Alyson Klein at Education Week’s Campaign K-12 picks up on my “scalpel” post to dig into the likely candidates for Barack Obama’s knife, were he to win the presidency.  After referring to “my” list of federal education programs that don’t work (actually, it’s the Administration’s list, based on a systematic review of their evidence of effectiveness or lack thereof), she writes:

But many of the programs on this list are absolutely, never ever going to be on the chopping block during an Obama administration and not just because Congress isn’t likely to go along with the cuts, but because Obama himself has championed them.

She mentions the Teacher Quality Enhancement grants, Even Start, and the Parent Information Resource Centers. And surely Klein is right—Obama is unlikely to kill any of these. Which is a real shame, coming from a candidate who argues that budgeting should be based on our “values.” Yes, we value teacher quality, and an even playing field, and parental involvement. But we should also value results, and these programs haven’t achieved them, over many many years. So which matters more? A program’s intentions, or its outcomes? Senator Obama?

I was surprised by how strongly Rick Kahlenberg attacked the new Ed Sector report on interdistrict public school choice, since the study really has nothing new to offer us other than some really neat maps. Instead of keeping things in proportion, we get Kahlenberg waxing poetic on the basic standards of “Social Science 101″ and methodology nitty gritty in an excessively long winded diatribe. Of course, Dillon actually spends quite a bit of time explaining her choices (try page four, which Kahlenberg calls “the fine print in a sidebar”-it’s actually an entire page-or the Appendix). I’ve extricated his two main points from the overblown rhetoric: Dillon makes two inappropriate assumptions, which cause her findings to be unnecessarily pessimistic, and she’s giving fodder to choice’s opponents.

Kahlenberg doesn’t like Dillon’s first assumption, a 20 minute driving time as her outside radius for finding high performing receiving schools, because it’s too confining. I could spend time arguing with this but I’ll let Dillon explain it herself (from page four, naturally): “We chose a 20 minute driving distance to represent the time most students spend commuting to school-according to data from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, the average commute to school is 18 minutes”. Oh look the data is from 2001, before gas prices skyrocketed; I’d say that Dillon may have overestimated how far parents are willing to drive at a $4.50/gallon. Districts all over the country are even cutting back on or eliminating routes because of fuel costs.

His second critique is even worse as he condemns Dillon’s assumption that schools can increase their enrollment by 10%. His reasoning (as he explains to Education Week) is nothing but childish: I don’t know how we should cap school enrollment so Dillon and Ed Sector must not know either. On his blog, he elaborates with rhetorical gusto:

Social Science 101 suggests that when a variable - in this case, school capacity - is unknown, researchers don’t simply assume the validity of an arbitrary figure.  Instead, a careful social scientist would consider the known variable - empirical findings about the number of schools within a reasonable driving distance - forthrightly admit that the capacity variable is unknown, and then calculate the impact under various assumptions about increases in available space (e.g. 10% capacity, 20% capacity, 30% capacity etc.).

Yes, and why don’t we crunch the numbers at 11%, 14.7% and 64.8998345% of capacity too? I would even call Dillon’s estimation liberal, seeing as many schools have neither the capacity nor the willingness to expand capacity. But according to Kahlenberg’s “Social Science 101″, we should throw all studies that necessarily restrain themselves for the sake of cogent data analysis out the window. The truth is that the only reason he takes issue with Dillon’s methodology is because the study doesn’t find what he wants it find. At the end he whines, “it provides timid politicians with yet another excuse” to fight school choice programs. Dillon’s study adds nothing to the choice debate besides some cool looking maps; a long winded whiny post trying to be some defender of statistical purity is not going to change that.

The NCLB conversation has gone digital—at NewTalk.Org, a fancy shmancy blog that allows big thinkers to “talk” via posting for a set time period. This week, it features some big names in the education world; our very own Checker Finn is participating, along with good friends Rick Hess, Diane Ravitch, and Philip Howard. PBS’s John Merrow moderates. The “conversation” runs until August 7th.

It occurs to me that we may need to start on this blog a “Quick and the Ed Watch” category. It’s not that we want to, you see; it’s that somebody needs to.

The reason is exemplified by Kevin Carey’s latest post about John McCain, in which the blogger is upset by the following sentence, from McCain’s speech to the NAACP, that laments that talented people without proper certification are barred from teaching in public schools: “They don’t have all the proper credits in educational ‘theory’ or ‘methodology’—all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it.”

Carey is exercised by the inclusion within quotation marks (”contemptuous quotes,” he calls them) of theory and methodology. Such punctuative liberty is “ridiculous,” Carey writes. Furthermore, he continues, it “is garden variety anti-intellectualism and doesn’t speak well of Senator McCain’s approach to policy or other matters.”

But are we so sure that knowing about educational theory and methodology, be they quoted contemptuously or not, is a necessary condition for effectively running a classroom? Is it not true that much of this theory and methodology is a relatively modern invention, one that did not exist a half-century ago, when fine teachers surely did? And knowing what we know about the education school curriculum, knowing what we know about the impenetrable, jargon-ish, gobbledygook that goes by the names theory and methodology, is it so ridiculous that McCain would choose to surround those terms with quotation marks, as if to say, “This is what they call it. But who knows what it is in actuality.”?

I think not. Nor do I think that Carey puts forth anything close to a convincing or logical or evidence-based argument to support his umbrage. Nor do I understand his last two paragraphs:

This is garden variety anti-intellectualism and doesn’t speak well of Senator McCain’s approach to policy or other matters. One could imagine, for example, that having a lot of knowledge about war and a desire to conduct wars but lacking a larger theoretical understanding of geo-politics and the methods of statecraft might lead one to actively support a ruinous foreign war and then continue to support it even after its ruinousness has become obvious for all to see.

In theory.

Alas, what are we to make of these meaningless lines, which unfortunately drip with a sort of un-clever, too-righteous, too-self-serious sarcasm that calls to mind the rantings of those sign-waving folks that one must occasionally dodge when attempting to execute a relaxing jog on the National Mall? We wonder: Can this impugnation of Senator McCain’s war plans be somehow related to attracting to classrooms qualified teachers, or to education in any way? Are Carey’s observations by any objective standard humorous or informative? Sadly, we cannot help but also wonder: Does this blogger even have a damn clue about the substance behind the words he so casually flips on to the screen?

This is all a real bummer for me, too, you see. I’d be ever so willing to take more vacation time this summer, but I’m concerned that were certain bloggers to discover my imminent virtual absence, they would hastily prepare bucketfuls of posts like the one noted above and then would, once I had boarded my overpriced flight to Tonga, let fly with a barrage of blog blather like none yet seen, safe in their assumption that their ill-founded fulminations would go unopposed. Alas, I believe in accountability, and for that reason I remain firmly ensconsed behind my desk.

Eduwonkette lands a profile in today’s New York Sun.

If you’re the type of Flypaper reader who only has time for the latest postings, not those published a whole two hours ago and invisible without scrolling, I commend to you Liam’s update to this post; after reading it, I think you’ll agree, you’ll be better informed about blogging etiquette and, frankly, kind of glad that William Buckley-esque wit lives on.

Richard Whitmire—USA Today editorial writer, president of the National Education Writers Association, and father of two girls—has started a blog all about “why boys fail.” Find it at www.whyboysfail.com.

Flypaper is no longer the newest blog in the edu-neighborhood. We send our greetings to jaypgreene.com, a direct link to one of the most fertile minds in education reform. His inaugural articles argue that if you stand at a state capitol building and throw a rock, you’re likely to hit the teachers’ union headquarters—and a male teacher who’s sexually abusing his students.

Venture capitalist-cum-school reformer Whitney Tilson comes in for a ribbing at the Education Notes Online blog, at the hands of Norm Scott, whom one New York friend of mine calls “an anti-UFT lefty who is very smart.” It’s a pretty good piece of satire, but Scott’s complaint is an age-old and tired one: everyone thinks they’re an education expert because they attended school at one point. We should leave education punditry to the classroom teachers, Scott implies.

As a certified education pundit with limited classroom experience myself, I take umbrage at that assumption, for two reasons. First, the skills required to be a great teacher and to convince policymakers to act are quite divergent; the former takes a sense of humor, the ability to talk to children, perseverance…wait, maybe the skills required are the same. But my second point still stands: what some business types like Tilson can do—and what is difficult for most rank-and-file teachers—is to see the big picture, the forest for the trees. Mrs. Smith might know how to teach reading really well, but that doesn’t mean she knows how to set national policy that will make great reading instruction more likely in classrooms nationwide. (Not that Congress has been doing all that great on that front lately either.)

At least half of education reform is about garnering the political will for change, and the rest is about the details of implementation. If the Tilsons of the world can help build political will, so much the better.