Nominated for the Al Copeland Award: Banksy

October 18, 2012

My nominee for the 2012 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award differs from past nominees.  He is not an inventor, like Earle Haas, Debrilla M. Ratchford, Stan Honey, Ralph Teetor, or  Marion Donovan and Victor Mills.  Nor is he an entrepreneur or businessperson,like  Steve Wynn,  David Einhorn,  Herbert Dow, Steve Henson, or  Mary Quant .  I don’t even think you could classify him as a political activist or thinker, like  Charles Montesquieu, Wim Nottroth, or Fasi Zaka.

My nominee is the graffiti artist known as Banksy.  How, you may ask, does a graffiti artist improve the human condition?  Banksy does so by beautifying public spaces, promoting free speech and liberty, and by engaging in incisive social criticism.

Since Banksy’s identity is not public, there is some confusion and uncertainty about what can really be attributed to him. We know that he made the movie, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which you can watch in its entirety on Youtube pasted at the top of this post.  The movie begins as a documentary about a thrift-shop owner in Los Angeles, Thierry Guetta, who follows graffiti artists with a camera.  He then decides to become a graffiti artist himself under the name, Mr. Brainwash.  At around that point Banksy assumes control of the documentary because of Guetta’s inability to edit or make a coherent narrative out of the countless hours of footage he has recorded.  We then see Guetta as Mr. Brainwash successfully imitating the styles of other graffiti artists, supervising a factory of workers creating graffiti-like art, and hosting a phenomenally successful and lucrative show in Los Angeles where his art is featured and sold.

The film raises excellent questions about what is really art, the role of commerce in art, and the distinction between incorporating other people’s work and stealing it.  The movie was nominated for the best documentary Oscar, but there have been some disputes about whether the movie is even really a documentary.  Like most of Banksy’s work, it leaves one amused and thinking, but also disoriented and unsure about what it all really means.

In addition to the movie, Banksy is mostly known for his street art.  His work is provocative, hilarious, and beautiful.  There are too many images to reproduce here, but you can view photos of Banksy’s art through Google Images, on Flickr, and on his own web site.  Some of his work simply plays with the idea of making art in a public space, like this:

Some appear to be critiques of urban life, like:

But he is more biting in his attacks on consumerism, like:

And he clearly has no use for authority, like in:

Sometimes he just wants to shock and amuse, like:

And often he just despairs, like:

Not everything about Banksy is likable, but then again there was much about Al Copeland not to like.  Banksy does make his art on property he does not own, but much of it is on public property.  We do have a procedure for commissioning public art, but it is unclear to me why majority rule over what speech occurs in public spaces is any more conducive to liberty than the free-for-all of the graffiti artists.  The majority procedures tend to produce vaguely Stalinist glorifications of the state or banal inoffensiveness.  They certainly severely restrict the amount of art and speech we have.  In addition, as I’ve argued before, a competitive market of public art is akin to the competitive market of ideas in public debates.  It’s almost certainly better not to centrally control it.

Banksy also has political views attributed to him with which I sometimes find myself in strong disagreement.  Wikipedia describes his work as having “an array of political and social themes, including anti-War, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism, anarchism, nihilism, and existentialism.”  I’m not sure that Banksy’s work has all of these qualities, since much about his work is ambiguous and his hidden identity makes it difficult to be certain of his views on anything.  I definitely reject the notion that he is a nihilist, since he seems to care quite passionately about certain values.

And, like the creators of South Park, Banksy is not easy to categorize politically because he is more irreverent than he is an activist for any particular movement. If you think he is a revolutionary, remember that he once quipped: “Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world, I can’t even finish my second apple pie.”  And if you think he is entirely anti-materialist, he jokes in the Q&A on his web site: “Why are you such a sell out? I wish I had a pound for every time someone asked me that.”  And here are some of the images he has of activists:

To the extent we can know Banksy’s thinking, he seems mostly to be an idealist, lamenting innocence lost.  This image on the barrier separating Palestinian and Israeli areas captures it pretty well:

By making our world more beautiful, by making us think, and by advancing the notions of free speech and liberty Banksy is worthy of the 2012 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.

1 Comment | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

University of Texas System to Join EdX

October 16, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The University of Texas system will be joining EdX today. This makes the lineup the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of California Berkeley and the nine universities of the University of Texas system (it is not clear whether the six health institutions of the UT system will eventually participate). The Texas schools plan to concentrate on general education and introductory courses in developing Massive Open Online Courses.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, because EdX has set up a system for third-party administered final exams. EdX not only includes not only two of the nation’s premier private institutions, but also the flagship institutions of the nation’s largest and second to largest states.

Given that the Chronicle of Higher Education story linked to above notes that the UT system is actually paying $5m to join EdX,  they must have obviously considered the decision carefully. I cannot imagine an intellectually coherent argument that any of the UT system schools could muster to deny students credit for successfully completed EdX courses, so the UT system seems to be embracing the future with both arms.

Second, how ironic is it that this announcement comes on the heels of the Supreme Court arguments over UT Austin’s affirmative action policy? Soon people from all over the globe will be taking University of Texas courses, making the scarcity of university spots underlying such policies potentially obsolete, almost certainly less severe.

Finally, the University of Texas system pioneered a system for measuring value added measures under the leadership of UT Board of Regents Chair Charles Miller using a broad test of cognitive skills. To the suprise of approximately no one who graduated from UT Austin that I know, the flagship did not lead the way in value added.

A refinement of this system may allow for a formal evaluation of MOOCs and student learning. I’m willing to bet that they improve student learning.

EDITED TO CORRECT HYPERLINK

3 Comments | Digital Learning | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

More Reasonable Responses to My WSJ Piece

October 16, 2012

Yesterday I chronicled the unreasonable (and unfortunately predictable)  reaction of the teachers union to my WSJ op-ed suggesting that there were trade-offs between hiring more teachers and quality teachers.  I also received a number of reasonable, but still mistaken, responses attempting to explain the 50% increase in the teaching workforce without improved results by blaming special education and English Language Learners (ELL).  A letter in yesterday’s WSJ succinctly stated the argument:

In 1970 many disabled and mentally handicapped students were denied access to public education. Today these students are guaranteed a public education until the age of 22. Also in 1970, about 5% of the U.S. population was foreign born, compared with about 20% today. Many of these children enter the education system with limited English skills and are provided services to improve their mastery of English. Such services were unheard of in many parts of the country even 20 years ago.

It is obvious from these statistics that many more special-education teachers and English-language specialists are counted in the teaching profession now as compared to 1970. Mr. Greene claims that math and reading scores of 17-year-olds are unchanged since 1970. I would submit that the teaching resources devoted to students, excluding teachers of special education and limited-English speakers, is close to unchanged since 1970.

There is a plausibility to this argument, but special education and ELL can neither account for the 50% increase in teachers nor can they be ignored when considering the stagnation in student achievement.  Special education teachers constitute about 14% of the teaching work force and disabled students constitute about 13% of the student population.  So, if we imagine, as the letter writer does, that many of these disabled students were denied access to public education, then the addition of teachers was roughly commensurate with the addition of disabled students.  Excluding all disabled students and teachers, the reduction in student-teacher ratios between 1970 and 2012 would still have been roughly from 22 to 15.  If you wanted to use as the starting point 1980, 5 years after the start of federally mandated special education, the ratio still drops from 18.6 to 15.2.

But of course not all disabled students were denied access to schools before federal legislation.  Outside of the most severely disabled, the bulk of students now classified as disabled would have been present in school in 1970; they just weren’t being served very well.  So, if we added a large number of special education teachers to better educate students who were always present but who we now consider disabled, it should have resulted in much better outcomes for those students.  But overall outcomes are flat.

There is a disturbing habit among people who make the argument represented in the WSJ letter to act as if special education is a black hole from which no progress can or should be expected.  Yes, they say, we hired more teachers, but that was for more special education students and you couldn’t expect that to result in any progress.  But this is entirely wrong.  Special education can and should result in greater academic achievement, so even teachers added in that category should be contributing to better aggregate outcomes.

All of these arguments also hold true for ELL except that ELL is much smaller and involves fewer teachers than special education.  A critic could note that the world has given the US public education system more ELL students because of higher immigration, although the same cannot really be said of special education.  Other than the exclusion of severely disabled students, whose numbers are quite small, the distribution of disabilities in the public school student population should be roughly the same today as it was back then given that most disabilities are genetic in their origin.  It’s just that we didn’t serve many of those students well in the past and therefore should expect that achievement should be rising as we devote more resources to them.  More teachers should be producing more achievement.

And yes, more ELL students might require more teachers to produce the same achievement.  But in other ways our student population has become easier to educate.  Unless students have become significantly more difficult to educate across all dimensions, it’s not possible to explain away the facts that we have 50% more teachers without any meaningful improvement in outcomes.

Several years ago Greg Forster and I addressed this in our Teachability Index, in which we tracked 16 indicators of the advantages or disadvantaged that students bring to school and found that overall students are somewhat less challenging to educate now than they used to be.  And for a forthcoming book I have updated and improved upon that analysis and still find that students are somewhat easier to educate, so it should not require many more teachers to get the same results.

We can’t blame special ed and ELL to account for the lack of productivity in education as we’ve hired more teachers.  The problem is that we’ve ignored the trade-offs between teacher quantity and teacher quality.

2 Comments | special ed, teacher quality | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Randi Weingarten and Friends Respond to My WSJ Piece

October 15, 2012

I’ve long argued that the teacher unions are hardly better at running their political interests than they are at running schools.  They compensate for lousy ideas and poorly made arguments with the brute force of mountains of cash and an army of angry teachers.

My view of the teacher unions was confirmed by their mangled reaction to my piece in the Wall Street Journal noting the trade-offs between the number of teachers we hire and their quality.  The boss of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, tweeted her response: “They don’t want to pay teachers comp salaries…”

Now, I should say that anyone who attempts to engage in a substantive debate on Twitter is an idiot and so I fully confess that I was an idiot for trying to do so.  I responded: “we could have increased teacher salaries by 50% instead of increasing their number by that amount.”  And then I reiterated the point: “you seem to prefer having 50% more teachers over 50% higher salaries. Why is that?”

Having raised the issue, Randi Weingarten obviously had not thought through where the argument might go.  She couldn’t offer the obvious answer: “Because the teacher union cares more about power than about teachers, so having 50% more of them gives us a larger army on election day while 50% more pay might create more satisfied professionals who are less dependent on the union.”

No, thinking things through is not exactly the union’s forte.  They are more accustomed to crushing opponents with ad hominem attacks or distracting the audience with emotional and irrelevant appeals.  So, that’s exactly what they did.  Teacher union flak, Caitlin McCarthy, chimed in with: “Jay Greene shld model how an XL class size would work w/ Randi sitting in back taking notes for us. LOL.”  Randi Weingarten agreed with Caitlin McCarthy, adding to the joke: “I wld have to be in front-so I cld see the board.”

I responded that it is obviously possible to have higher student-teacher ratios since we used to have them and without getting worse results: “student teacher ratios from 40 years ago were modeled 40 years ago. If impossible how did they?”

McCarthy replied with a “these go to 11” argument, repeating that I needed to model how it was possible to have higher student-teacher ratios, tweeting: “Jay, again I suggest u actually model this & not just write/imagine it. Practice what u preach.”  This was followed by a series of tweets from McCarthy all of which were based on the notion that only teachers have standing to hold opinions about education policy.  She wrote: ” I understand & respect teaching b/c I walk the walk. I’m not all talk. Model ur ideas, Jay” and “Jay, have you ever subbed in an urban area for a wk? Not being snarky. A legit question.” and “Never take advice from someone who hasn’t been there.”  Randi Weingarten again joined McCarthy in her argument, tweeting: “Good Q Jay-have u ever taught high school in an urban/rural setting.”

I was struck by the anti-intellectualism of their line of argument.  What kind of educator would believe that the only way to know something is by having done it?  If that were true, we should dispense with schools and just have apprenticeships.  I tweeted: “so the only way to know something is to have done it? Shows no faith in abstract learning” and “As an educator you believe in abstract learning, right? Or do we only learn by apprenticeship?”

Mentioning abstract learning to the teacher union’s army of angry teachers must be like waving a red cape in front of a bull.  Caitlin McCarthy charged with all of her bovine might: “I would expect this kind of comment from an ‘abstract thinker’ out of touch w/ reality. Go sub.”

McCarthy threw in some additional ad hominem just to complete her stereotype as a teacher union flak unable or uninterested in discussing the substance of arguments.  She tweeted: “Jay was born circa ’67. He never lived firsthand the schools of yore & has a pol agenda.”  Oh, the substance of my argument can be ignored because I have a political agenda while she and Weingarten have no agenda at all other than their love of children.  And when Texas Parents Union tweeted Randi Weingarten and Caitlin McCarthy “While we wait on @jaypgreene to respond, what is your specific concern with article? Just curious…” McCarthy replied ” Hmm…u link to StudentsFirst & Stand For Children on ur site, so it’s safe to assume u agree w/ Jay?”  Never mind the argument, let’s talk about who you link to and who’s side you’re on.

I would like to think that the anti-intellectual, non-substantive, and ad hominem nature of the teacher union response was simply a function of the stupidity of trying to have an argument on Twitter.  But unfortunately, this is the main way I have seen them argue for more than two decades.  Fortunately for those opposed to the union’s policy agenda, their bullying and mangled arguments only continue to erode their credibility in policy discussions.  As I’ve said before, the teacher unions are already starting to be treated like the Tobacco Institute, a well-financed and well-organized special interest that has no legitimacy in policy debates.

 

 

 

16 Comments | teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

El Paso Cheating Scandal

October 15, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

One guy who isn’t going to be nominated for this year’s Al Copeland award is Lorenzo Garcia, disgraced ex-superintendent of El Paso schools. He’s at the center of the latest major cheating scandal connected to NCLB. From the New York Times:

Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day. For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors…

In 2008, Linda Hernandez-Romero’s daughter repeated her freshman year at Bowie High School after administrators told her she was not allowed to return as a sophomore. Ms. Hernandez-Romero said administrators told her that her daughter was not doing well academically and was not likely to perform well on the test.

Ms. Hernandez-Romero protested the decision, but she said her daughter never followed through with her education, never received a diploma or a G.E.D. and now, at age 21, has three children, is jobless and survives on welfare.

“Her decisions have been very negative after this,” her mother said. “She always tells me: ‘Mom, I got kicked out of school because I wasn’t smart. I guess I’m not, Mom, look at me.’ There’s not a way of expressing how bad it feels, because it’s so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse.” [ea]

Accountability systems don’t work when those being held accountable percieve the system as political and illegitimate. Schools need these systems but they’re not going to work as long as education is a government monopoly. More on that here and here.

Via Bill Evers

6 Comments | politics, school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Nominations Solicited for the 2012 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award

October 13, 2012

It is time once again for us to solicit nominations for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”

Last year’s winner of “The Al” was Earle Haas, the inventor of the modern tampon.  As I wrote last year about why Haas won:

But the tampon also helps illustrate where advancements for women really tend to come from.  Technological innovation, like the tampon, helped liberate women and that innovation comes from a capitalist system.  Earle Haas invented the tampon, at least in part, to make money.  Tampax Corporation brought the product to a mass market primarily to make money.  And women were successfully educated about the benefits of tampons through advertising.  Contrary to the loosely Marxist notion that advertising artificially creates desires for unnecessary products, just look at how essential advertising of tampons was in overcoming irrational opposition and ignorance of its benefits for women and society.

Haas won over a group of other worthy nominees:  Charles Montesquieu, David Einhorn, and Steve Wynn.

The previous year’s winner of  “The Al” was Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.  He beat out  The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.

Another past winner of “The Al” was  Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag.  She beat out Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing,  Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban,  Ralph Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

Nominations can be submitted by emailing a draft of a blog post advocating for your nominee.  If I like it, I will post it with your name attached.  Remember that the basic criteria is that we are looking for someone who significantly improved the human condition even if they made a profit in doing so.  Helping yourself does not nullify helping others.  And, like Al Copeland, nominees need not be perfect or widely recognized people.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Forbes on Education Savings Accounts

October 12, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Forbes magazine on the ESA update to the voucher concept. I like the iPhone analogy as the first generation of phones were only designed to do one thing, whereas a modern smart phone expands capabilities and options considerably. Likewise, our first generation of choice programs were essentially designed to allow children to transfer into a pre-existing stock of non-profit schools, whereas Education Savings Accounts open many more options.

Meet the new and improved brick!

Take a look- but before any of you conspiracy theorists get started, please note that the financial services fees from similar accounts such as college savings accounts and HSAs went below 1% years ago and have continued to fall. If only the “management fee” for public education were heading in the same direction…

2 Comments | Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

So We Meet Again Baumol…

October 12, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Part 3 of the Baumol series at the Ed Fly blog is posted, and James Shuls weighs in with an illustration of Baumol from Missouri.

Leave a Comment » | money myth, NAEP | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

School Choice Expanding

October 11, 2012

Jonathan Butcher, my former colleague and an occasional guest blogger on JPGB, has an interesting new piece in Education Next on the flurry of expanding school choice over the last few years.  It begins with a bang:

One year ago, the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the year of school choice,” opining that “this year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.” Such quotes were bound to circulate among education reformers and give traditional opponents of school choice, such as teachers unions, heartburn. Thirteen states enacted new programs that allow K–12 students to choose a public or private school instead of attending their assigned school, and similar bills were under consideration in more than two dozen states.

With so much activity, school choice moved from the margins of education reform debates and became the headline. In January 2012, Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler said school choice has become “a mantra of 21st-century education reform,” citing policies across the country that have traditional public schools competing for students alongside charter schools and private schools.

But Jonathan goes on to warn that legal challenges are taking some shine off of the choice victories:

We must wait to see which laws will survive legal challenges and whether students will enroll while judges consider the programs’ constitutionality. While school-choice laws arrived en masse in 2011, and the laws that passed are bolder than ever, lawsuits keep the systemic change reformers hope for just out of reach.

As Terry Moe has warned, our political system is designed to offer many opportunities for organized interests to block new programs.  Then again, the courts are the establishment’s last ditch effort to block a program.  And the more they have to go to the courts the more they are losing, even if they occasionally halt a program with a legal challenge.

2 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The University of Texas versus the Future

October 10, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Fascinating article in Texas Monthly by Paul Burka about the battle between reformers on the UT Board of Regents and the skeptics on the faculty. Well worth a read.

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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