Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by James Shuls)

In a recent Education Next blog post, Peter Meyer wrote about the tendency of Common Core opponents to conflate the idea of content standards with curriculum. He writes, “It is not a small distinction, since standards provide goals and a curriculum provides the day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year road map for reaching those goals.” He goes on to say, “From both a pedagogical and political point of view, it is crucial to keep the distinction between standards and curriculum clean and clear. But, most importantly, we need to try as hard as we can to get the facts straight.”

I agree with Meyer in many regards. If Common Core supporters want to build support for the standards among Republicans they absolutely must differentiate the Common Core from curriculum. I also agree that we need to get the facts straight. Unfortunately, this is something that Meyer’s post fails to do.

This conflation of ideas is not simply something Tea Party activists or Common Core opponents are guilty of, it’s widespread. Do a Google search for “Common Core Content Standards” and “Common Core Curriculum Standards.” You’ll get more hits for the later. Curriculum and content standards are often used interchangeably. Teachers, principals, and even assistant superintendents are guilty of as much.

Last year I contacted my children’s school and requested a copy of the curriculum. They sent me a one-page summary of the Common Core and an excerpt from Children’s Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI)

When I met with them and asked about the curriculum for spelling and reading. The teacher’s response was, “We’re following Common Core.”

When I asked about the math curriculum, the teacher told me they were using CGI to teach the Common Core. The principal even told me that she researched it by asking the district’s assistant superintendent for education about the district’s math curriculum. The answer—Common Core State Standards.

I tried to correct them. I tried to point out that these are standards not curriculum, but they were insistent. The problem is that the distinction between a “content standard” and “curriculum” is only a matter of degree. This distinction is not clear, not even for many educators.

Let’s look at an example. If I say students in first grade should be able to “Express the length of an object as a whole number of length units, by laying multiple copies of a shorter object (the length unit) end to end” Is that simply a standard or is that an activity that could be part of a lesson?

Meyer somehow tries to defend the distinction between Common Core and curriculum by noting that the standards must be complimented by a curriculum; an attempt that falls flat on its face. Demonstrating that a Common Core curriculum must be developed to implement the Common Core Standards simply illustrates that the standards will dictate curriculum to local schools. This strengthens the link between standards and curriculum.

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

One of the bigger problems in education policy is hubris.  People regularly claim that they know what the right policies or practices are, and things would be better if only others would bend to their will.  The truth is that we know relatively little about effective education policies and practices.  This isn’t for lack of trying.  Despite considerable research effort and policy inquiry, we’ve found remarkably few “universal truths” about effective education.  Part of the difficulty is that knowing what works presupposes that there is a single, best way.  But  it appears much of what is effective in education is contingent on particular needs and circumstances and does not lend itself to broad declarations about the “right”  practices and policies.

Because the scourge of PLDD is endemic, however, we continue to hear claims that “We know what works.”   This was the traditional refrain of teacher union leaders, but now reformers have joined the hubris chorus.  The latest example of this is the ratings of Ed Schools issued by the National Council of Teacher Quality.  NCTQ claims to know what good teacher preparation programs should be doing and judges those programs against NCTQ’s vision of effective practices.

In particular, NCTQ identifies 18 standards by which it judges Ed Schools.  “Our standards for the first edition of the Teacher Prep Review” NCTQ assures us, ” are based on research; internal and external expert panels; the best practices of other nations and the states with the highest performing students; and, most importantly, what superintendents and principals around the country tell us they look for in the new teachers they hire.”

NCTQ describes the research basis for their standards in a lengthy document.  Yet, even according to their own description only 8 of the 18 standards are supported by “strong research.”  And in most of the 8 cases where they do claim to have strong research support, the research does not actually provide them with the strong support they assert.

For example, the “Early Reading” standard assesses whether “The program trains teacher candidates to teach reading as prescribed by the Common Core State Standards.”  None of the studies they cite actually examine the specific standard since none specifically examine what methods of teaching reading, if any, are actually prescribed by Common Core.  As is the case with all 18 standards in the NCTQ rating system, one has to make a series of leaps between the research cited and the actual standard being used to judge teacher prep programs.

In the case of early reading, the “strong research” they cite examines whether teachers are familiar with the “five components of effective reading instruction,” and whether teachers who are certified and have masters degrees are more likely to know those five components.  It turns out teachers are generally not familiar with the five components and are no more likely to know them if they are certified or have a masters.  That’s all very nice, but isn’t the “strong research” supporting the standard supposed to show that knowledge of the five components, which presumably have something to do with teaching “reading as prescribed by the Common Core State Standards,” actually lead to improved reading by students?  The strong research cited by NCTQ says it generally doesn’t: “This study also found no relationship between teachers’ knowledge of these components and their students’ reading growth – with the notable exception of third-grade students.”  This is typical of the “strong research” supporting 8 of the 18 standards by which NCTQ judges Ed Schools.

Standards 1 and 6 address whether teacher prep programs select “teacher candidates of strong academic caliber” and whether “teacher candidates have the broad content preparation necessary to successfully teach to the Common Core State Standards.”  In both cases the “strong research” on which these standards rely is a study by Boyd, et al examining the relationship between teacher characteristics and student achievement.  Let’s leave aside the fact that NCTQ acknowledges that research by Harris and Sass as well as Chingos and Peterson contradict their standard.  Even the Boyd, et al study they do cite does not specifically demonstrate that teachers from more selective programs or with more content training are more effective.  First, Boyd, et al are careful not to make the type of strong causal claims from their work that NCTQ does:

It is not easy to estimate how the achievement gains of students are affected by the qualifications of their teachers because teachers are not randomly sorted into classrooms. For example, if teachers in schools in which students perform best in math are more likely to be certified in math, one might be tempted to conclude that being certified to teach math contributes to higher student achievement. The causal relationship, however, may operate in the other direction; that is, more qualified teachers may be in schools where students perform well in math because they prefer to teach good students and because employers want to staff their courses with in-field certified teachers. Analysts need to be careful not to attribute the test-score gains associated with sorting to the attributes of teachers.

Beyond the fact that Boyd, et al would not make the strong causal claims from their work that NCTQ feels free to do, the Boyd, et al study examines a basket of teacher qualifications and does not claim to be able to distinguish accurately between teacher experience, selectivity of the college they attended, content knowledge, and other characteristics because “many of the measures of teachers’ qualifications are highly correlated with each other.”  In short, the Boyd, et al study is hardly the “strong research” in support of their standards that NCTQ claims it is.

Do we need more examples of how NCTQ misinterprets or stretches research to claim that their standards are supported by “strong research”?  Oh, how about one more…  Standard 13 is “Equity” and judges teacher prep programs based on whether “The program ensures that teacher candidates experience schools that are successful in serving students who have been traditionally underserved.”  The “strong research ” NCTQ cites for support of the claim “that entering teachers learn crucial methods of instruction and management through observation of and supervised practice in schools where staff are successfully teaching students living in poverty” is a piece by Ronfeldt.

Unfortunately, Ronfeldt’s study appears to make the opposite claim.  He finds that it is more important for student teachers to be trained in schools with low staff turnover that tend to have more advantaged students.  He concludes:

Should we place student teachers in “difficult-to-staff, underserved” schools to learn to teach? The main
findings of this study suggest otherwise – learning to teach in difficult-to-staff field placement schools is associated with lower teacher effectiveness and retention. Moreover, the results demonstrate that being trained in field placements with higher concentrations of poor, black, and lowest-achieving students has no significant effect on teacher retention or effectiveness.

I haven’t see this much unreliable citation of research since I read teacher union reports.

To be fair, NCTQ acknowledges that quality research on effective education practices is in short supply: “To the extent that high-quality research can inform how teachers should be prepared, NCTQ uses that research to formulate standards. Unfortunately, research in education that connects preparation practices to teacher effectiveness is both limited and spotty.”  But this lack of evidence does not prevent NCTQ from confidently declaring that they know what teacher prep programs should be doing and judging them on that basis.  If quality research is so limited, how does NCTQ know what everyone else is supposed to be doing?

And I’m sure that there is considerable room for improvement in teacher prep programs.  Many of NCTQ’s recommendations are probably sensible, even if they aren’t backed by “strong research.”  The problem is not so much that NCTQ is suggesting bad ideas as that they are claiming to know much more than they actually know.  And they are willing to boss around everyone else despite not knowing as much as they think.

Maybe we’d make more progress in improving teacher prep programs if we were more upfront about what we didn’t know and encouraged more experimentation and data-collection so that we can learn more.  And given that different circumstances may call for different practices, maybe we should be open to a variety of Ed School approaches rather than attempting to impose the one true way.

Back in April I argued:

Twitter can be handy for announcing links to other material, following breaking news and unfolding events, or for humor.   But for policy discussion, Twitter has to be just about the dumbest thing on the planet.  Watching people attempt to have meaningful exchanges on Twitter is just ridiculous….  Some education policy analysts, however, are undeterred by the stupidity of Twitter and are determined to attempt to change the world through thousands of 140 character messages.  Quite often they are communicating thousands of profound 140 character messages to a relatively small number of followers.  As is too typical in education policy debates, everyone is on the stage and almost no one is in the audience.

I then went on to develop “the Narcissus Index, which is the ratio of the number of Tweets people have issued to the number of their followers.  Essentially it is the ratio of how much we love hearing ourselves talk to how many people actually want to listen to us.”

Well, researchers at the University of Michigan have confirmed my suspicion that there is a link between Twitter use and Narcissism:

Researchers interviewed 486 college students…. Researches administered a personality assessment that evaluated a person’s narcissism and found that participants who appeared to have a superior sense of self were likely to be active on Twitter….   Likewise, adults who scored high on a narcissism assessment were likely to be active on Facebook, where the goal is to curate an image and control how you are seen….   According to the U-M release, the study is among the first to compare the relationship between narcissism and social media use across ages.

The researchers were unable to say which came first, the chicken or the egg. In other words, does constant social media use breed narcissism or is it a symptom of the condition?  The study is published online in Computers in Human Behavior.

There you have it.  Science reports that there is a connection between Narcissism and Twitter.  Now everyone proceed to argue about this in 140 characters or less with your customary level of outrage and snark.  Doing so will make the world a better place 140 characters at a time.

(HT: Morgan Polikoff)

Support for liberty does not appear to be natural.  It has to be learned.  Everyone is inclined to preserve his or her own autonomy, but that is not the same as protecting the autonomy of other or supporting the principle of liberty in the abstract.  From a narrow self-interested perspective, the rational thing is to protect one’s own autonomy while being indifferent to the oppression of others.  As long as you are free to pursue your interests, why should you care if others aren’t?

Of course, it could be argued that you should promote liberty for others so that your own liberty is protected.  But this ignores collective action failure.  As long as a person can protect one’s own liberty why should he or she endure the risk and expense of protecting others?  Notice that the press did not become alarmed about Obama Administration actions until it was revealed that AP phone records had been secretly obtained. This greater interest in preserving one’s own rights is actually quite typical.

So, how do we overcome collective action failure and get large numbers of people to support liberty as an abstract principle for all and not just for themselves?  We are in  paradoxical situation where our self-interest does not construct and sustain a system by which we are free to pursue our self-interest.  We need non-self-interested ideas and actions to lay the foundations for a system where self-interest can flourish.

Tocqueville gave a fair amount of thought to this problem, but current supporters of liberty pay little attention to the issue.  Tocqueville noted that institutions like religion, family, and community help lay the foundations for liberty.  It’s interesting that all of these institutions that support a system where liberty is protected are themselves illiberal.  For the most part, one does not choose one’s family, religion, or community.  And even when one does choose a spouse, to convert to a new religion, or relocate to a new community, in all cases one must still submit to the authority of others.

The reason why these illiberal institutions help lay the foundations for liberty is that they induce one to subordinate one’s narrow self-interest for abstract principle — just as liberty requires some sacrifice of self-interest for the principle that other people’s self-interest is also worthy of protection.

In addition to these illiberal institutions, another mechanism by which support for liberty is cultivated is through art.  Research that I am doing with Brian Kisida and Dan Bowen is finding that exposing students to art promotes support for liberty.  The reason for this may be that art helps us reflect on the human condition, much like religion, and may lead us to subordinate some of our self-interest for the abstract principle of liberty.  Perhaps the important thing about art is that it is not “productive” in a narrow economic sense.  So it trains us to think that there are things of value other than the acquisition of material goods and power for ourselves.  This then helps create and sustain a system where we are free to acquire material goods and power for ourselves.

Whatever the mechanism is by which we learn to love liberty, we need to pay more attention to promoting those mechanisms if liberty will continue to flourish.  Liberty will not protect itself.  It must be learned.

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

A random-assignment study of a high school athletics program shows that participating young men experienced a significant reduction in arrests for violent crimes and a significant increase in grade point averages and the probability of graduation.  Athletics help young men channel their aggression in acceptable ways, increases their grit, and moves them toward a path of success.

This evidence comes from an initiative in some of  Chicago’s toughest high schools that are embracing a new sports program that often includes violent sports. It is called Becoming a Man – Sports Edition, which is teaching adolescent boys boxing, wrestling, martial arts, archery and other Olympic sports like handball. The privately-run athletic program is combined with counseling sessions.

“So after you got hit in the face during that boxing match, what were you thinking that led you to drop your hands and charge blindly?” This is the kind of coaching – i.e. counseling – that accompanies a typical training day. Students also meeting to discuss their family circumstances. The program seeks to provide young men with male role models and athletic opportunities to help them deal with their aggression in a productive manner.

Much talk but little research surrounds high school sports. In fact, it’s astounding how rarely athletics in schools are rigorously studied. Sports are fundamental to a school’s identity, for better or for worse. Yet there is little evidence to tell us what to expect from BAM-Sports Edition.

Jay and Dan Bowen have new study that is somewhat helpful, recently published on Ohio high schools: “With regard to attainment, a 10 percentage point increase in a school’s overall winning percentage is associated with a 1.3 percentage point improvement in its CPI, which is an estimate of its high school graduation rate.” This certainly belies the notion that athletics undermine academics. But, as Jay noted on the blog, their data has limitations.

Of course, we cannot make causal claims based on our analyses about the relationship between sports and achievement.  It’s possible that schools that are more effective at winning in sports and expanding participation are also the kinds of schools that can produce academic success.

In Chicago the schools targeted by BAM – Sports Edition are not known for producing academic success. Also, BAM-Sports Edition, while apparently intense, is not geared toward league sports.

However, participation was determined by random assignment, allowing researchers to make strong causal claims about the effects of participation in the athletics program. In perhaps the best least-publicized paper I’ve read in awhile, University of Chicago graduate student Sara Heller led a rigorous study of the program. This is the only study I know of that uses an experimental design to evaluate high school athletics. The program randomly assigned 2,740 students to treatment and control groups. During the program year, arrests for violent crimes fell by 44 percent among the treatment group. One year after the program, treatment students had significantly higher GPAs. According to the study:

we forecast that the changes in GPA caused by the program could translate into increases in graduation rates between 3 and 10 percentage points, or 7 to 22 percent relative to control complier baseline rates

The athletics involved – boxing, martial arts, etc. – might startle a lot of observers. Some people think sports like basketball teach kids the wrong lessons. So what do these sports teach students?  Surveys suggest that the program improved the “grit” and attitudes of participants. Who knew? Fun sports and caring coaches can help students to give a damn about life.

Of course, this topic bears further study. Good thing Jay, Albert Cheng and I have a forthcoming study on the classroom performance of coaches as teachers.

(Link added)