Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Choice Remarks carries my article on OU President David Boren’s proposal to solve our education problems by throwing money at them – and doing so totally indiscriminately. Here’s one part of the proposal:

Another $125 million would go to higher education to keep down tuition and fees.

Yeah . . . I’ll just leave that there.

[Guest Post by Jason Bedrick]

On the campaign trail in Iowa yesterday, Hillary Clinton said she “wouldn’t keep open any school that’s not doing a better than average job.”

Andrew J. Coulson responds: “Garrison Keillor, please call your office.”

[Guest Post by Jason Bedrick]

The historical role of anti-Catholic bigotry in fueling opposition to school choice is well known. Justice Clarence Thomas recounted it in Mitchell v. Helms (2000):

[H]ostility to aid to pervasively sectarian schools has a shameful pedigree that we do not hesitate to disavow. […] Opposition to aid to “sectarian” schools acquired prominence in the 1870’s with Congress’s consideration (and near passage) of the Blaine Amendment, which would have amended the Constitution to bar any aid to sectarian institutions. Consideration of the amendment arose at a time of pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general, and it was an open secret that “sectarian” was code for “Catholic.” […] Notwithstanding its history, of course, “sectarian” could, on its face, describe the school of any religious sect, but the Court eliminated this possibility of confusion when […] it coined the term “pervasively sectarian”–a term which, at that time, could be applied almost exclusively to Catholic parochial schools and which even today’s dissent exemplifies chiefly by reference to such schools. […]

In short, nothing in the Establishment Clause requires the exclusion of pervasively sectarian schools from otherwise permissible aid programs, and other doctrines of this Court bar it. This doctrine, born of bigotry, should be buried now.

Sadly, it is far from buried. Some opponents of greater parental choice in education still find religious bigotry to be a useful tool in pushing their agenda. Consider the following excerpt from this (factually challenged) letter to the editor from Charles Sumner, president of the Nashville chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

After the Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments was circulated in Virginia by Madison and Jefferson, our nation decided we would never again send tax money to religious groups.

When I asked the principal of a Nashville Muslim school, I was told they would accept vouchers. However, most mainline religious groups are not known for having schools.

What an interesting choice of religious affiliation to cite as an example. Perhaps Donald Trump suggested it? And how helpful of Mr. Sumner to note that Islam is not “mainline”! [wink wink, nudge nudge] Apparently neither are the Catholics, since “mainline” religious groups apparently send their kids to the government-run schools, like they’re supposed to.

Although we disagree over school choice, Americans United has admirably defended religious minorities like Muslims when they experience persecution. Do the higher ups at Americans United know that a chapter president is not-so-subtly exploiting anti-Muslim bigotry for political ends? And what do they intend to do about it?

I highly doubt that the Americans United executives are themselves bigoted, but it’s worth noting that their reasons for opposing school choice today closely resemble those of the anti-Catholic bigots a century ago. When Catholics asked for public funding of their schools just as the Protestants received for theirs (i.e., the supposedly “public” schools), the Protestant establishment responded that the Catholics certainly had the right to open their own schools, but that they shouldn’t expect public funding because their schools were “sectarian” whereas the public schools were open to everyone.

Of course, that was true only in theory. In practice, the public schools reflected the views of the, shall we say, mainline religious groups, so Catholics had to choose between sending their children to schools that taught beliefs contrary to their own or opening their own schools.

When what is taught is schools is decided through a political process, there will be winners and losers. Politics is a zero-sum game. At best, the majority will have their views reflected in the schools and minorities will not. At worst, a well-organized minority will impose its will over even the majority. But even in the best case scenario, minorities like Catholics, Muslims, Jedi, etc. lose out:

Let’s consider an imaginary “public” school district where there are three groups of people: Hobbits, Ewoks, and Terrans. Each groups has very different and passionately held views about what should be taught in school and how it should be taught. All three groups are required to pay taxes to support the district school, which is ostensibly nonpartisan, nondenominational, and open to all. However, the majority of the district is Terran so the school reflects the Terran preferences. When the Hobbits and Ewoks open their own schools and seek equal per-pupil support from the local government, the indignant Terrans respond that the district school is meant for everyone. “It’s your right to open your own schools,” explain the Terrans, “but it’s your responsibility to pay for them.” Thus the majority brazenly forces minority groups either to abandon their values or to pay for two school systems. And lower-income minorities may have no choice at all.

A system of school choice, by contrast, enables minority groups to enroll their children in schools that align with their values without placing upon them the burden of supporting two school systems.

At the very least, Americans United should repudiate Mr. Sumner’s comments and take appropriate disciplinary action. Better yet, they should rethink their approach to education in a pluralistic society.

I came across this video and am convinced that the world is a better place knowing that it exists.

This is not an odd-couple duet, like David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.  Dylan and Cash were actually mutual admirers and there is significant overlap in their musical styles.  So, I am not posting this for its ironic humor.  Instead, I think this is a particularly touching rendition of a beautiful song.  And for anyone who thinks Bob Dylan can’t sing, listen to him harmonize with Johnny Cash at the end.

It’s not a particularly polished performance.  But it sounds very different from Dylan’s solo version and has an air of authenticity around it.  Unlike the artificial feel of the Bowie and Crosby duet and most other TV variety show performances, this actually feels like two friends picking up the guitar and just playing a song together.  Enjoy.

(Guest Post by Ze’ev Wurman and Bill Evers)

In a recent piece on his web site Mike Petrilli, the president of the Fordham Institute, makes a rather strange case arguing that Common Core is alive (and well?). He quotes multiple blogs that argued the recent Massachusetts decision to abandon PARCC and replace it with MCAS 2.0 (Massachusetts’s own test) is a blow to Common Core and PARCC, but instead he argues that the replacement of PARCC by MCAS 2.0 “is no repudiation of PARCC.” His reasoning?

[T]here’s every reason to believe that MCAS 2.0 is going to look much the same as PARCC 1.0. This is akin to a state dropping the “Common Core” label but keeping nearly all of the standards. It’s essentially a rebranding exercise undertaken for political reasons.

Now, we don’t know whether Petrilli is right or wrong about MCAS 2.0, and we are quite willing to believe his sources are better than ours. So what Petrilli is actually saying is that PARCC has been saved in Massachusetts by its own elected officials deceiving their constituents and spending millions of extra dollars to create a fakely different MCAS 2.0. If he is right, this is in line with similar rebranding efforts elsewhere across the nation intended to confuse the parents and keep them in the dark. Yet even if true, one wonders why he brags about deceiving parents, and one wonders how Massachusetts will react to being deceived, given that a statewide ballot to repeal Common Core has just been submitted to the Secretary of State there.

Petrilli then goes on to “prove” that Common Core has been successful and hence is healthy. First, he argues that, with Common Core, standards are “dramatically improved” when compared to the prior state standards. Opinions vary on this point, yet what nobody disagrees with is that nationwide student achievement on the NAEP took a sharp dive across the board this year for the first time ever, precisely five years after Common Core’s “dramatically improved” standards were adopted by most states.

Petrilli continues and praises the “quality of the reading, writing, and math tests in use throughout the country” under Common Core, and their alignment “with college and career readiness,” arguing a “huge improvement” in what he calls the “honesty gap” between what test say and true college readiness. It seems Mr. Petrilli is unaware of the “honesty” of Common Core test results from California. For many years California assessed college readiness of high school students, and the results were slowly but steadily improving until last year. Suddenly, with the new Common Core “college-readiness” Smarter Balanced test, 20% more students this year are suddenly “college ready” in English and more than twice (110% more, to be precise) are “college ready” for math. If these clearly-fake results seems to suffer from Petrilli’s honesty gap, the number of conditionally college ready in English almost tripled(!) from less than 50 thousand to almost 140 thousand students overnight. Perhaps we should rename it Common Core’s “college readiness illusion” instead.

He goes on to acknowledge we have little evidence that Common Core improved instruction in the classroom, yet he argues that “we do know is that higher-quality curricular programs have been developed, and at least one—Eureka Math—is being widely used all across the country.” Actually, we do not know that higher quality programs are in effect, as the recent NAEP collapse indicates. Were truly higher-quality programs being used, we would expect the NAEP scores to rise rather than fall. Moreover, we would expect not to have hundreds of exemplars of math instructional idiocy propagated across the nation and on the Internet, all clearly labelled “Common Core Aligned.”

Finally, Petrilli turns to the comparability among states that Common Core supposedly allows. He somehow forgets to mention states like Washington, or Ohio, or Arkansas, which “re-defined” Proficiency on Common Core test results to suit their own needs rather than to aid comparability.

Based on all that, Petrilli declares that the Common Core standards “are still very much alive” and that cut-scores “are dramatically higher than ever.” We agree that Common Core is still – albeit barely – alive and that millions of students are going to be harmed before it is finally and completely dead. But we also observe that the federally-sponsored consortia are already almost dead and that their college-ready cut-scores are — how to put it politely? — fake.