You Mean Wal-Mart Isn’t Evil?

February 9, 2009

 

(Don’t blame me for the lousy photo-shopping.  Eduwonkette did it.  But I told her it made me look like David Byrne in his giant suit.  Pretty cool!)

David Kinkade at the Arkansas Project alerted us to this piece by Charles Platt, a writer at Wired Magazine, on his experience going “undercover” to work for Wal-Mart.  Platt writes:

” I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans.”

He then concludes:

“Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s.”

So, the path to higher worker wages is improved education, not unionization?  Luckily the unions do so much to help improve education that I guess we are in great shape!

8 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Mistaken AJC Voucher Editorial Held Accountable

February 9, 2009

 

One of the great things about these here inter-web thingies is their ability to hold newspapers accountable when they make mistakes.  And the editorial by Maureen Downey that the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran last week on vouchers was very much mistaken.  In it Downey  claimed “in the handful of states that have conducted experiments with vouchers, the results contradict claims of improvement by Johnson and other voucher advocates… Yet, in return for zero impact, Johnson proposes to dismantle public education in Georgia.”  She also described “vouchers as a threat to the bedrock American belief that public education is critical to the health of the democracy and should not be sacrificed to political agendas.” 

To support her overwrought claims she cites a newspaper article on Ohio’s voucher program, studies of the voucher programs in DC and Milwaukee conducted by my colleague Pat  Wolf, and a review of the literature by Barrow and Rouse.  Unfortunately she cites all of them selectively or misinterprets their findings as showing “zero impact.”  Fortunately, Pat Wolf noticed her incorrect interpretation of his work and sent a letter, which the AJC ran today.

But letters are limited in length and less salient than the editorials they attempt to correct.  In the old days when newspapers were the only game in town, it was very difficult to hold newspapers accountable for editorials that were factually inaccurate.  They might have run letters, like the one Pat Wolf submitted, but they wouldn’t even have to do that if they didn’t want to.

With the inter-webs we not only have Pat Wolf’s letter in the AJC, we can also circulate it by posting it on blogs, like I just did.  And we can add additional material, for which there would have been no space in the letters section.  So let me add that here is a complete list of random-assignment studies of the effects of vouchers on students who use them.  Here is a summary of the effect of vouchers on the public school system.  And here is random-assignment research on the effect of charter schools on participants.  And if she thinks choice destroys democracy, here is a review of that literature showing that she is mistaken about that as well.

If Maureen Downey and the Atlanta Journal Constitution want to say that evidence shows “zero impact” from vouchers, then they have to explain away all of this evidence.  And if they don’t want to justify their claims in the pages of their paper, we can hold them accountable on the web.

(edited for typos)

1 Comment | vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Jay Praises the Stimulus!

February 4, 2009

billy-bragg-talking-with-the-taxman

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Don’t miss Jay’s article on NRO this morning praising the stimulus bill – that is, celebrating the fact that the stimulus isn’t even worse than it actually is.

As Jay reminds us, the Democrats made big promises about expanding preschool. The enormous slab of edu-pork in the stimulus bill could easily have been designed to lay the groundwork for fulfilling those promises, but it doesn’t:

Of course, if this money isn’t really going to help children learn, it would be best if we didn’t spend it at all. But Congress seems determined to burn giant piles of cash in the hopes that its warm glow will stimulate us. Given the circumstances, it’s some consolation that the current education stimulus won’t force us to burn larger and larger piles of cash forever into the future.

Burning large piles of cash, eh? Hmm. Sounds familiar.

2 Comments | economics, money myth | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Critical Thinking About Critical Thinking

January 27, 2009

snakeoil553.jpg

Fayetteville Public Schools have been hypnotized by Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap.  They’ve bought 2,000 copies, which they’ve distributed to administrators, teachers, and members of the community.  They’ve organized three public discussions of the book.  They are bringing in Wagner himself.  And they’ve indicated that they would like to use this book as a guide for planning a new high school and other changes.

My colleague, Sandra Stotsky, applies her critical thinking skills in today’s Northwest Arkansas Times to Wagner’s call for more emphasis on “21st Century Skills,” like critical thinking, adaptability, and creativity, and less emphasis on subject content:

“Who can argue against teaching students ‘agility and adaptability’ or how to ‘ask good questions?’ Yet these ‘skills’ are largely unsupported by actual scientific research. Wagner presents nothing to justify his list except glib language and a virtually endless string of anecdotes about his conversations with high-tech CEOs.

Even where Wagner does use research, it’s not clear that we can trust what he reports as fact. On page 92, to discredit attempts to increase the number of high school students studying algebra and advanced mathematics courses, he refers to a ‘study’ of MIT graduates that he claims found only a few mentioning anything ‘more than arithmetic, statistics and probability’ as useful to their work. Curious, I checked out the ‘study’ using the URL provided in an end note for Chapter 3. It consisted of 17, yes 17, MIT graduates, and, according to my count, 11 of the 17 explicitly mentioned linear algebra, trig, proofs and/ or calculus, or other advanced mathematics courses as vital to their work – exactly the opposite of what Wagner reports! Perhaps exposure to higher mathematics is not the worst problem facing American students!

Similarly, while I agree with Wagner that too many public schools fail to teach ‘effective oral and written communication,’ I am utterly puzzled by his contention that teachers’ obsessions with teaching grammar, test-prep and teaching to ‘the test’ are the problem. Really? Which English teachers? A lot of parents would kill to get their children into a classroom where they knew the teacher cared about grammar, or at least was brave enough to try to teach conventional sentence structure and language usage.

As for too much testing in schools, another of his complaints, Wagner again cites no relevant research. On the other hand my colleague Gary Ritter finds that here in Arkansas public schools the most tested students – those in grades five and seven – spend only 1 percent of total instructional time being tested, probably less time than spent in class parties or on field trips. And without testing, how can we figure out what our students know, and which programs successfully teach them?

Wagner’s book is engaging and sometimes points to real defects in American schools. Yet it fails to use research objectively to ascertain what is truly happening in America’s 90,000 public schools. Moreover, like all too many education ‘reformers’ Wagner is simply hostile to academic content. Wagner does not seem to care if students can read and write grammatically, do math or know something about science and history – real subjects that schools can teach and policy-makers can measure.

Unfortunately, Wagner dismisses measurable academic content while embracing buzzwords like ‘adaptability’ and ‘curiosity,’ which no one could possibly be against, but also which no one could possibly measure. Do we really care if our students are curious and adaptable if they cannot read and write their own names? “

I have my own op-ed on Wagner pending at another local paper.  Meanwhile my colleague Stuart Buck has an excellent blog post on a related topic — Alfie Kohn’s attack on Core Knowledge.  Even worse, Stuart notes, Kohn accuses people who disagree with him of having bad intentions and not just being mistaken.

It is puzzling how this entire industry of education consultants, including Wagner, Kohn, Kozol, and Gardner, manage to have such large followings with such weak arguments.

8 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

A Modest Proposal

January 19, 2009

As we at JPGB have been arguing for many months and in many posts, giant federal bailouts are unlikely to have any beneficial effects and may well do harm.  (See for example here, here, and here.)  But if we have to have a new $800 billion stimulus package on top of the already adopted  $700 billion financial bailout on top of the trillions in implied or explicit loan guarantees via the federal takeovers of Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Bank of America, Citi, etc…, there might be a smarter way to do it.

So I would like to offer my modest proposal for the new $800 billion stiumuls package — voucherize it.  Give every man, woman, and child in the US a check good for an equal portion of the $800 billion.  With 300 million people that works out to about $2,667 dollars.  A family of four would get a total of $10,667. 

If it’s true that the federal government needs to tax, borrow, or print the money to stimulate the economy (a theory that makes no sense to me), can’t we at least empower everybody to use the money in the way they think best rather than the way that a bunch of log-rolling, pork-eating, back-slapping politicians think best? 

If schools really need to be rebuilt, let local communities pass a bond referendum and raise their taxes,whose cost could be defrayed by the extra cash we just put in everybody’s pockets.  If the community thinks that they need better roads instead of better school buildings, they could direct their bailout voucher funds in that direction.  If banks really need more capital, then they can earn the deposits from these bailout vouchers.  If the consumer needs more resources to keep spending, the bailout voucher puts cash in their pocket.  If people are having trouble paying their mortgages, the bailout voucher eases their burden.

Rather than having the priorities set in Washington, the bailout voucher lets the priorities of the stimulus package be determined by everybody.  Do we have any reason to believe that Washington knows best which schools need to be remodeled or which bridges need to be built or which mortgages should be refinanced?

Much of the intellectual work over the next four years is going to be to reshape dumb policy ideas that are going to get passed even though they shouldn’t.  Let’s start by urging that the stimulus package be voucherized.

(edited to correct typos)

4 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Man On Wire

January 18, 2009

I just saw the excellent documentary Man on Wire last weekend about Philippe Petit’s daring tight-rope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.  Petit, a Parisian street performer, juggler, and high-wire artist, obsessed for six years on his dream to rig a wire between the roofs of the two buildings almost 1/4 mile above the street and walk across it.  With the elaborate planning of a bank heist, he studied the towers, devised a method to rig the wire, and sneak his team and equipment into place.  And then he did it.  And it was spectacular. 

We are drawn to people with the vision, determination, and skill to accomplish great things.  Petit is a Howard Roark… or a Howard Hughes.  But like Roark and Hughes, Petit also comes off as crazy and narcissistic.  Does great achievement require some amount of insanity?  The right amount of obsessive compulsive disorder might help provide the focus and drive to do something extraordinary.

And like Roark and Hughes, people might doubt the true worth of Petit’s accomplishments.  In the movie he’s asked why he went to all this effort to walk on a tight-rope between the twin towers.  “There is no why,” he replies.  At other times he would answer: “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”

3 Comments | random pop culture | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Growing Charter School Consensus

January 15, 2009

A string of high quality studies is finding that students benefit academically from attending a charter school rather than a traditional public school. 

First we had a random-assignment study of Chicago charter schools by Caroline Hoxby and Jonah Rockoff that found “that students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading.” 

Then Hoxby conducted a random-assignment study of charter schools in New York City and found: “that the average effect of the charter schools on math is 0.09 standard deviations for every year that a student spends in his or her charter school. The average effect on reading is 0.04 standard deviations for every year that a student spends in his or her charter school.” 

Then Kevin Booker (Mathematica), Tim Sass (Florida State), Brian Gill (Mathematica), and Ron Zimmer (Rand)used a well-designed instrumental variable analysis to see whether charter middle-schoolers who continue to charter high schools are more likely to graduate.  They are. 

And most recently a random-assignment analysis of charter schools in Massachusetts led by Tom Kane at Harvard and Josh Angrist at MIT found that charter school students accepted by lotteries significantly outperformed their counterparts in traditional public schools, unless the charter school was operated by the teacher unions.

In light of these high quality studies, it is harder to oppose charter schools on a scholarly basis.  And with the clear support of charters from the incoming Obama administration, it is getting harder to opposed charter schools on a political basis — at least at the national level.

But don’t expect to see the teacher unions waving a white flag despite their losses in research and national politics.  They don’t need facts or the support of the US Department of Education so long as they continue to dominate local school politics. 

And that is exactly why they have focused on organizing local charter schools to neutralize the threat to their grip on local school politics.  As my colleague Marcus Winters writes today in the New York Post, the unions managed to organize two successful charter schools in New York City.  The fact that union-run charter schools in Massachusetts trailed the non-union charters in performance is not of concern to the unions.  It isn’t about student achievement; it’s about keeping their hold on power even as the facts pile up against them.

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

New DC Voucher Study

January 13, 2009

My colleague Pat Wolf released today a new study of the DC voucher program based on focus group interviews of families.  It found high levels of parental satisfaction with the program, even among families that returned to the public system.  People appreciated having the choices and felt more involved in their children’s education.

Of course, these satisfaction outcomes don’t usually move the debate very much.  Opponents of voucher programs tend not to be persuaded by parental reports of satisfaction because they doubt the judgment of parents.  That’s why they are skeptical about choice.  And supporters of vouchers view satisfaction outcomes as important, but they are already inclined to trust parental assessments.

But the report provides plenty of contextual information that is useful and interesting even if it is not decisive.  A new test score analysis of the DC voucher program is expected sometime this Spring.

Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Simpson’s Paradox — D’oh!

January 12, 2009

When it is pointed out that NAEP scores for 17 year-olds or graduation rates have remained flat for roughly three decades despite a doubling in per pupil spending (adjusted for inflation), I always brace myself for the Simpson’s Paradox response.  I particularly brace for it because its most active (and grating) purveyor is Gerald Bracey — D’oh!

As Bracey explains it, “Simpson’s Paradox occurs whenever the whole group shows one pattern but subgroups show a different pattern. ”  Test scores may rise over time for every ethnic/racial subgroup but the overall average may still decline or remain flat.  “The explanation lies,” Bracey argues, “in the changing makeup of the test taking groups. At Time 1, only 20% of the test takers were minorities. At Time 2, they make up 40% of the group. Their scores are improving, but they are still lower than whites’ so as they become a larger and larger proportion of the total sample of test takers, their improving-but-lower test scores attenuate the overall average or, in this case, actually cause it to fall.”

On the surface this story sounds very appealing.  Even sensible-sounding people like JPGB commentator, Parry, repeat the argument.  But on closer examination, Simpson’s Paradox does not explain away the frustrating lack of education productivity over the last few decades.

If we want to know whether we are receiving returns on our enormous additional investment in education, we want to see progress in the overall picture.  It would provide us with little comfort to see that our investments benefited some students but did not produce an aggregate gain — unless holding steady was actually a victory in the face of significantly more difficult to educate students.

And that is the unstated argument behind the use of Simpson’s Paradox to explain the lack of educational progress: minority students are more difficult to educate and we have more of them, so holding steady is really a gain.

The problem with this is that it only considers one dimension by which students may be more or less difficult to educate — race.  And it assumes that race has the same educational implications over time.  Unless one believes that minority students are more challenging because they are genetically different, which I do not imagine Bracey or Parry believe, we have to think about race/ethnicity differently over time as the host of social and economic factors that race represents changes.  Being African-American in 1975 is very different from being African-American in 2008.  (Was a black president even imaginable back then?)  So, the challenges associated with educating minority students three decades ago were almost certainly different from the challenges today.

If we want to see whether students are more difficult to educate over time, we’d have to consider more than just how many minority students we have.  We’d have to consider a large set of social and economic variables, many of which are associated with race.  Greg Forster and I did this in a report for the Manhattan Institute in which we tracked changes in 16 variables that are generally held to be related to the challenges that students bring to school.  We found that 10 of those 16 factors have improved, so that we would expect students generally to be less difficult to educate.  For example, we observed that students are significantly more likely to attend pre-school and come to the K-12 system with greater academic preparation.  Expansions in higher educational opportunities have significantly improved the average level of parental education, which should contribute to student readiness for K-12.  Median family incomes (adjusted for inflation) have improved and a smaller percentage of children live in poverty.  Children are more likely to come to school with better health and there are fewer teen moms.

Yes, some factors have made things more difficult.  There are more students from homes in which English is not the first language and more children in single-parent households.

And yes, there are more minority students, but those minority students have better incomes, better educated parents, more pre-school, and lower rates of crime in their communities.  Unless one wants to make a genetic argument, it is obviously misleading to say that students in general are more difficult to educate because there are more minority students.

But that is exactly what the purveyors of Simpson’s Paradox are doing.  They focus only on race and act as if it were an immutable influence on academic performance.  Many things have changed over the last few decades and most of them tend to make students better prepared for K-12 school.  Even if you are not completely persuaded by the report that Greg and I produced (and we make no claim to having a definitive analysis), it would be very difficult to suggest that students have become twice as difficult to educate to completely off-set the doubling in resources we have devoted to their education.  Any reasonable examination of the evidence suggests that we have suffered from a serious decline in educational productivity, where we buy significantly less achievement for each additional dollar spent.

11 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Willingham Strikes Again

January 10, 2009

Psychologist Dan Willingham strikes again with another excellent video about educational psychology.  In this one he makes a strong case for the importance of teaching content for teaching reading.

2 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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