What Success Would Have Looked Like

January 10, 2013

Yesterday I described the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) project as “an expensive flop.”  To grasp just what a flop the project was, it’s important to consider what success would have looked like.  If the project had produced what Gates was hoping, it would have found that classroom observations were strong, independent predictors of other measures of effective teaching, like student test score gains.  Even better, they were hoping that the combination of classroom observations, student surveys, and previous test score gains would be a much better predictor of future test score gains (or of future classroom observations) than any one of those measures alone.  Unfortunately, MET failed to find anything like this.

If MET had found classroom observations to be strong predictors of other indicators of effective teaching and if the combination of measures were a significantly better predictor than any one measure alone, then Gates could have offered evidence for the merits of a particular mixing formula or range of mixing formulas for evaluating teachers.  That evidence could have been used to good effect to shape teacher evaluation systems in Chicago, LA, and everywhere else.

They also could have genuinely reassured teachers anxious about the use of test score gains in teacher evaluations.  MET could have allayed those concerns by telling teachers that test score gains produce information that is generally similar to what is learned from well-conducted classroom observations, so there is no reason to oppose one and support the other.  What’s more, significantly improved predictive power from a mixture of classroom observations with test score gains could have made the case for why we need both.

MET was also supposed to have helped us adjudicate among several commonly used rubrics for classroom observations so that we would have solid evidence for preferring one approach over another.  Because MET found that classroom observations in general are barely related to other indicators of teacher effectiveness, the study told us almost nothing about the criteria we should use in classroom observations.

In addition, the classroom observation study was supposed to help us identify the essential components of effective teaching .  That knowledge could have informed improved teacher training and professional development.  But because MET was a flop (because classroom observations barely correlate with other indicators of teacher effectiveness and fail to improve the predictive power of a combined measure), we haven’t learned much of anything about the practices that are associated with effective teaching.  If we can’t connect classroom observations with effective teaching in general, we certainly can’t say much about the particular aspects of teaching that were observed that most contributed to effective teaching.

Just so you know that I’m not falsely attributing to MET these goals that failed to be realized, look at this interview from 2011 of Bill Gates by Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal.  You’ll clearly see that Bill Gates was hoping that MET would do what I described above.  It failed to do so.  Here is what the interview revealed about the goals of MET:

Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students’ education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.

“We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year,” he says. “Well, I’m enough of a scientist to want to say, ‘What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?’

“I watched the movies. I saw ‘To Sir, With Love,'” he chuckles, recounting the 1967 classic in which Sidney Poitier plays an idealistic teacher who wins over students at a roughhouse London school. “But they didn’t really explain what he was doing right. I can’t create a personnel system where I say, ‘Go watch this movie and be like him.'”

Instead, the Gates Foundation’s five-year, $335-million project examines whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting common student errors—can be systematically measured. The effort involves collecting and studying videos of more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts.

“We’re taking these tapes and we’re looking at how quickly a class gets focused on the subject, how engaged the kids are, who’s wiggling their feet, who’s looking away,” says Mr. Gates. The researchers are also asking students what works in the classroom and trying to determine the usefulness of their feedback.

Mr. Gates hopes that the project earns buy-in from teachers, which he describes as key to long-term reform. “Our dream is that in the sample districts, a high percentage of the teachers determine that this made them better at their jobs.” He’s aware, though, that he’ll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.

The final MET reports produced virtually nothing that addressed these stated goals.  But in Orwellian fashion, the Gates folks have declared the project to be a great success.  I never expected MET to work because I suspect that effective teaching is too heterogeneous to be captured well by a single formula.  There is no recipe for effective teaching because kids and their needs are too varied, teachers and their abilities are too varied, and the proper matching of student needs and teacher abilities can be accomplished in many different ways.  But this is just my suspicion.  I can’t blame the Gates Foundation for trying to discover the secret sauce of effective teaching, but I can blame them for refusing to admit that they failed to find it.  Even worse, I blame them for distorting, exaggerating, and spinning what they did find.

(edited for typos)

13 Comments | research reports | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Understanding the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers Project

January 9, 2013

If I were running a school I’d probably want to evaluate teachers using a mixture of student test score gains, classroom observations, and feedback from parents, students, and other staff.  But I recognize that different schools have different missions and styles that can best be assessed using different methods.  I wouldn’t want to impose on all schools in a state or the nation a single, mechanistic system for evaluating teachers since that is likely to be a one size fits none solution.  There is no single best way to evaluate teachers, just like there is no single best way to educate students.

But the folks at the Gates Foundation, afflicted with PLDD, don’t see things this way.  They’ve been working with politicians in Illinois, Los Angeles, and elsewhere to centrally impose teacher evaluation systems, but they’ve encountered stiff resistance.  In particular, they’ve noticed that teachers and others have expressed strong reservations about any evaluation system that relies too heavily on student test scores.

So the folks at Gates have been trying to scientifically validate a teacher evaluation system that involves a mix of test score gains, classroom observations, and student surveys so that they can overcome resistance to centrally imposed, mechanistic evaluation systems.  If they can reduce reliance on test scores in that system while still carrying the endorsement of “science,” the Gates folk imagine  that politicians, educators, and others will all embrace the Gates central planning fantasy.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the political reality, demonstrated recently in Chicago and Los Angeles, that teachers are likely to fiercely resist any centrally imposed, mechanistic evaluation system regardless of the extent to which it relies on test scores.  The Gates folks want to put on their lab coats and throw the authority of science behind a particular approach to teacher evaluation.  If you oppose it you might as well deny global warming.  Science has spoken.

So it is no accident that the release of the third and final round of reports from the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers project was greeted with the following headline in the Washington Post: “Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher,”  or this similarly humble claim in the Denver Post: “Denver schools, Gates foundation identify what makes effective teacher.”  This is the reaction that the Gates Foundation was going for — we’ve used science to discover the correct formula for evaluating teachers.  And by implication, we now know how to train and improve teachers by using the scientifically validated methods of teaching.

The only problem is that things didn’t work out as the Gates folks had planned.  Classroom observations make virtually no independent contribution to the predictive power of a teacher evaluation system.  You have to dig to find this, but it’s right there in Table 1 on page 10 of one of the technical reports released yesterday.  In a regression to predict student test score gains using out of sample test score gains for the same teacher, student survey results, and classroom observations, there is virtually no relationship between test score gains and either classroom observations or student survey results.  In only 3 of the 8 models presented is there any statistically significant relationship between either classroom observations or student surveys and test score gains (I’m excluding the 2 instances were they report p < .1 as statistically significant).  And in all 8 models the point estimates suggest that a standard deviation improvement in classroom observation or student survey results is associated with less than a .1 standard deviation increase in test score gains.

Not surprisingly, a composite teacher evaluation measure that mixes classroom observations and student survey results with test score gains is generally no better and sometimes much worse at predicting out of sample test score gains.  The Gates folks trumpet the finding that the combined measures are more “reliable” but that only means that they are less variable, not any more predictive.

But “the best mix” according to the “policy and practitioner brief” is “a composite with weights between 33 percent and 50 percent assigned to state test scores.”  How do they know this is the “best mix?”  It generally isn’t any better at predicting test score gains.  And to collect the classroom observations involves an enormous expense and hassle.  To get the measure as “reliable” as they did without sacrificing too much predictive power, the Gates team had to observe each teacher at least four different times by at least two different coders, including one coder outside of the school.  To observe 3.2 million public school teachers for four hours by staff compensated at $40 per hour would cost more than $500 million each year.  The Gates people also had to train the observers at least 17 hours and even after that had to throw out almost a quarter of those observers as unreliable.  To do all of this might cost about $1 billion each year.

And what would we get for this billion?  Well, we might get more consistent teacher evaluation scores, but we’d get basically no improvement in the identification of effective teachers.  And that’s the “best mix?”  Best for what?  It’s best for the political packaging of a centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation system, which is what this is all really about.  Vicki Phillips, who heads the Gates education efforts, captured in this comment what I think they are really going for with a composite evaluation score:

Combining all three measures into a properly weighted index, however, produced a result “teachers can trust,” said Vicki Phillips, a director in the education program at the Gates Foundation.

It’ll cost a fortune, it doesn’t improve the identification of effective teachers, but we need to do it to overcome resistance from teachers and others.  Not only will this not work, but in spinning the research as they have, the Gates Foundation is clearly distorting the straightforward interpretation of their findings: a mechanistic system of classroom observation provides virtually nothing for its enormous cost and hassle.  Oh, and this is the case when no stakes were attached to the classroom observations.  Once we attach all of this to pay or continued employment, their classroom observation system will only get worse.

I should add that if classroom observations aren’t useful as predictors, they also can’t be used effectively for diagnostic purposes.  An earlier promise of this project is that they would figure out which teacher evaluation rubrics were best and which sub-components of those rubrics that were most predictive of effective teaching.  But that clearly hasn’t panned out.  In the new reports I can’t find anything about the diagnostic potential of classroom observations, which is not surprising since those observations are not predictive.

So, rather than having “figured out what makes a good teacher” the Gates Foundation has learned very little in this project about effective teaching practices.  The project was an expensive flop.  Let’s not compound the error by adopting this expensive flop as the basis for centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation systems nationwide.

(Edited for typos and to add links.  To see a follow-up post, click here.)

22 Comments | research reports | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Administrative Bloat in the WSJ

December 30, 2012

This weekend the Wall Street Journal had a front page piece detailing how administrative bloat in higher education is causing costs to spiral higher.  The piece carefully dissects hiring patterns at the University of Minnesota to illustrate their general conclusion that:

Across U.S. higher education, nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example. The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It’s part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.

This conclusion is not new, but it is great to see it getting the attention it deserves.  As regular readers of JPGB will remember, Brian Kisida, Jonathan Mills, and I released a report on administrative bloat at the nation’s 200 leading research universities.  That report elicited a tizzy fit from Arizona State University President Michael Crow, including a letter to the chancellor of my university accusing me of academic fraud.  University leaders who should be the guardians of academic freedom are too often its greatest oppressors.

But the obvious facts about administrative bloat cannot be suppressed.  Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg recently published an excellent book on the topic.  And despite a lousy attempt by the professional association of State Higher Education Officers to spin the data, a subsequent analysis by the Pope Center successfully replicated our results and confirmed out conclusions.

And now we have a front page article in the Wall Street Journal reporting the same thing.  Michael Crow might try writing an angry letter to the editor but university leaders won’t be able to shut this story down.  The good university leaders are already taking steps to reign in runaway non-instructional, non-research costs.  See for example Erskine Bowles efforts at the University of North Carolina or the new leadership at the University of Minnesota.  The bad university leaders will bluster, brow beat, and continue to expand the mission of universities beyond their core missions of teaching and research.

3 Comments | higher education | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Head Start Manipulating Scumbags

December 20, 2012

I’ve heard that the latest round of results from the federal evaluation of Head Start is due to be released tomorrow afternoon.  And my psychic powers tell me that the results will show no lasting benefit from Head Start, just like the two previous rounds of results.

You heard that right — the federal government is releasing results that the administration dislikes on a Friday afternoon just before Christmas.  They might as well put the results on display in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind the sign that says “beware of the leopard.”

Why is the Department of Health and Human Services burying this study just like they delayed, buried, or distorted the previous ones?  Well, because the study is an extremely rigorous and comprehensive evaluation, involving random assignment of a representative sample of all Head Start students nationwide, that I expect will find no enduring benefits from this program that politicians, pundits, and other dimwits constantly want to expand and fund.  Anyone who casts doubt on think tank research should cast a critical eye toward gross manipulations and abuse of research that are perpetrated by the federal government.

I should repeat that the researchers have done an excellent job evaluating Head Start in this case.  It is the bureaucratic class at the Department of Health and Human Services who have cynically manipulated, delayed, and misreported this research.  The pending report is already delayed several years and has been around for a long time.  The decision to release it on the Friday afternoon before Christmas is completely calculated.

I don’t know your names, but I’m going to invest a little energy in tracking down who is responsible for this cynical abuse of research.  If there were any reporters worth their salt left out there, they would bother to expose you but I guess that job has now been passed to bloggers and enterprising individuals.  When I do find your names I will post them so folks can know who the scumbags are who think they can manipulate the policy community by delaying, burying, or misreporting research.  And then when you get hired by that DC think tank, advocacy organization, or other waste of space we’ll be able to remember who you are and assign no credibility to what you have to say.  These kinds of dastardly acts by public servants should not be cost free and if I have any say in the matter they will not be in this case.

29 Comments | politics, research reports | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

A Guide for the Perplexed — A Review of Rigorous Charter Research

December 17, 2012

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

So you say charter schools don’t work. That’s an empirical claim. It needs to be backed up by evidence. Here’s a helpful guide to the most rigorous research available. Once you’ve tackled this material, you’ll be in position to prove your point.

As you probably know, the gold standard method of research in social science is called random assignment. Charter schools are particularly well-suited for random assignment evaluations, since they’re usually required by law to admit students by lottery. The lotteries are fair to families – that’s why they’re put in place. But they also allow researchers to make fair comparisons between students who win or lose lotteries to attend charter schools.

To date, nine studies lottery-based evaluations of charter schools have been released. Let’s go through them, starting with the earliest work.

The first random assignment study of charter schools was released in 2004 by Caroline Hoxby and Jonah Rockoff. It focused on Chicago International Charter School. After three years, charter students had significantly higher reading scores, equal to 3.3 to 4.2 points on 100-point rankings.  Gains were even stronger for younger students.

That same year, the University of California San Diego released a study of the Preuss charter school located on the university’s campus. Test scores for charter students appeared unchanged, but the school improved college-going rates by 23 percent: 90 percent of Preuss juniors were headed to four year colleges.

So the first two random-assignment studies of charter schools won’t help your point. They find gains for charter schools. But those studies are becoming dated; most of the national charter boom has occurred since they were published. Also, the San Diego study employs few statistical controls. So these studies don’t disprove your point either. Let’s review the newer stuff.

In 2010, Harvard’s Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer released a study of the Harlem Promise Academy. Entering kindergartners experienced large gains by the third grade, sufficient to eliminate the black-white achievement gap, equal to 0.58 standard deviations (sd) in reading and 0.49 sd in math. Students who entered Harlem Promise Academy in early middle school saw smaller gains that nevertheless by the eighth grade closed the achievement gap in math and reduced it by half in reading.

Later in 2010, researchers from MIT, Harvard and Michigan released a study of KIPP Academy in Lynn, Massachusetts. The charter school is part of the national charter network, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). After a single year in the school, students saw achievement gains of 0.12 sd in English and 0.35 sd in math.

And earlier this year, researchers from Yale and Brown released a study of an unnamed charter network in an anonymous school district. There were no visible math gains for charter students, but they did see awfully big reading gains of 0.35 sd and writing gains 0.79 sd.

Charter advocates will point to these studies to try to prove you wrong, since these charter schools are definitely working. In turn, you could attempt to discredit the statistical math of the authors above. (Good luck.) Or you could make a more obvious point: these studies together look only at five charter operators. There are hundreds of charter operators across the country. The researchers could be cherry-picking – studying schools that they suspected beforehand were high-performing.

Larger random-assignment studies could address these issues, if they looked at a wider number of charter schools. Luckily, we’ve got four studies that do just that, all of them fairly recent.

The first is a 2009 study led by Caroline Hoxby. It examines practically every charter school in New York City. For every year students were enrolled in a charter school, they saw 0.04 sd gains in reading and 0.09 sd gains in math. The findings here are similar to the middle school gains that Fryer found at Harlem Promise Academy, though the citywide charter gains are clearly smaller than the Promise Academy’s extraordinary gains for kindergarteners.

Later that year, a citywide study of Boston charter middle and high schools found that charters produced “extraordinarily large” gains, according to the authors, who were based at Duke, Harvard, MIT and Michigan. After only one year, Boston’s charter high schools produced gains of 0.16 sd in reading and 0.19 sd in math. Charter middle schools in the city produced similar reading gains of 0.17 sd and a remarkable 0.54 sd in math.

In 2010, the US Department of Education released the first nationwide random-assignment study of charter middle schools. It contained two useful findings. Charter schools in affluent areas produced lower results than neighboring schools, which makes some sense. Charter schools in the suburbs are competing with higher quality schools than found in the inner cities. Charter schools in urban areas, enrolling a large percentage of poor students, posted significant gains in math, over two years equal to 0.18 sd.

In 2011, the team behind the 2009 study of Boston charter schools presented findings from a statewide evaluation of Massachusetts charter middle and high schools. Overall, results were positive. As with the USDOE study of middle schools, they found that charter schools in non-urban areas produced no positive gains. On the other hand, schools located in urban areas produced middle school gains of 0.12 sd in English and 0.33 sd in math and high school gains of 0.33 sd in English and 0.39 sd in math. These gains almost perfectly mirror the findings at KIPP Lynn, which is one of many schools included in the statewide sample.

So Harlem Promise Academy and KIPP produced results that are fairly similar to other charter schools nearby. So any allegation of cherry-picking in the studies of those two schools will need to be dropped.

Altogether, these studies have remarkably similar findings that urban charter schools are producing significant gains in reading or math, or both. Suburban charter schools perform less well – you could cite this fact, but frankly this a minor concern in the battle to close the racial achievement gap in American education.

You could make a methodological point: lottery studies don’t tell us about students who never participated in lotteries. In other words, what about students who never signed up for charter schools, who don’t have charter schools in the area, or who signed up for a charter school that didn’t need to run a lottery? Some researchers use less-rigorous “observational” methods to answer these questions.

Indeed, many of the studies above include secondary observational studies to test the validity of this very argument. They look at similar but artificial comparison groups of non-charter students who for unknown reasons didn’t enroll in lotteries. Those secondary analyses broadly confirm the main random-assignment findings.

Altogether, the best research tells a consistent story: charter schools are working. In order to find much evidence to the contrary, you’ll need to dig into third or fourth tier research. And you’ll need to invent a justification to ignore the random assignment literature, though you probably shouldn’t bother. Relying solely on third-rate research simply says that you were never interested in evidence in the first place.

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

Global Report Card 2.0

December 10, 2012

With help from my colleagues, Josh McGee and Jonathan Mills, we’ve produced for the George W. Bush Institute an updated version of the Global Report Card.  The Atlantic is hosting the Global Report Card 2.0 on their web site and has a nice piece about its release today.

And click here to see coverage of last year’s Global Report Card 1.0.  And here is a video of Bob Costrell and me discussing the GRC.

2 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Rigorously Studying Cultural Education

December 6, 2012

In my last post I mentioned a large-scale random assignment study of the effects of school tours of an art museum that I am conducting with my colleagues, Brian Kisida and and Dan Bowen.  Some people have asked for more information about that project.  So, here is a brief summary of what we are doing in that study as well as some related projects examining cultural education.

The random assignment study of field trips was made possible by the fact that the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Northwest Arkansas, an area that had never before had a major art museum.  Because there was intense interest from schools in the area in having school tours there were many more applicants for field trips than the museum could accommodate right away.  We worked with the museum to randomly assign tours to applicants.

Specifically, the museum received more than 300 applications for tours during the first semester.  We organized those applicants into matched pairs, which were often adjacent grades in the same school or the same grade in different schools with similar demographic characteristics.  We then randomly assigned one school in each matched pair to be the treatment group and one to be the control group.  We randomly ordered the matched pairs and the museum scheduled the first 55 treatment groups for school tours last spring.  The 55 matched control groups were guaranteed a tour during the next semester for participating in the study.

We then administered surveys to the randomly assigned treatment and control group students and teachers a few weeks after the treatment group visited the museum.  Those surveys were designed to measure five types of outcomes: 1) whether the school tour helped create cultural consumers (students who want to return to museums and engage in other cultural activities), 2) whether the school tour helped create cultural producers (students who want to make art), 3) whether the school tour increased student knowledge about art and history, 4) whether the school tour improved student critical thinking about works of art, and 5) whether the school tour altered student values, like empathy and tolerance.

We have already collected results from almost 6,000 K-12 students and teachers from 80 different schools during last spring’s research.  This fall we are adding another 4,000 students and teachers to the study from another 60 or so schools.  When it is all done and analyzed it will probably be the biggest, most comprehensive, and highly rigorous examination of the effects of school tours of an art museum.

As part of the study we are also asking students in grades 3-12 to write short essays in response to paintings that they have probably never seen before to assess how they critically analyze a new work of art after they’ve had a school tour of an art museum.  Last semester we coded almost 4,000 essays in response to Bo Bartlett’s painting, The Box, which was pictured in my previous post.  This semester we wanted to try something a little more abstract, so we we will be coding another 2,500 or so essays in response to Marsden Hartley’s painting, Eight Bells Folly, which is pictured above.  Dan Bowen has taken the lead in the coding and analysis of these essays and will soon be on the job market in case anyone is looking for a great and innovative researcher to hire.

There are obvious limitations to our study.  We can only measure short term effects since the control group receives the treatment the following semester.  And we can only measure a limited set of outcomes from an art experience.  But we will know a whole lot more and with higher confidence than we do now.

We are also conducting two studies with the Walton Arts Center, which is a performing arts theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  In one study we are are working with our colleague in the music department, Lisa Margulis, to learn about the effects of information in program notes on students’ experiences during school field trips to see performances.  We are randomly assigning students to receive program notes with information about the show they are seeing or “placebo” program notes  that do not tell them about the show they are seeing.  The question is whether information alters the experience.

And in the other study with the Walton Arts Center we are surveying more than 2,000 7th grade students in area schools to link the past performances they have seen on school field trips to their current behaviors as cultural consumers and producers as well as some empathy and tolerance outcomes.  We are also going to use attendance zone boundaries as an exogenous source of variation to make stronger causal claims about how past school field trips may have contributed to current behaviors and attitudes.

We are also in talks with various folks about additional studies, all of which will use random assignment or similarly rigorous methods.  This line of work is particularly exciting because there is a limited amount of rigorous research out there on how school cultural activities affect students.

(link edited)

4 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education Isn’t Entirely About Economic Utility

December 4, 2012
2002-the-box-sm.jpg

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a large-scale random assignment experiment of the effects of school tours of an art museum on students and their learning.  We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on school field trips and billions more on art museums, but we have relatively little rigorous evidence on how field trips and art museums affect students.  Soon we are going to have a lot more information.

Since the world of art and museum education is new to me, I’ve been trying to learn about how people in that field think about what they are trying to accomplish and what kind of evidence they present to justify the resources required.  Some  people try to justify the place of art in education by claiming that art positively affects achievement in math and reading — subjects whose importance is a matter of broad consensus.  Unfortunately, the evidence linking art education to improved math and reading achievement is generally weak and unpersuasive.

Why do people bother trying to justify art in terms of math and reading achievement?  Math educators don’t try to frame their accomplishments in terms of reading or vice versa.  Why do people in art try to frame the benefits of their field in terms of other subjects?

The problem is that a good number of  policymakers, pundits, and others who control the education system seem to think that the almost-exclusive purpose of education is to impart economically useful skills.  Math and reading seem to these folks to be directly connected to economic utility, while art seems at best a frill.  If resources are tight or students are struggling, they are inclined to cut the arts and focus more on math and reading because those subjects are really useful while art is not.

This economic utility view of education is mistaken in almost every way.  Most of what students learn in math and reading also has no economic utility.  Relatively few students will ever use algebra, let alone calculus, in their jobs.  Even fewer students will use literature or poetry in the workplace.  When will students “use” history?  We don’t teach those subjects because they provide work-related skills.  We teach algebra, calculus, literature, poetry, and history for the same reasons we should be teaching art — they help us understand ourselves, our cultural heritage, and the world we live in.  We teach them because they are beautiful and important in and of themselves.  We teach them because civilized people should know them.

Most parents understand that education is not entirely about imparting economically useful skills.  Yes, they want their children to get good jobs but they also want to have their children develop good characters, appreciate the good life, and generally be civilized human beings.  Of course, different parents may want a different mix of economic and cultural education for their children and school choice would allow them to find the schools that offered the mix that suited their needs and tastes.

But policymakers, pundits, and others suffering from PLDD who control our increasingly centralized education system focus almost exclusively on economic utility as the criteria for making education policy decisions.  Math and reading test scores are the only clubs they have to beat their opponents in establishing their preferred policies.  And economic payouts are the only objective measures they can use to justify expenditures.  Parents don’t think about education this way, but they have less and less say over what happens in the rearing of their children to become what they hope will be civilized human beings.

Some policymakers, pundits, and other PLDD sufferers have noticed that not everything taught in math and reading is economically useful and want to fix that.  You have folks like Tony Wagner and the 21st Century Skills movement suggesting that we cut algebra because students won’t “need” it.  Instead, students would be better off learning communication skills, like how to prepare an awesome Power Point (TM).  And you have Common Core cutting literature in English in favor of “informational texts.”

Of course, the logical culmination of the idea of school as job-skills provider is that we would do away with school altogether and just have apprenticeships.  I see nothing wrong with apprenticeship but it is not what I or most parents view as an “education.”

People in the art world can justify what they do by arguing for art in its own right.  They can rigorously measure art outcomes, as we are in our random-assignment field trip study.  In fact, as part of our study we had 4,000 students write short essays in response to Bo Bartlett’s painting, The Box (pictured above).  It may be harder to code and analyze essays about paintings than to run another value-added regression on the math and reading scores that the centralized authorities have collected for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important.  The purpose of education isn’t only what the centralized authorities decide it is and bother to measure.

14 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Introducing “The Higgy”

November 28, 2012

William Higginbotham

As someone who was recognized in 2006 as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, I know a lot about the importance of awards highlighting people of significant accomplishment.  Here on JPGB we have the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, but I’ve noticed that “The Al” only recognizes people of positive accomplishment.  As Time Magazine has understood in naming Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Ayatullah Khomeini as Persons of the Year, accomplishments can be negative as well as positive.

(Then again, Time has also recognized some amazing individuals as Person of the Year, including Endangered Earth, The Computer, Twenty-Five and Under, and The Peacemakers, so I’m not sure we should be paying so much attention to what a soon-to-be-defunct magazine does.  But that’s a topic for another day when we want to talk about how schools are more likely to be named after manatees than George Washington.)

Where were we?  Oh yes.  It is important to recognize negative as well as positive accomplishment.  So I introduce “The Higgy,” an award named after William Higinbotham, as the mirror award to our well-established “Al.”

Just as Al Copeland was not without serious flaws as a person, William Higinbotham was not without his virtues.  Higinbotham did, after all  develop the first video game.  But Higinbotham dismissed the importance of that accomplishment and instead chose to be an arrogant jerk by claiming that his true accomplishment was in helping found the Federation of American Scientists and working for the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.  I highly doubt that the Federation or Higinbotham did a single thing that actually advanced nonproliferation, but they sure were smug about it.  Here, I think, is a video of one of their meetings:

I suspect that Al Copeland, by contrast, understood that he was a royal jerk.  And he also understood that developing a chain of spicy chicken restaurants really does improve the human condition.  Higinbotham’s failing was in mistaking self-righteous proclamations for actually making people’s lives better in a way that video games really do improve the human condition.

So, “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.

We will invite nominations for “The Higgy” in late March and will announce the winner, appropriately enough, on April 15.  Thanks to Greg for his suggestions in developing “The Higgy.”

10 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, William Higginbotham Inhumanitarian Award | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Anti-Al

November 25, 2012

We have now given 4 Al Copeland Humanitarian Awards to recognize people who have made significant contributions to improving the human condition.  I am wondering whether it is time we start giving Anti-Al Awards to recognize people who significant worsen the human condition.  Maybe shaming the bad is as important as praising the good.

The problem with an Anti-Al is that it may be too hard to narrow the field since so many people harm the human condition.  And unlike the Al, which heralds the unheralded, the likely candidates for an Anti-Al are so well known that there may be little point in recognizing them with awards.

The most obvious type of candidate for an Anti-Al would be the ruthless tyrants who rule over large portions of the globe.  But it is already widely understood that the likes of Kim Jong-un or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are awful people who, along with their armies, bureaucrats, and fellow-government thugs, crush liberty, tolerance, and prosperity.  Then again, even in civilized societies one will occasionally hear about the need to understand, engage, and work with ruthless tyrants.  These same advocates for engagement of ruthless dictators are also often the same people who find Chick-Fil-A or Walmart too morally objectionable to frequent.  Perhaps the Anti-Al is necessary to remind people to have an appropriate moral perspective.  The real threats to liberty, tolerance, and prosperity are the folks being feted at diplomatic receptions, not retailers with disputed employment practices or objectionable views.

If ruthless tyrants are too obvious for an Anti-Al, then perhaps the most likely category of candidates would be those afflicted with Petty Little Dictator Disorder.  These tiny tyrants who populate the middle levels of government agencies, think-tanks, and cocktail parties everywhere are certainly not already recognized for their corrosive effect on liberty, tolerance, and prosperity.  The greater difficulty with using an Anti-Al to highlight these detractors from the human condition would be: how could we possibly choose among them?  They are so numerous and parrot each others’ ideas so much that I can hardly tell them apart let alone choose to highlight only one of them.  They are like a herd of zebras — a blur of proposed regulations, laws, and mini-dictatorial fantasies — that the lion cannot identify one to take it down.

Maybe there are other categories of likely candidates for an Anti-Al that would not have these same difficulties.  Or maybe others have more elegant solutions to the problems I’ve raised.  So, what do folks think?  Should we start an Anti-Al?

2 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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