Central Planning Conservatives and DC Edu-Punditcrats

August 15, 2011

Colin Farrell ET host Mary Hart and actor Colin Farrell, winner Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical Or Comedy for "In Bruges," backstage with Entertainment Tonight at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 11, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images) *** Local Caption *** Mary Hart;Colin Farrell

The Wall Street Journal had an excellent piece by Charles Dameron chronicling the “crony capitalism problem” of newly announced Republican presidential candidate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.  The piece describes a $200 million slush fund that the governor along with the leaders of the state house and senate have to “invest” taxpayer money in high tech start-ups in Texas:

The Emerging Technology Fund was created at Mr. Perry’s behest in 2005 to act as a kind of public-sector venture capital firm, largely to provide funding for tech start-ups in Texas. Since then, the fund has committed nearly $200 million of taxpayer money to fund 133 companies. Mr. Perry told a group of CEOs in May that the fund’s “strategic investments are what’s helping us keep groundbreaking innovations in the state.” The governor, together with the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the Texas House, enjoys ultimate decision-making power over the fund’s investments.

The piece goes on to document the extremely cozy relationship between the recipients of these funds (who have a proclivity for declaring bankruptcy) and Rick Perry’s campaign coffers.  But the real problem of having the government fund businesses is not the actuality or appearance of conflicts of interest, as the WSJ article seems to suggest.  The real problem is the hubris of thinking that a handful of government leaders can identify the “right” businesses to which capital should be allocated.  Why should they think that they are smarter with public dollars than the market investing private dollars?  In short, crony capitalism is an example of the errors of central planning.

The WSJ piece on Rick Perry is quite damaging, but ultimately we may have to sift through a set of candidates (from both parties) to see who has the least extensive and dangerous central planning fantasies.

I’ve often wondered why people are seduced by the thought that they know best which firms should receive investments or which standards should be used in all schools or which teaching methods are most effective for all children.  The obvious answers are that people desire power or money, both of which can be grabbed by the successful central planner.

But there is another explanation for the tendency toward central planning that deserves our attention — youth.  Young, smart people have an amazing abundance of confidence in their own abilities to identify the right way for others to act combined with an amazing shortage of disappointing experiences where that central planning has utterly failed.   And, for better or worse, young people tend to play a very large role in policy-making.

I notice the youthful dangers of central planning every time I visit Washington, DC.  Just sitting in a restaurant I often overhear some twenty-something describe (in some detail) how to restructure energy policy, deliver health care, promote virtue through the tax code, or reshape the nation’s schools.  These twenty-somethings are usually congressional staffers or think-tank wonks.  And I am just as likely to hear this central planning hubris from someone working for a Republican member of Congress or a conservative think tank.

I’ve never believed that teachers should determine education policy,that soldiers should determine military strategy, or that doctors should determine health policy, but there is something to be said for the wisdom of experience in policy-making.

Look at the folks who populate the DC education punditocracy.  Very few of them have actually ever done anything — except dream up what others should do and persuasively write about it.  They’ve worked in administrations, written policy briefs, and attended a whole lot of catered lunches, but they know remarkably little about the world.  Most have never had a regular (non-policy) job.  They don’t even know the world through scholarly inquiry, since almost none of them have ever conducted their own original empirical analyses of policies.  They read studies that others conduct, talk with each other, and write about what they think should be done.  The know about as much about policy as Entertainment Tonight hosts know about great acting.  They’ve seen other people do it and then talk about it all the time.

In short, I have no idea why we ever listen to many of these DC edu-punditcrats.  They may write very well (and often) and read a lot, but they don’t actually have any expertise.  And, given their youth and inexperience, they are very often tempted to engage in dangerous central planning fantasies.

Plenty of good-old-boys out in the hinterland engage in central planning like Rick Perry’s crony capitalism.  But their motivation to do so tends to be more cynical and obvious.  The straightforward desire for money and power is easier to detect and check.  The youthful central planning of the DC edu-punditcrats, on the other hand, is harder to contain because its practitioners enthusiastically believe in what they are doing.  They are ET Hosts who think their performances are Oscar-worthy.

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

Build New, Don’t Reform Old

August 2, 2011

Image result for gates foundation headquarters

When I wrote my two part critique of the Gates Foundation strategy, one of our frequent comment-writers, GGW, asked: “What would you do if asked by Gates how to better donate his (and Warren Buffett’s) billions?”

Here is a brief answer to that question: Philanthropists with billions of dollars to devote to education reform should build new institutions and stop trying to fix old ones.

In general, existing institutions don’t want to be fixed.  There are reasons why current public schools operate as they do and the people who benefit from that will resist any effort to change it.  Those who benefit from status quo arrangements also tend to be better positioned than reformers to repel attempts by outsiders to make significant changes.  The history of education reform is littered with failed efforts by philanthropists.

Instead, private donors have had much better success addressing problems by building new institutions.  And competition from newly built institutions can have a greater positive impact on existing institutions than trying to reform them directly.

Let’s consider one of the greatest accomplishments in American education philanthropy.  In the late 19th century, America’s leading universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) were badly in need of reform.  They were still operated primarily as religious seminaries and not as modern, scientific institutions.  Rather than trying to reform them directly, major philanthropists built new universities modeled after German scientific institutions.  John D. Rockefeller and Marshall Field helped found the University of Chicago.  Leland Stanford built Stanford University.  A group of private donors built Johns Hopkins.  Cornelius Vanderbilt founded Vanderbilt.  All of these universities imitated German universities with their emphasis on the scientific method and research and were enormously successful at it.  Eventually Harvard, Yale, and Princeton recognized the competitive threat from these German-modeled upstarts and made their own transition from a seminary-focus to a scientific focus.

The reform of the U.S. higher education system did not come from a government mandate or “incentives.”  It did not happen by philanthropists giving money directly to the leading universities of the time to convince them to change their ways.  It happened by philanthropists building new institutions to compete with the old ones.

The same could be done for K-12 education.  Matt Ladner has written a series of posts on “The Way of the Future.”  He, along with Terry Moe, Clay Christensen, Paul Peterson, and others, envision large numbers of  hybrid virtual schools offering higher quality customized education at dramatically lower costs.  Students would attend school buildings, but the bulk of their instruction would be delivered by interactive software.  The school would need significantly fewer staff, who would concentrate mostly on assisting students with the technology and managing behavior.

Obviously, this kind of school would not be good for everybody.  But it could appeal to large numbers of students and be offered at such a low cost that it could be affordable even to low-income families without needing public subsidy or adoption by the public school system.

Gates or someone else with billions to devote to education could build a national chain of these virtual hybrid schools to compete with existing public and private schools.  It’s true that Gates is already investing in the development and refinement of the virtual hybrid school model, but a complete commitment to building new rather than reforming old would give him the potential to do what Rockefeller, Stanford, and others did to higher education.  Virtual hybrid schools could be the disruptive technology, as Christensen calls it, to produce real reform in education.

Another benefit of the “building new” strategy for philanthropists is that it avoids the Emperor’s New Clothes problem, where philanthropists are encouraged to pursue flawed strategies to reform existing institutions because everyone is afraid to criticize the wealthy donor from whose largess they benefit.  With the “build new” strategy there is ultimately a market test of the wisdom of the strategy.  If the new institutions are not better, people won’t choose them.  If the University of Chicago had been a flawed model, it wouldn’t have attracted enrollment and would have failed to apply competitive pressure to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.  Similarly, if the virtual hybrid school is a bad model, then it won’t attract students and compete with existing public and private schools.

Edison Schools is an example of a “build new” strategy that failed the market test.  They failed to develop technologies or other efficiencies to bring down the costs of operating private schools.  And their revised strategy of operating public schools under contract with public school districts was flawed by an underestimation of the political resistance they would face and their inability to control costs or quality within the public system.

But we also have successful examples of the “build new” strategy adopted by philanthropists.  In addition to the string of scientific universities built in the latter half of the 19th century, we also have the example of Andrew Carnegie and public libraries.  Carnegie helped promote literacy and cultural knowledge by supporting the construction of hundreds of new libraries around the country.  He didn’t try to reform existing book-sellers, he just built new.  Another example (outside of education) can be seen in John D. Rockefeller’s role in the development of a national park system.  Rockefeller privately acquired large chunks of what are now the Acadia, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone national parks.  Rockefeller didn’t try to reform the operations of the existing Interior Department.  Instead, he effectively privately built nature reserves and then donated them to the U.S. to become national parks.

Of course, this “build new” strategy has limited potential for smaller-scale philanthropy.  But for the very wealthy, like Gates, the path to making a significant and lasting difference is to build new rather than reform old.  The lasting benefits of what Rockefeller did in higher education and national parks and Carnegie did with libraries are still noticeable today.  If Gates and others with billions to devote to education continue to focus on reforming the old rather than building new, I fear their efforts will soon be forgotten after the Emperor’s New Clothes adulation fades when they stop having large sums to give.

22 Comments | economics, National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Double-Agent Diane

August 1, 2011

I came across the following correspondence that appears to describe an ingenious plot to plant someone named “Diane” as a double-agent in the teacher union ranks.  Once “Diane” gains their trust, her mission is to rile up an Army of Angry Teachers whose slogan-chanting would become so bellicose and unreasonable that it would undermine the popular impression of teachers as a loving extension of the family.

As I’ve argued before, the teacher unions play a double game.  They put out a public image of being like the doting aunt or uncle who cares about our kids almost as much as (if not more than) parents do.   They know that as long as the public sees the school system as part of the family, they will favor policies that exempt education from the rigors of the marketplace.  People see their families as a refuge from the rough and tumble of the marketplace.  Families are governed by affection and mutual obligation rather than choice and competition.  But in the corridors of power, the teacher unions haggle over pay, benefits, work rules, and autonomy as if they were auto workers, not your favorite aunt or uncle.

The purpose of Diane’s under-cover operation appears to be to undermine that double game and make the self-interested power-grabs by the unions more transparent for what they are.  If teacher unions are not viewed as extensions of the family, people would stop exempting education from their normal expectation that there should be choice and competition in the provision of goods and services.  If “Diane’s” double-agent sabotage succeeds, the image of teachers buying school supplies out of their own pocket and believing in student potential regardless of difficulties would be replaced with the image of teachers demanding benefits for themselves and blaming circumstances for student low performance.

I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this correspondence, but if accurate it sure would go a long way toward explaining what has otherwise seemed inexplicable.

I’ve inserted videos throughout this post that may provide evidence to substantiate the existence of this conspiracy.

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Diane —

We commend you on your willingness to accept this difficult assignment.  We know you will have to estrange yourself from former friends and adherents.  We know that you will have to ingratiate yourself into a new network whose company may at times be difficult to tolerate — what with their obvious self-interest thinly disguised by shallow slogans, inconsistent arguments, and indifference to empirical evidence.  But those qualities are precisely the things that will allow you to gain their trust and rile them into a self-destructive frenzy.  Just feed them more shallow slogans, inconsistent arguments, and non-empirically-supported views and they will be like putty in your hands.

There will also be compensating benefits.  We know that reformers have stopped paying much attention to you as they shift focus to rigorous quantitative analyses of  test results rather than stories spun by polemical historians.  But your new teacher union friends will shower plenty of attention on you, as they make no demands for rigor in quantitative or historical analyses and instead judge the merits of arguments based on how they serve their interests.  Your new friends will also shower plenty of cash on you as they invite you to speak around the country at about $20,000 a pop.  Kozol and Kohn have earned a summer home or two doing this, so don’t let anyone tell you that advocating for public education is not financially rewarding.  Of course, if you are successful in this mission, your efforts will undermine the effectiveness of their advocacy by making it seem extreme and self-serving.  If you succeed we will reward you even more richly.

Good luck in your efforts!

–The Pentaverate

The Pentaverate —

It has been some time since you sent me on this deep-cover operation, but I am pleased to report that our plan is progressing well.  I’ve launched a blog on Education Week as a platform for my sabotage.  I’ve written a best-selling book whose arguments are so weak that a grad student could pick them apart in a few blog posts, but which is like catnip to our target audience.  I’ve recruited Valerie Strauss, a previously normal and respected journalist, to join our efforts at agitation.  And most importantly, I’ve developed a following of 17,307 on Twitter to whom I send about 70 missives a day.  I just get the ball rolling and then my followers write the craziest stuff, which I can then just retweet with the plausible deniability that I wasn’t saying it.

For example, I retweeted a message from Gary Stager describing Bill Gates’ view that education can overcome poverty as “Sad, pathetic, ignorant, dangerous, genocidal, wrong.”  Genocidal!  That’s gold.  That weak Jay P. Greene just says that the Gates Foundation has a flawed strategy, but I have folks saying that Gates and anyone who believes that poverty is not immutable is advocating genocide.  If stuff like that doesn’t undermine teacher union credibility with sensible people I have no idea what will.

In short, as you have requested I have assembled an Army of Angry Teachers and, like Pogo, they have met the enemy and they are it.  Last weekend we marched on Washington for the Save Our Schools (SOS) rally, which should reveal the nuttiness of my Army to policy and opinion leaders nationwide.

–Diane

Diane —

We are very proud of your efforts and admire your heroism is fulfilling the unpleasant task of mobilizing angry teachers into a fevered state.  For that work the members of The Pentaverate have decided to award you the Keyser Soze Medal for Excellence in Deception.

We are, however, a bit disappointed with the SOS Rally.  You only managed to get 2,000-3,000 people to show up, which makes your army seem like a distinct minority of all teachers (which it probably is).  We did, however, like your transparently false description of the rally as the spontaneous outpouring of a grassroots movement, even though it received half its roughly $100k funding from the teacher unions and another quarter from donations by you and Kozol (we will reimburse you for those expenses, just like before).

We liked your speech, particularly the part about how education policy should be made by educators, not by policymakers.  Of course by that reasoning energy policy should be made by energy-producers, not policymakers and tax policy should be made by accountants and lawyers.  Again, these flimsy and shallow slogans/arguments are doing a great job of undermining the teacher union cause.

We were also pleased with Kozol’s lecture.  He’s still rehashing the same stories he acquired from spending a few weeks with poor kids several decades ago, but his slightly slurred and irate delivery gives it just the right touch of insanity.  Even Kevin Carey had to comment that Kozol is “edging into deranged preacher territory.”  Excellent work!

Still, the small crowd was very discouraging.  We know that you couldn’t control the fact that there was a debt crisis going on at the same time, but we are worried about your success at convincing opinion and policy leaders of how representative and unreasonable the Army of Angry Teachers really is.

–The Pentaverate

The Pentaverate —

I appreciate your concerns.  It is true that we only managed to get CNN and the HuffPo to cover our rally while the rest of the media ignored us.  But we did get Matt Damon to speak at the event.  He’s always so eloquent.  I’ve attached a video of his speech below.

We will redouble our efforts and I assure you that by the time I am done with this Army of Angry Teachers, they will have thoroughly discredited the teacher unions.

–Diane

14 Comments | teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Gates Foundation Follies (Part 2)

July 26, 2011

Image result for gates foundation headquarters

A sketch of the $500 million new Gates Foundation headquarters

In Part 1 of this post, I described how the Gates Foundation came to recognize the importance of using political influence to reform the education system rather than focusing on reforming one school at a time in the hopes that school systems would see and replicate successful models.  No private philanthropist has enough money to buy and sustain widespread adoption of an effective approach and the public school system has little incentive to identify and spread effective approaches on their own.

Faced with the unwillingness of the public school system to reproduce successful models (assuming that Gates could even offer one), the Foundation was left with two solutions to encourage innovation: 1) identify the best practices themselves and impose them from the top down, or 2) encourage choice and competition so that schools would have the proper incentive to identify, imitate, and properly implement effective approaches.

The Gates Foundation made the wrong choice.  Their top-down strategy cannot work for the following reasons:

1) Education does not lend itself to a single “best” approach, so the Gates effort to use science to discover best practices is unable to yield much productive fruit;

As I’ve explained before, there are many different “best” techniques for different kinds of teachers with different kinds of students in different situations with different available resources.  There are some practices that are universally beneficial in education, but they tend to be pretty obvious and are already well known (e.g. it is bad to beat kids, it is better when teachers know the material they are teaching, it is helpful to break down ideas into their essential components, etc…).

The difficulty of discovering universally beneficial  practices that are not already well-known, especially with the blunt tools available to researchers probably helps explain why the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) project, on which the Gates Foundation is spending $335 million has yet to produce any meaningful results despite entering its third year of operation.

2) As a result, the Gates folks have mostly been falsely invoking science to advance practices and policies they prefer for which they have no scientific support;

Despite having nothing to show for the $335 million they are spending on MET, the Gates folks nevertheless claim that it “proves” the harmfulness of teachers engaging in “drill and kill.” The fact that the research showed no such thing did not deter them from telling the NY Times and LA Times that it did.  Even when I pointed out the error, the Gates folks refused to issue a correction (although the LA Times ran one on their own).

Similarly, the Gates-orchestrated effort to push national standards, curricular materials, and assessments is advancing without any scientific evidence of the desirability of these approaches.  Gathering a group of Checker Finn’s friends (er, I mean, “a panel of experts”) to attest that the Common Core standards are better is not science.  It is the false invocation of science to manipulate people into compliance with their agenda.

3) Attempting to impose particular practices on the nation’s education system is generating more political resistance than even the Gates Foundation can overcome, despite their focus on political influence and their devotion of significant resources to that effort;

Opponents of centralized control of education have begun to mobilize against the Gates-orchestrated effort to establish national standards, curricular materials, and assessments.  But the bulk of the political resistance to the Gates strategy will come from the teacher unions.  They don’t want anyone to infringe on their autonomy or place their interests in jeopardy with a nationalized accountability system.  They may play along with Gates for a while and take their money, but when push comes to shove the unions can only tolerate one dictator in education — the unions.  Of course, those of us who don’t want anyone centrally-controlling the nation’s education system will oppose both Gates and the teacher unions.

We already have a taste of the kind of resistance teacher unions will put up against the Gates nationalization effort in the slogans emanating from Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss’ Twitter feed, supported by their Army of Angry Teachers.  Falsely claiming that MET proved that drill and kill is harmful did not mollify these folks at all.

The teacher unions derive far more power and money from the status quo than Gates can ever offer them, unless of course Gates builds a nationalized system and cedes control to the unions, which is not part of the Gates plan.  Nothing in the Gates strategy weakens the unions and would force them to make significant concessions, so in the end the unions will either hijack the Gates strategy for their own benefit or block it.  Even Gates does not have the resources to beat the unions without first diminishing their power.

4) The scale of the political effort required by the Gates strategy of imposing “best” practices is forcing Gates to expand its staffing to levels where it is being paralyzed by its own administrative bloat; 

Over the last decade the Gates Foundation has roughly doubled its assets but increased its staffing by about 10-fold.  The Foundation is now huge, which is part of why it needs the Education Pentagon pictured above to house everyone.  The Foundation has gotten huge because it is trying to buy political influence as it buys people.  Gates has been snapping up or funding just about every advocacy group, researcher, or education journalist they can find.  Getting all of these people on board for a nationalized education system (or at least mute their dissent) involves paying an enormous number of people and organizations.

Gates can buy a lot of folks, but they can’t buy everyone and they can’t keep the folks they do pay in line for very long.  It’s like herding cats. (I should note that I’ve received Gates Funding in the past).

And the sheer size of their staff and funded allies along with the focus on controlling the political message is so overwhelming that it is significantly hindering their ability to do anything.  People inside the organization have told me that they are suffering from a bureaucratic gridlock with endless meetings, conference calls, and chains of approvals.  Notice that Gates is paying a ton of researchers and yet virtually no research is coming out.  Very curious.

5) The false invocation of science as a political tool to advance policies and practices not actually supported by scientific evidence is producing intellectual corruption among the staff and researchers associated with Gates, which will undermine their long-term credibility and influence.

As noted above, the need to advance a particular political message has led Gates to mischaracterize their own research (for example, claiming that MET proves that drill and kill is harmful when the research does not show that).  But the intellectual corruption extends much farther.  I had a highly respected and accomplished researcher employed by Gates tell me that Vicki Phillips’ mischaracterization of the MET results was not so far off because there isn’t a big difference between a low correlation and a negative one.  He also defended comparing the magnitude of a series of pair-wise correlations to determine the relative influence of different variables.  To hear someone who knows better twist the truth to avoid contradicting the education boss at Gates was just sad.

Unfortunately, too many advocates, researchers, and others are being similarly corrupted.  In most cases the Gates folks don’t have to exert any explicit pressure on people to keep them in line; they just anticipate what they think would serve the Gates strategy.  But I am aware of at least one case in which a researcher’s findings were at odds with the desired outcome and that person suffered for it.

I’ve heard another story from someone involved in the MET project that the delay in releasing any results from the analyses of classroom videos even as the project enters its third year is explained by their inability to find any meaningful results.  Perhaps another year of data will make something turn up that they can finally tout for their $335 million investment.  The fact that the initial MET report with basically no useful findings was released on a Friday just before Christmas suggests that the Gates folks are working hard to shape their message.

The national standards, curriculum, and testing campaign is rife with intellectual corruption.  For example, people are twisting themselves into knots to explain how the effort is purely voluntary on the part of states when it is manifestly not, given federal financial “incentives,” offers of selective exemptions to NCLB requirements for states that comply, and the threat of future mandates.  There is so much spin around Gates that it makes one dizzy.

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Let me be clear, most of the folks affiliated with Gates are good and smart people.  The problem is that when your reform strategy requires a top-down approach, these good and smart people are put under a lot of stress to have a unified vision of the “best” that will be imposed from the top.  And whenever an organization starts sprinkling millions of dollars on researchers and advocacy groups unaccustomed to that kind of money, there are temptations that are hard for the most virtuous to resist.

But the good and smart people at Gates can stop the counter-productive strategy that the Foundation is pursuing.  The Foundation changed course once before and it can do it again.

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UPDATE — For my suggestions of what the Gates Foundation could do instead, see this post.

31 Comments | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Gates Foundation Follies (Part 1)

July 25, 2011

Image result for gates foundation headquarters

A sketch of the $500 million new Gates Foundation headquarters

Jason Riley’s interview with Bill Gates in the Wall Street Journal was not as great as Riley’s interview with me last week (shameless plug for my new mini-book), but it was still very illuminating.  In particular, the Gates interview confirmed two things about the Foundation’s education efforts: 1) they’ve realized that the focus of their efforts has to be on the political control of schools and 2) they are uninterested in using that political influence to advance market forces in education. Instead, the basic strategy of the Gates Foundation is to use science (or, more accurately, the appearance of science) to identify the “best” educational practices and then use political influence to create a system of national standards, curricular materials, and testing to impose those “best practices” on schools nationwide.

The Gates Foundation came to understand the necessity of political influence over schools with the failure of their previous small schools strategy.  Under that strategy they tried to achieve reform by paying school districts to break-up larger high schools into smaller ones.  The problem with that strategy is that even the Gates Foundation does not have nearly enough money to buy systemic reform one school at a time.

School districts currently spend over $600 billion per year and the Gates Foundation only has $34 billion in total assets.  With the practice of spending only about 5% of assets each year and given the large (and effective) efforts the Foundation makes in developing country health-care, Gates only spends a couple hundred million dollars on education reform each year. Given the small share of total education spending Gates could offer, most public districts refused to entertain the Gates strategy of smaller schools, others took the money but failed to implement it properly, and others reversef the reform once the Gates subsidies ended.

The way I described the situation in my chapter “Buckets into the Sea” in the 2005 book, With the Best of Intentions, edited by Rick Hess is:

Philanthropists simply don’t have enough resource to reshape the education system on their own; all their giving put together amounts to only a tiny fraction of total education spending, so their dollars alone can’t make a significant difference.  In order to make a real difference, philanthropists must support programs that redirect how future public education dollars are spent.

And in 2008 I repeated this claim, saying: “total private giving to public education is a tiny portion of total spending on schools.  All giving, from the bake sale to the Gates Foundation, makes up less than one-third of 1% of total spending.  It’s basically rounding error.”

I don’t know whether the Gates Foundation was influence by my writing or whether they arrived at the same conclusions independently, but they are now articulating those same conclusions, often with the same exact words:

“It’s worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that’s ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it’s truly a rounding error.”

This understanding of just how little influence seemingly large donations can have has led the foundation to rethink its focus in recent years. Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.

While the focus of the Gates Foundation on influencing education policy is sensible, the particular political approach they have chosen is doomed to fail and attempting it is likely to be counter-productive.  In Part 2 of this post I will explain how the new strategy Gates has decided to pursue is flawed.

To give you a taste of what is coming in Part 2, the arguments can be summarized as: 1) Education does not lend itself to a single “best” approach, so the Gates effort to use science to discover best practices is unable to yield much productive fruit; 2) As a result, the Gates folks have mostly been falsely invoking science to advance practices and policies they prefer for which they have no scientific support; 3) Attempting to impose particular practices on the nation’s education system is generating more political resistance than even the Gates Foundation can overcome, despite their focus on political influence and their devotion of significant resources to that effort; 4) The scale of the political effort required by the Gates strategy of imposing “best” practices is forcing Gates to expand its staffing to levels where it is being paralyzed by its own administrative bloat; and 5) The false invocation of science as a political tool to advance policies and practices not actually supported by scientific evidence is producing intellectual corruption among the staff and researchers associated with Gates, which will undermine their long-term credibility and influence.

Tune in for Part 2.

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UPDATE — For my suggestions of what the Gates Foundation could do instead, see this post.

6 Comments | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

WSJ Interview on New Choice Mini-Book

July 21, 2011

Jason Riley of the WSJ interviews me about my new mini-book, Why America Needs School Choice.

I can’t figure out how to embed the video, but click here to view it.

1 Comment | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Army of Angry Teachers — When Success Breeds Failure

July 19, 2011

It must feel empowering for teachers upset by current developments to hold big rallies with thousands of union members chanting slogans.  They must finally feel like their voice is being heard, as Diane Ravitch, Valerie Strauss, and the new breed of teacher union advocates make their case.

While this may all feel like success to the teacher unions, I suspect that it is actually breeding failure.  The unions succeed by intimidating politicians with their raw power while convincing the public that teacher unions love their children almost as much as the parents do.  Maintaining this double-game is essential because it disarms parents, media elites, and others who might otherwise mobilize against teacher unions and apply their own direct pressure to politicians.

As long as teacher unions act like Mary Poppins to parents, media elites, and others, the general public is willing to suspend their normal inclination to desire choice and competition in the goods and services they consume.  Mary Poppins is an extension of the family and we don’t apply market principles to our family.  The family is a refuge from the rough and tumble of the market which is instead governed by a sense of mutual obligations and affection.  Where the family ends, the market begins and people think the market needs choice and competition to stay healthy.

But when the public face of the teacher unions is the Army of Angry Teachers, they no longer seem like Mary Poppins and begin to look a lot more like longshoremen beating their opponents with metal pipes.  Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss may provide psychological comfort to angry teachers (some of whom seem so irate that they may need professional psychological help to manage their anger), but it undermines the double-game that is at the heart of the teacher union strategy.

Giant mobs of yelling protesters and blogs filled with tirades may increase the intimidation politicians feel, but it seriously undermines the image of teachers as an extension of our family.  And as that Mary Poppins image is significantly eroded, media elites and the general public will increasingly think of education as something in the marketplace that requires choice and competition.  And this erosion is extremely hard for teacher unions to reverse.

What feels like success to angry teachers is actually sowing the seeds of failure for the teacher union.

16 Comments | teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Why America Needs School Choice — Now Cheaper and Better!

July 14, 2011

Why America Needs School Choice

My new mini-book, Why America Needs School Choice is now cheaper and better!  Encounter is selling it on their web site for $4.19, which is 30% less than the $5.99 list price available at Amazon.

Encounter is also selling an e-book version for the Ipad, which is also available on the Encounter web site.  Amazon is not yet offering the e-book version.  I think the e-book is much more useful because it has hyperlinks to all of the sources.  So, not only will you get the arguments and evidence that policymakers and advocates need to expand school choice, you’ll also be able to go to the original studies so that you can read the details and confirm the accuracy of my summary.

Leave a Comment » | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Minibook on Choice

July 10, 2011

My new minibook on school choice is now available for purchase on Amazon.  It will be in stores next week.

Also check out this great review by Andrew Coulson of Cato, this interview by David Kinkade of The Arkansas Project, and this audio podcast on School Reform News.

UPDATE: You can find the e-book version for IPad on the Encounter Books web site.  That version is very handy because it has hyperlinks to all of the sources.  Encounter also has a great price of $4.19

1 Comment | charter schools, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Time for state boards of education to sing!!!‎

July 5, 2011

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

Congress badly needs independent feedback on the very costly jar of snake oil that the USDE has enticed 46 clueless state boards of education into purchasing, with many national organizations handsomely funded by the Gates Foundation assisting in the seduction. Congress could do no better than speak to some of the many teachers and administrators across the country who, according to Catherine Gewertz’s June 29 blog titled “Educators Don’t Understand Common Standards, Boards Told,” don’t see differences between their previous standards and Common Core’s standards, adopted by these state boards this past year.

At http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2011/06/educators_dont_understand_comm.html Gewertz reported on a meeting for members of state boards of education designed to help them learn how to implement Common Core’s standards.  Speaker Susan Tave Zelman, once Ohio’s superintendent of instruction, tried to warn attendees about the core problem.  According to Gewertz, she said that “most folks just don’t understand how the new standards are different from the one’s they’ve already got.” “You’ve got to… make clear what is different between your current standards and the common core standards.”  “I’m telling you, out there people don’t see the differences.”

Educational disaster is farce, as well.  The sponsors of the meeting assured them that the biggest problem they face is “communication” and that the James B. Hunt Institute in North Carolina has secured a public-relations consultant to help them convince educators in their state to support their newly adopted standards.

However, it is not unreasonable for teachers and administrators to see little difference between the standards they had and what they now have.  First, as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has pointed out repeatedly, based on its evaluations of state standards for over a decade, most states had poor to mediocre standards.  Second, according to CCSSO and the NGA, the states also helped to shape Common Core’s standards (often with the help of the very same “experts” and organizations that developed their poor to mediocre state standards).  Given the non-transparent process CCSSO and NGA used to develop and validate Common Core’s standards, why should teachers and administrators now scrutinizing Common Core’s standards for the first time see significant differences between the poor to mediocre standards they had and the standards they must now prepare to use?

If the new standards are much better than the old ones, why weren’t these differences pointed out to state board members at the meeting?  After all, educators in these 46 states are being asked to spend en enormous amount of time and money learning how to use the array of test instruments, curriculum materials, technologies, and professional development aligned to Common Core’s standards.

Isn’t it time for state board members to justify to educators in their own state the decision they made to adopt Common Core’s standards as their state’s standards this past year?   How many state boards have requested to review drafts of the curriculum models, guidelines, and other materials, as well as the specifications for the tests themselves, as part of their responsibilities?  State boards of education, whether elected or appointed, should be as accountable to the teachers and school administrators in their state as the latter are going to be to the USDE for making all students college-ready by the end of high school.  Teachers may begin to wonder how many of their board members ever read Common Core’s standards before adopting them.

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

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