An Out of Context Quote from Jay Greene That Still Pretty Much Sums Up Jay Greene

Right here:

"But just because there could be bad tests or mis-uses of tests in teacher evaluations doesn’t mean that the use of tests for that purpose is inherently flawed."

Actually, if you use a bad test, or you mis-use that test, it does pretty much mean that the process is inherently flawed. Let's try changing a few words:

Just because there could be BAD FLOUR or ROTTEN EGGS in THE MAKING OF WAFFLES doesn't mean that the use of BAD FLOUR AND ROTTEN EGGS for MAKING WAFFLES in inherently flawed.

or,

Just because there could be RAGING ALCOHOLICS or THE CLINICALLY DEAD in THE COCKPIT OF YOUR AIRPLANE doesn't mean that the use of RAGING ALCOHOLICS AND THE CLINICALLY DEAD for FLYING AIRPLANES in inherently flawed.

All that said, a Jay Greene/Diane Ravitch slapfight could be fun to watch for a month or so.

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Shenanigans on Jay Greene

There’s a blurb in the May 7th Education Week on a new study done by the frequently wrong Jay Greene. His analysis of his own report:

“Our results from evaluating Florida’s McKay program provide additional evidence that rather than being harmed, public schools respond to the challenge of exposure to school choice by improving the education they provide.”

See? School choice works, vouchers are good for kids, the free market will indeed solve all, and Keynes deserves to be in the same pantheon of education gods as Dewey, Kozol, and Vgotsgy. But wait a minute....

McKay Scholarships are available for students with individualized education programs, which are required under federal law for students with disabilities. The vouchers let recipients attend public schools of their choice or private schools that accept the vouchers.

Are you getting a sense, then, of why schools that have a lot of kids leaving with McKay vouchers might be seeing an increase in test scores?

I’m sure that if I bothered to read the report (The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence From Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program) I’d find an awful lot about isolating variables and controlling for factors and ANOVA and the many other statistical tricks that can be used to make a point, but I have a feeling that the gut-level instinct is all I really need on this one.

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Hold 'em........back?

Jay Greene is one of the big talking heads in education; I've discussed his work here before on merit pay and his most recent work regarding how schools are named. He's now turned his eye to retention policies, with a non-typical result:

Students retained for a year under Florida’s test-based promotion policy slightly outperformed students with similar test scores who were promoted to the next grade in previous years, according to a study published in the September issue of Education Finance and Policy.

That finding contradicts previous research, which has suggested that holding students back for a year can have harmful academic and social effects. The study’s authors, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters from the University of Arkansas, attribute the difference to the use of an objective promotion policy, rather than a subjective one based on teachers’ and administrators’ recommendations.

The study also found that students who were retained continued to make achievement gains in subsequent years. The researchers studied data from 2002 to 2005 from the Florida Department of Education on public school students in grades 3-10. The state’s promotion policy was started in 2002.

You can find the entire study at the Journal of Education Finance and Policy here.

I can't really judge without reading the entire report, but one wonders if a slight increase is worth the money that it costs to educate the child for another year. The last piece I bolded, about the retained kids continuing to make progress from year to year, also could be a bit misleading--are they progressing at the same rate as the other kids in their peer group, the kids in their class, or their grade as a whole?

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Jay Greene Needs a Hobby

Jay’s got one of those names that pop up as regular as the sun shines when you read as much education material as I do. Perhaps best known for his 2005 book Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools and Why it Isn't So, Greene's a naysayer, but a well-spoken one.

Last week Greene released his latest report through the Center for Civic Innovation and the Manhattan Institute. It’s not good. I don’t mean not good in the, “We’re out of beer? That’s not good!” sense, either. I mean it’s really...not....good. He takes a trend and tries to make it mean something, but it’s wasted effort that I think will be forgotten before July gets finished.

The gist is that Greene and a pair of graduate assistants studied the trends in naming schools in seven states over the past century, and there’s a lot less naming the school after a historical figure and a lot more naming the school after geography and cuddly animals. This is bad because,

“This shift from naming schools after people worthy of emulation to naming schools after hills, trees, or animals raises questions about the civic mission of public education and the role that school names may play in that mission.”

Wow. Greene’s argument is that by moving away from naming schools after great Americans we’re undermining the entire “civic mission” of schooling. He should get together with David Gelernter; they’d be BFFs.

He does have some fun stats, including:

• In Florida, there are 5 schools that honor George Washington and 11 named after Manatees.
  
• In the last 20 years a new school in Arizona is 50 times more likely to be named after a mesa or a cactus than a president.
  
• A majority of public school districts nationwide do not have a school named after a president.

Ponder that last bullet point for a moment, because that’s a classic example of how some of these think-tank guys overreach to try and prove their point. It sounds like it’s something, but consider—there’s thousands of school districts in the country that are composed of just a few schools. Here in Washington State the vast majority of districts are composed of 6 school buildings or less; is it really that surprising, then, that none of the buildings are named after a president? In the smaller towns the schools are typically named after the town; would it make sense for Asotin, for example, to be the home of Nixon Elementary, Van Beuren Middle, and Clinton High Schools?

This is one of those products that's mildly interesting and tangentially related to education. Meaningful, though? Meh.

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