Jon Chait, Wrong About Education

The good thing about articles like Paul Tough's much-discussed NYTimes piece about the achievement gap is that they get a lot of people talking about an important educational issue. The bad thing is that many of those people don't really know what they're talking about.

Take, for example, Jonathan Chait's new column in the LA Times. Chait usually writes a great column; he's one of the few New Republic writers that I'll read based on the byline alone. But this column is full of shallow analysis and one major factual error. Chait says:

There are two main problems with our pool of teaching talent. The first is that it's badly distributed. Schools are mostly funded locally, which means rich districts can easily afford to pay teachers more than poor ones. Tough cites a study of schools in Illinois that found the highest-quality teachers concentrated in the richest schools and the lowest-quality teachers concentrated in the poorest schools.

This is the unavoidable result of making schools raise most of their funding locally. The only way to change this insane system would be to fund schools at the national level

Schools do not raise most of their funding locally. On average, a litle more than 40 percent of school funding comes from local sources, with about 50 percent coming from state revenues and 10 percent from the feds. This isn't news; as this table shows, the last year schools got most of their revenues from local sources was 1974.

He's right to point to the problem of teacher distribution in Illinois (I worked on the project that produced the report he cites). But Illinois has the worst school funding system in the country. They're the exception, not the rule.

Chait also repeats a point that I've seen a lot in the last week, that schools like KIPP are un-scaleable because the teachers there work "16 hours days." I remember being startled when Tough threw that assertion into his article--for the record, teachers in KIPP schools do not average 15-16 hours days, as at least one KIPP teacher notes in the comments section here. Can Mike Feinberg and David Levin please post something on the KIPP website to clear this up?

Chait also says:

My wife spent a few years teaching in a mostly low-income elementary school. The main thing I remember her telling me was that parental involvement was a near-perfect predictor of her students' performance. The kids with active parents did well, and the kids with disengaged parents did poorly.

Maybe Chait's wife was a great teacher, maybe not, I don't know. But this kind of deterministic thinking does poor children no favors. Schools are rarely successful when adults look at where children have come from and think they can see for certain where they're going.

Finally, Chait re-commits Tough's error of getting the politics wrong. Chait specializes in exposing the fallacies and illogic of conservative policies, which is, frankly, one of the reasons I normally like reading his stuff. But he's starting to become a hammer who only sees nails. The fact that the Heritage Foundation, which has very little to say about education policy, happened to write a report years ago titled "No Excuses" doesn't make that position conservative orthdoxy.

In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any reputable conservatives in the education policy world who hold the simplistic beliefs Chait criticizes. Like a lot of political commentators, Chait knows less about education policy than he thinks he does, but is perfectly comfortable stepping into the arena only occasionally as a means of fighting larger ideological battles. People like the teachers and students in KIPP schools deserve better.