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Taxing Our Tomorrow

Posted originally@ Voting Off The Record on January 17, 2009.

It is a pity that that first stimulus package was given to the architects of our crisis and received by no one in particular with less than nominal oversight. It looks now as if Democrat officials have begun to think hard about round two of troubled asset relief funding as spending proposals are released this week. The National Association of Budget Officers (NASBO) counts that $141.6 billion is to be applied to the project of education, and $79 billion of that number is for the purpose of paying for education within the states:

The state directed funding is made up of $39 billion to local school districts and public colleges and universities distributed through existing state and federal formulas; $15 billion to states as grants for meeting key performance measures; and $25 billion to states for other high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education. Additional funds include $15.6 billion to increase Pell grants by $500 and $6 billion for higher education modernization.

For one, as New Jersey’s school funding formula is difficult enough to understand without the confusion of exterior formulas and legislation, it will be important for New Jerseyans to keep an eye on this money—school funds disappear inexplicably in this state. Also, whether New Jersey even qualifies for this kind of assistance isn’t clear. It would be unfortunate if the money marked for education was absorbed somehow into the pet issue of lowering the property taxes of suburban New Jersey while poor schools and poor students in our various blighted areas continue to decline.

Whether every state should qualify for stimulus or not, the new plan should be much better appreciated by Americans than the prior plan, if you can call it a plan. The initiative shown by legislators to enrich all tiers of our nation’s schools is refreshing and long overdue. And if we think about it, the stimulus infusion gives educators and administrators the space and time to work out all of the un- or under-funded school reform programs of the past eight years. For instance, one often wielded bone of contention, the lack of funding for after school programs has been the most blaring of the nation’s school reform issues. Here is a program that gets kids off the street and makes constructive the time that might otherwise be spent in a troubled or empty home. Organizations like New Jersey after 3 are probably the best suited for this type of assistance. Specifically speaking, somewhere in the modest $39 billion, we may be able to find the resources to keep school facilities like libraries and study areas in low income areas open and supervised long after school is out. We could expand counseling programs, sports and leadership programs. We should add to, extend the duration of, and fundamentally amend the title 1 program in order to make it more like a grant or fellowship based on excellence and experience rather than willingness and need. Let us network with organizations like vista and sweeten stipends, pay new teachers to shadow, intern, and build or maintain urban habitats rather than paying them to cut their teeth on disadvantaged kids who, really, have enough on their plates without the added aggravation of inexperienced and mercenary teachers. Enriching after school and reforming title 1 are two of the most important priorities for any sincere education reformer.

Let us make these changes while reforming the way we test and spend. This isn’t an economic buffet but a buffer that may allow reformers to set in place what works and swiftly remove what doesn’t. Obama once said that he wants teachers to have a buy-in to accountability. Let’s sell them accountability while we have time to pay for it. Before we grade and discourage future adults with our accountability complex, why can’t we turn accountability on educators. I do not mean to say that we should be over harsh when we hold people accountable, but that it should be common sense that we hold educators accountable before we discourage, alienate, and experiment on students in an effort to make test scores and coffers balance. There are better ways to make education work. These children are assets who must be prepared to enter the labor market and perpetuate that business cycle that we are all so concerned about. Let us give educators SAT and GRE exams regularly and let us leverage their scores with promotions. Our $141 billion should be used as breathing room and it should encourage administrators to air out the unsatisfactory teachers and reward the excellent ones. Educators should base their decisions on a number of factors including competency and student performance. If educators are “teaching to the test” in order to keep their jobs then people should begin to wonder why there is such a divide between “the test” and “the teaching.” What is it, exactly, that children should learn and is that in some way different from what we expect them as adults to know? There are fundamental and philosophical problems that precede any attempt to induce the education of children with a 100 percent chance of success. Education is more subtle than this.

The “subtlety” of education describes a notion held by former New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne’s education commissioner Fred Burke who during the national shift to quantified educational outcomes in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasized “process” measures rather than the logic of input-output that reigns over our education system today.

Presumably, “process” describes a method of funding only the sufficient means of education, i.e. facilities, books, teachers, rather than the educational means to some predicted end. Process holds education to be variable, something experienced differently by everyone. The notion that educational success is subtle rather than predictable supports the notion of genius, originality, and novelty. Further, a process approach assumes that educational outcomes are, essentially, unpredictable. This does not mean that there are no conditions for adequate education but that deep and lasting educational experiences come only through a delicate process that cannot be reproduced in a lab with a 100 percent rate of success. Simply put, let us at least put a sufficient amount of money into providing programs and facilities that tend to produce better educational outcomes and better students. Let us raise the quality of life for students in poor districts.

In the higher education sphere, we must get realistic about the meanings of words like “modernization” and “education.” Schools that consider the erection of temples to Ditka, i.e. stadiums and massage rooms for coaches and athletes should be excluded from stimulus as long as their priorities are not the higher education of their students. It’s a shame but no one should ever have to insist that higher education be the first priority of our institutions of higher education. I know that people like sports, it’s great for families and alumni, for morale and all that. However, just like any school spending gimmick, there ought to be some measurement of tangible return to the school for each dollar spent. If even the money is not being redirected from the original purpose of education, parents and students must still wonder what kind of people would allow New Jersey’s future labor force to drop out or bankrupt themselves at so young an age so that wealthy football fans can have a cushy new sky box and a cute little tapas bar to enjoy once a year. At least use the room for classes in the off season. The skybox idea was absurd. You don’t build a bridge or a dam at the apex of a rocky mountain and expect some quantifiable return in dollars or social welfare, neither do you build a coliseum in one of America’s most revered institutions and expect anything other than gladiators and spectators to grow at the base. College graduates know that building a school requires that a school be built. Building a stadium requires that…well, you get it. Trading a new stadium with a sky box for books and educational opportunity is not how I would define the modernization of higher education. Rather, I would call that instead the noticeable decline of civilization. Three years ago when students at Rutgers University were being turned away at the financial aid line or asked to take on significantly more debt and a part time job, these private sport-funding people didn’t move a finger. School funding whiners—look there and only there before you ask the state and random alumni for more money. Don’t hound your graduates for donations when several millions are flowing into the college without a dime devoted to relieving the real and rising debt of students. Call some “helicopter company” somewhere and ask them to foot the bill for 25 or 50 deserving undergraduates. You’ll impress everyone. Regarding the definition of education, the University of Chicago since the 1930s has had a pretty good definition of higher education that other schools may want to emulate. It’s called a strong core curriculum. Not only does it make teaching a profession, it also adds worth to the degrees of graduates. It should be nurtured and strengthened because, for employers, it represents the quality of the graduates that it tempers. Likewise, it earns graduates real jobs and thereby earns departments real endowments. That’s real return. There is your god, educators. It’s not the skybox, it’s the curriculum.

Spending our money wisely is absolutely necessary because there will most likely be no third chance to get things right. This $141 billion dollars does not exist, this is money borrowed from the next generation that the federal government is investing in the American people. The stakes are high. Will we settle on a definition of “education modernization” and play football with old pads and without the skybox or will we destroy the next generation of students and tax them into oblivion simultaneously?

Comparing Apples to Children: How should We Look At Technology and Education?

The technology excitement continues as heavy hitting free market edvocates Terry Moe and John Chubb recite the hip research of Christensen, Johnson, and Horn’s Disrupting Class and take on Larry Cuban, the author of Over Sold and Unused: Computers in the Classroom. I have to agree with Cuban’s skepticism, I think the new technology movement as it has been forwarded by the “disruptive innovation” marketing group, really reveals the insensitive core and negligence that may underlie the opinions of some school choice edvocates. That is we would hope that the aim of education reform is education. As Chubb and Moe take the disruptive innovation side, they really, unfortunately, show themselves to be fans of market theories rather than education strategies. The memory of their legendary work on school choice is lowered significantly when they refer to Christensen’s absurd education/marketing ploy which essentially compares Apples to children:

An illuminating perspective on how these changes have come about in private industry can be found in Clayton Christensen’s work on “disruptive innovation.” Apple, for instance, successfully introduced its personal computer as a toy for children, thus not directly competing with DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and other established makers of mainframe and minicomputers. Its market was “nonconsumers”: people not being served by the big manufacturers, and for whom the alternative was nothing. In so doing, Apple did not provoke the opposition of the big boys, and personal computers soon flourished.  

This is very disappointing. Like many others who have fallen in with this technology set, the two distinguished authors fail to see that they are evaluating an educational theory based not on the fact that it provides greater choice, instruction, and socialization to underprivileged children but because it is easier to sell. No one seems to see the corruption of reason represented by the alignment of Apple’s success in the market with a child’s success in school. Macintosh’s success has done very little for its consumers and quite a bit for its stock price. Deployment of an educational product is categorically different from the quality of an educational product: why should anyone need to say that? What is probably most convincing about this theory—that is, what probably convinces most people—is the notion that this product is presented as the natural and necessary commodity of the underprivileged, tactfully called “nonconsumers” above: “people not being served by the big manufacturers, and for whom the alternative was nothing.” Disruptive innovation education (DIE), being directly correlated with computers, thus installs itself as the necessary consequent of no education at all. It seems elegant, like choice, but it is not. What is it?

Indeed, the disruptive innovation business model has broad applications. Christensen and friends have thought to market their model in this way, kind of like a tonic that cures fatigue and poverty all at once. This is a sexy new market ethos, like leveraged buyouts and credit default swaps. Different from these other ideas, the education-applied model commits a fundamental error of logic—it identifies effective marketing with successful education. In a sense, the disruptive education model is perhaps the most insensitive of all innovative education ideas as it risks draining underfunded school districts, at which DIE is aimed directly, of the rest of their money. It also lets all the administrators off the hook and replaces the instructor with an automation. Empirically, automations can be deemed infallible. Failure will then shift to the children or possibly to the software company who may respond with talk about the variations between sample data and software calibration. Larry Cuban tells EdNEXT:

Schools are held publicly responsible for achieving those ends; industries are responsible to shareholders only. Second, in deciding policies, schools are accountable for democratic and public deliberations; even with recent revelations of corrupt practices among CEOs and boards of directors and meltdowns in the mortgage lending community, minimal public oversight of corporate governance currently exists.   

Christensen’s model, like Moe and Chubb’s, should be considered but that is all. There is no reason to fire all the teachers because “now we know” that school teaches itself. Throughout the history of this issue, no one has ever said anything so definite about teaching. Christensen’s account and the idea of disruptive innovation has only to do with deployment. This is an infrastructural suggestion that has to do with making delivery cheaper. It has nothing to do with the cost of pedagogy which continues to be a most troubling and inestimable figure. Some scholars, in fact, have pointed to the increased costs of development associated with automated or online education. Though online education cuts overhead in the form of facilities and resource consumption, developing lessons and interface for students can be a lot of work for teachers as well as administrators. Text book companies have recently been responding to this changing demand, though the change is still unsteady.

Many who think that R&D in the education network described is a onetime cost should give this some more thought. Those who believe that once the automation is set up the initial development cost will be overtaken by the long run payroll savings should look to the general lack of a standard curriculum in our ever changing and state specific education system. Effective software will require the integration of exhaustive research with well designed user interfaces and complete content flexibility. Each state—and perhaps municipality—may have to retain a staff of programmers in order to respond to mandated curriculum changes and technical issues that have become commonplace in the American education landscape. A High school Teacher’s median salary is about $38, 646. A software engineer’s median salary is about $62,033. How many programmers could service, say, 593 school districts with 2,430 schools? The new school teachers or computer programmers, who will essentially become computer re-programmers, stand to make a killing in a DIE system.

In the end, there’s not much to say about a theory that has yet to move out of its fascinating account of deployment and to create an articulate plan for instruction. What is probably most interesting about this DIE fad is that the DIE manifesto, Disrupting Class is primarily full of provocative anecdotes that explain that this massive technology deployment is ripe to happen. However, it never really moves from the idea that this reform might happen to the idea that it should happen. It might happen. So, what? 

If anything should happen, school officials like those in New Jersey should prepare but not over prepare for the wheels of progress to roll through their states. Construction projects should be forward looking and seek to integrate the most expandable technology infrastructure possible—while the money is still there. One of our contributors, AJ Kelton, has noted that “All too often, technology is tossed in at the end, once all the plans are already in motion. Everything, from network traffic to electrical supply and jack availability to standard computer hardware, needs to be planned and budgeted for at the onset and with the same maintenance considerations as other essential infrastructure” (Education is Changing Oct 23, 2008). I would go Mr. Kelton one further and recommend that schools be fitted for anything from improvements in wireless technology to new classroom response systems. Having the capability there is important. However, replacing teachers with computer lab space because you read a provocative marketing pamphlet is a bit silly, though I don’t think anyone is really doing that.  

    

Of course I have been relating this approach to students in school zones that are undergoing improvement projects and growth. Yet,the authors suggest that “nonconsumers” of intellectual products are, oddly enough, the best consumers of this product. A more affectionate and cost wise means of educating these nonconsumers is available. Also, DIE is only a delivery plan which seems to favor the HOW of education and to ignore the WHAT—and even the WHO.  Therefore, it is irresponsible and negligent to set up the animatronic teachers and walk away from the problem—though, of course, these intellectuals may not mean to do so. A magazine that has covered education technology since well before many of us had email accounts, Educause Review has often published the work of contributors who take on the practical issue of technology infrastructure or “cyber infrastructure,” an important prerequisite to a technology based shift in education. To my mind, Cyber infrastructure may mean hardware, running communications infrastructure into high poverty areas, and making computers more available to “nonconsumers.” Sounds like a good excuse for urban development. In this sense, disruptive innovation seems like a real plan. It just isn’t being discussed correctly. Educators should look upon technology with excitement but also moderation.

The "Bradley Effect" in New Jersey?

The breadth of opinion among 68 people was surprising to me, that and the amount of “not either” that materialized in such a small sample in the liberal state of New Jersey. Is it the case that New Jerseyans would rather vote for no one at all before they vote for Obama? Or is it that they would rather vote for Ron Paul than Bob Barr?

In the beginning, Hillary led the polls against McCain in New Jersey. Now, only half of her former followers are voting for Obama. In our sample, at this stage of the game, the other half of that group must be our “not eithers.” If we believe what Quinnipac told us in early September, those are men.  I think this split is tenable.

I wanted to talk about Walter Lippmann and the flawed dilemma of two party systems but these results are probably just an example of what people are calling the “Bradley effect.” That’s an interesting term that makes racism seem like a respectable phenomenon of political science and makes racists seem like partisans, rather than racists. The popularizing term, many now know, describes a California gubernatorial race in 1982, and then again in 1986, wherein an African American man lost to a white man despite being ahead in the opinion polls. We “discovered” then that when people were asked their opinion publicly, being averse to sounding racist, they voted for Bradley. Their votes turned white once they got into the voting closet. In this poll, which is absolutely anonymous, public scrutiny is absent so Obama loses half of the sample. 

Hopefully this disparity between public and private opinion will not show up this coming week. That would be unfair and, well, racist. Obama is doing well, at this point in the election, about as well as Gore did against Bush in New Jersey in 2000: 49-35 percent around this time. It was close in New Jersey for a while, but, according to Quinnipiac Obama has McCain 59-36 percent.  McCain sure is feeling the Palin!

Spellings' NCLB Infrastructure:Sufficient to Stand, Free to Fall

Ed Secretary Margaret Spellings is working toward nailing school choice and standardized graduation formulas to the next administration. The NEA has whined that the next president should have the freedom to “to work with the next Congress and leave his or her mark on federal education policy, not have their hands tied by ill-timed and piecemeal changes.” Obama’s mark or role as the next president may be simply to let the policy be. Choice and holding schools responsible for their graduation rates is something necessary. It’s unfortunate that unions consistently put the institution ahead of the children—they sometimes seem to have lost a connection with their original purpose having become instead a giant lobbying entity. How ridiculous.

Is it fair that some under performing schools, due to geography or demographics, are given lower scores? Yes. Is it fair to punish them by withdrawing funding and issuing performance ultimatums? If the school faculty is found lacking or recalcitrant to pedagogical change and if students are presented with better alternatives then yes. The low graduation rates should otherwise signal a need for new strategies and a guided development of faculty and programs conducted by their government education agencies—not necessarily more money.

The combination of standardized graduation rating and choice definitely lays the policy infrastructure for the application of the super successful business model (being facetious) or a full blown voucher program. The opportunity and perhaps the temptation is there for any lazy president who has not yet developed a secularized understanding of progress, rather, who still believes in the invisible hand. However, there is also a refreshing amount of mobility shared between standards and choice for the president who holds a view of progress that is moderate and sustained through sound government regulation and support. The move has gleaned support from both sides of the aisle, probably for the above reasons, so I don't really see this effort failing. Therefore, on the contrary Mr. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel: a push to restart NCLB and nail down graduation measurement standards and choice will play a critical part in whether the next president’s does or does not leave a lasting mark on education.

The Storefront of your Student's Brain

What do we earn from teaching our kids to monetize their education? Well, for the moment, all we have learned is that distributing checks to kids in D.C. lowers tardiness and class skipping. Rather: kids will show up at a designated time if you pay them to.

Some kids whose parents are able to convince them that there are rewards on the other side of education learn to monetize their brains on their own. This is called getting on the career track. For some, perhaps, without a nearby example of the formula for success, study=money, understanding the value of an education is probably more difficult.

As most education innovations these days this latest, the attendance monetization project called Capital Gains, was developed by economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. a Harvard researcher at the American Inequality Lab. I buy this approach more than that weird destabilizing education movement that people were all excited about a few months ago. With all of their Apple analogies it seemed to me that those people were just trying to sell computers and software. For teachers and administrators it promised to relieve them of having to learn to teach all those underprivileged kids who had to be taught how to learn. It's a pretty cruel proposal, at its core.

So far the money gets them into the class. For some, it compels them to try--or gives them an excuse to. Sometimes, an excuse is all that children need. Often, the culture of anti-intellectualism pervades homes where parents, once poor students themselves, bitterly attack instances of intellectualism. This incentive program at least takes steps toward undoing some of these paralyzing social roles by sterilizing scholasticism with materialism—something we can all get behind.

What about those children who are now learning that they needed more than an excuse to do well in school? Hopefully the incentivizing experiment will not grind away at their emerging confidence about their power to think. Indeed, once they begin to try they will learn something else about the difficulty involved with learning. As Aristotle said: learning ain’t no walk in the park, it’s painful and that’s why many of us—including parents and teachers—naturally avoid it. Solutions like replacing teachers with computers or incentivizing grades may soothe some of the pain of being at school for kids, or some of the pain of running a school for teachers, but the real pain of learning always looms. Teachers and parents should not let the promises of painless education get the better of them.

Education monetization side effects?:

1. Merit will slowly become exclusively a two-way function of money.

2. Children are now free to do Marxist readings on their report cards.

3. Over protective parents can actually barter with teachers at parent-teacher conferences.

Is it possible to sell learning as an end in itself? Was it ever?

Priorities

The Washington post tells us today that charter schools in D.C. are suffering from the financial crisis as loans and capital altogether are becoming more difficult to get. Why don’t we figure out how to prioritize and spread some of that education money in the bailout bill to charter schools which work with and receive per-pupil funding from state education agencies. That ought to be fair.

It is not certain whether the bailout bill is meant to alleviate the school funding burden for states who must pare down education in next year’s budget or whether it is intended to add to preexisting funding. Of course dispersal is discretionary, yet, some states may not be undertaking large overhauls of school facilities and curriculum—many states may put most of their funding into pay roll and other operations in the next year’s budget. New Jersey has already allocated over $3 billion to schools and there’s little chance of getting that back considering the row from school supporters during its passage—we’ll know for sure on the 16th of this month when Governor Corzine holds his second fiscal crisis meeting. I have been thinking about what he might say and where he might cut. The cuts and proposals of this most recent budget session were hard enough. Is New Jersey ready for what is coming?

Perhaps some of our construction budget can be replaced with federal aid since our Abbott schools seem to qualify under the language of the bill. At least some of our most dejected areas should receive funding. And, of course our districts will demand the funding be added not replaced in the $3 billion. They may need to stand down considering the coming financial storm - for the good of the state. Though it was never absolutely clear whether this latest construction proposal carried with it all the constitutional imperative that its successors did, that certainly will be an issue if Corzine should try to take it back. I hate to say it but $2-3 billion would help considering the revenue loss that some are expecting. The proponents of this latest construction allocation were right when they said that the coming crisis would diminish any further school construction funding possibilities, though they may not have weighed the possibility that the hardtimes would be so severe. In regard to the policy reccomendations from Rutgers which billed the construction as a revenue generator, perhaps a New Jersey labor preference really should be built into the process.

We need to be ready to tighten our belts since such a large amount of New Jersey’s tax revenue will be lost as these finance giants up north go under. Perhaps it’s time to think about ways of improving teaching that have nothing to do with building classrooms. Perhaps there are some excellent educators out there who wouldn’t mind teaching kids who are hard to teach, in classrooms that maybe they wouldn’t park their car in. I have a great New York Times clip from the depression era when, in Newark, teachers who feared losing their jobs were reportedly fainting in classrooms from over exertion. I’m not saying that teachers will be or should be blacking out in the middle of a lesson—I really don’t think it’s possible these days—I mean to say that apart from all the panic mongering going on in the media these days, perhaps teachers will feel some proper sense of emergency and step up as great educators. To know what will happen around here I guess we’ll just have to wait till Thursday.