Freddie deBoer

It comes as little surprise to me that one of the leaders of the school reform movement is a serial fabulist. The entire movement is built on an edifice of plausible-sounding narratives that are always revealed to be empty when you give them a skeptical reading. On issue after issue within education, the education reform movement writ large has embraced the pleasant unreality of convenient stories over the messy work of gathering evidence responsibly and using it to improve public policy. So that Joel Klein lied about his background doesn’t surprise me; he’s just acting out personally the tendency of the movement writ large. (Perhaps this will shame The Atlantic out of letting him write advertising copy for his privatized reform efforts, which is like letting Ronald McDonald write pieces in your magazine about how McDonald’s hamburgers are delicious and affordable.)

What I am a little bit more surprised about is the fact that so many people are acting as though it’s the lies in his story that render it an improper point of discussion, and not the fact that it is a single piece of anecdotal evidence and thus useless for directing public policy. At the very best, Klein’s story would be a single data point. Arrayed against it is a large and growing body of empirical data that demonstrates that many of the reform movement’s favored policies– charter schools, merit pay, ease in firing teachers– has negligible effect on education outcomes, despite the promises of that movement.

Check this out from theProspectarticle:

As proof, Klein—and others for him—cites his life story in what has become a stump speech for his brand of school reform. Again and again, Klein recounts his own deprived childhood and how it was a public-school teacher who plucked him from a path to mediocrity or worse. He offers his autobiography as evidence that poverty is no bar to success and that today’s disadvantaged children fail only because they are not rescued by inspiring teachers like those from whom Klein himself had benefitted.

OK. Even if Klein’s story were true, and he was a poor kid who lived in a bad neighborhood like he says, this single story couldn’t tell us anything of responsible use when it comes to our public policy. If this story is really being used as evidence, the people taking it seriously probably shouldn’t be making important decisions about education. And if Richard Rothstein is right (and his piece is really a wonderful work of meticulous journalism), and the conventional wisdom has been deeply impacted by Klein’s story… well, that’s insane and scary.

There are multiple reasons to oppose charter schools, merit pay, teacher union busting, and private school vouchers, many related to fair labor practices, accountability when using public money, and local control of local schools. But the most obvious and salient reason is that none of them work to improve educational outcomes in the way that school reformers claim. That’s what any responsible assessment of the extant social science– rigorously conducted, appropriately sampled– tells us. That would be true whether or not one of the people growing rich off of the reform movement personally lived the plot of a Dickens novel. What happened to one guy is irrelevant. What matters is the crushing weight of all the numbers.

Anecdotal Evidence, True or False, Can’t Help UsPost + Comments (50)

This short piece from the Times illustrates a point I’ve been making for a long time: a lot of our educational difficulties probably stem from inequality in prerequisite skills that are developed prior to formal schooling. Or perhaps skills isn’t even the proper term, as what we’re talking about might best be understood as acquired rather than learned. The article points out that language and literacy skills are both hugely determinative of future success and largely developed prior to formal education.

As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough’s new book, “How Children Succeed,” there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success. Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.

As I wrote here at BJ earlier this year, ” Literacy skills, in particular, are likely dependent on students meeting certain thresholds of relevant exposure at a particular age. It’s possible, in other words, that an energetic and bright teacher might have a huge impact on a student who has already developed the prerequisite reading skills but have essentially no chance with a student who lacks them.” Of particular interest– and particularly discouraging– is the possibility that this dynamic is the product of a critical neurological period during which the developing brain is unusually receptive to syntactic conditioning. This would be discouraging because it might suggest a permanency to early-life educational disadvantage.

I think this sort of thing demonstrates the inadequacy of our educational discourse. First, it really should give pause to anyone who is among the “blame teachers first” crowd; how can a teacher be blamed for the results of processes that begin, at the latest, during the toddler stage? But more to the point, it demonstrates that our educational outputs are conditioned by a host of factors that are really beyond society’s control. We don’t take children from their parents, and of course we shouldn’t. But a growing body of evidence suggests that parental input at the earliest stage of life have a huge impact on the success of children. How do we square that with our egalitarian aspirations, when we know that not all parents are made equal? I don’t have an answer, except for this: to protect all of our people from disadvantage through a robust and generous social safety net.

Early Life and LiteracyPost + Comments (222)

I posted all of these earlier in the year. I’m just going to leave them here.

Pursuant to the preceding:

(source: NCELA)

(source: National Center for Education Statistics)

I’m told some people like their arguments in graph formPost + Comments (27)

It’s looking like a mutually beneficial deal is coming soon in the Chicago teacher strike, and I’m glad if so. Matt Yglesias has a post up that I think is really worth reading. One of the things that I’ve been trying to tease out in this discussion is a contradiction within the conventional, shall we say, market friendly progressive take. Many in the ed reform world both a) claim that American teaching is suffering from a serious dearth of talent and b) oppose the Chicago teacher union in their strike. I find this problematic, particularly when it comes from those who typically express value in purely monetary terms: if you think that a given occupation has failed to attract talented enough workers, simultaneously arguing to make the job worse is counterproductive. Yglesias avoids this, to his considerable credit, by arguing that the teachers are well paid and deserving.

As he says

What I think this drives home is that not only is Chicago compensating its teachers unusually generously, but Chicago is right to do so. The national average teacher is paid a low amount for a college graduate, which is not a smart way to try to attract and retain the best possible teachers. Chicago, by being unusually generous, is offering a level of compensation that seems modestly above average for a college graduate. That’s exactly what I would want to see from my city—a real effort to invest the money necessary to hire and retain quality people.

One thing Yglesias might have mentioned is that, by almost any measure, Chicago is a particularly difficult environment in which to teach. 90% of Chicago public school students are eligible for federal school lunch subsidies, and I don’t need to tell anyone the considerable educational disadvantage associated with low socioeconomic status. Chicago has also been subject to a recent spate of truly terrible violence, and has crime and violent crime rates that have not decline at the rates of many other major American cities. It’s a tough, tough job.

The question is where we go from here. Yglesias rightly identifies the issue of standardized testing as a major source of contention.

The city wants to make test-based, “value-added” models of teacher performance a very important part of retention and compensation policies. The union, reflecting the views of most classroom teachers, hates that idea. And here’s the crux of the matter. Chicago’s teachers aren’t living lives of luxury, but the city really is investing in paying them an above-average amount. Now it wants to ensure that it’s not just investing a lot of money but investing that money in quality. Chicago teachers don’t want to be subjected to that kind of regime and reject the premise that the test-based model the city’s elected officials favor is a good proxy for quality.

Again, credit where due: this is a fair and evenhanded gloss. And it really is the rub: what portion of a student’s educational output is student-derived and what portion is teacher-derived? My frustration with a lot of education reformers is that they, at an extreme, find that question somehow disqualifying in and of itself, or otherwise treat it as a dodge, a ruse, or a kind of wagon circling. (Yglesias is occasionally guilty of the latter.) The trouble is that divining the exact mixture is, well, really goddamn hard. Probably impossible on a per-student basis; the confounding variables are just too numerous. For myself– and I will risk saying that my opinion is not uneducated– I am confident both that the teacher side of the mix for the average student  is far from nothing, but also that the general assumption places far too much power in the hands of teachers to determine student outcomes. I also believe that the mixture is probably not static or universal. Literacy skills, in particular, are likely dependent on students meeting certain thresholds of relevant exposure at a particular age. It’s possible, in other words, that an energetic and bright teacher might have a huge impact on a student who has already developed the prerequisite reading skills but have essentially no chance with a student who lacks them.

Yglesias’s economic intuitions, which frequently contribute to really valuable analysis of current events, fail him here because of these dynamics. A teacher’s control over his students just isn’t the same as a factory worker’s control over a widget. That’s why, for example, merit pay has such a poor track record. (Here’s an informative blog post, written by someone who is frequently critical of teacher unions.) I truly believe that a large part of a better educational discourse is just getting past analogy to conventional economics.

What’s the mixture?Post + Comments (70)

One of the contentious aspects of the Chicago teacher strike is the role of standardized testing. As is typical of the reform movement, the Chicago school district is pushing for even more standardized testing. Teachers are resistant for a variety of reasons. Research suggests that increased standardized testing does not improve student outcomes, although those results must still be considered preliminary. Time spent “teaching to the test”– an inevitable consequence of high-stakes testing– robs students and teachers of the most valuable educational resource. What’s more, it is a simple fact that more standardized testing leads to more cheating, fraud, and abuse, from students, teachers, and administrators alike. That is not a normative statement; it is an empirical statement. Finally, there is widespread anecdotal evidence of the extreme psychological and emotional costs that repeated high-stakes, high-pressure testing has on children.

I would just like to add an important element to this: we don’t need to test everyone every year to have an extremely accurate picture of how our students are performing. People say that we need to know where our students stand and if they’re improving. And indeed we do! But we can find that information without subjecting all of our students to stressful testing that takes away valuable class time and invites considerable negative washback. Appropriately stratified samples, carefully selected, can tell us what we need to know about districts, states, and the nation. And we can express the accuracy of that information with mathematical precision using statistics like standard error and confidence intervals.

As Dr. Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus in Education at the University of Southern California– someone whose expertise and credentials are beyond reproach– has said, “One function of such tests is to compare groups and investigate factors related to high achievement, which works if tests are valid and are low-stakes and thus do not encourage cheating. But we don’t have to test every child in every grade every year…. When you go to doctors, they don’t take all your blood; they take only a sample.” We have developed validity and reliability tests, measures of statistical error, and processes for accounting for that error precisely so that we don’t have to check everyone. And lest you think that checking everyone is necessarily more accurate than extrapolating from samples, that’s not the case, even if we assume the validity of the test in assessing its given construct.

I can only conclude two things: first, that people simply don’t understand the power and accuracy of inferential statistics to describe complex realities like student academic achievement; and second, that people resist extrapolation out of the impression that this it offers a less effective bludgeon with which to attack teachers.

Look, I consider myself a quantitative researcher, among other things, and I hope to publish on questions of language testing and assessment. I just this past week agreed to peer review for a major language assessment journal. I’m not opposed to testing entirely, not at all. But their limitations are real, their negative consequences empirically verified, and most importantly, their primary strength ignored when they are used on all the kids, all the time. For our data collection, testing all kids twice during their educational careers, as the gold standard NAEP tests do, in addition to targeted stratified samples that can be minimally intrusive, is more than enough. If the purpose of testing isn’t data collection, but rather having an instrument to assault teachers, well, that’s a total betrayal of our children and our educational system.

Inferential statistics are powerful.Post + Comments (72)

The discussion about the Chicago strike is filled with people parsing the numbers about how much teachers make and whether it is too little or too much or just right. But having that conversation is conceding exactly the point we shouldn’t concede. It assumes that, for public employees and no one else, there is a certain amount that is just too much for the job. If you run a sex toy factory and make $250K a year, you’re a lion of capitalism. If you drive a city bus and you claw your way up to $38K a year, well, you’re a lucky ducky who has got to be put in his or her place.

So here’s Ezra Klein, doing his typically noncommittal thing, giving us his estimates of what Chicago public school teachers make. There’s a very direct and simple question, inspired by Corey Robin: how much do you make, Ezra? I’m willing to bet that Ezra Klein makes more than the median Chicago public teacher. I’m willing to bet that he in fact makes significantly more. I’m willing to bet that Klein makes something like what a lot of educated, upwardly-mobile young professionals living in Chicago make– the ones who, we are all supposed to assume, should be making several times what their peers who go to teach in inner city schools make.

Is what Klein makes too much? People will tell you that’s an absurd question, since he’s a journalist. I don’t begrudge Klein a dime of what he makes. I almost certainly want him to pay more of it back in taxes, but then I imagine that he thinks his own tax rates are too low. The point is: Ezra Klein is allowed, in our culture, to pursue as high a wage as he can. Public sector employees in general and teachers in particular are extended no such luxury. The question is both moral (do we value our teachers and our public employees, and do they have the right to pursue the best standard of living they can achieve) and practical (how can we claim to value education while working tirelessly to make educating a worse career). Leaving aside the ugly optics of legions of DC and NYC journos and pundits clucking their tongues at public servants who make much less than they do– this is supposed to make teaching a more attractive profession… how, exactly?

People believe that we are suffering from a lack of talent and drive in our teacher ranks. As you all know, I don’t agree, and I find the empirical evidence far, far more indicative of student-side demographic effects causing poor educational performance. But suppose the other side is correct. How the fuck are we going to fix a talent deficit when the self-same people work relentlessly to make teaching a less attractive profession? There’s a simple reality facing any talented, driven young graduate who is considering teaching as a profession: you know that our media and our politicians are always going to want to make your job worse. That’s reality. We have had decades of educational discourse dominated by the idea that our teachers are shiftless, incompetent swindlers. What rational person would prefer that over the alternatives available to people who are smart and hardworking?

I taught a brilliant young biology major a couple years ago. He mentioned in office hours once that he had always been attracted to teaching. I pressed him on why he didn’t consider the profession. And, being a polite kid, he deflected. Because of course, why on earth would he pursue a profession that pays next to nothing compared to what he could get in the private sector, where the benefits are getting relentlessly eroded, and where politicians and writers will hound you for life from their comfortable positions in DC and New York? I know, I know: the children, the children. Yes, some teachers work because they are inspired to create positive change. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not a plan. That is not a recipe for a teaching corps of the size we need in this country. (Here’s a wild idea: send Klein, Dylan Matthews, Reihan Salam, Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, etc., out to teach in inner city public schools. I wonder why they aren’t out there now, since they care so very much for the children?)

The reality is that you can’t be pro-education and anti-educator. Not just in the sense that you shouldn’t be, ethically, although I certainly believe that. I mean the notion that you can say that you care about education while working relentlessly to attack our actual teachers is nonsensical. If you want to attack our teachers as “overpaid,” OK. Go ahead. But you don’t get to pretend that you give a shit about education. If you don’t have a problem with celebrity dog trainers who make 7 figures or personal stylists who make $5,000 a consultation or people who sell artisanal moonshine for $400 a bottle, but you have a problem with teachers working in one of the most difficult teaching environments in the country making $75K a year, hey, alright. But save me the platitudes. Save me your chest-beating and your weeping for the children, the children. Quality health insurance, pensions, job security, a strong union to represent your self-interest: these are the only tools we have to attract people into this profession, when so many other educated professions make so much more. Advocate the end of those benefits and you declare yourself an enemy of education. You make it plain that you don’t actually value it with the only currency we care about in this culture, hard cash. You are saying that you don’t really value what you say you value. Period.

In this capitalist system of ours, what people make is a statement about how much society values what they do. Honey Boo Boo Child will make more this year than most Chicago teachers, and our friends in the media think they make too much. That’s all you need to know. If you think that people should be willing to teach for less, than shut your mouth and go apply to teach in Chicago yourself.

Update: The post in question was written by Dylan Matthews, not Ezra Klein; it ran under Klein’s Wonkbook section at the WaPo. I apologize for the error.

Making a Job Worse Is a Brilliant Strategy for Attracting the Best TalentPost + Comments (186)