The folks over at Choice Media TV put together a very productive discussion about Common Core. Check it out!
It features the following participants:
3 Comments | 
National Standards | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
In announcing the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award, I established the following criteria for selecting dis-honorees:
“The Higgy” will not identify the worst person in the world, just as “The Al” does not recognize the best. Instead, “The Higgy” will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.
Frankly, I had in mind those suffering from Petty Little Dictator Disorder (PLDD) more than those with BSDD (Big Scary Dictator Disorder). BSDD folks obviously worsen the human condition with their blood-thirsty and brutally oppressive ways. But almost everyone can recognize BSDD folks and an opposition to them forms naturally and immediately. BSDD is awful and frightening ( it is Big and Scary), but it is also relatively rare.
The more common and insidious threat to the human condition comes from PLDD folks as they sit around in their offices or bars or cafes dreaming about how everyone else’s lives should be organized and what should be done with everyone else’s money. Unlike those with BSDD, the PLDDers are facilitated in their disorder by the righteous (and self-deluding) conviction that everything they are doing is actually for the benefit of others.
The alphabet soup of DC-based think tanks and advocacy groups are filled with PLDD, but we couldn’t just give the Higgy to all of them. We aren’t Time Magazine (and as the recipient of the 2006 Time Magazine Man of the Year honor, I intend the magazine no disrespect). Instead, we have to name an individual who has worsened the human condition through the arrogant delusion of shaping the world to meet his or her own will.
This year’s recipient of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award is Pascal Monnet. Monnet is what the alphabet-soup PLDDers look like if they actually succeed in gaining power. Once their dreams of lording over others have been realized, rather than fixing the world, as they had imagined back in their cubicle days, successful PLDDers like Monnet just want to make sure that others don’t displace their position by fixing it on their own. In the end we learn that it was all really about control, not repairing the world.
Greg also had an excellent nomination, David Sarnoff. But Sarnoff didn’t have delusions of shaping the world; he actually did shape the world, at least for a while. He might be closer to a BSDDer than a PLDDer. And my nomination of Louis Michael Seidman fell short because Seidman only provides the rationale for the PLDD of others. Matt’s nominee, Pascal Monnet, more closely captures the essence of the Higgy because of his petty dictatorial impulses to block a group of artists from doing his job better than he could by fixing the clock in the Pantheon.
Anyone who could block a group of super-hero-looking artists like the UX members pictured below certainly has to be cast in the role of the villain.
3 Comments | William Higginbotham Inhumanitarian Award | Tagged: William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
A fascinating 2012 article in Wired introduced readers to the exploits of Urban eXperiment (UX for short). UX is a clandestine group of Parisians who make use of the underground tunnels break into museums in order to restore neglected pieces of art. Pascal Monnet is a museum administrator who did everything in his power to shut them down.
If this sounds too much like Robert DeNiro’s rebel-commando air conditioner repair man character from Brazil for comfort, well, yeah-me too. A friend of mine from graduate school, Dan Twiggs, sagely noted that Brazil was actually a documentary rather than a bizarre dark comedy.
UX is more than cool enough to force you to revise any stereotypes Americans hold about the French, but people like Monnet force you to reconsider your reconsideration. The group invests their time, effort and money into restoration projects neglected by the state, and even gives pointers to museum administrators regarding the flaws in their security. Armed with a map of the underground tunnel networks beneath Paris, UX members set up workshops in order to conduct late night restoration projects. In 2006, they decided to fix a large clock within the Pantheon:
That September, Viot persuaded seven other UX members to join him in repairing the clock. They’d been contemplating the project for years, but now it seemed urgent: Oxidation had so crippled the works that they would soon become impossible to fix without re-creating, rather than restoring, almost every part. “That wouldn’t be a restored clock, but a facsimile,” Kunstmann says. As the project began, it took on an almost mystical significance for the team. Paris, as they saw it, was the center of France and was once the center of Western civilization; the Latin Quarter was Paris’ historic intellectual center; the Pantheon stands in the Latin Quarter and is dedicated to the great men of French history, many of whose remains are housed within; and in its interior lay a clock, beating like a heart, until it suddenly was silenced.
Untergunther wanted to restart the heart of the world. The eight shifted all their free time to the project.
After fixing the clock, UX notified the administration of the Pantheon, whereupon the story started to go wrong:
As soon as it was done, in late summer 2006, UX told the Pantheon about the successful operation. They figured the administration would happily take credit for the restoration itself and that the staff would take over the job of maintaining the clock. They notified the director, Bernard Jeannot, by phone, then offered to elaborate in person. Four of them came—two men and two women, including Kunstmann and the restoration group’s leader, a woman in her forties who works as a photographer—and were startled when Jeannot refused to believe their story. They were even more shocked when, after they showed him their workshop (“I think I need to sit down,” he murmured), the administration later decided to sue UX, at one point seeking up to a year of jail time and 48,300 euros in damages.
Jeannot’s even more clueless successor, Pascal Monnet, not only continued to file suit against known members of UX, and he even hired someone to break the newly restored clock:
Jeannot’s then-deputy, Pascal Monnet, is now the Pantheon’s director, and he has gone so far as to hire a clockmaker to restore the clock to its previous condition by resabotaging it. But the clockmaker refused to do more than disengage a part—the escape wheel, the very part that had been sabotaged the first time. UX slipped in shortly thereafter to take the wheel into its own possession, for safekeeping, in the hope that someday a more enlightened administration will welcome its return.
Meanwhile, the government lost its lawsuit. It filed another, which it also lost. There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks. In court, one prosecutor characterized her own government’s charges against Untergunther as “stupid.” But the clock is still immobile today, its hands frozen at 10:51.
Well thank goodness for that- after all we wouldn’t want a clock actually displaying the correct time for more than two minutes a day- that would be like having a public school system that actually taught children how to read– quelle horreur! It strikes me that in a sense we are all waiting for that “more enlightened administration” in one form or another. I happily nominate Pascal Monnet for the Higgy, as he is a good candidate to be Patron Saint of Soulless Bureaucrats everywhere by displaying rigidity well past the point of absurdity.
3 Comments | William Higginbotham Inhumanitarian Award | Tagged: Pascal Monnet, the Higgy Award, UX, Wired Magazine | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Paul the psychic octopus sez: “Did I tell you so? Let me count the ways.”
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
And so it begins! Over on NRO, Heather Mac Donald is stirring up a culture war over the new national science standards:
One doesn’t need to be a global-warming skeptic to be appalled by a new set of national K–12 science standards. Those standards, developed by educrats and science administrators, and likely to be adopted initially by up to two dozen states, put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at the very core of science education. This is a political choice, not a scientific one. But the standards are equally troubling in their embrace of the nostrums of progressive pedagogy.
I’m sure Mac Donald is right – I certainly trust her more than I trust the cronies who are writing the standards. But the larger picture here is the dramatic increase in the politicization of school curricula that national standards inevitably creates. Of course, the very existence of the school monopoly is itself a neverending geyser of political headaches and occasional massive warfare over the curriculum. But nationalization multiplies the problem a hundredfold.
4 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: culture war, Greg Forster | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Improved news from Texas- the Senate Education committee passed both a special needs voucher and a scholarship tax credit proposal, and the full Texas Senate passed a modest increase in the charter school cap 30-1. Lotexas of Borg however shrugged off the damage and repeated the demand to be lead to Sector 78701 for more money, less accountability and no parental choice. Lotexas explained the collective’s position to a local Austin radio station succinctly: “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. You don’t want none of this, son!!”
You know what I love about the last decade of Texas public education? Every year I get a little older and they get more expensive without teaching students how to read any better.
Let’s see what happens next.
1 Comment | charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: Texas charter schools, Texas SB 2, Texas school choice | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Watch the above video from the Alliance for School Choice, and mind you, that the customized education that Jordan is receiving is using only state funds which districts have spent decades describing as inadequate. Whatever school district Jordan used to attend, assuming that school finance works the way public school advocates and lobbyists have claimed, would have been making a large shift of their own general education dollars in an attempt to educate Jordan. The district suffers no harm in losing Jordan, and in fact, one could make the case that they now have more resources to use on their remaining students.
Jordan benefits having an education custom designed to meet his needs.
Sadly a group of the anti-choice usual suspects are in court trying to make use of Blaine language forged by 19th Century Know-Nothing and Ku Klux Klan bigots in an effort to force students like Jordan back into district schools. I hope they will reconsider.
4 Comments | Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, ESAs | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post By Jason Bedrick)
Is school choice effective at improving measurable student outcomes?
That question has been at the center of a heated debate between Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas and Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, and one of her supporters. The controversy began when Ravitch attempted to critique Wolf’s studies of voucher programs in Milwaukee and Washington D.C.
After questioning Wolf’s credibility, Ravitch made three main empirical claims, all of which are misleading or outright false:
1) Wolf’s own evaluations have not “shown any test score advantage for students who get vouchers, whether in DC or Milwaukee.” The private schools participating in the voucher program do not outperform public schools on state tests. The only dispute is “whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools.”
2) The attrition rate in Wolf’s Milwaukee study was 75% so the results only concern the 25% of students who remained in the program.
3) Wolf’s study doesn’t track the students who left the voucher program. (“But what about the 75% who dropped out and/or returned to [the public school system]? No one knows.”)
Wolf then rebutted those claims:
1) Ravitch ignores the finding that vouchers had a strong positive impact on high school graduation rates. Moreover, there was evidence of academic gains among the voucher students:
The executive summary of the final report in our longitudinal achievement study of the Milwaukee voucher program states: “The primary finding that emerges from these analyses is that, for the 2010-11 school year, the students in the [voucher] sample exhibit larger growth from the base year of 2006 in reading achievement than the matched [public school] sample.” Regarding the achievement impacts of the DC program, Ravitch quotes my own words that there was no conclusive evidence that the DC voucher program increased student achievement. That achievement finding was in contrast to attainment, which clearly improved as a result of the program. The uncertainty surrounding the achievement effects of the DC voucher program is because we set the high standard of 95% confidence to judge a voucher benefit as “statistically significant”, and we could only be 94% confident that the final-year reading gains from the DC program were statistically significant.
2) The attrition rate in the Milwaukee study was actually 56%, not 75%. Ravitch was relying on a third party’s critique of the study (to which Ravitch linked) that had the wrong figure, rather than reading the study herself. Moreover, the results regarding the higher attainment of voucher students are drawn from the graduation rate for all students who initially participated in the voucher program in the 9th grade in the fall of 2006, not just those who remained in the program.
3) Wolf’s team used data from the National Clearinghouse of College Enrollment to track these students into college.
Ravitch responded by hyperventilating about Wolf’s supposed “vitriol” (he had the temerity to point out that she’s not a statistician, didn’t understand the methods she was critiquing, and that she was relying on incorrect secondary sources) and posting a response from Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who heads the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), which released the critique of Wolf’s study upon which Ravitch had relied.
Welner didn’t even attempt to defend Ravitch’s erroneous first and third claims, but took issue with Wolf’s rebuttal of her second claim. Welner defends the integrity of his organization’s critique by pointing out that when they read Wolf’s study, it had contained the “75% attrition” figure but that the number had been subsequently updated a few weeks later. They shouldn’t be faulted for not knowing about the update. As Welner wrote, “Nobody had thought to go back and see whether Wolf or his colleagues had changed important numbers in the SCDP report.”
That would be a fair point, except for the fact that they did know about the change. As Wolf pointed out, page four of the NECP critique contains the following sentence: “Notably, more than half the students (56%) in the MPCP 9th grade sample were not in the MPCP four years later.” In other words, the author of the NECP critique had seen the corrected report but failed to update parts of his critique. This is certainly not the smoking gun Welner thought it was.
Ravitch replied, again demonstrating her misunderstanding of intention-to-treat (“And, I dunno, but 56% still looks like a huge attrition rate”) and leaving the heavy lifting to Welner. Welner’s main argument is that Wolf should have “been honest with his readers the first time around, instead of implying ignorance or wrongdoing as a cheap way to scores some points against Diane Ravitch and (to a lesser extent) NEPC.” Welner would have had a point if Wolf’s initial response had been to NECP and not Ravitch, but Wolf’s point was that Ravitch was holding herself out as an expert when she had never read the primary source material that she was criticizing. Instead, she relied on a secondary source that cited two contradictory figures. She either didn’t notice or intentionally chose what she thought was the more damning of the two figures—though, again, the figure doesn’t matter for purposes of an intention-to-treat study.
We all make mistakes. Wolf’s team made a mistake in their report and corrected it within a few weeks. Welner has stated that his team will correct the NECP report now that their error has come to their attention a year later. Ravitch should also correct her erroneous assertions regarding the results and methodology of the studies.
(Edited for typo)
1 Comment | research reports, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The following is my review that was just published in Philanthropy Magazine of Sarah Reckhow’s book, Follow the Money:
In 2005, I conducted original research on a question that, to my mind, had not been satisfactorily examined. I tried to gauge and categorize how much total philanthropic giving there was to public education. I was surprised to discover that, relative to the vast public expenditures on K–12 education, philanthropic contributions were remarkably small—amounting to about one-third of 1 percent of total school spending. My paper was published in Rick Hess’ book With the Best of Intentions, and it concluded that trying to reshape public education through the sheer financial force of philanthropic dollars was futile—like pouring buckets of water into the sea. If philanthropists aspired to have a transformative effect on public education, they would have to use their limited resources to convince public authorities to redirect how public monies were spent.
In her new book, Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, Sarah Reckhow picks up where I left off. She provides a much deeper and quite thorough consideration of the potential and pitfalls of philanthropic giving in public education. Reckhow confirms that total foundation giving to K–12 education may exceed $1 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, but relative to the almost $600 billion spent annually on public education, it is actually a very small percentage.
Reckhow shows that large foundations have recognized the need to focus on influencing how public monies are spent, and that they are now devoting a significantly larger share of their giving on policy advocacy. Around the same time that I was recommending that donors shift their efforts toward policy influence, many large foundations were already making the change. Reckhow’s careful analysis of foundation tax filings shows direct giving to public schools dropped dramatically between 2000 and 2005, while giving to policy-advocacy efforts rose sharply.
Reckhow extends this analysis by warning us that shifting to policy advocacy won’t necessarily result in policy success, especially on an enduring basis. Foundations are tempted to concentrate their advocacy efforts in locations where there is centralized control over policy decisions. She empirically demonstrates that districts with mayoral or state control have been much more likely to attract foundation giving. It’s like one-stop shopping; foundations can get policy change while devoting fewer resources if they have to persuade fewer agencies or policymakers to embrace their preferred reforms.
But what happens when there is a personnel change among the central authorities? Eventually there will be a Pharaoh who knows not Joseph. Without building authentic and lasting support among local constituencies, philanthropic dreams of policy change may be ephemeral.
Reckhow illustrates this danger by contrasting the reform strategies in New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, mayoral control was fully achieved. Through both network modeling and extensive interviews, Reckhow is able to show that reform-oriented philanthropists concentrated their efforts in New York on a relatively narrow band of elites to advance their policy agenda. In Los Angeles, by contrast, education policy decision-making is more decentralized and diffuse. In Los Angeles, reform-oriented donors were forced to expand their efforts to cultivate support among a broader set of constituencies.
New York City may have been easier, faster, and cheaper for reform-oriented foundations to accomplish their goals, but that speed came at a price. The support for reform policies is so narrow in New York City that Reckhow doubts it will survive for long after Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves office at the end of this year. In Los Angeles, extensive efforts to build a base of support among a diversity of constituencies may help protect those reforms even with changes in political control of the district. To be clear, Reckhow does not provide evidence that Los Angeles’ reforms are lasting better than New York’s; her analysis leads her to expect that New York reforms rest on a thin and unsteady foundation and may not endure.
Reckhow is clearly advising foundations to avoid top-down reform strategies, but the largest foundations are not heeding her advice. Many have decided to up the ante on centralization. Mayoral or state control is no longer enough. They need national control. They are now focused on implementing the Common Core state standards with aligned national tests upon which teacher evaluation will increasingly rest. Federal policy, through Race to the Top financial incentives and selective offers of waivers to NCLB requirements, is pushing this centralizing strategy forward. If large foundations can build and control a national machinery to shape education policy nationwide, then they have no reason to worry about how broadly based support is for their preferred policies. As long as national elites favor their agenda, they hope that the national machine they are constructing can force policies from the very top all the way down to every classroom.
Reckhow’s implication is that this national reform machine is doomed to fail. Either state and local education authorities will resist the national reforms before they can be completed, or they will ignore and subvert policies that actually go into effect. Millions of teachers and thousands of schools cannot all be monitored and compelled from the top. Reckhow’s lesson is that enduring and successful reforms require a broad and deep base of support, which top-down reform efforts are failing to develop.
Of course, there is an alternative to trying to convince the education establishment to buy into reform. Donors could mobilize the most important yet most ignored constituency of all: parents. By expanding parental choices in schools, foundations can engage parents very effectively in controlling education policies.
Top-down reform strategies, such as merit pay or high-stakes testing, may be fragile, too vulnerable to shifts in the political winds. Once Bloomberg leaves office, who will fight to keep merit pay or high-stakes testing in place in the Big Apple? Bottom-up strategies, however, are more robust. Movements like school choice grow their own base of support. Once parents have good choices of schools, they are much more likely to fight efforts to take them away.
Reckhow thinks donors should court unions, community activists, and local leaders, but she fails to consider building the base of support for reform at the even more fundamental level of parents. Engaging parents in education reform through school choice may take longer, but no one involved in education reform should fool themselves into thinking that real and enduring reform can be done quickly. Donors need the wisdom and evidence that a book like Follow the Money can offer—but they also need the patience to do the job right.
Leave a Comment » | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Bad news from Texas– bipartisan super-majority of the House votes to prohibit vouchers in the House budget plan. It remains to be seen whether the state adding 80,000 new public school students per year and which has 17% of Hispanic and 15% of Black 8th graders reading proficiently will allow 10 new charters to be added to the state’s cap per year or not.
2 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: School Vouchers, Texas school vouchers | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
As long as we’re on the subject of narcissism here on JPGB, may I note that Michael Gerson quoted our Voltron op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post?
But even small, restricted choice programs have shown promising results — not revolutionary but promising. Last year a group of nine leading educational researchers summarized the evidence this way: “Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact. . . . Other research questions regarding voucher program participants have included student safety, parent satisfaction, racial integration, services for students with disabilities, and outcomes related to civic participation and values. Results from these studies are consistently positive.”
I’d tweet about it, but I’m too cool for Twitter.
2 Comments | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: Greg Forster, Michael Gerson | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Jay P. Greene's Blog 