there are very few great baseball players in the minors

This is going to largely rehash a comment I put up there, but I wanted to respond to this piece on education reform from Matt Yglesias. He uses a baseball analogy:

Baseball teams don’t pay a premium to guys who hit lots of home runs in order to create “incentives” for people to hit home runs. If that worked, we’d all be major league sluggers! Baseball teams pay a premium to guys who lots of home runs because home run hitters are valuable contributors to baseball teams. Hitters who perform worse are less valuable. And hitters who perform very poorly are drummed out of MLB. That’s not really about incentives; it’s about attracting and retaining high performers to your organization.

This is more telling than he knows: baseball players who are cut or sent down to the minors tend to be replaced by other marginal baseball players. It's a truism in baseball: most prospects don't pan out, and even those regarded as can't miss fail constantly. I think it's really a generative analogy! We have a tremendously well resourced structure to "attract and retain high performers" in baseball. They are the highest paid athletes in sports, generally speaking. Stars are celebrities and can make millions more in endorsement deals. Great players are showered with praise, adulation, and attention. Even non-stars live lavish lifestyles, and the benefits in the sexual and romantic realms are legendary. We have a system, in other words, that should attract just about everyone qualified to play baseball. There's almost no other job that such a person could do that would reward him equally.

And yet, somehow, Julio Lugo-- he of the .580 OPS-- played in 93 major league games in 2010. Despite terrible-bordering-on-putrid production, he was highly employable in the major leagues. All of those incentives still didn't mean that we suddenly had better baseball players than Julio Lugo leaping ahead and taking his spot. Ah, but he's barely playing in 2011! Who is getting his starts for the Atlanta Braves, his team? Why, Alex Gonzalez, he of the still-quite-awful .639 OPS. And there are teams that don't have any shortstops as good as Alex Gonzalez! This phenomenon is seen again and again in sports: players who are objectively bad at their jobs enjoy long and lucrative careers, because the amount of people who can effectively play baseball is limited independent of our desire to find more. It turns out that the sincere desire to find great baseball players, backed by tremendous resources used towards that end, is not a fool proof prescription for actually finding them. Human beings are in fact constrained by reality, after all.

Now, you could very reasonably point out that the collection of traits necessary to be a good teacher are likely far less rare than the collection of traits necessary to be a good baseball player. But I would suggest  that this is significantly balanced by the fact that we need vastly more teachers than we need professional baseball players in our society. And I think that the essential logic is the same: there's this weird implicit assumption in education reform circles that if you fire a bunch of teachers you're going to get a bunch of better teachers. Even before we talk about the vastly complicated issues of how to fairly evaluate teachers and how to separate student-dependent variables from teacher-dependent variables, there's the fact that many fired teachers are likely to be replaced by other marginal teachers.

I chose my examples carefully: Alex Gonzalez is indeed a better baseball player than Julio Lugo. (I could very easily have found poor baseball players that were replaced by even worse baseball players.) A .059 improvement in OPS isn't nearly enough to make Gonzalez a quality hitter but it isn't nothing. I'm not a fatalist, and I don't think teaching quality doesn't matter at all, nor do I think that there is no room for improved outcomes. It's just a lot harder to gauge than in baseball. There's no teacher OPS, and I must point out that it is not written in the sky that humanity is entitled to find effective teaching metrics. There's every reason to continue to seek improvement and I intend to. But modesty of expectations seems to me to be the only rational response to decades of discouraging data and failed experiments, and the "we can do something because we should" attitude is so dominant within the discourse of reform that I find it almost impossible to discuss with passionate reformers. Should still implies can. Otherwise sober and empirically-minded people become daydream believers on the topic of education reform.

It's the same old saw from me, at the end of the day: education reform is a subject where the large majority of participants seem to be interested only in desire and intent, not reality. What is possible comes first.

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typical sentiment re: college educated employment

I wrote a new piece for Balloon Juice, again about the value of college. A commenter uses perfectly typical language when he or she says, "there’s almost certainly no job waiting out there for a new graduate."

This is a novel use of the words "almost certainly." In 2010, the unemployment rate for those with a college education was 5.4%-- too high, certainly. For those with only a high school diploma it was 10.3%. Not quite double, but close. More to the point, these figures mean that better than 94% of work-seeking college educated Americans were employed in 2010. "Almost certainly" has meaning, and it doesn't mean that. I'm not picking on that one commenter; this is perfectly standard rhetoric when it comes to this question.

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no matter how many times you say it, it's not hypocrisy, and it wouldn't matter if it was

One more thing. The favorite argument of the pro-voucher movement gets amplified again, this time courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:

If Christie were acting in such a way as to limit the opportunities of other children while his own children were enjoying benefits not available to others, then where his kids go to school would be the business of the public. The fact President Obama sends his children to an elite private school while seeking to kill opportunity scholarship vouchers for poor kids is just such an example of hypocrisy that is very much the business of all Americans.

Jesus.

Look, guys. This is what Obama is doing: he's a) paying for his children to attend an expensive private school and b) opposing public subsidies of other people doing the same. In other words, he is defending the right to pay for something with private funds while opposing using public funds to pay for the same. You can agree or disagree with that on the merits, but that is hypocrisy? Huh:? Is everyone who has health insurance but is opposed to socialized medicine guilty of hypocrisy? Is everyone who owns a car but doesn't want to pay taxes for public transportation guilty of hypocrisy? Isn't supporting the right to pay for something yourself while not supporting government paying for it a perfectly common argument in American politics?

We already pay for other students to go to school! It's called the public school system. There is literally no other issue where this thinking is ever applied. I am not allowed to take my "share" of the taxes I pay that go to the FDA to have my meat inspected privately. I'm not allowed to take my "share" of the taxes that go to water filtration and use it to buy bottled water. I'm not allowed to take my "share" of parks department taxes and use it to landscape my lawn. And on and on. And if someone has supplemental health insurance, and opposes providing access to similar coverage publicly, I might not agree with it, but I don't mistake it for hypocrisy. Saying "don't pay publicly for what I pay privately" is not the same as saying "don't do what I do," particularly when there is already a publicly funded alternative to what is being privately paid for.

Oh, and by the way, even if there were hypocrisy, it would say nothing about the merits of school vouchers. And the merits are bad! Vouchers don't work! The evidence that exists is profoundly negative!

How does this stuff persist?

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note and an important link

So I've learned my lesson about ever saying that I'm on hiatus or retiring or whatever-- you've heard it from me before and it's never true!-- and I'll certainly be back. I have not been posting much for a few reasons. The first is that I happen to be in love, with a wonderful and accomplished woman, and that happily takes up a lot of my time, and more to the point a lot of the emotional energy that I have always needed to write anything remotely political. The other is that I'm moving on to a new university this fall, and I'm excited and exhilarated and, at the moment, compelled to devote my mental energy to scholarship, which is after all my passion, my purpose, and my future. I'd never say that there's something inherently more noble about the path that academics pursue than other endeavors, but for those of us who are compelled towards it, nothing comes close.

The third reason is that it's summer, and in summer it is right to rest. But I'll be back before you know it.

Now, if you please, I've written a post about the value of college for Balloon Juice, and it contains a lot of my thoughts on college and society as we move forward. Check it out.

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Adam Serwer is observing

For ideologies, character is destiny.

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the way stuff lives on in the Internet

One of the first things I ever put up on the Internet that wasn't a comment on somebody's site was this guest post on The American Scene where I complained about Dana Stevens, who was then quite new as Slate's movie reviewer. I suppose it satisfied my only rule when it comes to my writing; I was myself in it. Unfortunately, I wasn't all of myself, or I hope I wasn't. Looking back I wish I could have summoned more understanding, particularly for someone trying a new venture, and trying to fill big shoes. I guess I understand why I wrote quite as cuttingly as I did, beyond the fact that it was fun. Stevens used to write with a kind of forced snark, and it's always hard to resist the temptation to be snotty towards them who have been snotty first. But of course, that's when it's most important to be kind. Most people won't ever understand that.

I've been thinking about it because I've been thinking about online reputation. It's a subject that has been written about endlessly, so I won't belabor it. But it's interesting. To my dismay, for quite awhile there if you Googled "Dana Stevens" I believe that post was the first thing to pop up, which probably tells you more about errors in Google's search algorithms than anything else. As a bit of Internet karma, it was eventually replaced by this post, attacking it. And, I believe, that post showed up in the first page when you searched my name, as well. The post isn't so much an argument as a statement of different tastes, but like I said. Internet karma. Anyway-- I realized that the post was out there to stay, and that as much as it probably wouldn't be read, ever, it had something to do with me as long as it was.

What makes this hard is that I don't really think what I said was wrong, or entirely wrong, and I think many of my criticisms from then were true, and I think a few hold. It is, though, certainly overheated and certainly overcritical. I overshot the mark and in doing so made my criticism less accurate. I've said many very wrong things on the Internet, and what I try very hard to do is to apologize for mistakes and apologize for them for real. A real apology, a principled one, to me contains three elements: it contains the words "I'm sorry," free from qualification; it expresses that what was said was incorrect, without qualification; and it admits that I shouldn't have said it, without qualification. It was wrong, I shouldn't have said it, I'm sorry-- that, to me, is how to apologize. But as I said, I don't think that the post was all wrong, and I certainly have written things I regret more. On balance this is a little issue, mean but not disqualifyingly mean, snotty but not cruel. I don't have some great regret about it. I just wish I was a little more understanding, a little more restrained, a little more grown up. That's all.

Not that Stevens would care either way. But I made my statement, and now I'm making this one, and it's enough.

Incidentally, and again, to the interest of no one, I do think Stevens has gotten better with time. I thought then and I think now that she had Edelstein too much on her mind at first. This is similar to what is (still) the most controversial opinion I've ever expressed online, at least in terms of volume and vitriol of email, which is that Ta-Nehisi Coates was "called up" too quickly to the Atlantic in his blogging career, that as much as he was an experienced journalist, his blog was too new and that would inevitably color his early work at the next level. Despite all the discord that causes, I believe I was right. In any event, Stevens has gotten better. I have serious general concerns with Internet movie criticism. I think, broadly speaking, it is too negative, animated by resentment, and concerned too much with how critical statements stand in relation to those of other online writers. But Stevens has her own voice now, and while I do suspect that she "arranges" her opinions-- judges, that is, to build a corpus of perspectives on movies and filmmakers that makes a statement, rather than just reacting to the work-- that's mostly just my baggage. I've always read her reviews but now I admire them more and more.

To my dismay, Edelstein, I think, has gotten far worse. It seems to me that he read too much of his own good press, and worse, fell pray to Film Critic Weariness Syndrome, where every critical or middling review demonstrates that the reviewer approaches his or her job with a showy exhaustion. (I'd tell any movie critic suffering from the disorder: you can just retire.) It's too bad.

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reax, updated

Here's E.D. Kain's response to my latest screed on education reform.

And here's Conor P. Williams.

Here's Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior. Incidentally, to Ozimek I would merely say-- resources can be redistributed. Education cannot.

If I see more I'll link 'em up.

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