Jay P. Greene's Blog

Fordham’s Kathleen Porter Magee has responded to my post last week in which I argued that Fordham’s vision of Common Core as “tight-loose” is looking a lot more like “tight-tight.”  In her rejoinder, Kathleen Porter-Magee reiterates the distinction between standards and curriculum and insists that “good standards aren’t prescriptive, but they’re not agnostic, either.”

But just a week earlier in the foreword to Fordham’s new study judging the extent to which English teachers are changing instruction to meet Common Core, Kathleen and Checker talk about the “instructional shifts” Common Core standards “expect” and “demand.”  Now we are asked to believe that there is a world of difference between “prescribing” and ‘expecting” or “demanding.”

If this is beginning to sound like debating what the meaning of the word “is” is, there is a reason.  Almost everything coming out of Fordham (and a great many other DC think-tanks and advocacy groups) feels more like political campaign rhetoric than serious intellectual inquiry.  Rick Hess described Kathleen Porter-Magee’s rejoinder, saying it “read to me like a pol’s answer.”  Precisely.  It is a politician’s answer because the folks at Fordham (and many other DC policy shops) too often behave, talk, and write more like politicians than scholars or serious policy analysts.

My goal in critiquing Fordham (and the Gates Foundation) is to encourage them to behave less like politicians and more like scholars and serious policy analysts.  Kathleen Porter-Magee misunderstands my motivation, suggesting that I am trying to “undermine the credibility of [my] opponents” on Common Core so I “can win the day—facts be damned.”

But the truth is that I am under no delusion that what I write or say will have any effect on the fate of Common Core, nor do I really care about having such an effect.  As I have written and said on numerous occasions, Common Core is doomed regardless of what I or the folks at Fordham say or do.  Either Common Core will be “tight” in trying to compel teachers and schools through a system of aligned assessments and meaningful consequences to change their practice.  Or Common Core will be “loose” in that it will be a bunch of words in a document that merely provide advice to educators.

Either approach is doomed.  If Common Core tries being tight by coercing teachers and schools through aligned assessments and consequences, it will be greeted by a fierce organized rebellion from educators.  It’ll be Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch and their army of angry teachers who will drive a stake through the heart of Common Core, not me or any other current critic . If Common Core tries being loose, it will be like every previous standards-based reform — a bunch of empty words in a document that educators can promptly ignore while continuing to do whatever they were doing before.

This is the impossible paradox for Common Core.  To succeed it requires more centralized coercion than is possible (or desirable) under our current political system and more coercive than organized educators will allow.  And if it doesn’t try to coerce unwilling teachers and schools, it will produce little change.

If Common Core is doomed, why do I bother responding to Fordham, Gates, and others making arguments in its favor?  I am responding to the intellectual corruption that the political campaign for Common Core is producing among otherwise decent, smart, and well-intentioned folks.  Arguments like “tight-loose” are political campaign slogans, not intellectually serious ideas.  I’m trying to point this out, not “win the day” on the merits of Common Core.  I pick on Fordham because I am actually in substantive agreement with a good deal of what they are trying to accomplish and don’t want to see them pursue those goals with crappy political slogans.

But with Mike Petrilli assuming the presidency of the Fordham Institute next year, I see hope for a new Fordham.  He might start by hiring more social scientists and fewer former journalists and office-holders.  Policy analysis isn’t entirely about “messaging” to convince people to do what we already know is right.  There is a lot we don’t know and competing social science claims we need to adjudicate, so a good policy organization needs a bunch of people with content and research method expertise.  You can’t just rent this expertise on the cheap; you need to hire social scientists to make this expertise a stronger part of the organization’s DNA.  Look at Brookings, EPI, and AEI for models across the political spectrum that give priority to social science.

Mike might also consider diversifying support away from the Gates Foundation.  With more than $6 million from Gates in the last few years and with the appointment of former Gates political strategist, Stefanie Sanford, to the Fordham board, Fordham is beginning to feel like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gates Foundation.  I don’t think Fordham is advocating for anything they don’t believe because of Gates support, but I do think Gates is a corrupting influence that tries to make everything part of a political campaign rather than serious, honest inquiry.  Reducing reliance on Gates might free Fordham up to sound less like a string of political slogans.

To accomplish less reliance on Gates, Fordham might need to shrink a bit in size.  That would probably be a good thing.  A policy shop shouldn’t try to maximize its budget or head-count.  It should try to be the right size to do the work it wants to do.  Not chasing every dollar to become ever-larger would also free up Fordham to speak only when it wants to and not feel obliged to produce reports, tweets, and blog posts all of the frickin’ time.  A lower volume of communication might produce higher quality communication and probably increased influence.

Lastly, a shift away from the political obsession of journalists and former office-holders and toward a more serious, social scientific approach would help Fordham avoid crappy research and slogans.  Fordham should avoid doing any expert panel studies giving grades to this or that.  It should avoid doing selection on dependent variable analyses exploring why Massachusetts, Finland or anyone else is doing well.  It should avoid repeating the Fordham drinking game in which arguments depend on appending “smart” to regulation, curricum, etc… or dividing policies into three kinds where the middle one is the sensible alternative to two extremes.  Messaging is not really an argument.

One thing Fordham should not change is its principles and its sincere commitment to Common Core.  Contrary to Kathleen Porter-Magee’s assumptions, I am not trying to convince Fordham to change its position on Common Core. I just want Fordham not to confuse political campaigns for policy analysis.  Whatever happens with Common Core (and who knows, perhaps Fordham is right in thinking it is a great idea and will somehow help), we cannot degrade the currency of policy analysis by turning everything into an advocacy campaign.  Education reform is likely to be a very long game, so we don’t want to bend all rules, twist all facts, and pull out all stops just to win this one battle.  It would be nice to have a credible and effective Fordham around for the next ed reform debate.  I hope Mike Petrilli can help do this.

Checker Finn and the folks at Fordham have made the “conservative case” in support of Common Core.  In it they have reassured those concerned about centralized control that Common Core embodies a “tight-loose” approach, which is tight on the ends of education but loose on the means for accomplishing those ends.  Common Core doesn’t dictate curriculum or pedagogy Checker assured us, it only requires that “everybody’s schools use the same academic targets and metrics to track their academic performance”  and “then those schools can and should be freed up to ‘run themselves’ in the ways that matter most: budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule, and more.”

Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern made the same argument in National Review Online:

Here’s what the Common Core State Standards do: They simply delineate what children should know at each grade level and describe the skills that they must acquire to stay on course toward college or career readiness. They are not a curriculum; it’s up to school districts to choose curricula that comply with the standards.

And Fordham’s Peter Meyer responded to criticism of the curricular and pedagogical implications of Common Core in the New York Times by asserting:

In fact, there is no Common Core curriculum, radical or otherwise. Words matter. The Times essay, Cunningham says, “conflates standards, which are agreed-upon expectations for what children should know in certain subjects by certain ages, with curricula, which are the materials and the approaches that teachers use to help kids learn.”  There is no such thing as a “radical curriculum” because there is no such thing as a common core curriculum.

These were the promises the Fordham folks made when they were courting us on adopting Common Core, but now that we’re married, they’ve changed their tune.  No longer do they bring us flowers, write love-poems, or assure us that Common Core in no way dictates how schools should teach or what they should teach — their pedagogy and curriculum.  Instead, Fordham and their friends are now judging schools on whether they are properly implementing “instructional shifts—ways in which the Common Core standards expect practice to differ significantly from what’s been the norm in most American classrooms.”

I thought Common Core didn’t determine “practice.”  Now Checker Finn and Kathleen Porter-Magee argue:

In order for standards to have any impact, however, they must change classroom practice. In Common Core states, the shifts that these new expectations demand are based on the best research and information we have about how to boost students’ reading comprehension and analysis and thereby prepare them more successfully for college and careers. Whether those shifts will truly transform classroom practice, however, remains to be seen.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, with support and praise from the Fordham Institute, are grading teacher training programs on whether “The program trains teacher candidates to teach reading as prescribed by the Common Core State Standards.”   Wait.  “Prescribed?”  I thought Common Core didn’t prescribe pedagogy.  But that was back when I was young and we were dating.

It would be nice if Fordham and others trying to hold down the right flank of the Common Core advocacy campaign could keep their story straight.  The switch once the fight has shifted from adoption to implementation creates the impression that these folks make whatever argument they think will help them prevail in the current debate rather than relying on principle, evidence, and intellectually serious policy discussion.

Matt has alerted me to an excellent analysis by Martin Feldstein on a potentially fatal (pardon the pun) difficulty with Obamacare.  He writes, in part:

The potentially fatal flaw in Obamacare is the very same feature that appeals most to its supporters: the ability of even those with a serious preexisting health condition to buy insurance at the standard premium.

That feature will encourage those who are not ill to become or remain uninsured until they have a potentially costly medical diagnosis. The resulting shift in enrollment away from low-cost healthy patients to those with predictably high costs will raise insurance companies’ cost per insured person, driving up the premiums that they must charge. As premiums rise, even more relatively healthy individuals will be encouraged to forego insurance until illness strikes, causing average costs and premiums to rise further….

The “wait-to-insure” option could cause the number of insured individuals to decline rapidly as premiums rise for those who remain insured. In this scenario, the unraveling of Obamacare could lead to renewed political pressure from the left for a European-style single-payer health-care system.

But it might also provide an opportunity for a better plan: eliminate the current enormously expensive tax subsidy for employer-financed insurance and use the revenue savings to subsidize everyone to buy comprehensive private insurance policies with income-related copayments. That restructuring of insurance would simultaneously protect individuals, increase labor mobility, and help to control health-care costs.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the general approach of Obamcare — requiring everyone to purchase health insurance while subsidizing that purchase for people with fewer resources.  And I’ve been repulsed by the Republican response, with it’s hysterical over-reaction, strategically idiotic government shut-down, and lack of a reasonable alternative.  But Feldstein makes a lot of sense to me.  The problem is that Obamacare does not really require everyone to buy health insurance and the fines (err, I mean taxes) for not having insurance are too small so that many will rationally prefer the “wait-to-insure” option.

Of course, I’m not sure whether actually requiring everyone to buy health insurance would pass constitutional muster given Roberts’ reasoning in the Obamacare case.  But it’s amazing how adroit in its reasoning the Supreme Court can be when the alternative is a policy disaster.

It would also be nice if the minimum policy required for purchase were not laden with expensive and unnecessary features, like coverage for birth control or annual mammograms from birth (or something like that).  The trouble is that every special interest tries to get its pet project into the minimum required coverage, so it isn’t very politically realistic to hope that we would only require catastrophic coverage.  But here’s hoping.

(HT to Minnesota Kid for the image)

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

Another gold standard, random assignment study has found that Boston charter schools are producing large test score gains.Yesterday the Boston Foundation released the newest installment of its studies of Bean Town charters. It updates results from previous studies and finds continued, large test score gains for charter middle and high schools. From the study:

Since 2009, the middle school charter yearly gains for math are 0.23σ compared to 0.26σ overall and the gains for ELA are 0.15σ compared to 0.14σ overall. The comparison for charter high schools is similar. In recent years, the high school charter gains for math are 0.38σ compared to 0.35σ overall and the gains for ELA are 0.33σ compared to 0.27σ overall.

You will notice that these are yearly gains. The authors show that results are almost always stronger for poor and minority students, as well as English language learners. This kind of progress, for students of color, could easily eliminate the racial achievement gap over the course of middle and high school.

The report also looks at the question of whether charter schools effectively push out low-performing students. The authors find that charter middle schools are significantly less likely than other public schools to see their students transfer elsewhere. In high school, charter students for a time were more likely for a time to transfer out, but that trend has completely vanished since a state policy change regarding charter enrollment rules in 2010 – a time since which the test score results of charter high schools have improved.

So, we have another random assignment study finding gains for charter school students. We have another study dispelling the myth that charter schools push out their students.

Soon we should expect a retraction from all the people who’ve made evidence-free claims to the contrary. Right?

With the support of the Gates Foundation, New York City created 150 small schools of choice between 2002 and 2008.  Five previous rigorous studies of this program and other small school initiatives have demonstrated significant benefits for students.  Now we have a sixth study from the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative at MIT.

The authors, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Weiwei Hu, and Parag Pathak, are economists at Duke and MIT.  They take advantage of lotteries to gain admission to these non-selective small schools of choice to conduct a random assignment experiment. The full study can be read here, but it does not allow me to cut and paste text  to summarize the results. According to the press release:

The study follows cohorts of rising 9th graders for five application years from 2003-04 through 2007-08. For these students, small schools boost performance across all five major Regents exams: Math, English, Living Environment, Global History, and US History.  Students randomly offered a seat at a small school accumulate 1.4 more credits per year, attend school for 4 more days each year, and are 9% more likely to receive a high school diploma. 

 

As the cohorts have aged, it is now possible to measure the effects of small schools on college enrollment and choice, outcomes that have never been examined before.   Compared to the college enrollment rate of 37% for those not offered, students at small schools are 7% more likely to attend college and 6% more likely to attend a four-year college.  Most of these gains come at four-year public institutions.  There is a marked 7% increase in the fraction of students who enroll in the CUNY system. Small schools cause students to clear CUNY remediation requirements in writing or reading.  The early evidence suggests that students are more likely to persist in college, as measured by attempting at least two academic semesters.  Students in the lottery study are too young to say anything definitive about college graduation. 

 

A major innovation in the study is its use of information contained in NYC’s Learning Environment Surveys to characterize the small school environment for those in the experiment.  Small schools are rated higher than fallback schools by student survey respondents on the overwhelming majority of questions on engagement, safety and respect, academic expectations, and communication.  Surveys indicate that students feel safer and have closer interactions with their peers and teachers, despite reporting a smaller variety of course offerings and activities.  Teachers indicate greater feedback, increased safety, and improved collaboration.

 

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation. The research team includes Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Professor of Economics, Weiwei Hu, PhD Candidate at Duke University and Parag Pathak, Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and SEII Director.  The study uses data provided by the New York City Department of Education.  The findings are being released in the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series this week. 

 

The study uses an innovative research design based on admissions lotteries contained in the high school match.  The lottery-based research design relies on apples-to-apples comparisons: among those who apply to a given set of small schools, applicants who were randomly offered are compared with otherwise similar students who were not offered a seat.  The study covers more than 108 oversubscribed high school programs with 9th grade entry, which represent 70% of unselective small high schools opened between 2002-2008.

 

“These results indicate important possibilities for urban small schools reform,” said Pathak.  “The collaboration partnership between key stakeholders in New York City shows that within-district reform strategies can substantially improve student achievement.”

(Guest Post by James Shuls)

As a child, I spent several years in the Cub Scouts. That experience taught me many valuable lessons, like how to carve a car out of a block of wood. More importantly, I learned a bit about orienteering. There is really one thing you must know about plotting your course — where you are in relationship to where you want to be. This is true in all areas of life. At first blush, it seems this lesson was lost on the folks at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). Unfortunately, it was not the only lesson lost on Missouri’s education department.

DESE recently revamped the state’s teacher licensing process. They jettisoned the widely used Praxis teacher licensure exams and instituted new standardized exams. Among the new tests is one called the Missouri Educator Profile. The profile “is an assessment of work style preferences used to support the development of effective educator habits.” Pre-service teachers take this exam upon entering a college education program and again just prior to exiting their education program. Though teachers are expected to “develop” in their preparation programs, the Missouri Educator Profile website tells us that “there are no right or wrong answers.”

Progress, development, growth, improvement; these things cannot happen unless you know where you are in relationship to where to want to be. You must have a goal.

There are no pass/fail scores on the Educator Profile; but as a point of fact, this new Educator Profile does have right and wrong answers. When designing the test, DESE officials had “exceptional teachers” take the assessment. These exceptional teachers became the norming group for whom all prospective teachers will be compared.

The initial results will provide the student and advisor with information about how the student’s work styles match the work styles of successful teachers. The results also suggest ways in which the students can improve their work styles. This is an important step in helping the students choose whether or not professional education is the right career choice.

This highlights another important lesson that was apparently lost on the folks at DESE—selecting on the dependent variable is a poor research strategy and a poor way to identify effective teaching practices. This represents more of a Cargo Cult mentality than true scholarly research. We cannot identify what makes a teacher successful by only looking at successful teachers. We need a comparison group at the very least. Emulating the habits of others will not necessarily bring about the same results and you simply cannot make causal claims by selecting on the dependent variable.

DESE officials were wrong when they said “there are no right and wrong” answers on this new exam. Teachers whose attitudes, dispositions, and habits don’t match DESE’s preconceived notion of a good teacher will have wrong answers. They will be counseled out of their education major or they will be encouraged to fall in line and conform to the DESE standard. This can have a devastating impact on ingenuity and creativity in the classroom.

At first blush, it seemed DESE officials had not learned the lesson about orienteering. But perhaps they have learned the lesson all too well and they know exactly where they want to go. In Missouri, DESE is implementing new licensure exams, Common Core Standards, new requirements for teacher preparation programs, new Pre-K standards and tests, a new K-12 evaluation system, among other reforms. I think they know exactly where they are going: they have plotted a course for greater centralized control of Missouri’s education system.

James Shuls is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute.

(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…