I love how even Chinese communists understand the problems with local government monopolies and teacher union control of schools.
Update — As Chan noted in the comments, this was probably made in Taiwan, not communist China. No matter, I was just trying to be as over-the-top as the video. Gotta love Adrian Fenty with a machine gun.
9 Comments | 
charter schools, politics, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: Waiting for Superman | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
I learned from Matt Ladner that you should never pass up an opportunity to see a performer who is thought to be excellent, even if you aren’t particularly interested in that performer’s work. It’s just great to see someone be excellent at what they do.
With this lesson in mind I went to see Merle Haggard last night at the Walton Arts Center. He may not quite sound or look like this:
But he still has it and you can sure see why people think he is excellent.
In Fayetteville I’ve seen Itzhak Perlman, Steve Martin, Fiddler on the Roof, Shakespeare, The Trey McIntyre Project, and much more. Now I feel like my cultural literacy is more complete.
2 Comments | Fayetteville | Tagged: Merle Haggard | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
In addition to reading Matt’s post on the retirement of Joel Klein as New York City’s school chancellor, check out the op-ed I wrote with Stuart Buck that appeared in today’s New York Post. Here’s a taste:
In 2003, when Klein became chancellor, only 21 percent of the city’s fourth-grade students were proficient in math, trailing the national average of 31 percent. By 2009, 35 percent of Gotham’s students were proficient at math, nearly catching the national average of 38 percent. New York City’s 14-percentage-point gain was twice as large as the 7-point gain nationwide.
The improvement in fourth-grade reading was similarly strong. Between 2003 and 2009 the percentage of the city’s fourth graders who were proficient at reading jumped from 22 percent to 29 percent. That 7-point gain far outstripped the national improvement, up just 2 points from 30 percent to 32 percent.
The performance of New York City’s eighth graders was less dramatic: Proficiency in the math NAEP rose from 20 percent to 26 percent, tracking the US rise from 27 percent to 33 percent. In reading, city eighth graders remained statistically unchanged, mirroring the national rate.
The large gains in fourth-grade performance and more modest improvements among eighth graders didn’t win over Klein’s fierce critics. The vitriol with which they denounced him was severe, even by New York standards.
3 Comments | politics | Tagged: Joel Klein | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Kevin Carey responded to my post from yesterday arguing that his opposition to the Arizona tax credit scholarship was inconsistent and not logically compelling. I’m afraid that his argument remains as inconsistent and unpersuasive as it was before.
He rejects the claim that I attributed to him that tax credits and deductions, in general, are corrupt. Instead, his argument is now that the AZ tax credit scholarship is “specifically” corrupt. If that is his argument, then we might wonder why he doesn’t advocate for regulatory reform to keep the program while reducing the potential for abuse. If tax deductions are not “inherently” corrupt, then we should be able to properly regulate this program to address his “specific” concerns. In fact, Arizona has already revised its regulatory scheme to address the types of abuses he raised and Carey provides no evidence that the regulations now in place are insufficient.
In addition, if his objection all along was to specific problems with the AZ tax credit scholarship, why did he bother to write at length about how “there’s a well-established process for spending public resources” from which the Arizona program deviates by using tax credits rather than direct appropriations? Methinks his argument doth shift after I pointed out that the tax code is a very common policymaking method to shape private behavior, and he wouldn’t want to object to the day care tuition tax credit, charitable donation deduction, etc…
And if his claim is that the AZ tax credit scholarship is particularly bad because it creates “private appropriators,” why does he not have the same objection to charities as “private appropriators.” After all, the tax credit scholarship organizations are just a specific type of charitable organization. Like all charitable organizations, they are facilitated in their efforts with private funds by features in the tax code. All such organizations then “appropriate” money to others. And there is a potential for abuse with all charitable organizations, including the tax credit scholarship organizations, that we try to control through appropriate regulations.
I can’t imagine that Carey would favor abolishing the tax deduction for charitable giving, so it is unclear why, based on his stated concerns, he should advocate for the elimination of the private school scholarship tax credit. Of course, Carey is not motivated by his stated objections, since he would not apply those principles consistently. Instead, his argument is really just that he opposes private school choice. I don’t know why he doesn’t just write about that rather than hide behind a convoluted argument about the dangers of tax credits or his inconsistently applied principles of democratic policymaking.
Lastly, I can’t resist responding to Carey’s strange argument about what money belongs to the government. He writes: “The government doesn’t own all of your money but it does own some of it.” I agree. Of course, the part the government owns does not include any of the portions for which I can receive a tax credit. If his argument is simply that the money I owe the government, after all tax deductions and credits, belongs to the government, then he should have no objection to the AZ tax credit scholarship because that money, by definition, does not belong to the government. The same is true for money I can keep after tax credits for day care tuition, energy-saving repairs on my house, etc…
Again, his argument has shifted to the point where it no longer advocates for the position he prefers. Pointing out that there are specific problems with the AZ tax credit scholarship suggests he should favor regulatory reforms, not eliminating the program. And pointing out that the government owns the money you owe it after all deductions and credits suggests that he should have no difficulty with the AZ tax credit scholarship.
3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: Arizona tax credit scholarships, Kevin Carey | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Rob Pondiscio from Core Knowledge was at the University of Arkansas last week as part of the Department of Education Reform’s lecture series. The video of his lecture will be posted later on, but let me give you a preview — I thought he hit a home run.
Rob is not a researcher, but he is a very effective communicator of research. For the most part Rob was channeling the works of E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham. In particular, Rob was most effective in conveying the idea that reading is not a transferable skill. Once students have a basic understanding of phonics, which is not that hard, and once they have a few basic reading strategies, the greatest barrier to kids reading well is that they lack the content knowledge to understand what they are reading. Unless students know things it does them little good to spend more and more time focusing on abstract reading skills.
Check out this very handy illustration of why this is the case from Dan Willingham:
Unfortunately, the misconception that reading is a skill informs much of how elementary school instruction is organized. We are spending more and more time on reading, per se, but less and less on the content subjects, like history, science, art, and music, that would provide the knowledge to allow students to read with understanding.
To repeat, students don’t struggle with reading (for the most part) because they can’t sound out the words or because they lack reading strategies. They struggle because they don’t know enough about the world to put what they read into any context so that it would make sense to them. This is especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are exposed to less enriching content at home.
So what should we do to fix this? On this I think Rob Pondiscio hit a foul ball. Rob is doing the right thing in trying to convince people to focus more on enriching content and stop thinking of reading as a skill. But the Core Knowledge Foundation is making a mistake in backing national standards as a way to move their agenda forward.
Let’s think about the political logic of their strategy for a second. Ed schools and much of the rest of the edublob hate the idea of focusing on content. They think that content inevitably means an emphasis on dead white men. They think that expecting content knowledge sets some kids up for failure because they can’t or won’t learn it. They are more interested in advantaged kids who already possess a lot of rich content knowledge. For these reasons and more, the edublob is politically opposed to shifting the focus to content.
So how does Core Knowledge think we can sneak into national standards and the assessments a focus on content knowledge even while that approach is opposed by the edublob. The edublob will certainly control those standards and assessments over time. You can’t get the edublob to reform itself by sneaking your minority preferences into a regulatory regime that they dominate. If they don’t want to do it, they won’t. And they can either block your good ideas from national standards and assessment or alter them over time. Dan Willingham agrees that national standards are not a promising strategy.
Rather than centralize control over the education system via national standards and assessments and hope that your ideas will prevail, it is much smarter for Core Knowledge to push for greater decentralization over schools and the training of future teachers. They should want more vouchers, charters, and alternative certification. In doing so they could get kids and future teachers out of the edublob that still thinks reading is a skill and give them the freedom to pick schools where Core Knowledge’s good ideas have been adopted.
Yes, some people will pick bad schools with bad ideas. But at least Core Knowledge will be able to fight it out on the level playing field of the marketplace of ideas. With the status quo or even greater centralization, the edublob can enforce perpetuation of their bad ideas regardless of how effective your alternative is. They dominate the centralized institutions.
Members of a religious minority shouldn’t push for a state-sponsored church in the hopes that will embrace their minority view. They should push for religious freedom and try to make converts.
4 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Carey, a pundit at Education Sector, must also oppose the day care tuition tax credit adopted under President Clinton, deductions for charitable donations, and a host of other uses of the tax code to encourage or discourage what people do with their own money.
I say this because it is the logical conclusion that flows from Cary’s post at The Quick and the Ed railing against the tax credit-supported school scholarship program in Arizona whose legality was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.
Carey seems to think that the Arizona tax credit is an unusual and inherently “corrupt” deviation from the “well-established process for spending public resources.” According to Carey, the normal and appropriate process is:
First, the government raises money through taxes. Then, elected representatives pass a law directing how that money should be spent. One could fill a warehouse with examples of how this process fails to be optimal. But it is open, rational and fair at the core, which is why democracies the world over and throughout history spend money this way.
So if Arizona citizens want to support religious schools with taxpayer money, they should go to the statehouse during budget season and make their case alongside advocates for regular public schools, roads, hospitals, police protection, mental health, higher education, state parks, light rail, and so forth.
Of course, that is one way that democratically elected representatives make policy. Another very common way to make policy is to use the tax code by offering deductions or credits to shape how people behave with their own money.
If Carey were consistent he would be incensed that promoters of home-ownership or charitable-giving use the tax code to encourage these behaviors with private money rather than having direct government appropriations to home-owners or philanthropists. He should denounce all tax deductions and credits as a “convolution” and “shell game.”
Carey reserves his venom for school scholarship tax credits, while inconsistently ignoring all other similar uses of tax credits and deductions (most of which I assume he supports), because he particularly hates private school choice. He hates vouchers with a condescension that is extreme even for DC policy-wonks, as we have noted on JPGB in the past. The only convolution here is Carey inconsistently arguing against private school choice as a violation of democratic policymaking principles rather than making the direct argument against the merits of private school choice.
Carey does not shrink from making the direct (and frightening) argument that the government owns all of our money except for what it deigns to let us keep: “Katyal’s premise is that people own every dollar they come to possess. They don’t. They owe some of it the government. It’s not their money; it’s the government’s money.”
Again, if Carey wishes to be consistent he should oppose the charitable giving deduction because that money really belongs to the government, not to individuals who the government is encouraging to support charities. He should also call for an elimination of the deduction because there are some charities that have misused or unwisely spent the money they have received. Keeping the deduction but cracking down on abuse clearly wouldn’t satisfy him because he seems unmoved by efforts in Arizona to do that with the tax-credit scholarship program.
Perhaps Kevin Carey should stick to writing about higher education, where he has a number of useful things to say. When he wanders into the world of K-12 he seems to lose the ability to make logical and consistent arguments. It is obvious he has not thought through the implication of his argument that would oppose all uses of tax deductions and credits. He’s so focused on under-cutting private school choice that he fails to consider what his position would mean for home-ownership, charitable giving, or pre-school attendance. Emerson may have been right that a foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but that doesn’t mean we can abandon consistency altogether.
Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: Arizona tax credit scholarships, Kevin Carey | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
In keeping with our tradition on JPGB, Halloween is the time to announce the winner of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award. “The Al” is meant to honor a person who has made a significant contribution to improving the human condition.
The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:
“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards. Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997. And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu. Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists. From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.
Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone. By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian. But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”
Last year’s winner was Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag, beating out Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing, Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban, Ralp Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.
This year the nominees were The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.
These are all worthy nominees. They all meet the minimum requirements in that none of them threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone. And they all have done something to significantly improve the human condition. But I think we can rule out The Most Interesting Man because I’m not comfortable with the idea of giving the award to a fictional person. I also think we can rule out Herbert Dow because I’m not sure that he did anything beyond what almost all entrepreneurs have to do — overcome the government-assisted cartels of existing businesses to prevent the entry of new competitors.
Stan Honey’s yellow first down line is an amazing improvement for watching football on TV, but what about those who see the game in the stadium? I keep expecting there to be a yellow line on the field, which decreases my pleasure from watching the game in person. As soon as Stan Honey figures out how to install yellow lights to form lines in the turf, I’ll be sure to give him The Al, but until then he will have to be satisfied with a nomination.
Marion Donovan and Victor Mills greatly improved my life and the life of countless million with the invention of the disposable diaper. I should mention that in addition to their greater convenience, better function, and lower cost, disposable diapers may even be better for the environment.
All of this makes for a compelling case to award The Al to Donovan and Mills. But there is an even more compelling case to give The Al to Wim Nottroth. All of the consumer items that improve our lives, whether spicy chicken, roller-bags, or disposable diapers, depend on the existence of liberty for people to choose how they live, including what they make, what they buy, and what they believe. If the forces of tyranny that Wim Nottroth resisted prevail, we will eventually lose the liberty to enjoy these other benefits.
The tyranny Nottroth directly resisted was the kowtowing of Western governments to radical Muslims who found it offensive to say “Thou Shall not Kill” in the aftermath of the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic fascist who disliked a film made by van Gogh criticizing Islam. If we allow these restrictions on free speech we are surrendering our liberty bit by bit.
The only way we lose our liberty completely is if we surrender it to the new wave of fascists. Contrary to the gloomy claims of defeatists during the Cold War and today, freedom is not at a disadvantage in a struggle with tyranny. Freedom does not make us weaker; it makes us much stronger. Freedom makes us richer, which gives us the material advantages to defeat the enemies of freedom. Freedom improves the quality of our information and decision-making. Under tyranny everyone distorts information to fit the wishes of the tyrants for fear of punishment. And no one scrutinizes the quality of decision-making. The competitive market of ideas and the freedom to critique decisions improves the their quality in free societies.
As long as we maintain our appreciation for freedom and our desire to struggle for it, both at home and abroad, we are sure to win. The problem is that it is all too easy forget how wonderful our freedom is relative to the tyranny that exists in many other places. And it is an even greater danger for us to tire of having to struggle to preserve it, both at home and abroad. That struggle never ends. When the challenge from Nazis faded, the threat from the Soviets rose, and when that crumbled the danger has come from radical Islam. And when we defeat them, as I am confident we eventually will, some other threat will take its place.
There will always be people who prefer to tell other people how to live — what you can say, what you can buy, what you can sell, with whom you can sleep, and what you can think. In fact, there is nothing natural about freedom. It’s natural to want your own freedom, but it is equally natural to want to tell everyone else what to do. Respecting other people’s freedom is something that is acquired and sustained, not something with which we are born.
Clearly some government officials in The Netherlands as well as in other places in the free world are failing to teach and sustain the love of freedom. They tire of the struggle to preserve freedom and look for compromises with tyrants. Wim Nottroth resisted his government’s unacceptable surrender to tyranny. He reminded us how free speech is worth fighting for, even in the face of murderous thugs and their lackey government enablers. For that he has significantly improved the human condition and is most worthy of this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.
4 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: Al Copeland, Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award, Wim Nottroth | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
HT to DB for this hidden-camera window into a New Jersey teacher union meeting. Beside the bad attitudes and bad language, it looked like a pretty lame party. They haven’t hung out with Ladner.
3 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: NJEA, teacher unions | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The Oklahoma legislature and its Democratic Governor adopted a law allowing disabled students to use public funds to attend a private school if they wished to do so. Similar laws have been passed in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Utah, and Arizona.
Disabled students have had to fight for decades to receive an adequate education from the public school system. Federal legislation, now called IDEA, was adopted in the mid-1970s to ensure an appropriate eduction for disabled students. Unfortunately, having a legal right to something and actually receiving it are two very different things and many disabled students continue to be denied appropriate services despite their legal entitlements.
That’s why several states have decided to empower families with disabled children with an additional mechanism by which they could ensure receiving an appropriate education — special education vouchers that would allow them to transfer to private schools if they believe that the public schools are not serving them adequately. Oklahoma is the latest state to offer these vouchers but it almost certainly won’t be the last as several other states are considering the idea. And there is good evidence that special education vouchers are significantly improving outcomes.
But, according to Education Week, four Oklahoma school districts have decided not to offer these vouchers that are required by state law. The reasons given for willfully disobeying the state law are varied. One district, Broken Arrow, has suggested that the voucher laws violate the state’s constitution because funds would go to religious schools.
Besides the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court and several states have ruled that these vouchers would not pose this type of constitutional threat, apparently public school district officials in Oklahoma think they know better. And they’ve discovered some new constitutional process by which school officials interpret the constitution rather than the courts.
Actually, it’s not really a new method of deciding who should interpret the constitution, since it was a method well-established by segregationist school officials and governors who believed that they had the power to block black students from exercising their civil rights no matter what the law or courts said. Now it is disabled students who are being blocked at the schoolhouse door.
The willingness of public school officials to publicly flaunt their disobedience of the law is not even very unique in current times. Just two years ago school officials in Georgia decided to disobey the state’s duly enacted social promotion policy simply because they disagreed with the policy. Some of the Oklahoma public school officials similarly believe that they have standing as educators to decide what is best for kids and formulate the policy regardless of what the law and the people who pay them say.
Public school officials get away with this kind of willful violation of the law far too easily. No one will go to jail. No one will lose their job. No one will be sanctioned in any way. And they wonder why having a law to ensure appropriate services for disabled students isn’t sufficient. Maybe it’s because public school officials apparently don’t have to follow the law.
10 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, special education, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Politicians lie. Bless their hearts, they just can’t help it. There are things that they want and they’ve discovered that it is much easier to get those things if they don’t tell us the whole truth. And on some level we don’t really mind their lies. We want them to get things done and we’ve just grown accustomed to it. Besides, we all lie — at least about small things to facilitate daily living. So who are we to expect better from our politicians?
But maybe we should hold our politicians to a higher standard of truthfulness. After all, they do have a legal and moral responsibility to us. And their fibs have a much broader impact on other people than the lies of us regular people because they have power over the rest of us.
I’ve been thinking about all of this as I’ve been watching the machinations of local politics in Fayetteville. If the politicians were honest they would just announce that they want to raise our taxes, reduce spending on the popular trail system, and don’t really advocate for the interests of most businesses. But politicians can’t just tell us what they want. They have to lie.
Earlier this year city officials asked us to approve a referendum allowing the portion of the HMR tax that was dedicated to the development of parks to no longer have that restriction. They assured us that our parks won’t get cut. They just wanted more “flexibility.”
At the time I predicted that the “flexibility” they were seeking was to cut park development spending, including for further construction of our wonderful trail system. Sure enough, that is exactly what Alderman Bobby Ferrell proposed yesterday. According to the Northwest Arkansas Times, “Ferrell suggested cutting money budgeted for trail improvements…” I could have told you that they were lying when they said they only wanted “flexibility” over HMR tax proceeds, but then again I actually did tell you.
And no one should be fooled by the falsehood that Steve Clark, the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, advocates for the interests of businesses. He doesn’t. First, the Chamber only represents existing businesses, not future businesses. Unfortunately, existing businesses often favor regulations and other barriers to entry that would protect them from competition from yet-to-be-created businesses. There is no greater supporter of government-enforced monopolies than businesspeople. So, no one should confuse the Chamber of Commerce for an organization that advocates free-market policies that facilitate business formation and growth.
Second, Steve Clark doesn’t even appear to represent the existing businesses in Fayetteville. He and the Chamber clearly didn’t do a good enough job of advocating for local businesses to convince enough of them to pay the voluntary dues to keep him and the Chamber in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. So, they convinced the city to tax businesses to pay the Chamber. Yes, they called the tax a “business license fee,” but that is just part of the honesty-challenged pattern. Steve Clark doesn’t really work for local businesses. He works for the city since a large chunk of his salary is paid by the city and not by voluntary dues to the Chamber.
If you don’t believe me that Steve Clark really represents the interests of city government and not business interests, just listen to what he said in support of the latest proposal to increase the city’s property tax. According to the Northwest Arkansas Times: “Steve Clark, president of the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, said avoiding major cuts in city services, such as fire, police and sanitation, are his main priorities when it comes to finding ways to balance the budget.” (emphasis added)
I thought that protecting city worker jobs was the main priority of their unions or the politicians beholden to those workers. Advancing the interests of business is normally the main priority of the Chamber of Commerce, but I guess that changes when the Chamber staff effectively become city employees along with the police, firefighters, etc…
“Lie” is such a strong word that we have developed more polite terms for this regular behavior by politicians. We call it “spinning” or “packaging.” We have these more polite terms because it is probably unfair to expect politicians to avoid distorting or shading the truth altogether. They have to do it to get what they want done.
The problem is when we no longer recognize what is spin and what is truth. If we get fooled into believing that “flexibility” means something other than “cutting” and that the “Chamber of Commerce” necessarily means “business interests” we are the ones to blame, not the politicians. It’s part of their job to lie (or spin) and it is our job to be suspicious. Unfortunately, our local media and elites are overly credulous.
1 Comment | economics, Fayetteville, politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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