Yesterday, I posted on the story that the Republican commissioners on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission bailed early to release a maddeningly stupid ‘report’ of their own that reiterated all of the non-sense bouncing around talk radio and Fox News, because I felt that it offers us a clear picture of how political power is constructed in early 21st America and how that construct intersects with concrete realities only in an accidental and ad hoc manner. Today, Barry Ritholtz demonstrates why this is important and offers ten questions for any thinking individual to consider in assessing the validity of the claims being made by these public intellectuals. I realize that it is easy to dismiss the whole affair as ‘more of the same’, but I would caution you against such a dismissive conclusion.

Across the political spectrum, the means of constructing an effective political bloc capable of achieving power is through the manipulation of language. Repeat the Big Lies enough and those lies develop what you could call ‘truth effects’ as in they create their own reality in which certain outcomes becomes pre-ordained. Whether its a ‘Fair Tax’ that would push the nation’s tax burden down the income ladder or labelling the few remaining institutions mandated with the task of protecting workers and senior citizens from wage slavery as being Ponzi schemes, it is through the manipulation of language and popular discourse that the Masters of the Universe wield their evil magic.

What sparked this particular rant…? The new Big Lie being propagated in the noise machine that public employees [aided by their evil unions] are better paid than their private sector counterparts is leaking into more mainstream outlets despite being almost total fantasy…

Using the latest federal data, Keefe said the average total compensation for workers in the private sector with bachelor’s degrees is $89,041 compared with $56,641 for public workers.

For workers with professional degrees — lawyers, say, or doctors — the gap is more dramatic: $175,141 in the private sector, $79,330 in the public.

Where public outdoes private is among workers without much education. The average compensation for a public worker without a high school diploma is $41,000, compared with $27,719. With diplomas, employees in both sectors make $44,000.

Public workers are more educated than private — 57 percent have college degrees and higher, compared with 44 percent. Because workers in all sectors are paid according to education and skill levels, lumping them all together — the least skilled with the most — is misleading.

While the middle and working classes continue their descent toward peonage, the nation’s wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated among the noble few, and any resistance to this dynamic is quickly labelled ‘class warfare‘ by the powers that be.

Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.

In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.

The key here is to remember that this long slide toward a Banana Republic is not something that is being done to us [the body politic] by evil Republicans or Democrats but is something that we are doing to ourselves. We internalize discourses that do not only bear little resemblance to reality but also undermine our own self-interests as citizens of the republic, and this is where education enters the picture. The reason the Masters of the Universe use the Big Lie and marketing techniques to achieve political ends is that it works. Only a well-educated populace capable of critical thinking and rational inquiry can immunize the republic from this growing kleptocracy, and it only takes a quick glance at education statistics to understand that we’re in deep trouble.

Let’s look at a few inconvenient facts. We had housing bubbles in the UK, Australia, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Latvia, Canada, and a lot of Eastern Europe. Can we blame the CRA and Fannie and Freddie for that? How about the M&A boom, which resulted in a ton of leveraged loans being issued at super low spreads? If the Fed and other central banks had not driven rates to the floor, we’d see a good bit more distress and dislocation in this sector of the market. Oh, and how about the fact that banks in Continental Europe, which had no housing bubble in their home markets, and no evil Fannie or Freddie analogues, also nearly keeled over in the crisis?

This whole line of thinking is garbage, the financial policy equivalent of arguing that the sun revolves around the earth. Yes, the US and other countries provide overly generous subsidies to housing, and curtailing them over time would not be a bad idea. But that’s been our policy for decades. Calling that a major, let alone primary, cause of the crisis, is simply a highly coded “blame the poor” strategy, In reality, both the runup to the crisis and its aftermath were one of the greatest wealth transfers from the citizenry at large to a comparatively small group of rentiers in the history of man.

However, lest you think that these public intellectuals actually believe this garbage, it is important to note that not only have these commissioners been MIA during committee sessions since August but they are quickly scrubbing their bios to eliminate any mention of their previous advocacy of de-regulation.

It appears that the web editors at the AEI have been busy.

Peter Wallison, currently a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,
was also the co-director of AEI’s Financial Deregulation Project, along with his co-director, Columbia professor Charles Calomoris.

Over at Calomoris’s bio, his status as co-director of AEI’s Financial Deregulation Project is the first sentence;

Not so on for his co-director Wallison. Indeed, any reference to his participation on the Financial Deregulation Project is gone from Wallison’s AEI bio.  Instead, the language has been replaced with the more benign “codirector of AEI’s program on financial policy studies.”

Why the change? After all, it is the AEI’s position that deregulation was not a cause of the crisis.

The language change is a poor attempt to hide Wallison’s role in the radial deregulation of derivatives, banking, leverage and sub-prime mortgages from casual inspection.

This Intellectual dishonesty is telling, but unnecessary. Many people from across the political spectrum agree with the AEI that the bank bailouts were wrong, that corporate giveaways are inappropriate, and that the government created Moral Hazard.

However, some of those people consider data, facts, details, as part of their analysis.

Barry Ritholtz appears to be more forgiving than I as he points toward cognitive dissonance as the driver of this scrub-job. From where I’m sitting, this looks like pure cynical politics. These guys saw the writing on the wall in August and bailed to protect their careers in the right-wing noise machine. They know damn well that this is a bunch of non-sense, and that is why they are scrubbing their bios. But who cares? If they tow the party line like good little boys then they can look forward to well paying jobs and enjoying a prominent position in popular discourse. It’s best for everyone involved if they simply cut Trotsky their long embrace of de-regulation out of the picture.

While shilling for Teach for America, Friedman frames the de-professionalization of teaching through strict adherence to reductive standardized assessments and linking teacher pay to student scores on those very reductive assessments as being just the kind of professionalization that will help attract the best and brightest college students into the teaching field.

If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”

Indeed, Finland and Denmark did bring the teaching profession into the ‘knowledge economy’, but the real questions is how did they do so. The answer stands in stark contrast to the ‘wisdom’ being propagated by Friedman. First, they created a high bar for entry into the profession requiring teachers receive a Master’s in education, that they demonstrate competency through an extended period of student teaching, and that they are capable of engaging in classroom-based research to increase student learning. Second, individual teachers were given a high degree of professional autonomy on how to reach national curricular goals, and they were allowed significant time for planning, research, professional development, and collaboration. Third, teachers were empowered to be the engine of assessment. In Finland, for example, there are no national mandated assessments for all students; the overwhelming majority of assessment is of the formative variety and is constructed by teachers themselves in relation to student needs. In short, they made significant investments in teacher training and then empowered their teachers to use that training in their classrooms. They professionalized teaching. When you compare these reforms to what Friedman is selling the differences are apparent.

Teach for America participants receive only five-weeks training prior to entering the toughest classrooms in America, and their performance reflects their inexperience. When they enter the classroom, they more often than not work in charter schools employing scripted curricula closely tied to standardized assessments, and they have little to no autonomy in how to organize their classrooms. And, most importantly, the vast majority of Teach for America ‘teachers’ leave the field after their two year commitment is up. In short, Friedman is using the example of two highly successful education systems to justify his own pet policy project when the underlying reality contradicts the very thing he is selling, and this is presented to the public as being thoughtful commentary. He’s been doing this crap for years, and he suffers no consequences for it.

[UPDATE] Schools Matter has more here…

What follows is a simple example of the pundit shuffle in action.

Step 1) One think tank hack with zero experience or specialized training in education uses a research article identifying a need in Pre-K education for a broader “range of professional development activities and supports targeted toward teachers’ interactions with children” to publish a thinly veiled advertisement for a Pre-K standardized assessment “product” designed to measure the effectiveness of Pre-school programs.

Step 2) Communicate Cognitive Tag: We need better/more Pre-K assessment.

Step 3) Second think tank hack with zero experience or specialized training in education links to previous hack quoting the exact paragraph that introduces the new “product”.

Step 4) Communicate Cognitive Tag: We need better/more Pre-K assessment.

Step 5) Third think tank hack with zero experience or specialized training in education links to the first hack referencing the new “product”.

Step 6) Communicate Cognitive Tag: We need better/more Pre-K assessment.

Step 7) Profit… in the sense that a common sense idea has been introduced into public discourse via a traditional media outlet and has gained some modicrum of epistemic validity by being referenced by other “bloggers” AND [whether by design or simple 'peer effects'] a new “product” has been introduced to the very narrow demographic of individuals who read Education Week and follow issues related to education policy.

This is how “common sense” is constructed in the 21st century. It is not unique to education and schooling as it is operative across the political landscape from taxes to “entitlement reform”, and it is one of the ways in which our flailing democracy is being purchased. [Cue the Lee Greenwood music - Montage of happy children and the elderly in front of flowing American flags - Fade to black]

[Thomas] Friedman shows that the U.S. economy still has good paying jobs for people without skills by writing a column that addresses economic issues with no apparent awareness of most of the relevant facts.

One of the key players in the distribution of Waiting for ‘Superman’ is Walden Media, a film company owned by Philip Anschutz.  Barbara Miner touches on him (and many other players) in her recent article, but I’ve yet to see anyone look at how Anschutz uses his family’s foundation to push a conservative/libertarian agenda.

As I’ll lay out below, the Anschutz Foundation, chaired and financed by Philip, is quite fond of some of the biggest players in conservative education advocacy: the Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute.  The foundation also gives to the Freedom Works Foundation, Washington Legal Foundation, and various other influential think tanks/organizations.  I won’t really get into it here, but it’s fair to say this foundation uses their philanthropic arm much the way the Koch brothers do: to further their own conservative agenda while creating a climate that is more friendly for their businesses.

However, as with all politics, there is a growing count-narrative emerging, and it is fascinating to watch how it is taking shape. The University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center released a review today that validates the points I’ve been making on this blog and calls out Team Obama’s intellectual dishonesty. Education Week

The Obama Education Blueprint: Researchers Examine the Evidence is the first major effort from the National Education Policy Center, a university-based research organization in Boulder, Colo., that critiques the work of prominent think tanks…

In the book, scholars take a look at the six research summaries the administration released in May in support of its blueprint—a guiding document it sent to Congress in March to explain its vision of the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal law on K-12 education…

The researchers found “the overall quality of the summaries is far below what is required for a national policy discussion of critical issues.”

“Each of the summaries was found to give overly simplified, biased, and too brief explanations of complex issues,” co-editors William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner, both University of Colorado at Boulder academicians, write in the book’s introduction.

Mr.Welner, who is also the NEPC’s director, said the book is aimed at informing the discussion about the administration’s policies.

“It’s not that I don’t like a lot of the ideas and want to see them be successful,” he said. “But when the government makes statements that something is supported by research and it isn’t, that’s an important message to get across.”

President Barack Obama started the school week Monday with a call for a longer school year, and said the worst-performing teachers have “got to go” if they don’t improve quickly.

Bemoaning America’s decreasing global educational competitiveness, Obama sought in a nationally broadcast interview to reinvigorate his education agenda. At the same time, the president acknowledged that many poor schools don’t have the money they need and he defended federal aid for them. But Obama also said that money alone won’t fix the problems in public schools, saying higher standards must be set and achieved by students and teachers alike.

Asked in an interview if he supported a year-round school year, Obama said: “The idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense.” He did not specify how long that school year should be but said U.S. students attend classes, on average, about a month less than children in most other advanced countries.

“That month makes a difference,” the president said. “It means that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the school year during the summer. It’s especially severe for poorer kids who may not see as many books in the house during the summers, aren’t getting as many educational opportunities.”

The Education Commission of the States reported last year that U.S. schools through the high school level offer an average of 180 instruction days per year, compared to an average of 197 days for lower grades and 196 days for upper grades in countries with the best student achievement levels, including Japan, Korea, Germany and New Zealand.

Of course, if you actually go to the National Center for Education Statistics [a unit of the Department of Education that is itself a part of the executive branch] and view data on the average hours of formal instruction per year, you will see that students in the U.S. actually spend more time receiving formal instruction than do Canadian, Japanese, and Korean students… students that out-perform American students on the PISA international assessments conducted by the OECD. As with the “proven models” of school turn-arounds and his love of value-added measures as the primary means of assessing teacher effectiveness, the reforms being pushed by Team Obama are almost totally lacking in an empirical foundation. The disconnect between the rhetoric of ‘hope and change’ that brought Team Obama to the White House and the policies pursued by this administration are stunning, and it is this disconnect that will be President Obama’s downfall.

If you want to do something through a bonus/incentive mechanism, what would make sense is to offer teachers extra money to take on challenging assignments in high poverty schools.

The point is that an absolutely flat salary structure makes no sense. Instead, we prefer to rely on proxies for quality. Currently, we use length of service and possession of a master’s degree as our proxies. But the evidence suggests that these are bad proxies and that value-added metrics, despite their flaws, are better.

Ahhh… Nothing like the smell of dogmatic assertions in the morning! Let’s start with assumption numero uno: incentive structures must be centered around financial compensation. As I’ve pointed out previously, the most powerful incentive mechanism for the ‘professions’ is not related to monetary rewards. Instead, the research tells us that the best way to motivate professionals dealing with complexity in the workplace is to provide them with the opportunity to exercise their professional autonomy whenever possible and to foster a sense of purpose within the organization or institution. In fact, monetary rewards actually work to undermine performance in complex tasks.

Assumption numero dos: value-added metrics provide a relatively accurate measure of teacher performance. The idea that value-added metrics are the best methods we currently have for measuring teacher performance has become commonsensical among both policy elites and the average “man on the street”. I mean its scientific! Right?! No, as the National Research Council pointed out, it is not. Simply put, excluding the majority of phenomena impacting student performance on standardized assessments in order to offer up quantifiable metrics is most certainly un-scientific. Yet, that is exactly what Yglesias and the edu-philanthropists that pay his salary are telling us we should do. Of course, he offers us nothing to back that up. It’s just “true”… right Matt? Glad to see that philosophy degree from Harvard is paying off for ya…

What is its basic conception of assessment?

What is its goal?

Does it reduce everything to numbers?

Is it about “doing to” or “working with”?

Is its priority to support kids’ interest?

Does it avoid excessive assessment?

Note Kohn’s last point… “excessive assessment”. It is obvious here and elsewhere in Kohn’s work that he is not against assessment in all forms, just those forms of standardized assessment that kills curiosity and discovery in education and reduces the goals of schooling to the cognitive basement. However, for those whose pay check is dependent on organizations pushing these kind of assessment-based curricula, this outrage must not stand. So, how does Tucker respond?

There’s a real need for healthy skepticism around our nation’s quest to collect and utilize education data to improve and deepen student learning. Complex formulas, such as those used to calculate value-added scores for teachers, need to be open to examination, testing, and improvement over time. Policymakers and educators need to better understand how to interpret and use assessment data, both from statewide summative tests and their own classroom activities. And we need smart policies, practitioners, and even skeptics to help us use better information about student learning to its full potential.

But there’s a big difference between healthy skepticism and denial. Alfie Kohn, writing in Education Week, sits firmly in denial.

If you follow the link offered by Tucker, he is attempting to tar Kohn by linking him to climate change deniers! That’s right… If you do not accept reductive quantitative measures of academic performance that are not very good at doing the job for which they are being used [1][2][3][4], then you are a “Data Denier” akin to the anti-science global climate change deniers. Neat trick, right?