wishing doesn't make it so

One of the things that interests me about Matt Yglesias's writing on education is that he is the man who coined the term "Green Lantern Theory"of geopolitics, where pundits and politicians insist that our foreign policy problems are the result of a lack of will, that if only we cared enough, were committed enough, etc., our problems will be solved. It's a classic post, and you should read it if you haven't. What is so interesting to me is that Yglesias's attitude towards education perfectly represents Green Lantern thinking: educational problems are bad, and we need to fix them, therefore solutions must exist. (And, as corollary, people who oppose whatever educational reform scheme that is currently en vogue are likely shills for unions or mere obstructionists.) We can because we ought to.

To my great dismay, Yglesias has deepened his rhetoric in recent months. Now, essentially anyone who does not believe in the maximal power of good intentions is an "edunihilist" and doesn't believe that teaching inputs matter at all. Personally, I find his conclusions on what the consequences should be of edunihilism ("If it’s true that we don’t need to shake up the K-12 school system because what happens inside K-12 schools doesn’t alter socioeconomically determined achievement gaps, then the policy remedy is random across-the-board cuts in K-12 school spending")  to be inadequately defended, but ultimately that's irrelevant, because as far as I can tell edunihilists don't exist. Matt is writing about Kevin Drum here, who I don't think can justifiably be called an edunihilist by the post Yglesias links to, but he has written about this issue time and again without credibly citing who, exactly, is an edunihilist.

I certainly am not. I am incredibly skeptical about the efficacy of constantly banded-about educational reform efforts. I am, for obvious reasons, deeply suspicious of the motivations of many involved in education reform, whether conservatives who hate unions, Democratic constituencies, and government efforts like public schooling, or corporate interests who seek to make money by destroying public education and replacing it with their own, accountability-free private surrogates. I do believe that poverty matters, that race matters, that the presence of a stable home life matters, that parent's education level matters, and that community matters. I believe these things for the sensible reason that I am empirically justified in believing them. But do I believe that school quality means nothing? That teacher quality means nothing? That there is no room for positive impacts on education because uncontrollable variables are too powerfully determinative? I do not. Nobody I know in the academy does. Nobody I know of, at all, does.

The fact of the matter is that you can at once believe that socioeconomic factors and other input-level factors are hugely determinative of student outcomes, and that we should be cognizant of that fact when considering teacher quality, AND that education quality is a meaningful variable in arriving at student outcomes, and we should continue to subsidize public education as a society. And if I can speak broadly, this is the attitude that I have encountered as I work towards my PhD in an area of education and pedagogy. Teachers work under the constraints of reality, which greatly limit their capability to improve outcomes for students, but that doesn't mean you burn the schools down. It does mean that efforts to improve educational outcomes through harsh penalties for teachers-- by making a difficult and relatively low-paying job worse-- will likely be undermined by the vexing power of confounding variables in evaluating educational inputs and educational outputs. I'm sorry that this is so inconvenient, but you can ask anyone who has ever gotten a PhD in education and struggled to come up with dissertation research; it's really, really hard to sort variables when you're looking at student outputs as a function of student inputs.

One shouldn't, and I don't, blame Matt solely. You can find a lot of cheery belief in the power of good intentions in education from Reihan Salam, too. (With the usual Reihan nice/mean thing going on.) Or take Good's education editor, Liz Dwyer, who I enjoy reading but who far too often treats empirical vetting of new ideas-- that is, checking out the reality of educational reform efforts-- as parenthetical, rather than
central. Take this post, where she finishes with "if models like the one in D.C. actually do result in increased student achievement, districts nationwide would be smart to adopt their methods." Well, yeah. The point is that we don't know that yet, and it may be premature to call that particular idea superb, however excited we may be about it. Educational policy is the graveyard of superb ideas. This Green Lantern theory of education is the default mode of the educational reform movement, and most clearly and disruptively when it comes to pundits and journalists and writers, outside commentators who are (to their great credit) deeply passionate about this issue but lack the kind of day-in, day-out relationship to a) discouraging data and b) actual student interaction that inevitably breeds a tough realism when confronting educational issues.



Here's a gloss on a recurring dynamic in education reform:

1. Perfectly well-meaning, passionate outside commentators lament educational outcomes
2. Commentators proclaim "something must be done!"
3. Someone dreams up a promising change in educational policy
4. Outside commentators on education get very, very excited
5. Researchers do the long hard work of testing this change
6. Empiricism demonstrates that change does not cause expected beneficial results
7. Outside commentators get mad at empiricists
8. Perfectly well meaning, passionate outside commentators lament educational outcomes
9. Commentators proclaim "something must be done!"


If I could ask popular writers on education for one thing, it would be to understand that reality is perfectly indifferent to their frustrations.

Take Erik Kain. I like his blog, I enjoy that he's writing so much about education, I think his voice is important in the debate. But peep this.

I mean, fundamentally I’m a radical on education and I want to tear down the entire edifice and start all over. If I had my three wishes we’d have a radically different system of education than the one we have today. But of course this will never happen, and politics has a way of twisting good change into bad. So you have to remain cautious, skeptical, and hopeful that the more we experiment the better the outcomes will be for everyone involved.

There's a lot you can say here, and the first thing I would say is that it seems crazy to me to tear down an edifice that well serves the needs of the large majority of the people who pass through it. You won't find this in most education reform debates, but the fact is that a huge part of our education problems are found among a relatively small subset of our public school populations. Many millions of students pass through American public education and are perfectly well served, ready to go compete in that global marketplace I keep reading about. And then you have a numerically small minority who are terribly underserved, in terms of educational outcomes, and who drag down our educational statistics considerably. Helping them is our duty, it is absolutely essential that we improve their outcomes, but tearing down the whole system out of our despair at their plight will not help them. The first step in meaningfully solving any problems is having an accurate picture of the depth of those problems-- not exaggerating them.

Erik often links to this video on new educational paradigms. I can't help but feel a little weary about it. Yes, I appreciate the sentiment, and the gentlemen giving the talk is certainly more influential, successful, and important than I will likely ever be. But there is no lack of this sort of thing in educational circles. Every year, a new, supposedly revolutionary text emerges that challenges our core understandings of pedagogy, which asks us for an entire new educational philosophy, which is sure to spark massive change in our schools.... Vague aphorisms and broad rhetoric, however cogently expressed or well-meaning, can't teach a 10 year old long division or an 18 year old how to write a business letter. Sure, get inspired by videos like I do. Don't pretend that "big think" pieces, even from brilliant people, can solve all of our educational problems. The point of evolutionary change is not to get to revolutionary change. We have to consider the possibility that improving educational outcomes will always be expensive, frustrating, and slow, and the gains tenuous. We have to consider that this might be reality.

Among the most frustrating elements of debating education reformers is that many tend to speak as though they are the first to ever "put their foot down." When you study the history of education reform, you will find that one thing that has never been lacking is earnest, well-meaning white people talking loudly about how something must be done. I assure you: if the presence of impassioned, minimally-involved liberal strivers in the education debate guaranteed progress, we'd have achieved far more than we have. I expect and welcome discussion of education reform from passionate popular/generalist sources. That's democracy. But I do wish people would understand that it is no coincidence that teachers and administrators at public schools tend to have a much more limited and skeptical view of reform. They live where education happens.

As someone who spends a lot of time talking shit on the Internet, let me say with minimal malice and genuine respect (really) that talking shit on the Internet is easy. Educating is hard. Doing responsible social science is hard. This debate is desperately in need of modesty. Adjusting your expectations downward is not nihilism, and it's not despair. It is reacting to decade upon decade of discouraging data.