Psychologist Dan Willingham strikes again with another excellent video about educational psychology. In this one he makes a strong case for the importance of teaching content for teaching reading.
Willingham Strikes Again
January 10, 2009
2 Comments | 
instructional reform | Tagged: Dan Willingham, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Quality Counts Lacks Quality
January 9, 2009(Guest post by Stuart Buck)
Education Week has released its annual report “Quality Counts,” which ranks all fifty states’ education systems along several dimensions, such as school finance, achievement, accountability, and the like. You can find detailed statistics for any given state on an interactive map, and you can generate a table comparing the states of your choosing.
This Quality Counts report gets a huge amount of attention, as can be seen from the hundreds of results in a search of Google News.
But the Quality Counts report suffers from two glaring flaws. In fact, the report reminds me of the old joke (I can’t remember who to credit for this) of a beggar sitting on the streets of New York, with a sign reading, “Wars, 2; Legs Lost, 1; Wives Who Left Me, 2; Children, 3; Lost Jobs, 2. TOTAL: 10.” Well, obviously, the number “10” doesn’t represent ten of anything.
So what’s wrong with the Quality Counts report?
First, the “School Finance” measure has two basic components: equity and spending. Equity refers to several measures that look at whether a state’s districts get relatively equal funding. Fair enough, although there’s a decent argument that impoverished districts might need higher spending to attract better personnel. But then part of the “School Finance” measure is based on per-pupil spending, as well as the percentage of a state’s taxable resources dedicated to education.
The problem here is that it doesn’t make sense to reward a state with a higher grade just for spending more, in and of itself. Indeed, the “spending” measure ends up getting averaged with the measure for “K-12 Achievement.” This means that, in theory, a state with high spending and low achievement — thus combining incompetence and extravagance — could get an overall score equal to a state with low spending and high achievement. But if a school manages to get high achievement with low spending, this means that, all else equal, that state has a more efficient and productive education system.
Second, an even worse problem lies in the “Chance for Success” measure. This ranking is supposed to tell us about the chances that people in a given state have of succeeding. There are numerous components to the “Chances for Success” measure, including percent of students above 200% of the poverty line, percent of students with college-educated parents, percent of children whose parents speak English, and more. Not surprisingly, the richer and more privileged states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut do quite well on this measure, while states like Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico are near the bottom.
What makes no sense whatsoever is that a high score on the “Chance for Success” measure is averaged together with all the other items — including K-12 Achievement — to produce each state’s final score. You can see this for yourself: Pick your home state here, and then take the simple average of all six measures (Chances for Success; Standards, Assessment & Accountability; K-12 Achievement; Transitions & Alignment; School Finance; and Teaching Profession), and that average will be the state’s overall final score.
In other words, imagine a state that managed to produce A-level achievement even though its population was poor and disadvantaged (and thus got a lower grade on the “Chances for Success” measure). Under any rational grading system, we should give that state the highest possible rating. But the Quality Counts method would actually downgrade the state for having too many poor children. By the same token, Quality Counts would upgrade a poor-achieving state that happened to have a privileged and rich student population, even though that state’s education system would obviously be far more incompetent and inefficient. If anything, the “Chances for Success” ranking should be counted inversely as compared to all the other measures of a state’s education system.
6 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: Quality Counts, Stuart Buck | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
BCS declares OU National Champions
January 9, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Why not? The last time a team beat OU by ten points on a neutral field, they edged that team out for a spot in the Big 12 title game and the national championship game.
Luckily for OU they lost exactly by ten points again on a neutral field. I fully expect the BCS, it its’ collective stupor, to award OU the national championship.
5 Comments | college sports | Tagged: BCS, Oklahoma Sooners | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
The Irony of Social Promotion
January 9, 2009In the current issue of the Economics of Education Review, Marcus Winters and I have an article about the use of exemptions to Florida’s test-based promotion policy. Under Florida’s policy students need to perform above a certain level on the 3rd grade reading test to automatically be promoted to 4th grade. If students score below that level they can still be promoted if they are granted one of various exemptions. Some of those exemptions are objectively measured, like scoring well on an alternative test or having certain special ed or English Language Learning classifications. But other exemptions are more subjectively determined, like having a portfolio of work worthy of being promoted.
Marcus and I looked at who received those exemptions and whether being exempted was beneficial. We found that African-American and Hispanic students were less likely to receive exemptions and get promoted, controlling for other factors. That is, minority students with the same test scores and economic status were less likely to be exempted from retention if they fell below the testing threshold. The test-based policy is not racially biased, since all students who lack the academic skills to pass the test may be retained. The bias is introduced in who gets exempted from that test-based policy.
And the irony of it all is that failing to receive an exemption actually benefited those minority students academically. That is, students who were denied the exemption and repeated third grade outperformed their promoted colleagues on achievement tests two years later. The retained students had more academic skill at the end of 4th grade than their comparable promoted peers at the end of 5th grade — despite being exposed to one less grade of curriculum.
Minority students denied the exemptions may have been the vicitms of discrimination, but they ended-up making greater academic progress as a result. Receiving those exemptions wasn’t doing many of the other students any favors.
The St. Pete Times has an article on the study today and had a blog post recently.
2 Comments | social promotion | Tagged: Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Marcus Winters, social promotion | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Dubya’s Failure vs. Jeb’s Success
January 8, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The Heritage Foundation released a study by Dan Lips and yours truly today making the case that real education reform needs to come up from the states, rather than down from the federal government. We focus on the success of Florida’s reforms, the disappointment of NCLB, and note that in fact NCLB threatens Florida’s continued success. Now the Bushies are exiting the Washington scene, can we at long last admit that the 2014 requirement is encouraging states to lower their standards?
Dan explains this better than I can, so I’ll just sit back an marvel at the cool graphics that the Heritage folks came up with, like the one above.
16 Comments | NCLB | Tagged: Dan Lips, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Jeb Bush education reforms, Matthew Ladner, No Child Left Behind | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
A Real Education Bailout
January 8, 2009(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Over on NRO, Petrilli, Finn and Hess note that yet another radical expansion of federal education funding is reportedly being considered for inclusion in the “stimulus” package, e.g. in addition to building lots of roads and bridges, we’ll build lots of schools.
PFH (as I’ll call them for short) note that more spending has not only proven itself an ineffective way to improve schools, but may actually even harm them:
Naturally, the leaders of any organization would rather sidestep problems than confront them. In good times, budgets expand, payrolls grow, new people come on board, and managers delay difficult decisions. Tough times come to serve as a healthful (if sour) tonic, forcing leaders to identify priorities and giving them political cover to trim the fat.
So instead of more money, they advocate less:
Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions.
And while we’re at it, I’d like a pony, and a spaceship, and a million dollars.
One thing they don’t point out is that “stimulus” spending, like all pork, is notorious for going to politically useful projects rather than to projects that serve the public interest. Just because you spend more money building bridges doesn’t mean you get the bridges that you actually need. Never mind the “bridge to nowhere” – remember that big bridge collapse in Minneapolis a while back? In the immediate aftermath, some liberals rushed to blame the deaths on hard-hearted budget cutters. But it later came out that plenty of money was being spent on road and bridge repair, but it didn’t go to the bridge that needed it, despite the bridge having been rated “structurally deficient” for two whole years.
PFH then go on to ask:
Is there a way to make the impending bailout actually help those kids as well as the nation? Team Obama and its Congressional allies could take a page out of the Troubled Assets Relief Program playbook and require the various education interest groups to “take a haircut,” just like auto workers, investors, and shareholders have had to do. As the auto bailout required the U.A.W. to forfeit its beloved “jobs bank,” states taking federal dollars could be required to overhaul their tenure laws, ban “last hired, first fired” rules, experiment with pay-for-performance, make life easier for charter schools, and curb unrealistic pension promises.
I’m not in a position to throw stones since I’ve advocated the same thing, but I’m not holding my breath.
Next on their wish list, inexplicably, is a big pile of money for summer programs. If there’s any research showing that summer programs are a good investment, they don’t cite it. To their credit, they insist that solid empirical evaluation should be a condition of the money. But if we want to set up big new federally funded pilot programs for educational innovations, why not do it for an innovation that is solidly proven to work in many limited trials but has never been tried on a larger scale?
They also wish for better data systems (who doesn’t?) and, as always, whether it’s relevant to the topic or not, “national standards.” About the latter, our own Matt Ladner has already given us what I think is really the last word.
(link added)
4 Comments | money myth, politics | Tagged: Checker Finn, Greg Forster, Mike Petrilli, NRO, Rick Hess | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Charters Work, Unions Don’t
January 7, 2009
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
On Monday the Boston Foundation released a study by researchers from Harvard, MIT and Duke, examining Boston’s charter schools and “pilot” schools using a random assignment method (HT Joanne Jacobs).
Pilot schools were created in Massachusetts in 1995 as a union-sponsored alternative to charter schools, which came to the state a year earlier. Pilot schools are owned and operated by the school district. Like charter schools, pilot schools serve students who choose to be there (though it’s easier to get into a charter school than a pilot school; see below). Like charter schools, pilot schools have some autonomy over budget, staffing, governance, curriculum, assessment, and calendar. Like charter schools, pilot schools are regularly reviewed and can be shut down for poor performance.
There are two main differences between charter schools and pilot schools. First, the teachers’ unions. Pilot schools have them, and all the shackles on effective school management that come with them. Charter schools don’t.
Second, some pilot schools are only nominally schools of choice, not real schools of choice like charter schools. Elementary and middle pilot schools – which make up a slender majority of the total – participate in the city’s so-called “choice” program for public schools, and thus have an attendance zone where students are guaranteed admission, and admit by lottery for the spaces left over. So while on paper everyone who goes to a pilot school “chooses” to be there, some of them will be there only because the city’s so-called “choice” system has frozen them out of other schools. The students compared in the study are all lottery applicants and are thus genuinely “choice students” – they are really there by choice, not because they had no practical alternatives elsewhere. However, the elementary and middle pilot schools are not “choice schools.” (Pilot high schools do not have guaranteed attendance zones and are thus real schools of choice.)
The Boston Foundation examined two treatment groups: students who were admitted by lottery to charter schools and students who were admitted by lottery to pilot schools. The control groups are made up of students who applied to the same schools in the same lotteries, but did not recieve admission and returned to traditional public schools.
As readers of Jay P. Greene’s Blog probably know already, random assignment is the gold standard for empirical research because it ensures that the treatment and control groups are very similar. The impact of the treatment (in this case, charter and pilot schools) is isolated from unobserved variables like family background.
The results? Charter schools produce bigger academic gains than regular public schools, pilot schools don’t.
The two perennial fatal flaws of “public school choice” would both seem to be at work here. First, public school choice is always a choice among schools that all partake of the same systemic deficiencies (read: unions). Choice is not choice if it doesn’t include a real variety of options. And second, public school choice typically offers a theoretical choice but makes it impossible to exercise that choice in practice. In this particular case, if each school has a guaranteed-admission attendance zone, the practical result will be fewer open slots in each school available for choice. (Other kinds of public school choice have other ways of blocking parents from effectively using choice, such as giving districts a veto over transfers.)
Charter schools are only an imperfect improvement on “public school choice” in both of these respects. Charters have more autonomy and thus can offer more variety of choice, but not nearly as much as real freedom of choice would provide. And with charters, as with public school choice, government controls and limits the admissions process.
But charters are an improvement over the status quo, even if only a modest one, as a large body of research has consistently shown.
There are some limitations to the Boston Foundation study, as with all studies. Pilot high schools are not required to admit by lottery if they are oversubscribed, while charter schools are. (Funny how the union-sponsored alternative gets this special treatment – random admission is apparently demanded by the conscience of the community when independent operators are involved, but not for the unions.) Of the city’s pilot high schools, two admit by lottery, five do not, and one admits by lottery for some students but not others. Thus, the lottery comparison doesn’t include five of the pilot high schools. It does include three high schools and all of the elementary and middle schools.
As always, we shouldn’t allow the limitations to negate the evidence we do have. Insofar as we have evidence to address the question, more freedom consistently produces better results, and more unionization consistently doesn’t.
3 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, research reports, teacher union | Tagged: Boston, Boston Foundation, charter schools, Greg Forster, pilot schools | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
College Football 2008: Wrapup and Predictions
January 6, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
So attended my very first bowl game last night. I’d have to say that I got my money’s worth, and then some. In a hard-fought, tight game, Texas scored a dramatic late touchdown to put away Ohio-State 24-21.
Games like the one last night are great if your team wins, heart-breaking if they lose. I felt bad for Buckeye Fan last night, but then again, better them than me! I’m still trying to recover from the trauma of Lubbock, after all.
Now, looking forward, I will predict that Florida will beat Oklahoma decisively to win the national championship. Looking at the bowl results from this year makes it apparent that there wasn’t a whole lot of defense being played in the Big 12 South this year, in large part because Big 12 officials refuse to call holding.
Notice for instance that when the refs called holding four times on Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl, Ole Miss tore into their offense like a Rottweiler with a tasty rag-doll. Michael Oher, of the amazing Blind Side book by Michael Lewis, has now taken his final college snap for the Ole Miss Rebels. Some mock drafts have him going in the early first round, which will provide a storybook ending to what has already been an incredible ride.
This season certainly seems to make the case for a college football playoff. Just imagine if USC and Texas were scheduled to meet after dispatching Penn State and Ohio State. LET’S GET READY TO RUMMMMMBLE!!!!
Utah’s upset of Alabama would be even more exciting by pitting them against a Virginia Tech this week- the Cinderella season continues!
Obama is right- 8 teams, play them off. Florida, Oklahoma, Southern Cal, Utah and Texas all have arguments for a number one ranking. There’s only one proper way to settle this: on the field.
For Thursday, I’ll predict Florida 38, OU 21. Mind you, what I want is OU 3, Florida 2, but that doesn’t seem likely. Leave your prediction in the comments, and the closest guess will be the reigning JPGB football pronostication king.
1 Comment | college sports | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Randi Weingarten Can’t Get No Respect
January 5, 2009
In what the AFT web site described as “her first major speech since being elected AFT president in July,” Randi Weingarten “decried the widespread scapegoating of teachers and teachers unions for public education’s shortcomings.” Her comments have generated numerous reactions, including from NYT columnist Bob Herbert, Andy Rotherham, Joanne Jacobs, and our own Greg Forster. They all raised interesting points, but none addressed one of the most curious aspects of Weingarten’s speech: Why do teachers, perhaps more than other professionals, seek praise for their work (or are particularly sensitive to blame)?
I don’t think other occupations have produced bumper-stickers that are the equivalent of “If you can read this thank a teacher.” I can’t imagine plumbers distributing bumper-stickers that said: “If you flushed your toilet thank a plumber.” Nor can I imagine: “If you still have your teeth thank a dentist.”
Teachers particularly demand respect — and of course they deserve respect. But why do they give speeches, print bumper-stickers, write letters, hold rallies, etc… decrying their social status when I am hard pressed to think of other occupations that do the same?
Of course, one important factor is that almost all teachers are public employees. The demand for respect can be understood as part of the demand for resources. My plumber doesn’t have to demand my respect to get my resources. He just has to do a good job to get me to continue paying him for his services.
But the resources devoted to education are largely unrelated to how well teachers serve their students. Political popularity largely determines the level of resources available for teachers, so not surprisingly, teachers actively lobby the public to enhance their image.
The problem is that it is hard to sustain political popularity and community respect as results continue to disappoint despite huge increases in resources. Teachers interpret this disappointment as a lack of respect, when it is really just frustration at being forced to pay for services that are chronically inadequate. If people could hire teachers like they hire plumbers or dentists, teachers wouldn’t need to demand respect to get resources. They would earn respect and resources by serving their voluntary customers well.
9 Comments | teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: Andy Rotherham, Bob Herbert, Greg Forster, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Joanne Jacobs | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Blaming Special Ed
January 4, 2009
It’s all too common but also completely mistaken to blame special education for the shortcomings of the public k-12 system. If you point out that per pupil spending has more than doubled in the last three decades (adjusting for inflation) while student outcomes have remained unchanged, people blame the rising costs of special education. (See for example Richard Rothstein on this). If you point out that the teaching workforce has increased by about 40% in the last three decades (adjusted for changes in student population), people blame special education (see below). If budgets are tight and programs get cut, people blame special education for draining money from general education.
Blaming special ed is easy. Most attempts to blame special ed don’t even bother presenting data or make the most crude use of data to support their claims. Reporters simply accept assertions from school and state officials without question. Folks accept the blame-special-ed-story so easily because — well, to put it bluntly — it is a a widely held but unstated prejudice. People quietly resent special education because they fear that it is short-changing their regular education students. They assume that money spent on disabled kids is necessarily money taken away from general education. They can’t imagine that resources for general education have also increased at a very rapid clip even as special ed costs have risen.
School officials — people who should know better — play upon this popular prejudice to rationalize their failures. They would never dare blame the programs that have been created or expanded in the last three decades for the education of poor and minority students. Those programs also cost quite a lot of money. No, school officials choose to blame special ed because it seems like blaming fate. Fate has overwhelmed us with a rise in disabilities, the story goes, which have drained general education of money, teachers, and flexibility under tight budgets. Never mind the considerable evidence that the rise in special education over the last few decades is almost certainly due to an increased classification of students as disabled rather than a true increase in the rate of disabilities in the world. Fate had nothing to do with it.
I’ve rebutted the claims that special ed is largely responsible for rising per pupil spending in chapters 1 and 2 of the book Education Myths as well as in this Education Next article and in this paper that was published in the Peabody Journal of Education.
My purpose in this post is to address the comment written by “Kevin” that attributed the increase in the teaching workforce to special education. Kevin was responding to a post by Greg in which he wrote: “But teachers’ unions have pushed up costs – dramatically. In the past 40 years, the cost of the government school system per student has much more than doubled (even after inflation) while outcomes are flat across the board. And this has mainly been caused by a dramatic increase in the number of teachers hired per student – a policy that benefits only the unions.” And Kevin replied: “Any comparison of staffing in schools 40 years ago and today typically ignores one group of staff that didn’t exist in 1968 – special education teachers and aides. Special education programs weren’t in most schools 40 years ago, hence there were no staff hired to work with those specific populations, particularly students with cognitive delay and autism who need a much higher staff ratio than is provided in the general education classroom.”
I’m bothering to rebut Kevin’s claims because 1) he appears to be a state employee (perhaps a school official, judging from his email address), and 2) his comments are typical of the blame special ed rhetoric. Notice that Kevin doesn’t bother to present any evidence. He just tells a plausible story, which because he and many others have “pre-judged” it to be true, they consider persuasive without need of any proof. But let’s consider the evidence here.
In 1974, the year before federal legislation governing the education of disabled students was adopted, there were 2.165 million public school teachers and an average student to teacher ratio of 20.8. In 2006 there were 3.177 million public school teachers, an increase of 1.012 million teachers. And in 2006 there were a total of 404,577 teacher FTEs providing special education services.
But we have to adjust for the fact that that some of those 404,577 teachers assigned to special education have been shifted (or had their lines shifted) to special education as more students have been reclassified as disabled. We also have to adjust for the fact that there are more students in 2006 than in 1974. To make everything comparable, let’s assume that the student-teacher ratio had remained at 20.8 for all students. Given that there were 49.370 million public school students in 2006, there would have been 2.374 million teachers if ratios had stayed the same for everybody instead of the 3.177 million teachers we have. So there was really an increase of 803,442 teachers, adjusted for the change in student population.
But if the 6,081,890 students classified as disabled also had 20.8 students for each teacher, they would have 292,398 teachers. Given that there are 404,575 teachers assigned to special education, the lower student-teacher ratios required for disabled students only results in a net increase of 112,179 teachers (404,575 minus 292,398). So, of the 803,442 teachers added since 1974 only about 112,179 can be explained by the need to offer smaller student-teacher ratios to disabled students. That is, special ed may only account for about 14% of the increase in the teaching workforce.
What people like Kevin forget is that while virtually “no staff” were hired specifically for special education several decades ago, there were also virtually no students classified as disabled (although most were in schools and under-served). If we shift 6 million students into special education and maintained the same 1974 ratio of 20.8 students per teacher, we would have shifted 292,398 teachers with them. It’s true that with an increase in federal and state subsidies along with a mandate to provide services, we’ve reduced student teacher ratios for disabled students. But we’ve only added an additional 112,179 teachers to produce smaller ratios for disabled students.
Of course, Greg also makes an excellent point when he says in the comments to his post that resources devoted to special ed should also be expected to produce improvements in results. Regardless of how resources have been allocated between regular and special education, the money should be yielding benefits for students. The fact that we have observed virtually no change in student outcomes over the last four decades despite a huge increase in real expenditures (regardless of how it was allocated) is a source of chronic frustration with public education.
The unstated assumption of these blame-special-ed stories is that money spent on special education is basically money flushed down the toilet. They assume that nothing can help disabled kids, which fuels the quiet resentment of resources devoted to special education. Rather than looking for scapegoats — special education, rising poverty, cosmic rays, etc… — folks should focus on the perverse incentives of a broken public education system. The fault, dear reader, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
22 Comments | myth of helplessness, special ed | Tagged: Best of Jay, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Richard Rothstein, special education | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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