The folks at ChoiceMedia.TV have developed a new PBS series focused on education reform issues called “Reform School.” Below you can see part 4 of the show. You can see two earlier clips here.
UPDATE: And here is part 5:
Reform School: Parts 4 and 5
June 12, 2012
5 Comments | 
National Standards, vouchers | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
The 100 Year Reich
June 11, 2012Russian courts have affirmed the decision of the Moscow municipal government to ban gay pride parades for the next 100 years. Something tells me that like the 1,000 Year Reich proclaimed by the Nazis and the New Scientific Man unveiled by the Soviets, this 100 year ban will crumble well before its stated expiration date.
According to the AP coverage:
Gays serve openly in Israel’s military. The parliament and Supreme Court have granted gays a variety of family rights, such as inheritance and survivor’s benefits.
Earlier this year, Tel Aviv was picked by readers of the travel website Gaycities as the top gay destination, ahead of Amsterdam and San Francisco.
So, which country do the UN and the leftist intelligentsia repeatedly condemn as a violator of human rights?
3 Comments | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Never Having to Say You’re Wrong
June 9, 2012
Some of you may remember the brouhaha caused by Sol Stern’s denunciation of vouchers in the pages of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal — an event which I suppose eventually led to my departure from the Manhattan Institute. Sol Stern made a series of arguments that I argued were mistaken at that time, but subsequent events have further confirmed Stern’s errors.
In particular, Sol, like Jay Mathews more recently, declared that the political prospects for expanding private school choice were bleak: “taxpayer-funded voucher programs for poor children… have hit a wall…. Proposals for voucher programs have suffered five straight crushing defeats in state referenda.” But with the Year of School Choice just completed, we’ve never seen so much growth in private school choice.
And another incredibly wrong claim that Sol made was that the demise of urban Catholic schools was pretty much inevitable, which would prevent students with vouchers from having quality options: “Even more discouraging, vouchers may not be enough to save the Catholic schools” and “Greene says that the school choice movement has little reason to be concerned about the closing of thousands of urban Catholic schools, a problem that can be alleviated, he believes, by pushing for more vouchers and tuition tax credits. This reflects precisely the approach that leads some school choice reformers to ignore reality. As I have previously written in City Journal, the demise of inner-city Catholic schools is the result of long-term and seemingly irreversible demographic and economic trends…”
Who exactly was ignoring reality? The Wall Street Journal has an article in today’s paper that describes the resurgence in Catholic schooling as a result of voucher and tax credit programs. The WSJ reports:
For the first time in decades, Catholic education is showing signs of life. Driven by expanding voucher programs, outreach to Hispanic Catholics and donations by business leaders, Catholic schools in several major cities are swinging back from closures and declining enrollment…. Catholic schools are showing signs of growth even in cities without vouchers. But they are benefiting disproportionately from the rise of vouchers, available in 10 states and Washington, D.C., and tax credit programs that provide tax relief to individuals or businesses that donate to scholarships for low-income students.
Does Sol Stern or the folks at City Journal and the Manhattan Institute feel any obligation to admit that Sol’s 2008 article was a huge mistake? And I’m not saying it was a mistake because it was politically hurtful (although it really was); but it was a huge mistake because the claims in it were grossly mistaken, which subsequent events have helped confirm.
(edited for typos)
6 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The One You Want to Attend
June 6, 2012
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
A former Al award nominee once sagely informed us:
So here it is-the After Party. I have continued to receive congratulations from JPGB readers all week on my humbling (Get a Life)time Achievement Award from the NEPC. Reactions include:
This is just awesome!! I’m so impressed!!!
Congratulations Matt!
Such an honor!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I couldn’t be more proud to know you!
I am so damn jealous – apparently we’ve all got to up our game to keep up with you!
The awards video is creepy. what a weird thing for them to do. congrats!
I have not been this vicariously proud since…..
Matt can die happy, knowing that he can never top this!!!
Our boy’s all growns up.
WELL DONE!
I think you are far from being able to ‘die happy’ as you said on Jay Greene’s blog as there are other awards to be earned. I’ve heard that you are in the running to be named in the Journal of Medicine as the leading cause of high blood pressure among NEA officials. Keep at it my friend…I know you can win this one.
Grand Prize Winner:
This is the equivalent of receiving the Bradley prize..just without the money.
Now this is a very perceptive comment indeed. The NEPC (Get a Life)time Achievement Award is in fact so profoundly opposite from the Bradley Prize in every way, so much so that they become strangely similar.
It goes without saying that we in the reformer tribe hold a deeply skeptical view of the policy preferences of teacher union leaders, but now comes word that their credibility has waned even among public school teachers and of course actions speak louder than words. This party just keeps getting better-when does Snoop Dog go on?
3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Matthew Ladner, NEPC | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
More Evidence that Teacher Unions = The Tobacco Institute
June 6, 2012
Events this week help provide more support for my argument that the teacher unions are rapidly turning into the Tobacco Institute. The defeat (again) of the unions in Wisconsin and the article by Paul Peterson, William Howell, and Marty West showing the sharply declining popularity of teacher unions — even among teachers — support this post I wrote almost 3 years ago:
I want to add a little to my post the other day about how the teacher unions lie and so should not be treated as credible players in policy discussions.
The unions don’t have to lie. The NEA didn’t have to falsely claim that the DC voucher program “yielded no evidence of positive impact on student achievement.” They could have said something about the effects not being large or that there are other harms to vouchers that are greater than the benefits. A pattern of lying fundamentally undermines the credibility of the teacher unions so that they will increasingly be shunned in policy discussions and lose in policy debates.
You may think that the unions are so powerful that they can just lie and get away with it, but you’d be wrong. Remember the fate of the tobacco industry. They created the Tobacco Institute, which produced “research” claiming to be unable to find links between smoking and cancer.
The tobacco companies didn’t have to do this. They could have just said that people should be free to choose whether they smoke or not regardless of health risks. They didn’t have to lie about health effects, they could have just said that it was none of the public’s business whether people chose to smoke or not.
At the time it was conventional political wisdom that the Tobacco Institute could get away with lying because the tobacco lobby was so powerful and rich that they could do almost anything. But eventually lying destroys one’s credibility in a way that no amount of money can restore. And the teacher unions may suffer the same fate as the Tobacco Institute. They may seem all-powerful right now, but over time it is hard to sustain dumb ideas, especially when lying.
11 Comments | teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
School Choice and the Greenfield School Revolution
June 5, 2012
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Today, the Friedman Foundation is releasing a study I did with James Woodworth: The Greenfield School Revolution and School Choice. We know from previous research that vouchers (and equivalent programs like tax credits and ESAs) consistently deliver better academic performance, but the size of the impact is not revolutionary. Meanwhile, the whole world is watching as charter school operators (Carpe Diem, Rocketship, Yes Prep, etc.) reinvent the school from the ground up.
It’s ironic that these schools are charters, not voucher schools. A properly designed (i.e. universal) choice program would do a better job than charters of supporting these highly ambitious “greenfield” school models. But existing choice programs are not properly designed, so our impression was that they’re excluding these educational entrepreneurs, instead simply transferring students from one existing set of schools (public) to another (private).
We wanted to test our theory and make sure it was true, not just an accident of publicity or media bias, that the reinvention of the school wasn’t being supported by existing choice programs. We combed through twenty years’ worth of federal data (CCD and PSS) to see if we could find any evidence of disruption in the structure of the private school sector in places that had school choice programs.
We found that while existing school choice programs may be delivering moderately better academic outcomes, they aren’t disrupting the private school sector the way they need to be. In one or two places we found visible impacts, but nothing like a reinvention of schooling. The only impact of any considerable size is the dramatic change in racial composition in the private school population of Milwaukee.
In addition to the empirical findings, the study outlines 1) why radical “greenfield” school models are essential to drive the kind of education reform we need, and 2) why universal school choice would do a better job than charter schools of sustaining it.
Special thanks to Rick Hess, from whom we borrow the term “greenfield,” and Jay Greene for giving us their comments and insights as we developed this study!
3 Comments | charter schools, Education Savings Accounts, research reports, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: Friedman Foundation, greenfield, Greg Forster, James Woodworth | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Silly Season
June 4, 2012With the approaching presidential elections we enter the Silly Season, when otherwise sensible and knowledgeable people abandon all reason to make some of the most ridiculous arguments to advance the interests of one candidate or another. I completely understand why smart people make these really dumb remarks — they love hearing themselves talk, the are indulging fantasies of being able to influence events over which they have virtually no actual influence, it is part of their job, etc…
But that raises something that I don’t understand at all: why does anyone pay these people to spout nonsense? I can’t see that it does anyone any good. I don’t believe that raving on Twitter makes any difference to how anyone will vote. I find it hard to believe that anyone derives entertainment value from their dribble. So why does someone voluntarily hand money to individuals or organizations that revel in the Silly Season?
I think I may have discovered an answer while watching a production of Twelfth Night the other day. I noticed that everyone keeps handing Feste, the fool, money even though he almost never does what they want. In fact, he mostly makes fun of his patrons for which they hand him gold. They often do so just to make him go away. Andy maybe that is the solution to the mystery of why anyone pays the babbling idiots of Silly Season. It isn’t because they benefit from the nonsense; it is just that they wish the fools will spout nonsense about someone else.
Of course, the babbling idiots of Silly Season are not nearly as insightful and clever as Feste, so perhaps another example might better illustrate why they are paid. I was recently walking on Bourbon Street and saw the world’s oldest profession. As the saying goes, they aren’t paid for their services; they are paid to leave.
And in case you need some examples of the nonsense spouted during the Silly Season here are some:
New York Times blogger, Nate Silver, recently tweeted this spin to the abysmal job numbers: “This jobs report is no big deal. Every economy has a few bad decades.” Um, OK. And he also tweeted this: “Per capita global GDP did not grow AT ALL between 2000 B.C. and the Industrial Revolution. We’re just reverting to the mean!” Unless this was meant to be satire, these are remarkably stupid things for a smart guy to say.
Slate columnist and perpetual windbag, Matt Yglesias, provided this spin: “Impressed by conservatives ability to pretend to believe that Obama is 100% responsible for events 1.5 years into divided government.” One can just imagine how he would crow about Obama’s genius if the circumstances were opposite.
And Kevin Carey, who is somehow considered an expert despite never having conducted a rigorous study or had any significant experience, offers this talking point: “Romney’s education platform is a sign of how swiftly the consensus Republican position on education has been overwhelmed by… the economic interests of big business.” I didn’t see anything in his piece showing that Romney’s education proposal served the interests of big business, but he just needed to throw that in there to keep the meme going.
I apologize for citing only only pro-Obama examples because I could just as easily find a steady stream of silliness from the pro-Romney side. These were just the first few to catch my eye and I’m too lazy to dig up more. Unlike these ladies of the night, I don’t get paid for blogging and spouting nonsense.
6 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Kevin Carey, Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Walmart Shareholder Meeting 2012
June 1, 2012
It was another excellent Walmart shareholder meeting this year. The musical acts were not exactly to my taste, but it’s just impressive to see Celine Dion, Lionel Ritchie, Taylor Swift, Zac Brown, and Juanes perform. And Justin Timberlake did an excellent job as MC.
There wasn’t really much exciting news to report during the meeting. It was another year of steady growth in profits. It was another year of Walmart emphasizing how they provide people with opportunities and keep the cost of goods low so that people — especially poor people — can live better. But I’ve already written about this in the past (see for example this).
As I’ve said before, if Walmart were a government program designed to help poor people by providing them with low cost, basic goods and job opportunities, academics would be holding conferences to identify just how it was so successful, the New York Times would write editorials to laud its accomplishments (like they do for the ineffective Head Start program), and politicians would be tripping over each other to take credit for it. But because they help provide people, especially poor people, really low cost basic goods and make a profit at it, they are demonized. Little do these haters realize that Walmart’s success at innovating to keep costs down is entirely made possible by the profit motive. These folks fail to understand the lesson of Al Copeland — entrepreneurs are often among the greatest humanitarians.
There was some excitement at this year’s shareholder meeting surrounding the Mexican bribery allegations. But the only people I heard mention it were the Walmart officials, who several times directly addressed the topic by pledging to conduct a full investigation and emphasizing Walmart’s commitment to do what is right and uphold integrity, and the reporters covering those comments. None of the associates or shareholders seemed to care much. And I saw no protesters of any sort.
A reporter for the Huffington Post, Alice Hines, tried to manufacture some news by claiming to detect signs of rebellion among Walmart associates. She even alleged that she was manhandled by a cop at a Walmart event the other night because she was mistaken for a protester. Ms. Hines may have an active imagination because I did not see the same things she alleged. She tweeted “Walmart secretary booed by a few in the audience after shareholder proposal on exec incentive report.” I didn’t hear any booing. She tweeted “Lots of applause from UK & Canada section for shareholder proposal on political transparency; scattered claps elsewhere.” I didn’t hear that either. She was accurate in tweeting “Presenting exec incentive proposal, Jackie Goebel says Walmart stores are understaffed. gets big applause.” And her claim to have been mistaken for a protester and threatened with arrest by a police officer at an earlier Walmart event sounds fishy given that there were virtually no protesters for whom she could have been mistaken.
The anti-Walmart folks may love retweeting these reports suggesting discord and strife at the Walmart shareholder meeting, but the image her “reporting” conveys is completely misleading. The Walmart shareholder meeting is basically a giant cheer-leading event that went perfectly smoothly this year just as it has in the past. You can criticize the meeting for feeling like a Disney show, as some did, but you can’t suggest that it was Chicago in the summer of ’68. It was just another well-choreographed event and the associates, many of whom were visiting the US for the first time or had just flown on an airplane for the first time in their life, just seemed thrilled to be there.
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Walmart | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Ladner Celebrates Lifetime Achievement Award!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 31, 2012
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I feared that my career had peaked upon receiving a Bunkum Award from the NEA’s rent-a-reactionary academic shop, but today I learned that I can now die happy as the first recipient of a Lifetime Bunkum Award. The prestigious award reads as follows:
NEPC has never bestowed an individual with a Bunkum Award. But we’ve never before had someone campaign for one, and we’ve never before found someone with an individual record of Bunkum-worthy accomplishments that cries out for recognition. This year, however, we are honoring Matthew Ladner, an advisor to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s advocacy organization, the “Foundation for Excellence in Education.”Dr. Ladner’s body of Bunk-work is focused on his shameless hawking of what he and the Governor call the “Florida Formula” for educational success. As our reviews have explained, they’d be less deceptive if they were selling prime Florida swampland. One cannot, however, deny Dr. Ladner’s salesmanship: gullible lawmakers throughout the nation have been pulling out their wallets and buying into his evidence-less pitch for flunking of low-scoring third graders and other policies likely to harm many more students than they help. See here and here for more analysis of Dr. Ladner’s body of bunk and its unfortunate reach.Our judges were particularly impressed recently, when Ladner attributed Florida’s “hitting the wall” drop in NAEP scores to a collapse in the housing bubble and other “impossible to say” factors. Bunkums have been awarded for far less impressive an accomplishment than this sort of “heads I win, tails you lose” use of evidence. So Matt Ladner – this Bunkum’s for you.You can watch NEPC’s award ceremony youtube here:
My reaction:
Honestly I can’t take credit for this great honor. It was Governor Bush and his team of fearless reformers who ignored the wailing howls of K-12 reactionaries and forced through a set of reforms that improved Florida education steadily over time. It is they who deserve credit for moving Florida from one of the worst performing states by ignoring the “expertise” of NEPC’s ideological tribe and drove their low-income literacy scores above statewide averages for all students.
My role in all of this has simply been to help document the progress, all of which happened over the howling objections of NEPC’s soul mates. NEPC has mounted a series of feeble attempts to muddy the water. Their first effort completely ignored a peer-reviewed article in the nation’s most influential education policy journal that fell directly on point to concerns raised in the article. Oh and it also contained an appendix that refuted its own central thesis. Undeterred, the next effort a “review” of a Powerpoint presentation that the critic didn’t see. All of this climaxed with sending out one of their scholars to claim that Harry Potter books may have caused the improvement in Florida reading scores. This is, you see, because Harry Potter books are seldom read outside of Florida, and no, I am not making this up. An audience of hundreds witnessed it with their own eyes.
I am thrilled to receive this Lifetime Achievement award. Reformers around the country have begun the process of making K-12 policy based upon things other than the political preferences of the special interests organized around the K-12 status-quo. If this grand undertaking were a play, I would have but a small role in it-this is far, far, far bigger than me and bigger than Florida. Notice for instance that both the Progressive Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress earned NEPC Bunkum Awards this year (congratulations!) which is a probable sign that those groups are doing good work and a certain sign of the political and intellectual isolation of the teacher union left.
I want to thank my family, my teachers and professors, my mentors and all the other people who helped me to win this unique and prestigious award. You know who you are and you hold my deepest appreciation. I want to thank those who fought so hard to produce the gains which NEPC is so desperate to obscure. Most of all I want to thank NEPC for revealing what they fear most, which we can infer from this year’s Bunkum ritual seems to be the success of reformers and their own isolation from their former allies in the morally and intellectually serious left, apparently in that order.
I will now redouble my efforts in the hope of becoming the first winner of a second lifetime Bunkum Award. Otherwise, I will have no worlds yet to conquer.
17 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Jeb Bush, Kevin Welner, Matthew Ladner, NEPC, NEPC Bunkum Awards | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Jay Mathews Comes Back for More
May 29, 2012
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
True story: At the house of some friends from church, the elder son (about six years old) was explaining the big bandage he was wearing. He told us he had climbed up on the stove in order to reach the cookies that were on top of the refrigerator, accidentally turned on the range with his foot, fell over, and was badly burned.
The following exchange occurred:
ME: Did you learn a lesson from what happened?
HIM: Uh . . . no.
Apparently Jay Mathews didn’t learn anything either after getting badly burned on the stove of my wrath last year.
He’s once again up to his typical stove-climbing antics, still trying to reach the cookies of bipartisan acceptability on top of the refrigerator of political ambiguity. Over the weekend, he wrote:
Instead, the two parties pound each other with an education issue that makes them look tough to their most partisan supporters. That convenient weapon is vouchers, tax-supported scholarships for students who want to attend private schools. Obama has cut funds for a voucher program in the District, so Romney embraces it. “It will be a model for parental choice programs across the nation,” he said in the speech.
The split doesn’t affect the bipartisan approach to schools much because vouchers have no chance of ever expanding very far. There aren’t nearly enough available spaces in good private schools to meet the demand. Any significant growth in vouchers would lead to heavy government interference in private schools and kill any allegiance conservative Republicans had to it.
Let’s take these claims one by one:
vouchers have no chance of ever expanding very far
Uh, yeah, let me just go ahead and link this again. Thanks. If Mathews wants to lose another bet on vouchers’ legislative prospects, he’s welcome to as much pain as he wants.
He links that statement to an older article of his on the DC voucher program, which serves under 2,000 kids. Compare that to the gargantuan sizes of the new Indiana and Louisiana programs (400,000 kids eligible in Louisiana!).
I’m not saying we’ve reached the promised land, but the political trend is very obviously up and not down.
There aren’t nearly enough available spaces in good private schools to meet the demand.
William F. Buckley once asked, speaking about a person whose name escapes me: “What do you think he would do if the devil removed the blinders from his eyes and showed him the world of economics? I say the devil, because God would never be so cruel.”
What do you think Jay Mathews would do if the devil removed the blinders from his eyes and showed him that quantity supplied can change in response to demand?
Any significant growth in vouchers would lead to heavy government interference in private schools and kill any allegiance conservative Republicans had to it.
Yeah, except for the part where there are now 34 school choice programs serving 212,000 students, and this story Mathews is telling hasn’t happened anywhere.
Keep reaching for those cookies, Jay. You’ll get them someday.
(Edit: In the first version of this post, the devil made me write the wrong name in the WFB quote above.)
9 Comments | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: Greg Forster, Jay Mathews | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
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