Jay P. Greene's Blog

Technocracy is the belief that government should be run by experts, with policies shaped by scientific evidence.  Advocates of technocracy have little enthusiasm for people making decisions about their own lives or those of their children because people too often choose the wrong thing.  Experts, guided by evidence, are much better situated to shape people’s decisions so that they work best for themselves and others.

Technocracy rose to prominence during the Progressive Era, but it has hardly lost its appeal to elites since then.  It is clearly the dominant mode of thought among education policy experts.  In fact, at the most recent annual conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, attendees wore buttons declaring their creed, “Evidence-Based.”  Let’s leave aside that appending “Based” to “Evidence” seems to negate what it is modifying, like “natural flavoring” or “based on a true story.” And let’s acknowledge that evidence is, of course, extremely useful for making good decisions.  But the motivation behind this button and the thinking that pervades education experts is that policy should be “based” on evidence, not merely informed by it.  Evidence is the foundation.  Technocracy should rule.

To repeat, evidence is a good thing.  But claims about what the evidence really says are often in dispute and science is a very limited and imperfect enterprise.  So to be ruled by evidence rather than informed by it is extremely dangerous.  Consider the example of eugenics, which is “the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.”  Eugenics is now considered thoroughly disreputable, but for several decades it was the consensus approach of our scientific elite.  Its science was widely respected and its practices and policy recommendations were “evidence-based.”

It’s a little too easy to dismiss eugenics as a horrible error of our pre-scientific past.  For several decades, it was the scientific present of the most respected elites.  As Sol Gittleman put it: “The presidents of MIT, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard all supported eugenics research, and as early as 1914, academic courses on the subject were taught at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Clark, and MIT. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, meanwhile, spoke openly and wrote freely about ‘racial suicide’—their term for what would happen if the nation permitted the mixing of races.”

While laws against the “mixing of races” had been introduced during slavery, a flurry of new laws were adopted as a result of this scientific inquiry into eugenics such that 41 of the then 48 states eventually had such laws in place.  You could say that these laws were “evidence-based.”  In addition, laws calling for the forced sterilization of people deemed to be “feeble-minded” were adopted and ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared in his decision, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  This ruling by the Supreme Court was also considered “evidence-based.”

During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt organized a secret committee to consider what to do with the large number of war refugees, especially Jews, who he expected to flee Europe after the war.  Roosevelt asked Aleš Hrdlička, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, to head this secret planning group.  It’s worth quoting Steve Usdin’s account of this episode at length:

The two men had carried on a lively correspondence for over a decade and the President had absorbed the scientist’s theories about racial mixtures and eugenics. Roosevelt, the scion of two families that considered themselves American aristocrats, was especially attracted to Hrdlička’s notions of human racial “stock.”

A prominent public intellectual who had dominated American physical anthropology for decades, Hrdlička was convinced of the superiority of the white race and obsessed with racial identity. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack he’d written to Roosevelt expressing the view that the “less developed skulls” of Japanese were proof that they were innately warlike and had a lower level of evolutionary development than other races. The president wrote back asking whether the “Japanese problem” could be solved through mass interbreeding.

Roosevelt had long resisted opening the doors to large numbers of immigrants, not as a result of political expediency, but based on his understanding of what science had to say on the matter.  In 1925 Roosevelt had written a series of columns for the Macon Telegraph in which he praised Canada’s immigration policies, which were designed “to prevent large groups of foreign born from congregating in any one locality…. If, twenty-five years ago, the United States had adopted a policy of this kind we would not have the huge foreign sections which exist in so many of our cities.”

This evidence-based resistance to increasing immigration condemned countless European Jews to their death.  It also informed the findings of the secret committee he organized as to what to do with Jewish refugees following the war: “The solution, which the President endorsed, ‘essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world,’ rather than allow them to congregate anywhere in large numbers.”  Apparently, he hoped to improve their stock through inter-breeding, as he speculated might be done to reduce war-like tendencies among the Japanese.

Keep in mind, eugenics was not championed by a fringe group.  It was championed by the presidents of  leading universities, researchers at the Smithsonian, and several presidents of the United States.  I’m proud to note that my alma mater, Tufts University, never offered a course in eugenics, and a Tufts medical professor, Abraham Myerson, was a leading critic of the idea, including in his testimony against forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded.” But Tufts was the exception, while more elite universities like Harvard and MIT actively pursued eugenics.  Only the close association between eugenics and the Nazis eventually brought the idea into disrepute.

Before we turn over policymaking to the current scholars at Harvard and MIT, we might want to reflect on how wrong evidence-based policies can be.  And rather than smugly asserting that past scholars were quacks while current ones are true scientists, we might want to learn the lessons of humility that the eugenics episode teaches.  Let’s be informed by evidence, but not be evidence-based.

Mike McShane and I have an article in the Phi Delta Kappan Magazine summarizing the lessons we learned from our edited book on Failure.

We took the contributions by Larry Cuban (from Stanford University), Matthew DiCarlo (the Shanker Institute), Anna Egalite (North Carolina State University), Rick Hess and Paige Wiley (the American Enterprise Institute), Ashley Jochim (the Center for Reinventing Public Education), Matthew Ladner (the Charles Koch Institute), Megan Tompkins-Stange (the University of Michigan), Martin West (Harvard University), and Daniel Willingham (the University of Virginia) and boiled it down to three trade-offs and three lessons.

But if like Hillel I had to state what we learned while standing on one foot, I’d say, “Education is an inherently political enterprise, so if you try too hard to substitute normal political processes with the authority of technical expertise, you will fail.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

EdChoice carries my post using the new NAEP results to bring us back to our earlier discussion of Ian Kingsbury’s finding about what our condescending friends at NACSA do to minority charter operators:

If you’re wondering why the education status quo wants heavy regulation, ask yourself why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked Congress to regulate social media: Regulation cements the power of dominant providers, shutting out smaller and less powerful rivals. That’s why heavy regulation does so much damage to minority communities. They have less political power to influence the content of regulations — which more powerful providers can shape in their own favor — and less ability to afford the enormous cost of compliance.

Borrowing Matt’s graphic above to make the point about Louisiana, land of the overregulated NACSA dream.

You don’t have to wait until tomorrow, tomorrow, or tomorrow.  Our article on the effects of student groups seeing live theater is available on Educational Researcher today!

The article is an updated and peer-reviewed version of the article we posted on SSRN last fall.  In it we discuss the combined results of five experiments we conducted in which students were randomly assigned to go on a field trip to see live theater or be in the control group.  In two of those experiments we added a second treatment condition in which students went on a field trip to see a movie version of the play.  We found that students randomly assigned to see live theater experienced significantly higher tolerance and social perspective taking as well as stronger knowledge of the plot and vocabulary of the plays than the control group.  Being randomly assigned to the movie treatment did not produce these same benefits.

So there seems to be something about experiencing live theater that cannot easily be produced by watching a movie instead.  Given how often schools are inclined to watch movies and how rarely they are now willing to go see live theater, these results are quite relevant.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

My latest in OCPA’s Perspective is on ed schools as barriers to entry in the teaching profession:

Arne Duncan, the Obama administration education secretary, said in 2009 that “by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.” He said education schools are “cash cows,” and he’s right. Teachers who need credentials are hostages to the ed school system, so universities create ed schools in order to collect the ransom money.

In addition to economic rent-seeking, I also cover the ideological side of the problem:

Gregg Garn, the dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Education, lists “politics of education” as his first area of research interest. On his web page, a document full of left-wing political and policy posturing is listed more prominently than his curriculum vitae. I suppose since education schools seem to exist for political propaganda, it’s fair enough that he considers his political platform a more relevant credential to establish his qualifications than his academic track record.

School me on what you think!