Walmart Shareholder Meeting 2009

June 5, 2009

I just returned from another excellent Walmart shareholder meeting.  Ben Stiller was the mc.  Michael Jordan gave some inspirational words.  Miley Cyrus, Kris Allen,  and Smokey Robinson performed.  And earlier in the week I saw Sugarland, Brad Paisley, Foreigner, and Daughtry perform at free events leading up to the meeting.  It’s been another great week of entertainment in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

And of course, the meeting discussed Walmart’s business, including its financial results and values as an organization.  On that topic I’ll just repeat what I wrote after last year’s meeting: “They presented impressive evidence and compelling anecdotes of how Walmart saves money for families of modest means and, in doing so, improves people’s lives….  It struck me that if Walmart were a government program, designed to provide basic goods to low-income families at reduced prices, it would be lauded as a great success on the order of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan.  Books would be written about how it worked so well.  Conferences would be organized to sing its praises.  But because someone is actually making a profit while serving low-income families, somehow the whole thing is ruined.  It’s as if social progress can only be made if taxpayers lose money.”  If you want to see more along these lines, check this out.

At this year’s meeting my puzzlement about why people vilify Walmart only continues to grow.  This made me think about how the enemies one chooses says a lot about who one is.  Why do some people choose to focus their energies attacking Walmart while ignoring or even embracing others who more clearly violate their principles?

Let’s take as an example President Obama.  He has clearly chosen Walmart as an enemy.  Obama declared that he “won’t shop” at Walmart.  And during the campaign he participated in a conference call organized by the anti-Walmart advocates, WakeUpWalMart.  According to USA Today Obama said: “‘I think the battle to engage Wal-Mart and force them to examine their own corporate values and what their policies and approaches are to their workers and how they are going to be good corporate citizens, I think, is absolutely vital,’ Obama said, adding he was proud of WakeUpWalMart’s work.”

So how does Obama feel about Iran, whose values and policies must be much more objectionable to Obama than Walmart’s?  In his speech yesterday Obama said about Iran: “There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.”  And earlier in the week Obama said: “what I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations.”  During the campaign, Obama stressed that he would “be willing as president to meet with the Iranian leader.”

Let’s see if I have this right.  Obama wouldn’t go to a Walmart and thinks the “battle” against Walmart is “vital.”  But he’s willing to meet with holocaust-denying Iranian leader,  Ahmadinejad, without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect keeping in mind their legitimate aspirations.

I fully believe that Obama strenuously opposes Iran’s illiberal policies.  The problem is not that he is ignorant of how Iran more clearly threatens his own principles than does Walmart.  The problem is that he approaches Walmart like an enemy while approaching Iran like a friend. 

Who you choose as an enemy says a lot about your own values and priorities.

(edited to add Kris Allen)

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

School Name Trend Reverses?

June 2, 2009

As Brian Kisida, Jonathan Butcher, and I documented, there has been a dramatic decline over the last several decades in the naming of schools after presidents, in particular, and people, in general.  Instead, schools are increasingly receiving names that sound more like herbal teas, day spas, or nature shows than our nation’s founders.  It’s gotten to the point where there are more schools in Florida named after manatees, the lovable sea cow, than George Washington.  In Arizona there are more schools named after roadrunners (beep-beep!) than Thomas Jefferson.  And there are plenty of schools that sound like Whispering Hills, Hawk’s Bluff, Deer’s Leap, etc….

But take heart, fans of school names with a civic purpose, the trend away from naming schools after presidents may be reversing.  According to Powerline, “St. Paul’s Webster Magnet Elementary School changed its name last month to the Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary.”

As David Shribman writes on RealClear Politics, erasing the name Webster from the school marks a real loss:

“There is no trace at all of Webster in the Obama Service Learning Elementary school today, not even a picture of Webster, who may have been the subject of more formal portraits of any man of his time, if not of all American history. Indeed, in the period leading up to the vote on the name change, the principal of the school, Lori Simon, actually had to figure out for whom the school was named originally.

Talk about a missed teaching moment. Webster was the greatest orator in the age of great oratory; some of his words remain in the American memory, even in this ahistorical age. He was probably the most eminent Supreme Court lawyer in American history, having argued 249 cases before the court, including several of the landmark cases of the early 19th century that shaped constitutional law in the United States for generations. And he was one of the greatest secretaries of state ever (and the first to serve non-consecutive terms, one under William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, another under Millard Fillmore).”

Of course, school names should reflect a community’s values and as those values shift, so too should school names.  But couldn’t they have found a Gopher Valley school somewhere to rename?

1 Comment | civic values | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Duncan Endorses Universal Vouchers (without knowing it)

June 1, 2009

Below is a portion of the transcript from a National Press Club event last week featuring Secretary of Ed, Arne Duncan.

If I am reading Duncan right, the problem with vouchers is that they only serve 1 to 2 percent of the population.  So, the obvious solution he endorses must be universal vouchers.  Right?

MODERATOR:  OK.  What is your position on a potential national education voucher program?   

DUNCAN:  I’ve been very, very clear that I don’t think vouchers work.  They’re not the answer.  Let me explain why.      

Vouchers usually serve 1 to 2 percent of the children in a community.  And I think we as the federal government, we as local governments, or we as school districts, we have to be more ambitious than that.  That’s an absolutely worthy or noble goal.  If a nonprofit or philanthropy wants to provide scholarship money to children, that’s a great, great use of the resources.       

But I don’t want to save 1 or 2 percent of children and let 98, 99 percent drown.  We have to be much more ambitious than that.  We have to expect more.       

And this is why I would argue rather than taking one of these struggling schools, these thousands (inaudible) — rather than taking three kids out of there and putting them in a better school and feeling good and sleeping well at night, I want to turn that school around now and do that for those 400, 500, 800, 1,200 kids in that school and give every child in that school and that community something better, and do it with a real sense of urgency. 

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Liberating Learning

June 1, 2009

Liberating Learning by Terry M. Moe: Book Cover

Two decades after writing Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, Terry Moe and John Chubb have done it again.  With Liberating Learning they’ve written a a compelling account of what is blocking significant improvement in public education and provided strategies for overcoming those obstacles. 

The main obstacle has remained the same across the two books: teachers unions.  Organized special interests in education as in other sectors of public policy shape the policies that are made.  In the case of education the special interests are so large, well-organized, and well-funded that their influence has distorted policy significantly to the benefit of the adults working in schools and against the interests of students and their families.

In their earlier book the solution to union dominance was choice and competition.  Interest groups can control policy but they can’t easily control markets.  But in the new book Moe and Chubb (they flipped the order of the names) acknowledge that unions have been generally successful at using politics to block the creation of effective markets.  Something has to loosen the union stranglehold to allow the markets to develop and prosper.

In Liberating Learning they’ve found what they think will break that logjam: technology.  The increasing use of technology in education will transform the operation of schools and the role of teachers in education.  In general, it will reduce the need for teachers by replacing (at least to some extent) labor with capital.  It will generate tons of data, improving the transparency of schools to the public and policymakers.  And it will decentralize the education workplace, making it harder for unions to organize and control the workforce.

There are clear echoes of Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive technologies in this new book.  But unlike Christensen, Moe and Chubb focus on the politics of public organizations rather than technology per se.  In fact, if you are looking for detailed descriptions of how technology should be used in education or hard proof of its effectiveness, you won’t find it in Moe and Chubb’s new book.  They are not trying to prove that these technologies are educationally effective or describe best practices, although it is clear that they have some ideas on these topics.  They are trying to describe the political logic of the current stagnation in education and how it might be altered.

The clear writing and tight argument will make Liberating Learning a pleasure to read for education reformers.  We might still wonder whether unions will be able to use politics to block the transformative effect of technology, but the book is sure to provoke a lot of productive discussion and thinking.

(edited for typos)

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

School Choice is the New Civil Rights Struggle

May 31, 2009

So says the WSJ on Saturday.  Didn’t they get the memo that serious people don’t talk about school choice?  Or was the message of that memo that we want the embarrassment this issue causes Democrats to go away already.

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

This is the Song That Never Ends

May 20, 2009

The AFT’s Leo Casey of union cue-card check and sock-puppet fame has written a blog post for his “steakholders” once again accusing me of cherry-picking.  The last time Leo accused me of cherry-picking voucher studies I produced what I believe are comprehensive lists of random-assignment voucher participant and high-quality voucher competitive effect studies.  Given his inability to substantiate that cherry-picking charge, I’m a bit surprised to see that he is a glutton for punishment and wants to make the charge again.  I guess Leo has joined with Shari Lewis, Lambchop, and all his sock-puppet friends to make this cherry-picking charge another song that never ends.

This time the issue is whether teacher unions tend to raise costs and lower student achievenement.  Leo noticed my guest posts over at Flypaper on this and asserts: “if you think that the scholarly literature on the subject is a guide, it clearly comes down in a place quite different from that suggested by Greene.”

Leo’s claim hinges entirely on what “scholarly literature” means and whether all “studies” should be treated equally.  For example, I could claim that the scholarly literature shows that candy improves student achievement, citing as scholarly literature papers written by my 5th grade son and friends whose research design involved describing how smart they felt after eating candy.

Leo doesn’t go quite that far but he does cite a study by the AFT’s very own Howard Nelson that makes a cross-sectional comparison of test scores controlling for a handful of observed demographics.  He also cites literature reviews that consist mostly of these cross-sectional analyses controlling for observed demographics. 

The problem is that there is a serious design flaw with these studies — unobserved factors that are associated with unionization may also be associated with student achievement.  For example, wealthier communities may be more likely to produce unionization because those communities have the wealth to bear the higher costs associated with unionized teachers.  Wealth may be associated with higher student achievement, but our controls for wealth (free lunch status) may not fully or accurately capture the differences in wealth.  So, unobserved and uncontrolled factors would bias the results from these cross-sectional studies.

Caroline Hoxby’s study, upon which I base my claims, employs a vastly superior research design that addresses this problem.  I’ll let her describe the problem and how she solves it:

“The … most serious obstacle is the identification problem caused by the difficulty of differentiating between the effects of a union on a school and the characteristics of a school  that make a union more likely to exist.  Even after controlling for observable characteristics of a school district such as demographics, there are presumably unobservable school characteristics associated with unionization.  The unobservable school characteristics that promote unionization may themselves affect the education production function….  My third, and probably best, attempt to solve the identification problem combines differences-in-differences and instrumental variables estimation.”

Her instrumental variable strategy involves using changes in state laws regarding unionization to derive unbiased estimates of when schools would unionize.  The change in the state law would help predict whether a school unionizes without being associated with the academic achievement in that school.  This is a far better way to estimate the effect of unionization than simply looking at whether unionized schools have higher or lower scores, since the scores and other factors associated with school quality could themselves be causing the unionization.

I’d put much more confidence in this rigorously designed study than a dozen weakly designed cross-sectional analyses.

But even if Leo insisted upon relying on the literature reviews he cites rather than the higher quality research, he would have to accept some results that aren’t very flattering to teacher unions.  Those lit reviews find that unionization raises the cost of education by about 8% to 15%.  In addition, they find that unionization tends to hurt the academic achievement of high-achieving and low-achieving students while benefiting more typical students found in the middle of the ability distribution. 

As Leo’s authority, Eberts, Hollenbeck and Stone, put it: “While on average students fare at least as well, if not better, in unionized schools, atypical students – students well below or above average ability – do appear to fare less well because instructional settings are more standardized, less individualized in unionized schools.”

So, if Leo wants to say that unions exacerbate the achievement gap for disadvantaged minority students while driving up costs, I guess he can rely on that literature review.  I prefer to rely on Caroline Hoxby’s rigorously designed study in a top economics journal.

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

For Those Keeping Score

May 20, 2009

For those who are keeping score, 3 of the top 5 circulating newspapers in the United States have recently written editorials supporting the D.C. voucher program:  USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. 

The New York Times along with their teacher union readership have remained quiet on the issue, hoping the dirty deed can be done as silently as possible. 

And the Chicago Tribune, which is a top 10 circulating newspaper as well as the hometown paper for voucher-killers Obama, Duncan, and Durbin, also endorsed DC vouchers.

Somebody needs to reach Kevin Carey in his hermetically-sealed DC bubble to let him know that at least some people who “are serious about education policy” seem to care about vouchers — that is, unless we want to believe that the editorial boards of the country’s largest newspapers with total circulation in excess of 5 million readers shouldn’t be considered as serious as policy analysts at tiny DC think tanks.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Would You Want This Man As Your Chief Advocate?

May 19, 2009

Rocket scientist and wholly-owned subsidiary of the teacher union, Sen. Dick Durbin, makes his best attempt to write a negative op-ed on D.C. vouchers in USA Today this morning.  The unsigned main editorial in the paper endorses D.C. vouchers and Durbin was given the opportunity to articulate the opposing view.

Durbin writes:

“Now, after three years of study, the results of that evaluation are in, and the U.S. Department of Education found: no statistically significant improvement in math scores for any voucher students (boys or girls); no statistically significant improvement in scores for male voucher students; no statistically significant improvement in scores for students transferring from failing schools (the targets of the voucher program), and only a slight improvement in reading scores for female voucher students (equivalent to three months of additional reading proficiency).”

The program also did not produce statistically significant gains for space aliens and did not make voucher students more handsome or grant them super-powers (HT to Matt).  There are many things that the D.C. voucher program did not do or that the rigorous study could not detect with high confidence for small sub-groups of students.

But one thing that the program did do that Durbin somehow fails to mention is raise reading scores significantly in the analysis of all students offered vouchers.  That is, he mentioned almost every tiny sub-group analysis lacking the statistical power to detect significant effects but leaves out the overall effect of the program. 

This selective and misleading reporting of results is obviously disingenuous.  I’m beginning to lean toward the lying end of stupid or lying.

Why would the union’s water-boy make such an obviously misleading and weak argument?  Can’t they find anyone better to do their bidding? 

Unfortunately, the teacher unions may feel like they don’t have to do any better than this.  As long as they offer their supporters some fig leaf for killing a program proven to work, they are going to press forward.  They don’t have to defend their ideas; they just have to have enough brute force to win.  And unfortunately it seems that they believe they have enough brute force.  That’s why they didn’t even bother to show up to the Senate hearings to defend their position.  They don’t care about being right — only about getting what they want.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Get Lost for Good

May 18, 2009

File:5x16 Jacob and nemesis.png

OK, I won’t gloat (too much) about how I correctly predicted that Locke was actually dead and was possessed by some evil force.

Instead I’m going to make new predictions for next season.  The secret to my success at Lost prognostication is just to make a lot of predictions and hope you all forget the majority that I get horribly wrong.

So, here is what I see for next season —  There are two supernatural beings Jacob and his nemesis, who I bet will be called Essau. 

Jacob is the god of life and Essau is the god of death.  Jacob can bring people to life simply by touching them.  We see him bring Locke back to life after he is thrown out of the window.  He brings Illana back from grave injuries in her Russian hospital.  I’m guessing that it was Jacob that saved Ben from death when Richard brought young Ben into the Temple.  In fact, I’ll wager that all of The Others are Jacob’s people because he has saved all of them from death.  That’s why they are so loyal to him and do not fear death.

Essau is the god of death.  All of the dead people we’ve seen around walking around the island are really Essau, including John Locke, Christian Shephard, Eko’s brother, Harper, etc…

Jacob and Essau have been through human history countless times, each working on their superpower of life or death.  They are also playing out a disagreement they have about whether human beings have free will and whether Fate can be changed.  Essau thinks that there really is no free will and Fate cannot be changed.  The details change but Time course-corrects and, as he puts it, “it always ends the same way.”  The way it ends is with death for the individual and global destruction for all of humankind. (Remember the Vanzetti numbers that the Dharma project is working to alter?)

Jacob thinks there can be progress.  He also seems convinced that human beings can make choices and change Fate.  He tells Hurley that he can choose when they ride together in the taxi.  He tells Ben that Ben has a choice before Ben stabs him.

The difficulty is that Jacob promotes the idea of free will at the same time that he manipulates the characters.  He saves Katie from being caught stealing.  He gives Sawyer the pen he uses to finish his revenge letter.  He saves Locke from death.  He save Illana in the hospital and recruits her for her mission.  And he steers Hurley back to the island.

The only flashback in the finale episode that did not involve Jacob manipulating the characters was the one involving Juliet.  And it was Juliet who chooses to let go and fall  into the drill shaft.  And it was Juliet who chooses to detonate the nuke.  She is the variable.  Her choices are different this time through history and that will lead to a change in Fate.

My guess is that the next season will begin on the Oceanic 815 flight to LA and it won’t crash this time.  So, we will think that Fate has changed.  But then all of the main characters will reconnect and find their way to the island.  We will begin to suspect that Time has course-corrected and we’ll think that we are back to things always ending the same way.  But is the grande-finale Jacob and his view of free will will prevail.  The characters will make important choices that avert global destruction.  And I’ll bet that their choices have to do with the affirmation of love, just as Juliet did.

4 Comments | Lost | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

I Want A New Civics Teacher

May 18, 2009

Kevin Carey offers a Civics 101 lesson on his blog.  All I can say is that I want a new civics teacher because this one doesn’t even have basic facts right. 

For example, Kevin writes that DC is “the one place in America without representation in Congress.”  The people of Guam, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico will be thrilled to learn that they’re not part of America or that Kevin has decided to give them representatives. 

But this is a bit of a distraction from the main issue, which is whether charters are good because they are allegedly accountable while vouchers are bad because they allegedly are not.  And here Kevin makes yet another bold, false assertion saying that vouchers schools are “currently unaccountable.” 

In what meaningful sense are DC charters more accountable than vouchers?  Both are subject to market accountability so that if they fail to perform to parental satisfaction they can lose students and the revenue those students generate.  In this sense both charters and vouchers are far more accountable than D.C. district public schools, which receive ever more revenue even as they perform miserably and lose students.  The only “currently unaccountable” schools are the district public schools, not the voucher schools.

But I imagine that Kevin only understands accountability to mean directly accountable to a public authority.  Even with that narrow meaning of accountability vouchers are accountable because they are subject to Congressional regulation and oversight.  Just watch the excellent hearings on DC vouchers held last week if you want to see what accountability looks like.

Perhaps Kevin has an even more narrow understanding of accountability, meaningful compliance with a particular set of rules regarding testing and reporting of results.  But even then DC vouchers are truly more accountable.  DC voucher students are required to take a standardized test and an independent evaluator is assessing whether students are benefiting from having access to the voucher program.  It’s true that DC charters must report test results by school, but that doesn’t make them any more accountable.  Knowing raw test results does not tell parents or public authorities whether those students would have done better had they not gone to that school or had access to the charter program.  The only way to know that with high confidence would be with a random-assignment evaluation, which many voucher programs have had and charter programs almost never have.

By accountability maybe Kevin means checking boxes on some regulatory check-list regardless of benefit to parents or the public.  Kevin would be right about that one.  Charters do have more meaningless and even counter-productive regulation with which they have to comply in the false pursuit of accountability.  The net effect of those mindless regulations is to undermine charter effectiveness and help preserve the unionized traditional district stranglehold.  That’s the kind of false accountability that I’m glad vouchers don’t have.

(edited for typos)

7 Comments | charter schools, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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