James Tooley to Unveil Book at Cato

April 8, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Next Wednesday at noon, James Tooley will be at Cato’s DC headquarters to launch his book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into how the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.

I’ve previously written on Tooley and coauthor Pauline Dixon’s amazing research on high-quality and low-cost private schools in the third world. It is really, really an amazing eye opener. Private schooling is pervasive in low-income areas of very poor third world countries, and Tooley and Dixon document that they outscore students at much better funded public schools.

Do yourself a favor and attend if you can.

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Posted by matthewladner

Simpson’s Paradox — D’oh!

January 12, 2009

When it is pointed out that NAEP scores for 17 year-olds or graduation rates have remained flat for roughly three decades despite a doubling in per pupil spending (adjusted for inflation), I always brace myself for the Simpson’s Paradox response.  I particularly brace for it because its most active (and grating) purveyor is Gerald Bracey — D’oh!

As Bracey explains it, “Simpson’s Paradox occurs whenever the whole group shows one pattern but subgroups show a different pattern. ”  Test scores may rise over time for every ethnic/racial subgroup but the overall average may still decline or remain flat.  “The explanation lies,” Bracey argues, “in the changing makeup of the test taking groups. At Time 1, only 20% of the test takers were minorities. At Time 2, they make up 40% of the group. Their scores are improving, but they are still lower than whites’ so as they become a larger and larger proportion of the total sample of test takers, their improving-but-lower test scores attenuate the overall average or, in this case, actually cause it to fall.”

On the surface this story sounds very appealing.  Even sensible-sounding people like JPGB commentator, Parry, repeat the argument.  But on closer examination, Simpson’s Paradox does not explain away the frustrating lack of education productivity over the last few decades.

If we want to know whether we are receiving returns on our enormous additional investment in education, we want to see progress in the overall picture.  It would provide us with little comfort to see that our investments benefited some students but did not produce an aggregate gain — unless holding steady was actually a victory in the face of significantly more difficult to educate students.

And that is the unstated argument behind the use of Simpson’s Paradox to explain the lack of educational progress: minority students are more difficult to educate and we have more of them, so holding steady is really a gain.

The problem with this is that it only considers one dimension by which students may be more or less difficult to educate — race.  And it assumes that race has the same educational implications over time.  Unless one believes that minority students are more challenging because they are genetically different, which I do not imagine Bracey or Parry believe, we have to think about race/ethnicity differently over time as the host of social and economic factors that race represents changes.  Being African-American in 1975 is very different from being African-American in 2008.  (Was a black president even imaginable back then?)  So, the challenges associated with educating minority students three decades ago were almost certainly different from the challenges today.

If we want to see whether students are more difficult to educate over time, we’d have to consider more than just how many minority students we have.  We’d have to consider a large set of social and economic variables, many of which are associated with race.  Greg Forster and I did this in a report for the Manhattan Institute in which we tracked changes in 16 variables that are generally held to be related to the challenges that students bring to school.  We found that 10 of those 16 factors have improved, so that we would expect students generally to be less difficult to educate.  For example, we observed that students are significantly more likely to attend pre-school and come to the K-12 system with greater academic preparation.  Expansions in higher educational opportunities have significantly improved the average level of parental education, which should contribute to student readiness for K-12.  Median family incomes (adjusted for inflation) have improved and a smaller percentage of children live in poverty.  Children are more likely to come to school with better health and there are fewer teen moms.

Yes, some factors have made things more difficult.  There are more students from homes in which English is not the first language and more children in single-parent households.

And yes, there are more minority students, but those minority students have better incomes, better educated parents, more pre-school, and lower rates of crime in their communities.  Unless one wants to make a genetic argument, it is obviously misleading to say that students in general are more difficult to educate because there are more minority students.

But that is exactly what the purveyors of Simpson’s Paradox are doing.  They focus only on race and act as if it were an immutable influence on academic performance.  Many things have changed over the last few decades and most of them tend to make students better prepared for K-12 school.  Even if you are not completely persuaded by the report that Greg and I produced (and we make no claim to having a definitive analysis), it would be very difficult to suggest that students have become twice as difficult to educate to completely off-set the doubling in resources we have devoted to their education.  Any reasonable examination of the evidence suggests that we have suffered from a serious decline in educational productivity, where we buy significantly less achievement for each additional dollar spent.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Blaming Special Ed

January 4, 2009

It’s all too common but also completely mistaken to blame special education for the shortcomings of the public k-12 system.  If you point out that per pupil spending has more than doubled in the last three decades (adjusting for inflation) while student outcomes have remained unchanged, people blame the rising costs of special education.  (See for example Richard Rothstein on this).  If you point out that the teaching workforce has increased by about 40% in the last three decades (adjusted for changes in student population), people blame special education (see below).  If budgets are tight and programs get cut, people blame special education for draining money from general education. 

Blaming special ed is easy.  Most attempts to blame special ed don’t even bother presenting data or make the most crude use of data to support their claims.  Reporters simply accept assertions from school and state officials without question.  Folks accept the blame-special-ed-story so easily because — well, to put it bluntly — it is a a widely held but unstated prejudice.  People quietly resent special education because they fear that it is short-changing their regular education students.  They assume that money spent on disabled kids is necessarily money taken away from general education.  They can’t imagine that resources for general education have also increased at a very rapid clip even as special ed costs have risen. 

School officials — people who should know better — play upon this popular prejudice to rationalize their failures.  They would never dare blame the programs that have been created or expanded in the last three decades for the education of poor and minority students.  Those programs also cost quite a lot of money.  No, school officials choose to blame special ed because it seems like blaming fate.  Fate has overwhelmed us with a rise in disabilities, the story goes, which have drained general education of money, teachers, and flexibility under tight budgets.  Never mind the considerable evidence that the rise in special education over the last few decades is almost certainly due to an increased classification of students as disabled rather than a true increase in the rate of disabilities in the world.  Fate had nothing to do with it.

I’ve rebutted the claims that special ed is largely responsible for rising per pupil spending in chapters 1 and 2 of the book Education Myths as well as in this Education Next article and in this paper that was published in the Peabody Journal of Education. 

My purpose in this post is to address the comment written by “Kevin” that attributed the increase in the teaching workforce to special education.  Kevin was responding to a post by Greg in which he wrote: “But teachers’ unions have pushed up costs – dramatically. In the past 40 years, the cost of the government school system per student has much more than doubled (even after inflation) while outcomes are flat across the board. And this has mainly been caused by a dramatic increase in the number of teachers hired per student – a policy that benefits only the unions.”  And Kevin replied: “Any comparison of staffing in schools 40 years ago and today typically ignores one group of staff that didn’t exist in 1968 – special education teachers and aides. Special education programs weren’t in most schools 40 years ago, hence there were no staff hired to work with those specific populations, particularly students with cognitive delay and autism who need a much higher staff ratio than is provided in the general education classroom.”

I’m bothering to rebut Kevin’s claims because 1) he appears to be a state employee (perhaps a school official, judging from his email address), and 2) his comments are typical of the blame special ed rhetoric.  Notice that Kevin doesn’t bother to present any evidence.  He just tells a plausible story, which because he and many others have “pre-judged” it to be true, they consider persuasive without need of any proof.  But let’s consider the evidence here.

In 1974, the year before federal legislation governing the education of disabled students was adopted, there were 2.165 million public school teachers and an average student to teacher ratio of 20.8.  In 2006 there were 3.177 million public school teachers, an increase of 1.012 million teachers.  And in 2006 there were a total of 404,577 teacher FTEs providing special education services.

But we have to adjust for the fact that that some of those 404,577 teachers assigned to special education have been shifted (or had their lines shifted) to special education as more students have been reclassified as disabled.  We also have to adjust for the fact that there are more students in 2006 than in 1974.  To make everything comparable, let’s assume that the student-teacher ratio had remained at 20.8 for all students.  Given that there were 49.370 million public school students in 2006, there would have been 2.374 million teachers if ratios had stayed the same for everybody instead of the 3.177 million teachers we have.  So there was really an increase of 803,442 teachers, adjusted for the change in student population.

But if the 6,081,890 students classified as disabled also had 20.8 students for each teacher, they would have 292,398 teachers.  Given that there are 404,575 teachers assigned to special education, the lower student-teacher ratios required for disabled students only results in a net increase of 112,179 teachers (404,575 minus 292,398).  So, of the 803,442 teachers added since 1974 only about 112,179 can be explained by the need to offer smaller student-teacher ratios to disabled students.  That is, special ed may only account for about 14% of the increase in the teaching workforce.

What people like Kevin forget is that while virtually “no staff” were hired specifically for special education several decades ago, there were also virtually no students classified as disabled (although most were in schools and under-served).  If we shift 6 million students into special education and maintained the same 1974 ratio of 20.8 students per teacher, we would have shifted 292,398 teachers with them.  It’s true that with an increase in federal and state subsidies along with a mandate to provide services, we’ve reduced student teacher ratios for disabled students.  But we’ve only added an additional 112,179 teachers to produce smaller ratios for disabled students.

Of course, Greg also makes an excellent point when he says in the comments to his post that resources devoted to special ed should also be expected to produce improvements in results.  Regardless of how resources have been allocated between regular and special education, the money should be yielding benefits for students.  The fact that we have observed virtually no change in student outcomes over the last four decades despite a huge increase in real expenditures (regardless of how it was allocated) is a source of chronic frustration with public education. 

The unstated assumption of these blame-special-ed stories is that money spent on special education is basically money flushed down the toilet.  They assume that nothing can help disabled kids, which fuels the quiet resentment of resources devoted to special education.  Rather than looking for scapegoats — special education, rising poverty, cosmic rays, etc… — folks should focus on the perverse incentives of a broken public education system.  The fault, dear reader, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Great Minds Think Alike

December 10, 2008

I’m not the only one to compare the auto bailout to K-12 education.  Andrew Coulson has a great piece with that theme over at Cato.

Also, I’m not the only one to see Rorschach (or is it Horshack) inkblots in the TIMSS results spin-fest.  Rob Pondiscio over at Core Knowledge also references Horshack — er, I mean, Rorschach.  And in the forthcoming Gadfly a little birdie named Mike Petrilli told me that he also has a Rorschack/Horshack piece forthcoming.

If this continues I’m going to have to re-position my lead helmet that keeps others from reading my thoughts with their Alpha rays.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Black Market Private Schooling in the Third World

October 23, 2008

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

 

Jay, Greg and I all had the chance to see a presentation by Pauline Dixon on private schooling in the third world at a recent conference sponsored by the Friedman Foundation and Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. The information was very compelling.

 

Dixon and her co-author James Tooley explained their research in the 2005 Cato Institute report Private Education is Good for the Poor. Their two-year in-depth study in India, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya found amazing results.

The first component of our research consisted of a systematic census and survey of all primary and secondary schools, government and private, in selected low-income areas. The second component examined a stratified random sample of between 2,000 and 4,000 children from each of those areas. Tests in mathematics, English, and (in Africa) one other subject were administered. Children and teachers were also tested for their IQ, and questionnaires were administered to students, parents, teachers, and school managers or headteachers.

What did they learn? For starters, a large majority of students in each of the low-income areas studies in all four countries were attending private, not public schools. For instance, the census of the low-income area of Ghana found 779 schools total, only 25 percent were government schools. The census found that 64 percent of schoolchildren in the area attended private school. In the surveyed area of Nigeria, 75% of students attended private schools.

Interestingly, the majorities of these schools are unregistered, and in many cases illegal. They are neighborhood proprietary operations, run almost exclusively based upon student fees. The vast majority of these schools and students receive no public subsidy whatsoever. In fact, many of them must pay bribes just to stay in business. Many of these schools provide subsidized spaces for the poorest of the poor, and all of them are the precise opposite of the Dead Poet’s Society stereotype of private schooling.

As you can see from the photo above (taken by the research team), these schools are not housed in fancy facilities. In fact, as Dr. Dixon presented a power point presentation of these schools, it brought to mind the old story about Abraham Lincoln learning to read by writing on a shovel with coal.

The story here isn’t that there aren’t public schools to attend- it’s more that those schools are dysfunctional to an unimagined (by me anyway) scale. Parents told the researchers of rampant absenteeism by teachers, meaning that children simply run wild when their teachers decide not to report- which is frequent.

My impression: the public school system in these countries represent blatant jobs programs, rather than schools. This impression seems borne out by the test score results:

The raw scores from our student achievement tests show considerably higher achievement in the private than in government schools. In Hyderabad, for instance, mean scores in mathematics were about 22 percentage points and 23 percentage points higher in private unrecognized and recognized schools, respectively, than in government schools. The advantage was even more pronounced for English. In all cases, this achievement advantage was obtained at between half and a quarter of the teacher salary costs.

So there you have it- much better and much less expensive. Oh, and often illegal and great for the poor.

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Posted by matthewladner

PJM Column by GF on BB (Just AAMOI)

August 22, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Pajamas Media carries my take on BB today. I’m not as harsh on BB as Jay and Matt have been. I’m harsher.

Those of you who have been following the unions’ desperate attempt to distract you from the fact that BB doesn’t have the empirical evidence they claim it has by flinging a bunch of calumny at Jay may find this section of particular interest:

The really funny thing is, we’ve tried bringing social services into schools before. Fifty years ago, schools didn’t serve breakfast and provide teams of guidance counselors. Providing these and other social services in schools was originally justified on grounds that the kids needed these services to do well in school. How has that worked out?

Well, after all the empirical research that’s been done on schools, there’s no serious evidence that educational outcomes have improved as a result of these services. When the unions were challenged to come up with some evidence, they responded that “teachers know” these policies work.

But if the real purpose of providing these services in schools was to enlarge the government education blob, mission accomplished.

I wrote the column before the exchange about evidence and “cherry picking” over the last few days, but I see nothing that needs revision. As Jay pointed out, the evidence to which they now appeal is on the same scientific level as that used to prove the healing power of crystals. Their original “teachers know” argument was actually better – at least it didn’t pretend to be scientific.

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Posted by Greg Forster

The Vitamin C of Education

August 20, 2008

Earlier this week I made my Modest Proposal for B.B. (Broader, Bolder or is it Buying Bananas?).  I noted that Randi Weingarten denounced vouchers as a waste of time despite considerable evidence supporting it, while she embraced the B.B. idea of community schools despite there being absolutely no evidence to support the claim that public schools could improve achievement by expanding their mission to include a host of social services.

Given the lack of evidence for B.B. I generously : ) offered to support a series of large pilot studies of the community schools approach, if Weingarten, Leo Casey, and the B.B. crowd would agree to a similar series of large pilot voucher programs as a way of learning more about both reform strategies.  No word yet but perhaps their internet is broken (just try unplugging it and plugging it back in).

Shital Shah from the Coalition for Community Schools, however, sent me a nice note with a link to a report claiming to contain the evidence supporting their approach.  After reviewing the report I still see virtually no evidence to give us confidence that public schools can increase student achievement by offering everything from legal assistance to health care.

In Appendix B the report lists 21 studies of the community school approach.  Seven of them have no student achievement outcomes.  Seven examine student test scores but only make pre/post comparisons without any control group.  And another seven have comparison groups but none employ random assignment, regression discontinuity, or another rigorous research design.  Four of those seven just compare achievement at schools using the B.B. approach to city or statewide averages.  And of the seven studies with some kind of control group, two find null effects, another finds null effects in math but not reading and even then only among schools with “high implementation” of the approach.  The quality (and quantity) of the evidence supporting community schools is no greater than what we could find to support the healing power of crystals. 

I understand why Randi Weingarten or Leo Casey would be pushing the educational equivalent of crystal healing.  Their job is to advocate for the interests of their union, not to make fair and reasonable assessments of research claims.  If schools expand their mission to include providing health care and other social services just think of all of the dues-paying nurses and social workers they could add to their rolls.

The greater mystery is why normally tough-minded and rigorous researchers, like Jim Heckman and Diane Ravitch, would sign on to this approach entirely lacking empirical support.  Heckman won the Nobel Prize for Economics for crying out loud.  But then again Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and later became a public advocate for mega doses of vitamin C to cure cancer, another intervention completely unsupported by rigorous evidence.

I’ll repeat that I am not against trying the B.B. community school approach with large pilot programs that are carefully studied.  I just can’t see why normally smart people would fully endorse untested approaches while ignoring other interventions, like expanding choice and competition in education, which have considerably more supporting evidence.

(edited for typos)

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Broader, Bolder = Bloated Behemoth

August 13, 2008

 

Over at D-Ed Reckoning Ken DeRosa reviews the “evidence” that the AFT’s Leo Casey presents on the effectiveness of the Broader, Bolder approach being pushed by the union-backed Economic Policy Institute (with the support of some impressive people who you would think would know better). 

The issue is not whether kids would benefit from better health care or social services, or even whether receiving those benefits might contribute to higher achievement.  The issue is whether public schools are capable of expanding their mission to effectively provide these additional services, and whether those schools can translate the provision of additional services into higher achievement.

The Broader, Bolder folks provide a list of “background papers” to support their cause.  But those papers are very far in the background in that only a handful of the more than 100 studies cited actually assess the effects of providing students with additional services.  And even fewer look at the effects of public schools providing those services.  Before we endorse a bold new plan for education wouldn’t we want at least a few  evaluations of pilot programs in which public schools actually provided the full set of services being advocated?  I can’t find one such evaluation in the list of 100+ studies provided.

But don’t worry, Leo Casey has stepped into the breach with the solid research we need.  Here’s DeRosa’s commentary bracketing Casey’s, uhm, evidence:

“Leo must have had a few of his underlings pouring over the ERIC databases non-stop finding the requested evidence. Here is Leo’s evidence. I am leaving in all the internal citations and footnotes.

Classroom teachers recognize immediately the educational value of providing a comprehensive array of services to students living in poverty. They have seen the effects of undiagnosed and untreated eye problems on a student’s ability to learn how to read, and of untreated ear infections on a student’s ability to hear what is being said in the classroom. They know that the lack of proper medical care heightens the severity of childhood illnesses and makes them last longer, leading to more absences from school for students who need every day of school they can get. They have seen asthma reach epidemic proportions among students living in poverty, and they know that the lack of preventive and prophylactic medical care leads to more frequent attacks of a more severe nature, and more absences from school. They understand that screening for lead poisoning happens least among children in poverty, even though their living conditions make them the most likely victims, with all of the negative effects on cognitive functions. They know that the stresses of life in poverty make mental health and social work services for students and their families all that more important, and yet they are least likely to receive them. They see how the transience that marks poverty disrupts the education of students again and again, as the families of students are constantly on the move. In short, teachers know that the students living in poverty lack the health and social services routinely available to middle class and upper class students, despite the fact that they need them even more. And they know that the absence of these services has a detrimental impact on the education, as well as the general well-being, of students living in poverty.

I emphasized Leo’s evidentiary citations since they do not conform to the generally accepted norm.”

(edited for typos)

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

AFT Goes Up in Smoke

August 6, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

[Editor’s note — See new post on “Broader, Bolder” here.]

P.J. O’Rourke once described the early Clinton administration as “running the country by dorm-room bull session.” Some recent ferment among education progressives makes me wonder if they too have fallen back onto some old college habits. Catherine Johnson over at Kitchen Table Math for instance wrote on Randi Weingarten’s first speech as AFT President. Weingarten engages in NCLB bashing, and then lays out a vision for the future of public education:

“Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities and homework assistance … and suppose the schools included child care and dental, medical and counseling clinics, or other services the community needs,” Ms. Weingarten said. “For example, they might offer neighborhood residents English language instruction, GED programs, or legal assistance.”

Personally, I’m trying to imagine a system of public schools that could teach 4th grade kids how to read after spending $40,000 or more on their education. In 2007, 34% of American public school 4th graders scored below basic in reading on the NAEP. If we can’t trust schools to teach kids how to read, just why would we want them trying to fix our teeth or attempting to resolve our legal issues?

Weingarten echoes the “bigger and bolder” crowd, who seem to believe that schools can become more effective by becoming less focused on academics. Given the AFT opposition to standardized testing, these schools social welfare centers will ideally be free to thrive without the burden of academic transparency.

This of course is precisely the wrong direction to take. Paul Hill recently conducted a series of studies for the Gates Foundation concerning the stubborn lack of academic progress despite increased public school spending. After a series of studies, Hill reached the conclusion:

“…money is used so loosely in public education – in ways that few understand and that lack plausible connections to student learning – that no one can say how much money, if used optimally, would be enough. Accounting systems make it impossible to track how much is spent on a particular child or school, and hide the costs of programs and teacher contracts. Districts can’t choose the most cost-effective programs because they lack evidence on costs and results.” (Hat tip: Nevada Policy Research Institute’s Steven Miller)

Summarizing then, public schools have yet to do a cost-benefit analysis on the nearly $10,000 per year per child they are already spending. They therefore have a very poor idea about which of their activities help achieve the goal of producing a well educated child, and which do not. They, in essence, just do what they do, which certainly helps explain how a school system could burn through tens of thousands of dollars without teaching a child to read.

Let me be specific. In Arizona, 44% of 4th graders score below basic in reading. Despite that fact, we have elementary school days that include a regular coursework in art, music and physical education. These offerings are of course enriching and wonderful for many children. Why however would a 3rd grader who can’t read be taking courses in art or music? We know that children not gaining basic literacy skills in the early grades are all but doomed to academic failure.

Could it be the case that schools should reallocate their resources under the theory that one’s lifelong ability to appreciate music and art would be greatly enhanced by learning how to read?

We’ve got quite a problem to sort out here and I will submit that the last thing we would want to do is get schools even less focused on academic achievement. It isn’t hard to imagine burning through even more money while still failing to teach basic academic skills to large numbers of kids: schools have been doing it for more than 40 years.

(edited for typos)

13 Comments | myth of helplessness, school accountability, teacher union | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Broader, Bolder — Bigger Budget

July 28, 2008

Check out Ken DeRosa’s critique of Broader, Bolder (the union backed plan to improve the struggling education system by doubling-down the bet and expanding the responsibilities of those struggling schools to include health care and other social services). 

Here’s my favorite bit of his post:

“Let’s take Ravitch’s defense first:

I care as much about academic achievement as Checker or anyone else in the world, but I don’t see any contradiction between caring about academic achievement and caring about children’s health and well-being.

The issue isn’t about who cares about children’s health and well-being. The issue is whether public schools, who are by and large failing at their primary task of education, should take on the additional responsibilities of caring about children’s health and well-being. You could care very much about the health and well-being of children and NOT think it’s a good idea to hand these services over to our public schools.

The argument seems to be that since children attend school every day (cough, cough) that social services could be easily provided at school. Then why not hand over these responsibilities to the post office. After all, they make house calls six days a week regardless of the rain, snow, heat, or gloom of night. They could give the kids a quick vision screen and drop off any drug prescriptions.”

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

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