For Those Keeping Score

May 20, 2009

For those who are keeping score, 3 of the top 5 circulating newspapers in the United States have recently written editorials supporting the D.C. voucher program:  USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. 

The New York Times along with their teacher union readership have remained quiet on the issue, hoping the dirty deed can be done as silently as possible. 

And the Chicago Tribune, which is a top 10 circulating newspaper as well as the hometown paper for voucher-killers Obama, Duncan, and Durbin, also endorsed DC vouchers.

Somebody needs to reach Kevin Carey in his hermetically-sealed DC bubble to let him know that at least some people who “are serious about education policy” seem to care about vouchers — that is, unless we want to believe that the editorial boards of the country’s largest newspapers with total circulation in excess of 5 million readers shouldn’t be considered as serious as policy analysts at tiny DC think tanks.

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

Would You Want This Man As Your Chief Advocate?

May 19, 2009

Rocket scientist and wholly-owned subsidiary of the teacher union, Sen. Dick Durbin, makes his best attempt to write a negative op-ed on D.C. vouchers in USA Today this morning.  The unsigned main editorial in the paper endorses D.C. vouchers and Durbin was given the opportunity to articulate the opposing view.

Durbin writes:

“Now, after three years of study, the results of that evaluation are in, and the U.S. Department of Education found: no statistically significant improvement in math scores for any voucher students (boys or girls); no statistically significant improvement in scores for male voucher students; no statistically significant improvement in scores for students transferring from failing schools (the targets of the voucher program), and only a slight improvement in reading scores for female voucher students (equivalent to three months of additional reading proficiency).”

The program also did not produce statistically significant gains for space aliens and did not make voucher students more handsome or grant them super-powers (HT to Matt).  There are many things that the D.C. voucher program did not do or that the rigorous study could not detect with high confidence for small sub-groups of students.

But one thing that the program did do that Durbin somehow fails to mention is raise reading scores significantly in the analysis of all students offered vouchers.  That is, he mentioned almost every tiny sub-group analysis lacking the statistical power to detect significant effects but leaves out the overall effect of the program. 

This selective and misleading reporting of results is obviously disingenuous.  I’m beginning to lean toward the lying end of stupid or lying.

Why would the union’s water-boy make such an obviously misleading and weak argument?  Can’t they find anyone better to do their bidding? 

Unfortunately, the teacher unions may feel like they don’t have to do any better than this.  As long as they offer their supporters some fig leaf for killing a program proven to work, they are going to press forward.  They don’t have to defend their ideas; they just have to have enough brute force to win.  And unfortunately it seems that they believe they have enough brute force.  That’s why they didn’t even bother to show up to the Senate hearings to defend their position.  They don’t care about being right — only about getting what they want.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Daily Show on Arizona State University

May 18, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So Arizona State asked Barack Obama to deliver the commencement speech, but decided not to offer him an honorary doctorate, opining that his body of work was yet to come, and thus apparently did not merit such an honor.

The Daily Show picked up on this, and well, judge the clip for yourself. I’ve been critical of ASU for a lousy graduation rate and offering staggeringly unseemly bribes overly generous National Merit Scholarships in an effort to create the appearance of academic quality. Get the Daily Show mad at you, however, and they will drop the “Harvard of Date Rape” cluster-bomb on your village without a second thought.

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for ASU (once I got my breath back and dried my eyes) but when you lead with your chin, you can’t credibly complain when someone breaks your jaw. When you accept 92% of applicants and have a 28% 4-year graduation rate, it just might indicate that you are using a large number of ill-prepared students as financial cannon-fodder.

Yes, yes-it’s their choice, everyone gets an opportunity, yadda yadda yadda.  That’s all fine until you finance these six-year-beer-soaked-odysseys-of-self-discovery-resulting-in-a-graduation-about-half-the-time-vacations-from-reality with money forcibly extracted from other people. Many of the third party payers never went to college and are struggling to make ends meet.   What choice did they get?

(edited for typos)

1 Comment | higher education | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Get Lost for Good

May 18, 2009

File:5x16 Jacob and nemesis.png

OK, I won’t gloat (too much) about how I correctly predicted that Locke was actually dead and was possessed by some evil force.

Instead I’m going to make new predictions for next season.  The secret to my success at Lost prognostication is just to make a lot of predictions and hope you all forget the majority that I get horribly wrong.

So, here is what I see for next season —  There are two supernatural beings Jacob and his nemesis, who I bet will be called Essau. 

Jacob is the god of life and Essau is the god of death.  Jacob can bring people to life simply by touching them.  We see him bring Locke back to life after he is thrown out of the window.  He brings Illana back from grave injuries in her Russian hospital.  I’m guessing that it was Jacob that saved Ben from death when Richard brought young Ben into the Temple.  In fact, I’ll wager that all of The Others are Jacob’s people because he has saved all of them from death.  That’s why they are so loyal to him and do not fear death.

Essau is the god of death.  All of the dead people we’ve seen around walking around the island are really Essau, including John Locke, Christian Shephard, Eko’s brother, Harper, etc…

Jacob and Essau have been through human history countless times, each working on their superpower of life or death.  They are also playing out a disagreement they have about whether human beings have free will and whether Fate can be changed.  Essau thinks that there really is no free will and Fate cannot be changed.  The details change but Time course-corrects and, as he puts it, “it always ends the same way.”  The way it ends is with death for the individual and global destruction for all of humankind. (Remember the Vanzetti numbers that the Dharma project is working to alter?)

Jacob thinks there can be progress.  He also seems convinced that human beings can make choices and change Fate.  He tells Hurley that he can choose when they ride together in the taxi.  He tells Ben that Ben has a choice before Ben stabs him.

The difficulty is that Jacob promotes the idea of free will at the same time that he manipulates the characters.  He saves Katie from being caught stealing.  He gives Sawyer the pen he uses to finish his revenge letter.  He saves Locke from death.  He save Illana in the hospital and recruits her for her mission.  And he steers Hurley back to the island.

The only flashback in the finale episode that did not involve Jacob manipulating the characters was the one involving Juliet.  And it was Juliet who chooses to let go and fall  into the drill shaft.  And it was Juliet who chooses to detonate the nuke.  She is the variable.  Her choices are different this time through history and that will lead to a change in Fate.

My guess is that the next season will begin on the Oceanic 815 flight to LA and it won’t crash this time.  So, we will think that Fate has changed.  But then all of the main characters will reconnect and find their way to the island.  We will begin to suspect that Time has course-corrected and we’ll think that we are back to things always ending the same way.  But is the grande-finale Jacob and his view of free will will prevail.  The characters will make important choices that avert global destruction.  And I’ll bet that their choices have to do with the affirmation of love, just as Juliet did.

4 Comments | Lost | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

I Want A New Civics Teacher

May 18, 2009

Kevin Carey offers a Civics 101 lesson on his blog.  All I can say is that I want a new civics teacher because this one doesn’t even have basic facts right. 

For example, Kevin writes that DC is “the one place in America without representation in Congress.”  The people of Guam, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico will be thrilled to learn that they’re not part of America or that Kevin has decided to give them representatives. 

But this is a bit of a distraction from the main issue, which is whether charters are good because they are allegedly accountable while vouchers are bad because they allegedly are not.  And here Kevin makes yet another bold, false assertion saying that vouchers schools are “currently unaccountable.” 

In what meaningful sense are DC charters more accountable than vouchers?  Both are subject to market accountability so that if they fail to perform to parental satisfaction they can lose students and the revenue those students generate.  In this sense both charters and vouchers are far more accountable than D.C. district public schools, which receive ever more revenue even as they perform miserably and lose students.  The only “currently unaccountable” schools are the district public schools, not the voucher schools.

But I imagine that Kevin only understands accountability to mean directly accountable to a public authority.  Even with that narrow meaning of accountability vouchers are accountable because they are subject to Congressional regulation and oversight.  Just watch the excellent hearings on DC vouchers held last week if you want to see what accountability looks like.

Perhaps Kevin has an even more narrow understanding of accountability, meaningful compliance with a particular set of rules regarding testing and reporting of results.  But even then DC vouchers are truly more accountable.  DC voucher students are required to take a standardized test and an independent evaluator is assessing whether students are benefiting from having access to the voucher program.  It’s true that DC charters must report test results by school, but that doesn’t make them any more accountable.  Knowing raw test results does not tell parents or public authorities whether those students would have done better had they not gone to that school or had access to the charter program.  The only way to know that with high confidence would be with a random-assignment evaluation, which many voucher programs have had and charter programs almost never have.

By accountability maybe Kevin means checking boxes on some regulatory check-list regardless of benefit to parents or the public.  Kevin would be right about that one.  Charters do have more meaningless and even counter-productive regulation with which they have to comply in the false pursuit of accountability.  The net effect of those mindless regulations is to undermine charter effectiveness and help preserve the unionized traditional district stranglehold.  That’s the kind of false accountability that I’m glad vouchers don’t have.

(edited for typos)

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

Ed Sector’s K-12 Incoherence Week

May 15, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I’ve been out and about this week, but our pals over at Education Sector have kept me entertained. On Carey’s too-cool for-school dissing of vouchers, I can’t help but wonder: what would stop an advocate of home-schooling from dismissing Kevin’s beloved charter schools on a broadly similar basis? After all, home-schooling is legal in all 50 states, charters in only 40. Many of those 40 laws, however, are dogs that will never produce more than a rounding error number of schools. They’re not bad, they’re just drawn that way:

Precise numbers are not available, but twice as many or more students may be home-schooling than attending charter schools, and the rate of growth has been faster. High quality outcome data is hard to come by, but anecdotally universities have come to view home-school students very positively. I haven’t seen the same said for charter schools yet, nor have we seen (yet) a charter school student crush the evil Sooners like the bugs they are after winning the Heisman Trophy.

Im way too cool for you Carey, google my girlfriend

I'm too cool for you Carey, google my girlfriend...

Does it follow then that home-school supporters should be completely dismissive of charter schools? No of course not. The truth is that we don’t know what is going to take hold in K-12 reform, only that it is going to change.

Meanwhile, Andy Rotherham has delivered a brilliant column on the limitations of transparency that all but screams out at the end for a decentralized, self-regulating mechanism to hold schools accountable for results.

Ummm….you know….like parental choice.

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

The Negative De-Sarcasticizer

May 14, 2009

Kevin Carey ran my post from yesterday through a “negative de-sarcasticizer”  and wants to take issue with the suggestion that D.C. vouchers were adopted democratically. 

First, I should warn Kevin that a negative de-sarcasticizer actually makes things more sarcastic.  I know because I bought one on Ebay and I use it to help make my posts as sarcastic as they are.  The negative de-sarcasticizer comes with a large, yellow label warning about the hazards of double negatives.

Second, the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers.  All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard.  This would include NCLB and other federal education legislation that Kevin praises charter schools for more strictly obeying.

Third, I am glad that Kevin believes that “giving parents educational choices and opening up public education to competition and innovation will improve outcomes for students.”  And I agree with him that charters would be one way of expanding choices and competition.  But I continue to be puzzled by the argument that vouchers are bad because they are less accountable than charters.  Whatever regulation you believe is desirable for schools could be applied to vouchers as well as to charters.

Finally, I continue to be troubled by Kevin’s need to dismiss vouchers by labeling the idea as “unworkable” or “not serious.”  This is just argumentation by name-calling rather than addressing the substance of the issue.  When I hear this kind of argument it makes me want to turn my negative de-sarcasticizer up to full power.

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

A Different Kind of WaPo Gold

May 14, 2009

Billy-Bragg-Talking-With-The-Taxman

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In other Washington Post news, those who have been following our coverage of the resurgence of socialism will not want to miss George Will’s column today:

The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

HT Jim Geraghty

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Posted by Greg Forster

More WaPo Gold

May 14, 2009

The Washington Post has yet another excellent editorial today on D.C. vouchers.  This time they discuss yesterday’s Senate hearings on the program featuring our very own Patrick Wolf.

It’s all money quote, so here’s the whole thing:

“WE HOPE that President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and others who have questioned the effectiveness of school vouchers were tuned in to yesterday’s Senate hearing on the District’s program. They would have heard moving testimonials from students whose lives have been changed by their ability to get an appropriate education, as well as a plea from a mother desperate that her young daughter have that same opportunity for a better future. Even more critically, they would have heard the judgment of an objective researcher that — contrary to the claims of some critics — vouchers are indeed working.

“In my opinion, by demonstrating statistically significant impacts overall in reading in an experimental evaluation, the D.C. [Opportunity Scholarship Program] has met a tough standard for efficacy in serving low-income inner-city students,” Patrick J. Wolf told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Operations. Mr. Wolf is the principal investigator on the team conducting a congressionally mandated study of the program and, as a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, has spent more than a decade evaluating school choice programs. Particularly striking was Mr. Wolf’s testimony that of the 11 other federal education programs evaluated, only three produced statistically significant improvements akin to what the voucher program has produced. Consider also his calculation that a typical student who entered the program in kindergarten would, by the time of graduation from high school, be reading 2 1/2 years ahead of peers who didn’t receive scholarships. There were no discernible impacts in math, although scores show some promise.

The hearing, convened by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), was part of a last-ditch effort to save the federally funded program that gives D.C. low-income students vouchers of up to $7,500 to attend private schools. Congressional Democrats, backed by the powerful teachers unions, included language in the recent omnibus budget bill that would end the program in 2010. Mr. Obama has proposed letting the 1,700 students now in the program continue their schooling while admitting no new students and letting the program die by attrition. We are glad that Mr. Obama is protecting the interests of participating students, but, as Mr. Lieberman argued, if the program is working, why not continue it so more children can benefit?”

Also check out the news coverage of the hearing in the Washington Post.  In particular, I found this bit interesting:

“Lieberman said the committee invited “no less than six witnesses” who oppose the vouchers but got no takers.

Among them were the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the nation’s two major teachers unions.”

Apparently the unions and their fellow travelers are unable to defend their actions and feel no need to do so as long they can bully their way to victory behind the scenes.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Mike Petrilli Buys into Hope and Change

May 13, 2009

Pollyanna

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday, Mike Petrilli posted that he has “hope” some good will come from the giant geyser of money that the federal government is blindly spewing into the government school system under the “stimulus” bill.

I would let it slide, but I owe Mike a good ribbing for this. So . . .

Mr. Sulu, you have the bridge. Mr. Spock, Mr. Checkov, you’re with me. Set phasers to snark.

Mike’s “hope” comes from the fact that he attended a meeting with some state-based reform leaders and heard some stories about how states are going to do great things in order to qualify for some of the relatively tiny portion of stimulus funding that has been set aside to reward good behavior (the so-called “race to the top” funds).

He actually calls these tales “bona fide stories of state legislatures contemplating” reform. Amazing – they’re contemplating reform!

To substantiate his point, he says that because Arne Duncan said he “may” withhold some of the tiny race-to-the-top portion of stimulus funds from states that limit charter schools, Maine is “considering” enacting a charter law. What kind of charter law we might expect to get under such conditions is a question Mike doesn’t raise. Plenty of states have charter laws that effectively block the creation of any charters that might actually produce change. The purpose of the law is for state legislators to be able to claim they have a charter law. Such laws do much more harm than good, since they siphon off political capital for reform and create a few phony, lousy charters which can then be held up and pilloried to discredit further reform efforts. You think that might happen in Maine?

“Mr. Spock, is all this . . . what I think it is?”

“Tricorder readings confirm we are witnessing the phenomenon known as ‘kabuki,’ Jim. Judging by the crudity of the performance, I would estimate that this particular specimen is at a very low stage of development.”

I’ll agree with Mike on one thing, though. The stories he heard are ceratinly “bona fide stories.” That is, they clearly are stories. What kind of stories is a question worth pondering.

Ironically, Mike wrote his post in response to an earlier post yesterday from Fordham’s Andy Smarick, which adduces with devastating clarity just some of the many reasons why we have no right to even hope for good results from the edu-stimulus:

First, although the application requires the governor to sign assurances promising to make progress in four areas, remarkably, it requires neither a plan for accomplishing those goals nor details on how these billions of dollars will be spent.  The states that have applied so far have obliged, including none of this relevant information in their packages.

Second, the Department sent a letter to states on April 1 saying that states don’t have to demonstrate progress on the assurances to get the second batch (~$16 billion) of stabilization funds.  They only have to have systems in place to collect data.

Third, governors lack the power to require districts to use these funds wisely.  From the guidance released in April:

III-D-14.  May a Governor or State education agency (SEA) limit how an LEA uses its Education Stabilization funds?

No.  Because the amount of Education Stabilization funding that an LEA receives is determined strictly on the basis of formulae and the ARRA gives LEAs considerable flexibility over the use of these funds, neither the Governor nor the SEA may mandate how an LEA will or will not use the funds. 

Finally, the only leverage the Department seems to have is threatening to make states ineligible for Race to the Top funds if this money isn’t wisely spent.  But states, not districts, are the only eligible applicants for the Race to the Top funds, and, as the guidance makes clear, states can’t force districts to behave.  So the threat is misdirected.

Game, set, match – Andy.

Looks like we’re done here. Mr. Scott, three to beam up.

4 Comments | charter schools, money myth, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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