And national experiments

I strongly believe in being careful when generalizing the results from one country to another, particularly when those countries are as different as the US and Sweden. On the other hand, when considering radical shifts in national policy, you have to at least consider how well those policies have worked in other countries.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sweden is perhaps the best test we've had of the kind of privatization advocated by many in the education reform movement. As a result, the country's reforms were embraced by such unlikely supporters as the Heritage Foundation.

Here's a 2010 Foundation interview with Thomas Idergard, Program Director of Welfare and Reform Strategy Studies at Timbro, a "free-market think tank" based in Stockholm:

The Swedish school voucher program was introduced in 1992 by the then Center-Right government. First, the Social Democrats opposed the reform, but after having returned to power in 1994 they not only accepted it but also expanded the legislated compensation level of the voucher. Today there is almost a total national political consensus—with the one and only exception from the small Left (i.e., former Communist) Party—on the foundations of school choice in Sweden.

Since the 1970s, the Swedish school system had declined regarding quality and student attainment. One reason for this was the lack of choice. Only the very rich, who could afford private schools with private tuition fees on top of our very high taxes, had a right to choose. For all the rest, the school was one monolithic organization in which all students were considered to have the same needs and to learn the same way. The lack of choice created a lack of innovation regarding pedagogical concept and ways of learning adapted to different students’ needs. Public schools, run by politicians in the local branch of government (cities and municipalities), were all there was for 99 percent of all students.

The school voucher program was designed to create a market—with competition, entrepreneurship, and innovation—based on the Swedish and Scandinavian tradition of social justice and equality: All families should be able to choose between public and private schools regardless of their economic status or wealth. This equal opportunity philosophy, taken into its full potential, created an education market!

Since the calls for American reform are often based on low PISA scores and since a new round of scores have just been announced, it would be reasonable to check what has happened to Sweden's scores:

No other country has fallen so abruptly as Sweden in maths over a ten-year span. Overall, not one of the other 32 countries included in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) survey has seen its students take such a beating in their studies.

"The bleak picture has become bleaker with the Pisa review that was presented today," Anna Ekström, head of Sweden's National Education Agency (Skolverket), said after she became privy to the results. She had hoped for Sweden to finally buck the trend and stop declining in the ranking.

Sweden's schools now rank below both the United States and the UK according to the Pisa rankings.

I've never been a fan of using international test scores (even less so after this history lesson from Diane Ravitch), but if you are going to use such arguments they need to be what my business analyst friends call "directionally accurate." Recently we've seen a lot of arguments that don't clear that bar.

Natural Experiments

This was fascinating:

Their answer is yes: when urban life revived in the medieval period, French towns tended to be near old Roman centers, while British towns didn’t. And the British had the better of this deal, because optimal town locations in the Roman era — with good roads — weren’t the same as in the Middle Ages, when roads remained terrible but the technology of water transport had improved.

 Which says all sorts of things about how it might actually be possible to improve things in a rather dramatic way by asking some tough questions. 

How did we miss this?

It's terrifying when Brad DeLong is more on top of interesting stories on education than we are!  But this is from James Kwak: 

I have no problem with the premise: better teachers improve student outcomes, which is worth a lot of money. But do you see what’s going on? To get better teachers, the authors say, requires ”attracting more qualified people” and then “identifying and retaining” the most effective ones.

That just doesn’t follow. And anyone who’s worked in an actual company should realize that. Yes, it’s always better to have better workers. One way to get better workers is to hire more effective people and to fire less effective people. But the other way—which, in most industries, is by far more important—is to make your current workforce more effective. You do that in part by figuring out what attributes or processes make people more effective, and in part by training people and implementing processes in ways that improve productivity.

The idea that the only way to improve teacher effectiveness (remember, they said “requires”) is to increase quality at the front end and link retention to quality on the back end is the kind of illogical, impractical inference you draw if you have a certain type of attitude toward workers: the attitude that there’s only one abstract attribute that matters (quality) and that it’s intrinsic and unchanging. What’s surprising is that this is a non-obvious kind of fallacy: again, anyone who has run a business realizes that what matters more is what you do with the workforce you have.

I think that the whole idea of organizations like Teach for America falls into the trap above.  Focusing entirely on the recruitment and retention piece and not at all on the teacher development piece.  In some ways this seems to be a malaise of our age -- the want to have plug and play human resources instead of developing the work force with patience and practice. 

The conclusion is interesting as well:

But I also suspect that there’s a feeling, maybe not among these authors, but among the billionaires who like investing in education, of “if only more people like us became teachers”—that there are highly productive people and less productive people, and all we need is to adjust the incentives so more of the former go into teaching. I don’t think the world is that simple.

 That would also be a big issue with the whole inter-state competition piece.  If you think ability is an intrinsic quality (and a scalar) that is invariant between positions then this type of approach is very sensible.  Alternatively, if you want job insecurity to be high, using fear to motivate employees is actually surprisingly effective.

That would put reform into an awkward place, wouldn't it?

TFA Context -- one interesting table

On the heels of Gary Rubinstein's recent post on his first year in Teach for America (reviewed here) and this piece by Jennifer Berkshire on the generous contributions the organization gets from numerous corporate donors like FedEx and Subaru, and given TFA's way of popping up in various ed reform discussions, this seems like a good time to review some basic and uncontroversial facts about this very controversial subject.

Let's start with Wikipedia's introduction:

Teach For America (TFA) is an American non-profit organization whose mission is to "eliminate educational inequity by enlisting high-achieving recent college graduates and professionals to teach" for at least two years in low-income communities throughout the United States.

Of course, TFA does other things, but this is very much the persona-mission of the organization, so it's useful to evaluate the performance of TFA as a teacher recruiting organization. There is a great deal of disagreement over how to interpret the data on TFA members' effectiveness and retention, but some other aspects are much more clear-cut.

TFA is a small, expensive program.

More precisely, this was a very small and expensive program; it's become a merely small but very expensive one.

Year	# of Applicants	# of Incoming Corps Members	# of Regions	Operating Budget
2003	15,708	1,646	20	$29.8M
2004	13,378	1,626	22	$34.0M
2005	17,348	2,181	22	$38.4M
2006	18,968	2,464	25	$55.6M
2007	18,172	2,895	26	$77.9M
2008	24,718	3,614	29	$122.3M
2009	35,178	4,065	35	$153.4M
2010	46,359	4,493	40	$176.0M
2011	47,911	5,066	43	$229M
2012	48,442	5,800[21]	46	$244M
2013	57,000	6,000[22]	48

The cost per recruit has increased dramatically

In order for the TFA model to be scalable, the cost per recruit needs to drop sharply at some point. No sign of that yet.

There is reason to be concerned about selection effects

Actually, double selection effects. First there's self-selection. TFA is known for a daunting and highly selective application process that tends to attract high-achievers with solid resumes. Second, there's the process itself:

In 2010, 46,366 candidates applied and 5,827 were initially admitted, making the acceptance rate 12.6%. However, that number does not include those who earned eventual acceptance into the program from the waitlist of 932 candidates. If all on the waitlist were given acceptance, the acceptance rate would be 14.6%. Since some but not all were accepted from the waitlist, the exact 2010 acceptance rate is unknown, but it ranges from 12.6-14.6%. The acceptance rate for 2011 corps members was less than 11%

The result of all this is a tremendously unrepresentative sample of the pool of potential teachers. As a result, it's difficult to apply anything we learn from TFA data to general policy questions in education.

Equal enforcement of contracts?

Dean Baker is strident:

If the connection with AIG isn't immediately apparent, then you have to look a bit deeper. Folks may recall that AIG paid out $170m in bonuses to its employees in March 2009 with its top executives receiving bonuses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These were people who not only shared responsibility for driving the company into bankruptcy; they also had been at the center of the financial web that propelled the housing bubble into ever more dangerous territory. In other words, the bonus beneficiaries were among the leading villains in the economic disaster that is still inflicting pain across the country.

The prospect of executives of a bailed out company drawing huge bonuses at a time when the economy was shedding 600,000 jobs a month provoked outrage across the country. President Obama spoke on the issue and said that unfortunately no one in his administration was smart enough to find a way that could keep the bonuses from being paid. The problem according to Larry Summers, then the head of President Obama's National Economic Council, was that the bonuses were contractual obligations and they had to be honored.

This provides a striking contrast to what might happen to current and former city employees in Chicago and may happen to current and former employers of the state of Illinois and Detroit. In these cases, it seems that the contracts workers had with their employers may not be honored. Employees who worked decades for these governments, with part of their pay taking the form of pensions in retirement, are now being told that these governments will not follow through on their end of the contract.

The differing treatment of contracts in these situations is striking for several reasons. First, the AIG executives stood to gain much more money with their bonuses on a per person basis. In contrast to the six-figure bonuses going to top executives, pensions for Detroit's workers average just $18,500 a year. Pensions for Chicago's workers average over $33,000 a year, but almost none of these workers will get Social Security, so this will be their whole retirement income.

I am not as upset at the difference in size of the individual compensation, the difference in liability for global economic problems, or the asymmetry in harm -- these points are decent but they are secondary to the key argument.  The real issue is whether the need to honor contracts is being applied equally.  And, it is true that bailing out pensioners has a serious element of moral hazard.  But it would be intriguing to see the argument for bank bailouts NOT having at least some element of moral hazard.   

The real question is what is the status of contracts as being fundamental; the ability to amend a long term agreement when the terms work out in somebody else's favor would really change the dynamics of our ability to run a modern economy.  Remember, it is a small walk from this to deciding not to pay for materials that have been purchased because your business plan did not work . . .

Non-linear relation of the day

There is a modern ethic that more and harder work is always an unbounded good.  But this perspective piece argues that too much pressure can actually reduce outcomes:

When knowledge workers are pressed too hard, the intimate connection between workers and their work is compromised and many things go wrong. Stress and anxiety harm mental health and, hence, performance. Competition rises and team cohesion—a major source of productivity gains—declines. Animosity may develop among staff, or between staff (who feel exploited) and management. Overworked workers take on extra tasks and pay a task-switching productivity penalty that DeMarco estimates at 15%, minimum. And it isn't just average productivity that declines; it is also peak productivity, those rare moments of transcendence when important breakthroughs are made.

Simply assuming a linear relation between effort and output seems like a dangerous assumption, and one that leads to bad policy.  It's also worth noting that we'd prefer to be on the other side of the productivity/pressure curve if we wanted to accept this lower productivity -- happy, unstressed workers tend to be easily retained by an employer.  But unhappy/stressed workers and low productivity seems like a bad trade. 

h/t: Mike

Good reporting alert

From the Seattle Times:

But what’s remarkable is the degree Boeing also wants the public to pay its basic costs. Including, it said, “acquiring site, constructing facility, building infrastructure and procuring equipment/tooling.”

That’s right — we are to buy the land, the factories and the machines that go inside, or at least a share of them. And give it all to Boeing, or let them use it rent-free.

“Company preference is toward a location that will share in the cost of all capital expenditures,” Boeing wrote.

Now that’s socialism. It’s the corporate variety, and it isn’t all bad, what with the good-paying jobs and boost to the local economy. But having the public buy the means of production — socializing the capitalists’ risks (though definitely not their profits) — is a far cry from free enterprise. Almost as far, in a different direction, as what the socialist was going on about.

I think that this point is right on.  It is one thing to ask for tax relief or talk about infrastructure, but when the company is asking the state to build the means of production then it really is socialism.  Whether these profits go to a corrupt apparatchik or to the management of a publicly traded corporation is irrelevant.  What is important is that nobody can realistically compete with the state.  So this type of behavior gives a subsidy to some folks, and prevent entry into the market by competitors with fewer political connections.  

Food for thought, really.  

An extraordinary post by Gary Rubinstein on his first year of teaching

If you're just joining us, Gary Rubinstein is a distinguished math teacher and education writer. He's also, as you'll see, both an alumni and a sharp critic of Teach for America. In this post, he takes a remarkably hard and honest look back at his first year of teaching.

This kind of walk down memory  is not something I'd like to do. My first year appears to have gone a little smoother than his did (at least none of the students hit me), but it was still highly stressful and I still have to live with the knowledge that a lot of kids learned less than they should have because their teacher was just beginning to figure out what he was doing.

The whole piece rings exceptionally true and I recommend reading it in its entirety  but there are a few secondary points I'd like to highlight because they fit in with some of the ongoing threads on our blog.

1. Under the circumstances,  a $5,000 recruitment fee seems high. It's been a few years since I was in the field, but back then applicants were expected to shoulder all of their own expenses (the best I ever got out of the deal was the very occasional  free lunch) and it's a lot easier for schools to find qualified applicants than it was twenty years ago.  It should also noted that some of the schools that pay significant fees to schools in areas that have a large surplus of qualified and experienced teachers, perhaps the most egregious example being Huntville, a major aeronautics research center (hence the nickname 'Rocket City') that gets dozens of qualified applicants for every teaching position. (For a bit of context, the organization had a 2012 operating budget of $244M and put out 5,800 new corps members.);

2. You have to have a thick skin to teach junior high and high school. Kids can be cruel, but more to the point, they are going through an incredibly intense, confusing and stressful period and, as a characteristic of their age, they have a natural proclivity for misplaced emotions. Combine that with an instinctive need to test boundaries and you are left with a room filled with people who will make your life miserable if you let them. With time, you learn how respond without letting them feel they've pushed your buttons and, ironically, in the long run they'll be happier having failed. When you're just starting out, though, you might as well be prepared.

3. I realize I've been spending a lot of time on the culture of the ed reform movement lately, but I don't think you can fully understand what's been going on in the education debate without understanding that culture. TFA is a big part of that picture. Reading accounts of TFA alumni, I'm always struck by what an intense bonding experience the training and first two years would have been. Even though Rubinstein may not have been the best fit with TFA, he still says half the people he invited to his wedding were fellow core members.
Add to that official rhetoric that creates distance between TFA members and established traditional teachers, and you can see why compromise and self-policing might be difficult for the movement they largely define and why the movement is so quick to converge on certain sometimes unusual positions like pedagogical theories that seem to owe more to Derrida than to Piaget.

4. Putting aside those occasional unusual positions, whenever I read accounts of the training material, there's generally an odd disconnect. Most of what I hear is relatively familiar, pretty much in line with what you'd hear in a typical education class, but it's usually described as something special, perhaps even unique to TFA (apparently trainees sometimes also pick up on these discrepancies -- check out what this writer had to say about these “uncommon techniques”). Apparently, assertive discipline* is another one of those overlaps between TFA and lots of traditional educators. I used the technique for a year when I first started teaching twenty-plus years ago (then dropped it like a fresh horseshoe). It was a hot trend and its proponents assured all the new teachers that it was almost completely effective if done according to the instructions. In practice, most new teachers seemed to get results closer to Rubinstein's.

Here are some excerpts:

Nowadays, districts pay a $5,000 recruitment fee to TFA for the opportunity to hire the new TFA trainees.  I don’t know if back then TFA got any money for me.  I hope they didn’t.  At my school that year there were about 150 teachers.  Three of us were new, me, Jon, and Mitzi, all TFA.  I don’t know who the school would have hired if not for us, so it is hard to say whether or not we were a positive or negative influence on the school compared to what it would be without us.  Though that year did nearly break me, and wasn’t so kind to Mitzi or Jon either, I’ve always felt that, in the scheme of things, we didn’t do ‘damage’ to our students.  One reason for this was that we taught middle school so I was just one out of seven teachers my students had each day.  The other six teachers knew what they were doing so in some ways my class became an opportunity for students to try to learn self-control since the teacher wasn’t doing a very good job at creating a controlled learning environment.
...
But having lived through the TFA experience and having many TFA alumni who are close friends of mine — I think half of the friends I invited to my wedding were people I met through TFA — I do know that there is a big difference between ‘the organization’ which is a greedy and power hungry one that will lie about their statistics when it benefits themselves to do so and ‘the corps,’ the mostly twenty-two year olds who just graduated college and who try to use whatever skills they have along with their very limited training to get through that first year and try to still make some kind of difference.  And while I am sure that TFA, the organization, at least in its current incarnation, harms children, teachers, and communities, overall, I do think that most of the individual teachers don’t.
...
Mr. Popcorn Pinnochio Afro Rubinstein is one of the meaner nicknames I’ve been called as a teacher.  (The Pinnochio is because of the size of my nose, and not, I think, because they thought I was a liar).  Better nicknames have been Mr. Frankenstein and even Mr. Robitussin.  As can be seen in the picture, till the end I had faith in the TFA endorsed ‘Assertive Discipline’ method of writing names on the board and putting checks next to them.  Still, you either have to hate a guy a lot to make a picture like this, or maybe like them a little.

* I later learned that assertive discipline was recent variant of the far older Rumplesnitz Method of crisis management.

Weekend blogging -- auteur edition

I've always wondered why, despite Orson Welles reputation, his films were so difficult to find. Here's one of the few exceptions.

Comment on last post

Blogger ate another comment so I am going to put it out as a post.

Mark wonders why a movement with smart people and admirable goals can have issues with corruption.  I think that the key piece to understand here is that, in a real organization, the goals will be a mix of real goals and marketing. 

You only have to look at the rhetoric of he top 1% of earners being job creators (remember trickle down economics) to see how this can happen.  After all, the goal of making everyone wealthier and more prosperous is noble.  But it is a "heads I win, tails you lose" scenario.  If trickle down happens the elite get more money.  If it doesn't happen the elite get more money.  It's worth noting that the elite do pretty well regardless of what the truth is.

Similarly, if charter schools improve outcomes for all children than the people who run charter schools will get rich and help kids.  If they fail, these same people will simply get rich (as we won't be able to see failure fast enough to prevent vast profits.  Now I am positive that 100% of these people want the first scenario.  Everybody would like to be wealthy and to be a moral hero at the same time. 

It gets tricky when these goals conflict.  These things range from the subtle (that one study is concerning but maybe it was a fluke) to the less so (this stuff is great marketing and provides cover for all sorts of actions).  It isn't helped by our media preference for news about problems and not news about "another senior class graduates from a public school with a solid education provided by hard working union members" -- which is anodyne and unremarkable news.

So I think that option #5 (it is all marketing) should show up.  It's a variation of #3, except it does not necessarily require the people saying this stuff to necessarily believe it. 

"Carerruption" -- the biggest threat to the education reform movement

The following is the beginning of a blistering piece of satire over at EduShyster:

How can something so wrong feel so righteous? 

For far too long, three little words have been holding back the adult interests that long to put students first. What are they you ask? The teachers union conflict of interest laws. Thankfully these outdated and antiquated restrictions are now out of sight and out of mind where they belong. And while haters like you are already mumbling about ethics, may I take this opportunity to remind you that it isn’t corruption if you do it for the right reasons? I believe the word is *carerruption*

From there the blogger, Jennifer Berkshire, proceeds to list a few select examples of questionable education reform initiatives (totaling in the billions) pushed or brokered by officials who personally stood to profit from the enterprises. It's a great read but it leaves what might be the most important question unasked: why is a movement dedicated to such admirable goals and run by such smart people so vulnerable to blatant scams and rampant corruption?

I'll be filling out more details, but these are the bare bones of my attempt at an explanation.

1. Group dynamics -- given the scope, size and influence of the movement, we are talking about a surprisingly tight-knit, highly interconnected group. Add to that a relatively high level of homogeneity in terms of background, education, class, teaching experience and pedagogical philosophy. Under these conditions we would expect a tendency toward group-think, excessive social norming, powerful group identity, and us vs. them attitudes. We would also expect affinity cons.

2. Culture -- those us/them tendencies are greatly heightened by a dogma that implicitly and sometimes explicitly blames the failures of schools on "some combination of apathy or incompetence" on the part of non-movement educators. You can find many more examples on Gary Rubinstein's blog.

3. Spin feedback -- the reform movement has been extraordinarily aggressive in its well-financed lobbying and PR efforts. For a while, it was quite successful at selling the twin narrative of impending disaster and shining hope. We've since seen growing popular skepticism about this narrative but very little of that skepticism seems to have made it into the movement itself. Unfortunately, if perhaps inevitably, the rhetoric intended to convince the rest of the world is most resonant within the group.

4. Lack of immediate external checks -- the press has tended to be sympathetic and has generally held off from criticizing until there was overwhelming evidence that something was wrong (Michelle Rhee, the LA IPad fiasco).

The result of all of this is a movement that has no natural defenses against internal abuses, and, given the amount of money we're talking about, abuse is pretty much inevitable.

Update: If you're coming in via link, make sure to check out Joseph's reply.

"But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There"

For some reason I started thinking about the title of this old Doonesbury book. Funny how the mind works.

On a completely unrelated note, David Sirota has a fascinating article on Detroit's financial troubles. As our favorite auteurist used to say, check it out.

"A grain of discovery"

[Dictated into a smart phone. I tried to catch all of the homonyms, but, hell, it's late and I'm fading.]

Having opened up what will probably be a long thread on Common Core, we really need to bring George Pólya into the conversation.

Pólya was a first rate mathematician and an enthusiastic and dedicated teacher. so dedicated that he spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 years in front of a classroom and he spent a large part of those years thinking long and hard about how we learn mathematics.

I'll go into more detail later about his conclusions. In addition to being insightful and interesting in their own right, they provide a useful alternative when discussing both the rigorously axiomatic approach of 'new math' and the reductionist 'deliberate practice' being pushed by advocates of common core.

For now though, I think it's important to start with the underlying assumptions of Pólya's approach to mathematics: Humans are by nature curious and drawn to interesting problems; therefore, if taught correctly, math should be both stimulating and enjoyable (as are the many popular games and puzzles based on mathematics).

In other words, if my kids hate math, I'm not teaching it right.

This is how Pólya opens the preface to How to Solve It:

A great discovery solves a great problem but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest; but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and if you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of discovery. Such experiences at a susceptible age may create a taste for mental work and leave their imprint on mind and character for a lifetime.

Thus, a teacher of mathematics has a great opportunity. lf he fills his allotted time with drilling his students in routine operations he kills their interest, hampers their intellectual development, and misuses his opportunity. But if he challenges the curiosity of his students by setting them problems proportionate to their knowledge, and helps them to solve their problems with stimulating questions, he may give them a taste for, and some means of, independent thinking. 

Here's the entire preface, preprefaced with more of my thoughts on the subject.

Diane Ravitch provides some historical perspective on international math rankings

A perverse problem with education reform is that, on a high enough level, almost everyone agrees it's a good thing. Unfortunately, it is easy to confuse the question of "is it a good idea to improve education?" with some far murkier questions such as: 

Why is it urgent now to change education radically?

What constitutes ideal educational outcomes?

What are the most effective steps for improving education?

These are difficult questions which interact with each other in highly complex ways. Discussing them is hard enough under the best conditions but it gets much worse when advocates for certain proposals dismiss criticism by saying the people on the other side simply don't care about children (a practice that far predates the current education reform debate).

As for the question of urgency, members of the education reform movement have almost always pointed to either our decline in international tests such as PISA or our race and class based achievement gaps. The second of these is very real and very worrisome, but it often has a rather indirect relationship with reform proposals like introducing common core or greatly reducing teacher tenure.

As for the first, education historian and movement reformer turned gadfly, Diane Ravitch offers the following context.

International testing began in the mid-1960s with a test of mathematics. The First International Mathematics Study tested 13-year-olds and high-school seniors in 12 nations. American 13-year-olds scored significantly lower than students in nine other countries and ahead of students in only one. On a test given only to students currently enrolled in a math class, the U.S. students scored last, behind those in the 11 other nations. On a test given to seniors not currently enrolled in a math class, the U.S. students again scored last.

The First International Science Study was given in the late 1960s and early 1970s to 10-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and seniors. The 10-year-olds did well, scoring behind only the Japanese; the 14-year-olds were about average. Among students in the senior year of high school, Americans scored last of eleven school systems.

In the Second International Mathematics Study (1981-82), students in 15 systems were tested. The students were 13-year-olds and seniors. The younger group of U.S. students placed at or near the median on most tests. The American seniors placed at or near the bottom on almost every test. The “average Japanese students achieved higher than the top 5% of the U.S. students in college preparatory mathematics” and “the algebra achievement of our most able students (the top 1%) was lower than that of the top 1% of any other country.” (The quote is from Curtis C. McKnight and others, The Underachieving Curriculum: Assessing U.S. Mathematics from an International Perspective, pp. 17, 26-27). I summarized the international assessments from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s in a book called National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide (Brookings, 1995).

The point worth noting here is that U.S. students have never been top performers on the international tests. We are doing about the same now on PISA as we have done for the past half century.

Does it matter?

In my recent book, Reign of Error, I quote extensively from a brilliant article by Keith Baker, called “Are International Tests Worth Anything?,” which was published by Phi Delta Kappan in October 2007. Baker, who worked for many years as a researcher at the U.S. Department of Education, had the ingenious idea to investigate what happened to the 12 nations that took the First International Mathematics test in 1964. He looked at the per capita gross domestic product of those nations and found that “the higher a nation’s test score 40 years ago, the worse its economic performance on this measure of national wealth–the opposite of what the Chicken Littles raising the alarm over the poor test scores of U.S. children claimed would happen.” He found no relationship between a nation’s economic productivity and its test scores. Nor did the test scores bear any relationship to quality of life or democratic institutions. And when it came to creativity, the U.S. “clobbered the world,” with more patents per million people than any other nation.

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be “a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success.” What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain “spirit,” which he defines as “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.”

Baker’s conclusion was that “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless.”

Fairness and regulation

Dean Baker has some good points:

For the last three decades the government has pursued a wide range of policies that have had the effect of redistributing income upward. For example our trade policy, by deliberately placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world, has lowered the wages of large segments of the work force. By contrast, we have left in place the restrictions that protect doctors and other highly paid professionals from foreign competition, ensuring that their pay stays high.

and

The question at issue is not the amount of redistribution, the question is the direction of the redistribution. The Post seems to want readers to imagine that the upward redistribution of the last three decades was just a fact of nature, as opposed to being an outcome of government policy. That is a major distortion of reality.

This really is the heart of the argument about inequality today.  The notion that the wages earned by high status professions (medicine, finance) is a result of pure market forces and nothing to do with the regulatory environment is weak.  In the same sense, the huge returns to intellectual property have a lot to do how the laws protecting this property are implemented.  And it is not an accident that 401(k) style retirement plans are popular among companies that get to collect management fees.  This isn't to say all IP law is bad (it isn't) or all wages earned by finance gurus is unearned (also untrue). 

But it is a worthwhile starting point to realize that the web of laws and customs that we do have does benefit some groups at the expense of others.  So it is a very weak claim to argue fairness of economic outcomes in the face of differential regulatory treatment. 

Happy PISA Day, everybody!

Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy of the Economic Policy Institute have some strong words about how PISA data is released.

It is usual practice for research organizations (and in some cases, the government) to provide advance copies of their reports to objective journalists. That way, journalists have an opportunity to review the data and can write about them in a more informed fashion. Sometimes, journalists are permitted to share this embargoed information with diverse experts who can help the journalists understand possibly alternative interpretations.

In this case, however, the OECD and ED have instead given their PISA report to selected advocacy groups that can be counted on, for the most part, to echo official interpretations and participate as a chorus in the official release.* These are groups whose interpretation of the data has typically been aligned with that of the OECD and ED—that American schools are in decline and that international test scores portend an economic disaster for the United States, unless the school reform programs favored by the administration are followed.

The Department’s co-optation of these organizations in its official release is not an attempt to inform but rather to manipulate public opinion. Those with different interpretations of international test scores will see the reports only after the headlines have become history.

Such manipulation in the release of official government data would never be tolerated in fields where official data are taken seriously. Can you imagine the Census Bureau providing its poverty data in advance only to advocacy groups that supported the administration, and then releasing its report to the public at an event at which these advocacy groups were given slots on a program to praise the administration’s anti-poverty efforts? What if the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave its monthly unemployment report in advance to Democrats, but not to Republicans, and then invited Democratic congressional leaders to participate in the official release?

I know I've hammered this point before, but the education reform movement has been playing a very aggressive long game when it comes to lobbying and PR. Add to that a tradition of advocate research and a culture that tends to eschew firewalls and turn a blind eye to conflicts of interest, then lubricate the gears with a flood of government contracts and private grants. The result is a movement prone to all manner of problems and abuses.

The problem isn't that most of the people in the movement are uncaring and insincere; it's that they aren't. The typical movement reformer cares deeply about kids and genuinely feels that our education system is in a state of crisis. Given that mindset, it's easy to understand the decision to feed the data to groups that will give it the 'correct' interpretation in those first few days when the narrative starts to set.

But to understand the behavior is one thing. To condone it is another. Official data needs to be presented so that all sides start on an equal footing, even if that means your side may lose.

* The Alliance for Excellent Education, Achieve, ACT, America Achieves, the Asia Society, the Business Roundtable, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the College Board, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the National Center on Education and the Economy.

"Up until about a month ago, we all knew what merit pay meant."

Dana Goldstein has a good write-up on a recent education study:

In 10 cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston, researchers at Mathematica identified open positions in high-poverty schools with low test scores, where kids performed at just around the 30th percentile in both reading and math. To fill some of those positions, they selected from a special group of transfer teachers, all of whom had top 20 percent track records of improving student achievement at lower poverty schools within the districts, and had applied to earn $20,000 to switch jobs. The rest of the open positions were filled through the usual processes, in which principals select candidates from a regular applicant pool.

If a transfer teacher stayed in her new, tougher placement for two years, she’d earn the $20,000 in five installments, regardless of how well her new students performed. In public education, $20,000 is a whopping sum, far more generous than the typical merit pay bonus of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars.

In the process, a remarkable thing happened. The transfer teachers significantly outperformed control-group teachers in the elementary grades, raising student achievement by 4 to 10 percentile points—a big improvement in the world of education policy, where infinitesimal increases are often celebrated.

 but I have one big problem with the way she presents the findings.

That’s why the results of a new study, the Talent Transfer Initiative, financed by the federal government, are so important. Surprisingly, this experiment found merit pay can work.

Up until about a month ago, we all knew what merit pay meant. Under these systems of compensation, your pay would vary based on certain performance metrics from the previous period.

The initial rationale for applying this type of compensation to education was based on the assumption that teachers would work harder and do a better job if their performance (defined by their students' test scores) was tied to their pay . This played in very closely with the sub-narrative that problems in American education were largely driven by lazy, tenured teachers.

Unfortunately, when this idea was was tried in various pilot programs, it failed to show any substantial effect. It almost appeared as if teachers were already, for the most part, trying to do their best even when their pay didn't vary with performance.

This failure of concept led to a wave of revisionism from movement reformers such as Jonathan Chait. They quickly came up with a new claim. Under the revised history, rationale for merit pay had never been about incentives; push had always been about selection and retention of the best people.

There were always significant problems with this new rationale. Unless you were to assume that being a good teacher was strongly correlated with being bad at mathematics, the size of the bonuses would have to be very large to compensate for the deferment and variability of compensation. Even more troubling, the metrics proposed to evaluate teachers had been shown to be wildly unstable, thus teachers would have very little idea of what their annual take-home pay would be from year-to-year.

The flaws in that second rationale were so obvious, it almost suggested that the proponents were simply looking for a face-saving claim to make before backing away from the issue.

That face-saving quality is even more prominent in the coverage of the recent Chicago experiment in hiring bonuses for teachers. As generally presented by Goldstein and others, this seems like a partial win for both sides. Movement reformers can point to the findings and say that merit pay works while counter-reform advocates can point out that the teachers who got these great results were highly experienced and certified.

The problem with that story is that the first part of the claim is based on a complete 180-degree redefinition of merit pay. The bonus had nothing to do with metrics of success; instead it was solely contingent on those teachers serving out a specified term in the position. In other words, it used the exact same rationale that movement reformers have always objected to when applied to tenure and pay raises for seniority. (You can see Diane Ravitch making some of the same points here.)

I understand the benefits of keeping a debate civil. We should constantly make it clear that the vast majority of people on both sides of this debate share the common goal of improving education. We cannot, however, let the desire for civility become an excuse for dishonesty, particularly not when we are reporting on research that affects open policy questions.

This study suggest taking something like the Canadian approach to managing and compensating teachers. In other words, roughly the opposite of what those advocating merit pay have called for. You can question the quality of this study. You can call it impractical and question whether the results can be scaled up to a useful level. What you cannot do is claim that the data supports your position because you have changed your definitions mid-argument.

Weekend blogging -- save this one for late in the day

As a former creative writing major, I probably shouldn't admit this but I wasn't really familiar with Paul Verlaine and I had no idea that Clair de lune was inspired by his poem of the same name.

Nothing more to add in the way of comment except the recommendation that you wait till late in the evening before pushing play.




Clair de Lune by Paul Verlaine

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.

Putting Arne Duncan's remarks in context

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Arne Duncan said. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.”

To understand why Duncan hit such a nerve, you need to consider the long and complicated role that racial politics have played in this debate.

The public face of the education reform movement has always been pictures of eager young African-American and Hispanic children. Not only has the movement been sold as a way of helping these children but people who object to parts of the reform agenda have often been accused, implicitly or explicitly, of not wanting to help children of color. This naturally has caused some resentment by those, such as myself, who disagree with many of the proposals and who have actually taught in places like Watts and the Mississippi Delta, but there are more serious sources of tension.

For starters, with certain notable exceptions, the leaders of the reform movement tend to be white or Asian (for example, "2012 members of TFA are 62 percent white and only 13 percent African American"). By comparison, the tenured and/or unionized teachers who have paid the highest price in terms of policy changes and school closures have been disproportionately African-American. Under these circumstances, you can imagine the reaction when education reformers make statements like “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”


(as a side note, Jay Altman is one of the best paid administrators in the city)

Even more troubling is the disconnect between the marketing and the actual focus of the reform movement. Though the defining image of the movement is of a reformer surrounded by a happy group of African-American or Hispanic elementary school students in brand-new charter school uniforms, almost none of the major reform initiatives are specifically targeted at helping these particular kids. Initiatives like Common Core and teacher accountability are being proposed for all schools. Sometimes reformers will argue that though these changes affect all students they will have their greatest impact on disadvantaged kids. Other times, they simply let their photo ops do the talking for them.

Even TFA, which was held up as the definitive program for helping kids in poor neighborhoods, is now focusing more on developing leaders and administrators and is actually providing teachers for areas like Chicago and even more notably Huntsville that have a surplus of highly qualified instructors applying for the jobs.

Perhaps people did read too much into Duncan's comments but, considering recent history, you can see how some might react badly to his suggestion that race was a factor in people's decision to criticize his proposals.

So what am I missing?

This conclusion of a piece by Megan McArdle was confusing:

Those victims should not be abandoned -- no American should be allowed to starve in retirement. But the federal government should not step in to guarantee those false promises, any more than it should attempt to re-create the vulnerable housing developments that were washed away by the storm.

The context is that of the Detroit bankruptcy, where retirees are getting 16 cents on the dollar.  There is also issues with health care that I am not clear about, but I am presuming that these people are eligible for Medicare (they are not eligible for Social Security since they did not participate in the contributions).

What I don't understand is what the path forward being proposed is?  We cannot recover the money from past administrations, and the issues with the pension are complex.  Fault is very hard to assess.  So the choices seem to be: short other creditors, default on pension obligations, or find another source of funds.  Unless the suggestion is that the state should backstop these obligations, I am unclear what the source might be? 

I am hoping that further information makes this situation seem less dire. 

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line

If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. .

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

Equality and Adam Smith

Bill Gardner from the Incidental Economist (in comments):

As you know, Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. You might want to ponder this quote from the Wealth of Nations:

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.”

I think that this really is the piece that modern objectivists (Randians) miss.  Even in Atlas Shrugged, the hyper-capitalist society was clearly defined as being better for the average worker.  In fact, the story of the company becoming socialist suggested that socialism under-mined values like generosity. 

The notion that an equitable society is a better society is very important and yet seems to be increasingly lost in the rhetoric.  When we have a high unemployment rate, it cannot merely be laziness that prevents work and it seems that we are having trouble with the most expensive part of the formulation (lodged --it is housing that is the big expense these days). 

Now before the argument that this inequality was necessary for progress comes into being, remember that Adam Smith celebrated a nation of shopkeepers, not of corporations. 

Teacher incentives

Dana Goldstein writes about a program that gives a $20,000 bonus to teachers who transfer to "high poverty, low test score" schools.  These are all established mid-career teachers, not ivy-leaguers parachuted in to help.  They showed benefit in elementary schools but not middle school.  All of these transfers were inter-urban.

I have two thoughts.  One, huge merit pay bonuses are the precise opposite of revenue neutral.  There is no evidence that cutting everyone's pay to afford these bonuses for some teachers would be a cost-effective strategy.  Its an average causal effect applied to a population already getting an underlying rate of compensation.  So what this really has to be judged against are other interventions that would spend the same money in different ways. 

Two, the political feasibility seems low.  So long as education is funded via local taxes, it seems challenging to build support for a program to pull good teachers out of well funded schools and push them into high poverty area schools (almost certainly with lower funding).  Just how one might build the political coalition to do this (without encouraging mass abandonment of existing public schools) seems to be a open question.

You will never guess who I'm quoting...

And, God help me, she pretty much nails it:

There’s much more to the fight than simple left-right divisions. The Common Core peddlers include meddling, Fed Ed Republicans from Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee to progressive billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates to Newscorp. media giant Rupert Murdoch and dozens of educational corporate special interests that stand to gain billions from the Common Core testing/textbook/data-mining boondoggle.

I have to give credit where credit is due, even if it costs us at least one loyal reader.

Education blogging -- Common Core, accountability and the cost of deadwood

I've started digging into the Common Core standards and one of the things that hit me was the large amount of what I would consider deadwood, topics of limited value that take up valuable class time (my favorite example is synthetic division, but there are plenty of others).

The damage caused by deadwood is not that great when teachers are allowed some leeway in deciding what to focus on, but in an age of standardized tests and fetishized accountability, teachers are forced to make difficult decisions. Math teacher Gary Rubinstein has a truly depressing example.

When teachers have to teach too many topics, they do not have time to cover them all in a deep way.  The teacher, then, has to choose which topics to cover in a meaningful way, and which to cover superficially.  It would be as if an English teacher was told to cover fifty novels with her class.  Not being able to have her classes read all fifty books, she would pick some to read fully while having her class read excerpts or even summaries of the other ones.

I got to witness an extreme example of this decision making when I graded the Geometry Regents at the centralized grading center this past June.  A huge part of Geometry, in my mind the most important part, is deductive proofs.  I’d say that over half of a ‘true’ Geometry course would involve proving different theorems.  Well, on the Geometry Regents these proofs are not a large percent of the test, less than ten points out of eighty.  So on the June Regents the last question on the test, a six point question, was the proof question and I was assigned to grade about 200 papers from a school, I won’t say which one, to grade.  As I graded I noticed that many of the students left the proof blank.  By the end of my grading I realized that out of 200 papers, all that could have received up to 6 points for the proof — a total of 1,200 potential points to have been earned on this question, I had awarded only two points total.  That’s two points out of a possible 1,200.  I asked around and the consensus was that teachers, knowing that proofs would take months to cover but be only worth less ten percent of the points on the test, would be too risky to teach.  All the time spent on this tough topic would only, at best, get the students a few extra points while they would lose all that time they could use to teach some of the easier topics that were more likely to be on the test.

Of course, we could have a long discussion on whether proofs belong in HS math classes (I tend to agree with Rubinstein on this one, at least when it comes to geometry), but it's important to realize that's not what happened here. There was no discussion. No arguments were made. No supporting data was gathered. The people who wrote the curriculum simply dodged the question of what to leave out.

When you overstuff a curriculum you guarantee that certain topics will be skimmed or skipped entirely and when you apply tremendous pressure on teachers to raise test scores, you force teachers to make the kind of choices you've seen here.

Antibiotics: an ever evolving story

I really think that the issue of antibiotic resistance gets too little play, so I am happy to see it discussed -- even if the discussion errs on the alarmist side.  In particular, I am unclear as to why we can't rotate antibiotics, why we even imagine that antibiotic soap is a good idea, and would be interested to hear a good reason for the routine use of antibiotics in raising cattle. 

The last is the strangest -- we are subsidizing meat production by not making farmers pay for the externality of antibiotic resistance.  I have no trouble with meat consumption, but it is unclear to me that it is an ideal target for subsidy given the high energy costs of that food source. 

However, it is true that we would still have options post-antibiotics.  Alcohol, heat treatments, and, surprisingly, silver remain effective despite antibiotic resistance.  Having said that, there is no reason we couldn't be doing more to make use of these techniques and rely less on the medications to which germs become resistant with time. 

Ed reform background reading -- three from Wikipedia

I know this is rich coming from a blogger but too many people are joining in on the ed reform debate without having taken the time to learn the basics (Frank Bruni being a veritable poster child), particularly when it comes to curriculum reform and Common Core. Below I picked three topics that are important and generally well known among people who have been in the weeds of the education debate but which seldom show up in the standard coverage. If you're interested in this debate, they're worth checking out.

The first is one of the biggest education reform initiatives to predate the current era. It had striking parallels to many of the current initiatives and was often supported by almost identical rhetoric but it seems to have dropped down the memory hole.


New Math

New Mathematics or New Math was a brief, dramatic change in the way mathematics was taught in American grade schools, and to a lesser extent in European countries, during the 1960s. The name is commonly given to a set of teaching practices introduced in the U.S. shortly after the Sputnik crisis in order to boost science education and mathematical skill in the population so that the perceived intellectual threat of Soviet engineers, reputedly highly skilled mathematicians, could be met.
...
Mathematicians describe interesting objects with set-builder notation. Under the stress of Russian engineering competition, American schools began to use textbooks based on set theory. For example, the process of solving an algebraic equation required a parallel account of axioms in use for equation transformation. To develop the concept of number, non-standard numeral systems were used in exercises. Binary numbers and duodecimals were new math to the students and their parents. Teachers returning from summer school could introduce students to transformation geometry. If the school had been teaching Cramer's rule for solving linear equations, then new math may include matrix multiplication to introduce linear algebra. In any case, teachers used the function concept as a thread common to the new materials.

Philosopher and mathematician W.V. Quine wrote that the "rarefied air" of Cantorian set theory was not to be associated with the New Math. According to Quine, the New Math involved merely..."the Boolean algebra of classes, hence really the simple logic of general terms."

It was stressed that these subjects should be introduced early. The idea behind this was that if the axiomatic foundations of mathematics were introduced to children, they could easily cope with the theorems of the mathematical system later.

Other topics introduced in the New Math include modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and abstract algebra. Most of these topics (except algebraic inequalities) have been greatly de-emphasized or eliminated in elementary school and high school since the 1960s.

The second is a widespread though perhaps fading approach to running a business. Outside of various questionable theories of incentives, it might be the most influential set of private sector ideas in the reform movement. (For a more detailed account of the relationship, check out this article by Shawn Gude)

Scientific Management

Its development began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s within the manufacturing industries. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s; by the 1920s, it was still influential but had begun an era of competition and syncretism with opposing or complementary ideas.

Although scientific management as a distinct theory or school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its themes are still important parts of industrial engineering and management today. These include analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation. 

Scientific management's application was contingent on a high level of managerial control over employee work practices. This necessitated a higher ratio of managerial workers to laborers than previous management methods. The great difficulty in accurately differentiating any such intelligent, detail-oriented management from mere misguided micromanagement also caused interpersonal friction between workers and managers.

The third is rather specific and it's perhaps more up-and-coming than big, but it has some powerful supporters and is already having a having a major impact, particularly in mathematics education.

Deliberate practice

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of Psychology at Florida State University, has been a pioneer in researching deliberate practice and what it means. According to Ericsson:

"People believe that because expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance the expert performer must be endowed with characteristics qualitatively different from those of normal adults." "We agree that expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance and even that expert performers have characteristics and abilities that are qualitatively different from or at least outside the range of those of normal adults. However, we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent. Only a few exceptions, most notably height, are genetically prescribed. Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain."

One of Ericsson's core findings is that how expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times. An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert and focuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities, often paired with immediate coaching feedback. Another important feature of deliberate practice lies in continually practising a skill at more challenging levels with the intention of mastering it.[4] Deliberate practice is also discussed in the books, "Talent is Overrated," by Geoff Colvin,[5] and "The Talent Code," by Daniel Coyle,[6] among others.

Points to Ponder

Ezra Klein:

In their ambition to simultaneously reformulate almost every major government program, Republicans have embraced an agenda of greater complexity and scope than anything Democrats now promote. An America in which the federal government can successfully run Medicaid but can’t build functional exchanges has no place for Ryan’s far-reaching reforms.

One of the advantages of simple and universal programs is that they are easy to administer.  When you have a country of 300 million people, it is not trivial to figure out who is entitled to benefits. 

Ironically, the sort of reforms where we match people more precisely to benefits are precisely the reforms that require really good government in order to work. 

Kennedy, Camelot and the danger of myth

"I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man's terrible."
Jacqueline Kennedy, speaking in the months after her husband's assassination.

Over at the Monkey Cage, there's a political science take on the anniversary of the assassination (Why so many Americans believe Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories). It makes some interesting points but I have a somewhat different take.

As we've talked about before, if there's an idea that fits in with pre-existing beliefs (particularly one which alleviates cognitive dissonance) and which is aesthetically attractive, people will tend to favor that idea over better supported but less appealing alternatives.

The Sixties are a period that inspire intensely conflicting emotions, particularly among boomers, often producing great cognitive dissonance and there is probably no more resonant myth than that of a lost golden age (with loss due to betrayal being a particularly popular variant). In the case of John F. Kennedy, the Camelot allusions started almost immediately after the assassination and Johnson was soon identified with one of the most mythic of betrayers. (The use of conspiracy theories to delegitimize presidencies is, of course, not limited to LBJ.)

The power of these loss myths obviously rely on the counterfactual leading to a happy place. (if Orpheus and Eurydice were headed for a miserable marriage, the story isn't nearly as effective.) In the case of JFK, for many Democrats and boomers (particularly boomers who had been draft eligible), this basically means the great society without the escalation in Vietnam.

As for the latter, there is certainly evidence that Kennedy was seriously considering getting out, having come to suspect that the war was a lost cause, but every president from Ike through Nixon saw Vietnam as problematic, but every administration got us in deeper. Wars have a long history of being easier to get into than out of. Add to that JFK's commitment to fighting communism (particularly in Latin America and, because nothing ever changes, Iraq) and you can see how certain historians take this position:

Patricia Limerick, a University of Colorado history professor who heads the school's Center of the American West, doubts Kennedy would have backed off from U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The policy of communist containment was too ingrained in him.

"That was one Cold Warrior, that Kennedy," Limerick said. "He gave so much momentum to Vietnam. Cold War thinking was such a powerful arranger of brain cells of people of a certain age at that time."

The domino theory — the notion that communist expansion would continue unless directly confronted — drove decisions. Even the race to the moon was a direct competition with the Soviet Union.

"So I don't know any reason to think that foreign policy would have evolved," Limerick said. "Lyndon Johnson inherited a rat's nest, and we all know who he inherited it from."

How about domestic (and extraterrestrial) policy? Kennedy had laid out an ambitious "New Frontier" agenda but outside of research the progress had struck many observers at the time as somewhat slow, particularly on the social justice side. It's not entirely clear why that would have changed. Even when it came to Apollo, Johnson had been pushing the space race as early as the late Fifties and was, if anything, more dedicated to the issue than was Kennedy.

Of course, the cause where the difference is sharpest is civil rights. While Kennedy was certainly progressive on these issues, they were not a priority. Furthermore, there was considerable emotional distance between the Kennedys and the leaders of the civil rights movement, most notably Martin Luther King who was not even invited to JFK's funeral.

By comparison:

By this time in January 1965, Johnson had already driven through Congress the most important civil rights legislation since emancipation. Now, he told King, their work was only beginning. When Congress reconvened, he intended to introduce a voting rights bill, one that would bring justice to the segregated South, creating a vast new pool of loyal Democratic voters even as it would surely alienate multitudes of whites. ''The president and the civil rights leader -- the politician and the preacher -- were bouncing ideas off each other like two old allies in a campaign strategy huddle, excited about achieving their dreams for a more just society,'' Nick Kotz writes in his narrative history of the two men's alliance. ''As always,'' he continues, ''Johnson did most of the talking. As always, King was polite and deferential to the new president. But there was a shared sense of new possibilities, new opportunities for cooperation to bring about historic change.'' This carefully etched scene serves complementary purposes. It captures Johnson and King at the apex of their collaboration, a snapshot of an optimistic peak that only magnifies the friction and tragedy to come.

The standard response to the Kennedy-King antipathy has generally been to blame J. Edgar Hoover ("Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John and Jacqueline, said her mother's comments about King are evidence of the 'poisonous' activities Hoover was engaged in, as he ruled the FBI as his private fiefdom."), but as appealing as this is from a psychological standpoint (the "bad council" excuse is often used to alleviate cognitive dissonance), there are at least a couple of problems with this explanation.

For starters, Hoover had constructed his empire in large part by being able to sense both what presidents needed to know and wanted to hear. Here's Tim Weiner, author of "Enemies: A History of the FBI."

GROSS: So did Hoover kind of make a lifelong practice of using his wiretapping to spy on people he perceived as his enemies in government?

WEINER: Well, that's correct, but he also was very well-attuned to what presidents wanted to hear. President Eisenhower wanted to hear about the communist threat. President Johnson wanted to know about the Ku Klux Klan, and despite his lifelong predilection for opposing integration, Hoover did as the president ordered. He was very sensitive to the needs of presidents.

More importantly, Johnson had heard the same FBI reports that Kennedy had but they had no apparent effect on his attitude toward King, though they may have shaped his feeling toward Hoover. ("It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.")

In other words, the golden age story here assumes that Kennedy was about to change direction on the two defining issues of the decade -- Vietnam and civil rights -- and that he was going to change in the right direction (right according to the belief system of those who tend to hold most tightly to the Camelot myth). This could well have happened during a second Kennedy term. Or we could have had withdrawal from Vietnam but no Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, or Voting Rights Act. We might have even stayed in Vietnam and lost all of those programs.

Myths of golden ages and the loss of innocence are tremendously appealing in large part because they let us avoid facing the way things really are. With all due respect to JFK (who was, in many ways a great man), maybe it's time to let this one go.

Students will little note, nor long remember what was taught here...

[Update: For more on Common Core and David Coleman check out this follow-up post, "The great pedagogical end run"]

It was just over one hundred and fifty years ago that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. That makes this story from Valerie Strauss particularly timely:

Common Core’s odd approach to teaching Gettysburg Address

Imagine learning about the Gettysburg Address without a mention of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, or why President Abraham Lincoln had traveled to Pennsylvania to make the speech. That’s the way a Common Core State Standards “exemplar for instruction” — from a company founded by three main Core authors — says it should be taught to ninth and 10th graders.

The unit — “A Close Reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address“ — is designed for students to do a “close reading” of the address “with text-dependent questions” — but without historical context. Teachers are given a detailed 29-page script of how to teach the unit, with the following explanation:

The idea here is to plunge students into an independent encounter with this short text. Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset. It may make sense to notify students that the short text is thought to be difficult and they are not expected to understand it fully on a first reading — that they can expect to struggle. Some students may be frustrated, but all students need practice in doing their best to stay with something they do not initially understand. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.

The Gettysburg Address unit can be found on the Web site of Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit organization founded by three people described as “lead authors of the Common Core State Standards.” They are David Coleman,  now president of the College Board who worked on the English Language Arts standards; Jason Zimba, who worked on the math standards; and Susan Pimental, who worked on the ELA standards. The organization’s Linked In biography also describes the three as the “lead writers of the Common Core State Standards.”

At the risk of deviating from the standards of close reading, this requires some context. The education reform movement, like all major movements, is an alliance between different groups with different agendas. One of the less recognized of these groups is well-intentioned educators who champion certain pedagogical theories that have proven to be hard sells. (David Coleman is, in many ways, the archetypal member of this group.) The reform movement's emphasis on standardization (note the 29-page script) has given them a chance to apply these theories on a massive scale without a lot of review and despite a lot of resistance.

This resistance is a major but largely unreported source of tension between movement reformers and teachers (particularly experienced and, ironically, effective teachers) who are reluctant to scrap proven approaches for ideas that can, frankly, sound a bit flaky. More on that later.

This post continues the Common Core thread that started here. It also relates to some of my earlier comments about rutabaga cults.

More Motley Foolishness -- Hydrogen is safe as a fuel, not as an investment

I spotted another doozy from Motley Fool. For a change, it doesn't involve Netflix or Disney, but other than that the formula is basically the same and the advice is, if anything, worse. As is often the case, the title gives you a good idea what to expect:

"Will This New Toyota Hydrogen Car Change the World?"

The story, by John Rosevear, is pretty much a retyped press release along with some standard pop science boilerplate on hydrogen fuel cells all delivered in MF's typical breathless style ("heavy bets on fuel cells — and hydrogen — as a way to power the automobiles of the future"). As always, MF is careful not to come out and say that this is the next big thing while being just as careful to downplay (or omit entirely) all the troubling facts that undercut their argument.

There's an old saying in military circles that goes "Amateurs talk strategy; Professionals talk logistics." When dealing with transportation technology, you might replace 'strategy' with 'features' and 'logistics' with 'infrastructure.' Transportation infrastructure often faces a nasty chicken/egg problem -- few people want to buy the vehicles until the infrastructure is in place and you can't get infrastructure funded until lots of people own the vehicles -- but with hydrogen fuel cell cars the problem is particularly acute. Not only is hydrogen somewhat difficult to handle, it is competing against a range of low and zero emission vehicles, all of which use well-established infrastructure. There is no county in America where you cannot get gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and electricity.

On top of that, you also have a serious concern about energy density. There simply is not that much power you can extract from a cubic foot of hydrogen, even under considerable pressure.Gasoline has excellent energy density. Diesel is even better. Batteries are constantly improving. With hydrogen, I don't see much room for improvement. Energy density isn't as much of a problem with stationary systems but if you have to carry your fuel around with you it's a big deal. The FCV has "two spun-carbon and aluminium tanks holding hydrogen gas pressurised to 700 bar (10,000psi)" for decent range. That's a solid piece of engineering by Toyota (which employs a lot of smart people) but you have to suspect that higher pressures will be very hard to come by.

I don't want to paint too grim a picture. It's possible that Toyota's FCV will lead to something major -- there could be an unexpected technological advance or a major government initiative that subsidizes both the cars and their infrastructure -- but based on current comparative functionality and infrastructure issues, this technology is very much a long shot.

More to the point, the challenges facing fuel cell vehicles are widely known and if you're reading something about investing in this sector, these challenges need to be prominently mentioned very near the top of the page. If they aren't, you need to ask yourself how much value to put on the writer's advice.