The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, based in our old home Chicago, announced the cohort of “MacArthur Fellows” for this year yesterday. By way of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I once worked in a support capacity, not a decision-making capacity, for the Fellows Program at the foundation.
You can read the full list of this year’s recipients of unrestricted $500,000 grants on MacArthur’s website, here, or briefly in The Washington Post, here, The New York Times, here, or The Wall Street Journal, here.
The individuals chosen are selected, as you might imagine, to advance the work of the foundation, so some crafting of the list is inevitable. That is, you are not likely to have as good a shot at one of the grants if you are working in a high school classroom as you would if you’re working in a university. The simple fact is, our world is full of creative individuals who could be called geniuses in their own right. Most of these people, however, don’t publish their results too often and are unlikely to be nominated for a MacArthur fellowship.
However, since education and specifically digital learning are on the foundation’s list of missions, I found it unusual that among the year’s 23 winners, not one teacher, principal, or K-12-affiliated individual made the cut. No one, of course, knows what individuals were considered for the grants, but only 23 were selected, and none of those people work for public or private schools, except perhaps as a side job.
One researcher who did make the list, however, is a Harvard professor who published a study, referenced by President Obama in his last State of the Union address. Raj Chetty, 33, studies how “policy decisions affect real-world behavior,” according to MacArthur’s website. Along with John Friedman, also of Harvard, and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University, Mr Chetty studied the school records and income tax records of 2.5 million students in a major urban district—probably New York—over a 20-year period. They “discovered” that good teachers cause students to get higher test scores, which leads to higher lifetime earnings (by about $7 every two weeks, it turns out), fewer teen pregnancies, and higher college-going rates.
The problems with this study were not with the economics, but rather, with the education. A few of MacArthur’s missions also have to do with economics, so we credit them for that, but $7 a paycheck? It won’t exactly help any local economy, let’s just say.
And then, disregarding the foundation’s missions in education starts to look like an abuse of trust, similar to what we noticed when the Komen group shifted funding away from Planned Parenthood. Note that the MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation, not a public charity, and their program officers answer only to the board, not to the public. Although Mr Chetty’s research is as sound as can be, the questions asked are more pedestrian than those asked by elementary reading specialists every day. The difference is, the Harvard study was published; the output of elementary reading specialists is only seen in the advancement of their students. And who, after all, puts kids above published research findings?
The foundation has awarded genius grants to schoolteachers in the past, most recently last year to Francisco Núñez, a music educator who directs the Young People’s Chorus of New York, and in the cohort of 2010, to Amir Abo-Shaeer, a physics teacher in Goleta, Calif., and Sebastian Ruth, a violinist and music educator in Rhode Island. These are inspiring leaders who need to be recognized for their contributions to education in our lives and encouraged to continue in their own unique and creative endeavors. This year’s list, however, includes no K-12 fellows.
The only possible connection between this year’s fellows and education is the aforementioned study, which has produced a call, among grossly undereducated people, for policies that will degrade the quality of schools. The questions asked by Mr Chetty’s study must be considered as dull as asking a Christian if he really believes a snake can talk, “because that’s what it says in the Bible: a snake talked to Adam and Eve, ya’know.”
The result of allowing the simple-minded answers to these moot questions to inspire our education policy—if caring, intelligent people don’t intervene—will be the weakening of healthy relationships between teachers and students. It will force teachers to compete with one another rather than collaborate with each other. These values will then be passed down to students.
The absence of any public educator and the inclusion of a researcher whose work advances conclusions that are bad for our schools have reduced the value of these awards and done harm to the mission of one of this nation’s most inspiring philanthropic giants, I’m sorry to say.
Finally, one of the criteria for the genius grant is that it enables the winner. Schoolteachers, especially those at schools in poverty-ridden areas or who teach students from poor families, often use their own money to provide school supplies for their students. A dear friend of mine Sunday told me how her high school government teacher, decades ago, bought her cap and gown because she couldn’t afford it as she had been kicked out of her house. Teachers like that could use some enabling, in my opinion.