Author Archive
School Reform’s Shaky Foundations?
Philanthropy Daily has just published the most interesting review to date of my recent charter school philanthropy study (“The Other Lottery“). Scott Walter, an expert in charitable giving in the field of education, looks not only at the central finding (that there is no link between charter networks’ performance and the amount of grant funding they’ve received) but also extrapolates to what the findings imply about the nation’s top education foundations.
I’m curious to know if anyone else shares his interest in seeing the numbers crunched to allow education foundations to be ranked in terms of the performance of the charter school networks they have backed. Ping me on Facebook if you’d like to see that.
Rick Perry, Arne Duncan, and Michael Jackson
To my astonishment, Arne Duncan went after Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry yesterday on the grounds that Perry hasn’t done enough to improve the schools under his jurisdiction. According to Bloomberg News, Duncan said public schools have “really struggled” under Perry and that “Far too few of [the state's] high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college.”
I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan, but for some reason his “Man in the Mirror” track just popped into my head as I read this. You see, once upon a time, Arne Duncan was “CEO” of the Chicago Public Schools. During and for some time after his tenure, he was celebrated as having presided over “The Chicago Miracle,” in which local students’ test results had improved dramatically. That fact turns out to have been fake, but accurate. The state test results did improve, but not because students had learned more; they appear to have improved because the tests were dumbed-down.
When this charge was first leveled, I decided to look into it myself, and found that it was indeed justified. There was no “Chicago Miracle.” Arne Duncan ascended to the throne of U.S. secretary of education, at least in part, on a myth. The academic achievement of the children under his care stagnated at or slightly below the level of students in other large central cities during his time at the helm. Seems an opportune occasion for someone to “start with the man in the mirror, asking him to change his ways.”
Slate.com vs. Tea-Party/Christians/Bachmann
Slate worked itself into a lather yesterday over the insidious education policy implications of Michele Bachmann’s Iowa Straw Poll victory:
As recently as a decade ago, Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Boehner embraced bipartisan, standards-and-accountability education reform…. Now we are seeing the GOP acquiesce to the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann…. Against a backdrop of Tea Party calls to abolish the Department of Education and drastically cut the federal government’s role in local public schools….”
To support this narrative, Slate asked Bachmann what the federal government’s role was in education, to which she replied, “There is none; Education is a matter reserved for the states.”
Oh, whoops, sorry. Got that last quote wrong. That wasn’t Bachmann‘s answer, it was the answer of the FDR administration.
This answer rests squarely on the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and the people powers not expressly enumerated and delegated to Congress by the Constitution. It was published by the federal government in 1943, under the oversight of the president, the vice president, and the speaker of the House.
Though it might come as a surprise to Slate‘s writers, our nation was not founded on state-run schooling. And, until very recently in historical terms, the idea that the federal government had a role to play in the classroom was unthinkable. It may have required some theorizing to evaluate the merits of Congress-as-schoolmarm prior to the feds getting involved in a big way in 1965, but now… now we can just look in the rear-view mirror (see chart below).
With nearly half a century of hindsight, advocating a federal withdrawal from America’s schools does not seem “anti-government.” Just anti-crazy.
Here’s Where Better Schools HAVE Scaled Up…
Earlier this summer, I released a study comparing the performance of California’s charter school networks with the amount of philanthropic grant funding they have received. The purpose was to find out if this model for replicating excellence was consistently effective. The answer, regrettably, was no.
But a new study we are releasing today finds that there is at least one place where better schools HAVE consistently scaled-up: Chile. Thanks to that nation’s public and private school choice program, chains of private schools have arisen, and they not only outperform the public schools, they also outperform the independent “mom-and-pop” private schools.
For anyone interested in replicating educational excellence, this study by a team of Chilean scholars is worth a look.
Colorado Court Halts School Voucher Program
Last Friday, a Colorado District Court halted the new and unique Douglas County school voucher program with a permanent injunction. School choice legislation is a little like the Field of Dreams: pass it, and they will sue–and we all know who “they” are. So there’s a tendency to dismiss legal setbacks for the choice movement as purely the result of self-serving monopolists exploiting bad laws or partisan, activist judges. There are certainly cases that fall into that category, but this Colorado ruling isn’t one of them.
Oh, the self-serving monopolists and opponents of educational freedom are no doubt cheering it, but the ruling does not read like the work of a rube or an ideologue, and not all of the state constitutional provisions on which it was based can be dismissed as outdated examples of religious bigotry. The state’s “compelled support” clause, in particular, seems to uphold a fundamentally American idea: that it is wrong to coerce people to pay for the propagation of ideas that they disbelieve. Thomas Jefferson, in his Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom, called this: “tyranny.”
Obviously, conventional public schools have been a source of such coercion for a very long time–everyone has to pay for the public schools, despite profound objections they may have to the way those schools teach history, literature, government, biology, or sex education. That’s why we’ve had “school wars” as long as we’ve had government schools. And obviously vouchers offer the advantage of giving parents a much wider range of educational options for their children than do the one-size-fits few public schools. But despite this advantage, vouchers require all taxpayers to fund every kind of schooling, including types of instruction that might violate some taxpayers’ most deeply held convictions. That’s a recipe for continued social conflict over what is taught.
If there were no alternative to vouchers for providing school choice, perhaps it would make sense to have a debate over which freedoms should take precedence: the freedom of choice of families or the freedom of conscience of taxpayers–and then to sacrifice whichever one was deemed less worthy. But there is an alternative, and it does not require anyone to be compelled to support any particular type of instruction. I discuss this alternative, education tax credits, in a recent Huffington Post op-ed.
Want an Amateur Doing Your Splenectomy?
You’re on the operating table, trying to remain calm. The anesthetist holds the mask over your face with her left hand, while adjusting the flow of gasses with her right. Just before you slip under, she says: “Your splenectomy will be performed by Dr. Killdare, who received his degree in Surgery Appreciation from MSU. He’s never actually operated on anyone, but he knows everything there is to know about the way surgeons think about surgery.”
According to software architect and former Department of Education adviser Ze’ev Wurman, that’s essentially the way the national “Common Core” standards treat science:
This framework does not expect our students to be able to do any science, or to be able to solve any science problem. [It] simply teaches our students science appreciation…. It expects our students to become good consumers of science and technology, rather than prepare them to be the discoverers of science and creators of technology.
After reading through the document (twice), Wurman was deeply distressed to discover only a single mention of algebra, a single equation, and no mention of calculus or trigonometry. Most people would not want to be cut open by someone who has only studied Surgery Appreciation. Similarly, a student who has only learned to appreciate science, rather than to actually do it, is not well equipped for a career in research or engineering.
This is one of the utterly obvious problems with homogenizing educational standards at the national level: get them wrong, and you ruin education from sea to shining sea.
The other utterly obvious problem is that children learn different subjects at different paces. Some are ready to study algebra in elementary school, while others might have to wait for high school. And, as demonstrated by Khan Academy and others, it is easy to allow each child to learn as fast as they are able.
The fact that many intelligent people have nevertheless convinced themselves that uniform national standards tied to age/grade are a good idea bears witness to the impressive human capacity for self-deception.
Yes, math is the same from Connecticut and Colorado (as national standards advocates are so eager to point out), but children vary dramatically in their aptitudes and interests even within a single family. In generations to come, people will marvel at our inanity for plunking every student down on the same conveyor belt moving through every subject at a pace determined by their age. Current efforts to elevate this travesty from the state to the federal level, through national standards, will no doubt elicit the fiercest scorn and most profound incomprehension.
People Think of Something as Their Business When It Is Their Business
A WSJ interview with Bill Gates includes this pivotal observation:
“I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.” Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. “That’s partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research.”
While it’s true that public school districts don’t spend a lot on R&D, a vast army of academics has been cranking out research in this field for generations. The Education Resources Information Center, a database of education studies dating back to 1966, boasts 1.3 million entries. So the problem is not a lack of research, but rather that most of the research is useless and that the rare exceptions have been ignored by the public schools.
Why? Because, as Bill Gates correctly observes, hardly anyone thinks of education as their business. And how do you get masses of brilliant entrepreneurs to think of education as their business? You make it easy for them to make it their business. When and where education is allowed to participate in the free enterprise system, entrepreneurs enter that field just as they do any other–and excellence is identified and scales up. It is a process that happens automatically due to the freedoms and incentives inherent in that system. More than that, it is the only system in the history of humanity that has ever led to the routine identification and mass replication of excellent products and services.
So what happens if you want market outcomes but reject the market system that creates them? You are left to re-invent the wheel… without the only value of pi that makes a circle.
Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
The free Web tutoring service “Khan Academy” has gotten much well-deserved attention, including a feature story in the current issue of Wired. That story includes a quote that literally took my breath away:
Even if Khan is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it’s not clear that the schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of students moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics—but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”
This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly. In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so. That is why the for-profit Asian tutoring industry groups students by performance, not by age. There are “grades,” but they do not depend on when a student was born, only on what she knows and is able to do.
But why should a monopolist bother doing that? It’s easier just to feed children through the system on a uniform conveyor belt based on when they were born.
Rahm Emanuel Practices School Choice… Grouchily
Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has followed in the footsteps of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, choosing to send his kids to the elite private UC Lab School. It’s a very good school by all accounts, so it’s probably an excellent choice. So why did Rahm get so grouchy when asked about it?
I think it might have something to do with the obvious hypocrisy of cherishing and exercising educational choice for one’s own kids while advocating a one-size fits-few state monopoly school system that makes private schooling unaffordable to the majority of your fellow citizens. Just a thought.
How Sweden Profits from For-Profit Schools
The brass ring of education reform is to find a way to ensure that the best schools routinely scale-up to serve large audiences, crowding out the mediocre and bad ones. Over the past twenty years, the United States and Sweden have taken two very different approaches to achieving that goal, which I wrote about in a recent op-ed.
In the U.S., our main strategy has been for philanthropists to fund the replication of what they deem to be the academically highest-performing networks of charter schools. In a recent statistical analysis of California, the state with the most charter schools, I discovered that this is not working out particularly well for us. There is no correlation between charter school networks’ academic performance and the philanthropic funding they’ve raised. And, at any rate, charter schools still enroll less than 3 percent of the nation’s students.
In 1992, Sweden introduced a nation-wide public and private school choice program. Private schools went from enrolling virtually no one to enrolling about 11 percent of the entire student population–a figure that continues to grow with each passing year. Moreover, recent research finds that these new private schools outperform the public schools. And which private schools are growing the fastest? The chains of for-profit schools that are in greatest demand, and that have an incentive to respond to that demand by opening new locations. The popular non-profit private schools tend not to expand much over time.
Given that Sweden is universally regarded as a liberal nation, and the U.S. is seen as a bastion of capitalism, one wonders why they got to the brass ring first, and why it is taking us so very long to get there now that they’ve shown us the way.
NCLB Is a Failure. It’s Nothing Personal.
Education writer RiShawn Biddle has offered a spirited response to my blog post yesterday about the failure of the No Child Left Behind act. In it, he asserts that NCLB has advanced school choice, and links to an earlier essay that ostensibly presented his case. Summarizing it, Biddle writes that:
The impact of No Child on advancing choice… starts with the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress requirements. Thanks to the data culled, the low quality of education in traditional district schools was exposed for all to see, providing parents and school choice activists with the information they needed to push for the advancement of choice.
No thanks. The poor performance of U.S. schooling has been evident to a great many people for a very long time. The bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read was first published in 1955. Over the past 40 years, the NAEP’s Long Term Trends (LTT) tests have revealed stagnation in math and reading and decline in science toward the end of high school. In contrast to the consistent and nationally representative results of the NAEP LTTs, the NCLB is tied to state-administered tests that are so often corrupted by tinkering with their content and cut scores that they are largely worthless for measuring achievement at a single point in time let alone for measuring trends.
Biddle also claims that NCLB
exposed the long-running gamesmanship by states looking to define proficiency downward (a fact that Cato has used to its own advantage in arguing against expanding federal education policy); this, in turn, has rallied more reformers to move toward advancing school choice.
In reality, NCLB exacerbated the gamesmanship of state-level tests by giving state officials incentives to show the appearance of progress rather than actual progress. Moreover, it was not NCLB that exposed this fraud that was partially of its own making. For that we can thank… the NAEP. It was by comparing unreliable state test scores to far more reliable NAEP scores that it was discovered just how badly public schools in many states have been lying to families about their children’s performance. Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has noted this fact, saying in 2009 that:
When states lower [their own academic] standards, they are lying to children and they are lying to parents. Those standards don’t prepare our students for the world of college or the world of work. When we match NAEP scores and state tests, we see the difference. Some states, like Massachusetts compare very well. Unfortunately, the disparities between most state tests and NAEP results are staggeringly large.
[Ironically, Duncan seems to have benefited from the absence of such a comparison while he was head of Chicago Public Schools, riding into his current position on the wings of a supposed “Chicago Miracle” that appears, based on NAEP scores, to have been a mirage induced by fanciful state tests.]
Biddle then goes on to praise NCLB’s “focus on graduation rates,” which he claims “forced states to present realistic numbers.” While it is true that many states had been reporting meaningless graduation statistics prior to NCLB, it is not at all clear that the law has improved matters. On the contrary, Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman concluded from his exhaustive statistical study of the subject that NCLB appears to have fostered further cheating with graduation rates—what he calls “strategic behavior” by states and districts to present inflated graduation rate figures in order to avoid NCLB penalties. So, once again, it appears that NCLB is obfuscating rather than illuminating educational performance in America.
Finally, a note about Biddle’s characterization of my and my colleagues’ work at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. Apparently discomfited by my criticism of NCLB, Biddle dubs us dogmatic ideological purists, unthinking and blindered, and claims that we praise or attack policies based on our “worldview,” etc. etc. While I can understand becoming exercised as a result of a policy debate, I cannot understand why someone who wants to be taken seriously would stoop to such obviously fatuous ad hominem attacks. My last paper was a regression study of the link between the performance of charter school networks and the grant funding they receive. It has multiple technical appendices, several of them added in response to peer reviews. Anyone who doubts its findings is welcome to repeat it and see if they obtain different results. The paper I wrote before that was a regression study of the regulatory burdens imposed by voucher and tax credit programs. It, too, can be repeated by other researchers if they wish to verify its findings. The term for this kind of testable, repeatable work is science, not “dogma” or “ideology” or “world view.” My colleagues are likewise engaged in empirical research and we derive our policy recommendations from that research. So our conclusions are indeed very narrowly constrained, but not by ideology. They are constrained by what works, and what does not work, in the real world.
NCLB a Barrier, Not an Aid
Sandy Kress, former Bush administration official and architect of NCLB, took issue last Friday with my post criticizing the law. Today, education writer Rishawn Biddle publishes and expands on Kress’ critique. Sandy’s objection was that Idaho, one of the states planning to start ignoring the law, isn’t performing well academically and so “is hardly a poster child for arguing against a federal role.”
As it happens, I wasn’t using Idaho—or any “poster child”—to make the case against against NCLB. I was using the experiences of real children. More specifically, I was using the performance of nationally representative samples of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long Term Trends tests. The LTTs for students near the end of high school are the best gauge we have of the performance of the nation’s public schools over time. The stagnation and decline in those results across subjects are not the only evidence or argument against NCLB, but they are compelling.
Rishawn offers little in the way of argument or evidence to support his own comments, but one of them is nevertheless worth responding to because it represents a common view that is not only wrong but exactly backwards: the notion that NCLB helps to advance the kind of market reforms that actually work. Au contraire.
The state tests NCLB focuses on are all but worthless for comparing states to one another or for determining trends over time, so the law tells us considerably less than we could already discover from the NAEP. NCLB has, however, been an epic, expensive distraction, pulling the efforts of countless activists, policymakers and educators away from the market reforms that work and consuming their time arguing about the details of a policy that never had a sound research base to support it and still does not. Adding insult to injury, NCLB exacerbated the unconstitutional overreach of its earlier form, the ESEA. If NCLB worked better and more efficiently than alternative policies, and had no deleterious side effects, I would be all for amending the Constitution to allow it. It doesn’t.
So no, NCLB is not an aid to meaningful reform. It is a barrier. The sooner we get over it, the better.
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