I can’t figure out how to embed this, but it is well worth clicking on the link. The Onion does a news analysis of the real skills our children will need for the post-apocalyptic 21st century. One analyst emphasizes the need for basic skills, like how to collect water from the morning dew in human skulls.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/are_violent_video_games
UPDATE: Here it is embedded:
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instructional reform | Tagged: 21st Century Skills, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Beltway edu-analysts discuss the world over brandy and cigars. Note where they are headed.)
I feel sorry for my education colleagues within the DC Beltway. I don’t know if it’s all those wine and cheese receptions or box lunch lectures that addle their brains, but they are clearly confused. They confuse political analysis for research. And they confuse their political preferences for political analysis.
Look, for example, at the recent post by my friend Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk on vouchers, which states:
“Now, paradoxically, the school choice experience since the early 1990s has lessened the allure of vouchers as a scalable education reform but at the same time made these smaller “pilot” type initiatives like the one in D.C. seem less toxic and more harmless among an increasing number of players. Opponents don’t even really have a slippery slope to point to in any of the early adopter sites for vouchers. There’s not one in D.C. There it’s the public charters not the vouchers that are taking over and not in the other cities/states, even Milwaukee, where vouchers have been tried and the effects have been modest. In other words, vouchers are not destroying the public schools. Rather, systemically, they’re not really doing much of anything at all.”
Andy concludes that “systemically” vouchers aren’t “much of anything at all” because they aren’t expanding very rapidly. This is a political analysis on the appeal of larger voucher programs, not a summary of research on the effects of vouchers on public school achievement. If Andy had wanted to talk about the research on the systemic effects of vouchers he would have referenced this literature, which clearly shows that expanding choice and competition through vouchers improves public school performance. So, Andy substitutes political analysis for research.
But he also substitutes his political preferences for political analysis because he ignores the steady growth in vouchers over the last two decades. There are now 24 voucher or tax-credit programs in 15 states serving over 100,000 students. Just last year two new programs were adopted, in Georgia and Louisiana, and the tax credit program in Florida was significantly expanded. Andy may wish the voucher movement to be stalled, but a clear political analysis would reveal that vouchers continue to move forward.
Now, it’s true that there have been setbacks in the voucher movement. And it’s true that each new program encounters a blizzard of opposition, making each step forward seem inordinately difficult. But vouchers are just the spearhead of a broader choice movement that includes the more rapidly expanding charter movement. If not for the viability of voucher programs, charters would have been the target of this onslaught of opposition.
Vouchers have made the world safe for charters. And the moment that vouchers really do stall, the enemies of school choice will redirect their fire at charters, strangling them with regulation and repealing charter gains. To say that vouchers haven’t really done much of anything politically because charters are really where the action is ignores how much charters owe their political strength to the credible threat of new and expanded voucher programs.
It may be fashionable at Beltway receptions to dismiss vouchers as everyone is eager to be seen as championing the latest DC fad proposal. But real analysis of research and politics show that the expansion of school choice, led by vouchers, will have a greater impact on education reform than building new school buildings, expanding pre-school, adopting a 21st century curriculum or whatever folks there are now talking about.
(edited for typos)
2 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: Andrew Rotherham, charter, Eduwonk, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, voucher | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(This is actually Jeremy Bentham. He’s preserved and kept at Oxford, where they bring him out for certain occasions. True story. But he doesn’t come back to life, unlike another Jeremy Bentham we know.)
Our Friday Lost commentary was again exposed to negatively charged exotic material and shifted through time to today. And that makes about as much sense as Lost lately. You could say that I am starting to lose it with Lost.
The problem is that Lost has clearly committed itself to having dead people come back to life. We’re not just seeing ghosts of dead people. And we aren’t just seeing time-loops to when people were still alive. People seem to die and then not be dead.
We know with certainty that this happened to John Locke. We saw him get killed and then later come to life. And he wasn’t just a ghost or time-looped. He remembered dying. He ate a mango. He was alive after being dead.
Keep in mind that the producers of the show swore that dead people were dead in the Lostverse. They told Entertainment Weekly: “These people have hearts, and when those hearts stop beating, they die.” This was part of their explicitly debunking the theory that the Island was Purgatory. No, they swore, the people on the Island are alive and when they are dead they are dead. They added to E! Online: “”If we did such a thing after repeatedly stating otherwise, we’d be tarred and feathered!”
Well, get out the tar and feathers. I guess they did not technically break their pledge that the Island was not purgatory, but it is clear that they misled us about whether being dead means that you stay dead.
Why does this matter? I’ve been concerned for a while that Lost has turned from a science-fiction story into a faith-based fantasy. In science-fiction there are “natural” rules and the plot is constrained by those rules. Those rules aren’t science as we know it, but they resemble science and must be consistent and logical within the universe of the plot. In a faith-based fantasy there is a power outside of and exempt from the “natural” rules. Those stories largely revolve around the desirability of faith in this power.
Now, I have no problem with stories that affirm the desirability of faith, per se. It’s just that they tend to be less compelling as stories. Dramatic tension in most stories occurs by bumping against the constraints of the rules. But if the rules within the story can be broken or suspended at any time or if there is a mystery that is never resolved because it lies outside of the rules, then the drama is undermined. The book of Job may be a great read and provoke a lot of interesting discussion, but it is hardly great drama. The explanation is that you are not entitled to an explanation.
If Lost has an Island with a conscious purpose (not the unconscious purpose of Fate, as we discussed last week) and if death does not mean you are dead, then we are breaking outside of a natural system with rules. It’s true that zombie movies involve the un-dead, but they are always explicit about their rules upfront so that they clearly stay within a natural order. But in Lost we are trying to figure out what the rules are and it is becoming clear that the rules are mystical and not natural. Sure, they may explain the rules before the end, but it will seem post hoc and unsatisfying. We can’t even infer the rules from what we are seeing since clearly anything can happen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still going to watch because I’m addicted and need to get the answers. But I am preparing myself for the fact that the answers will be unsatisfying because they will come from outside of any natural order that we can observe in the Lostverse.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
The Quick and the Ed has additional comment on the teacher pension conference I discussed yesterday. Rather than focusing on the financial sustainability of teacher pensions, Chad Aldeman at QATE focuses on how the odd accrual of pension wealth distorts teacher labor market decisions. This is also an incredibly important issue.
In particular, he focuses on the work done by my colleagues Bob Costrell and Mike Podgusrky that finds that the convoluted design teacher pensions encourages some teachers to continue working to receive a large increase in the value of their pensions at a particular age, while it pushes other teachers out the door because they would lose an enormous amount of pension wealth if they continued working.
These “peaks and valleys” in pension wealth can have profound effects on teacher quality, by possibly keeping some teachers in the profession too long and by cutting the careers of others too short. The chart above should give you a feeling for how convoluted teacher pension designs are. Aldeman calls it “the chart that launched a conference” because the publication of these findings in Education Next sparked a flurry of new research on teacher pensions, much of which was presented last week.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Last week Greg suggested that the Island has a will of its own that trumps the will of humans to direct its powers. According to Greg’s analysis, the Island is essentially a super-natural being, like God, although he admits the possibility that it is a malevolent super-natural force. And like God, Greg suggests that faith in the Island involves obeying even when the Island’s reasons are mysterious: “If we understood why the Island demands what it demands, there would be no question of faith (remember, John is the “man of faith”). In theology, “faith” doesn’t mean simply believing in certain facts about God, it means trusting and obeying God. And the supreme test of faith is to trust and obey when you don’t understand.”
Upon first seeing this week’s episode, 316, I thought Control-G (the hot-key for agreeing with Greg). Greg is right so often that we had to develop a hot-key to make our agreement more efficient (in your heart you know he’s right). It certainly would be novel to have a TV series entirely built around faith in a super-natural power. Ben’s suggestion that Jack was similar to the Apostle Thomas, Locke’s note wishing that Jack had believed, Lapidus’ presence as the pilot of Ajira 316, and the allusion of the flight number to John 3:16 made me think — at first — that Greg was entirely right — Control G! In the most recent episode Lost not only seemed like a story of vindicated faith but almost an explicit Christian allegory.
That’s when I started doubting this interpretation. Major TV producers would never make a series of a Christian allegory. The religious references, whether Christian or Island as super-natural power, have to be a false lead. The argument between faith and science will be revived. Faith has only temporarily prevailed.
The original faith/science debate revolved around pushing the button. The alleged purpose of pushing the button was to save the world from destruction. Locke had faith that the button must be pushed. But what seemed like faith may have just been the prescience of time-loops. The odd coincidences may just be the necessity of time course-correcting. Is the purpose and direction of events determined simply by Fate, a power without an independent will or consciousness, or is there a super-natural entity choosing the course of events? Greg’s theory seems to be the later, but I suspect it is the former.
I suspect that Fate has the world being destroyed. Humans have detected this Fate through the Numbers and time-travel and are struggling to alter that Fate. What seems like the will of the Island may just be the actions of humans in time loops attempting to steer Fate away from global destruction. Whether they succeed or not will revolve around whether humans can change Fate, not the will of a super-natural entity. I just can’t imagine a TV series emphasizing the will of a super-natural being over the primacy of human “agency.” It would be gutsy and interesting if they did, but I just can’t see it in mainstream TV.
The video embedded at the top of this post, suggests that human action to prevent destruction of the world is going to be central. The video comes from Comicon and I found it on Lostpedia, where it is known as the Dharma Booth Video. In it, Pierre Chang sends a message through time urging whoever sees it to continue the Dharma research to change time. The different factions will struggle over who will control the potential power to change Fate, but we will discover that who controls it will be less important than using it to avoid total destruction.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Townsperson: Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let the outside world break its own head….
Tevye: He is right…
Perchik: Nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.
Tevye: He’s right.
Rabbi’s pupil: He’s right, and he’s right. They can’t both be right!
Tevye: (Pause). You know, you are also right.
Fiddler on the Roof is coming to Fayetteville (the Ozark center of Yiddishkeit) in May. But it felt like Fiddler arrived early with Tony Wagner’s visit yesterday to promote his 21st Century Skills (TM) concept. People asked him a variety of questions and as it turns out, they were all right.
My colleague Gary Ritter commented that Wagner’s anecdotes sounded more like examples of bad teaching than of a bad curriculum. You’re right, Wagner replied. There is also bad teaching out there.
A student questioned his lack of empirical evidence to support his claims. You’re right, Wagner replied. He admitted to lacking quantitative evidence but said he was a qualitative researcher.
Stuart Buck noted that in the book Wagner profiled 3 schools that ignored the state tests, taught in a way they believed best, and still did very well on those exams. So is the problem really with accountability testing? You’re right, Wagner replied. The problem is in the unnecessary over-reaction of risk-averse educators.
A math professor asked about whether too much content was really the problem. You’re right, Wagner replied. He’s not against content and agrees that content is essential for developing his 7 essential skills (TM).
It didn’t really seem to matter if his answers contradicted claims he made in the book or even ten minutes earlier in his presentation. In the end, everyone was right and he was for everything people suggested. He was for accountability testing (as long as it was done right). He was for academic content (as long as it was the right amount and on the right stuff). He was for teaching to the test (if the test was a good one).
The quick, confident answers and the futuristic jargon may have wowed some, but it left me and many others a bit bewildered. He can’t be for all these things.
Happily there is a video record of his lecture. It’s actually from his web site, but it is almost identical to the lecture that he gave at least three times yesterday to different audiences. Notice that in minute 20 he clearly says that our kids don’t need content; they need “competencies.” And the best part of watching this video on the web is that it is free as opposed to the $20,000-$25,000 consulting fee that Fayetteville schools paid him for more or less the same thing.
See: http://www.schoolchange.org/videos/the_global_achievement_gap_video.html
7 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: 21st Century Skills, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Tony Wagner | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Walter Olson over at City Journal and his blog, Overlawyered.com, has uncovered a frightening and probably unintended effect of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. Children’s books made before 1985 are essentially being removed from the market. Olson writes:
“under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.”
He continues:
“CPSIA imposed tough new limits on lead in any products intended for use by children aged 12 or under, and made those limits retroactive: that is, goods manufactured before the law passed cannot be sold on the used market (even in garage sales or on eBay) if they don’t conform…. Not until 1985 did it become unlawful to use lead pigments in the inks, dyes, and paints used in children’s books. Before then—and perhaps particularly in the great age of children’s-book illustration that lasted through the early twentieth century—the use of such pigments was not uncommon, and testing can still detect lead residues in books today. This doesn’t mean that the books pose any hazard to children. While lead poisoning from other sources, such as paint in old houses, remains a serious public health problem in some communities, no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations—not surprisingly, since unlike poorly maintained wall paint, book pigments do not tend to flake off in large lead-laden chips for toddlers to put into their mouths.”
This doesn’t just hit used book-sellers hard, it also applies to any individual trying to sell a book on Ebay and even to public libraries. We will have to discard countless classic children’s books, many of which are no longer in print, to avoid something that has never been shown to be harmful.
But don’t worry. I’m sure we won’t actually burn the books. It might produce harmful toxins! Instead, I bet we are preparing a facility near Yuca Mountain to safely dispose of Make Way for Ducklings and Anne of Green Gables so those books will no longer harm our children. Better that they should sit in front of the TV.
(edited to change photo)
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
According to research published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, smokers who were offered financial incentives to quit smoking were more likely to do so. As the Wall Street Journal describes it:
“For the new study, researchers, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, tracked 878 General Electric Co. employees from around the country for a year and a half in 2005 and 2006. Participants, who smoked an average of one pack of cigarettes a day, were divided into two groups of roughly equal size. All received information about smoking-cessation programs.
Members of one group also got as much as $750 in cash, with the payments spread out over time to encourage longer-term abstinence. Those participants got $100 for completing a smoking-cessation program, $250 if they stopped smoking within six months after enrolling in the study, and $400 for continuing to abstain from smoking for an additional six months.
All participants were contacted three months after they enrolled in the study and periodically after that. Those who said they had stopped smoking at any point during the study were asked to submit saliva or urine samples for testing so that their claims could be verified.
About 14.7% of the group offered financial incentives said they had stopped smoking within the first year of the study, compared with 5% of the other group. At the time of their last interview for the 18-month study, 9.4% of the paid group was still abstaining compared with 3.6% of those who got no money.”
Wait a minute! If I’ve learned one thing from Alfie Kohn it is that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. The smokers paid to stop should have had the internal motivation to quit undermined and should have been less successful than those who quit for the pure joy of it.
I’ve got an idea. Let’s stop paying people for their work because it only undermines their internal motivation to work. And to avoid undermining Alfie Kohn’s motivation, I’m sure he’d understand if people stopped paying him for his lectures and books.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
The U.S. Department of Education released a study on how alternatively certified teachers affect student achievement. The bottom line is that they find: “students of teachers who chose to enter teaching through an alternative route did not perform statistically different from students of teachers who chose a traditional route to teaching. This finding was the same for those programs that required comparatively many as well as few hours of coursework. However, among those alternative route teachers who reported taking coursework while teaching, their students performed lower than their traditional counterparts.”
I’m sure that the headlines will be: “Alternative Certification Fails to Improve Student Achievement.” But they will have it backwards. The real headline should be: “Years of Teacher Education Coursework Yields No Benefits for Student Achievement.”
Besides, the real question is whether the alternatively certified teachers are better than the traditional certified teachers districts would have hired if they were constrained to hire only certified teachers.
And in other research news, the forthcoming issue of Education Next has an article by Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos comparing student achievement in Philadelphia’s for-profit managed schools versus district-managed schools. The find: “the effect of for-profit management of schools is positive relative to district schools, with math impacts being statistically significant. Over the last six years, students learned each year an average of 25 percent of a standard deviation more in math — roughly 60 percent of a year’s worth of learning — than they would have had the school been under district management. In reading, the estimated average annual impact of for-profit management is a positive 10 percent of a standard deviation — approximately 36 percent of a year’s worth of reading. Only the math differences are statistically significant, however.”
Leave a Comment » | research reports, teacher quality | Tagged: alternative certification, Education Next, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Matthew Chingos, Paul Peterson | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
This story comes out of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. I think it raises all sorts of interesting questions about identity politics, but I don’t have the answers. So, I’ll just reproduce portions below to see what folks think.
“Rep. Richard Carroll of North Little Rock, Arkansas’ only Green Party legislator, asked to be a member of the Arkansas Black Legislative Caucus but was rejected because he’s white…. Asked about it after the meeting, Carroll said he wanted to be a member, but that caucus leaders told him that caucus bylaws require that members be black.
Caucus Chairman Rep. Nancy Duffy Blount, D-Marianna, likened the situation to a man wanting to be part of the Legislative Women’s Caucus. ‘With men, there are some things that men can understand and share and there are some things they can’t because they’re not women,’ Blount said. ‘Same thing here…’
Carroll, 52, said he wanted to be a caucus member to better represent and understand the views of his constituents. He said he could ask his wife, who is black, for her thoughts, but that she would only be one person.
‘You have to be an elected legislator and you have to be black,’ Blount said…. The latest bylaws for the caucus on file at the Bureau of Legislative Research give no race requirement for membership. It says that the membership ‘shall consist of any current member of the Arkansas General Assembly who pays an annual membership.’ But the bureau staff didn’t know whether those bylaws were current. Blount said she didn’t know either but she thought they had been changed to include a race requirement. She said she doesn’t have a copy of the bylaws but based her understanding of the membership requirements on ‘common sense’ and from what caucus vice chairman, Sen. Tracy Steele, D-North Little Rock, told her the bylaws said. Steele later said he had ‘no idea’ what the bylaws said about membership. …
Carroll wondered how the caucus ‘defines black,’ whether you needed to be a ‘certain percentage’ black. Blount said, ‘If you say you are an African-American, we don’t go back and do a historical search. We just go on whatever they say they are.’
Another caucus member, Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, said Carroll’s interest in the caucus is ‘commendable’ but ‘since it’s called the ‘black caucus’ he can’t be a member. It is a caucus defined as being black. All discrimination is not bad. You can discriminate about whether you are going to drink four beers or 10 beers. I would say that’s good discrimination. “‘ Elliott said excluding whites is a legitimate form of discrimination because black legislators need to join with others of ‘common cause.’
Carroll said he didn’t see it as a discrimination either. ‘It’s just that that’s their bylaws,’ he said.
It’s only a matter of time until there is a dispute over membership in the Gay Caucus. How will we tell?
2 Comments | politics | Tagged: Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Joyce Elliott, Nancy Blount, Richard Carroll | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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