Highlights from the NCPI Conference

I attended the first two sessions of the National Center on Performance Incentive’s conference. The morning started predictably. James Guthrie opened by paying homage to the value of apolitical inquiry and then praising Russ Whitehurst for single-handedly lifting education research out of the gutter and elevating it to the status of a real science.

Michael Podgursky chanted the economists’ mantra that “the law of supply and demand cannot be denied.” His point in this case is that if we ‘artificially’ control the wages of teachers, they will seek other ways of being compensated (for instance, by moving to easier to teach districts, or by teaching less difficult subjects).

Richard Rothstein suggested that it may be wise to learn something about the private sector before one seeks to mimic it. I do not think he persuaded many of the economists in the audience, but the teacher crowd loved him.

Paul Peterson asked Rothstein a terrific question. He argued that the current compensation system is an incentive plan—it incentivizes endurance and the accumulation of graduate credits. Since neither of these seem to be correlated with student achievement, why not try incentivizing something else?

Rothstein’s response was essentially that two bad ideas don’t make one good one. He proposes a pay-for-performance system in which 80% of the measures are qualitative and 20% are quantitative. He argues that this is the way the private sector actually implements performance pay.

I’ve saved my remarks about Russ Whitehurst’s address until the end. I can’t give it the full attention is deserves, but here is my initial concern.

The next generation of educational historians will no doubt see the Whitehurst era as bringing significant changes to educational research. Whitehurst said today that the old funding system was based on the federal government trusting that research centers could come up with their own questions. This led to a multiplicity of research agendas. He counts as one of his achievements the narrowing of education research down to a few issues, mostly focused on introducing market reforms into education. The important point here is that the federal government provides questions while researchers provide answers.

I think he has put the political cart in front of the scientific horse. Generally speaking, the greatest thinkers are not those who answer other people’s questions. They are the ones who ask better questions. (Perhaps here one would reference Kuhn on normal vs. revolutionary science. But I’m tired of reading the reference to Kuhn. Instead, check out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar.”)

My very first dissertation

Yesterday I settled on a tentative title: “Pragmatism and Reconstruction in Social Science.”

But wait, there's more! I have an outline, a dissertation chair, and a first reader. I kind of, sort of, have drafts of two chapters (they need significant revisioning). At this rate, I should definitely graduate before Carter starts high school.

Lawrence Cremin Would be Proud

Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder just released a new study, “A Report Card on Comprehensive Equity: Racial Gaps in the Nation’s Youth Outcomes.” I scanned the report yesterday and will be reading it in more detail this week. So far it looks like a highly imaginative and significant contribution to the study of what Lawrence Cremin called the ‘educational configuration,’ that is, the nexus of institutions which work with and against each other to influence the capacities, beliefs, habits, values, and attitudes of individuals. The authors draw on a wide array of input variables, rather than the same shopworn background and academic achievement variables that are in nearly every other study. They argue that the availability of affordable and safe housing, for instance, is an important educational input. They also diversify both output and outcome variables (an interesting distinction) to include things such as civic achievement and aesthetic capabilities.

Teachers, Priests, and Car Salespersons

This week Vanderbilt is hosting some of the biggest names in educational research for a conference on incentive-based pay for school teachers. Richard Rothstein, Michael Podgursky, and Russ Whitehurst are among the luminaries that will be presenting. This conference is being organized by our very own multi-million dollar National Center on Performance Incentives.

Jim Guthrie is one of the people responsible for bringing the center to Vanderbilt. So this makes him a run-of-the-mill neo-liberal who puts his faith in the power of market mechanisms to improve education, right?

Maybe, but his comments during a seminar last week show him to be more thoughtful than many of my friends in philosophy of education give him credit. He asked simply whether priests would work any harder if they were paid based on their performance. This is a pretty common question, but to hear it coming from him gave it a certain significance. Like priests, teachers have a wide array of outcomes at which they aim, and any attempt by management to exaggerate the importance of any one outcome is often met with resistance. Teachers who refuse to narrow their curriculum to conform to standardized tests may have something in common with the priests in South America who still distribute condoms despite the Pope’s condemnation.

One reason that incentive pay may work for salespersons is that the range of outcomes is so narrow. Current studies (including those conducted by my colleagues) try to make teaching more like selling cars, with narrow but clear measures for performance.

The problem is that (good) teaching is aimed at a wide variety of outcomes. Narrow outcome measures may work if they can serve as proxies for much broader skills. But I worry that they fail to do this. Rothstein will be presenting a paper arguing a similar point, but in much greater depth. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

A Passing Comment on Education Science

Dale Ballou offered a brilliant critique of psychometrics and value-added testing during yesterday's Economics of Education class. I won’t recreate the entire example here, but the gist is that it is difficult to tell what it means to learn “more” math than another person. Current testing methods seem to require that the mind be like a bucket and mathematical concepts be like some sort of ooze.

So such questions arise as: how many ounces of mathematical ooze must the teacher pour into the student’s brain bucket for her to achieve mastery of a simple addition problem? Is this more or less ooze that it takes to go from simple addition to multiplication of fractions?

Wittgenstein’s concluding remark in Philosophical Investigations comes to mind:

The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a “young science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. (Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the other case conceptual confusion and methods of proof.)
The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.
An investigation is possible in connexion with mathematics which is entirely analogous to our investigation of psychology. It is just as little a mathematical investigation as the other is a psychological one. It will not contain calculations, so it is not for example logistic. It might deserve the name of an investigation of the ‘foundation of mathematics’.

How much education 'science' is marked by “conceptual confusion” yoked to “experimental methods”?

Fifteen to Twenty-Seven

The longer one incubates in graduate school the better one’s CV can mature. Some wiz-kids game the system and graduate in three years, only to idle as an adjunct for another three years while they build a research record. If possible, I’d like to avoid the bardo state between graduate school and the tenure-track position.

I hope to graduate in May 2009, which is in fifteen months. From now until then, I have to take a few more courses, pass my comprehensive exams, defend two prospectuses, and write a couple of dissertations.

If things don’t progress as quickly as I hope, then I’ll graduate in May 2010, which is in 27 months. Plan A means that my total time from beginning to completion would be six years; plan B puts me at seven. Plan C is to sell advertising on my forehead. Meaning: regardless of my marketability, I can’t stay in graduate school much longer.

The joke hasn’t yet aged: “Graduate School. Hard to get in, harder to get out.”

Uneasy about the Multisport Lifestyle

It seems that much of the 'multisport lifestyle' involves signaling to others that one is, indeed, living the mulitsport lifestyle. We put "Swim, Bike, Run," "70.3," and "IM" stickers on our cars. Even the mediocre athletes spend upwards of $1000 on a new bike. Then we spend hundreds of dollars on designer athletic wear, often color coridinated with our bikes.

What do all of these signals do? Within the multisport community, they demonstrate commitment and passion. A 'serious' athlete doesn't were a Wal-Mart cotton hoodie ($8, on sale) during a jog; she wears a Pearl Izumi waterproof, windproof, sweat-wicking thermal layer, at a typical cost around $100. She doesn't refuel with water and food, but with Accelerade and Hammer Gel.

I'm suspicious that most money spent in multisport enhances image rather than performance. Basketball, baseball, and football are often critized for being more about business than sport. In their defence, the enthusiast of any of these sports needs little gear other than a ball and some friends. They are activities in which nearly all people can participate. Perhaps this is the attraction to multisport--few can afford to particpate, thus participation signals that one is educated, wealthy, and possessed of leisure. These steep financial barriers help ensure that multisport athletes do not have to worry about mingling with people from different economic and educational backgrounds.

Multisport has joined skiing and horseracing as hobbies which reflect and, to an extent, reinforce our longstanding racial and socioeconomic divisions. We already work in seperate places, live in seperate neighborhoods, and (increasingly) attend different schools. The prospects for common values and shared understanding grow dim when every aspect of our lives isolates us from one another.

Modesty and Meliorism

Modest Meliorism implies that the world can be improved through human effort, but that such efforts are made in a condition of uncertainty. I first came across the term while reading William James, who described meliorism as a middle ground between optimism and pessimism. According to James, both the optimist and the pessimist are convinced that the fate of the world is fixed; they differ only in their assessment of whether that fate is good or bad. The meliorist believes that the future is pliable. Most importantly for James, human effort is a detirmining factor in whether the future will be better than the present. This is a move away from placing fate at the hand of nonhuman (natural or supernatural) forces and placing it squarely on our own shoulders.

If indetiminacy is at the heart of our condition, then certain intellectual virtues are called for, among them modesty, courage, openness, imagination, and flexibility. I've added the term modesty to James meliorism not because it is the most important among all virtues, but because it is one in which we are particularly deficient.

I'm currently working on two dissertations, one on philosophy and social science, and another on education and democracy. I'm also a father, husband, triathlete, and political junkie. Expect infrequent posts ranging across these subjects.