Another perspective on failing schools

This article in the Wall Street Journal discusses a study of so-called failing schools in California. It measures the mobility of schools in terms of how likely bad schools are to become good.

Mr. Loveless looked at 1,100 schools in California and compared test scores from 1989 and 2009. "Of schools in the bottom quartile in 1989—the state's lowest performers—nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) scored in the bottom quartile again in 2009," he writes. "The odds of a bottom quartile school's rising to the top quartile were about one in seventy (1.4 percent)." Of schools in the bottom 10% in 1989, only 3.5% reached the state average after 20 years.

Conversely, the best schools tended to remain that way. Sixty-three percent of the top performers in 1989 were still at the top in 2009, while only 2.4% had fallen to the bottom.

His conclusions were that, "School achievement, or lack thereof, is remarkably persistent," and he "the answer may lie in a school's culture—its education DNA."

I tend to be a believer in the group socialization theory of child development, so I'm sensitive to the idea that a school can have a culture that can't be changed by bringing a tougher principal or some more-concerned teachers. However, there's another question that needs to be answered before we start spending money closing bad schools and opening new ones: What if the schools are fine but the kids are failing?

In other words, part of the reason a school's culture doesn't change over a twenty-year period is that the students who attend over that period tend to be similar. I suspect they are particularly similar in terms of wealth and race, both of which are strong predictors of IQ, which is in turn a very strong predictor of school performance. If you think of it in those terms, then the idea that schools would not change much over time is unsurprising.

There can be no doubt that some schools are inherently better than others, but let's please ask some pertinent questions before we charge ahead; we better do a little more research. For example, those few schools that did move from the top to the bottom or vice versa, were there demographic changes in the regions they served? Did the neighborhood gentrify? Did a large company close its doors causing everybody but the poorest and least able to leave?

I'd also like to know whether the kids who leave failed schools after they're closed actually do any better than they did at the failed school. And please, don't talk to me about a some kid who left MLK High School after his freshman year to attend the Topsider Academy and raised his GPA from 0.7 to 2.5. We need to deal with the world as it actually is. These kids won't be plonked into a great environment all of a sudden. They're going to attend another school with DNA that's probably a lot like the one they just left. That's the reality. And I am not sure I see why we would expect this new school to be much different from the old, "failed" one.

A side note:
There's also a bit of a measurement problem here. No matter what we do, there will always be a range of school and student performance. That necessarily means that some schools and students will be worse than the rest. I.e., we cannot all be above average. Perhaps we should ask whether these worst-performing schools are actually good enough. I know that idea isn't popular in the ed biz, but surely there must be some point we'd be satisfied that no school is failing. How do we know we're not there already? I'd love to hear somebody at least address this question in a serious way, including thoughts about benefit/cost. We can always spend another dollar to improve schools, but the return on each additional dollar is diminishing. We're already spending so much; it must be legitimate to ask whether the next dollar we're proposing to spend provides at least a dollar of benefit.

Market failure: necessary but not sufficient

One justification for the heavy involvement of state and federal governments in education is market failure. Market failure is a micro-economic idea in which free exchange does not produce the theoretically optimal level of production and consumption. Usually this occurs because of an externality. An externality is a cost or benefit from an exchange that accrues to someone who is not a party to the exchange. Since the cost or benefit of this externality is not considered by the parties involved in the exchange, a free market might tend to under- or over-produce a particular good.

For example. I build a factory to make widgets. (All example economics problems involve widget manufacture. Did you know?) I produce widgets up to the point that the last widget I make is worth exactly as much to the purchaser as it cost me to me. For example, if widgets are worth $10 on the market, I'll make as many widgets as I can until the last, most expensive widget costs me ten dollars, and then I'll quit.

This is all well and good. I'm happy, my customers are happy. We're both benefiting from the surplus of trade. It's great! But what if there's an externality? Let's say my widget factory puts out a stream of noxious liquid that runs across my neighbor's yard. If that cost were borne by me, I'd have an incentive to make fewer widgets, since the cost of manufacture would be higher. If it were borne by my customers, they'd buy fewer widgets, since the cost of buying widgets would be higher. But since it's borne by a third party, not involved in the transaction, no one has any incentive to take the cost into account, and widgets are over-produced.

In the case of education, the externality is not a negative, it is a positive. The argument is that my education benefits others besides me. Those benefits are not taken into account when I decide how much education to buy or when the suppliers of education decide how much education to produce, so the market for education is smaller than it ought to be. Ideally.

This simple idea is the basis for billions of dollars of spending by governments on education. My own state of Washington has a constitutional clause stating that education is the state's highest priority. But is that right? Does that follow from the logic of externalities?

Let's remember that one of the options we are given is not perfection. We must compare options as they are actually available to us. Therefore, the "failed" free market for education does not have to compete with the idealized provision of education by the state, but rather by the provision of education by the state as it actually exists. Although it is possible that a free market in education would tend to under-supply, are we sure this is worse than the other alternatives? How do we know that the current system doesn't over-supply the education market? I have yet to hear anyone even raise this issue.

Education is important. But it's not infinitely important. Let's have some thought to return on investment in our spending decisions regarding education. Let's at least be sure that the benefits of the marginal dollar outweigh the costs.

Are standards fatally flawed?

I'm generally a supporter of standards in education. It may seem like that's a trivial statement. After all, who supports education without standards? Yet it turns out to be a major source of division. On one side, we've got those who insist that education has got to mean something if we're going to spend so much on it. The arguments against standards are more varied. Some worry about disparate impact on racial groups. Others worry about politicization of the curriculum. And of course some are teachers who would, understandably, like not be be judged in any way, least of all by the performance of their students. This last group is vocal.

Lately I've gotten to wondering whether the idea of standards is fatally flawed. There are plenty of difficulties with implementing a standards program, most of which can presumably be worked out. But there's one big problem: what happens to the students who can't meet [typo corrected] the standard?

The logic of simply not giving them a diploma is rock-solid. You didn't demonstrate the necessary skill to justify a diploma; therefore, in order to protect the value of the diploma for those who did so demonstrate, we can't give you one. The benefit/cost calculation is impeccable. But the political calculation is not. What are you gonna do with all those students who don't graduate? More specifically, what are you gonna do with all those ninth-graders who realize they will never graduate and simply drop out?

Funneling non-academic types out of high school and into the job market as apprentices, say, is a great idea. It will suit both those students and the ones who remain in high school better. Unfortunately, that's not where we are, and I see nothing in the discussion of standards that addresses this fundamental problem. Instead, the response seems to be that we must help all students rise up to meet the standard. This is not reality and is doomed to failure.

Certainly good teachers and good schools can eke a little more out of bad students. But does anybody really think that just working a little harder is going to do the trick? If you're serious about a standard you must start by acknowledging that some students will never be able to meet it no matter what they do, and that the number who can't meet the standard varies directly with the difficulty of the standard. In other words, the harder the standard, they fewer students will meet it.

Is this controversial? It shouldn't be. We've been dumping resources on education for decades and we've seen little change in the outcomes. It's possible that we just haven't tried the right trick yet, but the more likely explanation is that we're bumping up against some fundamental limits on what can be accomplished. But let's not get hung up on this point. Maybe there's some whiz-bang Ed School theory about how with just the right blend of carrots and sticks you can make a kid with an IQ of 85 into college material. Even if that's possible, do you really think it will happen? In other words, the issue isn't whether most students could meet the standard; it is whether they actually will. That they won't is indisputable. There are too many examples showing us the stubbornness of this fact.

We've seen the beginnings of what happens when academic standards meet political reality in Washington State. Washington's WASL was supposed to ensure that high school graduates meet a high standard in several areas, including reading, math, science, and writing. So far so good. Unfortunately, right from the beginning trouble brewed. In the first sample tests, most students could not pass the math section. What was the response from the political establishment, you ask? Why, they stood up in support of the standards. They braved the outrage of their constituents whose children were in danger of not graduating high school to protect the value of the high school diploma.

No, I'm kidding. They dropped the math section from test and delayed using the remainder as a graduation requirement. What else could they do? In the end, eliminating the WASL was the only plank in the platform of the guy who defeated the incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction. She lost her job because she proposed and defended meaningful standards. She was right, but her strategy was a Darwinian loser, politically.

We're stuck. You can't have meaningful standards and still give out high school diplomas to pretty much everybody. The solutions to this dilemma seem not to be on the table. Much as it pains me to say so, it seems inevitable that the standards will ultimately lose this battle.

Poverty and performance, updated

Diane Ravitch has been a supporter of both school-choice and standards. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, she seems to take back her support for both. This is interesting and worthy of discussion of itself, but I thought the most interesting part came in the third-to-last paragraph (emphasis mine).

The current emphasis on accountability has created a punitive atmosphere in the schools. The Obama administration seems to think that schools will improve if we fire teachers and close schools. They do not recognize that schools are often the anchor of their communities, representing values, traditions and ideals that have persevered across decades. They also fail to recognize that the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers.

I know this isn't the main point of her article, but I can't help wondering, does anybody really believe this? I mean, I know we're all supposed to pretend that being poor makes you dull, but isn't the other way around at least as as likely? The irony is that speaking the plain truth, that some kids are not smart enough to meet tough standards, makes her argument against those standards even stronger. Unfortunately, it bumps up against the Immovable Object, the fantasy that we are each born perfect, capable of anything, until our parents and society and I-don't-know-what-all make us flunk out of eighth grade.

Until we're ready to start talking like adults we have absolutely no hope of improving anything.

Update:
The graph below was scanned (probably illegally - sorry) from Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. It shows the effects of socio-economic status (SES) and IQ on one measure of school performance, namely getting a degree.

The graph clearly shows that IQ is a much better predictor than SES is of at least this particular measure of performance. Look at it this way: if somebody said to you, Tell me whether Joe Blow here ever got his diploma. I'll give you one piece of information about him, you would ask whether he was smart, not whether he was poor. In other words, IQ is a better predictor than poverty.