Jay P. Greene's Blog

James Lynn Woodworth, who goes by Lynn, has been picked to lead the National Center for Education Statistics in the US Department of Education.  Lynn enrolled in the Department of Education Reform‘s PhD program as part of its inaugural class in 2009. He completed his doctorate in 2013 and began work as a researcher with CREDO at Stanford University.  Before coming to the University of Arkansas, Lynn was a teacher and band instructor at Mansfield High School for 11 years.  Before that he was a Marine, where he worked in Intelligence and developed a proficiency in Arabic.

We are extremely proud of Lynn as we are of the successes of all of our Alumni.  If you would like to see a list of our graduates and their impressive accomplishments, visit this web site.  And if you are interested in joining the ranks of these amazing people, you still have until January 10 to apply to our doctoral program for next academic year.  You can read more about the program and how to apply here.

(Guest Post by Corey A. DeAngelis and Lindsey Burke)

The first experimental evaluation to find negative impacts of a voucher program on student achievement was released to the public over two years ago. Since then, education scholars and public officials have debated whether the initially large negative effects in Louisiana could be explained by the program’s burdensome regulations. While some education policy analysts argued that the state-testing mandates and open-admissions policies deterred higher-performing private schools from participating, others contended that the program might have performed even worse without the rules in place to ensure that parents only chose high-quality educational institutions.

The discussion heated up again three months ago with the release of the Louisiana Scholarship Program’s (LSP) third-year reports showing that students using a voucher caught up to their public school peers on test scores. Just after the public release, John White, Louisiana’s superintendent of education, reasoned that “it may very well be the regulation itself – the accountability system – that is the thing that has promoted the performance.”

However, one of the third-year reports released by researchers at the University of Arkansas addressed this very issue and concluded that the heavy regulatory environment in Louisiana may have driven away higher-quality private schools from participating in the program at all.

Likewise, we just released an analysis examining whether school voucher environments in Louisiana, D.C., and Indiana affected the specialization of the private school market overall. We found that when individual private schools switch into highly-regulated voucher environments such as Louisiana, they are less likely to self-identify as specialized or nontraditional educational institutions.

Theory

Since the voucher programs in question are funded by taxpayers, the public has a legitimate interest in understanding the impact of regulations on private school function and structure. When publicly funded private school choice programs are introduced, most public officials have good intentions when attempting to guarantee that families have access to high-quality educational institutions. In a well-meaning attempt to control levels of school quality and institutional equity, policymakers require that private schools comply with regulations associated with academic quality, financial viability, and access.

Nonetheless, efforts to ensure “accountability” through regulations mirror the various policies governing traditional public schools. If government officials decide to regulate private schools operating within a voucher environment in the same way traditional public schools are regulated, the supply of schools in the private market is expected to become similar to public schools over time. Obviously, private schools that participate in a voucher program will behave more like public schools if they are required to do many of the same things: focus on state standardized tests, fill out supplementary paperwork, and conform admissions processes to the government model.

We expect that private schools in the most-heavily regulated program, the LSP, will be the most likely to experience reductions in specialization. After all, only a third of the private schools chose to participate in the LSP, while between 70 and 78 percent of private schools participated in the programs in D.C. and Indiana. The unusually low LSP participation rate may be because the program is targeted to the least advantaged children in Louisiana and requires students to take the state’s standardized tests and schools to have an open-admissions process.

Results

Every other year, private school leaders provide information about their institutions using the nationally representative Private School Universe Survey (PSS). For our analysis, we examine changes in responses to question eleven which asks school leaders to check one box that best describes their private institution. We examine whether switching into voucher program environments influences the relative likelihoods that private school leaders report that their institutions are regular, specialized, or alternative schools.

As shown in our study, three out of the four effects that were statistically different from zero were in Louisiana. After switching into the voucher program environment in Louisiana, individual private school leaders were around 4-percentage points, or about a tenth of a standard deviation, more likely to identify as regular schools. Furthermore, private school leaders in Louisiana were around 2-percentage points, or about a fifth of a standard deviation, less likely to identify as schools with a “special program or emphasis,” and about 2-percentage points, or around a tenth of a standard deviation, less likely to identify as “schools that offer a curriculum designed to provide alternative or nontraditional education.”

In addition, we found that private school leaders in the nation’s capital were about 10-percentage points, or over a half of a standard deviation, less likely to report that they were alternative schools. This may be because the D.C. voucher program was the only one that required teachers in core subjects to have a bachelor’s degree. It may be that D.C. private schools that provided a nontraditional or alternative education relied more heavily on a robust supply of diverse teachers.

No statistically significant impacts were detected in Indiana, the more lightly regulated voucher program of the three. Although Indiana private schools participating in the state voucher program are required to take the state test, the fact that most did so prior to the introduction of the voucher program in order to be eligible for the high school athletics association may have mitigated the effect such a regulation would have otherwise had on school participation.

But why does this matter? What does this mean for the education of children going forward?

Since individual student needs, learning abilities, interests, and desires are all unique, specialized services ought to lead to improved outcomes. Conversely, access to schools that mimic the district system may not offer much additional choice at all. Consequently, homogenization in the supply of schooling options could have led to the recent negative experimental impacts revealed in Louisiana.

While a hearty set of program regulations may be tempting to policymakers, especially since they give well-intentioned public officials the illusion of quality-control, the disheartening result may be a less meaningful set of choices for parents and their children.

Our results suggest that burdensome packages of regulations likely limit schooling choices in an unfortunate way. Policymakers and school choice advocates interested in establishing a robust universe of education options that are responsive to family needs and preferences should limit red tape and enable private schools to retain their unique identity and character.

###

Corey A. DeAngelis is an Education Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

Lindsey Burke is the Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

The hardest thing to do, quite often, is just choosing to do the right thing.  It’s easy to posture, to proclaim, and to promote the idea that one is striving to fix the world or to achieve justice.  If you really want to repair the world and promote justice, just try to do something good… and then another good thing… and then another.

Focusing on grand goals, like saving the world or realizing justice, tends to produce little good in the world and can often do the opposite.  We are too small and the world is too big for us to understand how to map a path toward saving it.  And if we focus on building an unknowable path to reach distant objectives, we are more tempted to ride roughshod over good things and people along the way.  If you want to promote good in the world, start by doing one good thing without a plan for saving the entire world.

But very rarely, choosing to do one good thing can save the world.  In the case of Stanislav Petrov it actually did.  When Petrov, who was a Lt. Colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, received a signal indicating that the US had launched nuclear missiles, he chose not to follow established procedures and inform his superiors.  Rather than risk a nuclear war, he chose to assume that the signals of a US launch were faulty.  He didn’t have a plan to save the world.  He didn’t take to the 1980s equivalent of Twitter or Facebook and declare his intentions to save humanity from nuclear self-destruction.  In the midst of a stressful and confusing moment, he just chose to do the right thing, even when he had orders to do otherwise.  For making that one fateful good choice, Petrov is clearly worthy of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.

Just as an aside, the Petrov story that Matt recounts is a reminder of how weak and stupid authoritarian systems really are.  There is a bad habit among Western observers to believe that free societies are weak and vulnerable because they are divided and riddled with conflict among groups each seeking their own interests.  Authoritarian systems are admired, even among some who say they oppose them, for their unity of purpose and speed of action.  This was a common view during the Cold War (even held by fellow Al nominee, Whittaker Chambers) who feared the West would lose if it didn’t shed some of its freedoms for the sake of prevailing over a more menacing threat to freedom.  Joseph Kennedy and the Duke of Windsor were fascinated by the Nazis and leaned toward appeasement in part because they thought authoritarianism had an edge over free societies.  Previous Al nominee, Bill Knudsen, shows how wrong they were, specifically with respect to the superiority of the free US war mobilization over the Nazi effort.  This belief that we need to sacrifice freedom to prevail over an authoritarian advantage is also a common reaction to Islamic terrorism.

Even in the world of education reform, I’m old enough to remember people urging us to imitate educational practices from Japan and more recently China because of the imagined greatness to be achieved by suppressed individualism.  These are some of the same people who push national standards, like Common Core, increased centralized control over education, etc… But that is a post for another day.

As the Petrov story makes clear, authoritarian systems are actually quite weak because they have difficulty obtaining accurate information and avoiding self-destructive groupthink.  Once they get it into their collective head that the US is preparing a first-strike, they can’t consider all of the evidence showing that is wrong, nor can they avoid interpreting all actions from the faulty assumption that they are part of an imminent attack.  We see this time and again with dictators.

Whittaker Chambers also made a fateful choice to do one good thing by (we now know truthfully) accusing Alger Hiss and others in senior government positions of being Soviet agents.  But Chambers’ accusations also fueled the McCarthyite over-reaction, which was based on this false belief in an authoritarian advantage that required we had to become less free to defeat bigger threats to freedom.  And Chambers is not really lacking in recognition for the good choice he did make, having received the Medal of Freedom, which is the highest award for civilians, in 1984.

My own nominees, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, who are the creators of the Rick and Morty animated TV show, as well as Jason’s nominee, Russ Roberts, who hosts a popular podcast, also fall short.  While promoting decency among those who assume nihilism and promoting honest intellectual inquiry are both worthy accomplishments, they just can’t compare to avoiding nuclear war.  We need more Stanislov Petrovs, who just choose to do the right thing.  And some of those good choices might really save the world.

(Guest Post by Patrick J. Wolf)

Robert Enlow of EdChoice and David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute have engaged in a titanic battle of words over at The74.  Enlow claims that Osborne is opposed to universal school vouchers because of his political ideology, even though vouchers would fit well with Osborne’s theory of action that decentralized, choice-driven education policies produce better outcomes than the traditional, bureaucratized system of public schools.  Osborne responds that the argument he made in his book is not political and Enlow is ignoring its substance.  Let’s have a look.

Osborne’s main argument is that his opposition to universal school vouchers is driven by objective, scientific reason, not political ideology.  He makes that claim from his perch at the highly political Progressive Policy Institute in that most political of cities, Washington, DC.  We like to avoid “guilt-by-association” arguments here on the JPG Blog, so let’s just assume that Osborne’s employment by an explicitly political organization has nothing to do with his position on school vouchers.  Generosity rules our hearts.

Osborne begins his argument that he is not being political by quoting a passage from his recent book, Reinventing America’s Schools.  Osborne’s “non-political” argument begins:  “Our Republican leaders, from President Trump down through Congress and state legislatures, have turned to vouchers as the answer.”  Whoooaaa there Hoss!  Nothing like defending the non-partisan nature of your thinking by falsely ascribing support for vouchers solely to Republicans.  Osborne is arguing that the explicitly political nature of his anti-voucher argument proves that he is being non-political.  Clever.

We are social scientists here on the JPG Blog so let’s look at the truth or falsity of Osborne’s claim associating the push for school vouchers singularly with Republicans.  Private school choice, in the form of vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and Education Savings Accounts, has been a bipartisan issue from its germination through the present day.  The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was launched in 1990 only because Democrat legislator Polly Williams joined with Republican Governor Tommy Thompson to steer the proposal through the law-making process.  The Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program similarly was established by a bi-partisan legislative coalition.  Washington, DC, has a private school choice program largely due to the efforts of Senator Joe Lieberman, Former Mayor Anthony Williams, Former City Councilman Kevin Chavous, and Senator Diane Feinstein.  Last time I checked, none of them were Republicans.  Osborne would have been more correct to say, “Our bipartisan policymakers, in Washington and the states, have turned to vouchers as the answer.” Because they have.

Osborne begins the next paragraph of his response with this indictment: “First, vouchers offer no guarantee of academic success…”  Well, the same charge can be leveled at every education policy.  Osborne’s preferred policy is heavily regulated charter schools.  “David Osborne is foolish to advocate for heavily regulated charter schools,” David Osborne might charge, “Because heavily regulated charter schools offer no guarantee of academic success.”  The only two guarantees in this world are death and taxes.  Osborne makes a silly argument by declaring that school vouchers are bad policy because they don’t produce perfection.  Nothing does.

Osborne proceeds to lament: “Experience teaches that some parents will stick with a school if it is safe and nurturing, even if test scores are abysmal, so we cannot rely on parents to abandon all failing schools.” He is correct that urban parents tend to value safety and the nurturing of their children at school above test scores, as Thomas Stewart and I established in our book, The School Choice Journey.  Abraham Maslow, quite properly, would applaud them for being so rational in their decision-making.  David Osborne, instead, is irrational and paternalistic by insinuating that parents are choosing badly when they prioritize the protection and nurturance of their children above their score on a standardized test.

His next charge is that universal vouchers will lead to the hyper-stratification of private schools by family income. This is a red herring.  Schools are hyper-stratified by income in the traditional public school system because the primary feature that distinguishes the otherwise standardized government-run schools is family income.  When family background is the only condition that varies across schools of choice, then family income becomes the single criterion of school choice, exercised indirectly in the case of public schools through residential choice.  Private school choice programs allow schools to differentiate themselves based on religious identity, underlying child development theory, curriculum, use of technology, and, yes, that dreaded safety and nurturance that David Osborne disdains.  With so many criteria to choose schools, families rely less on peer-group features like family income and race when choosing private schools, which is why private school choice often leads to less stratification of schools. Besides, policy makers have a range of tools to limit stratification in a universal school voucher program including weighting the voucher value by student need or requiring that participating schools accept the full voucher as the cost of educating the child. The increased stratification that Osborne fears is unlikely under private school choice and, even if possible, is preventable.

Osborne further claims that due to the increased stratification through private school choice, “Children would also lose the chance to rub elbows with those from different social classes, races, and ethnic groups.  That experience creates a more tolerant society…” Exactly.  And you know where that mixing of diverse groups more frequently takes place?  In private schools of choice!  As a result, private school choice programs promote levels of tolerance that are equal to or better than public schools.  You can find evidence of this reality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, oh heck just read the systematic reviews here and here!

So, my final question to David Osborne is, if the research evidence isn’t behind your opposition to private school vouchers, what is?  Could it be…

The Department of Education Reform, which I chair at the University of Arkansas, is looking for qualified applicants for our doctoral program.  If you are looking to make a difference in education reform, we offer excellent training in a wonderful environment with generous support.  Qualified students can make over $36,000 plus have their tuition paid, which allows one to live pretty well in Fayetteville, AR.  The program is designed to have students graduate in 4 years, after which our alumni have gone on to some very influential and well-paying jobs.

Our program tends to emphasize quantitative methods, but we do not demand that students enter with any specific prior math training.  We’re just looking for smart folks who are willing to work hard and are eager to learn.  We provide a lot of support to help students.  In addition to generous financial packages and readily available funds for travel, equipment, and research, we also lavish a lot of attention on our students.  We only have 15-20 students at any given time for a faculty of 7.  And much of our training occurs by having students join research teams right away and begin working on projects.  Our program has a strong apprenticeship model, encouraging students to learn by doing.

We only enroll 4-5 students each year and do not admit anyone who does not qualify for a fellowship.  So, the standards are high, but the opportunities are great for those who are admitted.  We encourage prospective applicants to check out details about our program on our web site.  Also feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions.  Applications are due January 10.

Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon are the creators of the animated TV show, Rick and Morty, which appears during Adult Swim on Cartoon Network but is also available on Hulu and Netflix.  Rick is Morty’s grandfather as well as an inebriated and self-absorbed genius scientist.  Morty, a very anxious and not too swift kid, regularly accompanies Rick on adventures across different dimensions, visiting ridiculous planets, during which they alternatively endanger and save the entire universe.  They live with Rick’s daughter (Morty’s mother) who is a horse surgeon, and her unemployed and chronically insecure husband, along with Morty’s older sister, Summer, who was born as the result of a prom night tryst, which resulted in the unhappy and unstable marriage of Morty and Summer’s parents.  Got all that?

None of these details matter.  In fact, the entire show is built on the idea that nothing really matters.  It is an absurdist comedy reacting to our nihilistic times.  Much of current popular culture is built on a nihilistic foundation, but unlike most of that other entertainment, Rick and Morty affirms love and compassion despite occupying a world in which nothing really matters.  Rick and Morty offer a moral (and hilarious) nihilism in contrast to the amoral and dreary nihilism commonly found in current popular entertainment.

HBO, Netflix, and AMC, in particular, feed us a steady diet of anti-hero shows set in nihilistic universes — think of House of Cards, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, etc…  In all of them we are invited to root for awful people, doing awful things because nothing matters.  If there is no purpose to anything, these shows suggest, you might as well just impose your will and do whatever you want.  The acquisition of power is an end in itself, so you might as well lie, cheat, kill, or engage in incest.  The anti-heroes in these series will occasionally claim that they are acquiring power for some greater purpose, but they usually candidly concede that they were just doing horrible things because they like it.  These shows also regularly feature people who attempt to stand for something good, but they almost always suffer a horrible fate just to prove to us that believing in anything other than the power to impose one’s will is for suckers.  Very occasionally these shows will have a character who is genuinely attempting to do good and succeeds, but they almost always have to advance that good by doing something else horrible.  If there is any good in these shows, it is the result of a cruel utilitarian calculus.

Popular entertainment is littered with these bleak, nihilistic shows and dystopian nightmares because they are a dark reflection of how many people perceive our modern era.  Despite our incredible wealth and technological advancement, people feel adrift in a world without well-functioning social institutions or government and without the traditional values and religion that help give people purpose and meaning.  Our entertainment is nihilistic because people feel nihilistic.

It might be nice if a show like Rick and Morty could directly challenge people’s nihilism and argue that people have wrongly fallen into despair, but that may be asking too much.  Instead, Rick and Morty accepts the nihilistic premise audiences seem to expect, but nevertheless makes the case for love and compassion even when nothing seems to matter.

The best example of this in Rick and Morty is the “Rixty Minutes” episode.  In that episode Rick has installed inter-dimensional cable on the TV so that the family can watch shows from any parallel universe.  The parents, Beth and Jerry, discover that in some parallel universes they are movie stars and are eager to learn more about what their lives are like in those other universes.  They are fascinated by how they achieved great success in those alternative realities because the accident of their prom-night conception of Summer never happened and they never get married.  Summer also looks for herself in these alternative realities but she doesn’t exist because her conception was a fluke that didn’t happen in most universes.  She despairs that her life is nothing more than an unhappy accident that prevented her parents from having more successful and happy lives.

As Summer prepares to run away, Morty tries to comfort her.  As shown in the video clip at the top of this post, Morty points out her bedroom window to two graves in the back yard.  He explains that in a previous adventure (which was in a previous episode) he and Rick had destroyed the universe in which they lived and had to find another one where they happened to have died at the same point in the timeline but where the world was not irretrievably messed up.  He and Rick buried their own bodies in the back yard and just took the place of their dead selves to keep living in an alternative universe.  He explains that he eats breakfast every morning 20 yards from his own rotting corpse.  He then tells her: “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”

This is the essence of Rick and Morty.  It embraces the nihilism that is common in popular entertainment but it does not lose love and compassion.  Morty tells Summer his story to help her realize that there can be joy, goodness, and love even when nobody exists on purpose.  He loves her even knowing that he could be dead and she is an accident.  In our dark age, this is a happy, sweet, and hilarious story.

Meanwhile in the same episode, the parents come to realize that they belong together and were right to have gotten and stayed married despite how their lives might have turned out better had they not.  They accept the reality of their lives and understand that one needs to behave decently given the circumstances.  If this were one of the HBO/Netflix/AMC nihilistic shows, they would be suckers for accepting circumstances and making the best of it rather than attempting to impose their own will on circumstances regardless of the costs — in this case Summer wouldn’t exist.

Other shows praise The Triumph of the Will, as their ideological cousins put it, while Rick and Morty embrace a humanistic type of existentialism.  Like Kurt Vonnegut or Albert Camus, Rick and Morty struggle to find purpose and order in the world, but they can’t help but care about people and strive to behave decently anyway.

For trying to turn our nihilistic age in a moral direction while being highly entertaining and funny, the creators of Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, have done much to improve the human condition.  This makes them very worthy nominees for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.

And so that you can enjoy inter-dimensional TV, here are some clips of what you could find on TV in alternative universes:

It is time once again for us to solicit nominations for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.

Last year’s winner of “The Al” was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who prevailed over a very competitive field of nominees, including Tim and Karrie League, Remy Munasifi, and Yair Rosenberg.  Edmonds stood up against fascists at considerable risk to himself by declaring that he and all of his fellow prisoners of war were Jews to foil the Nazis’ effort to separate Jewish prisoners.  It is this type of courage in the face of illiberalism that we need more of in these times.

The 2015 winner of “The Al” was the internet humorist, Ken M.  Ken M did more to improve the human condition than just make us laugh by making idiotic comments on social media (although that would have been enough).  His humor reveals the ridiculousness of people trying to change the world by arguing with people on the internet.  Given how much time ed reformers waste on social media, especially Twitter, Ken M’s humor is a useful reminder that many of the people reading your posts are probably not much swifter or influential than the Ken M persona.  Ken M beat a set of strong nominees, including Malcolm McLean, Gary Gygax, and John Lasseter.

The previous year’s winner was Peter DeComo, the inventor of the Hemolung Respiratory Assist System.  To save a life DeComo had to trick border control officials to bring a model of his artificial lung machine into the US from Canada because the device had not yet been fully approved by the FDA.  DeComo won over a worthy field, including Marcus Persson, the inventor of Minecraft, Ira Goldman, the developer of the “Knee Defender,”  Thomas J. Barratt, the father of modern advertising, and Thibaut Scholasch and Sébastien Payen, wine-makers who improved irrigation methods.

The 2013 winner of “The Al” was Weird Al Yankovic.  Weird Al beat an impressive set of nominees, including Penn and Teller, Kickstarter, and Bill Knudsen.

The 2012 winner of “The Al” was George P. Mitchell, a pioneer in the use of fracking to obtain more, cheap and clean natural gas. Mitchell won over a group of other worthy nominees:  Banksy, Ransom E. Olds, Stan Honey, and Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes.

In 2011 “The Al” went to Earle Haas, the inventor of the modern tampon.  Thanks to Anna for nominating him and recognizing that advances in equal opportunity for women had as much or more to do with entrepreneurs than government mandates.  Haas beat his fellow nominees:  Charles Montesquieu, the political philosopher, David Einhorn, the short-seller, and Steve Wynn, the casino mogul.

The 2010  winner of  “The Al” was Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.  He beat out  The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.

And the 2009 winner of “The Al” was  Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag.  She won over Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing,  Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban,  Ralph Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

Nominations can be submitted by emailing a draft of a blog post advocating for your nominee.  If I like it, I will post it with your name attached.  Remember that the basic criteria is that we are looking for someone who significantly improved the human condition even if they made a profit in doing so.  Helping yourself does not nullify helping others.  And, like Al Copeland, nominees need not be perfect or widely recognized people.

I have a piece in Education Week that is part of a forum on arts education.  You can also find my piece on a newly launched blog that is part of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab that I direct at the University of Arkansas.  Since readers of this blog may not travel in circles that would take them to Ed Week or to my NEA Research Lab site, I’ve reproduced the piece below.

Arts advocates are earnest in their support of arts integration through science, technology, engineering, art, and math instruction. But as a strategy for promoting arts education, STEAM is almost certainly counterproductive as well as pedagogically unsound.

Instead, the best way to ensure that students are exposed to the arts is to set aside regular times in the school day for arts education to be taught by designated arts teachers in separate arts classrooms. If arts instruction is integrated into science, math, and other subjects, schools will be tempted to curtail separate arts classes and staff. School leaders could claim that the arts are being covered at other times, in other places, and by other staff, so there is less need to set aside specific time for the arts. By trying to put the arts almost everywhere, integration is likely to result in arts education almost nowhere.

Pursuing arts integration would be like most new-age religions: initially attractive but quickly forgotten without the regular reinforcement provided by ritual and sacred spaces. Most religious movements have learned that the best way to encourage people to contemplate the divine is to designate special places and times for worship. We might say that people should integrate religion into all aspects of their lives at all times, but the reality is that most people have a hard time doing so without reserving a time, place, and leadership for religious practice.

If you find the religious analogy unpersuasive, consider this thought experiment: Imagine that educators suggested teaching math by integrating it into the rest of the curricula. Do you think math education advocates would believe humanities teachers could cover the topic just fine? It is telling that math educators are generally not seeking to have their subject taught in arts classes.

Of course, some educators seem to think that all subjects should be integrated into all others. Why stop at STEAM? Why not add history to make it SHTEAM or add physical education to make it PHSTEAM?

The problem with this approach is that academic disciplines help organize and convey knowledge more effectively. It is pedagogically unsound to integrate all disciplines, especially when teaching young children, because it demands that students combine knowledge they do not yet possess. Students cannot gain new insights from the connections between geometry and the arts until they first have some mastery of those subjects. We cannot expect students to run before they can walk.

This type of interdisciplinary instruction also places too many demands on teachers, who would need expert knowledge in multiple fields as well as command of effective techniques for integrating them. There are exceptional teachers who can pull off true interdisciplinary instruction, but those cases are rare.

Most arts advocates are trying to turn STEM into STEAM not because they find interdisciplinary instruction so attractive, but because they recognize that the arts are being squeezed out of the curriculum and hope to protect them by joining other, more “popular” subjects. Like the plot of a teen movie, the bullied kid hopes to find protection by joining the cool group. That story is unlikely to turn out any better for the arts than it does in those films. The only way for the arts to ensure their place in the curricula is for advocates of the arts to stand up for themselves and argue for why the arts are important on their own.

Arts advocates have made this mistake before, trying to demonstrate arts education’s value by claiming that it increases performance in math and reading. Unfortunately, as researchers Ellen Winner, Thalia R. Goldstein, and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin documented in a 2013 report for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, there is little evidence that arts instruction improves outcomes in math or reading. Some arts advocates saw priority being given to math and reading, so they hoped they could borrow some of that protection by claiming that the arts contributed to those subjects. By failing to emphasize the demonstrable benefits of arts education for those subjects, the strategy undermined the arts’ case for integration.

Arts advocates need to make the positive case for what arts education teaches, not hide behind the skirts of math and science. The arts teach particular ways of thinking about and viewing the world. The arts teach some vocationally useful skills. And most importantly, the arts connect us to our cultural heritage and teach us how to be civilized human beings. Education is not entirely about the pragmatic, but should also convey the beautiful and profound—something the arts do well. That is why arts education should be preserved in its own right.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation is impressive for its intellectual honesty and curiosity.  They have an education reform strategy with which I have some important differences, but they are nevertheless interested in hearing criticism of their approach, so they invited me to present my critique to their board.  Below is the essence of what I prepared for that meeting.  I don’t expect that this will cause them to alter course, nor should it.  It’s their money and they should do whatever they think best.  But the amazing thing about the Arnolds and the head of their education effort, Neerav Kingsland,  is that they are at least open to the possibility of being wrong and want to hear criticism in case they would like to reconsider any aspects of their strategy.

The heart of the Arnold reform strategy is Portfolio Management, which is a term with which they are not enamored, but is essentially a rapid expansion of choices across different sectors with a centralized and muscular system for engaging in quality control.  The Portfolio Manager would govern schools of all types in a location — traditional, charter, and perhaps private — and select which schools should be allowed to operate, which should be closed, and police certain aspects of their operations, including admissions, transportation, and perhaps special education, discipline, and other issues.  I’m a fan of the rapid expansion of choices, but I believe that the centralized and muscular quality control system produces significant educational and political damage.  I am not suggesting that the Arnold Foundation (or the charter movement in general ) abandon all quality control efforts, but I think quality is best promoted by relying heavily on parent judgement and otherwise relying on a decentralized system of authorizers with the most contextual information to make decisions about opening and closing schools if parents seem to have difficulty assessing quality on their own.  The problem with Portfolio Management is the centralized and overly-active nature of a single quality-control entity.  Here is my case in 7 points:

1. Conceptually, Portfolio Management is no different from School Districts, so there is no reason to expect it to be any better at quality control than School Districts are.  People often claim that PM is different because its mission is only to maintain the quality of the portfolio of schools, not interfere in their operations.  But social scientists think about organizations based on their powers and incentives, not their mission.  Regardless of what PM is supposed to do, we should focus on what it can do and what is in its interest to do.  There is nothing that a PM can do or should want to do, given its organizational interests, that is not also the case for a School District.  PMs can open and close schools, just like  School Districts do.  PMs can set policies that affect school operations, just like School Districts do.  Remember that PMs have already crept into setting policies about admissions, transportation, special education, and discipline — all of which affect school operations.  And the types of schools they decide to let open or force to close shape the curriculum and pedagogy of those schools.  Also remember that School District boards do not actually operate schools, just like PMs don’t.   School District boards just set policies and decide which schools should open and close, just like PMs.  Given that they have the same powers and organizational interests, the only difference I can see between PM and School District boards is that the PM is imagined to be a good guy, who will properly be motivated by quality and avoid interfering unproductively in school operations, while School District board members (even if appointed) are imagined to be bad guys who are more concerned with satisfying special interests and following procedures than with school quality.
2. Even if you can manage to get a PM system in place (and there are very few), and even if you manage to get “good guys” in charge of it, the good guys won’t stay in charge for very long.  The poster boy for PM, New Orleans, with its exceptional hurricane origin and large charter sector to advocate on its behalf, reverted to control by the previously reviled and inept locally elected school board in about a decade.  Yes, there is a law that swears that the school board now serving as PM will not interfere in charter operations, but these oaths of non-interference hardly provide any protection.  As discussed in 1., PMs already take actions that affect school operations by regulating their admissions, transportation, special education, and discipline.  And their ability to open and close schools can effectively control any other aspect of school operations that they wish.
3. Even if you can get PM and keep the “good guys” in charge for longer than a decade, the PM is unable to effectively control quality because it has no tools that reliable identify quality.  Basically, the only tool available is the level of test scores.  We all fantasize about a world in which student learning growth on math and reading tests is calculated and used by central authorities to judge quality, but the reality is that very few school systems actually rely heavily on value-added measures (VAM).  In New Orleans, for example, only 5% of the school quality grade is based on VAM.  The rest is based on the level of student performance.  No reasonable person believes that the level of student performance is a reliable proxy for school quality.  Instead, the level of performance is largely a function of the severity of disadvantage among the students.  And yet the PM in New Orleans is making judgments about school closure based on a flawed measure that effectively punishes schools for trying to serve a high concentration of kids who are too disadvantaged.  And even in the imaginary world in which VAM is used, learning growth on math and reading tests only captures a narrow portion of school quality, which is why those measures are not consistent predictors of later life outcomes, like graduation, college attendance, and earnings.  As I’ve written before, you can’t manage quality if you can’t predict it, and PM does not possess any tools to reliably predict school quality.
4. Even if we thought test score levels or the imaginary future of VAM were good enough for PMs to manage the quality of their portfolio, the heavy reliance on those measures distorts schools in ways that are educationally harmful.  To avoid the risk of being judged low quality, schools will tend to narrow their curriculum to tested subjects and even within those subjects focus more narrowly on tested items.  Other subjects and non-tested material can produce important benefits for students, but PM provides incentives for schools to neglect those benefits.  The result is that we get a homogeneous set of schools that are narrowly focused on improving test outcomes.  That kind of school might be good for some kids, but is certainly not good for all.
5. The homogeneous set of school options that results from PM is very unlikely to offer anything that appeals to more advantaged families.  It basically results in a charter movement that is designed to serve certain urban students with no-excuses-type schools.  Suburban and more advantaged families have no interest in this kind of schooling for their own children.  By failing to offer more advantaged families any benefits, the charter movement then loses their political support, and advantaged families have much more political power than disadvantaged families.  PM advocates seem to have forgotten that politics is driven largely by self-interest manifested in organized groups.  The crushing defeat of the charter referendum in Massachusetts is at least partially explained by the political foolishness of narrowly focusing the charter movement on a certain type of school to serve disadvantaged students.  No matter what science you present to prove that those schools are good and no matter what appeals to justice you make, advantaged families will not support a movement that poses any risks to their own children and offers them no benefits.
6. In addition to alienating advantaged, mostly white, families, PM has also alienated minority community leaders.  First, a centralized and muscular system of quality control, like PM, that is only established in urban districts clearly communicates to minority communities a lack of trust in their ability to judge quality as parents or even to judge it as decentralized charter authorizers.  It effectively says that suburbanites can choose whatever they like, but folks in big cities can’t be trusted.  Even worse, raising the barrier to entry for operating a charter school (without actually improving quality, as we already discussed) disproportionately excludes minority community leaders from operating charter schools.  It is the same principle as occupational licensure.  Things that make it hard to enter and have nothing to do with quality typically have the effect of keeping minorities and more disadvantaged people out.  Not surprisingly, we get a charter sector that is largely developed and run by white folks from elite college.  If Rev. Johnson would like to open a charter school in the classrooms he uses for Sunday school, he will have a particularly hard time completing the 700 page application in a way that satisfies the PM’s rubrics and his educational background may not appear as impressive.  But he may know his community well and his political support could be helpful.  Centralized and muscular quality control, like PM, tends to turn these folks away.
7. The Arnold Foundation invests heavily in another initiative that promotes rigorous science for medical and policy decision-making, yet they do not seem to apply that same standard of proof to their own education strategy.  When pressed, the main evidence they point to in support of PM is a study by Doug Harris that shows that New Orleans made significant gains post-Katrina that cannot fully be explained by changes in the composition of students in the district.  Even if true, however, that study cannot tell us what New Orleans did to produce this improvement.  Perhaps the huge expansion in school choice deserves the credit and the muscular quality control added no benefit or even hurt.  Perhaps New Orleans produced gains because it imported a small army of elite college kids, greatly increasing human capital in the school system.  Maybe the large increase in spending in New Orleans deserves some of the credit.  The point is that attributing the gain to PM is unscientific, since Harris’ research was not designed to address this question.  Saying that we should pursue PM nationwide because New Orleans has it and has improved is roughly the equivalent of saying that you should wear copper bracelets because I wore them and my arthritis feel much better.  If someone made the later claim, the Arnold Foundation would (rightly) scoff at them as quacks.  I understand that foundations cannot have rigorous evidence to support all steps in their reform theory, but before pursuing a reform strategy that promises to close a bunch of schools that parents want and alienating both advantaged suburbanites and minority community leaders, they might want more evidence for the strategy than they have.

What do students learn from field trips to see live theater?  As it turns out, quite a lot.  That’s the finding of my new working paper co-authored with Heidi Holmes Erickson, Angela Watson, and Molly Beck that was posted on SSRN this week.

We randomly assigned groups of students to receive free tickets to see a play or to remain in their school to serve as the control. We repeated this experiment for five different plays over a period of two years.  For two of the plays we added a second treatment condition in which students left school to see a movie comparable to the play, while some were randomly assigned to see the play and the rest remained in school as the control.

Across all five plays we found that students randomly assigned to see live theater scored significantly higher than the control students on measures of tolerance and social perspective taking as well as a test of their knowledge of the play’s plot and vocabulary.  For the two plays in which there was also a movie treatment, we found no difference between students who saw the movie and those who remained in school as the control.  Seeing live theater produces important social and cognitive benefits for students that are not realized by showing them a movie instead.

This experiment cannot tell us the exact mechanisms by which these benefits are produced.  Our best guess is that leaving school to see a play exposes students to a broader world, which helps them gain greater understanding and acceptance of that broader world.  For many students, theater is a window to different people, places, and ideas.  Movies may not have the same effect because they lack the personal interaction of live theater.  Perhaps students are more intellectually and emotionally engaged when there are people acting out a story in front of them than when they see that story on a screen.  The relative novelty of theater may also be a factor.

Dan Bowen, Brian Kisida, and I saw similar tolerance and knowledge benefits in a previous experiment in which students were randomly assigned to go on field trips to see an art museum.  There appears to be something about the in-person exposure to cultural activities that affects student values and knowledge of that material.

The new working paper builds on and improves upon an earlier article that presented the results from the first two of the five play experiments we conducted.  With significant help from Cari Bogulski, Hunter Gehlbach, and Thalia Goldstein we revised the original study design to collect pre-treament measures of outcomes, add the movie treatment condition, and to include social perspective taking as an outcome.  The new study presents the results of all five plays combined although the estimated effects are remarkably consistent for each play separately.

Our research of both art museums and theater shows that out of school arts experiences produce significant benefits for students.  Much may be lost if we continue abandoning these activities as schools narrow their focus on math and reading test results.