ETS calls for Graduate Schools of Educational Public Health and more attention to poverty

ETS (!) has sponsored an excellent report on poverty and education.  Written by Richard Coley of ETS and Bruce Baker of Rutgers (and schoolfinance101), the report says what should be obvious to any observer and what many other excellent reports have said over the past forty years: that poverty is a problem for education, but education alone is not a solution to poverty.  Most of the report does the noble work of making (again) a detailed case that there is way too much poverty in the US, that we don't do enough about it, and that this poverty has serious negative educational consequences. The whole report is worthy, but I noticed a couple of things in particular:

A call for a focus on educational public health
The report's executive summary contains a wonderful sentence expressing a sentiment I wish we saw more often:

Given the strong connection between educational success and economic disadvantage, we might
expect education policy to focus on ways to overcome the effects of poverty on children.

In other words, they want schools of Educational Public Health!

What to do
Despite the report's clear implication that fixing poverty would be a good way to improve educational outcomes, the authors unfortunately choose, apparently from modesty, not to recommend any non-educational measures: "There are other strategies that fall outside of the education arena — tax policy, job creation, minimum wage policy, etc. — that also are outside of the purview of this report." The report does, however, make seven specific suggestions for actions within the "education arena", all of which ought to be common sense:

Increasing awareness of the incidence of poverty and its consequences. Child poverty costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Current poverty levels, combined with the growingwealth gap between those at the top and bottom of the distribution, threaten to destabilize our democracy and limit the upward mobility of children of future generations.
Equitably and adequately funding our schools. The economic downturn has taken a toll on state school funding and on targeted programs like preschool that can help disadvantaged children. There is a need for better coordination of federal and state education programs targeted at poverty.
Broadening access to high-quality preschool education. High-quality early childhood education programs improve the educational outcomes of all children, but particularly for low-income children. The administration’s proposed major expansion of preschool programs across the country should be supported.
Reducing segregation and isolation. Many of the nation’s schools are increasingly segregated by race/ethnicity and income. Each student should have the opportunity to attend schools with peers from diverse social and economic backgrounds.
Adopting effective school practices. School policies that have been documented by research and practice to be effective should be broadly adopted. Examples include class size reduction, longer school days and years, and tutoring.
Recognizing the importance of a high-quality teacher workforce. Attracting and keeping high-quality teachers in high-poverty classrooms should be of the utmost priority and may require special incentives. 
Improving the measurement of poverty. The poverty rate is an important social and economic indicator that is used to allocate resources for scores of federal, state, and local programs. Work should continue to expand the official definition of income to include government spending directed at low-income families and to recognize cost-of-living differences across regions.

These aren't new ideas, but as the poet says, it is necessary to write about the same old things
in the same way, repeating the same things over and over. And who knows, maybe this report will get a lot of attention, and we'll stop spending so much time designing ways for schools to compete for the richer students (in Hirschman's terms, we need a system where change is based on voice, not exit).  And, yes, we need a lot less poverty.

NOLA schools "improvement": Ed Reform is likely less important than time, funding and demographics

The NYT has a post up about Ed reform in New Orleans that's getting a lot of attention.  The post basically says that ed reform is helping lift student achievement but may be hurting communities in other ways.  The part about hurting communities is interesting, but the part that attributes increasing student achievement to Ed Reform seems dubious to me.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers (and schoolfinance101) has been pointing out for years that all charter successes are completely explicable by looking at two factors: (a) increased spending and in-school time (as at HCZ etc.); (b) different populations.  If you spend more money and time on a school, and if your student population has fewer poor, ELL or special ed students, then your test scores will be higher.  Baker has repeatedly shown that highly touted charters are actually spending more money and/or enrolling more advantaged populations.

The New Orleans schools have both increased spending (as the NYT article mentions but passes over quickly) and a distinctly different population (as the article does not mention at all, as far as I could see.)  This second point is important. The population of New Orleans is distinctly different post-Katrina (as the NYT reported).  It is smaller overall, it is more white and less black, and it is less poor.

My guess is that these factors are easily enough to explain the higher test scores.

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.