Jay P. Greene's Blog

In today’s Wall Street Journal  Paul Peterson makes a personal and compelling argument for why deference should be given to parents over the false-expertise of distant bureaucrats.

Paul’s adult son is autistic and sometimes engages in potentially life-threatening self-injurious behavior, such as banging his head and shoving his hands down his throat.  After many years and much searching, Paul and his family found an effective intervention that checks this self-injurious behavior and enables his son to live a better and safer life. The intervention involves skin electric shocks, which essentially grab his son’s attention and interrupt his self-injurious activities.

The shocks do hurt, but the pain is relatively mild and fleeting relative to the serious harm his son might do to himself otherwise.  And his son receives plenty of positive rewards for avoiding self-injury.  The shocks are a back-stop when things get out of control.

But bureaucrats at the FDA think they know better and want to prohibit the type of intervention benefiting Paul’s son.  They believe that there are drug therapies that are more effective.  Unfortunately, even if those drug therapies work on average, there is a distribution of results and Paul’s son has tried the drugs without success. No matter, declares the FDA, everyone should get what we think works best for the average person even if your circumstances differ.

You should read Paul’s entire piece.  When doing so keep in mind that this isn’t just about the FDA and people with autism.  This is about who knows best.  Should families and care-providers who possess more contextual information decide what to do or should distant bureaucrats impose on everyone.  And, of course, this is the heart of my support for choice in education.  Who should decide what is best for children — their families and the educators they select or regulators, portfolio managers, and other over-bearing bureaucrats?

I’ve written several times recently about how short term gains in test scores are not associated with improved later life outcomes for students.  Schools and programs that increase test score quite often do not yield higher high school graduation or college attendance rates.  Conversely, schools and programs that fail to produce greater gains in test scores sometimes produce impressive improvements in high school graduation and college attendance rates, college completion rates, and even higher employment and earnings.  I’ve described at least 8 studies that show a disconnect between raising test scores and stronger later life outcomes.

Well, now we have a 9th.  Earlier this month MDRC quietly released a long-term randomized experiment of the effects of the SEED boarding charter school in Washington, DC.  Because SEED is a boarding school, there was a lot of hope among reformers that it might be able to make a more profound difference for very disadvantaged students by having significantly more time to influence students and structure their lives.  Of course, boarding schools also cost significantly more — in this case roughly twice as much as traditional non-residential schools.

While the initial test score results are very encouraging, the later life outcomes are disappointing.  After two years students admitted to SEED by lottery outperformed those denied admission by lottery by 33% of a standard deviation in math and 23% in reading.  If we judged the quality of schools entirely based on short term changes in test scores, as many reformers would like to do, we’d say this school was doing a great job.

In fact, SEED may be doing a great job in a variety of ways, but when we look at longer term outcomes for students on a variety of measures the evidence demonstrating SEED’s success disappears or even turns negative.  Of the students accepted by lottery to SEED 69.3% graduate from high school after four years compared to 74.1% for the control group, a difference that is not statistically significant.  And when asked about their likelihood of attending college, there was no significant difference between the two groups.  SEED students also score significantly higher on a measure of engaging in risky behavior and lower on the grit scale.

We’ve seen this pattern before.  Research by Marty West and colleagues of no excuses charter schools in Boston found large gains in test scores but also significantly lowered student performance on noncognitive measures.  And Josh Angrist and colleagues found that those schools actually decrease four year high school graduation rates despite large gains in test scores.  In their words:

Perhaps surprisingly given the gains in test score graduation requirements reported in column 2 of table 4, the estimates in column 4 of this table suggest not. In fact, charter attendance reduces the likelihood a student graduates on time by 14.5 percentage points, a statistically significant effect.

It’s time that people start paying a lot more attention to this pattern of a disconnect between short term test score gains and long term life outcomes.  We can’t just dismiss this pattern as fluke.  And the reduction in noncognitive skills may be important for explaining this pattern.  Reduced grit scores may not just be the product of reference group bias.  It appears that certain types of charter schools that are able to produce large test score gains also lower character skills and fail to yield long term improvements in life outcomes.  Conversely other types of charter and private schools in choice programs fail to improve test scores but yield large gains in later life outcomes.

If we think we can know which schools of choice are good and ought to be expanded and which are bad and ought to be closed based primarily on annual test score gains, we are sadly mistaken.  Various portfolio management and “accountability” regimes depend almost entirely on this false belief that test scores reveal which are the good and bad schools.  The evidence is growing quite strong that these strategies cannot properly distinguish good from bad schools and may be inflicting great harm on students.  Given the disconnect between test scores and later life outcomes we need significantly greater humility about knowing which schools are succeeding.

Russ Whitehurst, one of the most cool-headed education researchers, throws cold water on the grit craze seizing some quarters of the ed reform world.  As I warned in my recent review of the Angela Duckworth and Paul Tough books, “This new attention to character skills has many of the markings of previous failed fads…. In short, school and educator practice with respect to character skills is running far ahead of knowledge.” I wanted to cool grit fever, but in his recent piece Russ throws icy cold water on it.  He raises excellent points but I wonder if Russ is too cold on the importance of character skills.

Russ makes three arguments: 1) A recent study that compared grit scores among fraternal and identical twins suggests that grit may be heritable to a large degree, which would make it unrealistic to expect schools or others to be able to alter it; 2) The twin study as well as a meta-analysis of grit research found that grit only explains about 2-3% of the variance in achievement scores, which Russ thinks makes it a poor predictor of other outcomes; and 3) The meta-analysis suggests that grit may be highly correlated with conscientiousness, one of the Big 5 personality traits that psychologists have been studying for a long time.

I think Russ is most persuasive on the last point.  Grit may be more of an effective marketing brand than a new contribution to the field.  But whether it is really distinct from conscientiousness or not, this does not establish whether grit and other character skills are important for education reform.

Russ is much less persuasive with his second argument.  The fact that grit or other character skills may not be strongly predictive of achievement test results is not surprising if these non-cog measures capture something that is important independently of cognitive ability.  That is, the true test of the predictive power of “noncog” measures is not whether they are correlated with cognitive measures (like achievement scores), but whether they are correlated with later life outcomes.  As it turns out out, they are.  As this recent piece in Economics of Education Review by Collin Hitt, Julie Trivitt, and Albert Cheng shows, their character skill measure collected in middle or early high school is predictive of later educational attainment, employment, and earnings in 5 different longitudinal panel data sets, even after cognitive ability and other factors are controlled.

Russ’ first argument is the most important for educational reform.  If grit or other character skills are not malleable, then why bother devoting a lot of energy to trying to address them in schools?  Russ is correct to point out that about 37% of the perseverance component of grit is heritable, but that does not establish that educational policy and practice are unable to alter the non-heritable factors that form grit and other character skills.

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests character skills are malleable and that education plays an important role in shaping and altering character.  Albert Cheng and Gema Zamarro have a new study that shows students randomly assigned to teachers who possess stronger character skills experience an increase in their own character skills.  And Albert Cheng has another study using a student fixed-effect research design that has the same finding.  This would not be possible if character skills were not malleable.

In addition we have an entire literature on pre-school and school choice suggesting that educational interventions can produce long-term success without improving short term achievement test scores (and vice versa).  It’s not well-understood exactly how these benefits are being produced, but a reasonable explanation is that early childhood and effective school choice programs may improve character skills without also increasing test scores.  And in the long-run the improvement in character skills may be more important for success.

Russ Whitehurst is right to warn us about the irrational exuberance some have about grit, but he shouldn’t throw out the baby with ice cold bath water.  There seems to be something very important about character skills in education even if we do not fully understand how to define, measure, or alter them.

(edited for typos)

Today more than 200,000 people are marching in support of Gay Pride in Tel Aviv.

Here is how Gay Pride is celebrated in Gaza:

The New York Times describes the Gazan celebrations a few months ago:

Mr. Ishtiwi, 34, was a commander from a storied family of Hamas loyalists who, during the 2014 war with Israel, was responsible for 1,000 fighters and a network of attack tunnels. Last month, his former comrades executed him with three bullets to the chest. Adding a layer of scandal to the story, he was accused of moral turpitude, by which Hamas meant homosexuality.

And earlier this week Israel crowned its first “Miss Trans Israel.”  There is no word yet on when Miss Trans Israel will compete against Miss Trans from other countries in the Middle East.   Here she is:

Time Magazine profiles the winner:

For those who wish to showcase the relative freedom and tolerance enjoyed by Israel’s LGBT community, Talleen Abu Hanna is an ideal model. Born and raised in Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus Christ, Abu Hanna is a Catholic Israeli Arab. Like many of Israel’s 1.6 million Arab citizens, she calls herself Palestinian as well. But ask her where she’d rather live, and her response is swift.

“I wouldn’t be alive if I grew up in Palestine,” she says in perfect Hebrew. “Not as a gay man, and definitely not as a transgender woman.”

She recalls how in Thailand, where she completed her gender transition surgery just one year ago, she met many transgender women from Arab countries. Their occasional trips to Thailand — known in the trans community as the best place for transitional surgery –were the only times when these women felt safe to be themselves, wearing makeup and dressing as women. Back home, they told her, they had to disguise themselves as men. “It’s something you need to keep a secret in Arab countries, and even then it’s forbidden,” she says.

Homosexuality is considered a crime in many countries. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are just a few whose penalties for homosexuality include death and lashings.

While all countries fall short, it’s important to keep in perspective where the rare and delicate flower of liberty is cultivated.  If people forget which countries, on balance, are friends to liberty, no friends of liberty will remain.

Stacey Childress, the head of New Schools Venture Fund, whose conference sparked the current row over the Left/Technocratic takeover of the ed reform movement, penned a reply to Robert Pondiscio.  While Stacey deserves credit for the level-headed nature of her response, which stands in stark contrast to much of the reaction Robert has received elsewhere, she unfortunately misses the point of Robert’s piece.  Robert is not questioning the desirability of diversity in the ed reform movement.  To the contrary, he is expressing concern about the development of a new Left/Technocratic orthodoxy in the movement that would, among other things, harm the political prospects of maintaining support from state Republicans who have and will continue to be essential for passing and implementing reform policies.

Stacey denies the charge.  She argues that it promotes rather than hinders diversity to have a panel discussing other important “social movements”:

The purpose of the session was to learn more about movements in general and hear directly from some people who are part of a couple of them…. Yes, the session included Black and Latino leaders working in ed reform (TFA alums and staff) who also are part of current social movements they view as intertwined with urban education issues.

Her reply reveals the problem. Let’s leave aside the fact that neither Robert nor I are concerned solely with that panel.  Frankly, I found Arne Duncan to be the most insufferable speaker at the Summit.  When asked to describe his three greatest failures as Secretary, he listed his failure to convince Republicans to spend more on pre-K, his inability to get Republicans to solve problems for undocumented college students, and the refusal of Republicans to adopt new gun control legislation following Sandy Hook.  Notice that all of his greatest failures were his inability to get Republicans to do the right things.  And notice that none of these are even K-12 issues.  And as a prime example of groupthink, Duncan was being interviewed by his former deputy, Jim Shelton.

And let’s leave aside that neither Robert nor I are concerned solely with New Schools Venture Fund or its conference.  We both argued that the ed reform movement as a whole has taken a dramatic turn.  If Stacey doesn’t think her conference is an example of that, then she can surely find confirmation in the hyperbolic reaction to Robert on social media.  More than 100 people, representing a broad swath of foundation-fueled ed reform organizations, have co-signed an “open letter” rebuking Robert and his essay.  Just a brief review of the Twitter feeds of these co-signers should convince anyone of the accuracy of Robert’s concerns about groupthink, ideological litmus tests, and lack of intellectual diversity in the new ed reform movement.

The main problem with Stacey’s contention that learning “more about movements in general” is beneficial is that it fails to grasp how broad and diverse coalitions are actually maintained.  The way you hold together a coalition of people who agree on some core issues while strongly disagreeing on other issues is by not raising or focusing on the issues on which people do not agree.  It’s like politically diverse families trying to get along at the Thanksgiving dinner table.  It’s best not to bring up or dwell on certain topics if your goal is to maintain family harmony.

Stacey may be right that some members of the broad coalition see a variety of “social justice” issues “as intertwined with urban education issues,” but other, conservative members of that coalition may have their own issues that they see as “intertwined.”  For example, conservatives might want to talk about their concerns about Affirmative Action, abortion, and promoting intact families as issues they see as related to urban education.  Panels on those topics at ed reform conferences would almost certainly hurt the building of a broad and diverse coalition, so those issues rarely come up and are almost never part of ed reform conference planning.

Most conservatives within the ed reform movement have the good sense not to plan panels around these tangential conservative movements.  Evidence for the Left/Technoratic takeover can be found in the fact that Stacey and other ed reform leaders no longer feel any restraint in highlighting tangential “social justice” movements in their conferences, organizational activities, writings, Tweets, and other activities.  They would be right to find efforts to highlight “conservative” tangential issues as a divisive distraction, but they are unable to see how the tangential issues they view as good might produce the same reaction in others.

Let me be clear, that by “tangential” I mean issues on which there is not broad consensus among those we wish to include in the ed reform coalition.  I am not offering any opinion here on whether institutional racism, poverty, police brutality, affirmative action, abortion, and two-parent households are educationally important or not.  My point here is not whether these are valid and related concerns or not, but that they are likely to divide and shrink the ed reform coalition if they are highlighted.

I am also not trying to silence anyone, hinder their free speech, or demand “safe spaces” in which people do not have to confront issues.  People should feel free to talk about whatever they want and organize conferences in any way they think best.  But people have to understand that if they choose to focus on certain issues, they will narrow their coalition.  This would be as true if you wanted to emphasize alleged problems with affirmative action as alleged problems with police brutality.

You can decide to be the family member at the Thanksgiving table who lectures your uncle on the errors of his ways, but you will do so at the expense of family harmony.  And he will be less likely to accept invitations to future family gatherings or offer help on family needs.

It’s possible that Stacey and the co-signers of the “open letter” have just had enough of their uncle and don’t care about alienating him.  That’s fine.  But as I’ve argued in much more snarky fashion elsewhere, the adoption and implementation of ed reform depends heavily on support from state Republicans. You can’t alienate them and those to whom they listen in the ed reform movement without seriously weakening the political prospects for ed reform.  I am also puzzled by why the largest donors will continue paying for organizations, conferences, and staff who would rather lecture their uncle than maintain family harmony.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today praising the voucher meta-analysis you read about on JPGB by Patrick J. Wolf, M. Danish Shakeel, and Kaitlin Anderson.

Here’s a highlight:

Today 26 states and the District of Columbia have some private school choice program, and the trend is for more: Half of the programs have been established in the past five years. That hasn’t stopped opponents from arguing there’s no proof vouchers help students learn. But a new study from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas shows otherwise.

The study’s most important news is that voucher students show “statistically significant” improvement in math and reading test scores. The researchers found that vouchers on average increase the reading scores of students who get them by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by about 0.15 standard deviations. In laymen’s terms, this means that on average voucher students enjoy the equivalent of several months of additional learning compared to non-voucher students.

It’s time, fellow ed reformers, that we sit down and have a little talk about where ed reform political victories come from.  The bizarre Social Justice/Technocratic tilt to the ed reform movement has me a little concerned that maybe you don’t understand how this really works.  Maybe you’re getting bad information from the other kids on the social media playground.  So let’s make sure we understand the ed reform facts of life.

Ed reform largely happens in states and localities.  They spend the bulk of the money, have the legal responsibility, and have operational control over what happens on the ground.  Your friends on the social media playground may talk a lot about ESSA, NCLB, and other aspects of federal policy, but the action is mostly in states and localities.

The vast majority of state legislators and governors who vote to adopt and implement meaningful ed reform policies are Republicans.  I know the kids are all excited about appealing to Democrats by narrowly targeting reforms toward disadvantaged students, heavily regulating those programs to ensure social justice goals are protected, and so on.  But the reality is that very few Democratic state legislators and governors are won over by these appeals because they are too dependent on the unions.  You need almost all of the Republicans on board to win most state policy battles.

So, turning the national ed reform movement into a Social Justice/Technocratic rally is not a way to adopt and expand ed reform policies.  You need the Republicans to support you, but you won’t keep their support if you regularly denounce and alienate them.  And you will hardly win over any Democrats to make up for their loss. I know Republicans can be stinky and gross, but you can’t make a baby ed reform policy without them.

Whatever the merits of the Social Justice/Technocratic view, it is a losing political strategy.  If your goal is to feel righteous and engage in mutual-congratulations in your giant fish bowl, then by all means keep up the current trends.  If your goal is to make progress — even if it is imperfect and partial progress — then you have to make sure that you keep opponents of Social Justice/Technocratic approaches in the coalition.

When ed reformers and state Republicans love each other very much…

Robert Pondiscio has written a very important piece about the current state of the education reform movement.  He correctly notes that the previously diverse coalition leading ed reform is breaking down and he accuses the Left of taking over.  I’d modify his argument only slightly to note that the real divide in ed reform is not between Right and Left, but between Technocrats and those favoring more decentralized reforms. The danger is not just that Social Justice Warriors have seized control of ed reform, but that they are perfectly content to advocate no end of faux-scientific management and top-down regulation to impose their preferences.

Robert is not completely original in noting this hostile takeover.  I’ve been decrying the rise of the Petty Little Dictator Disorder for quite some time.  And Rick Hess warned last year about the wheels coming off of the old ed reform coalition.  However, the fact that the ever-conciliatory Fordham Foundation is declaring the Ed Reform Civil War seems to make it official.

In this post I’d like to talk a little about how we got to this point.  I blame the big ed reform foundations for facilitating this Technocratic/Social Justice Warrior takeover. An entire industry of ed reform activists has been created by foundation dollars.  They populate a host of organizations with a variety of banal names; few of which would exist if foundations didn’t pay their salaries.

So, we now have a giant industry of foundation-paid reformers staffed mostly by young, enthusiastic, and bright-but-lacking-in-wisdom, idealists.  It should come as no surprise that the profile of those who staff the ed reform industry tilts heavily toward the profile of Social Justice Warriors.  Their high education levels, lack of wisdom, and boundless self-confidence inclines them strongly toward Technocracy.

In addition, once you’ve assembled a large ed reform industry, what are all of these people supposed to do?  They aren’t likely to have a meeting at which they decide that parents and local communities are probably better situated than they are to devise solutions appropriate to the circumstances.  If they turned power over to families and communities, most of them would have to quit their jobs and close up shop.

Instead, they have meeting after meeting at which they sit around and dream about how other people should live their lives.  They develop plans, systems, and metrics, to guide, nudge, or force others to do the “right things,” typically from DC or other distant locations  And they have no doubts about what those right things are nor do they lack confidence in their ability to measure those good outcomes or to devise plans and systems for ensuring them.

I really wished that it would not come to this.  But I watched the New School Venture Fund Conference as Robert did and came to a similar conclusion.  Their hostility to the common values that held the diverse ed reform coalition together was manifest.  Their contempt for all non-believers was insufferable.  The way in which they swarm and bully dissenters on social media demonstrates anti-intellectualism and intolerance.

The good news is that this Technocratic Cult mostly doesn’t matter.  Education policy is mostly made by state and local governments paying virtually no attention to what foundation-funded organizations say or do.  It’s quite striking how national advocacy organizations promoting a Technocratic approach to school choice typically have no ability to anticipate where new choice proposals are going to make headway and usually play little or no role in shaping them.  Statewide school choice programs have been passed in Nevada and Arizona with only the Friedman Foundation and the Foundation for Education Excellence playing significant roles among national organizations. Students First actually tried to block Nevada’s universal choice ESA with the same lack of effectiveness that is typical of the national Technocrats.

The only thing lost by the Technocratic takeover of national ed reform efforts is the enormous amount of money being wasted.  But if the donors want to set giant piles of money on fire, they are free to do so.  I just hope they enjoy the warm glow because they aren’t getting much else good out of it.

(Correction — I incorrectly wrote Step Up for Students when I meant Students First.  My apologies.  Also, I changed Rob to Robert.  I keep forgetting which he prefers.)

Last week M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin Anderson, and Patrick Wolf released their meta-analysis of experimental studies of private school choice, finding significant test score benefits from the 19 studies they reviewed.  This week Greg joins the party with an updated edition of his “Win-Win” report reviewing the evidence on school choice.

Greg goes beyond the scope of the Shakeel, et al meta-analysis by also considering evidence on how expanding school choice affects traditional public schools, public finances, segregation, and civic values.  That’s covering a lot of different types of effects.  And what does he find?

The evidence points clearly in one direction. Opponents frequently claim school choice does not benefit participants, hurts public schools, costs taxpayers, facilitates segregation, and even undermines democracy. However, the empirical evidence shows that choice improves academic outcomes for participants and public schools, saves taxpayer money, moves students into more integrated classrooms, and strengthens the shared civic values and practices essential to American democracy. A few outlier cases that do not fit this pattern may get a disproportionate amount of attention, but the research consensus in favor of school choice as a general policy is clear and consistent.

This is a very handy resource.  Check it out!

Supporters of Portfolio Management have held up New Orleans as a model for what they are advocating.  They argued that every city should be like New Orleans in which a single, super-regulator could oversee a portfolio of schools to ensure that only quality schools are opened and expanded while bad ones are closed.  The Portfolio Manager could also issue regulations to govern school discipline, admissions, special education, and transportation as well as ensure “coordination” among the schools.

It was a beautiful dream until we woke up this month to discover that the Louisiana legislature is transferring responsibility for all schools in New Orleans from the Recovery School District, the city’s Portfolio Manager, to the locally elected Orleans Parish School Board, which has repeatedly declared its hostility toward charter schools.  This hostile school board will assume all responsibility for opening and closing all schools as well as continue regulating discipline, admissions, special education, transportation and other matters it deems necessary.  The fox has officially been awarded the keys to the hen house.

Those in denial about this failure cling to provisions in the state law that say charter schools will maintain their operational autonomy even after the school board takeover. But these declarations protecting autonomy are likely to be as meaningful as the Kellogg–Briand Pact declaring that war is illegal. If the school board can open and close schools as well as issue a host of regulations about their operations, they effectively control their operations.

A big problem with building a centralized authority — a Portfolio Manager — to govern all schools is that you cannot count on the good guys being in charge of that process forever.  Eventually, in this case barely a decade later, forces hostile to school choice will assume control of the Portfolio Manager and begin to strangle choice.

If only someone had warned backers of Portfolio Management about these dangers!  Oh wait…

In general, centralized, monopoly regulators are more susceptible to capture than decentralized, multiple regulators. The problem with portfolio districts is that they are trying to be one ring to rule them all…. The ability to control who operates all types of schools and what regulations govern them is too much power not to attract bad people to it or to corrupt those who possess it.

The solution is to decentralize power so that schools are governed by multiple regulators…. When that power is dispersed, it is too hard to capture all of them and they compete with one another to keep regulations reasonable. This is the logic behind separation of power and federalism. It is the virtue of Tiebout choice. The superiority of dispersing and checking power was understood by the founders. It was understood by Montesquieu. It was really Woodrow Wilson who launched a full-frontal attack on the idea of dispersed power and it is his progressive descendants who continue to this day to believe that they can wield the One Ring for good.

Arizona provides an alternative model for how to create a large and successful charter school sector.  Rather than building centralized machinery for controlling all schools of choice, like the Portfolio Manager in New Orleans, which can be captured by forces hostile to school choice, Arizona has multiple authorizers and light regulation.  No one will be able to capture the authorizers in Arizona and turn that machinery against them.

Of course, because choice creates its own political constituency, the charter schools in new Orleans will not collapse or be strangled immediately.  But the Portfolio Management approach has built the regulatory infrastructure to hassle those schools, prevent new ones from opening, and slowly squeeze them out.  At the very least, the progress of the charter sector in New Orleans will stagnate.  In Arizona, where charter schools will not have to run the gauntlet of a hostile regulator, that sector is likely to thrive.

Despite the fact that Portfolio Management is now one of the most popular reforms and despite the enormity of the setback in New Orleans, there has been relatively little discussion of this development in the blogosphere.  It’s bad enough not to have anticipated the rather predictable failure of Portfolio Management, but reformers can’t even acknowledge the failure.  How are we supposed to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes if we can’t even acknowledge that Portfolio Management has experienced a dramatic political failure in New Orleans?