Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making

By Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb and Adam Swift

“An ambitious effort that succeeds in providing a fundamentally new way to talk about and . . . think about policy choices in education.” —Jeffrey R. Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University

We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education—what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve?

In Educational Goods, two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin by broadening the language for talking about educational policy: “educational goods” are the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that children develop for their own benefit and that of others; “childhood goods” are the valuable experiences and freedoms that make childhood a distinct phase of life. Balancing those, and understanding that not all of them can be measured through traditional methods, is a key first step. From there, they show how to think clearly about how those goods are distributed and propose a method for combining values and evidence to reach decisions. They conclude by showing the method in action, offering detailed accounts of how it might be applied in school finance, accountability, and choice. The result is a reimagining of our decision making about schools, one that will sharpen our thinking on familiar debates and push us toward better outcomes.

“Every education decision-maker—and every education researcher—would benefit from reading this book.” —David N. Figlio, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University

“Imaginative, informative, and unfailingly constructive.” —Michael S. McPherson, co-author of Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226514208

Book preview

Educational Goods

Educational Goods

Values, Evidence, and Decision Making

HARRY BRIGHOUSE, HELEN F. LADD, SUSANNA LOEB, ADAM SWIFT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51403-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51417-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51420-8 (e-book)

doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226514208.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brighouse, Harry, author. | Ladd, Helen F., author. | Loeb, Susanna, author. | Swift, Adam, 1961– author.

Title: Educational goods : values, evidence, and decision making / Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb, Adam Swift.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017009046 | ISBN 9780226514031 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226514178 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226514208 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Education—Decision making. | Education—Aims and objectives. | Education and state—Decision making. | Education—Philosophy. | Values.

Classification: LCC LB2806 .B734 2018 | DDC 371.2—dc34

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009046

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Figures

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1  Values

CHAPTER 1.  Educational Goods

CHAPTER 2.  Distributive Values and Independent Values

CHAPTER 3.  Achievement as an Educational Good

PART 2  Decision making

CHAPTER 4.  Combining Values and Evidence

CHAPTER 5.  School Finance

CHAPTER 6.  School Accountability

CHAPTER 7.  School Autonomy and Parental Choice

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Figures

1.1  Educational goods and flourishing

1.2  Educational goods and capacities

2.1  Independent values

3.1  Distribution of student-level achievement as measured by test scores

3.2  Comparison of groups with different levels of average achievement

3.3  Comparison of groups with different amounts of variation

3.4  Depiction of two possible thresholds of adequacy

3.5  Achievement gap between two groups

3.6  Trends in average reading scores for thirteen-year-old black and white students

3.7  Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) reading scores (2009)

5.1  Spending on elementary and secondary education across select Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (2012)

5.2  Current per-pupil expenditures for public elementary and secondary education in the United States (fiscal year 2013)

Preface and Acknowledgments

We first met at a series of workshops funded by the Spencer Foundation and held at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2009–2010. The workshops were motivated by a concern that we already shared: educational social scientists often proceed with their empirical work without sufficient attention to normative considerations while philosophers of education often conduct their normative work without sufficient attention to empirical reality. The result is that the former sometimes fail to focus on interesting, decision-relevant, empirical questions while the latter sometimes miss interesting, decision-relevant, normative questions. The workshops brought together researchers and scholars from history, English, philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, public policy, and political science with the aim of fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue and understanding. The intention was to produce a new kind of research and to enhance the ability of the participants to work more deeply across disciplinary boundaries in the future. Some of the results can be found in Education, Justice, and Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2013), edited by Danielle Allen and Rob Reich.

The four of us chose to continue working together after the workshops were finished. Our ambition was to produce something informed by serious engagement across the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and the educational social sciences in a way that would be useful for social scientists, philosophers, and reflective decision makers. This ambition exposed us to the logistical difficulties inherent in a project involving four collaborators located in four disciplinary homes (education, public policy, politics, and philosophy), in four time zones, on two continents, and all with numerous other commitments. We held several prolonged face-to-face meetings in which we discussed preliminary ideas, and after writing commenced, we discussed drafts and then revisions of drafts during numerous Skype and phone meetings involving various combinations—and, usually all—of us. While we can still identify the initiating authors of some parts, every chapter and every passage (if not quite every sentence) reflects the contributions of us all.

Many others, however, have also contributed, and we can acknowledge some of them here. We are grateful to Danielle Allen and Rob Reich in particular for the matchmaking that brought us together and, eventually, produced this book, continuing the interdisciplinary enterprise they nurtured. Thanks also to the other participants: Sigal Ben-Porath, Angel Harris, Andrew Jewett, Tony Laden, Patrick McGuinn, Seth Moglen, Melissa Roderick, Richard Rothstein, Anna Marie Smith, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Gregory M. Walton.

We are also grateful to the Spencer Foundation both for supporting the original workshop that brought us together and for funding the meetings during which we worked on this project. Harry Brighouse is also grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for a scholarship that allowed him, some years ago, to start thinking about educational reform. And, of course, we thank our home institutions—Duke University, Stanford University, the University of Warwick, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison—for the supportive environments they continue to give us and the license they grant faculty to pursue knowledge.

We owe much to audiences at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM), Trent University, the University of Amsterdam Center on Inequality Studies (AMCIS), Northwestern University, the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and the School of Government at the Victoria University of Wellington. We are grateful also to Robert Bifulco, Jonathan Boston, Tim Brighouse, Matthew Clayton, Randall Curren, Jennifer Jennings, Michael McPherson, Kate Norlock, Karen Robertson, and Ken Shores for their individual comments. We are grateful to Stephanie Sheintul for compiling the index.

We also thank our editor, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, who has been patient and encouraging throughout, and three readers for the University of Chicago Press, whose comments on our first draft, together with Elizabeth’s, did much to improve the final product.

The conceptual framework for the book has previously been published as Educational Goods and Values: A Framework for Decision-Makers, Theory and Research in Education 14, no. 1 (2016): 3–26.

Introduction

Societies have to make decisions about what children should learn, how to teach them, how to divide teaching between family and school, and how many resources to allocate to the education of different children. Education is the process that transforms newborn infants into adults with characters and temperaments, with skills and abilities, with beliefs and attitudes. Decisions about education influence the character of the whole society. They shape the way people become individuals, their capacities to live flourishing lives, and how those capacities are distributed across the population.

Policy makers at top levels of government, teachers in individual classrooms, and parents all know that their decisions matter. Because these decisions affect such fundamental concerns—how well people’s lives go and whose lives go better than others—they are morally significant. Aware of that significance, most education decision makers want to make morally responsible decisions.

But what is a morally responsible decision? However keen they may be to do the right thing, decision makers are often not well equipped with the conceptual resources they need. There is a growing body of academic work on how decision makers in fact gather and interpret research evidence and some on how they should do so.¹ But very little is available on how decision makers, particularly those in education, should combine their interpretations of the evidence with considerations about values when deciding what, actually, to do. In this book we offer a clear and manageable framework for combining value considerations with empirical data to make judgments about how well specific policies are likely to realize valued outcomes. We do not recommend particular policies. What we offer instead is a method for assessing and evaluating policy options. This method draws on our joint expertise as philosophers and social scientists. Philosophy supplies resources for thinking better about the goals or values that decisions are, or should be, trying to achieve, while social science research yields information about how likely the various options are to achieve them.²

We have three main aims.

The first is to broaden the language for talking about the goals of education policy. To that end, we have coined the terms educational goods and childhood goods. As we explain fully in chapter 1, we use the term educational goods to refer to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions that children develop both for their own benefit and for the benefit of others. These goods are varied, and include much more than the cognitive skills that are often associated with student achievement. We offer a way of thinking about the educational goods that educators should seek to promote by describing capacities of individuals that lead to flourishing. These are capacities such as the capacity to function in the labor market, to be a good democratic citizen, to develop healthy personal relationships, and to treat others with respect and dignity. The word goods signifies that they are valued in the sense that they help individuals to flourish and to contribute to the flourishing of others either in the present or in the future. The adjective refers to the fact that these goods emerge from an educational process, one that is broadly conceived to include the contribution not only of schools but also of families and communities. We supplement the concept of educational goods with that of childhood goods, which are the good experiences enjoyed by children during their childhood years. Childhood is a distinct phase of life with its own special joys that are no longer available, or much harder to achieve, as adults. Identifying the valued outcomes of the educational process and acknowledging the value of childhood experiences is the first goal of the book.

The second aim is to add precision and clarity to the discussion of the distributive values that are essential for good decision making about education. A decision maker will need to consider not only the total amount of educational goods but also how those goods are distributed across individuals or groups of individuals. Clear thinking about distributive considerations helps one avoid the commonly used but vague and imprecise terms social justice and equity, which often mean different things to different people. To this end, we spell out three distributive values: equality, adequacy, and benefiting the less advantaged. Some policies may promote all three. Others may promote one or two while harming the third. Armed with these three values, the decision maker is in a position to make conscious trade-offs among them.

Our third aim is to provide a framework for individual decision makers that enables them to combine values and evidence in the evaluation of policy options. For reasons we explain in chapter 4, we focus on decisions related to schools. To be sure, the decision makers we have in mind—whether they be governors, legislators, school board members, school superintendents, school principals, teachers, voters, or parents—are unlikely to be in a position to make such decisions on their own. Instead, decisions will be arrived at through a collective decision-making process. That may be a public political procedure involving elected officials, or it may simply be the process by which teachers or administrators within an individual school devise school policy. This book does not address the collective aspects of decision-making processes. Instead, our goal is to help those who contribute to the collective process think in an organized way about the values at stake in any decision and what the evidence has to say about the potential for realizing those values so as to make the trade-offs inherent in policy choices clearer.

Although the main audience for this book is decision makers in the field of education policy, the framework also has implications for philosophers and social scientists who want to contribute to the policy-making process. Our experience is that philosophers tend to think at a general level about what is important but often do not devote much attention to what is, or could be, measured or attend sufficiently to complicated issues of institutional and policy design. Meanwhile, social science research is not always well oriented to providing the information needed given the values that are actually at stake. Both groups can benefit from the approach we present here.

The Role of Values and Evidence

The evaluation of policy involves interactions between values and evidence. One can assess policies simply in terms of how likely they are to achieve, or how well they have in fact achieved, their stated goals. We can investigate their effects, or their likely effects, both intended and unintended, in a value-neutral, technical way. But evaluating policies involves more. It requires judging whether policies are good or bad.

By values we mean whatever is good or right about an action or state of affairs, whatever it is that makes them valuable. If, for example, you think it would be good for the achievement gap between black and white students to be smaller than it is at present, you must think something makes a society with smaller achievement gaps better than one with bigger gaps. Perhaps more than one thing makes it better. Maybe it would give its children more equal opportunities and be more productive and its members would be less likely to experience racial prejudice. Often there is more than one value that accounts for why some states of affairs are better than others. The important point is that at least one value judgment must be involved. To claim that A is better than B is to claim that A is more valuable than B, which necessarily involves judgments about values.

Because there are many values, they often conflict, and one needs to make trade-offs among them. Perhaps the best-known example is the clash between liberty and equality. In the educational context, that arises mainly as a tension between parents’ freedom to devote their resources to their children’s education and the concern that children born into different families should enjoy something approaching equal opportunities in life. Other conflicts may be less dramatic, but judgments about how to balance the competing claims of different values are implicit in every decision to allocate scarce resources. Some readers may well think that smaller achievement gaps between racial groups, better provision for those with learning disabilities, and the recruitment of higher-quality teachers would all be good. Each of them would help to realize one or more values. But because in practice they compete with one another for resources, any judgment about how to allocate those resources requires one to make trade-offs between the different values.

Thorough evaluation of policy proposals depends not only on weighing the different values in play but also on assessing the empirical evidence about how each policy option would affect the values. The careful analysis of values requires philosophical reflection, but decision makers cannot make good policy without equally careful analysis of how society actually works, which is the job of the social scientist. Sometimes this distinction is formulated in terms of a contrast between the normative and the positive. The normative is concerned with questions of value: what is valuable or desirable. The positive is concerned with the description, explanation and prediction of what is and what could be. Policy decisions inevitably involve both.

Detailed and thorough investigation of relevant evidence, with all its complications, is an essential prerequisite for good policy decisions. Social scientists are trained to understand institutional frameworks, to use appropriate quantitative and qualitative methodologies to answer well-defined questions, and to construct explanatory theories based on the careful accumulation of empirical evidence. They have learned about what inferences are and are not warranted on the basis of what data, and they know when research findings corroborate or falsify particular claims. Given the nature of this training, social scientists may well be skeptical about the possibility of making judgments about values in ways that provide the kind of objectivity they associate with their own research findings.

But value judgments are inescapable. Anybody who thinks one thing is better than something else is implicitly relying on some judgments about what makes things better or worse. Those are value judgments. Social scientists’ choices about what to study—academic achievement, civic participation, occupational choice—typically reflect their views about what is valuable. Inequalities can be bigger or smaller, test scores can go up or down, and different school regimes can differently accommodate parents’ views about how their children should be educated. Without some standard of evaluation, nobody can judge any of those alternatives to be better or worse than the other, and nobody can view research findings as yielding even the most tentative implication for policy. Those judgments and views about policy will be better if they are based on criteria or standards that have been subject to careful analysis.

This book is based on the assumption that individuals can make better policy choices if they are systematic in their consideration both of the relevant empirical evidence and of the relevant moral values. That may sound daunting or unmanageable. We aim to show how it can be done.

Sometimes it may be wise for a decision maker deliberately to conceal the complicated trade-offs between values that are always implicit in policy judgments. Rarely are there only winners and no losers from any proposed reform, however desirable that reform may be given all the relevant considerations. So those keen to sell a reform may well find it strategic to talk only about the good bits or to come up with feel-good rhetoric that highlights the upside while concealing the downside. We understand that in some contexts precise and explicit public acknowledgment of trade-offs is not always wise.

That said, reasons for saying vague, imprecise, or confused things are not reasons for holding vague, loose or confused beliefs. When it comes to thinking—including thinking about decisions—clarity, precision, and truth have to be better than the alternatives. Even where it is strategic not to be too precise in the positions offered to a particular audience, one can still be clear about one’s own beliefs, about what values one expects such a strategy to realize, and why one endorses those values. The pragmatic and strategic pursuit of carefully thought-through policy aims is one thing. Flailing around without a moral compass, or with an inadequate sense of the complex terrain one is negotiating, is another.

Decisions about Education Policy

Education policy choices are often posed in terms of their effects on student achievement. One advantage of that focus is that achievement can be measured, albeit imperfectly, by test scores. Measures allow social science researchers to use quantitative empirical methods to examine the effects of programs on achievement—often taking into consideration the details of how the programs were implemented. The findings that emerge from such studies may be useful to policy makers, but they are not conclusive. Even if policy makers are interested only in how a policy affects achievement and the research evidence is clear and persuasive, they may need to weigh predicted changes in one dimension, such as higher overall achievement, against changes in another, such as a widening achievement gap. Thus, they need to compare the value of higher levels of achievement with the disvalue of larger gaps. They may also need to clarify what it is about the distribution of achievement that matters. Should they care primarily about gaps between groups or about the low achievement of the lower-performing group?

Moreover, student achievement is rarely the only consideration at stake. What about other outcomes, such as how students view each other? It matters whether children learn to regard one another as equals