Gloom and Gloomier

February 1, 2011

The editors at Education Next have two essays on the state of education reform that remind me of Woody Allen’s never-delivered university commencement speech:

More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

In one essay, Paul Peterson, Marci Kanstoroom, and Chester Finn reject my rosy assessment of progress in the war of ideas about education reform, saying “It’s way, way too early to declare victory. Atop the cliffs and bastions that reformers are attacking, the opposition has plenty of weapons with which to hold its territory…. It’s dangerous to think a battle is over when it has just begun.”

In the other essay, Frederick Hess, Martin West, and Michael Petrilli go even further in their gloom, arguing not only that the war has hardly begun, but that the reform warriors are really the enemy:

First, reform “support” resides with a mostly uninformed, unengaged public—one that isn’t especially sold on their ideas and that, in any event, is often outmatched by well-organized, well-funded, and motivated special interests. And second, and more unfortunately, many reformers are eagerly overreaching the evidence and touting simplistic, slipshod proposals that are likely to end in spectacular failures. In short, some forces of reform are busy marching into the sea and turning notable victories into Pyrrhic ones. To quote that wizened observer of politics and policy, Pogo: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

That’s funny.  I thought the enemy was a monopolistic, bureaucratized 19th century school system propped up by teacher unions and their allies who place the interests of adults over the needs of children.  I guess I was wrong in not understanding that it is really the opponents of that system who are the problem.

In truth, I don’t really disagree with much of what either essay has to say.  It is all just a matter of emphasis and framing. In my declaration of victory I was careful to acknowledge that the war over policy has barely begun and reformers have a long and difficult road ahead:

We won!  At least we’ve won the war of ideas.  Our ideas for school reform are now the ones that elites and politicians are considering and they have soundly rejected the old ideas of more money, more money, and more money.

Now that I’ve said that, I have to acknowledge that winning the war of ideas is nowhere close to winning the policy war.  As I’ve written before, the teacher unions are becoming like the tobacco industry.  No one accepts their primary claims anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t continue to be powerful and that people don’t continue to smoke.  The battle is turning into a struggle over the correct design and implementation of the reform ideas that are now commonly accepted.  And the unions have shown that they are extremely good at blocking, diluting, or co-opting the correct design and implementation of reforms.

Rick Hess correctly demonstrated how important design and implementation are almost two decades ago in his books, Spinning Wheels and Revolution at the Margins.   And it is always useful for him and others to remind reformers of the dangers that lurk in those union-infested waters.  But for a moment can’t we just bask in the glow of our intellectual victory — even if our allies are a new crop of naive reformers?

Yes, there is a danger in thinking that the policy war is over when it has barely begun.  And yes, there is a danger in over-promising and over-simplifying reform ideas.  But there is also a danger in reform burn-out.  The struggle over school reform has been going on for decades and will almost certainly take several decades more.  Donors have grown frustrated and advocates have jumped to ill-conceived quick fixes that would set the cause of reform back significantly, like adopting national standards and assessments.  If we don’t periodically note our policy progress and intellectual victories, we will have great difficulty sustaining the reform movement.

My view does not really differ substantially from the two essays in Education Next except that they see a greater danger in over-confidence and I see a greater danger in burnout.  And I don’t mind being used as the straw man for their arguments.  The Straw Man had a brain.

13 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education’s Long Forgotten Vision

January 28, 2011

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

An illuminating essay titled “Education’s Forsaken Vision,” by Avner Molcho, an Israeli historian, appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue of Azure, a publication of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. In it he presents an assessment of the shift in educational philosophy he has observed in Israeli public education since Israel’s founding. Evolving from a mission to serve the civic needs of a new nation as well as the mathematical, scientific, and other intellectual needs of a modern society—a mission that enhanced social cohesion despite wide differences in student achievement–the reigning view he sees today emphasizes student rights instead of shared civic values and promotes upward social mobility for students from low-income families as the chief purpose of public education.

Molcho’s purpose is to suggest that Israeli society would benefit from a revival of the central features of a classical education—its stress on intellectual goals and civic virtues. As justification, he points to the failure of the new mission for education to stimulate academic achievement in poor students or their upward mobility, despite increasing resources dedicated to these ends. In fact, he notes, achievement gaps between children of low- and high-income parents seem to have grown even as they all learn less, according to international test scores.

However, Molcho omits mention of the most recent expression in U. S. public policy of this problematic mission for public education, an expression that is likely to have undreamed-of negative effects on the school curriculum, academic achievement, and American society as a whole. U.S. educators have long looked for ways to improve the academic achievement of students from low-income families and, hence, their social mobility. The American public needs to learn what signposts U.S. education policy makers are following on the yellow-brick road to Oz. Otherwise, “Education’s Forsaken Vision” may soon become “Education’s Long Forgotten Vision” in both countries.

As is well-known, the original formulation of “equal educational opportunities” did not imply equal outcomes or the repudiation of intellectual and civic goals by the schools. Equity was understood to mean a fairer distribution of resources to raise poor children’s achievement. But as it became clear by the late 1990s that the increasing flow of federal and other funds to improve their “basic skills” was not changing the demographic profile of low achievers quickly, if at all, U.S. educators and policy makers redefined equity to mean equal outcomes for all demographic groups (except for boys and girls) and altered the goal line.

Stressing the “closing of demographic gaps” as the supreme goal of the schools, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act set forth a utopian goal: proficiency for all students by 2014 as determined by state assessments. An additional accountability criterion required “adequate yearly progress” for each demographic group. However, no practically significant increases in achievement at higher grade levels resulted for low-performing groups after accountability was added to the formula (although there has been progress on basic skills in the early grades). And serious problems elsewhere were ignored by policy makers.

Not unexpectedly, schools focused on what mattered to NCLB–getting low-performing students to pass state tests. But NCLB offered no reward at the same time for, for example, increasing the number or percentage of students, regardless of demographic category, who moved from Proficiency to Advanced, or completed an authentic Algebra I course in grade 8, or passed more advanced mathematics courses in high school. Yet, the need to pay attention elsewhere was clear. On TIMSS 2007, only 6% of U.S. students were at the advanced level in grade 8 mathematics, compared to, e.g., 40% of the students in South Korea. As a November 2010 report noted, “the U.S. trails other industrialized countries in bringing its students up to the highest levels of accomplishment in mathematics.”[1] The report did not identify “any single cause of the relatively small percentage of students in the U.S. who are performing at a high level of accomplishment,” although the shortage of academically qualified mathematics teachers looms as a major cause.

Despite the stunning comparisons of percentages at the highest performance level, no alarm bells were set off and no policies incentivizing increases in mathematics and science achievement at higher performance levels were forthcoming. Instead, the new mission for education drove public policy in the Obama administration to higher utopian heights than the Bush administration had aimed for, with an even more intense focus on low-achievers and little attention to anyone else.

While early advocates of “equal educational opportunities” wanted more poor students reaching high academic goals, not a change in these goals, supporters of the goal of social justice were quick to see an idiosyncratic and shrunken secondary curriculum (as content-free as possible), accompanied by changes in pedagogical practices and classroom organization, as a quicker means to their desired ends. If academic credentials (i.e., a college degree) are what promote social mobility, then what needed fairer distribution to get low-achieving groups moving upward were the credentials, not necessarily what they were designed to reflect.

The first step in facilitating a more equitable allocation of academic credentials was development of national standards in English and mathematics loosely tethered at the secondary level to their traditional content. That step was completed with the help of the Gates Foundation, which paid for the development, review, post-facto validation, and promotion of the reading and mathematics standards Common Core released in June 2010, and which also influenced the selection of most of the personnel involved. Public officials and the media were repeatedly told by the developers of the standards that they were research-based and internationally benchmarked, even though independent subject matter experts and researchers indicated this was not the case.[2] To clinch the first step, the U.S.D.E. ensured state adoption of these skills-oriented standards (about 45 states so far) with the lure of Race to the Top competitive funds.

The next crucial step is the development of tests based on Common Core’s standards and the working out of important matters such as the quality and difficulty of the test items and the level of the passing scores. The U.S.D.E. is funding and supervising this step directly. So far as we now know, the U.S.D.E. also wants, in a re-authorization of NCLB, schools to ensure that all their high school graduates are “college ready” as determined by the passing score on high school level tests. If so, schools will be held accountable for a greater utopian reach than was expected in 2001.

Efforts are already underway to make sure that all “college ready” students can be successful in their freshman college courses. Public colleges are being asked to “align” entrance requirements and the content of freshman courses to Common Core’s secondary standards, not the other way around. And, to ensure that “college ready” students can graduate from a college degree program in record time, all of their freshman courses must be credit-bearing, not tagged as remedial. (Otherwise, these students could not be called “college ready.”)

This means, in effect, that those who pass the national high school tests, which are to be first given at the end of grade 10, can go right to a college that accepts them and earn college credit for the content of the grade 11 or 12 courses they skipped, if the content is deemed necessary for their degree program.

Does anyone doubt that public colleges will be under pressure to admit “college ready” students and produce equal group outcomes in retention and graduation rates? Like high school teachers, public college instructors will find it in their interest to produce equal group outcomes no matter how the outcomes are related to the content of what individual students know.

Once upon a time, making students “college ready” meant strengthening, not weakening, the high school curriculum. Selective colleges in the U.S. will likely be able to fill their freshman classes with students from schools in, say, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. But how long can any modern society sustain itself if it ignores both the intellectual and civic goals of public education and believes that able students come only in a few colors.

[1] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf

[2] See http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/college-and-career for a critical review of the research base for Common Core’s standards, by Diane Ravitch and William Mathis for the National Education Policy Center.

See also the letter sent by Sandra Stotsky explaining why, as a member of the Validation Committee, she could not sign off on the final draft of Common Core’s secondary English language arts and reading standards, at http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/docs/0710/item1.html?printscreen=yes&section=stotsky;

See also Appendix B, an analysis by mathematician R. James Milgram of the problems he sees in the final draft of Common Core’s mathematics standards, at http://www.pioneerinstitute.org/pdf/common_core_standards.pdf

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

Who’s the Criminal?

January 26, 2011

In Akron, Ohio a woman who put her children in a better public school was sent to jail when private investigators hired by the school found that she did not live in the district.  Her father did and she sometimes stayed with him, but that was not enough to keep her out of prison for seeking a better education for her children.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta there is evidence of widespread cheating on standardized tests by teachers and administrators as well as a potential cover-up in the investigation of those accusations.  No one has gone to jail (and no one ever will) for robbing children of a quality education and then lying about their true achievement by cheating on the state test to hide that fact.

A few years ago Atlanta and other Georgia districts violated the state law to prohibit the social promotion of students who failed the 3rd grade reading test.  There was a procedure for exempting students if the schools and parents met and decided it was in the best interest of a student to be promoted, but many districts exempted virtually all of the students and did so without actually holding the required meetings.  They already knew what was best for children regardless of what the law said.

I could keep going with stories along these lines, but I think you get the idea.  So, who’s the real criminal here?

9 Comments | civic values, school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Reason TV

January 24, 2011

I don’t find much on regular TV that I want to watch, especially since Lost went off the air.  But there is almost always new, exciting stuff on Reason TV, especially when I’m on it.

2 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Educationist View of Math Education

January 23, 2011

(Guest post by Barry Garelick)

In Jay Greene’s recent blog post, “The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism,” he points out that Vicki Phillips, head of education at the Gates Foundation misread her Foundation’s own report.  Jay’s point was that Vicki continued to see what she and others wanted to see: “‘Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.’ Science had produced its answer — teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms).”

I was intrigued by the education establishment’s long-held view as Jay paraphrased it.  This view has become one of the “enduring truths” of education and I have heard it expressed in the various classes I have been taking in education school the last few years.  (I plan to teach high school math when I retire later this year).  In terms of math education, ed school professors distinguish between “exercises” and “problems”.  “Exercises” are what students do when applying algorithms or routines they know and can apply even to word problems. Problem solving, which is preferred, occurs when students are not able to apply a mechanical, memorized response, but rather have to apply prior knowledge to solve a non-routine problem.  Moreover, we future teachers are told that students’ difficulty in solving problems in new contexts is evidence that the use of “mere exercises” or “procedures” is ineffective and they are overused in classrooms.  One teacher summed up this philosophy with the following questions: “What happens when students are placed in a totally unfamiliar situation that requires a more complex solution? Do they know how to generate a procedure?  How do we teach students to apply mathematical thinking in creative ways to solve complex, novel problems? What happens when we get off the ‘script’?”

As someone who learned math largely though mere exercises and who now creatively applies math at work, I have to question this thinking. I believe that students’ difficulty in solving new problems is more likely to be because 1) applying prior knowledge to new or non-routine problems is hard for everyone, and 2) it is even harder for students who may lack the requisite knowledge and/or mastery of skills—not because they possess such knowledge and mastery.   So while the educationists distinguish between “exercises” and “problems”, the view refuses to distinguish between novices and experts.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist who teaches at the University of Virginia, finds the distinction between novice and expert to be quite important.  He maintains that it takes time and effort for knowledge to accumulate to the point that connections between learned material and new and difficult problems can be made.  Willingham refers to the difficulty that novices have with thinking critically as “inflexible thinking.”  In fact, he characterizes such difficulty as perfectly normal and to be expected among students.  Willingham argues that understanding the deep structures of a discipline such as mathematics is an important goal of education, “but if students fall short of this, it certainly doesn’t mean that they have acquired mere rote knowledge and are little better than parrots.” Rather, they are making the small steps necessary to develop better mathematical thinking. Simply put, no one leaps directly from novice to expert.

I was therefore extremely interested to see the sample problem of the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics (BAM) in Appendix 1 of the Gates Foundation’s preliminary report. The BAM is to be used to assess teacher effectiveness and according to the Gates Foundation’s preliminary report, “In comparison to many other assessments, BAM is considered to be more cognitively demanding and measures higher order reasoning skills using question formats that are quite different from those in most state mathematics achievement tests. There is also some evidence that BAM is more instructionally sensitive to the effects of reform-oriented instruction than a more traditional test (ITBS).”

The sample problem is reproduced below and is from the 8th grade mathematics assessment:

The diagram makes it clear how one is to count the number of tiles needed, so the first question is relatively easy.  Question 2 requires more thought, and the student must be able to extend the counting algorithm for the 4ft pond in question 1 to ponds of other sizes; i.e., they must understand that 4 is added to the product of the number of one foot long squares that fit on one side of the pond times 4, or 4n + 4 where n is the length of one side of the square pond in feet.

There are four additional questions that become increasingly difficult:  “How many paving stones are needed to surround a fish pond that is 20 feet by 20 feet?”, “Chris has 48 paving stones.  Find the size of the largest square pond the paving stones can surround.”  “The garden center sells many different sizes of square fish ponds. Write down a rule that will help Chris figure out how many paving stones are needed to surround square  ponds of different sizes.”  “The garden center decides to sell rectangular ponds.  Find a rule that will help Chris figure out how many paving stones are needed to surround rectangular ponds of different sizes.”

This set of questions is fairly challenging to beginning algebra students. (It is even more challenging if they have had no algebra at all, but since this is a problem for 8th grade students, I am assuming that they have had some experience with algebraic expressions and equations. This is not always a safe assumption but that’s a topic for another article.) The sample problem is illustrative of the type of problem that the education community deems coach-proof since it appears that memorization of problem solving techniques and “drill and kill” exercises will not work here.  But in fact, practice with some exercises would help students in tackling such a problem—specifically, having students express in mathematical terms certain situations described in English.  For example, “Three more than two times what John’s age will be in five years” (3 + 2(x + 5) ).  These types of exercises are frequently deemed by the education establishment to be inauthentic and irrelevant to the deeper underlying concepts of math unlike “reform oriented instruction” which purportedly provides such deep understanding through so-called authentic problems and a minimum of “exercises”.

Interestingly, the TIMSS exam—an international exam given every three years—also contains questions of this sort, as well as more straightforward problems.  For comparison’s sake, I looked at TIMSS eighth grade questions in algebra (found at http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/TIMSS8_Math_ConceptsItems_2.pdf ) and found a similar type of problem:

This problem requires students to understand and ultimately express the relationship between the number of smaller squares on each side of the larger square, and the number of triangles contained in the square.  Question C, in fact, requires the student to be able to express the relationship mathematically in order to calculate the number of triangles.  The TIMSS report in which this appears provides some interesting data related to this question; namely the percent of students taking the test in each country that obtained the correct answer:

The top five scoring countries for this question ranged from 44 to 49% correct.  For the more straightforward problems the top five scores tend to be in the 70 and 80 percent range.   The US students obtained 19 percent correct for this problem; on more straightforward problems, the US scores in the 50 and 60 percent range. Thus, for all students, regardless of country, non-routine problems prove to be difficult.  Of interest, however, is that the five top scoring countries for this particular problem are Asian,  frequently criticized for using drilling and “inauthentic” exercises which they maintain do not properly prepare students for solving non-routine problems.

If Vicki Phillips’ statement about teaching to the test is any indication, however, the educational establishment will see what they want to see.  They will likely proclaim that the higher scores obtained by Asian countries on non-routine problems serves as evidence that the Asian countries use “reform-oriented instruction”.  Either that, or they’ll shrug their shoulders and say “It’s the culture; what can you do?”  (See http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/104502.html )

In any event, whether the education establishment realizes it or not, the new generation of coach-proof tests that will be used to evaluate teachers, appear to be measuring the skills students are expected to be learning.  And by teaching what should be taught, teachers are teaching to the test, whether the Gates Foundation and its look-alikes realize it, like it, or not.

BIO: Barry Garelick is an analyst for a federal agency and is cofounder of the U.S. Coalition for World Class Math. (http://usworldclassmath.webs.com/ )  He plans to teach math later this year.

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

More on Scientific Progressivism

January 19, 2011

I just wanted to add a few thoughts to my post yesterday.  Readers may be wondering what is wrong with using science to identify the best educational practices and then implementing those best practices.  If they are best, why wouldn’t we want to do them?

Let me answer by analogy.  We could use science to identify where we could get the highest return on capital.  If science can tell us where the highest returns can be found, why would we want to let markets allocate capital and potentially make a lot of mistakes?  Government could just use science and avoid all of those errors by making sure capital went to where it could best be used.

Of course, we tried this approach in the Soviet Union and it failed miserably.  The primary problem is that science is always uncertain and susceptible to corruption.  We can run models to measure returns on capital, but we have uncertainty about the models and we have uncertainty about the future.  Markets provide a reality test to scientific models by allowing us to choose among competing models and experience the consequences of choosing wisely or not.  Science can advise us, but only choice, freedom, and experience permit us to benefit from what science has to offer.

And even more dangerous is that in the absence of choice and competition among scientific models, authorities will allow their own interests or preferences to distort what they claim science has to say.  For an excellent example of this, check out the story of Lysenko and Soviet research on genetics.  For decades Soviet science was compelled to believe that environmental influences could be inherited.

Science facilitates progress through the crucible of market tests.  Science without markets facilitates stronger authoritarianism.

14 Comments | economics, instructional reform, methodology | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism

January 18, 2011

In Education Myths I argued that we needed to rely on science rather than our direct experience to identify effective policies.  Our eyes can mislead us, while scientific evidence has the systematic rigor to guide us more accurately.

That’s true, but I am now more aware of the opposite failing — believing that we can resolve all policy disputes and identify the “right way” to educate all children solely by relying on science.  Science has its limits.  Science cannot adjudicate among the competing values that might attract us to one educational approach over another.  Science usually tells us about outcomes for the typical or average student and cannot easily tell us about what is most effective for individual students with diverse needs.  Science is slow and uncertain, while policy and practice decisions have to be made right now whether a consensus of scientific evidence exists or not.  We should rely on science when we can but we also need to be humble about what science can and can’t address.

I was thinking about this while reflecting on the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers Project.  The project is an ambitious $45 million enterprise to improve the stability of value-added measures while identifying effective practices that contribute to higher value-added performance.  These are worthy goals.  The project intends to advance those goals by administering two standardized tests to students in 8 different school systems, surveying the students, and videotaping classroom lessons.

The idea is to see if combining information from the tests, survey, and classroom observations could produce more stable measures of teacher contributions to learning than is possible by just using the state test.  And since they are observing classrooms and surveying students, they can also identify certain teacher practices and techniques that might be associated with greater improvement.  The Gates folks are using science to improve the measures of student progress and to identify what makes a more effective teacher.

This is a great use of science, but there are limits to what we can expect.  When identifying practices that are more effective, we have to remember that this is just more effective for the typical student.  Different practices may be more effective for different students.  In principle science could help address this also, but even this study, with 3,000 teachers, is not nearly large enough to produce a fine-grained analysis of what kind of approach is most effective for many different kinds of kids.

My fear is that the researchers, their foundation-backers, and most-importantly, the policymaker and educator consumers of the research are insensitive to these limitations of science.  I fear that the project will identify the “right” way to teach and then it will be used to enforce that right way on everyone, even though it is highly likely that there are different “right” ways for different kids.

We already have a taste of this from the preliminary report that Gates issued last month.  Following its release Vicki Phillips, the head of education at the Gates Foundation, told the New York Times: “Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.”  Science had produced its answer — teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms).

Unfortunately, Vicki Phillips mis-read her own Foundation’s report.  On p. 34 the correlation between test prep and value-added is positive, not negative.  If the study shows any relationship between test prep and student progress, it is that test prep contributes to higher value-added.  Let’s leave aside the fact that these were simply a series of pairwise correlations and not the sort of multivariate analysis that you would expect if you were really trying to identify effective teaching practices.  Vicki Phillips was just plain wrong in what she said.  Even worse, despite having the error pointed out, neither the Gates Foundation nor the New York Times has considered it worthwhile to post a public  correction.  Science says what I say it says.

And this is the greatest danger of a lack of humility in the application of science to public policy.  Science can be corrupted so that it simply becomes a shield disguising the policy preferences of those in authority.  How many times have you heard a school official justify a particular policy by saying that it is supported by research when in fact no such research exists?  This (mis)use of science is a way for authority figures to tell their critics, “shut up!”

But even if the Gates report had conducted multivariate analyses on effective teaching practices and even if Vicki Phillips could accurately describe the results of those analyses, the Gates project of using science to identify the “best” practices is doomed to failure.  The very nature of education is that different techniques are more effective in different kinds of situations for different kinds of kids.  Science can identify the best approach for the average student but it cannot identify the best approach for each individual student.  And if students are highly varied in their needs, which I believe they are, this is a major limitation.

But as the Gates Foundation pushes national standards with new national tests, they seem inclined to impose the “best” practices that science identified on all students.  The combination of Gates building a national infrastructure for driving educator behavior while launching a gigantic scientific effort to identify the best practices is worrisome.

There is nothing wrong with using science to inform local practice.  But science needs markets to keep it honest.  If competing educators can be informed by science, then they can pick among competing claims about what science tells us.  And they can learn from their experience whether the practices that are recommended for the typical student by science work in the particular circumstances in which they are operating.

But if the science of best educator practice is combined with a national infrastructure of standards and testing, then local actors cannot adjudicate among competing claims about what science says.  What the central authorities decide science says will be infused in the national standards and tests and all must adhere to that vision if they wish to excel along these centralized criteria.  Even if the central authority completely misunderstands what science has to say, we will all have to accept that interpretation.

I don’t mean to be overly alarmist.  Gates has a lot of sensible people working for them and there are many barriers remaining before we fully implement national standards and testing.  My concern is that the Gates Foundation is being informed by an incorrect theory of reform.  Reform does not come from science identifying the right thing to do and then a centralized authority imposing that right thing on everyone.  Progress comes from decentralized decision-makers having the freedom and motivation to choose among competing claims about what is right according to science.

(edited for typos)

12 Comments | instructional reform, methodology | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Common Core Smackdown

January 13, 2011

Actually it was much more civilized than that.  You can see below my discussion with Mike Petrilli on the pros and cons of Common Core (national) standards.

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

China Envy

January 12, 2011

We are beginning to be envious of all things Chinese.  For some indication of this trend see the book on the superiority of Chinese mothers described (and mocked) in yesterday’s post.

I’ve seen this movie before when it was called Gung Ho.  And that movie sucked.  Is anybody else old enough to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s when media and policy elites were convinced that the Japanese had figured out better ways of doing everything and we needed to imitate them before we were crushed?  I specifically remember a bunch of education experts (and you know who you are) telling us that we had to imitate Japanese schools.  How did all of that work out?

I expect we are about to hear all of the same stuff, but this time it will be about the Chinese.  We need to parent like they do, eat like they do, run the economy like they do, etc… to imitate their success and prevent from being crushed by their superiority.

I don’t even believe the accuracy of the stereotypes we are supposed to emulate.  The Japanese were not all working together as if they were the same team.  Chinese parents do not all raise their children in the same way (nor do “Western” parents all do something different).  This is the worst kind of “pop” social science — incorrectly attributing the success or failure of a society to inaccurate stereotypes.

If you want a more accurate picture of China, see the photo at the top of this post.  And over the long run I cannot imagine that a centrally planned economy, like China’s, will be the one we need to emulate to prosper.  We have plenty of good social science to tell us that liberty, relatively free markets, and the fair rule of law are much better predictors of economic success.

Yes, China is gaining rapidly, but so did the Soviet Union when it fully mobilized its agrarian workforce into the industrial sector.  That type of growth levels off without markets to properly allocate capital, property rights to ensure that entrepreneurs can keep the fruits of their innovation, and liberty to critique the favoritism and corruption that undermine the fair rule of law.  China has been making some strides toward market allocations of capital, but remember that most of the banks are government controlled.  And property rights in China remain murky, which will hinder innovation.  And there isn’t much freedom to critique the government.  Without much more progress on these fronts I see little prospect of the Chinese overtaking us economically.

If you want to keep an eye on a rapidly growing developing country, I would look at India.  Yes, India is messy, complicated, and often inefficient, but that’s how freedom looks.  If they keep liberalizing their economy and politics, I see India growing much more rapidly over the long run.

7 Comments | economics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Are Chinese Moms Superior?

January 11, 2011

I have no idea.

But, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, Yale Law professor and author of a new book on the subject, Amy Chua, extols the virtues of Chinese parenting styles over Western ones.  I thought she was describing Jewish mothers, but apparently the Chinese are Jews… or Jews aren’t Western… or something.

And in the wonderful age of auto-animation, someone has already critiqued Chua’s piece with this video:

UPDATE

And here is the comedian, Louis C.K., making an argument similar to Amy Chua’s about effective parenting.  Wait a minute.  How can he do that?  Doesn’t he know that he isn’t Chinese?

3 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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