Jay P. Greene's Blog

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Jason Riley on “The Soccer Mom Revolt Against Common Core.”  In it, I was quoted offering the analysis that upper-middle class moms were accustomed to having significant control over their kids’ schools.  NCLB may have annoyed these moms with tests that had little meaning for their kids, but by remaining largely agnostic on standards, academic content, and the method of testing, NCLB didn’t interfere with the operational control of suburban moms.

The over-reach of Common Core and federally-sponsored aligned tests is that they impinge to a much greater extent on the operations of schools.  When soccer moms come to school to complain about Rome and Juliet being cut to make way for informational texts, they are being told that the school had no choice in the matter.  Common Core made them do it.  And if they want to do well on the PARCC or Smarter Balanced tests, they have to make these changes.  It doesn’t matter whether CC really requires this change or not.  The issue is that large numbers of upper-middle class parents are being told that they no longer have the same kind of influence over their schools that they are used to having.  And they are pissed.  So, they are starting to boycott the tests.

Not so fast, says Mike Petrilli.  In a post today he argues:

Here’s where Jason’s argument falls apart: Common Core is almost everywhere. Soccer moms are found almost everywhere. Yet the rebellion he describes is limited to one specific area.

As for Jay, maybe the loss of parental control is a real issue, but why do parents in Montclair, for example, feel that their power is being usurped much more so than parents in other states? Again, it can’t be Common Core, or testing, or school accountability policies, because those are almost universal.

Common Core couldn’t explain the opt-outs because they are concentrated in NY and NJ while CC is spread across the country.  The culprit must be the unions, he argues, since they are strong in NY and NJ and managed to enroll these parents in their general fight against accountability.

Let’s try Petrilli’s argument on another situation to see how well it stands up.  The Baltimore riots couldn’t be caused by police abuse, he would have to argue, because the riots are concentrated in Baltimore while police abuse is widespread.  Convinced?

Let’s try another one.  The unions can’t be responsible for the opt-outs because their opposition to accountability is longstanding while the opt-outs are a new phenomenon.  Common Core sophistry is fun!

Of course, mass protests, like opting out or rioting, have to start somewhere even if the source of complaint is widespread.  In addition, agitators typically play a role in motivating and organizing mass protests, but the underlying injury needs to be present or the agitation fails to gain traction.  The unions couldn’t get the soccer moms to opt-out unless they were upset about something.  Before Common Core, the unions tried but failed to elicit upper-middle class action against accountability tests.  Now they are finding a receptive audience.

No amount of sophistry is going to change the political challenge Common Core faces by interfering with soccer moms’ control over local schools.  And no amount of blaming those soccer moms for failing to care about poor and minority students is going to guilt them into surrendering that control.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

…up two-zip, Texas is.

Below is the text of the testimony I intend to present to the Arkansas Common Core Council on Wednesday.  The Council is chaired by Lt. Governor Tim Griffin and was charged by the legislature with providing advice on the future of Common Core Standards and PARCC testing.  You can watch videos of the Council testimony and discussions here.

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Jay P. Greene’s Testimony to the Arkansas Common Core Council
May 6, 2015

Standards are about what we value. They communicate what we think is important for our children to learn, when they should learn it, and ultimately what kinds of adults we hope they will grow up to be.

Because standards are about values, their content is not merely a technical issue that can be determined by scientific methods. There is no technically correct set of standards, just as there is no technically correct political party or religion. Reasonable people have legitimate differences of opinion about what they want their children taught. A fundamental problem with national standards efforts, like Common Core, is that they are attempting to impose a single vision of a proper education on a large and diverse country with differing views.

National standards can try to produce uniformity out of diversity with some combination of two approaches. They can promote standards that are so bland and ambiguous as to be inoffensive to almost everyone. Or they can force their particular vision on those who believe differently. Either way, national standards, like Common Core, are inappropriate and likely to be ineffective. If national standards embrace a vague consensus, then they make no difference since almost everyone already believes them and is already working toward them. If, on the other hand, national standards attempt to impose their particular vision of a proper education on those with differing visions, then national standards are oppressive and likely to face high levels of resistance and non-compliance. So, national standards are doomed to be either unnecessary or illiberal. Either way, they are wrong.

Some of you may be thinking that education is not entirely about values. Can’t we at least agree, you might be thinking, that all children need to acquire basic competency in literacy and numeracy? And if so, might not standards be helpful in addressing these more technical issues even if they cannot address broader issues of values?

Unfortunately, even when it comes to some of the narrower goals of education, there is no evidence that standards deemed to be higher quality are effective in producing higher levels of literacy and numeracy. I’m aware of four analyses that have examined whether states with standards judged to be better have greater academic achievement. I’ve provided references to these four analyses in the written version of my testimony. None of them show any relationship between the ratings of state standards according to the Fordham Institute and Education Week and each state’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I’m not aware of any empirical analyses that show that “better” standards lead to better outcomes for students.

The lack of relationship between the judged quality of state standards and student achievement should raise a number of concerns for this Council. First, it should make you doubt claims about the quality of Common Core standards. How does anyone know whether Common Core standards are good and will contribute to academic achievement if no one has ever found a relationship between Common Core (or any standards for that matter) and student outcomes? Many people claim to be expert judges of the quality of standards but no one’s judgment has been validated by actual improvement in student performance.

Second, perhaps the lack of relationship between expert judgments about the quality of standards and student achievement is explained by the fact that there is not a single path to academic success for all of our incredibly different children. Common Core or other standards might be good for some students in some circumstances, but bad for other students in other situations. The reason why expert claims about the quality of standards have never aligned with student achievement is that there is no single set of standards that could be optimal for promoting even basic literacy and numeracy for all students. Standards, particularly national standards, are then a fool’s enterprise of one size fits none.

Third, the lack of relationship between “better” standards and achievement might be caused by low levels of compliance by schools and educators rather than the unreliable judgment of experts. That is, standards are just a bunch of words in a document. Even if they are the right words and even if one set of words could fit what all children need, there is no assurance that schools or educators would teach to those standards. Schools and educators have their own ideas about the proper goals of education and little can be done to force them to change their practice.

Key backers of Common Core standards are aware of this problem and so the U.S. Department of Education funded the development of new tests that would be aligned with these national standards. If these new tests could detect whether schools and educators were changing their practices in the ways desired by Common Core and if rewards and punishments could be imposed on schools and educators for their compliance with the new standards, then perhaps the empty words of standards could be transformed into a real change in the education system.

The problem with trying to use PARCC or Smarter Balanced tests to drive Common Core changes is that it almost certainly requires more coercion than is politically possible and would be undesirable even if it could be accomplished. If Arkansas tries to use the PARCC test to impose strong enough sanctions on schools and educators to drive changes in their practice, we will witness a well-organized and effective counter-attack from educators and sympathetic parents who will likely neuter those sanctions. If, on the other hand, the consequences of PARCC are roughly the equivalent of double secret probation in the movie, Animal House, then no one has to change practice to align with the new standards.

And even if by some political miracle the new PARCC test could be used to impose tough sanctions on schools and educators who failed to comply with Common Core, it’s a really bad idea to try to run school systems with a test. All sorts of bad things happen when maximizing performance on standardized tests becomes the governing principle of schools. Schools and educators are likely to narrow the curriculum by focusing on tested subjects at the expense of untested ones. If we care at all about the Arts, History, and Science we should oppose trying to run schools with math and ELA tests. And within tested subjects schools and educators are likely to focus narrowly on tested items at the expense of a more complete understanding of math and English.

Common Core is unlikely to produce meaningful changes in practice without an aligned test that punishes schools and educators, but those types of harsh consequences are unlikely to survive the political opposition of educators and parents. And even if PARCC could impose tough consequences to drive changes in practice, the changes would produce a disastrous narrowing in the curriculum of schools.

So what should this Council recommend? Given that there is no technically correct set of standards and given that expert judgment about the quality of standards has never been validated by better student outcomes, there is no reason for Arkansas to defer to the small group of national experts who drafted the Common Core standards. Arkansas policymakers, educators, and parents know as much about effective standards as these self-proclaimed experts. So we should be empowered to write our own standards that reflect our own priorities and values in education. If standards are about values, they should be developed as close to the people to whom they apply as is practical.

But even standards that are developed in a decentralized way will fail to capture all of the legitimate diversity of goals and needs. For that reason, even standards that are developed locally should be humble about what they can accomplish and the extent to which schools and educators ought to change their practice as a result. In the end, it is families, educators, and communities who need to set appropriate goals for individual children, not the state and certainly not the national government or organizations.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we should abandon PARCC and purchase an already-developed, nationally-normed standardized test from ACT or any of the reputable testing companies. The purpose of PARCC is to drive changes in educator behavior in ways that are desired by Common Core. But we should not be using tests aligned with a set of standards to coerce schools and educators to change their practice. What we really need from standardized testing is just information about how our students are performing. This can be accomplished at much lower cost by just buying a nationally-normed test off of the shelf. And lower stakes tests that are primarily about information rather than coercion will produce much less harmful narrowing of the curriculum.
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References
Charlie M. Belin and Brian Kisida, “Science Standards, Science Achievement, and Attitudes About Evolution,” Educational Policy, September 21, 2014. http://epx.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/23/0895904814550069

Eric A. Hanushek, “Is the Common Core Just a Distraction?” Education Next, May 9, 2012. http://educationnext.org/is-the-common-core-just-a-distraction/

Tom Loveless, “How Well are American Students Learning?” The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education, The Brookings Institution, February, 2012.http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2012/2/brown%20center/0216_brown_education_loveless.pdf

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, “Don’t Forget Curriculum,” Brown Center Letters on Education, The Brookings Institution, October, 2009. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2009/10/14-curriculum-whitehurst

Shakespeare can be taught.  Students don’t even have to know how to read to become familiar with the sound and cadence of Shakespeare’s language.  Watch this video of Brian Cox teaching a friend’s toddler to recite a portion of the “To be, or not to be…” soliloquy.

Meaning and understanding comes later, but familiarity almost certainly makes that easier.  And to grasp the meaning, it would help if only we had more teachers follow the example of Geoffrey Tennant in the great Canadian TV series, Slings and Arrows, and declare: “So, let’s get rid of the curriculum and I think we should just f*ck around with some texts.”  I’ve experienced many an English teacher drain  all of the joy and depth from Shakespeare by mechanically having the class take turns reading passages while ticking off what students need to know for the AP exam.

Watch Geoffrey motivate an accountant from the plastics firm to do a better reading of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” soliloquy:

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Check out the trippy cover on this month’s OCPA Perspective – and, if you have any extra time when you’re done admiring it, spare a minute to read the cover story, too:

For thirteen years, I’ve been a researcher in the school choice movement, and from day one the most important part of the job has been mythbusting. Ask any other researcher in this field and he’ll say the same. There’s no other issue in American politics where one side has built its case so thoroughly upon untrue factual statements. It seems like no media story on this topic can get by without repeating these myths as facts. It never stops.

Here are a few of the more important myths, drawn from recent debates in Oklahoma…

It’s a shame we still have to spend so much time mythbusting:

There’s so much we still don’t know about education. I’d love it if we researchers could focus our energy on uncovering the facts we don’t yet have. What factors are most important in a high quality teacher? To what extent does a school’s institutional culture make a difference? What policy and social conditions are needed to support more robust creation of new schools? Why do we see some evidence that there may be a tradeoff between good academic outcomes and good moral character outcomes, when we would expect the two to be aligned?

What we still don’t know about education is a big deal. But our bigger problem is what we think we know that isn’t so.

I nominate Jim Ardis for “The Higgy.” Jim Ardis has been the mayor of Peoria, IL since 2005.  A year ago Jon Daniel created a parody Twitter account, @peoriamayor, mocking the mayor with juvenile humor suggesting that the mayor had a penchant for drugs, liquor, and prostitutes.  The mayor didn’t appreciate the humor (or the 1st Amendment).  The Chicago Tribune describes what happened next:

Within two days of the account’s creation, the city manager sent an email to Sam Rivera, the city’s chief information officer, asking for his help in getting the account taken down.

“Someone is using the Mayor’s likeness in a twitter account,” Urich wrote in a March 11 e-mail. “It’s not him. @Peoriamayor. Can you work to get it shut down today?”

Less than an hour later, Urich turned to Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard and asked him to have a detective investigate the identity of the account’s creator. Settingsgaard quickly assigned the case to Det. James Feehan, a member of the department’s computer crimes unit. By 11 a.m. – about four hours after Urich first contacted the department – Feehan expressed doubts about whether any crime had been committed.

“I looked at the comments and photographs posted by the suspect. Nothing contained within amounts to criminal violations,” Feehan wrote in an email to his chief. “However, there are tweets posted by the individual which amount to defamation. Without a subpoena issued to Twitter to obtain the IP address of the account creator, there is not much else we can do. I did send Twitter the report of the impersonating account and requested it be removed asap.”

Settingsgaard passed the detective’s findings along to the mayor, though he doubted whether Ardis could meet the legal threshold for a defamation suit.

“This phony Twitter account does not constitute a criminal violation in that no threats are made,” the chief wrote. “I’m not sure if it would support a civil suit for defamation of character. I’m not an expert in the civil arena but my recollection is that public officials have very limited protection from defamation.”

Ardis was undeterred. He sent an email the next day to Urich, Rivera and Settingsgaard, urging them to get the account taken down.

“Any chance we can put a sense (of) urgency on this?” Ardis asked.

Urich echoed his boss’ wishes in a reply sent three minutes later.

“Quickly please,” he wrote.

Feehan and Rivera, however, already had separately reported the fake account to Twitter, which allows for parody accounts as long as they’re labeled as such.

In the meantime, Feehan continued to research the law regarding impersonation and came across a new state statute that prohibits people from falsely identifying themselves as public officials. Though it was only a misdemeanor crime, it would give the department the legal muscle it needed to force Twitter’s cooperation in shuttering the account.

If Ardis wanted to prosecute, they would proceed with taking a formal complaint.

“i absolutely will prosecute,” Ardis wrote in an email to Settingsgaard. “bring it on. thanks chief.”

Ardis’ decision allowed police to subpoena Twitter, which turned over the IP address used to access the account and temporarily suspended the account. With that information secured, the department subpoenaed Comcast for the account holder’s name and address.

On April 15 – more than three weeks after the @peoriamayor account was suspended – Peoria police raided the home where Daniel lived. Four officers tore the house apart, as records show they searched for any and all electronics capable of sending the offensive tweets. The search warrant also allowed officers to scour the house for drugs, as they believed “cocaine, heroin, (or) drug paraphernalia” could be present in the home because one of the tweets included a picture of a “white powdery substance” being cut by a razor blade.

In the end, police confiscated four computers, four iPhones, an iPad and two Xboxes belonging to several people who lived at the house. They also found a “broken black ashtray with green seedy substance” and a “large gold gift bag with five sandwich bags containing a green leafy substance,” according to police reports. Tests showed the seedy substance was marijuana, officials said.

Authorities charged Jacob Elliott, whose name was on the home’s Comcast account, with possession of marijuana. His case is pending.

Daniel, who was not home during the raid, showed up at the police station later that evening and declined to answer questions without a lawyer present. He later acknowledged he created the Twitter account, but he was never arrested….

Three days after the raid, with the public backlash gearing up, the would-be case against Daniel unraveled completely. In an email sent to Ardis and Urich entitled “Twitter problem,” Settingsgaard broke the news to his bosses.

“Det Feehan is going to review with (State’s Attorney Jerry) Brady on Monday but there may be an internet exception to the impersonating statute,” he wrote. “If it is exempt, everyone missed it from the investigators to the SAO (the state’s attorney’s office) and the judges.”

There are so many things wrong with this story that it’s hard to know where to begin.  You know what, I’m not even going to try to list what is wrong with what Ardis and other city employees did other than to emphasize that they ended up using a SWAT team to raid someone’s house over Constitutionally protected free speech on the pretext that it was a misdemeanor violation for impersonating a public official when it turns out that the statute actually exempts the internet from such violations (leaving aside the 1st Amendment stuff).

I think this qualifies Ardis for “The Higgy.”  As the award’s criteria state: “‘The Higgy’ will not identify the worst person in the world, just as ‘The Al’ does not recognize the best.  Instead, ‘The Higgy’ will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.”  Jim Ardis is not the worst person in the world.  I’m sure he loves his family and (in the spirit of Al Copeland) the O’Leary’s Restaurant he used to own may serve a delicious fried chicken (even if it is only as chicken tenders.)

Despite these possible positive qualities, Ardis is still a tyrant who chips away at our liberty by using the authority of the government to persecute people who offend him.  You might even call him a Petty Little Dictator.

The delicious justice is that Ardis’ thuggery has not been effective.  When he once was being mocked by a single, obscure parody account on Twitter, there are now more than a dozen.  And Jon Daniel has filed a civil suit seeking damages.

High school musicals used to attract parents and friends of the cast and crew, but as the Wall Street Journal tells us, the audience has expanded.  The entire article is worth reading, but here is a taste:

With high-school musical season under way, moms and dads are cheering for their favorite Pippins, Annies and Tevyes in auditoriums across the country.

Buried in the crowd, trying to blend in, is a different sort: the adult with no connection to the school whatsoever….

Long a springtime ritual, the high-school musical has never been known widely as must-see entertainment. But high-school shows have become increasingly elaborate—with Broadway-worthy sets, local competitions for best actor and actress and R-rated choices like “Rent.” Fans seek out the student performances for cheap entertainment or a chance to see a musical that otherwise might not be performed locally. Some even follow the teenage thespians as though they were A-list stars….

How good are these shows?

It doesn’t really matter, said Scott Delman, a tough critic in his normal life. He has won four Tony Awards for producing such Broadway hits as “The Book of Mormon” and “Death of a Salesman” and sometimes attends secondary-school interpretations with business associates who want to show off a son or daughter. When he goes to a high-school show, “I don’t even focus on the quality,” he said. “I am swept away by the energy and the enthusiasm.” Occasionally he congratulates performers after a show, disclosing his day job so they know it is more than just a parent’s biased view.

So, don’t worry if you don’t know anyone in the upcoming Fayetteville High School production of Little Shop of Horrors.  Just go to enjoy fun and reasonably priced entertainment.

It is time once gain to solicit nominations for the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award.  Below I reproduce portions of the first announcement of “The Higgy” in 2012, so you have an understanding of the historic significance and criteria for this dishonor.

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As someone who was recognized in 2006 as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, I know a lot about the importance of awards highlighting people of significant accomplishment.  Here on JPGB we have the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, but I’ve noticed that “The Al” only recognizes people of positive accomplishment.  As Time Magazine has understood in naming Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Ayatullah Khomeini as Persons of the Year, accomplishments can be negative as well as positive.

(Then again, Time has also recognized some amazing individuals as Person of the Year, including Endangered Earth, The Computer, Twenty-Five and Under, and The Peacemakers, so I’m not sure we should be paying so much attention to what a soon-to-be-defunct magazine does.  But that’s a topic for another day when we want to talk about how schools are more likely to be named after manatees than George Washington.)

Where were we?  Oh yes.  It is important to recognize negative as well as positive accomplishment.  So I introduce “The Higgy,” an award named after William Higinbotham, as the mirror award to our well-established “Al.”

Just as Al Copeland was not without serious flaws as a person, William Higinbotham was not without his virtues.  Higinbotham did, after all  develop the first video game.  But Higinbotham dismissed the importance of that accomplishment and instead chose to be an arrogant [jerk] by claiming that his true accomplishment was in helping found the Federation of American Scientists and working for the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.  I highly doubt that the Federation or Higinbotham did a single thing that actually advanced nonproliferation, but they sure were smug about it…

I suspect that Al Copeland, by contrast, understood that he was a royal jerk.  And he also understood that developing a chain of spicy chicken restaurants really does improve the human condition.  Higinbotham’s failing was in mistaking self-righteous proclamations for actually making people’s lives better in a way that video games really do improve the human condition.

So, “The Higgy” will not identify the worst person in the world, just as “The Al” does not recognize the best.  Instead, “The Higgy” will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.

We will invite nominations for “The Higgy” in late March and will announce the winner, appropriately enough, on April 15.  Thanks to Greg for his suggestions in developing “The Higgy.”