A free-market primer for the classroom

ANYONE who appoints himself a myth-buster also, implicitly at least, claims to be an unbiased arbiter of evidence. Jay P. Greene, an ardent believer in the salutary effects of competition and privatization on education, is hardly that.

In his new book, “Education Myths,” Greene contends that the views of teachers, their unions, administrators and education professors carry undue weight in debates over how to improve U.S. public schools. He says self-interest drives educators to advocate what, in his view, is just so much featherbedding: more spending, less accountability and staunch resistance to any challenge to their monopolistic dominion. Parents and policymakers should listen to “neutral” parties such as him, not to educators.

Greene, however, is hardly neutral. That’s clear from reading this book, much of which draws on his previous work as a senior fellow for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York think tank that promotes free-market alternatives to public programs. The widely published essayist, well-known in education circles for energetically marketing his ideas, is effective at marshaling evidence for his views. He doesn’t take his readers into classrooms or introduce them to teachers and students, their problems and challenges. Instead, this book is a relatively quick and painless journey through the labyrinth of education research, if a selective and unconvincing one.

Greene deals with four broad areas: resources, which include education spending, class size and teacher pay; outcomes, meaning test scores and graduation rates; school choice, including an analysis of the effects of competition; and last, the effect of student testing. In each area he cites studies that back his claims and discounts the methodology or import of those that don’t. Where the evidence is thin or contradictory, he offers conjecture and interpretation.

He reports, for example, that education spending has increased more than sevenfold since 1945, belying the widely held view that it has declined. But spending more, he argues, doesn’t produce better-educated students. He’s right, of course, if new money is spent exactly the same way as the old money, as it usually is. Indeed, paying teachers more money for the same work may make them happier, but they probably won’t teach differently and children probably won’t learn more. But it’s also true that low salaries are not the top complaint of teachers. Working conditions, weak leadership and a lack of support are greater concerns, surveys of teachers show.

Still, he adds little to the debate over whether schools have adequate money for what they’re asked to do. New Jersey, for example, spent more than $13,000 per child, on average, in 2002 while Utah spent less than $6,000, federal statistics show. That wide variation makes it difficult to evaluate Greene’s claim that the nation as a whole spends plenty on the “education system.” In fact, the education system Greene refers to doesn’t exist. Try telling kids who don’t have books, music classes or science labs at their schools that the “system” has enough money.

Greene favors private schools, saying that they promote integration and that many get better academic results than public schools at a lower cost. It’s true that private schools generally don’t discriminate on the basis of race anymore, and many even strive to offer scholarships to diversify their student bodies. But that doesn’t mean, as the author asserts, that white parents from the suburbs will send their children to integrated inner-city schools in search of a high-quality education in a diverse setting.

More important, private-school spending is lower on average because most private schools are church-subsidized, pay lower salaries, have larger class sizes and don’t provide transportation or offer comprehensive curricula or the array of special-education services required of public schools.

Greene cites studies of programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland and a few other school districts that give parents vouchers to pay private school tuition, which show small positive effects on test scores, mostly in math and almost exclusively for African American children. In the same chapter, he acknowledges that these studies have inherent weaknesses in methodology and that therefore the strongest claim that can be made is that kids with vouchers do no worse than those who remain in public schools, at half the cost.

Greene also says it’s a myth that so-called high-stakes tests, ones that have real consequences for schools and students, such as preventing them from graduating if they don’t pass, are unreliable and drive up dropout rates. Tests do provide valuable information and foes do overstate the downside. But he’s wrong in claiming that tests improve education. Rather, improvement comes when educators use the results to change how they teach.

One of the most important myths he does dispel is about teacher compensation. They aren’t underpaid when their generous health, vacation and pension benefits are considered.

For Greene, however, statistics can sometimes lead to absurd conclusions. He contends that student achievement would rise if big districts were chopped into small ones that had to compete for students the way private companies compete for customers.

Breaking up Los Angeles into districts the size of Manhattan Beach or Beverly Hills isn’t going to change the quality of teaching or make poor and immigrant kids from single-parent or no-parent families without healthcare suddenly perform like the children of well-paid executives.

Greene’s big idea comes from economic theory, which drives policymaking these days in many areas, including healthcare, the environment and correctional systems. The idea is that human beings are rational and will respond to financial and other types of incentives to work harder and more productively.

He has faith that “the power of incentives to change behavior, and therefore to improve outcomes ... is a pattern that emerges across the whole body of evidence in education.” He calls it a “meta-myth” that in education, monetary incentives produce the opposite of what’s intended.

Greene is right that performance matters far too little in education. That’s why policymakers across the country are giving parents more choice in where to enroll their children and are experimenting with teacher salaries that reward performance and additional training. In his concluding paragraphs, he acknowledges that incentives alone will not transform public schools. But there’s little in the book to show that he has much doubt.

Those who share Greene’s views will welcome this handbook of supporting arguments; others will find themselves thinking “Yes, but

But being provocative, though valuable, does little to ensure that American students will learn far more than they have in the past. *