What is Required to be Part of the Black Caucus?

February 10, 2009

This story comes out of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  I think it raises all sorts of interesting questions about identity politics, but I don’t have the answers.  So, I’ll just reproduce portions below to see what folks think.

“Rep. Richard Carroll of North Little Rock, Arkansas’ only Green Party legislator, asked to be a member of the Arkansas Black Legislative Caucus but was rejected because he’s white….  Asked about it after the meeting, Carroll said he wanted to be a member, but that caucus leaders told him that caucus bylaws require that members be black.

Caucus Chairman Rep. Nancy Duffy Blount, D-Marianna, likened the situation to a man wanting to be part of the Legislative Women’s Caucus. ‘With men, there are some things that men can understand and share and there are some things they can’t because they’re not women,’ Blount said. ‘Same thing here…’

Carroll, 52, said he wanted to be a caucus member to better represent and understand the views of his constituents. He said he could ask his wife, who is black, for her thoughts, but that she would only be one person.

‘You have to be an elected legislator and you have to be black,’ Blount said…. The latest bylaws for the caucus on file at the Bureau of Legislative Research give no race requirement for membership. It says that the membership ‘shall consist of any current member of the Arkansas General Assembly who pays an annual membership.’ But the bureau staff didn’t know whether those bylaws were current. Blount said she didn’t know either but she thought they had been changed to include a race requirement. She said she doesn’t have a copy of the bylaws but based her understanding of the membership requirements on ‘common sense’ and from what caucus vice chairman, Sen. Tracy Steele, D-North Little Rock, told her the bylaws said. Steele later said he had ‘no idea’ what the bylaws said about membership. …

Carroll wondered how the caucus ‘defines black,’ whether you needed to be a ‘certain percentage’ black. Blount said, ‘If you say you are an African-American, we don’t go back and do a historical search. We just go on whatever they say they are.’

Another caucus member, Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, said Carroll’s interest in the caucus is ‘commendable’ but ‘since it’s called the ‘black caucus’ he can’t be a member. It is a caucus defined as being black. All discrimination is not bad. You can discriminate about whether you are going to drink four beers or 10 beers. I would say that’s good discrimination. “‘ Elliott said excluding whites is a legitimate form of discrimination because black legislators need to join with others of ‘common cause.’

Carroll said he didn’t see it as a discrimination either.  ‘It’s just that that’s their bylaws,’ he said.

It’s only a matter of time until there is a dispute over membership in the Gay Caucus.  How will we tell?

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

You Mean Wal-Mart Isn’t Evil?

February 9, 2009

 

(Don’t blame me for the lousy photo-shopping.  Eduwonkette did it.  But I told her it made me look like David Byrne in his giant suit.  Pretty cool!)

David Kinkade at the Arkansas Project alerted us to this piece by Charles Platt, a writer at Wired Magazine, on his experience going “undercover” to work for Wal-Mart.  Platt writes:

” I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans.”

He then concludes:

“Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s.”

So, the path to higher worker wages is improved education, not unionization?  Luckily the unions do so much to help improve education that I guess we are in great shape!

8 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Mistaken AJC Voucher Editorial Held Accountable

February 9, 2009

 

One of the great things about these here inter-web thingies is their ability to hold newspapers accountable when they make mistakes.  And the editorial by Maureen Downey that the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran last week on vouchers was very much mistaken.  In it Downey  claimed “in the handful of states that have conducted experiments with vouchers, the results contradict claims of improvement by Johnson and other voucher advocates… Yet, in return for zero impact, Johnson proposes to dismantle public education in Georgia.”  She also described “vouchers as a threat to the bedrock American belief that public education is critical to the health of the democracy and should not be sacrificed to political agendas.” 

To support her overwrought claims she cites a newspaper article on Ohio’s voucher program, studies of the voucher programs in DC and Milwaukee conducted by my colleague Pat  Wolf, and a review of the literature by Barrow and Rouse.  Unfortunately she cites all of them selectively or misinterprets their findings as showing “zero impact.”  Fortunately, Pat Wolf noticed her incorrect interpretation of his work and sent a letter, which the AJC ran today.

But letters are limited in length and less salient than the editorials they attempt to correct.  In the old days when newspapers were the only game in town, it was very difficult to hold newspapers accountable for editorials that were factually inaccurate.  They might have run letters, like the one Pat Wolf submitted, but they wouldn’t even have to do that if they didn’t want to.

With the inter-webs we not only have Pat Wolf’s letter in the AJC, we can also circulate it by posting it on blogs, like I just did.  And we can add additional material, for which there would have been no space in the letters section.  So let me add that here is a complete list of random-assignment studies of the effects of vouchers on students who use them.  Here is a summary of the effect of vouchers on the public school system.  And here is random-assignment research on the effect of charter schools on participants.  And if she thinks choice destroys democracy, here is a review of that literature showing that she is mistaken about that as well.

If Maureen Downey and the Atlanta Journal Constitution want to say that evidence shows “zero impact” from vouchers, then they have to explain away all of this evidence.  And if they don’t want to justify their claims in the pages of their paper, we can hold them accountable on the web.

(edited for typos)

1 Comment | vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Does your economy have performance issues?

February 6, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Nicely done by the Reason Foundation…

Leave a Comment » | economics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Get Lost 9

February 6, 2009

(Spoiler Alert!)

Another great episode, but not too much new was revealed that could not have already been guessed. 

1) Jin is alive, but not having seen him die, we could have guessed that he’d be back.  In addition, having him alive will make Sun’s efforts at revenge more tragic. 

2) Miles has been on the island before and is probably Pierre Chang’s (Marvin Candle’s) son, who was the baby we saw with him when the record skipped in the season opener. 

3) Ben was the one sending lawyers to take Aaron from Kate, probably to push her into returning with Aaron to the island to keep him.

The introduction of younger Danielle and the French scientists suggests that much of this season will be consumed with “back-filling” the plot.  That is, we are going to fill in the story of how various, previously minor, characters are actually significant parts of the plot in the past.  Now that we’ve seen the younger Widmore and the younger Danielle, I bet we are going to learn about how Widmore was forced from the island and why some are allied with him and some with Ben.

I’m also pretty sure that “Ellie,” the woman who held Daniel Faraday at gunpoint as he went to dismantle “Jughead,” the H-bomb, is a younger Ms. Hawking.  And Ms. Hawking is Daniel Faraday’s mom.  You can see the evidence for this theory here.

I think Lost will be governed by Terminator Rules, where the future cannot be changed despite efforts to do so.  And with an H-bomb on the island I fear that the end is that the island is destroyed by it.  People are trying to “save the island” by changing time, but it will be doomed.  And we’ll have one big time loop where “Adam and Eve” (who may be Aaron and Ji Yeon, Sun and Jin’s baby) loop back to the start of the island in time from near it’s end.

I do have some questions about Jin and Danielle.  Had they met in the future?  If so, did Danielle remember that she had met Jin in the past?  Is it possible that we aren’t playing by Terminator Rules and Jin’s encounter with Danielle in the past is something that didn’t happen previously?  Has the string of time been changed?

Also, Brian has suggested a theory that the water bottle in the canoe is going to be very significant.  Perhaps the people in the canoe are members of the Oceanic 6 unknowingly (?) shooting at their former fellow castaways.  Or maybe they are intentionally doing so to stop them from something horrible that they are about to do.  As we back-fill we are going to see these same episodes from different perspectives.

3 Comments | Lost | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Munchausen by Proxyocracy

February 4, 2009

I See Bankrupt People!

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Byron Schlomach and I had fun co-authoring this piece for the Goldwater Institute:

The supernatural thriller “The Sixth Sense” features a young boy who assists the ghost of a young girl in exposing her mother as her murderer. The mother, suffering from an uncommon mental disorder known as “Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome” had slowly poisoned her daughter to death.

While actual Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome (MBPS) is very rare, something much like it is sadly all too common in American policy-making.

MBPS involves a caregiver deliberately making another person sick. The caregiver may exaggerate, fabricate, or even induce symptoms. The perpetrator achieves a twisted satisfaction from deceptively gaining the attention and sympathy of doctors and others. Because the caregiver appears to be so caring and attentive, often no one suspects any wrongdoing.

In politics, many of our longstanding, serious policy problems are similarly inflicted upon us by our alleged caregivers. Two obvious examples of this political slow-poisoning: runaway costs in heath care and higher education. Simply put, government policies have spun heath care and higher education costs out of control.

These damaging cycles of cost inflation are the direct result of the MBPS-like policies administered by the federal government. When citizens raise concerns that health care or a college degree are financially out of reach for many, politicians show their compassion by administering more of the bad medicine that created the problems in the first place.

Consider health care. The problem is people can’t afford it. Although history shows medical care prices do not inevitably rise, medical inflation more than doubled general inflation from 1960 to 2006. If medical prices had not raced ahead of general inflation, health care would represent 7% of the American economy rather than the current 16% and growing. While many politicians want to make the availability of health insurance the issue, the real issue is that medical care is becoming increasingly less affordable, reducing accessibility.

Americans went from paying the lion’s share of medical costs ourselves to depending on government (Medicare and Medicaid) and employer-provided health insurance to pay for us. Consequently, price has become no object and we have become uninformed and unwise shoppers for medical care. Providers have become wasteful, often taking advantage of this distorted market, competing on a non-price basis.

All of this has occurred because government tax policy has encouraged employers to pay us in health benefits instead of cash. Add Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracy to the mix, and you’ve got a perfect prescription for out-of-control costs and increasingly reduced accessibility.

What are politicians offering as a solution? The Obama administration offers more of what got us here in the first place: expanded insurance, expanded market regulation, expanded Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. As we pay even less out-of-pocket, medical prices will only get higher and medical services will only get more expensive and less accessible.

Amazingly, higher education costs have been rising at a rate even faster than medical cost inflation. Since 1982, the average cost of college tuition and fees has increased by 439% while median family income increased by a mere 147%. Think of it as compound interest for putting college financially out of reach and/or crushing families with debt.

Again, President Obama has proposed more of the same: a $4,000 tax credit for higher education expenses. Sounds great, but based on decades of bitter experience we have every reason to believe that if Obama’s tax credit plan passes, universities would simply hike their tuitions and fees. Congress has been chasing its own tail on college affordability for decades: while providing ever-increasing subsidies, costs continue to go up, so it repeats the process again and again.

Please- no more Congressional medicine!

Obama’s policy plans will simply add more fuel to the fire, leaving our very serious affordability problems in higher education and health care unaddressed. This is not change that we can believe in, but more of the same.

Like the MBPS abuser, politicians often come across as compassionate as they indulge their pathologies. If our politicians suffer from MBPS, we suffer our own sort of insanity in allowing ourselves to be victimized by it year after year. Our form of insanity could be referred to as Battered Taxpayer Syndrome, and it is time to call a halt to it.

It is a fallacy for the public to judge our leaders by their stated intentions, rather than the results of their decisions. Why is health care so expensive in the United States? Why the crushing debt for college educations of no greater worth than those obtained decades earlier at far less cost? Sadly, it’s because of federal policies whose follies have been repeatedly reinforced.

Rather than Munchausen by Proxy politicians, we need leaders who will follow the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

13 Comments | higher education | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Jay Praises the Stimulus!

February 4, 2009

billy-bragg-talking-with-the-taxman

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Don’t miss Jay’s article on NRO this morning praising the stimulus bill – that is, celebrating the fact that the stimulus isn’t even worse than it actually is.

As Jay reminds us, the Democrats made big promises about expanding preschool. The enormous slab of edu-pork in the stimulus bill could easily have been designed to lay the groundwork for fulfilling those promises, but it doesn’t:

Of course, if this money isn’t really going to help children learn, it would be best if we didn’t spend it at all. But Congress seems determined to burn giant piles of cash in the hopes that its warm glow will stimulate us. Given the circumstances, it’s some consolation that the current education stimulus won’t force us to burn larger and larger piles of cash forever into the future.

Burning large piles of cash, eh? Hmm. Sounds familiar.

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

On School Spending, Palin’s Palein’ Again

February 4, 2009

sarah-palin

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Back in October, I gritted my teeth and, against my inclinations, pointed out that as governor, Sarah Palin cozied up to the teachers’ unions and loved to brag about how much money she threw at schools. Never mind that the schools never got better; it played well to the media, and even more to the great “mushy middle” (in Charles Krauthammer’s wonderful phrase) that likes to make public policy based on what feels good, not on what gets results.

Then she endorsed vouchers and directly promised to push for a specified voucher plan if elected, which of course was big news. Vouchers have consistently produced academic gains whenever they’ve been tried and scientifically evaluated, and are by far the most promising reform for improving education for all students, as everyone who cares to know already knows. I tried to do justice to both sides of the story by noting that both Palin and Obama were trying to have it both ways on education.

Now she’s going back to her roots. She’s not for the stimulus, and she’s not against it (UPDATE: oops, see below). Her only position on the stimulus is that the bill doesn’t throw enough money at Alaska, and specifically that “the stimulus package rewards states for not planning when it comes to prioritizing for things like education, as Alaska has planned ahead by forward-funding 21 percent of our General Fund dollars for this very important priority. It appears only those states that did not plan ahead with education will benefit. States like Alaska should not be punished for being responsible; yet that’s what the plan means for Alaska right now” (HT Jim Geraghty).

Meanwhile, as Alaska faces a billion-dollar shortfall, she’s pushing to build a road to Nome that will cost up to $2 billion. I’m sure that has nothing to do with a desire to have “shovel ready” projects at hand, ready to shovel into the maw of the federal “stimulus” sugar daddy.

National Review‘s Greg Pollowitz was the first to dub it the “road to Nome-where.”

I hate being the designated Palin critic of the education reform movement. When I’m with my education reform comrades, I’m usually the only Republican in the room. And I’m much more Sarah Palin’s kind of Republican than, say, Mitt Romney’s, much less John McCain’s. But somebody’s got to point this stuff out.

Does anybody want to take over the job?

UPDATE: I wanted to check on this before posting it. I’ve confirmed that, in addition to usually being the only Republican in the room when I’m working on education reform, I’m also the only Republican on this blog. (Matt specifically requested that I describe him as a “disgusted former Republican.” Duly noted.)

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Wouldn’t you know it? She just put out a statement saying she agrees with the decision of Alaska’s Senators to vote “no” on the stimulus. I saw it just two hours after I posted this. But she adds that a stimulus “is needed” and plumps again for mo money, mo money, mo money!

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

The Wagner Epic Continues

February 3, 2009

No, not that Wagner.  There is more on Tony Wagner, the snake-oil salesman educational consultant.  My op-ed on Wagner ran in the Northwest Arkansas Morning News.  I’ve also reprinted the text below, since it is easier to read that than the scanned pdf in the link.

The first community discussion on Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap, was held last night.  It wasn’t too bad.  A number of teachers (at tables other than mine) expressed resentment at the suggestion that they weren’t already aware that critical thinking and creativity were desirable.  But administrators and GT teachers seemed more enamored with the book.  And the reaction from parents and community members included a fair degree of skepticism. 

It’s hard to get people to think critically about people who push a focus on critical thinking.  To be for critical thinking is like being for goodness and light.  The tricky part is in how you get there.  To the extent that Wagner has any concrete suggestions, he seems to be taking folks down the wrong path.  He wants less emphasis on content and less testing.  But he shows no evidence that higher levels of critical thinking can be found in places or at times when there was less content and less testing.  In fact, the little evidence he does provide would suggest the opposite.

Some smart folks are pushing back against these data-free educational consultants.  Sandra Stotsky had an op-ed on Wagner last week.  Dan Willingham had an excllent blog post on Alfie Kohn as did Stuart Buck.  And Robert Pondiscio at Core Knowledge ,  AndyRotherham at Eduwonk , and Ken De Rosa at D-Ed Reckoning have added their two cents (which, with the new stimulus package, will become 2 trillion cents).

So here is my op-ed pasted below:

Fayetteville Public Schools Need Evidence, Not Snake-Oil (submitted title)
By Jay P. Greene

              The Fayetteville Public Schools purchased 2,000 copies of Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap and organized a series of public fora to discuss how that book might guide our schools.  The District is to be commended for engaging the community in this process.  But it is unclear why the District selected Wagner’s book as the focus of this discussion.

Wagner’s book makes claims about what skills students really need to learn, what is blocking them from learning those skills, what countries are more successful in teaching these skills, and what some schools are doing to remedy the problem.  But he provides no systematic evidence to substantiate any one of these claims.  In short, the book is a series of anecdotes that more closely resembles what one would find in a self-help manual than in a work of social science.  If we apply our critical thinking skills, which Wagner says are essential, we should reject this book as a sound basis for planning the future of Fayetteville schools.

First, Wagner says there are seven essential survival skills that our children need to learn.  How does he know that these are the essential skills?  He chatted with a CEO on an airplane and selected a few more to interview.  Does he review any research on the types of skills that predict who will become successful adults?  No. Wagner relies upon the authority of his experience and the experiences of a handful of corporate executives to identify the essential skills.  Accepting claims on this basis would be the sort of thing we would hope people with critical thinking skills might reject.

Frankly, the seven skills he lists — critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, initiative, communication, analysis, and imagination – seem reasonable enough, but they are also so vague as to be unhelpful in informing schools about what to do.  How exactly do we produce critical thinking or adaptability or creativity?  It’s not as if educators have been unaware of these goals, but they haven’t generally been effective at developing strategies to achieve them.

Then Wagner identifies what he believes is blocking the acquisition of these seven essential skills – high stakes testing.  What evidence does he present to support this claim?  Again, he presents no systematic evidence to demonstrate that there is a tradeoff between the content knowledge required in accountability testing and the essential skills he wants.  Couldn’t it be the case that improving mastery of basic skills and content knowledge provides the foundation for these seven skills?  It’s hard to be imaginative, analytical, etc… without knowing subject matter and basic skills of literacy and numeracy.  Einstein may have said “imagination is more important than knowledge,” as the book’s dedication indicates, but Einstein couldn’t have succeeded without a firm grasp of advanced mathematics.

If Wagner were right that accountability testing undermines essential skills, then surely these skills must have been more plentiful before testing became as salient as it is today.  But Wagner does not (and cannot) provide any evidence to show that.  Instead, he shows (on p. 74) that students in the United States significantly lag students in Finland, Hong Kong-China, Japan, and Korea in certain problem solving skills on an international test called PISA.  As it turns out, high stakes testing is extremely prominent in most of these countries with strong problem-solving results – a fact curiously at odds with Wagner’s claims.  If accountability testing undermines essential skills, why do countries with such strong accountability systems manage to succeed so well in teaching the essential skills Wagner wants?

Wagner describes three model schools that he says have been effective at teaching essential skills (although he again fails to provide any evidence that they are as successful as he claims).  But it is by no means clear that the approaches adopted by these three schools are the only valid approaches or that they could be replicated easily by others.  Replication is especially problematic because the three models he provides are all charter schools or alternative schools of choice.  Perhaps the secret of these schools’ success has something to do with school choice and not the features he describes.  If true, it’s not clear how Fayetteville could imitate the success of these schools.

To achieve our goals in education we have to adopt approaches backed by systematic evidence.  If we believe critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity are the most important goals for schools, then we need systematic evidence on systems of teacher preparation, curriculum, and pedagogy that effectively produce those goals.  There is a growing body of scientific research on these issues, including a number of studies sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, that the Fayetteville Public Schools might wish to consider rather than consulting with the latest peddler of educational snake-oil.

10 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Building Without Foundation of Evidence

February 1, 2009

This is the model for new school construction. (HT: Arkansas Project)

 I understand why House Democrats included $20 billion for school construction in the $819 billion stimulus package they passed last week.  They need to throw money out the window as fast as the printing presses can make it.  That way they can say they are doing something to “help” the economy.  And as long as they are doing something they might as well help their friends in the educational industrial complex.

What I don’t understand is why some normally smart people feel compelled to justify this school construction spending by claiming that it will help students or that it is badly needed.  There is no evidence to support these claims.  That’s why I was surprised to see Sara Mead, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, write:

“But perhaps the most important reason to invest in school construction is that our students need it. Just as Americans have underinvested in our bridges, roads, and other infrastructure, we’ve also underinvested in our education infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure report card gives our school buildings a grade of D — lower than grades for bridges, rail, or public transit infrastructure. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, it would cost $127 billion just to renovate and repair crumbling or outdated school facilities to good condition. Poor school facilities don’t necessarily prevent students from learning, but, it’s unconscionable that we currently ask students to learn, and teachers to work, in buildings that are overcrowded, inadequately heated and ventilated, poorly maintained, and in some cases literally falling apart. The contrast between schools and other buildings sends our most disadvantaged children a devastating message about the value we place on their education.”

As readers of JPGB may recall, the research literature finds no relationship between school facilities and student achievement (outside of developing countries, where a grass hut and mud floor may be a hindrance in bad weather).  To repeat: “In the Handbook of the Economics of Education, Eric Hanushek reviews all of the research meeting minimal quality standards regarding the relationship between school facilities and student performance.  He identifies 91 analyses on the issue in the U.S. and finds that 86% of them show no statistically significant relationship.  Of the remaining 14% of analyses that did show significant effects, 9% were positive and 5% were negative. ”

If the evidence generally fails to find that better school facilities improve student outcomes, it’s not clear how Sara Mead can support claims like “our students need it” or that current facilities send “a devastating message about the value we place on their education.”  If it has no effect on their learning, how devastating could it be?

Perhaps Sara Mead relies upon the assessments from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to support her claims.  Let’s look into those references a little further to see whether we should believe them or believe the research reviewed by Rick Hanushek.

The ASCE grade of D-  for school infrastructure is in a report card issued by the interest group representing engineers who design public infrastructure.  To determine the grades ASCE “assembled a panel of 24 of the nation’s leading civil engineers” who then reviewed other reports and surveys of civil engineers.  I would be more specific about their methodology, but they provide almost no information about their methods or standards.  Their entire description of the methodology consists of 5 sentences.  You can read it yourself to see.

In the 2009 report card they actually gave school infrastructure a D.  But don’t worry, that is the average grade they gave to the 15 categories of public infrastructure they graded, which ranged from C+ to D -.  They also determined that we need to spend $2.2 trillion (with a T!) on public infrastructure.  How exactly did they determine that?  Again, the five sentences describing their methodology didn’t exactly explain all that.  But since they are a lobby group representing engineers who work on public infrastructure projects, I’m sure we can just trust their expert judgment that we urgently need to spend $2.2 trillion on what they do.

Using the NCES to support a need for $127 billion in school construction spending is hardly more persuasive.  To be precise, the NCES did not determine the amount that needs to be spent on schools.  They just surveyed school district officials and in the survey asked the school officials how much money they thought needed to be spent on their schools to bring them to “good” condition.  The NCES does not represent this result as their own opinion; they portray it as the opinion of the people they surveyed.

Again, asking people who are the potential beneficiaries of public spending whether they need more money without any standards to define their “need” is unlikely to be a reliable method. 

To illustrate the point, I’ve conducted a survey of “experts” on JPGB – the regular contributors — to determine the resources we would need from the federal bailout to bring the blog “into good overall condition.”  One respondent identified the need for martinis, cigars, and a few Vegas junkets to improve our creative process.  Another identified the need for a board game marathon only interrupted by Indian food buffet binges to sharpen our intellect.  And another agreed with the first two and added  the need for a spaceship, pony, and a lifetime supply of spicy wings and candy.  (You can guess who’s who.)

I think I’m going to trust Hanushek’s assessment of 91 analyses that meet social science standards over the self-serving assessments of school officials and and a construction lobbying organization.  If you disagree, then I expect that you’ll support our demands to add JPGB to the bailout since, after all, the “evidence” clearly demonstrates our need.

18 Comments | money myth | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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