Union Busting

AFTie Ed flags this story from Illinois, where it appears that when teachers in a newly-opened charter school attempted to unionize, the school responded with various heavy-handed and probably illegal tactics including loyalty oaths, etc. In my mind, if a charter school opens its doors, the teachers are happy working there without being represented by a union, and (most importantly) the students get a high-quality education, then that's fine. If, however, the teachers decide they want to unionize, then the only morally defensible response is to accept it, embrace it, bargain, and move forward. The right to organize is non-negotiable. Union-busting tactics like these are just as odious in public education as in Wal-Mart or anywhere else, if not more so. Any responsible teaching of history in the public schools will include the prominent role of labor in creating the way of life that all workers, union and non-union alike, currently enjoy, as well as the vicious, sometimes deadly struggles that those gains required. Schoolchildren shouldn't be taught those lessons even as their school administrators repudiate them. 

Dummies for Dummies

Via Russo, let me heartily endorse Greg Toppo's article in USA Today about people who preface this or that agenda with the assertion that students today are stupider than they've ever been, which they know because some study indicates that many students are ignorant of some historical or geographical fact that they happen to care about. To wit, Toppo begins:

In her new book, The Age of American Unreason, cultural critic Susan Jacoby tells of a dinner conversation with a student who was about to graduate with honors from Michigan State University in 2006. After Jacoby dropped a reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "fireside chats," she watched as the student "looked absolutely blank" in response.

According to Wikipedia, Susan Jacoby was born in 1945. She grew up in the years immediately after the Roosevelt presidency, among, one presumes, people who had personally listened to his fireside chats. As her Web site details, she's spent the last four decades as a public intellectual, during which time I imagine she's learned a tremendous amount. The honors student, by contrast, was probably born around 1985, and has no personal memory of presidents before George H. W. Bush. Prior to their dinner conversation, she had spent 40 fewer years than Jacoby living and learning.

Which is to say that (1) A person's sense of what facts and ideas matter most is inevitably influenced by their personal history and frame of reference, and (2) People are lousy at maintaining an accurate sense of what they knew, when. Without direct evidence to the contrary, as in "I didn't know that then because it hadn't happened yet," I think we unconsciously assume that we've always known what we now know. At the very least, our sense of this is biased in a way that inaccurately minimizes our previous ignorance, and thus convinces us that we were smarter then than people of a similar age are now.

I'm guessing, for example, that had Susan Jacoby been unlucky enough to have dinner with a professional scold in 1966, she might have shocked him with her ignorance of some noteworthy detail of Grover Cleveland's second administration.

Toppo's article also highlights the sin of attributing the alleged ignorance of today's youth to whatever trendy phenomenon is mostly likely to get people's attention and offer opportunities for facile analogies and unsupported assertions. You know, the kids today with their MTV hippity-hop music Ipods Myspaces Internet chat rooms:

[Mark] Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, due in May, blames digital technology, which distracts kids in ways their parents could never imagine. "When we were 17 years old, social life stopped at the front door," says Bauerlein, 49. Now teens can continue their conversations online, on Facebook, by instant messaging or on cellphones in their bedrooms — all night. "Peer-to-peer contact … has no limitation in space or time."

On some level, this is understandable. Bauerlein was 17 in 1976, well before the Federal Communications Commission lifted its now-infamous ban on the installation of telephones in teenagers' bedrooms.  

Now, there are people out there with legitimate things to say on this topic, people like E.D. Hirsch (who Toppo quotes) and his ideas about the role that knowledge plays in learning. Hirsch, it should be noted, is not as conservative as people think based on the conservative embrace of Cultural Literacy; his work focuses less on knowledge for specific knowledge's sake than knowledge as an essential building block for learning to read and gaining higher conceptual skills.

But there are plenty of others who bemoan the fact that some large percentage of high school seniors got the wrong answer on a multiple choice question of historical fact and then quickly proceed to denounce educational reforms that emphasize rote memorization skills as measured by multiple choice tests.

With Your Weekend Coffee

Via This Week in Education, NPR's This American Life will focus this week on human resources, with a segment on NYC's infamous "rubber rooms". So, enjoy your weekend coffee with Ira Glass's oddly soothing voice and what will, no doubt, be an entertaining but depressing look at a baffling institution.

If I Only Had a Gun

Various Nazis have been apocryphally quoted as saying "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun." When people like Cato's Brink Lindsey, writing in the New Republic($), identify culture as the chief source of educational inequality, I feel the same way.

The "riddle" Lindsey purports to solve is why low-income people are less likely to graduate from college. It is not, says Lindsey, because the government isn't doing enough to help them. Shocking to hear this from Cato, I know. He frames the specifics thusly:

As of 2003, 80 percent of high school seniors from families in the top 20 percent of income enrolled in college the fall after graduation, while only 49 percent from families in the lowest 40 percent did so. That class divide translates directly into big disparities along ethnic lines. In 2006, 34 percent of white Americans aged 25- 29 held college degrees, compared to 19 percent of African Americans and only 10 percent of Hispanics.

Note that in pivoting from class to race, Lindsey switches from a measure of college enrollment to one of college completion. Why? Perhaps because if he had kept his measures consistent, they wouldn't be so dramatic. According to this table, the rolling three-year average rates of immediate college going (which are preferable given small sample size issues with the Census data from which these numbers are derrived) in 2003 for white, black, and Hispanic students were 66%, 60%, and 58%, respectively. This U.S. Department of Education study of high school sophomores found (Table 34) that the white / black difference in college-going expectations varies by less than three percentage points. Black students are more likely than white students to aspire to achieve a PhD, MD, or other advanced degree. It turns out that, despite the allegedly pernicious "acting white" stigma, etc. etc., minority students want to go to college pretty much just like everyone else.

Lindsey acknowledges that the differences that do exist are rooted in different levels of high school achievment. He also acknowledges that low-income and minority student go to worse high schools--before asserting that two aren't connected. Yeah, quite a coincidence, that. As evidence, he cites the Coleman Report. For the non-education wonks in the audience, let me offer some advice. Anytime you read the words "As we have known since the 1966 Coleman Report...." or some variation thereof, immediately discount the likelihood that the author is arguing in good faith by 50%. I'm not talking down Coleman, who was quite a social scientist, but it's been 42 years and we've learned some things since then. Conservatives and Cato types will constantly tell you that "money isn't the answer" just before they drive home and write a $25,000 check to the private school where they send their kids, or to mortgage company to pay for the house in the wealthy suburbs with the good schools.

Lindsey concludes by conceding that because poor children don't have the capacity to act as autonomous agents, "government intervention to improve [their] circumstances could actually expand the scope of individual autonomy." Programs like "preschool enrichment programs along the lines of Head Start, but more intensive and beginning with even younger kis." That's an interesting endorsement from the vice president for research of an organization with the stated goal of destroying public education as we know it, but okay. Must be Sara Mead's influence.

Lindsey is not wrong to say that culture matters. Of course it does. It just doesn't matter as much as he thinks, relative to the influence of schools. This is just the latest in a long history of agenda-driven arguments against the efficacy of public education. Cato makes it because public education is expensive and popular; people like to pay taxes to support government schools, and Cato is against taxes and government. Others make similar arguments from the left, because they're worried that a belief that schools can help poor students will undermine efforts to make fewer students poor. It's all of a piece.

It's too bad that on the relatively rare occasion that putatively left-leaning magazines like TNR and others decide to write about education, they don't have much to say other than it's not important. It really is.

Real Issues, Real Learning

Adam Doster, in an article in the 25 Feb. 2008 issue of The Nation, discusses several schools across the country that are using social issues to teach basic concepts. For instance, in Social Justice High School (SJHS) in Chicago (part of the brand new Little Village Lawndale High School, where 98% of students qualify as low-income), students participate in weekly colloquiums about social issues that affect their lives (like the income gap), designed to spark them to deeper inquiry, covering basic standards requirements (like reading) along the way. For instance, Doster quotes Rico Gutstein, a math professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who recommends using the unequal distribution of wealth or racial profiling as backdrops for math lessons.

Doster notes that some conservative groups (City Journal and the New York Sun) have argued against this type of teaching, saying that it imparts liberal politics in the place of a “general education.” (Some believe teaching social issues to be even more pervasive and destructive.) But this is a red herring: the issue is not so much about politics, but educating students, and students learn better when they can relate to the subject matter and the manner in which it is taught. The 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) reports that 98% of students reported being bored in school, and 39% of them said that was because the “material wasn’t relevant” to them while 75% percent said they were bored because the “material wasn’t interesting” – two intimately related problems. E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, stresses the necessity of a high-quality curriculum here, here, and here, among other places, but successfully teaching our students is at least as much about methods/pedagogy as curriculum. Good methods often hinge on teaching skills via a relatable curriculum.

Whether students learn math by analyzing the achievement gap or understand Central Place Theory by looking at White Flight, the learning is the key, and this type of learning requires critical thinking that will allow students to demonstrate this knowledge. And in the age of accountability, another end – passing the test – is just as important as the means.

Some may argue that teaching math is great, but shouldn’t be done vis-à-vis topics of questionable existence or unwieldy or unconfirmed political charge. In response, I would ask why we use “widgets” to explain the principles of mean, median, and mode, and how we can have political science courses at all.

There is a debate over whether or not inadequate teaching methods are the result of inappropriate reactions to NCLB by teachers and schools and the persistence of poor teaching, or of direct, logical results of NCLB mandates. But either way, effective instructional methods shouldn’t be challenged based on political-ideological grounds – like whether or not the methods at SJHS are imparting liberal politics over a “general education.” To raise the achievement of all students, we need to meet them where they are, not wish they were where we want them to be, and present topics to them in ways that they can understand and from which they can benefit.

Posted by Sumner Handy

Sara Returns

Former Education Sector staffer Sara Mead not only authored many of this blog's best posts in its first year of existence, she also came up with the name. I've always harbored a secret, irrational hope that she'd come back to the Q&E fold but now that she's launched a brand-new early education blog at the New America Foundation, that seems unlikely. Our loss is the gain of small children everywhere.

1,000 Words, or More

Via Ross Douthat, these pictures of the long-abandoned Detroit School Book Depository are oddly beautiful in a very sad kind of way.

Eggs

Firing another salvo in the baseball / teaching debate in response to this post from Matt Tabor, Leo Casey begins with an ode to the pastoral nature of the game, pivots to a defense of baseball unionization and Curt Flood--which no one is disputing--before seizing on word that Tabor quotes someone else using: commodity. "We Are Not Commodities" declares Leo--that's the title of the post--"we are men and women, proud of our profession, skilled in our craft, dedicated to our students. As long our our union is standing...." etc., etc. You get the drift.

Hmmmm.....commodities. Let's talk about those for a moment. Merriam-Webster's definition of commodity includes the following:

"a mass-produced unspecialized product"
"a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price"
"one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market"

That sounds pretty bad, I can see why Leo would take umbrage at the mere suggestion that teachers be treated like a commodity. I mean, eggs are a commodity, right? And that has a lot of implications. Most importantly, there was until recently hardly any market for quality eggs. Ironic, given that people say "he's a good egg," when at many supermarkets you cannot, in fact, buy a good egg, in the sense that it tastes better than any other egg. Eggs are only differentiated one one, easy-to-measure scale: size. There are six official sizes or "grades"--Jumbo, Extra- Large, Large, etc., with prices to match.

Commodification leaves the market vulnerable to quality problems--people selling inferior eggs for the same standard price--so we've developed a government-controlled inspection system whereby minimum standards are established that eggs must meet before they enter the market. Because you can't crack all the eggs open to see how they taste before selling them, those standards are mostly tied to the means of production. When you see a U.S. Department of Agriculture grade on an egg carton, that means the plant processed the eggs following USDA's sanitation and good manufacturing processes.

When something is a commodity, quantity matters more than quality. This affects the basic way we think about the product. If, for example, I was baking a quiche and felt like it needed more egg, it probably wouldn't occur to me to buy better, more eggy eggs. How could I? Instead, I'd throw in bigger eggs, or more of them--increase the egg/quiche ratio, in other words.

Commodification also means that producers are mostly competing on price, which tends to keep prices down. But that's okay if you're a producer, you can make it up on volume. It's okay if you're the government quality regulator, since it maintains your reason for being. And it would actually be a plus if you were running an organization whose finances were based on getting a fixed amount of money for every every egg sold. For you, the more the better.

It's a problem for consumers, though. If I'm frying up an egg in a pan, I don't much care whether it's Jumbo or Extra-Large. I'm glad the government is enforcing some baseline safety standards by trying to ensure that my egg isn't full of salmonella, although I'm disturbed that the regulators often bend to political pressure to ease off on the quality controls. But what I really want is a great-tasting egg. This is doubtless why there's been a big increase in the market for organic eggs in recent years. But since the USDA is in charge of certifying eggs as organic, there are concerns that the process is becoming subject to the same problems of regulatory capture, and once again consumers are getting the shaft.

But hey, not to worry, because of course teachers are not eggs and, as Leo has clearly explained, the very last thing the United Federation of Teachers wants is for its members to be treated like commodities.

Also, this post is worth reading.

Selection Effects and...What?

In the comments section of Matt Yglesias' response to this morning's post on improving the higher education market, several readers raise the issue of selection and peer effects in higher education. This comes up a lot. Essentially the argument is that very selective colleges provide a lot of value to students, and are thus worth paying for and trying to get into, because:

A) It's good to go to college with a lot of other very bright students, from whom you'll learn a lot and strive to compete against.

B) Hanging out with those peers for four or more years is also valuable because you're accumulating a great deal of social capital in the forms of networks that will help you later in life.

C) The simple fact that you attend a selective college sends strong signals to the job market that you had what it takes to get admitted in the first place.

All of these things are true. By themselves, they're probably enough reason for people to rationally pursue an elite college education. But they have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of education those colleges provide.

By this line of reasoning, if everyone collectively decided that the most elite college in America was the University of the District of Columbia, then UDC would, in fact, be the "best." Heck, if all a college did was provide a place for the smartest students to eat, sleep, socialize, listen to music, read books, watch sports, blog, and talk among themselves for four years, without ever offering a single course or actual formal educational experience of any kind, it would still provide all the benefits listed above.

In other words, if the best arguments in favor of elite higher education institutions are completely divorced from the actual practice of higher education, then that's a problem. And it's particularly problematic if that ethos influences national higher education policy, because of course the vast majority of students attend colleges that provide little or no peer or selection benefits and thus really need their institution of higher learning to actually teach them stuff and help them earn a degree.

Perversity

Sherman Dorn says of a new Washington State initiative that would give community colleges financial rewards for students completing college credits, passing basic skills tests, and earning degrees:

I worry that such an incentives structure will affect standards in institutions with weak faculty governance and protection of academic freedom: "We need these students to pass these credits, or we lose money." Better incentive structure: if public funding plus current tuition is sufficient for an institution's operating expenses (a rather big if, as I'm aware in Florida), keep the hands off the potential perverse incentives inside the curriculum and give students an incentive to do well by keeping tuition stable for students as long as they make steady progress towards degrees. In other words, tuition stability (or a cap on rising tuition) is guaranteed if students are doing well. The institutional incentives then can be geared towards summary graduation measures, to some extent.

I'd like to propose that people be more judicious and precise in their use of the term "perverse incentives" by not applying it to any incentive that could theoretically cause someone to act in bad faith. Sherman is a college professor so I assume he assigns students to write papers and then grades them. Student have strong incentives to get good grades, or at least good enough grades, so they can earn a degree, go to grad school etc. The problem of plagiarism in higher education is well-known, made much easier by the Internet. Does that mean the Sherman or his university have created "perverse incentives" for cheating by grading papers? Of course not.

"Perverse incentives" are those that logically compel people to act in bad faith, or offer incentives so compelling that they overwhelm others. I don't think that's at all what's going on in Washington State. Sure, a community college could, in theory, betray its ideals and its students by watering down curricula and standards. Or it could do the right thing, look to its high-performing peers, and try to do a better job teaching them. I don't think the incentives to take the former, dishonorable path are nearly strong enough to warrant the term "perverse." And I'm always amazed that educators are so quick to assume that great numbers of their peers will sell their students down the river whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Improving the Higher Ed Market

One of the frustrating thing about working on higher education policy issues is that DC is pretty much a one-issue town: all anyone cares about is costs. From the average politician's perspective, our higher education system is fantastic with one exception: it costs too much, and costs more every year. This is reflected in the version of the Higher Education Act now moving toward final passage up on the Hill, with lots of new provisions designed to hold down the cost of college. Congress has thrown huge amounts of money at the problem over the last year or so by boosting funding for Pell grants and lowering student loan interest rates. Now there are proposals to shame colleges that have the highest annual tuition increases and force them create internal task forces to ask themselves tough, probing questions about why they made the decision they just made. Because if there's one thing colleges don't have enough of, it's committees.

None of these things are going to work. There's no amount of money that the government can throw into student aid that the higher education system can't absorb, and then some. The only way to hold down costs in the long run is to change the system of incentives under which individual colleges make pricing decisions. Currently, price and quality are seen as synonymous in the market. Colleges have every incentive to raise prices and none to lower them--in fact, they can't lower them, because it would reduce demand. High barriers to entering the traditional market keep price-undercutting competitors out, and students keep coming because there's almost no amount of money you could pay for a four-year degree that's not worth it over the course of a lifetime.

Higher education is also in the peculiar position of being dominated by non-profits that sell extremely valuable and expensive services for lots of money. Being non-profit means there's no incentive to increase margins by being more efficient; all the incentives run toward simply raising as much money from as many sources as possible--students, governments, and donors, primarily--and spending it willy-nilly.

The key then, is to introduce more quality information into the market and shift from a price=quality dynamic to a value = quality / price dynamic, which is the way normal markets work. Unfortunately, the DC higher educaton lobby has pressured Congress into putting a series of provisions into HEA that would limit the ability of the federal government to produce such information. In other words, Congress is actually making it harder to solve the expensive cost problem it's so worried about.

For more, see this ($) from yrs truly in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 8

At this point, I think the major weakness of Season Five is clear: David Simon didn't have the good sense to repeat himself. Imagine this: There is no Scott Templeton. Instead, the season revolves around Alma Gutierrez. She's young,  a little naïve, and wants to write about Baltimore's rapidly-growing Latino population (according to Simon, the likely focus of Season Six if there had been one), which remains largely invisible in city that still sees everything in terms of black and white. Then, in the course of reporting a prize-bait series on the Dickensian lives of the homeless, she runs across a man in a soup kitchen whose life seems to sum up everything that needs to be said about Baltimore's past, present, and future. But when she brings these ideas to her boss, Gus Haynes, he's reluctant. Gus is an essentially decent man who's been ground down by relentless budget cuts and has started to give into cynicism. He sees a little of his old self in Alma, but he has one eye on retirement, has to think of his family, and knows her ideas won’t fly with the idiots running the show. So Alma has a choice to make, about herself, her profession, and her city.

Instead we get the lengthy Templeton story, which is strange given that of the myriad flaws and problems with the news media today, outright fabrication isn’t one of them.

Similarly, while I enjoy Isaiah Whitlock Jr. as much as the next person, what does the story of Clay Davis’ baroque corruption really tell us? Better to focus on someone with a more complex mix of self- and public-interest, like Council President Campbell. Fortunately, the show seems to be moving back to its roots in the final three episodes, because this was easily the best episode of the season. 

Summary: McNulty discovers that he’s an open book, and that after years of railing against The Man, actually being The Man isn’t as easy as he thought. Carcetti continues to sell out the schools piece by piece, first to the police and then to PG County pols, in a way that’s particularly terrible if you think about education for a living. Even as Marlo and Chris get ready to celebrate in A.C., people are closing in from all sides.  There were a lot of great notes and moments—Kima’s stubborn integrity, Dukie on the junk cart, Lester throwing down on Senator Davis, McNulty finally having an honest conversation with Beadie. Poot, meanwhile, emerges from hiding at last, disguised as a Foot Locker salesman. The fan part of me enjoys the extended roll-call / where-are-they-now thing, but it does pull you out of the narrative slightly.

Also, Omar dies. After years of watching The Wire, I can’t say the moment or manner of his death was a surprise. The scene before it, with him hobbling around, shouting for Marlo in the bright, empty, quiet streets, was terrific. Omar’s survival as a lone predator depended on him living within the system. He served as a kind of natural Darwinian check on the inefficiencies of the Game, probably making it stronger in the long run. Once he decided to fight against it directly, he was doomed, because even the baddest man in Baltimore can’t stop a bullet, and your rep doesn’t carry to little men with guns. R.I.P, Omar Little. Even the coroner knew your name.

Next week: The previews are too spoilerish by half, but the next episode looks kind of awesome.