington Monthly article, actually manages to broach the subject of the scientific quality of one of the Milwaukee studies. Unfortunately, he doesn’t cite any of the other research, in Milwaukee or elsewhere, examining the effect of vouchers on public schools. So if you read his article without knowing the facts, you’ll think that one Milwaukee study is the only study that ever found that vouchers improve public schools, when in fact there’s a large body of consistently positive research on the question.

 

Moreover, Anrig’s analysis of the one Milwaukee study he does cite is superficial. He points out that the results in that study may be attributable to the worst students leaving the public schools. Leave aside that this is unlikely to be the case, much less that it would account for the entire positive effect the study found. The more important point is that there have been numerous other studies of this question that use methods that allow researchers to examine whether this is driving the results. Guess what they find.

 

Though he ignores all but one of the studies cited by school choice supporters, shuffling all the rest offstage lest his audience become aware of the large body of research with positive findings on vouchers, Anrig cites other studies that he depicts as refuting the case for vouchers. Like Stern’s citation of the raw data in Milwaukee, these other studies in fact are methodologically unable to examine the only question that counts – what was the specific impact of vouchers, as distinct from the raw aggregate results? (I’m currently putting together a full-length response to Anrig’s article that will go over the specifics on these studies, but if you follow education research you already know about them – the notoriously tarnished HLM study of NAEP scores, the even more notoriously bogus WPRI fiasco, etc.)

 

But Anrig, like his predecessors, is primarily interested not in the quality of the evidence but in the motives of school choice supporters. He spends most of his time tracing the sinister influence of the Bradley Foundation and painting voucher supporters as right-wing ideologues.

 

And these are the more respectable versions of the argument. In the comment sections here on Jay P. Greene’s Blog, Pajamas Media, and Joanne Jacobs’s site, much the same argument is put in a cruder form: you can’t trust studies that find school choice works, because after all, they’re conducted by researchers who think that school choice works.

 

(Some of these commenters also seem to be confused about the provenance and data sources of these studies. I linked to copies of the studies stored in the Friedman Foundation’s research database, but that doesn’t make them Friedman Foundation studies. As I stated, they were conducted at Harvard, Princeton, etc. And at one point I linked to an ELS study I did last year that also contained an extensive review of the existing research on school choice, but that doesn’t mean all the previous studies on school choice were ELS studies.)

 

What is one to make of all this? The more facts and evidence we provide, the more we’re accused of ignoring the facts and evidence – by people who themselves fail to address the facts and evidence we provide.

 

I’m tempted to say that there’s a word for that sort of behavior. And there may be some merit in that explanation, though of course I have no way of knowing. But I also think there’s something else going on as well.

 

One prominent blogger put it succinctly to me over e-mail. The gist of his challenge was something like: “Why don’t you just admit that all this evidence and data is just for show, and you really support school choice for ideological reasons?”

 

I think this expresses an idea that many people have – that there is “evidence” over here and then there is “ideology” over there, and the two exist in hermetically sealed containers and can never have any contact with one another. (Perhaps this tendency is part of the long-term damage wrought by Max Weber’s misuse of the fact/value distinction, but that’s a question for another time.)

 

On this view, if you know that somebody has a strong ideology, you have him “pegged” and can dismiss any evidence he brings in support of his position as a mere epiphenomenon. The evidence is a distraction from your real task, which is to identify and reveal the pernicious influence of his ideology on his thinking. Hence the widespread assumption that when a school choice supporter brings facts and evidence, there is no need to trouble yourself addressing all that stuff. Why bother? The point is that he’s an ideologue; the facts are irrelevant.

 

But, as I explained to the blogger who issued that challenge, evidence and ideology are not hermetically sealed. Ideology includes policy preferences, but those policy preferences are always grounded in a set of expectations about the way the world works. In fact, I would say that an “ideology” is better defined as a set of expectations about how the world works than as a set of policy preferences. (That would help explain, for example, why we still speak of differences between “liberal” and “conservative” viewpoints even on issues like immigration where there are a lot of liberals and conservatives on both sides.) And our expectations about how the world works are subject to verification or falsification by evidence.

 

So, for example, I hold an ideology that says (broadly speaking) that freedom makes social institutions work better. That’s one of the more important reasons I support school choice – because I want schools (all schools, public and private) to get better, and I have an expectation that when educational freedom is increased, schools will improve. My ideology is subject to empirical verification. If school choice programs do in fact make public schools better – as the empirical studies consistently show they do – then that is evidence that supports my ideology.

 

Even the one study that has ever shown that vouchers didn’t improve public schools, the one in D.C., also confirms my ideology. The D.C. program gives cash bribes to the public school system to compensate for lost students, thus undermining the competitive incentives that would otherwise improve public schools – so the absence of a positive voucher impact is just what my ideology would predict.

 

Other evidence may also be relevant to the truth or falsehood of my ideology, of course. The point is that evidence is relevant, and truth or falsehood is the issue that matters.

 

Now, as I’ve already sort of obliquely indicated, my view that freedom makes things work better is not the only reason I support school choice. But it is one of the more important reasons. So, if you somehow proved to me that freedom doesn’t make social institutions work better, I wouldn’t immediately disavow school choice, since there are other reasons besides that to support it. However, I would have significantly less reason to support it than I did before.

 

If we really think that evidence has nothing to do with ideology, I don’t see how we avoid the conclusion that people’s beliefs have nothing to do with truth or falsehood – ultimately, that all human thought is irrational. Bottom line, you aren’t entitled to ignore your opponent’s evidence, or dismiss it as tainted because it is cited by your opponent.

 

UPDATE: See this list of complete lists of all the empirical research on vouchers.

 

Edited for typos

14 Comments | competitive effects, methodology, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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