Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by James Shuls)

What would it look like if Hollywood put teacher tenure on trial on the silver screen? I imagine the closing arguments would look something like this, although probably condensed to 3 minutes. This is video of the closing argument of Marcellus McRae, lead co-counsel for the plaintiffs in Vergara v. California. It is just shy of an hour, but is well worth a watch.

I’ve taken the liberty to pull out some of my favorite quotes.

McRae notes that the teacher credentialing period can actually be longer than the period provided to determine tenure decisions. He says:

“Teachers can actually receive notice that they are being reelected for a tenure teaching position and then subsequently fail to successfully complete the induction program necessary to obtain a clear credential. That’s like telling somebody, we’re going to go ahead and let you get out on the highway and endanger everybody else’ lives for two months and then we’re going to tell you that you failed your driver’s test.”

He goes on to refute the idea that principals can gather enough information in the 16 month period allowed to make tenure decisions.

“There’s not enough time. There’s not enough data. There’s not enough processing time to get an informed view about who can achieve learning gains. So, that you’re deluding yourself if you think you actually have visibility into whether or not this is an informed decision. What you’re doing with your drive by observations in the classroom, what you’re doing in this 16 month, unduly compressed period is making tenure decisions based on impressionism rather than realism. And that is not good enough for the children in the state of California.

How long does it take to remove a tenured teacher who is grossly ineffective? Too long.

“LAUSD has never completed a performance based teacher dismissal hearing in less than two years. Your honor, think about that. We have litigated this case, and we have brought it from the filing of the complaint trough demurs, through discovery, through summary judgment in less time than it takes to dismiss a teacher for unsatisfactory performance in California. That is insane.

But there are ways of getting around tenure laws, there is a ‘workaround.’

“How many times does someone devise a workaround for something that isn’t broken? You can’t make sense out of nonsense.”

He points out the insanity of the “Last In, First Out” (LIFO) layoff policies, which resulted in a teacher of the year being laid off.

“What kind of system do we have, where your prize, your reward, for being teacher of the year is to receive a layoff notice?”

The defendants argued that LIFO was good because it was objective. He points out how the absurdity of this claim.

“…touting something as objective as if that’s virtuous, well height is objective. I mean, alphabetical order is objective. You could have a layoff system based on who can dunk a basketball. I don’t think we want that either, just because its objective doesn’t mean that it has any merit to it and it points out that it is an absurd untenable argument.”

But, but, tenure just gives teachers due process.

“This is not an effort to attack due process. What the teachers under the dismissal code have is not due process. They have excessive, bloated, unnecessary statutory protections. What California state employees have, including teachers, like classified employees, that’s due process.”

And last, but not least:

We have Serrano which acknowledges that funding is an essential component to educational equality. We have the Buck case that acknowledges that time in school is an essential component to educational equality. Let’s place Vergara in that same vain and acknowledge the obvious, that teachers are an essential component to educational equality.

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

The Edu-Pundit Industry loves faux-business-like measures of their effectiveness, so here’s one for you — the Return on Tweets.

In my first “Narcissus” post about Twitter I suggested that Twitter encourages some people to talk much more than people actually want to listen.  So I developed my first faux measure of the ratio of Tweets to Followers to capture that.

In my second “Narcissus” post I suggested that there is perhaps an unhealthy compulsive nature to high-frequency Tweeting.  So I developed another faux measure of the number of minutes on average during people’s waking lives between each tweet.  I identified “The Lost Threshold” to highlight folks who Tweet more often, on average, than once every 108 minutes of their waking lives.  As with the characters in Lost who believe they must enter The Numbers into a computer every 108 minutes, it is ambiguous whether they are engaged in an incredibly important activity (like saving the world) that is worthy of this compulsive behavior or maybe suffering from a manic delusion.

In this third post I calculate how many tweets people have sent between April 2, 2013 and March 27, 2014 as well as the change in “Followers” each person has experienced during that period.  Dividing the number of new tweets by the change in followers, I get the Return on Tweets.  If tweeting is influencing the world, rather than just enjoying listening to oneself talk, then more people should be attracted to listen, or follow, as people talk, or tweet.  People who have to issue more tweets for each new follower have a lower Return on Tweets.

I’m constrained to use the same list of people as I used in my initial post because they are the only ones for whom I have historical information on the number of tweets and followers.  The list for the initial post was identified from Mike Petrilli’s ranking of the most influential education policy Tweeters.  In addition, recent tweet and follower counts have sometimes become less precise when they are large numbers because Twitter has rounded that information to the closest hundred or thousand.  But this is good enough for a faux measure in a dumb blog post about a dumb activity.

As you can see, Alfie Kohn, Michelle Rhee, Vicki Phillips, Wendy Kopp, Sara Mead, and Diane Ravitch have a very high Return on Tweets.  Kohn gets almost 50 new followers for every tweet.  Diane Ravitch may tweet on a near-constant basis, but she attracts new followers even faster — almost three new followers for every one of her 11,102 tweets over the last 359 days.

On the other end of the spectrum are some folks with a very low Return on Tweets.  They send many tweets for each new follower. Sherman Dorn issues almost 17 tweets for each new follower; Morgan Polikoff almost 13; RiShawn Biddle almost 11; Sara Goldrick-Rab more than 9; and Neal McClusky more than 7.  I actually enjoy “following” many of these folks, but that may be an acquired taste.

It is no accident that “powerful people” with money to dispense or popular programs to trumpet show better Returns on Tweets than do scholars.  Maybe Twitter just isn’t the right place for scholarly exchange.  It’s fine for telling a joke, sharing a link, or following breaking news, but as a place for serious policy discussion Twitter seems to have a very low return on investment.

Dude.  You should check out Pat Wolf’s review of Chris and Sarah Lubienki’s new book claiming that public schools academically outperform private schools.  Despite decades of research, including rigorous experiments showing the opposite, the Lubienksis discover a public school advantage by 1) restricting their analysis to standardized math scores (reading, graduation rates, college attendance, incomes, etc…don’t fit their story so they ignore those measures),  2) controlling for participation in government programs, like free lunch and special ed, which are not comparable across public and private schools because privates participate and identify students for those programs at much lower rates, even when dealing with the same exact students, 3) arbitrarily excluding from their longitudinal analysis students who switch sectors.

The net effect of these three methodological choices, plus the fact that standardized math results are more closely aligned with how the subject is taught in public than private schools, strongly skew the results in favor of public schools.  The beauty of randomized experiments is that their results are not so easily manipulated by bizarre choices of what is controlled.  But the Lubienski’s don’t like randomized experiments.  Advocates for quack medicine also tend not to like randomized experiments.  They don’t let you selectively control for things until you get the answer you want.

Dude, let’s go bowling.

One of my personal heroes, Kinky Friedman, appears poised to win the Democratic nomination to be the party’s candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner.  According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Friedman knocked out the party establishment’s candidate and is facing a run-off against a little-known cattle rancher who has no plans to raise money or campaign for the office.  Kinky’s prospects in the general election may be weak, but it looks like he has a good shot at the nomination.  And Texas Agriculture Commissioner is no small job.  The WSJ describes it as “a powerful position that oversees an agency with 700 employees and a $550 million annual budget.”

Kinky’s likely nomination warrants national news coverage for two reasons.  First and foremost, he’s a very atypical political candidate.  He’s primarily known as a musician, comedian, and general rascal.  According to Wikipedia, his band,  Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, “toured with Bob Dylan in 1975-6. His repertoire mixed social commentary (“We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You”) and maudlin ballads (“Western Union Wire”) with raucous humor (such as “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed”). His “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” was an extended tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. One of his most famous numbers is “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” a song in which Kinky verbally and physically beats up a drunken white racist who berates blacks, Jews, Greeks, and Sigma Nus in a bar.”

His political views are also eccentric.  Again, according to Wikipedia: “On capital punishment, he previously summed up his position, ‘I am not anti-death penalty, but I’m damn sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed…. The system is not perfect. Until it’s perfect, let’s do away with the death penalty.'”  On gay marriage: “I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.”  And: “According to Cigar Aficionado magazine, Friedman plans to roll back ‘any and all smoking bans’ if elected. One of his favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain: ‘If smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go.’ Friedman supports the decriminalization of marijuana, though he doesn’t advocate making its sale legal. ‘I’m not talking about like Amsterdam,’ he noted, ‘We’ve got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.'”

But beneath Kinky’s politically incorrect music and public pronouncements is a serious agenda.  Watch the video above and you’ll learn that Kinky was an early Peace Corps volunteer in Indonesia.  And he’s concerned about President Obama’s lack of leadership in the Middle East and failure to connect with the “common man.”  He admires Winston Churchill and Harry Truman.  He’s a champion of the little guy.  Sure, his ideas are not carefully crafted, but that’s the point.  He’s a Jewish cowboy who pokes fun at everyone, including himself.

The second reason Kinky’s likely nomination is making news is that it’s posing problems for other Democratic candidates in Texas who had hoped to present a unified front in the coming general election.  How will they handle a candidate who has used campaign slogans such as “How Hard Could It Be?” and “Why The Hell Not?”

At the very least it will be very entertaining.  And if you’d like some entertainment in the meantime, enjoy this live performance from Ireland of Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys performing “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.”  Remember, he’s joking, but he’s also making a serious attack on racism.

The new SAT will be like totally awesome.  As David Coleman, that righteous dude who was Gates’ majordomo for writing Common Core and now re-writing the SAT, said, the old SAT had “become disconnected from the work of our high schools.”  Yeah, it had a bunch of bogus vocab words that only brainiacs use in literature, poetry, and other useless stuff.  

No man, the new SAT will test for words people really use when they are all-like career and college ready,  like “drill-down” and “synergy.”  As that excellent SAT company says “the SAT will focus on words that students will use consistently in college and beyond.”  Yeah, like “bong” and “extended unemployment benefits.”

And the new SAT will be all equal and stuff.  It’s no fair when people get an edge cuz they know more things.  We can’t have that.  So the new math test won’t have no pre-calculus stuff that nobody but some foreign kids know how to do anymore.  Don’t we have computers for that stuff?  The new test will just cover “linear equations, functions, and proportions,” man.  Maybe I can get extra points for writing a little note on the math problems about how they make me feel.

And there’s no penalty for guessing anymore, so I finally have a chance.  Totally excellent!

(edited to add typos)

UPDATE — Cora Frazer at The New Yorker has found some of the items from the new SAT.  Here’s a taste:

2. Student-produced-response math. According to an electronic sign in the subway, an uptown 2 train is arriving in 3 minutes. You lose a game of Tetris on your phone and see that 4 minutes have gone by, at least. The electronic sign says that a 3 train is arriving in 0 minutes. 0 minutes go by. Do you just say fuck it and walk from Barclays?

10. Short-response logic. If you wear your high-heeled boots, you will be as tall as or taller than your date. But, if you don’t wear your high-heeled boots, you will feel less cool. Should you stay at home and watch anything featuring Connie Britton?

11. Improving sentences. You receive the following text message: “You’re an animal.” This is an autocorrection of:

(a) “You’re almost at Ludlow.”

(b) “Young Leo DiCaprio.”

(c) “Do we need eggs?”

(d) No autocorrection.

12. Optional-essay response. Choose one of the following writing prompts and respond in essay form, drawing on what you have read, your observations, and your experiences.

• Write a letter to your building’s superintendent explaining that although it was you who left the roof entrance open the other night, because you wanted to show that “you’re not old yet!,” you are nevertheless a responsible tenant who puts the recycling in the right bins, unless the bins are empty and it’s unclear which is which.

• Write a controlled yet scathing Yelp review that conveys just how profoundly wrong your waiter was to refer to you and your friends as an “especially large” party, causing this waiter deep moral shame and personal fear.

• Write for as long as you can, in as many words as you can, in the space provided.

Last night’s performance by the Razorback basketball team was the most impressive showing I’ve seen in college basketball.  The Hogs destroyed Ole Miss 110 to 80.  Anthlon Bell scored 23 points in 12 minutes of play with 7 three point shots.  Mardracus Wade had 18 points with 5 three point shots.  In total the team was 17 for 30 from beyond the three point line, 37 of 77 overall, and 19 of 20 from the charity stripe.  I’ve never seen the Razorbacks shoot like that.  And the Razorback defense was ferocious, forcing 18 turnovers and blocking 2 shots.

These stats understate how well the Hogs were playing because after they were up 43 points, Coach Mike Anderson began playing everyone on the bench, especially seniors in their final home game.  Ole Miss didn’t look so bad.  We just looked awesome.

I don’t want to count our dance partners before they’ve come a-calling, but it looks like we are headed toward the Big Dance.

Here’s how Razorbacks render the old Mac Davis song:

UPDATE —  Of course it gets easier to be humble when you get whooped in the next game.

Pat Wolf has a superb post over on Choice Words about the hypocrisy of President Obama calling for program’s to advance the education of African American men while at the same time wrongly describing the results of voucher programs  that do precisely that and attempting to cut funding for those programs.

Here’s the money quote:

Given the results of these three studies, one which was overseen by the U.S. Department of Education and two which were recognized with the Department’s highest award for rigor, we might expect President Obama to receive a swift response regarding his call for the federal government to search for programs that boost educational outcomes for African American men. The U.S. Department of Education need not search far and wide for such initiatives: they have already found one. Research shows that private-school choice through vouchers or scholarships is one of our nation’s most effective dropout-prevention programs for African Americans. It should be number one on the list of programs that President Obama encourages My Brother’s Keeper to support. But, apparently, it isn’t.

In fact, President Obama’s 2015 budget proposal includes no program funding whatsoever for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, even though his U.S. Department of Education found it to be highly effective in promoting educational attainment for low-income African Americans. Why would the President use his phone to encourage nonprofits to promote educational opportunities for African Americans, but then use his pen to defund a federal government program already proven to do just that? Certainly that is not the sort of action one expects from his brother’s keeper.

(Guest Post By James Shuls)

Yesterday, the Show-Me Institute released a new case-study, “Live free and learn: A case study of New Hampshire’s scholarship tax credit program.” The study was written by the incomparable Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute. In the paper, he presents the first survey of New Hampshire Opportunity Scholarship recipients. What he found should not come as a surprise – parents love the program.

Of the scholarship recipients whose children attended a public school in the previous year, all reported greater satisfaction with their current school. In all, 97% of the parents surveyed indicated they are satisfied with their chosen school or homeschool.

Here are a few choice quotes from parents:

“[My son] is thriving and the school is the perfect fit for his needs…”

“I feel like the private school saved my daughter.”

“We are thrilled with the improvement we have seen in our son both academically and socially.”

“This school is incredible.”

“This school has been a lifesaver for my child.”

What’s more, many of these parents were low-income families that might not have had the luxury of school choice without the program. The state’s only scholarship granting organization, the Network for Educational Opportunity (NEO), made it a point to prioritize need in the granting of scholarships. They appear to have done a great job. Roughly 91% of the families qualified for free or reduced price lunches and 74% indicated they would not have been able to afford tuition without the scholarship.

In the words of Matt Ladner:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Check out more about the program and NEO in this great video.