Jay P. Greene's Blog

Several months ago Robert Pondiscio started a little storm within the education reform movement by raising alarms regarding the movement’s heavy leftward tilt over the last several years.  I joined the fray emphasizing that the social justice takeover of ed reform organizations was politically foolish since state-based Republicans are the ones who do almost all of the work in actually adopting meaningful ed reform.  I tried to address the political foolishness of alienating your key backers while making futile attempts to woo one’s opponents by providing some basic lessons from political science.  And Matt Ladner warned ed reformers against marching into a political dead-end alley.  Many others added their two cents, including Max Eden, Rick Hess, and Derrell Bradford.

But Robert Pondiscio — the man who sparked this debate — has topped all of us with the post to end all posts on the social justice wars in ed reform.  It is part of an excellent forum that Education Next has organized on the topic.  Pondiscio accurately describes the angry reaction of white ed reform leaders to his original piece and their call to remedy the fact that “The leaders of reform organizations are mostly white, and mostly from backgrounds of relative privilege, creating a stark contrast with the communities, and leaders, of color that demand rapid improvements in their schools.”

In his new piece Pondiscio calls their bluff.  If creating greater diversity among ed reform leaders is a priority for these white social justice leaders, why don’t they step aside and let more people of color take their jobs?  They say actions speak louder than words, unless, as it appears, these leaders care more about words than actions.  The failure of these national organizations to cause much action in changing state policies seems to reinforce the point.

Here’s the heart of Pondiscio’s piece:

The founder and leader of Education Post is Peter Cunningham, who was an assistant secretary for communication at the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan, with whom he also served when Duncan ran Chicago Public Schools a decade ago. Cunningham has worked in PR, politics, and for small weekly newspapers but never, to my knowledge, as a teacher. He’s also a middle-aged white man. He is, in the argot of social justice thought, deeply privileged….  But if Education Post is serious about “elevating the voices” of the communities it serves, at some point it should be run—should it not?—by someone representative of those communities.

What about now? What about right now? What about Marilyn Anderson Rhames?

I ask this not to be mischievous, but to call the question and settle one of ed reform’s most sensitive debates. When I published my now-infamous piece earlier this year, it prompted, in addition to Rhames’ piece and others, an “open letter” signed by 170 “white education leaders” (including, not incidentally, much of the staff of Education Post) who took serious exception to my critique and lamented reform’s failure to put people of color in leadership positions.

“The education reform coalition has a problem,” the letter started. “Unlike other historical movements dedicated to the urgent betterment of social conditions, the most prominent leadership and voices of the school improvement coalition have not been representative of the communities that the effort hopes to serve. The leaders of reform organizations are mostly white, and mostly from backgrounds of relative privilege, creating a stark contrast with the communities, and leaders, of color that demand rapid improvements in their schools.”

All true, but this elides an awkward truth. Closing the achievement gap will take decades. Closing the leadership gap can be done this afternoon. All it takes is for the “white, privileged leaders” who signed the letter to recruit a person of color and step aside. The right person, like Rhames, might already be on staff, already contributing to the movement as a foot soldier or subordinate but not occupying a position of leadership or authority.

My paramount concern, almost completely unaddressed in the outsized reaction to my piece, remains that a militant leftward tilt in education reform endangers the longstanding bipartisan political support that has long fueled the movement. Neither do I believe that the only children poorly served by their schools are from families of color. But it makes little sense to bemoan “the extraordinary flaws and shortsightedness in our own leadership for letting the field become so lopsidedly white.” This is, as Teach For America likes to tell its corps members, within your locus of control. Those who signed the “open letter” may believe they are standing on principle. But if their theory of change rests on diversifying leadership, they are mostly standing in the way.

I invite those leaders to step aside for the greater good. No more open letters. No more manifestos. No more virtue signaling on Twitter. Either you are serious about the need to diversify the leadership of the reform movement, or you are not. It simply will not do to congratulate yourselves for being “brave leaders” and cluck earnestly at conferences about the need for education reform to “look like the communities it serves” year after year, while blocking exactly those people from the positions you insist they deserve.

To be clear, I continue to question whether the ed reform movement at large is properly viewed as a race-focused “social justice” movement or a broad school improvement initiative benefitting all children, thereby serving social justice ends. But let’s not quibble. If diversity of leadership is integral to your theory of change, why not practice within your organizations? And why not do it now?

Our infant nation survived George Washington relinquishing power and returning to his fields at Mount Vernon. Ed reform will survive without its current cadre of self-flagellating white leaders.

What – what exactly – is stopping you?

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 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 the soon-to-be-sold 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.

Education Reform has taken the counter-productive path of focusing narrowly on identifying the “scientifically” validated techniques to maximize  math and reading test scores.  The advocates of this approach imagine themselves as rational people, using the tools of science to improve others’ lives.  In reality, they have failed to grasp the limitations of science and the inability to centrally plan improved outcomes for all.  Rather than truly relying on science, they are abusing the authority of science to exercise control.

This abuse of science to wield power is also known as technocracy, the rule by self-proclaimed experts.  Greg had an excellent piece yesterday describing the problems of technocracy.  In this post I would just like to add two illustrations of the failure of technocracy in education — one from program evaluation and the other from the perspective of the humanities.

The program evaluation illustration comes from the results of a US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Evaluation study of “a 93-hour professional development program focused on deepening math content knowledge.”  Teachers were randomly assigned to receive this intensive math professional development or to a control group that did not receive any additional training.  Measures of math knowledge collected from the teachers show that those who received the professional development learned what the training was attempting to convey.  And independent classroom observations found that the “quality” of classroom instruction was higher for the teachers who received the training.  Again, the professional development intervention appears to have been properly implemented in that it changed the treatment group teachers’ knowledge and their classroom practice.

Despite successful implementation of this professional development based on what many experts believed to be the best practice for improving math instruction, scores on the NWEA and state math tests showed small declines (and the NWEA decline was not statistically significant while the state test decline was).

It is unclear what part of this effort failed.  We can’t simply conclude that this PD, like many before it, was unproductive.  To do so, we’d have to know that the measures of implementation — teacher knowledge and classroom instruction quality — are in fact capturing knowledge and quality.  And we’d have to know that the NWEA and state math test scores are valid predictors of later life outcomes.  So, even with a clear failure we have no idea whether the failure was in the PD, the measures of implementation, or the measures of the outcomes.  Of course, it is also possible (perhaps highly likely) that the math approach deemed the best by math education experts wasn’t actually the best for all.

This illustrates the trap of technocracy in education.  Experts may well be wrong and our tools for scientifically evaluating policies are very imperfect.  And all of this assumes that we do not differ on values and priorities which might lead to legitimate differences about what outcomes should be optimized and for whom.

My second illustration of the failure of technocracy in education comes from the perspective of the humanities.  Scott L. Newstok, who directs the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College, recently gave the convocation address to the entering class of 2020 at that institution.  His entire remarks were published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and they are well worth reading in full.  To paraphrase Lincoln, I can do little to add or detract from what he said other than to highlight some of the key passages below:

Your generation is the first to have gone through primary and secondary school knowing no alternative to a national regimen of assessment. And your professors are only now beginning to realize how this unrelenting assessment has stunted your imaginations.

In response to the well-intentioned yet myopic focus on literacy and numeracy, your course offerings in art, drama, music, history, world languages, and the sciences were all too often set aside “to create more time for reading and math instruction.” Even worse, one of the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing is that it narrowed not only what you were taught but how you were taught. The joy of reading was too often reduced to extracting content without context, the joy of mathematics to arbitrary exercises, without the love of pattern-making that generates conjecture in the first place.

You’ve been cheated of your birthright: a complete education. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (at your age of 18), a “complete education” gives “not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.”…

The most fascinating concept that Shakespeare’s period revived from classical rhetoric was inventio, which gives us both the word “invention” and the word “inventory.” Cartoon images of inventors usually involve a light bulb flashing above the head of a solitary genius. But nothing can come of nothing. And when rhetoricians spoke of inventio, they meant the first step in constructing an argument: an inventory of your mind’s treasury of knowledge — your database of reading, which you can accumulate only through slow, deliberate study.

People on today’s left and right are misguided on this point, making them strange bedfellows. Progressive educators have long been hostile to what they scorn as a “banking concept” of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge in passive students. Neoliberal reformers — the ones who have been assessing you for the past dozen years — act as if cognitive “skills” can somehow be taught in the abstract, independent of content. And some politicians seem eager to get rid of teachers altogether and just have you watch a video. You, having been born when Google was founded, probably take it for granted that you can always look something up online.

But knowledge matters. Cumulatively, it provides the scaffolding for your further inquiry. In the most extreme example, if you knew no words in a language, having a dictionary wouldn’t help you in the least, since every definition would simply list more words you didn’t know. Likewise, without an inventory of knowledge, it’s frustratingly difficult for you to accumulate, much less create, more knowledge. As the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante said, “There is no work … that is not the fruit of tradition.”

Tradition derives from the Latin traditio — that which is handed down to you for safekeeping. I think part of our innate skepticism of tradition derives from our good democratic impulses: We don’t want someone else telling us what to do; we want to decide for ourselves. In other words, you rightly reject a thoughtless adherence to tradition, just as you rightly reject (I hope) the thoughtlessness that accompanies authoritarianism. However, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, education “by its very nature … cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.” Educational authority is not the same thing as political authoritarianism.

Ed reformers, including path-breaking scholars Terry Moe and Paul Peterson, championed digital instruction as the way of the future.  Teaching courses online has enormous potential appeal.  Instruction could be better customized to match student needs, abilities, and learning-speed.  Online courses could achieve greater economies of scale, producing desperately needed efficiencies.  Online instruction could address critical shortages in quality teachers, substituting capital for labor.  And online instruction could politically circumvent and undermine the teacher unions and their allies by opening the door to multiple, competing education providers for each student.

Some of these benefits may hold true, at least for some students, but the dream of revolutionizing education with online instruction appears to have over-stated its prospects.  The edtechnophiles may have missed the central task in education: motivating students to learn by creating social communities in which failure to learn would disappoint people with whom students have authentic relationships.  The problem of learning is not how to provide information to students.  Almost all of human knowledge is available to students at virtually no cost — it’s called the internet.  Students could look up and learn anything they want right now.  The trick is motivating students to acquire that knowledge.

Online courses appear to be less effective in getting the average student to learn and I suspect the problem is that teaching online is less able to create social communities and authentic relationships that are necessary to motivate students.  Having a human being in front of students who would be disappointed if students did not learn the material seems important and something that online instruction has not been able to simulate.  Students appear to be better motivated to learn when they have an in-person, authentic relationship with a teacher and when they try to please that teacher by working hard to learn.  Digital instruction or a human being on the other side of the internet may not be able to create that same relationship and motivation.

There has been a fairly consistent string of studies with disappointing results from online instruction.  The most of these studies, which also contains a useful literature review of past research, is by   Cassandra M.D. Hart, Elizabeth Friedmann, and Michael Hill at the University of California, Davis. They examine the effects of online course-taking in California’s Community College system. Rather than summarize, I’ll let them describe their results:

Using a series of fixed effects techniques, we find patterns that are strikingly similar to those found in past literature. We find that online course-taking is negatively associated with contemporaneous course performance in terms of course completion, course passing, and the likelihood of receiving an A or a B. We subject our analyses to several novel tests to determine whether selection into online courses biases these fixed effect estimates, and find that the results are likely not biased….

We find that contemporaneous student performance in online courses is generally weaker than in [Face to Face] FtF classes. The results hold whether we use college-course fixed effects, student fixed effects, or instructor fixed effects. Our results are consistent across multiple ways of measuring student performance, for students with different characteristics, and across different subject Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes 29 areas. The consistency of these results across different methods of specification and for different groups adds credence to our findings. Our results are close in magnitude to results from similar studies conducted in multiple states (Xu & Jaggars, 2011; Xu & Jaggars, 2013; Johnson & Cuellar Mejia, 2014). In addition, the coefficients’ stability and the fact that the coefficients become more negative as we add controls suggests that the degree of selection on unobservables (Altonji, Elder, Taber, 2005; Oster, 2013) would have to be substantial and in the opposite direction from selection on observables to invalidate the fixed-effect results for our contemporaneous course-taking outcomes….

We find more modest evidence that online course-taking is associated with some negative downstream outcomes as well. Our findings that online course-taking is positively associated with course repetition and negatively associated with subject persistence are stable across a number of estimation techniques; like the contemporaneous course performance results, these are consistent whether we use student, college-course, or instructor fixed effects. The subject persistence results are largely stable across student subtypes, but are non-significant for AfricanAmerican students. There is more heterogeneity across subject types; while subject persistence gaps are negative for math, humanities, and social science classes, the gap is non-significant for business classes and is actually positive for information technology courses. In all cases, however, the subject persistence gaps are much smaller in magnitude than the estimates for the contemporaneous outcomes.

Despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be politically sophisticated, the leadership of the ed reform movement seems to be badly in need of some basic lessons in political science.  Political failures like Common Core, Portfolio Management in New Orleans, electoral defeats (like those recently in Tennessee), and repudiations of the entire ed reform agenda by Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and the DNC despite extensive courting by left-leaning ed reformers suggest that ed reform might benefit from learning a thing or two about how politics works.

Lesson #1 — Concentrated interests have an advantage over dispersed interests

This is one of the most well-established and older insights from political science articulated most clearly in James Q. Wilson’s book, Political Organizations.  In education, the unions and others who benefit from the status quo system are concentrated interests.  They know how proposed changes would help or hurt them and they can easily be mobilized to donate, agitate, and vote to protect their concentrated interests.  Parents and taxpayers may be more numerous, but they are dispersed.  Each proposed change is likely to help or hurt them less than employees of the school system and parents/taxpayers (unlike school employees) do not all work in the same place and regularly share information.  This makes parents/taxpayers more dispersed and much harder to organize politically.

The political implications are that reformers will rarely be able to defeat the unions in a direct political assault nor can reformers expect to maintain control over boards or other centers of power over the education system.  Even with large campaign war-chests, as reformers had in the recent Tennessee elections, the unions and their allies will tend to prevail because they have a larger number of concentrated beneficiaries who campaign and vote.  Even with an army of DC organizations endorsing Common Core, the unions and their allies have more boots on the ground in each state to neuter or repeal standards-based reforms. Even with the financing and support of major reform foundations, the unions and their allies could hijack Portfolio Management in New Orleans, returning control to the local school board whose elections they dominate.  All of these failures could have been avoided if reformers understood this first lesson.

Despite the advantage that the concentrated interests of the unions and their allies have, reformers can achieve political victories if they keep two thing in mind. First, they shouldn’t build centralized institutions for controlling education because inevitably the unions and their allies will gain control over those institutions and use them to promote their own interests.  Don’t build a national system of standards with aligned tests because the edublob will gain control over it if they do not first block or repeal it. Don’t build Portfolio Managers governing all schools because inevitably  the unions and their allies will grab control over that. If reformers understand that they do not have concentrated interests on their side, they should prefer decentralizing control so that it’s hard even for the unions to seize all of the levers of power in one fell swoop.  If there are multiple authorizers, multiple and independent schools, and the revenue and policies of those schools are determined more by parents than bureaucrats, the unions and their allies can’t control all of it.

Second, reformers need to generate their own concentrated interest groups that have a better chance of competing politically with the unions.  The best way to do that is to expand choice so that the beneficiaries of those programs have an interest in protecting those programs.  And families at a choice school are more concentrated physically so that they can be better informed and organized for political action.  The way to fight the organized interests of traditional school employees is by creating organized interests of choice parents.

Reformers have had a bad habit of being attracted to policies that do not generate constituents to protect or expand those programs.  No one ever held a rally to test kids more.  No one ever held a rally to support test-based evaluations of teachers and schools. No one ever held a rally to increase the share of informational texts in reading standards or to ensure that uniform tests are aligned with a particular set of standards.  No one ever held a rally to regulate choice schools more closely so that the range of options is restricted or schools are more constrained.

Whatever merits these policies may have (and their merits are dubious), they are all political losers.  Eventually all of these policies will be blocked, diluted, or co-opted by concentrated interests. But the great political virtue of school choice is that it generates its own constituents who can then be mobilized to protect and expand choice.  Once parents have expanded choices it is extremely difficult to take that away politically and it rarely happens. The same cannot be said for top-down accountability and regulation reforms.

Lesson #2 — Higher income people have more political power than lower income people

As much as reformers may be motivated to promote equity, a basic lesson about political reality is that more advantaged people tend to have more political power.  Rather than lament this fact, reformers should try to use it to advance their goals.  The old political adage that programs for the poor tend to be poor programs is all too true.  Reformers have made horrible political mistakes in concentrating programs in disadvantaged areas, means-testing participants, and focusing on options that are mostly of interest to lower income families.  Not only do these program tend to be less-well funded, overly regulated, and generally of lower quality, but they are always highly vulnerable to being weakened further or eliminated.

To increase the odds of having better quality programs that are more generously funded and more reasonably regulated, reformers should be sure to include higher income families as potential beneficiaries.  And those wealthier families are more likely to be mobilized politically to protect and expand programs.  If reformers should seek to organize concentrated interests of beneficiaries, it would really help if they did not exclude higher income families that tend to have better resources, networks, and experience to participate more effectively in politics.

Lesson #3 — Winning requires 51% of the legislature

Most significant education reforms have been championed by Republican governors and state legislators with relatively little support from the other side of the aisle.  Reformers have invested an enormous amount of time, rhetoric, and money in trying to convince more Democrats to support meaningful reform, but these efforts have made few in-roads.  Reforms continue to be passed largely by Republican governors and legislators.

The problem is that elected Democrats continue to rely heavily on the concentrated interests of the unions and their allies for political support.  Reformers can’t peel away Democratic officials with targeted campaign donations because the unions and their allies can match or exceed those donations.  In addition, the unions can bring an army of campaign volunteers and voters to each election in a way that reformers generally cannot, especially in Democratic districts.  In addition, reform arguments about equity or social justice cannot shame Democrats into supporting their cause.  The unions have their own arguments about equity and social justice that, regardless of their merits, provide a sufficient fig-leaf to Democratic office-seekers.

Rather than chasing Democrats who mostly cannot be won over, reformers should remember that it only takes 51% of the legislature to win.  In states with Republican control of the legislature and/or governor’s mansion (which is currently most states), reformers can make policy entirely or largely with the support of Republicans.  Reformers should craft policies and adopt rhetoric that appeal to the Republicans they need to reach 51%.  Increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric about equity and social justice not only fails to win over Democrats, but it turns away some Republican reformers.  When Republicans are already the majority, reformers should concentrate on keeping all of them on board rather than chasing Democrats they don’t need or can’t get.

Lesson #4 — Helping your political enemies hurts you

This may seem too obvious to need articulating, but in an age where we ship $400 million in cash to the Iranians, this lesson apparently requires emphasis.  Certain groups are allied with the unions and their friends, so reformers shouldn’t provide them with money, a platform for advocating their ideas, or political rhetoric to support them.

In a fit of political naivete, the Gates Foundation actually gave money to the teacher unions in the belief that they could secure support from the unions for Common Core.  The unions happily took the money, made empty promises about support, and promptly betrayed Common Core as soon as it was convenient.  The New School Venture Fund gave a platform to Black Lives Matter at its national conference only a few months before that organization repudiated charter schools and the rest of the traditional reform agenda.

The Uber Model

The political strategy adopted by Uber provides a useful model for ed reformers.  Uber understood that taxi companies were concentrated interests in each market and therefore better positioned to block regulatory changes that would allow Uber to operate more freely.  Rather than attempting a futile direct political assault, Uber focused on creating beneficiaries of its services who could then be organized politically to fight against the taxi companies.  And while low income people are among the greatest beneficiaries from Uber’s services, Uber was determined not to exclude higher income people from its services.  They understood that once wealthier urbanites experienced Uber, they could be mobilized more easily and effectively to fight for it.  The poor benefit by having the rich fight for policy changes that benefit the rich and poor alike.

Uber does not chase the support of politicians who are determined to oppose them.  And Uber does not give money to taxi companies in the false hope that they will come around to seeing the virtues of greater competition with Uber.  In short, Uber seems to understand these 4 basic lessons of political science in a way that reformers have not.

If reformers adopted a political strategy more akin to what Uber is doing, they would enjoy far greater success.  Reformers should avoid building centralized systems of control that the unions will eventually dominate.  Reformers should focus on policies that generate their own constituents, like expanding school choice, rather than policies that only technocrats could love.  And  reformers should be sure that higher income families are among the beneficiaries of those choice programs so that their greater political power could be mobilized to more effectively fight to protect and expand programs.  Reformers should also craft policies and adopt rhetoric that appeal more to the legislators they are likely to get to reach 51%.  And it should go without saying that reformers should avoid providing support to groups that are are fundamentally opposed to the reform agenda.

(Guest Post by Dr. Williamson M. Evers)

Improving education is a combination of (1) teachers effectively conveying to students certain essential information; (2) getting a better match between schools (with different strengths and teaching talents) and students (with different capacities, needs, and interests); and (3) creating learning environments where teachers are motivated to engage the students’ intellects and emotions and students are motivated to learn challenging subject-matter — and learning in a way that embeds it and puts it into practice beyond the level of learning facts that could be looked up on the web. The classroom should be a kind of theater of high-morale learning. In that shared theater of learning, the important components of civilization are passed on, teachers are role models for students, and students’ character is formed.

Curriculum should promote patriotic and liberty-loving citizenship (without ruling out exposure in high school to our country’s problems.) We should always remember that the family is the site and source of the most important education that a child receives. The public school system should avoid undermining the family and related social institutions like churches, charities, and voluntary associations.

There are steps that Alabama should consider to improve student performance:

Reading improvement. The Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) was a professional development program (started in 1998) with school-level reading coaches. It took a few years to plan and put into place. It was based on the scientific research literature on the teaching of reading and therefore took a phonics-first approach.

By 2007, Alabama’s grade 4 reading score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a nationwide examination that tests a sample of students, had risen significantly – an eight-point jump from 2005 (almost a grade level). The grade 4 students made another four-point jump in 2011, catching up with the national average. In 2009, Alabama’s grade 8 reading score on NAEP rose three points, and in 2011, it rose another three points. The grade 8 gains were slower and less sharp than the gains for grade 4 and remained  five to six points below the national average. Even the less dramatic grade 8 gains did constitute considerable improvement.

The official history of the ARI says:

“From 2003 to 2011, with a state-funded reading coach in every elementary school, Alabama’s 4th graders made more progress in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) than students from any other state in the nation. Alabama met the national average in 4th grade reading for the first time, and Alabama is one of only four states in the nation (second only to Maryland) to show increases in 4th grade reading from 2009 to 2011. The number of Alabama students reading below grade level has been reduced by half.”

Since the coming of Common Core, the State Superintendent has directed the funds for the reading initiative and the STEM initiative to coaches for Common Core. Subsequently, grade 4 reading scores on NAEP in Alabama have declined eight points, to below the national average. Grade 8 reading scores remain stagnant.

I don’t like to made pronouncements about policy issues without talking to a range of people and looking into the details of what changes could be made. But my working hypothesis would be that the reading initiative needs to be restored.

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) improvement. Alabama also had a long-running math, science, and technology initiative. In contrast with the reading initiative, it seems to have produced no noticeable effects on student achievement. I think it makes sense for Alabama to look into why there has been such a sharp difference in results between the two initiatives, and make appropriate adjustments.

In both STEM and reading, the Alabama State Department of Education should consider certifying Professional Development programs that are based on science – based on empirical research with control groups and the like. A State superintendent should seek to make sure that districts know about good Professional Development and should nurture the growth of such programs.

Graduation rate and academic attainment. To boost academic attainment, Alabama should put in place a 3^rd grade test (Florida currently retains students who cannot pass its 3^rd grade reading test) and a 10^th-grade/graduation test. Alabama discarded its High School Exit Examination (AHSGE – Alabama High School Graduation Exam) in 2013 and replaced it with ACT/CCRS (College- & Career-Ready Standards).

The 11^th grade ACT cut scores in Alabama are 18 for English; 22 for math and reading; and 23 for science. The ACT scores are the standard current national “college readiness” scores. So they are, in fact, quite demanding and above the 10^th grade level.

ACT is basically used in Alabama for federal reporting purposes to comply with the federal Elementary & Secondary Education Act.  Graduation is currently based on area requirements and seat-time (measured in Carnegie units).

Alabama should restore its exit exam, but it should operate in a multiple second-chances way, with many opportunities to retake the tests and offering a variety of exemptions and special categories.  The idea is to create a focus and a shared goal, not to deny some large number of students a diploma.  Alabama should also reconsider its One Diploma policy.  Since there are a wide variety of students with different capacities, interests, and needs, there should probably be a variety of diplomas.

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution estimates that all the prep time and all the millions spent on the Common Core national curriculum-content standards boosted achievement in the U.S. by only a tiny amount: one scale-score point. The new Every Student Succeeds Act does much to protect against future federal interference with curriculum. When it comes to testing, Alabama is not now with PARCC or SmarterBalanced, but has instead affiliated with ACT. Yet Alabama has a set of state standards largely based on Common Core. It is time, I would think, to revisit those current state standards to see what needs fixing. (I participated in California’s line-by-line review of the Common Core in 2010, and I participated in creating the late-1990s California State Academic Content Standards, judged best in the nation by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers.)

Career and technical education. Students, because they are different individuals, should have different educational pathways in high school. Blouke Carus — a leading children’s magazine publisher (including Cricket, Ladybug, Cobblestone), math and reading textbook developer, and chairman emeritus of the Carus Corporation (a company producing manganese compounds) — has said: “Our schools need to offer each student a choice among six or more challenging and rigorous high school curricula, as do other, higher-performing countries.”

As I and my colleagues wrote in a 2013 manifesto entitled “Closing the Door on Innovation”: “There is no evidence to justify a single high school curriculum for all students. A single set of curriculum guidelines, models, or frameworks cannot be justified at the high school level, given the diversity of interests, talents, and pedagogical needs among adolescents. American schools should not be constrained in the diversity of the curricula they offer to students. Other countries offer adolescents a choice of curricula; Finland, for example, offers all students leaving grade 9 the option of attending a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school, with about 50% of each age cohort enrolling in each type of high school. We worry that the ‘comprehensive’ American high school may have outlived its usefulness, as a [2011] Harvard report [Pathways to Prosperity] implies.”

Because vocational education has a reputation for being a dumping ground and a place where minority children were channeled because of racial bias, education policy has neglected vocational education and sometimes even eliminated it. Alabama’s “Essentials/Life Skills Pathway” is a separate vocational-education pathway.  For example, instead of English 9, the student would take English Essentials 9. This is intended to prep students for community college or the workforce, not for entry to 4-year colleges.

Alabama needs to avoid a situation which the only high school available for a student is a college-prep comprehensive or, alternatively, vocational-only.  The state should incentivize local districts (through waivers) to create a variety of career-tech program alternatives (including a variety of mission-oriented schools), but these should include an academic component (as they do now). In general, Alabama should look carefully at Arizona where the process of school creation is highly decentralized, and the results have been fruitful.

Teacher Quality. As the 1999 manifesto “The Teachers We Need” (of which I was a co-signer) says, “the surest route to quality is to widen the entryway [and] deregulate the processes.” This would expand the pool of potential teachers. It would open the doors to highly-qualified, but non-traditional recruits who want to become teachers and thereby improve overall quality. New York State currently has a relatively open process allowing alternative certification.  In Arkansas, almost half the incoming teachers come in under alternative certification.

But Alabama gets only a C- from the National Council on Teacher Quality for the extent to which the state’s teaching pool has been expanded by alternative certification and the like. Alabama should also be open to non-traditional teacher training programs like the Relay Graduation School of Education in New York City.

Michael McShane of the American Enterprise Institute has written:

“Recently, I have been influenced by the work of Northwestern University economist Kirabo Jackson, whose fascinating NBER working paper calls into serious question policy’s recent overreliance on math and reading scores as the primary measure of the ‘goodness’ of schools and teachers. As it turns out, teachers have important and measurable impacts on both the cognitive and non-cognitive development of students. While it’s certainly true that test scores can tell us something important about a teacher, what is troubling for the test-score types is that it looks like (1) non-cognitive scores are better predictors of later life success (completing high school, taking the SAT, and going to college) and (2) that it is not the same set of teachers that is good at raising both cognitive and non-cognitive measures.

“Such has to be the same for schools, right? If there are teachers that are increasing non-cognitive, but not cognitive skills, surely there are schools that are doing the same. As a result, trying to assess if a school is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ relies on a complex web of preferences and objective measures that, quite frankly, cannot be taken into account in a centralized accountability system. We need something more sophisticated, and something that can respect a diverse conception of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means.”

In citing Michael McShane and Kirabo Jackson, I am suggesting a goal for the future, while not saying that there should be no accountability. We should consider a change in providers of accountability because Alabama has a variety of school districts, localities, and other groupings. As Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute and Andrew Smarick, chair of the Maryland State Board of Education, have separately pointed out, accountability doesn’t have to be in conformity with One Best Way. School evaluation can be pluralistic and rivalrous and doesn’t have to be solely governmental. Churches could do it, neighborhood associations could do it, chambers of commerce could do it.   As Bedrick writes: “Parents can then evaluate the quality of education providers based on their own experience and the expert evaluations of appropriate external providers, and the entire system evolves as parents select the providers that best meet their children’s needs.”

Currently if a teacher is educated in Alabama teachers colleges and receives bad evaluations during the first three years, the teacher can go back to college for free. This seems like a smart program worth retaining.

Education Next magazine surveyed teachers nationwide and the teachers themselves said that about 5% of teachers deserve an “F” and 8% deserve a “D.” But we should be cautious about grandiose projects to improve teacher quality. The “highly qualified teacher” provisions of the No Child Left Behind law were never successfully put into effect. The elaborate new teacher-evaluation systems put in place (at the cost of millions) in about 20 states have reduced the percentage of teachers rated “satisfactory” from 99% to 97%.

Currently teacher-certification testing is under court supervision. Alabama has low passing scores on the PRAXIS II tests that it expects of teachers. When court supervision is over, the state could slowly raise passing scores (as Texas has). Teachers do need to know the subject-matter they are teaching. But the most important thing is to increase the inflow of good prospects into the teaching pool (from which districts and schools can select), rather than reducing the size of the pool.

Economic growth and student attainment. Both policymakers and the civically active public underestimate the economic gains from school improvement. The differences in rates of growth among states can be matched to the education of the workers in the various states. A multiplicity of causes affect economic growth, but nothing is more influential in the long run than school improvement. Although it is certainly difficult to improve schools, it is easier to improve schools than it is to change other factors that figure in increased productivity.

Equated to PISA international test results, Alabama is currently below Turkey.

Some people think that Alabama’s low results are because of demographics. But the only state whose whites do worse currently is West Virginia.

For Alabama, which is educationally at the bottom of the lowest quartile in the United States, the present value of bringing the state to the level of Kentucky – in the next quartile — would be three times Alabama’s current Gross Domestic Product (according to my Hoover Institution colleague Eric A. Hanushek). Other states at the Kentucky level are Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. To get to the level of Kentucky would mean for Alabama over 6% annual growth in GDP and about 12% annual growth in salaries.

Conclusion: A State Superintendent should not be a Caesar, lording it over local districts and local superintendents. State superintendents should not act as if they are progressive technocrats with coercive utopian powers. It will be harmful to learning communities if state superintendents act that way.  Where sensible, they should devolve much of the responsibility over academic content, teaching methods, and instructional materials to the local districts. The different districts can – and should — try different things. Parallel learning communities will sometimes arise.  If districts and schools endeavor to conscientiously do their best, Alabama can climb out of the cellar and surpass states like Kentucky academically. The State of Alabama will prosper, and Alabama’s children will have more fulfilling lives.

—————————————————————

Williamson M. Evers, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. He is a finalist for the position of Alabama State Superintendent of Education.

The summer of 2016 did not have much to offer in terms of summer movie blockbusters.  We had another avalanche of super-hero sequels that are becoming mind-numbing in their predictable plots and exhausting action sequences.  It’s almost enough for you to root for the villain to finally destroy the world and save us from having to watch more of this dreck.  There were some cute animated films, like Zootopia and Finding Dory, but neither of these stood out as being significantly better than past summer animated movies.

I’d argue that the best films of the summer of 2016 were a trio of small, independent films: Sing Street, Maggie’s Plan, and Love and Friendship.

Sing Street comes from writer/director John Carney who previously made Once and Begin Again.  Sing Street is even better than those prior two, excellent movies.  All three films are about trying to capture the purity and innocence of making music, but Once and Begin Again are about trying to recapture those qualities while Sing Street is about discovering that purity and innocence for the first time.  The movie is set in economically depressed Ireland in the 1980s.  A teenager sent to a new school tries to find his place and (most importantly) impress a girl by forming a band.  The newly formed band tries every genre of 80s pop music, providing a nostalgic tour de force of the music of that era.  No school band was ever this good or versatile, but you just need to let go and enjoy the fantasy.  In addition to music, and youthful romance, the movie offers a touching picture of the relationship between brothers, a topic that deserves more attention in modern movies.  So grab your eye liner, synthesizer, and sensible brown shows and be sure to see Sing Street.

Maggies’s Plan by writer/director Rebecca Miller is like one of Woody Allen’s sophisticated relationship comedies, but even better.  The basic plot is that Maggie, played by Greta Gerwig, is a sweet and nerdy university administrator in New York City who is perhaps a little too capable at managing things.  She meets a fellow-academic played by Ethan Hawke who is a star in his field of ficto-critical anthropology but wants to be a novelist.  He’s already married to an even more accomplished academic, but is drawn to Maggie’s ability to manage his life and boost his ego.  At first Maggie is attracted to Hawke’s character, but eventually tires of him.  So, she comes up with her Plan, which is an even more elaborate attempt to manage everyone’s lives.  Maggie’s Plan exceeds its typical Woody Allen counterpart by more accurately capturing the perspective and voice of the women characters.  It also portrays the crappy apartments and chaotic lives of New York pseudo-intellectuals much more accurately.  It’s dry comedy but darn funny.

Love and Friendship is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel by writer/director Whit Stillman.  Unlike prior films of Austen novels, this one departs severely from realism.  The characters and dialogue are so over-the-top that it comes off more as a farce.  And Whit Stillman’s direction and use of on-screen character descriptions really make this farce work.  Stillman’s earlier films, which include Metropolitan (one of my all-time favorites), Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco are all like Austen films in that they feature a declining upper-class. But I think some may misunderstand Stillman in those films and in this new one as pining for a return to those old, aristocratic days.  Far from it, I think Stillman is really a champion of the rising and enterprising bourgeoisie in all of these movies.  What may seem like the manipulative villain in this movie is actually the practical and enterprising new class, while the aristocrats are generally buffoons who are easily fooled and generally deserve the decline they are experiencing.

All three of these movies may be out of theaters, but should soon appear on the small screen via, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or whatever.  Pop some popcorn and enjoy these small, indy hit of the summer of 2016.

(Guest Post by Ze’ev Wurman)

Recent weeks saw a welcome attention to the groupthink that saturates what is mellifluously called the “education reform” community. I thought Rick Hess’ (School Reform Is the New Ed. School) and Jay’s (Ed Reform is Animal Farm) were particularly powerful, but their main focus was – as it should be – on the systemic and structural aspects of school reform that has become the new orthodoxy, and on the reform movement character becoming essentially a power struggle for control, not much different from what ed schools and teacher unions already do.

Here I want to focus on a particular aspect of this change by school reformers – the effort to  impose their curricular ideas based not on what works but on their interest in centralized control, and about their efforts to silence objections and dissent.

Last week the Fordham Institute published its 2016 look at Common Core math implementation in the classroom. Fordham has been a big Common Core supporter from early on so it is not surprising that despite finding skepticism and frustration among parents and students, and despite finding enthusiasm among elementary teachers (who largely know little math) but a negative response among middle school teachers (who actually know some math), Fordham still is supportive:

For the first time in our nation’s history, there is a high level of consistency regarding what’s taught in American elementary and middle school math classrooms. Fewer teachers appear to be closing their classroom doors and doing their own thing.  … [S]tudents are being exposed to fewer topics in more depth, spending significant time on applications.” (p. 44)

What struck me was the praise for the “high level of consistency,” justified by students spending “significant time on applications.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by Fordham’s love of consistency. After all, it was Checker Finn who signed the 2011 Shanker Manifesto that called for uniform national standards – not only in math and English, but also in civics, the sciences, and health and physical education. Clearly, centralized uniformity has been a high priority for Fordham for quite some time.

But what about the praise for “significant time on applications” brought by Common Core, supposedly Fordham’s  justification why it is OK to impose Washington’s will on the country? Just three days before the Fordham report was published, a new large study of students found that the “difference between the math scores of 15-year-old students who were the most exposed to pure math tasks and those who were least exposed [and exposed instead to real-world problems] was the equivalent of almost two years of education.” Surely if Fordham was driven by research evidence rather than by faddish support of centralized education it would have at least restrained itself from blindly supporting one-size-fits-all model, when a year old study clearly says:

[G]iven the pervasiveness of the belief in a conceptual-then-procedural sequence despite the lack of empirical evidence, would additional research convince those who hold the belief? In fact, widespread endorsement of this belief among mathematics education researchers may help to explain why so little research has directly evaluated it. Thus, it seems important to briefly consider nonempirical reasons that might support this belief and which could impede progress in addressing it … [C]ulture may play into the persistence of this belief. The directionality of developing conceptual and procedural knowledge seems to only be debated in the USA. This may be because in the USA and some other Western cultures, practice is not believed to aid the development of understanding. In many Asian countries, by contrast, practice is viewed as a route toward understanding, where there is a public perception that only through a great deal of practice can true understanding be developed. Our anecdotal interactions with mathematics education researchers in non-Western countries suggests that they are confused by the debate in the USA. Elsewhere, it is taken as obvious that procedural knowledge can lead to conceptual knowledge (and vice versa).

I wanted to comment on Fordham’s site about this, and then I realized that … Fordham has eliminated reader comments. I guess it was tired of even those few dissents that found their way to their pages. So no more of that! Now that I think of it, Education Next, the journal that “will steer a steady course, presenting the facts as best they can be determined, giving voice (without fear or favor) to worthy research, sound ideas, and responsible arguments” also decided recently that giving voice to sound ideas does not include readers’ (moderated) comments and shut them off without warning. So much for openness to dissent, so much for the voice of the parents and the unwashed masses, so much for being research driven.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

When I became involved in education reform more than two decades ago, the movement was about empowering parents to make choices for their own children rather than having choices made for them by well-meaning but distant bureaucrats and professionals.  At its heart, ed reform was about decentralization of control.

In the last quarter-century this effort to expand choice in education has been amazingly successful.  We’ve gone from the first charter school in 1990 to more than 4% of all students enrolled in charters.  We’ve gone from two, century-old voucher programs in Maine and Vermont to having private school choice in more than half of the states.  And the beauty of expanding school choice is that it generates its own advocates as families that benefit from these programs lobby to protect and expand their choices.We are almost at the point where ed reform organizations don’t have to do very much other than to coordinate choice families pushing for more choices.

But just as choice is achieving escape velocity, a groupthink gang of petty little dictators are grabbing the reins of ed reform organizations to advocate for greater restrictions and regulations on choice. They are beginning to make arguments and advocate policies that are essentially the same as the ones favored by the traditional education establishment. Like their rivals in the traditional ed establishment, this new ed reform establishment mistrusts parents to make choices.  Parents, in their view, are not capable of making good choices without the guidance and restrictions imposed by experts and policymakers. And children need to be protected by regulations and bureaucrats against the errors and abuses of their parents or schools.

It has gotten to the point where, like in Animal Farm, it is difficult to tell the difference between the nanny-statism of the old ed establishment and the new ed reform establishment.  The new ed reformers are no longer fighting for parental empowerment, they are just struggling with the old establishment over who will be in control.  Will it be the smart and righteous reformers, as they imagine themselves, or the stupid and self-interested old establishment, as they imagine the unions and their allies? The reformers are convinced they can do it better, but the arrangements they favor are not all that different from those championed by the old guard.

Reformers are currently gathered in a groupthink frenzy over the need to regulate how charter schools discipline their students.  You know who else issues detailed policies on school discipline? Traditional school districts.  Last year they were in a frenzy over the need to force charter schools to “backfill” so that they can take more students in more grades that are assigned to them. You know who else is pre-occupied with filling seats in schools with assigned students? Traditional school districts.

It is currently the fashion among reformers to favor portfolio management, in which a single super-regulator would control which schools open, which close, and issue policies regarding transportation, special education, discipline and other matters.  We’ve even heard proposals recently to have the entity responsible for opening, closing, and regulating schools be elected democratically.  Let’s see if you can guess what all of this sounds like.  That’s right — traditional school districts.  They are also democratically elected.  They also decide which schools should open and close.  They also issue policies regarding transportation, special education, discipline and other matters.  I have looked from portfolio management to districts, and from districts to portfolio management, and from portfolio management to districts again; but already it is impossible to say which is which.

The advocates of portfolio management or democratically elected authorizers say that the difference is that traditional districts actually operate schools, while their proposed entities only concern themselves with opening, closing, and regulating while avoiding interference in operational matters.  We were assured that things would be fine with portfolio management in New Orleans despite the takeover of that role by the Orleans Parish School Board because the district is prohibited from interfering with school operations.

I may not be able to read the continually revised commandments on the barn wall much better than Boxer, but I’m pretty sure that issuing policies with respect to school discipline, special education, admissions, and transportation necessarily interfere with school operations.  And it is only a hop, skip, and jump from telling schools whether they can suspend kids to telling them which methods best teach reading or how many minutes they should be on the playground.  Anyone who is not hypnotized by the reform groupthink would recognize that school boards do not “operate” schools any more than portfolio managers do.  Boards just develop policies to govern schools, just like portfolio managers do.  They contract with others to operate schools under those regulations, just like portfolio managers do.  And they decide which schools should be opened and which should be closed, just like portfolio managers do.

The ed reform crowd enamored with portfolio management and issuing a host of regulations dictating how schools must operate and what parents may choose has become almost indistinguishable from the traditional education crowd with whom they are vying for control.  I say a pox on both their houses.  I got into this line of work because I was excited about empowering parents to make decisions, not imposing my superior brand of control on them.

(edited for typos)