Since Matt started it, already gloating about the defeat of our beloved University of Arkansas Razorbacks by the University of Texas Longhorns in this upcoming Saturday’s football game, I thought I would respond by showing real Longhorn fans giving the Hook ‘Em Horns Sign.
(edited to replace broken link to Yassir and to add the guy from the Breakfast Club)
7 Comments | 
college sports | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
I miss Bill.
I miss significant expansions in free trade, like with the passage of NAFTA. Instead, under Bush we’ve had new tariffs on steel, tariffs on underwear, and protectionism on catfish.
I miss welfare reform that encouraged work and discouraged irresponsible behavior. Instead, under Bush we’ve just had $1 trillion in corporate socialism that simply transfers wealth from taxpayers who didn’t work for or invest with reckless financial institutions to the people who do. Doing so discourages work and rewards irresponsible behavior.
I miss low inflation and unemployment partially sustained by fiscal restraint. Instead, under Bush we’ve had runaway government spending with rising inflation and unemployment.
I miss an articulate, well-crafted speech that inspires us to support promising government efforts. Instead, under Bush… well, you know.
Of course, divided government may have helped shape Clinton’s agenda and deserves some of the credit. And of course, presidents can’t take full credit or blame for the economy or world events. And I certainly wouldn’t say I miss everything about him. But whoever helped shape Bill, whatever credit doesn’t belong to him, and despite his failings, those were good times and he was a good president.
18 Comments | politics | Tagged: Bill Clinton, Jay P. Greene. Jay Greene | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Good can come from failure. Abraham Lincoln’s failure to capture a Senate seat set the stage for his presidential run. Winston Churchill’s failure at Gallipoli prepared him for the strategic challenges of WW II. Recognizing failure and trying to move forward is almost always better than pretending that you haven’t really failed.
So why is the federal government preventing the failure of financial firms, such as AIG or Bear Stearns? Providing government loans to AIG or guaranteeing the buyer of Bear Stearns against loss did not alter any of the financial reality. Nothing new was produced or created. No new capital was created; it was simply transferred from taxpayers (either by contributing to inflation or by adding to national debt) to people who do work for or business with these firms.
Conversely, if these firms had instead been allowed to fail by going bankrupt nothing would have been destroyed. All of the financial capital held by these firms would still exist. And all of the human capital of the people who works for those firms would still exist. Bankruptcy doesn’t mean that you take all of the capital of a firm, put it in a pile, and blow it up. It’s all still there. What bankruptcy does is it forces people to reorganize what they will do with that financial and human capital. That is, they are forces to recognize their failure and figure out a better way to do things.
And even more importantly, failure forces people involved with these firms to experience the consequences of their actions. Those people — and everyone else — learns from those consequences and hopefully changes their behavior in the future. To prevent failure is to prevent learning.
The same is true for schools. Good can come from failure. Of course, we’d prefer to avoid failure, if at all possible. But if the reality is that students or educators or schools have failed, then insulating people from that reality doesn’t do anyone any favors. No new knowledge is created by hiding failure and none is destroyed by recognizing it. Admitting that students, educators, or schools have failed allows us to reorganize how we do things and to all learn important lessons.
13 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: aig, bear stearns, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Education policy debates should have a law. No one should be allowed to highlight numerators without also presenting denominators. That is, it is often misleading to describe a big number without putting that number in perspective. In almost every education policy issue we see debates distorted by large numbers (the numerators) without the benefit of perspective that comes from also mentioning the denominator.
For example, the placement of disabled students in private schools is a regular sore spot for school districts and the topic of numerous alarming articles in the media. New York City complained as part of its lawsuit in the Tom F. case that private placements initiated by parent request were costing NYC schools $49.3 million in a single school year.
Wow, that sounds like a huge burden — it’s millions of dollars! But that is just the numerator. If we add the denominator to the discussion, private placements no longer seem like a large financial burden. NYC has a total annual budget of about $17 billion. Once we add the denominator we see that private placement consists of about .3% of the NYC budget. And if we consider that disabled students would have to be educated in the public schools if they were not placed in private schools, the additional cost of private placement is less than .1% of the total NYC budget. See what a difference a denominator can make?
Articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, etc… lament the crushing burden of private placements. One would think from all of these articles that private placements happen all of the time. In fact, there are 57,708 disabled students using public funds to be educated in private schools at parental request.
Wow, that’s tens of thousands of students. But wait. There are more than 6 million disabled students and almost 49 million total students in K-12 education. So privately placed students represent less than 1% of all disabled students and about one-tenth of one percent of all students. Enforcing the denominator law would have a huge effect on news coverage of this issue.
The presentation of numerators without denominators also distorts the “boy crisis” debate. In a recent report issued by the American Association of University Women, they argue that boys are doing fine since the number of men graduating college has increased over time: “More men are earning college degrees today in the United States than at any time in history. During the past 35 years, the college educated population has greatly expanded: The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually rose 82 percent, from 792,316 in 1969–70 to 1,439,264 in 2004–05.” It’s true that the number of women enrolled in college has increased even faster, they claim, but as long as college enrollment is rising for both men and women, there is no cause for alarm.
But there are also more people in the United States over time. How do things look when we add a denominator to the discussion? In 2006 25.3% of men between the ages of 25 and 29 had a BA or higher. If we look at the cohort of men three decades earlier (ages 55-59) 34.7% have a BA or higher. Educational attainment is declining for men once we add the denominator. The same comparisons for women show an increase from 27.4% holding a BA or higher among those ages 55-59, rising to 31.6% among women ages 25-29.
The Denominator Law is important because the number of people and dollars involved in education is so huge that everything seems big without the benefit of the perspective that denominators bring.
2 Comments | journalism, special ed | Tagged: AAUW, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, private placement, special education | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The NY Sun columnist, Andrew Wolf, has posted a long and angry comment, taking exception to Matt Ladner’s post, Little Ramona’s Gone Hillbilly Nuts. In that post Matt challenged Diane Ravitch’s assertion that Joel Klein, Cory Booker, Michelle Rhee, and Adrian Fenty were seeking to “dismantle public education, piece by piece” by supporting merit pay, reductions in teacher tenure, and charter schools. Matt observed that these were extra-ordinary charges to make “without presenting a scintilla of supporting evidence.”
But Wolf responds: “I am astounded by the puerile ad hominem attack on Dr. Diane Ravitch that appeared in Jay Greene’s blog. Like all of us, Dr. Ravitch has a right for her opinion to be respected and discussed without opponents resorting to such a childish (and inaccurate) attack. Apparently, Prof. Greene and his band of acolytes can’t muster the intellectual arguments to counter those of Dr. Ravitch, so must resort to this denigration of her scholarship and beliefs.”
I see. And accusing Klein, Booker, Rhee, and Fenty of seeking to dismantle public education without any supporting evidence is not ad hominem?
It is not ad hominem to say, as I did in my post on this, that “it is shocking to see these new claims made without any evidence that merit pay, weaker tenure, and charter schools harm public education, let alone destroy it. Other than the fact that Bloomberg and Klein support these policies, it is not clear why Diane Ravitch opposes them.” The fact is that Diane Ravitch did not provide evidence to support her claim and it is perfectly within reasonable discourse to point that out.
If Andrew Wolf wants a substantive discussion rather than ad hominem, how about if he starts by providing the evidence that merit pay, reduced tenure rights, and charter schools “dismantle public education” that Ravitch neglected to provide?
In his own defense, Matt added, “A long and distinguished career does not entitle one to make such reckless and unsupported claims.”
4 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: Diane Ravtich, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Matt Ladner | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Mike Petrilli is thinking ahead over at Flypaper. He’s trying to figure out who the next secretary of education might be under a McCain or Obama administration.
He’s got some good guesses but I would only add — Please, let it not be Huckabee.
Take it from an Arkansan. Unless you like huge spending increases with little achievement improvement, hostility to vouchers and charters, consolidation of small school districts, and an odd interest in music education which he tried to promote in a conference call with country musicians who all learned music in church and not in school… Huckabee wouldn’t be your pick.
5 Comments | politics | Tagged: Mike Huckabee | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
No, this isn’t a photo of Greg, Matt, and me (but if it were, I’m sure I’d be Egon on the right).
This is what came to mind when I heard that Doug Tuthill, the former head of the teacher union in Pinellas County Florida, was named the new president of the Florida School Choice Fund, an organization that raises money for and promotes tax-credit supported vouchers. And Jon East, the former St. Pete Times editorial writer and prominent voucher critic, has signed on to be the Fund’s communications director. There must be a cataclysm of biblical proportions going on here. Dogs and cats are living together!
Add this to the Democrats for Education Reform hosting an event at the Democratic Convention where “In front of a gathering of about 500 delegates, four ‘smart, young, powerful, bald** black state and local elected officials’ (Kaus’s description; the asterisks lead to a note conceding the presence of some hair on one guy’s head – but only on the sides) denounce teachers’ unions, explicitly and in strong terms, and recieve vigorous applause. ‘In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention!’(emphasis in original) Most satisfying line: “John Wilson, head of the NEA itself, was also there. Afterwards, he seemed a bit stunned.”
Rick Hess, Mike Petrilli, Diane Ravitch, and Sol Stern may be jumping off the school choice train (or at least hanging dangerously off the side), but Adrian Fenty, Marion Bary, Al Sharpton, and a bunch of Democratic delegates are jumping on. (OK, you can insert your Marion Bary or Al Sharpton joke here). But these are signs of a possibly dramatic political realignment.
I wonder what’ll happen if we cross the streams?
2 Comments | politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Juan Cole has an awful piece on Salon this morning “What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick.”
A friend of mine commented: “Hmmmmm….well, lipstick, and the whole blowing up innocent people thing…. personally, its the blowing up people that gets me a bit upset about radical Islam, but hey, that’s me.”
Another friend noted: “So if this is what Juan Cole really thinks, why does he support one set of fundamentalists (the ones with suicide belts) and not the other (the ones with lipstick)?”
(edited to correct source as Salon)
4 Comments | politics | Tagged: Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Juan Cole, Sarah Palin | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
It must be the back to school season because there are a lot of interesting education pieces on the web. I thought I’d just mention and briefly comment on some:
4 Comments | teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: Diane Ravitch, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Marcus Winters, Matt Ladner, National Review Online, Thomas Hibbs | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
I have a piece this morning on National Review Online about special education vouchers.
Governor Palin said in her convention speech that she was going to be an advocate for special-needs kids in the White House. I discuss what she should be an advocate for — special ed vouchers.
4 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, McKay, Sarah Palin, special eduction, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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