After evolution, classroom fights over climate science and The Big Bang Theory are the next front in the education cultural war.

Here’s a pretty frightening article from The Washington Monthly on how Texas’s radical State Board of Education is rewriting textbooks nationwide.

Or at least it does in my hometown, which voted overwhelmingly against what would amount to an average of $11 more a year in property taxes to shore up a failing school budget.   [Read more →]

Will backtracked last week from this post, which included a chart detailing federal spending increases in education and the rather flat results over the past few decades.  And I wish he hadn’t, despite the many good points brought up about education spending, possible causes for increases in federal education spending, and so forth.

Here’s the thing – during those same years that the federal government has increased its role in education funding, state and local governments have become increasingly dependent on the federal government to shore up budgets, step in during a crisis, and keep them solvent.  Look no further than the recent stimulus money and the bailout of the states.  Many states could barely sustain their commitments to education budgets without federal padding.  Is there any reason to think this will change next year?  Next recession?

It’s not so much that this is a serious problem right now, either.  As Will notes, the federal government is responsible for only about 8.3 percent of all education spending in the country.  The problem lies in the future, as state and local governments continue down the path of dependency, relying more and more on the federal government to catch them when they fall, and doing whatever it takes to make sure they qualify for the handouts.  [Read more →]

Jason Kuznicki produces a pretty damning chart comparing federal expenditures to educational achievement. Looking at the numbers, I can’t think of a more eloquent case for thorough-going reform.

Merit pay’s out, but teacher job security may still take a hit. Here’s The Washington Post on the final round of contract negotiations between DC and the teachers union (via): [Read more →]

Picking up the merit pay ball from Will for a moment, let’s hash out a few competing ideas.

First of all, I think just about everyone agrees on two fundamentals: teachers are probably paid too little, and yet teacher pay in and of itself will not solve the problem with our education system.  There are other areas filled with more contention.  Should teachers be paid on seniority alone?  Has tenure become an outdated model that protects teachers over students?  If we do decide to offer merit pay to keep the best teachers rather than merely the longest-serving teachers, how do we measure the success of those teachers?  Or would offering merit funds to schools be more effective?

There is a contradiction inherent in my two-item-wish-list for teachers.  I want to see a return to teacher autonomy and I’d like to see merit pay on the table.  Autonomy is important for the same reason merit pay is important – it gives smart, creative, involved teachers a reason to begin and to remain teaching.

One huge problem with a program like Teach for America is that it brings in all these bright, hard-working young people who are only in it for a couple years.  But that Teach for America enthusiasm can be transported to the rest of the teaching field.  We just have to make teaching a desirable profession.  Most Teach for America alumni go on to be lawyers and investment bankers because the program offers them great benefits at lots of good schools.  Perhaps if young people saw teaching as a profession akin to being a lawyer, more high quality teachers would remain in the field instead of basically coming on as temporary employees in programs like Teach for America. [Read more →]

Stepping back from the weeds of the merit pay debate, it’s kind of amazing to survey the arguments against compensating teachers based on performance and realize that this stuff literally wouldn’t fly in any other context. Can you imagine an entire industry deciding that its employees aren’t motivated by financial incentives and, as a result, should only get promotions based on seniority and outside accreditation? It sounds absurd on face, but that’s the current state of affairs in many school districts.

Another argument that would be laughable in any other profession is that teacher achievement is just too hard to quantify (see here or here), making any merit-based pay scale unfair and vulnerable to favoritism. Leaving aside the fact that it is possible assess teacher quality despite demographic and environmental factors,  I think anyone who has ever held down a job recognizes that favoritism, personal connections, and outside circumstances play a role in determining workplace success. But that doesn’t stop every other organization on the planet from at least trying to measure employee performance  for the purposes of assigning compensation. We embrace this system – warts and all – because it works; employees who get rewarded for performance are, on balance, more successful and productive.

Obviously, education – like every other profession – has to contend with certain unique conditions. This is why no one is suggesting we hand out assessment forms to students and parents at the end of each year to determine teacher salaries. But the fact that paying educators based on performance is still a controversial proposition reflects a vast (and, in my view, unwarranted) disconnect between how we view teachers and how we view the rest of the workforce. I think this is hugely problematic, which is why we should start asking ourselves why teacher compensation is treated differently than every other employee’s paycheck.

I confess I’m somewhat baffled by Dana Goldstein’s beef with merit pay:

Forty years of psychological research demonstrates that when someone is faced with a complex, creative task — like teaching — money is an ineffective motivational tool, and may even delay progress. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise.

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This jives with the latest findings from one of my favorite education researchers, Cornell University labor economist C. Kirabo Jackson. After looking at North Carolina schoolchildren for 11 years, Jackson found that students’ test scores improved when a high quality teacher taught in their grade-level — even if they were not themselves in that teacher’s class. Why? The positive impact comes not because teachers are competing with another for merit pay rewards, but because they are working alongside more competent colleagues, who are improving their skills.

“If it’s true that teachers are learning from their peers, and the effects are not small, then we want to make sure that any incentive system we put in place is going to be fostering that and not preventing it,” Jackson told Education Week. “If you give the reward at the individual level, all of a sudden my peers are no longer my colleagues—they’re my competitors. If you give it at the school level, then you’re going to foster feelings of team membership, and that increases the incentive to work together and help each other out.”

“Forty years of psychological research” notwithstanding, I think it’s a bit of  a stretch to argue that teaching – unlike nearly every other profession known to man – is immune to monetary inducement. Moreover, teacher quality is measurable, and there seems to be a correlation between merit pay and improving student achievement. It’s also worth noting that reform need not jeopardize educators’ job security: DC, for example, wants to allow teachers to choose between a tenure-track career with less financial compensation and a more lucrative merit-based option.

I’m not opposed to experimenting with different incentive structures, so rewarding schools collectively may be worth trying. But it occurs to me that across-the-board opposition to certain reforms is precisely the wrong way to go about fixing our public schools. As E.D. says, all education is local, and foreclosing district- and state-level experimentation on the grounds that it may not work or that it offends members of your ideological coalition seems pretty silly. Maybe there’s something to Goldstein’s collective rewards program (then again, maybe not). Maybe correlation doesn’t equal causation and merit pay is a false hope. To return to the DC example, however, we’re talking about a school system that spends a ton of money and is still ranked as the worst in the country. So why not give merit pay a shot?

UPDATE: This sounds about right to me.

One thing I thought about reading this Hot Air post is that if a lot of the proposed health care funds come from state coffers, we run the risk of not being able to fund our education systems year after year, with that money diverted into bloated health care budgets.  The worse our children do in school, the more likely they are to need state-provided health coverage in the future.  It’s a vicious cycle.

by Mike at the Big Stick

I am a conservative, so many of my views on education are, well, conservative. But I’ve also been involved with public education for a long time through my work with various historical sites and museums and the result has been that on some issues I diverge from mainstream conservative thought towards what many would probably describe as liberal territory.

The issue that I am most passionate about right now is the idea of a national curriculum.

The Department of Education has been a whipping boy for conservatives for a long time, often for good reason. I won’t provide a list of conservative grievances here, though I think they can best be summed up by saying that centralized power can be extremely corrupt. What I have come to believe, though, is that a national curriculum is one of the few positive things that could come from the federal government on education.

The most obvious benefit is the standardization of curriculum. What I am talking about is not a federally-provided lesson plan that would remove flexibility and creativity from the classroom. Rather, I advocate a national curriculum that acts as a sort of map, providing landmarks that teachers must visit throughout a given school year.

A national curriculum might mandate that all students study the First and Second Continental Congresses in their 8th grade year, or require all students to take Physics their junior year of high school and provide certain topics that must be covered throughout the year like gravity, force, energy, etc. Teachers would actually have more flexibility with a landmark-based strategy than with the current district-provided plans that micro-manage their teaching. [Read more →]

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates comes this piece by Pat Buchanan that centers around the following allegation:

Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.

This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

Now whatever Pat Buchanan’s, uhh, complicated relationship with mainstream American conservatism and libertarianism, the sentiment in this statement is a pretty common one – i.e., affirmative action programs reward mediocrity, discriminate against whites, and a whole host of other evils.  Buchanan then even goes so far as to insinuate that the credentials Judge Sotomayor earned once at those schools were themselves the product of racial favoritism:

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of “Chicken Little” and “The Troll Under the Bridge”?

There is a sentiment in these specific arguments, when made in this way, that really bugs me.  That sentiment is that Judge Sotomayor achieved not a thing because of her own talents or intelligence – not only did she get into those schools solely because of affirmative action, but once she was there she succeeded only because of racial favoritism.  Since Judge Sotomayor graduated first in her class and received all sorts of honors (e.g. editor of the Yale Law Review), this argument thus implies, intentionally or unintentionally, that not a single other minority student deserved to be at those schools or even hypothetically could deserve to be at those schools.  Otherwise, why would Judge Sotomayor, of all the other minority students, reach the top of her class? 

But there’s also some sentiments in these arguments that I encounter pretty regularly in discussions of affirmative action.  They’re sentiments that are easy to arrive at, but which just don’t hold up to close scrutiny and are part of why I’ve become less opposed to, and even downright supportive of, affirmative action programs even as I’ve gotten more passionate about my libertarianism.  Specifically, I’m referring to the notion that somehow affirmative action programs represent a form of bigotry and racism against whites and that they stand in the way of a “color-blind” society.

First, let’s be clear that we’re talking in this case about private affirmative action programs, not public ones.  So why should anyone care, unless they want to advocate that it’s perfectly acceptable for a government to force a private employer to adopt a sort of affirmative action for white people?  By this I mean that the original more or less Goldwater-esque (and definitely libertarian) argument against discrimination laws was that people should have the right to be racist douchebags.  If you really think that affirmative action programs are a form of reverse racism and that private colleges should thus be prohibited from implementing them, then you are abandoning the argument that people should have a right to be racist douchebags.  (And yes, I know that Ivy League schools get federal money…so do plenty of private businesses, though.  Regardless, see below). 

But more importantly, there’s this question – how are affirmative action programs, whether public or private, for purposes of “diversity” or for purposes of remedying some other discrimination, really worth getting upset about in the first place?  Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure there are cases where a more qualified white candidate gets rejected because of an affirmative action program that is based on a “diversity” rationale.  This after all was the basis for the claims in both Gratz and Gruttinger.  But as I’ll show, the “diversity” rationale isn’t really the underlying rationale. 

When an affirmative action program is set up as a means of remedying some other form of discrimination, then the presumption is that the only reason the average minority applicant would be less qualfied than a white applicant would be that other form of discrimination, whether past or present.  Thus, if you factor that past discrimination into the equation, the two applicants would be equally qualified.  In that situation, affirmative action is absolutely necessary to restore a meritocracy – it doesn’t stand in the way of meritocracy.  In other words, it’s an attempt to approximate what would happen in a discrimination-free environment.  This rationale strikes me as doubly relevant in the public context, since government is supposed to serve all of its people, and representat all of its people.  Allowing the legacy of past discrimination to take longer to work its way through the system strikes me as pretty insidious, and the only reasons to be concerned about such programs are if you think that other forms of discrimination need not be remedied or are unnecessary because we’ve already achieved a “color-blind” society.  Few people are willing to admit to the former reason (although there may be good arguments in support), but the latter reason winds up being pretty weak: even if we’ve achieved a “color-blind” society, then the worst that can be said about affirmative action policies is that they are unnecessary and on some rare occasions affect qualified applicants at the margins.  This is unfortunate and wrong, but it’s also not exactly something that threatens the fabric of our society either.

The supposedly bigger problem with affirmative action arises when it is justified based on a diversity rationale because other forms of discrimination have supposedly been rooted out of the system (often a debatable proposition).  But even here, the argument just doesn’t hold up on a macro-level.  Affirmative action programs are intended to ensure that people of different races are represented in a proportion that is roughly reflective of the rest of society.  So, if we assume that no particular race is inherently more qualified than another particular race – i.e., we sincerely believe we are or should be ”color-blind,” then in most instances, and particularly when we’re discussing large institutions, affirmative action programs will have exceedingly little effect.  All races are equally capable of being qualified, so therefore if there were no affirmative action program, the result would be almost exactly the same.  At worst, we have a policy that is useless but does no real harm in the aggregate (there may, again, be exceptions to this, but they’re likely to be pretty rare). 

Of course, quota systems are prohibited, so instead we wind up with race being a “plus” rather than creating something along the lines of a separate applicant pool.  Oddly, this results in a situation where the more clearly “race-neutral” result is somewhat less likely - a “plus” system actively prefers a minority over an otherwise equal candidate solely as a means of increasing diversity even though, assuming a colorblind world, such a “plus” would be unnecessary – the accepted candidates would already represent the relevant society at-large.

This leaves opponents of affirmative action in a tough spot – they have to at least implicitly argue that policies based on diversity result in blacks and Latinos being over-represented relative to their representation in the population, an argument that is easily disproven with statistics. 

All that said, there’s something else here: affirmative action programs based on diversity do not result in overrepresentation of blacks and Latinos at just about any university that is not an HBC, and at most non-Ivy private schools that use the diversity rationale, they are severely under-represented.  This can only lead to two conclusions, both of which are uncomfortable though they shouldn’t be equally so: either (a)blacks and Latinos are inherently inferior, or (b) we still have not overcome the legacy of racial discrimination, and affirmative action policies based on “diversity” are just an attempt to make up for racial discrimination that the institution doesn’t want to acknowledge is racially discriminatory. 

I don’t intend to sign up with the KKK anytime soon, so I’m going to say option (b) is about 1000% more likely.  And indeed, when you look at the case of the Ivies, there is something that is pretty damn racially discriminatory that they should be making up for: the legacy system.  Suffice to say: if we want a color-blind society anytime in the next several decades, legacy systems will have to go first.  Until that time or until something resembling racial economic equality is achieved through the effects of affirmative action, poor and middle-class whites will be the ones to bear the costs of legacy admissions policies.