Jay P. Greene's Blog

Back in April I argued:

Twitter can be handy for announcing links to other material, following breaking news and unfolding events, or for humor.   But for policy discussion, Twitter has to be just about the dumbest thing on the planet.  Watching people attempt to have meaningful exchanges on Twitter is just ridiculous….  Some education policy analysts, however, are undeterred by the stupidity of Twitter and are determined to attempt to change the world through thousands of 140 character messages.  Quite often they are communicating thousands of profound 140 character messages to a relatively small number of followers.  As is too typical in education policy debates, everyone is on the stage and almost no one is in the audience.

I then went on to develop “the Narcissus Index, which is the ratio of the number of Tweets people have issued to the number of their followers.  Essentially it is the ratio of how much we love hearing ourselves talk to how many people actually want to listen to us.”

Well, researchers at the University of Michigan have confirmed my suspicion that there is a link between Twitter use and Narcissism:

Researchers interviewed 486 college students…. Researches administered a personality assessment that evaluated a person’s narcissism and found that participants who appeared to have a superior sense of self were likely to be active on Twitter….   Likewise, adults who scored high on a narcissism assessment were likely to be active on Facebook, where the goal is to curate an image and control how you are seen….   According to the U-M release, the study is among the first to compare the relationship between narcissism and social media use across ages.

The researchers were unable to say which came first, the chicken or the egg. In other words, does constant social media use breed narcissism or is it a symptom of the condition?  The study is published online in Computers in Human Behavior.

There you have it.  Science reports that there is a connection between Narcissism and Twitter.  Now everyone proceed to argue about this in 140 characters or less with your customary level of outrage and snark.  Doing so will make the world a better place 140 characters at a time.

(HT: Morgan Polikoff)

Support for liberty does not appear to be natural.  It has to be learned.  Everyone is inclined to preserve his or her own autonomy, but that is not the same as protecting the autonomy of other or supporting the principle of liberty in the abstract.  From a narrow self-interested perspective, the rational thing is to protect one’s own autonomy while being indifferent to the oppression of others.  As long as you are free to pursue your interests, why should you care if others aren’t?

Of course, it could be argued that you should promote liberty for others so that your own liberty is protected.  But this ignores collective action failure.  As long as a person can protect one’s own liberty why should he or she endure the risk and expense of protecting others?  Notice that the press did not become alarmed about Obama Administration actions until it was revealed that AP phone records had been secretly obtained. This greater interest in preserving one’s own rights is actually quite typical.

So, how do we overcome collective action failure and get large numbers of people to support liberty as an abstract principle for all and not just for themselves?  We are in  paradoxical situation where our self-interest does not construct and sustain a system by which we are free to pursue our self-interest.  We need non-self-interested ideas and actions to lay the foundations for a system where self-interest can flourish.

Tocqueville gave a fair amount of thought to this problem, but current supporters of liberty pay little attention to the issue.  Tocqueville noted that institutions like religion, family, and community help lay the foundations for liberty.  It’s interesting that all of these institutions that support a system where liberty is protected are themselves illiberal.  For the most part, one does not choose one’s family, religion, or community.  And even when one does choose a spouse, to convert to a new religion, or relocate to a new community, in all cases one must still submit to the authority of others.

The reason why these illiberal institutions help lay the foundations for liberty is that they induce one to subordinate one’s narrow self-interest for abstract principle — just as liberty requires some sacrifice of self-interest for the principle that other people’s self-interest is also worthy of protection.

In addition to these illiberal institutions, another mechanism by which support for liberty is cultivated is through art.  Research that I am doing with Brian Kisida and Dan Bowen is finding that exposing students to art promotes support for liberty.  The reason for this may be that art helps us reflect on the human condition, much like religion, and may lead us to subordinate some of our self-interest for the abstract principle of liberty.  Perhaps the important thing about art is that it is not “productive” in a narrow economic sense.  So it trains us to think that there are things of value other than the acquisition of material goods and power for ourselves.  This then helps create and sustain a system where we are free to acquire material goods and power for ourselves.

Whatever the mechanism is by which we learn to love liberty, we need to pay more attention to promoting those mechanisms if liberty will continue to flourish.  Liberty will not protect itself.  It must be learned.

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

A random-assignment study of a high school athletics program shows that participating young men experienced a significant reduction in arrests for violent crimes and a significant increase in grade point averages and the probability of graduation.  Athletics help young men channel their aggression in acceptable ways, increases their grit, and moves them toward a path of success.

This evidence comes from an initiative in some of  Chicago’s toughest high schools that are embracing a new sports program that often includes violent sports. It is called Becoming a Man – Sports Edition, which is teaching adolescent boys boxing, wrestling, martial arts, archery and other Olympic sports like handball. The privately-run athletic program is combined with counseling sessions.

“So after you got hit in the face during that boxing match, what were you thinking that led you to drop your hands and charge blindly?” This is the kind of coaching – i.e. counseling – that accompanies a typical training day. Students also meeting to discuss their family circumstances. The program seeks to provide young men with male role models and athletic opportunities to help them deal with their aggression in a productive manner.

Much talk but little research surrounds high school sports. In fact, it’s astounding how rarely athletics in schools are rigorously studied. Sports are fundamental to a school’s identity, for better or for worse. Yet there is little evidence to tell us what to expect from BAM-Sports Edition.

Jay and Dan Bowen have new study that is somewhat helpful, recently published on Ohio high schools: “With regard to attainment, a 10 percentage point increase in a school’s overall winning percentage is associated with a 1.3 percentage point improvement in its CPI, which is an estimate of its high school graduation rate.” This certainly belies the notion that athletics undermine academics. But, as Jay noted on the blog, their data has limitations.

Of course, we cannot make causal claims based on our analyses about the relationship between sports and achievement.  It’s possible that schools that are more effective at winning in sports and expanding participation are also the kinds of schools that can produce academic success.

In Chicago the schools targeted by BAM – Sports Edition are not known for producing academic success. Also, BAM-Sports Edition, while apparently intense, is not geared toward league sports.

However, participation was determined by random assignment, allowing researchers to make strong causal claims about the effects of participation in the athletics program. In perhaps the best least-publicized paper I’ve read in awhile, University of Chicago graduate student Sara Heller led a rigorous study of the program. This is the only study I know of that uses an experimental design to evaluate high school athletics. The program randomly assigned 2,740 students to treatment and control groups. During the program year, arrests for violent crimes fell by 44 percent among the treatment group. One year after the program, treatment students had significantly higher GPAs. According to the study:

we forecast that the changes in GPA caused by the program could translate into increases in graduation rates between 3 and 10 percentage points, or 7 to 22 percent relative to control complier baseline rates

The athletics involved – boxing, martial arts, etc. – might startle a lot of observers. Some people think sports like basketball teach kids the wrong lessons. So what do these sports teach students?  Surveys suggest that the program improved the “grit” and attitudes of participants. Who knew? Fun sports and caring coaches can help students to give a damn about life.

Of course, this topic bears further study. Good thing Jay, Albert Cheng and I have a forthcoming study on the classroom performance of coaches as teachers.

(Link added)

Two new studies deserve your attention.  The first is a follow-up on the random-assignment evaluation of charter schools in Boston led by Josh Angrist at MIT.  Here’s a summary from the press release:

“This study builds on earlier work using admissions lotteries which showed impressive short-run achievement gains for those randomly offered seats at Boston’s charter schools.  As the applicants have grown older, it’s now become possible to measure longer-term outcomes like SATs and college going,” said [MIT professor, Parag] Pathak.

The study shows that there are large positive effects of charter high schools on grade 10 MCAS for both English and Math.  Students are more likely to meet MCAS-based graduation requirements, earn eligibility for Adams scholarships, and score in the Proficient or Advanced categories.  Charter students are also more likely to take AP exams, though the score gains on the tests they take are modest.  SAT composite scores increase by 100 points and SAT Math scores increase by 50 points.

Early evidence on college shows that no overall effect on college enrollment, but a marked shift from two-year colleges to four-year colleges.  Charter high schools cause students to enroll in four-year public colleges, with many applicants enrolling at public schools within the state of Massachusetts.

And the other is a quick analysis by Marty West on the Education Next blog that shows families are not fooled by inflated scores on state tests with weak performance standards.  Parental assessment of school quality tracks NAEP results.  This undermines the case for Common Core assessments as an antidote to the misinformation produced by lousy state tests.  I’ll let Marty explain it:

There’s no doubt that the definition of proficiency in many states provides a misleading view of the extent to which students are prepared for success in college or careers.  Yet whether the way in which states define proficiency matters for student achievement is far from clear.  As Tom Loveless demonstrated in the 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education, the rigor of state proficiency definitions is largely unrelated to the level of student achievement on the NAEP across states.   Similarly, Russ Whitehurst and Michelle Croft have shown that the quality of state standards (as assessed by third party organizations) is unrelated to NAEP scores, a finding confirmed by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Josh Goodman in an analysis that examined the effects of changes in the quality of standards within states over time.  The lack of  a systematic relationship between either the rigor or the quality of state standards and student achievement casts doubt on claims that higher and better standards under the Common Core will, in and of themselves, spur higher student achievement.

Less attention has been paid to whether the rigor of state standards matters for public perceptions of the quality of the schools in their states and local communities.  If using a more lenient definition of proficiency leads citizens to evaluate their schools more favorably, then the advent of common expectations under the Common Core could alter public perceptions quite dramatically – perhaps increasing pressure for reform in regions of the country in which state proficiency definitions have provided an inflated view of student accomplishment.  Is such an outcome likely?

To shed light on this question, I use data from two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012 under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.  In each year, my colleagues and I asked a nationally representative sample of roughly 2,500 Americans to grade the public schools in their local community on a standard A-F scale.  In the figures below, I examine whether the average grade the residents of each state assigned to their local schools is associated with the share of 2011 8th graders deemed proficient by the state’s own test and by the NAEP.  To the extent that differences in the definition of proficiency from one state to the next interfere with citizens’ ability to discern the performance of their local schools, we should see that the average grades citizens assign their schools hew more closely to proficiency rates as determined by state tests than by the NAEP.

The figures demonstrate the opposite….

A simple regression of the average grades citizens assign to local schools in each state on NAEP and state proficiency rates simultaneously confirms that average grades (1) are strongly correlated with NAEP proficiency rates and (2) after controlling for NAEP proficiency rates, have no relationship whatsoever with proficiency rates on state tests.   An increase in NAEP proficiency rates of 32 percentage points – the difference between Washington DC and Massachusetts – is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of more than a half of a letter grade.  Holding NAEP scores constant, a difference in state test proficiency rates matters not at all.

In short, this evidence suggests that Americans have been wise enough to ignore the woefully misleading information about student proficiency rates generated by state testing systems when forming judgments about the quality of their state’s schools.  This does not mean that they ignore state testing data altogether.  Indeed, Matthew Chingos, Michael Henderson and I have shown that, within a given state, the grades citizens assign to specific elementary and middle schools are highly correlated with state proficiency rates in those schools.  Nor does it necessarily imply that information from the NAEP has a causal effect on perceptions of school quality.  The relationship between NAEP performance and the grades citizens assign their schools could easily be driven by other variables, such as the prosperity level of the state, that influence student achievement levels and could also influence school grades.  Yet it does suggest that the implementation of the Common Core, by providing information about performance against a common standard, may have less of an impact on public perceptions of school quality than many have projected.

And that’s all we have for this roundup.  Yeeehaw!

For Common Core to work — that is, for it to be more than a bunch of vague words in a document and to actually change what teachers do in their classrooms — it has to be aligned with new tests that impose meaningful consequences on individual teachers for complying with the New Educational Order.  As I’ve been expecting, teachers and their unions have no desire to be controlled by the Common Core standards-testing-accountability machine and are starting to rebel against it in earnest.  Randi Weingarten has called for a halt to efforts to link Common Core to high stakes assessments and Diane Ravitch and her army of angry teachers are mobilizing against this intrusion on their authority.

I have to admit that I am sympathetic with this resistance by teachers to having their classrooms controlled by a system of national standards, testing, and consequences.  If a giant machine controlled our nation’s schools it might become self-aware, obtain the launch codes, and then….  But I digress.  I don’t want a centrally planned education system, just as I don’t want a centrally planned economy.  It wouldn’t work and it would be incredibly oppressive.  So, I support teacher opposition to being controlled by the central planning of Common Core.  I understand that teachers don’t want to be ruled by the Petty Little Dictators behind Common Core.

The problem is that I also don’t want to be ruled by the Petty Little Dictators of teacher unions and localized public school monopolies.  The fight between teachers and Common Core backers is really a clash of the Petty Little Dictators.  Common Core wants to dictate what teachers do to make sure they are “doing it right.”  And teacher unions resist this because they want to be in charge.

I don’t think we have to choose between these Petty Little Dictators.  I favor a third way.  Why don’t we not have any dictators and just let families choose the education that they think is appropriate for their children?  No one has to tell them what a good education is.  They don’t need Common Core to restrict their choices and they don’t need teachers unions to confine them to public school monopolies.  I oppose both efforts at dictatorship and favor liberty.

Now it’s time to release the Kraken.