Jay P. Greene's Blog

My students, Charlie Belin and Brian Kisida, have a new article in the journal, Educational Policy, that examines the relationship between state science standards and science achievement according to NAEP.  As an indicator of the quality of state science standards they use Fordham’s ranking of those standards.  They find no relationship between Fordham’s ranking of standards and achievement.

Possible explanations for this result include:

1) Fordham is lousy at judging the quality of standards.

2) The quality of standards doesn’t matter.

I’m inclined toward the latter explanation, but either way, would it seem like a good idea to blow hundreds of millions, engage in endless and destructive in-fighting, and consume nearly all of the energy of the reform movement on something that makes virtually no difference?

I know, I know… the standards crowd readily admits that standards, by themselves, are not the issue.  It’s the way we link standards to teacher training, professional development, and assessments with consequences for teachers and students that really matters.  OK, so standards only matter if we also achieve a level of benevolent, top-down control over key aspects of the education system that has never been accomplished before.

Where have I heard this kind of argument before?  Oh yeah! That’s what the crazy guy in Harvard Square was yelling about when he said that the past failures of communism didn’t matter because it would finally work if we just did it correctly and completely.  And how much coercion and forced conformity would be required in the futile effort to achieve this level of top-down control?

Of course, it is also possible that Charlie and Brian’s analysis failed to capture the true causal relationship between standards and achievement given that is is only an observational study.  But if that is the case, the burden would still be on the advocates for national standards to demonstrate the causal connection between the reform they advocate and improved outcomes.  We shouldn’t remake all of American education on a hunch and a rationalization borrowed from the failure of communism.

The Wall Street Journal has an article that you might mistake for something in The Onion.  The federal government has a program that provides surplus military equipment to state and local governments at no cost other than the expense of shipping.  A number of public schools have taken advantage of this program to acquire military gear.  As the WSJ reported:

Some school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, stocked up on grenade launchers, M-16 rifles and even a multi-ton armored vehicle…

And Matt will be pleased to know that:

In south Texas, near the Mexican border, the sprawling Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District has 34,700 students and operates its own SWAT team, thanks in part to military gear it was given in recent years.

This is a toxic combination of 1) school districts lining up for anything the feds are handing out, 2) the excessive militarization of local police (and apparently school security) forces, and 3) schools focusing on incredibly rare events, like school shootings, as opposed to incredibly common ones, like incarcerating millions of children in schools that fail to serve their needs.

But don’t worry, one school district official explained that “These officers are trained in tactics. Some are former military.”  And a Defense Department spokesperson assured that “each state is visited biannually for a program compliance review to further look at records, property and usage.”  Well… if these are trained school employees who are inspected by the federal government biannually, I’m sure it will be fine to have SWAT teams with grenade launchers in our schools.

My only question is when will public schools be able to get surplus nukes.  I mean, how else will they maintain Mutually Assured Destruction to deter the growing threat of private school choice?

Brian Kisida, Dan Bowen, and I have a new article in the journal, Sociology of Education, about how field trips to art museums help develop cultural consumers — people who want to visit cultural institutions in the future.  This piece is a more focused and technical follow-up on the summary of our art museum field trip study last year in Education Next.  Earlier we also published a more technical piece in Educational Researcher focused on the critical thinking results from our experiment.  There are more technical pieces on particular aspects of the study in the works.

Also keep you eyes out for a random-assignment study on what students learn from field trips to see live theater performances of Hamlet and A Christmas Carol.  It should be published by Education Next some time in October.

And if you are hiring, keep your eyes out for Dan Bowen and Brian Kisida, who are both now applying for academic jobs.  They each have at least 8 peer-reviewed articles.  Dan also has two grants that he earned while working as a post-doc at Rice University.  Another one of our graduate students, Anna Egalite, is currently in a post-doc at Harvard and is also on the academic job market for next year.  All thee would be great hires for any university smart enough to snap them up.