When Policy Meets "Art for Art's Sake"

Reading Jonah Lehrer's post about the promise of developing the ability of people (especially children) to focus, I was struck by how much it contrasts the usual rhetoric on matters of focus, especially when it comes to education. There's a lot of conventional wisdom out there about focus issues, and it consists mostly of excessive doubt or excessive sympathy. That is, most people either treat all focus issues as the upshot of bad parenting/bad-kidness or treat every ostensibly focus-based issue as the result of a disorder and beyond the control of the student. But rather than engage in this pretty fruitless back and forth, he instead highlights the evidence for various methods of improving the executive function of those students who lack focus (emphasis mine):

But here’s the good news: Executive function can be significantly improved, especially if interventions begin at an early age. In the current issue of Science, Adele Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, reviews the activities that can reliably boost these essential mental skills. 

The list is surprisingly varied, revolving around activities that are both engaging and challenging, such as computer exercises involving short-term memory, tae-kwon-do, yoga and difficult board games. Dr. Diamond also notes that certain school curricula, such as Montessori and Tools for the Mind, have also been shown to consistently increase executive function. 

Yet, despite this impressive evidence, most schools do virtually nothing to develop executive function. Even worse, education departments are slashing the very activities, such as physical exercise and the arts, that boost executive function among the broadest range of students.

Lehrer's critique of cuts here is spot on, but its interesting how rhetorically different it is from so much of the criticism you hear of such cuts. Unlike most criticism, Lehrer cites the specific value of the arts and physical education in his defense of keeping them in school curricula. Too often, you hear a defense such programs on a much less clear basis. People tend to argue that cutting such things deprives students of a fuller curriculum and the broad range of subject matter that they deserve. I certainly agree with that, but when policy makers find themselves making cuts, especially in the recent economic environment, they aren't cutting things like art and phys. ed because they are malicious bureaucrats hell-bent on the destruction of the liberal arts. Nor are they even underestimating the value of art and phys. ed. They're simply setting budget priorities and, given the fiscal constraints of the system, are forced to make choices between cutting programs they see as more essential to a child's education. So, rhetorically, if you want to make an argument for saving such programs, it's important not to overlook the utility of such programs. Now, I fully understand that a big part of the value of a liberal arts education is learning to appreciate art for arts sake. But it's important to recognize that just because the arts may have an inherent value doesn't mean they don't also have a utility value. And if you're sitting down for a budget meeting, you're going to get a lot farther with an argument based on utility than you will with one based on the squishy, feel-good value of the arts.

One version of this type of argument appeared in a weekend editorial by Claire Needell Hollander in the Times tellingly titled "Teach the Books, Touch the Heart," except this one was aimed at standardized testing. In the article, Needell Hollander laments the disappearance of high-quality literature in today's classrooms and, especially, on exams. Instead, she says, exams are beginning to feature the boring, lifeless informative texts. She explains,

Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data. But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test-preparation tutorial program. Only the highest-performing eighth graders were able to keep taking the reading classes.

Since beginning this new program in September, I have answered over 600 multiple-choice questions. In doing so, I encountered exactly one piece of literature: Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” The rest of the reading-comprehension materials included passages from watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures — passages chosen not for emotional punch but for textual complexity.

Now, it is certainly a negative thing that students have to spend more time preparing for tests and less time reading great literature. But this is hardly the fault of standardized exams. Instead, doing that seems to me to be a case of blaming the thermometer for the temperature. That is, what stops students from accessing great literature in way that all students deserve to is that far too many students still lack the requisite skills to handle such texts in a robust way. Take for example this chart from the National Center for Education Statistics based on data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy:

Given that even those adults registering as "Intermediate" in their prose literacy can only "perform moderately challenging literacy activities," it certainly seems questionable that anyone other than adults at the proficient level could handle the type of literature Needell Hollander rightly values, and it is certainly doubtful that anyone at the Basic or Below Basic level could. And, if people aren't able to handle it as adults, then they certainly weren't prepared while they were students either.

That this adjustment in the focus of the curriculum was made to compensate lacking literacy skills and not rather the result of a misguided desire to advance a crazy standardized testing regime seems to be betrayed in Needell Hollander's column itself. As she notes, "the highest-performing eighth graders were able to keep taking the reading classes." This suggests that those students with high literacy skills don't need the strict test prep in order perform well on the tests. Put another way, if you have the skills, test prep isn't going to add a lot of value to you. But, if you lack the skills, intensive test prep can produce an increased focus on gaining those literacy skills necessary to not only handle the tests, but also handle texts such as those that Needell Hollander would like to see stay on syllabi throughout the country. Sure, this may be, when executed poorly, a short-sighted, short-term way of boosting student scores. But it is crucial to see that this is both a failure of pedagogy and a symptom of the tremendous deficits students have. The response, therefore, should not be to roll-back the testing requirements that make such deficits apparent, but rather continue to focus on the methods of both policy and pedagogy that will set students up to develop the literacy skills necessary that they need to read the great books in the first place. 

Also - just as a quick PS to all of this. To my mind, one of the failings of Needell Hollander's article is that it confuses the value of exposing students to interesting and moving stories with the value of developing in students a sharp literary sense. This may seem like splitting hairs, but to me it is the difference between reading the SparkNotes version of Shakespeare and reading the actual text. Great plots are wonderful as far as they go, but the value in literature is not simply in reading an entertaining, emotional story. Instead, great literature helps us examine the created world of fiction or poetry, and instead, using skills that help us dissect more fully the tropes, diction, imagery, etc., we learn to think more clearly and profoundly about our own world. This distinction matters because students with substandard literacy skills might be able to connect with the plot of great stories, but they will struggle much more to connect with its true depth as a piece of literature. 

Go Read "The Blind Side"

I haven't seen the movie, but I finally just finished Michael Lewis's The Blind Side. It's a really tremendous read that provides a unique perspective on football, race, class and poverty with a depth and power of metaphor you rarely see in non-fiction like this. It's hard for me to do it justice here, so it's probably just worth going out and picking up the book. But, if you're into the whole brevity thing, The New York Times ran an adapted version of the Michael Oher story called the Ballad of Big Mike back when the book was about to be released. Here's a taste: 

For his first year it didn’t matter. He failed his classes and didn’t play anything. As far as the Briarcrest teachers could determine, he didn’t have a thought or a fact or an idea in his head. But then almost by accident they figured out that he needed to be tested orally, whereupon he proved to them that he deserved high D’s instead of low F’s. It wasn’t clear that he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Simpson and Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year and soon afterward the track-and-field team (throwing the discus and putting the shot). In his junior year he finally got onto the football field. 

The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so for the first six games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn’t any worse than his replacement, but he wasn’t much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike’s main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of its locker room or bus and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. “They’d see all of us,” Crone says, “and then they’d see Mike and say, ‘Oh, God.”’

Michael Lewis has something of a pattern he uses when writing, especially about sports. And it's a smart idea that he does because it's a really compelling pattern. The pattern is roughly: here's some way that talent once went unrecognized, and now let's tell the story of how it got recognized. If you've seen Moneyball you know that this is the basic structure of the plot, and that is true as well for The Blind Side. In the Blind Side, though, the story of why Michael Oher's talent went unrecognized for so long (even though it was so obvious) has a lot to do with race, class and educational opportunity. Lewis tells that story in a really interesting way and does not fail to recognize just how many kids like Michael never get their talent recognized, whether in sports or academics, because of the limitations of their environment. 


Lewis also authored a piece of this same basic structure (tremendous talent gets underestimated, and then, suddenly, properly estimated) in the New York Times about Shane Battier. It too is a story colored in interesting way by the backdrop of race and class, and whether you're interested in those things or are just a basketball fan, it's well worth your time. Here's a bit: 

Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people. “On Martin Luther King Day, everyone in class would look at me like I was supposed to know who he was and why he was important,” Battier said. “When we had an official school picture, every other kid was given a comb. I was the only one given a pick.” He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: “I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit in!” And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ‘‘Everything I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this,” he said. “What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game.”

The School and the City

So I have recently discovered a love for the 99% Invisible podcast. Roman Mars has a developed a really admirable aesthetic for the show and some deeply cool stories on the design behind everything we encounter in our daily lives, but rarely notice. But besides being greatly entertaining, 99% Invisible takes seriously the idea that design has real consequences for the quality of life of those people interacting with the design. They trace this theme through examples small and large, from the design of queues through the design of the World Trade Center. But one episode in particular caught my attention recently:
 

In this episode they explore the way the design of cities can serve to exclude or segregate various groups within that city. This is a theme that's been on my mind a lot recently. Especially having recently read Matt Yglesias's new book, "The Rent is Too Damn High," and being in the middle of Ryan Avent's book "The Gated City," of similar subject matter. In their books, Yglesias and Avent explore another kind of design, policy design, and the ways in which it subtlety shapes and distorts the cities in which we live, and as a result, the quality of life of the people living in those cities. Both see a tremendous power in the ability of cities to generate innovation, maximize productivity and just plain make people happier by providing them with more of what they like and need nearby. But both also see how the design of cities, specifically regulations that affect the supply and use of land, can lead to majorly destructive constraints on the potential of cities to make the most of those positive attributes. For Yglesias, the story is simple: artificial constraints on the housing supply (such as minimum parking regulations or height restrictions on buildings) drive up the cost of rent. This is a problem because these regulations not only straightforwardly prevent more people from moving to the city (that is, if you build less places for people to live, less people will live there), but also do indirectly by pricing less affluent people out of the market. Most people know this process of rising land value pushing out poor people as gentrification. (For a funnier explanation of gentrification check out Michael Che subtlely here.) But, as Yglesias explains in the book, this isn't just an immutable law of city physics. Part of what exacerbates the problem of gentrification is that regulations that constrain the supply of housing artificially raise rents. And, he explains on his blog, equality of access requires abundance.

So what does all of this have to do with schools and poverty? Well, as it turns out, schools have to pay rent too. (Or at least have to purchase land. Either way, they're affected directly by the artificially high cost of land.) But also it seems fairly obvious that the problems of gentrification make people uncomfortable because of the exclusion it implies. Economic exclusion is just one type of exclusion that can be embedded in our cities, as the 99% Invisible episode makes clear. And exclusion in schooling is called segregation. Granted, this is de facto segregation, but it's segregation nonetheless, and it leads to all sorts of inequitable outcomes for students. This became really clear to me recently when I was looking at some maps of DC recently on the tremendously cool Radical Cartography site. Here are a few maps that show the effects of such exclusions.

First, you can see that there clearly is a divide in DC based on income (the darker the pink you see, the higher the income; the darker the blue you see, the lower the income):

Second, as you can see, this divide is also disproportionately one of race: 

 

Third, you can see this divide also tracks very much with educational outcomes, as measured by attainment of a bachelors degree. 

As is pretty clear, if you live in deep northwest, you have a college degree or will someday get one. If you live almost anywhere else, you don't. This is pretty obviously a big problem for those of us interested in seeing a large portion of the population receiving a high quality education. But in an economy where low-skill labor jobs are increasingly disappearing (highly recommended link, by the way), this is pretty clearly a major economic problem too. Matt Yglesias also recognizes in his book that the disparity in educational outcomes implies that some people currently are receiving a high-quality education. Which raises the question of why poor families don't just move to the areas where the best educational opportunity is. Well, as you might have guessed, it's because the rent is too damn high:

Many parents, of course, do relocate. It's common for affluent young couples to move out to the suburbs when their children reach appropriate age. "Everyone knows" that poor families can't afford to do this. But we only rarely ask why it is that poor families can't afford to move to nice suburbs. It's not because construction costs are higher in the suburbs. It's because it's frequently illegal to build the kind of dense apartment buildings that could accomodate lower-income families.

This is all just to say that for all the bluster today about the importance of school choice, education reforms often focus on increasing choice by increasing the supply of schools available to students, especially to those attending the worst schools. But, in addition to building charter schools at a dizzying pace, much of which often allows sub-par quality charter schools to enter the market, education reformers might take a second look at the promise of increasing choice by promoting density.

Lobbying and Education

So I recently saw the above video of Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman discussing the process and strategy of pushing education legislation in Illinois (comments for which he subsequently apologized) and I, as I think were a lot of people, was dismayed. It may just be a factor of the truism that in policy-making as in sausage-making, it's never easy to see the process, but my initial reaction was to be repelled by how much this seemed like a clear instance of moneyed interests bullying the legislative process. And I haven't really changed my mind on that fact. It certainly is a clear example of how money and lobbying influences politics. But, I think it might be easy to take from this (and I have little doubt that many did) that this is a clear sign of the corrupt, corporate nature of reform movement, and that's not the right conclusion.

Instead, what I think we're seeing is not anything particular to the reform movement but is instead just the nature of current system of funding elections and the lobbying that has grown up as a result of that system. Maybe you could accuse Stand of playing that game more cunningly than the unions on the other side, but it's important to recognize that they're not playing a different game. Indeed, teachers unions are one of the biggest powerhouses in this game. OpenSecrets.org from the Center for Responsive Politics has put together a list of "Heavy Hitters" or the biggest donors to political campaigns over the years 1988-2012 and the two major teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), rank 6 and 11 on that list, respectively.

I've recently been very caught up in the work of Larry Lessig on campaign finance. He has a new book out, called Republic, Lost. His work is well worth your time (see links below) and his basic thesis is that the influence of lobbyists, which demands both the attention and time of our congress (with, he says, senators and representatives spending between 30% and 70% of their time fundraising), is the root issue facing our nation (and distorting our policies) today. He certainly has me convinced, and I think most people react the way they do to instances like the one in the video because of how intuitively misguided this type of undue influence feels. What we see is not our legislators engaging in a sober, rational investigation of the best course of action to promote a healthy and thriving society, but rather a process dictated by forming alliances based on campaign contributions and personal vendettas (often connected to leglisators' follow-through, or lack thereof, with advancing the interests of interest groups, which is expected implicitly with every contribution given). As Lessig says, quoting John Edwards, in an appearance on Reason.TV, there's a big difference between making an argument to a jury and passing out $100 bills to the jurors. Because we all sense that so easily, we quickly recoil when we see the latter happening in our legislative process. And rightfully so.

What is perhaps most interesting about this process, though, is how it affects education in ways you might not even expect. Take for example this article from Slate describing the influence of lobbyists for King's Dominion Theme Park in Virginia in creating a law to prevent schools in Virginia from opening before labor day. Why you ask?:

It seems that since 1986, a Virginia law has barred schools from opening before Labor Day because it’s bad for the amusement park industry...The Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association, which represents Kings Dominion and other amusement parks, contends that shortening the summer tourism season “would forgo spending by about $274 million and decrease wages and benefits by about $104 million.” Last week the director of government affairs for the Association, Katie Hellbbush, clarified that "We’ve never seen any kind of difference in academic achievement in terms of starting before Labor Day. But studies have shown a distinct change in tourism."

While Hellbbush may have a point that the difference between August 22 and September 8 may be no big deal, this fails to recognize the huge difference that is seen between schools that extend the school year by more considerable margins (especially in low income communities) and schools that maintain the regular-length school year. And as the battle to change the norm of school-year length on a broader scale continues, it's unnerving to discover the influence of such a seemingly petty thing as the well-being of amusement parks. 


Lessig links:
Repulic, Lost in video form
Daily Show Interview: Part 1 Part 2
NYT OpEd
Good Soul Corruption: Part 1 Part 2
His new blog.

Not everyone has the level of responsibility it takes to owe Tiffany's half-a-million dollars...

Having talked at length about poverty and rhetoric surrounding it, I bow to the masters over at the Daily Show, especially the always wonderful Larry Wilmore:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Whose fault is poverty?

Watch How Would Payroll Tax Extensions Be Funded? on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.

So, while the title of this post promises a lot more than I can really deliver, I've been meaning to write about poverty for awhile now. And, as the rhetoric around Occupy Wall Street has been heating up and budget questions have forced the political discussion to questions of poverty and wealth, it has been increasingly difficult to avoid the type of rhetoric that reveals a lot about the broader society's views on what life in poverty is like and who is at fault when someone finds themselves in poverty. But I was watching the Newshour the other night when I saw the above piece and was struck by these comments of Senator Barrasso: 

GWEN IFILL: What about means-testing government health benefits, unemployment compensation and food stamps? Are you hitting the people who will be hurt the most? 

SEN. JOHN BARRASSO: Well, we heard from Sen. Coburn here today that there are people actually on unemployment who make huge amounts of money, and as well as those on -- on food stamps. And we want to see exactly -- I want to see exactly what the language is there.

So what really strikes me about this (beside the heavy mention of my hometown of Scranton) is the denial of the true state of poverty in this country and what it means for the families who live under the strain it creates. Felix Salmon had a recent post on the current state of the social safety net  that enlightens this a bit: 

It’s true that the poverty rate for children has come down — but it’s still unconscionably high. There are 13.6 million children under the age of 18 living in poverty — that’s 18.2% of all the children in the country. 

And most egregiously, even after taking into account food stamps and the like, 5.4% of the population — and fully 8.6% of the Hispanic population — is living on less than half the poverty level.

What does that mean, in practice? Here are the new poverty levels: 

 

To live on less half the poverty level means that a family of four — two adults and two children — would have a total household income of no more than $12,172 per year. Call it $1,000 per month. And that’s after accounting for aid from the government. 

With all respect to Senator Coburn, whose presentation Senator Barrasso cites, even if there are some people on unemployment and food stamps who make significant amounts of money, the evidence that Salmon presents show that there are huge numbers of people who do not make anywhere near "huge amounts of money" in our country, and any way of paying for government debts and programs that weighs heavily on those people is likely to cause a great deal of suffering. Let's match that plan against the administration's proposed tax hikes on those making over $1 million. As Gene Sperling explains of the program in the same Newshour piece: 

It asks those who make over $1 million, only 300,000 Americans, to pay a little more, about 3 percent more a year in the next -- in the coming years, so that we can give this type of tax relief, and not have the deficit go up by a single penny.

Let's put aside the seeming inconsistency of Barrasso's claim that it's alright to cut social safety net programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits because people being assisted those programs are actually secretly pretty well off with his view that it's not alright to raise the tax rate on those American's who are making more than $1 million by 3 percent (For a really great commentary on this type of argument, see Jon Stewart from back during the Wisconsin collective bargaining debates). 

What's clear, beyond issues of fairness, is that the impact of implementing these different plans for paying for programs like the payroll tax extension will be vastly different. And, it seems clear to me, that a 3 percent increase on Americans making over $1 million will not cause suffering. It may cause some families to change their spending habits a bit, but compared to the impact of cuts on families already squeezing to live on close to $1000/month for whom such cuts might mean children eating less or walking to school in winter without a jacket or any one of the many important things that separate suffering from not suffering. This is just another way of saying that the same amount of money has different value to two people on different ends of the poverty and wealth spectrum. If your monthly salary is $1000, gaining another $1000/month doubles your salary. But if your monthly salary is $83,000,  an extra $1000/month is a drop in the bucket as a percentage of your salary. 

But more important than the math of the thing is what you're likely to spend that money on (or whether you're going to spend it at all). If you only make $1000/month there are probably still a lot of necessities that you are not spending money on and that would make your life significantly better if you were able to spend on them. If you're making $83,000/month you likely have very few necessities to spend that money on that will make large differences in their quality of life. So in a certain sense that extra $1000 is much more valuable to the person on the low end than it is to the person on the high end. But also, from the perspective of stimulative effect, the person making less money seems to me way more likely to spend that money because they're spending on necessities than the person who has those necessities already taken care of. (Admittedly, I'm sure there is a lot of economic work on this, and I am not really aware of it, so please feel free to leave links or responses in comments.)

There is another element to the discussion of poverty that is a bit troublesome to me, beyond the widespread underestimation of how extensive the problem really is. That is the question of what role the decisions and personal qualities of those in poverty contribute to their own impoverishment. Recently Tyler Cowen and Matt Yglesias had a bit of a back and forth on this recently, and Cowen represented the libertarian camp that wants to see more emphasis on personal responsibility when it comes to discussions of poverty:

How often will a progressive stress that the poor should develop greater conscientiousness rather than looking to government support? Many progressives are genuinely unaware of how unusual a moral code they often are communicating and celebrating, if only implicitly.

But for as much such a view on the effects of social welfare programs might seem intuitive or logical, I remain totally unconvinced that it's actually the case that a lack of personal responsibility is really what's at work in driving most of what keeps people in poverty. No doubt there are irresponsible poor people, but that shouldn't be confused as knock down evidence that poor people are irresponsible. After all, there are plenty of irresponsible rich people, and often enough that irresponsibility doesn't lead them to being poor.

Rather, I think the right way of framing this is that poor people have to face a lot more high-stakes decisions to be responsible for. This idea was explored recently in an article by John Tierney on the work of Roy Baumeister regarding will power:

Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.

Basically, when you have a lot of money, certain decisions are less high-stakes or simply do not exist for you. Budgeting is a much more labor intensive process when you have to do it consistently for things that are absolutely necessary. And, because the strain of that decision-making process is pretty considerable and there is limited mental energy to exercise the self restraint which serves as the base of personal responsibility, poor people aren't so much bad at exercising personal responsibility as it is they are asked to do a lot more of it.

And this has profound effects on other, comparatively less important decisions that nevertheless drive a lot of people's attitudes about the decision-making capacity of low-income people. Tierney explains:

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget.

 While certainly this type of issue is not the whole story on poverty, but in the discussions I hear, these effects of poverty are rarely discussed. But when it comes to people's judgments of the poor information such as this is crucial. Because no doubt when people make statements like Senator Barrasso's, they are given the rhetorical license to do so not only by the superficial question of whether or not the economic need is actually there (that is, do they already make "huge amounts of money"), but also by the underlying assumptions about whether or not the poor are deserving.

How does this all relate to education? Well, when poor kids come to school, they not only face the deficits of having parents who come from lower educational backgrounds, but they also face these same questions about their own personal responsibility. And it affects their outcomes as well.

Admittedly, this is a hugely complex question, but as with most such questions of huge complexity, Planet Money has an enlightening perspective on these matters that, more than anything else, gives a clear sense of all the obstacles someone in poverty faces. Check out their podcast The Art of Living on the Poverty Line and When a Dead End Job Isn't a Dead End.

The best way to raise scores is to teach students.

Jonetta Rose Barras has a piece in the recent Washington City Paper education issue that, despite some seriously disconcerting generalizations about middle class black families in DC, is a pretty interesting look at what’s happening at schools on Capitol Hill. Still, the article is sloppy in its discussion of the socio-economic integration (or lack thereof) that is taking place on the Hill and the supposed ethical obligations of parents in such neighborhoods:

"But the real culprit is the flight-not-fight mentality prevalent in the black middle class. Experts have long complained that such departures lead to starving neighborhood schools of the brightest students. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that test scores of children in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, like Wards 7 and 8, trail those of their counterparts in Ward 3. It didn’t mention, however, that many of those Ward 3 students are, in fact, upper- or middle-class African Americans from outside that Upper Northwest community."

I think this is an important example of how easy it is to get tangled up in the complexities of education policy. There’s a bunch going on in this paragraph. For starters, the “flight-not-fight mentality” that Barras posits underscores how intertwined housing policy is with school policy. (For more on that, check out this Matt Yglesias piece on the awesome new Atlantic Cities site.) But, putting that aside for a second, Barras also seems to use as the foundation of her argument the notion that parents who decide to take advantage of the District’s school choice opportunities are “starving neighborhood schools of the brightest students.” In the process, Barras misses another crucial nuance of education policy: the idea of adding value to students. In Barras’ diagnosis of the main problem facing neighborhood schools in less affluent wards is essentially one of recruitment and retention. That is, because the most affluent (and consequently, the highest achieving) students are fleeing their neighborhood schools, the scores that neighborhood schools should “deserve” to have coming out of their own schools are going to Ward 3 instead. 
        It’s important to recognize that this is in no way an argument about the quality of education that is taking place at these schools. Essentially, it discounts the value of schools altogether. Instead of saying that schools are (at least in part) responsible for taking students from where they are academically and teaching them to a level of proficiency or advanced proficiency, Barras argues that there is a limited (and static) supply of high-scoring students in the DC and the allocation of those students to different wards is totally screwy. Further compounding the seeming injustice of this inequitable allocation of students is the fact that so many high-scoring students that test in Ward 3 live in Ward 7 & 8 and therefore their high scores in some sense belong to those schools.
        But this is a totally extraneous argument to be having. Students’ ability to achieve certain scores is, of course, not static at all and the main work of schools is not to recruit and retain those high scorers. Although there is no doubt that schools that have a preponderance of students with previously high achievement have a much easier job to do in keeping those students at high-achieving levels, what’s causing schools in Ward 7 & 8 to struggle is not that there high-scorers are leaving. Instead, what’s causing high-scorers to leave is that their neighborhood schools have failed so many students for so long. Now, of course, as those high achieving students leave, the benefits of the peer effects that such students bring with them disappears, and I would not fault Barras for lamenting that fact. However, even if her argument were based on the idea that the loss of these peer effects is a huge factor compounding the difficulty of lower-achieving schools, the correct conclusion does not seem to me to be to accuse the parents of students who are leaving their neighborhood schools of shirking their responsibility to their community. Instead, it seems to just expose a huge vulnerability of such schools that might otherwise be obscured somewhat by peer effects. If schools aren’t able to add value to students who aren’t getting great scores, then they probably weren’t teaching very much to the kids who would naturally have scored high on tests. To me, the first priority in such a situation would not be to bring back the peers, but to take a good hard look at the teaching that happens there.
        Now, I want to be clear that while I think peer effects are an important part of understanding the vicious and virtuous cycles that drive scores in the worst and best schools, they are far from as important as my most charitable reading of Barras’ argument would suggest. I tend to think that peer effects aren’t really what she’s discussing, though. I think it’s much more likely that she’s mounting an argument about who has the right to retain and take credit for the highest achieving students and how the individual choices of families impact this.
        Putting aside the policy issues, from an ethical perspective this message to parents that they owe it to their community to keep smart kids in failing or struggling schools seems amiss. I'm not certain I'm ready to commit to the idea that what people owe to their local community ought to be construed as an ethical obligation, but I will certainly concede that communities as a whole are bettered by active participation of community members who feel that they have a stake in the local community. Still even if you decide that your commitment to your community is an ethical matter, it's definitely not the only ethical concern people have to contend with. One of those ethical obligations is to provide your children with a good education that will promise them optimal life prospects. And, when two ethical obligations compete to guide your actions (for example, when your obligation to your community competes with your obligation to your child and his or her education), the more important of the two ought to prevail. Ultimately, parents do (and, I would argue, ought to) feel a stronger pull in the direction of their ethical obligation to give their child the best possible education and will act accordingly and they shouldn't be faulted for this.

As a parting shot on this matter, one quote in particular stuck out to me as provocative, but never explored or explained by the speaker or Barras. Barras quotes Daniel Holt as saying "Economic integration is the quickest way in our lifetimes to make schools better." This is a very thorny matter, and raises the question of whether we want school reform to happen in the quickest way or in the most effective and long lasting way. Personally, I'd go with the latter, but in reform circles you hear a lot of talk about "urgency" that tends to reject in principle the notion that doing what's best and doing what's quick ever exist in a strict dichotomy. But I think if you choose to ignore the fact that efficacious reforms take time you do so at considerable peril. In any case, I hope to write more about economic integration soon, but for a really smart and important post about the subject, check out Sara Mead here. 

Parking Lot

My apologies for not writing much of late. Been quite busy. Lots of stuff coming soon, though. In the mean time, here's some reading for you:

David Foster Wallace ruins everything. (NYT Mag)
"At 20 I congratulated myself on my awareness of the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, the arbitrariness of critical proclamations, the folly of received wisdom. I pored over the Deconstructionists and the French feminists and advocated, in complete seriousness, the overthrow of language. (Also, the patriarchy.) Then I went to law school and was forced to confront serious practical and ethical questions — Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, and Roe v. Wade — that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida."

Your favorite quotes are probably made up. (NYT)
"Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: 'Be the change you wish to see in the world.' When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like ... a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug."

Did you know that Michelle Bachmann started a charter school? (New Yorker)
"'The minutes of the school’s board meetings show that Bachmann, who was a member of the board, and her fellow-administrators repeatedly violated that rule. The C.E.O. of New Heights was Dennis L. Meyer, an evangelical-Christian activist and former schoolteacher who ran a prison ministry. At one of the first meetings, on July 20th, Meyer set the tone for how the school would be run: “Denny encouraged the board to do things and move forward not because we ‘think’ it should be done a certain way, but because God wants us to.'"

Don't go to grad school. (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

"Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" (The Chronicle, June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from pursuing Ph.D.'s in the humanities by telling them what I had learned about the academic labor system from personal observation and experience. It was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone themselves." 

(Also check out Felix Salmon with an interesting chart on Law School salaries and an even more interesting chart on the overall value of advanced degrees.) 

It's really depressing that these two Larry Lessig videos only have 355 & 245 views on youtube. That's not just because I've been pushing them excessively on Facebook, but also because they're really good. Luckily, he has a book on the subject coming out tomorrow. (Apropos of all that, check out which of your Senators and Representatives are receiving money from whom.)