Denial Isn’t Just a River in Middle Earth

August 20, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Goldwater Institute Economist Byron Schlomach and I coauthored this piece about the need for state policy innovation in last Sunday’s East Valley Tribune:

Economy on Edge

Director Peter Jackson began his “Lord of the Rings” saga with an ominous message: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air,” Cate Blanchett darkly says. “Much that once was … is lost.”

We have the same sense of foreboding when considering Arizona’s unresolved budget crisis, without the Hollywood ending. Arizona has been fortunate to have a vibrant economy and falling poverty rates, but a series of bad policy decisions now puts this at risk.

Arizona has seen booms and busts in state revenues before. Old Capitol hands have what some regard as a tried-and-true method for dealing with recession: borrow money, resort to accounting gimmicks, and pay back accounts on the rebound.

Lawmakers tried this again with the most recent budget, but it may not work this time. Arizona’s economy may have reached a tipping point.

HARD TIMES ARE HERE

Two important factors make the current situation different. First, the nationwide housing bust has slowed the migration of people to Arizona from other states. It is hard to move when you can’t sell your house, and it shows in the economic statistics.

University of Arizona economist Marshall J. Vest recently wrote that Arizona homebuilding is experiencing one of the sharpest corrections on record, consumer spending is in full retreat, and “measure after measure of economic activity is at recessionary levels.” With fewer new residents moving in, fewer new houses need to be built, and fewer new taxpayers are contributing to government coffers.

Second, Arizona lawmakers have spent several years increasing spending in a way that would make a drunken sailor blush. Despite a 39 percent increase between 2005 and 2007, the recent budget reduced General Fund spending by only 3 percent.

Hard times are here, and a combination of legislative actions and proposals on this year’s ballot could make matters worse. The Legislature effectively decided to raise property taxes this year by failing to extend the 2006 repeal of the state property tax. One ballot initiative seeks a 17.8 percent increase in the state’s sales tax to pay for roads, bike paths and mass transit. Raising taxes is almost always a poor economic idea, but especially so during an economic downturn.

Another ballot initiative seeks to keep the state from selling hundreds of thousands acres of state trust land. This proposal will not only cost the state future revenue, but will also kick the housing industry while it’s down.

Without land available to build new communities, homebuilding won’t have the opportunity to contribute to our economy like it has in the past.

If economic growth manages to return to historical averages despite all of this, lawmakers have already allocated the revenue. This year’s $200 million in new borrowing, along with voter-approved automatic annual program increases of $600 million, more than eat up the $700 million in annual revenue growth.

CALL FOR CREATIVITY

If we get creative, we can address these challenges. The state spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year building new schools. Charter schools, however, make up nine out of the top 10 high schools in the greater Phoenix area and receive no funding for buildings. Why not have a moratorium on new school construction, and encourage school districts to authorize new charter schools when they need additional seats?

Furthermore, Arizona has allowed thousands of private school seats to sit unused while piling up billions in district school construction debt.

Businesses would be willing to pay the state for the privilege of building new highways in exchange for the opportunity to collect tolls on those roads. Letting the private sector pick up the tab for new road building would turn a current cost into a source of revenue for the state.

State revenues boomed during the property bubble, and policymakers established new spending baselines as if this temporary boom was permanent. As this fantasy comes crashing down, they have raised taxes and added to the state’s already high debt.

The need for innovative and courageous leadership has never been greater. Unless we recognize our changed situation, much that once was great about Arizona may indeed be lost.

1 Comment | charter schools, politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

False Claims of Cherry Picking are the Pits

August 20, 2008

Leo Casey over at Edwize is urging me to join the “United Cherry Pickers” union because he thinks I’ve cherry picked the evidence on vouchers in a previous post.  This sounds like a great deal if my dues, like those from AFT and NEA members, can contribute to paying for skyboxes for Leo and his buddies at the Democratic National Convention to make-up for the convention’s shortfall of $10 million.  Where do I sign up?

Making a charge of cherry picking is easy.  Substantiating it requires, well, uhm, evidence.  Evidence isn’t exactly Leo Casey’s strong-suit.

I said that there have been 10 analyses of random assignment voucher experiments.  I said that 9 of those 10 analyses show significant, positive effects (at least for some subgroups).  If I am cherry picking, which random assignment analyses am I leaving out? 

Leo Casey then asserts: “Serious research conducted by respected scholars without an ideological axe to grind has consistently found every major voucher experiment in the United States wanting. John Witte’s and Cecilia Rouse’s definitive analyses of the Milwaukee voucher program and the Indiana University studies of the Cleveland voucher program have shown no meaningful educational performance advantage for students in those two high profile, large scale voucher programs.”

Neither Witte nor the IU studies analyzed random-assignment experiments, making it harder to have confidence in their results, which is why I focus on the 10 analyses using the gold-standard approach. 

Rouse’s study did examine a random-assignment experiment, but Casey mischaracterizes her findings.  She writes: “I find that students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program had faster math score gains than, but similar reading score gains to, the comparison groups. The results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition, although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results.”   Remember, Casey falsely claims that she finds “no meaningful educational performance advantage for students.”

Casey also mischaracterizes my citation of Belfield and Levin’s findings: “[He even cites research that is not on the subject of vouchers: Hank Levin will be most surprised to learn that his research ‘supports’ vouchers.]” 

Since I actually bothered to quote Belfied and Levin’s findings about the effects of expanding choice and competition, I don’t think Hank Levin will be the least bit surprised to read what he wrote.  I’ll repeat the quotation here so that no one is shocked: “A sizable majority of these studies report beneficial effects of competition across all outcomes… The above evidence shows reasonably consistent evidence of a link between competition (choice) and education quality. Increased competition and higher educational quality are positively correlated.”

If Leo Casey is going to make the charge of cherry picking and improperly citing evidence, he has to deliver proof of those charges.  To the contrary, the facts indicate that Casey is the one cherry picking and improperly citing research.

Is there a union for playing fast and loose with the truth?  Maybe Leo Casey should join it.  Oh, I forgot.  He’s already a member of the AFT.

(Links added)

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

The Vitamin C of Education

August 20, 2008

Earlier this week I made my Modest Proposal for B.B. (Broader, Bolder or is it Buying Bananas?).  I noted that Randi Weingarten denounced vouchers as a waste of time despite considerable evidence supporting it, while she embraced the B.B. idea of community schools despite there being absolutely no evidence to support the claim that public schools could improve achievement by expanding their mission to include a host of social services.

Given the lack of evidence for B.B. I generously : ) offered to support a series of large pilot studies of the community schools approach, if Weingarten, Leo Casey, and the B.B. crowd would agree to a similar series of large pilot voucher programs as a way of learning more about both reform strategies.  No word yet but perhaps their internet is broken (just try unplugging it and plugging it back in).

Shital Shah from the Coalition for Community Schools, however, sent me a nice note with a link to a report claiming to contain the evidence supporting their approach.  After reviewing the report I still see virtually no evidence to give us confidence that public schools can increase student achievement by offering everything from legal assistance to health care.

In Appendix B the report lists 21 studies of the community school approach.  Seven of them have no student achievement outcomes.  Seven examine student test scores but only make pre/post comparisons without any control group.  And another seven have comparison groups but none employ random assignment, regression discontinuity, or another rigorous research design.  Four of those seven just compare achievement at schools using the B.B. approach to city or statewide averages.  And of the seven studies with some kind of control group, two find null effects, another finds null effects in math but not reading and even then only among schools with “high implementation” of the approach.  The quality (and quantity) of the evidence supporting community schools is no greater than what we could find to support the healing power of crystals. 

I understand why Randi Weingarten or Leo Casey would be pushing the educational equivalent of crystal healing.  Their job is to advocate for the interests of their union, not to make fair and reasonable assessments of research claims.  If schools expand their mission to include providing health care and other social services just think of all of the dues-paying nurses and social workers they could add to their rolls.

The greater mystery is why normally tough-minded and rigorous researchers, like Jim Heckman and Diane Ravitch, would sign on to this approach entirely lacking empirical support.  Heckman won the Nobel Prize for Economics for crying out loud.  But then again Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and later became a public advocate for mega doses of vitamin C to cure cancer, another intervention completely unsupported by rigorous evidence.

I’ll repeat that I am not against trying the B.B. community school approach with large pilot programs that are carefully studied.  I just can’t see why normally smart people would fully endorse untested approaches while ignoring other interventions, like expanding choice and competition in education, which have considerably more supporting evidence.

(edited for typos)

Leave a Comment » | myth of helplessness, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Passing of a Giant

August 19, 2008

 

A guest tribute by Patrick Wolf

 

The education reform community lost a champion yesterday when John E. Brandl died of cancer on the eve of his 72nd birthday.  John was many things in his lifetime: gas station attendant, Army ROTC officer, Harvard-trained economist, McNamara “Whiz Kid”, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education in the Johnson Administration, Minnesota State Representative and Senator, professor, Dean of Public Affairs, scholar, author, mentor, husband, father, and friend to many.  He is perhaps best known in education reform circles as the sponsor of legislation to develop and expand school choice in Minnesota, especially our nation’s first public charter schools.  In 2005 he received the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Excellence in Education Prize for “Valor” and was saluted as the “godfather of school choice.”

 

He was my godfather as well, in fact and deed if not formally in name.  My mother and he grew up in the same neighborhood in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in the 1940s and 50s and remained close friends their entire lives.  I first met John on March 24, 1965, when I was two weeks old.  I was born in Washington, DC (my dad was working for the General Accounting Office at the time) when John was starting to explore strategies of education reform at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.  One of my uncles was named my godfather, but he was not able to attend the baptism.  John stepped into the role, holding me while the priest delivered the sacrament, and never stepped out of it.  That was John.

 

When I was 13 I had a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge about American history, politics, and public policy.  In a telephone conversation one day, my mom confessed to John that she was having great difficulty “feeding the beast” of my interests.  John had a simple solution, “Put him on a train to the Twin Cities and I will take him with me to the Legislature.”  John was a State Representative and a member of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) majority at that time.  In the morning he gave me a quick walking tour of the State Capitol and allowed me to sit in on a DFL strategy session.  John and I then had lunch with the Speaker of the House, Harry “Tex” Sieben.  It was the second-to-the-last day of the legislative session, so dozens of important bills came up for a vote in the afternoon.  John found me a seat on the House floor, just to the right of the Speaker’s podium, and set me up with a copy of “House Orders” so that I could follow the action.  Periodically he broke away from discussions with his colleagues to sit down next to me and explain his vote on whatever bill was up for consideration.  For a social studies nerd like me, this was heaven.

 

John was an accomplished scholar as well as a law-maker.  Although he was an economist by training, the ideas that drove him were primarily Madisonian and Tocquevillian.  From Madison, John took the idea that the worse angels of our nature need to be checked and the better angels encouraged through government-designed incentive systems.  From Tocqueville he drew the insight that human needs are best satisfied by and within community institutions such as families and churches that are capable of loving the people they serve in a way that government organizations, unfortunately, are not.  Government should not ignore or neglect the needs of citizens, John argued.  It should provide resources and limited oversight to individuals and community institutions and allow them to deliver services to people in need.  Parental school choice fit perfectly within John’s intellectual framework for effective service delivery, and he championed all forms of it – vouchers, charters, tax credits, magnet schools, and open enrollment – throughout his academic and policymaking career.

 

The following statement, from one of John’s many Minneapolis Star-Tribune columns, effectively captures his policy vision:

 

Meeting social responsibilities through associations rather than through government agencies honors the Democrats’ commitment to building community.  In associations people are drawn by love or duty to help one another.  Often, powered by those heroic virtues, associations can carry out social responsibilities better than can either private firms or government bureaus.  Education is a good example.

 

John’s support for school choice came at a personal cost to him.  After he had moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate in the 1980s, I asked him what was next on his career agenda.  He said, “I’d like to be governor of Minnesota, but I can’t see how to get there from here.”  This was an artful way for John to acknowledge the political problem that school choice posed for him.  He was a Democrat his entire life.  He thought that Democrats should stand for educational improvement for disadvantaged children, and that school choice was the best mechanism for bringing about that improvement.  The teachers union disagreed with John on that issue, and their opinions held great sway in deciding the DFL nomination for governor.  John had to decide between a reform that he was convinced helped children and a public office that he aspired to fill.  It wasn’t even a fair contest, as John’s principles easily trumped his political aspirations.

 

John’s principles also made him a great husband, father, grandfather, and friend.  His nearly 50-year marriage to Rochelle, an accomplished child psychologist, was a model partnership of commitment and love.  He and Shelly raised three wonderful children: Chris (a home builder), Katie (a math professor), and Amy (a mid-wife).  In his later years he often spoke of his two grandchildren with great wonder and delight.  In June over 200 of John’s family members and close friends converged on the Humphrey Institute in Minneapolis for a dinner in his honor.  They included fellow politicians (anyone ever hear of Walter Mondale?), professors, former students, childhood friends, and even policy adversaries.  A common theme of the tribute speeches was how John was a master at effectively disagreeing with someone without being disagreeable.  He never backed down from a fight but he also never disparaged his opponent.  In his eyes, all people were equally dignified human beings and wondrous gifts from God, even if they couldn’t be persuaded to come around to his point of view.

 

I’ll always remember the last conversation I had with John Brandl.  It was last Thursday and it was clear that the end was coming.  I had something that I had to share with this man who had shared so much with me and with so many others.  I told him, “John, you probably know that you taught me a lot about how to be a public policy scholar.  What you may not know is that you also taught me how to be a man.” 

 

Rest in peace, my friend.  We, on the other hand, still have work to do.                  

4 Comments | tributes | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Why Aren’t We Already Doing It?

August 19, 2008

Last week Charles Murray made an innovative and provocative proposal in the Wall Street Journal:  Let’s not make the college B.A. the standard training for all professions and higher-skill occupations.  Instead, let’s increasingly use certification tests, like the CPA for accountants, to indicate whether people are qualified for certain jobs.  People could prepare for those tests by taking classes from traditional colleges, by taking courses on-line, by studying on their own in the neighborhood library, or in any other way they want.  Expanding the paths by which people could enter high-paying occupations expands equality of opportunity by reducing the financial and logistical barriers that requiring a college B.A. imposes.  And focusing career-oriented training on the skills required for that career and removing other requirements improves the efficiency of that training. 

In this scenario we would have to rely on the K-12 system to provide the basic liberal arts training and civic education we think all people need to be productive citizens.  Post-secondary education would be more focused on career training except for the relatively few people who really want further liberal arts training or additional preparation in a traditional academic field.

Expanding equality of opportunity and improving the efficiency of post-secondary education make Murray’s proposal very appealing.  So appealing that one has to ask why we aren’t already doing it.  The government does not mandate that employers of professionals and high-skilled occupations require a college B.A. — at least not directly.  Why do employers require something that limits the pool of qualified labor from which they could hire and consumes considerably more time and resources than the certification test approach Murray suggests?  If Murray’s proposal is on target, shouldn’t employers already be developing and using certification tests in lieu of the B.A., at least for certain occupations?

There are several reasons why Murray’s vision is not the current reality.  First, developing appropriate certification tests for a number of high-skill occupations may not be as easy as Murray suggests.  Perhaps many employers have not switched from the B.A. model because they don’t think they can meaningfully improve upon it. 

Second, employers and private associations that develop and use certification tests would likely face a flood of employment discrimination lawsuits that challenged the validity of the test.  I am no lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but I suspect that fear of litigation plays a large role in deterring employers from relying on private certification tests for hiring. 

Third, much of what employers want from their employees (at least in some occupations) is the self-discipline and obedience to authority necessary for completing assigned tasks.  Perhaps employers don’t care too much about what prospective employees do in college as long as they have to complete a long list of assigned tasks demonstrating self-discipline and compliance.  College selects and cultivates these desired traits.

Fourth, even if employers just want to use college as a liability-free way to screen for self-discipline and compliance, it is clear that this is a very inefficient arrangement from a societal perspective.  It would be much more efficient to have employers hire crowds of interns/apprentices at low wages and only keep the most skilled, self-disciplined, and compliant as long-term employees.  While this may be more efficient from a societal perspective, it is far less efficient from the perspective of individual employers.  If they had to sort and train a crowd of prospective employees as interns/apprentices, employers would have to bear the costs that students and taxpayers currently bear in paying colleges to perform these roles.  And having to dump a large number of interns/apprentices who didn’t make the cut would invite another flood of employment discrimination lawsuits.

Murray’s vision has much appeal, but there are also significant barriers to its implementation.  Unless we address those barriers, especially liability issues related to employment, we are unlikely to realize the benefits of expanding equality of opportunity and reducing costs from Murray’s proposal.  There are also practical barriers, like the difficulty of testing for certain skills and traits, that limit the benefits that could be realized.  But we could still take steps toward what Murray has suggested and think about how those ideas could shape reform within the post-secondary education world.

10 Comments | higher education | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

A Modest Proposal for B.B.

August 18, 2008

The advocates of B.B. (Broader, Bolder; or is it Bigger Budgets? or is it Bloated Behemoth?) have yet to muster the evidence to support widespread implementation of their vision to expand the mission of schools to include health care, legal assistance, and other social services. They do present background papers showing that children who suffer from social problems fare worse academically, but they have not shown that public schools are capable of addressing those social problems and increasing student learning.

And if you dare to question whether there is evidence about the effectiveness of public schools providing social services in order to raise achievement, you are accused of being opposed to “better social and economic environments for children.” Right. And if you question the effectiveness of central economic planning are you also then opposed to a better economy? And if you question the effectiveness of an untested drug therapy are you then opposed to quality health-care?

To help the B.B. crowd generate the evidence one would need before pursuing a reform agenda on a large-scale, I have a modest proposal. How about if we have a dozen large-scale, well-funded pilot programs of the “community school” concept advocated by B.B.? And, at the same time let’s have a dozen large-scale, well-funded pilot voucher programs. We’ll carefully evaluate the effects of both to learn about whether one, the other, or both are things that we should try on an even larger scale.

I’m all for trying out new ideas and carefully evaluating the results. I can’t imagine why the backers of B.B. wouldn’t want to do the same. So as soon as Larry Mishel at the union-funded Economic Policy Institute, Randi Weingarten of the AFT, and Leo Casey of the AFT’s blog, Edwize, endorse my modest proposal, we’ll all get behind the idea of trying new approaches and studying their effects — “community schools” and vouchers.

Wait, my psychic powers are picking something up. I expect that some might say we’ve already tried vouchers and they haven’t worked. In fact, Randi Weingarten just wrote something very much like that when she declared in the NY Daily News that vouchers “have not been shown by any credible research to improve student achievement.” Let’s leave aside that there have been 10 random assignment evaluations (the gold-standard in research) of voucher programs and 9 show significant positive effects, at least for certain sub-groups of students. And let’s leave aside that 3 of those analyses are independent replications of earlier studies that confirm the basic positive findings of the original analyses (and 1 replication does not). And let’s leave aside that 6 of those 10 studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals (including the QJE, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the Journal of Policy Studies), three in a Brookings book, and one in a federal government report (even if Chris Lubienski somehow denies that any of this constitutes real peer-review). And let’s leave aside that there have been more than 200 analyses of the effects of expanding choice and competition, which Clive Belfield and Henry Levin reviewed and concluded: “A sizable majority of these studies report beneficial effects of competition across all outcomes… The above evidence shows reasonably consistent evidence of a link between competition (choice) and education quality. Increased competition and higher educational quality are positively correlated.”

Let’s leave all of that aside and ask Randi Weingarten how many random-assignment studies of the community school concept she has. Uhm, none. How many evaluations of community schools, period? Uhm, still none. But that doesn’t stop her from drawing the definitive conclusion: “Through partnerships with universities, nonprofit groups and other organizations, community schools provide the learning conditions and resources that support effective instruction and bring crucial services to an entire community.” How does she know?

But I’m eager to help her and all of us learn about community schools if she is willing to do the same to learn about vouchers. Better designed and better funded voucher programs could give us a much better look at vouchers’ full effects. Existing programs have vouchers that are worth significantly less than per pupil spending in public schools, have caps on enrollments, and at least partially immunize public schools from the financial effects of competition. If we see positive results from such limited voucher programs, what might happen if we could try broader, bolder ones and carefully studied the results?

And if community schools really deliver all that is being promised, great, let’s do that too. But if our goal is to do what works, why not give both ideas a real try?

(Link added)

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

Che Studies

August 17, 2008

The Arizona Republic’s Doug MacEachern has a column today on the Raza Studies program in Tucson, Arizona.  Raza Studies is part of their Ethnic Studies program in Tucson public high schools emphasizing Latino history and pride.  But the particular way in which Tucson’s program does this has raised some critical scrutiny.  MacEachern writes:

The ethnic-studies directors make a great many claims that teeter over into the wrong side of truth.  They claim not to “teach” communism, socialism or Marxism in their classes. But they lionize Marxist revolutionaries like “Che” Guevara; they all but worship Marxist education theorist Paolo Friere; and they have developed entire lesson plans celebrating modern Marxists like Subcomandante Marcos, the southern Mexican Zapatista who considers himself a “postmodern Che.” But they don’t “teach” the stuff.

The directors of the program “humbly and respectfully welcome the scrutiny and spotlight” their program has attracted, but then denounce “the tyrannical and fascist perspectives that are held and espoused by our adversaries.”

To defend their program, the directors have produced what one local paper called nine “cohort studies,” which the school district claims show that Raza Studies has a positive effect on the high school graduation rate and state achievement test scores of the students who elect to participate in the program.  MacEachern sent the “studies” to me for my comment.  They were actually just a few bar graphs making simple comparisons between the outcomes of students who did and did not choose to participate in Raza Studies at some (but not all) of Tuscon’s high schools.  There is no way to know from a few bar graphs whether Raza Studies helped, hurt, or had no effect on student achievement since the self-selected group of students who chose to take Raza Studies may have already been higher achieving at the beginning.  A few bar graphs does not an evaluation — or nine cohort studies —  make.

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

Pass the Popcorn: Starship Troopers

August 15, 2008

I’ll be redeeming myself in Harold and Kumar. I don’t know about you two.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Last week, we had the number one seed in the East for the greatest so-bad-its-good movie: Xanadu.

This week, the number one seed in the North: Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers was actually an interesting book, written by a libertarian but denounced as totalitarian. The book raises a number of interesting questions about the obligation of the individual to the state and whether citizenship should be earned rather than automatically granted.

Forget all of that in the movie though, this movie should have been called 90210 Pretty Kids vs. The Giant Space Roaches from Hell.

You get it all in this one folks: violence galore, hearbreak and drama, arms and legs chopped off by cgi bug-monsters, casual use of tactical nuclear weapons, Doogie Hauser MD as a pyschic kid who dresses like a Gestapo agent, and more. Did I mention violence?

So the basic plot is that humanity fights a war against a race of killer bugs from outer space. It’s kill or be killed pretty kids, so wipe them all out! The movie is moved along by a series of faux war propaganda pieces. In this one, you more or less get the beginning of the film:

Hollywood cheese galore is worked into the plot, including a romantic triangle or two and a high-school teacher turned psychopath alien killer. Life is too short not to watch movies like this, that is if you like movies about Dawson’s Creek trying to wipe out an entire species with machine guns and nukes.

2 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Fear and Loathing Abates in Carson City

August 14, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Back in the misty origins of the JPGB (okay a few months ago) I posted on the Nevada Board of Education’s absurd 8-0 vote to impose a moratorium on the approval of new charter schools. Board members told the press that the freeze was necessary because the state Education Department is being “overwhelmed” by 11 charter applications.

Arizona’s State Board for Charter Schools oversees 482 Arizona charter schools with a staff of 8. Nevada has 22 charter schools. Somehow, Nevada taxpayers manage to fund a board overseeing hair salons with 14 full time employees. In addition, the Nevada legislature created a funding stream for charter school oversight of 2% of the per student funding. Charter school oversight would be self-funding if they would, ahem, approve some applications.

Now comes the happy news that that the Nevada Board of Education has voted 6-2 to lift the moratorium. Congratulations to the Nevada Policy Research Institute and other Silver State charter supporters who fought the decision.

1 Comment | charter schools | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Broader, Bolder = Bloated Behemoth

August 13, 2008

 

Over at D-Ed Reckoning Ken DeRosa reviews the “evidence” that the AFT’s Leo Casey presents on the effectiveness of the Broader, Bolder approach being pushed by the union-backed Economic Policy Institute (with the support of some impressive people who you would think would know better). 

The issue is not whether kids would benefit from better health care or social services, or even whether receiving those benefits might contribute to higher achievement.  The issue is whether public schools are capable of expanding their mission to effectively provide these additional services, and whether those schools can translate the provision of additional services into higher achievement.

The Broader, Bolder folks provide a list of “background papers” to support their cause.  But those papers are very far in the background in that only a handful of the more than 100 studies cited actually assess the effects of providing students with additional services.  And even fewer look at the effects of public schools providing those services.  Before we endorse a bold new plan for education wouldn’t we want at least a few  evaluations of pilot programs in which public schools actually provided the full set of services being advocated?  I can’t find one such evaluation in the list of 100+ studies provided.

But don’t worry, Leo Casey has stepped into the breach with the solid research we need.  Here’s DeRosa’s commentary bracketing Casey’s, uhm, evidence:

“Leo must have had a few of his underlings pouring over the ERIC databases non-stop finding the requested evidence. Here is Leo’s evidence. I am leaving in all the internal citations and footnotes.

Classroom teachers recognize immediately the educational value of providing a comprehensive array of services to students living in poverty. They have seen the effects of undiagnosed and untreated eye problems on a student’s ability to learn how to read, and of untreated ear infections on a student’s ability to hear what is being said in the classroom. They know that the lack of proper medical care heightens the severity of childhood illnesses and makes them last longer, leading to more absences from school for students who need every day of school they can get. They have seen asthma reach epidemic proportions among students living in poverty, and they know that the lack of preventive and prophylactic medical care leads to more frequent attacks of a more severe nature, and more absences from school. They understand that screening for lead poisoning happens least among children in poverty, even though their living conditions make them the most likely victims, with all of the negative effects on cognitive functions. They know that the stresses of life in poverty make mental health and social work services for students and their families all that more important, and yet they are least likely to receive them. They see how the transience that marks poverty disrupts the education of students again and again, as the families of students are constantly on the move. In short, teachers know that the students living in poverty lack the health and social services routinely available to middle class and upper class students, despite the fact that they need them even more. And they know that the absence of these services has a detrimental impact on the education, as well as the general well-being, of students living in poverty.

I emphasized Leo’s evidentiary citations since they do not conform to the generally accepted norm.”

(edited for typos)

7 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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