Dr. Raymond, Please Meet Mr. Kenneth Boulding

Wikipedia describes Kenneth Ewart Boulding as “… an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. “ Indeed, Ken Boulding was all of those things and many more. At the University of Michigan in the 1950-60s, he founded the General Systems society with Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Born in Liverpool in 1910, he was educated at Oxford (Masters degree).

His textbook, Economic Analysis (1941) was virtually the introduction to Keynesianism to American academics. He never obtained a doctorate, though surely he never felt the want of one due to the many honorary doctorates he received. In his long career, he served as president of the Amer. Econ. Assoc. and the AAAS, among other organizations. He died in Boulder in 1993.

I was very lucky to be situated at the University of Colorado when Boulding left Michigan in 1967 to join the Economic Department at Boulder. I had joined the faculty there in 1966. Within a few years the word spread that this new fellow in Economics was someone to listen to. Twice, in the early 1970s, I sat through his undergraduate course in General Systems. The undergraduates had no idea how lucky they were; I was enthralled. Boulding was a Liverpudlian, and that coupled with a pronounced stammer made listening to him lecture extremely demanding. But somehow the effort produced greater concentration. I can recall so many of the things he said though more than 40 years have passed. “”The invention of the correlation coefficient was the greatest disaster of the 19th century, for it permitted the subtitution of arithmetic for thinking.”

From 1969 through 1971, I was editing the Review of Educational Research for the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In the office, I enjoyed a few small privileges in connection with the 1971 Annual Meeting. For one, I could invite a speaker to address the assembled conventioneers. I invited Boulding. An expanded version of his talk was published in the Review of Educational Research (Vol. 42, No. 1, 1972, pp. 129-143). I have never read anything else by an economist addressing schooling that equals it.

Here is the merest sampling of what he wrote:

Schools may be financed directly out of school taxes, in which case the school system itself is the taxing authority and there is no intermediary, or they may be financed by grants from other taxing authorities, such as states or cities. In any case, the persons who receive the product-whether this is knowledge, skill, custodial care, or certification-are not the people who pay for it. This divorce between the recipient of the product and the payer of the bills is perhaps the major element in the peculiar situation of the industry that may lead to pathological results. (pp. 134-135)

Boulding originated the notion of the “grants economy” in which A grants a payment to B who delivers a service or product to C. Of course, this turned on its head the paradigm used by most economists, who imagine C paying B for services or products. When Boulding referred to this grants economy underlying schooling as leading to “pathological results,” he was referring to the fact that the schooling industry is “not normal,” i.e. does not follow the course of classical economic models. In the years ensuing since Boulding’s early forays into this notion, the grants economy has become increasingly important to understanding a nation’s economy.

Boulding was considered a bit of a rebel. David Latzko wrote of Boulding that “The narrow bounds of the economics discipline could not contain his interests and talents.” Perhaps this accounts for why many traditional economists have not followed him where reality leads. Perhaps this is why Dr. Margaret Raymond could pronounce so recently that “And it’s the only industry/sector [schooling]where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.” In fact, the “market mechanism” fails to work in many sectors.

But back to Dr. Raymond. Margaret Raymond is the head of the Hoover Institution’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes. As key researcher in charge of the first big CREDO study of charter schools that dropped on the charter school lobby with a big thud: charter schools no better than old fashion public schools, some good, some really bad. And then more recently, CREDO under Raymond’s direction conducted a study of charter schools in Ohio, a locale that has known its problems attempting to keep charter schools out of the newspapers and their operators out of jail. What did this second CREDO charter school study find? Charter schools in Ohio are a mess.

All of this bad news for the charter school folks caused Dr. Raymond to go before the Cleveland Club and confess thusly:

This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s the only industry/sector [schooling] where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.

Of course, it is positively absurd to think that schooling is the only “industry” in which free markets just don’t work. And Dr. Raymond didn’t give up entirely on the free market ideology for education — she would probably have to find a professional home outside the Hoover Institution if she did. She went on to tell the Cleveland Club that more transparency and information for parents will probably do the trick.

Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement.

So parents just aren’t smart enough to be trusted to make choices in a free market of schooling, and they need more information, like test scores, I presume. I’ll leave Dr. Raymond at this point, and recommend that she and her associates at the Hoover Institution spend a little more time with Kenneth Boulding’s writings.

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Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of the National Education Policy Center, Arizona State University, nor the University of Colorado Boulder.

Mirabile Dictu! State Departments of Education are Political!

Brad McQueen is a teacher in Tucson, Arizona. He’s suing the State Superintendent of Instruction. I’ll try to make a long story short.

McQueen was appointed to the Department of Education standardized testing committee. The State Board of Education adopted the Common Core in 2010. But McQueen spoke out against the Core in a book entitled The Cult of Common Core. And he followed that up with some negative comments about Common Core in a podcast on a Tucson radio station and in an article in a Phoenix newspaper. This proved to be a little too much insubordination for the Superintendent’s office, according to emails flying around between Associate Superintendents: “FYI regarding a teacher named Brad McQueen. He is on a roll criticizing AZCCRS [Arizona College & Career Ready Standards]. … just thought you might want to check your list of teacher teams [from which teachers are selected to serve on committee].” The Deputy Associate Superintendent to whom the email was addressed replied that a note had been placed in McQueen’s file. Shortly thereafter he was uninvited from Department of Education committees. McQueen wants a) the negative notes purged from his file, b) to be reinstated to the committees on which he served, and c) attorney fees.

McQueen’s case struck a resonate chord in my memory. Back in the 1990s, I was invited to serve on an AZ Department of Education committee. Our committee was to advise the Department on a test that would be given to persons seeking a teaching credential in the state of Arizona. The contract for test development had been let to a company in New Hampshire. The test was a paper & pencil multiple-choice test in which the examinee was presented with a classroom situation and asked to pick the best action to take. We warned to company about the arbitrariness of cut-score problem, to no avail; they assured us that the Angoff Method would be used. That this assurance gave us no comfort was passed over with no comment.

But let’s back up. There were 6 or 8 of us on the Technical Advisory Committee. The Chairperson was a professor from the University of Nevada Las Vegas who specialized in measurement. He flew into Phoenix in the morning for the meetings and flew home that evening; round trip air-fares between Phoenix and Las Vegas in those days were about $70. Two or three representatives of the New Hampshire company were present at every meeting of our committee.

Our committee eventually arrived at the point where we said that we could not vouch for the technical adequacy of the proposed test unless a validity study were done. In other words, let’s have observers spend some time in the classrooms of certified teachers, rate their performance, and then see if the paper-pencil test can distinguish the better teachers from the poorer one. This position taken by the committee did not sit well with the people from New Hampshire. It would cost money — money not written into the contract. But our committee stood firm, for a while.

Before the next meeting of the committee could be called, we members received a letter from the Associate Superintendent of Instruction. Our services would no longer be needed. We were being dismissed. The reason? The Department could no longer afford to fly the Chairperson into town from Las Vegas. In point of fact, the Department was spending more money on bagels and coffee for the committee’s breaks than they were spending on the chairperson’s plane ticket.

Shortly thereafter, word spread that the Department had reconstituted the technical advisory committee under the chairmanship of a professor from East Lansing, Michigan. None of the previous committee members was serving on this new committee, and this new chairman’s views on high-stakes testing were known to be much less critical than ours.

No one sued. Life went on. I suspect that most of us simply accepted the fact that this is how things are done in an office in which the head is the third highest elected position in the state government. Maybe we should have reacted how Brad McQueen has done, twenty years later.

Another BASIS Charter School Mother Speaks

I received this feedback from a mother of a former student at a BASIS charter school. The note was stimulated by an earlier posting on this blog about problems at BASIS schools. I haven't asked the person's permission to post her thoughts here, so they will appear anonymously.

Dear Dr. Glass:
This morning, I read your post of Jennifer McDowell's encounter with BASIS, Inc., Charter School. My daughter, who is an exceptionally gifted student but also has moderate asthma, attended the school for three years. I was so relieved to read, for the first time, a more realistic viewpoint of the school, as for the last two years, I have tried to explain to others how the national high school ranking for the school as published by U.S. News is only reflective of test scores for a much smaller student body than in most public schools, and the ranking also does not reflect quality of education for the majority rather than the minority. My daughter currently attends a larger school, however, the school's sole purpose is not to compete in the number of AP tests and scores the students take and develop the school's curriculum based on those AP tests, but rather on how to best educate the entire, and larger student body that is very diverse in many ways including physical and intellectual abilities. Thank you for your post.

Sincerely.

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Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of the National Education Policy Center, Arizona State University, nor the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dear Teacher, You Are Not the Most Important Thing in the Universe

The Arizona Republic has a very conservative Editorial Board for a very conservative newspaper in a very conservative state. So when they address the subject of teacher preparation, it’s no surprise that they parrot folk wisdom about schools and teachers.

In addressing Arne Duncan’s new guidelines on teachers colleges, the Editorial Board strikes its closing notes by perpetrating one of the more pernicious myths about teachers and schools.

Plenty of research has come to a common-sense conclusion: Nothing is more important to the success of a student than a highly qualified teacher. But we don’t have enough of them, nor will we as long as teacher colleges are not held accountable.

Now that’s a statement that packs a big load of deceit into just 43 words. First, it’s highly doubtful that the Arizona Republic Editorial Board has made itself familiar with “plenty of research” about education. Second, in their review of “plenty of research,” apparently their faith in the ability of test scores to hold teachers colleges “accountable” was never shaken?* But worst of all is the repeat of that tired wheeze that nothing is more important than a teacher.

What makes the All-Important-Teacher myth so pernicious is that teachers themselves occasionally and the general public usually take it as a compliment when in fact it is an attack on teacher tenure and professional autonomy.

The facts of the matter are that teachers are not the most important thing determining what a child gets out of school. What a child brings to school is much more important. Jim Coleman showed this in 1966 in Equality of Educational Opportunity, and though he softened his position slightly in 1972 when he accorded a bit more important to schooling that he had 6 years prior, out-of-school influences remained dominant in determining how much kids learned during their years in school. Parents, home and neighborhood conditions, physical health, language use and language complexity in the home, whether the student lives in a psychologically and physically healthy environment with access to competent medical care, access to books, games and activities that prepare the student for school, and even genetic endowment can greatly contribute to or restrict a child’s development. What walks in the door on Day #1 has more to do with what leaves on Day #2340 (180 X 13) than what transpires during the few hours of students' lives that they are in the classroom, attentive, and capable of absorbing what that teacher is talking about.

Teachers are wonderful human beings. For many children, teachers are the most caring and competent individual whom they will encounter during their lifetime. But teachers cannot undo the damage inflicted on youngsters by a society in which nearly half of all births are to unwed mothers and in which more than 20% of children live below the poverty level (income below $23,000 for a family of 4).

So, my fellow teachers, beware. Don’t fall for the false compliment that you are so important — so important that you should be fired if your students’ test scores are lagging behind, so important that your school’s graduation rate is a moral and a civil rights issue, so important that you should be replaced by an inexperienced liberal arts major on a two-year resume building junket.

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*Just take a look at Bruce Baker’s analysis of the absurdity of judging teachers by their students’ test scores.

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Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of NEPC, Arizona State University, nor the University of Colorado Boulder.