Economists’ view of education not all bad

The growing presence and influence of economics in education has been discomfiting to those who view teaching and learning through the lens of the social sciences. But varying viewpoints can enhance our understanding of education reforms.

Economists’ view of the world can sometimes be pretty hard for educators to accept. In fact, for a long time, economics wasn’t considered relevant to education policy making. Psychologists and social scientists dominated the education space with scholars and theorists like Jean Piaget and Howard Gardner influencing educators and policy makers. Not until the mid-1990s did economists really begin to make their opinions known regarding U.S. education. Noted economists such as Eric Hanushek and business-led reform efforts like New American Schools (NAS) made a powerful argument for educators to consider the economic dimensions of school improvement. (The author worked for NAS from 1997 to 2000.) Economic terms like productivity, incentivizing, human capital, and resource reallocation suddenly became part of the school reform conversation. Over the last 15 years, the influence of economic analyses on education reform has steadily grown, and today economists of all stripes have become a vocal and powerful part of the education policy landscape.

However, the influence economists have had on education has not come about without a certain amount of consternation among educators. For some, the introduction of cost-benefit analyses and predictive analytics intrudes profoundly on the personal and intangible magic that has always been part of great teaching. Many educators cringe at the thought of using the same metrics applied to mass producing widgets to developing young minds; they see the economist mindset as too analytical, too data-driven to ever really explain all that happens in a classroom or school. Others balk at the idea that policy makers today see education more as the first line of defense in economic warfare than as the cornerstone of a civil democratic society.

Consternation or not, economists and their tools have permeated the inner sanctum of education policy making. Collecting and using data to measure the performance of students and teachers is firmly established as best practice in schools and districts. Organizations like the Data Quality Campaign support and promote using data to help guide school improvement efforts. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s signature Race to the Top program made a robust data system a key priority in determining funding for states. Beyond that, there is the use of predictive analytics to measure teacher performance and predict student performance; the use of value-added assessments to evaluate teachers; and a myriad of indicators that many states now use to make accountability decisions. I’m sure some educators feel that for every school improvement issue, some well-meaning soul will offer an economic-based theory or model that can explain it, fix it, and predict whether it will or won’t remain fixed.

No one field of study should have a dominant role in developing education policy.

Without a doubt, this issue reached a fever pitch when education reformers started using test scores and tools like value-added assessments to evaluate teacher performance and determine consequences for failing to advance student achievement. The idea that a group of economists would use a blunt instrument like test scores to evaluate the complexity and nuance of teaching and learning was like a hard slap in the face to many longtime educators schooled in social science and psychology. Fear and apprehension about how school and district leaders would interpret and use the data made test scores and metrics the biggest bullies in the schoolyard. To make matters worse, the issue became a political hot potato when Michelle Rhee appeared on the cover of Time magazine, broom in hand, ready to “clean house” to get rid of teachers who didn’t make the grade set by the District of Columbia’s new teacher evaluation system. How to fairly and effectively evaluate teachers continues to spark a range of reactions, analyses, and opinions among the nation’s best and brightest researchers and advocates.

The great irony about whether economic theory has become too much a part of education policy making is that state and local leaders need to develop systems that can accurately measure, track, and analyze education data, something economists are very comfortable doing. While educators may not like the intrusion, at least the visitors have arrived bearing useful gifts. The analogy that comes to mind is the complex algorithms that helped create social media tools like Facebook and Google. These complex systems are a mystery to most of us. Intellectually, we may know that some combination of data and analysis produces the information that controls much of what happens in the world today, but in our guts we just feel a little queasy about the whole thing.

The apprehension some feel about the influence of economics on education likely comes from a similar place. Not so long ago, people viewed education in pretty simple terms. You went to school, hopefully you were assigned a good teacher, made the best of it regardless, and then you moved on. Not a lot of quantitative decision making involved. Education today is a far more complex enterprise, and the stakes have never been higher for both students and teachers. All parties are keenly aware that they’re being monitored and measured to improve performance.

Despite the apprehensions, it would be hard to argue that economists have not made significant contributions to education policy making. I suspect the concerns about the growing influence of economists on education policy stems in large part from the consequences tied to the results of the economics-based analyses, not the underlying economic theories. In fact, there seems to be a cottage industry developing around the connection points between economics and psychology and social science a la such bestsellers as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics.

Some educators balk at the idea that policy makers today see education more as the first line of defense in economic warfare than as the cornerstone of a civil democratic society.

But within the education space, individuals tend to self-identify based on their field of study, so it is not surprising that those coming from different fields might not see eye-to-eye about how best to improve education. Those differences, however, serve a vital purpose. No one field of study should have a dominant role in developing education policy. If you think about the remarkable range of activities and behaviors that exist within a school system, why would we ever look to only one or two fields of study to inform policy and practice?

This point has been raised several times as researchers and policy makers think about how to develop and support a research agenda to evaluate the effect of the Common Core and the soon-to-be-released aligned assessments. Since the Common Core and the assessments will affect a wide range of issues that go far beyond student achievement, a research agenda should include the perspective of an equally broad range of academic disciplines. In the past, there has been a tendency to compartmentalize the research on reform efforts into discreet places. Social scientists may be interested in one aspect of the reform efforts, political scientists and economists another. While that in itself is not such a terrible thing, the divide between and among disciplines has at times negatively affected the larger and broader value of the research.

The Common Core presents researchers and policy makers with an opportunity to develop a broad and robust research agenda that includes contributions from a range of academic disciplines even beyond social science and economics. Ideally, those contributions would look at short-term and long-term indicators and actively inform the decisions made by policy makers and practitioners as implementation of the standards and assessments continues. History has shown us that widespread education reform efforts, like the Common Core, are often doomed by an inability to fully measure and communicate outcomes. The amount of information communicated about the reform as it begins should be equally matched (or better yet trumped) by the amount of information that is being shared about it two, five, and 10 years down the line. As implementation of the Common Core continues, contributions from a range of academic disciplines will certainly help policy makers, practitioners, and the public better understand the short and long of its effect.

CITATION: Ferguson, M. (2013). WASHINGTON VIEW: Economists’ view of education not all bad. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (3), 68-69.