(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Milton turns 104 this weekend. Above is the tribute I contributed to the Friedman Foundation’s photo series. We should, indeed, never forget.

When he came on the scene, half the world was in slavery to totalitarian socialism, and he made a material contribution to their liberation. Here at home, both parties were deeply committed to statism, and he rightly advised the friends of freedom not to spend most of their time trying to elect the “right” side. He emphasized that all politicians are powerfully affected by self-interest while in office, so instead of trying to elect people who say they support freedom, we should work to change incentives for officeholders so it will be in their interest to support freedom. “Don’t change the players, change the game,” he wisely said. Words to remember.

I was honored to work for Milton in the last years of his life. I admired that he was so eager to help other people learn. One way you could see this was that he was always asking people questions – questions intended to help them notice their blind spots and become aware of internal contraditions in their thinking. He never talked “at” anyone. He asked you what you thought, in a way that made you think. That’s another thing we’d be wise to remember.

If you’re near Indy, join my Friedman friends for the main event. I’ll be spending the evening tonight with the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, saying a few words about Milton’s legacy – and of course school choice.

However alarming things may be now, let’s remember that the danger to freedom was even worse in his time. Yet he didn’t lose hope that people could be enlightened and persuaded. And he didn’t let personal or factional hostility take over what was supposed to be a debate about ideas. Let’s carry that legacy forward, whatever comes!

(Guest Post by Ze’ev Wurman)

Recent weeks saw a welcome attention to the groupthink that saturates what is mellifluously called the “education reform” community. I thought Rick Hess’ (School Reform Is the New Ed. School) and Jay’s (Ed Reform is Animal Farm) were particularly powerful, but their main focus was – as it should be – on the systemic and structural aspects of school reform that has become the new orthodoxy, and on the reform movement character becoming essentially a power struggle for control, not much different from what ed schools and teacher unions already do.

Here I want to focus on a particular aspect of this change by school reformers – the effort to  impose their curricular ideas based not on what works but on their interest in centralized control, and about their efforts to silence objections and dissent.

Last week the Fordham Institute published its 2016 look at Common Core math implementation in the classroom. Fordham has been a big Common Core supporter from early on so it is not surprising that despite finding skepticism and frustration among parents and students, and despite finding enthusiasm among elementary teachers (who largely know little math) but a negative response among middle school teachers (who actually know some math), Fordham still is supportive:

For the first time in our nation’s history, there is a high level of consistency regarding what’s taught in American elementary and middle school math classrooms. Fewer teachers appear to be closing their classroom doors and doing their own thing.  … [S]tudents are being exposed to fewer topics in more depth, spending significant time on applications.” (p. 44)

What struck me was the praise for the “high level of consistency,” justified by students spending “significant time on applications.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by Fordham’s love of consistency. After all, it was Checker Finn who signed the 2011 Shanker Manifesto that called for uniform national standards – not only in math and English, but also in civics, the sciences, and health and physical education. Clearly, centralized uniformity has been a high priority for Fordham for quite some time.

But what about the praise for “significant time on applications” brought by Common Core, supposedly Fordham’s  justification why it is OK to impose Washington’s will on the country? Just three days before the Fordham report was published, a new large study of students found that the “difference between the math scores of 15-year-old students who were the most exposed to pure math tasks and those who were least exposed [and exposed instead to real-world problems] was the equivalent of almost two years of education.” Surely if Fordham was driven by research evidence rather than by faddish support of centralized education it would have at least restrained itself from blindly supporting one-size-fits-all model, when a year old study clearly says:

[G]iven the pervasiveness of the belief in a conceptual-then-procedural sequence despite the lack of empirical evidence, would additional research convince those who hold the belief? In fact, widespread endorsement of this belief among mathematics education researchers may help to explain why so little research has directly evaluated it. Thus, it seems important to briefly consider nonempirical reasons that might support this belief and which could impede progress in addressing it … [C]ulture may play into the persistence of this belief. The directionality of developing conceptual and procedural knowledge seems to only be debated in the USA. This may be because in the USA and some other Western cultures, practice is not believed to aid the development of understanding. In many Asian countries, by contrast, practice is viewed as a route toward understanding, where there is a public perception that only through a great deal of practice can true understanding be developed. Our anecdotal interactions with mathematics education researchers in non-Western countries suggests that they are confused by the debate in the USA. Elsewhere, it is taken as obvious that procedural knowledge can lead to conceptual knowledge (and vice versa).

I wanted to comment on Fordham’s site about this, and then I realized that … Fordham has eliminated reader comments. I guess it was tired of even those few dissents that found their way to their pages. So no more of that! Now that I think of it, Education Next, the journal that “will steer a steady course, presenting the facts as best they can be determined, giving voice (without fear or favor) to worthy research, sound ideas, and responsible arguments” also decided recently that giving voice to sound ideas does not include readers’ (moderated) comments and shut them off without warning. So much for openness to dissent, so much for the voice of the parents and the unwashed masses, so much for being research driven.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

As long as we’re talking about ridiculous hit pieces, the servants of the edu-blob at NEPC have published a hatchet job by Christopher Lubienski attacking the new edition of my Win-Win report reviewing the evidence on school choice, as well as another recent research review by three authors at U.Ark.

Guess what? Both Lubienski and (in their press release) NEPC now admit that school choice improves educational outcomes!

Don’t believe me? Check out how the press release opens:

The degree to which students benefit from voucher programs, which allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private schools, has been debated for years. Most studies have found only modest benefits, at best. Two new reports claim to offer empirical support for the effectiveness of vouchers.

That’s right – what’s debated is not whether school choice improves students’ academic outcomes but the degree to which they improve outcomes.

It’s over, folks. Just like Jay said years ago…

WE WIN!

Let’s also note that they shamelessly ignore four of the five sections of my report. The research on how school choice affects outcomes in public schools (it improves them), taxpayers (it saves money), segregation (it breaks down racial barriers) and civic practices (it strengthens democracy) is dismissed without notice:

While the report weighs in on a number of outcomes from voucher programs, including the competitive and fiscal impacts on public schools, the effects on civic values, and on racial segregation, these issues have not been seen as central to questions of voucher efficacy, and are not always illuminated by randomized studies.

Segregation and impact on taxpayers hasn’t historically mattered in choice debates? That will come as a surprise to a lot of legislators and activists I know!

The hit piece itself is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, as we’ve come to expect from the all-hat-and-no-cattle Lubienski and NEPC. They make a lot of noise about “misrepresentations of the research literature,” but if you actually read their report (which they’re counting on you not to do) they bring no substantial allegations that might back that up – only pedantic interpretive quibbles that aren’t even worth responding to here.

Their only real accusation is the old “cherry-picking” routine. As always, they say we cherry-picked the research that supports our conclusions. Of course we didn’t; in my report I bent over backward, methodologically speaking, to ensure I didn’t exclude anything. Doesn’t matter. Whatever method researchers use to discover studies, they say it’s “cherry picking.” If they saw me walk right past a cherry tree without touching it, they’d accuse me of cherry picking.

Lubienski and NEPC know that most reporters don’t understand or even read research reports, so they can say what they want and get away with it. I’m content to let my work stand for itself; anyone who reads my report will see that the cherry-picking accusation is false, and none of Lubienski’s other accusations adds up to much beyond quibbling over issues where reasonable people can disagree, none of which (singly or jointly) affects the overall finding of my report.

My personal favorite part of the hatchet job was this gem. My method is to count a study as having found a positive effect if any of its reported results were positive, and to count it has having found a negative effect if any of its reported results were negative. I do this to avoid cherry-picking which of the results “really count” and which don’t. Lubienski complains, in the context of discussing a report that was put into the positive column under my method:

Nevertheless, the Friedman Foundation classifies this report as demonstrating “positive effects” if it has any single positive estimate, even when a “study typically includes multiple analytical models — sometimes many of them, occasionally even more than 100.” (While a single negative estimate could also place a study in the “negative effect” category, there are no such instances of this in the Friedman Foundation report.)

Got that? There were no studies of this kind that had any negative findings reported, at all, and that somehow tells against my positive finding because it means my method never put one of those studies in the negative column.

If that doesn’t discredit Lubienski, I’m not sure what would.