1. The K-12 chapter is by Frederick M. Hess.
Conservatives should broaden the implications of their intuition in favor of choice and encourage more choices within school curricula. These choices would allow families to better meet the needs of their children–through more robust foreign-language instruction, for instance in math, or the ability of home-schooled students to participate in school sports or electives.
When I said at the rollout of Room to Grow that I found it timid and tentative, this is the sort of thing I had in mind. I would prefer a bolder approach that is more focused on making it possible for entrepreneurs to compete in the education field. I think you have to regard as harmful any Federal funding that supports public schools rather than enabling alternatives to gain a foothold.
I have not through what these bold reforms might look like. How about prizes for achieving results? Maybe for getting students from disadvantaged backgrounds up to grade level. Maybe for enabling high-caliber students to win contests in math, science, or writing? Maybe for getting decent educational outcomes at very low cost?
2. The higher-ed chapter is by Andrew P. Kelly.
Rather than trying to hammer an antiquated accreditation system into something well suited to innovative ideas, policymakers should instead develop a new, parallel pathway to the market. The could mean a new accreditation agency that is designed to certify innovative programs (as Senator Rubio, among others, has proposed), or it could mean devolving accreditation to a new set of actors (like state governments, as Senator Mike Lee has proposed).
I agree that this is the important problem to solve.
Getting rid of the teachers unions would definitely improve the local political and tax situation, but at this point on the education/return curve the returns are diminishing. Past a certain point of education, variation in natural talent completely dominate the variation in outcomes.
How is the null hypothesis in education compatible with incentivizing outcomes?
If I were a David Brooks style fantasy despot, I might establish a metric like “sustained average standard deviation from actuarial expected value added”. That’s a mouthful, but you can just call it ‘Alpha’. Basic training batteries at Fort Sill, Oklahoma used to evaluate Drill Sergeants that way for improvements in physical performance, so it’s not some new invention. Here’s what it means.
Create a kid profile that collects and test for all their personal information, circumstances, and talents, but somehow leaves out the teachers and the peer-group effects (that last part will be the toughest). Give kids similar test at the start and end of a semester. Measure the difference and see how much they improved: ‘value-added’.
Do a regression model that comes up with a reasonably predictive model that correlated the kid profiles to the expected value added. If the null hypothesis is true, (most yield is ‘Beta’) the predictive value will be very large. If it is false, it will be hard to account for a lot of the variation.
One expects average teachers to have a lot of random noise between various students within a year, and between classes in various years – often exceeding or falling short of the actuarial expected value-added.
But if the null hypothesis is false (or just ‘weak’) some teachers will consistently outperform others, and sustain an average that is above the expected yield in student outcomes, which is like ‘Alpha’.
I don’t think most people really care about how much Alpha the teachers at their school have as much as they care about other factors, but it seems the only way to ‘justify’ entrepreneurial experimentation outside the public school system is to do so in terms of this Seeking Alpha.
I also think the null hypothesis in education is indeed just like the efficient markets hypothesis in finance, which is that it is extremely unlikely and rare to do better than Beta, and that Alpha is rare, misunderstood, impossible to replicate and scale, and except for the most gifted students, we are very much out on the edge of diminishing marginal returns in terms of squeezing more Alpha out of teachers with more money.
The Devil’s in the details, and making that ‘kid profile’, no matter how pure one’s intentions, will certainly get one in a lot of political hot water. It’s probably a non-starter.
My contention again is that no one really cares that it’s a non-starter, because no one really cares about Alpha except some true believer types. What people want is to maximize the quality of their kids’ peer group, and to escape the multitude of government controls over the content and quality of education. It’s a shame we have to debate around people’s core interests.
When I was an undergrad I tried to start a NPO called Brainery. The idea was to create an open educational accreditation records. To as a user have access to transcripts/performance evaluations from universities, , O’Reilly internet classes, piano teacher reviews and karate master belts awarded. Or so a parent of a Dyslexic child could find a specialty math teacher. Or a specialty geometry teacher. Or a specialty Pythagorean theorem teacher. Or that an unemployed person might see what curriculum or specific teachers were shared by current employees of a firm.
The thing to remember about K-12 is that we’re probably doing as well as could be expected, until we acknowledge what your commenters point out–that there aren’t any “results” to “reward” that aren’t achieved by gaming the populations or the tests.
Could we cut down on costs? Probably a bit. I think unions are a non-starter (in fact, I think we will probably see an increase in unions if corporations continue down their path). Pensions and government workers are a big issue, but any time people single out teachers, who are relatively inexpensive compared to the male-dominated union gov workers (cops, firefighters, prison guards), they look like they’re attacking teachers rather than fixing pensions. Most anti-union folk conspicuous ignore the public safety fields, who cost more, work less, and collect for longer. So I would prefer (as a teacher, of course), that pension reform be addressed at the larger level, because it’s annoying that teachers, who are relatively inexpensive (we can’t spike, work longer, get paid less) compared to cops, firefighters, etc.
But after that, there’s relatively little to be won. Education is a *huge* field. Entrepreneurs are a limited population, and they want big gains and big payoffs. Once they realize that big gains and payoffs aren’t popular, off they go.
Also: education reform is an incredibly white male field. Teachers are a mostly white female field, but at the lower levels–where low income blacks and Hispanics are most involved with their kids–the minority teaching population is larger. We’ve done a lot to reduce or eliminate the minority teaching population at the high school level through higher credentialing requirements, even though the research shows little relationship of teacher ability to student achievement, and a much less trivial relationship between teacher race and student achievement.
So ultimately, all these reforms end up doing the same thing: bringing profound disruption into black and Hispanic communities, firing a lot of blacks and Hispanics from secure jobs, moving kids around schools, creating winners and losers based on lotteries, lots of money for the reformers and consultants, and nothing in the way of test results.
You have to ask yourself why this is improved.
Truly radical: set lower expectations for all kids, track, tier high school results, allow schools to easily kick out troublemakers and send them to charter schools geared solely to make their lives miserable. If you want radical, push the Null Hypothesis in Education and ask what that means. It doesn’t mean give up, or let kids run wild on the streets. At least, it doesn’t have to.
But no one wants radical. They settle for disruptive, and pretend it’s the same thing.
Actually, I think something like 40% of the population wants ‘radical’ in the sense you describe.
I’d like to see that ‘radical’ version of R2G or SNEP. Maybe we should write one.