Jay P. Greene's Blog

Jay Mathews may not have gotten it right in his bet with Greg over how many school choice programs would be adopted during the most recent round of state legislative sessions, but he is completely on target with his take on the bleak political future of the national standards movement.  I’d say that he is Right On!

Here’s the money quote:

[A system of national standards, curriculum,  and assessments]  sounds great. But it won’t help and won’t work. Such specific standards stifle creativity and conflict with a two-century American preference for local decision-making about schools….

No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top grants are likely to be the high water mark of federal involvement in schools. Washington officials will dump all kinds of education programs so that they don’t have to cut too deeply into monthly allotments to regular voting geezers like me.

We already have all the national standards we need from decades of states borrowing one another’s ideas. The colleges generally agree how much math, English, history and science our students need. Employers are pushing for special requirements for students who want to work after high school. Those local business executives will know better than any national panel what the students in their communities need to learn in the way of teamwork, critical thinking, presentation skills and time management.

And Jay Mathews favorably discusses one of my blog posts on this topic, so obviously he is right. : )

As I previewed yesterday, I think the the tide has turned and the push to nationalize standards, curriculum, and assessments will fail.  It’s impressive how far the current effort has gotten and the Gates/U.S. Department have a bunch of folks believing that their triumph is inevitable.  But the drive for nationalization is doomed for the following reasons:

1) Every major Republican presidential candidate (and even the minor ones) have come out clearly against national standards.  That means if the Republicans retake the White House, this federally-driven effort will fall apart.  Even if Obama is re-elected, having the Republican standard-bearer come out clearly against national standards will raise the profile of this issue and signal to congressional, state, and local Republicans that this is something they should oppose.  A louder and more partisan debate on national standards makes any big national change highly unlikely.

2) It’s true that forty-some states have signed on for national standards but that was largely a cost-free gesture in response to Federal offers of Race to the Top money and selective waivers from NCLB requirements.  At this point the national standards are just a bunch of words on pieces of paper.  To make standards meaningful they have to be integrated with changes in curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy.  Changing all of that will take a ton of money since it involves changing textbooks, tests, professional development, teacher training, etc… States don’t have that money to spend while the Feds don’t have any more to bribe them with and Gates itself can’t even come close to footing the bill.  Up until now states have been paid to do something cost-less, but things will fall apart when state legislatures have to be asked to pay for the implementation.

3) The national standards effort has needed the feeling of inevitability to move forward.  Once the juggernaut stalls people have some time to reflect and discuss the merits of nationalizing key aspects of our education system.  Opposing groups in each state will have the time and ability to form and gain their own counter-momentum.  And divisions among the disparate supporting groups will become more apparent, making some previous supporters turn against the effort.  A lot of people, like Randi Weingarten, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Checker Finn, fantasize that they’ll be at the controls of this nationalized machine once it is built.  Time will make more clear who will really be in charge (hint: it ain’t gonna be Checker) and the losers will rescind their support.

4) Digital learning supporters will have more time and experience to discover that achieving scale to provide virtual instruction across states will not require a national regulatory regime.  The textbook industry has achieved incredible scale and sells nationwide despite 50 different state standards and even with less ability to customize their products for each state.  Besides, when backers of digital learning discover who will be at the controls, they may recognize that a national regulatory regime could hinder their efforts in all states, preventing them from achieving beach-heads in more reform-minded states so that they can build and refine their business models.  The digital learning supporters of national standards provide the strongest intellectual cover for nationalization on the right, so as they peal away from the nationalization effort the partisan nature of the debate will become even more severe (see above).

I honestly can’t see how the nationalization folks can prevail politically without slipping requirements into a re-authorized ESEA.  The use of selective waivers by Duncan is so obviously abusive and manipulative that it will certainly backfire (to wit: Mike Petrilli’s denunciation of that tactic).  Since ESEA re-authorization is going to take a while and since it will be virtually impossible to slip a nationalization of standards, assessments, and curriculum requirement into it, I see the whole nationalization project as doomed to fail.  Rather than their victory being inevitable (as they would like people to think), I see their defeat as inevitable.

I just returned from another excellent conference organized by Paul Peterson and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance.  At the conference I had a number of interesting discussions about national standards where I pressed advocates to describe the theory or evidence behind the push to nationalize standards, curriculum, and assessments.  For the most part, people had a hard time articulating exactly why they favored this strategy.

In the past I suggested that the reluctance of nationalization supporters to make an open and straightforward case was part of an intentional strategy:

… their entire project depends on stealth.  If we have an open and vigorous debate about whether it is desirable for our large, diverse country to have a uniform national set of standards, curriculum, and assessments, I am confident that they would lose.  Time and time again the American people through their political and educational leaders have rejected nationalization of education when it has been proposed in a straightforward way.

I continue to believe that the chief architects of the nationalization campaign at the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education are intentionally concealing the full extent of their nationalization effort to improve its political prospects.  For example, repeatedly describing the effort as “voluntary” and led by the states is obviously false and misleading, especially as the primary impetus was financial rewards during Race to the Top and its persistence is the offer of selective waivers to NCLB requirements to those states that comply with federal wishes.

But most of the national standard supporters I spoke to at the Harvard conference were not trying to obfuscate.  Instead, they were genuinely puzzled by the need to articulate a justification.  They simply assumed that all right-thinking people would support the idea.  The suppression of an open debate by the chief architects of the nationalization plan has prevented many of these people from ever hearing dissent or having to wonder about whether their initial inclination to support it was well-founded.

It was also interesting that once I pressed people to say why they supported nationalization out loud, the flaws and limitations of their arguments became apparent — even to themselves.  Having to articulate your reasons can serve as a useful check on whether people have really thought something through.

For example, one person used the phrases “national standards” and “rigorous standards” interchangeably.  Obviously he simply assumed that rigorous standards are produced at the national rather than at some other level.  Once he said it, it was easy to press him on why the national level would necessarily be more rigorous.  It was clear that he hadn’t really thought about that and had no quick response.

I have a theory (and evidence) to support my opposition to national standards, which I described at the conference and have described before on this blog.  It comes from Paul Peterson’s book, The Price of Federalism, in which he explains how the national government is better at redistributive policies, while state and local governments are better at developmental policies.  Education is mostly developmental, so it is best done at the state and local level.

If you want to learn more about this theory you can read my earlier post and the Price of Federalism, but the point is that I have clearly stated my reasons.  Supporters of national standards often have not.  Having to articulate one’s theory and muster supporting evidence is a very useful exercise to avoid policy mistakes.  I’m not saying that there are no plausible theories and no supporting evidence that advocates of nationalizing education could offer.  I’m just saying that virtually none of them have had to explicitly make their case — to themselves or anyone else.

If we are going to make an enormous change to our educational system by centralizing control over standards, curriculum, and assessments, I at least want to have a big, open, national discussion about the wisdom of doing it.  If, after that discussion, policy and opinion leaders were still determined to proceed I would probably continue to dissent but I would feel a whole lot more comfortable.  At least they would have thought of the various implications of this gigantic change.

The thing that is so irritating to me about the Gates/U.S. Department of Education juggernaut is their obvious disinterest in having a big, open national discussion.  They prefer brute force over intellectual exchange.  Of course, they seek to avoid the open discussion because they’ve already made up their minds about the right thing to do and are just trying to maximize the political prospects for success.

The Gates/USDOE juggernaut is intended to create the impression that nationalization is inevitable, so you might as well get on board.  A number of the nationalization supporters with whom I talked at Harvard offered inevitability as a reason for why they were supporters.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why I think nationalization is far from inevitable.  In fact, I think the tide is about to turn on the nationalization movement.  The D.C. and other policy folks who just like to support the winning team might want to tune in tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The strip of the day for today on dilbert.com, presented for the edification of national standards advocates:

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

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

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

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

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

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

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

When challenged, the natural inclination of the education establishment (The Empire) is to suppress dissent.  They prefer matters to be decided by small groups of selected elites behind closed and they certainly don’t want critical ideas to be given a full and open hearing.

With that in mind, you should know that Twitter has suspended the account of Old Diane Ravitch.  In case you missed it, some genius was “Tweeting” under the name of Old Diane Ravitch, quoting the writings of Diane Ravitch before she underwent her tranformation.  Old Diane Ravitch (ODR) would send “tweets” that were in direct contradiction to the “tweets” that current Diane Ravitch is sending.

The point of this was not to show that Ravitch has changed her mind, which anyone can do when presented with new information.  The point of ODR was to show that Ravitch’s current bold declarations are just as shallow and unsupported as were her old declarations — just in the opposite direction.  Since Twitter seems to consist of little more than a series of shallow and ill-thought-out declarations, it was the perfect medium to showcase the silliness of both the current and past incarnations of Diane Ravitch.

But the Empire struck back.  Someone, perhaps Diane herself, must have complained to Twitter and they have suspended ODR’s account.  ODR emailed me via an ODR Gmail account to provide the text of an appeal to Twitter to reverse the suspension.  ODR rightly observed:

These followers and the other 200+ followers of this account know that this account is not operated by Diane Ravitch, but rather is aimed to entertain by tweeting quotes from her earlier writings (the sources of which are clearly documented by links contained in the tweets). Thus, this account is not “impersonating” a real individual (as would be prohibited by the Twitter Rules) any more than the fake Mayor Emanuel was impersonating the real Rahm Emanuel.  Additionally, the account has never been used in a manner that is threatening, demeaning, or disrespectful in any way.

We’ll have to see whether this appeal works but I am not very optimistic.  Twitter makes a lot of money from people like Diane Ravitch who tweets about 70 times per day to her more than 13,000 cult members, er, I mean followers.  On the other hand, Twitter, like all social media, can rapidly lose their mostly young and anti-authoritarian customers if they start acting like heavy-handed jerks who suppress open communication.

In another example of how the Empire likes to operate, I received an e-mail yesterday from Eugenia Kemble from the Shanker Institute that reveals the establishment’s preference for discussions among small groups of selected elites behind closed doors.  Kemble was responding to a mass email originally sent by Mike Petrilli to dozens of education “analysts,” think-tankers, reporters, congressional staffers, and Department officials.  Several people replied to all and the debate was being continued by mass email.

Eugenia, whose union-backed think tank issued the Manifesto in support of national curriculum, decided to weigh-in but added to the bottom of her reply: “Note to All:  This is a private email and not for publication, quotation or circulation beyond those to whom it is addressed.”  No one in the exchange of mass emails had previously requested or could have reasonably expected that their comments would be private.  The list included a bunch of reporters as well as public officials whose emails are subject to Freedom of Information requests.

Inserting that note revealed Kembel’s and the establishment’s preferred method of operation.  Keep debates limited and secret.  Happily the debate over the nationalization of standards, curriculum, and assessments is out in the open and no matter how hard Kembel tries, she can’t bottle it back up.

(guest post by Ze’ev Wurman & Bill Evers)

Some people who favor national standards have pointed to the variability among states as making comparisons difficult and have been quick to point to national standards and tests as a consistent, nationwide, uniform system to judge all schools in the same way.  No one has been more outspoken on those points than the Fordham Institute, whose 2007 The Proficiency Illusion report was touted far and wide. It was followed in 2009 by another Fordham report, The Accountability Illusion, that took states to task not only for having distinct definitions of proficiency, but also with fuzzing the issue even more by playing with other NCLB accountability rules. Checker Finn came out on its publication declaring:

“This report’s crucial finding is that – contrary to what the average American likely believes – there is no common, nationwide accountability system for measuring school performance under NCLB. The AYP system is idiosyncratic, even random and opaque. Without a common standard to help determine whether a given school is successful or not, its fate under NCLB is determined by a set of arcane rules created by each state…”

 And:

“It looks like a school’s ability to clear the NCLB bar depends as much on the state in which it’s located as on how its students perform. No Child Left Behind’s image suggests that schools across America are being judged in a consistent, fair and transparent way—but that turns out to be an illusion.”

Hence it is a small wonder that Fordham has been on the forefront of the push in recent years for uniform national standards, and the recent alliance between it and the Gates Foundation and AFT, with the support of another dozens of “independent” organizations paid for by Gates, pitched for a national curriculum built on top of the federally pushed “voluntary” Common Core standards. From its reports, it is clear that Fordham believes in a single set of content standards with a single set of performance standards (cut-scores) as pitched in its Proficiency Illusion.

Yet, interestingly enough, in 1995 Albert Shanker came out against a single set of cuts scores across the nation. As he wrote (p. 79):

A recent and popular slogan in American education is that all children can learn to the same high levels. This is news to parents, teachers, and the public; it defies everything we know and appreciate about human differences. But reformers are nonetheless insisting that we establish a single set of “world-class”  performance standards and that schools be held accountable for getting all their students to achieve at that level.…

If we set a single standard, we essentially have two choices. One is to set the standard high. That is desirable, especially since we are talking about “world-class.” Unfortunately, most of our students would not reach it. … [It] would produce intense pressure to lower the standard, and we would effectively be back where we started.

The other choice is to set the standard low, perhaps slightly higher than the minimum competency standard we now have but at a level that would be attainable by virtually all of our students. We could then congratulate ourselves for raising the floor of achievement, but we will have missed an opportunity to raise the ceiling and to move up the middle as well. If we can do better by all students by acknowledging that they, like all human beings, differ in their capacities, motivations, and interests, then why settle for a new minimum competency standard disguised in “world-class” rhetoric?

This issue is not solved by just having a single set of standards, or by a single test. To have the same meaning for “proficiency,” the test must also have a uniform definition of cut scores for all states that define the various achievement levels. Yet the national assessment consortia have been notably mealy mouthed on this issue — in their presentations to the California State Board of Education this March, both consortia indicated a flexibility to allow each state to set its own cut scores.

Makes one wonder how the new ideological partners, Fordham and AFT, will resolve this underlying tension between them.

[Ze’ev Wurman is an executive at a Silicon Valley start-up and was a senior policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Education.  Bill Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a member of the institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.]