Krugman on Ed Reform

Paul Krugman has a good piece in the NYRB discussing the ill-judged move, over the past few years in the west,  to "austerity"-- that is, cutting government spending and raising taxes.  The article is worth reading even for people who aren't usually terribly interested in economics, both because this is one of the major stories of our time and because Krugman's analysis of how the opinions of the elites and the policymakers could be so wrong is more broadly applicable.  In particular, I think the analysis applies pretty well to the Ed Reform movement of the past decade.

According to Krugman, the move to austerity has a few notable features:

* It found support from scholarly studies that are, despite fancy pedigrees (Harvard!), shaky and dubious
* It had a simple moral and psychological appeal
* It did not demand anything difficult from the elites themselves

All of these fit the Ed Reform movement as well:

Support from dubious but ivy-league scholarship
Educational research is, like economics research, anything but conclusive.  A lot of pretty basic questions are surprisingly unclear: whether homework is worthwhile, whether class size makes a big difference, how reliable or valid standardized test scores are as measures of teacher effectiveness, whether vocabulary instruction is useful, and many , many more.  Nevertheless, you would never know this from the self-assured pronouncements of people like Bill Gates, who can move with dizzying fickleness from demanding small schools to demanding Common Core Standards to demanding that teachers be evaluated by test scores to demanding larger class sizes, citing studies for each new "evidence-based" proposal despite the fact that none of these proposals has more than the slimmest of empirical evidence in its favor.  

In fact, the Ed reformers' emphasis on standardized tests is striking in its radical departure from what has long been understood: that what matters is student engagement with the material in as authentic a way as possible.  But just as radical proponents of austerity economics have, on the basis of thin scholarship and simplistic moralizing ("We must tighten our belts!"), left behind the accepted wisdom of John Maynard Keynes--just so have the Ed reformers radically left behind the legacy of John Dewey on the basis of thin scholarship and similarly simplistic moralizing ("We need to get tough!").

Crude moral and psychological appeal 
Blame and punishment have an eternal appeal.  Just as the Germans blame the Greeks, and demand cuts and austerity from the Greeks even though cutting the Greek economy off at the knees means it won't ever get back on its feet, American Ed reformers blame teachers and schools, and demand punishment.  Never mind changing the larger system of inequality and poverty, never mind the fact that punitive measures never work, blame and punishment are appealing--especially if you can put them onto other people, not yourself or people you know.

Few demands on the elites themselves
Because cutting taxes on the rich helps the rich, cutting government spending doesn't hurt them directly, and failing to tackle high unemployment keeps wages down and corporate profits high, the wealthy proponents of government austerity are remarkably insulated from the bad effects of the policies they propose.  In the same way, the Ed reformers are very far from personally connected to the reforms they propose.  Not only have none of these people (Gates, Broad, Duncan, Obama, Bloomberg, Klein, Coleman, Emanuel, etc.) ever actually been a teacher, not a single one of them, as far as I know, has kids in public school.  The fact that all of the ed reformers send their kids to private school is significant for two reasons: (1) because private schools like Lakeside, Sidwell Friends or the Lab School do not follow an ed reform model now, and (2) because they will never have to.  New standards, new testing regimes, increased class sizes, teacher evaluation based on test scores--all of these dubious reforms will be imposed on those of us in public schools, but their architects and proponents are sheltered and insulated from them.  It is infuriating.

Conclusion
What Krugman says about proponents of austerity economics is, I think, appropriate to Ed Reform as well (and reminds me why the wonk is an invasive species).  Here's Krugman:

"It’s a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It’s also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right."

Economics research is better than education research, after all!

It's been interesting to follow the responses to the revelation that Reinhardt and Rogoff's influential 2010 paper about debt and growth was fundamentally flawed (their paper implied, and their own public advocacy made more explicit, that once a country's debt/GDP ratio got above 90%, economic growth fell off sharply, but it turns out that there is no such falling off).

I've already written about the first thing that interested me, the similarity between the shoddiness of economics research and the shoddiness of education research.  Neither field is particularly scientific, and both are subject to what looks to me like heavy cultural and political bias or influence. One problem is that it's difficult in both fields, and virtually impossible in macroeconomics, to do controlled experiments.  A related problem is that it's often hard to tell what's cause and what's effect. And both education and economics are central to culture and politics, so both are more subject to cultural and political pressures than, say, chemistry.

Another remarkable phenomenon has been the chutzpah of Reinhardt and Rogoff. In their response yesterday, they wrote that they didn't believe that their mistakes affected in any significant way the "central message" of the 2010 paper or their subsequent work. That is an eye-poppingly nervy assertion.  You would never know from their response that the supposed 90% tipping point had become central to the public debate, nor that they themselves, in testimony to Congress and in prominent opinion articles, like this one, had claimed that the 90% line was "an important marker," with "little association" between debt and growth below 90%. Nor, from their response, would you know that they had continually, in their public statements, implied that it was the debt that was causing the slow growth, rather than the other way around.

The other interesting thing about the R&R debate this week has been the amount of attention, discussion, and thoughtful analysis their work has prompted.  And it is here that the economics research community has shown itself as vastly superior to the education research community.  Thoughtful and fundamental questions had been raised about the Reinhardt/Rogoff paper from the very beginning, with people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and many others suggesting that their 90% cut-off was bogus, that the causality was likely reversed (with the slow growth causing the debt, rather than vice versa), and that R&R should release their data set so that other researchers could analyze it.  Then this week, once the data was finally made available to the public, other scholars did immediately start to analyze it, with one of them finding that the causality did indeed seem to run the other way, since high debt was correlated more with low growth in prior years than with low growth in succeeding years, and with others noting that the negative relationship between debt and growth was more significant at the low levels of debt (<30%) that R&R had claimed showed "little association" than at the >90% levels that R&R had been telling everyone were so dangerous.

The level of debate, just over the past couple of days, has been impressive, and puts education debates to shame.  For instance, when I looked into vocabulary research last summer, what I found was virtually no scientific debate at all, and an apparently general innumeracy that supported Paul Krugman's contention that advanced mathematics is usually not important; what you need instead is just a level of comfort with numbers and a sense of how they relate to the real world.  The same was true when I looked closely at the most prominent statistical study of education research, John Hattie's meta-analysis of education studies; there were significant problems with his analysis that seemed to have been publicly noted, in the years since publication, only by a guy in Norway and by me, a high school English teacher.

This is not to say that education research is never thoughtfully debated.  When the Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff paper about the long-term effects of "high-VA" teachers came out, it was very carefully responded to by Bruce Baker, among others.  Overall, however, education research strikes me as basically a backwater, and especially those areas of research that have to do with actual pedagogy.  Perhaps this is partly because pedagogy, despite its central importance, seems more obscure to non-teachers than less important but larger-scale issues like school funding and class sizes.  These large-scale issues seem more like economics problems, and so tend to be studied, not by Ed. School professors, but by economists.  Some of the best work on class sizes was done by Alan Krueger, the chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, and the study on the long-term effects of "high-VA" teachers was done by Raj Chetty, who just won the Clark medal.

So, how can Education research get better?  I'm not sure.  I guess I hope people become more aware that it's lousy and that when scholarship is brought into public debate it is almost inevitably turned into propaganda, even by the scholars themselves. In particular I hope it becomes clear that some of the great received ideas of the ed. world are actually urban legends (vocabulary increases comprehension; schools can overcome poverty; etc.)--but that's another post.