PJM on Civics Ignorance

October 6, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over the weekend, Pajamas Media carried my column on the centruy-long failure of public schools to teach civics effectively:

On the other hand, just because the school system’s failure has been going on for a long time doesn’t mean it isn’t a failure. And school failure always has consequences.

Just think how much better American life might have been over the past century if we had been a nation of citizens who knew what citizens ought to know, rather than a nation whose schools failed so miserably and so consistently at their jobs. Would fewer people have succumbed to the siren song of isolationism in the 1930s, while Hitler and Stalin built their empires of mass murder and Mao took control of the Chinese revolutionaries? Would the triumph of the civil rights movement have come sooner and with less toil and bloodshed, and left behind fewer of the unresolved problems that still fester in our politics? Would there have been a clearer understanding of the nature of communism, meaning less denial and excuse-making for Soviet and Maoist atrocities, perhaps even leading to an earlier and more complete victory for freedom in the world? Who can say what horrors we might have avoided if our citizens had all along understood the intellectual and historical foundations of liberty?

Moreover, if the failure is so long-term, we can’t attribute it to transitory phenomena like 1960s radicalism. We have to expect it to be rooted in the basic structure of our educational institutions — whatever we’re doing wrong, it’s something we’ve been doing wrong for at least a century.

2 Comments | civic values, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Palin’s Palein’ on Education

October 3, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I didn’t bother watching the debate, but from the comments around the web it looks like my prediction that there would be nothing really worth watching was accurate.

Cruising through the commentary, though, I came across this from Mickey Kaus:

Palin sounded like she was campaigning in Iowa for the teachers’ union vote when she talked about education. We need to spend more money. Pay teachers more. States need more “flexibility” in No Child Left Behind (“flexibility” to ignore it). I didn’t hear an actual single conservative principle, or even neoliberal principle. Pathetic.

So much for all that talk about how the McCain staff was overcoaching her. It’s remarkable – yet few seem to be remarking upon it, which is also remarkable – that Barack Obama is more of an education reformer than Palin. (At least, on paper he is. In practice they’re probably both about the same, which you can take as a compliment to Obama or as a criticism of Palin according to preference.) At any rate, her approach to education is pretty hard to square with McCain’s.

The lack of attention to this rather glaring contradiction, even by Palin detractors (and McCain/Palin detractors) who presumably have a motive to pay attention to it, shows just how irrelevant education has become as a national issue, at least for this cycle. Remember how big education was in 2000?

Good thing real reforms like school choice are winning big at the state level. The movement was wise not to bother showing up in DC for the big NCLB hulaballoo eight years ago. Now they’re not tied to NCLB or in general to the fortunes of education as a federal issue. I’ve heard some conservatives bash NCLB because it lacks serious choice components. But NCLB was never about choice. It seems clear that the choice components in Bush’s original proposal were only there to be given away as bargaining chips. The important question is, where would the school choice movement be now if it had tied itself to NCLB?

1 Comment | money myth, NCLB, politics, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Just a Mint? One Mint?

October 1, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Great news! Our schools are saved.

Billionaire Eli Broad is spending $44 million to start up a new Harvard center to figure out what’s wrong with public schools.

That’s right; the first $500 billion a year we spend on K-12 education didn’t do the job, but spending another $44 million (not per year but only once) will put us over the top.

Just like that after-dinner mint in the Monty Python sketch, I guess.

Larry Summers will head the center’s board. The Wall Street Journal reports that Summers was asked whether opening the new center was a rebuke to all the other education research centers which have been doing exactly the same thing for decades and have produced no tangible improvements in education to show for it.

Summers replied: “It’s not a rebuke to any individual.”

With respect to the fine people who work at these cushy “education laboratories,” the real education laboratories are the private and charter schools taking advantage of school choice programs to experiment with new approaches to education.

Milton Friedman always used to comment that education is the only thing we still do the same way we did it 100 years ago. Innovation in education has been stifled not because we lack comfortably endowed research centers but because education is controlled by a government monopoly. He would go on to comment that the real innovation in education won’t come until school choice programs are expanded to include all students – because only with universal choice will you get a more robust market that will produce bigger innovations. And once free-market schools begin discovering better educational techniques, others can copy them. Doctors improve care by copying other doctors who devise new and better treatments – and it’s not the doctors who work for the free, government-issue providers who devise new and better treatments, but the doctors who serve the middle and upper classes and have the opportunity to make more money if they provide better treatment.

The best thing we can do for the education of the poor, Milton would conclude, is to extend school choice to the middle class. Schools for the poor can’t improve service until the education sector as a whole figures out how to improve service, and that isn’t going to happen without a universal market.

4 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Speaking of Standards for Debate . . .

September 30, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Since I’m on the subject of the lack of decent standards for public debate in America (see below), could supporters of the bailout please observe a moritorium on the following practices?

1. Attributing to opponents of the bailout, without citation, the position that a general economic crash or depression would be “no big deal,” or not as bad as the bailout. As far as I can see, the most common argument against the bailout seems to be that no general economic crash will occur. You may disagree; you may even have difficulty taking that position seriously. But to say that they’re cool with destroying the American economy is really a pretty obvious straw man. (Except, of course, in those rare cases where you actually do catch somebody saying that a depression would be no big deal, as here. But attributing that view to opponents of the bailout generally seems to me to be clearly false.)

2. Calling opponents of the bailout “irresponsible,” as several people did in The Corner last night. Of course, the position that a new Great Depression would be no big deal would indeed be irresponsible – if opponents of the bailout held it. But they don’t. As I understand it, they think financial markets will take a sizeable hit, as a natural result of bad investment decisions made by the major Wall Street firms under prompting from two decades of really bad housing policy in Washington, and then life will go back to normal. They further think (again, as I understand it) that the bad decisions made during the housing boom are going to have economic consequences regardless of what we do, and it’s better for those consequences to fall quickly on those who deserve them than to spread them out over all of society and have them take a long time to clear. (And that’s to say nothing of the opportunity the bailout bill offers for the authors of the old bad housing policies to enact new bad housing policies as part of the bailout.)

Let me be very clear that I have no opinion on the merits of the bailout itself, and I’m glad that it’s not my job to have one. It seems to me – and I’m no finance expert, so I welcome correction if I have this wrong – that the argument for the bailout goes roughly as follows:

1. We are in a financial panic.

2. During a financial panic, markets don’t price assets rationally in the short term (this is what I think is meant when people talk about assets being basically sound but having a “liquidity problem”).

3. If nothing is done to correct this irrationality, panics escalate into general economic crashes.

4. During a panic, the Treasury Department (or some other government entity) is able to price assets more rationally than the maket in the short term, and thus it can avert a general crash by buying the assets and then selling them off after the panic has subsided and markets are rational again.

Now, all of these are, at bottom, claims about empirical facts. And I lack the factual knowledge to say whether any of them is true or false. People whose opinion I respect are falling on both sides of the fence. And I have no pressing need to sort through all their arguments to figure it all out. So I’m content not to have an opinion.

But if I did have to choose, I’d start by looking at which side is treating the other side more fairly. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb (though not infallible) that the people who are in fact right are going to be more confident they have truth on their side, and you can tell who are really confident they have truth on their side by looking at who’s afraid of a fair exchange of ideas.

3 Comments | economics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served on Live TV

September 30, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Joe Biden wishes Bret Stephens didn’t have such a long memory:

Debate Questions for Joe Biden

Finally, senator, something from the more distant past. In 1981, at the outset of the Reagan administration, you took the lead in cross-examining William ‘Judge’ Clark for his confirmation hearings for deputy secretary of state. Mr. Clark’s job was explicitly intended to be managerial, not policy oriented. Nevertheless, you asked him for the names of the prime ministers of South Africa and Zimbabwe, both of which were second-tier posts in presidential systems.

In the same spirit, Sen. Biden, and as a longstanding leader of the Foreign Relations Committee, can you give us the names of the prime minister of France and the president of Germany? Just to be clear here, senator, I am not referring to President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel.

Ouch!

Too bad we Americans never developed a tradition of real debate in politics. The only reason you’ve heard of the Lincoln/Douglas debates is because they’re unique. People might actually tune in and watch – even at 9:00 on a Friday night – if there were some prospect of interesting questions being asked. But there isn’t. And that’s why even this Thursday’s VP debate is likely to be anti-climactic.

Having picked on Joe Biden, which is too easy anyway, I’ll now show my spirit of evenhandedness (and also bring this blog post back to an educational topic) by picking on Sarah Palin.

Suppose there were some prospect of Sarah Palin being asked the following questions:

Governor Palin, during your term you have developed a working alliance with Alaska’s teacher union – throwing more money at schools even with no prospect of improvement, opposing real reforms like school choice, and shifting state funds into archaic and unaffordable “defined benefit” pension plans that you actually opposed when you ran for governor. In return, the state and national unions have praised you, and the state union stayed out of the governor’s race, effectively endorsing your candidacy.

Do you agree with Senator McCain that school choice “is a fundamental and essential right we should honor for all parents”?

If a constitutional provision such as Alaska’s bigoted Blaine Amendment (your excuse for opposing vouchers as governor) violates people’s “fundamental and essential rights,” which should prevail?

Do you agree with Senator McCain that Obama’s opposition to vouchers is “tired rhetoric” that “went over well with the teachers union” but leaves children “stuck in failing schools,” and that “no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity”?

Do you agree with Senator McCain that it is “beyond hypocritical that many of those who would refuse to allow public school parents to choose their child’s school would never agree to force their own children into a school that did not work or was unsafe”?

Whom do you think he is talking about when he says that?

Do you think this would be a better country if we had that kind of debate?

Of course, we would need to have politicians who could give as good as they got. As in:

Biden: Mr. Stephens, I asked that question because I thought it was important. If Mr. Clark felt the question was unfair, he could have just said so. In that spirit, if I need to know the name of the prime minister of France when I’m vice president, it will probably be because I’m going to his funeral, in which case I’m sure I’ll have no trouble finding out the name before I show up.

Or:

Palin: Mr. Forster, as governor, I don’t have the privilege of rewriting the state constitution at will. I have to govern according to the laws as they are. I’m glad that bloggers like you have the freedom to call those laws into question. And I suppose being governor of the nation’s largest state is a little bit like being a blogger . . . except that I have actual responsibilities.

Think either of them would be up to that kind of answer?

2 Comments | politics, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Blog Security Risk

September 29, 2008

I don’t mean to alarm all of you, but I should tell you that Greg Forster, Matt Ladner, and I were all in the same place last week.  I know that this was an unacceptable breach of blog security — if something awful should have happened to us, if terrorists had struck, who would have been left to carry-on with the blog?

Normally we maintain blog security by ensuring that one of us is kept in a bunker in an undisclosed location when the other two meet.  Having us all three together was running an unreasonable risk.

We have taken concrete steps to improve blog security.  In particular, I have successfully cloned myself so that Jay Prime can go to the bunker if the three of us ever get together again.  Jay Prime has been taught all of the secrets of the Jay P. Greene Blog so that if anything should happen the blog will be able to continue.  The Blog Security color remains orange, so we will continue to be vigilant against any and all threats.

3 Comments | blogging | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

It’s a Sign, All Right!

September 23, 2008

HT digitalius

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

When former Pinellas County teacher-union head and “national NEA activist” Doug Tuthill became president of the Florida School Choice Fund, Jay announced that dogs and cats were living together. (By coincidence, in the same week The Onion ran this, one of their best ever.)

Not so fast, says America’s Last Education Labor Reporter. “Tuthill has always been something of a union maverick,” notes ALELR in his latest communique. “He was a new unionist well before NEA President Bob Chase took up the call and made it official policy. Tuthill’s essay in the February 1997 NEA Today, headlined ‘Time to Face the Hard Truth,’ could have been written today – which might explain why Tuthill has gone over to the Dark Side.”

ALELR quotes from Tuthill’s article: “The traditional role of education unions has been to protect members from the negative effects of dysfunctional school systems. That’s not enough anymore.” As recently as 2004, Tuthill was calling for new unionism to “rise from the ashes” and was pushing for NEA involvement in charter school management, membership services for private schools, and “supporting” home schoolers.

Well, I read “Time to Face the Hard Truth,” and frankly, other than that one line about how unions should do more than protect teachers from being fired, it all looks like standard NEA boilerplate. “Today’s education unions must take on the task of transforming these systems. Our primary goal must be to create learning systems in which all adults and children achieve at high levels.” Etc. Etc. Etc. These days the NEA just has computers write this stuff for them, switching the words around so we don’t notice (e.g. “Today’s education unions must take on the goal of transforming these learning systems for all adults and children. Our primary task must be to create systems in which all achieve at high levels”). That frees up more time for them to hang out in their member-funded stadium skyboxes and go on those all-important conference trips.

So ALELR is right that the essay “could have been written today,” but not by a reformer. This kind of fluff only passes as deep thought among the “wow, man, kids need so much” crowd.

In the article, Tuthill talks about a teacher who was being fired for incompetence: ” ‘I know I haven’t done a good job,’ she said crying, ‘but I’m doing the best I can. These kids have so many problems, I just don’t know where to begin. What am I going to do?’ “

What happens? The union saves her job, and Tuthill is glad that this incompetent teacher is returned to the classroom. He sees her as a “victim” of “dysfunctional systems.” His only regret is that more effort (read: money) isn’t being spent on teacher training to help ensure that future teachers won’t be incompetent:

I was pleased that our union had helped her, but the episode bothered me. This teacher had been the victim of a series of dysfunctional systems. She was poorly trained, improperly placed, and not adequately supported. Consistent with our traditional advocacy role, we helped her, but we did nothing to change the systems that caused her problems.

Even that line about unions doing more than just protecting teachers from being fired gets it wrong. What does he say the union is protecting teachers from? “The negative effects of dysfunctional school systems.” I guess any school system that wants to fire a teacher is by definition dysfunctional.

Tuthill gets a little maverick cred simply for mentioning the fact that unions do help prevent teachers from being fired, but is that all it takes to render Tuthill’s move to the school choice movement a yawner?

With all due respect to ALELR, if Tuthill has signed on to lead the charge for school choice, it’s clear that he’s made a lot of progress since 1997. Dogs and cats are indeed living together. Now it’s just a question of how many more politicians realize that they can save the educational lives of millions of registered voters.

1 Comment | tax-credit scholarships, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Civics Ignorance: A Very Long Track Record of Public School Failure

September 17, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Around these parts we sometimes discuss the failure of civic education in government schools. Our focus is usually this body of research, consistently showing that private school students have stronger democratic values than public school students. And of course Jay has more recently done some pathbreaking research on how civic values are embodied (or not) in public school names (which seem to have undergone a dramatic change in the past 50 years) and public school mascots (which do not appear to have done so).

But of course most people come at this issue from a different angle, bewailing the results of the breakdown of civic education in government schools – our high school graduates don’t know when the Civil War happened, etc. – without saying much useful about the cause.

Well, in response to a recent article on the subject, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included an intriguing letter to the editor drawing our attention to a 1943 study of the civic knowledge of 6,000 incoming freshmen at the nation’s top colleges. According to the letter, over half did not know the dates of the Civil War and could not locate St. Louis on a map, and nearly two-thirds mistook Walt Whitman for bandleader Paul Whiteman.

 

Separated at birth?

The study doesn’t appear to be on the web, but I did find this Chronicle of Higher Education article that cites some more findings from it. Apparently only 6 percent were able to name the original 13 colonies. The article also cites a 1917 study that found widespread ignorance of historical items that history teachers said “every student should know” at all levels from elementary school to college.

(Digression: The 1943 study was conducted by historian Allan Nevins of Columbia. While searching for it online, I stumbled across the fact that Nevins is widely credited as the founder of the field of oral history, having been the first to systematically seek out and record on tape, for the use of future scholars, the recollections of persons who had witnessed events of historical significance. Fascinating! Don’t say you never learned anything from Jay P. Greene’s Blog.)

So it seems that on civics education, as on the subject of reading and math scores, the reason we have an outrageous and unacceptable failure of outcomes is not because our schools have undergone a recent decline but because our schools have a consistent, very-long-term record of shocking underperformance. To quote an author who used to be a leading scholar of the history of education, there was no golden age.

What to make of this? To judge from the Chronicle article, some seem to think that we should find it comforting rather than all the more disturbing to know that the failure of civics education is not new. Clearly it does mean that civic ignorance is not a sign that the Republic is in immediate jeopardy of an existential crisis, and the overheated rhetoric to that effect needs to be toned down. On the other hand, the long-term damage done by civic ignorance is going to be all the worse and all the more difficult to repair. It appears that the failure of public schools to teach civic knowledge and values is not the result of a recent change that might be attributed to transitory influences (such as 1960s radicalism) but a fundamental flaw at the heart of our educational institutions. I find the latter thought more daunting than the former, not less.

But there is hope. As I mentioned at the outset, private schools do a better job of civics education. That gives us a clue as to what that fundamental flaw in our educational institutions is (they’re a government monopoly) and how we can go about setting it right.

9 Comments | civic values | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Pass the Popcorn: In Praise of Sequels . . . But Not These Sequels!

September 12, 2008

Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season! (It’s Kevin Smith, so use caution)

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Sequels are a good thing. Why does everybody complain about them?

Do they represent a new trend, one whose influence might be negative? No, they’ve been around since the medium of film began. If you’re going to assert that sequels have ruined the movies, what’s your control group?

Are sequels on average lower in quality than non-sequels? It seems unlikely. Sure, most sequels are bad. So are most other movies. That’s just the way it is.

And that’s the starting point, I think, for why people get this bee in their bonnets about sequels. The one thing sequels have in common is that they all follow upon, and thus invite comparisons to, a successful movie – the one that started the franchise. Since the first movie in the series is always one that a lot of people thought was good, and most movies are bad, statistically it will always be unusual for a sequel to live up to the standard set by the original. And since that’s the metric we judge them by, we dislike them.

But sequels do for movies what brands do for other consumer products: they convey information about the content of the product, thus helping consumers make a more informed choice.

It’s true that the imperatives of the movie business create much stronger incentives for filmmakers to “dilute the brand” than are present for other consumer goods. Thus, the extremely strong trend for movies to get worse as a franchise ages. In some of the older francises, you can actually trace the life cycle from awesome to mediocre to brain-numbingly stupid to the franchise reboot that brings you back to awesome. (Cue Elton John: “It’s the ciiiiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiiife . . .”) Occasionally you get a fallow period between the end of one cycle and the start of the next, where the filmmakers have realized something is wrong, so the quality gets somewhat better again, but they’re still trying to figure out how to get back to where they should be. And, of course, sometimes there’s a failed reboot.

By my count, James Bond has had six reboots since its debut. I include Goldfinger as a reboot because the previous two movies just don’t have the winning Bond formula down yet (in contrast to the books, where the Bond formula was actually in place from the very start). And Dr. No is in the “awesomeness” category solely because it was first – I dare you to sit all the way through it now. Few movies have aged worse.

Reboot Awesomeness Dr. No Goldfinger Live and Let Die The Living Daylights GoldenEye Casino Royale
Still Good From Russia with Love   The Man with the Golden Gun   Tomorrow Never Dies  
Passable     The Spy Who Loved Me   The World Is Not Enough  
Please Kill Me Now!   Thunderball Moonraker Licence to Kill Die Another Day  
Fallow Period   You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, View to a Kill      
Failed Reboot   On Her Majesty’s Secret Service        

And if that doesn’t get a comment thread going, nothing will.

But, having praised the phenomenon of sequels in general, let me balance the scales by making fun of some upcoming sequels that the world really, really does not need:

Huh? Of all the movies Pixar could be making a sequel to, they’re going with this?

“All the world’s a racetrack as racing superstar Lightning McQueen zooms back into action, with his best friend Mater in tow, to take on the globe’s fastest and finest in this thrilling high-octane new installment of the ‘Cars’ saga. Mater and McQueen will need their passports as they find themselves in a new world of intrigue, thrills and fast-paced comedic escapades around the globe.”

Do you like that? Cars is now a “saga.” Wonder how many they’ll make before the well runs dry.

Uh . . . they all died. That’s the point of the story. What’s the sequel going to be about?

Movieinsider.com dryly notes of “Untitled 300 Sequel Project” that “no plot details have been announced.”

Maybe we get to watch them bury all the bodies.

The sequel will be shot in the Smithsonian. The perfect pair – a brainless movie franchise and the museum conglomerate that actually manages to make American history boring.

The project was started by Disney without Pixar’s involvement, solely to gain bargaining leverage over Pixar. In other words, they started it because they knew it was a bad idea and they wanted to hold Pixar’s baby hostage. The first thing the Pixar people did when they merged with Disney was kill this project.

Now they’re really making it. Check out the plot. Can even Pixar pull this off?

Where have you gone, Steve Martin? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you . . .

Rambo 5. Yes, Rambo 5. I would never make that up.

But after making fun of all these sequels, let me end on a positive note: Power of the Dark Crystal. See you in 2009.

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

Good Schools Don’t Reward Students . . . Except When They Do

September 10, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last week I ran a column on Pajamas Media defending the practice of providing students with tangible rewards, including money, for academic achievement. At almost the same time that went live, Fordham’s latest Gadfly came out with a column by Liam Julian attacking the practice.

In his column, Julian wrote that a “recalcitrant youngster . . . requires strict discipline, not bribes. David Whitman’s fine new book, Sweating the Small Stuff, illumines the wonders such discipline can work.”

To start with, I feel perfectly comfortable juxtaposing Julian’s paean to the stick with my defense of the carrot: “To train students at all, you need to motivate them primarily with something that they understand. That means either ‘bribes’ or punishments for failure. Bribes are the more humane option.” I didn’t intend that to mean that there should be no discipline – of course student misconduct requires punishment – but discipline should not be the motivator for success.

Nor is it, I believe, in the schools profiled by Sweating the Small Stuff. I think that in these schools, the real motivator is promising kids they’ll have a better, more prosperous, more successful life if they get with the program. And, as I argued in my column, promising kids prosperity later in life if they study hard now is not really different, in principle, from giving them tangible rewards now. The only difference is the time lag.

More important, I thought Julian’s remark was a little funny, seeing how the “neo-paternalist” schools praised by Fordham’s Sweating the Small Stuff rely so heavily on providing kids with immediate tangible rewards for success. KIPP schools even give kids a weekly allowance, which is reduced if they don’t behave.

I had planned to write a post this morning making this point to Julian. But it appears that Michelle Rhee, whose plan to establish rewards for success in DC is what set off Julian’s original article, has beaten me to it. On Flypaper, Julian writes:

I’m told that Michelle Rhee, who moments ago wrapped up a “Reporter Roundtable” here at the Fordham offices (I knew I noticed a soft glow emanating from our conference room), defended her plan to pay students for right behavior by pulling out the KIPP Card.

Julian is not impressed:

First, let’s make the obvious distinction between KIPP dollars and American dollars, the former being valid tender only at KIPP-operated enterprises that stock wholesome inventory and the latter easily traded for 64-ounce buckets of cola and pornographic magazines. To be clear: There is a not insignificant difference between rewarding 12-year-olds with school supplies and cutting them each month a $100 check (as Rhee’s plan would do), which they can spend on whatever savory or unsavory products or activities they please.

But KIPP dollars are good for more than “school supplies.” For example, kids don’t get to go on big school trips to fun destinations – trips the kids really want to go on – if they haven’t got enough money to pay for it. So Julian isn’t quite playing fair here – KIPP does reward students with things they want.

And that’s not even the real problem. The real problem is that Julian is tacitly conceding the main point he defended in his original article: that kids need discipline, not bribes. Now, apparently, the new line is that it’s perfectly fine to provide kids with tangible rewards for success as long as you do it in the right way.

Well . . . OK then! So much for the position that all these kids really need is a good hard smack of “discipline.” Turns out they need tangible rewards, too. Julian just objects to what kind of reward Rhee wants to give them. That’s a carrot of another color.

Sure enough, Julian goes on to insist that some tangible rewards are “bribes” and others are not:

Second, Rhee’s plan is bribery and KIPP’s is not. To be clear: Rhee’s plan is engineered such that D.C. pupils who habitually miss class and refuse to do their work may, encouraged by offers of payment, deign to act as they already should. At a KIPP school, a consistent truant who balked at books wouldn’t be paid, wouldn’t be bribed—he’d be disciplined and maybe expelled. KIPP uses its KIPP Dollars as rewards for the good behavior that is already expected, not as an incentive to generate such behavior that wouldn’t otherwise be present. KIPP Dollars are simply one reminder among many to pupils that they shouldn’t act out, that they should be conscientious and decorous.

So rewards are not bribes when they are used to reward good behavior, but they’re bribes when they are used to reward the absence of bad behavior? I’m afraid Julian is simply manipulating the definitions of words in order to bring his condemnation of “bribes” into conformity with his praise of “neo-paternalism.” But you can’t redefine your way out of a flat contradiction. Obviously KIPP schools (and not only them) provide tangible rewards as a motivator. If this is OK with Julian, he should stop talking about “bribes” as though he had some kind of principled, across-the-board case to make against motivating students with rewards, and instead frame his case in terms of what kinds of rewards are acceptable in what kinds of situations.

Moreover, in a public school system where the kids have not chosen to be there, you don’t have the option of simply expelling everyone who doesn’t fall right into line. Obviously this is yet another argument for universal vouchers (if more arguments were needed), and someday when all students can choose where to go to school, schools (including government schools) will be able to demand more from the students who go there. But until that day comes, Rhee has to work with the system she’s got. Telling her to just do things the way KIPP does them is not a serious option for public schools.

Let me put that another way. In his original article, Julian said that rewarding students for showing up and behaving themselves is inappropriate because school attendance is supposed to be compulsory. Now he’s praising KIPP schools for expelling students if they don’t show up and behave themselves. Well, does he think public schools should start doing that? If so, then attendance at public school would no longer be compulsory, would it?

Does Julian really think that our approach to kids who don’t currently want to show up and behave themselves should be to tell them to stop showing up? If not, what does he propose to do to change their motivation, if not rewarding them for changing their behavior?

What this all really comes down to is the difference between coercion and choice. You can change people’s behavior by offering them something they want in return for doing what you want, or else by brute force. In terms of both effectiveness and ethics, rewards beat brute force eleven times out of ten.

4 Comments | charter schools, civic values | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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