Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA’s Perspective carries my article on the school choice information problem:

“I support school choice,” some education policymakers say, “but we need to make sure parents choose good schools!” In order for parents to choose good schools, of course, they need good information. Not information from government bureaucracies—which have a long track record of measuring the wrong things and deceiving parents—but from emerging resources such as Great Schools, Global Report Card, School Grades, and more. Better information, not tighter regulation, is the best way to let parents improve school quality.

I note a remarkable reversal – the blob used to heap contempt on parents but is now rushing to position itself as allies of beleagured parents against reforms run amok; reformers, meanwhile, who used to champion parents have suddenly begun heaping contempt on parents’ capacities to make good choices for their own children:

There are several reasons for these changes. One is the collapse of the school monopoly’s credibility…

A more important reason is the greatly increased political success and attractiveness of school choice itself…This has brought school choice new allies—allies who aren’t yet completely comfortable with the idea…

It has also meant that the limitations of school choice in its current form are becoming more visible…

Parents need good information to make good choices, and the school choice movement is going to have to take an interest in pushing the existing information structures to the next level if it hopes to make more people comfortable with the idea of parents as the locus of school accountability.

As always, your thoughts and responses are welcome!

Yesterday, Harvard Education Press officially released The New Education Philanthropy, a volume edited by Rick Hess and Jeff Henig.  The book is a follow-up to one Rick edited a decade earlier, With the Best of Intentions.

Empirical analysis and constructive criticism of the role of foundations in education is hard to come by.  There are few professional rewards and significant risks in trying to analyze foundations and offer suggestions for improvement.  Foundations are accustomed to criticism, but much of it comes from people opposed to the idea that foundations should influence the education system, so foundations tend to classify all criticism as hostile and tune it out.  Folks not opposed to the mission of foundations tend to want funding from them and so tend to censor themselves when they might have analysis and criticism to offer.  In addition, foundations generally limit channels of communication from their friends for fear of being unduly lobbied by them for funding.

The ironic result is that foundations seeking to improve learning have virtually no mechanisms for learning about themselves and making their own improvements.  They generally don’t want to know.  They don’t want to hear the rantings of those who hate them and they don’t want to be influenced by the flattery and manipulations of those who love them.  But there is a third type of person that they have difficulty recognizing — someone who wants to help them by offering independent analysis and criticism.

This is why books like The New Education Philanthropy and With the Best of Intentions only come along every decade or so.  Few foundations will provide any support for independent empirical and critical examination of their efforts and few scholars are willing to engage in this type of work.  Even if someone else pays, few foundations are willing to engage in conferences, panel discussions, and written exchanges about their own efforts.  They tend to be as defensive and insular as presidential campaigns and are often operated as if that is what they are rather than learning organizations.

This is why books like The New Education Philanthropy and With the Best of Intentions are so important.  There is much that education philanthropies and others could learn from these volumes.  My chapter in the first book, “Buckets into the Sea,” examined the extent of philanthropic activity in education relative to public funding.  I found that all private giving to public K-12 schools, from the bake sale to the Gates Foundation, amounted to less than one-third of 1% of annual spending.  It’s basically rounding error.  A billion dollars feels like a lot of money to you, me, and the folks at foundations, but to a public school system spending over $600 billion annually it is not nearly enough to get them to do things that they don’t already want to do nor enough to purchase things that they can’t already buy.

So, foundations lack the resources to purchase education reform through the sheer force of their money.  In the chapter I wrote a decade ago, I suggested that if foundations wanted to change the education system they would have to engage in policy change to re-direct how the much larger pool of public resources is spent.

Around the same time that my chapter was published in With the Best of Intentions, many large foundations started to change their strategy to focus on policy advocacy.  Unfortunately, just as foundations failed to grasp the limitations of their fiscal resources, they also failed to understand how limited their political resources are as well.  This prompted my new chapter, “Buckets into Another Sea,” in The New Education Philanthropy.

Foundations have enough money to dominate the conversation of a few hundred people engaged in policy research and advocacy, but they don’t have enough resources to achieve enduring policy change without backing policies that generate their own constituency.

If expanding school choice creates tens of thousands of beneficiaries who are willing to rally on the steps of the capitol, they can create self-sustaining policy change.  But if foundations back policies that generate few natural constituents, then those policies are difficult to get adopted and even harder to keep over time.  There are no rallies for using test scores to evaluate teachers.  There are no rallies for common standards, assessments, and the “instructional shifts” they require.  Whatever the merit of these policies, foundations lack the political resources to achieve them without genuine constituents who will fight for them independent of foundation funding.

Check out The New Education Philanthropy and With the Best of Intentions to see what other insights folks have to offer.  We may not be right, but an honest and open discussion about effective strategies for foundations is sorely needed.

Anna Egalite, Jonathan Mills, and I have a new study in the journal, Improving Schools, in which we administer multiple measures of “non-cognitive” skills to the same sample of students to see if we get consistent results.  We didn’t.

How students performed on a self-reported grit scale was uncorrelated with behavioral measures of character skills, like delayed gratification, time devoted to solving a challenging task, and item non-response.  These are all meant to capture related (although not identical) concepts, so they should correlate with each other.  The fact that they don’t suggests that we still have a lot of work to do to refine our understanding of character skills and how best to measure them.

Angela Duckworth, who developed the self-reported grit scale, and David Scott Yeager, who is a pioneer in measuring growth-mindset, have been trying to warn the field that these measures are still in their infancy.  They have an article in Educational Researcher and have been giving interviews emphasizing that while non-cog skills appear to be a very important part of later life success, our methods of measuring these concepts are still not very strong — certainly not strong enough to include in school accountability systems.

Our research showing the lack of relationship between behavioral and self-reported measures of character skills adds to the case for caution in using these measures for evaluation or accountability purposes.  Remember, it took decades of research and practice to develop reliable standardized tests.  A similar effort and patience will be required to develop reliable measures of character skills.  And I suspect that even improved measures may be useful for research purposes but never robust enough to use for accountability.

Ed reformers can be dangerous if they are too much in a hurry.  We unfortunately want to apply every new insight right away and lack patience for the careful development of policies and practices for long-term benefit.  We also invest few resources in basic research that is essential for long-term gains.  According to my analysis in a chapter in a new book edited by Rick Hess and Jeff Henig on education philanthropy, the largest education foundations only devote 6% of their funding toward research.  And most of that research may really be short-term policy advocacy masquerading as research.  The federal government is little better at making funds available for basic research.

Non-cog or character skills are incredibly important but if we are going to use these and other ideas to improve education, we are going to need a significant shift toward funding research and greater patience to bring those ideas to fruition.

Yesterday AEI hosted an event at which I presented a new paper by Cari A. Bogulski and me examining the relationship between the type of school people attended when they were children and their attitudes toward Jews as adults.  We find that the more people attended religious private schools as children, the less anti-Semitic they are.  Secular private schools resemble public schools in the average level of anti-Semitism among their former students.

Of course, we were not able to randomly assign people to different types of school, so we cannot be confident that this relationship is causal.  But the relationship holds true after controlling for a variety of background characteristics.  It is still possible that adults who attended religious schools have more favorable attitudes toward Jews because of unobserved advantages but this seems unlikely given that the generally more advantaged families who send children to non-religious private schools do not appear to yield lower anti-Semitism.  And we do not typically think of families who choose to send their children to mostly Christian religious schools as doing so because of a particular affinity toward Jews .

Why might religious schooling be associated with lower anti-Semitism?  Prior research has found a general link between private education and higher tolerance, so this may just be consistent with that.  But the fact that the effect is restricted to religious schools is somewhat unexpected.  Perhaps religious institutions that operate schools, most of which are Christian, have adopted a much more favorable orientation toward Jews than is widely appreciated.

Many Jewish organizations have been slow to recognize that historically hostile groups may now be allies (and some traditional allies may be turning more hostile). Perhaps these findings may motivate several Jewish organizations to reconsider their opposition to private school choice programs.

For more details be sure to read the paper and watch the video above.