Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA’s Perspective carries my response to folks in Oklahoma who have tried to peel off small-government types (thick on the ground in that state) from the school choice coalition by arguing that choice expands the state:

Now, it is true that ESAs are an “entitlement” in the way that term is normally used in the context of public policy. Like Social Security and food stamps, they create a benefit to which all people in the relevant class (retirees for Social Security, the poor for food stamps, parents for school choice) are entitled under the law.

The key difference is that Social Security, food stamps, and other typical entitlement programs represent the expansion of government into a leading role in areas previously dominated by private savings, employer-paid pensions, church and community organizations, and other non-governmental solutions…

School choice, by contrast, reverses the endless expansion of government by moving us away from a government monopoly…Compared to the government school monopoly, school choice liberates individual initiative, economic interdependence, and spiritual community. It allows parents to take control of their children’s education, becoming stewards over their own lives, instead of treating them like perpetual wards of government—as if they were cattle in the government’s pen. It supports educational entrepreneurs who create new school systems designed to serve the customer base created by school choice. And it allows schools to have a holistic vision of what it means to be an educated person—one that doesn’t yank the leash and stick a gag in teachers’ mouths when students ask big spiritual questions about the meaning and purpose of human life.

Oh, and it also contains this moment:

The email exchange was later made public by subpoena, to Hofmeister’s embarrassment. (Why anyone involved in government uses email or texting is beyond me.)

Come for the well-deserved embarrassment of a politician caught in shenanigans, stay for the political philosophy of the modern state!

I’ve written several times before about the disconnect between changing test scores and changing life outcomes.  In general, even when we can rigorously identify changes in math and reading test results caused by schools or programs, we have weak and inconsistent evidence that this produces commensurate changes in later life outcomes.  Keeping in mind that test-based accountability mostly focuses on the level of test scores, not changes, and virtually never relies upon a rigorous identification of how test scores are caused by schools and programs, we have no way of knowing that that the kinds of schools, programs, and practices that we are pushing in education will actually help kids later in life.  We might actually be hurting them and are certainly foreclosing potential opportunities based on our false confidence that we (policymakers, researchers, and pundits) are better at judging quality than are families.

Rather than contemplate the implications of our ignorance, people in our field are inclined to press ahead.  Yes, our measures are imperfect, they’ll admit, but we have to do the best we can with what we have.  Or they will say we just have to try harder to develop better measures of knowledge acquisition or expand our measures to include non-cognitive skills that provide a more complete picture of the recipe for success.

But what if there is simply no recipe for success?  Or more precisely, what if the recipe for success is highly context-dependent so that distant policymakers, researchers, and pundits are unable to prescribe what programs and schools should be cooking?  Maybe only parents, communities, and local educators are well-enough positioned to make reasonable (if imperfect) judgments about what each child needs.

If you were holding out hope that the expansion of educational measures to include non-cognitive skills would give policymakers, researchers, and pundits a stronger ability to prescribe how and where students should be educated, I have some bad news for you.  The disconnect between educational measures and later life outcomes is at least as severe in non-cognitive measures as it is in test scores.  Let’s leave aside the fact that most non-cognitive measures are too easily gameable to be used for any accountability purposes.  Even if only for research purposes, there does not appear to be a straightforward and consistent connection between non-cognitive measures and later life outcomes.

A new study led by Nicholas W. Papageorge at Johns Hopkins University and IZA examines the connection in Great Britain between teacher reports about behavior when students are 11 and later life outcomes for those students.  Because non-cognitive measures are in their infancy, we aren’t entirely sure how to slice and dice the measures and do not have a clear system for labeling the related concepts we are measuring.  In this study, if we simply lumped all of the teacher reports of misbehavior together we would find that students who misbehave more tend to do worse later in life.

But if we split misbehavior into two categories — one that captures misbehavior directed toward others (externalizing) and another that captures whether students are misbehaving because they are withdrawn (internalizing) — the picture gets more complicated.  Students who score poorly on measures of internalizing misbehavior still seem to fare poorly later in life.  But for students who score lower on the externalizing misbehavior, how they fare later depends on their social class.  If students are from more advantaged backgrounds, externalizing is actually associated with higher earnings, while for more disadvantaged students externalizing seems to have no effect on earnings.

This null to positive effect on earnings for a certain type of misbehavior occurs despite that fact that externalizing is associated with lower levels of educational attainment.  That is, students who misbehave toward others don’t go as far in school, but they earn more in the workplace if they come from more advantaged backgrounds despite that negative effect on educational attainment.

Yet gain, we see that what we think is “good” performance on a a near-term educational measure is highly dependent on context and is not connected to later outcomes in a straightforward way.  Policymakers, researchers, and pundits are inclined to say that scoring higher on a measure of behavior is better, but that is not necessarily the case.  It depends on the type of behavior and who the student is.

In addition, things we do to increase educational attainment may come at the expense of later earnings.  Increasing compliance with school authorities may help students go further in school, but may stifle the initiative and ambition necessary to make larger contributions to the economy later.  Policymakers, researchers, and pundits cannot simply identify a set of educational measures (test scores, non-cog measures, or educational attainment) and judge from afar which programs and schools are going to help students succeed later in life.  You can’t just maximize these measures and expect uniformly good results.

None of this should be surprising to parents engaged in the complicated task of raising their children.  We often want our children to possess certain qualities — but not too much of those qualities.  We want our children to be obedient, but not too obedient.  We want them to be ambitious, but not too ambitious.  We want them to value abstract knowledge, but not too much abstract knowledge.  We want them to value being in school, but not stay in school forever.  And we know that the approaches we take to produce these balanced outcomes vary for each child, even within our own family let alone across all families.

As it turns out, educating children is simply an extension of raising children to be the kinds of adults we hope they can be, requiring all of the same nuance, balance, and judgment.  Solutions imposed by distant policymakers, researchers, and pundits are no more likely to be effective in educating our children than they would be in raising them.  Yes, parents, communities, and local educators will make mistakes in raising children as well as educating them.  But they are better positioned to understand the context and achieve the appropriate balance for each child than are distant policymakers and experts, even if they are well-intentioned and highly knowledgeable.

The German movie, Er ist wieder da (available on Netflix as Look Who’s Back), is no ordinary political comedy.  On one level it’s quite disturbing and not a comedy at all, while at the some time it is a brilliant and hilarious satire.  The premise is that Hitler is somehow not dead and finds himself in modern Berlin.  He’s taken in by a desperate free-lance film-maker who introduces him to a set of conniving TV executives seeking ratings with what they think is a comedy act.  But he’s no comedian.  He’s really Hitler, adapting to our times and re-building political support.

There are many successful movies featuring Hitler, including The Producers, The Great Dictator, and (one of my all time favorites) Inglourious Basterds, but they generally portray Hitler as a buffoon.  In this film Hitler is occasionally buffoonish, but he is also a keen observer of people and politics.  He immediately detects that Germany’s current nationalist party, the NDP, would be an inadequate vehicle for his return to power.   He even storms their headquarters and denounces them as a pack of losers, which they obviously are.  Instead, he sees potential for the rise of authoritarianism in the Green Party.  That’s both astute and hilarious.

The film also mixes scripted scenes with improvised ones in which Hitler encounters real people on the streets of Germany.  He’s shown (for the most part) being warmly received, with people taking selfies and laughing.  Perhaps they also think he is a comedian and are going along with the joke.  But others give him Nazi salutes and describe their complaints about immigrants.  He listens as a very sympathetic and effective politician.

At one point a “man on the street” share his vision of democracy with Hitler.  He says that we need a democracy that is willing to put its foot down more: “That’s how we do it! Point, finished! No discussion!”  Hitler replies, “You’re absolutely right, and that is exactly my kind of democracy!”  Again, both astute and hilarious.

There are many ways a movie like this could go wrong and at times it does go off the rails, but not very often.  The film could become a heavy-handed parable about today’s nationalist politicians.  It avoids that by emphasizing how today’s nationalists lack the skill and energy that Hitler possessed.  At the same time, the film does not attribute to Hitler magical powers to hypnotize us into backing authoritarianism.  It shows us as either wanting authoritarianism or being too easily distracted by frivolous things to bother to stop it.  Hitler is just capable of exploiting that opportunity.

The film’s mixture of real and fictional, comedy and serious commentary, are disorienting.  At one point a TV executive warns what she thinks is comedian Hitler not to do jokes about Jews because they aren’t funny.  Hitler agrees that there is nothing funny about Jews.  That is simultaneously serious commentary and a hilarious joke.

Look Who’s Back at times feels like Borat but it is more like the brilliant 1976 Oscar-winning movie, Network.  It’s a satire that is often more serious than funny and more disturbingly accurately than most dramas.  If you haven’t seen Network you really should.  It’s as if the script writer, Paddy Chayefsky, had a time machine and could see how TV news would turn into its current manifestations of 24 Hour News channels and Twitter.  Let’s hope Look Who’s Back is not similarly prescient.