Matt Yglesias

Neko Case and the Department of Education

It seems that a new, hipper era of governance really has arrived here in the nation’s capital. Seyward Darby explains:

Spotted: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan introducing flame-haired indie goddess Neko Case at the 9:30 Club last night. But … why? Is the Cabinet member a devoted Neko fan, or is she a big supporter of education reform? (A friend who was at the concert said she put in a good word for Obama’s education plans.)

As it turns out, the backstory proves, yet again, just how tied the administration is to the Chicago scene. Last week, the Department of Education hired Tim Tuten, co-owner of The Hideaway, a hip Chicago club, as assistant secretary for communications and outreach. (He’s also been a schoolteacher in the Windy City.) Tuten is friends with Neko, a fixture in recent years at The Hideaway, and he set up Duncan’s introduction. “That’s all Tim making something like that happen, connecting those two things [education and music],” Duncan told The Chicago Tribune through a spokesman on April 1. “No one thinks like him. We need more of that here.” And Tuten’s not the only music promoter on board at the DOE: He was brought on by Peter Cunningham, “a Chicago musician and media specialist,” according to the Tribune.

Good times. That said, I always find it slightly annoying when bands come to DC and bring a political message to an audience that inevitably contains a huge number of people working professionally in the political game. I remember especially being at a Death Cab show in October 2004 and listening to Ben Gibbard explain how important it was to help John Kerry get elected. As if political apathy is a big problem among young professionals in the DC area or something.

But churlishness aside, I think an innovative public relations approach is welcome. Especially as it pertains to government agencies trying to bring messages to people outside the Beltway. One important task for progressive governance is making people more aware of the positive role government programs play in many people’s lives, and of the importance of engaging in the political and policy process. That’s harder to define than “pass a health care bill” but over the long run I think its equally important.

Why Education Reform Can’t Wait

Noam Scheiber says it makes sense to pursue health care reform at the same time as economic recovery, but that the Obama administration should consider sidelining the rest until the crisis can be dealt with, but he felt Larry Summers mounted a convincing case for energy. Still:

I was less persuaded by the case for doing education reform now. (Though, interestingly, David Brooks, who made the case for paring down even before Galston did this week, seemed high on Obama’s education reform plans–and precisely because he thinks they’re ambitious.)

On Brooks, I think this just shows that we shouldn’t take his timing objections very seriously. Brooks’s views about education policy are, on the merits, close to my views and close to Obama’s views. Consequently, he likes Obama’s education reform agenda. Brooks’ views on other matters are more conservative and he objects to them on the merits, but he’s pretending to be concerned about the timing. Feh. Meanwhile, one could argue for pursuing education reform now on the grounds that education reform is very important. But I think there’s a real technical reason for avoiding delay.

The first aspect of this is simply that the main pillar of federal K-12 education—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act whose most recent re-authorization was dubbed No Child Left Behind—is due to be reauthorized. Which is to say re-written. Congress and the White House can just stall on this, but since a bunch of people want to see a whole bunch of things changed, and since the schedule says it’s time to change the law, it would take time and political capital to maintain the status quo. Better to spend that time and political capital on making change for the better.

The second aspect of this is that macroeconomic considerations have compelled a very large short-run increase in federal education spending. The reason for this is that probably the least controversial aspect of federal fiscal stimulus is the idea that aid should be sent to state and local governments. The reason for that, in turn, is that such spending isn’t even really new net public sector activity. Rather, the federal government is stepping in to reduce the extent to which state and local governments need to enact pro-cyclical anti-stimulus in the form of spending cuts. Meanwhile, the main non-entitlement item in state budgets is education. So in practice, increased financial aid to states primarily entails a substantial shift in financial responsibility for education toward Washington. This by no means requires a rethinking of federal education policy, but it does make thinking harder about how that money is used a fairly natural complement to the macroeconomically dictated trend toward the federal government being responsible for more of the money.

Last, we’re talking about very different policy silos. It’s not as if Arne Duncan can tell the permanent staff at the Department of Education to lay off the schools and spend time thinking about AIG. The president probably should not, personally, be letting school reform take up a great deal of his time and mental energy. But the president had plenty of time in his past life as a State Senator, a U.S. Senator, and a Presidential candidate to outline his philosophy on this subject and he has the backbone of an education policy team in place. Having that team twiddle their thumbs won’t accomplish anything—they may as well press forward.

Did Achivement Gaps Grow in Arne Duncan’s Chicago?

Ezra Klein and Dana Goldstein observe that black-white achievement gaps, as measured on the National Assessment of Education Progress, generally increased during Arne Duncan’s tenure as head of Chicago Public Schools. I looked this up via the useful TUDA site and it’s true. At the same time, the evidence is overwhelmingly good. Of the five sets of metrics available (4th grade reading, 4th grade math, 8th grade reading, 8th grade math, and 8th grade reading) black scores improved on four metrics. And Hispanic scores improved on all five. The trouble is that the small white minority (about 10 percent) in Chicago public schools also improved and sometimes showed a larger increase than did black test scores.

Here, for example, is 4th grade math where you see that racial achievement gaps grew. On the other hand, scores for minority students went up . . they just went up more for white students:

I don’t think that’s necessarily the worst thing in the world. You see the same pattern for 8th grade math:

By contrast, in 4th grade reading you saw the same general upward trend but also a slight narrowing of the white/nonwhite gap:

In 8th grade reading, the whites stagnated while Hispanics improved so that gap narrowed. But black scores got worse. Since Hispanics improved by more than blacks declined, this constituted an overall improvement in average scores:

In terms of writing, 8th grade scores went up across the board in Chicago between 2002 and 2007, and racial gaps narrowed:

To me, this makes Arne Duncan look pretty good. It also exposes some conceptual problems with efforts to narrow the achievement gap. It would have been politically difficult for Duncan to somehow try to implement policies that were designed to prevent white students from improving their performance. Nor does it seems like deliberately thwarting the efforts of the highest-performing groups purely in order to close gaps makes much sense as a policy. I think about the most you can ask of a city superintendent is that achievement broadly increases — including for poor students and minorities — during his tenure. A federal policy maker, by contrast, has the ability to not only back policies that enhance achievement but also to back policies that substantially increase the volume of resources available to high poverty schools and, therefore, will plausibly have some gap-narrowing bite.

Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan always seemed like the obvious choice for Secretary of Education to me. He works in Chicago, just like Obama. Obama knows him personally. He went to Harvard and he plays basketball. On top of that, he’s had a good record in Chicago. And compared to other reform-oriented big city superintendents he has a much better relationship with teacher’s unions.

Under the circumstances, it seems to me that there was an enormous tactical cleverness in the way Obama let this thing play out with increasing levels of hysteria from unions and reformers about potential choices. If Obama had done the obvious thing early, it’s possible that both sides would have come away disappointed. But by getting everyone afraid of the specter of Joel Klein or Linda Darling-Hammond, he wound up making a pick who makes everyone happy. And, honestly, everyone should be happy! Of course this means conflicts will now be deferred onto subcabinet choices and so forth. But I would say that with NCLB architects George Miller and Ted Kennedy still running the relevant committees in congress and a reformist in the White House, the basic principles of testing and accountability look set to remain in place.

Meanwhile, the team of ballers has just added its most accomplished player. Duncan was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and after graduation he played professionally in Australia for several years. That puts him a cut above the pick-up crew that you’ll see in the rest of the administration.

The EduTransition

The Education Secretary job hasn’t yet gotten much attention, but with the principles for the national security and economic teams in place people are starting to focus on it. And for whatever it’s worth, let me add my vote to Paul Glastris and The Washington Post in hoping that Obama picks a serious reformer who’ll work with George Miller and Ted Kennedy to keep the momentum for education change moving forward rather than a timid incrementalist whose main role is to reward the teacher’s unions for their support during the general elections.

I don’t have any particular candidate I’m pushing, but Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan seems like the obvious pick out of the reform camp for a Chicago-based politician.

But of course it’s worth saying that who gets which cabinet post is of limited relevance when it comes to this sort of thing. Margaret Spellings is currently Secretary of Education and also the most influential voice on education policy. But she was the most influential voice on education policy back when she was Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy as well. Given the intra-party divides on education, and the second-tier nature of the issue, I would be very surprised to see either camp shut out of an Obama administration. The question then becomes who does he listen to and about what.