Eduresponses to Edubloggers

July 10, 2008

My recent posts on the release of our new study on the effects of high-stakes testing in Florida and posts here and here on the appropriateness of releasing it before it has appeared in a scholarly journal, have produced a number of reactions.  Let me briefly note and respond to some of those reactions.

First, Eduwonkette, who started this all, has oddly not responded.  This is strange because I caught her in a glaring contradiction: she asserts that the credibility of the source of information is an important part of assessing the truth of a claim yet her anonymity prevents everyone from assessing her credibility.  I prefer that she resolve this contradiction by agreeing with my earlier defense of her anonymity that the truth of a claim is not dependent on who makes it.  But she has to resolve this one way or another — either she ends her anonymity or she drops the argument that we should assess the source when determining truth.

But apparently she doesn’t have to do anything.  Whose reputation suffers if she refuses to be consistent?  Her anonymity is producing just the sort of irresponsibility that Andy Rotherham warned about in the NY Sun and that I acknowledged even as I defended her.  The only reputation that is getting soiled is that of Education Week for agreeing to host her blog anonymously.  If she doesn’t resolve her double-standard by either revising her argument or dropping her anonymity, Education Week should stop hosting her.  They shouldn’t lend their reputation to someone who will tarnish it.

Mike Petrilli over at Flypaper praises our new study on high stakes testing but takes issue with referencing comments by Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch about how high stakes is narrowing the curriculum in the “pre-release spin.”  I agree with him that this study is not “the last word on the ‘narrowing of the curriculum.’”  But to the extent that it shows that another part of the curriculum (science) benefits when stakes are applied only to math and reading, it alleviates the concerns Checker and Diane have expressed. 

As we fully acknowledge in the study, we don’t have evidence on what happens to history, art, or other parts of the curriculum.  And we only have evidence from Florida, so we don’t know if there are different effects in other states.  But the evidence that high stakes in math and reading contribute to learning in science should make us less convinced that all low stakes subjects are harmed.  Perhaps school-wide reforms that flow from high stakes in math and reading produce improvements across the curriculum.  Perhaps improved basic skills in literacy and numeracy have spill-over benefits in history, art, and everything else as students can more effectively read their art texts and analyze data in history.

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk laments that what I describe as our “caveat emptor market of ideas” doesn’t work very well.  I agree with him that people make plenty of mistakes.  But I also agree with him that “in terms of remedies there is no substitute for smart consumption of information and research…”  There is no Truth Committee that will figure everything out for us.  And any process of reviewing claims before release will make its own errors and will come at some expense of delay.  Think Tank West has added some useful points on this issue.

Sherman Dorn, who rarely has a kind word for me, says: “Jay Greene (one of the Manhattan Institute report’s authors and a key part of the think tank’s stable of writers) replied with probably the best argument against eduwonkette(or any blogger) in favor of using PR firms for unvetted research: as with blogs, publicizing unvetted reports involves a tradeoff between review and publishing speed, a tradeoff that reporters and other readers are aware of.”  He goes on to have a very lengthy discussion of the issue, but I was hypnotized by his rare praise, so I haven’t yet had a chance to take in everything else he said.

2 Comments | journalism, research reports, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Eduwonkette Apologizes

July 8, 2008

I appreciate Eduwonkette’s apology posted on her blog and in a personal email to me.  It is a danger inherent in the rapid-fire nature of blogging that people will write things more strongly and more sweeping than they might upon further reflection.  I’ve already done this on a number of occasions in only a few months of blogging, so I am completely sympathetic and un-offended.

One could argue that these errors demonstrate why people shouldn’t write or read blogs.  In fact some people have argued that ideas need a process of review and editing before they should be shown to the public.  These people tend to be ink-stained employees of “dead-tree” industries or academia, but they have a point: there are costs to making information available to people faster and more easily.

Despite these costs the ranks of bloggers and web-readers have swelled.  There are even greater benefits to making more information available to more people, much faster than the costs of doing so.  People who read blogs and other material on the internet are generally aware of the greater potential for error, so they usually have a lower level of confidence in information obtained from these sources than from other sources with more elaborate review and editing processes.  Some material from blogs eventually finds its way into print and more traditional outlets, and readers increase their confidence level as that information receives further review.

Of course, the same exact dynamics are at work in the research arena.  Releasing research directly to the public and through the mass media and internet improves the speed and breadth of information available, but it also comes with greater potential for errors.  Consumers of this information are generally aware of these trade-offs and assign higher levels of confidence to research as it receives more review, but they appreciate being able to receive more of it sooner with less review.

In short, I see no problem with research initially becoming public with little or no review.  It would be especially odd for a blogger to see a problem with this speed/error trade-off without also objecting to the speed/error trade-offs that bloggers have made in displacing newspapers and magazines.  If bloggers really think ideas need review and editing processes before they are shown to the public, they should retire their laptops and cede the field to traditional print outlets. 

We have a caveat emptor market of ideas that generally works pretty well.

So it was disappointing that following Eduwonkette’s graceful apology, she attempted to draw new lines to justify her earlier negative judgment about our study released directly to the public.  She no longer believes that the problem is in public dissemination of non-peer-reviewed research.  She’s drawn a new line that non-peer-reviewed research is OK for public consumption if it contains all technical information, isn’t promoted by a “PR machine,” isn’t “trying to persuade anybody in particular of anything,” and is released by trustworthy institutions.

The last two criteria are especially bothersome because they involve an analysis of motives rather than an analysis of evidence.  I defended Eduwonkette’s anonymity on the grounds that it doesn’t matter who she is, only whether what she writes is true.  But if Eduwonkette believes that the credibility of the source is an important part of assessing the truth of a claim, then how can she continue to insist on her anonymity and still expect her readers to believe her.  How do we know that she isn’t trying to persuade us of something and isn’t affiliated with an untrustworthy institution if we don’t know who she is?  Eduwonkette can’t have it both ways.  Either she reveals who she is or she remains consistent with the view that the source is not an important factor in assessing the truth of a claim.

No sooner does Eduwonkette establish her new criteria for the appropriate public dissemination of research than we discover that she has not stuck to those criteria herself.  Kevin DeRosa asks her in the comments why she felt comfortable touting a non-peer-reviewed Fordham report on accountability testing. That report was released directly to the public without full technical information, was promoted by a PR machine, comes from an organization that is arguably trying to persuade people of something and whose trustworthiness at least some people question.

So, she articulates a new standard: releasing research directly to the public is OK if it is descriptive and straightforward.  I haven’t combed through her blog’s archives, but I am willing to bet that she cites more than a dozen studies that fail to meet any of these standards.  Her reasoning seems ad hoc to justify criticism of the release of a study whose findings she dislikes.

Diane Ravitch also chimes in with a comment on Eduwonkette’s post: “The study in this case was embargoed until the day it was released, like any news story. What typically happens is that the authors write a press release that contains findings, and journalists write about the press release. Not many journalists have the technical skill to probe behind the press release and to seek access to technical data. When research findings are released like news stories, it is impossible to find experts to react or offer ‘he other side,’ because other experts will not have seen the study and not have had an opportunity to review the data.”

Diane Ravitch is a board member of the Fordham Foundation, which releases numerous studies on an embargoed basis to reporters “like any news story.”  Is it her position that this Fordham practice is mistaken and needs to stop?

3 Comments | methodology, research reports | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Eduwonkette and Eduwonk Aren’t Edumarried?

July 8, 2008

The New York Sun had a nice profile yesterday of Eduwonkette.  Well, it’s not exactly a profile because Eduwonkette writes anonymously.  In the article some folks complain that her anonymity is a problem: “A co-director of the Education Sector think tank, Andrew Rotherham, suggested on his blog Eduwonk that Eduwonkette might be unfairly pretending to be unbiased because she has ‘skin in the game… It’s this issue of you got all this information to readers, without a vital piece of information for them to put it in context.'”

I think Andy’s mistaken on this. (Did they have some kind of edu-break-up?)  The issue is not who Eduonkette is, but whether she is right or not.  Knowing who she is does not make her evidence or arguments any more or less compelling.  I wish we all spent a whole lot less time analyzing people’s motives and a whole lot more time on their evidence and arguments. 

The only major problem with anonymity is lack of responsibility for being wrong.  There is a reputational price for making bad arguments or getting the evidence wrong that Eduwonkette avoids paying professionally — although she does pay a reputational price to the name brand of Eduwonkette.

Speaking of being wrong, Eduwonkette knocks the study Marcus Winters, Julie Trivitt, and I released today through the Manhattan Institute.  She complains: “It may be an elegantly executed study, or it may be a terrible study. The trouble is that based on the embargoed version released to the press, on which many a news article will appear today, it’s impossible to tell. There is a technical appendix, but that wasn’t provided up front to the press with the glossy embargoed study. Though the embargo has been lifted now and the report is publicly available, the technical appendix is not.”

This isn’t correct.  Embargoed copies of the study were provided to reporters upon their request.  If they requested the technical report, they could get that.  Both were available well in advance to reporters so that they could take time to read it and circulate it to other experts before writing a story.  Both the study and the technical report were made publicly available today (although there seems to be a glitch with the link to the technical report that should be fixed within hours).  The technical report can be found here.

And while we are on the subject of Eduwonkette being wrong, her attacks on test-based promotion policies are overdone.  The Jacob and Lefgren paper does raise concerns, but there is more positive evidence from the experience in Florida.  As I wrote in a previous post: “In a study I did with Marcus Winters that was published in Education Finance and Policy, we found that retained students significantly outperformed their comparable peers over the next two years.  In another study we published in the Economics of Education Review, we found that schools were not effective at identifying which students should be exempted from this test-based promotion policy and appeared to discriminate in applying these exemptions.  That is, white students were more likely to be exempted by school officials in Florida from being retained, but those students suffered academically by being exempted.”

Our results may actually be consistent with what Jacob and Lefgren find.  We find academic benefits for students retained in third grade.  They find: “that grade retention leads to a modest increase in the probability of dropping out for older students, but has no significant effect on younger students.”  It could be that test-based promotion is more beneficial when done with younger students.  It could also be that the policy has positive effects on achievement with some cost to graduation. 

And particularly severe problems with the integrity of test results used for promotion decisions in Chicago may limit the ability to generalize from Chicago’s experience.  In Chicago it may have been easier to move retained students forward by cheating on the next test than actually teaching them the basic skills they need to succeed in the next grade.

Besides, I’m sure that Edwuonkette wouldn’t put too much stock in Jacob and Lefgren’s non-peer-reviewed paper released straight to the public.  I’m sure she would be consistent in her view that: “By the time the study’s main findings already have been widely disseminated, some sucker with expertise in regression discontinuity may find a mistake while combing through that appendix, one that could alter the results of the study. But the news cycle will have moved on by then. Good luck interesting a reporter in that story… So as much as I like to kvetch about peer review and the pain and suffering it inflicts, it makes educational research better. It catches many problems and errors before studies go prime time, even if it doesn’t always work perfectly.”  

Or do these standards only apply to studies whose findings she doesn’t like?   If Eduwonkette isn’t careful she might get a reputation.

6 Comments | social promotion | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Study Release Tomorrow

July 7, 2008

Keep your eyes peeled for the release tomorrow by the Manhattan Institute of a new study on the effect of high-stakes testing on achievement in low-stakes subjects. The study, led by Marcus Winters and co-authored by me and Julie Trivitt, examines whether achievement in math and reading comes at the expense of science on Florida standardized tests.  Because there are meaningful consequences for performance in math and reading, but not for the rest of the curriculum, many people have worried that schools would improve their math and reading results by skimping on science and other subjects.

These concerns are not just coming from the usual critics of school accountability.  Even accountability advocates have expressed second thoughts.  For example, Chester Finn writes in the National Review Online: “Do the likely benefits exceed the ever clearer costs? Boosting skill levels and closing learning gaps are praiseworthy societal goals. But even if we were surer that NCLB would attain them, plenty of people — parents, teachers, lawmakers, and interest groups — are alarmed by the price. I don’t refer primarily to dollars. (They’re in dispute, too, with most Democrats wrongly insisting that they’re insufficient.) I refer to things like a narrowing curriculum that sacrifices history, art, and literature on the altar of reading and math skills…”

Diane Ravtich has similarly stepped on the high-stakes brakes, expressing concern about the crowding out of other academic subjects and activities: “a new organization called Common Core was launched on February 26 at a press conference in Washington, D.C., to advocate on behalf of the subjects that are neglected by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation and by pending STEM legislation. These subjects include history, literature, the sciences, the arts, geography, civics, even recess (although recess is not a subject, it is a necessary break in the school day that seems to be shrinking or disappearing in some districts). I serve as co-chair of CC with Toni Cortese, executive vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers.”

To find out whether these concerns are supported by the empirical evidence from Florida, tune into the Manhattan Institute web site tomorrow to see the study.

Leave a Comment » | school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Another Special Ed Post on Pajamas Media

July 5, 2008

Greg Forster and I continue the discussion of financial incentives and special education over at Pajamas Media.  This piece responds to a PJM column by Laura McKenna, which was a response to an earlier PJM column we wrote.

All of this builds on special education posts on this blog here, here, here, and here.

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Taking the Public out of Public Schools

July 1, 2008

One of the arguments regularly trotted out against school choice is that public schools, whatever their academic defects, are at least accountable to the public in what they teach and how they operate.  And while private schools may be accountable to the parents of students who attend, they are not broadly accountable to the public in what they teach and how they operate.  Vouchers are bad, the argument goes, because public money goes to schools that are not really accountable to the public.

In light of yesterday’s post on wide-spread non-compliance by Georgia public schools with the state’s social promotion law, people who like to make this argument might want to reconsider. 

In general, I am struck by how little public accountability there can be in public schools.  As mentioned yesterday and in past postings on this blog, getting public schools to implement policies that the public adopts, through their elected representatives, is an enormous challenge.  If public school officials or educators prefer not to implement a policy they have remarkable latitude not to do it or to do it in a way that severely undermines or negates the purpose of the policy. 

Monitoring what schools actually do is extremely difficult because what happens in schools and classrooms behind closed doors is rarely seen by anyone other than the staff and students.  And even when non-compliance is observed, imposing sanctions is next to impossible.  I’ll wager that no teacher, principal, or superintendent in Georgia will lose his or her job or suffer in any other way for disobeying the law that they retain certain students.

Even in the age of NCLB, with wide-spread testing, obtaining meaningful school data can be a nightmare.  If researchers want to assess school policies or approaches they need access to individual student test and demographic data stripped of identifying information.  Requests for individual student data (with no identifying information) are regularly rejected on the false grounds that student privacy prevents releasing those data.  If there is no identifying information, then there is no threat to student privacy.  States and districts should post identity-stripped individual student data on the web for anyone to analyze.  Instead, they require proposals, inquire about purposes, assess whether the research could be embarrassing, drag their feet, and regularly turn those proposals down.

I was once even refused aggregate data for schools in a district in Massachusetts.  They claimed that they would only release the average test scores for schools if I could prove that I was a resident of their district.  What if I wanted to move there?  Too bad.

On another occasion a school official in Arizona refused to provide information on how many student were enrolled in each grade broken out by race and ethnicity.  I just wanted a count of students.  When asked why he wouldn’t provide the data, the official said that it sounded like we were trying to estimate graduation rates and he wouldn’t help us do that because we might report grad rates that were different from those reported by the state.  He actually said that out loud.

If the public isn’t allowed to know information as basic as how many students are enrolled in school, how public are those schools really?  The Arizona official acted as if they were his schools, not public schools because he could decide whether to share information based on whether it would be flattering to him or not.  Really, it should be none of his business why I want public information.  They’re my schools, too.

4 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Anti-Social Promotion

June 30, 2008

Georgia joined several other major school systems, including Florida, Texas, New York City, and Chicago, when its legislature mandated that student promotion to the next grade be linked to performance on standardized tests.  All failing students in certain grades must re-take the test, according to state law.  Students failing twice can be promoted anyway if the parents, principal, and teachers review the student’s other work and agree that promotion would be beneficial, but it is clear that this should be the exception, not the rule. 

But according to a report in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution, “school districts are promoting the vast majority of [failing] students anyway… In 2007, for instance, 92 percent of the nearly 9,500 eighth-graders who couldn’t pass the math CRCT were promoted.”    In Clayton County 97 percent of students who failed the re-test to get promoted or simply didn’t take the re-test were promoted to the next grade.  When asked about why these students were promoted, the District issued a statement that said, “the philosophy of prior administrators was to promote students who failed and provide them remediation.”

Oh.  I see.  The law says that students unable to pass the state’s test ought to be retained but Clayton County school officials had a different philosophy.  Their philosophy was that they don’t have to follow the law. 

Districts weren’t simply exploiting the loophole of promoting students by consent of parents, teachers, and principals.  Districts were directly violating the law by promoting students who did not even take the re-test, which is clearly mandated for all students before promotion by alternative means can be considered.  As the AJC writes, “About one in five students missed the retest after failing a high-stakes CRCT in 2006 and 2007.  Eighty percent were promoted anyway.”

Non-compliance by public school officials with legal mandates is an enormous obstacle to education reform.  Even if one thinks that this particular mandate on social promotion is mis-guided, the frequency with which school officials feel free to flout legally mandated attempts at reform undermines the potential for any reform strategy.

In an earlier study I led on NCLB’s choice provisions, I found that the requirement that chronically failing schools inform parents that they had the option to transfer to other schools was undermined by the failure of schools to inform parents of that option.  (The study was published in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, but an earlier free version of it can be found here.)

Problems with implementation have also been central themes in the discussions on this blog on Response to Intervention, Reading First, more Reading First, and more Reading First. Until we develop the political will to actually enforce the reforms we do adopt, we shouldn’t expect much from them.

In addition, the evidence from Florida suggests that limiting social promotion by linking testing to retention is actually a very beneficial reform.  In a study I did with Marcus Winters that was published in Education Finance and Policy, we found that retained students significantly outperformed their comparable peers over the next two years.  In another study we published in the Economics of Education Review, we found that schools were not effective at identifying which students should be exempted from this test-based promotion policy and appeared to discriminate in applying these exemptions.  That is, white students were more likely to be exempted by school officials in Florida from being retained, but those students suffered academically by being exempted.

But the more important point is that each school district, school, or teacher cannot decide whether to comply with the law or not.  These are public schools and the public, through their elected representatives, is entitled to set policies that govern how those schools will operate.

11 Comments | social promotion | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

What Are They Smoking?

June 27, 2008

On July 1 the University of Arkansas will become one of the first major universities to ban the use of all tobacco products on campus property.  This is not a smoking ban, it is a ban on all tobacco, including chewing tobacco.  And this is not just a ban on smoking inside buildings or within 25 feet of entrance-ways, which is already prohibited, it is a ban on using tobacco anywhere on campus by anyone.

The University has not specified the exact reason for the ban, but it cannot be to prevent second-hand smoking problems.  By including chewing tobacco, from which there can be no second-hand harm, it is clear that the motivation for the ban is to benefit the health of the users of tobacco themselves by pushing them to quit.

Forcing students, staff, and visitors to our campus to improve their health seems beyond the reasonable authority of the University.  What’s next?  How about banning people from bringing fast food on campus?  How about intentionally scheduling classes on opposite sides of campus to force people to walk more?

I see no problem with the University banning smoking inside or near buildings that may harm or seriously bother others.  And I see no problem with educating students and staff about the health hazards of smoking.  But the University also has a responsibility to respect and instill within students an appreciation for liberty.  To do that they have to allow people to make life choices for themselves, especially when those choices pose no direct harm to others.

There is a University web forum in which these issues have started to be discussed.

On July 1 it will be the University of Arkansas, but soon it may be at a campus near you.  As the University press release says, “people from several colleges across the nation have called university officials to get information about how they might create a similar policy on their campuses, and to find out what kinds of issues could arise when making this kind of policy decision.”

6 Comments | higher education, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Baked Alaska

June 25, 2008

I just returned from vacation in sunny Alaska to see how well the blog has been doing in my absence.  Thanks to Jonathan Butcher for being my substitute blogger and to Greg Forster and Matthew Ladner for keeping everything running smoothly.  Thanks also to Reid Lyon, Dan Lips, and Larry Bernstein for their guest posts.  Looks like I missed a lot of interesting discussions.

The most striking thing about Alaska, other than the amazing natural beauty, is how remote living there must be.  The state capital, Juneau, can only be reached by boat or plane.  There are communities sprinkled throughout the state whose link to the outside world is regularly cut by snow, rain, fog, rock-slides, or high winds. 

I kept wondering, how in the world do they offer kids in all of these communities a public education?  By necessity, they don’t restrict their vision of public schools to students riding in yellow school buses to government built and operated school buildings.  In Alaska a significant portion of public education is provided by distance learning technology, just as Matt Ladner has suggested in his post The Shape of Things to Come. 

The Alyeska Central School is a statewide virtual school than began operating in 1939, when distance learning technology was the mail service.  Until recently it was run by the state department of education but has recently shifted to being a charter school.  In addition, about one-fifth of the districts offer their own distance-learning programs.  In total, more than 10,000 students out of a public school enrollment of 133,000 receive their public education in their own homes via distance education technology. Many more are home-schooled with the assistance of distance learning technology but are not enrolled as public school students.  Another 4,800 students are enrolled in charter schools, many of which rely heavily on distance learning.  In total, well more than 10% of all students in Alaska are educated in their own homes with distance learning.

It’s hard to judge the quality of these distance learning programs without a carefully designed evaluation, but it is clear that distance learning makes it possible to offer public education to all Alaskan children at a reasonable cost.  Keep in mind that almost everything has to be brought into Alaska since they grow almost no crop, have virtually no farm animals, and manufacture very little.  The cost of shipping in difficult to reach environments has to be factored into almost everything.  Their schools are more expensive to build, their teachers and staff have to be (and in fact are) paid more given the higher cost of living, and transportation of students is much more expensive. 

Distance learning certainly helps Alaska control costs.  With distance learning there is less need to build schools, lower cost for transportation, and the pupil-teacher ratios can be much higher.  In the Alyeska Central School the ratio is 50 students for each teacher.

To be sure, distance learning isn’t for everybody, but if states want to offer make courses available to more students at lower costs, they should pursue distance learning.  The student living in Manhattan or suburban Chicago may not be as remote as those in Haines, Alaska, but both may benefit from options other than taking a yellow bus to a brick and mortar school.

Leave a Comment » | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Walmart Shareholder Meeting

June 6, 2008

This morning I went to the Walmart shareholder meeting held in the University of Arkansas basketball stadium.  The theme was the new marketing slogan, “Save money.  Live better.”  They presented impressive evidence and compelling anecdotes of how Walmart saves money for families of modest means and, in doing so, improves people’s lives. 

The best example they provided was their $4 prescription drug program.  Lee Scott, the CEO, emphasized that policymakers have been trying to get more people to switch to cheaper generics for years.  But Walmart has been able to succeed where the government has failed, by bringing the price down.  How did they do that when the government hasn’t?  Walmart was able to squeeze the pharmaceutical companies in a way that the government won’t.  Just think of the Medicare Drug Benefit program that has been a near-total flop, failing to make drugs more available while costing taxpayers dearly. 

It struck me that if Walmart were a government program, designed to provide basic goods to low-income families at reduced prices, it would be lauded as a great success on the order of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan.  Books would be written about how it worked so well.  Conferences would be organized to sing its praises.  But because someone is actually making a profit while serving low-income families, somehow the whole thing is ruined.  It’s as if social progress can only be made if taxpayers lose money.

It’s not accurate to say that Walmart is only able to provide low prices because it underpays its workers, who are themselves often low-income.  In fact, Walmart pays its workers above the industry average and offers health benefits rarely found in retail.  The reality is that Walmart primarily reduces prices by squeezing its suppliers.  Remember the prescription drug companies?  Ironically, anti-Walmart activists are really pro-Procter & Gamble.  Their chant should be “Charge poor people more for shampoo so that Procter & Gamble thrives!”  I guess that wouldn’t be a very good chant at a rally (I’d make a bad activist), but you get my point. 

Of course, the other groups that get squeezed are the unions.  But even if you believed that unions provided significant benefits to workers, we should all recognize that it would have to come at the expense of low-income consumers.  There is no free lunch.  And keep in mind that Walmart workers already receive above-industry-average wages and health benefits, so the additional benefits of unionization are more dubious.  Furthermore, outside of North America Walmart workers are mostly unionized (as are the workers of all of their major competitors in those markets) and the company still thrives. 

I know.  People will hold this post up as an example of how I’m somehow in the employ of Walmart.  Just to set the facts straight — I’m an employee of the University of Arkansas and am primarily paid by the taxpayers of Arkansas.  I’ve never heard anyone suggest that my (or anyone else’s)  receipt of money from the government presents a conflict of interest that disqualifies them from evaluating government programs.  I’m as free to criticize Arkansas policies as to criticize Walmart.  (And I do have criticisms of Walmart.  For example, the produce is lousy and the stores in Florida, when I lived there, looked dingy.)

It’s true that my department received a $20 million gift from which I draw some income.  But that $20 million endowment was initiated by an anonymous foundation (not connected to the Waltons) with a $10 million gift that was then matched by the University’s matching grant program, which applied to all gifts that met certain criteria.  It’s true that the matching grant money originally came from the estate of Sam Walton, but he passed away in 1992 and neither the Waltons nor Walmart control those dollars.  So, my connection to Walmart exists, but it is tenuous.  They certainly have no ability to control what I say or do.

But even if I were a corporate executive at Walmart, the issue is whether my argument is true, not with whom do I have a financial connection.  Walmart executives could make an argument and be right.  The intellectually honest way to exchange ideas is to address the merits of other people’s ideas, not analyze their motives for articulating those ideas. 

My assessment of the evidence is that Walmart really does help people save money and live better.  If you disagree, rebut the evidence.

11 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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