(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Today Pajamas Media runs my column on the latest long-term trend NAEP results and what they say to critics and supporters of NCLB:
The good news for the critics is that the Nation’s Report Card shows reading and math scores still have not substantially changed since 1971.
The good news for supporters is that the Nation’s Report Card shows reading and math scores still have not substantially changed since 1971.
Welcome to the confusing world of education policy!
1 Comment | 
NCLB | Tagged: Greg Forster, NAEP, NCLB, Pajamas Media | 
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Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
This morning, Pajamas Media carries my column on the results of the new Milwaukee studies released last week by the School Choice Demonstration Project:
It’s bad enough that everyone seems to be ignoring the program’s positive impact on public schools. About four-fifths of the students are still in public schools. Why look only at the results for the voucher students, only one-fifth of the total? If you had a medical treatment that would help four-fifths of all patients suffering from some horrible disease — and what else can you call the present state of our education system but a horrible disease? — that would be considered a fantastic result.
But it gets worse. These results don’t just show that the program improves education for students in public schools. They also indicate that the program improves education for the students who are using vouchers.
1 Comment | competitive effects, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: Greg Forster, Milwaukee vouchers, Pajamas Media, School Choice Demonstration Project | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Think we should spend $100 billion as part of the new “stimulus” (read: pork) plan on school buildings? Greg Forster’s piece on Pajamas Media will convince you otherwise.
3 Comments | money myth | Tagged: Greg Forster, Pajamas Media, school stimulus | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
This morning, Pajamas Media carries my column on the selection of Arne Duncan as Obama’s education secretary. At first, I agreed with Jay’s assessment that the choice is a boring subject, but after thinking about how boring it is, I now find it fascinating:
It really is amazing how totally uninteresting — how completely devoid of any possible justification for paying attention to it — the choice of Duncan for education secretary is. In fact, the selection has succeeded in fascinating me by achieving such an unprecedented level of anti-fascinatingness. It repels my interest so strongly that I can’t stop thinking about it.
Not that this means I’m wowed by the pick:
If Duncan is acceptable to everybody, that’s another way of saying he’s the lowest common denominator. And as a great education reformer once said: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you.”
2 Comments | politics | Tagged: Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, Greg Forster, Pajamas Media | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
You may have heard about the Texas prof who was fired for publicly disclosing the names of students he caught cheating. Pajamas Media carries a somewhat confessional column today in which I discuss the role of the Internet (which, contrary to popular opinion, makes cheating harder rather than easier) and the rise of educational lawsuits (which colleges have responded to by abdicating their traditional disciplinary role), but also reflect, without satisfaction, upon my own experience dealing with a cheater:
The fear of lawsuits only compounds the difficulty of what is already a difficult decision. Even with the strongest possible intellectual conviction that it’s the right thing to do, actually imposing a punishment on a fellow human being takes a certain amount of moral courage. It takes some guts.
The isolation of the teacher as the lone defender of honesty in the classroom only makes it much more difficult to do the difficult but necessary thing when the time comes. And this, again, is something I can testify about from personal experience.
I regret to say that when I confronted my cheater, I chickened out.
What I ended up doing in the end, instead of what I had resolved to do and then didn’t have the courage to do, actually might be a good model for how to deal with a cheater. Of course, I’d rather have discovered it through intelligence rather than cowardice. As C.S. Lewis says, only fools learn by experience, but at least they do learn.
2 Comments | civic values, scandal | Tagged: cheating, Greg Forster, Loye Young, Pajamas Media | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Over the weekend Pajamas Media carried my column on how Obama and Palin have flip-flopped on education:
Suppose I told you Candidate A has supported rigorous academic standards, has stood up to the teachers’ unions — even been booed by them at their convention — and proclaimed the free-market principles that schools should compete for students and better teachers should get higher salaries. On the other hand, Candidate B says that competition hurts schools, that kids should be taught a radical left-wing civics curriculum, that we should throw more money at teachers’ unions — excuse me, at schools — and that rigorous academic standards should be replaced with the unions’ old lower-the-bar favorite, “portfolio assessment.”
Candidate A is Barack Obama. So is Candidate B.
Meanwhile, Candidate C has made an alliance with the teachers’ unions, opposed school choice, thrown money at the unions — excuse me, at schools — and even helped undermine a badly needed reform of bloated union pensions. On the other hand, Candidate D has broken with the teachers’ unions, demanded that schools should have to compete for students, and endorsed the most radical federal education reform agenda ever proposed by a national candidate, including a national school choice program for all disabled students.
Candidate C is Sarah Palin. So is Candidate D.
Important disclaimer:
None of this implies anything about the overall merits of any of these candidates. One can love a candidate overall while hating his or her stand on education, and vice versa.
1 Comment | competitive effects, money myth, politics, school accountability, social promotion, special ed, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: Barack Obama, Greg Forster, Pajamas Media, Sarah Palin | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Over the weekend, Pajamas Media carried my column on the centruy-long failure of public schools to teach civics effectively:
On the other hand, just because the school system’s failure has been going on for a long time doesn’t mean it isn’t a failure. And school failure always has consequences.
Just think how much better American life might have been over the past century if we had been a nation of citizens who knew what citizens ought to know, rather than a nation whose schools failed so miserably and so consistently at their jobs. Would fewer people have succumbed to the siren song of isolationism in the 1930s, while Hitler and Stalin built their empires of mass murder and Mao took control of the Chinese revolutionaries? Would the triumph of the civil rights movement have come sooner and with less toil and bloodshed, and left behind fewer of the unresolved problems that still fester in our politics? Would there have been a clearer understanding of the nature of communism, meaning less denial and excuse-making for Soviet and Maoist atrocities, perhaps even leading to an earlier and more complete victory for freedom in the world? Who can say what horrors we might have avoided if our citizens had all along understood the intellectual and historical foundations of liberty?
Moreover, if the failure is so long-term, we can’t attribute it to transitory phenomena like 1960s radicalism. We have to expect it to be rooted in the basic structure of our educational institutions — whatever we’re doing wrong, it’s something we’ve been doing wrong for at least a century.
2 Comments | civic values, vouchers | Tagged: civic values, Greg Forster, Pajamas Media | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Today, Pajamas Media carries my column on Michelle Rhee’s push for a limited, voluntary merit pay system in Washington D.C.:
To see how much has changed, just consider the amazing fact that about one out of every three public-school students in D.C. attends a charter school — government-owned but non-unionized, privately operated, and (most important of all) chosen by parents — instead of a regular public school. “We lost 6,000 students last year,” says Parker, referring to the number of students who moved from regular schools to charters. Six thousand students is over 13% of the city’s remaining enrollment in regular public schools — in one year.
Rhee isn’t the force behind charter schools or vouchers in D.C. She’s in charge of the regular public system. But the same widespread mandate for reform that made charters and vouchers successful have allowed Rhee to succeed with reforms like closing schools that were only there to create patronage jobs, introducing curriculum innovation, and taking on the unbelievable amount of bureaucratic waste in the system. And as vouchers and charters have sent a message that the system can’t take students for granted any more, the pressure for reform has only increased — strengthening Rhee’s hand.
By coincidence, the Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher has a column today emphasizing how the explosion of charter schools in D.C. was decisive in bringing the unions to the bargaining table, even on the issue of reforming the structure of teacher pay. Just as competition from globalization forced the private sector unions to start the long, slow process of giving up the ridiculous extravegances that they won from management in the 1960s and 1970s, thus rescuing the American economy from disaster, now competition in schooling is forcing the teachers’ unions to start the same process of giving up their own ridiculous extravegances – the biggest of all being a system of hiring, firing and pay that bears no serious relationship to job performance.
Leave a Comment » | charter schools, competitive effects, politics, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: DC, Greg Forster, merit pay, Michelle Rhee, Pajamas Media | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
This morning, Pajamas Media carries my column on schools giving out cash or other tangible prizes to reward academic achievement:
These days, if a child asks why he should care about doing well in school, what kind of answer does he get? He gets the same answer from every source: from parents, teachers, and school administrators; from movies and TV shows; from public service announcements, social service programs, and do-gooder philanthropies; from celebrities, athletes, and actors; from supporters and opponents of education reform; from everybody.
The answer is always some version of: you need to do well in school in order to have prosperity later in life.
Well, if you scrape away the sanctimony, what is this but a “bribe” on a colossal scale?
The practice of tangibly rewarding educational success is the subject of a forthcoming article in Education Next, which is a top scholarly journal, as we all know.
Leave a Comment » | civic values | Tagged: cash for grades, Greg Forster, Pajamas Media | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Pajamas Media carries my take on BB today. I’m not as harsh on BB as Jay and Matt have been. I’m harsher.
Those of you who have been following the unions’ desperate attempt to distract you from the fact that BB doesn’t have the empirical evidence they claim it has by flinging a bunch of calumny at Jay may find this section of particular interest:
The really funny thing is, we’ve tried bringing social services into schools before. Fifty years ago, schools didn’t serve breakfast and provide teams of guidance counselors. Providing these and other social services in schools was originally justified on grounds that the kids needed these services to do well in school. How has that worked out?
Well, after all the empirical research that’s been done on schools, there’s no serious evidence that educational outcomes have improved as a result of these services. When the unions were challenged to come up with some evidence, they responded that “teachers know” these policies work.
But if the real purpose of providing these services in schools was to enlarge the government education blob, mission accomplished.
I wrote the column before the exchange about evidence and “cherry picking” over the last few days, but I see nothing that needs revision. As Jay pointed out, the evidence to which they now appeal is on the same scientific level as that used to prove the healing power of crystals. Their original “teachers know” argument was actually better – at least it didn’t pretend to be scientific.
Leave a Comment » | money myth, myth of helplessness, teacher union | Tagged: Broader Bolder, Greg Forster, myth of helplessness, Pajamas Media | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
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