Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by James Shuls)

There may not be an actual town of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” There is, however, a profession that comes very close – A profession where everyone is effective, meets expectations, and is an all-around great person. It is the teaching profession.

In 2009, The New Teacher Project brought attention to the Lake Wobegon effect in education. Their report analyzed teacher evaluation practices in 12 districts in four states and found that almost universally teachers received good marks. In districts that use a broad scale to rate teachers, 94% received one of the top two ratings. In districts that used a binary scale, 99% were rated as satisfactory. They concluded, “A teacher’s effectiveness – the most important factor for schools in improving student achievement—is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way.”

This practice of marking all teachers above average is not isolated to a few districts. Education Week reporter Stephen Sawchuk noted:

The figures are resoundingly similar. In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better under new teacher-evaluation systems recently put in place. In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or better.

Principals in Tennessee judged 98 percent of teachers to be “at expectations” or better last school year, while evaluators in Georgia gave good reviews to 94 percent of teachers taking part in a pilot evaluation program

More recently, Sawchuk reported the results of Indiana’s new teacher evaluation system. He wrote:

 …similar to other states, the results are almost entirely rosy.

The Associated Press reported that 88 percent of teachers and administrators were rated as either effective or highly effective under the system; only about 2 percent need improvement, and less than a half a percent were deemed ineffective. About 10 percent of teachers weren’t rated because their collective-bargaining agreements hadn’t been updated yet.

Now, I love teachers as much as the next guy (I used to be one and I married one), but these reports are troubling. We know, from personal experience and from objective data, that not all teachers are wonderful and effective.

A number of studies have documented the tremendous variation in teacher quality. Economist Eric Hanushek writes:

…the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year.

Sadly, Lake Wobegon doesn’t exist and not every teacher is above average. Centrally imposed evaluation systems, however, are not the answer for this problem. As the results from Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Tennessee have made clear, these plans often turn out to be meaningless – most  likely, because these teacher evaluation systems tend to be “blocked, diluted, and co-opted” by the education establishment, just like merit pay plans.  Centrally imposing an evaluation system deemed optimal by the scientists and experts has not solved the Lake Woebegon problem.

If we want meaningful evaluations of teachers, we don’t need to mandate the evaluation. Rather, we need to give school leaders the ability and motivation to make their evaluations mean something. If school leaders actually had the authority and proper incentives to make positive pay or firing decisions based on teacher performance, we might start seeing some teacher evaluation systems that reflect reality.

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James Shuls is the Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute. Follow on Twitter @shulsie

My colleagues, Bob Maranto and Michael Crouch, have an oped in the Wall Street Journal today arguing that single parenthood is a major contributor to poverty and inequality and yet receives remarkably little attention from scholars and media elites.  They write:

Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can’t change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn’t some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

Their critique of political science and education researchers’ neglect of this issue is particularly devastating:

In the past four years, our two academic professional organizations—the American Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association—have each dedicated annual meetings to inequality, with numerous papers and speeches denouncing free markets, the decline of unions, and “neoliberalism” generally as exacerbating economic inequality. Yet our searches of the groups’ conference websites fail to turn up a single paper or panel addressing the effects of family change on inequality.

The piece is certain to generate a variety of strong reactions.  It is already the #1 article in today’s WSJ.  But just so that you don’t caricature the authors as nanny-state moral police, they understand that the solution has to flow from a gradual and non-coercive national discussion:

The change must come from long-term societal transformation on this subject, led by political, educational and entertainment elites, similar to the decades-long movements against racism, sexism—and smoking.  But the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

And in a further departure from stereotype (and to make sure he angers more people), Bob has repeatedly written in defense of gay marriage, including here and here and here.

Morgan Polikoff thought my posts last week on the Paradoxical Logic of Ed Reform Politics were “a tad premature for the ‘CCSS are dead’ hysterics.”  I had written:

The unraveling of Common Core makes this flop the most obviously ill-conceived and doomed-to-fail reform effort since the Annenberg Foundation threw $500 million away in the 1990s.  I assure you that while the money was flowing from Annenberg that effort had plenty of defenders, just as Common Core does today.  After Common Core fails, everyone will say how they knew it was flawed, just as they currently do with Annenberg.  Victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.

Morgan noted that “At last count, 1 state out of 45 has repealed the standards.”  I responded: “I’m sure gay marriage opponents felt similarly triumphant in 2004. How many states have effectively implemented Common Core?”

So, we have agreed upon a wager.  In ten years, on April 14, 2024, I bet Morgan that fewer than half the states will be in Common Core.  We defined being in Common Core as “shared standards with shared high stakes tests-even if split between 2 tsts.”  Given 51 states and DC, Morgan wins if 26 or more states have shared standards and high stakes tests and I win if the number is 25 or less.  The loser has to buy the winner a beer (or other beverage).

According to Heritage’s count, 15 states have already refused to join Common Core, paused implementation, or downgraded or withdrawn from participation in national tests.  I just need all of these states to continue toward withdrawal from Common Core and 11 more to join them over the next ten years.  I like my chances.

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

All Rick Hess and Mike McShane needed to do was e-mail me (they know my address) and ask what I’ve done, instead of presenting a baseless complaint—that critics of Common Core have not come up with next steps to “repeal and replace” for states that want to restore academic integrity to their K-12 curriculum in English language arts and mathematics.  I’m almost but not quite exhausted from all the “next steps” I’ve taken.

Two years ago I crafted an updated set of English language arts standards based on the set I helped develop in Massachusetts in 1997.  This set of standards, copyright-free and cost-free, has been available for districts and states to use in place of Common Core’s standards since May 2013. The document is on my old home page at the University of Arkansas and on the website of the Association for Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.

Here’s how they are described in an introduction to the document by John Briggs, an English professor at the University of California, Riverside and current ALSCW president:  “The role of literature and the literary imagination in K-12 education is of particular concern to the ALSCW. The … carefully articulated and detailed set of English Language Arts standards prepared by Sandra Stotsky… will contribute to the national conversation by emphasizing the importance of literary study in the education of the young.”

Far from being so obscure that few know about this document, it was listed in the recently released Indiana standards document as one of the resources the standards-drafting committee referred to. Nothing in my document was used, of course, but not for the reason Hess and McShane cook up.  That the standards-drafting and evaluation committees came up with an imitation of Common Core is not because Common Core was the “default” position for educators under a “tight timeline.” It was because a warmed-over version of Common Core was the goal set for the committees established by Governor Michael Pence’s education policy director, Claire Fiddian-Green, and the Indiana Department of Education staffer co-directing the project with her, Molly Chamberlin.

Fiddian-Green came to her position from being director of the Indiana Charter School Board, with a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University and undergraduate majors in political science and Russian studies at Brown University. Sterling academic credentials, but no teaching experience in K-12, it seems, and apparently little if any knowledge of English language arts and mathematics.

What makes it clear that an imitation of Common Core was the goal of this project is the content of the drafts, starting with the public comment draft (Draft #1) released in February. It was so like Common Core that it evoked a storm of public criticism for its resemblance. I declined Governor Pence’s request to review that document, making it clear that there was no point in my reviewing Common Core yet another time. Fiddian-Green promised me that the next draft would be significantly different and, in response to another request from Gov. Pence, I agreed to review Draft #2 if it was not warmed-over Common Core.

On March 14, I was sent Draft #2.  It was almost identical to Draft #1 in grades 6-12.  I wrote back immediately asking Fiddian-Greenand Chamberlin if I had been sent the wrong file.  No, I hadn’t. On March 17, Fiddian-Green sent me the fruits of their week-end analysis: 93% of the standards in ELA in grades 6-12 were Common Core’s, most verbatim.  I wrote to Gov. Pence that day saying I wouldn’t review that cut-and-paste job, either, but would send him a report from two workshops on Draft #2 that I would hold at a conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, serendipitously to take place in Bloomington, Indiana, on April 4 and 5.

My purpose was to give the governor, Fiddian-Green, and Chamberlin whatever suggestions came out of workshops attended by literary scholars and local high school English teachers.  I invited Fiddian-Green, Chamberlin, and indeed the entire staff of the Indiana Department of Education to participate in the workshops.  None came.  But four local English teachers did, as did over 20 literary scholars at the conference.

I sent the report containing their many suggestions for revising grades 6-12 in Draft #2  (readers must remember this draft was mainly Common Core, which they all thought was pretty awful) to Gov. Pence, Fiddian-Green, and others on April 8.  Not one suggestion made its way into the final draft released on April 14 (Draft #3).  In retrospect, it is clear that Draft #3 had to look like Common Core to satisfy Jeb Bush, the Gates Foundation, and the USDE, but it also had to look somewhat different to justify all the thousands of hours Fiddian-Green claimed the committees had spent on this job.  How much this game of pretense cost Indiana taxpayers we may never know.

Remember that Gov. Pence had publicly asked for “uncommonly high standards, written by Hoosiers for Hoosiers.”  The major problem in getting even a decent imitation of Common Core to come out of such an ill-conceived and poorly-executed plan was that the committees selected by Fiddian-Green and Chamberlin weren’t capable of doing anything other than making the standards even weaker and more incoherent than Common Core’s.  “Not making mathematical sense (NMMS),” as most of the mathematics standards were described by Hung-Hsi Wu, one of the reviewing mathematicians, and from the University of California, Berkeley.

I had already asked for expanded committees to include qualified high school English teachers and recognized literary scholars from Indiana after I had looked at the original list of committee members. But I had been told by Fiddian-Green that she and Chamberlin had complete confidence in the committees they had selected.  I am sure there are qualified high school English teachers in the state and recognized literary scholars at Indiana universities; they just weren’t on these committees.

Bottom Line:  Indiana citizens now have uncommonly incoherent standards, written less incoherently four years ago in Washington DC by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, but botched up by Hoosiers for Hoosiers.

We have had another excellent (that is, horrible) group of nominees for the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award.  It is more than a bit disconcerting that both this year and last we have had a plethoria of compelling nominees.

My own nominee, Paul Ehrlich, was a strong candidate.  His modern Malthusian warnings about how humans were exhausting natural resources and needed to control pupilation to avoid an imminent catastrophe helped justify the oppressive and disastrous Chinese One-Child Policy.  Ehrlich would have won The Higgy were it not for the fact that folks are already recognizing the dangers of declining birth rates, especially when coerced by the government.  Even the Chinese are starting to back away from their policy.  The demographic problems of more retireees dependent on fewer workers is becoming a big topic of discussion throughout Europe, Japan, and America.  And even the developing world is producing dramatically lower birth rates.  The highly influential Higgy does not appear necessary to discredit Ehrlich’s ideas.

Barney Frank is also a very worthy nomination.  Frank not only personally contributed to the causes of the Great Recession by  championing policies that pushed and subsidized lenders to provide houses to everyone, regardless of the ability to pay, but also has the chutzpah to assert “The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it.”  But Frank falls short of The Higgy because he was far from alone in the governmental recklessness that nearly destroyed private credit.  Politicians on both sides of the aisle favored a house in every pot (they had to up the ante from chickens).  Politicians will always be tempted to promise free money and we’re to blame if we take them up on their offer by electing them.

A reader in a comment suggested John Maynard Keynes, who is also a compelling candidate for The Higgy.  But the reader did not make a full case, so it is hard for me to fully judge the merits of this nomination.  In addition, I’m inclined to believe that governments did not need Keynes to believe that they should actively meddle in the economy.  They were doing it plenty  well before Keynes came along.

This year’s winner of The Higgy is Paul G. Kirk, Jr. for inventing the pernicious notion of a “free speech zone.”  Even with a constitutional guarantee, free speech is always under seige because the government and other powerful folks would rather not be undermined by it.  People often wrongly cite the decision in Schenck v. United States as proving that the government would only restrict speech if it posed a “clear and present danger.”  What those people forget is that even while articulating the clear and present danger standard, the Supreme Court upheld Schenck’s conviction for passing out leaflets in front of a draft office during the Great War.  If a guy on the street corner handing out leaflets can be interpreted as a clear and present danger, then clearly the government will be inclined to restrict speech whenever it can.

The essential check on government control over speech is the popular backlash that would occur if the government over-reaches.  The accountability of the government to people in elections (and if bad enough, in the form of revolution) is essential to making the words in the Constitution protecting free speech real.  In the face of popular protection of free speech, censoring authorities have to find sneakier ways to control speech.  They have to find indirect and less obvious ways, like creating free speech zones.

For contributing to this sneaky infringement on our liberty, Paul G. Kirk, Jr. is deserving of the dishonor of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award.

In my last post I suggested that “In education, as in military and political strategy more generally, the most direct and definitive path to victory often lays the foundations for defeat.  Instead, the indirect and less definitive solution is almost always more effective.”

The paradoxical logic of military and political strategy is a result of the fact that in the strategic world one’s opponent is able to react to your efforts with counter-moves.  Technocrats seem to think that effective policy-making just consists of identifying the optimal solution and then imposing it on everybody.  Strategists understand that the other side of a policy battle has interests and values that lead them to different policy preferences. Even if the technocrat can identify the optimal solution and manage to get that solution adopted as policy (and this is a huge if), the other side doesn’t go away no matter how much the technocrats just want them to shut up and disappear.

Technocrats have an authoritarian streak that makes them expect the losing side to surrender permanently in deference to what “science” and “experts” have decided is best.  But in a diverse, decentralized democracy, people don’t have to accept what you claim based on your science and expertise (and they might be right in doing so).  They can subvert effective implementation of your policy and bide their time until they can re-open the debate and regain control over policy.

The more completely and directly you try to prevail in a policy dispute the more you mobilize the other side to oppose you — if not at the time of adoption, then later in implementation or when the debate is re-opened. Seeking total victory often lays the foundations for defeat.  In  Dred Scott v. Sandford Chief Justice Taney seemed to hand supporters of slavery a total victory, but it led to their ultimate defeat.  As Wikipedia summarizes it:

Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would settle the slavery question once and for all by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, it produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern slavery opposition, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.

In a diverse, decentralized democracy you can’t settle contentious issues once and for all.  In policy-making there is no total and final victory, only perpetual struggle.

Technocrats are inclined to seek total and final victory.  If science or the experts have shown something to be wrong, why should that wrong be allowed to continue anywhere?  This produces a tendency to over-reach.  Technocrats can’t tolerate the notion that a solution won’t cover everybody and improve things for everyone.  If things are bad in Mississippi it just ruins their whole day.

But trying to fix everything, everywhere usually leads to fixing nothing anywhere — or sometimes to making things much worse.  In the end the technocrat doesn’t seem as motivated by helping as many people as possible, as much as motivated by the unreasonable feeling of responsibility for “allowing” something bad to continue for someone.  But addressing your inner angst about someone still suffering somewhere at the expense of making progress toward helping more people is egotistical.  It isn’t about you.  You are not the Master of the Universe who “allows” bad things to happen.  You’re just a person trying to work with others to make progress.

People sometimes think that I’m a radical because of my preference for parental control over the education of their children.  But I think I’m really the moderate in education debates.  The extremists are the ones who are trying to devise fixes for everyone else’s problems.  They’re radical because they (falsely) believe they can identify optimal solutions and successfully impose them on everyone.  My approach is moderate because I accept that gradual progress toward better outcomes (even if some people  might make the “wrong” choices and not experience improvement) is more realistic and productive.

Even if you are a standards and test-based accountability person, you are better off not seeking total victory as the Common Core people have.  Yes, some states had lousy standards.  And yes, some tests were poorly designed or had low thresholds for passing.  But trying to fix all standards and tests, everywhere, all at once is the wrong approach.  Seeking this total victory has more fully mobilized the opponents of all standards and testing.  In response to a more heavy-handed and top-down national effort, more previously un-involved people have flocked to the anti-testing side.  Not only will these folks undermine effective implementation of Common Core, but in their counter-effort to roll back national standards, they will destroy much of what was good about state standards and tests.  The whole idea of standards and test-based accountability is being undermined by the imprudent over-reach of Common Core.

I apply the same cautiousness to my approach to parental choice in education.  I would never recommend adopting nationwide school choice programs.  The truth is we don’t know how best to design choice programs.  Is it best to have vouchers, tax-credit funded scholarships, individual tax credits, ESA’s, etc…?  What kind of regulatory framework should we have?  Should testing be required?  What test?  I have my guesses about what would be good, but I don’t have the technocrat’s confidence that I can identify the right solution and impose it everywhere.  Let’s let different localities try different kinds of programs and gradually learn about what seems to be working and what doesn’t.

Whether your preferred policy solution is based on standards and accountability, parental choice, instructional reform, or something else, the better approach to reform is gradual and decentralized so that everyone can learn and adapt.  Your reform strategy has to be consistent with the diverse, decentralized, and democratic country in which we live.  You won’t fix everything for everyone right away, but you should avoid Great Leaps Forward. Seek partial victories because with the paradoxical logic of ed reform politics total victory ultimately leads to total defeat.

April 15 is known nation-wide as the day when your taxes are due and when the winner of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award is announced.   But sometimes April 15 falls on a weekend or a holiday and the tax deadline is extended.  This year Passover starts tonight and observant Jews refrain from work through Wednesday.  While the US government does not care enough about Passover to delay the tax deadline, I will delay the announcement of The Higgy until the end of this week to allow some people to complete and submit their nominations while they observe the ultimate Freedom Holiday.  Chag Sameach.

Ed reform has been going through a bad stretch lately.  Currently dominant reform theories are the result of technocratic thinking.  They seek to identify (and impose) “optimal” topics to be taught, ways to teach those subjects, methods for training teachers, strategies for evaluating and motivating teachers, etc…  An army of economists or economist-wannabes have seized the reins of reform organizations with the hope that their next regression will tell everyone what to do to solve the mystery of improving schools.  They pay little heed to history, which might alert them to the failure of past efforts similar to their brave new undertakings.  And they are unfamiliar with basic lessons from political science on the dangers and failures of technocratic central planning.

Let me offer one political science lesson for ed reformers that I learned from reading Edward Luttwak’s book, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.  Luttwak argues that there is a paradoxical logic to strategy.  In the realm of strategy what often seems good turns out to be bad and vice versa.  This is why strategists often say things like: “If you want peace, prepare for war;” “A buildup of offensive weapons can be purely defensive;” and “The worst road may be the best route to battle.”

Both military and political strategy have this paradoxical logic because they involve opponents who can observe your efforts and make counter-moves.  You can’t just run a regression to find the optimal solution and then expect everyone to thank you for discovering what you claim to be better methods.  Education is a political system that involves competing interests and values.  For the most part our problems are not caused by ignorance of optimal solutions, but by these clashing interests and values embedded in dysfunctional systems.

To fix these problems we need to address people’s competing interests and values and not just impose a technocratic solution from above.  In education, as in military and political strategy more generally, the most direct and definitive path to victory often lays the foundations for defeat.  Instead, the indirect and less definitive solution is almost always more effective.

Before turning to education, let’s consider the paradoxical logic of strategy with respect to another policy — gay marriage.  Opponents of gay marriage pursued the most direct and definitive approach to securing the victory of their policy view.  In 1996 they managed to get a bipartisan and veto-proof majority in Congress to pass the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which became law with the signature of President Bill Clinton.  DOMA “barred same-sex married couples from being recognized as ‘spouses’ for purposes of federal laws, effectively barring them from receiving federal marriage benefits.”  Opponents then managed to get 31 states to adopt constitutional amendments forbidding those states from recognizing same-sex unions.

By banning gay marriage at the federal level and in a majority of state constitutions one might have thought that opponents of gay marriage had scored a decisive victory.  But, by seeking to impose their policy view with a direct and definitive approach, the opponents of gay marriage planted the seeds of their own defeat.  Big losses for supporters of gay marriage motivated them to organize and develop inventive strategies for reversing those defeats.  They focused heavily on influencing popular culture and the media.  They went to the courts.

Meanwhile, opponents of gay marriage failed to continue efforts aimed at influencing mass opinion and neglected the debate.  They thought they had won, so why keep debating?  In a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country, there are no permanent political victories or defeats.  Winning a legislative battle or ballot initiative does not make the other side change its mind or go away.  They’re still there, devising ways to come back and win in future rounds.

Supporters of Common Core have made some of the same political mistakes that opponents of gay marriage did.  They figured if they could get the US Department of Education, DC-based organizations, and state school chiefs on board, they would have a direct and definitive victory.  And at first blush it looked like they had achieved it, with about 45 states committing to adopt the new set of standards and federally-sponsored standardized tests aligned to those standards.  Like opponents of gay marriage, the Common Core victory seemed so overwhelming that they hardly felt the need to engage in debates to defend it.

But in the rush to a clear and total victory, supporters of Common Core failed to consider how the more than 10,000 school districts, more than 3 million teachers, and the parents of almost 50 million students would react.  For standards to actually change practice, you need a lot of these folks on board.  Otherwise Common Core, like most past standards, will just be a bunch of empty words in a document.

These millions of local officials, educators, and parents often have reasons for holding educational preferences that are different than those dictated by Common Core.  Common Core may call for things like more focus on “informational texts”  and delaying Algebra until 9th grade, but there are reasons why that is not already universal practice.  It’s not as if local officials, educators, and parents are unaware of the existence of informational texts or just waiting to be told by national elites about when they should start teaching Algebra.  They have interests and values that drove them to the arrangements that were in place prior to Common Core.

Having the Secretary of Education, state boards, and a bunch of DC advocacy groups declare a particular approach to be best and cram it into place in the middle of a financial crisis with virtually no public debate or input from educators or parents did not convince local officials, educators, and parents to change their minds.  These are the folks who need to be on board to make the implementation of Common Core real.  And these are the folks who are organizing a political backlash that will undo or neuter Common Core.  A direct path to victory by Common Core supporters sowed the seeds of  its own defeat.

The unraveling of Common Core makes this flop the most obviously ill-conceived and doomed-to-fail reform effort since the Annenberg Foundation threw $500 million away in the 1990s.  I assure you that while the money was flowing from Annenberg that effort had plenty of defenders, just as Common Core does today.  After Common Core fails, everyone will say how they knew it was flawed, just as they currently do with Annenberg.  Victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.

But some of us have been warning of the political naivite of the Common Core effort for some time now.  Rick Hess and Mike McShane at AEI have also done an admirable job of describing the political weakness of Common Core, regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the standards themselves.

Supporters of Common Core may draw the wrong lesson from this post and increase efforts to convince the public and train educators to love the Common Core.  Not only will these re-education efforts be too little, too late, but they fail to grasp the inherent flaw in reforms like Common Core.  Trying to change the content and practice of the entire nation’s school system requires a top-down, direct, and definitive victory to get adopted.  If input and deliberation are sought, or decisions are truly decentralized, then it is too easy to block standards reforms, like Common Core.  Supporters of CC learned this much from the numerous failed efforts to adopt national standards in the past.

But the brute force and directness required for adopting national standards makes its effective implementation in a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country impossible.  This can’t be solved by more professional development and a belated marketing campaign.  Even the Chinese re-education camps couldn’t make the Cultural Revolution reailty — and they invested a whole lot more energy and resources in trying to do so than the Common Core folks ever could.

There is a better, more indirect and less definitive approach to education reform.  In the next post I’ll discuss what that looks like.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The most recent edition of the OCPA Perspective ran an article by yours truly on measuring the “cost per graduate”:

Suppose you buy your daughter ten piano lessons at $20 apiece, but you forget to take her to the first two lessons. You have to pay for all 10 lessons, but she only gets eight of them. Being a conscientious parent, you then buy your daughter another two lessons at $20 apiece so she can complete the 10-lesson course of instruction. And this time you remember to take her!

How much did you spend per lesson? Not $20, but $24. It’s pretty simple math: you spent a total of $240, and your daughter got 10 lessons. Yes, the immediate cost of each lesson at the time you paid for it was $20, but the total cost per lesson ended up being 20 percent higher than that because you didn’t do your job with the first two lessons…

Oklahoma’s high school graduation rate is only 78.5 percent. According to calculations from the U.S. Department of Education, about 10,529 Oklahoma students who ought to have graduated from high school in 2010 dropped out instead. A state that spends so much has a right to expect a lot better than that from its schools.

The education of these dropouts is roughly analogous to the two missed piano lessons. The people of Oklahoma paid the schools to educate these students, but the students didn’t get the education Oklahoma paid for.

I calculate that if we look at spending per high school graduate instead of per student, at current spending levels the annual cost of Oklahoma public schools is not $8,630, but $10,483.

The most important question is not whether Oklahoma taxpayers can afford to go on spending $10,483 per graduate every year, although that question matters. The most important question is whether Oklahoma can afford to go on failing 10,529 students in every high school class, year after year. Schools, like students, need to learn to see a tough task through until it’s complete. And if they tell us they’re having too much trouble learning, reforms like school choice could help them get up to speed.

Paul Ehrlich is a Stanford University biologist most famous for his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, and subsequent dire predictions about how human population growth would exhaust food and other natural resource supplies, leading to cataclysmic destruction of the human race and all of earth’s creatures.  Ehrlich was not the first to predict that population growth would outstrip food production (the idea goes back at least to the 18th century’s Thomas Robert Malthus), and he certainly won’t be the last.  People love doomsday predictions no matter how often they turn out false.

And Ehrlich’s predictions have turned out to be remarkably false.  Wikipedia provides some examples:

On the first Earth Day in 1970, he warned that “[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” In a 1971 speech, he predicted that: “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The fact that nearly half a century after warning of  the imminent collapse of civilization and mass starvation Ehrlich’s predictions have not come to pass has done nothing to shake Ehrlich or his most ardent supporters’ confidence in his analysis.  Disaster has merely been deferred, in their view.  Like the members of the cult profiled in Leon Festinger‘s When Prophesy Fails, Ehrlich and his supporters have doubled-down with an increased conviction that human action is about to destroy the planet.

Of course, it is always possible that humans will eventually destroy themselves, but this does not appear to be imminent.  Ehrlich’s analysis has been and is likely to continue to be flawed because he grossly under-estimates the ability of human ingenuity to innovate and adapt, avoiding resource shortage catastrophes.

The economist, Julian Simon, articulated this argument in his 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource.  Simon explains that price is the most efficient mechanism for avoiding shortage catastrophes.  When rising demand begins to make a resource more scarce, the price rises.  Rising prices provide strong incentives for people to find substitutes for the scarce resource or to innovate and develop techniques for producing more of that resource.  Catastrophic shortages tend not to sneak up on us.  Prices anticipate future shortages and give us time to innovate or adapt.

To prove his point, Simon actually made a wager with Ehrlich about how innovation and adaptation would make shortages less severe over time, causing resource prices to tend to decline in real terms.  Here’s how Wikipedia describes the wager:

In 1968, Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims, so proposed a wager, telling Ehrlich to select any raw material he wanted and select “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

Ehrlich and his colleagues (including John Holdren, later an advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology) picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, the price of each of Ehrlich’s selected metals had fallen…. As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon’s favor.

I am not nominating Paul Ehrlich for The Higgy because he’s been wrong.  A lot of scientists have been wrong about a lot of things and there is no harm in advancing an argument that turns out to be mistaken.  Nor am I nominating Ehrlich because he has stubbornly adhered to his theories despite considerable evidence to contradict them.  This is a remarkably common flaw among scientists when they are proved wrong and also does relatively little harm.

Instead, I am nominating Ehrlich because his arguments have provided intellectual support for oppressive government policies to reduce population growth.  As Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb:

“We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.”

As it turned out, resource shortages have not produced the catastrophes Ehrlich expected, but government-orchestrated population control efforts have almost certainly been far more destructive, let alone oppressive.

China’s One Child Policy is the most glaring example of the devastation produced by this mistaken, authoritarian approach.  Since 1979 China has imposed fines on families that have what the government considers to be too many children.  This “system of incentives and penalties,” as Ehrlich suggested, was effective at reducing population growth in China… but at what cost and for what benefit?

Because families are pushed to have only one child and because there is a strong preference for boys, girls have become an endangered species in China.  Between 2000 and 2013 there were 117 male babies born for every 100 girl babies, likely the result of selective-sex abortions.  In addition, neglect, abandonment, and outright infanticide are skewing China even more towards boys after birth.  According to a Chinese government commission, there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020.  In short, there has been a female genocide in China with hardly a peep from American feminists pre-occupied with what they consider more important matters, like whether they need to Lean In to avoid being called “bossy.”

The gender imbalance produced by China’s One Child Policy is also far more likely to lead to social instability and war than the imaginary resource crisis it was meant to prevent.  Having tens of millions of young men unable to find wives is likely to create a violent mob whose untamed aggression Chinese leaders may wish to divert toward conquest and war rather than against their own rule.

The severe decline in birth rates is also creating a demographic disaster of enormous proportions.  Elderly Chinese are dependent on a shrinking number of younger Chinese to support them in old age.  If young Chinese men are not driven toward violence by an inability to find marriageable women, they may well be by the crushing burden of having to work harder and longer to support a much larger number of older Chinese.

And of course, it is hard to imagine a more severe intrusion on personal liberty, including women’s reproductive rights, than to have the government coerce people to have only one child.  Again, where are the developed world’s feminists on this issue?

The Chinese government has begun to notice the disaster they’ve created and are starting to relax the One Child Policy in a variety of ways.  Unfortunately, government technocracy is not nearly as efficient at anticipating and adjusting to the future as price mechanisms are.  There is a government-induced shortage of young people, particularly young women, that cannot be as quickly corrected by tinkering with China’s family policy as other resource constraints could be handled by allowing price to encourage adaptation and innovation.

Ehrlich is worthy of The Higgy because he advanced the catastrophically wrong notion that central planning could more efficiently manage resources than could price mechanisms.  And he is further worthy because his views rationalize the enormous infringements on human liberty that central planning produces.