I caught Brian Setzer’s Christmas show last year, and I liked it so much that I am going to see it again this year. Setzer’s big band and guitar setup reminds me of a brief, cool era of music like this:
I have previously confessed my admiration for Setzer as a genre bender, but seeing him in person deepened my appreciation. Keeping an orchestra on the road is an expensive proposition, which probably kept this performance format as a short lived niche, but a delight to see nevertheless. During last year’s show, Setzer spent an interlude with a three-man drum/base/guitar Stray Cats setup. Once he built the crowd up to a frenzy, he stopped everything, smiled and announced:
“I get to play music with these guys EVERY NIGHT! It’s my JOB!!!”
Which of course reminded me of my favorite Zen quote:
The Master in the Art of Living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.
It’s Bryan Setzer’s world folks- we are just living in it.
I’ve been poking fun at people using Twitter for serious policy debates. I acknowledge that Twitter is great for disseminating links, breaking news, and humor, but for conducting serious arguments Twitter has to be just about the dumbest thing on the planet (and I’m so dumb I periodically try to do it).
But there is something worse about trying to have serious policy debates on Twitter — it makes everyone come off as snarky and mean. I’m sure I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But there is no doubt that forcing communication in short, 140 character bursts coarsens debate and polarizes differences by removing subtlety and nuance.
There is an antidote to this corrosive effect of Twitter — meeting people in person. AEI’s Rick Hess has a gathering a couple times a year of policy analysts, scholars, entrepreneurs, and practitioners. Rick has an excellent ability to bring together top-notch people from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. I always learn something useful at these meetings, but much more importantly, I get to meet people whom I might otherwise only know through Twitter or blogs.
The vast majority of times, when I meet people in person with whom I’ve had run-ins on the internet I discover that these folks are good, friendly, and a pleasure to talk to. I almost always discover that we don’t disagree on policy nearly as much as we thought when we were taking shots at each other on Twitter or the blogs. Occasionally, I find that people who I liked and agreed with on the internet turn out to be jerks. But, on average, in-person meetings greatly reduce the personal animosity and bickering promoted by the internet.
There is no going back on the increasing use of the internet for policy debates. More information, more quickly disseminated, and more easily accessed are good things that people rightfully want. But it comes at a price. To reduce that price we should continue to invest in in-person gatherings, like the ones Rick hosts.
What do you see in this picture? The new PISA results are out and education charlatans of every stripe are finding proof of their own preferred policy solution.
Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association sees addressing poverty as the solution: “The United States’ standings haven’t improved dramatically because we as a nation haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance — the effects of poverty on students.” There is some evidence for this, but the OECD analysis finds that student socioeconomic status only explains 15% of the variance in test results. And according to the Wall Street Journal coverage, “Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, noted that American students from families with incomes in the highest quartile did not perform as well as students with similar backgrounds in other countries.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, “‘None of the top-tier countries,’ said Randi Weingarten head of the American Federation of Teachers, ‘nor any of those that have made great leaps in student performance, like Poland and Germany, has a fixation on testing like the United States does.'” Except many of the big gainers, particularly in Asia, do fixate on testing.
Best Practices guru, Marc Tucker, was on NPR this morning saying something about how “what you will find among the top performers” is that they”provide more resources to kids who are harder to educate than kids who are easier to educate.” But in the San Jose Mercury News Tucker seems to suggest that more resources is not the solution when he asks, “Why are we not getting more bang for the buck?” And on NPR Tucker credited Singapore’s success to “not just more teachers but better teachers.” But the Wall Street Journal cites the OECD analysis, saying it “found a low connection between class size and test scores.” And in the country Tautology Land better teachers are the ones who produce better scores.
It is possible to do credible social scientific analyses of international test scores if you do something like a regression that systematically examines variation in performance within and across countries controlling for other variables. See for example work by Ludger Woessmann. But just eyeballing the top performers and making up stories about why they succeeded based on picking and choosing characteristics about them is pure quackery. As I’ve said before, best practices are the worst.
So, reach for your Duck Dynasty duck quacker and watch as folks make up stories about the picture above. Personally, I see a cute little dog.
Be sure not to miss our newly published articles in Educational Researcher and Psychology of Music expanding this body of research and exploring it in greater detail.
In the past week there’s been a flurry of articles coming out featuring our art research. Education Researcherhas a new piece by Dan Bowen, Brian Kisida, and me on how field trips to an art museum affect students’ critical thinking. This article is a more technical and focused follow-up to our piece in Education Next.
Psychology of Music has a new study by Lisa Margulis, Brian Kisida, and me on how information affects the student experience when seeing a live musical performance. In particular, we experimentally gave students a program note with information about a show and others a note with information about the venue but nothing about the show. We then measured student enjoyment and knowledge.
And most recently, the New York Times published today a piece by Brian, Dan, and me summarizing our study of field trips to an art museum.
Nothing seems to generate a buzz of discussion on Twitter, Facebook, and email quite like a New York Times article. Let’s hope it all leads to more research and thinking about the importance of art in education.
… it seems clear to me that Mr. Gates thinks it immoral for rich people to give money to museums instead of medical projects, presumably those that have received the official Bill Gates Seal of Moral Approval. To be sure, he deserves full credit for putting his own money where his mouth is: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives away some $4 billion a year, much of which is used to support health-related initiatives in developing countries, including a world-wide initiative to stamp out polio.
Good for him—but when it comes to art, he’s got it all wrong, and then some.
It almost embarrasses me to restate for Mr. Gates’s benefit what most civilized human beings already take to be self-evident, which is that art museums, like symphony orchestras and drama companies and dance troupes, make the world more beautiful, thereby making it a better place in which to live. Moreover, the voluntary contributions of rich people help to ensure the continued existence of these organizations, one of whose reasons for existing is to make it possible for people who aren’t rich to enjoy the miracle that is art. If it weren’t for museums, you wouldn’t get to see any of the paintings of Rembrandt and Monet and Jackson Pollock (and, yes, Francis Bacon). Instead they’d be hanging in homes whose owners might possibly deign to open their doors to the public once a year. Maybe.
It is, as they say, a free country, and rich people get to do whatever they want with their money. They can spend it on paintings or children’s hospitals or beach houses. But the surprising thing—or maybe not—is that so many of them believe in helping to make the world a better place for their fellow men.
Nor do I hear any groundswell of support among the rich for Mr. Gates’s rigidly utilitarian view of charity. Perhaps that’s because the desire to partake of beauty is so deeply rooted in the human soul. Flip through a book of quotations and you’ll see an abundance of testimony to its lasting importance throughout the whole of recorded history. I especially like what Somerset Maugham said in his novel “Cakes and Ale”: “Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.” So it is, and sooner or later most of us will long for it as we do for food. What could be more honorable than for a rich person to help satisfy that hunger in the same way that he might underwrite the operation of a food bank?
Indeed, many philanthropic organizations see no need to choose. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, for example, supports the performing arts and medical research.
Think that over the next time you feel inclined to sputter with rage over the results of the latest big-ticket art auction. While you’re at it, remember that in the long run, the chances are very, very good that the paintings for which “some rich guy dropped millions” will end up in a museum, perhaps even one that, like New York’s Frick Collection or the Phillips Collection in Washington, was built by the rich guy in question. And think about this as well: Of course it’s admirable to help prevent blindness—but it’s also admirable to help ensure that we have beautiful things to see.
Amid the gloom of the Arizona Board of Regents putting a sawed off shotgun into the mouth of the public high schools of the state and pulling the trigger release of a report tracking the college completion rates of Arizona public high-school students were a few items of note. First, just eyeballing of the top 10 schools reveals that 6 of them are either charter or magnet schools. The top rated school, University High in Tucson, is a magnet that requires an entry exam and minimum GPA. The school that served as the origin for the Great Hearts network of schools comes in 2nd place, narrowly behind University High, BASIS Tucson makes the list, as does the Arizona School for the Arts, Foothills Academy and the Arizona Academy of Science and Technology.
Ok, so that is about it on the good news front.
If you rank the schools from the bottom up, sure enough you find charters down there too. I’m happy to have the State Board nuke these schools when they come up for renewal, or potentially even earlier if some sort of transparent process is used and the river runs both ways for charter and district schools. Where pray tell do you put these kids? It is not like there are an abundance of high-quality public options here in the cactus patch.
So what should a state do when it has a grim future staring it in the face? HALF of the high-schools in the state had 5% or fewer kids earn 4 year college degrees. Yes I agree that not everyone wants or needs to go to college and that Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Jobs all dropped out of college, etc. etc. etc. but let’s get real- 5% or fewer represents catastrophic failure. It’s hard to become a Gates/Dell/Jobs impatient super-genius entrepreneur if you, um, can’t read at grade level or do a some math. The NAEP reveals that only about a third of Arizona 8th graders are achieving at those levels.
I doubt there is any one solution. I however remain open to suggestions and no, pack up the kids and flee in panic is not an option. At least, not yet.
I’m starting to think about a Recovery School District should be a part of the solution. Many of those 230 high-schools with 5% or fewer of their kids earning college degrees after six years were paid for by the Arizona School Facilities Board. These were state dollars spent for the purpose of educating students. A great many of those schools seem to have not gotten around to that part yet. Perhaps the state of Arizona should take them back and lease them out at very favorable rates to anyone with a good plan and a good track record of educating students. Perhaps lease to own contracts could be formulated to give the buildings to operators who meet academic growth goals.
The new schools could be constituted with charters with shorter renewal time horizons (say five years) and the current group of students could have a guaranteed spot in the new school if they desire it. Obviously not all will succeed, but what do we have to lose? You can’t get much worse than 5% or lower, and like the Louisiana Recovery School District, it gives you the opportunity to replace failed teams on a regular basis. I would be happy to follow New Zealand’s example and have the schools run as non-profits with elected boards of parents with children enrolled in the school.
In other words, why not leverage educational assets in order to conduct a global talent search for people with a track record of successfully educating children and running schools? At this point I would trade away the Grand Canyon for a couple of hundred high-quality schools. Why not give people the chance to earn school buildings that are currently being horribly mismanaged to the detriment of children and the broad public interest?
There is a legitimate diversity of views on what constitutes a good education. We should be no more willing to impose the “right” kind of education on people than we would impose the “right” religion or the “right” political preference. Reasonable people disagree about what constitutes the good life and the government in a free society should not be in the business of severely restricting that range of disagreement.
Unfortunately, even when we expand the set of publicly-funded education providers to include charter and private schools we still very often require that students attending those schools take the state test, designed to measure the teaching of state standards and curriculum. But what if we want something other than the state vision of a good education encapsulated in state standards and testing? Too bad. You still have choice…. sort of. “There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one, and they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.”
You might respond that state testing, curriculum, and standards are not so constraining as to meaningfully restrict choice. That might be the case in some states right now, but over time the clear goal of the standards-based reform movement is to drive particular instructional changes. I think they are very likely to fail in that effort (because teachers are powerful and don’t like being bossed around), but they may at least partially succeed and in so doing restrict the range of differing visions of a good education much more than is desirable in a free society. Besides, counting on others failing in pursuing a bad plan is a risky way to prevent bad from happening.
You might respond that choice schools need to comply with the state’s vision of a good education if they want state funding. So, the state only pays for its own vision of a good education but you have to pay extra if you want to pursue something else. This is roughly comparable to the status of Dhimmis (non-Muslims in an Islamic state) who are allowed to practice a different religion as long as they pay an extra tax. Doesn’t feel compatible with a free society, does it?
Besides the oft-repeated claim that state funding requires accountability to the state is an obviously shallow and false political slogan rather than a well-considered policy view. Most state funded programs require no formal accountability to the state and instead rely primarily on the self-interest of the recipients to use the funds wisely. For example, the largest domestic program, social security, is designed to prevent seniors from lacking basic resources for housing, food, or clothing. But we don’t demand that seniors account for the use of their social security checks. They could blow it at the casino if they want. We’re just counting on the fact that most would have the good sense to make sure that their basic needs are covered first.
Even in the area of education most government programs require no formal accountability. Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and the Daycare Tuition Tax Credit do not require state testing for people using those funds. We just trust that the public purpose of subsidizing education will be served by people pursuing their own interests. Anyone who declares that state funding requires state accountability obviously hasn’t thought about this for more than 10 seconds.
If choice schools don’t have to take state tests, why should traditional public schools? Every education provider should decide for itself what its goals are, develop its own standards, curriculum, and pedagogy, and decide how best to assess its progress. Traditional public schools are agencies of the state, so the state can and should decide the standards, curriculum, and method of assessment for those schools. The state could devolve those decisions to individual school districts or schools. But private schools are not agencies of the state. They have their own visions of a good education and should develop standards, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments as they think best.
Don’t parents need state testing requirements for consumer protection and to get information to make intelligent choices? Most markets generate consumer information without government mandates for them to do so. For example, I have more information than you can imagine to pick a hotel or restaurant through Trip Advisor, Yelp, Urban Spoon, etc… GreatSchools.org and other market sources of information about education are already springing up as choice expands without government mandates. But if you still feel the need to require testing, why not just require choice schools to take any one of a large number of standardized tests? At least that way we place fewer restrictions on the curriculum schools could pursue.
While I would prefer no testing requirements on choice schools, I understand and have defended the need for compromises to pass choice programs. But let’s not confuse a compromise with the ideal. Testing requirements are a concession that should only be granted if necessary to expand choice. And a requirement that choice schools take any one of a long list of standardized tests is much more desirable than requiring the state test. Choice supporters in Indiana and Louisiana should be proud that they were recently able to enact state-wide programs, even though those programs required all choice schools to take the state test. But now maybe those supporters should start a new push to remove or relax those requirements.
When your children come home from school today, I’d like you to ask them if they discussed the Gettysburg Address. I’m curious to hear their answers.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Posted by matthewladner 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 