Jay P. Greene's Blog

My former students and sometimes co-authors, Dan Bowen and Collin Hitt, have a superb piece in Phi Delta Kappan Journal on the history and evidence on sports in schools.  They demonstrate convincingly that sports improve academic outcomes and play an important and positive role in K-12 schools.

They also successfully rebut claims by Amanda Ripley and others that sports should be taken out of schools and instead be provided by club teams, as is common in Europe.  As it turns out, the rigorous research contradicts the casual observations based on journalistic tourism.  In particular, Dan and Collin debunk three commonly made claims about sports in schools:

#1. Sports participation has no role in academic development; in fact, sports might undermine academics.

#2. Adopting European-style sports club programs would enable adolescents to participate in sports while eliminating any negative influences that school-sponsored athletics have on academics.

#3. Eliminating school-sponsored sports will increase student participation in other extracurricular activities.

Be sure to check out their piece in the Kappan.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

Yesterday I noted that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards was planning to cut the state’s school voucher program for low-income students, despite promising during his campaign that he wouldn’t take vouchers away from students. The American Federation for Children (AFC) released a stinging ad (video below) and now the governor has struck back:

In a statement released after the ad debuted, Edwards attacked as a”special interest” AFC and the parents who are upset that their children might not be able to attend the schools they did last year, and shifted blame for the spending cut in the voucher program to White. Edwards said he delegated authority to each department head to make necessary cuts to balance the state budget.

“Every agency head did their best to prioritize their funding based on their mission,” Edwards, a Democrat, said in the statement. “It is important to recognize that every student currently receiving a scholarship will continue to receive one. This out-of-state special interest should direct its criticisms at the small group of legislators who failed to do the necessary work in the special session to fill the largest deficit our state has ever seen.”

It’s pretty rich for Edwards to accuse a public interest organization like the AFC of being a “special interest” when he’s going after the voucher program primary because of his special interest allies, like the Louisiana Federation of Teachers.

AFC isn’t taking any guff, however:

“Now, Gov. Edwards claims that $36 million will cover all the kids in the program, but without taking into account tuition increases at private schools, at the very least, the state would need to fund the program at the same level it funded the program at last year — $42 million,” said Frendewey. “Edwards’s budget was at $36 million – that $6 million cut equals an estimated 1,000 children or more who would lose their scholarship and be sent back to their underperforming public school.”

Frendewey said Edwards, who also cast some blame toward Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal, should take responsibility for his administration’s budget. White, an independent, was appointed by Jindal.

“This is pure rhetoric,” said Frendewey. “But, I can tell you it’s offensive in terms of Gov. Edwards wanting to balance the budget on the back of poor families.”

As Matt Ladner would say: BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA’s Perspective carries my article on why we should restore final authority over education to parents, particularly in light of the Louisiana debacle:

Tests are not neutral. If you control the test, you control the curriculum. What gets taught is determined by what gets tested.

Allowing the state to test the schools gave politicians power over the schools, and the schools refused to accept it. Private schools don’t like limitations on what students they can take or what they charge, and rightly so. Such limitations damage education. But schools will typically put up with that to participate in a choice program, because they want to serve kids.

However, most schools absolutely will not allow outsiders to tell them what to teach. That’s surrendering the essence of the school. Admittedly, there are exceptions…Absent such unusual conditions, however, private schools rightly reject the extension of state power into the content of the classroom.

I also enjoyed doing a delightful radio interview this morning on the same subject, focusing more on why parents are the right repository of power over education – not only because they know their children best and are most motivated to seek their good, but also because parental authority is the only way to ground education in a holistic and coherent understanding of what education is for – what is the good life that we want children educated into.

As always, your comments are very welcome!

It’s been nearly a decade since Brian Kisida, Jonathan Butcher, and I produced our study on trends in names given to schools.  In it we documented a stark decline in the naming of schools after people.  Instead, schools are increasingly given inoffensive nature names, like Hawk’s Bluff or Mesa Vista.  New school names are more likely to sound like herbal teas or day spas than to honor accomplished leaders, educators, scientists, or artists.  There are now more schools in Florida named after manatees than George Washington, and more schools in Arizona named after road runners than Thomas Jefferson.

We lament this decline in naming schools after people because we see these names as civic education opportunities.  Communities can use school names to convey to their children the values they hold dear and to provide models of people who embodied those values.  Of course, no person is perfect, so controversy may erupt over the flaws in school honorees.  In addition, communities may fight over which values they hold most dear and which people best personify those values.  We suggested in our report that the decline in naming schools after people stemmed from school boards becoming increasingly unwilling to expend political capital over school names to serve civic goals about which they increasingly don’t care.  Basically, they have abdicated their civic responsibility to avoid anything that rattles their smooth political control.

If you were unpersuaded by this explanation for why school boards shy away from naming schools after people, I’d like to refer you to an article in today’s Arkansas Democrat Gazette about the naming of two new schools, Osage Creek Elementary and Creekside Middle, in the Bentonville School District, which is home to the Walmart headquarters.  A few of the board members objected that neither school was named after a person:

Quinn also argued in favor of naming at least one of the schools after a person, which gives students and teachers someone to celebrate and rally around. He cited former teacher Mary Mae Jones, after whom an elementary school is named.

“I thought, she’s a powerful example of someone who has done something meaningful for the fastest growing and hopefully best district in the state,” Quinn said.

Lightle agreed, saying there are people who would provide good namesakes. He mentioned Hattie Caraway, an Arkansas woman who was the first woman elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate.

But the majority sided with Board President Travis Riggs:

Riggs, the board president, said he generally opposes naming schools after people.

“I just think when you do that, you are going to offend somebody,” Riggs said. “I just don’t want to offend people.”

Well, at least he’s honest.  But with comments like this Riggs and his majority on the Bentonville School Board are sounding like Capt. Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 when he tells Montag:

The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! …

Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday I did a short and sweet radio interview in Oklahoma (well, they were in Oklahoma) on my recent article about religious leaders and school choice. Roman Catholics and Jews were praised for maintaining their traditions in the face of great pressure to homogenize; evangelical skepticism of choice as entanglement with the state was both sympathized and respectfully disagreed with. Choice programs, as I pointed out, have actually created political constituencies that turn out and rally at state capitals to defend private school autonomy when it is threatened!

As always, your comments are very welcome.

I’ve written before about the Character Assessment Initiative (Charassein) at the University of Arkansas, headed by my colleague Gema Zamarro.  This post provides an update about the strong progress they are making with their research.

First, the paper by Collin Hitt, Julie Trivitt, and Albert Cheng that I’ve been telling you about for more than two years is now being published in the Economics of Education Review.  Getting into a top journal takes time, but this paper certainly deserves high placement.  In this paper, Hitt, Trivvit, and Cheng demonstrate across several longitudinal data sets that students who are more non-responsive to survey questions (skipping items or saying “don’t know”) have significantly lower educational attainment and fare less well in the labor market, even after controlling for a broad set of background characteristics and cognitive measures.  Essentially, this paper validates that item non-response is a useful proxy for character skills (probably conscientiousness) and is predictive of later life outcomes.

Second, Albert Cheng and Gema Zamarro have a new paper that demonstrates that teachers actually alter student character skills.  In particular, they look at data from the MET Project in which students were randomly assigned to teachers in the second year of the study.  They find that teachers who themselves have weaker character skills during the first year of the study, as measured by non-responsiveness or careless responses on surveys, weaken the character skills of the students experimentally assigned to them during the second year of the study.  Conversely, teachers who model higher levels of conscientiousness improve the character skills of their students.

This teacher ability to affect student character skills in not related to their ability to improve math and reading test performance.  So teachers who are great at building character skills may not be the same ones who are great at conveying math and reading.  Students are more successful when they learn both cognitive and non-cognitive skills.  If we focus only on retaining and rewarding teachers or schools that do one, students may miss out on having teachers or schools that are good at the other.

I hope it’s not another two years until you see this new Cheng and Zamarro paper in a top journal.  Now that their measure has been validated by the EER piece, future publications should come more quickly.  And Albert is himself headed to great things as he completes his Ph.D. and begins a post-doc at Harvard next year.  Keep you eye on him and this line of research on using survey responsiveness and carelessness as measures of character skills with strong predictive power for student success.

One of the banes of education reform is its obsession with producing uniform reforms at scale.  Donors and policymakers tend to prefer standards and testing reforms that affect all students at once.  And if they are willing to entertain the messiness of school choice, donors and policymakers tend to prefer large chains, like KIPP, over mom and pop charters or the diverse assortment of small private schools.  They want to achieve what they imagine are the economies of scale in education by having the same reform affect large numbers of students at the same time and in roughly the same way.

Unfortunately, there do not appear to be many economies of scale in education.  In fact, the nature of education, like other aspects of human development, appear to be more effectively conducted at small scale.  Education, like child-rearing, relies for success on personal interactions among people with authentic relationships.

We’ve tried a variety of arrangements throughout history for raising children.  People have experimented with all sorts of collective child-rearing approaches but have gravitated back in almost all cultures across long-periods of time to raising children within small family groups.  Despite the allure of economies of scale, we’ve almost universally rejected communal child-rearing.  Even though we could house more children and would require fewer adults in giant, orphanage-like settings, we rightly recognize that proper human development involves the close interaction of caring adults with children.  It’s just not something that is produced well at scale.

We should no more prefer scale in education than desire collective child-rearing.  Children are sufficiently diverse in their interests and needs that uniformly imposed solutions tend not to serve them very well.  Instead, it takes caring adults with an understanding of each child to customize (at least partially) how each child should be educated.  In addition, education requires motivating children to exert effort to learn.  That motivation is much more easily produced by an adult with whom children have an authentic relationship.

So the next time you hear reformers ask if a reform is scalable, remind them that orphanages are scalable — but that doesn’t mean we want them.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

Today, the Library of Law and Liberty is carrying my review of Dale Russakoff’s book, The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?, which explored the impact of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark’s district school system. Years later, it had little to show for it. At times The Prize reads like a comedy of errors, but given what was at stake, it was really a tragedy. But it didn’t have to be.

Zuckerberg’s gift was matched by other philanthropists and foundations, but even $200 million wasn’t enough to bring the “transformational” changes that reformers desired. The bureaucracy was just too good at impeding reform and sucking up resources:

The new labor agreement was also pricier than initially anticipated: it consumed nearly half of the $200 million of the philanthropic package. The teachers’ contract itself cost $50 million, including $31 million in back pay to cover the raises that teachers hadn’t received over the previous two years.

The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, made the back pay a condition for even holding the negotiations. “We had an opportunity to get Zuckerberg’s money,” Del Grosso later explained, “Otherwise, it would go to the charter schools. I decided I shouldn’t feed and clothe the enemy.” The contract also included merit bonuses and financial incentives for teachers to switch to a universal pay scale.

On top of that, [Newark Superintendent Cami] Anderson asked for $20 million in “buyout” funds to incentivize low-performing teachers, principals, and support staff to leave; $8.5 million in tuition support for teachers to earn graduate degrees relevant to their subject area; and $15 million for a new contract with the principals’ union (which didn’t actually happen during Anderson’s term because the principals refused to negotiate).

The high cost of the agreement meant eliminating plans to invest in community organizing, early-childhood programs, and vocational programs for Newark’s thousands of recent dropouts, which had been one of [Newark Mayor Cory] Booker’s priorities.

Then, too, the teachers’ contract contained fine print that raised its cost even higher. Teachers received 15 paid sick days and three paid personal days (in a less than year-round job, that is, a school year of 180 days), meaning that the district had to pay for both regular and substitute teachers for up to one out of every 10 school days—a particularly large expense given that at least 560 teachers earned more than $92,000 a year. The seniority pay bumps also remained in place, so the district couldn’t afford the performance incentives that they had wanted to give promising young teachers to persuade them to stay.

The great expense was deemed necessary to get greater flexibility and accountability, but it was never clear how permanent those features would be. Asked if the union would continue the accountability reforms after the contract expired in three years, Del Grosso replied: “Let’s pray there’s another Zuckerberg.”

Four years after Zuckerberg’s announcement on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the reforms had not lived up to expectations. The 2014 state test results showed that proficiency in both math and English had declined in every tested grade since 2011. Moreover, the ACT college admission test, which all high school juniors had taken, revealed that only 2 to 5 percent of non-magnet school students in the district were ready for college. Anderson resigned the following year. By then, Booker had already moved on to the U.S. Senate, and his successor, Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka, was elected largely because of his opposition to the Booker/Anderson reforms. Soon after, [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie turned his attention to his (ultimately failed) presidential bid.

If anything, Newark’s education reform debacle is further evidence of the wisdom of Jay Greene’s advice: Build New, Don’t Reform Old.

[Cross-posted at Cato-at-Liberty.]