I’ve rewritten the introduction to this blog.

My readers may be forced wonder: am I stalling? Well, maybe a little—I admit, I’m a little daunted by all the different things I want to research and write about—but I’m also trying to lay a foundation. The more I think about the subject of this blog and the more I try to write the posts that I really want to write, the more I feel that the basic terms are not defined, or else poorly defined—that the theoretical framework has not been established to have the discussion that I want to have. These pages—these introductions and overviews and glossaries—are my attempts to sketch out that framework. It will be a very cursory sketch, partly because I don’t want to get lost in a theoretical discussion, but mostly because I am still piecing together the origins and subtle interrelations of today’s major educational movements.

I've significantly altered the page on No-Excuses charter schools. The final section has been completely rewritten, because I had previously overlooked a major selection bias in No-Excuses student populations— namely, student-attrition— and other significant changes have been made throughout the article. If you read the original version and are interested in the subject, I recommend taking another look.

No new post today, but I just created a new feature for this blog-- an overview of No-Excuses charter schools. If you don't know much about No-Excuses charters, or if you already know a lot, but you're curious what I have to say about them, please read up!

Teaching For the Test

I've been slaving over this long enough—I'm just going to post it. More on this to come.

In my last post I outlined the trap in which American education reform is mired: our best hope for improving education—tying incentives to outcomes—has reduced inner-city education to a massive, year-round test-prep regimen. I want to talk about how we could improve the situation, but first we need to look more closely at the phenomenon of test-driven education.

The phrase "teaching to the test" gets thrown around a lot, and I don't want to write facilely about the ills of No Child Left Behind, because that leads to the kind of simplistic ideology I'm trying to avoid. I think that there are serious downsides to NCLB, and I'd like to discuss those in detail, but I'm hindered by the narrowness of my experience. I can talk with great specificity about the impact of NCLB on New York State middle-school mathematics education; but it's hard to be sure how generalizable that analysis would be. At some point, I'd like to conduct a qualitative study of state exams and curricula in a variety of subject-areas, at a variety of grade-levels, from a wide selection of states—but that study will require months of research. Anecdotal evidence from teachers in other states and subject areas, however, suggests that New York State middle-school math is not some wild aberration. What follows, therefore, in lieu of more definitive conclusions, is my analysis-by-extrapolation of the specific mechanisms by which NCLB is undermining education in America.

Measurement, Incentives, and Educational Reform

In my last post, I talked about how the way we assess the quality and effectiveness of education comes to determine the overall quality and effectiveness of our entire education system. I made that argument principally with regard to colleges and universities, but in fact, the relationship between assessments and outcomes is one of the most important questions public education in America today—and it is a discussion many layers deep. In this post, I will peel back another layer of that debate, and disassemble the assumptions behind the arguments in my last post.

If you missed the last post, my point was this: in a system as massive as that of American higher education, educational quality can be maintained only to the extent that educational quality is measured: in the other words, you only get what you test for. Why? Because if we do not measure educational quality, then we cannot know where and when it exists; if we do not know where and when it exists, then we cannot reward anyone—teachers, administrators, and staff—for producing it, nor punish them for failing to do so; and if there are no incentives to produce it, then why should anyone care about educational quality? Now, of course, there is another reason why anyone would care, but I'll get to that a little later.

As obsessively mechanistic as the above argument may sound, it constitutes a fundamental assumption behind contemporary American education policy. What's more, there's evidence that that assumption is at least partly correct. The seminal education act of the past couple decades, No Child Left Behind, nationalized what had been a growing movement at the state level towards high-stakes testing. The principle behind this movement is that you test kids regularly, and you reward or punish teachers and administrators based on students' performance. Why? Because, if you don't, teachers and administrators won't bother educating anyone.

Higher Education: Not Really About Education Anymore

There was a disturbing little article in the Times a couple weeks ago about the increasing share of college and university budgets going to athletic facilities, sports teams, student clubs, fancy dormitories, and other non-instructional ends. The article quotes Ohio University Professor Richard K. Vedder giving the obvious explanation: "In the zeal to get students, [schools] are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities." Professor Vedder studies the economics of higher education, but it doesn't take a specialist to see how this is playing out.

I was riding the Q train over the Manhattan Bridge a couple days ago, and the whole car was plastered with an ad campaign for Monroe College; the ads touted the school's sports teams, its student clubs, its athletic facilities; they compared the dormitories to luxury condos; and they said very little about academics. I think it's pretty clear that what we're seeing is a higher-education system that's responding to market forces.

This is something that we want to take a close look at, because a lot of people think that the model for public primary and secondary schooling ought to be a lot more market-based. In an article from 2000, for example, U. of C. professor of economics and Nobel laureate James Heckman makes the argument in no uncertain terms: "Once it is recognized that public schools, especially inner-city public schools, are a virtual monopoly, while the U.S. university system is highly competitive, the mystery of the poor performance of the former, and the great success of the latter vanishes.".^[1]

On the surface, the decreasing emphasis on instruction in college and university budgets seems like an argument against Heckman. In fact, I think that decreasing emphasis tells a different story, not about the merits of competition in education, but about the tools by which education is measured.

Heckman's thinking on this issue is, like that of so many academics, distorted by the assumtions and paradigms of his field. Economists are used to thinking about goods whose quality is relatively easy to determine. An education is vastly more complicated than your average widget, and its quality is extremely difficult to assess. It is the tools and structures by which we evaluate it, far more than the competition or lack thereof, that will ultimately determine quality of education. Only what is measurable can be rewarded or punished by the market. In other words, it's all about incentives.

Crisis-Point Interventions, Part I

I've been working on a new post for five days now, and it keeps squirming out of my grasp. The fact is that the data on the topic is a lot more ambiguous than I wish it were. My goal was to use last Friday's Times article on Chicago's new program to reduce gun-violence against grade-schoolers (actual article; my summary) as a jumping-off point for a discussion of crisis-point interventions versus early interventions and prevention programs: the Chicago program is taking highschoolers who are currently in gangs or have been in the past, and trying to get them safely out of gangs and out of the way of former gang-contacts who are seeking retaliation; why not, I wondered, target younger kids and try to prevent them from joining gangs in the first place. It's harder than I expected to make that argument.

When you're talking about a program like this, the big question is cost-effectiveness. You only have so much money—six million dollars, in federal stimulus funding, in this case—and you want to use it to have the biggest impact you can. By my admittedly rough estimation, the Chicago program is costing around $6,000 per student, per year. (See my calculations.) To put that number in perspective, that's about 60% of the total cost of sending these kids to school every year.^[1] By that estimate, the program will cost a total of around nine million dollars, when it's expanded to cover 1,500 students next year.

Based on the data in the article, it's impossible to be sure what the real impact of the program is—there were 40 fewer students shot this year than last year, a reduction of about 16%, but there's no way of knowing whether that's due to the program or not, especially since the article gives no information on the variance in number of shootings from year to year.^[2] Even if we assume that the reduction in shootings was due entirely to the advocates program, though, that doesn't mean the program was cost-effective—after all, there might be another program that could prevent more shootings for the same amount of money.

I assumed, naively, that the motivations for the Chicago program were sentimental: the city was devoting all its resources to the neediest few, rather than stepping back, practicing a little triage, and fixing the problem at its source. Turns out, I may be the sentimental one. The current wisdom on how to reduce youth gang activity is decidedly cool-headed—possibly even cold-headed.