This narrative of American cultural decline, with the public school teacher playing a starring role as villain, is a trope that appears frequently in conservative circles dedicated to waging ‘culture war’ on issues of race, gender and sexuality.  In his piece, Finn cites a forthcoming book by paleo-conservative Charles Murray on the decline of ‘industriousness’ in the America’s white working class. (Murray is best known as the author of The Bell Curve, with its theory of a genetically based African-American intellectual inferiority; apparently, the industriousness of American workers of color is not worth discussing.) Finn links to a chapter from Murray’s book, just published in the Wall Street Journal,  in which he characterizes the declining rate of full-time employment among male white workers as a cultural failing of the workers. Amazingly, Murray has no discussion of the impact of the current economic downturn, the deepest and longest since the Great Depression, on working class employment, and no mention of the effects of four decades of globalization, during which corporations exported decent paying industrial jobs abroad to countries with very low labor costs enforced by authoritarian regimes. No, in Murray’s hands, the decline of full-time working class employment is entirely a cultural flaw, a loss of the Puritan ethic of hard work, to be found in the workers themselves.

Finn does not simply endorse Murray’s narrative of working class cultural decline; he provides his own supporting argument, centered on Apple Inc.’s outsourcing of its production work to China. He offers as evidence a New York Times article which recounts a dinner conversation between Barack Obama and the late Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, Inc.  Obama reportedly asked Jobs what it would take to bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and Jobs tells the President in so many words that it just wasn’t happening. According to the Times, the reasoning of Jobs and other Apple executives is along these lines: “the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.” Finn swallows the Apple, Inc. justification for exporting manufacturing jobs abroad, hook, line and sinker. He objects to Obama’s Osawatomie, Kansas speech in which the President notes that the broken social contract and the long economic downturn in the U.S. has meant that “(h)ard work stopped paying off for too many people.” No, the real problem, Checker tells us, is that Apple, Inc. finds in China “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills” that American workers lack.

If Finn had given a careful reading to the entire Times article, he would have found a revealing description of the Chinese manufacturing enterprise to which Apple, Inc. outsources most of its production, Foxconn Technology. The workers in Foxconn’s China plant that manufactures Apple’s iPhones work under 19th century sweatshop conditions — they work 12 hour days and 6 day weeks, sometimes doing ‘double shifts’ of 24 hours, live in company barracks and earn less than $17 a day. In echoes of the Cultural Revolution, workers who arrived late for work were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. The Times article describes how, when Apple, Inc. redesigned its iPhone, the glass for the new product arrived in at the Foxconn factory in the middle of the night and all the workers were dragged out of bed to begin production immediately. Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, told that the Times that Foxconn “could hire 3,000 people overnight. What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?

SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) staged a protest in front of a Foxconn shareholder meeting in Hong Kong in 2010. (www.sacom.hk)

A subsequent New York Times article documents just how unhealthy and unsafe the conditions in the Chinese factories producing Apple, Inc. products are. Chinese workers report being forced to stand so long in production that their legs swelled and they could hardly walk. Child labor is commonly used in the factories. The Chinese manufacturers have falsified records and improperly disposed of hazardous waste. Two years ago, 137 Chinese workers were injured after being forced to use a poisonous chemical to clean the glass of iPhones. Last year, explosions at factories producing iPads killed four Chinese workers and injured 77 others. A Hong Kong based advocacy organization reported that it had told Apple of the hazardous conditions that led to explosions, and Apple did nothing. “If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department, told the Times. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

What’s undeniable is the desperation of the Chinese Foxconn workers. In recent years, there has been an epidemic of worker suicides at Foxconn — 19 in all according to the Times. Just this month, 300 Foxconn workers producing Sony’s Xbox threatened mass suicide in a dispute over pay and working conditions.

In a written statement to the Times, Foxconn said that “(a)ny worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights.” But the truth is that Chinese law only allows for one “union,” the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese state. The CCP appoints all ACFTU officials, and they come almost exclusively from outside of the ranks of that organization. The ACFTU’s own documents pledge fealty to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, and Chinese law mandates that when workers engage in strikes and other work-related protests, the role of the ACFTU is that of strike-breaker. Far from protecting Chinese workers, the Chinese state and Chinese law establishes and enforces the conditions necessary for their brutal exploitation.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” one former Apple executive told the Times, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Academics and manufacturing analysts consulted by the Times estimated that the shifting of the manufacture of iPhones to the U.S. would add approximately $65 to the cost of the product, which would still leave Apple with a substantial profit, given its margin of hundreds of dollars of profit on the phone. But the lower price of labor is only part of the equation for Apple: the sweatshop conditions in the factories and the near absolute rule exercised over the workplace are just as important for Apple’s ‘in time’ production.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” Li Mingqi, who until April worked in Foxconn management, told the Times. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where one of the explosions occurred. “Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

That’s one helluva of a system of “flexibility, diligence and industrial skills,” Checker.

(An earlier version of this post was inadvertently published before it was completed. This is the final post.)

An email exchange I had with one of the co-authors of the study, Raj Chetty of Harvard, provides interesting evidence that the answer to all of these questions is yes.

Chetty sent me an unsolicited email as a result of a post I wrote here on Edwize. In my comments, I had noted that the analysis of Chetty and his co-authors, John Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia,  had received a great deal of prominent media attention despite the fact that it had not yet been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication, much less actually published. Instead, shortly before the Times article appeared, the paper had been uploaded on Harvard and National Bureau of Economic Research web sites as a working paper. The sheer complexity of the analysis, combined with the unorthodox way in which it was released, meant that its authority could be used to support policy proposals without fear of challenge, regardless of how poorly founded and unsupported these proposals were by the study itself. This, I concluded, was “the politicization of educational research.” The causalities were the quality of discussion and decision-making around policy choices.

Chetty wrote to me, professing an unawareness of recent political events that shaped the discussion of value-added measures of teacher performance. “Our goal as researchers,” he avered, was “simply to report the most rigorous scientific evidence on a subject in order to help the debate be guided by data.” And “while the headlines in the press may sometimes suggest otherwise,” he concluded, “the main message of the paper is simply that great teachers have great value, and that test score impacts can be one useful input into identifying such teachers.”

I wrote back, thanking Chetty for his email and explaining that it would have been easier to accept his statement of intentions if he and his co-authors had not been quoted in the Times and on the Newshour supporting policy prescriptions – the mass firings of teachers with low value-added scores – that their own analysis did not support. I specifically referenced the fact that their working paper discussed the problems of the high-stakes use of value-added scores, asking whether the potential benefits of using it in teacher evaluations outweighed the possible costs. Chetty and his co-authors has characterized these problems as  “important issues” that “must be resolved before one can determine whether VA should be used to evaluate teachers.” How could this caveat be reconciled, I asked, with the following passages in the Times:

“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,” Professor Friedman said.

Professor Chetty acknowledged, “Of course there are going to be mistakes – teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.” But he said that using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more.

And on the Newshour:

RAY SUAREZ: Is — could it also be concluded from your study that it ought to be easier to fire ineffective teachers? And I’m really sorry the union leader isn’t here with us right now when I’m asking this question.

But is that part of your conclusion?

RAJ CHETTY: Yes.

I think — you know, let me make an analogy here. Suppose you are managing a baseball team, say, the Boston Red Sox, and you’re trying to do as well as you can. You have players with different batting averages. One approach you might take is to bring the hitting coach out and try to raise the batting averages of the players you have.

But I think it also makes a lot of sense – and this will make sense to sports fans – that, on occasion, you might decide to let some of the players with lower batting averages go, and try to get somebody else who might do better. And so I think it makes sense to use a combination of those tools.

Here, I think the stakes are even much bigger. We’re talking about the future of our children, rather than winning a baseball game. So I think it does make sense to consider those policies seriously.

Chetty wrote back, responding to my counterposing of the qualifying lines from their paper and the quotes of he and his co-authors in the media:

I think the PBS statements you quote do summarize my current reading of the evidence fairly; the Times quotes are out of context and thus I agree give an incorrect impression.  I agreed to do the PBS interview partially to have the opportunity to state our findings more clearly, recognizing that people might misinterpret the articles in the press.

While I continue to have some clear differences with the way in which Chetty and his co-authors extrapolate their findings and draw policy inferences from their study, it is important that they themselves were dissatisfied with the way their study and policy recommendations were represented in the Times‘ article.

Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.

AFSCME Memphis Sanitation Strike, April 3, 1968

You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.

As hard as it is to believe, it now seems that the initial reports we received from the field actually understated the complete lack of educational integrity in this development. We have now been told that not every PLA school was told it would close; rather, for purely political reasons, some schools will not be slated for closure. Incredibly, while a school such as Maxwell which received an ‘A’ on their School Progress Report was told it would close, there are reports of a school which received an ‘F’ being passed over. No wonder Tweed has not published a list of all the PLA schools it is closing.

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Much like the brief torrential rain which drenched New Yorkers on Thursday morning, Mayor Bloomberg’s Thursday afternoon State of the City Address received a deluge of media attention. Today, the print and electronic media feature talk of his jeremiad against the UFT, of his attempted resurrection of ‘market reforms’ such as merit pay which have been discredited even in ‘reform’ circles, as study after study has shown them ineffective, and of his claims that he will introduce a new evaluation system by fiat. Tellingly, nowhere will you read an account of what the Mayor’s proposed imposition of closure under the Turn-Around model would mean for the PLA schools, were he to be successful in implementing it.

Consider what is happening to just a few of the PLA schools. Note that we use here the performance data that, the DoE insists, informs their decisions on the future of schools.

Maxwell Career and Technical H.S. in East New York. Over the last two years, the principal and staff have taken a school which had a ‘D’ on its 2008-09 School Progress Report and was slated for closure by the NYC Department of Education and led it to grades of ‘B’ on its 2009-10 and ‘A’ on its 2010-11 School Progress Reports. The DoE’s now wants to remove that principal and half of the staff that produced that real turn-around, all without the slightest bit of help from Tweed.

Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology.  For three years, the DoE left in place the principal of this school who was found by his own superintendent to have engaged in sexual harassment, and was the subject of continued sexual harassment complaints from female staff and parents. The school was finally given  a new principal and a chance to turn itself around this past September, but now the DoE wants to remove that principal and half of the staff.

Unity Center for Urban Technologies. DoE Deputy Chancellors consider this school to be a paragon of a school turn around. Unity received an ‘A’ on both the 2009-10 and 2010-11 School Progress Reports, but now the DoE wants to remove the principal and half of the staff it has touted so widely. Talk about the Tweed ‘kiss of death.’

Long Island City High School. For many years, LICHS had done a credible job of teaching a high needs student population before it ran afoul of federal and state benchmarks that demanded it produce the same graduation rate as Stuyvesant High School. Far from being given the additional funds, supports and resources which it had been promised to allow it to improve its instructional program, LICHS has been  radically destabilized by Tweed since it became a PLA school, as decisions made at the highest level of the NYC DoE have created turmoil and disrupted the educational program. The schools has had three principals over the last three years, and the imposition of closure under the Turn Around Model would require a fourth in September. The school’s administrative capacity had been so deteriorated by these frenetic changes, that the school was forced to introduce a third entirely new class schedule and program in November, in the third month of a five month term: half of the term had been lost to administrative mismanagement. Despite this sabotage by Tweed, LICHS still pulled a ‘C’ on its last School Progress Report, but now the NYC DoE says it wants to further destabilize this school by removing 50% of its staff.

Bushwick Community H.S. and Harlem Renaissance H.S. As transfer schools, both Bushwick and Harlem Renaissance teaches students who had dropped out of other high schools. They ended up as PLA schools not just because they were held to the same graduation standards as Stuyvesant H.S., but also because they were given as little as one or two years to have their students pass 5 Regents exams and acquire 40 credits. The Regents are now considering changes to the performance metrics for transfer schools so they can be more fairly assessed. With these extraordinarily long odds against them, Bushwick scored a ‘C’ and Harlem Renaissance scores a ‘B’ on their last School Progress Reports. But the NYC DoE wants to fire the principals and half of the staffs that accomplished this, against all odds.

Queens Vocational and Technical High School. Queens Voc is a school that has been placed on the PLA list only because there is a full year’s lag in the data the state uses for these decisions: by the time it was added, its graduation rate was already well above the cut-off line.  It had an ‘A’ on its 2009-10 School Progress Report and a ‘B’ on its 2010-11 School Progress Report. How could such a record deserve closure under Turn Around? And what will happen to the many high needs students at Queens Voc when the school leadership and 50% of the school staff that has served them so well are forced out?

The list can go on and on. Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Franklin D. Roosevelt High School, William E. Grady High School, the School for Global Studies… All good schools with strong leadership and a solid track record of educating large numbers of high needs students. Each school received a ‘B’ on their 2010-11 School Progress Report. And each is now scheduled to lose their principal and half of their staff.

Could there possibly be more damning evidence of how decisions are made by the Mayor and his lieutenants at Tweed, without the slightest concern for what happens in schools to students? Like the cavalier military officer who dismisses civilian deaths as ‘collateral damage,’ Bloomberg and Tweed see the harm that will come to schools and students as the necessary cost of their political blitzkrieg.

Given the importance of such a study, the method and timing of its release to the media is of particular note. To date, the authors have only presented their analysis in seminars, the Times reports. They have yet to submit CFR to a peer reviewed journal for publication, as is the scholarly norm for the public distribution of such research — it is just now available as a working paper on Harvard and NBER web sites. Sherman Dorn is certainly correct that there is little reason to think that a study of this magnitude is not already very close to what would be needed for publication in a peer reviewed journal, and that those critics who have hung their hat on that hook are bound to be disappointed. But it should be noted that scholarly norms of peer reviewed publication are designed not just to assure the quality of the work, the aspect that Dorn is invoking; no less important is the way in which these norms regulate the use and misuse of expert research in public policy debates, with the objective of ensuring that those debates are full and robust, characterized by public access to all of the essential information. This is particularly important with a study of this complexity, one which introduces a rather significant number of new elements into its field.

When CFR was released to the media in the fashion we witnessed Friday, before it had undergone the peer review publication, a full public discussion was deliberately preempted — whatever conclusions the authors want to draw in the media were presented without the slightest fear of challenge. Note that the first thoughtful takes on the study in the blogosphere — those by Bruce Baker at the School Finance blog, Matt Di Carlo at the Shanker Institute blog and Sherman Dorn himself, public intellectuals with the requisite skills in quantitative analysis to assess the study on its own terms — are appearing a day or two after the fact: it has taken that long to prepare what each of them readily concedes is a preliminary assessment of CFR. Yet when full critiques are produced down the road, they will receive a small fraction of the media attention given to CFR, if that.

This criticism of the abandonment of scholarly norms is of particular salience with respect to the release of CFR, because the authors are using the authority of their study to advocate public policy prescriptions which are simply not supported by their underlying analysis, even if one were to grant its validity. Take the three points that appear on the blackboard during the NPR story, as a summary of what CFR has demonstrated:

• Testing of students is a good tool for evaluating teachers’ success.
• Replacing a bad teacher can boost students’ lifetime savings.
• Could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their careers.

In fact, all value-added analysis of test scores, including that of CFR, assumes that standardized exams are accurate, reliable and robust measures of actual student learning, a necessary assumption if one is to use them as a measure of teacher performance.  It is tautological to claim that an analysis proves what it assumes, especially when that assumption is precisely what is contested in the public debate over standardized tests and value added measures.

Further, even if one were to grant for purposes of argument that the value-added analysis of CFR correctly identified the lowest performing teachers, it is far from clear that the way to improve the quality of teaching is to fire and replace those teachers. Here the CFR trio have taken up the policy prescription of fellow economist Rick Hanushek, that it is possible not only to use value-added analysis to identify and fire the lowest performing teachers, but that it would be a simple exercise to find considerably higher performing teachers to replace them. Quite frankly, this is a mistaken policy prescription that emanates from a lack of understanding of the real world of teaching and education, not uncommon among economists who limit themselves to econometric studies that study our world at an extraordinary distance. At best, the value-added analysis of CFR is applicable to a minority of teachers — teachers of ELA and Math in grades 4 through 8; there are extraordinarily difficult, possibly insurmountable problems in extending it much beyond them. More importantly, since it takes a number of years for a teacher to master the fundamental skills of his/her craft, a reality that Chetty himself concedes as supported by the CFR analysis in his Newshour interview, the likelihood is that this method will disproportionately target novice teachers working in low performing schools which provide them little support, and then replace them with another set of novice teachers sent into the very same settings. In sum, this policy would simply increase the teacher churn and turnover which already plagues high need, low performing schools. An educationally grounded policy proposal would be to provide the professional development, the supports and resources, that would improve the performance of the great preponderance of the teachers in place.

Finally, as Dorn, Baker and DiCarlo all note, what CFR’s analysis identifies as “small but noticeable improvement in some young-adult quality-of-life measures” (Dorn’s characterization) are being extrapolated into such hyper-inflated claims as differences in “hundreds of thousands of dollars” over a lifetime. At the very least, this is highly speculative; logically, it is, as Dorn’s wryly notes, a trip through a “fallacy of composition fantasyland.”

One last word on the timing of Friday’s release of CFR. The choice of this particular moment, with the NYC DoE walking out of negotiations with the UFT over the teacher evaluation system for the 33 PLA schools, State Education Commissioner King’s disallowance of the teacher evaluation plans of all ten major urban school districts and Governor Cuomo’s announcement in the State of the State address that he would take up the matter of teacher evaluation, is telling. Combined with the assertion by the CFR authors that their study supported the mass firings of teachers identified as low-performing by value-added measures,  this moment points to the political nature of the CFR authors’ abandonment of scholarly ‘peer reviewed’ norms for the publication of research. Their decision serves well their partisan political purpose. It is just the quality of debate and decision-making around important public policy choices that suffers.

In the British Guardian, Eric Foner has a moving obituary.

The response of DFER? Don’t even think about deviating one inch from the mad rush toward that cliff.