Now She Tells Us

February 18, 2009

randi-weingarten-at-obama-rally

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Randi Weingarten explained this week that, contrary to the outrageous slander that the unions are against education reform, she’s actually in favor of having the federal government create rigorous national academic standards for public schools, and will remain in favor of it as long as the Democrats are in power. (I’m paraphrasing.)

She writes: “Should fate, as determined by a student’s Zip code, dictate how much algebra he or she is taught?”

So the AFT now endorses the principle that a child’s education should not be determined by Zip code? When did that happen?

And if a child’s Zip code shouldn’t determine how much algebra he or she is taught, why should that determination be made in Washington instead? Apparently the amount of algebra you learn should be determined not by your Zip code, but by your international dialing code.

At least with Zip codes, some families can exercise school choice by moving to a different neighborhood. Yes, it’s an unfair system, since not all families are equally mobile; apparently Weingarten thinks the fair thing to do is to take away the freedom now enjoyed by some parents, so that there will be an equality of unfreedom.

Here we see the real modus operandi of the Left – achieve equality by leveling downward.

1 Comment | politics, residential school choice, school accountability, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Onay Ildchay Eftlay Ehindbay

February 18, 2009

dr-evil-zip-it

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has signaled he’s open to changing the name of No Child Left Behind. (HT Eduwonk)

Conspiracy theory time! Is this:

1) A cheap way of giving the unions a symbolic victory, to make it easier to deny their more substantial demands?

2) The opening maneuver in the long-awaited rollback of the ridiculous promise to reach 100% student proficiency?

3) A red herring desgined to keep us busy with conspiracy theories and “name that law” contests so no one will notice that the administration isn’t going to do anything substantive on education policy, despite extravagent campaign promises?

4) All of the above?

The betting pool is now open.

But since we have a storied tradition of acronym contests here on JPGB, we can’t pass over the opportunity to come up with a replacement name for NCLB. And of course it has to start with “smart.” Zip it!

How about Smart And Clever Kids, Overcoming Fallacious Canards, Really Achieve Perfection? There’s an acronym for you.

2 Comments | NCLB | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Wagner and the Wisdom of Tevye

February 17, 2009

Townsperson: Why should I break my head about the outside world?  Let the outside world break its own head….

Tevye: He is right…

Perchik: Nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.

Tevye: He’s right.

Rabbi’s pupil: He’s right, and he’s right.  They can’t both be right!

Tevye:  (Pause). You know, you are also right.

 

Fiddler on the Roof is coming to Fayetteville (the Ozark center of Yiddishkeit) in May.  But it felt like Fiddler arrived early with Tony Wagner’s visit yesterday to promote his 21st Century Skills (TM) concept.  People asked him a variety of questions and as it turns out, they were all right.

 

My colleague Gary Ritter commented that Wagner’s anecdotes sounded more like examples of bad teaching than of a bad curriculum.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  There is also bad teaching out there.

 

A student questioned his lack of empirical evidence to support his claims.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  He admitted to lacking quantitative evidence but said he was a qualitative researcher.

 

Stuart Buck noted that in the book Wagner profiled 3 schools that ignored the state tests, taught in a way they believed best, and still did very well on those exams.  So is the problem really with accountability testing?  You’re right, Wagner replied.  The problem is in the unnecessary over-reaction of risk-averse educators.

 

A math professor asked about whether too much content was really the problem.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  He’s not against content and agrees that content is essential for developing his 7 essential skills (TM).

 

It didn’t really seem to matter if his answers contradicted claims he made in the book or even ten minutes earlier in his presentation.  In the end, everyone was right and he was for everything people suggested.  He was for accountability testing (as long as it was done right).  He was for academic content (as long as it was the right amount and on the right stuff).  He was for teaching to the test (if the test was a good one). 

 

The quick, confident answers and the futuristic jargon may have wowed some, but it left me and many others a bit bewildered.  He can’t be for all these things.

 

Happily there is a video record of his lecture.  It’s actually from his web site, but it is almost identical to the lecture that he gave at least three times yesterday to different audiences.  Notice that in minute 20 he clearly says that our kids don’t need content; they need “competencies.”  And the best part of watching this video on the web is that it is free as opposed to the $20,000-$25,000 consulting fee that Fayetteville schools paid him for more or less the same thing.

See: http://www.schoolchange.org/videos/the_global_achievement_gap_video.html 

7 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Is CPSIA the New Fahrenheit 451?

February 15, 2009

Walter Olson over at City Journal and his blog, Overlawyered.com, has uncovered a frightening and probably unintended effect of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.  Children’s books made before 1985 are essentially being removed from the market.  Olson writes:

“under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.”

He continues:

“CPSIA imposed tough new limits on lead in any products intended for use by children aged 12 or under, and made those limits retroactive: that is, goods manufactured before the law passed cannot be sold on the used market (even in garage sales or on eBay) if they don’t conform…. Not until 1985 did it become unlawful to use lead pigments in the inks, dyes, and paints used in children’s books. Before then—and perhaps particularly in the great age of children’s-book illustration that lasted through the early twentieth century—the use of such pigments was not uncommon, and testing can still detect lead residues in books today. This doesn’t mean that the books pose any hazard to children. While lead poisoning from other sources, such as paint in old houses, remains a serious public health problem in some communities, no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations—not surprisingly, since unlike poorly maintained wall paint, book pigments do not tend to flake off in large lead-laden chips for toddlers to put into their mouths.”

This doesn’t just hit used book-sellers hard, it also applies to any individual trying to sell a book on Ebay and even to public libraries.  We will have to discard countless classic children’s books, many of which are no longer in print, to avoid something that has never been shown to be harmful.

But don’t worry.  I’m sure we won’t actually burn the books.  It might produce harmful toxins!  Instead, I bet we are preparing a facility near Yuca Mountain to safely dispose of Make Way for Ducklings and Anne of Green Gables so those books will no longer harm our children.  Better that they should sit in front of the TV.

(edited to change photo)

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

Get Alfie Kohn on the Phone!

February 13, 2009

According to research published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, smokers who were offered financial incentives to quit smoking were more likely to do so.  As the Wall Street Journal describes it:

“For the new study, researchers, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, tracked 878 General Electric Co. employees from around the country for a year and a half in 2005 and 2006. Participants, who smoked an average of one pack of cigarettes a day, were divided into two groups of roughly equal size. All received information about smoking-cessation programs.

Members of one group also got as much as $750 in cash, with the payments spread out over time to encourage longer-term abstinence. Those participants got $100 for completing a smoking-cessation program, $250 if they stopped smoking within six months after enrolling in the study, and $400 for continuing to abstain from smoking for an additional six months.

All participants were contacted three months after they enrolled in the study and periodically after that. Those who said they had stopped smoking at any point during the study were asked to submit saliva or urine samples for testing so that their claims could be verified.

About 14.7% of the group offered financial incentives said they had stopped smoking within the first year of the study, compared with 5% of the other group. At the time of their last interview for the 18-month study, 9.4% of the paid group was still abstaining compared with 3.6% of those who got no money.”

Wait a minute!  If I’ve learned one thing from Alfie Kohn it is that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.  The smokers paid to stop should have had the internal motivation to quit undermined and should have been less successful than those who quit for the pure joy of it.

I’ve got an idea.  Let’s stop paying people for their work because it only undermines their internal motivation to work.  And to avoid undermining Alfie Kohn’s motivation, I’m sure he’d understand if people stopped paying him for his lectures and books.

3 Comments | instructional reform, teacher pay | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Get Lost 10

February 13, 2009

christian-locke

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

For a while during this week’s episode I was thinking that using the time-travel plot device to go back and fill in all the continuity holes (e.g. what was up with Rousseau and her teammates getting “sick”?) is really, really good for the show – in fact, I started to think that it works a little too well. It’s very convenient that the Island ’s flashes just happen to bring Jin to the right place at the right time to see Rousseau’s team get attacked, and then her later elimination of the “sick” team, and then – supreme convenience! – meet up with the other castaways.

But then it dawned on me that this “too convenient” dynamic isn’t a problem at all – because it returns us to the central theme of the first season, which began to trail off in the second season and has been moved to the background of the show for some time now – the theme of the Island having a plan and a purpose, rather than just being a passive natural phenomenon.

Over time, as we’ve learned more about what’s on the Island and how the Island works, the focus has been on 1) the mechanics of the Island’s power, and 2) the conflict between the various human organizations (Dharma, the Others, Widmore, and now the 1950s U.S. Army) who have striven for control of its power. The mysterious things that happen on the Island have been less and less about the Island ’s purpose and more about powers harnessed by humans for their own purposes. This goes all the way back to the season 2 button-pushing hatch, where the unimaginable power in the hatch was under human control (first by Dharma and then by castaways). Back in season 1, when stuff happened on the Island it wasn’t under the control of anyone that we know of, except the Island itself, and the power of the Island was directed not to human purposes but rather to the Island ’s purpose for the humans – getting them to confront their inner demons. In season 4 there was a little bit of the Island having its own purpose, with John getting his commission from Christian to move the Island, but that was mainly framed as part of the war between the Others and Widmore.

In this season, at long last the Island is once again its own master. Clearly someone or something with a mind of its own wanted Jin to see what he saw and then carry the knowledge back to the rest of the group. And when Christian told John, “I told you that you had to move the Island – I said you had to move it, John,” and all the ramifications of that began to dawn on me, I was overjoyed. The perfect finishing touch was when Christian said he couldn’t help John get up, and John had a moment of – panic? anger? hard to say – but then accepted it and steeled himself to drag himself up with his own strength. Because he doesn’t need to understand. He needs to carry out his orders and trust that they’re right.

And notice that after John promised not to bring Sun back, Christian emphasized to John that his orders are to bring everyone back.

So now that we’re getting answers to the questions about what kind of power the Island has, the show is going back to the questions it raised in season 1 – namely what kind of purpose lies behind that power.

And we don’t have any answers about that yet. Is the Island’s mind independent? Or is “Jacob” some kind of collective projection of the inner desires and fears of the people on the Island, such that their personal demons get reflected back to them in the Island ’s behavior? Or is the Island a gateway to the afterlife? Note that Charlotte ’s statement “the Island is death” was the episode’s title. They’re deliberately dredging up the theory that the Island is really some sort of Purgatory – but they’re not committing themselves to that theory in any way, they’re just reminding us that it’s one possibility.

Final thought: perhaps John’s death was necessary so that Sun could be recruited to return to the Island without John having to break his word. If so, John’s death could be viewed as a poetically just penalty for his making a promise to Jin that he knew he shouldn’t have made. Because he disobeyed his orders, John doesn’t get to come back to the Island – sort of like Moses’ death on the mountain, just before his people enter the promised land, was his punishment for a seemingly trivial disobedience. John’s death being a “sacrifice” doesn’t conflict with its also being a punishment, as any student of theology will tell you.

But if John’s death is arranged in any way by the Island – as a penalty, a sacrifice, whatever – that implies the Island is somehow in control of events not just on the Island, but everywhere. Perhaps through human agents loyal to it or at least under its influence, or perhaps in some other, more disturbing way.

Either way, it’s clear that this season we’re not just out to discover what lies behind the time travel, the cursed numbers, the smoke monster, etc. We’re also – perhaps we’re primarily- out to discover what lies behind the words “Jacob sent me.”

3 Comments | Lost | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

KIPP RIP

February 11, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, two KIPP schools in New York have had a majority of their teachers vote to unionize under a card check type provision. New York Times story here.

Andy Rotherham attempts to downplay the whole incident. Nice try Andy, but forget about it. KIPP should pull the plug on these schools at the end of the school year, burn down the buildings and plow salt into the ground upon which they once stood. This would be tragic for the people that no doubt worked very hard to bring these schools to life, but let’s face it, their efforts would be much better rewarded in other states.

The whole idea of running a KIPP academy along with a thousand page union contract is absurd. Half-days on Saturday? Not on your life. On call to help with homework? Are you kidding? KIPP has earned many donors, but can they afford a rubber room? Need to change a light bulb in your classroom? Page 844, paragraph 5 clearly states that you must call a union electrician. You kids sit quietly with your heads down in the dark until he arrives. It will be any day now.

KIPP has a methodology and a hard earned brand to protect, and there are plenty of other kids in other states to help. If Congress is misguided enough to pass a national card check, it will be up to individual states to ban the practice. Those that do may find themselves rewarded by the opening of some very high quality schools.

UPDATE Andy has posted a hopeful reply that the first generation of union agreement with KIPP may be benign due to the threat of closing the school, which he views as a PR nightmare. The unions seems nigh immune to bad PR to me, and the best way to get leverage is to display your willingness to use it. Let’s see how events unfold.

18 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Porkapalooza

February 11, 2009

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I just got caught up reading the last 24 hours’ worth of Jim Geraghty over on NRO, and it’s a cornucopia of posts that relate directly to a variety of topics we’ve been discussing here on JPGB:

Jim: “Say, fellows . . . when the central argument that the president uses to defend $838 billion or so in new spending is a lie, isn’t that news? Shouldn’t that be something of a big deal?”

In case the president is interested, Jay has proposed an alternative to the stimulus, although he has also noted that even doing nothing would be better than a stimulus bill.

Which I take as evidence that even the bill’s supporters don’t expect it will have a stimulative effect on the economy, as we’ve discussed; they’re supporting it because it’s a forty-year wish list of liberal fantasies and payoffs.

By which time he hopes the economy will have turned around on its own, so that the improvement can be attributed to the “stimulus,” just like Jay has pointed out.

This slander was debunked within days of the collapse, as we’ve noted. The real reason it collapsed is because “infrastructure” spending goes where politics dictates, not where there are real needs for improved infrastructure. So more spending doesn’t produce improved results.

And speaking of how infrastructure spending is really spent…

Jim reminds us that the Post, even while admitting that Murtha was a profound embarrasment, endorsed him on grounds that he delivered “infrastructure” pork to his district.

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

Buildingpalooza

February 11, 2009

fancy-church  shack

An underfunded regular public school; a money-draining charter school

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I can see that school buildings are going to be a big topic for us for the foreseeable future. There’s the feds’ desperate need to blow money on something, anything, in the “recovery” bill (they’re no longer even bothering to call it a “stimulus” bill, apparently). And Jay’s post on school construction last week generated some interesting conversation in the comment thread.

Then last week opponents of the bill had a lot of fun spotlighting its provision of $89 million for school construction in Milwaukee, despite the fact that Milwaukee has had major enrollment declines leading to lots of empty and “underused” buildings, its buildings are deemed to be in good condition, the city has no plans for any construction projects, and just last year it had a major scandal centering around the waste of tens of millions of dollars in construction funding.

But here’s something I don’t think anyone outside Milwaukee has highlighted yet. In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s story on the funding, somebody at the paper (presumably a bemused editor) inserted the following subtitle above a section of the story:

What is “Construction”?

Somebody get Socrates on the line, because it’s a good question. As a commenter pointed out on Jay’s post last week, once money goes into the system, we can’t be sure what it really gets spent on. We know how much money was budgeted for “construction,” but typically there’s nobody checking to see what was actually bought with those “construction” funds.

Sure enough, the Journal Sentinel quotes a state Democratic spokesperson saying that all of that yummy yummy swag for “school construction” could legitimately be spent on “school modernization.”

Next month’s headline: “What is ‘School Modernization’?”

Do these sound like conditions under which the money will be spent wisely? And don’t kid yourself that Milwaukee is somehow a special exception, and the stimulus money is going to be well spent elsewhere.

Suppose you don’t believe the vast mountain of empirical research that Jay cited last week. Let’s just drop all that science into the toilet bowl and flush. Even so, can anyone believe that money will be well used when it’s handed over to a system that has no real transparency, much less effective oversight, never mind accountability for results – and that is run by people who also just happen to derive political power by diverting school funding into an enormous gravy train of featherbedding, pork, etc.?

If we’re dumb enough to hand over the money under those circumstances, why would they not divert it to the gravy train? I’m amazed the schools in the government monopoly system aren’t even worse than they are.

But wait. There’s yet another school building story on the horizon. This one broke out in the edreformblogosphere just yesterday.

stlouisarch

They built it with surplus “school construction” money

Like Milwaukee and pretty much every other city, St. Louis has long-term declining enrollment, but that didn’t stop it from pouring tons of money into school construction over the past few decades. Now St. Louis has a bunch of empty school buildings it needs to unload, so it’s going to sell them off.

But not everyone is allowed to bid on the empty school buildings. Joanne Jacobs puts it succinctly: “The school board has banned sales of buildings to liquor stores, landfills, distilleries, sex shops and charter schools.”

Read that again: Liquor stores, landfills, distilleries, sex shops and charter schools.

Not much more to say, is there? Charters are the one sector of the government-owned education system that is 1) growing fast, 2) willing to take on the most disadvantaged, toughest-to-teach kids, and 3) producing improved results, and they do it with less money – especially less construction money! – than the regular system. But they aren’t allowed to buy – not take for free, but buy, as in purchase at market value, by paying actual money – the city’s empty buildings.

drive-thru-liquorlandfill

distilleryPT006149

Some typical St. Louis charter schools

I’m with Matt – if the system’s defenders don’t realize they’re destroying millions of children’s lives in order to funnel money to a corrupt gravy train, it’s only because they don’t want to know.

10 Comments | charter schools, money myth, school funding | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Research Round-Up

February 10, 2009

The U.S. Department of Education released a study on how alternatively certified teachers affect student achievement.  The bottom line is that they find: “students of teachers who chose to enter teaching through an alternative route did not perform statistically different from students of teachers who chose a traditional route to teaching.  This finding was the same for those programs that required comparatively many as well as few hours of coursework. However, among those alternative route teachers who reported taking coursework while teaching, their students performed lower than their traditional counterparts.” 

I’m sure that the headlines will be:  “Alternative Certification Fails to Improve Student Achievement.”  But they will have it backwards.  The real headline should be: “Years of Teacher Education Coursework Yields No Benefits for Student Achievement.”

Besides, the real question is whether the alternatively certified teachers are better than the traditional certified teachers districts would have hired if they were constrained to hire only certified teachers.

And in other research news, the forthcoming issue of Education Next has an article by Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos comparing student achievement in Philadelphia’s for-profit managed schools versus district-managed schools.  The find: “the effect of for-profit management of schools is positive relative to district schools, with math impacts being statistically significant. Over the last six years, students learned each year an average of 25 percent of a standard deviation more in math — roughly 60 percent of a year’s worth of learning — than they would have had the school been under district management. In reading, the estimated average annual impact of for-profit management is a positive 10 percent of a standard deviation — approximately 36 percent of a year’s worth of reading. Only the math differences are statistically significant, however.”

Leave a Comment » | research reports, teacher quality | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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