NEPC’s attempt at strategic nihilism

August 4, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In the American film classic Animal House there is a scene where students smoke marijuana with their English professor, played by Donald Sutherland, and speculate that it could be the case that the molecules in your fingernails each contain a microscopic universe.

You can’t prove that there aren’t microscopic universes in your fingernails, after all, so they might be in there!

A nice post from Mike Petrilli on the Florida NAEP score gains prompted a response from Kevin Welner from NEPC that shows that the spirit of Sutherland’s Professor Dave Jennings is alive and well at the University of Colorado.

Again there is no attempt to address any of the gaping holes in retention theory. These holes include the fact that Florida’s 4th grade reading scores had improved substantially before the retention policy went into effect, and that they have continued to rise even as retention has fallen off substantially, and that they have fallen off substantially because of a very large improvement in 3rd grade scores.

Welner attempts to tiptoe around this by noting that our EdNext article addressing these points were addressed to a previous Walter Haney paper on the subject rather than the NEPC stuff, which is a distinction without much of a difference. The Chatterji paper contains a carbon copy of the Haney analysis. Amazingly, Chatterji dinged Burke and I for not doing a literature review (not the norm in our tribe) and then cites neither the Education Next paper nor Haney’s analysis. At best, she employed a double standard and at worst, she owes Professor Haney an apology.

Welner’s broader project is to attempt to use the causation problem as a shield. We don’t know, after all, exactly what caused Florida’s remarkable learning gains. Florida’s reformers had to implement their reforms in the real world rather than in a petri dish or in an Intention to Treat Random Assignment study. Welner believes that this allows him the opportunity for strategic nihilism:

The truth might be: (a) there are not actual improvements (the current study is too weak to say whether or not there are), (b) there are improvements, and they’re caused by a combination of all these things, (c) there are improvements, and they’re caused by something none of us pointed to (perhaps the green shirts??), or (d) there are improvements, and they’re caused by some of the things we’re pointing to BUT some of the other things we’re pointing to are actually harming students (just not enough harm to overcome the benefits of the other things).

In other words, when it comes to understanding the FL package of reforms, we are flying blind.

Welner is flying blind all right, but it is by choice. Let’s take each of these little gems on one at a time:

A. The NAEP results show very substantial improvements, as do other indicators.

B. I have always held that the exact cause for the improvement is impossible to know, because Florida’s reformers enacted multiple reforms simultaneously. The logical response to this is not to do none of the Florida reforms, but to do all of them.

C. Florida lurked near the bottom on NAEP for many years, enacted reforms in 1999, and then enjoyed sustained gains over time. While it could be the case that some mysterious X-factor caused the improvement, I’ve yet to hear a plausible theory regarding this. Dan Lips and I addressed multiple possibilities in the Education Next article, including demographic change, spending, etc, and found no evidence to support them.

D. This could be the case, but I haven’t seen a single scrap of evidence to suggest that it is actually the case- return to B above.

Welner is of course correct that there is a correlation and causation problem to consider. As a practical matter, there is nothing else to do but to carefully examine the evidence and history and draw the best conclusions that we can. Dan Lips and I did this in the Education Next article. Florida’s reforms coincided with the student population becoming poorer and less Anglo. State lawmakers increased funding per pupil, but it wasn’t by much and is still below the national average. NEPC complains about a lack of mention of the preschool voucher program when those kids have yet to age into the 4th grade NAEP sample. The class size amendment was implemented very slowly, long after Florida’s scores had begun to rise.

If Dr. Welner would like to provide a plausible explanation for why Florida’s NAEP scores increased so much after 1998, I’d be very interested to read it.

If he prefers to attempt to continue to play games, NEPC’s credibility will go on double secret probation.

 

 

 

 

4 Comments | research reports | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Sorry Science Standards

August 4, 2011

“This is the most blatant case of false advertising
since my suit against the movie The Neverending Story.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

National standards advocates keep asserting that the standards they’re touting are rigorous and demanding. I’ve noticed that they tend to be strong in assertion but weak in analysis – as though their strategy is to say “These are rigorous standards!” so many times that it becomes true.

In fact, when standards are set across an entire sector they tend to reflect the lowest common denominator. (One word: Betamax.)

Keep that in mind as you read Ze’ev Wurman’s takedown of the science standards recently published by the National Academies. Money quote:

Suddenly it all became clear. This framework does not expect our students to be able to do any science, or to be able to solve any science problem. This framework simply teaches our students science appreciation, rather than science. It expects our students to become good consumers of science and technology, rather than prepare them to be the discoverers of science and creators of technology.

Now I finally understood the wisdom of our government in easing the immigration of skilled professionals even in the midst of the largest unemployment in almost a century. When even our congressionally-chartered National Academies, and their most prestigious National Research Council, have lost their belief that American students can compete with their foreign peers, what else can a lowly government department do?

1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Classic: Milton Friedman Versus…”Michael Moore”

August 3, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Do not, I beg you, do not go another day without watching this:

The young man asking the question, and persistently coming back time and again for more punishment, is Michael Moore someone who reminded the original YouTube poster of a young Michael Moore. This is circa 1977-78.

[Update: Below, commenter Alsadius reports this isn’t Michael Moore after all. Sure enough, the original YouTube poster has changed the video description to clarify: “I thought the metaphor would be obvious, seeing as how the kid is a skinny redhead, while Michael Moore… well, isn’t a skinny redhead. I apologize for the confusion.” It was too good to check! 😉 I’ve amended the post title. FWIW, the video’s worth your time even if only one of the interlocutors is an intellectual titan of the 20th century.]

Milton does not have the world’s most highly polished interpersonal skills, but he cares deeply about ideas and he desperately, desperately wants this highly motivated young man to broaden his horizons and begin to understand the buried assumptions in his thinking and the real stakes involved in these issues. Too bad he didn’t take the opportunity.

HT Outside the Beltway

6 Comments | economics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Build New, Don’t Reform Old

August 2, 2011

Image result for gates foundation headquarters

When I wrote my two part critique of the Gates Foundation strategy, one of our frequent comment-writers, GGW, asked: “What would you do if asked by Gates how to better donate his (and Warren Buffett’s) billions?”

Here is a brief answer to that question: Philanthropists with billions of dollars to devote to education reform should build new institutions and stop trying to fix old ones.

In general, existing institutions don’t want to be fixed.  There are reasons why current public schools operate as they do and the people who benefit from that will resist any effort to change it.  Those who benefit from status quo arrangements also tend to be better positioned than reformers to repel attempts by outsiders to make significant changes.  The history of education reform is littered with failed efforts by philanthropists.

Instead, private donors have had much better success addressing problems by building new institutions.  And competition from newly built institutions can have a greater positive impact on existing institutions than trying to reform them directly.

Let’s consider one of the greatest accomplishments in American education philanthropy.  In the late 19th century, America’s leading universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) were badly in need of reform.  They were still operated primarily as religious seminaries and not as modern, scientific institutions.  Rather than trying to reform them directly, major philanthropists built new universities modeled after German scientific institutions.  John D. Rockefeller and Marshall Field helped found the University of Chicago.  Leland Stanford built Stanford University.  A group of private donors built Johns Hopkins.  Cornelius Vanderbilt founded Vanderbilt.  All of these universities imitated German universities with their emphasis on the scientific method and research and were enormously successful at it.  Eventually Harvard, Yale, and Princeton recognized the competitive threat from these German-modeled upstarts and made their own transition from a seminary-focus to a scientific focus.

The reform of the U.S. higher education system did not come from a government mandate or “incentives.”  It did not happen by philanthropists giving money directly to the leading universities of the time to convince them to change their ways.  It happened by philanthropists building new institutions to compete with the old ones.

The same could be done for K-12 education.  Matt Ladner has written a series of posts on “The Way of the Future.”  He, along with Terry Moe, Clay Christensen, Paul Peterson, and others, envision large numbers of  hybrid virtual schools offering higher quality customized education at dramatically lower costs.  Students would attend school buildings, but the bulk of their instruction would be delivered by interactive software.  The school would need significantly fewer staff, who would concentrate mostly on assisting students with the technology and managing behavior.

Obviously, this kind of school would not be good for everybody.  But it could appeal to large numbers of students and be offered at such a low cost that it could be affordable even to low-income families without needing public subsidy or adoption by the public school system.

Gates or someone else with billions to devote to education could build a national chain of these virtual hybrid schools to compete with existing public and private schools.  It’s true that Gates is already investing in the development and refinement of the virtual hybrid school model, but a complete commitment to building new rather than reforming old would give him the potential to do what Rockefeller, Stanford, and others did to higher education.  Virtual hybrid schools could be the disruptive technology, as Christensen calls it, to produce real reform in education.

Another benefit of the “building new” strategy for philanthropists is that it avoids the Emperor’s New Clothes problem, where philanthropists are encouraged to pursue flawed strategies to reform existing institutions because everyone is afraid to criticize the wealthy donor from whose largess they benefit.  With the “build new” strategy there is ultimately a market test of the wisdom of the strategy.  If the new institutions are not better, people won’t choose them.  If the University of Chicago had been a flawed model, it wouldn’t have attracted enrollment and would have failed to apply competitive pressure to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.  Similarly, if the virtual hybrid school is a bad model, then it won’t attract students and compete with existing public and private schools.

Edison Schools is an example of a “build new” strategy that failed the market test.  They failed to develop technologies or other efficiencies to bring down the costs of operating private schools.  And their revised strategy of operating public schools under contract with public school districts was flawed by an underestimation of the political resistance they would face and their inability to control costs or quality within the public system.

But we also have successful examples of the “build new” strategy adopted by philanthropists.  In addition to the string of scientific universities built in the latter half of the 19th century, we also have the example of Andrew Carnegie and public libraries.  Carnegie helped promote literacy and cultural knowledge by supporting the construction of hundreds of new libraries around the country.  He didn’t try to reform existing book-sellers, he just built new.  Another example (outside of education) can be seen in John D. Rockefeller’s role in the development of a national park system.  Rockefeller privately acquired large chunks of what are now the Acadia, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone national parks.  Rockefeller didn’t try to reform the operations of the existing Interior Department.  Instead, he effectively privately built nature reserves and then donated them to the U.S. to become national parks.

Of course, this “build new” strategy has limited potential for smaller-scale philanthropy.  But for the very wealthy, like Gates, the path to making a significant and lasting difference is to build new rather than reform old.  The lasting benefits of what Rockefeller did in higher education and national parks and Carnegie did with libraries are still noticeable today.  If Gates and others with billions to devote to education continue to focus on reforming the old rather than building new, I fear their efforts will soon be forgotten after the Emperor’s New Clothes adulation fades when they stop having large sums to give.

22 Comments | economics, National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

How Standards Are Created: A Primer

August 2, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The strip of the day for today on dilbert.com, presented for the edification of national standards advocates:

Leave a Comment » | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Double-Agent Diane

August 1, 2011

I came across the following correspondence that appears to describe an ingenious plot to plant someone named “Diane” as a double-agent in the teacher union ranks.  Once “Diane” gains their trust, her mission is to rile up an Army of Angry Teachers whose slogan-chanting would become so bellicose and unreasonable that it would undermine the popular impression of teachers as a loving extension of the family.

As I’ve argued before, the teacher unions play a double game.  They put out a public image of being like the doting aunt or uncle who cares about our kids almost as much as (if not more than) parents do.   They know that as long as the public sees the school system as part of the family, they will favor policies that exempt education from the rigors of the marketplace.  People see their families as a refuge from the rough and tumble of the marketplace.  Families are governed by affection and mutual obligation rather than choice and competition.  But in the corridors of power, the teacher unions haggle over pay, benefits, work rules, and autonomy as if they were auto workers, not your favorite aunt or uncle.

The purpose of Diane’s under-cover operation appears to be to undermine that double game and make the self-interested power-grabs by the unions more transparent for what they are.  If teacher unions are not viewed as extensions of the family, people would stop exempting education from their normal expectation that there should be choice and competition in the provision of goods and services.  If “Diane’s” double-agent sabotage succeeds, the image of teachers buying school supplies out of their own pocket and believing in student potential regardless of difficulties would be replaced with the image of teachers demanding benefits for themselves and blaming circumstances for student low performance.

I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this correspondence, but if accurate it sure would go a long way toward explaining what has otherwise seemed inexplicable.

I’ve inserted videos throughout this post that may provide evidence to substantiate the existence of this conspiracy.

———————————————————————————————

Diane —

We commend you on your willingness to accept this difficult assignment.  We know you will have to estrange yourself from former friends and adherents.  We know that you will have to ingratiate yourself into a new network whose company may at times be difficult to tolerate — what with their obvious self-interest thinly disguised by shallow slogans, inconsistent arguments, and indifference to empirical evidence.  But those qualities are precisely the things that will allow you to gain their trust and rile them into a self-destructive frenzy.  Just feed them more shallow slogans, inconsistent arguments, and non-empirically-supported views and they will be like putty in your hands.

There will also be compensating benefits.  We know that reformers have stopped paying much attention to you as they shift focus to rigorous quantitative analyses of  test results rather than stories spun by polemical historians.  But your new teacher union friends will shower plenty of attention on you, as they make no demands for rigor in quantitative or historical analyses and instead judge the merits of arguments based on how they serve their interests.  Your new friends will also shower plenty of cash on you as they invite you to speak around the country at about $20,000 a pop.  Kozol and Kohn have earned a summer home or two doing this, so don’t let anyone tell you that advocating for public education is not financially rewarding.  Of course, if you are successful in this mission, your efforts will undermine the effectiveness of their advocacy by making it seem extreme and self-serving.  If you succeed we will reward you even more richly.

Good luck in your efforts!

–The Pentaverate

The Pentaverate —

It has been some time since you sent me on this deep-cover operation, but I am pleased to report that our plan is progressing well.  I’ve launched a blog on Education Week as a platform for my sabotage.  I’ve written a best-selling book whose arguments are so weak that a grad student could pick them apart in a few blog posts, but which is like catnip to our target audience.  I’ve recruited Valerie Strauss, a previously normal and respected journalist, to join our efforts at agitation.  And most importantly, I’ve developed a following of 17,307 on Twitter to whom I send about 70 missives a day.  I just get the ball rolling and then my followers write the craziest stuff, which I can then just retweet with the plausible deniability that I wasn’t saying it.

For example, I retweeted a message from Gary Stager describing Bill Gates’ view that education can overcome poverty as “Sad, pathetic, ignorant, dangerous, genocidal, wrong.”  Genocidal!  That’s gold.  That weak Jay P. Greene just says that the Gates Foundation has a flawed strategy, but I have folks saying that Gates and anyone who believes that poverty is not immutable is advocating genocide.  If stuff like that doesn’t undermine teacher union credibility with sensible people I have no idea what will.

In short, as you have requested I have assembled an Army of Angry Teachers and, like Pogo, they have met the enemy and they are it.  Last weekend we marched on Washington for the Save Our Schools (SOS) rally, which should reveal the nuttiness of my Army to policy and opinion leaders nationwide.

–Diane

Diane —

We are very proud of your efforts and admire your heroism is fulfilling the unpleasant task of mobilizing angry teachers into a fevered state.  For that work the members of The Pentaverate have decided to award you the Keyser Soze Medal for Excellence in Deception.

We are, however, a bit disappointed with the SOS Rally.  You only managed to get 2,000-3,000 people to show up, which makes your army seem like a distinct minority of all teachers (which it probably is).  We did, however, like your transparently false description of the rally as the spontaneous outpouring of a grassroots movement, even though it received half its roughly $100k funding from the teacher unions and another quarter from donations by you and Kozol (we will reimburse you for those expenses, just like before).

We liked your speech, particularly the part about how education policy should be made by educators, not by policymakers.  Of course by that reasoning energy policy should be made by energy-producers, not policymakers and tax policy should be made by accountants and lawyers.  Again, these flimsy and shallow slogans/arguments are doing a great job of undermining the teacher union cause.

We were also pleased with Kozol’s lecture.  He’s still rehashing the same stories he acquired from spending a few weeks with poor kids several decades ago, but his slightly slurred and irate delivery gives it just the right touch of insanity.  Even Kevin Carey had to comment that Kozol is “edging into deranged preacher territory.”  Excellent work!

Still, the small crowd was very discouraging.  We know that you couldn’t control the fact that there was a debt crisis going on at the same time, but we are worried about your success at convincing opinion and policy leaders of how representative and unreasonable the Army of Angry Teachers really is.

–The Pentaverate

The Pentaverate —

I appreciate your concerns.  It is true that we only managed to get CNN and the HuffPo to cover our rally while the rest of the media ignored us.  But we did get Matt Damon to speak at the event.  He’s always so eloquent.  I’ve attached a video of his speech below.

We will redouble our efforts and I assure you that by the time I am done with this Army of Angry Teachers, they will have thoroughly discredited the teacher unions.

–Diane

14 Comments | teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

News Video on Arizona ESA program

July 29, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

 

3 Comments | Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Enlow’s Year of School Choice

July 29, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday Robert Enlow had a piece in Education Week heralding the “year of school choice”:

Sixteen years ago, as students were enjoying their summer break, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman issued his own report card on the American education system. In a guest commentary in The Washington Post, he described it as “backward,” often producing “dismal results.”

Not much has changed in 16 years.

Friedman noted that education had been stuck in a 19th-century model for decades, producing results that hadn’t kept up with our fast-paced world…

The explosion of new and expanded school choice programs shows that Milton Friedman got it right when it comes to mounting frustration with monopolies.

“Support for free choice of schools has been growing rapidly and cannot be held back indefinitely by the vested interests of the unions and educational bureaucracy,” Friedman wrote in the Post in 1995. “I sense that we are on the verge of a breakthrough in one state or another, which will then sweep like a wildfire through the rest of the country as it demonstrates its effectiveness.”

In 2011, that wildfire broke out.

Let’s keep rubbing it in!

2 Comments | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Gates Foundation and the Rise of the Cool Kids

July 28, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Jay and Greg have been carrying on an important discussion concerning the Gates Foundation and education reform. I wanted to add a few thoughts.

Rick Hess and others have noted the “philanthropist as royalty” phenomenon in the past. Any philanthropist runs the danger of only hearing what they want to hear from their supplicants, and Gates as the largest private foundation runs the biggest risk. The criticism of the Gates Foundation I had seen in the past emanated from the K-12 reactionary fever swamp, hardly qualifying as constructive.

The challenge faced by philanthropists: how do you challenge your own assumptions and evaluate your own efforts honestly? Do you hire formidable Devil’s advocates to level their most skeptical case against your efforts?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, just that if I were Bill Gates I would be terrified of everyone telling me how right my thinking is because they want my money. This is however the best sort of problem to have…

Jay’s central critique of the Gates Foundation strategy seems to be that they have put too much faith in a centralized command and control strategy. They would be wise to entertain this thought. If command and control alone were the solution, then we wouldn’t have education problems-district, state and federal governance have all failed to prevent widespread academic failure for decades.

The Gates strategy does however embrace decentralization. Over the years they have supported charter schools, and fiercely opposed the worst one-size fits all policy of all: salary schedules and automatic/irrevocable tenure. Riley’s WSJ article makes clear that Gates understands the benefits of private school choice, but that he falls for the Jay Mathews fallacy of thinking it is just too politically difficult.

Sigh…perhaps next year Greg can make a dinner bet with Bill.

Gates is also the primary backer of Khan Academy. This new article on Sal Khan in Wired magazine makes clear that Khan understands the danger of being swallowed by school systems and that he is not going to allow it to happen. Khan academy is both radically decentralized and is in the early stages of being used by people within the centralized school system to improve outcomes.

Whatever the mistakes to date, the Gates Foundation has in my mind has succeeded in serving as a counter-weight to the NEA, mostly through funding the efforts of a myriad network of reform organizations collectively known as the Cool Kids. Today, there is a struggle for power going on within the Democratic Party over K-12 policy and the Gates Foundation deserves some credit in my mind for supporting  the ideas behind the “Democrat Spring” on education policy. This spring is following more of the Syrian than the Egyptian model thus far, but it is happening, and it is very important.

Does that mean that they are the “good guys” and Jay should lay off of them? Of course not-reasoned critiques of large philanthropists are in short supply for all of the factors cited above. Jason Riley wished that Gates were bolder in embracing decentralization reforms, but noted that in the end that it was the Gates rather than the Riley Foundation. This is absolutely true, but it doesn’t make the royalty problem go away, and leaves a continuous question of how the emperor gets feedback on his new clothes.

I don’t agree with the Cool Kids about everything. The next time I hear someone ask a question about having Common Core replace NAEP (the very pinnacle of naive folly) for instance I may pull out entire tufts of my graying, thinning hair in utter exasperation. Reformers of all stripes need to be on guard against the ship-wheel conceit, which is to imagine that if only my strong hands steered the ship, we’d sail through the rocky shoals of ed reform without a hitch.

The East Germans ran a much better economy than the North Koreans, much to the benefit of Germans and to the detriment of Koreans. This is real and important in human terms- I do not make this point glibly. I never heard about an East German famine decimating the population, but food shortages have even soldiers starving to death in North Korea (pity the women and children). Better quality management is good and desirable, but…it will only take you so far. Today, Chinese apparatchiks are noisily crediting themselves for the tremendous economic progress in China without the slightest hint of irony. Without the market forces Deng introduced and with more apparatchiks, China would revert back to a starving backwater. With fewer apparatchiks, her progress would almost certainly accelerate.

As Sara Mead correctly noted in this guest post at Eduwonk, today’s education debate largely involves a mixture of technocratic and market-based reforms (neo-liberals) on one side and a group of reactionaries lacking realistic solutions on the other. A third of our 4th graders can’t read and have been shoved into the dropout pipeline. We need both technocratic and market based reforms, and we need stronger reforms of both sorts than those fielded to date.

Jay’s critique concerns the right mix of reforms within the bounds of the neo-liberal consensus. This of course is a matter of debate, and debate is the path to deeper understanding. The sheer size of the Gates Foundation has the potential to stifle such debate as it relates to their efforts, even passively, and reformers should recognize the danger in allowing it to do so. This isn’t about them so much as it is about us.

6 Comments | politics, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Command v. Choice Part II: Trust and Teamwork

July 27, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster) 

Jay P. Greene’s Blog Presents: 

Ineffective Teambuilding Techniques!

Group Religious Instruction

“Tryouts”

Mandatory Employee Leave Policy 

See Part I.

The existing school system persistently fails to pick up and reproduce best practices. Reformers have identified no end of good ideas that hold a lot of promise – provided you can get schools to try them. But no matter how good the ideas are, no matter how many high quality models you build and demonstrate, other schools never seem to pick them up and adopt them.

Therefore fixing schools will require the exercise of power. Somehow we have to get people to do things they currently find unpersuasive or excessively painful.

But people don’t like to be made to do things. They want to live in the way that seems right to them. And this is a legitimate desire – we can’t “live in the truth” if we have to live in ways that we experience as inauthentic. The more we have to do things that we don’t believe in because others, who have power, force us to to them, the more inauthentic our lives become. This makes us miserable, destroys motivation and idealism, shuts down the entrepreneurial drive for improvement, and breeds resentment.

That last item on the list can’t be stressed too strongly. Command and control is not only destructive in many other ways, it also fails to accomplish its explicit goals, because people who are subjected to it quickly develop a strong sense that cheating the system is okay, even virtuous, since the system itself is evil.

Reforms only work if you have three things. First you need a good idea – the reform itself. Next you need people who are capable of carrying it out – hence the rise of teacher quality as a focus of reform. But there’s a third thing you need, and this is why command-based approaches never work: you need an institutional culture in which reform is viewed as legitimate, necessary and empowering.

In any organization, institutional effectiveness is driven by trust and teamwork. To the extent that people are merely obeying rules, chasing carrots or avoiding sticks, effectiveness collapses. Effective institutions are ones that succeed in 1) cultivating trust and teamwork – for real, not the phony kind you get by making people do ropes courses and stuff; and 2) harnessing the trust and teamwork of the organization for effectiveness.

That second point is key. The trust and teamwork of an organization can be oriented toward goals other than the proper goal of the institution. They can even be oriented against the proper goal of the institution – as in Atlanta, where the whole system mobilized in a high-trust, intensive team project to cheat on accountability testing.

But trust and teamwork can only be mobilized for the right goals when people sincerely believe in the goals. The processes – and reforms – necessary to achieve those goals need to be understood and experienced as legitimate. Reform can’t just be imposed by power; it needs to become part of people’s truth.

Forgetting this fact, and actively corrupting the social processes that people rely on for truth, is the great temptation that always comes with power. The Gates Foundation, having succumbed to this temptation, is now embarking on what looks to be a wasted, deeply counterproductive decade or so (depending on how long it takes them to come to themselves) of command-and-control based reform.

So how can we accomplish reform in a way that is both humane and effective?

Let’s go back to the original reason we need power: “Somehow we have to get people to do things they currently find unpersuasive or excessively painful.” Emphasis added!

People need to be persuaded to adopt reform as part of their truth – something they experience as legitimate, necessary, and empowering.

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “That’s what we’ve been trying for decades, and it hasn’t worked!”

That’s right, so let’s ask why it hasn’t worked. I mean, isn’t it a little odd that 1) the system is so overwhelmingly dysfunctional that it’s destroying millions of children’s lives, 2) the people in the system are normal people, not psychotic or anything, people who by all accounts care about children’s education at least as much as the average person if not, you know, a lot more, and yet 3) the people in the system can’t be brought by any means to see reform as necessary?

What is it about the system as currently constituted that ensures reform is never embraced as something legitimate, necessary and empowering?

The system is moribund because it is a monopoly. When any institution has a captive client base, support for innovation vanishes. Reform requires people and institutions to do uncomfortable new things. Thus it won’t happen unless people are even more uncomfortable with the status quo than they are with change. So we need institutional structures that make the need for change seem plausible and legitimate. A captive client base ensures that such structures never emerge. An urgent need for change never seems really plausibile. An institution with captive clients can – or at least it will always feel like it can – continue to function, more or less as it always has, indefinitely. So why change, when change is uncomfortable, even painful?

This is why even small reforms that seem like they would be easy to implement have consistently failed to scale, and the attempt to impose such reforms through national command structures will fail even more spectacularly. Institutional culture in the existing system is hostile not just to this or that reform, but to reform as such, because it excludes the only institutional basis for making the need for change seem plausible and legitimate: the prospect of losing the client base.

This is what school choice advocates are talking about when they talk about the value of competition. “Competition” does not mean a cutthroat, ethics-free environment where individuals and institutions seek their own good at the expense of the good of others. Rather, competition is the life-giving force that drives institutions to become their best and continuously innovate, because it is the only way to hold institutions accountable for performance in a way that is both productive (because it aligns the measurement of institutional performance with people’s needs) and humane (because it creates accountability in a decentralized way rather than through a command-and-control power structure).

Where real competition is present, the cutthroats and self-servers are generally the first to fail. It is the individuals and institutions that focus on serving the needs of others who find success.

This is why big corporations, Wall Street firms, etc. are always opposed to free competition and are always seeking partnerships with government to undermine and eliminate it. They want to be able to use their dominant position to extract wealth without being accountable to serve anyone else’s needs.

This is the most important reason school choice has consistently improved educational outcomes for both the students who use it and for students in public schools. Studies of school choice programs consistently find that students using choice have better outcomes, and also that public schools improve in response to the presence of school choice. The explanation is simple: school choice puts parents back in charge of education, freeing the captive client base and creating an institutional environment in schools that makes the need for change seem plausible and legitimate.

Educators experience the urgency of the need for change when families not being served can leave for other schools – and they will never experience it any other way. Discomfort with change is also reduced for parents, because school choice restores their control over their children’s education.

This is not to say that power plays no role. The school choice movement needs power to break the union deathgrip on education policy and implement a real (i.e. universal) school choice program. And of course that means we need to be on our guard against the temptation to corrupt the knowledge process – to make power more important than truth, to say things that aren’t true but will help us get power. And power will continue to play a role, not only in continuing to defend real choice once it’s implemented, but also to enforce the rules of participation (to punish cheating, etc.).

But choice is the approach that is able to take both power and truth seriously. Command and choice are the two great methods of changing institutions. Command puts power in the driver’s seat, and sometimes (e.g. when punishing crimes) that’s necessary. Choice tends more in the direction of favoring truth over power.

I know which path I’m betting on. And so, I guess, does Gates. May the best man win.

7 Comments | instructional reform, politics, school accountability, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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