Leon Todd: May 2010

The Milwaukee Voucher Failure
One of the very first magazine pieces I ever published was about how the Milwaukee school voucher program—the largest and most robust in the country—wasn’t leading to any gains in learning for Milwaukee schoolkids. The data was somewhat controversial at the time, but in the intervening years the case has become clearer and clearer as, for example, AEI’s Rick Hess is prepared to concede albeit in a somewhat odd manner.

Giving parents choices about where to send their kids to school has certain kinds of virtues. It turns out, however, that parents of low-income kids don’t seem to particularly use this freedom to select schools that are good at improving kids’ academic performance. At least they’re not sufficiently invested in doing that so as to put a lot of pressure on schools to figure out ways to improve academic performance. The choice program does seem to lead to a lot of consumer satisfaction, but not actual improvements in performance. It’s sort of like when people switch to a “low fat” version of a product, find it’s surprisingly delicious, and don’t pay attention to the fact that it actually has just as many calories as the old variety.

At the end of the day, to improve academic performance you need policies that specifically focus on that goal. You can shut down charter schools that consistently deliver below-average demographically adjusted academic performance and allow operators of charter schools that consistently deliver above-average performance to open new franchises. You can pay teachers who consistently deliver above-average performance enough to persuade them to keep teaching. You can recognize that schools that teach a lot of poor kids are going to need more resources rather than fewer. You can try to research which pedagogical methods actually work instead of just guessing. But you can’t just throw some procedural switch and fix everything, especially if the process you put in place doesn’t even specifically focus on improved academic achievement.

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86 Responses to “The Milwaukee Voucher Failure”

Fencedude Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 8:34 am
There you go, using that “logic” and “common sense” stuff again. You know that that isn’t allowed in public discourse, especially when it comes to something like education!

rory Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Actually the studies about which pedagogical methods work have been done before.

See Project Follow Through

Everyone just ignored the results and didn’t follow through.

Ironic, huh

Thomas Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 8:46 am
It’s an odd use of the word “failure”–the program gets the same academic results, leads to higher parental satisfaction, and costs less than public schooling. That’s not an overwhelming success, but it isn’t a failure.

pjcamp Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 8:47 am
You can stop using local property taxes to fund the system. That pretty well guarantees that high performing schools get the lion’s share of resources while low performing schools are impoverished.

ThomasWAdams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 8:48 am
@3: It’s failure if the only goal that matters is improved academic results.

DTM Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 8:56 am
The real action is whether or not voucher programs work better than robust charter programs, because if not there isn’t much to commend them.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Re Matthew’s comment “You can shut down charter schools that consistently deliver below-average demographically adjusted academic performance and allow operators of charter schools that consistently deliver above-average performance to open new franchises. You can pay teachers who consistently deliver above-average performance enough to persuade them to keep teaching. ”
————–
And you can apply those same standards of performance to public schools and members of teachers’ unions. I will hold my breath waiting for the Democratic party to do that.

PS I agree with pjcamp at 4 that funding largely with local property taxes stacks the debt against poor kids and poor neighborhoods. The state and federal government need to supplement such funding to bring the funding per child consistant across locations, with adjustments for cost of living in different regions.

barbarian Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:07 am
Stepping back a moment, this is an issue with free-market solutions generally. It’s mistaken to claim “Just add choice and competition and Good X will improve along every dimension.” Good X will improve, but only along the dimensions that its customers care about the most in aggregate.

School choice is, according to the links you cite, working. It’s working at giving parents what they want, which is what choice always does for the choosers. Their customer satisfaction is high. They’re picking schools according to some measure that they like.

That measure is evidently not educational quality. At least, not the kind of quality we can measure through tests..

The big rub here is that if you want to simply increase SATISFACTION then free-market, more-choice solutions almost tautologically do that. If you want, as a policy goal, some specific aim — better-educated children, less pollution, longer life expectancies, or the like — free-market policies might very well not do that.

Daniel Kuehn Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:09 am
@5 – no the whole point is it’s not a failure it’s just not any better. This isn’t evidence that we should stop voucher programs – it’s evidence that we shouldn’t overstate their benefits.

I’ve personally always been fine with school choice strategies – what frustrates me is when they’re expected to be a panacea, and especially when they drain resources from traditional public schools.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:09 am
Plus you could have the government forcibly sterilize any couple that had more than one child while having made no provision to fund the rearing of the child. Works in China.

At least we make people get license to have a dog. But we provide Incentives for dumb bitches to have litters of kids while not having any capability to provide a decent upbringing for the kids.

AnotherAnon Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:22 am
A NYT article from:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/study-finds-that-online-education-beats-the-classroom/

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

How accurate is this comment? I searched for a comparison study using google and chose the first result.

I would think the vest education is a combination of on-line personal study mixed with weekly meeting with the teacher.

The classroom is toast, and nothing can be done to save it, sorry.

ThomasWAdams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:26 am
@9: I get your point, but if we disrupt the current system, adding burdens to that system (at least initially, if not for an extended period of time) and there’s no measurable success in the area that we hoped to improve, then I’d say it’s a failure.

Kent Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:37 am
Anotheranon–

Regarding online study. First, the bulk of the studies reviewed by the NYT article were at the college level not the K-12 level. Anyone who’s sat through 200 student undergrad lectures in college could understand how watching the same lecture on iTunes from your computer might be just as valuable.

Second, most of the studies of online learning at the K-12 level are of distance learning programs like those in Alaska or remote areas of the mountain west where kids on remote ranches and that sort of thing are forced to do a lot of their learning through online schooling. It’s guided homeschooling in a way as there is generally a parent at home guiding the instruction. It’s not surprising that kids in such situations tend to perform slightly higher than the mean. They are most likely coming from supportive learning environments at home.

But as a classroom teacher at the HS level I can tell you that the majority of kids today simply do not have the maturity and self-discipline to do any kind of online learning on their own. And they don’t have the support at home either. When I take my kids to the computer lab to do any kind of online research I have to constantly patrol to keep them on task and off facebook, ESPN, Craigslist, etc. The typical office cubical drone is probably no different actually.

But the idea that you can do away with classroom teaching and just plug kids into the computer is laughable. Sure there are motivated, curious and mature kids who will learn just fine on the computer. But those are the kids who will learn just fine in any learning environment. It’s the harder to reach kids that are the challenge.

Hector Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:38 am
Re: Plus you could have the government forcibly sterilize any couple that had more than one child while having made no provision to fund the rearing of the child

Ah, I see that once again, Mr. Don Williams lays bare the wonderful charity and humanity at the heart of the pro-choice movement. The depressing thing is that I bet a lot of the Yglesian hipsters share his views but are just too polite to say so.

Re: At least we make people get license to have a dog. But we provide Incentives for dumb bitches to have litters of kids while not having any capability to provide a decent upbringing for the kids.

…and once again, the self-styled party of women’s emancipataion refers to mothers with children as ‘dumb b*tches’.

Here’s a suggestion for how to improve mothers’ ability to care for their children: we tax the hell out of the damned childless hipsters who are too busy doing lines and watching blue movies to actually participate in old-fashioned things like marriage, procreation, and childrearing. Then we can use the money to provide jobs for the women with children.

Tootat Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:49 am
#14

Whatever else Mr. Williams might be, he is no “hipster.” But you go ahead with your little rant. I am sure it makes you feel so superior.

james Robertson Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:51 am
What neither left or right wants to deal with is a simple reality: neither more money for the public schools or more choice will solve this problem. The problem is one of culture. Simply put, too many urban families don’t particularly care about education. If there’s no support from home, no amount of heroic effort on the part of the school will help.

I also don’t know that government can do a lot to fix that; cultural issues aren’t that amenable to government solutions.

DTM Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:53 am
barbarian,

Well put, and I would use that point to suggest the basic issue from the perspective of the state is that its interest should be in the child, not the parents. So if you are improving satisfaction of the parents’ preferences but not improving outcomes for the child, you may not be doing anything to advance the state’s goals.

Hector Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:57 am
RE: But you go ahead with your little rant.

Just so, Tootat. Don Williams refers to poor mothers with children as ‘dumb b*tches’, and of course you take issue with my response, rather then with his horrible aspersion. I’d say that that shows the priorities of the cultural elite rather well.

Tom Fisher Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:57 am
Matt,
It’s fun to investigate what is happening in Wake County, North Carolina. The district is something like the 3rd largest school district in the US, home to many diversity and integration programs which often require lengthy bus rides for rich kids and poor kids, and has won recognition and prizes for doing good things.
Now Art Pope the rich guy and his five conservative members of the board of education have reversed all of this. The board chairman also serves on a private school in part of the district. “Neighborhood Schools” is the cure-all now. No more requirements for the number of subsidized lunches in a given school. No more trying to level the opportunity playing field. No more mandatory year-round schools to better utilize the assets.

It’s getting ugly down here, with as many cops showing up at the board meetings as there are interested parents.

Bottom line: our diverse, award winning programs have been flushed in favor of “going to the school where all your neighborhood gangs go, too.” If the school year gets long because there’s no frequent year-long-tracking-out breaks, and punks get violent with each other, well, that’s just the price you pay for nice white schools and nice black schools.

We deserve what get, as there is a “mandate” supported by the 2.5% of voting citizens in Wake County who actually voted for these conservatives. They’re not quite the KKK, but it’s hard to see the difference.

Tasty tidbits in here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/12/433559/for-schools-a-bigger-agenda.html

DTM Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:59 am
What neither left or right wants to deal with is a simple reality: neither more money for the public schools or more choice will solve this problem.

If you are just suggesting that more funding for instruction isn’t enough on its own to entirely solve all education problems, fine. But if your claim is that more funding for instruction doesn’t help at all, that is wrong: studies have found that even after controlling for other factors, funding spent specifically on instruction is indeed correlated with better outcomes (this point gets obscured sometimes by studies not finding a strong correlation between funding in general and outcomes, which is why it is important to focus on funding for instruction specifically).

Willie Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:01 am
@16:
Boston public schools do a better job teaching poor black kids than D.C. public schools.

New Jersey public schools do a better job teaching poor black kids than Mississippi public schools.

Schools can’t do everything, but good schools can help at the margins. And marginal improvements are important, especially if well-educated parents are more likely to have well-educated kids.

james Robertson Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:09 am
#20 – Please explain the awesome results from Kansas City then. A multi-decade experiment in huge levels of new funding and better infrastructure that simply ran into a wall in the face of a culture that doesn’t care much about education. As the old saying goes – you can lead a horse to water…

Drew Miller Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Just bribe the kids!

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589-1,00.html

Morgan Warstler Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Here’s the logic and common sense:

1. Matt’s non-fat example isn’t valid. SCHOOL CHOICE KIDS ARE CHEAPER. Same results, less expense = better program.

2. The studies are spurious. Go read them. Whenever gains are made by School Choice students in tests, the researchers urge us not to think it matters:

Readers are urged not to draw conclusions about the relative success of the MPCP or MPS based upon these rough descriptive comparisons. Any differences observed between the test scores of MPCP and MPS FRL students are open to varying interpretations. The higher scores observed for MPCP over MPS FRL students in the 8th grade could be attributed to older students in the MPCP benefiting from participation in the program, or it might be true that those 8th grade students who have remained in the MPCP are simply more able than those who have left.

Although these descriptive statistics appear to show some academic improvement as Choice students mature, these grade-cohorts of students are compositionally different. Moreover, these data tell nothing about individuals’ achievement growth over time, since they measure different groups of students at the same point in time. Readers are cautioned against inferring from these data that the MPCP is responsible for the difference in performance between 10th grade MPCP students and their 8th and 4th grade counterparts.
3. This is exactly what choice is about. Higher satisfaction and less cost. Go read the focus groups.

Allan Masri Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:11 am
When we look for solutions to a problem, we generally look for incremental improvements to the existing system and ignore its fundamental flaws. All teachers know how difficult it is to teach someone who doesn’t want to learn. The classrooms of poor schools are filled with such people. The fault lies not with teachers, nor with students, but with the system itself.

Kent@12 makes excellent points about how children learn. I would disagree only with his proposition that

kids today simply do not have the maturity and self-discipline to do any kind of online learning on their own

Kent himself contradicts this statement by observing that kids left to themselves will explore Facebook, ESPN, and Craigslist. Although this isn’t directed learning, and therefore doesn’t improve test scores, it is definitely learning, and students in a rich environment like the internet will learn much more quickly if they are allowed to follow their own inclinations.

Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that what people want to learn isn’t good for them, so they must be forced to learn what they don’t want. Tough sell, that.

There is no good learning or bad learning. There is only learning.

Morgan Warstler Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:12 am
Here’s the logic and common sense:

1. Matt’s non-fat example isn’t valid. SCHOOL CHOICE KIDS ARE CHEAPER. Same results, less expense = better program.

2. The studies are spurious. Go read them. Whenever gains are made by School Choice students in tests, the researchers urge us not to think it matters:

Readers are urged not to draw conclusions about the relative success of the MPCP or MPS based upon these rough descriptive comparisons. Any differences observed between the test scores of MPCP and MPS FRL students are open to varying interpretations. The higher scores observed for MPCP over MPS FRL students in the 8th grade could be attributed to older students in the MPCP benefiting from participation in the program, or it might be true that those 8th grade students who have remained in the MPCP are simply more able than those who have left.

Although these descriptive statistics appear to show some academic improvement as Choice students mature, these grade-cohorts of students are compositionally different. Moreover, these data tell nothing about individuals’ achievement growth over time, since they measure different groups of students at the same point in time. Readers are cautioned against inferring from these data that the MPCP is responsible for the difference in performance between 10th grade MPCP students and their 8th and 4th grade counterparts.

3. This is exactly what choice is about. Higher satisfaction and less cost. Go read the focus groups.

Aqua Regia Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:14 am
Morgan there is no call to post your spam multiple times in one thread.

Tom Fisher Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Continuing on the note above, there is an insightful stream of messages on “how not to destroy a well-running school district,” courtesy of the Republican puppet-masters Art Pope (richest guy south of the Mason Dixon line) and Bob Luddy (owner of three private schools and therefore an excellent leader of his competition, the pubic school).

Read all about Pope and Luddy and the Pope & Luddy Buddies here: http://bluenc.com/tags/wake-county-schools

As goes Wake County, so goes the nation?

Harold Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:21 am
I googled “Project Followthrough” and found material published by the Washington Times. The study seems to have been a genuine one, however. The results were that no method worked better than “Direct Instruction” a method that relied on a lot of drill and repetition. This doesn’t surprise me, as in learning any skill (like playing the piano or sports or cooking) repetition is necessary for a task to become 2nd nature. Naturally, greater competence leads to greater confidence and self esteem.

Further googling, however, shows that while it does improve “decoding”, “Direct Instruction” does not have any effect on vocabulary and and comprehension, the two areas where middle class children excel their disadvantaged peers, and that therefore the gains are limited. Middle class children learn language indirectly, and by immersion in use of complex language and ideas. So — other methods will have to be used if disadvantaged children are to catch up in these areas.

Hint: from time immemorial memorizing poetry, singing, and dictation (ideological anathema to modern educators, who nevertheless have no experience with them, but only know of them from hearsay) and the study of history and other languages have been used to expand vocabulary and comprehension.

All the methods mentioned above are associated with boredom, humiliating punishment, and turning students off forever, which is why they were abandoned, but there is no reason, in this day of computer games and the like, why effective methods couldn’t be used in a positive manner and made engaging and entertaining for teachers and students.

DTM Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:27 am
#20 – Please explain the awesome results from Kansas City then.

Gee, it is almost like I didn’t already write:

[F]unding spent specifically on instruction is indeed correlated with better outcomes (this point gets obscured sometimes by studies not finding a strong correlation between funding in general and outcomes, which is why it is important to focus on funding for instruction specifically).

After a quick googling, Here is the relevant Kansas study. It regressed on funding levels in general, which I already explained would obscure the results that other studies have found with respect to funding specifically on instruction.

And as I was expecting, here are the takeaways in the Kansas study. With respect to test scores:

The regressions results reported in Table 2 show that there is generally a positive relationship between test scores and per-student funding for all grades in math and in reading. However, in only two instances is this relationship statistically significant at conventional levels, i.e. the 5 percent level. We cannot say with confidence that the other 16 relationships in this table are actually true.

And with respect to dropout/graduation rates:

The signs of the coefficients go in the expected direction; that is, they show a negative relationship between
the dropout rate and per-student revenues and they show a positive relationship between per-student funding and (1) the fraction of students earning diplomas or (2) the graduation rate. However, many of the coefficients are insignificant and we cannot rule out the possibility in those cases that there is no statistically valid relationship between student persistence and per-student funding.

Again, if you don’t focus specifically on funding for instruction, this is what typically happens: there is still a positive correlation between funding and performance, but it slips below the standard benchmarks of statistical significance. Which is exactly what you should expect, because increased funding for things besides instruction isn’t necessarily correlated with better performance.

Robert Waldmann Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:27 am
I see Hess has written an article entitled “Science and Non-Science.” He sure seems expert on the subject. He looks at the available data and decides that they aren’t his preferred metric. He doesn’t say what his preferred metric might be or why it might be preferred. Instead he makes an abstract theoretical argument with no stated connection to testable predictions or the public interest.

His view is that a tautology (”more choice” means more choice) trumps the available data because there’s something less than ideal about the available data which assertion does not have to be supported by an argument (note he didn’t provide a link to an earlier argument in the quoted passage).

I assume that in the article “Science and Non-Science” Dr Hess declared his preferrence for non-Science. He sure seems to have total contempt for the scientific method.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:30 am
Re Allan at 25: “Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that what people want to learn isn’t good for them, so they must be forced to learn what they don’t want. Tough sell, that.”
————
I concur. The K12 school curriculum is one of the most stupid fucking creations I’ve seen — and yet no one questions it. No one addresses what kids need to learn and whether the time and effort we demand from them is consistent with the rewards the kids receive.

Why should the kids devote themselves to a dumbshit waste of time? A curriculum constructed to create some of the most stupid fucking people on the planet –corporate drones fit only to run the corporate rat race until they hit 65 –no, make that 67 — and can be sent off to die.

Tyro Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Everyone else seems to have figured it out for MattY– it increases satisfaction, which is what all choice programs will do, tautologically. Keep in mind that there may be many factors other than school performance that parents are selecting for: namely, safety, better behavior from their children, etc.

I’m curious about whether voucher schools give better or worse results than neighboring suburbs with similar demographics as Milwaukee. After all, those suburbs are Milwaukee’s main competition when it comes to where patents choose to live and send their kids to school.

Tyro Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:40 am
The problem is one of culture. Simply put, too many urban families don’t particularly care about education.

I would conclude that parental willingness to take the time to sign up for a voucher program and pick a private school is prima facie evidence of parents who care about the education of the kids. If the parents didn’t care, they would bother to make the effort.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Re Harold at 29: “All the methods mentioned above are associated with boredom, humiliating punishment, and turning students off forever, which is why they were abandoned, but there is no reason, in this day of computer games and the like, why effective methods couldn’t be used in a positive manner and made engaging and entertaining for teachers and students.”
—————
1) The dumbshits criticizing computer instruction don’t realize that the 5 universities devoted to identifying and nurturing our geniuses in K12 heavily use computer instruction.

2) Stanford University’s computer program — Educational Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) — is used by Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, John Hopkins,etc to provide advanced math and English instruction to gifted youth.

3) When my son was in elementary school, I noticed that he received a B one period for math instead of As. When I asked him if he was having problems, he replied that the class was too boring to pay attention to. I looked around, found EPGY,and signed him up. He loved the computer game –which explained math to him, test him, and restated material in which he got errors, and retested him again. What he really liked was that it let him move ahead at HIS own pace.

Within a few weeks, he was 2 years ahead of grade level.

4) He was later admitted into one of the top prep schools and was one of their National Merit Scholars.

He’s my son so obviously his genetic endowment is limited. I think EPGY gave him a boost — and interest and self-confidence — that helped a lot.

EPGY does have human tutors that kids can call if they get stuck. My son rarely had to consult them — the computer program is really quite good. The color graphics illustrated concepts well –better than some teacher scribing on a distant blackboard.

RW Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Don Williams refers to poor mothers with children as ‘dumb b*tches’, and of course you take issue with my response, rather then with his horrible aspersion.

Mr. Williams is clearly a wingnut or a troll; his comments are so extreme that there is no need to reply to his comments.

Not a single person posting on this thread has posted a response in support of his position. More importantly, there isn’t a single mainstream liberal political organization that is trying to implement his claimed position. Accordingly, it is obviously not an agenda item for your political opponents.

The right does a fantastic job of consistently creating straw men to knock down, presumably because it is easier to argue against manufactured opponents than it is against real ones. Still, you exhibit just enough rationality that unlike Mr. Williams, you can elicit a response. So congratulations, your membership in the movement is still valid, and you may continue to be a good soldier in service to The Cause.

ScentOfViolets Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:44 am
I googled “Project Followthrough” and found material published by the Washington Times. The study seems to have been a genuine one, however. The results were that no method worked better than “Direct Instruction” a method that relied on a lot of drill and repetition. This doesn’t surprise me, as in learning any skill (like playing the piano or sports or cooking) repetition is necessary for a task to become 2nd nature. Naturally, greater competence leads to greater confidence and self esteem.

Speaking as a math guy who teaches “algebra you should have learned in high school the first three times you had it” as often as anything at the higher level, this is 1000% percent true And this is what homework and in-class drill is all about. But for some reason, if we as teachers don’t make this interesting, or the kids “eager to learn” . . . it’s all our fault. This is precisely where parents have an invaluable role to play.

As a side musing, there does seem to be one class of teacher who does get students willing to do the work, and whose students do respect the office, and this is, sadly, the canonical high school football coach. Certainly there is some self-selection involved, but the sorts of performance and practice that can coaxed out of these athletes is sometimes nothing short of amazing. Especially when their performance in straight-up academics is also considered.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:47 am
The fact that Bill O’Reilly , Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck are multi-millionaires is the most damming evidence against our K12 educational system and teachers’ unions that I can think of.

Aqua Regia Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:47 am
Everyone else seems to have figured it out for MattY– it increases satisfaction, which is what all choice programs will do, tautologically. Keep in mind that there may be many factors other than school performance that parents are selecting for: namely, safety, better behavior from their children, etc.

“Satisfaction” doesn’t really seem like a useful rubric for measuring the quality of education at all. Unfortunately, the good measurements are all too difficult to do, and satisfaction is easy to measure.

Argus Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:48 am
My mother is a teacher, inner city, my father is a teacher, suburbs, sister is a teacher, city, brother is a teacher, rural, I couldn’t do it. The key to success according to them is the parents and their attitudes and priorities. All the money in the world can’t fix low achievement when low or no achievement is acceptable to Mom and Dad, if he is even around.

Kevin Sutton Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Matt– the link to you column doesn’t seem to be the right column, heading aside.

AnotherAnon Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Don Williams in #35 says it all. I would add that the teachers are behind the times in not embracing the technology.

Finally, please distinguish between babysitting and teaching, they are different functions.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:54 am
Re RW at 36: “Mr. Williams is clearly a wingnut or a troll; his comments are so extreme that there is no need to reply to his comments.

Not a single person posting on this thread has posted a response in support of his position. More importantly, there isn’t a single mainstream liberal political organization that is trying to implement his claimed position. Accordingly, it is obviously not an agenda item for your political opponents. ”
————
What is “extreme” is the idea that a social contract should be a one-way street — that people who work hard should have to subsidize the irresponsibility of others. There are many middle class families that can barely pay to rear one child.

As I’ve noted , we have a duty to each other — but that is a two-way street. Government and our capitalists have an obligation to provide full employment –but people have an obligation to work. Government has an obligation to provide public education that provides value but Parents have an obligation to not have children unless they can provide for them — and certainly to not have one after another when the parent is too poor to feed themselves.

You are right that Democrats don’t try to manage social programs in a responsible manner. That is because they are largely vote-buying mechanisms –intended more to create misery rather than fix it. That is why many citizens don’t support them. That is also why liberals duck addressing my points.

ScentOfViolets Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:59 am
My mother is a teacher, inner city, my father is a teacher, suburbs, sister is a teacher, city, brother is a teacher, rural, I couldn’t do it. The key to success according to them is the parents and their attitudes and priorities. All the money in the world can’t fix low achievement when low or no achievement is acceptable to Mom and Dad, if he is even around.

Count me in as one of those teachers saying the same thing. I understand that it is something of a truism that the only people who show up for parent-teacher conferences are those whose kids are doing just fine. And really, “parental involvement” is not something that requires twenty hours a week of effort every week by the already overworked and long-suffering parents. Mostly it’s getting on their kids about doing homework, keeping up with project due dates, studying before tests, etc. And these days, when all of this seems accessible to the parents from home with some application the schools are running, say Blackboard, even this is not as hard as it used to be.

Njorl Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:02 am
I would conclude that parental willingness to take the time to sign up for a voucher program and pick a private school is prima facie evidence of parents who care about the education of the kids. If the parents didn’t care, they would bother to make the effort

People who say there is a lack of parental involvement are not arguing that it is 100%. The voucher programs would preferentially preselect students with more parental involvement.

Which leads me to:

”–the program gets the same academic results, leads to higher parental satisfaction, and costs less than public schooling. That’s not an overwhelming success, but it isn’t a failure

These students would generally be the cheapest to educate in the public school system. They have involved parents, and are responsive to disciplinary action. They are almost certainly not mentally handicapped or emotionally disturbed. If they are physically handicapped, the cost of any extraordinary assistance is born by the public schools. When you compare public school students who are not in special ed to parochial schools, and don’t lump in nutrition programs with the education costs, the costs are roughly equal.

TheMoneyIllusion » The wonderful “failure” of the Milwaukee voucher program Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:02 am
[...] It is interesting to see how progressives interpret experiments in competition. Matt Yglesias has a post entitled: The Milwaukee Voucher Failure [...]

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:04 am
Re AnotherAnon at 42: “Don Williams in #35 says it all. I would add that the teachers are behind the times in not embracing the technology.”

While I think that much of the instruction in K12 could be accelerated and improved by computer instruction, I do see a Strong need for human teachers.

Teaching Things like critical analysis, evaluating evidence, debate re political philosophy, application of the scientific method, entrepreneurship,self-defense, medical care etc could use human tutors.

Unfortunately, many teachers would probably not be qualified to provide that instruction, although maybe they could be trained. I also think they would find being a Socrates a lot more interesting than the boring drill that is their current lot.

Nate Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Will reiterate again that parents are the biggest problem in most cases. On one end you have parents who don’t care at all, whose children are unmotivated and unwilling to learn. On the other, you have parents who raise a stink anytime their perfect little angels aren’t given straight A’s, even if they don’t deserve them, which leads to the dumbing-down of curricula and grade inflation.

lfv Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:29 am
# Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:30 am

Re Allan at 25: “Somehow we have arrived at the conclusion that what people want to learn isn’t good for them, so they must be forced to learn what they don’t want. Tough sell, that.”
————
I concur. The K12 school curriculum is one of the most stupid fucking creations I’ve seen — and yet no one questions it. No one addresses what kids need to learn and whether the time and effort we demand from them is consistent with the rewards the kids receive.

Why should the kids devote themselves to a dumbshit waste of time? A curriculum constructed to create some of the most stupid fucking people on the planet –corporate drones fit only to run the corporate rat race until they hit 65 –no, make that 67 — and can be sent off to die.

This point gets missed a lot. For young kids, it isn’t necessarily important what they learn, but that they learn anything at all and thus discover that it is fun to know things and that they learn how to learn. Things deemed more important can be taught later, but schools HAVE to make it interesting for young kids.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:29 am
Re Nate at 48: “Will reiterate again that parents are the biggest problem in most cases. On one end you have parents who don’t care at all, whose children are unmotivated and unwilling to learn. ”
————-
The ones I think are heartbreaking are the kids who never had a chance — who were too hungary to learn because their parents spent the food money on booze or drugs, kids who were too sleepy to learn because their home environment didn’t let them sleep, kids too consumed with anxiety or depression to learn because their parents abused them –or failed to protect them from abuse.

Harold Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:33 am
I want to repeat (since adults also need repetition) that drill works, but indirect methods middle class parents use: immersion, teaching through art also work. And, indeed, work better for higher levels of learning

Imitation also works and is the most powerful of all. If we want to create a cultural environment that promotes learning, I propose that we fund adult education on a large scale, including the arts. If the parents and other cultural models are seen educating themselves, i.e., reading and taking courses lifelong, the children will imitate.

Why don’t we do this? Answer: our social commitment to learning is a mile wide and an inch deep.

gcochran Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 11:53 am
“Will reiterate again that parents are the biggest problem in most cases. ”

True, according to behavioral genetics, but not in the way you think.

rlwesty Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Matt: I have some familiarity with the Milwaukee program and can say with certainty that the studies on achievement that have been done have been deeply flawed. In fact, the Milwaukee program has served a large number of kids who were spit out by the system. The program is largely available to a population who historically leaves school early. The studies you’ve based your conclusion on ignore that fact. Also, the most often cited studies on the results of the Milwaukee program ignore the fact that its greatest successes are with older kids — kids who stick with schooling beyond age 18 (and thus are counted as failures in most testing protocols). Overage graduates are a great success in any rational measure of successful service to historically marginalized kids. The Milwaukee studies, sadly, count these as failures.

CarolineSF Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
The notion that it’s clear-cut which charter schools are successful is unforgivably naive. Charter schools are free to pick and choose their students if they feel like it — the endlessly-gushed-over KIPP chain (all kneel and worship) engages in eye-popping attrition, for example.

Any public school would soar if it could get rid of the lowest performing 60% of its students and just keep the remaining 40% of higher achievers, as is the case with the KIPP schools in my area (the San Francisco Bay Area, as confirmed by a 2008 study by SRI International).

Well, if that’s the secret to their success, is that they key to solving the challenges of public education? In that case, Mr. Yglesias, what will happen to that 60% who are dumped by “miracle” KIPP?

What will it take to get our opinion leaders, commentators and political leaders to stop being so hopelessly naive and gullible about these snake-oil miracle solutions?

Hector Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
RW,

Excuse me. As Mr. Williams notes, his proposed solution is current government policy of the People’s Republic of China, and a noted liberal intellectual whose name escapes me at the moment, went on record last year as proposing that the world should follow the Chinese lead. This is hardly just a figment of my imagination.

Incidentally, I am not now nor have I ever been a Republican, and I do not vote for the Repubblican Party.

lfv Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Hector, surely you know the Don is a crank.

Hector Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Re: Government has an obligation to provide public education that provides value but Parents have an obligation to not have children unless they can provide for them — and certainly to not have one after another when the parent is too poor to feed themselves

Mr. Williams also has the obligation not to call other people’s mothers, quote, ‘dumb b*tches’, and not to encourage young women to abandon their unborn children to the tender mercies of the vaccuum tube. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear to be honouring that aboligation.

richard miniter Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Excellent points! There is a reason why voters have voted down school-voucher plans whenever given the choice. Still I wonder why no one looks at the variable most-changed since 1960: the number of school districts, which have shrunk from almost 25,000 to less than 18,000 while the population has almost doubled. L.A. and Miami have massive single “unified” districts. New York is little better. Maybe breaking up large districts into smaller, more manageable ones–and holding principals responsible for results–would work instead.

urgs Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Why blame the parents. . Every parent should be able to just send their children to the closes public school and get the same standard as anywhere else. Anything else is not aceptable. And whos to say parents do wrong when they send their children to a close by lower performing school. Better a low performing school than a 2 hour bus trip each way 5 days a weak.

Aqua Regia Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
@ richard, 58;

Great point, it’s something I hadn’t thought of before. I found a paper that discusses this very subject. Unfortunately, like everything related to education, the results are inconclusive.

@ urgs;

That appears to be just another in the long list of things that the US apparently cannot do that the rest of the developed world can.

If schooling is not education, choosing a better school wont necessarily lead to better learning | culturekitchen Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
[...] to really shit on what basically could have been a good reCase in fact? The following excerpt from The Milwaukee Voucher Failure: Giving parents choices about where to send their kids to school has certain kinds of virtues. It [...]

Eli Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
People have been arguing that the real problem is parents. I agree 100%. The next question is “what kind of parents”. That’s where differences in socioeconomic status become clear. School quality does have some effect, but this is largely dependent on the population served to begin with. (I’ll skip further comment here because it’s complex and if looking at policy, teacher performance is going to get you minimal results compared with a student-targeted model).

So the next question is what is it about SES that influences student behavior. There is a lot of data on this. It begins in the womb. Environmental toxins, esp. lead paint, are surprisingly big factors in poor neighborhoods, and they have serious physiological effects. From there, you go to mother’s hormones – stress levels. Language and emotional development begins very early. These are enormously dependent on environment. Basic cognition, vocabulary and social skills can be literally years behind by the time kids enter kindergarten.

So what can we do about it? “Money” is a loaded term: spent poorly, it has no effect, obviously; spent wisely it can have very good results. Again, this is in the data. What you really want is to target at-risk students, looking at academic deficits, whether behavioral or skill-based. Models can predict pretty well where these will come from demographically. Some students will certainly be very difficult to properly provide support for (I’m thinking of those where drug use or criminality is a major factor at home). But in most cases a comprehensive investment in outreach and daily – if not hourly – support will be plenty.

This won’t look like the standard public school model, where a child shows up the first day of kindergarten, sits all day in a class of 30, then goes home with a backpack loaded up with worksheets. That model simply doesn’t work. Certainly not as a guarantee of the right to an equitable citizenship. If we are serious about leaving no children behind, we need to take ownership of the idea that every single child, no matter where they come from, will turn 18 having been adequately prepared for life success.

We have pretended that just by giving children basic access to a teacher in a schoolhouse, we have done our job. Some stop-gap measures have been cobbled together, such as busing, reduced-price lunches, or special education resources. But these don’t begin to address the many disadvantages many children face. Some will decide this is too big a task, either because it is impossible or not worth it. The truth is that it is possible, and a strong case can be made that it will ultimately be worth it not just in a moral sense but because the economic and social gains will end up outweighing the initial investment.

The Harlem Children’s Zone in New York claims to have gotten every child into college. Even if not entirely true, this is a staggering achievement. They also get 2/3s of their funding from private sources. That’s a budget 2-3 times that of ordinary public schools. But they are able to use this money to provide services over and above the traditional one child, one teacher model. They provide parenting workshops, health services, extended hours, and round the clock support. Their Harlem Gems pre-K program runs 8am-6pm and has a 1:4 child/teacher ratio.

If we currently spend around $7,000 per child for 12 years, that’s roughly $84,000. California spends more than half that in one year per inmate. If we took as seriously the problem of giving every citizen an equitable start in life, as we do the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, we could be replicating the success of the HCZ in cities all across the country. Imagine what this would do for us in terms of productivity? Real estate values!

As a matter of civil rights, as arguably enshrined in the constitution, this will likely require federal intervention. Specific, evidence-based programs can be funded by mandate at the federal level. But we need the public will to commit the resources in a serious way. All the talk of teachers and charters and unions is largely irrelevant. What is needed is a paradigm shift in which a child’s development is viewed in a holistic, environmental context. Most schools will not need very much extra help at all. Most communities will not need health services or parenting classes or all day kindergarten. At risk students can be individually targeted and services provided on an as-needed basis.

We can do this.

Aqua Regia Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
@ Eli;

Great post. And, it won’t everything, but it seems to me that state-provided daycare (as well as making sure everyone has access to high-quality pre-natal care) might go a long way towards bringing academic results up.

Aqua Regia Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
*it won’t solve everything

Jeffrey Davis Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
(responding to the blog comment from Yglesias)

Or you could have a humane society that valued learning and intellectual achievement.

smintheus Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
A basic issue is typically neglected: Parents of students in charter schools and taking advantage of vouchers tend to be more supportive of education and more directly involved than those parents whose children stay put. Also, as CarolineSF says, the charters from their end can cherry pick students (and parents).

Parental involvement in education is the single most important ingredient for a chold’s success. So experiments like Milwaukee’s are a failure because the most motivated students are siphoned off but the public schools still manage to do as well or better on average than the charter/voucher schools.

You can pay teachers who consistently deliver above-average performance enough to persuade them to keep teaching.

This is Race to the Top nonsense. You need to pay all teachers well and treat them with respect if you want to attract excellent people into the profession. You don’t treat them like they’re the problem, or try to hold them accountable for student achievement (on tests or otherwise). And you don’t pretend like it’s a simple matter to evaluate teaching skill.

The problem with US schools is cultural, it’s parents who are negligent, and students who don’t care about education, and schools that aren’t safe. If kids care about learning and are given a safe environment, they find a way to learn even with the worst teachers. But if a kid is determined to do as little work as possible, even the best teacher can’t make much headway. I’ve tried to

You can’t force a student to open a book. What works best in education is pretty simple: reading. Reading teaches kids to think for themselves, and trains them in understanding complexity. It also gives them a vocabulary. More and more kids never read, and the results are clear in everything they say and write and do in class. Their thinking is just mush. There’s a vast gulf between the abilities of kids who read and those who don’t.

Does it really make sense, per Arne Duncan and Obama, to tie teachers’ salaries to the test scores of random students who show up in a teacher’s classroom, when they may have abysmal preparation and little interest? Teachers aren’t miracle workers. Go down that road and what you’re likely to achieve is to encourage teachers to get a better selection of students in their classes and keep out as much dead wood as possible.

Teachers don’t “deliver”. That’s what pizza boys do. Teachers help to lead students forward (that’s what ‘pedagogy’ means) in their own quest for an education. You don’t demand that teachers “deliver” students who won’t bother to make that journey for themselves. The idea that teachers ought to be held accountable for what their students learn is silly and insulting. The means that Duncan and others would use to measure student learning for the purposes of accountability is even more silly.

Oh, and one further counter-intuitive point: Sometimes the best way to teach something essential to lousy students is to fail them, whereas the worst thing you can do might be to hold their hands and try to prod or carry them along toward a goal the don’t care about. The lesson of failure might kick in only several years later, so you usually don’t get any credit as a teacher for doing that – even when you know it’s the kid’s best hope. One of the reasons why our educational culture has decided that failure is ‘not an option’.

gcochran Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Acting on my own theories, which have loads of empirical evidence, I sent my daughter to the local mediocre majority-minority public high school: she still managed to get the top ACT score in the state.

Between-family differences, the stuff you all want to tweak, have almost no effect on adult IQ.

“We can do this.” No, we can’t. It doesn’t work.

One other fun fact about the local high school: they changed their class schedule to that used by the highest-scoring school in the state – figuring that it must be helpful. That high-scorer is Los Alamos High School.
Ya think it’s the schedule? Ya think it’s their SES?

Steve Sailer Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
In the 1970s, I knew a girl in college from the public high school in Cocoa Beach, FL, who had gotten a 1580 out of 1600 on the SAT, when only 10 people a year got a perfect 1600. I was amazed when she said that was only the 4th highest score in her class.

“Who are their parents? Rocket scientists?” I laughed.

“Yeah,” she said, in matter-of-fact agreement.

“Huh?”

“You know, German V2 scientists who got rounded up in 1945 and built Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo for NASA. Those rocket scientists.”

Why Vouchers Haven’t Failed « Voting While Intoxicated Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
[...] Vouchers Haven’t Failed Matthew Yglesias announces the Milwaukee voucher program a failure: One of the very first magazine pieces I ever published was about how the Milwaukee school voucher [...]

Hadric the Unpleasant Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
“Everyone else seems to have figured it out for MattY– it increases satisfaction, which is what all choice programs will do, tautologically.”

Err, not necessarily. San Francisco had a city-wide choice/lottery system (because you can’t fit all the kids into the most popular schools, you have to use a lottery).

The result was a mad dash of parents checking out 10, 15, 20 public schools (plus privates and parochials), and regular moaning from those in neighborhoods with good schools why they couldn’t send their kid there.

I liked the system, but most didn’t – a combination of *too much choice* [e.g. 70 elementaries, with maybe 100 separate elementary grade programs to apply to] Plus, about 20% of applicants would not get any of their choices.

Result: this year, the SF school board moved to a system that gives kids living in areas with the lowest quintile of school test scores preference, but everyone else will essentially get their neighborhood school.

trillo Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
“At the end of the day, to improve academic performance you need policies that specifically focus on that goal.”

This is rather like saying that you can improve athletic performance by working out a lot. It’s fine for people who are otherwise in good health. But improving athletic performance among non-athletes would require attention to other things that influence their lack of athleticism: smoking, diet, lack of exercise…

Academic performance among poverty-stricken schoolchildren is a result of many non-academic factors. You’d improve academic performance in most urban environments by promoting policies that made the childrens’ lives more stable and provided incentives for doing well in school that might compete with the incentives for not doing so and then taking part in the underground economy. If you’re the two-year-old illegitimate child of an unemployed girl who speaks English as a second language and can barely read, you need something more than a good teacher in front of you when you finally arrive in 1st grade.

Don Williams Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Re Hector at 57: “Mr. Williams also has the obligation not to call other people’s mothers, quote, ‘dumb b*tches’, and not to encourage young women to abandon their unborn children to the tender mercies of the vaccuum tube. ”
——————
Hey, Hector, Someone already said it better than I could:

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species.

I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not.

You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area.

There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague,”

http://www.hecklerspray.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/smith.jpg

Jim Glass Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
The US health care system is a disaster because it provides the same results as other systems at twice the cost — we must change it!

We must adopt a system that has less cost!

Milwaukee public schools are a success because they provide the same results as voucher schools at more than twice the cost: >$15,000 per student to $6,500.

The system that halves the cost is a *failure*. We must kill it!

The choice program does seem to lead to a lot of consumer satisfaction

Another measure of failure to the big-government, government- union crowd. “Consumer satisfaction”? Who cares about that when *we* know what is good for them.

Hmmm … A program delivers the same results at half the cost and increases consumer satisfaction by “a lot”.

If that isn’t the definition of *failure*, what is??

ScentOfViolets Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Imitation also works and is the most powerful of all. If we want to create a cultural environment that promotes learning, I propose that we fund adult education on a large scale, including the arts. If the parents and other cultural models are seen educating themselves, i.e., reading and taking courses lifelong, the children will imitate.

Why don’t we do this? Answer: our social commitment to learning is a mile wide and an inch deep.

I’d say this is a Bingo!, except this applies to a lot of other areas as well: Americans “support the troops”, and show it by sticking tacky magnetic strips on their automobiles. But they will not stand for raising taxes by as much as 5% to do anything for the vets who come home, maimed either physically or psychically or both, and who have little in the way of salable skills to fall back on.

Americans support “environmentally friendly” policies, but only to the extent that the price of gasoline doesn’t rise one red cent, or that they be inconvenienced by – heaven forbid – carpooling.

And so on and so forth. So it goes.

cw Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 12:43 am
Jim Glass,

Cost less because of self-selection. Parents who take the time to get their kids into a differnt school do a better job of parenting. That means the kids need less school resources. That means they cost less to educate. Kids who need lots of resounrces often need these resources because of bad parenting. Bad parents do not typically make the time or effort to sign their kids up for a diffenrt school.

This results in skewed cost per student averages.

Harold Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 1:08 am
Experts in vocabulary estimate that to understand spoken or written speech, a person needs to know about 95 percent of the words.
“Direct Instruction” and like methods address only part of the problem, as explained by E.D. Hirsh:

From age two on, there exist large differences in children’s familiarity with unusual words, standard pronunciation, and complex syntax, a fact that was long suspected, but not well documented and quantified until the monumental research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley, as summarized in their book Meaningful Differences. Many a low-income child entering kindergarten has heard only half the words and can understand only half the meanings and language conventions of a high-income child. Our schools, as currently constituted, do not reduce this original knowledge/vocabulary gap.

The verbal gap is not effectively compensated for by programs like Direct Instruction and Success for All, which bring children to fluency in decoding skills yet do not sufficiently and systematically enlarge their vocabularies. Low-income children who read with fluency still typically show big deficiencies in vocabulary and comprehension. Hence, instead of the term “reading gap,” clarity would be better served by using a more descriptive term like “language gap” or “verbal gap.” Such a shift in terminology might reduce public confusion between “reading” in the sense of knowing how to decode fluently, and “reading” in the sense of being able to comprehend a challenging diversity of texts. It is the second, comprehension deficit, based chiefly on a vocabulary deficit, that constitutes the true verbal gap indicated in the NAEP scores.

The widening of this verbal gap as students progress through the grades is the archetypal example of the so-called Matthew effect in education, “unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

Cognitive psychologists have explained the mechanism for the Matthew effect, which is made even more acute by subsequent social and emotional influences on the low-vocabulary child. Experts in vocabulary estimate that to understand spoken or written speech, a person needs to know about 95 percent of the words. The other 5 percent of word meanings can then be inferred from context. If we assume that an advantaged kindergartner knows 95 percent of the words in a teacher’s remarks, or in a passage read aloud from a book, the result is that the child is not only gaining new knowledge from the exposition, she is also gaining new word meanings, by being able to infer the meaning of the other 5 percent of the words–achieving a gain in both world knowledge and in word knowledge.

The less advantaged child, by contrast, suffers a double (or triple) loss. The exposition is puzzling from the start, because the child doesn’t know enough of the words. He therefore fails to gain knowledge from the exposition and also fails to learn new word meanings from the context. And to intensify that double loss, the child loses even that which he has — his interest, self-confidence, and motivation to learn.

CarolineSF Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 1:16 am
In addition, Jim Glass, private schools do not accept the students who cost the most to educate — disabled students and English-language learners — and “disabled” students includes many categories, from autistic to blind to severely emotionally disturbed. And they do not face many of the costly, unfunded mandates that public schools do.

I saw a particularly cruel and bloodless example of this when a local parochial school dumped a kindergartner who was disabled by a terminal illness into my kids’ urban public elementary school. The dumped child was the daughter of parishioners whose older children attended the parochial school that dumped the dying child. Our public school welcomed and supported the child, who has since passed on, and the family. That provided a very clear view of how private schools keep their costs down.

rory Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 5:23 am
“The verbal gap is not effectively compensated for by programs like Direct Instruction and Success for All, which bring children to fluency in decoding skills yet do not sufficiently and systematically enlarge their vocabularies.” (post 76)

This is absolutely true, but it should be noted that volcabulary without decoding skills also results in poor readers. (Dyslexia)

Pedagogy like Whole Language though fails to teach volcabulary or decoding, therefore at least we know DI and SFA type curriculums at least get us closer to our goal.

I suspect that the Core Knowledge program is the closest you will find today to address the knowledge/volcabulary deficiency, which is why the most successful schools combine DI with CK principles.

rory Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 5:25 am
For the record, the study that Matt links to at the bottom of the post has nothing to do with pedagogy, but talks about teacher training/preperation… two related, but different issues.

Club Lorem Ipsum :: Materias Grises » Archivo » El objetivo final del movimiento conservador Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 6:26 am
[...] Sin ponerme como paladín de todo lo zurdo, cuando hablo de política siempre tengo algunos objetivos más o menos claros, y una flexibilidad bastante amplia en los medios. Al hablar de educación, quiero garantizar la igualdad de oportunidades, fomentar la movilidad social y dar una enseñanza de calidad. No me importa cómo lo hagamos; sea enseñanza pública, concertada, internados, escuelas de alta hechicería o cheques escolares, si algo dar resultados, adelante. No diré que sí o que no a los cheques escolares por motivos filosóficos, lo haré porque la evidencia empírica dice que no han funcionado bien. [...]

Harold Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 9:29 am
Um, what are teachers trained in, if not pedagogy?

I don’t think E.D. Hirsch is advocating
“whole language”. (He usually advocates what he calls cultural literacy and what the French call “culture generale.”) As for myself, I am very willing to believe “direct instruction” is effective — for those things in was designed to teach. But even though learning to read involves a certain amount unavoidable of drudgery, maintaining motivation and morale for both teachers and beginning is not a trivial problem but is critical.

Hector Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Re: Pedagogy like Whole Language though fails to teach volcabulary or decoding, therefore at least we know DI and SFA type curriculums at least get us closer to our goal.

Ah, Whole Language, the trendy hipster cause par excellence.

I suspect American kids would be much better off today if the professors Schools of Education back in the 1960s had been doing fewer bong hits and more serious thinking.

Harold Says:
April 13th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
An approach that “focus[es] on motivational aspects of literacy, emphasizing the love of books and engaging reading materials” (wikipedia) could only have been invented by an unholy trinity comprising Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, and and Michel Foucault, eh, Hector?

The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : The "Failure" of School Vouchers in Milwaukee Says:
April 15th, 2010 at 10:57 am
[...] in Milwaukee has not been the panacea that school-choice proponents have promised. Matt Yglesias took it one step further and called the program a [...]

Mark Fletcher Says:
April 15th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Yglesias gets owned yet again:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/04/15/failures-in-ed-policy-analysismisunderstanding-milwaukee/

Cite one result from one study that supports your position and ignore the other result of that study and all of the other studies. That is truly desperate.

Don’t you ever get tired of trying to twist reality to show that your outdated socialist ideas will make people’s lives better? Wouldn’t it be more gratifying to admit you were mistaken and then enjoy being honest for the rest of your life?

Malcolm Kirkpatrick Says:
April 16th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
“Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.”–Benjamin Disraeli (1874)

Albert Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school. Einstein observed, by analogy, that you could kill a healthy animal’s appetite for its favorite food by force-feeding.

Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school.

Given compulsory attendance statutes, the case for State (government, generally) operation of school is weak.

Joshua Angrist
“Randomized Trials and Quasi-Experiments in Education Research”
NBER Reporter, summer, 2003.
One of the most controversial innovations highlighted by NCLB is school choice. In a recently published paper,(5) my collaborators and I studied what appears to be the largest school voucher program to date. This program provided over 125,000 pupils from poor neighborhoods in the country of Colombia with vouchers that covered approximately half the cost of private secondary school…A comparison of voucher winners and losers shows that three years after the lotteries were held, winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished eighth grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades. Lottery winners also scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. A follow-up study in progress shows that voucher winners also were more likely to apply to college. On balance, our study provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the possible benefits of demand-side financing of secondary schooling, at least in a developing country setting.(6)
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
“Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings”
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1, 2000, Feb. , pg. 16.
Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991). This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/the-milwaukee-voucher-failure.php

Leon Todd

Sunday, May 9, 2010

The Milwaukee Voucher Failure of Choice and Charter Schools

All my skinfolk aint kinfolk.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Will Allen Urban Farmer, Farming Crops & Fish in the big city

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