Author Archive
Reply to Samuelson: It Is an Engineering Problem
In today’s Washington Post, Robert Samuelson argues that the performance of U.S. public schools is at least adequate, and that the relatively low achievement of black and Hispanic students is to be attributed to history and culture rather than to our education system. These claims are not new, and I might well have ignored them if he hadn’t got my Irish up with the off-hand comment that “what we face is not an engineering problem.” (More on that in a second.)
First, let’s dispatch the claim that public schooling is off the hook for the poor performance of low-income minority children. I’m currently undertaking a statistical study of the performance of 78 separate charter school networks in California, relative to one another and to the state’s traditional public schools. To foreshadow the results, the performance differences within socioeconomic groups are enormous even after controlling for school-wide peer effects. Among low-income Hispanic students, across grades, schools and subjects, average scores at two of the top charter networks (American Indian Public Schools and Oakland Charter Academies) are roughly 4 standard deviations above the statewide traditional public school mean. Quatre. Quattro. FOUR.
To put that in perspective, effect sizes in social science research are normally evaluated based on Jacob Cohen’s rule of thumb that 0.2 standard deviations is “small”, 0.5 is “moderate”, and anything bigger than 0.8 is “large.” To put it further in perspective, the low-income Hispanic effect sizes of two of California’s most elite and academically selective public schools are closer to 2 S.D. So the top charter networks, which accept every student who applies, massively outperform elite public schools that actively select their students based on prior test scores. Consistently. Across grades and subjects. [Note that there's also wide variation in performance among charter school networks, with many performing below the mean of traditional public schools. Further details when the paper is published in a few months].
So, no, public schooling is not off the hook. We know it is possible to dramatically raise the achievement of low-income minority students above the current public school level. The problem is that we lack a system for reliably replicating the good schools and crowding out the rest. And what kind of problem is that? Even Wikipedia knows the answer:
Engineering is the discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge to design and build… systems… and processes that safely realize solutions to the needs of society.
Engineering is just a broad set of tools for finding practical solutions to complex problems. One of the most useful of those tools is an aversion to reinventing the wheel, so engineers always ask how the kind of problem they’re addressing has been approached previously, in other places, even in other fields. When possible, they adapt proven solutions to the problem at hand.
So let’s all be engineers for a day on January 28th and hear what education experts from Sweden and Chile have to say about how their nations have been encouraging the replication of good schools. You can register for this unique lunchtime event here.
Cloning “Superman”
We all know there are too few good schools and too many lousy ones. The trouble is, we lack a mechanism for reliably scaling up the former and crowding out the latter. Competitive markets perform this service in other fields, from coffee-shops to cell phones. Can the same thing work in education?
To find out, we’ve invited experts from both hemispheres to tell us what their nations have learned from decades of experience with private-school choice. Peje Emilsson founded the largest chain of for-profit private schools in Sweden’s nationwide voucher program. Humberto Santos has studied the academic performance of public schools, independent private schools, and chains of private schools in Chile’s voucher program. Responding to their findings and asking challenging questions will be Education Week journalist Sarah Sparks.
I hope you can join us for this fascinating discussion, and lunch, at noon on January 28th. Click here to register. The sooner we can stop “Waiting for Superman,” the better.
Random Assignment
The Brookings Institution released a new study today on charter schooling—assessing how well it’s working and what the federal government should do about it. One of the recommendations reads as follows:
Student participation in lotteries for admissions to any public [charter] school and the results of such lotteries should be a required student data element in state or district longitudinal data systems supported with federal funds.
Why? Because it would make it a lot easier to measure relative school quality, by permitting more widespread use of randomized, control group experiments. Experiments are certainly great from a researcher’s standpoint, but mandating that schools must admit students on a random basis has a catch:
an observer effect as subtle as an 80-foot fire-breathing robot. One of the reasons markets work is that exchanges are mutually voluntary, and producers and consumers don’t enter into an exchange unless each perceives it to be beneficial. If you eliminate the mutually voluntary character of an exchange in the process of trying to observe how beneficial it is to one of the parties, you’re affecting the very thing you’re trying to measure. It becomes more likely that you will have students assigned to schools that are not well equipped to serve their particular needs, injuring such students’ educational prospects.
Lottery admission to oversubscribed charter schools appeals to people’s desire for fairness, but a much better solution is to adopt a true market approach to education in which oversubscribed schools have not only the freedom but the incentives to expand as demand increases. For-profit enterprises, schools among them, do not generally ignore rising demand for their services. Kumon, the for-profit tutoring service, does not turn students away when it reaches capacity at a given location, it grows that location or opens a new one. As a result, it now serves about four million students in 42 countries.
Rather than figuring out how to ration good schools, why don’t we just unleash the market forces that will grow and replicate them?
The Private Sector Lacks What?!?
So there I was, checking e-mail this morning on my JooJoo when I came across this editorial about how the private sector lacks accountability unless the government provides it through regulation! This naturally caused me to expectorate New Coke all over over myself and my Apple III, forcing me to toss my Levi’s Type 1 jeans in the wash and hop back in the shower. (You know, that Touch of Yogurt shampoo by Clairol is really… uh… something).
Twenty minutes later I was still so preoccupied about responding to the editorial that I backed over my neighbor’s Segway as I pulled the Edsel out of the garage. Oops. Sorry Dean.
Anyway, once I got into the office I popped a couple of Ben Gay Aspirin to ease my now ferocious headache, but realized as I did so that I’d left my Colgate Kitchen Entree frozen dinner at home. Argh!
You get the idea, yes?
The fact that consumers have demands, and that they can go elsewhere if you fail to meet them, makes producers accountable. We see this in every sector of the economy. Provide a product or service that people don’t want, take away one that they do want, or charge more than they are willing to pay, and they will kick you right in the bottom line.
The result is the same in education as in other fields: the least regulated, most market-like education systems consistently outperform highly regulated state-run school systems such as we have in this country—across every measure people care about.
Regulations are an attempt, crude and usually unsuccessful, to imitate the accountability inherent in competitive markets. So as long as you allow market forces to work in education, and you allow people to allocate their own money rather than taxing it and spending it through the state, regulations are not only unnecessary they are generally counterproductive. (Milton and Rose Friedman had a good chapter on this in Free to Choose.)
Note that this is true under both personal use education tax credits (for parents’ own education costs) and scholarship donation tax credits (in which taxpayers donate to non-profit organizations that subsidize education for the poor). If a scholarship organization becomes corrupt or inefficient, taxpayers can easily redirect their donations to better-run competing organizations. The accountability is built into the system’s design. No other private school choice program has this feature, and certainly public schools do not.
There is no evidence that layering government regulations on top of this market accountability system improves outcomes, and ample evidence that heavily regulated school systems perform badly. Unless those facts change, there is good reason to fight off attempts to regulate private schools under education tax credit programs.
President Touts Historic Education Failure… Again
He did it on the campaign trail in 2008, he did it in his first year in office, and how he’s done it again: speaking at the Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina yesterday, President Obama praised post-Sputnik federal education initiatives aimed at improving achievement in math and science. The trouble is, those investments—the National Defense Education Act—failed.
Having already demonstrated the decline in achievement that followed the passage of the NDEA two years ago, I won’t re-hash it here. I’m left to wonder though, what the next two years are going to be like. If the president is still recycling campaign speeches about programs that never worked in the first place, is this what we can expect for the next two years?
Perhaps, faced by the latest international test scores showing that the United States continues to languish in educational mediocrity, this administration is simply out of ideas. Perhaps it’s unable to accept that 40 years (and $1.8 trillion) of federal education intervention have failed, and unable to accept that educational freedom is the solution.
If so, that’s yet another reason for Congress to return the reins of educational power to the states and the people, where the United States Constitution so wisely left them.
Warner Brothers Distributes “The Cartel”
Early this year, when I heard that Paramount had picked up the education documentary “Waiting for Superman” after its award winning appearance at the Sundance Film Festival, I was honestly surprised. The film is not kind to the status quo education monopoly in this country, and Hollywood does not have a history of indicting that system as a whole. But its director was an Obama-supporting, “Inconvenient Truth” shooting Democrat who perhaps, I thought, had made the message palatable to the Left Coast establishment. It didn’t necessarily portend a fundamental change in Hollywood’s tastes.
But that was months ago. Times change. Yesterday I learned from Bob Bowdon, director of the brutally candid education expose “The Cartel” that his film has been picked up for distribution by Warner Brothers Studios. It’s now available not just for sale but instant viewing on Amazon.com.
Remember 2010. It’s the year Americans finally started to tear down education’s Berlin Wall.
Diane Ravitch Is Right on Republicans and NCLB
Writing in yesterday’s WSJ, education historian Diane Ravitch laments that Republicans have abandoned their earlier defense of federalism and limited government in education, embracing vast and expanding powers for Washington over the nation’s schools. In particular, she faults the No Child Left Behind act for demanding public school improvements that have not been forthcoming and for imposing “corrective” measures that will not correct the problem.
Though I depart from Ravitch on most education policy matters — and not just on conclusions but also methodology — she is right in both of the above observations. Over the past decade, many Republicans have championed new federal powers in education that have no basis in the U.S. Constitution, no plausible empirical justification, and no evidence of success. NCLB demands higher achievement without creating the market freedoms and incentives that would actually allow it — asking, in other words, for the impossible.
With the current resurgence of public interest in limited government, Republicans have an excellent opportunity to rekindle their commitment to the limited federal role in education laid out by the U.S. Constitution. Phasing out NCLB would be a good place to start.
Why Is Bill Gates Writing Code for a Coleco Adam?
Bill Gates is addressing the Council of Chief State School Officers today. According to the NYT, he’ll tell them to bite the bullet and start making sound budgetary decisions like rewarding teachers based on merit instead of time served, and not handing out raises simply for the trappings of higher learning, but rather for demonstrated prowess in the classroom. In principle, that’s good advice.
But it’s an ultimately futile effort, and here’s why:
Bill established himself early on as a pretty sharp computer programmer, and no doubt he still is. But there’s only so much you can do when the hardware you’re writing for is a pile of junk. Public schooling is the Coleco Adam of education systems.
The Adam was a pretty cute looking machine for its time (1983), but it had some fundamental flaws. Among other things, turning the power on or off had a habit of sending out electromagnetic pulses that fried the data on its storage tapes. Oops. Now a good programmer might figure how to mitigate the damage caused by that problem (I dunno, treat the two tapes as a RAID 1 array, maybe?), but then the machine also had its power-supply located in the mandatory (and noisy, and slow) printer that came with it. So if the printer had to be serviced, you were left with a paperweight. Hard to fix that one in software.
Sweden’s Voucher-Funded ‘Nazi’ School
They told me if we have school choice, there’d be Nazi schools. And they were right! Sort of.
I’m talking with one of the teachers and I ask why she left the Swedish state school system.
“Because of the chaos,” she says. “There is no discipline. The students do what they want. They listen to their iPods and mobiles in class.”
My eyes open wide. “They have their mobiles out in lessons?”
She nods. “Yes. There is nothing the teacher can do about it. There are no punishments like detention in Sweden….”
I frown. “But here, it’s different, yes?”
She nods. “Oh yes. Here we’re all about order. They call us the Nazi school.”
This conversation, which took place in a voucher-funded private school, is illuminating. It illustrates a problem at the core of official state schooling: the enrollment of a child in a government school is not a mutually voluntary act.
All our (legal) interactions in civil society and within the free enterprise system are mutually voluntary. People choose their own churches, grocery stores, and clubs — and those organizations choose them. Fail to abide by the code of conduct of the establishment, and you’re out. Everyone knows this, and expulsions are rare as a result. We seek out others who share common goals or values because we all benefit from our interactions.
This is not the case under official state school systems. Everyone is compelled to pay for state schooling and so there is intense economic pressure to send one’s children to the state schools. The state schools, in turn, are constrained in the extent to which they can establish rules of conduct for attendance. State school attendance is not truly voluntary for either party.
Not surprisingly, this compromises the value of the interactions. State schools often can’t do everything they think is necessary to fulfill their mission, and parents often find the schools unresponsive to their needs and demands.
Moving education back toward the mutually voluntary sector, as Sweden has done with its private school choice program, has freed up each school to establish its own clear rules of conduct and has freed up parents to choose the kinds of schools best suited to their children. Some prefer permissiveness and others order and each family can get what it’s looking for without having to impose its preferences on others. The system isn’t perfect, but its advantages over the U.S. status quo are obvious.
New NAEP Scores Reveal Education Shell Game
Over the past two decades, the media and federal education officials have tended to focus on modestly improving test score trends of 4th and 8th graders. As my colleague Neal has mentioned, new 12th grade results were released today, and they once again call that practice into question.
Whether one looks at the fixed “Long Term Trends” series of national test results reaching back to the early 1970s, or at the ever-evolving “Nation’s Report Card” series, it seems as though student achievement has improved a little over time at the 4th and (to a lesser extent) 8th grade levels. By the same token, both of those data series show little or no improvement in achievement at the end of high-school over the past one, two, or four decades. Indeed the most recent 12th grade results show a small but statistically significant decline in reading scores since 1992.
High school graduates are no better prepared today than they were in previous generations, despite the fact that we’re spending 3 times as much on their K-12 educations. Some of what they’re learning they may be learning a bit earlier, but when applying to college it’s the K-12 academic destination that matters, not the journey.
And that destination suggests that the past four decades of so-called public “school reform” have done nothing to improve the academic preparation of high school seniors for college, life and work. Not ESEA. Not NCLB.
Perhaps government is not the best source of progress and innovation after all? Perhaps if we want to see progress and innovation in education we should allow it to participate in the free enterprise system that has been responsible for staggering productivity growth in every field not dominated by a government monopoly?
Future Teachers Most Likely to Cheat in College?
The current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features a story by a professional ghost-writer of college student papers. One passage in particular caught my eye:
it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals….
This is of course the weakest of anecdotal evidence and no one should take it as gospel (particularly the seminary students who apparently also contract out papers to the same ghost writer). But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s true—that ed school students are the most common consumers of fraudulent papers. How could we explain that?
There’s no reason to believe that future teachers are any more ethically deficient than their peers in other fields, so that’s an unlikely explanation. Could it be that ed school students are less well prepared for college? Certainly it’s an uncomfortable truth that the SAT scores of those applying to ed school (both undergraduate and graduate) consistently rank below those of applicants to most other college programs. But it is also widely acknowledged that the academic standards of ed schools are commensurately below those of other college disciplines, so future teachers shouldn’t have any more difficulty completing their assignments than students in other fields.
But there is one way in which education is fundamentally different from every other college discipline: it’s the only one whose students will go on to work in a government monopoly industry. Not only is the hiring process of public school systems less focused on identifying candidates’ academic excellence, there is evidence that it is actively hostile to excellence (e.g., that principals are less likely to hire top-scoring candidates from elite colleges than candidates from less rarefied institutions). What’s more, compensation for public school teachers is generally a function of time served (over which teachers have no control) and degrees conferred (over which they do). This has created demand on the part of teachers for graduate degrees—not necessarily for the acquisition of advanced skills, but for the diplomas themselves, which amount to valuable cash prizes.
Again, we can’t know from a single ghost-writer’s experience if ed school students systematically cheat more in college than their peers in other fields, but we certainly shouldn’t be surprised if they do. We’ve organized education in this country in a way that decouples skill and performance from compensation, and instead couples compensation to the mere trappings of higher learning (e.g., masters degrees). We’ve created a powerful financial incentive for existing and future teachers to cheat. Maybe not such a good idea.
Hat tip: Bill Evers.
‘Chicken Smackers with Biscuit or School Choice’
My inbox this morning contained the following Google News Alert for “school choice” from the Evansville Courier & Press:
School menu
Evansville Courier & Press
The middle school menu is chicken smackers with biscuit or school choice, peas, mashed potatoes with gravy and pineapple. Monday’s elementary and K-8 school …
See all stories on this topic »
My colleagues and I have been asking for school choice for some time — folks have even made movies about it — so it’s nice to finally see it on the menu. [Just for middle school, though; I really think it should run the gamut.]
In case the Courier Press decides to tweak that menu after the fact (you know, seasonal ingredients and all), here is a screen cap.
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