Links worth reading: Jacobin edition

Jeff Bryant on the (predictably) broken promises of the charter school movement

Glenn Greenwald on the American political class's lurching from supporting dictatorship, then democracy, then back again to dictatorship in Egypt

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The next issue of Jacobin is due out very soon. It sure seems longer than 3 months since the last issue of Jacobin was sent out. To hold you over until the next issue, here are some of my favorites from Jacobin so far:

Megan Erickson - The Strike that Didn't Change New York
Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones - Bad Science
Pankaj Mehta - There's a Gene for That
Seth Ackerman & Mike Beggs - Don't Mention the War
Gavin Mueller - The Rise of the Machines
Penny Lewis - The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk

Economies of scale, avoiding administrative problems, and automatic eligibility: why social democratic/single payer systems are more efficient

Image: source

Update: Part 3 can be found here

Social democratic programs can provide social welfare services more efficiently--higher quality at a lower cost--than other types of public social welfare programs, as well as the private market. My first post on this issue dealt mostly with actuarial values, and for good reason. For all social welfare services--from health insurance to child care--actuarial values are of primary importance; for disability insurance and defined benefit pensions--a category that includes Social Security--actuarial values are the entire story (much more about retirement benefits in the first post on this issue, as well as here and here).

But in my excitement over actuarial values (I'm not like most people), I failed to elaborate the other factors that make social democratic programs more efficient than other program designs and the private market: economies of scale and other administrative issues, mostly centering around eligibility.

Another blow against the idea that poverty itself cannot explain the diminished academic performance of poor students

I'm not an expert in educational policy, so I don't have much to say about it. I wrote previously about how it's long been known that poverty is the greatest predictor of student performance, and how parents or teachers need to be scapegoated in order to justify the poverty and inequality that are the real source of the problems in the American education system.

Basically, if poverty and inequality are the real causes of poor student performance, than there is an obligation to alleviate poverty and inequality. But that's a very expensive proposition. What if there was a cheaper, more convenient explanation of poor student achievement? Who can we blame instead?

Poor parents are a popular scapegoat: If poor parents were more involved in their children's lives, impoverished students would be doing just fine in school. If only poor parents had the initiative and desire to exercise the same level of responsibility as rich parents.

Dana Goldstein explains how a major study has just fatally wounded the scapegoating of poor parents:

In the largest-ever study of how parental involvement affects academic achievement, Keith Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Angel L. Harris, a sociology professor at Duke, mostly found that it doesn’t. The researchers combed through nearly three decades’ worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. In an attempt to show whether the kids of more-involved parents improved over time, the researchers indexed these measures to children’s academic performance, including test scores in reading and math.

What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.

Lesson for Teach for America in statistical versus practical significance

Image: Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp (source)

A recent study has many touting the benefits of TFA. The most overheated has been Dylan Matthews (Teach for America is a deeply divisive program. It also works.), but Matthew Yglesias is similarly condescending (Since empirical evidence doesn't change anyone's mind about this issue...), though Yglesias is at least more reasoned in his assessment (see below). No, the study didn't show that TFA works. It showed that it works for one subject in economically disadvantaged schools versus inexperienced teachers, provided you assume that TFA volunteers weren't teaching to the test. And, just because something's statistically significant doesn't mean it has any real world value. I'll let Dana Goldstein take it from here:

TFA math teachers outperformed non-TFA math teachers in their schools by .06 standard deviations in middle school and .13 standard deviations in high school. The talking point will be that this is the equivalent of an additional 2.6 months of learning per schoolyear. But it's important to realize this represents a relatively modest improvement in student achievement. For the average child in this study, who scored in just the 27th percentile in math compared to her peers across the country, having a TFA teacher will help her move up to the 30th percentile--still a long way off from grade-level math proficiency.

Right. TFA "works," in that it can improve student performance in one subject from well below grade level to...still well below grade level. Also worth noting: