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Pitching New Ideas in Education (Rhonda Meyer)

Our nation’s vexing education problems could use a little dose of real-world wisdom.  Some of the insights painfully learned in the world of baseball could work wonders.

Not too long ago, I read Michael Lewis’ best-seller Moneyball. It is a compelling story of Billy Beane’s unique approach to building a baseball team through comprehensive data analysis. Beane has consistently built a winning low-budget program by using players’ statistics to determine their most likely path to success in the game. This scientific approach, known as sabermetrics, has produced teams that are maximally efficient. The most bang for the buck, in other words.  

Yet even with visible results (Beane’s major league team, the Oakland A’s, has won at least 88 games in the past 5 seasons), the establishment of baseball has had tremendous difficulty in responding to those results in any meaningful way. The traditional scouting system continues to place emphasis on a player’s “look” while downplaying the importance of several areas of statistical performance. In reality, as we all know past performance is a better indicator of future performance than aesthetics.

Simply put, the numbers don’t lie. The same reasoning holds true in education. Past performance of our education system reveals significant racial achievement gaps, for example, which are not likely to be corrected without systemic and sustainable reform efforts. Unless there is substantial change, we have no reason to expect anything different from what we have already seen.

In education reform, we demonstrate the success of an issue such as school choice with powerful and meaningful quantitative research, including graduation rate studies by Jay Greene and research by economist Caroline Hoxby. Greene’s statistics point to the strong academic success of choice schools. In discussions about school choice, many people mistakenly assume that there will be winners and losers. Hoxby has, among other things, demonstrated the power of competition in improving achievement in all public schools. In other words, with school choice, every student wins in the long run because all schools have incentive to improve in order to attract students. The numbers don’t lie.

School choice is an attempt to move the institution of education toward maximal efficiency by forcing it to respond to the choices made by parents for their children’s education.  Parental choices are market forces. Of course, parental choice alone will not result in maximal efficiency unless choices can be based on meaningful information. The quality of teachers in a school makes a difference; as does the quality of the curriculum, the involvement of the parents and students as well as the support of the administrators and larger community. Until all that information is made available to parents regarding all schools, they will have to do the best they can with the information at hand. Billy Beane created a winning baseball team because he had all of the important data he needed. Just think what low-income parents in failing school districts could do if they had that kind of access to meaningful school information.

Change is never easy, and quite often it isn’t pretty. In Lewis’ words, “[i]f you look long enough for an argument against reason you will find it.” (p.298) Opponents of school choice point to the closing of under-performing charter schools. Those of us who favor school choice are saddened by the news coverage garnered by these rare schools, but we wouldn’t change the fact that we can close schools that don’t perform. That should be a realistic option for any school that doesn’t meet standards. Changing the education system is a long, slow process, but it is one so important that we dare not stop. As more parents become familiar with the concept of school choice it will become an approach increasingly difficult for the education establishment to ignore, just as baseball is having a hard time ignoring a new approach.

Major League Baseball is finally responding to the inherent value of Billy Beane’s sabermetrics system. Just think back to October 2004, when Theo Epstein used sabermetrics to bring the Boston Red Sox their first championship in 86 years, and you’ll get a sense for how innovative K-12 education reform can be.

Rhonda Meyer is director of research for the Alliance for School Choice.