If I Woke Up With Larry Grau, I’d Really Hate Myself

April 24, 2013

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) supports Common Core.  I don’t for reasons I’ve explained on numerous occasions in the past, but most recently here.  Reasonable people can disagree, so I am not particularly perturbed by DFER’s position.  It’s fine.

What’s not fine is how DFER Indiana director, Larry Grau, tries to support Common Core in a blog post that was mass e-mailed today. It’s provocatively titled, “Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?”  He answers saying that if you “have spent the night canoodling with far-right opponents of the Common Core State Standards… we can almost guarantee the answer will be yes.”

His argument, such as it is, in support of Common Core standards is that a number of Common Core opponents are the kinds of people you wouldn’t want to wake up next to: “Before you decide to get into bed with extremist right-wing critics of the Common Core, we highly recommend that you get to know them better.”  He then goes on to profile State Senator Scott Schneider and Eagle Forum founder, Phyllis Schlafly, to show that they oppose abortion and other policies that DFER folks might like.  In sum, Larry Grau’s case for Common Core is that its opponents are people with whom you may strongly disagree on other matters.

By Grau’s brilliant reasoning, of course, you should also oppose charter schools, which DFER strongly supports.  As it turns out, Sen Scott Schneider was given the Charter School Warrior of the Year Award in 2012 by School Choice Indiana.  So if you should recoil at the thought of agreeing with Sen. Schneider, you should also oppose DFER on charters.

Unfortunately, this type of non-substantive, ad hominem argument is becoming the norm in education policy discourse.  Even people with whom I generally agree, like DFER, think this is how you are supposed to make arguments in education policy.  It’s disgusting.

Well, if Grau wants to go down this path of ad hominem in defense of Common Core, he might consider how it could be used against Common Core.  After all, I’m hard pressed to think of a single pro-Common Core organization that has not received money from the Gates Foundation.  And at least if folks get in bed with Sen. Schneider to oppose Common Core they are doing it for love, not money.  So when Grau or other Common Core supporters wake up in the morning to find Gates money on the nightstand, they can at least take comfort in the thought that they are carrying on the traditions of a venerable profession — some say the oldest profession.

5 Comments | National Standards, politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Vouchers Win More

April 18, 2013

On the heels of Greg’s updated review of the research on the effects of vouchers, we have a new article in Education Next by Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson finding significant benefits from New York City’s private voucher program on college attendance by African American students:

We find that the offer of a voucher increased college enrollment within three years of the student’s expected graduation from high school by 0.7 percentage points, an insignificant impact. This finding, however, masks substantial variation in impacts among students from different ethnic groups. We find evidence of large, statistically significant impacts on African Americans, but fairly small and statistically insignificant impacts on Hispanic students. We discuss results for the small number of students from other groups below.

The SCSF-NSC linked data indicate that a voucher offer increased the college-enrollment rate of African Americans by 7 percentage points, an increase of 20 percent. If an African American student used the scholarship to attend private school for any amount of time, the estimated impact on college enrollment was 9 percentage points, a 24 percent increase over the college enrollment rate among comparable African American students assigned to the control group (see Figure 1). This corresponds to 3 percentage points for every year the voucher was used.

The impact of a voucher offer on the college-enrollment rate of Hispanic students is a statistically insignificant 2 percentage points. Although that estimate is much smaller than the one observed for African Americans, the impacts on the two ethnic groups are not significantly different from one another.

We obtain similar results for full-time college enrollment. Among African Americans, 26 percent of the control group attended college full-time at some point within three years of expected high-school graduation. The impact of a voucher offer was to increase this rate by 7 percentage points, a 25 percent increment. Among students using the voucher to attend a private school, the estimated impact was 8 percentage points, or roughly 31 percent. No statistically significant impact on full-time college enrollment was evident for Hispanic students.

Only 9 percent of the African American students in the control group attended a private four-year college. The offer of a voucher raised that proportion by 5 percentage points, an increase of 58 percent. That extraordinary increment may reflect the tight connections between private elementary and secondary schools and private institutions of higher education.

The percentage of African American students in the control group who attended a selective four-year college was 3 percent. That increased by 4 percentage points if the student received the offer of a voucher, a better than 100 percent increment in the percentage enrolled in a selective college, a very large increment from a very low baseline. Once again, no impacts were detected for Hispanic students.

3 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Common Core Debate on Choice Media TV

April 16, 2013

The folks over at Choice Media TV put together a very productive discussion about Common Core.  Check it out!

It features the following participants:

3 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

And the Higgy Goes to…

April 15, 2013

In announcing the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award, I established the following criteria for selecting dis-honorees:

“The Higgy” will not identify the worst person in the world, just as “The Al” does not recognize the best.  Instead, “The Higgy” will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.

Frankly, I had in mind those suffering from Petty Little Dictator Disorder (PLDD) more than those with BSDD (Big Scary Dictator Disorder).  BSDD folks obviously worsen the human condition with their blood-thirsty and brutally oppressive ways.  But almost everyone can recognize BSDD folks and an opposition to them forms naturally and immediately.  BSDD is awful and frightening ( it is Big and Scary), but it is also relatively rare.

The more common and insidious threat to the human condition comes from PLDD folks as they sit around in their offices or bars or cafes dreaming about how everyone else’s lives should be organized and what should be done with everyone else’s money.   Unlike those with BSDD, the PLDDers are facilitated in their disorder by the righteous (and self-deluding) conviction that everything they are doing is actually for the benefit of others.

The alphabet soup of DC-based think tanks and advocacy groups are filled with PLDD, but we couldn’t just give the Higgy to all of them.  We aren’t Time Magazine (and as  the recipient of the 2006 Time Magazine Man of the Year honor, I intend the magazine no disrespect).  Instead, we have to name an individual who has worsened the human condition through the arrogant delusion of shaping the world to meet his or her own will.

This year’s recipient of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award is Pascal Monnet.  Monnet is what the alphabet-soup PLDDers look like if they actually succeed in gaining power.  Once their dreams of lording over others have been realized, rather than fixing the world, as they had imagined back in their cubicle days, successful PLDDers like Monnet just want to make sure that others don’t displace their position by fixing it on their own.  In the end we learn that it was all really about control, not repairing the world.

Greg also had an excellent nomination, David Sarnoff.  But Sarnoff didn’t have delusions of shaping the world; he actually did shape the world, at least for a while.  He might be closer to a BSDDer than a PLDDer.  And my nomination of Louis Michael Seidman fell short because Seidman only provides the rationale for the PLDD of others.  Matt’s nominee, Pascal Monnet, more closely captures the essence of the Higgy because of his petty dictatorial impulses to block a group of artists from doing his job better than he could by fixing the clock in the Pantheon.

Anyone who could block a group of super-hero-looking artists like the UX members pictured below certainly has to be cast in the role of the villain.

3 Comments | William Higginbotham Inhumanitarian Award | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Wolf v. Ravitch/Welner on the Effects of School Choice

April 8, 2013

(Guest Post By Jason Bedrick)

Is school choice effective at improving measurable student outcomes?

That question has been at the center of a heated debate between Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas and Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, and one of her supporters. The controversy began when Ravitch attempted to critique Wolf’s studies of voucher programs in Milwaukee and Washington D.C.

After questioning Wolf’s credibility, Ravitch made three main empirical claims, all of which are misleading or outright false:

1) Wolf’s own evaluations have not “shown any test score advantage for students who get vouchers, whether in DC or Milwaukee.” The private schools participating in the voucher program do not outperform public schools on state tests. The only dispute is “whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools.”

2) The attrition rate in Wolf’s Milwaukee study was 75% so the results only concern the 25% of students who remained in the program.

3) Wolf’s study doesn’t track the students who left the voucher program. (“But what about the 75% who dropped out and/or returned to [the public school system]?  No one knows.”)

Wolf then rebutted those claims:

1) Ravitch ignores the finding that vouchers had a strong positive impact on high school graduation rates. Moreover, there was evidence of academic gains among the voucher students:

The executive summary of the final report in our longitudinal achievement study of the Milwaukee voucher program states:  “The primary finding that emerges from these analyses is that, for the 2010-11 school year, the students in the [voucher] sample exhibit larger growth from the base year of 2006 in reading achievement than the matched [public school] sample.” Regarding the achievement impacts of the DC program, Ravitch quotes my own words that there was no conclusive evidence that the DC voucher program increased student achievement.  That achievement finding was in contrast to attainment, which clearly improved as a result of the program.  The uncertainty surrounding the achievement effects of the DC voucher program is because we set the high standard of 95% confidence to judge a voucher benefit as “statistically significant”, and we could only be 94% confident that the final-year reading gains from the DC program were statistically significant.

2) The attrition rate in the Milwaukee study was actually 56%, not 75%. Ravitch was relying on a third party’s critique of the study (to which Ravitch linked) that had the wrong figure, rather than reading the study herself. Moreover, the results regarding the higher attainment of voucher students are drawn from the graduation rate for all students who initially participated in the voucher program in the 9th grade in the fall of 2006, not just those who remained in the program.

3) Wolf’s team used data from the National Clearinghouse of College Enrollment to track these students into college.

Ravitch responded by hyperventilating about Wolf’s supposed “vitriol” (he had the temerity to point out that she’s not a statistician, didn’t understand the methods she was critiquing, and that she was relying on incorrect secondary sources) and posting a response from Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who heads the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), which released the critique of Wolf’s study upon which Ravitch had relied.

Welner didn’t even attempt to defend Ravitch’s erroneous first and third claims, but took issue with Wolf’s rebuttal of her second claim. Welner defends the integrity of his organization’s critique by pointing out that when they read Wolf’s study, it had contained the “75% attrition” figure but that the number had been subsequently updated a few weeks later. They shouldn’t be faulted for not knowing about the update. As Welner wrote, “Nobody had thought to go back and see whether Wolf or his colleagues had changed important numbers in the SCDP report.”

That would be a fair point, except for the fact that they did know about the change. As Wolf pointed out, page four of the NECP critique contains the following sentence: “Notably, more than half the students (56%) in the MPCP 9th grade sample were not in the MPCP four years later.” In other words, the author of the NECP critique had seen the corrected report but failed to update parts of his critique. This is certainly not the smoking gun Welner thought it was.

Ravitch replied, again demonstrating her misunderstanding of intention-to-treat (“And, I dunno, but 56% still looks like a huge attrition rate”) and leaving the heavy lifting to Welner. Welner’s main argument is that Wolf should have “been honest with his readers the first time around, instead of implying ignorance or wrongdoing as a cheap way to scores some points against Diane Ravitch and (to a lesser extent) NEPC.” Welner would have had a point if Wolf’s initial response had been to NECP and not Ravitch, but Wolf’s point was that Ravitch was holding herself out as an expert when she had never read the primary source material that she was criticizing. Instead, she relied on a secondary source that cited two contradictory figures. She either didn’t notice or intentionally chose what she thought was the more damning of the two figures—though, again, the figure doesn’t matter for purposes of an intention-to-treat study.

We all make mistakes. Wolf’s team made a mistake in their report and corrected it within a few weeks. Welner has stated that his team will correct the NECP report now that their error has come to their attention a year later. Ravitch should also correct her erroneous assertions regarding the results and methodology of the studies.

(Edited for typo)

1 Comment | research reports, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Review of Sarah Reckhow’s Book, “Follow the Money”

April 5, 2013

The following is my review that was just published in Philanthropy Magazine of Sarah Reckhow’s book, Follow the Money:

In 2005, I conducted original research on a question that, to my mind, had not been satisfactorily examined. I tried to gauge and categorize how much total philanthropic giving there was to public education. I was surprised to discover that, relative to the vast public expenditures on K–12 education, philanthropic contributions were remarkably small—amounting to about one-third of 1 percent of total school spending. My paper was published in Rick Hess’ book With the Best of Intentions, and it concluded that trying to reshape public education through the sheer financial force of philanthropic dollars was futile—like pouring buckets of water into the sea. If philanthropists aspired to have a transformative effect on public education, they would have to use their limited resources to convince public authorities to redirect how public monies were spent.

In her new book, Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, Sarah Reckhow picks up where I left off. She provides a much deeper and quite thorough consideration of the potential and pitfalls of philanthropic giving in public education. Reckhow confirms that total foundation giving to K–12 education may exceed $1 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, but relative to the almost $600 billion spent annually on public education, it is actually a very small percentage.

Reckhow shows that large foundations have recognized the need to focus on influencing how public monies are spent, and that they are now devoting a significantly larger share of their giving on policy advocacy. Around the same time that I was recommending that donors shift their efforts toward policy influence, many large foundations were already making the change. Reckhow’s careful analysis of foundation tax filings shows direct giving to public schools dropped dramatically between 2000 and 2005, while giving to policy-advocacy efforts rose sharply.

Reckhow extends this analysis by warning us that shifting to policy advocacy won’t necessarily result in policy success, especially on an enduring basis. Foundations are tempted to concentrate their advocacy efforts in locations where there is centralized control over policy decisions. She empirically demonstrates that districts with mayoral or state control have been much more likely to attract foundation giving. It’s like one-stop shopping; foundations can get policy change while devoting fewer resources if they have to persuade fewer agencies or policymakers to embrace their preferred reforms.

But what happens when there is a personnel change among the central authorities? Eventually there will be a Pharaoh who knows not Joseph. Without building authentic and lasting support among local constituencies, philanthropic dreams of policy change may be ephemeral.

Reckhow illustrates this danger by contrasting the reform strategies in New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, mayoral control was fully achieved. Through both network modeling and extensive interviews, Reckhow is able to show that reform-oriented philanthropists concentrated their efforts in New York on a relatively narrow band of elites to advance their policy agenda. In Los Angeles, by contrast, education policy decision-making is more decentralized and diffuse. In Los Angeles, reform-oriented donors were forced to expand their efforts to cultivate support among a broader set of constituencies.

New York City may have been easier, faster, and cheaper for reform-oriented foundations to accomplish their goals, but that speed came at a price. The support for reform policies is so narrow in New York City that Reckhow doubts it will survive for long after Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves office at the end of this year. In Los Angeles, extensive efforts to build a base of support among a diversity of constituencies may help protect those reforms even with changes in political control of the district. To be clear, Reckhow does not provide evidence that Los Angeles’ reforms are lasting better than New York’s; her analysis leads her to expect that New York reforms rest on a thin and unsteady foundation and may not endure.

Reckhow is clearly advising foundations to avoid top-down reform strategies, but the largest foundations are not heeding her advice. Many have decided to up the ante on centralization. Mayoral or state control is no longer enough. They need national control. They are now focused on implementing the Common Core state standards with aligned national tests upon which teacher evaluation will increasingly rest. Federal policy, through Race to the Top financial incentives and selective offers of waivers to NCLB requirements, is pushing this centralizing strategy forward. If large foundations can build and control a national machinery to shape education policy nationwide, then they have no reason to worry about how broadly based support is for their preferred policies. As long as national elites favor their agenda, they hope that the national machine they are constructing can force policies from the very top all the way down to every classroom.

Reckhow’s implication is that this national reform machine is doomed to fail. Either state and local education authorities will resist the national reforms before they can be completed, or they will ignore and subvert policies that actually go into effect. Millions of teachers and thousands of schools cannot all be monitored and compelled from the top. Reckhow’s lesson is that enduring and successful reforms require a broad and deep base of support, which top-down reform efforts are failing to develop.

Of course, there is an alternative to trying to convince the education establishment to buy into reform. Donors could mobilize the most important yet most ignored constituency of all: parents. By expanding parental choices in schools, foundations can engage parents very effectively in controlling education policies.

Top-down reform strategies, such as merit pay or high-stakes testing, may be fragile, too vulnerable to shifts in the political winds. Once Bloomberg leaves office, who will fight to keep merit pay or high-stakes testing in place in the Big Apple? Bottom-up strategies, however, are more robust. Movements like school choice grow their own base of support. Once parents have good choices of schools, they are much more likely to fight efforts to take them away.

Reckhow thinks donors should court unions, community activists, and local leaders, but she fails to consider building the base of support for reform at the even more fundamental level of parents. Engaging parents in education reform through school choice may take longer, but no one involved in education reform should fool themselves into thinking that real and enduring reform can be done quickly. Donors need the wisdom and evidence that a book like Follow the Money can offer—but they also need the patience to do the job right.

Leave a Comment » | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Charter school waiting lists: the other side of the story

April 3, 2013

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(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

WBEZ in Chicago has published one of the more incomplete stories on charter schools I’ve read in a long time.  It asserts:

Charter advocates and even the Chicago Tribune editorial board say 19,000 kids are on charter school waiting lists in the city.

There’s just one problem with that number: it’s not accurate. It significantly overstates demand.

Charter schools in Chicago each maintain their own lotteries and waitlists. Many eager families apply to more than one school, and then suffer the double disappointment of failing to win a lottery to get into either. Thus – WBEZ’s main point – waitlist statistics overstate the demand of the charter school because many children are on more than one waitlist.

The effect of the story is to discredit the school choice movement in Chicago. A full story would have reached the opposite conclusion. WBEZ presents this line as its coup de grace.

Though Andrew Broy from the Illinois Network of Charter Schools has insisted that 19,000 children are on waiting lists for Chicago charter schools, he now says he believes the real number is around 65 percent of that.

Assuming Broy’s guess is correct, that means as many as 6,650 students are on more than one waitlist. How does that undermine the case for charter school demand? Thousands of parents have sought numerous options to flee their current schools. These are determined and desperate people. But limits on charter school supply have denied them any option. To boot, WBEZ reports that there are waitlists at district-run magnet schools as well, suggesting that some parents on charter waitlists have tried and failed to win lotteries into other schools of choice as well. That’s a tragic story that, to me, calls for more charter schools.

WBEZ took particular pleasure in needling the Chicago Tribune, who frequently cites the 19,000 number. There’s a reason, however, that the Trib reports that stat. It’s officially reported by the Illinois State Board of Education. Neither the state board nor WBEZ calculated a different figure that adjusts for double counting. If they did, I’m sure the Trib would report it.

All of this boils down to an obvious point. Waitlists are a crude way to measure charter school demand. Some children land on more than one waitlist. Some families don’t ever apply, discouraged by the long waiting lists they read about. Some families attempt to transfer after enrollment periods and waitlists have closed. Other families haven’t yet found a charter school they like – an inevitable side effect of policymakers limiting the number of charter schools permitted to open.

A complete journalistic account would have found other ways to estimate demand. One such way: commission a survey of families. Guess who did that – the Chicago Tribune, in partnership with the Joyce Foundation.

On the Trib’s behalf, the University of Chicago conducted a scientific phone poll of Chicago adults. Half of the 1,010 respondents were Chicago Public School parents.  It reports:

Many existing charter schools in Chicago have waiting lists because more parents want to enroll their children in public charters schools than these schools can currently accommodate. Would you agree or disagree that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) should make it easier for public charter schools to expand in neighborhoods where public charter schools have waiting lists ? (AFTER RESPONSE, PROBE) Do you…

Strongly agree 46.4

Somewhat agree 17.3

Somewhat disagree 8.0

Strongly disagree 24.0

Neither agree nor disagree 2.4

DON’T KNOW 1.2

REFUSED 0.7

So 63.7 percent of Chicagoans support increasing charter schools to meet demand. Chicago Public Schools enrolls 400,000 students. There are 19,000 students on waitlists and another 40,000 or so enrolled in charter schools. Together that’s 15 percent of total enrollment, yet 63 percent of Chicago residents support increasing supply. So do we really think – as WBEZ suggests – that the 19,000 number overestimates demand?

Relying on polling, of course, has its limits. Here’s something else that WBEZ could have done: looked at charter demand elsewhere. Gary, Indiana is a beleaguered suburb of Chicago. It’s a rough place with its share of academic struggles. Indiana policy is more permissive of charter schools than is Illinois’. In Gary, 31 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools, as compared to 11 percent in Chicago. In Detroit, 41 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools. In Milwaukee, 21 percent are in charters and even more students are enrolled in that district’s school voucher program.

Chicago and Milwaukee and Detroit are different. But not so different that charter school demand would be two to four times lower in the Windy City. There is unmet and unmeasured demand for charter schools in Chicago, which brings me to my final point.

Charter schools create their own demand. There were zero students on charter waiting lists when there were zero charter schools in Chicago. As charter schools expand in the city, more families will sign up to attend them. Waitlists tell a compelling story – people want into charter schools. But they don’t tell the whole story, and neither did WBEZ.

3 Comments | charter schools | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Narcissus Index

April 2, 2013

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 (and I should know because I have occasionally attempted it with miserable results).

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.

So, I’ve developed 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.  I identified 80 education policy analysts from Mike Petrilli’s ranking of the most influential education policy Tweeters as well as the list of Tweeters followed by the Fordham Institute.  I excluded the Twitter accounts of organizations, focusing only on individuals.  I also excluded office-holders and reporters who may Tweet or be followed by virtue of their position rather than as a means of influencing education policy.  I then recorded the number of Tweets and followers for each of these analysts as of today.

I’m sure that I’ve missed some people who I should have included and vice versa, but hey… this is a blog post, not a dissertation.  And it’s true that people have been on Twitter for different lengths of time, but more time should allow people to accumulate more followers as well as send more Tweets, so I think that mostly balances out.  Lastly, this list is also probably distorted by age, since younger people are more likely to Tweet about everything, including how delicious dinner was, in addition to their thoughts about education policy.

As you can see in the table below, 47 of the 80 education policy analysts I examined had more Tweets than followers.  That is, they had more things to say to the world than there were people who wanted to hear them.  Some people have quite a lot that they need to tell the world in 140 characters.  Teacher and blogger, Larry Ferlazzo has the most Tweets, with 55,215, followed by Diane Ravitch (41,798), and RiShawn Biddle (37,514).  Ravitch has even more followers than she has Tweets, for a ratio of .87 Tweets to followers, but Ferlazzo and Biddle don’t have the followers to match their prolific Tweeting, with ratios of 2.21 and 6.89, respectively.

USC professor, Morgan Polikoff, wins the prize for the highest ratio, with 15.19 times more Tweets than followers.  I think he is relatively new to Twitter, so perhaps his followers will catch up to his Tweeting.  The Frustrated Teacher, Dave Russell, may be frustrated by having 12.64 times more Tweets than followers.  Wisconsin professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab has 9.93 times more Tweets than followers.  And South Florida professor, Sherman Dorn, has 8.82 times as many Tweets as followers.

At the opposite end of the list we see some education policy analysts with very large numbers of followers relative to Tweets.  A lot of people want to hear the relatively few things they have to say.  Jeb Bush has 79,312 followers compared to only 582 Tweets for a Narcissus Index score of only .01.  When Michelle Rhee talks, people want to listen, giving her a a ratio of only .03.  Alfie Kohn has nearly 20 times more followers than his 1,243 Tweets.  And Linda Perlstein has nearly 10 times as many followers as Tweets.

Now while you guys search for your own names and argue about the results, I’ll just go ahead and Google myself to read more about me.  I clearly need to invest more in my Narcissism.

Name Handle Tweets Followers Ratio
Morgan Polikoff  @mpolikoff 6,576 433 15.19
The Frustrated Teacher @tfteacher 25,742 2,036 12.64
Sara Goldrick-Rab  @saragoldrickrab 32,516 3,276 9.93
Sherman Dorn   @shermandorn 9,558 1,084 8.82
RiShawn Biddle  @dropoutnation 37,514 5,442 6.89
Neal McCluskey  @NealMcCluskey 7,266 1,112 6.53
Ben Boychuk  @benboychuk 10,384 1,627 6.38
Nancy Flanagan @nancyflanagan 16,354 2,914 5.61
Matt Williams  @mattawilliams 2,572 464 5.54
Mike Klonsky @mikeklonsky 20,575 3,777 5.45
Ashley Inman  @ahsleyemilia 819 151 5.42
Allie Kimmel  @allie_kimmel 5,409 1,019 5.31
Rachel Young  @msrachelyoung 2,230 445 5.01
Laura Bornfreund  @laurabornfreund 2,819 565 4.99
Deborah M. McGriff  @dmmcgriff 2,660 548 4.85
John Bailey  @john_bailey 12,545 2,901 4.32
Jamie Davies O’Leary  @jamieoleary 870 236 3.69
Terry Stoops  @terrystoops 1,795 546 3.29
Eric Lerum  @ericlerum 1,614 491 3.29
Marc Porter Magee  @marcportermagee 4,284 1,414 3.03
Jenna Schuette Talbot  @jennastalbot 5,165 1,708 3.02
Kathleen Porter Magee  @kportermagee 2,997 1,229 2.44
Larry Ferlazzo  @larryferlazzo 55,215 25,016 2.21
Sam Chaltain @samchaltain 7,742 3,540 2.19
Erik Syring  @eriksyring 2,825 1,325 2.13
John Nash  @jnash 2,945 1,383 2.13
Matthew K. Tabor  @matthewktabor 10,081 4,811 2.10
David DeSchryver  @ddeschryver 1,546 747 2.07
Lindsey Burke  @lindseymburke 2,943 1,593 1.85
Mike McShane  @MQ_McShane 658 358 1.84
Matthew Ladner  @matthewladner 660 360 1.83
Alexander Russo @alexanderrusso 17,254 9,665 1.79
Bruce Baker  @schlFinance101 6,049 3,768 1.61
Joanne Jacobs  @joanneleejacobs 5,182 3,303 1.57
Howard Fuller  @howardlfuller 4,163 2,673 1.56
Robert Pondiscio  @rpondiscio 3,013 1,999 1.51
Adam Emerson  @adamjemerson 787 532 1.48
Chad Alderman  @chadalderman 1,984 1,458 1.36
Anthony Cody @anthonycody 5,759 4,289 1.34
Andrew P. Kelly  @andrewpkelly 693 532 1.30
Irvin Scott  @iscott4 1,565 1,221 1.28
Matt Chingos  @chingos 878 710 1.24
Neerav Kingsland  @neeravkingsland 956 824 1.16
Andy Smarick  @smarick 4,840 4,267 1.13
Doug Levin  @douglevin 4,671 4,286 1.09
Charles Barone  @charlesbarone 2,311 2,163 1.07
Kevin P. Chavous  @kevinpchavous 1,340 1,339 1.00
Michael Petrilli @michaelpetrilli 5,967 6,196 0.96
Gary Rubinstein  @garyrubinstein 1,219 1,344 0.91
Patrick Riccards @Eduflack 11,356 12,671 0.90
Diane Ravitch @DianeRavitch 41,798 47,956 0.87
Greg Richmond  @GregRichmond 366 455 0.80
Randi Weingarten @rweingarten 16,353 21,071 0.78
Paul Queary  @paulqueary 1,117 1,496 0.75
Heather Higgins  @TheHRH 383 530 0.72
Ulrich Boser  @ulrichboser 1,332 1,923 0.69
Vicki Davis  @coolcatteacher 34,109 50,600 0.67
Mickey Kaus  @kausmickey 8,813 14,362 0.61
Justin Cohen  @juscohen 895 1,470 0.61
Tom Vander Ark @tvanderark 8,044 13,805 0.58
Andrew Rotherham  @arotherham 5,396 9,425 0.57
Jeanne Allen  @jeanneallen 1,998 3,538 0.56
Roxanna Elden  @roxannaElden 644 1,159 0.56
Lisa Duty  @lisaduty1 1,801 3,359 0.54
Sara Mead   @saramead 2,268 4,597 0.49
Dana Goldstein @DanaGoldstein 5,826 12,820 0.45
Richard Lee Colvin  @R_Colvin 1,472 3,336 0.44
Not Diane Ravtich  @NOTDianeRavitch 270 616 0.44
Ben Wildavsky  @wildavsky 577 1,327 0.43
Brian Backstrom  @nyedreform 824 1,948 0.42
Kevin Carey  @kevincarey1 1,444 3,601 0.40
Jay P. Greene  @jaypgreene 454 1,416 0.32
Matt Kramer  @kramer_matt 204 978 0.21
Michael Barber  @michaelbarber9 935 4,719 0.20
Wendy Kopp  @wendykopp 906 6,015 0.15
Vicki Phillips  @drvickip 476 3,842 0.12
Linda Perlstein  @lindaperlstein 364 3,202 0.11
Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn 1,243 27,489 0.05
Michelle Rhee @m_rhee 1,353 48,945 0.03
Jeb Bush  @jebbush 582 79,312 0.01

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

A Good Media Week

March 29, 2013

This week the work of two of my colleagues in the Department of Education Reform was mentioned in national newspapers.  Patrick Wolf’s research finding that the Milwaukee voucher program increased high school graduation rates from 75% to 94% was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal.  And Bob Maranto’s work on the decline in New York City’s murder rate as a result of more effective policing was mentioned in David Brooks’ column in the New York Times.

Way to go!

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Louis Michael Seidman for William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian

March 26, 2013

My nominee for the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award is Georgetown University law professor, Louis Michael Seidman.  Seidman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times during the midst of the budget and tax battle between the president and Congress in December suggesting that we should no longer think we have an obligation to adhere to the requirements and procedures of the U.S. Constitution.  As Seidman puts it:

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

Seidman thinks that political leaders should just do what is “best,” not worry themselves with the legal niceties of an archaic document:

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Remember this wasn’t a classroom exercise with a group of law students meant to provoke critical discussion.  This was an essay in the house organ of the Democratic Party in the midst of a struggle over budget and tax issues.  The clear implication is that if the president doesn’t get from Congress what he thinks is best for the country, he should ignore them and just do the “right thing” anyway.  I’m not the only one who read the piece this way; here is Paul Peterson’s take:

If a call for constitutional disobedience is openly advocated in the nation’s leading liberal newspaper, one must assume similar arguments, phrased more carefully, are being elaborated by skilled attorneys inside the White House.

Peterson continues, suggesting that the Seidman op-ed was carried by the NYT as  intellectual justification for an executive branch power-grab of enormous proportions:

As the administration begins its second term, it is expressing extreme frustration at the constitutional powers held by the House of Representatives. To counter, the administration is threatening to catapult presidential power to levels attained only by such Machiavellian politicians as Otto von Bismarck, who consolidated executive power vis-a-vis the German parliament and local fiefdoms in the late 19th century.

Peterson lists the president’s threat to ignore the debt ceiling, the Senate use of a simple majority vote to curtail the super-majority barriers to passing legislation particularly threatening to minority interests, the expansive use of regulatory powers to make what are effectively new laws without congressional authorization (with examples from environmental issues, No Child Left Behind, and healthcare), and effectively changing immigration law by publicly announcing that the executive branch will not enforce large portions of the existing law.  Whatever you may think about the merits of each of these issues, this pattern of executive actions represents a remarkable centralization of power and subversion of Constitutional checks and balances.  Peterson warns that the long-term implications are ominous:

Clearly, the president has shown a willingness to interpret his constitutional authority and the laws of the land about as freely as Bismarck did 150 years ago. The German chancellor got away with his power grab for many years, though by so doing he laid the groundwork for 20th century political disasters.

To be fair, it is not just the current president who has been using extra-legal and un-Constitutional means of accumulating more power.  The imperial presidency has been a one-way ratchet of increasing executive power for decades.  But the rate of centralizing power in the president has accelerated in the last two administrations.  Yes, our country faces challenges, like terrorism and financial difficulties, but are these challenges really greater than the Cold War, civil rights, the Great Depression, industrialization, etc…?

Even in the face of great challenges we need our Constitutional system of separation of powers, federalism, and the attending decentralized nature of checks and balances precisely because there are legitimate disagreements about how best to meet those challenges.  Presidents shouldn’t just do the “right thing” regardless of Constitutional procedures, as Seidman suggests, because it isn’t really obvious what the right thing is.  We have to follow Constitutional procedures because they ensure that competing visions of solutions can be heard and compromises achieved.  This often results in improvements in the quality of government solutions as well as protection for minority interests.  And if you think that compromises achieved under Constitutional procedures are lower quality than solutions derived from the best judgment of a central authority, I suggest that you consider North Korea, Syria, Soviet Union, Egypt, etc…

Eventually there will come a day when someone the New York Times hates will be president and perhaps control majorities in both chambers of Congress.  When that day comes, don’t you think it would be wise for them to have preserved the non-majoritarian procedures of our Constitution and political tradition?  I distinctly remember them feeling that way when Bush was president.

What is the origin of this recklessness of wishing to prevail in a current political conflict by destroying the Constitutional procedures that protected us in the past and could again in the future?  Why does the New York Times find a receptive audience to arguments about just doing the “right thing” at the expense of the Constitution?  I suspect, but cannot prove, that it has something to do with the changing nature of social studies in our schools.  Social studies used to consist primarily of civics, with a focus on understanding and appreciating our system of separation of powers, federalism, and the virtue of checks and balances.  That version of social studies has been eclipsed by one focused on social justice.  Students are learning about the importance of doing the “right thing” perhaps “by any means necessary.”  So, it should come as no surprise that there would be a receptive audience to claims that getting the “right” marginal tax rate trumps Constitutional procedures.  That’s how little a growing cadre of elites now think of civics.

There is a name for central authorities doing what they think is best regardless of the law and governmental procedures.  It is fascism.  For contributing to the intellectual defense of this neo-fascism, Louis Michael Seidman is worthy of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award.  As the criteria for the award require, he displays the arrogant delusion of trying to shape the world to meet his own will.  Let’s hope he really is delusional and we do not see a triumph of his will.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

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