Matt Yglesias -- Defending the indefensible

[I've been off line most of the week so instead of participating in the discussion on the Students First report card, I am, with apologies for the length, putting down my reaction in one big, ugly lump]

At some point in the past year, it became impossible to mount a serious defense of Paul Ryan. There had always been cracks in the facade -- numbers that didn't add up, unlikely claims, extremist quotes -- but most of these could be ignored and those that couldn't were invariably excused that Ryan was sincere, he was a serious budget guy and he was getting us to discuss important policy questions.

Eventually though, the discrepancies started to accumulate, and by the time we got the specifics (or non-specifics) of the Ryan budget and the close scrutiny of the campaign, the standard excuses simply weren't sufficient. This left a large number of journalists with a difficult choice: distance themselves from a politician they had invested great emotional and reputational capital in; or invest still more in increasingly strained defenses. The most memorable example of the first was William Saletan's amusing break-up letter. The most embarrassing example of the second probably comes from James Stewart.

In many ways, Michelle Rhee has occupied a Ryan-like niche in the education. Both started out as camera-friendly media darlings with highly marketable bipartisan appeal and reputations as serious problem-solvers. In both cases there were, from the beginning, troubling details that undercut these reputations but at the time these details never got much traction. As with Ryan and fiscal responsibility, criticizing Rhee was often read as indifference towards the education gap.

But, as they did with Ryan, nagging questions started to accumulate. There were incidents that seemed to show Rhee abusing her authority. There were questions about cheating under her watch. There was increasingly pointed anti-teacher rhetoric. There was the aggressive pursuit of self-advancement.  At each stage, more of Rhee's liberal supporters started getting uncomfortable.

For many, such as the New Republic's Seyward Darby, the tipping point came when Rhee partnered with Florida's Rick Scott. Before Scott, Rhee's liberal supporters had taken the position had been that she was tough on teachers, but reluctantly, and only because it was necessary in order to improve education. With Scott these outcomes were reversed. He was willing to pursue a "reform" agenda if it hurt a faction he saw as hostile.

The alliance with Scott and similar figures alienated some supporters on the left, but it still allowed the possibility that Rhee was acting in good faith. With the release of the Students First state report card, even that is gone. There is not even a pretense that this is about anything other than promoting Rhee and her allies. The Washington Post had a good summary.

In Rhee’s grading system, the D.C. school system that is implementing the reforms she instituted got a higher grade than the states of Maryland and Virginia — which consistently are at or near the top of lists of high-performing states — and Virginia. Maryland got a D-plus. Virginia got a D-minus. The District? The urban system with the highest achievement gap in the country? It got a C-plus. 

The states that got the highest score handed out — a B minus — were Florida and Louisiana. No surprise there.

Florida’s reform efforts were spearheaded more than a decade ago by then-Gov. Jeb Bush, who was the national leader in these kinds of reforms. The school accountability system that Bush set up, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, is scandal-ridden, but he still travels the country promoting his test-based reform model.

Louisiana is the state where Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal instituted a statewide voucher program that gave public money to scores of Christian schools that teach Young Earth Creationism, the belief that the Earth and the universe were created by God no more than 10,000 years ago. Kids learn that dinosaurs co-existed with humans. That’s the state that got Rhee’s top grade.

A quick digression on some good indicators of when a metric has been cooked:

1. It reaches an unexpected, even unbelievable conclusion in the favor of the person designing the metric;

2. It leaves out important variables;

3. And leaves in other variables only tangentially related to the central question;

4. It uses an odd, difficult to justify weighting scheme, making certain factors dominant for no apparent reason.

This report is not only cooked till it's charred; it also flies in the face of Rhee's own rhetoric on tests and accountability. It is, in a word, indefensible, but just as Ryan had James Stewart, Rhee has Matt Yglesias.

Michelle Rhee is a controversial figure, and anything her advocacy organization, Students First, does is going to attract a lot of derision. But having had the chance to play around with their "report card" on state policy, I think there's a lot to like here.

The best thing about it, really, is just that they did it. Importantly it's a report card assessing the state of education policy in different places, not outcomes. ... Only two states score above C+ on their ratings—Louisiana and Florida—and student learning outcomes in those states are far from the best in the nation. If Louisiana starts making a lot of progress in closing the gap with, say, Maryland, then that'll be powerful evidence for the Students First approach. But if it doesn't, then you get the reverse.
...
In policy terms, the most interesting thing about the Students First report is probably its treatment of charter schools. ... The Students First perspective more wisely dings states that make it too hard to open charters but also dings states (like, say, Arizona) that do much too little to hold charter schools accountable for performance.

You should probably read the whole thing (it's less than 300 words) but this gets at the gist. The entire piece is pretty much just a pander and two short, flawed arguments.

Let's start with the "powerful evidence" argument. Yglesias here treats the report card as not really being a measure of school quality (he doesn't have much choice since the score is actually inversely related to school quality), rather a measure of where schools fall on a policy spectrum so we can basically treat their score as an independent variable when evaluating these policies by comparing score with improvement.

It's worth noting that Rhee's site introduces the report card as follows "We hope this helps reveal more about what states are doing to improve the nation’s public education system so that it serves all students well and puts each and every one of them on a path toward success." Here and elsewhere, Rhee clearly means that the states with better scores are doing a better job. This doesn't align very well with Yglesias's argument.

More to the point though, the argument doesn't hold up even in isolation. The idea of providing a useful indicator would only make sense if we scored the schools at the beginning of implementation of the policies. Instead we have a collection of initiatives with varying start dates, most a few years old, some dating back to Jeb Bush. Perhaps as bad, Yglesias leaves the time frame open (always a bad idea) in a situation where a shake-up in the achievement rankings for any reason will tend to favor states at the top of the Students First list. (Louisiana can't really go that far down.) Any kind of causal inference drawn from a change in one of these top scored states would be meaningless.

The only other specific Yglesias can come up with is that the report supposedly requires schools to hold charter schools accountable for performance. Putting aside the obvious "accountable for performance" irony, this claim is a bit difficult to accept at face value given the related question of holding private institutions that receive state money accountable. Remember, Louisiana is Rhee's top ranked state despite a voucher system notorious for its lack of accountability:

The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

"We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said.

Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

That's it. Out of the "lot to like" here, Yglesias can only come with a flawed we-can-see-how-we're-doing argument and a highly suspect claim about accountability. Less than three hundred words total and he's clearly scraping bottom to put those together.

This whole affair is a case study in how bad ideas lodge themselves in the discourse through journalistic convergence and superficiality, the fetishizing of balance, and the inability of otherwise smart, responsible people to admit (perhaps even to themselves) that they've been proven wrong.

update: link added.

Teachers are nervous about Michelle Rhee's suggestions because they're afraid other people in power will act like Michelle Rhee

The debate over job security for teachers is often employs an analog of the "If you're not hiding something..." argument in national security. Just as those who are guilty of nothing are supposed to have no reason to object to searches and wiretaps, teachers who are effective and conscientious have nothing to fear from the elimination of tenure and LIFO.

The argument works on two levels: it has a convincing though overly simplistic logic and it casts aspersions on the competence and character of those who object to it.

Of course, it collapses completely if those with the power to hire and fire ignore educators' accomplishments, make arbitrary and opaque decisions, play politics, let small factions gain undue influence over the process.

In other words...

Rhee Dismisses Principal of School That Her Children Attend

By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 9, 2008

Oyster-Adams Principal Marta Guzman can recall the ripple of anxiety that ran through some faculty members last summer when they learned that the new D.C. schools chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee, had chosen the bilingual school for her two daughters, a kindergartner and a third-grader.

But Guzman, an educator with more than 30 years' experience, said she wasn't concerned. The dual-immersion program, where native English and Spanish-speaking children learn side by side, has long made the Cleveland Park school among the city's most coveted, with high test scores and a national Blue Ribbon for academic achievement. Every year, parents from outside its attendance boundaries vie through a lottery for a handful of spaces to enroll their children.

"I thought it was a good thing," she said of the Rhee children's enrollment.

This week, Rhee fired her.

Guzman received a form letter from Rhee informing her that she was out of a job effective June 30, one of at least two dozen principals whose contracts for the 2008-09 school year were not renewed. Guzman said she was given no reason for her dismissal, either in the letter from Rhee or at a Monday meeting with Assistant Superintendent Francisco Millet.

...

Guzman's departure has stunned many Oyster-Adams parents who wonder why, in a city filled with under-performing public schools, Rhee would sack a principal who has presided for the past five years over one of its few success stories. The move has also heightened ethnic and class tensions within the school's diverse community. Eduardo Barada, co-chairman of the Oyster-Adams Community Council, the school's PTA, said Guzman was toppled by a cadre of dissatisfied and largely affluent Anglo parents with the ear of a woman who was both a fellow parent and the chancellor.

"I believe there are some parents who want to control and dominate," he said. "They want to silence the Latinos there."

Claire Taylor, council co-chairwoman, said she "absolutely respects Eduardo's position" but doesn't agree with it. "From what I've seen of Michelle Rhee, she is an exceedingly fair person who wants what's in the best interests of the students," she said.

Taylor added that ethnic and class divisions are the norm at Oyster-Adams. "A leaf falls and there are issues," she said.

Taylor was one of a group of Oyster-Adams parents, both white and Latino, who dined with Rhee in November and aired complaints about Guzman. Among the issues raised with Rhee, who took notes, according to another attendee, were Guzman's alleged lack of organization, reluctance to delegate and sometimes-brusque style.

Asked to discuss the dinner, which was at the home of another parent, Taylor said she was "not going to get into intra-school politics."

...

The first sign that her job was in jeopardy, Guzman said, came last month, when Millet convened a meeting of Oyster-Adams teachers to discuss her leadership. Guzman, who was not invited to the meeting, said she learned from a teacher that Millet began the meeting by announcing that a national search was underway for her replacement.

She quickly asked for a meeting with Rhee, who told her about the dinner meeting. Rhee said parents were frustrated by Guzman's lack of organization and "not comfortable with her" on a personal level.
...

Maureen Diner, who has a fourth-grader at the school, said Rhee's silence is not seemly for a chancellor who came into office a year ago promising reform.

"Anybody asked not to return deserves a process, at the very least a community meeting," Diner said. As for Rhee, "she talked about creating a culture of accountability. At the same time, she needs to be accountable for her own actions."

I wish I could say I was shocked to read this, but I can't. I can't tell you that this sort of politics is unusual. I can't even claim that this is my first encounter with a dinner party putsch.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on what is already a damned sharp spike, a group of parents who invite the chancellor of a major metropolitan school district over for dinner will not, as a rule, be poor, simple, honest workin' folk. They will tend to be wealthy, influential and grossly unrepresentative. To accept their invitation at all showed exceptionally poor judgement. To fire one of the district's most effective administrators based on their influence showed none whatsoever.

Of course, under the current system, teachers have protections that principals don't. They can give poor grades for poor work, keep the wooden and the clumsy in the chorus and the second string respectively, write honest evaluations. They can, and often will, be harassed for doing their jobs but they aren't in danger of losing them.

At least for now.

Time to call a lie a lie

One of the most effective rhetorical tools in the education reform movement is the "we're just in this for the children" chant. The implication, of course, is that the people who disagree with the movement's proposals must not be putting the children first. It is an obviously unfair suggestion but it done a spectacular job quelling potential criticism on the left.

Of course, the vast majority of people on both sides of the debate are there because of a concern for kids. I disagree strongly with Jonathan Chait and Ray Fisman (just to name two) but I have no doubt that both men are motivated by a desire to see young people get a better education. (For the record, that's a courtesy that many of those in the movement, such as Chait, have been reluctant to extend to the other side.)

This concern does not, of course, preclude self-interest. As functional adults we expect people to act out of a mixture of motives. When policemen lobby for more cops on the street or our dentists advise us to schedule more appointments, we know that their advice to us is also in their self-interest but, barring evidence to the contrary, we believe that they are genuinely concerned about us as well.

These two facts, that everybody has mixed interests and that their advice should still be given the benefit of the doubt, need be kept in mind during all debates. Acknowledging these facts goes a long way toward keeping things civil and, more importantly, honest. That's why, in the context of recent events, the behavior of Michelle Rhee has been so difficult to forgive.

Rhee has always played an aggressive game and has gone out of her way to portray her opponents in a negative light, but with the formation of her lobbying group StudentsFirst, Rhee has crossed the line into claiming that only she and her allies have pure motives.

Consider this quote from an interview conducted by the painfully credulous Guy Raz on Weekend All Things Considered:

"Over the last 30 years, the education policy has been driven in this country by lots of special interest groups, including the teachers union," she says. "I think that one of the missing pieces is that there is no organized national interest group that has the heft that the unions and the other groups do who are advocating on behalf of children."

The trouble with proclaiming your own purity is that someone will remember those proclamations when you have to make compromises. Rhee's recent role as an adviser/advocate for various conservative Republican governors has made some of these compromises unavoidable.

The recent debate over Florida's education bill provided an ideal example:

Among the amendments proposed and rejected as poison pills:

Requiring superintendents to offer a written explanation for denying a teacher's contract renewal, if test scores and evaluations make the teacher eligible for the renewal.

Let's take a minute and unpack this. First let's keep in mind that Rhee's philosophy is based on the assumptions that you can largely fix the current problems in education by putting better teachers in the classroom and you can accurately identify those teachers through test scores and evaluations. The teachers being denied these letters are, by definition, the same teachers Rhee says we need to keep in the classroom in order to save our school system.

Unfortunately, the main effect of denying that letter will be to force many of these teachers out of the profession forever. As I explained it before, the problem is asymmetry of information. It is incredibly difficult and disruptive to make staffing changes during the school year. This makes administrators very skittish about hiring a teacher who has been fired elsewhere. The administrators would, however, probably take a chance if they knew that the teacher got good evaluations and produced high test scores but was fired for something like budgetary reasons. In other words, that letter might have determined whether or not the effective teacher remained employable.

The effect here is two-fold: effective teachers who find themselves caught in this trap will have a great deal of trouble finding another job and may have to leave the profession; other effective teachers will see that competence and accomplishment cannot protect them from arbitrary career-ending decisions and will consider leaving the field as well. Either way, the law Rhee endorses causes us to lose more of the teachers Rhee says we need to keep.

To be blunt as a sock full of sand, from the students' standpoint this is all bad. There is no possible benefit. You simply cannot argue that causing effective teachers to leave the classroom is good for kids. Despite Michelle Rhee's titular claim, rejecting that amendment puts students a poor second.

This doesn't Rhee and the Florida GOP don't care about the quality of teachers (I'm sure they do), but it does mean that, in this case, other things mattered more. Things such as the money to be saved by firing teachers who are likely to max out the merit pay system and the power that comes from running the education department like a political machine.

If Michelle Rhee were concerned solely with the interests of children, she would have been actively lobbying for rules like the one in the amendment, rules that furthered her stated goal of having more teachers in the classroom whom she considered competent. But, of course, Rhee has to balance the interests of children against the interests of those she represents, an alliance that includes, among others, educational entrepreneurs who stand to make a great deal of money from proposed reforms and conservative Republicans who see the current conflict as a way of maintaining political power and moving back to a period when the country was on the right track.

I have no doubt that Michelle Rhee's concern for children is genuine. Rhee is a professional educator and it is exceptionally rare to find someone who has spent a career working in schools who doesn't care about kids. Nor does the fact that she has sometimes put other interests above those of students (including a particularly notorious case involving her own children) indicate a lack of concern -- making compromises is a necessary part of being an adult.

The sin here is in the lie, in claiming purity of motive and suggesting that only she was trustworthy. That was unfair to her opponents, provably false and terribly damaging to the discourse. Michelle Rhee should be ashamed of herself for saying it and Guy Raz and the rest of the press corps should be ashamed of themselves for not holding her accountable.

Something else that shouldn't surprise people but probably will

I suspect Seyward Darby spoke for a lot of people on the left when she admitted growing disenchanted with Michelle Rhee (despite Rhee's remarkably consistent educational philosophy). Rhee was, of course, part of the Adrian Fenty administration in D.C. and Darby and the New Republic were big supporters, endorsing him in 2010 with the headline, "Why the fate of education reform rides on the D.C. mayoral race."

TNR's editors might be rethinking that support now:

Speaking on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, Fenty -- whose term in office was marked by battles with organized labor in the city, especially the teacher's union -- said that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was "right on the substance" and "right on the politics" when it came to the fight with unions and their supporters in the Badger State.

"I think it's a new day," Fenty said. "I think a lot of these collective bargaining agreements are completely outdated."

Having made fun of Paul Krugman's puns, there's no way I can use the title "Darby's Rhee Lapse"

From the New Republic's Seyward Darby:

The mantra goes, “You either love or hate Michelle Rhee.” In the education world, there is no figure as polarizing as the former chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public schools, who famously warred with the city’s teachers’ union and left abruptly when her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost reelection last year. Since then, she has started an organization called StudentsFirst to push for education reform nationwide. She announced the group in a Newsweek cover story, and it raised more than $700,000 in its first week. Andrew Rotherham, an education policy expert, told me, “Do people say, ‘I [am] kind of uncertain about Michelle Rhee’? No way.”

Count me, then, as one of the uncertain few. To be sure, I am generally a fan of Rhee. The world of liberal education policy consists, more or less, of two factions: reformers, who support performance pay, charter schools, and weakening seniority-based job protections for teachers; and opponents of these ideas, who are often allied with teachers’ unions. Like most reformers, I greatly admired Rhee’s tenure in D.C., in which she closed failing schools, fired underperforming teachers, and helped raise student achievement.

But, in reading about Rhee’s recent moves, I’ve felt a nagging sense of disappointment. She is now advising several conservative governors who line up with reformers on certain issues but whose commitment to public education is questionable. Meanwhile, she hasn’t offered robust answers to some of the thorniest matters facing education policymakers. Last week, I put these challenges to Rhee directly. And I came out of our conversation much as I went in: with decidedly mixed feelings about her vision for the education-reform movement.

I have long had decidedly mixed feeling about Seyward Darby (as you can see for yourself with a quick keyword search). Her reporting and analysis of the education reform movement has been, to put it simply, bad (better than Chait's but still bad). She was overly eager to accept the movement's preferred narrative, credulous about its claims, negligent about digging into the research that called these claims into question, and dismissive of those on the other side.

That last trait is still on display even now with the weasel-worded "more or less, of two factions... opponents of these ideas, who are often allied with teachers’ unions." The implication here is that the opponents are shilling for the unions. I don't know the alliances of everyone out there but I can tell you that I'm not allied with the unions (I never even bothered to join one when I was a teacher), nor is Joseph, nor is David Warsh, nor, to my knowledge are most of the people in my corner of the blogosphere. In my experience, it would have been more accurate to say "opponents who question the evidence presented by the reformers."

But there was no question in my mind that Darby is an intelligent, competent and basically honest journalist and that eventually the internal contradictions would start to get to her. One of the ways that people deal with cognitive dissonance is by convincing themselves that things have changed. Rather than question their original assessment and reaction, they convince themselves that they were right then but they are taking the opposite position now because things are different.

Michelle Rhee hasn't changed. She is constant as the northern star. Every point on her career trajectory is collinear. Those who didn't see her current incarnation coming either weren't paying attention or weren't being honest with themselves.

The rest of Darby's article is behind a paywall and I haven't had a chance to look at it. Perhaps something in the piece will invalidate something I've said here. If so let me know and I'll gladly make the appropriate retractions.

The Self-esteem gap

Michelle Rhee was on Marketplace yesterday. She's worried about all the coddling and empty praise we've been heaping on our children.

We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.

I can see it in my own household. I have two girls, 8 and 12, and they play soccer. And I can tell you that they suck at soccer! They take after their mother in athletic ability. But if you were to see their rooms, they're adorned with ribbons, medals and trophies. You'd think I was raising the next Mia Hamm.

I routinely try to tell my kids that their soccer skills are lacking and that if they want to be better, they have to practice hard. I also communicate to them that all the practice in the world won't guarantee that they'll ever be great at soccer. It's tough to square this though, with the trophies. And that's part of the issue. We've managed to build a sense of complacency with our children.

Take as a counterpoint South Korea, where my family is originally from. In Korea, they have this culture that focuses on always becoming better. Students are ranked one through 40 in their class and everyone knows where they stand. The adults are honest with kids about what they're not good at and how far they have to go until they are number one. Can you imagine if we suggested anything close to that here? There would be anarchy.

This is an old and much loved refrain in the reform movement, but when you look closely and take the time to disaggregate the data the argument completely collapses. The problem is that the culture of esteem-building Rhee describes is essentially a suburban phenomena. In poor neighborhoods, the situation is exactly the opposite:

Hart and Risley also found that, in the first four years after birth, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback; a working- class child receives merely 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements; a welfare child receives 125,000 more discouragements than encouragements.

Other words, our best performing schools are filled with kids who, according to Rhee, should be complacent and lacking competitive spirit while most of the kids in our worst performing schools have received little of the empty praise that so concerns her.

Perhaps we should worry less about the exaggerated self opinions of students and more about that of our pundits and commentators.