Blog Envy

December 4, 2009

I’m suffering from blog envy.  Other blogs have had some great posts — much better than what I’ve come up with recently.  If I can’t beat them I might as well link to them and poach their material.

First, Brian Kisida has a superb post at Mid-Riffs on the predictable waste and banality of consultant reports in the political and education arena.  He demonstrates this using as his examples a “curriculum audit” that the Fayetteville school district has commissioned from Phi Delta Kappa for $36,000 as well as a “visioning” report that the City of Fayetteville commissioned from Eva Klein & Associates for $150,000:

To be sure, the report that Phi Delta Kappa comes up with won’t look exactly like the same ideas the community gave them.  They’ll be re-written in such a way that any resemblance or lack of substance will be obfuscated by consultant-speak gobbledy-gook.  For example, when the Rogers School District hired Phi Delta Kappa to conduct an audit, one of the recommendations they received was:

Develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management system that delineates short- and long-term goals, directs curriculum revision to ensure deep alignment and quality delivery, and defines the instructional model district leaders expect teachers to follow in delivering the curriculum.

Translation: Establish a system to set and achieve goals. And make it a good one.

Here’s another recommendation from the Rogers audit:

Research, identify and implement strategies to eliminate inequities and inequalities that impede opportunities for all students to succeed.

Translation:  Do what you and every other school district has already been doing (or should have been doing) for decades.

I’m willing to bet Fayetteville’s audit will contain many of the same recommendations given to Rogers.  These types of consultant groups have stock boiler-plate language that they recycle time and time again.  I also expect to see some of the views of the community rewritten in consultant-speak.  Here’s some of the comments and concerns the Northwest Arkansas Times picked up from teachers and parents at one of the focus groups:

  • Weaknesses in foreign languages
  • lack of flexibility, especially at the high school level
  • poor communication about special programs
  • lack of strong leadership in some schools
  • the need for more vocational classes, including in middle school
  • too many different intelligent levels in the classroom
  • special needs and at-risk students need more technology
  • need more literacy coaches, especially one at the high school
  • more coordination in all programs
  • need more time for physical activity
  • need more writing in classrooms

    •  I got this list from the newspaper, which cost me fifty cents–a whopping $35,499.50 less than Phi Delta Kappa is going to charge for repackaging these ideas in consultant-speak.

    I don’t know exactly why organizations pay money to outside consultants, like when the city paid Eva Klein & Associates to tell us that the University was one of our strengths, and that the perception that Fayetteville was anti-business was one of our weaknesses.   Don’t we already elect and pay people to think about these things and have a vision for what we need to do?  So why are they sub-contracting out their duties?

    Wow.  Great blogging!

    And Paul Peterson is hitting his stride as a blogger over at the Education Next Blog.  There he notes the political difficulty posed by teacher union financial might for President Obama and Secretary Duncan’s efforts to turn Race to the Top rhetoric into reality:

    The National Education Association (and its local affiliates) gave $56.3 million dollars to state and federal election campaigns in 2007 and 2008, more than any other entity. That’s what we learn from the recently released report issued by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) together with the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

    The much smaller American Federation of Teachers tossed in another $12 million dollars into political campaigns….

    The money is wrested directly from teacher paychecks as an add-on to their monthly dues (unless teachers specifically object), a power granted unions by school boards as part of collective bargaining deals.  So the NEA’s slush fund is in fact built by taxpayer dollars, which flow directly to the NEA instead of into the teacher’s own bank account.  Yes, some individual teachers object and don’t make the political contribution, but unions typically collect the money by default.

    With all that cash in hand, unions are in a position to tell state legislatures what to do, if they want campaign dollars next time around.  Significantly, over $53 million of the $56.3 million dollars went for state-level expenditures, a clear indication that unions know that the action is not in Washington but in state capitols.

    This enormous cash nexus that swamps anything any business entity has contributed creates a huge problem for President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who is asking states and school districts to put merit pay into place.

    1 Comment | blogging, politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    Marcus on Tenure & Test Scores

    December 2, 2009

    HT Education Week

    (Guest post by Greg Forster)

    On NRO today, Marcus soldiers on through the endless New York test score tenure wars, reporting on a gutsball move by Mayor Bloomberg:

    New York’s state legislature gave teachers a gift last year by banning the use of student test-score data in tenure decisions. Many expect the legislature to allow the law to expire next year, but Mayor Bloomberg refuses to wait. Last week, he ordered schools chancellor Joel Klein to use the data anyway, arguing that the teachers up for tenure this year were hired in 2007, and a careful reading of the law suggests it applies only to teachers hired after July 1, 2008.

    I’m not a Bloomberg fan on any other issue, but on education he’s a cut above most mayors. And remember, he does this in a town with a City Council so thoroughly corrupted by the unions that legislators actually read from union cue cards during hearings.

    4 Comments | school accountability, teacher quality | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Greg Forster

    Coulson Schools LA Times on Charters

    December 2, 2009

    Andrew Coulson teaches the LA Times a thing or two about charter schools in his post on the Cato blog.  Here’s the meat of it:

    Yesterday’s LA Times editorial on charter schools combined errors of fact and omission with a misrepresentation of the economic research on public school spending. First, the Times claims that KIPP charter public schools spend “significantly more per student than the public school system.” Not so, says the KIPP website. But why rely on KIPP’s testimony, when we can look at the raw data? LA’s KIPP Academy of Opportunity, for instance, spent just over $3 million in 2007-08, for 345 students, for a total per pupil expenditure of $8,917. The most recent Dept. of Ed. data for LAUSD (2006-07) put that district’s comparable figure at $13,481 (which, as Cato’s Adam Schaeffer will show in a forthcoming paper, is far below what it currently spends). Nationwide, the median school district spends 24 percent more than the median charter school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

    Next, in summarizing the charter research, the Times’ editors omitted the most recent and sophisticated study, by Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby. It finds a significant academic advantage to charters using a randomized assignment experimental model that blows the methodological doors off most of the earlier charter research. The Times also neglects to mention Hoxby’s damning critique of the CREDO study it does cite….

    There are certainly reasons to lament the performance of the charter sector, and the Times’ editors even came close to citing one of them: its inability to scale up excellence as rapidly and routinely as is the case in virtually every field outside of education. Before getting into such policy issues, however, the Times should make a greater effort to marshal the basic facts.

    Leave a Comment » | charter schools | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    Mid-Riffs on Arkansas Charters

    December 1, 2009

    Brian Kisida and Josh McGee, who blog at Mid-Riffs, had an op-ed in the Sunday Arkansas Democrat Gazette on the State Board of Education’s rejection of all six new charter applications.  Here is the money quote:

    The Board often cited the same tired reason for denying charter applicants: The proposed charter wasn’t innovative enough. Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell echoed this sentiment after the Board’s meeting, summarizing that he thought the Board was looking for “something different and innovative that students can’t get in a normal public school.” Likewise, a Springdale representative in attendance said that “if a charter school is going to go in, it should offer something better or do something we can’t.” Board member Brenda Gullett, at a Democratic luncheon last week, confirmed that demonstrating innovation was the standard to which she held charter applicants. Some version of this reasoning seems to show up in state and local school board discussions every time a charter school is opposed in Arkansas.

    It is an undue burden to force charter applicants to demonstrate radically new techniques before they open their doors. Imagine that Taco Bueno had to get permission from Taco Bell to open a store in the same town. You might hear the same anti-competitive argument from Taco Bell: “Why should Taco Bueno be allowed to open? They’re just going to offer the same things that we do. They have tacos; we have tacos. They have burritos; we have burritos.” But of course, the whole point of choice and competition is that a competitor will offer essentially the same goods or services. If the goods or services are too different, it isn’t really competition after all. It’s up to the customer-not Taco Bell-to decide whose tacos are, in fact, “better.”

    Moreover, the question regarding whether charter applicants must demonstrate innovation is a legal one. The state legislature has the power to make laws. The Board, as an arm of the executive branch, has a duty to execute the law. And nothing in Arkansas’ charter school law can reasonably be construed to empower the Board to reject charter applicants solely for not demonstrating innovation. The word “innovation” doesn’t even appear in the Arkansas Department ofEducation’s rules and regulations that govern the requirements for charter school applicants.

    2 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , , | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    School Choice Reduces Crime, Increases College-Attendance, and Makes Your Breath Smell Better

    November 29, 2009

    Well, at least the first two claims are supported by rigorous new research based on school choice lotteries in Charlotte, North Carolina. Harvard researcher, David Deming, looked at a public school choice program that allows families to rank order their preferred schools and then admits students by a weighted lottery formula.  The program is designed primarily to facilitate school integration but it also allows random-assignment designed research of the effects of choice.  In the paper, “Better Schools, Less Crime?” , Deming found: 

    Seven years after random assignment, lottery winners have been arrested for fewer and less serious crimes, and have spent fewer days incarcerated…  The reduction in crime persists through the end of the sample period, several years after enrollment in the preferred school is complete. The effects are concentrated among African-American males whose ex ante characteristics define them as “high risk.”

    In another paper Deming wrote with Justine Hastings, Tom Kane and Doug Staiger, they examined the same Charlotte program but this time focused on the effects of choice on high school completion and college attendance.  They found:

    We find strong evidence that high school lottery winners from neighborhoods assigned to the lowest-performing schools benefited greatly from choice. Girls are 12 percentage points more likely to attend a four-year college. Boys are 13 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school but are less likely to attend a four-year college. We present suggestive evidence that changes in relative rank within schools may explain these puzzling gender differences. In contrast with the results for students from low-performing home school zones, we find little evidence of gains for students whose home schools are of average quality.

    So, expanding school choice reduces the likelihood that students will become criminals (particularly among African-American males) and increases the chances that boys will graduate high school and girls will attend college.  Given previous research showing that choice increases achievement for participating students, students who remain in traditional public schools, and improves civic goals (like school integration) in addition to these new findings, maybe choice really does make your breath smell better.  It seems to do so many other useful things.

    2 Comments | charter schools, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    Ed Schools Take the FCAT

    November 25, 2009

    (Guest post by Greg Forster)

    Good gravy! Never mind the debate on using test scores to evaluate teachers. Florida is actually using test scores to evaluate teacher colleges:

    It determined what percentage of graduates from each program had 50 percent or more of their students make a year’s worth of progress [on the FCAT]. USF’s College of Education — a huge pipeline for teachers in the Tampa Bay area — had 76 percent of its graduates reach that bar, putting it ninth among the 10 state university programs. Florida International University in Miami topped the field at 85 percent. The University of West Florida in Pensacola was last at 70 percent.

    The only problem I can see here is that this just compares education schools to one another. All education schools are part of the problem. Still, I can see a lot of value in knowing which ones are more a part of the problem or less – not least because if they start competing with one another on the basis of results, maybe someday one of them will actually produce a radical transformative revolutionary breakthrough and actually become a value-adding rather than value-subtracting part of the education system.

    62% of a hat tip goes to Flypaper’s Andy Smarick. I’m penalizing Andy by withholding 38% of the hat tip because he claims, with no justification, that Arne Duncan must somehow deserve some credit for this move. First of all, as Andy sort of sheepishly admits, a move like this must have been in the works for a while before reaching fruition.

    But more important is that Florida has been the nation’s leader in this field for a long time now. Florida doesn’t follow the USDOE on this issue, the USDOE follows Florida. The only effect the USDOE has ever had on Florida’s interest in using test scores for evaluation purposes is to prevent it from going further faster.

    7 Comments | higher education, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Greg Forster

    Gloomy Required Reading

    November 24, 2009

    As I reviewed my 9th grader’s required reading list for English class I saw good and bad news.  The good news is he is reading some excellent literature, including Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Night and To Kill a Mockingbird.  The bad news is that these works are remarkably gloomy. 

    To Kill a Mockingbird is the most upbeat of the bunch and can at its most positive be described as a bittersweet recollection of childhood and at its most negative a horrifying tale of the lynching of an innocent man.  The other books are more consistently downbeat, featuring mutual suicide, killing an innocent retarded man, and the holocaust.

    I know that the world can be a nasty place and I know that great literature tends to explore that nastiness.  But I have to wonder whether it is really such a good idea to require our moody adolescents to read a steady stream of such depressing works.

    Can I suggest that we break-up the persistent gloom by substituting some more upbeat books?  Maybe students could read Measure for Measure instead of Romeo and Juliet.  Measure for Measure would appeal to youthful resistance to authority without modeling overwrought teen crushes.  Maybe schools could add some Kurt Vonnegut, which softens the gloom with absurdist humor.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think my child’s reading list is pretty typical and I like everything on it.  I’m just wondering if people have thought about how downbeat the list is.

    11 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    The Case for Israel

    November 23, 2009

    We had a screening of the film, The Case for Israel: Democracy’s Outpost, Saturday night in the newly constructed Temple Shalom in Fayetteville, AR with comments from the producer, Gloria Greensfield.  It was a huge success.

    There were nearly a hundred people there of whom about a third were from pro-Israel Christian Churches.  As certain segments of the Jewish community have gone wobbly on Israel, the support of the Christian community is becoming more important.

    But the most important reason that the screening was a huge success is that it was probably the largest pro-Israel gathering in a college community dominated by the anti-Israel King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, created with an $18 million gift from the Saudi Arabian government.  The King Fahd Center along with the Omni Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology host a few anti-Israel conferences each year.

    The oddest thing about these King Fahd and Omni Center events is their singular focus on human rights abuses by Israel.  Yes, the government of Israel along with the governments in the US and all other democracies can work on improving how they treat their own and other people.  But if we really wanted to address human rights abuses wouldn’t we be paying a whole lot more attention to the flagrant oppression perpetrated by the dictatorships governing every other country in the Middle East?

    In Saudi Arabia , Iran, Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East (but not Israel) homosexuality is a crime sometimes punished by death.  Religious and political dissent is almost entirely repressed in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Gaza, and elsewhere in the Middle East (but not Israel).

    Shouldn’t progressives who value freedom for homosexuals as well as religious and political minorities (as I do) be devoting much more energy protesting other countries in the Middle East?  And shouldn’t people who value democracy and human rights (as I do) praise those countries in the world where such values exist and are implemented (even if very imperfectly) rather than concentrating the bulk of their energy denouncing those countries?  It’s as if we have gone through the looking glass and up is now down.

    3 Comments | Fayetteville, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    States to Protect Health Care Freedom?

    November 19, 2009

    (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

    George Will wrote a column today about an effort to protect Arizonans from being forced to buy health insurance or to ban the right to privately purchase medical care by Obamacare.

    If Obamacare passes, the people of Arizona may give it the proverbial single finger salute. Other states may as well.

    The proposed initiative reads:

    No law shall be passed that restricts a person’s freedom of choice of private health care systems or private plans of any type. No law shall interfere with a person’s or entity’s right to pay directly for lawful medical services, nor shall any law impose a penalty or fine, of any type, for choosing to obtain or decline health care coverage or for participation in any particular health care system or plan.

    Clint Bolick notes that the federal protection of individual rights have always served as a floor, not a ceiling. If both Obamacare and this language passed, an interesting legal battle would ensue. Money quote from the column:

    The court says the constitutional privacy right protects personal “autonomy” regarding “the most intimate and personal choices.” The right was enunciated largely at the behest of liberals eager to establish abortion rights. Liberals may think, but the court has never held, that the privacy right protects only doctor-patient transactions pertaining to abortion. David Rivkin and Lee Casey, Justice Department officials under the Reagan and first Bush administrations, ask: If government cannot proscribe or even “unduly burden” — the court’s formulation — access to abortion, how can government limit other important medical choices?

    How indeed? This would all be much better if judges simply rediscovered an ability to read the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution, but if you can’t “unduly burden” abortion how are you supposed to “unduly burden” an individual’s right to pay a heart surgeon or have an appendix removed?

    Hopefully the Senate will kill Obamacare, but if not, the fight can be carried on by other means. If some states passed such amendments and other did not, get ready for the second great doctor migration. I had a Canadian doctor growing up in southeast Texas in the 1970s. Any guesses why?

    1 Comment | politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
    Posted by matthewladner

    Reading Osama bin Laden his Miranda Rights

    November 18, 2009

    (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

    Oh.My.God.Becky! Senator Lindsey Graham demolishes Eric Holder.  Pop some popcorn and check it out here.

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

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