Walmart Shareholder Meeting

June 6, 2008

This morning I went to the Walmart shareholder meeting held in the University of Arkansas basketball stadium.  The theme was the new marketing slogan, “Save money.  Live better.”  They presented impressive evidence and compelling anecdotes of how Walmart saves money for families of modest means and, in doing so, improves people’s lives. 

The best example they provided was their $4 prescription drug program.  Lee Scott, the CEO, emphasized that policymakers have been trying to get more people to switch to cheaper generics for years.  But Walmart has been able to succeed where the government has failed, by bringing the price down.  How did they do that when the government hasn’t?  Walmart was able to squeeze the pharmaceutical companies in a way that the government won’t.  Just think of the Medicare Drug Benefit program that has been a near-total flop, failing to make drugs more available while costing taxpayers dearly. 

It struck me that if Walmart were a government program, designed to provide basic goods to low-income families at reduced prices, it would be lauded as a great success on the order of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan.  Books would be written about how it worked so well.  Conferences would be organized to sing its praises.  But because someone is actually making a profit while serving low-income families, somehow the whole thing is ruined.  It’s as if social progress can only be made if taxpayers lose money.

It’s not accurate to say that Walmart is only able to provide low prices because it underpays its workers, who are themselves often low-income.  In fact, Walmart pays its workers above the industry average and offers health benefits rarely found in retail.  The reality is that Walmart primarily reduces prices by squeezing its suppliers.  Remember the prescription drug companies?  Ironically, anti-Walmart activists are really pro-Procter & Gamble.  Their chant should be “Charge poor people more for shampoo so that Procter & Gamble thrives!”  I guess that wouldn’t be a very good chant at a rally (I’d make a bad activist), but you get my point. 

Of course, the other groups that get squeezed are the unions.  But even if you believed that unions provided significant benefits to workers, we should all recognize that it would have to come at the expense of low-income consumers.  There is no free lunch.  And keep in mind that Walmart workers already receive above-industry-average wages and health benefits, so the additional benefits of unionization are more dubious.  Furthermore, outside of North America Walmart workers are mostly unionized (as are the workers of all of their major competitors in those markets) and the company still thrives. 

I know.  People will hold this post up as an example of how I’m somehow in the employ of Walmart.  Just to set the facts straight — I’m an employee of the University of Arkansas and am primarily paid by the taxpayers of Arkansas.  I’ve never heard anyone suggest that my (or anyone else’s)  receipt of money from the government presents a conflict of interest that disqualifies them from evaluating government programs.  I’m as free to criticize Arkansas policies as to criticize Walmart.  (And I do have criticisms of Walmart.  For example, the produce is lousy and the stores in Florida, when I lived there, looked dingy.)

It’s true that my department received a $20 million gift from which I draw some income.  But that $20 million endowment was initiated by an anonymous foundation (not connected to the Waltons) with a $10 million gift that was then matched by the University’s matching grant program, which applied to all gifts that met certain criteria.  It’s true that the matching grant money originally came from the estate of Sam Walton, but he passed away in 1992 and neither the Waltons nor Walmart control those dollars.  So, my connection to Walmart exists, but it is tenuous.  They certainly have no ability to control what I say or do.

But even if I were a corporate executive at Walmart, the issue is whether my argument is true, not with whom do I have a financial connection.  Walmart executives could make an argument and be right.  The intellectually honest way to exchange ideas is to address the merits of other people’s ideas, not analyze their motives for articulating those ideas. 

My assessment of the evidence is that Walmart really does help people save money and live better.  If you disagree, rebut the evidence.

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

Pass the Popcorn: Curse of the Hulk

June 6, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

“I’m Gumby, dammit!”

 

(Gen Y readers see here for explanation.)

With no Lost episodes until at least the fall – the network isn’t saying when it’s coming back; my guess is they put the whole show into “The Vault” and transported it forward in time, so who knows when it will reappear – the weekly Get Lost feature is going on summer break and we’re starting a new Friday distraction called Pass the Popcorn.

Before moving on to new business, I’d like to report that to my very great surprise, my 12,000 line epic poem on the virtues of Speed Racer generated no negative reaction whatsoever – because it turns out I’m the only person on earth who has seen the movie.

One week from today, Marvel will unveil the latest attempt to make an Incredible Hulk movie that doesn’t suck. As all geeks and fanboys know only too well, in 2003 the career of one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1990s, Ang Lee, shipwrecked on the rocky shoals of the big mean green machine.

“I agreed to make a Hulk movie? Oh, please . . . please, no!”

It’s worth contemplating the significance of Lee’s failure. Here was a man who was perfectly positioned to make a great movie out of the Hulk. After establishing himself with his intimate portrait of family and romantic relations, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), he turned out two of the most noteworthy movies of the decade, each of which achieved serious commercial success while retaining the deep emotional sensibility of the arthouse: Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), in addition to his less widely noticed but still artistically important indictment of the sexual revolution, The Ice Storm (1997). His masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility, can make a fair bid to have been the best movie of the 1990s. Why should Emma Thompson get all the credit – sure she produced what is probably the best film script adaptation of a novel ever, but Ang Lee directed the darn thing.

Though the choice of an “arty” director to produce a Hulk movie seemed daring and risky at the time, and was thus interpreted in hindsight as a huge blunder, I don’t think that was the problem. Lee’s movies may have been “arty,” but not in an obscure way. They’re completely accessible to non-specialist viewers. Lee was always concerned to connect with a broad audience. And his gift for communicating the emotional lives of his characters should have served him very well in making a movie whose central plot device hinges on the emotional state of the main character. Moreover, with Crouching Tiger, Lee had already demonstrated a mastery of the art of fantastic narrative.

Alas, during the same period as his triumphs, he also produced Ride with the Devil (1999). It was dismissed at the time as a mere one-time stumble for an otherwise successful director, but perhaps it may now appear as a harbinger of trouble to come.

Lee’s downfall with the Hulk, I think, was his decision to experiment. His previous movies, though arty, were by and large not experimental. Yes, people flew in Crouching Tiger, but that was nothing new; Lee was building on a long tradition of visually fantastic martial arts movies. Lee and his team certainly advanced the technology of these movies in important ways – nobody had ever run up a wall quite that convincingly before – but they were building on an established genre of visual presentation.

But his critical and commercial success, combined with the big franchise he was handed, appears to have prompted the onset of hubris. Lee notriously decided that the visual presentation of his Hulk movie would be comic-style; that is, multiple views of the action would appear on the screen simultaneously, in rectangles vaguely reminiscent of comic book panels. This might have worked, if Lee had done it right; the TV show “24” has done great things with split-screen presentation – and without the benefit of the big movie-theater screen. But Lee was so busy with his panels that he forgot to use them for anything worth having them for. We got multiple views of things that didn’t reward multiple views – Dr. Banner fiddling with the switches on his big fancy science machines does not get any more interesting when you see it from different angles. And I think this fascination with form to the exclusion of content was the major reason the movie failed (though the weak script and other problems didn’t help).

“Just sit still, Mr. Norton, and this machine will painlessly remove your desire to appear in a Hulk movie.”

After his demolition at the hands of critics and audiences alike, Lee abandoned the mainstream and ran screaming back to the arthouse from whence he had come, producing (in 2005) a movie about gay cowboys – thus ensuring his restoration to the good graces of the Hollywood illuminati, and giving new life to a priceless gag about the obscurity of arthouse films from a 1998 episode of South Park.

“These are independent films.”

“You mean like ‘Independence Day’?”

“Naw dude, ‘independent films’ are those black and white hippie movies. They’re always about gay cowboys eating pudding.”

Now Marvel is trying again, and this time it’s not letting anyone else spoil the Hulk – this time Marvel is going to spoil the Hulk for itself. (If you want something done right . . .) Though it’s being distributed by Universal, the movie was produced entirely by Marvel’s new movie production unit Marvel Studios. Iron Man was the unit’s first major film project, and obviously it’s off to a great start both artistically and commercially. So naturally they decided their second project needed to be abysmally bad, to balance the cosmic scales.

No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen the trailer, and that’s more than enough. Edward Norton certainly looks like he does a good enough job in the role. But take a look at the new “Hulk”:

I mean, there’s a lot more to a good summer movie than special effects – but if the special effects look lousy, then the whole time we’re sitting there watching, we’re going to be constantly thinking about the fact that we’re watching a special effects movie with lousy special effects. In other words, no amount of great story, witty dialogue, etc. is going to overcome the fact that people will be sitting there looking at the Hulk and thinking, “Man, that thing looks so much like a clay figurine, I keep expecting Pokey to wander onto the screen.”

And for the big finale, the claymation Hulk battles – another claymation Hulk! It’s better than having him fight a magic tornado, or whatever that was at the end of Lee’s movie. But still. Did you notice that the only weak part of the Iron Man movie is where the good Iron Man fights the bad Iron Man? What’s up at Marvel Studios – did they play too many games of Mortal Kombat and decide that every movie must end in a Mirror Match? (Come to think of it, the new Hulk doesn’t just look like Gumby on steroids; with that disproportionately tiny head, he looks like Gumby and Goro’s love child.)

“Get me outta this friggin’ movie!”

So what is it about the Hulk? Is he unfilmable? Cursed? Maybe it’s a problem, not an advantage, that his superpower is so bound up with psychology. In comics, it’s remarkably easy to shift the tone of the story; that’s one of the inherent advantages of the medium. So you can have a big fight scene immediately followed (or, more likely in the case of the Hulk, immediately preceded) by an intimate emotional scene. On screen, though, it’s harder to shift tone at such a rapid pace. The sound and the fury of the big fight scenes drown out everything around them. That may also explain why the TV Hulk wasn’t an embarrassment – TV can switch moods better than film (although still not as well as comics), and in those low-tech days there were fewer highly intense “effect” scenes and the ones they did have were less intense. For that matter, the Hulk himself wasn’t an “effect,” and that alone may have been the key.

Tune in next Friday for another look back at a talented filmmaker ruined by success: M. Night Shyamalan.

4 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Leaving No Interest Group Behind

June 6, 2008

(Guest post by Dan Lips)

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed its first major K-12 education initiative for the 110th Congress: “21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act,” (H.R. 3021) —  legislation authorizing a new $6.4 billion federal program for school construction and modernization. 

This is a great proposal…if you think that the biggest problem in American education is that public schools aren’t environmentally friendly enough. For anyone who thinks that federal power in education should be limited, or that states and localities are better positioned to decide how to allocate resources to improve school facilities, it earns an F. 

I have an op-ed on National Review Online today discussing the bill’s problems. In short, the bill is a regulatory gift bag to environmental groups and labor unions. 

The bill is unlikely to move in the Senate.  And if it passed, President Bush would probably veto it.  So Americans shouldn’t expect to see federally-mandated “green” public schools anytime soon.  But the House vote serves as a preview of where federal education policy could be headed. 

Leave a Comment » | politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by danlips

More Special Ed

June 5, 2008

My earlier post on Response to Intervention and special education has prompted discussions on Joanne Jacobs’ site and at Flypaper.  I’m struck by how frequently discussions of special education contain claims that are completely at odds with the evidence, but that people seem to prefer repeating. 

This is the central theme of the Education Myths book and there is a chapter in the book that specifically addresses special education.  Despite current and past efforts to dispel some common false claims (myths) about special ed, they just keep going.  As NYC Educator wrote in a comment, “Greene can argue all he likes, but…” [I’ll just go ahead and repeat the claim that he just debunked.]   You can have your facts, say the myth-makers, but I know what’s really true.

Sigh.

Just to briefly review the unsubstantiated and false claims that have come up in this current discussion:

1) Parents are the driving force behind over-identification of disabilities.  (Not true. If parents were the driving force, why are special education enrollments so sensitive to financial incentives facing schools?)

2) External developments, such as improving medical care for premies, deinstitutionalization, and socio-economic forces, account for a large part of rising special ed costs.  (Not true.  The number of premies and deinstitutionalized students pales in comparison to the growth in special ed, which has almost entirely occurred in SLD.  And mental retardation has been declining and total severe disabilities have remained flat over time, contrary to what one would expect if premies and deinstitutionalization were at work.  And poverty cannot, by definition, be the cause of a disability.)

3) Special education students are typically found in self-contained classes with tiny class sizes and high costs. (Not true.  Most disabled students, especially those with SLD, spend a majority of their day in regular classrooms.  Services for most disabled students consist of some accommodations in their regular classroom or a little pull-out, small group instruction.  These services are not dramatically different in character or cost than what is provided to lagging students who are not classified as disabled.)

I’ve attempted to respond to each false claim where it was posted and these topics were previously covered in Education Myths, so I won’t repeat the complete refutations here.  Instead, I’d like to speculate about why people are repeatedly drawn to myths about special education.  Even normally smart and sensible people, including some very good ed reformers, are confident about claims that they cannot empirically support and that most evidence contradicts.  Why?

First, many ed policy wonks live in the DC area and their perceptions of special ed are distorted by the highly exceptional practices in the District.  For example, many people think that private placement, the education of disabled students in private schools at public expense, is a common and financially burdensome arrangement.  In fact, there are only 88,156 such students in the entire country out of almost 50 million students in public schools.  But in DC private placement is almost 17 times more likely than in the rest of the country.  DC is just different (for a variety of reasons) but people feel comfortable generalizing from their immediate experience.

Second, many ed policy wonks run in relatively elite circles.  They know or have heard of savvy parents who have extracted unreasonable services from the public schools.  But as I mentioned above, the evidence contradicts the claim that special ed placements are driven primarily by parents.  Most people aren’t like the ones who went to your selective college, live in your comfortable neighborhood, or who blog about education policy.

Third, school leaders and educators have a vested interest in complaining about the financial burdens of special education or the unreasonable demands of parents.  But newspapers treat their claims as if they were those of disinterested experts.  If the local superintendent says that special education costs are threatening what can be provided in general education or that parents are to blame for a rise in special ed enrollments, it must be so.

Fourth, the hard reality is that most people are primarily interested in their own children.  If they are led to believe that special education is going to drain resources from their non-disabled kids, they want to stop that.  Since this is what they hear from school leaders and the news, they learn to resent special education.  No one repeats that extra money for Title I kids drains money from their children (which is as true as for special ed), so they don’t resist programs for poor and minority students to the same degree.

Fifth, there is a false image in some people’s heads that disabled kids are basically basket cases and that money spent on them is money wasted.  We even see this, to some degree, in school spending analyses by people like Richard Rothstein, who argue that special ed costs should be excluded when examining increases in expenditures over time and the relationship to student achievement.  It’s as if they assume that that money is poured into a black hole and couldn’t possibly improve student outcomes.  Crusty, conservative reformers are also drawn to this black hole view.  Don’t waste the money on losers, they think but don’t quite say.  Survival of the fittest!

Of course, these explanations for the extra prevalence of myths about special education are just speculation.  I don’t have evidence to prove them.  But I do have evidence debunking a number of false claims that are regularly made about special education.  It would be a shame if smart people ignore the systematic evidence and repeat myths because they trust their direct experience and prior prejudices more than facts.  This is why we have systematic evidence — to check the errors that regularly occur from following one’s gut.

13 Comments | special ed | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Standardized Testing Jumps the Shark in AZ

June 4, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In an attempt to keep viewers tuning-in after many years on the air, the sitcom Happy Days produced an episode where Fonzie jumped a Great White shark on water-skis. This episode brought the phrase “Jumping the Shark” into the pop-culture lexicon. Jumping the Shark denotes a tipping point in which something becomes absurd and suffers a noticeable decline. Arizona once was a leader in the standards and accountability movement, but those days are long gone. Days ago, Arizona lawmakers dispensed with AIMS as a graduation requirement, making the sad decline of AIMS into farce complete.

The credibility of Arizona’s K-12 testing has suffered the death of a thousand cuts. In 2004, Arizona schools faced a problem in that No Child Left Behind requires schools to be judged by ethnic subgroups, and Hispanic scores were all but certain to force many schools to be ranked failing under federal guidelines.

Instead, the state simply made AIMS much, much easier to pass. Presto-chango, Arizona Hispanic students (and others) were transformed from having been projected to fail the federal standards in almost all subjects at all grade levels in 2005 to passing almost all of them. A study by Peterson and Hess noted that Arizona’s dummy-down was the largest in the country.

Where were you when we needed you Jaws?

Hop on over, the water’s fine!

Around that same time, the Arizona Department of Education recommended replacing the Stanford 9 exam with an Arizona version of the Terra Nova to imbed into AIMS. Happily, the new “Terra Zona” exam found that Arizona students are above the national average in every grade and in every subject tested.

One small problem: the results aren’t the least bit credible. The Arizona Department of Education recently mailed out the latest state report card, and the evidence of the farcical nature of this home-grown exam can be found in ADE’s own booklet.

On the one hand, the ADE touts the above average Terra Nova scores, but in the same booklet, it presents an analysis from the RAND Corporation showing that if you control for student demographics, Arizona’s scores on the Nation’s Report Card are average instead of rock bottom. The Nation’s Report Card- or NAEP- represents the nation’s most highly respected source of K-12 testing data.

The RAND report is entirely credible. Arizona has a far more difficult to educate student body than the national average- with a much higher percentage of low-income students, English language learners and minority students than the national average.

Controlling for demographic factors is a huge step to take. For instance, Arizona has a percentage of children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch more than twice as large as the national average. Our ratio of children who are English Language Learners is almost four times the national average.

If you pretend that Arizona has an ELL population one fourth its actual size, and about half the number of low-income children that we actually have, and some similar heroic assumptions, Arizona’s adjusted scores near the Minnesota middle instead of close to the bottom.

Arizona’s Terra Nova, however, does not control for demographics at all but somehow finds our students above the national average in every single subject without any adjustment whatsoever. If you are willing to buy that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you in Brooklyn.

Finally, AIMS has suffered what ought to be its final indignity. The legislature passed “AIMS Augmentation” in order to allow 6,000 high school seniors to graduate despite an inability to pass what at most amounts to a test of basic skills.

If you can’t pass a 10th grade level test, the original thinking went, you don’t deserve to graduate. A diploma should mean something. After delaying the graduation requirement several times, the augmentation bill has effectively killed it.

State policymakers should rethink our entire system of testing. Research shows that children who fail to learn to read in the early grades later drop out in huge numbers. Using AIMS as a graduation requirement addresses the problem at the back end. Arizona should look to Florida, which uses testing to require students to repeat grades if they don’t learn to read in the early years. Florida’s 4th grade reading scores used to scrape the bottom with Arizona, but now they greatly exceed us. Florida’s system set kids up to succeed, rather than to fail.

Parents, teachers, administrators and policymakers all require a credible and transparent system of student data. The AIMS/Terra Nova exam is not delivering. ABC eventually cancelled Happy Days and replaced it with another program. Arizona policymakers should do the same with AIMS.

1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Teacher Glut

June 4, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Many of you will be familiar with Mike Antonucci, who is probably America’s last remaining full-time education labor reporter. On his website, he regularly compiles up-to-date Census data on enrollment, staffing, spending and teacher salaries for all school districts in each of the 50 states; he now has almost all the states done for 2005-06.

Lately he’s been commenting on how teacher hiring continues to far outpace enrollment growth; even states where enrollment is flat or shrinking are still hiring like crazy. Maryland, for example, expanded its teacher workforce 10 percent from 2001 to 2006, while enrollment grew less than 1 percent. California, which is still carrying around an extremely bloated teacher workforce from its apparently failed experiment in class size reduction, has just announced that it’s cancelling the large majority of its planned teacher layoffs.

This isn’t a new phenomenon; as somebody pointed out you-know-where, the teacher workforce has been expanding relative to the student population for decades.

What effects does this have? You might expect it to reduce class sizes. The benefits of class size reduction are seriously doubtful and can’t possibly be cost-effective anyway, but never mind that for now. The fact is, class sizes don’t seem to have been reduced. Data from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics indicate that while the system’s student/teacher ratio has been falling, class sizes have been flat, partly because each teacher teaches for fewer hours per day; there are also probably more teachers with non-teaching assignments (as mentor teachers, etc.) but I don’t know if we have data for that.

One effect the teacher glut is almost certainly to exert negative pressure on teacher salaries. Now, despite what you’ve been told, teachers are not underpaid. (See also the chapter on this in . . . well, you know.) But teacher salaries have remained stable, growing only a little faster than inflation. If we didn’t have a teacher glut, the laws of economics tell us salaries would be growing faster.

So who benefits? Well, the teachers’ unions make out like bandits. More teachers means bigger budgets without the hassle of selling the membership on dues hikes, and more political clout because the public school gravy train is larger. And while the unions’ political clout is badly overestimated – witness, for example, the startling political success of school choice – they do have enough power to exercise significant influence when no one else is looking, such as where staffing policies are concerned.

All of which reminds me of a story Antonucci covered recently (see Item 5 here) about a complaint filed with the IRS by the Ohio teachers’ union against White Hat Management, a charter school operator. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported: “Susan Taylor, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, said White Hat, which is supposedly hired by the schools’ boards, exercises too much control over the schools, boards, and finances, violating IRS rules, she said.”

The teacher’s union files an IRS complaint because a tax-exempt organization has too much influence over education policy. So when does the union disband?

7 Comments | class size myth, teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Make Every Day Count

June 3, 2008

In Arkansas, as in many states, standardized tests are given well before the end of the school year.  This year the augmented benchmarks for grades 3 through 8 were administered April 13-17 and the “end of course exams” for geometry, algebra, and biology were given April 21-29.  Apparently the end of the course occurs 6 weeks before school breaks for the summer.

After the tests are done academic work grinds to a halt.  Instead, academic content is increasingly replaced with field days, watching movies in school, parties, etc… as the end of the year approaches.

Don’t get me wrong, field days, watching movies, parties, etc… all have their place in a healthy school environment.  It’s just odd that some educators who so often complain that testing narrows the curriculum and prevents them from pursuing the higher order instruction they really want seem at a loss about what to do when they no longer have the test bearing down on them.  One would think that they would use those last 6 to 8 weeks to find their inner Alfie Kohn.  Instead, a lot of it is used as play time.

Given how important time spent on instruction is to academic achievement, it would be great if we made full use of the academic year.  Perhaps we can push back the tests closer to the real end of the school year.  I know that grading tests, especially with open-ended items, is very slow.  But frankly open-ended items add nothing to the predictive power of standardized tests, so eliminating that would allow faster grading, later testing, and fewer wasted days.

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

Responding to Response to Intervention

June 2, 2008

(Editorial Note — See also follow-up post here)

Like many well-meaning instructional reforms, Response to Intervention (RTI) is likely to fail if it is not coupled with other reforms that address the perverse incentives blocking its proper implementation.

The idea behind RTI is that we could avoid placing many students in special education if only we provided them with well-designed instructional approaches in the early grades.  The huge increase in special education enrollments consists almost entirely of growth in Specific Learning Disability (SLD), which is an ambiguous category that is difficult for practitioners to diagnose properly.  Almost any student with a normal range IQ but sub-par achievement could be labeled as SLD.  But of course, students may lag in their achievement because they have been poorly taught, not because they have a problem processing information, as is characteristic of a true SLD.  Schools have a variety of incentives to discount the former explanation and instead push students into special ed.

RTI is a federally-backed program that attempts to address this problem by allowing schools to divert 15% of their special education money into well-designed instructional programs for the early grades.  If students are taught well, they won’t be lagging academically and so will not end up being identified as disabled.

This all sounds great, but it is almost certainly doomed to failure if we do not also address why schools were not previously providing well-designed instruction in early grades or why they are so motivated to identify students as disabled.  Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades.  Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.  Even if we thought that the problem was that schools were unaware of the effective approaches that RTI offers, we have no reason to believe that schools will truly adopt or effectively implement those strategies. 

It is a a seductive but entirely mistaken reform approach to believe that schools are eagerly awaiting to be told by the federal government or philanthropists how to teach effectively but are just lacking the critical resources and knowledge to do it.  Schools already hire certified professionals who have been exposed to countless hours of pre-service and in-service training.  Why would we think that the only reason that they are failing to employ an effective technique is because they are unaware of it?  And with school budgets increasing every year, why would we think that the next bit of money is the one that they finally need to pursue effective strategies?

Instead, we have to recognize that educators have reasons for doing what they are doing.  They generally believe that the techniques they’ve adopted are effective, even if they aren’t.  Getting them to switch to something else takes more than just offering it to them.  This is especially the case when they’ve seen untold failed instructional fads come their way.  They’ve learned to tuck their heads down and do what they think works based on their own limited experience and inertia. 

RTI does nothing to address these barriers to instructional reform.  In addition, it does nothing to address the incentives that schools have to place students in special education.  In most states schools receive additional funding when a student is identified as disabled.  If a student is lagging academically and the school would have to devote some resources to helping that student catch-up, the school could either choose to say “my bad” and pay for those extra resources out of their existing budget, or they could say that the student is disabled and get additional money to help that student catch-up.  Of course, they have strong financial incentives to choose the latter explanation.  Research that I’ve done with Greg Forster and that Julie Cullen at UC San Diego has done, confirms that these positive financial incentives play a large role in the growth of special education.  That is, special education is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for increasing their special ed enrollment.

I know that many people claim that special education is a horrible financial burden on schools because it costs far more than the subsidies they receive.  But people who say this are either simply advocating for more subsidies or don’t properly understand what a “cost” is.  A cost is an expenditure that one would not otherwise make.  Simply showing that more is spent on special education students than subsidies received does not prove that the subsidy is less than the cost of identifying a student as disabled.  More is spent on students lagging academically whether they are identified as disabled or not. 

The positive financial incentive for identifying students as disabled exists when the subsidy is greater than the expenditure required by the special ed label beyond what would have been spent on that student anyway.  Because proper accounting is almost entirely absent in education, it is difficult to measure these additional costs directly.  But from the research showing the response to financial incentives, we know that there is often a financial reward for putting students in special education.

I don’t mean to suggest that educators are cynically gaming the school finance system or are even aware of its details.  My point is that the systems that school districts have adopted for the evaluation and identification of disabilities are shaped by these financial incentives so that even well-meaning practitioners will tend to over-identify disabilities when there are financial rewards for doing so.

Of course, RTI does nothing to address these financial incentives for increasing special ed enrollments.  In fact, it may contribute to those perverse incentives because schools are rewarded even more by placing more students in special education because they now get to divert 15% of that money for general education, which is essentially fungible.  And to make matters worse, diverting 15% of special education money away from disabled students may short-change truly disabled students who need those resources.

I’m sure that the people backing RTI are completely sincere in their confidence that we could prevent disabilities (and save money) if only we had proper instruction.  But wishing does not make that happen.  Reformers need to stay focused on combining promising instructional reforms with fixing the perverse incentive systems that undermine those instructional approaches. 

The incentive reforms should include changing the process by which we provide financial subsidies so that there are not strong rewards for over-identification of disabilities.  One way to do that is to provide vouchers for students with disabilities equal to the full value of what is spent on them in public schools.  That way schools would have to think twice before identifying a student as disabled.  Sure, they’ll get extra resources if they put a kid in special ed, but they also risk having that student walk out the door with all of his or her resources.  It places a check on perverse financial incentives. 

RTI with special ed vouchers could be a winning combination.  RTI by itself is just increasing federal subsidies for the status quo.

28 Comments | instructional reform, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Grad Rates Higher in Milwaukee Voucher Program

May 31, 2008

In case anyone missed the release of this study this week, Rob Warren of the University of Minnesota has a new study comparing high school graduation rates in Milwaukee’s voucher program and public schools.  The bottom line is that students graduate at much higher rates in the voucher program. 

Warren is careful to emphasize that he cannot draw causal inferences from this work.  That is, the voucher students graduate at higher rates than public students, but he can’t say whether the voucher program caused their higher graduation rate.  That kind of conclusion can only be drawn from a study that compares apples to apples.  With Pat Wolf I am involved in an evaluation that will be able to produce a graduation rate comparison of matched samples of voucher and public students, but results are still a few years down the road.

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

Get Lost 5

May 30, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

The season finale did not disappoint.  I’ll sing its praises but first let me vent a complaint.

Jack’s decision to get the Oceanic six to lie about the island makes no sense.  He justifies the decision by citing the strength of the conspiracy to create a false Oceanic crash site in which they are all supposed to be dead.  But the first law of conspiracies is that you cease to be a threat once you tell as many people as possible as much as you know.  If you’ve already spilled all of the beans, then the conspiracy gains nothing by killing you.  Anyone trapped in a John Grisham novel would do well to keep this law in mind. 

I hope they provide additional justification for this decision, but keeping the secrets of the island does nothing to protect them or the people on the island.  Bad guys can and still do target them.  And because they don’t know where the island is, keeping secrets is not needed to protect the people left there.

Now on to the good stuff.  We now have some sense of why Jack wants to go back to the island — Locke has told him that his friends there are in trouble.  And now that Locke is dead he feels responsible, both for Locke’s death (in all likelihood) and for those remaining on the island. 

We also know why Kate does not want to go back.  She’s having dreams of Claire warning her not to bring Aaron back.  This is consistent with my earlier expressed theory that Aaron is supposed to be the next leader and there is a struggle about whether he should assume that role or not.

The struggle over whether they should return or not will likely be a main plot for next season.  One other interesting angle on Ben’s declaration that they all need to return is that he may use that to find Desmond and then Penny so that he can take his revenge on Charles Widmore by killing his daughter.  (hat tip to Greg for this observation) 

The discovery that Charlotte was previously on the island and may have even been born there seems quite important, especially given the fact that pregnant women seem to die before they can give birth. 

I’m assuming that Michael is dead and probably so is Jin (although he could have somehow been blown from the deck).  Having Christian Shepherd appear to Michael telling him that he could go was meant, I think,  to say that his purpose for the island was now done and he could die.

That vision strengthens the show’s reliance on mysticism, but the show also took steps to stay within the framework of sci-fi by revealing the negatively charged exotic material that moves the island (as well as bunnies).  It’s like dilithium crystals on Star Trek.  We don’t know how they work, but there is some physical substance that could account for a large chunk of the magic.

Now that the show is on hiatus for a few months, we’ll have to find some other distraction for Friday afternoons, but that shouldn’t be hard.  We are chock-full of distractions.

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »