Emma Brown writes in the Washington Post,
One of the Obama administration’s signature efforts in education, which pumped billions of federal dollars into overhauling the nation’s worst schools, failed to produce meaningful results, according to a federal analysis.
Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program — the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools — than in schools that did not.
But I imagine that from a teachers’ union perspective, the program has to be considered a success.
What did they do with the money? I can think of a lot of ways to spend money that makes education worse and the current ideas to improve education actually save money.
Oh.
“The Education Department did not track how the money was spent, other than to note which of the four strategies schools chose.”
Wake me up when we decide to stop goofing around.
It’s trivially easy for ed bureaucracies to spend money:
1. Hire lots of expensive consultants to conduct “seminars” on useless topics, especially on “social justice”. Make sure attending the seminars counts as overtime to really run up the bill.
2. Buy lots of computers! But don’t actually do anything useful with them…
3. Construction! And all the attendant corruption that goes with it. I was shocked that Los Angeles managed to spend a half-billion dollars on a single high school a few years ago (on land it already owned). After that, I resolved to vote down all school bond measures, no matter how seemingly well-intentioned.
Zuckerberg wasted an incredible sum on the Newark public schools as well, and he’s succeeded in the market. And while I support charters, charters that focus on the same community of students don’t work magic either (at best they promote better behavior and habits, they can’t change your SAT score).
Trying to go after the teachers union seems a roundabout way of doing it. It also makes for a sympathetic group being attacked (its not your grade school teachers fault inner city kids have low IQ). Similarly, attacking nurses and doctors hasn’t worked well in controlling healthcare costs.
Everyone knows multiple nurses and teachers they find sympathetic. Heck most people like their congressmen and hate congress.
The problem with all of these institutions is a fundamental understanding of reality is lacking in the public mind (and I include the “elite” public mind as well).
1) Schooling doesn’t raise intelligence.
2) Medical care can’t fundamentally improve many conditions.
3) Amiable personality and good intentions are not enough to get good government
The problem is that people believe that certain intractable problems of human nature can be solved by magic solution XYZ. If only bad thing ABC were removed. Getting rid of the teachers union is the ABC of the right. More school funding is the ABC of the left. Neither have an answer for what to do with the mediocre IQ once we don’t need them to punch holes in sheet metal anymore.
By now we should have an idea how to separate education from signaling (IQ, etc.). It seems like we don’t.
People don’t just want IQ signals though. They want a certain degree of conformity, and putting yourself through schools does that. HR departments also want easy ways to sort resumes and CYAs, credentials do that.
I’m not convinced laws against IQ testing are the major problem. A variety of market and cultural incentives mean that firms, or at least decision makers within firms, prefer credentialing over straight IQ tests.
There was a scene in “Silicon Valley” where the Google style executive owner talks to the young startup guy he is trying to buy out. He points out that when he was at the startup level he had all sorts of ideas about changing the way things are done. But once his company became a big globocorp he got an HR department and it slowly came to look like every other globocorp. Even if you founded a new company to take advantage of this perceived “IQ testing arbitrage” I have a feeling that once it reach a certain size the same incentives would rear their head.
Schools are ineffective at what they are trying to do but successful at what they aren’t? I’ll almost buy that.
Except my experience is they are p poor at encultiration as well.
Yes, getting better results is really hard. But getting the equivalent results for less money isn’t. Charters are quite effective in getting results that are as good or better than public schools for for a less. If that’s ‘all’ we get out of school choice, I’d still be more than happy to take it — we have lots of other demands for our tax dollars. So let’s have more of this kind of thing please:
http://reason.com/reasontv/2017/01/23/thales-academy-north-carolina-bob-luddy
You might want to look at the original article.
“Individual schools could receive up to $2 million per year for three years, on the condition that they adopt one of the Obama administration’s four preferred measures: replacing the principal and at least half the teachers, converting into a charter school, closing altogether, or undergoing a “transformation,” including hiring a new principal and adopting new instructional strategies, new teacher evaluations and a longer school day.”
About a thousand schools were chosen. “Three percent became charter schools, and 1 percent closed. Half the schools chose transformation, arguably the least intrusive option available to them.”
So, on this sample at least, becoming charter schools was not a cure-all. Granted, the schools in the experiment were supposed to be the worst in their districts, so maybe this just shows really bad schools don’t improve when converted to charters.
Selection bias: again, wake me up when we aren’t goofing around.
This is also how we know government stinks. There is zero or worse accountability for this money and barely accounting or followup. In fact, the choices made are likely steps backward. Of course they yielded a null result.
No a charter school won’t save any money if you create it by throwing a lot of extra money at an existing public school. But that’s a *really* atypical way for a charter school to be created and run.
The “deep problem” of publicly-funded education, to borrow the phraseology from philosophers of mind, is how to meaningfully reduce the politics (state, local, & federal) involved in it. I loathe public education as currently constituted, but anyone who thinks charter schools and related policy alternatives don’t create huge public-choice problems in their own right is fooling themselves.
I’d sure be interested in more details about the results of the various strategies — so maybe 30 became charters, and 10 closed.
Others changed principals and a) changed half the teachers, or b) longer school day and more teacher evaluation (50%, so about 500; leaving about 460 doing a, changing half the teachers).
Of those schools changing teachers, how many teachers got new/ different jobs in other school districts? I’d guess that was one of the easiest gaming plays.
I like charters, I prefer tax funded vouchers; I understand that tax credits isn’t politically feasible. I’d hope that vouchers per student would be equal for religious schools.
Final thought — why not PAY students to learn, and behave? $1/day for attendance, and up to $5/day for good learning results. Plus $ penalties for being late, being disruptive, getting kicked out of class, getting kicked out of school.
Most students don’t really understand the point of most class learning. Clear, immediate rewards, or lack of rewards, is very likely to improve student results.
This sounds good but I’m not sure it works.
There is a moderately large body of research that concludes that if you pay people for things, they stop doing it as soon as you stop paying them, and in the meantime their brain begins to categorize that activity as “burdensome work.”
The implication is that a society should instill in individuals the ability to “find pleasure in behaving virtuously.”
This is not anything I’m an expert on. But your suggestion may sound good yet wilt under careful scrutiny.
You’re referring to extinction, and that only occurs on a consistent reinforcement schedule (e.g. paying a student consistently for results). If rewards for good work come at random intervals and random sizes — but still only in response to good work — then the behavior shouldn’t die out.
I’d also argue a random reinforcement schedule more closely mirrors what real work is like.
Good point.
Oh yes, I have an electronic badge that tracks me through various doors at work. Similar badges should be used for all students to track them thru school doors, with weekly reports that they and their parents receive copies of.
I have a private school concept incorporating this. Do you have 10 million dollars burning a hole in youe pocket?
See also Andy Smarick, AEI: http://www.aei.org/publication/greatest-failure-in-history-us-department-of-education/comment-page-1/#comment-168385
(same available EdNext: http://educationnext.org/the-7-billion-school-improvement-grant-program-greatest-failure-in-the-history-of-the-u-s-department-of-education/ )
I’m not even happy with this. If you can’t make an education cynic happy with a null result on a government boondoggle you are really doing it wrong.
This wouldn’t even pass a middling peer review. Sometimes it seems like government is trying to reenact Brewster’s millions.
You know what’s funny, Arnold? You always come up with evidence and a clever and persuasive argument against some Obama policy/initiative. the evidence is not all that clear cut, but this is a fine blog and it makes me think. I am right down the middle on most issues and I highly sympathies with many points you make here. And that snarky remark about the all-powerful unions at the end – very cute. I hope you continue with the new administration as the Obama policies become the subject of history. You could start now with the libertarian take on the (excessive?) use of executive orders, the content of those orders, the trade “talk”, and how all that’s good (or not) for the economy, civil liberties, etc. Keep up the good blogging, but I am anxious to see a bit more balance. There is plenty of material already.
sorry for the couple of typos.