Free Market Uber Alles

My wife and I moved into our house on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC almost five years ago. At first we got a lot of mail addressed to the previous owners, but that quickly slowed to a trickle and then stopped altogether, with two exceptions: a seed catalogue based in the Midwest (tithonias, only $2.45 for 50), and regular propaganda from the Cato Institute. Apparently, the wondrous efficiencies of an unfettered free market don't extend to updating your mailing list.

The Spring 2006 "Cato's Letter" arrived this morning, feauturing some kind of manifesto from Tucker Carlson--ack--and an interview with Andrew Coulson, director of Cato's "Center for Educational Freedom." In addition to the usual monomaniacal focus on vouchers he adds:

"We have to fight for market reforms at the K-12 level and also against state and federal government encroachment at the preschool and university levels."

This is a nice summary of where logic takes you when you embrace one and only one principal--"markets, good; government, bad"--to the exclusion of all else, such as the obvious best interests of students and children.

The free market does a pretty decent job of providing Pre-K services to children of people who can afford them. It does a lousy job of providing them to low-income children, just as it does a lousy job of providing nearly everything to low-income people: witness the shady pawn shops, grungy grocery stores, check cashing outlets, and payday lenders common to low-income neighborhoods.

That's why a lot of people are pushing for universal preschool. There are legitimate arguments about how to get there, whether to expand rapidly or focus on the most vulnerable populations. But to reject helping all children get a decent education in the critical early years on principle--well, you'd have to be some kind of extremist organization that simply doesn't believe in public education at all. As Education Sector's Sara Mead recently wrote, there are ways to expand Pre-K funding while preserving the diversity and dynamism of the market. One doubts Cato would have interest, there are larger anti-government principles at stake.

Ditto the concern about higher education--again, it's abundantly clear that higher education does a bad job of serving many students, particularly low-income and minority students, less than half of whom graduate on time and who appear to be learning much less than their more affluent, white peers. The smart solution is for the government to bring more information about student success into the higher education market through mandatory transparency and reporting--like the SEC does for publicly-traded companies--but again, that's just not as hard-core as rejecting government involvement out of hand.

Markets, competition, choice--these are all good things, of which public education needs more, not less. But bringing the benefits of choice into the education arena while staying true to bedrock public values of access, community, and fairness is difficult and complicated. It's possible, but it means opening your mind to multiple--even competing--principles. But if you're pure of heart like Cato, that kind of thinking just marks irresolution and weakness. Free market today, free market tomorrow, free market (and, apparently, quarterly publications I don't want) forever.

CNN.com Award for Egregious Sensationalism

Today's award goes to ABC.com's third leading story (in their continuously updating stream of five) running under the banner "Sexy Video Sends Teacher Back to Jail." Clicking on the link brings you to the less egregiously titled story "Ex-Teacher Back in Jail," but rest assured it's filled with the requisite voyeurism, sexploitation, and parental outrage.

Posted by Ethan Gray

Is Wendy Kopp Today's Jane Addams?

After reading Christine Stansell's New Republic review of it, I'm really eager to read Louise W. Knight's Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. While I certainly don't agree with everything they did, I feel a particular debt to the early 20th century Progressive women reformers such as Addams, both for the positive social changes to which they contributed and the doors they opened for me asa woman.

I did have to question one line in Stansell's review, though:

By 1900, a stay in a settlement house was de rigueur for new college graduates who wanted to make the world better. Now, few things could seem less appealing to the best of my college students; what Addams called "the subjective necessity of the settlement"--the need to be in contact with others different from oneself--is more likely to propel young idealists to go live with the poor in the barrios of Mexico City or the shantytowns of Johannesburg rather than Chicago, Boston, or New York.

But, with tens of thousands of our nation's brightest college graduates applying to teach in some of our nations most disadvantaged urban and rural communities through Teach for America, I wonder if Stansell isn't missing a piece of the picture here. While we know that many of these young people remain in the classroom, it's also clear that Teach for America alums are emerging as a key source of leaders in both education and other social and public service and policy realms. Certainly, Teach for America is very different from the settlement movement in its methods, aims, and focus. But is it serving a similar function in developing connections between bright, priviledged, driven young people and disadvantaged communities, and in fostering a crop of future leaders for social and political justice?

Terrorist U?

Don't look now, but there's a terrorist at Yale, or so many folks would have you believe. Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former "roving ambassador and spokesman" for the Taliban has been enrolled in a special, non-degree program at Yale University and is now—after securing a 3.33 GPA with little more than a 4^th grade education, lots of self motivated study, and a keen interest—attempting to enroll in a full-fledged, four-year undergraduate program. Some, including my colleague Kevin Carey, believe that Hashemi has no right to study at one of America's greatest institutions of higher learning. Despite the arguments that Yale would be "good" for Hashemi, and vice versa, these critics argue that there is a proverbial line in the moral sand, and that once crossed, individuals of ill-repute ought not to be afforded the opportunity to, well, learn.

It's true that a Yale education is a privilege that very, very few in this country are afforded. So why should the former public face of one of America's post-9/11 enemies be given the chance to study in New Haven? Would we offer the same opportunity to a bureaucrat in Kim Jong-il's regime? What about an official from Stalin's Russia, or Hitler's Germany? Should these types of people get to (or have gotten to) study at a great American university despite all the bad things they've been involved in?

My answer is an equivocal yes.

There is a fundamental difference between those who commit atrocities—and should thus be put in jail—and those who play administrative roles to enable or explain them. Some are evildoers and the others are often the evildoers' puppets. Hashemi is a man whose job required him to spout an evil and vicious party line. Had he not been so good at his job, we might respect him more, but he'd probably be dead. Do you really think that he, having never been raised to challenge authority, would have dared to do anything other than what Mullah Omar told him to do? Keep in mind, as the NYT Magazine profile ($) that first brought this story to light notes, that on returning to Kabul from his trip to the states (where he was bombarded by questions about women's' rights and free exercise of religion) he immediately went to Omar to ask why the Taliban was failing to educate Afghan women. His conscience was beginning to be stirred.

Besides, in terms of judging how bad a person he is, it's important to remember one basic fact: if you can get a visa from the feds to study in the US, then you can't really be that bad, right?

So take a guy like Hashemi from any crackpot regime, assume they pass the feds security clearance, and then ask should they get to study at Yale (also assuming, and this is important, that they have the drive to apply and want to be there in the first place) and I'll say yes they should and the reason has profound implications: The more representatives of horrible governments that we can expose to scientific reason, a plurality of viewpoints, moral relativism, tolerance, diversity, and a free marketplace of ideas—all of which are the hallmarks of the American academy—the more we can hope to reduce the existence of political and religious extremism over time.

As the NYT Magazine wrote, Hashemi "had been raised in a faith, buoyed at every turn by the certainty of a higher order, a purposeful universe, and now here in this shrine of critical thinking he was learning to doubt, not to believe."

It is hard to absolve a person when they have participated, or been complicit in criminal atrocities. But if it's not our role to offer intellectual salvation, then whose is it, especially if that salvation holds the potential to help insert doubt into the most overzealously fundamental regimes on earth.

Posted by Ethan Gray

Meaning from Marshmallows

In yesterday's NYT, columnist David Brooks argued* that "structural" education reforms--such as accountability, school choice and teacher pay reforms--have a lousy track record of success because they fail to address "core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success." According to Brooks,

If you're a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. You're not getting to the crux of the problem.

Brooks is basing his arguments on the famous "Marshmallow Test" performed by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960's: Small children (about age 4) were given a marshmallow and told that they could have a second marshmallow if they waited until a researcher returned to eat the marshmallow they had; longitudinal follow-up found children who were able to wait had better life outcomes down the road. Brooks is joining a litany of researchers and commentators who have seized on this result to argue that "emotional intelligence" or psychological traits, such as the ability to delay gratification, may be more important to children's longterm success than academic skills. I doubt that many reasonable people disagree with that conclusion, but what kind of pragmatic guidance that's supposed to offer policymakers is far less clear than Brooks seems to think it is.

After all, it's not as if schools have never tried to impact children's emotional and psychological development or personal habits. In fact, the history of the Progressive education movement is littered with efforts to inculcate specific habits and values--from personal hygiene, to how to make friends, to good work habits, to self-esteem--in youngsters, often at the expense of academic content. Far from a lack of interest in intervening in what Brooks labels "the murky world of psychology and human nature," politicians and educators have evidenced a seemingly insatiable desire to do so, but one which history shows us has often been poorly implemented or focused on misguided ends. And fights between different schools of educators and idealouges over precisely what aspects of children's psychology and nature our public schools ought to seek to alter, and in what ways, have consumed an extraordinary amount of energy and produced a great deal of unproductive division within our nation's education system.

Contemporary education reformers focus on structural and organizational concerns not because they are myopic but because these tools are the most effective levers policymakers have to drive broad change. For example, high-quality preschool programs--the very type of structural reform Brooks derides--have shown positive long-term impacts in children's lives in large part because they focus on supporting children's social and emotional development--including the type of self-regulatory skills the Marshmallow Test measures--at least as much as academics. More broadly, when policymakers set clear expectations, hold educators accountable, and give them the freedom to run schools effectively, teachers and school leaders--who realize the importance of fostering children's moral, social and emotional as well as their cognitive development--choose to run schools in ways that foster the very skills Brooks wishes to see inculcated. Parents who are given choices also tend to choose such schools.

Throughout the country we find examples of high-performing public, private, and charter schools that seek to educate children to high standards in both academics and such virtues as responsibility, self-control, integrity, and respect. But numerous structural policy barriers conspire to prevent the creation or expansion of more such schools. Eliminating these barriers will do far more to generate the type of results Brooks seeks--and would do so with more respect for basic conservative values of family privacy and autonomy--than would legislating another indifferently implemented and controversial "values" program at the state or federal level.

*Sorry for Times Select link. Normally I try not to highlight anything many people can't access.