I’ve been poking fun at people using Twitter for serious policy debates. I acknowledge that Twitter is great for disseminating links, breaking news, and humor, but for conducting serious arguments Twitter has to be just about the dumbest thing on the planet (and I’m so dumb I periodically try to do it).
But there is something worse about trying to have serious policy debates on Twitter — it makes everyone come off as snarky and mean. I’m sure I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But there is no doubt that forcing communication in short, 140 character bursts coarsens debate and polarizes differences by removing subtlety and nuance.
There is an antidote to this corrosive effect of Twitter — meeting people in person. AEI’s Rick Hess has a gathering a couple times a year of policy analysts, scholars, entrepreneurs, and practitioners. Rick has an excellent ability to bring together top-notch people from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. I always learn something useful at these meetings, but much more importantly, I get to meet people whom I might otherwise only know through Twitter or blogs.
The vast majority of times, when I meet people in person with whom I’ve had run-ins on the internet I discover that these folks are good, friendly, and a pleasure to talk to. I almost always discover that we don’t disagree on policy nearly as much as we thought when we were taking shots at each other on Twitter or the blogs. Occasionally, I find that people who I liked and agreed with on the internet turn out to be jerks. But, on average, in-person meetings greatly reduce the personal animosity and bickering promoted by the internet.
There is no going back on the increasing use of the internet for policy debates. More information, more quickly disseminated, and more easily accessed are good things that people rightfully want. But it comes at a price. To reduce that price we should continue to invest in in-person gatherings, like the ones Rick hosts.
What do you see in this picture? The new PISA results are out and education charlatans of every stripe are finding proof of their own preferred policy solution.
Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association sees addressing poverty as the solution: “The United States’ standings haven’t improved dramatically because we as a nation haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance — the effects of poverty on students.” There is some evidence for this, but the OECD analysis finds that student socioeconomic status only explains 15% of the variance in test results. And according to the Wall Street Journal coverage, “Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, noted that American students from families with incomes in the highest quartile did not perform as well as students with similar backgrounds in other countries.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, “‘None of the top-tier countries,’ said Randi Weingarten head of the American Federation of Teachers, ‘nor any of those that have made great leaps in student performance, like Poland and Germany, has a fixation on testing like the United States does.'” Except many of the big gainers, particularly in Asia, do fixate on testing.
Best Practices guru, Marc Tucker, was on NPR this morning saying something about how “what you will find among the top performers” is that they”provide more resources to kids who are harder to educate than kids who are easier to educate.” But in the San Jose Mercury News Tucker seems to suggest that more resources is not the solution when he asks, “Why are we not getting more bang for the buck?” And on NPR Tucker credited Singapore’s success to “not just more teachers but better teachers.” But the Wall Street Journal cites the OECD analysis, saying it “found a low connection between class size and test scores.” And in the country Tautology Land better teachers are the ones who produce better scores.
It is possible to do credible social scientific analyses of international test scores if you do something like a regression that systematically examines variation in performance within and across countries controlling for other variables. See for example work by Ludger Woessmann. But just eyeballing the top performers and making up stories about why they succeeded based on picking and choosing characteristics about them is pure quackery. As I’ve said before, best practices are the worst.
So, reach for your Duck Dynasty duck quacker and watch as folks make up stories about the picture above. Personally, I see a cute little dog.
Be sure not to miss our newly published articles in Educational Researcher and Psychology of Music expanding this body of research and exploring it in greater detail.
In the past week there’s been a flurry of articles coming out featuring our art research. Education Researcherhas a new piece by Dan Bowen, Brian Kisida, and me on how field trips to an art museum affect students’ critical thinking. This article is a more technical and focused follow-up to our piece in Education Next.
Psychology of Music has a new study by Lisa Margulis, Brian Kisida, and me on how information affects the student experience when seeing a live musical performance. In particular, we experimentally gave students a program note with information about a show and others a note with information about the venue but nothing about the show. We then measured student enjoyment and knowledge.
And most recently, the New York Times published today a piece by Brian, Dan, and me summarizing our study of field trips to an art museum.
Nothing seems to generate a buzz of discussion on Twitter, Facebook, and email quite like a New York Times article. Let’s hope it all leads to more research and thinking about the importance of art in education.
… it seems clear to me that Mr. Gates thinks it immoral for rich people to give money to museums instead of medical projects, presumably those that have received the official Bill Gates Seal of Moral Approval. To be sure, he deserves full credit for putting his own money where his mouth is: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives away some $4 billion a year, much of which is used to support health-related initiatives in developing countries, including a world-wide initiative to stamp out polio.
Good for him—but when it comes to art, he’s got it all wrong, and then some.
It almost embarrasses me to restate for Mr. Gates’s benefit what most civilized human beings already take to be self-evident, which is that art museums, like symphony orchestras and drama companies and dance troupes, make the world more beautiful, thereby making it a better place in which to live. Moreover, the voluntary contributions of rich people help to ensure the continued existence of these organizations, one of whose reasons for existing is to make it possible for people who aren’t rich to enjoy the miracle that is art. If it weren’t for museums, you wouldn’t get to see any of the paintings of Rembrandt and Monet and Jackson Pollock (and, yes, Francis Bacon). Instead they’d be hanging in homes whose owners might possibly deign to open their doors to the public once a year. Maybe.
It is, as they say, a free country, and rich people get to do whatever they want with their money. They can spend it on paintings or children’s hospitals or beach houses. But the surprising thing—or maybe not—is that so many of them believe in helping to make the world a better place for their fellow men.
Nor do I hear any groundswell of support among the rich for Mr. Gates’s rigidly utilitarian view of charity. Perhaps that’s because the desire to partake of beauty is so deeply rooted in the human soul. Flip through a book of quotations and you’ll see an abundance of testimony to its lasting importance throughout the whole of recorded history. I especially like what Somerset Maugham said in his novel “Cakes and Ale”: “Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.” So it is, and sooner or later most of us will long for it as we do for food. What could be more honorable than for a rich person to help satisfy that hunger in the same way that he might underwrite the operation of a food bank?
Indeed, many philanthropic organizations see no need to choose. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, for example, supports the performing arts and medical research.
Think that over the next time you feel inclined to sputter with rage over the results of the latest big-ticket art auction. While you’re at it, remember that in the long run, the chances are very, very good that the paintings for which “some rich guy dropped millions” will end up in a museum, perhaps even one that, like New York’s Frick Collection or the Phillips Collection in Washington, was built by the rich guy in question. And think about this as well: Of course it’s admirable to help prevent blindness—but it’s also admirable to help ensure that we have beautiful things to see.
There is a legitimate diversity of views on what constitutes a good education. We should be no more willing to impose the “right” kind of education on people than we would impose the “right” religion or the “right” political preference. Reasonable people disagree about what constitutes the good life and the government in a free society should not be in the business of severely restricting that range of disagreement.
Unfortunately, even when we expand the set of publicly-funded education providers to include charter and private schools we still very often require that students attending those schools take the state test, designed to measure the teaching of state standards and curriculum. But what if we want something other than the state vision of a good education encapsulated in state standards and testing? Too bad. You still have choice…. sort of. “There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one, and they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.”
You might respond that state testing, curriculum, and standards are not so constraining as to meaningfully restrict choice. That might be the case in some states right now, but over time the clear goal of the standards-based reform movement is to drive particular instructional changes. I think they are very likely to fail in that effort (because teachers are powerful and don’t like being bossed around), but they may at least partially succeed and in so doing restrict the range of differing visions of a good education much more than is desirable in a free society. Besides, counting on others failing in pursuing a bad plan is a risky way to prevent bad from happening.
You might respond that choice schools need to comply with the state’s vision of a good education if they want state funding. So, the state only pays for its own vision of a good education but you have to pay extra if you want to pursue something else. This is roughly comparable to the status of Dhimmis (non-Muslims in an Islamic state) who are allowed to practice a different religion as long as they pay an extra tax. Doesn’t feel compatible with a free society, does it?
Besides the oft-repeated claim that state funding requires accountability to the state is an obviously shallow and false political slogan rather than a well-considered policy view. Most state funded programs require no formal accountability to the state and instead rely primarily on the self-interest of the recipients to use the funds wisely. For example, the largest domestic program, social security, is designed to prevent seniors from lacking basic resources for housing, food, or clothing. But we don’t demand that seniors account for the use of their social security checks. They could blow it at the casino if they want. We’re just counting on the fact that most would have the good sense to make sure that their basic needs are covered first.
Even in the area of education most government programs require no formal accountability. Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and the Daycare Tuition Tax Credit do not require state testing for people using those funds. We just trust that the public purpose of subsidizing education will be served by people pursuing their own interests. Anyone who declares that state funding requires state accountability obviously hasn’t thought about this for more than 10 seconds.
If choice schools don’t have to take state tests, why should traditional public schools? Every education provider should decide for itself what its goals are, develop its own standards, curriculum, and pedagogy, and decide how best to assess its progress. Traditional public schools are agencies of the state, so the state can and should decide the standards, curriculum, and method of assessment for those schools. The state could devolve those decisions to individual school districts or schools. But private schools are not agencies of the state. They have their own visions of a good education and should develop standards, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments as they think best.
Don’t parents need state testing requirements for consumer protection and to get information to make intelligent choices? Most markets generate consumer information without government mandates for them to do so. For example, I have more information than you can imagine to pick a hotel or restaurant through Trip Advisor, Yelp, Urban Spoon, etc… GreatSchools.org and other market sources of information about education are already springing up as choice expands without government mandates. But if you still feel the need to require testing, why not just require choice schools to take any one of a large number of standardized tests? At least that way we place fewer restrictions on the curriculum schools could pursue.
While I would prefer no testing requirements on choice schools, I understand and have defended the need for compromises to pass choice programs. But let’s not confuse a compromise with the ideal. Testing requirements are a concession that should only be granted if necessary to expand choice. And a requirement that choice schools take any one of a long list of standardized tests is much more desirable than requiring the state test. Choice supporters in Indiana and Louisiana should be proud that they were recently able to enact state-wide programs, even though those programs required all choice schools to take the state test. But now maybe those supporters should start a new push to remove or relax those requirements.
When your children come home from school today, I’d like you to ask them if they discussed the Gettysburg Address. I’m curious to hear their answers.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman, has been urging people to consider the importance of what are sometimes called “non-cognitive” attributes, like self-control, persistence, delayed-gratification, etc… As it turns out, these qualities seem to be at least as important as traditional measures of academic achievement in predicting success in life and are things that schools can teach.
The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills–personality
traits, goals, motivations, and preferences–that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many
other domains. Their predictive power rivals that of cognitive skills. Reliable measures of character
have been developed….
Character is shaped by families, schools, and social environments….
High-quality early childhood and elementary school programs improve character skills in a lasting
and cost-effective way. Many of them beneficially affect later-life outcomes without improving cognition.
There are fewer long-term evaluations of adolescent interventions, but workplace-based programs
that teach character skills are promising. The common feature of successful interventions across all
stages of the life cycle through adulthood is that they promote attachment and provide a secure base
for exploration and learning for the child. Successful interventions emulate the mentoring environments
offered by successful families.
The more that the education field narrows its focus to standardized achievement test scores, the more it detracts from these other essential aims of education.
(Guest Post by James P. Kelly III and Benjamin Scafidi)
More and more American parents are being given the opportunity for school choice, including through the Georgia K-12 tuition tax credit scholarship program. Through this program, Georgia taxpayers may contribute up to a statewide total of $58 million annually to student scholarship organizations (SSOs) that provide scholarships to students to attend private schools.
Why are parents actively seeking these scholarships for their children? Why are they looking to move from a public to a private school?
Our study, sponsored by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, “More Than Scores: An Analysis of Why and How Parents Choose Private Schools” is available at www.edchoice.org/MoreThanScores
More Than Scores analyzed voluntary survey data compiled from parents of 754 private school students who received financial support from the Georgia GOAL Scholarship program, the largest SSO in Georgia.
The survey results indicate that low and middle income tax credit scholarship recipients valued a wide variety of factors when trying to move their children from traditional public schools into another learning environment.
Parents were given a list of 21 possible reasons for choosing a private school. The top five reasons these 754 parents selected private schools were better student discipline (50.9%), better learning environment (50.8%), smaller class sizes (48.9%), improved student safety (46..8%) and more individual attention (39.3%).
When asked to name the top five reasons, test scores were named on 10.2% of surveys. When asked to select just one most important reason, test scores were selected by 0.0% of parents.
When one considers the academic, social, and cultural challenges so many young people and their families in America are facing, it is easier to understand why parents are far less concerned about standardized test scores as a simple form of accountability. In terms of academic goals, parents—especially low income and other traditionally disadvantaged parents—care more about school and classroom conditions that will lead to graduation from high school and success in college.
Offering more parents school choice would significantly increase the transparency and accountability of private schools. Low and middle-income GOAL Scholarship parents are willing to take several time consuming steps to obtain information about private schools. Further, 79 percent of parents said that if a private school declined to provide them with any specific information they desire that it ‘would’ impact their school choice decision; another 20 percent said that it ‘might’ impact their decision. This is powerful evidence that private schools—without any prompting from government—will have to be transparent with prospective parents or else risk losing students and their tuition funds.
Based on our survey results and the results of similar studies, we conclude that a “spontaneous education order” would arise if state governments provided all families with school choice. Civil society would create crowd-sourcing platforms like www.greatschools.org and other tools to aid families in their school choice decisions.
School choice advocates should stop imposing standardized tests on students who attend private schools for reasons of expedience or accountability. There are a number of schooling factors that satisfy a child’s educational needs and development. The low and middle income parents who receive GOAL scholarships are capable of holding schools accountable. States should create school choice programs that empower all parents to hold public and private schools accountable.
More About Georgia GOAL:
From 2008 through 2012, GOAL received $54.254,528 in contributions and awarded 8,681 scholarships to 5,220 students, totaling $33,161,165. As of December 31, 2012, GOAL had obligated an additional $17.8 million, earmarked for future scholarship payments and awards. In 2012, GOAL awarded 3,366 scholarships.
[Note from Jay: I accidentally jumped the gun and posted this before the study was released. I’ve taken down the URL that goes directly to the report, but will restore that tomorrow after the study is publicly available. My apologies.]
[Another note from Jay: The report is now available and I have updated the link]
I nominated Penn and Teller for their efforts in combating bullshit. But this year’s winner also combats bullshit and does so in a more gentle and perhaps effective way.
Greg nominated Kickstarter, the crowd-funding platform. Whatever its merits, Kickstarter is not a person and is not eligible. We aren’t Time Magazine, which has awarded person of the year to such non-persons as “The Computer” and “The Endangered Earth” as well as to collectives, such as “The Peacemakers,”American Women,” and The Protester.” Having personally won the 2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year Award I can tell you that we can’t stoop to the standards of a magazine like Time.
Matt nominated Bill Knudsen, the American businessman who marshaled the might of American industry to defeat the Nazis. Beating the Nazis is always worthy of praise, but I worry that some of the PLDDers might get the wrong central planning message from a Knudsen victory.
So, the 2013 winner of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award is Pat Wolf’s nominee — Weird Al Yankovic.
Like Al Copeland, Weird Al may not have changed the world, but he has certainly improved the human condition. He’s done so by making us laugh at the the absurdity of many who think highly of themselves. My favorite Weird Al song is a little dated, but it is his song Headline News, featured at the top of this post. Anyone who doesn’t recognize how ridiculous our news obsession with the faux-celebrity of petty scandal hasn’t read Fahrenheit 451. The news chatter about missing pretty white girls, “accidental” sex tape releases, and the like seems to be as much a distracting sedative from the real issues of life as “The Family” TV show in Fahrenheit 451. Weird Al, in his gentle and entertaining way, reveals the BS of this faux-celebrity worship.
Last year’s winner of Al Copeland Humanitarian Award was George P. Mitchell, the natural gas entrepreneur who commercialized fracking and horizontal drilling techniques that have made cheap, clean natural gas plentiful.
A common theme in past Al honorees is how they improved the human condition through individual freedom, not government control. Earle Haas liberated women from several days of confinement each month by developing the modern, hygienic tampon. This expanded women’s economic and political power by given them full access to public life. This advance in civil liberties came from a private businessperson, not from a government mandate. And the fact that he and the Tampex Company made a fortune in the process in no way sullies the benefits they produced for women. In fact, that profit motive made the advance possible by incentivizing them to develop and market it. And contrary to the vaguely Marxist critique of advertising as creating false and unnecessary desires, the marketing of the tampon was an essential part of making women aware of the tampon’s benefits and helping women overcome the ignorance and stigmas that hindered widespread use of tampons.
Similarly, Wim Nottroth’s improvement to the human condition came from his embrace of individual liberty. He stood up to an Orwellian government edict that denouncing killing was the equivalent of hate-speech against Muslims. As I’ve argued before, the most serious threats to liberty come from small-minded government officials and their enablers surrendering our freedom in the name of promoting something good, not the big scary dictators whose threats are self-evidently menacing and more easily resisted.
And Debrilla M. Ratchford, the inventor of the rollerbag, was recognized for how important the quirky inventor of something useful could be to improving the human condition.
Now Weird Al joins this illustrious list of honorees. It’s almost something he’d want to mock in a song.
Fordham’s Kathleen Porter Magee has responded to my post last week in which I argued that Fordham’s vision of Common Core as “tight-loose” is looking a lot more like “tight-tight.” In her rejoinder, Kathleen Porter-Magee reiterates the distinction between standards and curriculum and insists that “good standards aren’t prescriptive, but they’re not agnostic, either.”
If this is beginning to sound like debating what the meaning of the word “is” is, there is a reason. Almost everything coming out of Fordham (and a great many other DC think-tanks and advocacy groups) feels more like political campaign rhetoric than serious intellectual inquiry. Rick Hess described Kathleen Porter-Magee’s rejoinder, saying it “read to me like a pol’s answer.” Precisely. It is a politician’s answer because the folks at Fordham (and many other DC policy shops) too often behave, talk, and write more like politicians than scholars or serious policy analysts.
My goal in critiquing Fordham (and the Gates Foundation) is to encourage them to behave less like politicians and more like scholars and serious policy analysts. Kathleen Porter-Magee misunderstands my motivation, suggesting that I am trying to “undermine the credibility of [my] opponents” on Common Core so I “can win the day—facts be damned.”
But the truth is that I am under no delusion that what I write or say will have any effect on the fate of Common Core, nor do I really care about having such an effect. As I have written and said on numerous occasions, Common Core is doomed regardless of what I or the folks at Fordham say or do. Either Common Core will be “tight” in trying to compel teachers and schools through a system of aligned assessments and meaningful consequences to change their practice. Or Common Core will be “loose” in that it will be a bunch of words in a document that merely provide advice to educators.
Either approach is doomed. If Common Core tries being tight by coercing teachers and schools through aligned assessments and consequences, it will be greeted by a fierce organized rebellion from educators. It’ll be Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch and their army of angry teachers who will drive a stake through the heart of Common Core, not me or any other current critic . If Common Core tries being loose, it will be like every previous standards-based reform — a bunch of empty words in a document that educators can promptly ignore while continuing to do whatever they were doing before.
This is the impossible paradox for Common Core. To succeed it requires more centralized coercion than is possible (or desirable) under our current political system and more coercive than organized educators will allow. And if it doesn’t try to coerce unwilling teachers and schools, it will produce little change.
If Common Core is doomed, why do I bother responding to Fordham, Gates, and others making arguments in its favor? I am responding to the intellectual corruption that the political campaign for Common Core is producing among otherwise decent, smart, and well-intentioned folks. Arguments like “tight-loose” are political campaign slogans, not intellectually serious ideas. I’m trying to point this out, not “win the day” on the merits of Common Core. I pick on Fordham because I am actually in substantive agreement with a good deal of what they are trying to accomplish and don’t want to see them pursue those goals with crappy political slogans.
But with Mike Petrilli assuming the presidency of the Fordham Institute next year, I see hope for a new Fordham. He might start by hiring more social scientists and fewer former journalists and office-holders. Policy analysis isn’t entirely about “messaging” to convince people to do what we already know is right. There is a lot we don’t know and competing social science claims we need to adjudicate, so a good policy organization needs a bunch of people with content and research method expertise. You can’t just rent this expertise on the cheap; you need to hire social scientists to make this expertise a stronger part of the organization’s DNA. Look at Brookings, EPI, and AEI for models across the political spectrum that give priority to social science.
Mike might also consider diversifying support away from the Gates Foundation. With more than $6 million from Gates in the last few years and with the appointment of former Gates political strategist, Stefanie Sanford, to the Fordham board, Fordham is beginning to feel like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gates Foundation. I don’t think Fordham is advocating for anything they don’t believe because of Gates support, but I do think Gates is a corrupting influence that tries to make everything part of a political campaign rather than serious, honest inquiry. Reducing reliance on Gates might free Fordham up to sound less like a string of political slogans.
To accomplish less reliance on Gates, Fordham might need to shrink a bit in size. That would probably be a good thing. A policy shop shouldn’t try to maximize its budget or head-count. It should try to be the right size to do the work it wants to do. Not chasing every dollar to become ever-larger would also free up Fordham to speak only when it wants to and not feel obliged to produce reports, tweets, and blog posts all of the frickin’ time. A lower volume of communication might produce higher quality communication and probably increased influence.
Lastly, a shift away from the political obsession of journalists and former office-holders and toward a more serious, social scientific approach would help Fordham avoid crappy research and slogans. Fordham should avoid doing any expert panel studies giving grades to this or that. It should avoid doing selection on dependent variable analyses exploring why Massachusetts, Finland or anyone else is doing well. It should avoid repeating the Fordham drinking game in which arguments depend on appending “smart” to regulation, curricum, etc… or dividing policies into three kinds where the middle one is the sensible alternative to two extremes. Messaging is not really an argument.
One thing Fordham should not change is its principles and its sincere commitment to Common Core. Contrary to Kathleen Porter-Magee’s assumptions, I am not trying to convince Fordham to change its position on Common Core. I just want Fordham not to confuse political campaigns for policy analysis. Whatever happens with Common Core (and who knows, perhaps Fordham is right in thinking it is a great idea and will somehow help), we cannot degrade the currency of policy analysis by turning everything into an advocacy campaign. Education reform is likely to be a very long game, so we don’t want to bend all rules, twist all facts, and pull out all stops just to win this one battle. It would be nice to have a credible and effective Fordham around for the next ed reform debate. I hope Mike Petrilli can help do this.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 