Jay P. Greene's Blog

As usual, Little Ramona just can’t stop herself from pulling the trigger before taking the gun out of the holster.

With tremendous glee, she points out that a Friedman Foundation survey finds that more people respond positively to “smaller classes” than to vouchers. But as Friedman had already posted on their blog, there’s nothing surprising about that – “smaller classes” is an outcome everyone wants. On its face, the question whether you want smaller classes doesn’t involve any hard questions about costs or tradeoffs, nor the deeper question of who controls the decisions that determine what tradeoffs we make – parents or politicians.

My colleagues at Friedman are gently attempting to bring Little Ramona up to speed on logic 101. Prospects are not good. Meanwhile, this just in – water still flows downhill, bears still befoul the woods, and the pope is still Catholic. (Well . . . he is on his good days).

An additional point: while Little Ramona leaps to the conclusion that affirming small classes somehow implies a repudiation of vouchers, in fact the only realistic way to shrink classes would be a well-designed universal school choice plan that supports entrepreneurs with new school models. Small classes cost tons of money that we don’t have right now; school choice is by far the best-proven way to improve the cost-efficiency of education; a universal choice plan aimed at supporting educational entrepreneurs should be expected not only to deliver better academic results but to do so by destroying the huge inefficiencies created by Little Ramona’s newfound friends in the unions, thus freeing up resources to give parents what they want . . . like smaller classes.

The greatest thing about Rick Hess’ ranking of Edu-Scholar Public Influence is how much anger and denunciation it riles up.  People argue about the methodology, complain about who is excluded from the ranking, and dismiss the whole enterprise as irrelevant, all the while secretly hoping that they and their friends will rise higher in the rankings next year.  Rick is pretty up front about how imperfect his ranking is.  And he probably just views the whole thing as an amusing recreation.

Ranking scholars is like ranking actors or ranking albums.  It’s great fun and provokes lots of debates, but doesn’t really mean too much.  The Oscars and Rolling Stones lists tell us something about what people think about movies and music, but they offer far from objective methods of identifying excellence.  You are free to like what you like and make your own ranking.

That being said, I’m going to go ahead and abuse Rick’s ranking and brag about how the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform is the 7th most influential education policy program in the country.  Three of our six regular faculty members are listed among the 87 most influential scholars.  Only 6 other universities have more scholars in the top 87: Stanford (with 14), Harvard (with 9), Columbia (with 6), and NYU, Vanderbilt, and UCLA (each with 4).  We tie the Universities of Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania with having 3 scholars in the top 87.

And since 3 of our 6 faculty members are in the top 87, you could argue that we are the most influential department since no other program has half of its scholars in the top 100.  Anyone interested in working with these excellent people to get a Ph.D. in education policy should check out our doctoral program and learn how to apply there.  We cover tuition and fees and offer a generous stipend for all students admitted to our program.

Now I’m going to check out this list of the top 100 Bob Dylan songs.  What?  No Way!  Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue should definitely be 1 and 2.  How’d they do this stupid ranking?  Well, just enjoy this Joan Baez cover.

(Guest Post by James Shuls)

Traditionally trained teachers typically enter the profession after completing coursework that is designed to prepare them for the classroom. This training includes a student teaching experience—a hands-on opportunity to practice their craft. Alternatively certified teachers, on the other hand, often enter the classroom with little to no pedagogical training or classroom experience. So, how do alternatively certified teachers compare to traditionally trained teachers in terms of effectiveness? Many scholars have examined this question, but Julie Trivitt and I are the first to do so using Arkansas data. The results from our analysis of elementary and middle school teachers were recently published in Educational Policy. Like many others, we find the difference between the two groups to be negligible.

Here is a quick summary of the findings:

On average, alternatively certified teachers tend to perform slightly lower than traditionally certified teachers, but there is more variation within each group than between groups. Furthermore, the differences between groups tend to be small and marginally significant only when we control for prior academic achievement as measured by teacher licensure exams. Because alternatively certified teachers score significantly higher on licensure exams, on average, including these scores biases the estimates of alternative certification downward. Nevertheless, the coefficient on alternative certification remains negative, but insignificant, when teacher test scores are not included. We conclude that traditionally certified teachers gain some experience through their training program, which translates to close to a year of experience. Alternatively certified teachers seem to make up the difference as they gain from years of experience at a more rapid rate than traditionally certified teachers.

How could it be that teachers who have undergone training are no more effective than teachers who have not? One possible explanation is that the types of individuals who enter the classroom via the two routes are significantly different from one another; at least, that’s what we found. Alternatively certified teachers in our sample scored significantly higher on all sections of the Praxis I and on the Praxis II professional knowledge exams. The biggest difference between the groups was in math, where alternatively certified teachers scored roughly a half of a standard deviation higher than traditionally certified teachers.

Alternative routes to the classroom seem to be attracting individuals who have higher academic capabilities, on average, than the traditional route to the classroom. This finding is not unique to Arkansas. Tim Sass found that alternatively certified teachers in Florida scored significantly higher on the SAT (2011). In New York, a team of researchers found that alternatively certified teachers from more selective programs performed significantly better than traditionally trained teachers, “Only 5 percent of newly hired Teaching Fellows and TFA teachers in 2003 failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test (LAST) exam on their first attempt, while 16.2 percent of newly hired traditional teachers failed the LAST exam…”

So what does this say about traditional teacher training programs? Some might argue that they are of no use, but that is not exactly what the data say. What we see in the Arkansas data, and in the results from other states, is that colleges of education take individuals who have lower academic capabilities, on average, and make them equally effective as individuals who are more academically capable.

There is indeed value in teacher training programs, but there is also value in alternative routes to the classroom. Each route has its benefits and its drawbacks. That is why Julie and I conclude that “teachers, and students, would be best served by equipping schools with more authority to hire the individuals they believe are qualified for the job and to certify those individuals who meet the expectations in the classroom.” Expand routes to the classroom and let local school leaders do their job. Let’s let them decide which teacher is the right fit for their school.

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James Shuls is the Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute.  He earned his doctorate in education policy from the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

I hate the Olympics.  I hate everything about them… their show-casing of murderous authoritarian regimes, their graft and corruption, their promotion of obscure sports that generate little genuine interest, their hypocritical claim of being non-commercial and non-political, their subordination of athletic excellence to soap-opera story-telling… everything.

But soon it will be nearly impossible to escape the media-hype of the Olympics.  NBC has an enormous investment in broadcast rights they need to recoup.  Putin needs to advertise the greatness of re-hashed fascism.  And every hyper-nationalist has to obscure his regime’s abuses and claim superiority based on the defeat of a proximate foe.  Dictators, oppressors, exploiters, and scumbags of every stripe love the Olympics.  I don’t see why we should.

Unfortunately, even in the education policy world we will see folks attempt to channel some of the attention the Olympics generate toward their policy talking-points.  I say ignore them.  Even better — rather than worship at the altar of the Olympics, every time someone in the education policy world tries to harness this authoritarian and corrupt institution as part of an attention-seeking gambit, I propose that we should take a moment to sing the praises of those who advance the cause of liberty.

Sports and competition are great things.  But they are only great when they are organized, engaged-in, and voluntarily paid for by free people.  Otherwise they are just the bread and circuses of the new-age Caesars.

(Typo corrected)

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Next time Jay, make sure they include more cowbell.

As I’ve written before, every stripe of education charlatan has been cherry-picking PISA data to support whatever policies he or she prefers.  From Diane Ravitch’s obsession with imitating Finland to Marc Tucker’s divining of lessons from the “top performers,”  we’ve seen a host of causal claims attributed to the relationship between PISA results and particular practices or policies that are not causal at all.

Over on the Education Next blog, Matt Chingos has a brilliant piece demonstrating the relationship between Christmas spirit and student achievement. Matt even runs some regressions to “prove” his point — something that Diane Ravitch, Marc Tucker, and most other “best practices” gurus can’t or don’t bother doing.  Apparently, spending more on Christmas shopping “predicts” higher student achievement, controlling for some demographic factors.  Clearly, we don’t need smaller classes or better teacher-training to make schools better, we just need more Christmas spirit (or at least consumption).

This is why random-assignment and other research designs that more strongly identify causation are so important.  And this is why we should focus on random assignment research on private and charter choice  rather than the results of weaker research designs on those questions.

2013 has been a very good year.  In addition to having my piece with Brian Kisida and Dan Bowen about field trips to art museums as the most viewed and emailed piece in the Sunday New York Times, and having the research on which that was based as the most viewed piece in Education Next, I’ve now learned that one of my blog posts was the most read post on the Education Next site.

This most-viewed Ed Next blog post was one I wrote about whether high school athletic success comes at the expense of academic success.  It was based on an article that Dan Bowen and I wrote for the Journal of Research in Education.

A few other observations about these popular pieces:

• They are about art and athletics, not math and reading.  Education reformers (including myself) have gone too far in focusing narrowly on math and reading achievement scores, as if those were the only things about schools that matter.  As it turns out, people clearly think that the arts, athletics, and other things are also important and would like to read more articles about them.  I also think they would like schools and policymakers to pursue a diversity of goals and not just maximize math and reading achievement scores.
• Dan Bowen was co-author on both the art and athletics research projects.  Dan just graduated from our doctoral program in education policy and is currently a post-doc at Rice University.  Next year he’ll be back on the academic job market and I think having two #1 research projects won’t hurt.
• Department of Education Reform folks had 3 of the top 10 spots for blog posts and 4 of the top 20 articles in Education Next.  Way to go team!