Jay P. Greene's Blog

Yesterday, Harvard Education Press officially released The New Education Philanthropy, a volume edited by Rick Hess and Jeff Henig.  The book is a follow-up to one Rick edited a decade earlier, With the Best of Intentions.

Empirical analysis and constructive criticism of the role of foundations in education is hard to come by.  There are few professional rewards and significant risks in trying to analyze foundations and offer suggestions for improvement.  Foundations are accustomed to criticism, but much of it comes from people opposed to the idea that foundations should influence the education system, so foundations tend to classify all criticism as hostile and tune it out.  Folks not opposed to the mission of foundations tend to want funding from them and so tend to censor themselves when they might have analysis and criticism to offer.  In addition, foundations generally limit channels of communication from their friends for fear of being unduly lobbied by them for funding.

The ironic result is that foundations seeking to improve learning have virtually no mechanisms for learning about themselves and making their own improvements.  They generally don’t want to know.  They don’t want to hear the rantings of those who hate them and they don’t want to be influenced by the flattery and manipulations of those who love them.  But there is a third type of person that they have difficulty recognizing — someone who wants to help them by offering independent analysis and criticism.

This is why books like The New Education Philanthropy and With the Best of Intentions only come along every decade or so.  Few foundations will provide any support for independent empirical and critical examination of their efforts and few scholars are willing to engage in this type of work.  Even if someone else pays, few foundations are willing to engage in conferences, panel discussions, and written exchanges about their own efforts.  They tend to be as defensive and insular as presidential campaigns and are often operated as if that is what they are rather than learning organizations.

This is why books like The New Education Philanthropy and With the Best of Intentions are so important.  There is much that education philanthropies and others could learn from these volumes.  My chapter in the first book, “Buckets into the Sea,” examined the extent of philanthropic activity in education relative to public funding.  I found that all private giving to public K-12 schools, from the bake sale to the Gates Foundation, amounted to less than one-third of 1% of annual spending.  It’s basically rounding error.  A billion dollars feels like a lot of money to you, me, and the folks at foundations, but to a public school system spending over $600 billion annually it is not nearly enough to get them to do things that they don’t already want to do nor enough to purchase things that they can’t already buy.

So, foundations lack the resources to purchase education reform through the sheer force of their money.  In the chapter I wrote a decade ago, I suggested that if foundations wanted to change the education system they would have to engage in policy change to re-direct how the much larger pool of public resources is spent.

Around the same time that my chapter was published in With the Best of Intentions, many large foundations started to change their strategy to focus on policy advocacy.  Unfortunately, just as foundations failed to grasp the limitations of their fiscal resources, they also failed to understand how limited their political resources are as well.  This prompted my new chapter, “Buckets into Another Sea,” in The New Education Philanthropy.

Foundations have enough money to dominate the conversation of a few hundred people engaged in policy research and advocacy, but they don’t have enough resources to achieve enduring policy change without backing policies that generate their own constituency.

If expanding school choice creates tens of thousands of beneficiaries who are willing to rally on the steps of the capitol, they can create self-sustaining policy change.  But if foundations back policies that generate few natural constituents, then those policies are difficult to get adopted and even harder to keep over time.  There are no rallies for using test scores to evaluate teachers.  There are no rallies for common standards, assessments, and the “instructional shifts” they require.  Whatever the merit of these policies, foundations lack the political resources to achieve them without genuine constituents who will fight for them independent of foundation funding.

Check out The New Education Philanthropy and With the Best of Intentions to see what other insights folks have to offer.  We may not be right, but an honest and open discussion about effective strategies for foundations is sorely needed.

Anna Egalite, Jonathan Mills, and I have a new study in the journal, Improving Schools, in which we administer multiple measures of “non-cognitive” skills to the same sample of students to see if we get consistent results.  We didn’t.

How students performed on a self-reported grit scale was uncorrelated with behavioral measures of character skills, like delayed gratification, time devoted to solving a challenging task, and item non-response.  These are all meant to capture related (although not identical) concepts, so they should correlate with each other.  The fact that they don’t suggests that we still have a lot of work to do to refine our understanding of character skills and how best to measure them.

Angela Duckworth, who developed the self-reported grit scale, and David Scott Yeager, who is a pioneer in measuring growth-mindset, have been trying to warn the field that these measures are still in their infancy.  They have an article in Educational Researcher and have been giving interviews emphasizing that while non-cog skills appear to be a very important part of later life success, our methods of measuring these concepts are still not very strong — certainly not strong enough to include in school accountability systems.

Our research showing the lack of relationship between behavioral and self-reported measures of character skills adds to the case for caution in using these measures for evaluation or accountability purposes.  Remember, it took decades of research and practice to develop reliable standardized tests.  A similar effort and patience will be required to develop reliable measures of character skills.  And I suspect that even improved measures may be useful for research purposes but never robust enough to use for accountability.

Ed reformers can be dangerous if they are too much in a hurry.  We unfortunately want to apply every new insight right away and lack patience for the careful development of policies and practices for long-term benefit.  We also invest few resources in basic research that is essential for long-term gains.  According to my analysis in a chapter in a new book edited by Rick Hess and Jeff Henig on education philanthropy, the largest education foundations only devote 6% of their funding toward research.  And most of that research may really be short-term policy advocacy masquerading as research.  The federal government is little better at making funds available for basic research.

Non-cog or character skills are incredibly important but if we are going to use these and other ideas to improve education, we are going to need a significant shift toward funding research and greater patience to bring those ideas to fruition.

Yesterday AEI hosted an event at which I presented a new paper by Cari A. Bogulski and me examining the relationship between the type of school people attended when they were children and their attitudes toward Jews as adults.  We find that the more people attended religious private schools as children, the less anti-Semitic they are.  Secular private schools resemble public schools in the average level of anti-Semitism among their former students.

Of course, we were not able to randomly assign people to different types of school, so we cannot be confident that this relationship is causal.  But the relationship holds true after controlling for a variety of background characteristics.  It is still possible that adults who attended religious schools have more favorable attitudes toward Jews because of unobserved advantages but this seems unlikely given that the generally more advantaged families who send children to non-religious private schools do not appear to yield lower anti-Semitism.  And we do not typically think of families who choose to send their children to mostly Christian religious schools as doing so because of a particular affinity toward Jews .

Why might religious schooling be associated with lower anti-Semitism?  Prior research has found a general link between private education and higher tolerance, so this may just be consistent with that.  But the fact that the effect is restricted to religious schools is somewhat unexpected.  Perhaps religious institutions that operate schools, most of which are Christian, have adopted a much more favorable orientation toward Jews than is widely appreciated.

Many Jewish organizations have been slow to recognize that historically hostile groups may now be allies (and some traditional allies may be turning more hostile). Perhaps these findings may motivate several Jewish organizations to reconsider their opposition to private school choice programs.

For more details be sure to read the paper and watch the video above.

Actually, it was Friedrich Hayek who said this, but this image seemed a lot funnier.  Hayek — the economist with the funny mustache, not the movie star — was briefly a professor at the University of Arkansas before going on to the University of Chicago and winning a Nobel Prize.  Go Hogs!  As far as I know, Salma Hayek has never taught at the University of Arkansas and has also never won a Nobel Prize.  I think we can all see the causal connection.

While we are on the topic of the difficulty of drawing causal connections and being reminded of how little we know about what we imagine we can design, I’d like to add another piece of evidence to my previous post on “The Over-Confidence of Portfolio Management.” The central idea of portfolio management is to identify and close under-performing schools while opening and expanding higher quality schools.

The problem I noted in my previous post, is that portfolio management (PM) does not have a reliable tool for identifying which are the “good” and “bad” schools.  In New Orleans they identify “bad” schools based on the state’s school grading system, which is determined almost entirely by the level of student achievement on math and reading tests (and almost not at all on the growth in learning).  There is no reason to believe that schools with low levels of scores are “bad” schools, so there is no reason to believe that portfolio management is effectively identifying and closing  bad schools.  And if PM in NOLA can’t effectively distinguish between good and bad schools, there is no reason to believe that whatever progress has been made in New Orleans is due to portfolio management.

But this is not holding back PM supporters from adopting portfolio management as the “best practice” and hoping to implement it in Detroit and elsewhere.  They’re confident that they can identify bad schools for closure by focusing on growth in standardized test results, even if that was not what was done in NOLA.  The problem I noted in my last post is that even annual growth in test performance does not seem to be strongly predictive of later-life success.  Looking at 7 rigorous studies of long-term outcomes for charter and private school choice programs, we find that programs that produce large test score gains produce little or no gain in educational attainment while other programs with modest or no gains in test scores make large gains in high school graduation, college attendance, and even workplace earnings.

Well, now we have an 8th rigorous study and it fits the same pattern as the previous 7.  Joshua M. Beauregard’s Harvard doctoral thesis examines college outcomes for students applying by lottery for admission to High Tech High (HTH) School in San Diego.  High Tech High is a widely-lauded charter school that receives significant financial support from many of the big education reform foundations.  It’s a model of the kind of school that portfolio managers are supposed to open and expand.

So what is the effect of HTH on whether its students attend college?  Beauregard finds: “I detect no impact on the probability of enrollment in college of any type, which includes two-year and four-year colleges, for my aggregate sample. My estimates are consistent when including baseline demographics and ELA scores.” (p. 28) Similar to Angrist, et al’s results from studying “no excuses” charter schools in Boston, Beauregard does find that attending HTH seems to shift college-going students from two to four-year colleges, but it has no overall effect on post-secondary education.  He describes the increase in four-year college attendance as “statistically significant” although the results in Table 5 show that this is only at p<.1.  And we have no idea whether shifting students from 2 to 4 year colleges is good if students are unable to complete a 4 year degree. Beauregard also reports no increase in attendance at “competitive” four-year colleges as a result of attending High Tech High.

With HTH we have another example of a school of choice with impressive test score performance that does not produce commensurate improvements in long-term outcomes for students.  The central flaw of portfolio management is that the tool it uses to identify which schools should be closed and which should be opened and expanded is not well-connected with long-term success for students.  PM can’t improve outcomes for students by closing “bad” schools if it can’t accurately determine which are the bad schools.

Maybe Salma Hayek should explain to them “how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was many things — scholar,  ambassador to India and then the United Nations, United States Senator, and, of course, he was an alum of Tufts University where he earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees.  He was author of The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report, which examined the rise of single parenthood and its consequences, particularly for African-Americans.  Education Next recently devoted an entire issue to the Moynihan Report on the 50th anniversary of its release.

This week we are noting another anniversary.  It has been 40 years since Moynihan gave his passionate speech at the United Nations denouncing United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which infamously asserted that “Zionism is a form of racism…”  The UN revoked that resolution in 1991, but its hateful legacy lives on at the United Nations and among anti-Semites everywhere.

His speech that Zionism is not racism was, as Gil Troy’s book calls it, Moynihan’s Moment.  On its 40th anniversary I thought I would reproduce key parts of that speech.  It’s remarkable not just for its content but also for its style.  Let’s hope that school children will also be taught to remember the legacy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and that current and future leaders may be inspired to uphold his ideals.

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, November 10, 1975. Source: U.S. Congressional Record.

The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations not to do this thing. It was, he said, “obscene.” It is something more today, for the furtiveness with which this obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a shameless openness.

There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-semitism — as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the Abomination of anti-semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened.

As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number — not this time — and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost.

Nor should any historian of the event, nor yet any who have participated in it, suppose, that we have fought only as governments, as chancelleries, and on an issue well removed from the concerns of our respective peoples. Others will speak for their nations: I will speak for mine….

The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations is that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Now this is a lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated.

The very first point to be made is that the United Nations has declared Zionism to be racism — without ever having defined racism. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” as the Queen of Hearts said. But this is not wonderland, but a real world, where there are real consequences to folly and to venality….

What we have here is a lie — a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage. The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that is it not.

The word “racism” is a creation of the English language, and relatively new to it…. The term derives from relatively new doctrines — all of them discredited — concerning the human population of the world, to the effect that there are significant biological differences among clearly identifiable groups, and that these differences establish, in effect, different levels of humanity. Racism, as defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, is “The Assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another.” It further involves “a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to dominate over others.”…

Now it was the singular nature — if, I am not mistaken, it was the unique nature — of this [Zionist] national liberation movement that in contrast with the movements that preceded it, those of that time, and those that have come since, it defined its members in terms not of birth, but of belief. That is to say, it was not a movement of the Irish to free Ireland, or of the Polish to free Poland, not a movement of the Algerians to free Algeria, nor of Indians to free India. It was not a movement of persons connected by historic membership to a genetic pool of the kind that enables us to speak loosely but not meaninglessly, say, of the Chinese people, nor yet of diverse groups occupying the same territory which enables us to speak [o]f the American people with no greater indignity to truth. To the contrary, Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or — and this is the absolutely crucial fact — anyone who converted to Judaism. Which is to say, in terms of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the 20th General Assembly, anyone — regardless of “race, colour, descent, or nationally or ethnic origin …..”

The state of Israel, which in time was the creation of the Zionist Movement, has been extraordinary in nothing so much as the range of “racial stocks” from which [it has drawn its citizens.  There are black Jews, brown Jews, white Jews, Jews from the] Orient and Jew[s] from the West. Most such persons could be said to have been “born” Jewish, just as most Presbyterians and most Hindus are “born” to their faith, but there are many Jews who are …converts. With a consistency in the matter which surely attests to the importance of this issue to that religio[u]s and political culture, Israeli courts have held that a Jew who converts to another religion is no longer a Jew. In the meantime the population of Israel also includes large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other national origins. Many of these persons are citizens of Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical nation of Western Europe.

Now I should wish to be understood that I am here making one point, and one point only, which is that whatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be “a form of racism.” In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many things, theoretically, including many things undesirable, but it could not be and could not become racism unless it ceased to be Zionist.

Indeed, the idea that Jews are a “race” was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews. The idea of Jews as a race was invented by nineteenth century anti-semites such as Houston Steward Chamberlain and Edouard Drumont, who saw that in an increasingly secular age, which is to say an age made for fewer distinctions between people, the old religio[u]s grounds for anti-semitism were losing force. New justifications were needed for excluding and persecuting Jews, and so the new idea of Jews as a race — rather than as a religion — was born. It was a contemptible idea at the beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with it. To think that it is an idea now endorsed by the United Nations is to reflect on what civilization has come to.

It is precisely a concern for civilization, for civilized values that are or should be precious to all mankind, that arouses us at this moment to such special passion. What we have at stake here is not merely the honor and the legitimacy of the State of Israel — although a challenge to the legitimacy of any member nation ought always to arouse the vigilance of all members of the United Nations. For a yet more important matter is at issue, which is the integrity of the whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights.

The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences. Not only will people begin to say, indeed they have already begun to say that the United Nations is a place where lies are told, but far more serious, grave and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of human rights itself. The harm will arise first because it will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that it still precariously holds today.

An audio of the full speech can be found here:

Anna Egalite and Matthew Ackerman have a new study out that examines whether the matching methodology used by CREDO to evaluate charter schools is “a reasonable alternative when the gold standard is not feasible or possible.”  They conclude that it is.  Using data from FL, they consider and rebut a series of common criticisms that have been made against the CREDO methodology.

They find that using multiple students when matching does not change results much from using a single match.  They also find that matching on administrative classifications, like special education and English language learner, also does not distort results much even though those classifications are systematically different across sectors.  And they find that more rigorous methodologies, like using exogenous instruments, yield similar results in FL to using CREDO’s matching method.

Anna and Matthew have done excellent work and convincingly demonstrated their case.  Since Anna is a former student, who is now an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State (via a post-doc at Harvard), and another former student of mine, James (Lynn) Woodworth, is a researcher at CREDO and author of reports using this methodology, this superb analysis of CREDO’s approach fills me with pride in their accomplishments.

But I’m concerned that they or others may over-interpret what this study finds.  It does not demonstrate that matching generally gives you the same result as randomized experiments or other gold standard methodologies.  All that it demonstrates is that matching yielded similar results in this particular context.  In this circumstance, the selection of students into charter schools did not produce important differences between treatment and control students on unobserved characteristics.  And in this case, systematic differences in how charter and traditional public schools classify students into special ed, ELL, and free lunch did not bias the result.  But the next time we use a matching methodology, the situation could be completely different.  In the next matching study, the types of students who attend charters may be significantly different in unobserved ways and administrative classifications could produce strong bias.

People have a very bad habit of declaring that matching or another observational method is just as good as gold-standard research designs whenever the two produce similar results.  They did this after Abdulkadiroğlu, et al produced their Boston charter results.  But declaring that both methods are just as good ignores why we have gold-standard research in the first place.  The bias of observational methods is typically unobserved.  And those biases certainly exist some of the time even if they are not present all of the time.  Finding similar results for matching methods in one circumstance does not erase this fact.

To their credit, Ackerman and Egalite are careful to emphasize that matching should only be considered when more rigorous approaches are not available.  My strong preference is that we should avoid sub-par methodologies, especially when the same policy has been subject to at least some gold-standard evaluations.  We don’t need a study on every charter school in every state.  We should rely on the rigorous research where we have it and then extrapolate those results to other schools and states.  I’d rather be guided by theory supported by rigorous evidence than demand sub-par evidence for all things.  Demanding evidence for every school in every state gives us a false sense of confidence that we really know how each state and school are doing.

Unfortunately, in their drive to make “evidence-based” decisions and feel “scientific,” ed reform policymakers and leaders have demanded that evidence be produced  for each school in each state.  Some have gone so far as to demand evidence on the effectiveness of each teacher.  We can’t produce rigorous evidence all of the time, so these demands for evidence are driving us toward lower quality research designs.  That may produce unbiased results some of the time, but it certainly won’t all of the time.  So, in the desire to be evidence-based and scientific we are likely to undermine the quality of evidence and science.  Let’s stick to gold-standard work for policy questions where we have those studies.

The Gates Foundation’s education reform strategy is in the midst of the most catastrophic failure since the Annenberg Foundation blew $500 million in the 1990s.  The wheels are coming off Common Core, the center-piece of the Gates reform strategy.  Today’s front-page Wall Street Journal article documents how states and districts are abandoning the standards and their aligned tests and/or backing away from making the necessary expenditures to implement the new standards.  At this point only 23 states are still using one of the two Common Core assessments, putting me clearly in the lead on the Greene-Polikoff Wager.  The WSJ article paints a devastating picture of Common Core’s collapse.

Even local efforts by the Gates Foundation to implement its teacher quality strategy are falling apart.  Gates pledged $100 million to the Hillsborough School District in Tampa, Florida to make it the model of its reform strategy.  As the district is running out of Gates money and discovering the unsustainability of its own financial commitments, the whole effort of using new teacher evaluation methods, mentoring, and merit pay is about to be dismantled.

Despite all of this investment, Hillsborough is getting lousy academic results.  As can be seen in the table below, Hillsborough has been doing very poorly on the US Department of Ed’s Urban NAEP over the last 2 and 4 years.  Hillsborough has even lagged far behind the generally disappointing national results.  Nor is this a Florida problem as Hillsborough lags far behind the trend in Miami.  Of course, one cannot attribute these aggregate trends to any specific policy, but political interpretations do not hinge on these methodological niceties.  The obvious conclusion policymakers are drawing is that the Gates effort in Hillsborough cost a fortune, is not financially or politically sustainable, and is an academic flop.

The question is whether philanthropists and ed reformers are going to learn the right lessons from the unfolding Great Gates Political FAIL.  Some seem to have mistakenly concluded that the problem was just poor communication and messaging.  Others seem to think we just need to try harder to succeed with implementation.  I’m convinced that a top-down strategy that falsely invokes science to identify “best practices” and then attempts to impose those practices on our highly decentralized education system is always doomed to fail, regardless of how it is “messaged” and no matter how earnest we are about implementation.

There are no indications as of yet that folks at the Gates Foundation or other major reform organizations have learned the proper lessons.  Vicki Phillips just announced that she is leaving as the head of Gates education efforts, but the Foundation’s public statements indicate no change in strategy.  It’s unclear whether Phillips is leaving because of perceived failure, because of the repeated mis-representation of research, or just because it is time for a change after 8 years at the helm.  And other foundations seem to be drifting toward more top-down, high-regulation approaches.

Effective philanthropy is hard and education reform is even more challenging.  But unless the major organizations change their approach they are doomed to repeat this failure.

Yesterday I announced Ken M as the winner of the 2015 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  In that post I didn’t do enough to explain why I did not select one of the other very worthy nominees, so I’d like to remedy that today.

Malcolm McLean is like several of Matt’s previous nominees — a business innovator who had to overcome entrenched interests to introduce a new and more efficient method that has improved the human condition.  McLean’s development of inter-modal container shipping is a great advance but it is also a bit too similar to our past honoree and Matt nominee, George P. Mitchell, who pioneered fracking.  Recognizing the variety of ways in which people can improve the human condition is a factor in selecting the recipient of The Al.

I nominated Gary Gygax, who created Dungeons & Dragons.  Gygax does highlight the variety of ways people can improve the human condition, but he still falls short.  The real contribution of D&D is giving permission to adolescents and adults to play pretend, not the development of a bunch of rules, books, and accessories.  Had Gygax spent more energy emphasizing the former rather than the later, he might have been a stronger contender for The Al.

John Lasseter, is a crowd favorite and Greg writes a brilliant post nominating him.  But The Al tends to recognize the un-recongized over the already famous.  Lasseter has a shelf full of accolades for his amazing work.  Honoring Lasseter would be like honoring Jonas Salk or Steve Jobs.  There is no doubt that they accomplished great things that improved the human condition, but those accomplishments are already well-known and not in need of further recognition.

I explained my reasoning for selecting Mike McShane’s nominee, Ken M, yesterday, but I’d like to elaborate on that a bit.  Ken M reminds me of The Lazlo Letters, a collection of correspondence between comedian Don Novello’s alter ego, Lazlo Toth, and a variety of public figures and major corporations in the 1970s.  Novello, better known for playing Father Guido Sarducci, wrote idiotic letters to these powerful people and companies to elicit their polite but often manipulative replies.  As he put it, “No matter how absurd my letter was, no matter how much I ranted and raved, they always answered.  Many of these replies are beautiful examples of pure public relations nonsense.”  PR letters in the 1970s were just the primitive ancestors of today’s perpetual social media campaign and flacking.

I’m pleased to report that Ken M contacted me this morning in appreciation of receiving The Al.  In fact, of the living recipients of The Al, we have heard from all of the individuals or family members with the exception of Weird Al (perhaps a sign that he was already so widely recognized for his accomplishments that he might not have been the best selection to win The Al.)  But to the rest of The Al honorees I can only say thank you for all you have done to improve the human condition.  In the words of Lazlo Toth to then President Gerald Ford: “Lean to your left — Lean to your right — Stand up, sit down — Fight! Fight! Fight!”

We had another strong field of nominees for this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, including Malcolm McLean, Gary Gygax, and John Lasseter.  All of them would be worthy of “The Al” at some time, but one of them — Ken M — is the Al winner the world currently needs.

Why do we need Ken M to win the Al? Because serious and powerful people have adopted the ridiculous idea that policy can be changed and the world can be made a better place by constantly communicating and arguing on social media.  This idea has infected virtually every policy issue, including education reform.  Intellectual discussion of policy has often devolved into a perpetual campaign, where the goal is to get as many “likes” and “hits” as possible.  There are conference calls to develop “messaging” and distribute “talking points,” as if they were orchestrating an actual election campaign rather than trying to better understand and improve public policy. This is why we see so much total b.s., half-truths, and distortions from people who should be more responsible.  They just want to win as many votes (hits, likes, etc…) for their policy as possible, credibility be damned.

Ken M has made a significant contribution to improving the human condition by revealing what a complete waste of time social media is for anyone who takes it seriously and thinks they are changing the world by tweeting, posting, and arguing on the internet.  Social media is filled with idiots, like Ken M’s persona, whose opinions can’t be changed and whose opinions don’t really matter anyway.

It’s amazing to me that people with a lot of resources and who imagine themselves to be politically sophisticated have absolutely no idea how policy change occurs.  Retail politics with mass communication have practically nothing to do with how policy gets made, most of which is determined by better-informed elites and interest-groups.  Mass opinion matters only very indirectly.

In addition, it’s amazing to me that ed reformers would be attracted to a perpetual campaign approach given that the unions and other status quo forces have way more money and volunteers than reformers can ever have.  In a brute force political contest the unions and their fellow-travelers will win almost every time.  The one thing reformers have going for them is the truth.  The unions are stuck with lousy ideas that produce miserable outcomes.  Reformers can beat them by remaining committed to telling the truth as faithfully as they can.  Messaging, spinning, and distorting only undermine the credibility of reformers and deprive them of the one advantage they have.

I write all of this in a blog post with a complete understanding that this post will not change the world for the better.  This blog exists mostly because I enjoy having a running conversation with a few friends and because doing this amuses us.  Ken M has the right idea.  Social media is mostly for socializing and having fun, not changing the world.  For that he is worthy of this year’s Al.

(Guest Post by Mike McShane)

The internet is awesome. From the Marine in Afghanistan who can Skype home to Alabama to help his wife tuck his kids in, to the incredible amount of free, crowd-sourced information on sites like Wikipedia, to the connective power that social media has provided, even to the point of helping taking down unjust dictatorships, it has been an incredible force for good in our world.

But the internet is also terrible. The combination of anonymity, a perceived soapbox, and the belief that there is real connection between opinion makers and mothers’ basement dwellers has surfaced an ugliness that has meted mob justice (sometimes incorrectly), harassed people, hacked into cell phones and shared private photos, and said horrible things that I’m not even going to hyperlink to.

The internet has developed a word for the people who perpetuate such ugliness, trolls.  It is evocative and accurate. Some of these trolls become well known. Others shift from user name to user name and IP address to IP address to guard their secrecy.

By and large, trolls are terrible and most websites are powerless to do anything about them. But, a recent Gizmodo post reminded me of an individual that took on trolling in the only way that might actually work, by trolling the trolls.

Ken M, the nom-de-plume of comedian Kenneth McCarthy, pops into comment sections with a childlike wonder and an idiocy that is so deep and true that it drives self-righteous and pedantic internet commenters nuts.  Here are a couple of examples:

You tell ’em Ken.

I love Ken M for three reasons. First and foremost, he makes me laugh. Like big dirty, laughs. Second, he’s not mean spirited.  Sure, he’s pulling these folks leg and we’re having a laugh at their expense, but he’s part of the joke too, and there is no nastiness in what he is doing. Finally, like all great comedy, Ken M’s shtick is rooted in something true—it is stupid to argue on the internet.  It is stupid to argue on the internet, and only by watching a stupid person argue on the internet can we fully appreciate just how stupid it is to argue on the internet.

So I’d like to nominate the pedant-baiting, Mars Rover-chastising, Pompeii-defaming, National Geographic-baking, Ken M for the Al. Hope he made you laugh as hard as he made me.