The Education Gadfly Weekly

National Academy of Sciences
2008

President Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1863, just four years after Charles Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection in On the Origin of Species. Odds are the brand-new organization, like most others, didn't buy the theory then, but today's NAS has just published Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which makes the case for evolution, and scientific inquiry more generally, to the church-going public. As expected, the book is heavy on the evidence for evolution, describing important fossil findings and illustrating the workings of DNA. It also spends considerable time defending science itself as our most legitimate source of worldly knowledge. For instance: "In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena... If explanations are based on purported forces that are outside of nature, scientists have no way of either confirming or disproving those explanations." The authors also tout the practical benefits that have accompanied our growing understanding of evolution. For instance, the book features sidebars on evolution's role in "Combating New Infectious Diseases" and "The Domestication of Wheat." If all this doesn't budge creationists, the book offers several pages explaining away their objections to evolution, while noting that science and religion can easily coexist. One section provides "excerpts of statements by religious leaders who see no conflict between their faith and science." The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, for instance, tells us that "[T]here is no contradiction between an evolutionary theory of human origins and the doctrine of God as Creator." The authors are firm, however, in opposing the teaching of intelligent design theory in the classroom. There aren't really any new arguments in all of this, but the NAS's explanation of the two different worlds that science and religion inhabit is helpful and useful. Those in charge of impressionable young minds won't find the teaching of evolution laid out more clearly and comprehensively anywhere else. Buy a copy or read it online here.

Dallas has hit a rough patch. After their 13-3 season, the Cowboys' pitiable exit from the NFL playoffs has left the city despondent. And then there are Dallas's schools, which are so plagued by corruption that the district has created a 15-person investigative office just to crack down on such malfeasance. Among the abuses so far revealed: an assistant principal who had students build him a king-size bed in shop class, a lunch lady who absconded with hundreds of dollars in cafeteria pastries, and a manager who accepted free Cowboys tickets from a consultant (poor sap). The Office of Professional Responsibility has so far closed about 75 cases and handed over the amassed evidence to Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, who metes out punishment. "It's definitely working," Hinojosa said. "There are no sacred cows." And most school employees seem to appreciate the new department's objectivity, too. Gadfly is always on guard against school districts that solve problems by bedecking themselves in red tape, but Dallas's corruption cops don't appear to fit that bill. Rather, they work quickly, professionally, and efficiently. Shouldn't FOX make a reality show out of this?

"Dallas school district's corruption investigators keeping busy," by Tawnell D. Hobbs, Dallas Morning News, January 12, 2007

The market's ability to improve school quality has faced growing skepticism lately (see below). And now this.

We learn from a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that cheap wine tastes better when its drinkers believe they're sipping a Grand Cru. One wonders: Are parents who enroll their children in tony schools perhaps guzzling Two Buck Chuck?

But back to the wine. Twenty (lucky) volunteers, all of whom reported liking and at least occasionally drinking the red variety, were presented with five glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. They were told that no two glasses contained the same wine, and that each wine they tasted was differently priced, ranging from $5 to $90 per bottle. But the researchers had performed a sly trick. The $90 wine was the same as the $10 wine (actual price: $10), and the $45 wine was the same as the $5 wine (actual price: $5). The $35 Cab was really $35.

When volunteers vetted the vino, they ranked the supposedly pricier wines over the cheaper stuff. And not only did subjects find the expensive wines more pleasant, but their brains did, too. The medial orbital prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure, showed the greatest activity when subjects drank the supposed $90 liquid and the least when they sipped from the $5 cup. When the trial was repeated exactly, but without the wine prices elucidated, subjects reported being unable to discern a difference between glasses.

If schools are like wine, parents who can swing it (or get the requisite aid) surely derive pleasure from enrolling their offspring in a pricey institution. Their minds very likely correlate a school's educational quality with its lofty tuition. And wine is a useful analogy here, too, because it's as tough for most people to judge the worthiness of a glass of pinot as it is for them to judge the worthiness of a school. Thus, their perceptions of both are susceptible to tingeing by outside factors that have no intrinsic qualitative value, such as price.

A problem arises for universal voucher proponents, who believe that an educational market will take care of its own quality control, regardless of whether the government holds schools to account for raising student performance in academic subjects. Good schools will flourish, they say, because their sterling reputations will swamp them with customers. Bad schools will founder, shrivel, and die.

But when perception becomes the false reality on which reputation is based (as in the wine experiment), the market is corrupted, and schools may become "good" simply because they're expensive. Although voucher schools might be "free" to the consumer, they're certainly not free in reality; some will be more expensive, and thus more desired, than the others.  

Columbia Professor Henry Levin, who studies the economics of education, believes this occurs all too frequently. "People think that if something is priced lower, it's inferior," he said in a Forbes Magazine story. Levin, a scotch drinker, likes to call this the "Chivas Regal effect," a phrase first penned some two decades ago.

Wine producers have long known about the Chivas Regal effect (even before studies showed why it's true), and in many cases they've artificially inflated their prices because of it. Proponents of a universal voucher program have a duty to show why school providers won't learn the same lesson as vintners and hike up prices (especially when parents pay tuition with government funds, not their own). It is true that some existing voucher programs do not allow private schools to "top up" their costs--that is, to charge voucher students more in tuition than their voucher will cover. That does not, of course, mean that a private school couldn't hike up prices for non-voucher students, and raise their perceived prestige thusly.

Such an artificial increase in cost has certainly happened in higher ed. Government money is partly to blame. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "since 1980, federal student-loan volume has grown tenfold in constant dollars, while tuitions have increased, on average, at more than double the rate of inflation." In the 1980s, when he was secretary of education, William Bennett likened this scenario, in which student aid enables rising tuitions, to a dog chasing its tail.

George Washington University in D.C. has steadily raised its prices to raise its prestige. Now, its tuition and fees are over $50,000 per year. President Emeritus Stephen Trachtenberg told Washington City Paper, "Nobody cares what the tuition is. Students who pay the full tuition are a small fraction of the student body." Ursinus College, a small liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania, decided that it was losing applicants because tuition was too low. So in 2000, the school raised prices by 17 percent, and within four years the freshman-class numbers had risen by a third (see here).

Today, attending expensive, supposedly "better" universities has become at least partly a government-subsidized competition. So if price is believed to define quality, why would large-scale voucher programs not spur something similar in the k-12 arena, and why would government be able to control costs any better there than it has in higher ed?  

That we pay more for lower quality wine isn't terribly upsetting. That we could pay more for lower quality k-12 education is. Quality in wine, as in many other things, is interwoven with, and less important than, the pleasure it provides. If you swill pricey swill, fine. Your poor taste and coarse palette offends no one but yourself (and perhaps your slightly embarrassed spouse).

But the parent who derives pleasure from enrolling her child in a pricey yet inferior school does present a problem. Here we are on objective ground: Johnny either knows his multiplication tables or he doesn't. And unlike the philistine who gleefully slurps vinegar, the parent's unjustified pleasure comes with a cost: his or her child may receive a lesser education.

Something to ponder over your next glass.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the U.S. economy demands gobs more workers with bachelor's degrees. Veteran analyst and all-around-smart-guy Paul Barton thinks that this conventional wisdom is wrong and that the demand for college graduates is overstated. When one examines "the projected increase in the number of jobs in the 10 fastest-growing occupations," he writes, "61 percent of those new jobs will not require college and 39 percent will." Furthermore, "demand for college graduates is also overstated when whatever percentage of the workforce that has gone to college is equated with the percentage of jobs that require college-level learning." (Italics in original.) The truth, it seems, is that a significant number of college-educated workers are taking positions that don't actually necessitate a university diploma. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, of those with bachelor's degrees who are not enrolled in graduate school, 40 percent say they are working in a job that doesn't require a college education. Still, one may reasonably take issue with Barton's implication that we shouldn't be encouraging so many students to head to campus. A quality higher education (no small qualification there) can open worlds of learning to students that will enhance their enjoyment of life and enable greater contributions as democratic citizens. And if high-school diplomas actually meant something, probably conventional wisdom would be less likely to demand college diplomas. But Barton may be right that basing the case for universal higher education on America's economic needs just doesn't add up.

"How Many College Graduates Does the U.S. Labor Force Really Need?," by Paul Barton, Change Magazine, January/February 2008

Sol Stern no longer walks hand-in-hand with the invisible hand. In an article in the Winter 2008 City Journal, he reconsiders his once staunch belief that educational choice will cure ailing public-school systems. He writes that "markets in education may not be a panacea" and notes, "the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better." Stern is not the only choice advocate who is having second thoughts about the education market's power. Fordham's own Checker Finn told the New York Sun that he, too, doubts the ability of vouchers to affect widespread school-to-school competition and educational change. (We hear that Finn writes about this conversion in his forthcoming book.) Stern concludes: "Education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories...that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom." Fair point, but let's not go too far. Choice may not be "enough," but the evidence in favor of education monopolies isn't so hot either. A smart combination of parental choice and educational standards is the middle way--and the best way--to stronger schools in the future.

"A Libertarian Is Searching For an Education ‘Plan B'," by Elizabeth Green, New York Sun, January 14, 2008

"School Choice Isn't Enough," by Sol Stern, City Journal, Winter 2008

National Academy of Sciences
2008

President Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1863, just four years after Charles Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection in On the Origin of Species. Odds are the brand-new organization, like most others, didn't buy the theory then, but today's NAS has just published Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which makes the case for evolution, and scientific inquiry more generally, to the church-going public. As expected, the book is heavy on the evidence for evolution, describing important fossil findings and illustrating the workings of DNA. It also spends considerable time defending science itself as our most legitimate source of worldly knowledge. For instance: "In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena... If explanations are based on purported forces that are outside of nature, scientists have no way of either confirming or disproving those explanations." The authors also tout the practical benefits that have accompanied our growing understanding of evolution. For instance, the book features sidebars on evolution's role in "Combating New Infectious Diseases" and "The Domestication of Wheat." If all this doesn't budge creationists, the book offers several pages explaining away their objections to evolution, while noting that science and religion can easily coexist. One section provides "excerpts of statements by religious leaders who see no conflict between their faith and science." The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, for instance, tells us that "[T]here is no contradiction between an evolutionary theory of human origins and the doctrine of God as Creator." The authors are firm, however, in opposing the teaching of intelligent design theory in the classroom. There aren't really any new arguments in all of this, but the NAS's explanation of the two different worlds that science and religion inhabit is helpful and useful. Those in charge of impressionable young minds won't find the teaching of evolution laid out more clearly and comprehensively anywhere else. Buy a copy or read it online here.