McCluskey on National Standards

July 20, 2010

simp_itch_trapped.jpg image by anaisjude

Checker Finn may say he’s paranoid, but Neal McCluskey really seems to be thinking straight when it comes to national standards.  The issue isn’t whether the currently proposed national standards are good (and it is likely that they are better than those in some states and worse than those in others).  The issue is who will control the national standards system in the future, once it is built.

Fordham is aware of the problem and promises that they are working on a foolproof way to keep the “good guys” in control forever, but you might think that would be something they would have all worked out BEFORE they build the national standards system.  And as Murphy’s law says: “Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.”

Building a national standards machine before you know how to control it is like every sci-fi story where the scientists build the robots before working out a plan for how to handle the robots when they go haywire.  Don’t these folks know the Elementary Chaos Theory?

Here’s Neal’s  money quote:

let’s stop focusing on whether the Common Core standards right now are good, bad, or indifferent, and talk about their future prospects, which is what really matters. Oh, wait: Most national standardizers avoid that discussion like the plague because they know that the overwhelming odds are the standards will end up either dismal, or at best just unenforced. Why? Because the same political forces that have smushed centralized standards and accountability in almost every state — the teacher unions, administrator associations, self-serving politicians, etc. — will just do their dirty work at the federal rather than state level. Indeed, those groups will still be the most motivated and effectively organized to control education politics, but they will have the added benefit of one-stop shopping!

The tragic flaw in the thinking of many national-standards supporters is not the desire to create high bars for students to clear, but the utter delusion, or maybe just myopia, that allows them to assume that they will control the standards in a monopoly over which, by its very nature, they almost never hold the reins.

12 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Gates Can’t Buy National Standards — But Will Sure Try

July 19, 2010



Everyone involved in education policy understands that the Gates Foundation is the octopus with many arms (and even more dollars) pushing the national standards and assessment movement forward.  In a recent report in the Lowell Sun we learn:

The Gates Foundation since January 2008 has awarded more than $35 million to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the two main organizations charged with drafting and promoting common standards.

In the run-up to his recommendation, [MA school chief] Chester told the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that he would base his decision on analysis being done by his staff, as well as independent reports prepared by three state and national education research firms — Achieve, Inc., The Fordham Institute, and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education-reform organization, received $12.6 million from the Gates Foundation in February 2008, according to data provided to the Washington Post by the foundation.

The Fordham Institute has accepted more than $1.4 million from the Gates Foundation, including nearly $960,000 to conduct Common Core reviews.

Checker Finn, the head of the Fordham Foundation, oddly felt the need to tell Business Week in their profile of the Gates push for national standards that: “The Gates folks are well aware of our independence and, I think, incorruptibility.”

This sounds like Nixon declaring that he is not a crook.  If it’s true, there is usually no need to announce it.

I’ve long argued that in education policy debates we should focus on the merits of the arguments rather than the motives of the people involved in the argument.  Whatever Fordham’s motives I think their arguments have to be addressed and I have done so here, among other places.

But let me go further.  I strongly doubt that Gates money has had any serious effect on Fordham’s stance on national standards.  Fordham has always been in support of the idea, although it has often opposed specific proposals for standards that it thought were counter-productive.  Gates decided to pour a mountain of money on Fordham because Fordham was already on board for the idea of national standards.  The money would just help improve the efficacy of Fordham to advocate the view they already held.  There was the danger that Fordham would have opposed the specific national standards backed by Gates, but Fordham has decided that these are good enough standards for them.  Of course, Fordham may still change its mind (and is known for strategic reversals on policies, such as NCLB), but I have no doubt that Fordham is completely sincere in its support for national standards and assessment.

I just think they are wrong.

3 Comments | higher education, politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education in an Era of Austerity

July 18, 2010

Let’s face it.  The economy stinks and may continue to stagnate for a while.  And the financial picture stinks even more for local and state governments who are not only continuing to experience shortfalls in revenue, but are finally beginning to pay the tab for irresponsible and not easily changeable spending commitments.  The pensions of public employees, including teachers, may bankrupt a number of states and localities even if the economy picks up soon.  The huge and unfunded liabilities from healthcare reform will also begin to hit state budgets hard.  I’m not sure why public employee unions, including teacher unions, backed the bill so enthusiastically because it will inevitably come at the expense of state spending in other areas.  Since health and education are the two biggest state budget items, a big increase in state health spending without rapid economic growth driving up public revenues will result in enormous pressure on education budgets.  Thing are going to be very tough for education spending going forward.

But there is a silver lining to this very dire situation:  tight budgets improve the odds for serious education reform.  Traditionally, education reform has been “purchased” with big spending increases for traditional education interests.  The DC voucher program was won only after promising to pour even more millions into the traditional public schools than were poured into vouchers.  Merit pay in Denver was only won after a huge increase in education spending and salaries.

Unfortunately, the price of reform has almost always been too high.  Public schools could almost always get a ton more money without having to make any concessions to reform, so it would take truck-loads of money to get public schools to grudgingly tolerate even the weakest reform.

Those days are over and the price of reform has just come down a lot.  State and local politicians who have no interest in vouchers or charters, per se, will suddenly become very enthusiastic about any proposal that helps them figure out how to pay pension obligations without huge layoffs, giant tax increases, or bankruptcy.

Check out how localities are taking extraordinary actions, like out-sourcing the police department, just to make ends meet.    A similar desperation will soon hit education policy as state and local officials realize that the economy will not pick up fast enough and the feds will not come to their rescue.

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

Ravitch on Vouchers: Wrong Again

July 16, 2010

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)

On July 14, Diane Ravitch wrote this:

La. students with vouchers do worse than peers in regular schools: http://tinyurl.com/347yht5. The panacea that never works, never dies.

Leave aside the uninformed claim that vouchers never work (in fact, they improve graduation rates, force public schools to improve, and improve test scores at least some of the time).

Has Ravitch found any actual evidence that Louisiana students are being harmed by vouchers? No.

Consider who receives vouchers in Louisiana. The program is limited to families with incomes under 250% of the poverty line — that is, students who tend to be poorer. On top of that, students must have attended “a public school during the 2009-2010 school year that is labeled academically unacceptable by the State.”

In other words, the voucher program is limited to students with lower incomes who attended failing public schools.

Now, as described in the EdWeek article that Ravitch so credulously cites, a former insurance executive and state board of education member named Leslie Jacobs came up with a comparison of voucher students and public school students. As far as I can tell, that comparison is available only in a blog post:

In the 2009-10 school year, 1113 children in grades K-4 received vouchers to attend one of the 32 participating non-public schools. Unfortunately, looking at the spring 2010 test scores, voucher students performed much worse than students in the New Orleans RSD – both its traditionally run public schools and public charter schools.

. . . .

Analysis

The performance of students enrolled in the voucher program raises serious concerns. While Louisiana’s proficiency goal is for all students to be Basic and above, in the voucher schools, only 35% of 3rd graders and 29% of 4th graders earned scores indicating they are grade level proficient in reading. Compare that to the RSD charters, where 54% of 3rd graders and 58% of 4th graders scored Basic and above. In fact, in English 4th grade students enrolled in the RSD charter schools outperformed students attending voucher schools by 2 to 1.

That’s the full extent of the “analysis” section. Evidently, all that Ms. Jacobs did was compare the raw average scores of voucher students to those of New Orleans public school students as a whole. Needless to say, this “analysis” is worthless — she’s comparing poorer students from failing public schools to everyone else. It’s unsurprising that the former might not be doing quite as well. Such an apples-to-oranges comparison tells us nothing about the performance of voucher-receiving private schools.

It’s a shame that Ravitch would treat this comparison with such gullibility while refusing to acknowledge the highly rigorous research done on vouchers.

10 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck

Bill Gates on Teacher Pensions

July 15, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Interesting article from John Fund from the Aspen Ideas Conference.

7 Comments | school funding | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

UC Berkeley Going Online

July 14, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Interesting article about a controversy at UC Berkeley concerning the provision of online coursework.

Of course, Edley is right and his opponents have their heads buried in the sand.  Remember, you heard it here first:

The only question in my mind is how long it will be until an elite player has the necessary vision to defect from the comfortable cartel. Several universities have the means to do this, and could receive philanthropic help to do so. Attention Oxford and Cambridge: it wouldn’t require an American university to pull this off. A British university could put out a low-cost version of this, and unlike their American counterparts, they aren’t swimming in resources.

This is not what Berkeley is doing.  At least, not yet. Their approach seems like a more limited foray into the use of technology to lower higher education costs, given that their state government benefactor is completely bankrupt and dysfunctional to boot. I’m amused by the resistance. Guess what Berkeley reactionaries: if you don’t start down this course, someone else is going to do it to you. 

I bounced my theory that it is only a matter of time until an elite private university begins offering tuition free online degrees under a Google financial model off of two executives from a private for-profit online university a few months ago. Their response:

“We know it is coming. We are trying to figure out what to do about it.”

Jay has touched on the impact of general fiscal calamity and specifically Obamacare will have in moving states to consider innovative approaches for lowering costs in education. After a recent conference in Las Vegas, Patrick Gibbons of the Nevada Policy Research Institute summed it up:

Dr. Greene didn’t make this point to scare people away from Obamacare. He was pressing a point about the financial imperative of using existing resources more efficiently to provide a better system of public education. We have to reform, because public education is simply unsustainable in its current form.

I wrote recently about the Carpe Diem charter school’s successful use to boost strongly boost academic scores while fundamentally incorporating technology into the education model. The good in all of this is that while creative destruction is painful, the fact is that we can get better schools and better universities out of it. International comparisons show that American K-12 schools spend lavishly and teach ineffectively.  American universities, in my opinion, tend to be overpriced, overrated and blissfully unconcerned with student learning or their own ever-increasing costs. If ever there were two sectors in more dire need of a shakeup, I would be hard pressed to think of better examples than American K-12 and American academia.

5 Comments | higher education, school funding | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Journalist Errors

July 14, 2010

Anyone who follows print and broadcast news knows that journalists make a ton of mistakes.  I don’t mean factual errors, although there are also plenty of those.  I mean reporting mistakes, like failing to frame the question properly, failing to put the issue in context, failing to gather information from the right sources, failing to treat received information with the proper skepticism, focusing on an analysis of motives rather than of facts, etc…  You especially notice this when the news is about something with which you are more familiar.

In case you have any doubts about the astounding frequency and magnitude of journalist errors, consider the claims that Toyota cars automatically and uncontrollably accelerate.  There were hundreds of news reports that repeated these claims as if they were credible, promoting a mass hysteria about runaway cars.  Toyota sales plummeted, they became the target of SNL ridicule, etc…

Now we hear that the Department of Transportation has investigated more than 2,000 cases of alleged automatic acceleration and could not find evidence to support any one of these claims.  In these cases the throttle remained fully open and the brakes were not engaged.  In other words, people were mistakenly pressing the accelerator while thinking it was the brake.

Anyone with half a brain and a reasonable amount of skepticism would have suspected that the driver was likely the least reliable part of a modern car and would have guessed that people were mistakenly pressing the gas.  But very, very few of the news reports on this issue emphasized this likely explanation.  Instead, most acted as if we lived in a John Grisham novel where evil corporations knowingly hide the defects of their products as they killand maime their customers to maximize profits.  This does happen, but it is very, very rare.  To treat these claims as evidence of real safety issues with cars was simply mistaken reporting.

This raises the question why reporters make so many mistakes like this.  Is it that reporters:

a) lack the necessary critical faculties

b) are more interested in sensational stories than reliable information

c) have an ideology that makes them irrationally inclined to a John Grisham view of corporations

d) all of the above

(correction:  Toyota was the one to investigate more than 2,000 cases, but their findings are so far the same as the US DOT from a smaller set of cases, which found: “The U.S. Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of data recorders from Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration and found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren’t engaged at the time of the crash, people familiar with the findings said.” )

18 Comments | journalism | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Cool Kids vs. the Cavemen Update

July 13, 2010

Don't cross our union masters...errrrrr...allies again cool kids!

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Politico has more on the Cool Kids vs. Caveman power struggle.

2 Comments | politics, school funding | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Blaming Special Ed — Again

July 12, 2010

When times get tough, school systems and their enabling reporters blame special education.  Regular readers of JPGB and and Education Next have seen this argument debunked before, but I feel compelled to do it again in response to a sloppy and lazy article in the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ piece by Barbara Martinez is entitled “Private-School Tuitions Burden DOE.”  The DOE in this case is the Department of Education in New York City, which the article points out “last year spent $116 million on tuition and legal expenses related to special-education students whose parents sued the DOE on the grounds that the public-school options were inadequate. That’s more than double the number of just three years ago, and the costs are expected to continue to rise in coming years.”

As I’ve pointed out before, the trick to writing an article blaming special education is to mention a high cost for educating certain special education students (or even a high-sounding aggregate figure) without putting in perspective how much money that is relative to the entire school budget.  True to form, this article states: “The tuition payouts range between $20,000 and more than $100,000 per child and have been used for schools as far away as Utah.”  Wow, that sounds like a lot of money.  And going all the way to Utah sounds extravagant.

But let’s put this issue in perspective, which even a minimal amount of effort by the reporter could have done.  If private school tuition really is a “burden” as the title asserts, the cost of private-placement should be a significant portion of the New York City school budget.  It isn’t.  If you look at the NYC education budget you see that schools spent a total of $17.9 billion in 2009.  The total cost of private placement is only $116 million, which is about .6% of total spending.  This is close to rounding error for NYC.

To put it further in perspective, the NYC education system spent $151 million last year on pollution remediation to address lead paint, asbestos, and contaminated soil at its properties.  Imagine if there had been a news article entitled “Pollution Clean-Up Burdens DOE.”  People would have dismissed that as ridiculous, noting that the total amount spent on pollution is a very small part of the total budget and could hardly be considered a burden.  What’s more, people would have acknowledged that cleaning up pollution is important and the schools need to do it.

But this article on private tuition for special education “burdens” is even worse because the burden on the district isn’t the total cost, but the cost for private placement in excess of what the district would have spent if they had served these disabled students in traditional public schools.  We know from the article that there were 4,060 students who sought private placement for an aggregate cost of $116 million.  That works out to $28,571 per student.

We also know from the NYC DOE budget that schools spent a total of $17.9 billion for about 1.1 million students, which works out to $16,263 per student.  But wait, NYC spends more on its special education students than on the average student.  If we look at the NYC DOE budget (which any education reporter worth his or her salt could easily do), they identify additional costs associated with special education.  From that we can calculate that NYC spends an average of $24,773 on its special education students.

The “burden” on NYC DOE from paying private school tuition is the difference between the average tuition and legal costs associated with private placement ($28,571) and the average cost for a disabled student in the traditional public schools ($24,773), which works out to $3,798 per student.  An extra $3,798 per privately placed student over 4,060 students constitutes an additional expense of $15.4 million for NYC DOE.  That amounts to less than .09% of the NYC DOE education budget.

Calling this a “burden” on the district is irresponsible and just distracts people from the true and large areas of waste burdening the school system.

15 Comments | special ed | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Burke: Why Florida Was the “Smart” Choice for LeBron

July 10, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation explains why LeBron made the right decision in moving to Miami.

BOOOOOOOOOM!

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »