Jay P. Greene's Blog

In case you’ve missed them, there were some great pieces by Andrew Coulson and Bob Maranto in newspapers today.  And the book on Obama’s education policies edited by Bob Maranto along with Mike McShane, one of our graduate students who is now a research fellow at AEI, was reviewed by Nathan Glazer in Education Next.

Andrew’s piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal and made the unconventional but persuasive argument that we probably have too many teachers rather than too few.  Here’s a taste:

Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs….

[NAEP] tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.

Nor can the explosive growth in public-school hiring be attributed to federal spending on special education. According to the latest Census Bureau data, special ed teachers make up barely 5% of the K-12 work force.

The implication of these facts is clear: America’s public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement—people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year.

Bob’s piece appeared in the Northwest Arkansas Times.  The local Bentonville school district recently failed to  pass a millage to build a second high school to alleviate overcrowding in the current one.  Bob proposes that they might consider expanding the range of charter school options to alleviate overcrowding, save taxpayers money, and improve the choices for students for whom the large traditional public high school does not work well.  Here’s a taste:

There is a better and less expensive way to partially relieve overcrowding and serve student needs.

Why not keep a great big high school which works well for most kids, but also permit smaller schools of choice for parents who want something diff erent? Why not allow charter schools?

Charter schools are public schools managed like private schools. Like traditional public schools, charters are authorized by public authorities, must do well on state academic tests, have to serve special-needs students, and cannot impose religion or discriminate in admission.Yet like private schools, charters are self-governing rather than reporting to a district and school board.

Charters earn funding based on the number of parents choosing the school. If nobody chooses a charter, it closes, so charters work hard to please parents. Andif a charter fails financially or academically, the state closes it, making charter schools doubly accountable.

Charters typically serve niche markets with a singular focus such as the arts, vo-tech education, classical learning, or science and math, rather than trying to be all things for all families.

In Arkansas, charter schools must survive on the basic state per-pupil allocation and do not access any of the funding provided by local millage taxes. In Arkansas, and in most states, charters spend about a fifth less per pupil than traditional public schools, offering parents a choice and taxpayers a bargain.

Research shows that charters excel on teacher and parent satisfaction, and generally do somewhat better than average on student level value added (how much a student learns each year).

Approving a charter school in Bentonville could help alleviate overcrowding and enable Bentonville High to stay great rather than split in two. Since charter schools cost the local community nothing and charters are usually quick to open, they would off er more system-level flexibility in meeting demand. Charters could also offer a refuge to students who need a smaller environment, or just want something different.

And here is a taste from Nathan Glazer’s review of Maranto and McShane’s book on Obama’s education policies:

… the program that education reformers have tried to promote now for decades—introduce more choices of schools for students, enable competition among schools, open up paths for preparing teachers and administrators outside schools of education, improve measures of student achievement and teacher competence, enable administrators to act on the basis of such measures, and limit the power of teachers unions—has been advanced under the Obama administration, in the judgment of authors Maranto and McShane….

Maranto and McShane conclude by noting four large forces that will shape the future of education and its funding: the increasing number and percentage of the aged, putting pressure on all other public functions, primarily because of the cost of medical care; the rise of the ”creative class,” as described by urban theorist Richard Florida, as those who work with ideas and demand more from teachers and schools; the new technology for education, rivaling and undermining traditional approaches and structures; and advances in measurement of achievement and competence, making the failings of current schools and educational approaches more apparent. This makes for a sobering future for traditional education: it will not be able to count on more public resources, and ideas will become more important than ever. Clearly, despite NCLB and Race to the Top, we are only at the beginning of an age of reform in education, whoever comes out ahead in the election.

Of course, if Andrew, Bob, and Mike were really hot policy analysts they should have just communicated their arguments in 140 characters.  Don’t they know that all the really cool kids have PLDD?

I would like to tell you about a serious condition afflicting thousands of policy analysts.  It’s called Petty Little Dictator Disorder, or PLDD, and you or someone you love could be suffering from this epidemic sweeping through our think tanks, advocacy groups, and government offices.  According to the description pending for inclusion in the DSM V, here are the warning signs of PLDD:

• Do you spend a fair amount of your time imagining how the government could be used to shape people’s behavior for their own good?
• Do you tell yourself and others that you believe in liberty and stuff but there are negative externalities, information costs, and children who need protecting from their parents, so we need to step in?
• Do you use the word “we” a lot to refer to government action by which you really mean you and your friends?
• Do you consider yourself an expert despite having never really done anything or rigorously studied anything in your life?
• Do you feel the need to communicate your expert opinions in no more than 140 characters more than 1,000 times a year because you need constant reinforcement in the belief that you are changing the world?
• Do you sit in cafes or bars with your colleagues and have conversations that resemble dorm room pot-smoking bull sessions about how it would be best for families to live in apartments above bodegas with the sound of light rail roaring just outside their window because, after all, the life you currently have and enjoy is the same thing that families with three children and a dog should want?
• Do you think science or a panel of experts can identify the right way to do almost anything?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be suffering from PLDD.  But don’t worry, help is available.  Here are some steps that may address your PLDD:

• Think about how others have plans for their own lives just as you have a plan for yours.  Just because you don’t understand their plan doesn’t mean that theirs is not legitimate or that you should impose your vision on them.
• Recognize that just as others are subject to limited information and systematic deviations from rationality, so are you.  You shouldn’t imagine that you are the rational, well-informed one whose plan can fix the defects from which others suffer.
• Remember that you and your friends are not the government.  Once the government takes responsibility for an issue, no one can completely control what the government will do and those with the strongest vested interests (and often not the best intentions) are likely to have more influence than you.
• Be humble about the limits of your knowledge and expertise.  You may have gone to an elite school and have always been told how smart you are, but that doesn’t mean that you understand everything.  Understanding comes from real experience and/or rigorous examination of an issue.  Reading a bunch of articles or having spent a few years as the deputy assistant director of whatever does not count as experience or rigorous examination.
• Don’t confuse the constant sound of your own voice (or Tweets) and the praise of your friends with actually influencing things.  Roosters may be noisy but they don’t actually make the sun come up.  Pick your topics, develop real expertise in those topics by having meaningful experience and/or engaging in rigorous scholarship, and then communicate when you really think you have something to add.
• If you choose meaningful experience as your path to expertise, remember that it takes many years of experience to develop expertise.  Rigorous scholarship allows one to generalize from a systematic review of evidence relatively quickly, but it is virtually impossible to generalize from experience until you have accumulated many years of it.
• Dorm room, pot-smoking bull sessions are fine if you are in college, but you really need to grow out of them if you want to be a serious policy expert.  Sitting around after you’ve graduated college and agreeing with your friends about how much different occupations should be paid, what kinds of cars people should drive, what people should eat or drink, etc.. just makes you the Peter Pan of dorm room, pot-smoking bull sessions.
• Understand that “ideology” is just the negative spin that people suffering from PLDD use to describe the principles or values of people with whom they disagree.  There is nothing wrong with having an ideology (or principles and values) since it helps guide you about the ends for which you are striving.  Just be sure not to confuse your ideology with an empirical claim.
• Be humble about the ability of science or experts to resolve questions, just as you should be humble about your own expertise.  Science provides a method for understanding the world, but it does not answer questions about principles and values.  And even when it comes to empirical questions, science always leaves some uncertainty.  That doesn’t mean you should reject science and embrace the nihilistic view that science just consists of lies and manipulation to disguise interests and power.  But it does mean you have to be wary of interest and power corrupting science just as they can corrupt everything else.

PLDD has often gone unnoticed and untreated.  Attention has instead focused on BSDD — Big Scary Dictator Disorder.  And while it’s true that people with BSDD, like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, have posed grave threats to the world, the dangers of PLDD are more insidious.  People with BSDD are relatively easy to recognize, there is strong motivation to mobilize an opposition to their disorder, and the condition is quite rare.  When it comes to PLDD, however, people hardly notice how their liberty is chipped away bit by bit by those suffering from PLDD.  PLDD is also very common, by some estimates afflicting a majority of policy analysts.  And the righteousness and good intentions of those with PLDD undermine the effective mobilization of a response to the disorder.

I hope you will help me fight the scourge that is PLDD.  Try to check this disorder within yourself and watch for the signs of it in others.  Together, we can win the war against PLDD.