"We somehow took the education system that produced the individuals who put a man on the moon with technology less powerful than the phone in my pocket and characterized that education system as a failure using the word 'accountability.'"

I recently had a post on New Math up at the Monkey Cage. One of the comments was simply a link to a Youtube video. I watched with some trepidation (it was, after all, a TED talk), but, though I didn't agree with all the points, a lot of them were quite valid and all were stated with considerable eloquence.

Toxic culture of education: Joshua Katz at TEDxUniversityofAkron

New slogan: "Don't be evil... That's what we have subsidiaries for"

Between abuse of monopoly/monopsony* power, media consolidation and beating up on the little guy, there's a lot of evil to go around here.

From NPR's All Things Considered:

Stuart Johnson, president of the Canadian Independent Music Association, says YouTube has put the independents on notice.

"What we're seeing is YouTube dictating terms to the independent music community with the proviso that if those terms are not agreed to or met, then the repertoire of that label will be removed from YouTube," Johnson says.

Johnson says YouTube has already negotiated with the three major labels: Universal, Sony and Warner. Neither the site nor the labels will reveal the specifics of the deal, but Rich Bengloff of A2IM — the American trade group for independent labels — says YouTube paid more to the majors than it wants to pay independents, despite the fact that independents account for more than a third of music revenues.

...
James McQuivey is an analyst at Forrester Research. He says there are parallels between this fight and the current dispute between Amazon and the publisher Hachette over the cost of print and eBooks. Amazon is delaying delivery of some Hachette titles and has eliminated pre-orders for others. [a pretty appalling story in its own right -- MP] McQuivey says it signals a shift in the Internet economy, which is now centered on the small number of players that get the most eyeballs.

"Digital aggregation creates power, and now these companies — after years of talking about a big, open Internet future — are finally starting to show when it comes to be tough in negotiations," McQuivey says. "They're willing to use their access point as a source of power."

Representatives at YouTube would not talk to NPR for this report, but McQuivey says it's clear that its planned subscription service will somehow incorporate music video and audio streaming. Since the site is a place where fans are already able to hear and watch videos for free, it may be hard to get them to pay. Meanwhile, McQuivey says YouTube, while profitable, has never made the kind of money its owner, Google, would like to see.

[Don't you just love the phrase "would like to see"?]

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but this is why we don't like to see high concentrations of money and power combined with and almost complete lack of competition. Google effectively holds monopoly and or monopsony power in a number of markets. It even has a ruling from a federal judge saying that Google has a first amendment right to use that power to destroy other companies.

This kind of power is always worrisome, but combined with a willingness to bully small players in the pursuit of rent seeking, it makes you wonder if we shouldn't consider dusting off the concept of anti-trust.

P.S. I spotted this relevant Business Week article just before I was about to post this.


* Unrelated to this story but the spellchecker on Blogger sucks.

Framing of discussions is key

I think that there are good reasons that this is not the debate we are having:

But thus far to an amazing extent we haven't been having that debate. Instead we've been having a debate over whether Obamacare works, over death panels, over enrollment numbers, over income verification procedures, and over the minutia of premiums and payments. It's time to put that debate behind us. It's clear — as it always should have been — that if you offer people large subsidies to go buy health insurance, lots of people will happily take the money and go buy some health insurance.

It's time to start debating the real issue: should we do that, or is it more important to keep taxes on high-earners low than to give low-earners comprehensive health insurance?

There are extremely good reasons that people attacking programs like the Affordable Care Act or public school funding focus on efficiency or effectiveness and not on first principles.  Because the argument that money should be used to improve health care for 50% of the population is extremely hard to refute in a world where effective tax rates can be extremely low (see the carried interest exemption). 

Instead, the line of attack seems to be that these are poor uses of cash -- that the programs so funded will be filled with rent-seeking, waste, and so forth.  That makes the idea of rich people simply keeping their money seem like a pretty decent idea, as nobody wants to contribute to bloated and inefficient systems. 

So I am skeptical that we'll be able to reframe the argument this way.  It's rather like Singapore -- people focus on the pieces that are the most useful for their argument. 

Eli Broad's mixed messages*

A bit more context for understanding the complexities of the West Coast chapter of the education reform movement and the question of the relationship between philanthropy and influence.

David Sirota recently posted some interesting thoughts on the latter:

Later in his discussion, [Al] Gore said that “democracy has been hacked” by moneyed interests. Then, in response to a question about tech billionaires spending big on allegedly philanthropic enterprises, he said: “That’s a good thing, as long as the rest of us don’t ever fall prey to the illusion that charity is going to do the job of what democracy needs to do.”

Those latter comments come only a few weeks after Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced a $120 million donation to San Francisco-area schools. That donation came only a few years after California considered a ballot measure to increase funding for its schools. Zuckerberg was notably absent from the campaign to pass the measure.

That detail is germane to Gore’s point about charity and democracy. Indeed, there seems to be a trend of billionaires and tech firms making private donations to public institutions ostensibly with the goal of improving public services. Yet, many of these billionaires are absent from efforts to raise public resources for those same institutions. Zuckerberg is only one example.

For instance, hedge funders make big donations to charter schools. Yet, the hedge fund industry lobbies against higher taxes that would generate new revenue for education.

Likewise, there are the Koch Brothers, who simultaneously finance the nationwide anti-tax movement while making huge donations to public institutions.

Meanwhile, Microsoft boasts about making donations to schools, while the company has opposed proposals to increase taxes to fund those schools.

To understand the conflict between democracy and this kind of philanthropy, remember that private donations typically come with conditions about how the money must be allocated. In education, those conditions can be about anything from curriculum to testing standards to school structure. No matter what the conditions are, though, they effectively circumvent the democratic process and dictate policy to public institutions. While those institutions can reject a private donor's money, they are often desperate for resources.

In this, we see a vicious cycle that undermines democratic control. Big money interests use anti-democratic campaign finance laws to fund anti-tax policies that deprive public institutions of resources. Those policies make public institutions desperate for private resources. When philanthropists offer those resources, they often make the money contingent on public officials relinquishing democratic control and acceding to ideological demands.

Disruption theory is usually the defense of all this—the hypothesis being that billionaire cash is the only way to force public institutions to do what they supposedly need to do. But whether or not you believe that theory, Gore is correct: It isn't democratic. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

We've already discussed how Bill Gates sped up the adoption of Common Core (and arguably circumvented much of the vetting and quality control of the slower process). What we haven't mentioned and what Sirota surprisingly omits is the role of billionaire Eli Broad, founder of the Broad Superintendents Academy and unquestionably one of the most influential figures in the education reform movement.

Broad was recently involved in a recent minor scandal that is remarkably relevant to Sirota's argument.

A state investigation into a network of nonprofit groups that funneled $11 million into initiative campaigns in California last year has revealed the identities of dozens of previously hidden donors to the various organizations.

Those contributors include owners of the Gap Inc., for which California First Lady Anne Gust Brown was once a top executive, investor Charles Schwab and Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad. The groups they donated to gave money to other organizations, which gave to the campaigns.

One of the campaigns was an effort to derail a 2012 tax measure pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown -- which Broad had said he supported. The other supported a separate initiative that would have limited the power of labor unions to raise political cash.

The Fisher family, which owns the Gap, gave more than $9 million to Americans for Job Security, a Virginia-based group which eventually sent millions to an Arizona-based non-profit that ultimately wound up in a California campaign committee. Gust Brown formerly was the company’s chief administrative officer.

San Francisco investor Schwab gave more than $6.2 million to the same group. Broad gave $1 million despite his stated support for higher taxes on the wealthy.

If you're interested in a highly critical but well-researched view of the Broad Academy, check out The Broad Report, a blog that consists almost entirely of excerpts of newspaper and magazine stories about graduates of the Academy, pretty much all negative but presented with a minimum of editorializing. The selection is certainly biased but the stories are allowed to speak for themselves. If you're in a hurry, check out the Parents' Guide, a lengthy but pithy post that lays out the blogger's concerns about Academy's influence, supported with an extensive set of links to supporting articles.


* Assuming we define political contributions as a form of free speech.

Brad DeLong has an interesting approach to the cost of college problem

I don't remember a time when there were more things I wanted to write about. Professor DeLong just added another one to the pile. 

MAKING SENSE OF THE COLLEGE EDUCATION DEBATE: ANDREW KELLY SAYS SMART THINGS: OVER AT EQUITABLE GROWTH: TUESDAY FOCUS FOR JUNE 17, 2014

From an individual point of view, the questions are:
1. Could you finish a two-year program that opens doors in three years or less?

2. Could you finish a four-year program in five years or less?

If the answers are "yes", go for it. If the answers are "no", don't. And if you go for it, make sure you do finish: otherwise you will be behind the eight-ball in what looks to be for the foreseeable future a much worse job market, especially for the young, relative to our reasonable expectations than America has ever seen before. 

For public policymakers, the questions are more complicated and subtle. There are six groups: 

1. Those who would finish college whether or not college were made more affordable, who will be windfall gainers from policies to make college more affordable.

2. Those who would not attempt college unless college were made more affordable, but who would complete it if it were--these are the people at whom the policy is directed.

3. Those who would not attempt college unless college were made more affordable, but who would attempt it if it were but would fail to complete it--these are the losers from the policy.

4. Those who would attempt college but not finish it anyway--these are small gainers because more-affordable college reduces their student loan debt.

5. The taxpayers who pay for government policies to make college more affordable.

6. The academic administrators, faculty, entrepreneurs, and businesses who skim off their share from policies that make college more affordable.

We want policies to make college more affordable that maximize the number of and the value for people in group (2), and we are happy at the reduced debt burden on those in group (4).

We are really unhappy if such policies lead to an increase in the number of those in group (3), and we are also unhappy at the existence of groups (1) and (6), for the redistribution of the money of group (5) to them is a societal bad.

How large are the money flows between these six groups, and how large are groups (2) and (3), and how much extra education do groups (2) and (3) get?

Those are the questions that discussions of education policy should focus on. Yet when I look at the literature, those are not questions the answers to which I find readily.

The LA Times' Steve Lopez on the defenestration of Stuart Magruder

I've never seen a project hit FUBAR as quickly or as completely as John Deasy's iPad initiative has. Almost invariably, when you see something crash and burn this badly, you'll find with a little digging that:

There were people in the organization who anticipated the problems;

They were repeatedly told to shut up.

Supt. John Deasy and the Board of Education have been salivating over the chance to get their hands on some of that money to buy a digital tablet for every student, teacher and administrator. Last year, they began purchasing tablets for classrooms, and now they would like to tap about $1 billion in bond money to finish the job.

But there have been questions about the legality and efficacy of using the bond money for portable tablets with an estimated three-year life span in a district with an estimated $50 billion or so in needed repairs and upgrades. And even more questions about whether the district has a well-considered plan, or a get-out-of-the-way compulsion to plow ahead as quickly as possible, with Deasy leading the charge.

Nobody expressed more concerns than Magruder, an architect who was appointed to the oversight committee two years ago. He thought the district's legal justification for buying tablets was flimsy, and that was just part of his objection.

"My primary concern was that there clearly was no strong pedagogical idea behind this program, and they were literally throwing all this technology and money at teachers and students, expecting great things to happen with no proper preparation," Magruder said.

There's not enough space here to itemize all the issues raised at various times by Magruder and other committee members, along with members of the media.

But to name several:

Why iPads versus other, possibly less expensive tablets or laptops?

Why did the need for detached keyboards, at a cost of millions, seem to be such an afterthought?

Why did the district buy software sight unseen and only partially developed?

Why had there been so little teacher training and preparation?

Why so little consideration of who would be responsible for lost and damaged tablets?

And how useful could the tablets be if, by one legal interpretation, students wouldn't be allowed to take them home each night?

"I'm invested in this," said Magruder, who has two kids in L.A. Unified and got a first-hand look at the problems when his daughter's school was included in an early phase of the iPad rollout.

Magruder didn't find the programming engaging, compelling or linked to a larger curriculum strategy in a way that had been explained to teachers, parents or students.

"Technology doesn't solve problems unless humans and teachers use it well," said Magruder, who noted that the software company did manage to neatly promote itself to students with a logo on its programs.

"Not an 'M' for math or an 'E' for English, but a big 'P' for Pearson," he said.

Scott Folsom, another member of the oversight committee, and Tom Rubin, the committee's consultant, both told me they thought Magruder and others consistently raised important questions in a fair, thoughtful and constructive way, forcing the district to slow down and rethink some of its plans.

But that was Magruder's downfall. In raising inconvenient truths, he exposed and embarrassed district officials. Three weeks ago, the petulant school board threw a little tantrum and refused to reappoint him to the committee, a move that's being challenged by Magruder, the oversight committee and the architect association that nominated him to the board.

The rise and fall of "innovator"

In a positive review of Jill Lepore's recent article on the myth and reality of creative destruction, Paul Krugman wonders if Lepore underestimates just how long 'innovation' has been a buzzword.

Lepore tells us that innovation became a popular buzzword in the 1990s. I guess I thought it came much earlier — I wrote about product-cycle models of trade back in the 1970s, and even then I was formalizing a much older literature.

That sort of question is why god invented Google so I decided to check out what the n-gram viewer had to say. Based on a search of the books in Google's digital collection, it appears that both 'innovation' and 'innovator' took off in the early Forties and continued shooting up through the Post-War era. Nothing surprising there. The Forties, Fifties and Sixties were a period of rapid economic and technological growth and the topics of progress and innovation were very much on people's minds.




What seems strange though is the decline of 'innovator' starting around 1970. My first thought was Apollo but the peak here appears to be 1971 rather than 1972. 'Innovation' also flatlined briefly in the mid-70s but it quickly picked back up. I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious here but I'm not familiar enough with the data to know where to dig.

Putting aside the question of why Cantor lost

What I want to know is how something like this happens.

An internal poll by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) re-election campaign had him with a 34-point lead over primary opponent economics professor David Brat.

The poll, conducted by John McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates between May 27 and May 28 found Cantor with 62 percent to Brat with 28 percent, according to The Washington Post on Friday.

Cantor lost to Brat on Tuesday. With 90 percent of precincts reporting Brat defeated Cantor 55.4 percent to 44.6 percent. It was perhaps the biggest upset of any primary contest in the 2014 election cycle.

I know of a lot of mistakes in the design and analysis of polls (I've even made a few), but I can't recall any that produced results like this. I've seen numerous articles on what went wrong with Cantor's campaign. I want to know what was going on with his pollster.

Well, that didn't take long -- more on Vergara and the perils of legislating from the bench

As mentioned before, one of the problems with legislating from the bench is that it usually entails reasoning backward -- starting with a conclusion then coming up with arguments to justify it -- which leads to bad law. The precedents take on a life of their own. As Harvard's Noah Feldman wrote in Bloomberg View, "The court’s two-part reasoning was thin to the point of being emaciated," and that thin reasoning means that the ruling can be applied in ways that even many of its supporters are likely to object to.

You can certainly argue that California's system for assigning tenure and removing bad teachers is flawed (you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone on either side of the reform debate willing to defend it). Most of those cheering the decision seem to be taking an implicit ends-justify-the-means line -- the policy was bad and the decision made it go away, therefore it was a good decision -- but the sloppiness and the sparseness of the reasoning makes it applicable to a wide range of far more questionable cases.

If you were looking for a state at the other end of the tenure policy spectrum to California, you might pick Connecticut.

Danbury's Deputy Superintendent of Schools William Glass also said the California ruling won't have an effect on the educational community in Connecticut.

"We have a very effective process for dismissing a teacher with cause," Glass said.

"It takes time and we provide support for a teacher to see if they can improve. But if they can't, we are now down to a 10-month process for dismissal," he said, referring to the new reduction in due process.

Glass also said most teachers who are not a good fit will voluntarily resign.

No one wants an ineffective teacher because the principal, the school and the district all are held responsible for that teacher's ineffectiveness in teaching students, Glass said.

"Accountability has never been as clear as it is now," Glass said. "The days of hiding are gone. It's all very visible."

In California, tenure can be earned after only two years in front of a classroom. In Connecticut, it takes four years to earn employment protection.

Connecticut also recently added language to its tenure laws that allow ineffectiveness -- as determined by new teacher evaluation procedures -- to be a cause for dismissal.

Glass may have gotten one thing wrong. When he said the California ruling won't have an effect on Connecticut, he probably should have said 'shouldn't.'

[from the same article]

A California judge's ruling this week that teacher tenure laws deprive the state's children of their constitutional right to a quality education has some wondering if Connecticut could face a similar challenge.

"The Vergara case exposed the fact that children have unequal access to quality teachers in California. This problem exists in Connecticut as well," said Jennifer Alexander, chief executive officer of ConnCAN, an organization that supports school reform.

This is how bad law works

My ed reform ddulite study list

I'm working on a big thread on the the interlocking disasters of the LA school system. Part of that process is reading up and making a reference list. It greatly speeds things up when the actual writing begins and it reduces the chances of me getting my facts badly wrong.

In case anyone out there wants to play along, here are some of the sites I'm using to get a handle on the LAUSD iPad fiasco.

1. An LAUSD introduction to The Common Core Technology Project.

Troubling for its vagueness, motivational-speaker language and lack of insight into the way technology works. All problems that would get worse as things spiraled out of control.

[Though off-topic here, one of these days I'm going to have to come back to the connection between the influence of management consulting and the belief in the miraculous curative powers of standards like Common Core.]

2. The vision statement for the project

,,, because it tells us that the people behind the project are the kind of people who believe in writing vision statements.

3. An early warning about Superintendent Deasy's somewhat questionable relationship with Apple. Spelled out in more detail here.

4. Suppression of internal critics.

5. A piece on where the iPad funds were being diverted from.

6. A devastating comparison with another school district's successful iPad rollout.

7. An inside account of what went wrong from two LAUSD contractors.

8. The comically fast security breach,

9. Failure to anticipate even the most obvious complications.

10. Still more problems.

and a very nice wrap up by Michael Hiltzik.

I've been arguing for a while that ddulites and flaky management theories are doing great harm to our education system. Those arguments are about to get a bit more shrill.

Michael Hiltzik has perhaps the definitive summary so for of the California tenure ruling

Michael Hiltzik has perhaps the definitive summary so for of the California tenure ruling so far. If you're looking to get up to speed quickly, this is an excellent place to start.

If you have the stomach for it, also check out Hiltzik's account of LA's iPad fiasco.

I'll be getting back to this when I'm less disgusted

Diane Ravitch shares a telling passage from a post-trial brief in the Vergara case:

Plaintiffs Monterroza and Martinez both attend charter schools that are not subject to the challenged statutes at all. Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara both attend a “Pilot School” in LAUSD that is free to let teachers go at the end of the school year for any reason, including ineffectiveness.

Just to be clear, none of the nine plaintiffs could show that they had been assigned teachers who would have been fired if not for the challenged statutes. Four of them weren't even in schools where the statutes applied.

If that weren't enough, here's an example of one of the plaintiffs' "grossly ineffective" teachers.

p.s. I'm still looking for a transcript but in the meantime check out the brief and the original complaint.

I don't think Tyler Cowen is right here, but I hope he is

Elon Musk made a big announcement last Thursday:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

Tyler Cowen thinks that "this announcement will be discussed in business schools for years to come much like Henry Ford’s announcement of the $5 a day wage." I don't.

My co-blogger Joseph and I have consistently taken the position that, on the intellectual property spectrum with too little protection failing to encourage creation and innovation and too much stifling competition, our laws have long ago abandoned the sweet spot in the middle  and become far too excessive. That puts us in general agreement with Cowen.

Where I, at least, disagree is with the likely outcome. Musk deserves a huge amount of credit for this but given Tesla's size compared with the magnitude of this problem, I don't see it making much of a difference.

For what it's worth, though, I hope I'm wrong.

More on the California decision

A good question:

Rather than gutting hard-won protections for teachers, the next legal case should go after economic segregation itself. Instead of invoking Brown in a broad metaphorical sense, why not bring a state-level suit against actual segregation by class and race? If it is a violation of the California state constitution to have tenure laws that make it hard to fire bad teachers in poor and minority communities, why isn’t it a violation when the state and districts draw school boundary lines in a way that promotes deeply unequal, economically segregated schools that many strong educators won’t teach in?

I am also interested in why the new policy has to be a complete loss of job security.  After all, if the issue is: 

Los Angeles School Superintendent John Deasy testified it can take over two years on average — and sometimes as long as 10 — to fire an incompetent tenured teacher. The cost, he said, can run from $250,000 to $450,000.

Then why not make a new plan where firing a teacher comes with one years salary as a good-bye present?  Or have fast pension vesting as well (say 5 years).  It would bring excessive firing under scrutiny (as it would increase costs), but would save enormous amounts of money compared to the costs above and be cheap compared to the estimates people are making as to harm.  Of course, this presumes that there really is an effective teacher waiting to be pulled into a classroom, which isn't impossible but seems to be less likely in the poorest school districts. 

What this suggests is that the real issue isn't unequal student outcomes but rather these types of measures are aimed at degrading the working conditions of teachers.  Are we sure that this will end well? 

Understanding McKinsey

In style, rhetoric, preferred approaches, and general worldview, it is difficult to overstate how much David Coleman is a product of McKinsey & Company, the extraordinarily successful management firm that launched him. This is nowhere better illustrated than in this Washington Post account of the origins of the Common Core standards.

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

As Barry Ritholtz noted in a memorable post, McKinsey & Company has walked away from some of the most notorious corporate fiascoes of the past 50 years while somehow managing to keep their reputation and hourly rates intact.

This is, by no means, a matter of luck. Rather it reflects just how good McKinsey is at their core mission: winning over high-level executives and spinning compelling narratives for the press. As long as the C level executives like the consultants and the consultants make them look good, the executives will happily hand out shocking sums of money.

One of the challenges that management consultants often face is trying to sell a very expensive product or service to a company that is capable of providing something similar internally at a much lower cost. For this reason, firms like McKinsey are very good at driving a wedge between top level management and the rest of the company. If you can convince high level executives that the people two or three tiers below them are incompetent and/or untrustworthy, you can justify charging exorbitant fees for things could that which can be done cheaply and quickly in-house.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Coleman approach to Common Core follow this template exactly. He had a set of radical (and by some standards rather flaky) changes he wanted to make in American education. Instead of building support through research or grassroots lobbying, he approached one of the world's richest and most powerful former CEOs and, having secured his support, mounted a tremendously effective charm offensive on the press.

An essential part of Coleman's pitch has been to undercut the standing and authority of the education rank and file, from partnering with Michelle Rhee to patronizing the statisticians in his own organization, the College Board, to being openly dismissive of teachers who questioned some of his more extreme pedagogical ideas. This last point led a fawning NYT reporter to talk about Coleman's unwillingness to suffer fools (I'm trying to maintain an elevated tone in this post. You can see me addressing the article in a less refined mood here).

None of this means that Coleman is wrong or that his ideas should be dismissed, but if you want to understand what's going on in the education reform movement, you have to understand the culture that produced David Coleman.