Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Do This and You'll Get That: A Bad Way to Defend Good Programs
Do This and You'll Get That: A Bad Way to Defend Good Programs
When we're not sure people will support our cause, it's tempting to link it to something more popular. Because an idea may be controversial or lack broad support, we hitch a ride on an outcome that reflects mainstream values. It's a strategy widely used in education, although we may have failed to notice the pattern—and consider its risks. To wit:
• Play. The current cult of rigor has led to fewer opportunities for young children to explore, invent, and just be kids. But rather than take a stand in favor of the irreducible value of such activity, we defensively list the putative practical benefits of fooling around. Play is "children's work"; it teaches academic skills, promotes language development, offers opportunities for conflict resolution, and so on.
• Social-emotional learning. Let the headlines tell the story: "Study Finds Academic Payoffs in Teaching Students Social Skills" (Education Week); "Study: Whole-Child Program Boosts Reading, Math Scores" (ASCD SmartBrief). A Teachers College, Columbia University, report published earlier this year even tried to quantify "The Economic Value of Social and Emotional Learning."
• Music education. Lending new meaning to the phrase "instrumental justification," efforts to bring music to children's lives are often defended on the grounds of improved performance in math or a boost in general cognitive capabilities. (When was the last time you heard someone justify algebra as a way to help kids be better musicians?)
• Preschool. The economist James Heckman may be the most prominent proponent of the financial benefits of early-childhood education, but today you'll get millions of hits by Googling "preschool" and "investment." Forget its potential to enrich children's lives—the reason to get behind nursery school, we're told, is that it will enrich the treasury by reducing government spending once we see tots as "human capital."
• School itself. The logical conclusion of this strategy is the use of economic criteria to justify the very idea of giving children a good education. Politicians and corporate executives reflexively invoke the "competitive 21st-century global economy" whenever they want to make a case that schooling matters.
—Getty
What I'm describing isn't limited to our field, of course. Generosity is often promoted by citing the benefits that will redound to the giver (2013 article in the University Herald: "Charity Can Get You Laid"), while social programs to address infant mortality or homelessness are, like universal pre-K, routinely justified on economic grounds. I don't question the good intentions of people who talk this way; they're doing what they believe is most expedient to rally support for important initiatives.
But there are four serious problems with this strategy—all of them uncomfortably relevant to education.
1. It devalues the very thing you support. Scores of studies have found that offering people a reward for doing something (such as reading or helping) tends to reduce their interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. One reason for this effect, though not the only one, is that anything presented as a prerequisite for something else—a means to another end—comes to be seen as less desirable. The recipient of the reward figures, "If they have to bribe me to do this, it must be something I wouldn't want to do."
This applies to programs and causes, too, because the implication of emphasizing the extrinsic benefits of, say, social and emotional learning is that there's no reason to support it other than those benefits, no intrinsic value to fostering social and emotional growth. We're implying that English/language arts and math are the only important disciplines, or that test scores are the sole outcome we ought to care about, or that financial gain is the ultimate criterion by which to gauge the value of our activities.
This is particularly ironic in the case of play because the whole point of play is that it has no point. Play is about process, not product; it has no goal other than itself. But this same pernicious paradox also shows up with any activity we care about: It will be even harder to support something once we've suggested that it acquires its value from something else. As the teacher and former Education Week Teacher blogger Peter Greene implored recently, "Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. ... Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs."
2. It's a bargain with the devil. The consequences I've been describing are likely to result even if X does reliably bring about Y. But if doubts should develop about the empirical connection being alleged, you're really sunk. You've bet the house on a horse that didn't come in.
In fact, the researchers Peter K. Smith and Angeline Lillard have independently suggested that assertions about academic benefits derived from play may be overstated. Likewise, the case for the "Mozart effect" has been greatly exaggerated: In the classic study on the topic, music proved beneficial only with respect to spatial reasoning, an effect, moreover, that didn't last long and was demonstrated only with college students. As for education itself, a student's school achievement is only weakly related to his or her subsequent workplace performance, and there's little correlation between a nation's average test scores and its economic vigor.
"Every time we argue that preschool pays financial dividends down the road, we’ve missed another chance to defend the value of preschool in itself."
Once such findings become widely known, the case for funding and supporting education is likely to be far weaker than if we'd never emphasized economic results in the first place. The same is true of using academic outcomes to promote play, music, or social skills.
3. It may enhance the legitimacy of whatever we're using as the justification. I've been arguing that "do this in order to get that" deprives us of an opportunity to build a constituency for "this."
(Every time we argue that preschool pays financial dividends down the road, we've missed another chance to defend the value of preschool in itself.) But we also may be bolstering the value of "that."
Such a result may not trouble us when the claim is that social and emotional learning or the arts raise achievement in core academic subjects; that's not an objectionable outcome. But if the supposed benefit is framed in terms of higher scores, we're helping to legitimate standardized tests. And as for claims that preschool, or education itself, yields economic benefits, well, do we really need to reinforce the appeal of money relative to other values in our society?
4. It may change how we pursue favored programs to increase the chance of realizing that other result. If you've marketed preschool as ultra-early vocational prep, it's more likely to be taught in a way that's developmentally inappropriate. If you've claimed that social and emotional learning can raise test scores, don't be surprised if SEL programs start to incorporate test-prep-like instruction. And a 2012 study showed that when students are persuaded to stay in school mostly so they'll earn more money later, they become less engaged with the learning itself.
Some people already know all this, of course. There are folks with a proud history of defending art for art's sake, supporting the "whole child" without feeling compelled to mention academic skills, understanding that young children aren't just future grown-ups, and insisting that you can't put a price on thinking deeply. We ought to embrace and expand these efforts rather than offer bad reasons to advance good ideas.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Monday, September 28, 2015
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Friday, September 25, 2015
SC Supreme Court sets February deadline in school-equity lawsuit
COLUMBIA
S.C. lawmakers have until February to draft legislation to improve the state’s rural schools.
That deadline was issued Thursday by the S.C. Supreme Court, less than a year after the state’s highest court ruled South Carolina is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide a quality education to children in low-income schools.
In a 3-2 order issued Thursday, the court gave Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, and the leaders of the GOP-controlled House and Senate a Feb. 1 deadline to develop a plan – including legislation – to improve those schools.
Last year, the court ordered the state and school districts to work together to come up with an improvement plan. However, Carl Epps, an attorney representing the school districts that sued the state in 1993, said the two sides needed a time-line from the court to help move along the process.
“If the (state’s) proposed remedies are inadequate to meet the children's needs, the court will intervene,” Epps said. “I'm always hopeful and optimistic that the General Assembly will do what it is required to do to uphold the Constitution.”
House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington, called the deadline in Thursday’s court order arbitrary, adding it suggested the court’s three-member majority had a “complete lack of understanding of the legislative process.”
“Clearly legislation is not passed by proposal. It's passed by actual bills that have to go through the House, through the Senate and go through the veto process,” said Lucas, an attorney. “Those are the rules that we have to play by.”
Last November, the court ruled 3-2 that the state had violated its constitutional duty to provide a “minimally adequate education” to all S.C. public-school students.
Chief Justice Jean Toal and Associate Justices Don Beatty and Kaye Hearn formed the majority in that ruling, while Associate Justices Costa Pleicones and John Kittridge dissented.
That ruling was a long sought by 39 rural school districts that sued the state in 1993, alleging they did not have enough money to educate their students.
In response, House Speaker Lucas formed a task force of legislators, business and education professionals, including representatives of the school districts that sued the state, to propose how the state should address inequities between affluent schools and poor ones.
The House-appointed task force and its subcommittees have been meeting since the beginning of the year. It plans to produce a report in January with policy recommendations.
The process, Lucas said, “has been incredibly difficult for us, and I thought we were making tremendous progress.”
The state Senate also named a committee, which has been meeting, to try to address the high court’s school-equity ruling.
Lucas said the timing of Thursday’s order could be politically motivated.
“To have this ruling come at this point in time certainly makes me wonder whether the court is worried about this issue or just creating a legacy of the chief justice prior to her term expiring.”
Toal, who retires at the end of this year, said Thursday it would be inappropriate for her, as a member of the court, to comment on Thursday’s order, adding it speaks for itself.
However, she added, the order was the court’s reaction to a request by the rural school districts. In June, those districts asked the court to create a framework to guide the state and school districts as they sought a school-equity solution.
Toal’s retirement could create a power shift on the court that could impact its involvement with the school-funding lawsuit.
Earlier this year, legislators elected Associate Justice Pleicones to succeed Toal as chief justice. Pleicones, who dissented from the court’s 2014 school-equity ruling and Thursday’s order setting deadlines, will be presiding over the court when the school-reform proposal is scheduled to reach the court for review early next year.
On Thursday, the court ordered the formation of a panel of three experts by Oct. 15 to identify the educational needs of students in the poor, rural districts that sued the state.
The General Assembly and school districts each will choose and pay for one expert on that three-member panel. State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman will be the third expert.
The governor, S.C. House and state Senate have until Feb. 1 to present the court and the school districts with a plan to address the needs of poor schools, including legislation and dates to put that plan into action.
School districts have until March 1 to respond to the state plan.
The panel of experts has until March 15 to produce a written report evaluating the state’s plan.
The Supreme Court then will review the plan and the experts’ report, and issue an order stating whether the plan is a “rational means of bringing the system of public education in South Carolina into constitutional compliance.”
Reach Self at (803) 771-8658
WHAT’S NEXT?
Oct. 15: A three-member panel of experts, including the S.C. schools superintendent, starts reviewing the needs of poor rural schools.
Feb. 1: Governor, legislators must offer a plan to the Supreme Court and school districts to address inequities in schools.
March 1: School districts respond to the state plan.
March 15: Panel of experts produces a written report evaluating the state’s plan.
Later: Supreme Court will review the state’s plan and experts’ evaluation, ruling whether the plan can improve rural schools.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Monday, September 21, 2015
Friday, September 18, 2015
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
When “school choice” leads families to trade one bad school for another
When “school choice” leads families to trade one bad school for another
See research cited: Choice, Information, and Constrained Options: School Transfers in a Stratified Educational System, Peter M. Rich and Jennifer L. Jennings
See research cited: Choice, Information, and Constrained Options: School Transfers in a Stratified Educational System, Peter M. Rich and Jennifer L. Jennings
Gaps in Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data
Gaps in Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data
Note the gender gap in earnings in the graphic, and this:
Note the gender gap in earnings in the graphic, and this:
Monday, September 14, 2015
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Monday, September 7, 2015
Evidence that evidence doesn't matter
Despite decades of overwhelming research to the contrary, political and public support remains for corporal punishment and grade retention. See below:
Keeping children back a year doesn’t help them read better
Grade retention research compiled
There is no debate about hitting children – it’s just wrong
Keeping children back a year doesn’t help them read better
Grade retention research compiled
There is no debate about hitting children – it’s just wrong
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Friday, September 4, 2015
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
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