The federally funded program called “Reading First” recently received a poor evaluation. The American Prospect‘s Ezra Klein comments, “This fits into the larger pattern in education reform efforts which is that most ideas fall short of expectations. Vouchers have found themselves in a similar decline, and now they’re losing support even among conservatives.” Kevin Drum from Washington Monthly picks up the theme: “This is one of the reasons I don’t blog much about education policy even though it’s an interesting subject. For all the sturm and drang, in the end nothing really seems to matter. After a hundred years of more-or-less rigorous pedagogical research, we still don’t know how to teach kids any better than we used to.”

There are at least three ironies here:

1. Two major liberal bloggers take the failure of a program that conservatives love as evidence that nothing works in education. (Many comments on their blogs note this irony, as well.)

2. Many progressive educators dislike formal experiments that have control groups and quantitative outcome-measures. They associate those methods with the Bush administration, and they fear that holistic and interactive forms of education will suffer if so evaluated. However, it was because Reading First was subjected to a rigorous quantitative evaluation that we know it doesn’t work.

3. Conservatives seem to love the phonics approach embodied in Reading First and distrust “whole language” methods, which involve teaching reading through literature. I can’t understand why this has become a left/right issue. Evangelical Protestants should be enthusiastic about reading narratives.

Leaving ironies aside, the big issue is: What do we know about what works in education? If you want to see the results of evaluations that use randomized control groups, you can check out the Feds’ What Works Clearinghouse. I think that’s a worthwhile offering, but it’s far from the whole story. It would not be surprising if few curricular packages–off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped programs–made a big difference to kids. After all, education is mostly about relationships: between teachers and their classes, among students, between teachers and parents, and between teachers and administrators. We know that some teachers consistently produce better results than others, holding other factors constant. That’s partly because their relationships are better. (They’re not necessarily nicer or friendlier, but they are more effective at working with children and other adults in their contexts.) We also know that the level of community participation in schools makes a difference. These factors matter, but they are hard to influence through national policy.

Certainly, any parent knows that some schools are better than others, and some teachers are better than others; and it’s not just because of money or demographics. That means that some things work in education. Yet simple mandates and programs are unlikely to make schools better, because they don’t influence relationships. And formal experiments that evaluate programs are most likely to show disappointing results.

(Syracuse, NY) This evening, I will participate in a panel at Syracuse University on the topic: “Who Knows Best How to Educate You for Citizenship?” My co-panelists will be Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy, and George Saunders, essayist and MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow. Sam Gorovitz has posed the main question:

As we follow the coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, and of other aspects of public affairs, we encounter the many diverse views of experts of all sorts. But do these experts merit our trust? Is expertise real, or an illusion? We should consider what voices to heed, as we think about how to function as citizens in a democratic society.

That’s a very general question; but the panel will be focused on education and (specifically) civic education. I will need both of my hands for the discussion, because:

On the one hand, expertise about matters like civic education is problematic. Such matters involve deep moral or ethical questions, and it is unlikely that anyone is an expert about morality (although that question has been debated since Socrates and Protagoras took it up). When we allow experts to manage civic education–or any education–the key issues inevitably become test scores and other statistics. Experts have no special credibility or legitimacy about moral matters, so the whole expert debate narrows to measurement and causation. Relying on statistics conceals the fact that tests–and all other measures, quantitative or qualitative–reflect value-judgments that are not themselves statistical or otherwise “scientific.”

Furthermore, when we turn education over to experts, we reduce the scope and impact of participation by other people, especially teachers, parents, and students. Yet we know that schools perform much better when these people are fully engaged.

On the other hand, I am an expert on civic education. I don’t say that arrogantly or to claim any particular knowledge. I mean it in a very literal sense: I am paid to provide what is called expertise. For example, next week I will attend a meeting to help design the National Assessment of Education Progress in Civics. Our committee, funded by the Feds and chosen for its ostensible expertise, will make decisions about what questions thousands of kids must answer. In such contexts, I am very aware that it is helpful to know certain things: psychometrics and test design; facts and concepts in political science and history; educational policy and how classrooms work. Knowing these things is better than not knowing them, and such knowledge could be called “expertise.”

So there are two sides (at least) in the debate about expertise. Maybe I can help the audience to weigh the question by directing attention to three kinds of expertise in education:

1. Expertise about curriculum and instruction–about how and what to teach. This expertise is widely shared. Teachers certainly have it. Parents may have it, and even students do. Higher up the food chain, professors of education, senior administrators in k-12 school systems, textbook authors, test writers, psychologists, and policymakers claim expertise about curriculum and instruction. The question is what balance of expertise we need. To what extent is the teacher’s expertise, based largely on experience, to be honored? To what extent should that expertise be influenced by specialists, such as brain scientists, or by outsiders whose job is “accountability”? The answer depends not only on our assessment of who has the best and most knowledge, but also on political questions. Yielding all judgment to students and teachers reduces accountability. But seizing all judgment from teachers makes their jobs miserable and is unlikely to produce good results.

2. Expertise about management. School systems don’t only educate; they also construct and maintain buildings, handle payrolls, and negotiate with unions. In our worst-performing systems these functions are handled very badly. For instance, the Washington, DC School System (which enrolls my child and employs my wife) spends about $13,000 per child, but only $5,355 on teachers, classroom equipment, and other forms of “instruction” Some systems have tried to address these problems by choosing business executives for their superintendents or by hiring management consultants. For example, in Washington, the new Chancellor (who holds a Masters from the Kennedy School) has hired management consultants who have determined–very credibly–that the school system is wasting huge amounts of money by keeping schools open when their enrollments are very low. The Chancellor’s plan to close schools has provoked angry resistance. Is this simply a case of valid expertise versus citizens’ ignorance or short-sightedness? Maybe, but it is also likely that any real improvements in the efficiency of the DC school system will require changes in attitudes and values among school employees and parents. Many people who work in and around the system do not align their own interests at all with the interests of the kids. To change that, we will need a bottom-up movement (or possibly charismatic leadership)–not analysis by management consultants.

3. Expertise about incentives. Despite the mountains of writing that exists on curriculum, instruction, and management, those are not the main topics debated by high-level policymakers. The national debate is mainly about incentives. Liberals want to spend more money on teachers’ salaries. Some liberals and some conservatives want to send money to schools where the kids pass tests and divert it from failing schools. And many conservatives want parents to be able to direct tax dollars to public or private schools that they choose for their own kids. None of these strategies says what should be taught or how. All of these strategies change the incentives or rewards. Given this approach to education, the expertise that is relevant is economic. I think it is foolish to ignore the power of incentives in determining how institutions function. However, it is also foolish to treat a school as a “black box” that takes economic inputs, such as cash, and produces measurable outcomes, such as test scores. Someone has to decide what to teach and how.

In the Washington Post, Lonnae O’Neal Parker has written a fine series about Jonathan Lewis, a young man who graduated last year from Washington’s Coolidge High School–barely, years late, after scraping through the required courses. He is smart and he has supportive parents, but he rarely attended class or completed assignments, and he aimed for D’s.

Jonathan walks toward the cafeteria doors. A question follows him: If you want to make your mother proud, if you know you can do the work, if you swear to everybody you see that you want to graduate, why don’t you go to class?

Jonathan stares silently for a few moments.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I really don’t know.”

With due humility about my ignorance of Jonathan’s situation, I’d propose an answer. The whole structure of a school like Coolidge is inappropriate for his social and economic context. It’s a huge high school, with numerous classes and cliques of students and corridors longer than football fields (as Parker observed). The onus is really on individuals to get to class and to concentrate. That is very difficult if most of the other students are not focused; there are too many distractions and temptations, too little order.

So why do large high schools work in other contexts, such as affluent suburbs? And why did Coolidge itself work better when Jonathan’s mother attended it, 30 years ago? Because there used to be a social contract in which working class people had dignified and stable jobs. Their children could also obtain those jobs without college diplomas–sometimes without even graduating from high school. Because most adults had working-class jobs, there was a general atmosphere of order and respect for authority in the community. It was easy for kids to envision concretely the benefits they would obtain from completing school. There was crime and academic failure, but it was marginal, not prominent.

We have a social contract today, and it is not without merit. If you obtain skills for the business and professional world and credentials to demonstrate those skills, you have wide opportunities. Sex, skin color, and age are less profound obstacles than they once were. But it’s a long way from Coolidge High School to the professional world; the curriculum is much to easy to prepare students for college, and there are few role models in the community. Thus it’s pretty much unrealistic that most teenagers will be self-disciplined enough to delay gratification and get themselves through a school like Coolidge. Even if they do, the benefits will be hard to see.

That’s why, despite mixed evaluation studies, I remain interested in the new small high schools that provide one coherent, specialized curriculum for all their students. In a small high school that was focused on media, or engineering, or cooking, Jonathan wouldn’t have to choose between the halls and a classroom. There would basically be no halls. The school would be an organized work environment with limited numbers of teachers and students who all knew one another and had tasks to accomplish together. The gap between this place and the professional work world would be much smaller.

This afternoon, I’m off to Paris for a few days of meetings, about which I hope to blog (if the rules of the conference permit disclosure). I won’t be online again until Monday. Meanwhile, a thought about vouchers:

I found Megan McArdle‘s argument for school vouchers via what appeared to be a very strong endorsement on Kevin Drum’s liberal blog. It turns out that Drum didn’t mean to endorse McArdle’s essay, but it is still worth attention. She analogizes education to iPods, asserting that if everyone had the ability to choose schools–as the rich do today–then many excellent institutions would spring up to fill the demand. It is hypocritical, she says, to exercise school choice by putting your own kids in a private school or by moving to a suburb, while opposing vouchers that would offer the same opportunity to poor families.

I am open to vouchers, in principle, and I favor more experimentation. As a parent of a DC Public School student and a spouse of a DC Public School teacher, I can vouch for the negative part of the argument: some big urban school systems are dysfunctional, and we ought to consider radical alternatives.

However, the analogy to iPods isn’t satisfactory. The market for electronic goods is a classic one. Apple wants to sell as many iPods as it can, and customers want the best devices at the lowest cost. There are powerful incentives for quality and innovation. The situation is different for prestigious private schools. Parents choose to apply to these institutions, but the schools select their students. In other words, “choice” is exercised by the schools, at least as much as by the parents–which is not the case in the market for electronic goods.

The motives are different, too. Fancy schools don’t want to maximize the number of customers; if anything, they want to be able to admit the smallest possible percentage of applicants. Selectivity means prestige. Besides, kids actually benefit from being in highly selective company, surrounded by other students who are above grade level, very well behaved, and raised in wealthy, highly-educated homes.

Based on close observation, I do not believe that private schools add more value than public schools do–at least, not on average. The “product” isn’t any better. Instead, kids benefit from being enrolled with other privileged kids. If more parents had the opportunity to pay for private schools, new institutions would spring up. But the ones at the top of the pecking order would certainly not admit children who had discipline problems or academic “issues.” On the contrary, they would continue to skim the top 5% of applicants.

Thus I don’t think it’s hypocritical to send your own child to a highly selective private school while opposing vouchers. You’re not benefiting from a good that would be available to others if only the government provided vouchers. You’re benefiting from a good that exists because private schools are allowed to select their student bodies, and your kid has value in the market. This may be morally problematic, but the problem isn’t hypocrisy. Nor can the problem easily be solved by law, because private schools are associations that have (in my opinion) a constitutional right to select their own members.