Cranky Old Man Edition

I tried to be positive, I really did ...

Well, it’s been a long week full of deadlines and crazy work stuff, and it’s only Tuesday afternoon. Sigh. I wanted this edition of the newsletter to be full of early-year optimism and lightheartedness, and in reading it over … it’s a little grumpy. I touched it up a bit to take the edges off, but hey, sometimes you need to shake your fists at the world!

But seriously, I appreciate everyone who reads and subscribes to the newsletter, and I’m especially grateful to those who pass it on to others. My goal at the end of the first year was to hit 1,000 reads per issue, and we’re surprisingly close to that just a few months into this experiment. Thank you!

Please continue to forward it to people and recommend they subscribe.

In this issue, lots of stuff on advanced learning, creativity, and education policy, and our first ever Everyone Has a Plan Poll! Without further ado …

Something Short

We have a new blog post on needed research on homeschooling and gifted students, but it’s publication is delayed a few weeks. I’ll share it in next month’s issue.

Instead, here’s a short piece I wrote with Brenda Berg at NC BEST on the promise of automatic enrollment programs. Every state should have an automatic enrollment policy in place. In brief, the policies require that students who perform at the highest levels in a subject in one year of school get automatically placed in the most challenging courses the following year. As obvious as that sounds, that (highly appropriate) placement doesn’t happen now in many schools across the country. The estimate from North Carolina is that about 8-10% of students performing well in math were not being placed in advanced math the following year. Extrapolate that to the entire country, and we’re talking 4-6 million students. That’s not a small problem!

Automatic enrollment has helped NC drive the percentage of inappropriately-placed students close to 0%. The jury is still out about the impact on student achievement, but it’s not a stretch to imagine a positive bump for the students getting the new opportunities. Several states are considering automatic enrollment bills this year, and this promises to remain a hot topic. If you’re state doesn’t have it and you think it should, let’s talk.

In the meantime, here’s a policy brief we wrote on the topic, which goes beyond NC’s efforts and includes information on how a handful of other states are implementing it. Special thanks to David Steiner and Ashley Berner at the Hopkins Institute for Education Policy for continuing to support our work.

Something a Bit More Involved

The blog post isn’t available yet, but our full homeschooling article is available without a paywall for a couple months. I was invited to write on this topic for a special issue of the Journal of School Choice, guest edited by my colleague Angela Watson. I invited a student in our education policy program, Annie Connolly-Sporing, to work on it with me, and Annie did such a good job in the initial stages that she ended up leading the project. Annie is also a teacher at The Grayson School in Pennsylvania, and she has interests in advanced education, among other topics. We also involved a postdoc, Rachael Cody, whom we heard through the grapevine was interested in the topic.

Our goal was to summarize all that we know about bright students who are homeschooled, with an end product that focused on policy changes to address the needs of these students. That turned out to be impossible, as the research on the topic is paper thin. Part of that is the nature of the population - it’s not easy studying homeschooled students! - and part of it is that very few researchers have even tried. As a result, the body of the paper ended up being a review of important questions that need to be answered.

Of course, the dilemma here is that most homeschooling families want the government as far from their home as possible, making state-mandated data collection very tricky. In the current political environment, I just can’t envision a government-led effort to collect better data on homeschooled students, let alone advanced students learning primarily at home.

But I’d argue it is in the best interest of homeschooling families to support at least rudimentary research efforts. For example, knowing the actual number of families that chose to homeschool their bright child due to frustration with perceived lack of challenge in their previous school settings could be very helpful to those families. If the number is large - and it may be - the political strength of those families will increase as their size becomes more widely known. I imagine that curriculum and other educational service providers would also pay increased attention to this population of homeschooled students.

On more specific topics, the benefit becomes even more clear: Are there certain social or emotional issues that these students encounter more often than non-homeschooled students? If so, we can design interventions to be used in home education settings. People often treat research like the enemy, but it’s almost always more helpful than they expect.

There’s a ton of other great articles in this special issue. The entire issue is open access for a stretch, so please check it out now. And congratulations to Angela on pulling this great issue together!

Some Recent Things that Intrigued Me

Voucher Programs Have Complex Effects

Whether school choice programs pull the highest-performing students out of public schools - leaving behind fewer, struggling students who are more difficult to teach - is a longstanding debate. We looked into it back when I was in Indiana using state data, but our evidence was inconclusive. A recent paper, Cream Skimming and Pushout of Students Participating in a Statewide Private School Voucher Program, takes a careful look at the issue, with very interesting results. On the one hand, private schools did not appear to be “cream skimming,” in that they weren’t primarily attracting the best students from public schools. The researchers did, however, find evidence that lower-achieving voucher students were being pushed out of the private schools. This study is notable for two reasons: First, it was conducted by a team of researchers who are not known to be anti-voucher, and they’ve done a lot of high-quality choice research. Second, if the results hold up in subsequent research, policymakers will need to address this finding in their design of choice policies.

Never Forget that Vile Actors Helped Create the Anti-Vaccine Movement

The rise in autism diagnoses is always hotly debated, and the New York Times weighed in recently with an overview. I have some hypotheses, but this isn’t my area and I won’t publicly wade into it. But one part of the article sent me into orbit:

The misinformed theory that vaccines are behind the disorder is one such case of speculation. It gained traction when a British researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a study of 12 children in the late 1990s, purporting to reveal a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism.

Many larger studies have since discredited the hypothesis…. Dr. Wakefield’s article was retracted, and he lost his medical license, but the seeds had been planted in social discourse.

Wakefield’s story never gets fully told, and that’s ridiculous because it is one of the great scandals in medical research. He appears to have faked a study that made the dominant MMR vaccine look bad, then spent years campaigning against the MMR vaccine - even when his dishonesty was being revealed. How he ended up avoiding prosecution continues to puzzle me. It is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of research. He isn’t a misguided researcher who made some mistakes, he is a fraudster whose anti-vaccine rhetoric has had a big, negative impact on the world. He shouldn’t even be mentioned in stories such as this, much like the media no longer shows pictures of mass shooters. Either leave him out of it, or include more of the details about how deep his deceptions ran. Grrr!

Gifted Programs Help Boys

You’re not going to be surprised that I’m sharing additional evidence that advanced education programs help students. But this one, conducted by Nobel laureate David Card and colleagues, specifically looked at gender differences in those effects, finding that boys benefitted significantly in one district. Boys’ struggles in the modern era are receiving more attention lately, and this study provides evidence that advanced opportunities give them some much-needed assistance.

An App for Creativity!

I’ve been surprised that we’ve not seen more technology that seeks to help people increase their creativity. The co-creator of Messier recently called the app to my attention, and have enjoyed playing around with it. I’ve recommended the free app to family, friends, and colleagues. If you play around with it, let me know what you think.

Give Me a Break Already (San Francisco edition)!

The decision by San Francisco to eliminate advanced math classes in middle school was controversial from the start, and despite SFUSD personnel touting the success of the initiative (uncritically repeated by the media), the outcomes for students were as negative as most people expected. It has been, by many metrics, a disaster. But it also hasn’t been that long since the district changed course, and it was a bit surprising to see this piece looking back at the situation. It seems early for a nostalgic take! Regardless, I couldn’t believe that some of the proponents are doubling down on their support for the policies, with full-throated opinions about how SFUSD should have stayed the course! At some point, we have to acknowledge that eliminating opportunity in the quest for equality is a very fringe approach to policymaking that never works. In the end, eliminating opportunity hurts everyone and benefits almost no one. See Heather McGhee’s masterful The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

First Ever Reader Poll

Some Things I Found to be Cool

The Equalizer movies. I only recently discovered these Denzel Washington/Anthony Fuqua movies, based on the late 80s TV show of the same name (Queen Latifah stars in a reboot entering its 5th season on CBS). They are certainly violent, but not John Wick-level violent. What I like most about them is that you are never given much exposition about the main character’s background. It’s revealed breezily, in tiny doses, with lots of missing information: He was a spy, he lost his wife, everyone thought he was dead, and he loves to read the classics because his wife loved to read the classics. That’s about it. He may be on the spectrum, or his quirkiness may be a result of all the stuff he’s dealt with (or both). Even though the films are leisurely paced, they’re never boring. And Denzel is one heck of an actor.

The Billie Eilish and Finneas interview. Terry Gross recently had Eilish and Finneas on Fresh Air, and it was a fun conversation. For those who don’t know, they are siblings who have made lots of popular music and received not one but two Oscars for their soundtrack efforts. You’ve heard their work.

British politics and policy. My usual podcast playlist is full of political shows, but in the wake of the election I find the discussions to be excessively whiny, triumphant, or beside the point. For now, I’d rather think about policy than politics, and few podcasts do policy well. So I’m listening to entertainment stuff, which is fun, but I stumbled across some British podcasts and books that are oddly satisfying. There’s a little less window dressing and polish, which is refreshing right now. Some things I’ve enjoyed are The Rest is Politics UK (there’s a US version I don’t enjoy as much) and The Rest is Politics: Leading (these are YouTube links but you can find the podcasts through the usual channels). Leading focuses on interviews with UK and world leaders (including some U.S. folks), and the conversations are reasonable, serious, and often funny. One of the hosts, Rory Stewart, is a former Tory MP who has written a great book about his time as an elected official, How Not to Be a Politician. It’s as good as you would imagine given the title. (It’s worth noting that he is very self-deprecating and jaded about his experiences, but he was also a competitive, dark horse candidate for prime minister a few years ago.)

Some Things to Consider

The Hopkins Education Policy Master’s Program is planning for a late February virtual symposium on federal and state ed policy issues. We should have the details ironed out in a couple of weeks, so I’ll send out a special announcement via the newsletter feed so people have a few weeks’ notice. This was a student idea, and we’re excited about holding it annually. Details soon!

There are usual more events this time of year, especially in the education policy space, but I suspect the presidential transition is drawing up much of the available oxygen. Hopefully there will be more cool events to share next month.

Jade Plant of the Month

This month’s beauty is an ogre’s ear jade, popularly known as the “Shrek jade” for obvious reasons. I find them to be slower-growing and more temperamental than wild jade, but I’ve had better luck since keeping them outside and frequently watered during the warm months. This particular plant is relatively young and off to a great start with dense leaves and good coloring. Red edges can be elusive on Shrek ears, so this one is pretty happy!

Best wishes for a good winter!

Where to Find Me

http://Amazon.com/author/jonathanplucker

www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanplucker

https://twitter.com/JonathanPlucker

https://www.threads.net/@jonathanplucker