School Choice Wins in 2008; Unrestricted Eligibility in Georgia

June 18, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Washington Post is now reporting that the House Appropriations subcommittee will fund the DC voucher program for another year. People are saying that the future of the program doesn’t look good, because the subcommittee chairman is blustering about how much he doesn’t like it. But read that Post article carefully. He doesn’t say that the program will be killed next year. The Post reports that he says he’s funding the program for another year “to give District leaders a chance to restructure the program.” He is quoted as saying, “I expect that during the next year the District leaders will come forward with a firm plan for either rolling back the program or providing some alternative options.”

That sounds to me like a man who’s looking for a deal. The DC program is already loaded up with monster payoffs to the District’s patronage-bloated public school system. How hard is it to make those payoffs bigger? And maybe the program will have to accept some more politically motivated restrictions on participation, so that critics will have a trophy to hang on their wall.

Whether those tradeoffs are worth it for the school choice movement – there is a real cost, and not just in dollars, associated with them – is a question I leave for another day. And of course this is just the subcommittee; there could still be more trouble ahead. And maybe next year the critics will get a better offer from the unions than the deal they’re apparently angling to get on behalf of the DC patronage machine.

All I want to do is observe that the program’s chances of survival are now looking a lot better than they did yesterday.

As the political season winds to a close, let’s survey the results:

  • A new personal tax credit for private school tuition in Louisiana
  • A new tax-credit scholarship program in Georgia
  • A new voucher program in Louisiana
  • An expansion of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program, including a $30 million increase in the cap; a bump up in the value of the scholarship and a linking of the scholarship value to state school spending (which always goes up); and a relaxation of the program’s unreasonably stringent accounting rules (which used to allow not one penny of carryover from year to year in the scholarship organizations’ accounts, and not one penny from eligible donations for administrative expenses).
  • A million-dollar funding increase and guaranteed future funding stream for Utah’s voucher program.
  • Preservation (tentatively) of the DC voucher program in a hostile Congress.

That’s three new programs, two expansions of existing programs and an upset victory in DC. Pretty good for a dead movement, wouldn’t you say?

By the way, how did accountability testing do this year? How many new programs? How many existing programs expanded?

How about instructional and curricular reforms? How’s the Massachussetts miracle holding up?

Anyone? . . . Anyone?

Some of these victories did come at a cost. The two programs in Louisiana are going to score poorly when measured against the gold standard of universal choice. The tax credit is limited to a very small amount of money, which means it offers a very small amount of choice. And the new voucher program is only offered to students who are in grades K-3, low-income, and enrolled in public schools (or entering kindergarten) in a chronically failing school district located in a highly populated parish – which currently means only New Orleans. Plus it’s limited by annual appropriations (currently $10 million). A new grade level will become eligible each year (4th grade next year, then 5th grade, etc.) and Baton Rouge may become eligible if its public schools continue to fail. But this is still an inadequate program. And we can also add the prospect of more restrictions in the DC program to the debit column.

But there was also a huge step forward for universal choice. Georgia’s new tax-credit scholarship program offers school choice for all students. It has no demographic restrictions at all. Any public school student can apply. The only limit is the $50 million program cap – and experience in other states pretty consistently shows that dollar caps rise as programs grow to meet them.

Georgia’s new program is basically the same as the Arizona program funded by individual donations, except that Georgia’s program also allows corproate donations. And that makes a big difference, because it greatly expands the pool of available funds – and hence the size of the program.

Come to think of it, Georgia’s program is the first tax-credit scholarship program to include corporate donations and not place demographic restrictions on who can participate. That’s a potentially powerful combination. It will be exciting to see whether Georgia ends up taking school choice to a whole new level.

1 Comment | instructional reform, personal tax credits/deductions, politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The DC Voucher Evaluation

June 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today the U.S. Dept. of Education released the fourth annual report on the random-assignment evaluation of the DC voucher program, including academic results for the first two years of the program’s existence. As with last year’s report, across the whole population the voucher students had higher academic outcomes than the control group, but the positive results just barely fell short of the conventional cutoff for statistical certainty. This means that while the voucher students in fact had higher test scores, we cannot be 95 percent confident that their higher scores are due to vouchers and not a statistical fluke. This year it was the reading results that came close to statistical significance, reaching 91 percent certainty. The study also finds statistically certain positive results for three subgroups, which together comprise 88 percent of the voucher population.

Since the previous year’s results were also not statistically significant, this update of the study doesn’t change the balance of the studies on school choice. As before, there are a total of ten random-assignment studies on school vouchers, all ten of which found that the voucher students had higher academic achievement, with eight studies achieving statistical certainty for the positive finding and two not.

In other words, school vouchers are still better supported by high-quality scientific evidence than any other education policy. If you reject vouchers because this study is only 91 percent sure they produce academic improvements, you have no empirical grounds for supporting any other policy, since all other policies are far less well supported by empirical evidence than vouchers.

In a few minutes you’ll be able to see the Friedman Foundation’s response to the DC study, including details and citations on all ten random-assignment studies of vouchers, here.

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

PJM Column Today

June 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay and I have a column on Pajamas Media this morning with our take on Response to Intervention. A sample: 

Five years ago, we published a study with disturbing implications — literally millions of students may have been labeled as “disabled” and placed into special education when they didn’t really have a disability. Since then, we’ve been struggling to get past the many myths and misconceptions surrounding special education, trying to get people to see the problem.

Now there’s finally been a change, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, federal special education authorities have at last acknowledged the problem and adopted a policy designed to address it. The bad news is, the policy is no good.

That’s the way it usually goes in education reform — two steps forward, one step back. And the obstacles to reform in special education are unusually large, so the steps are baby steps.

But you know what they say: the first step is admitting you have a problem. And we’re glad to see that step has been taken.

UPDATE: Whoops, forgot the link.

4 Comments | instructional reform, special ed | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Pass the Popcorn: Night Falls

June 13, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Original movie title: “The Man Who Didn’t Know He Was Dead.”

(Due credit: I stole that gag from the “loading” page of an old The Critic webisode. I’d link if the creators had a page, but I can’t seem to find one.)

In addition to the new Hulk movie, M. Night Shyamalan’s comeback attempt, The Happening, opens today. As I promised in last week’s edition of Pass the Popcorn, here’s a retrospective of Night’s fall.

Before we get down to business, though, fascinating fact: did you know that Shyamalan was the lead author on the screenplay of Stuart Little? Well, that’s why God made IMDB. Come to think of it, how much difference is there, really, between writing lines for Haley Joel Osment and for a cute animated mouse?

On one level, Ang Lee (whose rise and fall we chronicled last week) and M. Night Shyamalan were two big 1990s filmmakers trying to do similar things: produce popular, mainstream movies that nonetheless had the higher ambitions of arthouse films. But other than that, you couldn’t ask for two more different filmmakers. Lee is all about emotional relationships. If you have a sibling, parent, or child whom you love but absolutely cannot even begin to understand – someone who is biologically your immediate neighbor but whose whole life is just totally alien to you – you’ll appreciate Lee’s achievement in Eat Drink Man Woman. Ditto Sense and Sensibility if you’ve ever been in love, The Ice Storm if you’ve been hurt by other people’s personal self-indulence, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon if you’ve ever loved someone you couldn’t have – or had to deal with an angry teenage girl.

By contrast, Shyamalan’s films aren’t about relationships, except in the sense that they’re about man’s relationship to the universe. What ties all his movies together is that they take place in a universe that isn’t what it seems, and they’re about how we cope with the realities that lie behind the universe of appearance that makes up our ordinary lives.

His characters are mostly two-dimensional. That’s not a criticism – Aeschylus’s characters are two-dimensional, too, and for the same reason. Narratives about “man and the universe” necessarily reduce the “man” to a broadly representational figure. That’s the whole point. In the Oresteia, Orestes is the paradigmatic “man torn between conflicting duties” – in other words, Orestes is all of us. So naturally Orestes as a character isn’t developed much; that would only detract from the drama, by preventing us from identifying with Orestes. Ditto for most of Shyamalan’s work.

By this rubric, Lee is the Sophocles of the 1990s – his plots are only there to illustrate and develop the personal qualities of the characters. Raise your hand if you remember the plot of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. (Okay, all of you with your hands up, report for detox at once.) And The Ice Storm barely even had a plot. Whereas in Shyamalan, as in Aeschylus, instead of the plot only being there to illustrate the characters, the characters are only there for the sake of the plot. Quick, how many main characters from Shyamalan’s films can you name without looking them up?

(Who, then, is the Euripides of 1990s film – the cynic for whom both plot and character give way to lengthy chunks of hard-bitten dialogue that either proclaim, or else ignorantly illustrate, the meaninglessness of the human world and the absence of the gods from it? My vote: David Mamet.)

Shyamalan’s characters often don’t change at all. Of the three main characters in The Sixth Sense, all three remain the same people at the end of the movie they were at the beginning. They change only in that they start the movie ignorant of certain very important facts, and end it knowing those facts. The boy is terrified and disturbed at the beginning but calm and well adjusted at the end, not because he’s grown as a person, but because he had mistakenly thought the ghosts were a threat to him and now knows that they’re not. Similarly, the psychologist lets go of his anger at his wife, not because he’s grown as a person, but because he realizes that he’s dead. The mother’s attitude toward her son changes, not because she’s grown as a person, but because she finally sees proof that he’s really seeing ghosts and isn’t crazy. Their personalities are unchanged. Only their knowledge of the mysteries of their universe has changed.

Or consider that, as far as I can recall, the few really emotional scenes in Shyamalan’s films are all either confrontations or revelations – both of which can produce strong emotions without doing much to advance character development. The scene from The Sixth Sense that really stuck with me and haunted me, so to speak – it still does – is that harrowing moment where the mother realizes that her son’s doctor believes she’s abusing him. She boils over with furious indignation, as do we – until we remember that while she knows the true reason for the boy’s injuries, and we know it, he doesn’t – and from his perspective, abuse is the logical explanation for what he sees in front of him. We can’t help but hate him – hate him with a boiling passion – for doing the right thing.

(An interjection: I’ve heard some people criticize as vain Shyamalan’s inserting himself into each of his movies, Hitchcock-style. But look at where he inserts himself. In the first three movies, and above all in the first one, he appears as someone who makes us intensely uncomfortable: the doctor who mistakenly – but rationally, given the facts available to him – thinks one of the protagonists is abusing her son; the dark-skinned man who is singled out and pulled aside by the protagonist for a drug search; the reckless driver who killed the protagonist’s wife. And in the fourth movie he’s a lazy cynic. This is vanity?)

The Sixth Sense could have been just a shlocky thriller with a neato twist ending, but it’s something more. (Not something else instead of a shlocky thriller with a neato twist ending, but something else in addition to a shlocky thriller with a neato twist ending; it’s still that, of course.) It’s about what it’s like to encounter, and be changed by, things that you don’t understand and that the people around you don’t understand. The frustration, the isolation, the resentment, the anger – and finally the relief of coming to understand, and finding others who understand, what you’ve encountered. “I see dead people” is a proxy for “I have a mental illness” or “I didn’t kill that girl but everyone thinks I did” or “I’m a Montague and I’m in love with a Capulet”  or “I’m the only person in my family who does (or doesn’t) believe in the Bible” or any one of a thousand other strange, alienating things that happen to us in our very strange universe.

Likewise, Unbreakable – a gem of a movie if you have the patience for it – takes what could have been a comic-book-movie premise and turns it into a meditation on the metaphysics of duty and destiny. If you find yourself having been blessed in some very important way, is it mere arrogance to think that you’ve been chosen to recieve that blessing? Is that an insult to the others who presumably were not chosen, and who may be suffering (or, in this case, dead) because they lack what you have?  And do you have a duty to accept your chosenness if it doesn’t give you the life that you want? The deleted scenes to this movie are well worth watching; having seen them only once, I find it impossible to think about Unbreakable except in terms of how those scenes frame the story. One in particular, a conversation between the hero and the town priest immediately after the mass funeral for the train wreck victims, really expands the significance of the movie and should have been left in; this slow-paced movie could have stood to move faster anyway.

Then came Signs. Here, Shyamalan’s ambition to comment on man’s place in the universe becomes explicit. Rather than take a premise that could have stood on its own as an ordinary genre movie (e.g. man investigating ghosts discovers that he is one; pitiful man with broken life discovers he has superpowers) and then subtly imbuing it with greater philosophical significance, Shyamalan builds the plot directly around his philosophical reflections.

The key to the whole movie is the “miracle man” dialogue between our hero, the ex-priest – and by the way, one of the few really false notes in this movie is how it puts the hero in a priest’s collar but then carefully avoids calling him a priest, resorting to all sorts of ridiculous verbal gymnastics (“I’m not a reverend anymore.” Neither Protestants nor Catholics ever refer to a clergyman as “a reverend”). What was the point? Presumably to avoid establishing whether he was Catholic or Protestant, to allow the broadest possible audience to identify with him. But identifying him as a priest wouldn’t have established whether he was Catholic, since plenty of Protestant clergy are called priests, and in any event the unavoidable tone of falsehood this introduces to the movie does much more harm than . . .

Where was I? Oh, yes. The key to the whole movie is the “miracle man” dialogue between our hero, the ex-priest, and his brother about the concept of providence. Either all events are ordained to serve a cosmic plan – or else not. The point of the movie is that no empirical evidence can settle the question; the universe of the five senses, the universe as we experience it by living in it, equally vindicates the nihilist view and the theist one (provided, of course, that we’re talking about a real theism that robustly faces the problem of evil, not the watered down happy-talk theism that has sucked the life out of the oldline denominations in the past century . . . but I digress). And saying that it vindicates both is just another way of saying it vindicates neither. In other words, mere experience (or “evidence”) cannot by itself distinguish between a meaningless universe and a meaningful one. As a result, most people make their real choice between the two alternatives based on some combination of emotion, instinct, and inclination; Signs is the story of how one man came to change sides, and then change back.

Of course there is another way to judge between the two, namely by metaphysical reasoning – evaluating the universe not as we experience it with the five senses, but as it appears to our logic. Unforutnately, there’s no way to work this point into a movie, and Shyamalan was right not to try. Nonetheless, Signs always makes me think about this book, which is the one book anyone who wants to understand this subject should read. (Strict logicians who want the issues formulated the the technical style appropriate to a doctoral dissertation in philosophy should instead read this.)

Appropriately enough for a post about M. Night Shyamalan, the book begins with a ghost.

“In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.

“For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience . . . . What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”

Signs contains more meditation on man’s place in the universe than Shyamalan’s previous films, but the absence of an independent story that could have carried the movie on its own balances that out. On the whole, it’s not better or worse than the previous movies, just different. But the greater ambition Shyamalan displayed in Signs was, if you’ll pardon me, a good sign. Greater things were around the corner.

And then it all started going wrong. First came The Village. I went into The Village as a Shyamalan fan and thus predisposed to enjoy the movie. And I think it was for that reason that I actually did enjoy it while I was watching it – not a lot, but enough. The performances are superb, and the scene where the male romantic lead confesses his feelings for the female romantic lead is especially powerful. However, as soon as the credits started rolling, all that faded away; superb performances are the most perishable part of any film experience. What lives most vividly in the memory is not the work of the actors but the work of the writer and director – and that was subpar in this movie.

The problem, I think, is laziness. There are just too many dumb moments, and dumb moments are always a symptom of a filmmaker who couldn’t be bothered to keep reworking things until they all fit together right. So Lee and Shyamalan both got self-indulgent, but where Lee fell off one side of the horse, working too hard on the wrong things, Shyamalan fell off the other side, not working hard enough. (Or that’s my theory, anyway.)

I’m told that The Village improves with repeat viewing. I can well believe it. Repeat viewing tends to increase the relative value of the actors’ performances and decrease the relative value of the writers’ and directors’ contribution, most especially regarding this movie’s greatest weakness: plot. If a movie improves on repeat viewing, that may rescue the performances and the movie as a whole from a negative verdict, but in general it shouldn’t rescue the director.

Then, as we all know, came Lady in the Water – about which the less said the better, not that that ever stopped anybody.

When I saw that Shyamalan was staging a comeback, I had cautious hopes. If we didn’t have a two-year-old to look after, I’m sure we’d have gone to see it. But check this out:

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer

The Village: 43%

Lady in the Water: 24%

The Happening: 20%

Now, I know only too well – as readers of this blog will recall – that Rotten Tomatoes is not infallible. At the time of release it gave 100% to this flaming nuclear turd of a movie, although I see that with the passage of time a handful of critics who actually saw the movie rather than judging it by the name of the director have brought the average down to 96%.

But, to use this gag one last time, a rating below Lady in the Water is definitely not a good sign.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Ho, Hum, Yet Another New Voucher Program

June 12, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday the Louisiana Senate passed Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program, 25-12. As soon as the governor signs, it will be the nation’s 24th school choice program. That makes three new programs and two expanded programs this year.

Not a lot of news coverage on this. But then, why would there be? It’s only news when school choice loses. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often.

UPDATE: It has to go back through the House before it goes to Jindal, since it was amended in the Senate, but no one seems to think there’ll be any problems there. The Senate vote was the real test.

1 Comment | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The College Access Myth Marches On

June 11, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In the May 30 edition of NEA’s Education Insider, the union makes the following request: “As we approach the graduation season, we are asking NEA members to share stories of your students who would like to attend college but cannot because of the cost. Stories will be collected and used to bolster the case for action by policymakers.” (Hat tip to America’s last education labor reporter.)

Here we go again. A while back, Jay and I ran the numbers using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s NAEP Transcript Study and found that the number of graduating 12th graders whose academic transcripts and possession of basic skills made them eligible to apply to four-year colleges was very close to the number of students actually entering four-year colleges for the first time: 1.3 million. The difference between the two figures was only about 42,000. The rest of the 4 million or so college-entrance-aged persons consists of those who either 1) dropped out of high school, 2) didn’t take the academic coursework (four years of English, three years of math, etc.) that is generally necessary to attend a four-year college (we reviewed the entrance requirements at a selection of low-prestige four-year colleges to confirm this), or 3) did not possess even basic reading skills. In other words, the college-entrance-aged population consists almost entirely of people who either entered college or were not academically qualified to enter college. A subsequent study Jay did with Marcus Winters confirmed the finding.

Obviously there are some non-traditional-age students entering college, and some students can get into four-year colleges without possessing the qualifications that are generally necessary to do so. (For more discussion of the methodological issues, see you know where.) But even if we allow a (probably over-generous) 10% allowance for these and similar factors, that still leaves us with about 2.4 million people who can’t go to college because they’re not academically qualified, as compared with about 270,000 who are qualified to go to college but don’t go because of all other factors combined. Some of those 270,000 will be people who are qualified to go but don’t want to, or are prevented by some other, non-monetary factor. So the number who are qualified to go and would like to go and are kept out by no other barriers but money would be some subset of that 270,000.

In other words, if our goal is to increase college access, focusing on people who lack access because of money is an extremely inefficient way to do it. You’re going to find a lot more “low-hanging fruit” in a pool of 2.4 million than in a pool of less than 270,000 (by this over-generous estimate). And that’s even before you consider that improving the academic performance of the K-12 system would create many other benefits besides just increasing college access.

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Posted by Greg Forster

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.

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Posted by Greg Forster

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

The New Crisis: Teacher Obesity

May 29, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Check out Michael Petrilli’s great article in the new Gadfly. If major media outlets are going to act like the sky is falling because of student obesity, why is nobody worried about teacher obesity – which imposes much more direct costs on the school system than student obesity?

Health insurance costs associated with treating overweight teachers and other school staff are taking a major bite out of public education budgets. I estimate that these costs come to at least $2.5 billion annually–more than Maine spends on its entire k-12 system in a year.

This calculation assumes that the obesity rate among people who work in k-12 education is the same as that for the population as a whole: about one-third of all adults. (I can’t think of any reason why it would be lower–and if you’ve been to many educator gatherings lately, you wouldn’t think so, either.)

Why is teacher obesity so expensive? Petrilli blames gold-plated health benefits thanks to “over-generous collective bargain agreements.”

It’s hard to tell just how far into his cheek Petrilli’s tongue is planted here, but the article’s worth a read.

11 Comments | journalism, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Speed Racer Is Better than Iron Man. Deal with It.

May 26, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

With no Get Lost feature this week – the episode was postponed on account of soap opera – I figure this blog is a week shy on geekdom and it needs some ballast. So I’m going to pull on my flameproof shorts, put my affairs in order, kiss my wife and daughter good-bye, and tell the world what it needs to know:

Speed Racer is better than Iron Man.

(I don’t intend to spoil anything big here, but in deference to the prime directive of geekdom, I hereby warn you that if you want to be absolutely unspoiled for these movies, you’d be a moron to even start reading a post entitled “Speed Racer Is Better than Iron Man.”)

Don’t get me wrong; Iron Man is a good movie. But it’s missing something.

John Podhoretz (in the May 19 Weekly Standard) is right – Iron Man is not a superhero movie, it’s a 1930s screwball comedy about the wacky hijinks of a billionaire playboy. Flying around in a tin can is just another of his wacky hijinks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I love “Cold Comfort Farm,” “Amelie” and “Down with Love,” so nobody can accuse me of screwball snobbery. And Iron Man works very well for what it is. (Which is a dignified way of saying that I laughed my pants off – and that’s saying a lot for a movie.)

It even manages to rise above the level of screwball in its evocation of the complex relationship between the male and female leads. Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow earned every cent of the millions they’re going to make on this franchise. I went away thinking, “This is what that lousy Superman movie could have been like if they had hired an actor instead of a mannequin to play Lois Lane.”

But the tin man at the center of this movie has no heart – the psychology of the main character, which the structure of the movie intentionally draws our attention to, is never developed. The plot hinges on Tony Stark having a traumatic change of heart about his profession. But what exactly was this change? Does he repent of making weapons altogether? Some of the dialogue hints a little in this direction. But his first act of pennance is to make a big weapon and fly around using it to kill people.

So what then does he really repent of? I can see at least two other possibilities. He repents of making weapons for the US government, or perhaps making them for government (any government), or perhaps making them for anyone at all but himself. Again, a few lines of dialogue seem to point in this direction, but then the subject is dropped. Or, on the other hand, he repents of not keeping an eye on the weapons he makes and allowing them to fall into the wrong hands – but not of making weapons in itself. His actions after his repentance – making a big weapon and flying around killing people with it – seem to point toward this interpretation.

You can see why the movie never tells you which it is. If the first, then the movie is implicitly anti-war, and the conservative half of the audience is alienated. If the second, then the movie is implicitly pro-war, and the liberal half is alienated. You get bigger ticket sales by just letting each moviegoer mentally supply his or her own preferred interpretation of Stark’s psychology.

Trouble is, this turns Stark into a cipher. His motivation, his whole psychology, is truncated. That might not matter in a lot of superhero movies; Michael Keaton is a cipher in Tim Burton’s Batman, and it’s still a great movie. But the whole structure of this particular movie demands more psychology than the studio’s marketing suits are willing to permit. Iron Man could have been a tormented anti-war warrior, battling to undo the damage his life’s work has done to the world by enabling war. Or he could have been a warrior plain and simple, waging a just and noble personal war to put right the deadly consequences of his own arrogance. As it is, he falls between two stools and is . . . nothing in particular.

Winner of the 2008 Vaguest Midlife Crisis Award

OK, you might say, but do you really prefer a brainless light-show movie? Come on.

If you said, that, you’d clearly be in good company. The critics seem to agree that it’s a stupid movie. But I think the critics went into Speed Racer determined to dislike it, or at least not to like it unless it conformed to their preconcieved notion of what a “good” light-show movie is like, which it obviously doesn’t.

Critics don’t like what computer graphics have done to the movie business. And with the enormous number of lousy movies where the story is nothing but a lame excuse to show you a bunch of computer graphics, who can blame them?

To someone who sees things through that lens, if a movie has a lot of computer graphics, it had better also have a complicated plot, brilliant dialogue, gay cowboys eating pudding – something that could pass muster in an arthouse movie. If so, they get to look high-minded by praising the movie in spite of its having a lot of special effects. (“The effects serve the story” is the universal code phrase for “All of us snobs have permission to like this movie.”) Otherwise it goes in the “light show” trash bin.

Speed Racer doesn’t have anything you would ever see in a theater where the coffee at the concession stand is brewed fresh every hour. The plot is simple to the point of melodrama, and the dialogue does its job in advancing the plot, but no more.

But that doesn’t make it dumb! Simple is not the same as stupid. Melodramatic plot devices are cheap and tacky when they appear in narratives that are not otherwise melodramatic. But that’s not because melodrama itself is bad. It’s because melodramatic plot devices don’t belong in narratives that aren’t melodramas.

A well constructed melodrama satisfies a deeply rooted need in human nature. Anyone who denies this is kidding himself. Much of what passes as “serious” drama is really melodrama, but isn’t called that because the people who like it are too snobbish to think that anything they enjoy could be melodrama. And how else do we explain the near-universal popularity of melodrama? Why, for example, does practically every TV news outlet turn practically every story it covers into a melodrama?

And ultimately this same function – satisfying a universal human need – is the only claim that the allegedly more serious forms of drama have on our attention. Augustine, caught up in a violent overreaction against his own youthful obscession with “serious” drama, wrote that he understood the appeal of comedy but thought that tragedy was disgusting and perverse. Why go to the theater to intentionally make yourself miserable? In ethics and metaphysics I’ll take Augustine over Aristotle any day, but here, Aristotle knew better. We go because we must. Our spirits demand tragedy (and comedy) as our bodies demand food. That’s just how we’re built. And it’s the same with melodrama.

Speed Racer is the best melodrama I’ve seen in years. No doubt you already know the plot: Speed is a young racing prodigy who looks set to become the greatest racer of his time. But as soon as he wins his way into the big leagues, he discovers that the outcomes of the major races are fixed. He’s too clean to be bought and too good to be beaten, so the only way the fixers can ensure that their chosen racers win is by cheating – attaching hidden weapons to their cars. So Speed has to be twice as good to win. Cue fantastic racing-battle scenes.

Honestly, what more do you need? No doubt you could make a lousy movie out of that story. But you could also make a terrific movie out of it. And that’s what Speed Racer is.

If you want to know why it’s suddenly snowing horizontally, you’re missing the point.

Another reason people probably think Speed Racer is stupid when they shouldn’t is because it demands a full surrender to the narrative world. In the speedracerverse, everybody drives racecars, even to go shopping; monkeys are semi-intelligent; the hero’s actual, legal name is “Speed Racer” and his mother and father are named “Mom Racer” and “Pops Racer”; even the incorruptible Eliot Ness figure who helps Speed bring down the bad guys is named Inspector Detector. And no explanation is offered. The movie says, in effect: Here is the world where our story takes place; you can come in and join the party or you can go see some other movie.

Which is exactly as it should be. Every story must show you how its narrative universe differs from the real world, but trying to explain why its narrative universe differs from the real world is a fool’s errand.

And then there are the brazen plot devices. For instance, Speed is attacked while racing across a desert. Giant hammers and morningstars pop out of the cars. And just as you’re wondering how all this could be going on without the race officials noticing these giant honking weapons flying around, we cut to the TV announcer saying, “Wow, with all that sand being kicked up, it sure is hard to see what’s going on out there.”

Cheap? Stupid? It would be if it happened in an ordinary narrative, because it wouldn’t belong there. But in Speed Racer, that kind of thing is the narrative. “Stupid” stuff happens all the time in Monty Python, but nobody complains – because the stupid stuff is the whole point of Monty Python. And so, in that context, it’s not stupid at all; it’s brilliant comedy. Same here.

Or if Monty Python is too lowbrow for you, consider the point Dorothy Sayers makes, in another context, in The Mind of the Maker. If you’re writing a novel and you can’t figure out how to get your hero out of the jam he’s in, it would be stupid and wrong to end the novel by writing “Joe suddenly inherited a fortune from a wealthy relative he didn’t know he had, and he used the money to solve all his problems.” On the other hand, you could write a really great novel that opens with the same sentence – a novel about a man who suddenly inherits a fortune. If something brazen and outrageous is stuck on arbitrarily to resolve a problem because you’re too lazy to resolve it in a way that’s organic to the plot, that’s poor storytelling. But there’s nothing wrong with having something brazen and outrageous in your story if that’s what the story is about.

Finally, there is the innovation in the way the digital effects are used. The filmmakers decisively abandon visual realism to an extent that is probably unprescedented for a mainstream movie. During moments of intense conflict, the background fades away, leaving only the main characters surrounded by lights and colors. Things children imagine become momentarily real. A scene will suddenly become a visual montage (complete with people floating randomly across the screen, delivering dialogue) and then return to the scene. And in the final race, once Speed has dispatched the main villain, the rest of the race goes by in a chaotic blur. I think this last scene must be what the critics are thinking of when they complain that the effects are so heavy-handed you can’t tell what’s going on; at least it was the only scene where I couldn’t tell what was going on. But that’s clearly intentional. Once Speed has beaten the bad guy, it’s a given that he’ll win the race. So the fimmakers spare us the tedium of watching it.

To a critic worried about the negative effect of computer effects on filmmaking, all this must come across as reductive – effects intruding into scenes where they don’t belong. But the surreal visual style serves the melodramatic narrative very well. The whole point of melodrama is to clear away all the inevitable complexities of the real world in order to isolate and focus our attention on the stark, even painfully simple moral realities that always lie behind those complexities. People are always a complex blend of good and bad, but good and bad themselves are always simple. The point of melodrama is to tap into that simpler level of truth so that we can experience it, in narrative form, free of the complexities that always cloud it in the real world. What better way to visualize that experience than to have the background fade away as Speed struggles to overcome a thug sent to kill him?

Obviously all this explication is negative – an explanation of why Speed Racer is not dumb. None of that establishes that it is any good.

Fortunately, the producers have spared me a lot of effort by releasing the first seven minutes of the movie for free on the web:

If that doesn’t sell you on the movie, nothing I write will. Do yourself a favor and give it a chance.

But don’t miss Iron Man, either.

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

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