power to the people

I am seriously tired of our policy elites. (Scroll down for observation re: "[constructivism] works well enough with middle- and upper-middle-class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives.")

Do policy elites have any idea what is actually going on inside public schools?

At all?

Or do they just sit around swapping clichés?

"Middle- and upper-middle class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives:" these are not real people. Yes, I do know a number of moms who are capable of putting dinner on the table at the same time every night, and whose kids have a regular bedtime: feats the one low-income mom I know also managed to pull off when her son was a boy. One of my pals here is so on top of things I have occasionally threatened to ship C. off to her house for a week or two or possibly three. "That will straighten you out," I say.

That mom spent this year teaching her kids math.

A child can have dinner with the family at 5; he can have bedtime at 8; he still needs explicit instruction in arithmetic.

So here's my question.

Why is it that policy elites, unions, and ed schools all have say and we don't?

I'd put money on it that if you scrolled back through the years and compared parent decisions about where and how their kids should be educated^* to the corresponding decisions made for parents by policy elites, union leaders, ed schools and all the rest of the stakeholders in the system,^** you would find that parents have consistently made the better choices.

Here's Joe Williams:

One of the most overlooked tools of modern school reform is the concept of power--who has it, who wants it, and who needs it. One reason so little changes in education is because the people who hold the cards are always the same, no matter what the popular reforms of the day involve. We have tried centralization of decision-making power and decentralization of decision-making power. We've raised standards and enacted zero-tolerance policies. We've beaten into the ground such catch phrases as "lifelong learners" and "capacity building." Yet, in all these reform efforts, parents have never really been allowed to be the ones who get to make the ultimate decision: choosing their child's school. Bureaucrats and politicians always seem to get the last word, even though parents have the best odds of making decisions that put their kids first.

Cheating Our Kids
by Joe Williams
p. 214-215

I've decided to start a collection of what do parents want stories.

This one's my favorite:

One of the most interesting aspects of FT that is rarely discussed in the technical reports is the way schools selected the models they would implement. The model a school adopted was not selected by teachers, administrators, or central office educrats. Parents selected the model. Large assemblies were held where the sponsors of the various models pitched their model to groups of parents comprising a Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) for the school. Administrators were usually present at these meetings and tried to influence parents' decisions. Using this selection process, the Direct Instruction model was the most popular model among schools; DI was implemented in more sites during FT than any other model. Yet among educrats, DI was the dark horse. Most educrats' bets would undoubtedly have been placed on any of the models but the Direct Instruction model. The model developed by the Illinois preschool teacher who didn't even have a teaching credential, much less a Ph.D. in education, was not expected by many educrats to amount to much, especially since it seemed largely to contradict most of the current thinking.

The Story Behind Project Follow Through
by Bonnie Grossen

^*on those few occasions when parents were allowed to make a decision, that is
^**note: I exclude students and parents from that category

Frederick Hess on the stealth approach

Terrific op-ed by Fred Hess (just saw Barry post it to Facebook).

In 2013, Gallup reported that 62% of Americans had never heard of the Common Core. The anti-Common Core documentary “Building the Machine,” released a few weeks ago, begins with a narrator intoning, “Before the fall of 2012, very little was known about the Common Core. The media wasn’t covering it. It wasn’t part of the national discourse. It wasn’t even on parents’ radar.”

If true, that’s a significant claim. The Common Core state standards are no small change. Forty-five states and D.C. adopted the K-12 reading and math standards, and promised to modify their tests, textbooks and teaching accordingly. In hot pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds, states hurriedly agreed to what proponents celebrated as a landmark change. The New York Times termed the Common Core “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” and Duncan said it “may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown vs. Board of Education.”

Change of this magnitude are typically hashed out in robust public debate. The Common Core was not.

In a recent study, we used the news search engine Lexis-Nexis to track media coverage of the Common Core during its five-year history. The results show just how little attention the Common Core received when it was being unveiled and adopted. In 2009, the year the draft standards were first released, there were 453 mentions of the “Common Core.” For comparison’s sake, that year, there were 2,185 mentions of Disney actor Zac Efron. Not a single reference to the Common Core mentioned “controversy,” “critic,” “opponent,” “supporter” or “defender.”

[snip]

By 2013, the issue exploded into the national consciousness, with 26,401 mentions. Of course, by that point, most states had been implementing the standards for years. Some criticism of the Common Core has been hyperbolic and rife with dubious claims. But today’s seemingly “misinformed” pushback may be mostly a case of frustrated citizens waking up to a fait accompli.
What does this all mean?

First, it’s hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that the mainstream media dropped the ball. The standards were rarely covered even as states planned to alter instruction for tens of millions of students.

Second, these results reflect a strategy of supporters seeking to stay below the radar in 2009, 2010, and 2011, while relying on the helping hand of the federal Race to the Top program. The thing is, stealth is a dubious strategy for pursuing fundamental change in 100,000 schools educating 50 million children.

Third, the democratic process relies on information. A lack of familiarity has proven to be fertile ground for all manner of rumor and uncertainty. Ultimately, informed consent is the key to policy durability.

The Common Core was foisted on students, parents and teachers with precious little open debate
BY FREDERICK M. HESS , MICHAEL Q. MCSHANE

Democracy deficit.

The profound indifference to parents and taxpayers on the part of the people who run public schools has always amazed me. Their indifference amazes me so much so that in the last couple of years I've taken to saying I'm amazed by my capacity to still be amazed.

This go-round our policy elites here in New York state decided -- consciously decided -- to give kids hard tests most of them would fail. Intentionally giving kids tests you know they will fail is an appalling idea, but our policy elites were free to make and execute that decision on their own recognizance. They didn't have to check in with John Q. Public first.

And when John Q. Public checked in with them, they didn't have to say they were sorry.

My favorite moment here in my own district -- this was pretty funny, actually -- was the standing-room-only Common Core confab at which the curriculum director told us that parents "watch TV" and "read the internet" so they don't understand Common Core.

Then she showed us a TV show about Common Core. A TV show that's on the internet.

After we watched the TV show, one of the building principals stood up and told us that her sister doesn't understand Common Core because her sister watches TV and reads the internet.

I was amazed.

Have I mentioned I don't like policy elites?

I opened up my NY Times app the other morning to discover this opinion from Richard V. Reeves, fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Center on Children and Families at Brookings:

"Let" affluent children fail is a thinkable public policy goal?

At Brookings?

The logic shoots off in all kinds of horrifying directions. E.g.: granting for the sake of argument that letting affluent children fail is a good thing, wouldn't giving them a little push off the cliff be even better?

(And how much should we pay suburban teachers for that service?)

Uggh.

I haven't been able to bring myself to read the column, especially after spotting this line:

"It is a stubborn mathematical fact that the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population."

Twenty percent is 20%, so the "bottom" 80%, a supermajority of the population, is forevermore locked into the bottom 80% unless we "let" affluent children "fail."

By that reasoning, whenever a child grows up in the top 20% and then, as an adult, descends to the top 21%, that child has "failed."

I skimmed long enough to spot the term "opportunity hoarding" and to discover that it originates with Charles Tilly, with whom I think Ed and I had dinner in Los Angeles years ago. I remember liking Professor Tilly immensely, assuming our dinner companion was in fact Charles Tilly; Ed doesn't remember. On the other hand, Ed did know Tilly, so I think it was Tilly.

Anyway, on the strength of one nonverifiable memory of a fabulous evening with Charles Tilly, I have decided that if I want to know more about opportunity hoarding, and I may want to know more about opportunity hoarding, I will go directly to the source and bypass Brookings.

In the meantime, I am now sufficiently well-versed in macroeconomics to know that the answer both to twenty percent being twenty percent and opportunity hoarding is a roaring economy and a weaker dollar.

Today's factoid: our strong-dollar policy apparently originated with Robert Rubin.

Another member of the policy elite.

Parents should pay attention to the Fed

Since the crash, I've become a Fed watcher.

I don't like what I see.

I'd been thinking for a while now that I want to start alerting ktm readers to the Fed's importance in our children's lives, but that idea, along with a hundred other things I've been thinking I want to do, has been languishing in the want-to-do queue.

Then this afternoon a quick trip to Marcus Nunes' historinhas blog spurred me to action.

So here it is.

Compare and contrast:

Many Fed officials want to start raising short-term interest rates before the economy reaches a point of full employment.

Nobody Knows Nairu, and That’s a Problem for the Fed By JON HILSENRATH | WSJ | 2/13/2015

And:



This, too:



The reason Fed officials want to raise rates before everyone who is looking for a job finds one is that the Federal Reserve "fights inflation" by keeping people out of work. Keeping people out of work keeps wages down, et voilà. Inflation fought.

By law, of course, the Federal Reserve is required to promote "maximum employment."

But the Federal Reserve has never promoted "maximum employment" in the sense of full employment, "full" being the proper synonym for "maximum."

Instead, members of the FOMC interpret "maximum" to mean 'whatever we say it means.' Typically, they see maximum employment as being 5% unemployment. That's 5% at a minimum, mind you. Their estimates of the proper level of joblessness have ranged as high as >6%.

If members of the FOMC see unemployment falling below 5%, they "tighten."

Tightening works 100% of the time. The Federal Reserve can always, without fail, stop growth in employment.

How do Fed officials decide how low is too low?

Beats me.

They don't appear to consult history (the U.S. had full employment with stable inflation in the 1960s); they don't appear to consult the experience of other nations (Japan's unemployment rate has fallen to 3.5% and we're still reading tragic stories about low inflation there); and they seem to have learned nothing from the fact that their past opinions re:maximum employment have been wrong time and time again. (Have they ever been right?)

They do what they do.

That is the long and the short of it: the Federal Reserve fights inflation by fighting full employment. That is why parents need to pay attention.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the employment-to-population ratio, which is abysmal, though a lot better than it was. (77.2% for workers aged 25-54, compared to 79.2% before the crash. The low point since the crash was 74.9% in 2011.)

I'm talking about unemployed people who want to be employed and are looking for work.

The Federal Reserve consciously and intentionally sets policy to ensure that 5% of those looking for work won't find it.


The Wage Growth Gap for Recent College Grads

The Fed's desire to "normalize" policy before we reach full employment bodes ill for the earning potential of millenials:

Median starting wages of recent college graduates have not kept pace with median earnings for all workers over the past six years. This type of gap in wage growth also appeared after the 2001 recession and closed only late in the subsequent labor market recovery. However the wage gap in the current recovery is substantially larger and has lasted longer than in the past. The larger gap represents slow growth in starting salaries for graduates, rather than a shift in types of jobs, and reflects continued weakness in the demand for labor overall.

Be sure to check out the charts.


On a related subject, a while back I mentioned that I'd been wondering why it is that, when I was a child, my father, a farmer in central Illinois, could raise four children and send us all to college on one income.

Now I know the answer to that question.

Two words: policy elites.

More on this anon.

UPDATE: Just saw this.

The Federal Reserve is not sounding like an institution that is ready to raise its benchmark interest rate in June.

Fed Appears to Hesitate on Raising Interest Rate

Good.

Over and over

To recap, the list of people with really bad ideas thus far:

• Kofi Annan
• David Brooks
• The Daily
• Barry Eichengreen
• Reed Hastings
• President Obama
• Larry Summers
• Robert Shiller

It's annoying enough that policy elites have to have bad ideas, but why do they always have to have the same bad idea?

off-topic (somewhat): Scott Sumner on targeting NGDP

Sumner: Nominal GDP Targeting Can Save the Recovery (video interview with Kelly Evans of the Wall Street Journal)

I can't remember when I first became convinced that the Federal Reserve should stop targeting the CPI PCE and start targeting NGDP (the sum of all current dollar spending in the US).

Maybe a year ago?

I bring it up today because the idea has abruptly broken through to the mainstream, and because the state of the economy will determine whether our kids have decent jobs after college (or any job at all), not to mention whether parents will have the money to pay for college in the first place. So now's the time.

I think about NGDP-targeting this way:

1.
The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: price stability and full employment. It is required to pursue both.

Since the crash, we have had unusually low core inflation, lower than average inflation during the Great Moderation, which was 2%. Update 1/10/2012: PCE inflation has averaged 1.37% over the four years 2007-2012.

We have also had a catastrophic collapse in employment, which is not becoming any less catastrophic as the years go by:

This chart shows the percent of the civilian population that is employed. Before the crash more than 63% of the civilian population was employed; since the crash we have bounced between 58 and 59%.

2.
The chart above is, literally, an image of a depression. In it we see employment drop off a cliff, hit bottom (let's hope), and stay there. The chart makes it impossible for me to call the situation we are in a "recovery," a "weak recovery," a "faltering recovery," an "anemic recovery," a "limping recovery," a "recovery experiencing strong headwinds," or any other formulation that includes the word recovery. This is not a recovery. In my book, this is a depression: a minor depression, but a depression nonetheless. It's not getting better, and I don't believe that more 20-year olds acquiring STEM degrees will fix things.

More STEM degrees may or may not be a good idea; better K-16 education (I've expanded my horizons) unquestionably is a good idea.

Neither one is going to fix the chart.

3.
Why is that?

Since I'm not an economist, I have to choose which expert(s) to believe. And, after spending probably a year of my life reading the various explanations of the crash, I'm persuaded by Scott Sumner and the market monetarists, (pdf file) which is not to say anyone else has to be persuaded, obviously. I'm writing an amateur economics post on an education blog just to let you know about market monetarism if you don't already.

I'm convinced the market monetarists are right, and I want our federal overlords policy elites to stop targeting inflation, and start targeting NGDP, as market monetarists recommend.

4.
Wages are sticky -- sticky meaning wages can go up, but not down. (Wages are sticky in one direction.)

I live in a state, New York, where public sector wages are beyond sticky; here in New York, public sector raises are sticky. I'm tuned in to public sector compensation because I've been dealing with my district's budget crisis for a few years now, but wages are sticky across the board in every sector, public and private.

Sticky wages kill jobs. Period. Sticky wages kill jobs because when profits decline, some employees have to be laid off so other employees can maintain their current salaries. In theory, when profits (or tax revenues) fall, wages could fall, too, and everyone would still have a job. Companies would bring in less money in sales, so they would pay less money in compensation, problem solved.

In reality, when profits (or tax revenues) decline, wages stay put. So people have to be laid off.

I have had a front-row seat watching this process unfold here in my town. Where sticky wages are concerned, I don't need experts to explain the world to me. Sticky wages are real, I've seen them, they take away jobs.

Update 1/10/2012: human employees replaced by wolves....

5.
Which brings me to the Fed.

The Bernanke Fed strongly opposes deflation and will do whatever it takes to prevent it.

The Bernanke Fed also strongly opposes inflation (the cure for deflation), and appears to think that if low inflation is good, lower inflation is better. It's fine to go to 1.5% "core" inflation (CPI minus food and energy). It's fine to go to 1%. Two percent is a ceiling, not a target. Update 1/102012: The new 'ceiling' appears to be 2.5%.

At some point (where?) inflation is bad because it might turn into deflation.

Also, if you go into recession for 18 months, and "lose" all the inflation you would have had during that period, the Bernanke Fed thinks that's fine.

There is no such thing as an inflation shortfall in the Bernanke Fed, it seems.

6.
Real estate.

Housing prices, overall, are at 1990 levels.

1990.

The Bernanke Fed is a deflation fighter, and yet the Bernanke Fed has presided over a 25% deflation in house prices in just 3 years time.

7.
Given what we've been through, I conclude that neither real estate nor jobs are coming back as long as the Fed continues to target inflation. If the Fed is targeting 2% (or 1%) inflation, and we need 33% inflation (roughly) just to get back to where we were, then we're looking at the new normal. Since I personally see no way jobs can be decoupled from prices, that means jobs don't come back, either. Not for years and years and years.

Update 1/10/2012: Hamilton Jobs Gap Calculator

So I'd like the Fed to stop targeting inflation and start targeting nominal GDP, which includes inflation but is not limited to inflation. The beauty of NGDP is that it combines inflation and employment in one number. Double mandate, single target.

I'll post links to the market monetarist blogs and the various endorsements and counter-endorsements later on. In the meantime, Scott Sumner began his blog, The Money Illusion, in 2009. Within the past month Goldman Sachs published a report endorsing the idea, and Cristina Romer wrote a column agreeing. Brad DeLong and and Paul Krugman have both endorsed; at National Review, Ramesh Ponnoru was an early adopter and advocate.

Update 1/10/2012: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative has the easiest-to-understand explanation of why inflation targeting has failed -- and why "level" NGDP-targeting would succeed -- that I've seen so far.

^* I've just this moment Googled a line from Brad DeLong saying 1% is the new 2%.

The civilizing mission

I found something funny in my travels yesterday.

From Paul Horton (Ed has now read Horton & says he's completely right), I discovered that the AAAS wrote standards for social studies that are based on social science. I had no idea. Seeing as how the AAAS also endorsed CMP, I question whether its social science standards would be embraced by social scientists, but who knows.

In any event, glancing through the site, I found this standard for teaching social change:

Peaceful efforts at social change are most successful when the affected people are included in the planning, when information is available from all relevant experts, and when the values and power struggles are clearly understood and incorporated into the decision-making process. 7D/H5** (SFAA)

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with Common Core as with nearly all reform efforts.

The policy elites who created and funded Common Core did not speak to parents, did not avail themselves of information "from all relevant experts," and did not trouble themselves to clearly understand and incorporate the existing values and power struggles into the "decision-making process."

So now they've got a parent uprising on their hands.

Parent and teacher.

(Which apparently is unnerving even to the richest man in the world.)

This reminds me of one of my favorite war stories. I'm sure I've told it before, but it bears repeating.

Back when the then-administration was trying to implement the "middle school model," Ed was leading the charge to head it off. I say 'leading the charge,' but in fact he was an army of one. (I was manning the Parents Forum.) All the other parents were upset, and rightly so, because the school was drastically shortening lunch break so students could attend "advisory" first thing in the morning.

In the end, the middle school model was delayed for one year -- Chris's last in the school -- and implemented the year after.

Anyway, during the board meeting at which that particular parent uprising took place, Ed sparred with our now-curriculum director^* on the question of teaching all subjects as one, which was the selling point of the middle school model as far as the administrators were concerned. Once we had the middle school model, subjects would no longer be taught in isolation.

At some point, Ed said: "I've been a disciplinary specialist for 25 years.

And RK said: "Have you ever thought maybe that's your problem?"

When Ed got home, he told me the administration was on a civilizing mission.


^*That particular story, in our school newsletter, is now inoperative. RK will remain as curriculum director. I'm very fond of RK, btw. I disagree with her on most things educational, but she's smart, determined, and often funny. Plus she's a survivor. I like survivors.

insider baseball

from Steve H:

At one underperforming high school in our state, the administration got to the point where they fired all of the high school teachers. (They wanted more money.) It recently made national news and even Obama commented on it. Only 7% of the 11th graders met minimal proficiency on the state math test. (Just today, it appears that this leverage has worked and they will come to some sort of agreement with the union.) Ironically, the superintendent of this school system was the one in charge of bringing MathLand to our schools (a different town) years ago. She left to go to this job when my son was in first grade. My son left for a private school after that year and the school started the process of switching to Everyday Math.

I feel that many of us parents are over on the sidelines with our hands raised and asking "Can we say something here?"

At a recent board meeting, when the topic of whether our teachers could 'handle' Singapore Math came up, I raised my hand and asked whether I could say something.

The Interim Director for Curriculum and Instruction said, "No!" Teachers and building principals sitting in the audience were invited to speak; parents had to follow the rules and wait until the end of the very long presentation to make 3-minute comments.

The Interim Director also told us she is recommending that we soldier on with Trailblazers because "there is no perfect curriculum." She said that several times over the course of the evening, with an air of gravitas: There is no perfect curriculum.

Also, we need a math coach, to complement the ELA "teaching learning facilitator" we have now. Plus we need to hire back the teaching-learning facilitator whose position was eliminated last year during the budget fracas.


coming soon to a school district near you

To those of you living in affluent suburban towns: this is the future. Public schools are committed to hiring tenured teachers to teach tenured teachers, and tenured curriculum specialists to "develop" curriculum. Absent tax revolts, there is no conceivable limit to the number of instructional coaches and curriculum specialists affluent schools will attempt to hire in the coming years, because there is no conceivable limit to the amount of "in-house professional development" classroom teachers require and no conceivable limit to the amount of "curriculum development" imperfect curricula require. A whole new tier of administration has been invented and is now in the process of being hired.

This story about Seattle administration tells you where we're headed. Here's Meg Diaz' report. (pdf file)

Do our policy elites have any idea this is going on? Do our newspapers and media outlets?

Drear

I've finally tuned in to Common Core a bit, mostly because I've been chatting with a Common Core person here in my town, who directed me to NYC's Tasks, Units & Student Work.

So today I took a quick look at NYC's sample ELA Tasks and Units and saw only one sample Task, across all 14 grades (Pre-K through Grade 12), that had anything whatsoever to do with fiction: Grade 9 Literacy in English Language Arts: Who Is to Blame for Romeo and Juliet’s Death.

It's always worse than you think!

Number one, Romeo and Juliet is too hard for 9th grade students to read, especially 9th grade students who've just spent 9 years reading "informational text" and writing "calls to action."

But, number two, even if 9th-grade students could read Romeo and Juliet, there is no earthly reason for anyone to undertake a "Task" that involves answering the question "Who Is to Blame for Romeo and Juliet's Death?"

Real English professors don't assign Tasks requiring students to figure out "Who Is To Blame for Romeo and Juliet's Death?" (Real English professors, in my experience, don't assign Tasks at all. They assign papers.)

Real English professors don't assign Tasks requiring students to figure out "Who Is To Blame for Romeo and Juliet's Death?" because Romeo and Juliet is a play, not a feature story in the New York Times. Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters; they don't actually exist.

Who is responsible for Romeo and Juliet's Death?

You got me.

William Shakespeare, maybe?

If this is Common Core, public school is about to turn into 13 years of SAT reading.

Thirteen years of SAT reading is nobody's idea of a good time. Let us pray that our policy elites do not manage to lengthen the school year before Common Core passes from the stage.

What actual English professors think students in English classes should write about:
Norton: Writing About Literature
Norton: Identifying Topics
English paper thesis statements 

The complete list of sample ELA tasks and units.