On Preschooling, Universal and Otherwise: No Hope?

Seeing as it appears to be Say Controversial Things About Public Education Week, I want to make a couple of remarks about state-sponsored preschool programs, by way of a column I wrote for Culture11 late last year.

That column grew out of what was, and still remains, a deep frustration with the ways that advocates for “universal” preschool have drawn on the work of Chicago economist James Heckman, whose research on the social and economic benefits of preschool programs is frequently put forward in support of the claim that federal and state governments need to make publicly-funded preschooling available to all. That Heckman’s work would be used to this end isn’t initially very surprising: he’s a Nobel laureate, after all, and his research into the economic benefits of preschool has turned up some tremendously encouraging results. But as I wrote in my column, Heckman’s case for preschool simply isn’t a case for universal preschool, and using his work to such an end requires ignoring a number of his own convictions:

[Heckman] is much more careful than many of those who appeal to his work to distinguish between the sorts of targeted preschool programs that have actually been found to work and huge, multibillion-dollar boondoggles like the Obama-Biden “Zero to Five” plan. While Heckman does speak and write passionately about the value of intensive early intervention in the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enlisting him as an advocate for a federally-sponsored universal preschool program requires severe distortions of his actual views: for example, a 2006 essay that Heckman wrote for the Wall Street Journal closes with the observation that there is “little basis for providing universal programs at zero cost,” and “no reason for [early childhood] interventions to be conducted in public centers.”

“Vouchers,” Heckman continues, “that can be used in privately run programs would promote competition and efficiency in the provision of early enrichment programs. They would allow parents to choose the venues and values offered in the programs that enrich their child’s earliest years.” Appropriately targeted, means-tested, and choice-driven ventures are one thing; but to spend public dollars in such a way as to “try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing,” as he put it in a 2005 interview, is “foolish.”

So what gives? What I wrote at the time, and still think is basically right, was that Heckman has been able to be enlisted on the side of universal preschool largely because opponents of such policies have failed to claim the moral high ground in anything like the way that they’ve – arguably, anyway – claimed it so successfully in the “school choice” approach to primary and secondary education. And again, there’s a reason for this: the kind of programs that Heckman’s research has found to work haven’t been ones like Head Start; they’re far more expensive than a universal program ever could be, and involve quite a lot more time and effort than preschool usually does. When Heckman cautions against universality as in the quotes above, or concludes a paper (gated, I guess) that discusses the famed Perry Preschool Program by saying that “[i]nvesting in disadvantaged (my emphasis – JS) young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large”, he means exactly what he says: every dollar spent on taxpayer-funded daycare for rich and middle-class kids is a dollar not spent on having teachers come, as they did in the Perry Program, to visit the homes of kids who are worse off. But as it is, there’s no real constituency for spending tens of thousands of dollars a head only on the lower-class kids who’d really stand – and need – to benefit.

All of which is just to say that politics is a drag, isn’t it? On one team you’ve got a group that supports the educational lobby and so favors universality; on the other you’ve got the group that screams “Socialism!” and “Statism!” at the faintest whiffs of redistribution or government intervention; and over on the sidelines you’ve got a rag-tag group, clinging tightly to the data showing that they’ve got an idea that just might work, watching the ongoing battle with horror and occasionally spitting into the wind. I think I need a beer.

(Cross-posted.)

Filed under: education, politics

From the Department of Great Awful Ideas

Berkeley’s undergraduate library currently has up a blackboard-sized piece of white paper and a bucket of markers, with a request for students to write down their suggestions on how to make the library more “green”. Among the multicolored contributions: F*CK FINALS, and Get reusable condoms for [NAME REDACTED]. (And yes, the redactions are mine.) How about “Stop wasting paper”, or maybe even “Tell the idiot administrator who came up with this idea not to bother burning the fuel it takes to drive into work next week”?

Filed under: education, environment, miscellany

How (Not) to Fix Our Schools

Commenting on the education fooferaw over at the Scene, E.D. Kain loads the bases with a handful of nice points about the difficulty in quantifying performance, then leaves those runners stranded with a huge swing-and-miss:

So let’s pay teachers more across the board.  Let’s give them back the reigns [sic] to their own classrooms, and put an end to the horribly self-defeating age of standardized testing.  And finally, let’s open up the trade-school model to give students not destined to academia a path to educational and economical success.  There’s a lot more to say about all of this, but I hope this is a good starter.

Targeting the unions, or replacing the model we have with one of performance compensation – these things sound nice on the surface, but they ignore the unquantifiable nature of our education.

So we’re supposed to react to a situation in which our schools are failing and the teachers’ unions are one of the biggest forces standing in the way of commonsensical and much-needed reforms by increasing what we pay our teachers, and … leaving the unions alone. Or in other words, we give the unions what they’ve already got and more, by leaving in place the structures that make it next to impossible to fire criminally irresponsible teachers and – notwithstanding the data, which I’d be happy to produce, showing no significant relationship between increased pay and improved performance – fattening those teachers’ paychecks while we’re at it. That may be a starter, but I don’t much like the way it’s headed.

Now, look: I have no objection to well-paid schoolteachers. Nor do I have any grand objection to teachers’ unions, or unions of any other sort. Hence Erik is mistaken in describing me and the other Scenesters as “arguing against teachers unions and in favor of performance pay”. Rather, we were arguing, against the teachers’ unions, in favor of performance pay: which is to say, it’s insofar as the unions are opposed to performance pay, not insofar as they’re unions, that (in this case) we think they’re a drag on the educational system. And that this is so should be obvious. But then why should the way that the unions stomp and scream whenever there’s a proposal to reform hiring and firing practices not be a reason to “target” them?

P.S. One more point, which basically mirrors what I was arguing in the comments: when it comes to quantifying performance, one helpful strategy is to draw on the collective intelligence of the masses, and one great way to do this is to put more power in the hands of parents rather than bureaucrats. Obviously such a reform would only be a part of the required solution, not the whole thing – and to that end, I agree with Conor that giving more leeway to principals would also be a worthwhile step. But once again, this sort of autonomy is exactly the thing that teachers’ unions consistently stand in the way of, and that’s exactly the reason why in arguing for it you can’t but be arguing against them.

Filed under: education

Freedom’s Underside

by JL Wall

Two weeks ago (but I’m just now getting to it) Patrick Deneen helped reiterate a point that I’ve become particularly keen on over the past year or so:

My argument, in a nutshell, is that the liberal arts were based on the teaching of an older form of liberty, namely the liberty that is achieved through self-governance. Its role has been increasingly displaced with the rise of the new liberty – achieved through the new sciences – namely, the liberty from limits aimed at the fulfillment of our desires.

and

For the humanities – the older science – liberty had been understood to be the achievement of hard discipline, the learned capacity to govern appetite and desire, to tame the unlimited cravings of the will and achieve a condition of self-government. For the new science, liberty was constituted by the removal of obstacles, by the overcoming of limits, by the transformation of the world – whether the world of nature, over which humans increasingly exercised control by means of science and applied technologies, or even the nature of humanity itself, a nature that was believed to be as malleable as nature had proven to be.

Case in point, for me: Sophokles’ Antigone is just as ill-at-ease with the title character as it is with Kreon, despite the fact that she follows the laws of the gods and he refuses to, despite the fact that her individualism sits better with modern audiences than Kreon’s blind near-authoritarianism.  A polis in which there is only one vote is not a polis, Kreon Haimon [EDITED 4/15: Whoops! -- JLW] says.  And, in the eyes of the play, neither have liberty and neither is the ideal citizen.  Antigone’s interpretations of what is right, her radical freedom from any restraint, separates her from society as much as Kreon’s decrees do him — this despite the fact that she is right to offer her brother the minimal burial rites required by the gods.  One could not be free except among fellow freemen, within society.  Say what one will about the particulars, it is a liberty that requires restraint and responsibility.

Or, since we’re in the proper season for it: Pesach is a celebration of liberation from slavery.  It is a deliverance into freedom, however, that culminates with the reception of the law and the Covenant at Sinai.  Deliverance into freedom required the revelation and acceptance of responsibility.

Freedom isn’t just another word for nothing left to lose. (The word you were looking for, Mr. Kristofferson, is “desperation,” or, if you needed more syllables, “Backed up against a wall.”  Neither actually give you choice, just alternatives that you might sometimes confuse for it.)

Filed under: civil liberties, education

Strunk’d

So Edinburgh linguist Geoffrey Pullum does not like William Strunk and E.B. White’s Elements of Style:

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

As someone who was assigned and tested on the Elements in one of my very first undergraduate classes and still harbors a near-religious devotion to conjoining my infinitives and keeping my “however”s tucked safely in the middles of my sentences, my initial reaction when I started reading this piece was to get, well, a bit defensive – but there’s no denying that Pullum makes a strong case. For example, consider Strunk and White’s notorious “however” rule:

However. Avoid starting a sentence with ‘however’ when the meaning is “nevertheless.” The word usually serves better when not in first position. (Elements, p. 48)

Comments Pullum:

Searching for “however” at the beginnings of sentences and “however” elsewhere reveals that good authors alternate between placing the adverb first and placing it after the subject. The ratios vary. Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, checked half a dozen of Mark Twain’s books and found roughly seven instances of “however” at the beginning of a sentence for each three placed after the subject, whereas in five selected books by Henry James, the ratio was one to 15. In Dracula I found a ratio of about one to five. The evidence cannot possibly support a claim that “however” at the beginning of a sentence should be eschewed. Strunk and White are just wrong about the facts of English syntax.

It goes on like that, with the textbook takes on “that” and “which” (“There was never a period in the history of English when ‘which’ at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.”), the number of a verb following “none” (”… the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.”), and even those famous strictures against using the passive voice (“Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.”) coming under similar fire. Indeed, argues Pullum, the real problem seems to be that Strunk and White, though both perfectly good writers who had the good sense not to write in the ways that they told others to, didn’t know anything about grammar at all:

The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like “subject” and “verb” and “phrase,” but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.

Pullum should know, of course: he’s the author of this big fat book, which having read this essay I’d gladly assign to my intro students in place of Strunk & White if not for the fact that it costs over $160 and runs to nearly 2,000 pages long. (Anyone have some alternative suggestions?) It’s hard, though, not to feel like his criticism sometimes goes a bit beyond its proper bounds, as for example when he seems to blame MS Word’s nasty habit of underlining EVERY SINGLE PASSIVE-VOICE CONSTRUCTION in one of those bothersome green lines on our national love-affair with the Elements (“That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.”); this may be accurate for all I know, but I’d need to see a bit more evidence.

Similarly, consider that charge I began with, that the “enormous influence” of the Elements “has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it”: I can think of quite a lot of things that have done great damage to the grammatical competence of our nation’s student population, ultimately driving things to a point where college upperclassmen at an institution like UC Berkeley turn in essays riddled with sentence fragments and marked by what seems to be an utter inability to differentiate, say, “one self” from “oneself”, let alone “its” from “it’s”. But blaming it on Strunk and White? Sure, an overly slavish devotion to the grammatical principles of Elements – or of any such handbook, for that matter – is going to make for some unpleasantly stilted prose, but I’m certainly not alone in wishing that more of my students ever showed evidence of “grammatical angst” when it came time to put words on a page (or, worse, an e-mail). Perhaps, since no one teaches grammar anyway, those of us in the humanistic disciplines with other material to get to would do better just to pass out copies of “Politics and the English Language”, run off a few of White’s old New Yorker essays, and tell our sophomores, “Here: write like this“. Given what we’re facing, though, turning to a slim and appropriately bossy text like the Elements seems an obviously understandable reaction.

“The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style“, Pullum calls us. If only.

(Cross-posted.)

Filed under: education, media/culture

Leaders Needed

Glenn Greenwald’s widely-cited post from over the weekend on Jim Webb’s courageous push for prison reform is a must-read. I especially liked this bit:

Webb’s commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making [that says that taking bad but popular positions is necessary if one is to avoid political risk] is –  just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold’s singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold’s subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush’s assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin.  Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy.  Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian [sic] consensus.  Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

In this context, the unpopular stances Greenwald has in mind concern the drug war, sentencing guidelines, prison conditions, and the horrid condition of a country where blacks are sentenced to prison on drug charges at over five times the rate of whites despite not using drugs any more frequently, but it’s not hard to think of others that fit the bill:

1. The specific question of whether a country with a criminal justice system in the state of ours can really be trusted to administer the death penalty responsibly.
2. The dangers inherent in the legislative branch’s unconstitutional, near-complete abdication of its roles in declaring war, making and passing laws, and so forth.
3. The questions of why, since college is demonstrably not for everyone, we insist on making it a precondition for a productive adulthood, and of how we can extend higher educational opportunities to those with the capacity really to benefit from them while helping others transition into family life and the workplace.
4. The need to rethink our open-ended and essentially conditionless support of the Israeli government, with all its aims and policies, no matter the damage this does to our image in the Middle East and the rest of the world.
5. The importance of a serious national dialogue about overconsumption, excessive indebtedness, and the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility – at home, in business, and in government alike.
6. The need for serious, far-sighted, and no doubt inconvenient (for many) entitlement reform, and the corresponding task of paying down our national debt.
7. The tremendous dangers, both foreign and domestic, inherent in our commitment to maintaining a massive national security apparatus with a near-trillion dollar budget the shrinking of which is a political impossibility.
8. The questions of whether international terrorism might be better opposed by abandoning or at least severely altering the present rubric of the Global War on Terror, and more generally whether the recent history of U.S. military engagement might suggest the need for a serious retrenchment of our far-overstretched armed forces and a recommitment to using American power to serve the national interest first and foremost.

That’s just off the top of my head – what have I missed, and where do you put the odds of finding “actual leaders” who are willing to take these and similar issues up?

Filed under: civil liberties, economics, education, foreign affairs, government/law, politics, torture, war

Double Standards

I don’t have much to say about the grand Catholic brouhaha over President Obama giving this year’s commencement address at my alma mater, though despite my initial reaction just to roll my eyes at all the fuss I’ve got to note that I think Bishop D’Arcy makes a pretty good case that the invitation is problematic. Wherever you come down on the controversy, however, there can be no denying that K-Lo just got pwn3d by the Dish:

But it was fine for pro-choice, pro-death penalty Condi Rice, who was part of the team that signed off on torture, to speak at Boston College. Seriously who do these people think they’re persuading any more?

Not me, surely. The question for Andrew, though, is what he’d say if the commencement speaker were Dick Cheney. Yeah, I thought so, and amen to that. But then, why do Obama’s commitments to federally-funded embryonic stem cell research and abortion on demand get a pass?

Elsewhere: Unending irony, indeed.

Filed under: abortion, education, morality, religion, torture, war

Civic Religion: Still Religion

Sorry, but life and work are still getting in the way of blogging. I do, however, wish to give my endorsement to these sentences of Will Wilkinson’s:

One of the first arguments against vouchers, tax credits or other systems of publicly-financed, privately-provided education is that taxpayer money should not go to schools that teach this or that allegedly malign belief. It just so happens that, on the way to making certain that children are not taught that the world is 6000 years old (which would obviously neutralize one’s ability to earn a living as a middle manager), children are also imbued with a certain nationalistic civic piety and the belief that, say, FDR saved capitalism from itself. Who knows what chaos might otherwise ensue?

The argument comes with bonus data (pdf), too.

Elsewhere: Per Will’s recommendation, do read Tim Carney on the power of the teachers unions.

Filed under: education, patriotism, politics, religion

“Closeted Christians?”

Over at The American Scene, I talk about a recent discussion between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett, and take on the question of whether Christians (and, by extension, other religious types) ought to keep their convictions to themselves if they want to get ahead in academia.

Filed under: education, philosophy, religion

Okay, ONE grading story …

It’s the good kind, though:

If Kant is correct, then the mind is essentially a good capitalist; it adds value to resources. Even after expenses (experiential knowledge) is [sic] accounted for or deducted, at the end of the day, the mind has still managed to turn a profit (synthetic knowledge).

I like this quite a lot, and plan to keep it for myself and reuse it in the future. Kids can say the darndest things …

ADDENDUM: Or, asks the Humean, are our minds more like MBAs?

Filed under: economics, education, philosophy