Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Patrick Wolf)

For this year’s Al Copeland Award I nominate another amazing Al:  Weird Al Yankovic.  The “Al” is intended to honor an entrepreneur or activist who has significantly improved the human condition but has not been fully recognized for their contribution.  Weird Al Yankovic fully satisfies all three criteria.

If you have been living under a rock for the past 30 years, or you pay absolutely no attention to pop music or comedy, you may not know Weird Al.  Born Alfred Matthew Yankovic in 1959 in southern California, his parents chose accordion over guitar lessons for Al because, according to Yankovic, “My parents…were convinced that [the accordion] would revolutionize rock music.”  While earning a degree in architecture at Cal Tech, Al began performing musical parodies in local coffee shops and got the famous Dr. Demento radio personality to play some of his demo tapes.

His first professionally recorded song was a 1979 parody of The Knack’s “My Sharona,” called “My Bologna.”  The next year he recorded “Another One Rides the Bus,” a parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” live on the Dr. Demento radio show.  “Another One Rides the Bus” went on to become the greatest-selling rock song of all time.  (Okay, I just made that last part up but it WAS a hit.)

Weird Al–a childhood nickname given to him by school bullies that he embraced, thereby literally getting the last laugh (well, he embraced the nickname, not the bullies, but I digress)—proceeded to produce a string of parody hits with obvious targets including “Like a Surgeon,” “Eat It,” “I’m Fat”, and “Smells Like Nirvana.”  His parodies of rap hits like “Amish Paradise” and “White and Nerdy” work especially well because, in the Weird Al tradition, his band reproduces the original music almost perfectly while contrasting the hard-edged hip-hop style with lyrics about the bland lifestyles of Amish people and suburban brainiacs.  His Star Wars parodies – “The Saga Begins” (set to Don McClean’s“American Pie”) and “Yoda” (from The Kinks’ “Lola”) are nothing short of genius.  Weird Al Yankovic is the pop music parody icon.

Yes but “What have the Romans ever done for us?”  I mean, what has Weird Al done for humanity?  Tons.  If you want to see the impact that Weird Al has had on improving the human condition, just take your 13-year-old son and his best friend to a Weird Al concert (as I did on Saturday) and watch them smile, laugh, and sing the night away.  Joy is only one of Weird Al’s many contributions to humanity.  More importantly, Weird Al humbles the haughty and over-serious members of the entertainment industry through his gentle and creative jabs.  For example, when I was young, there was a popular but sad rock ballad called, “Alone Again, Naturally.”  After the movie Rocky V was released (and bombed), Weird Al artfully penned “Stallone Again, Naturally.”  Weird Al literally aids humanity by humbling those who view themselves as superior beings, thereby reminding them and us we are all so very human.  Finally, by mocking high-brow musical art, Weird Al also celebrates it.  You have never really made it in the pop music world until Weird Al has parodied one of your songs.

Weird Al actually is an accomplished musician.  Rock accordion solos are really hard to play.  When people urge Weird Al to branch out into writing and performing serious pop songs, his stock response is:  “There’s enough people that do unfunny music.  I’ll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.”

Weird Al has received some recognition for his accomplishments.  He is rich and famous, which doesn’t disqualify him from receiving an “Al”, as Al Copeland was rich and famous, too.  Those aren’t necessarily bad things.  Weird Al has received three Grammy Awards, but those were in recognition of his contributions to music and not for his contributions to humanity.

I must say that actually attending a Weird Al concert prompted my brilliant idea (I am SOOOOO amazing) to nominate him for the “Al.”  The epiphany came when I approached the snack bar at the theatre and noticed that the only food item available was spicy chicken, lathered in ranch dressing, served in a box that you can use as a roller bag, with the following statement on the cover:  “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  And this year’s (Weird) Al goes to…

I’ve been railing against education policy arguments based on identifying places with successful outcomes and then claiming we should imitate certain practices or policy features of those places to achieve success elsewhere.  I argued forcefully against it in my review of Marc Tucker’s book.  Anytime someone says Finland (or Massachusetts or whoever) is doing well because they have high standards or little choice or no school athletics, or whatever, they are just engaging in quackery — pure BS.

It is a matter of basic logic that one cannot know what causes success only by looking at a successful place (or set of successful places).  You cannot know whether any factor contributes to success without also considering unsuccessful places and examining whether that same factor tends to be more present or absent in successful relative to unsuccessful places.  This is an error known as “selection on dependent variable” and it is taught in any decent introduction to research methods course.

People who regularly draw policy recommendations based on the Finland du jour should be made to hold up a giant sign that says “I do not understand the basic research methods of the field in which I claim to be an expert.”  And that’s just it.  These people aren’t really experts.  There used to be a time when a clever writer could be considered an expert on education policy simply by virtue of articulating a clear-sounding argument.  That time is gone.

Even journalists should be expected to have some basic understanding of the methods in education policy research.  No one would accept that science reporters could be ignorant of fundamental principles of the scientific method.  No one would accept that diplomatic correspondents would have no knowledge of diplomatic history.  Even journalists — especially when they are writing book-length arguments — need to have some understanding of research methods that would include the obvious point that no causal claims can be made from selection on dependent variable analyses.

So, I was delighted to see the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst take on David Kirp’s book, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools, which draws lessons from an examination of one “successful” district — Union City, NJ.  Whitehurst begins by illustrating why selection on dependent variable does not allow for causal claims:

A while back, I read a journalistic account of a small island off Italy in which people live to be quite old.  Could it be because they sleep late, or drink lots of wine, or live a communal existence, or don’t eat refined sugar?  Unfortunately there is no way to know based on the information provided in the article if it is one or more of the lifestyle characteristics the author identified as distinctive, or whether something else is going on.  Even the claim of unusual longevity is questionable since there is no birth registry. And taking everything at face value, maybe there are other places in Italy in which people live as long or longer with different lifestyles.

Whitehurst goes on to question whether Union City is really such a successful district.  And then he applies the problems of his Italy example to Kirp’s use of Union City to make causal conclusions about how school improvement can be achieved.  Lastly, Whitehurst concludes with:

Once we have valid descriptions of the distinctive operational differences between good and not-so-good schools, controlling for differences in student background and out-of-school factors that are beyond district control, the social science of district reform can move to planned and carefully evaluated interventions.  That is our playbook. That is where we need to be.  I don’t think the path goes through Union City.

Amen, Brother Russ.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Friedman Foundation strikes again, with School Choice the Next Generation officers Butcher and Bedrick offering a new survey of parents in the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program. Read the whole thing, but here is a useful summary graphic:

A number of years ago a Princeton philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt, gave a brilliant lecture, “On Bullshit,”  which was later published as a very short book.  In the book Frankfurt spends some time defining the term, distinguishing it from similar concepts, like a lie or humbug.  He suggests that bullshit is something that is “grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

Frankfurt acknowledges that there are some positive uses of bullshit. It sometimes just allows us to get along.  Rather than struggle at all times with everyone over what the truth is, bullshit is something that we all spout and accept as — if you will excuse the imagery — a type of social lubricant.  We would never be able to get along in large organizations without a fair amount of bullshit, which is part of why we see so much of it in all of our work lives.  Politics, which requires managing conflict, is also a bullshit-laden activity.

While bullshit is unavoidable and sometimes useful, it is overall a very destructive thing.  As Frankfurt puts it, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”  It is corrosive to the very process by which we seek truth by embracing an indifference to the truth.  The triumph of bullshit is not the triumph of falsehood, but the triumph of nihilism.  Bullshit makes us not care about the truth, so why should we care about anything?  To maintain a good society, bullshit must be held in check.

Unfortunately, Frankfurt suspects that bullshit is growing, not being held in check.  It is growing, he suggests because bullshit is a part of communication and as communication grows so does bullshit.  We are talking all of the freakin’ time and on all matters of public and private concern.  The extent to which we are communicating about all of these things far exceeds our ability to know the truth of them or even be concerned with the process of discovering the truth about them.  Facebook and Twitter pre-date Frankfurt’s lecture, but they nicely illustrate the relationship between increasing communication and increasing bullshit.   Frankfurt also blames the rise of bullshit partially on post-modern philosophies that actively promote and rationalize an indifference to the truth.

But I suspect that there is another force at work in the growth of bullshit.  I suspect that as violence becomes less permissible within modern societies, bullshit has substituted for violence as a mechanism for manipulating or coercing others.  The famous Prussian military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, once said “War is the continuation of policy by other means.”  I think bullshit is the continuation of violence by other means.

Earlier in our country’s history, before the domestic use of violence was so limited, differences were often settled through violence.  When Carnegie Steel was faced with a strike at a Pittsburgh plant, Henry Clay Frick called out 300 Pinkerton detectives who killed 16 striking workers and wounded 23 more.  Unions were similarly known to take baseball bats to workers who crossed their picket lines.

So when a modern day Andrew Carnegie, like Bill Gates, wants to have his way, he doesn’t hire a private army of Pinkerton detectives to beat us into submission.  Instead, he hires an army of foundation staff and advocacy organizations to spout bullshit.  And in response the unions don’t take up baseball bats, they take up blogging.  Violence, like bullshit, is indifferent to truth; it is simply a mechanism for prevailing.  As violence becomes less available as a strategy for winning a dispute, bullshitting becomes more prominent.

If bullshit is on the rise and is corrosive to a good society, how can we limit or even reduce it?  Science and its weaker sister, social science, are the antitheses of bullshit.  They are enterprises entirely committed to the pursuit of truth.  Unfortunately, bullshit has infiltrated science and social science as those activities become more politicized and embedded within large bureaucratic organizations.  The scientist or social scientist may be as likely to promote bullshit as to man the barricades against it.  Instead, we need something stronger, more resistance to corruption, than the scientist to fight bullshit.  We need the skeptic.

The skeptic is someone entirely devoted to the task of discovering and debunking bullshit.  The skeptic may be a scientist but often isn’t.  And the skeptic can often be mistaken about what is and is not bullshit.  But the skeptic is always on the prowl for bullshit and is even more committed to the process of finding truth than the mere scientist is.

Penn Jillette and Teller are worthy of “The Al” because they are the most active and effective skeptics of our era.  They are illusionists who have extended their professional interest in deceiving others for entertainment  into a professional interest in uncovering and debunking the deception of bullshit for entertainment.  For eight seasons they hosted a series on Showtime that was, appropriately enough, called Bullshit.  They targeted everything from alternative medicine to recycling to lie detectors to the Bible.  The have also crusaded (irony intended) against bullshit in their stage show, in magazine articles, and in TV appearances on other people’s shows.  Penn and Teller speak truth to bullshit.

As it is, we are already knee-deep in bullshit.  Were it not for the efforts of skeptics like Penn and Teller we might well need a life raft.  For this, they deserve “The Al.“

Marcus Winters has an excellent new study on charter schools and special education.  Why are there large gaps between the percentages of students classified as disabled in charter and traditional public schools?  A large part of the explanation — about 80% of the difference — can be explained by the fact that charters are just less likely to classify students as disabled and more likely to declassify them.  That is, charters have students with almost the same distribution of true disabilities as found in traditional public schools, they just don’t put labels on as many of them.  Here’s how Marcus put it:

The gap in special education rates between charter and traditional public schools grows considerably as students progress from kindergarten through third grade. A large part (80 percent) of the growth in this gap over time is that charter schools are less likely than district schools to classify students as in need of special education services and more likely to declassify them….

…the results do not suggest that charter schools are refusing to admit or are pushing out students with special needs. In fact, more students with previously identified disabilities enter charter schools than exit them as they progress through elementary grade levels…

By far, the most substantial growth in the special education gap occurs in the least severe category, that of specific learning disability. Rates of classification in what might be considered the more severe (and less subjective) categories of special education—autism, speech or language impairment, or intellectual disability—remain quite similar in charter and traditional public schools over time.

So… charter schools are not taking on students with dramatically different true disabilities; the traditional public schools are just more strongly inclined to classify the same kind of student as disabled.  And the traditional public schools mostly do this in the more subjective categories of disability, like specific learning disability.

These findings follow the same pattern as what Patrick Wolf, David Fleming, and John Witte discovered with special education and private schools participating in Milwaukee’s voucher program.  Schools of choice appear to be open to students with disabilities but aren’t as bureaucratically inclined to label students as disabled as are traditional public schools.

University of Arkansas graduate students, Anna Egalite and Jonathan Mills, have an excellent piece in Education Next on the effects of Louisiana’s voucher program on integration in schools.  This is an important empirical question because the US Department of Justice has filed suit against the state’s voucher program over concerns that it undermines federal desegregation efforts.

Egalite and Mills find that when students use vouchers to switch from a traditional public school to a private school, they tend to improve the racial integration of the public school they are leaving.  A transfer improves integration if the student’s departure would make that school more closely resemble the racial composition of the metropolitan area in which it is located.  So, if an African-American student leaves a school that is more heavily African-American than the broader community in which it is located, his or her transfer is positive for integration.  And the reverse is true.  Here are their statewide results:

When Egalite and Mills focus on the 34 school districts that are under federal supervision for desegregation in Louisiana, they find that the voucher program contributes to improved integration both in the public schools from which students are transferring and the private schools that they are entering.  Here are the results for those 34 districts:

The political boundaries of school districts and attendance zones appear to be an important impediment to integrating schools.  If we remove those boundaries by letting students mix voluntarily, we actually see more integration.    Maybe assuming that everyone is a racist and having the federal government try to force them not to be so racist is a less productive strategy than trying to remove barriers to voluntary and positive mixing of people from different backgrounds and different neighborhoods.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed their lawsuit without bothering to do this type of analysis.  It will be fascinating to hear how they react to this evidence, but since they are closed right now I guess we’ll just have to wait for their response.

In a classic piece of Flim-Flam, Amanda Ripley has a cover story in The Atlantic arguing that high school sports are bad for student achievement.  Her evidence?  She looked at Finland and South Korea, countries with higher test scores, and they put less emphasis on sports than do American schools.  They also eat a lot more fish in Finland and South Korea.  I don’t know how Ripley knows that de-emphasizing athletics is any more causally connected to higher achievement than fish consumption is.  But since flim-flam passes for evidence even in serious intellectual magazines, like The Atlantic, we have to endure this type of argument.

Happily, The Atlantic just ran a rejoinder from my former and current graduate students, Dan Bowen and Collin Hitt.  They actually reference evidence and properly consider questions of causation and conclude that high school athletics probably contribute to higher student achievement.  And they see no reason to believe that the absence of high school sports explains the difference between student achievement in the US and countries like Finland and South Korea.

But evidence, shmevidence — I’m not taking any chances.  So I’m urging school districts to increase serving fish in the cafeteria to replicate what the Finns and Koreans do and match their level of achievement.

I just noticed that according to the Blog Stats counter provided by WordPress and viewable in the right column of this website, this blog has now been viewed more than 1 million times.  Wow, do people have time to waste.

Of course, the WordPress counter does not capture nearly all of the total views, since I believe it does not include people who view this website through a reader or who see it re-posted in other places.  So I guess we really passed 1 million some time ago.

Still, it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate.  1,000,000.

It has been almost a decade since the publication of Education Myths.  At that time I was concerned that education policy was largely driven by emotional appeals and assumed facts.  “Don’t you love children?” and “we know education spending is plummeting” used to be regular arguments in policy discussions.  Ed Myths was a response to that type of policy argument and an attempt to demonstrate how systematic evidence could be used to inform policy-making.  I (along with co-authors Greg Forster and Marcus Winters) understood that the particular evidence we were citing would soon enough be out of date, but we hoped that our approach to using rigorous evidence could serve as a model for future policy debates.

Much progress has been made over the last nine years in the use of systematic evidence in education policy-making.  Mountains of data are being collected and scores of well-trained social scientists are applying cutting edge techniques and clever research designs to draw useful lessons from those data.  And policy-makers increasingly rely on this rigorous evidence when making decisions.  Emotional appeals and assumed facts have diminished in their influence.

Despite this progress, the field just can’t seem to shake the enduring attraction of the flim-flam man.  The flim-flam man resembles a social scientist and cites evidence to make his case, but often relies on faulty evidence drawn from flawed research designs as well as selective and distorted interpretations of evidence.  The flim-flam man uses the veneer of social science to disguise an agenda-driven or ill-conceived argument.

The most common manifestation of the flim-flam man in ed policy is the practitioner of “selection on dependent variable” arguments.  This is the person who says that Finland or South Korea or Massachusetts produce really great results, so we should do something that they do to make similar progress.  Of course, it is impossible to know from an examination of successful places why they are successful.  For all I know, Finland’s success is a function of the heavy concentration of reindeer, South Korea thrives because of delicious kimchee, and Massachusetts is blessed with excellent human capital to staff its schools and has had super folks like Sandra Stotsky and Bob Costrelll to direct its efforts.

Just because I choose to focus on Finland’s rigorous teacher preparation, South Korea’s emphasis on test-preparation over athletics, and Massachusett’s standards does not mean that those factors caused the success in question.  Identifying causation requires, at a minimum, observing that certain practices or policies tend to be present where there is success and absent where there is failure.  Only looking at these successful places tells us nothing about why they are successful because we do not know if those same practices or policies also existed in other, unsuccessful places.

The flaw of selection on dependent variable analyses is so obvious that it is shocking that education policy debates continue to be shaped by them.  I know that it is tempting to look at some place that is doing well and wonder what you could imitate to get the same results, but we just need to stop considering that evidence in education policy debates.

We should take a pledge — No more selection on dependent variable analyses!  No more divining the secrets of success in Finland!  Anyone who continues to present this kind of argument as evidence should be shunned as a flim-flam man.  A quack.

I take some heart from seeing that folks have started to critique Malcolm Gladwell as a flim-flam man.  Yes, he writes well.  Yes, he tells appealing stories.  But his reading of social science evidence is thin, selective, and often distorted.  In a review of Gladwell’s latest book in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Chabris summarizes it well:

Mr. Gladwell has not changed his own strategy, despite serious criticism of his prior work. What he presents are mostly just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior, but what his publisher sells them as, and what his readers may incorrectly take them for, are lawful, causal rules that explain how the world really works. Mr. Gladwell should acknowledge when he is speculating or working with thin evidentiary soup. Yet far from abandoning his hand or even standing pat, Mr. Gladwell has doubled down.

If psychology is turning on Gladwell, then maybe education can turn on its own flim-flammers.

It is time once again for us to solicit nominations for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”

Last year’s winner of “The Al” was George P. Mitchell, a pioneer in the use of fracking to obtain more, cheap and clean natural gas.  As I wrote last year about why Mitchell won:

George P. Mitchell didn’t even invent the techniques that he commercialized to extract significantly more natural gas.  Mitchell’s efforts didn’t just reduce carbon emissions by making clean energy plentiful, as Matt documents in his nomination.  Mitchell demonstrated how improving the human condition, including improving the environment, is more likely to come from individual freedom and capitalism than from government coercion.

Yes, Mitchell was richly rewarded financially for his accomplishments, but we’ve already established that making money in no way undermines one’s case for having improved the human condition.

Mitchell won over a group of other worthy nominees:  Banksy, Ransom E. Olds, Stan Honey, and Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes.

In 2011 “The Al” went to Earle Haas, the inventor of the modern tampon.  Thanks to Anna for nominating him and recognizing that advances in equal opportunity for women had as much or more to do with entrepreneurs than government mandates.  Haas beat his fellow nominees:  Charles Montesquieu, the political philosopher, David Einhorn, the short-seller, and Steve Wynn, the casino mogul.

The 2010  winner of  “The Al” was Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.  He beat out  The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.

And the 2009 winner of “The Al” was  Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag.  She beat out Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing,  Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban,  Ralph Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

Nominations can be submitted by emailing a draft of a blog post advocating for your nominee.  If I like it, I will post it with your name attached.  Remember that the basic criteria is that we are looking for someone who significantly improved the human condition even if they made a profit in doing so.  Helping yourself does not nullify helping others.  And, like Al Copeland, nominees need not be perfect or widely recognized people.