Jay P. Greene's Blog

Last week I noted that attention is not influence.  When foundations and others reward reform organizations for clicks, tweets, hits, etc… they are not actually rewarding influence.  If foundations really want to influence policy they have to reward actions that really lead to policy change.

Today I am extending that argument by emphasizing that changing the conversation is not the same as changing the world.  There are times when everyone around us seems to agree on something and we are liable to feel a sense of accomplishment.  “We did it,” we think to ourselves.  “We won.”

But having people around you change what they say is not the same as accomplishing it in the world.  Perhaps it is a result of pervasive post-modern thinking, but our representation of the world is not the world.  Mass rallies with #bringbackourgirls or #jesuischarlie did not free girls in Nigeria or establish the right to produce images of Muhammad.  There really is a world out there and what we say about it does not necessarily lead to changing it.  We also have to do something to make our talk real.

In education reform the conversation has been dominated by discussion of Common Core.  It was amazing how easy it was for supporters to accomplish this.  Getting a bunch of DC-based organizations to write some reports, hold conferences, and engage in advocacy for Common Core doesn’t take all that much money or effort.  It’s not that these organizations are saying things that contradict their beliefs.  They just don’t have a lot of deeply held beliefs and are eager to remain relevant and active on whatever everyone else is talking about.

It wasn’t even that hard to get state boards of education to endorse Common Core.  While they don’t say it out loud, many state officials (rightly) see standards as a bunch of vague and empty words in a document that have little effect on what really happens in schools.  If someone is offering them grants from the Gates Foundation and the possibility of millions from Race to the Top in the midst of an economic crisis, why not declare fealty to these standards?  In addition, state officials regularly get drawn into fights over standards.  Why waste political capital on something that hardly matters?  It’s much easier to just join the Common Core crowd and hide behind the skirts of “experts,” national organizations, and the federal government than to defend and constantly revise their own crappy state standards.  Besides, they could always change their mind later when it came to actually doing something, like adopting tests or imposing consequences on schools and teachers based on their actual implementation of Common Core.  Even state officials who embraced Common Core understood, on some level, that what they were doing was just talk.

Don’t get me wrong.  Standards could matter.  Determining what students should learn and when could have a profound effect on education.  And the difference between excellent and lousy schools has a lot to do with whether they have high expectations for their students and seek to teach worthy content.  The problem is that in a large and diverse society we  have little agreement on what constitutes worthy content or appropriate expectations.  To obtain democratic support for state (let alone national) standards, they have to be written at such a level of generality that they are largely meaningless.  That is why multiple studies show no relationship between the judged quality of standards and academic outcomes.  And to the extent that standards actually stand for anything, they draw opposition from those who disagree.  In a democratic country that opposition has plenty of opportunities to block, dilute, or co-opt standards, preventing the “talk” of Common Core from becoming reality.

I’ve been making this point that Common Core “talk” will not result in real educational change for years now.  When I do, I hear things like, “At last count, 1 state out of 45 has repealed the standards.”  And DC-based folks take comfort from the fact that everyone they meet at receptions agrees that Common Core opposition is crazy, paranoid, hysterical, political,  [insert your preferred empty pejorative here].  They all falsely believe that they have won the conversation and therefore have won the policy.  They continue to hold their hashtag signs.

But since I am not a post-modern and still believe that there is a world out there that is not changed simply by our words, I have developed a wager with Morgan Polikoff as an imperfect indicator of whether Common Core really is changing the world:

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).

Well, it didn’t take long but I think am already ahead on that bet.  Mississippi just voted to withdraw from using PARCC, one of the two Common Core-aligned tests.  In addition, Chicago is refusing to administer PARCC to all of its students.  And governor Walker in Wisconsin just re-iterated  his desire to withdraw the state from Common Core standards and testing.  A bill to that effect failed last legislative session, but the dike will only hold for so long.  It’s hard for me to find a current count of what tests states are using, but I believe we have dropped below half using one of the two Common Core tests.  If nothing changes over the remainder of our 10 year bet, I will win.  But I expect more states will abandon Common Core standards and/or tests.  The talk was easy.  The implementation is hard.

As any parent can tell you, children will do things, including negative things, to attract attention.  Attention is the currency of childhood.  Children tend to do more of whatever attracts attention.  This is why effective parents and teachers devise strategies to attend to desirable behavior and ignore (to the extent possible) undesirable behavior.

Unfortunately, the adult world of policy analysis has become like the playground of children.  There is a competitive race for attention among a growing group of think-tankers, academics, and journalists.  They aren’t competing for attention by doing the most professional work with the most thoughtful analysis and clear-headed conclusions.  They are competing by saying ridiculous things, saying them loudly, and saying them repeatedly

Of course, these attention-starved policy analysts occupy the world of Twitter.  Where else can they satisfy their obsessive need to blurt out an endless string of superficial claims?  Unfortunately, they are not confined to Twitter.  They increasingly occupy the halls of academia, control the institutions of journalism, and dominate the beltway.

The problem is that like the poor parenting of an ill-behaved toddler, they are receiving a lot of attention for their outbursts.  Diane Ravitch tops Rick Hess’ ranking of “influential” edu-scholars not because of her balanced reasoning and careful consideration of evidence but because of her hyperbolic and outrageous claims.  Vox has 193,000 followers on Twitter despite its error-plagued, shoddy journalism precisely because of its reckless desire to offer “click-bait” instead of responsible analysis and information.

These out-sized toddlers may be attracting a lot of attention, and even a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean they actually have influence.  I highly doubt Diane Ravitch has altered any policy outcome given that she is unlikely to have changed anyone’s mind about anything.  She may occasionally mobilize her army of angry teachers, but those teachers were likely to be mobilized anyway by the more grown-up teachers unions.

And Vox may get clicks and even raise large sums from venture capitalists, but who in the world cares what Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias or the rest of the Vox crew think about anything?  For the most part these people have never done anything, never seriously studied anything, and too rarely offer responsible analysis for anyone in real authority to heed their advice.

Attention, clicks, and money are not the same as influence.  If they were, Kim Kardashian would be the one of the most influential people in the world.

Real policy influence is achieved in two, much less loud and less easily measured ways.  First, people can have policy influence by engaging in serious empirical analysis that shapes elite thinking about policy questions over long periods of time.  Take, for example, how serious intellectual work shaped the policy context regarding crime and law enforcement in the 1980s.  In particular, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling wrote a series of pieces articulating the evidence and reasoning behind their “broken windows” theory of crime-prevention.  Prior to that time, policy elites thought about crime largely as a function of poverty that needed to be addressed through social programs.  But Wilson and Kelling influenced elites into thinking about crime as an issue of public disorder that could be addressed through innovations in policing techniques.  Their influence was gradual and never completely accepted, but it established the context for later policy action.

Second, people can have policy influence by quietly whispering in the ears of decision-makers about how to act within the elite understanding of the policy context.  Behind the scenes George Kelling advised Bill Bratton, who implemented broken windows policing techniques in Boston and New York City.  These approaches proved successful and the idea spread to other police departments around the country as the nation experienced a dramatic decline in violent crime.

These are examples of real policy influence, both through laying the intellectual groundwork for change and by quietly advising policymakers to pursue those changes.  Neither would be captured easily by the silly “metrics” that increasingly drive foundation and venture capitalist funding.  Foundations and VCs are paying for attention and clicks, not actual influence.

We do not have any additional breaking news to report on Europe once again descending into Jew-hating, illiberal fascism.  But we do have some good news to report on school choice.  My colleagues, Bob Maranto and Dirk Van Raemdonck, have a piece in the Wall Street Journal on how the US and Belgium made different choices about how to handle religious conflict over education in the 19th century.  The US chose to persecute its minority Catholic population by imposing a vaguely Protestant monopoly system on all students while Belgium created a competitive system allowing for choice across different religious and secular school systems.  The Belgian system is less repressive and has produced better outcomes.  Perhaps the US could give that approach more of a try.

Separately, Matt Chingos and Paul Peterson have an article in the Journal of Public Economics (also available without pay wall here) that supports the claim that the US would produce better long-term outcomes if it expanded school choice.  Chingos and Peterson are able to track long term outcomes of a privately-funded school choice program in New York City that gave students small scholarships to attend a private school.  As Chingos describes the results on the Ed Next blog:

Minority students who received a school voucher to attend private elementary schools in 1997 were, as of 2013, 10 percent more likely to enroll in college and 35 percent more likely than their peers in public school to obtain a bachelor’s degree.

Keep in mind that this is an enormous return on a very small investment.  The privately funded voucher was only worth $1,400, which is $2,080 in 2014 dollars.  And the Chingos and Peterson results are particularly important because they track long term outcomes that we know really matter, like attending and completing college.  Most studies of school choice focus on short term effects on standardized tests, which may not capture as well or as completely the benefits of a quality education.

(edited to correct typo)