The Hopefully Short-Lived Affirmative Action Theory of Male / Female Graduation Rate Gaps

John Tierney has a column($) in the NYTimes today focused in part on the under-representation of men in higher education. This is a real issue, and one where gender imbalance appears to be increasing. (Although after centuries of patriarchy and oppression, it's amazing how quick people are to hit the panic button when any trend starts to run women's way. Last I checked men still, you know, ran the world.)

However, Tierney's take on this issue is strangely peripheral, focused on a recent op-ed from Kenyon College detailing their attempt to rectify the imbalance through gender-specific admissions policies, i.e. affirmative action for men. Tierney says:

"It's not fair to the girls who are rejected despite having higher grades and test scores than the boys who get fat envelopes. It's not fair to the boys, either, if they're not ready to keep up with their classmates. Affirmative action just makes them prone to fail, and is probably one of the reasons that men are more likely than women to drop out of college."

"Probably"? Really?

Fortunately, this is a testable hypothesis. Using data from The Education Trust's College Results Online data tool, we can calculate the graduation rate gap between men and women at every 4-year institution in the nation. We can then group them by admissions selectivity using the popular Barron's Guide ratings. Here's the median male/female graduation rate gap (measured as the female graduation rate minus the male graduation rate) for each selectivity category, in descending order:

Most Competitive: 2.8%
Highly Competitive: 3.9%
Very Competitive: 6.0%
Competitive: 8.5%
Less Competitive: 9.7%
Non-Competitive: 7.2%

Among the "Most Competitive" institutions, for example, female students at the institution with the median gap had a graduation rate 2.8 percentage points higher than male students. The gap favors women in every other category as well. But if affirmative action was really a cause of increased disparities in male/female graduation rates, you would expect to find the largest gaps at the most competitive schools--that is, the relatively small number of schools that have selective admissions and are thus in the position to have an affirmative action policy, gender-focused or otherwise.

In reality, the data show almost exactly the opposite. With the exception of the relatively small number of institutions in the "Non-Competitive" category, tighter admission policies--and thus, opportunities to favor men--are associated with smaller male/female graduation rate disparities. The greater the selectivity, the smaller the gap.

In fact, a perfect example of a highly competitive institution with a below-average male/female graduation rate gap is...Kenyon College, the very institution Tierney cites. Less than three percentage points separate men from women there, which is less than half the norm.

Any gender-based disparity is problematic. But theories as to why should be based on actual data, particularly when it's right there for the asking.

French Connections?

We at Education Sector strongly believe in learning from other countries. In France, for example, you can walk into a crowded museum in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday and see
numerous groups of attentive young students grouped in front of great masterworks, being taught with animation and verve. Most of my museum-going here in DC doesn't occur during school hours, but I wonder if we can say the same.

Recent weeks have provided another French lesson, with massive student protests over proposed changes in French labor law. Of course, these being the French, the student outrage seems equally arrogant, utopian, and foolish--they're angry about the idea of raising the age at which they can't be fired for incompetence to 26. Because employers are reluctant to create jobs if they can't fire people who under-perform, they haven't been creating many jobs and youth unemployment is enedemic. Presumably that will be the subject of some future round of marches and burnings of cars. One French high school student said, "They're offering us nothing but slavery." Uh, no--slavery is when your boss won't let you leave your job, not when he won't let you keep it.

But the focus of student anxiety in France does point toward some of the profound differences between our countries in the relationship between education and employment. In France (I'm cribbing from Tony Carnevale here), most of the risk of a bad education falls on society. If you're poorly educated and can't afford to provide an income, health care, etc. for yourself, the government provides it for you. If you're bad at your job, you get to keep it. In America, by contrast, the risk of a bad education falls mostly on students, who are left poor, uninsured, and unemployed if they don't get the education they need.

Which is why it makes sense that French students would focus on labor policy instead of education, however misguided those ideas may be. And it's why one wishes American students had similar political power, and were able to marshall it in demanding far better schooling than many now receive.

Three Things You Should Read

I'm going to strongly recommend two new reports out this week.

One is the final report of the Teaching Commission, an independent commission established by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to identify and promote reforms that modernize the way American public school teachers are prepared and hired, the conditions in which they work, and how they are paid, in order to improve results and equity for kids. To advance this end, the Teaching Commission's first report, published in 2004, called for a variety of policy reforms, including more competitive, performance-based, and market-based teacher pay; career ladders; revamping teacher education programs; raising the performance bar for becoming a teacher while streamlining red tape; and giving school leaders more authority to hire, fire, and develop staff, and holding them responsible for doing so wisely.

The new report grades the progress being made nationally towards these goals and highlights reform steps being taken by states, school districts, and organizations around the country. A companion report from the National Conference of State Legislators delves into much greater detail about the various pieces of legislation around progressive teacher reform passed in various states--a pretty long and impressive list.

In the six years I've been working in education policy, reforms to the teaching profession--particularly around competitive or performance-based pay and alternate routes--have often seemed to me to be the area in which the greatest and fastest changes are occurring. This report is well worth reading for anyone working on these issues.

(The Teaching Commission's final report is dedicated to former Teaching Commission Executive Director Gaynor McCown and former AFT President Sandra Feldman, two amazing women who I deeply respect, and who, in their different ways, worked dilligently and intelligently to modernize the teaching profession and improve education for children in the United States. Both, sadly and far too soon, died of cancer in 2005.)

****
A second report worth reading this week is the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)'s 2005 State Preschool Yearbook. The state preschool yearbook is a valuable reference for anyone working with early childhood education issues. It chronicles national trends in publicly-funded preschool access and quality, and grades the states on access and quality measures. For 2005, the picture is mixed, with some progress and bright spots, but stagnation in many places. Despite dramatically increased attention to the importance of early childhood, states still spend barely one percent as much money for preschool as they do for K-12 education, access is poor in many states, and quality is often low, too. To learn how your state is doing, read the report.

***
Finally, I want to make a plug for the Spring 2006 issue of AFT's magazine, American Educator. I think it's one of the best magazines related to education that not anywhere near enough people know about or read. It has interesting articles on a wide variety of education-related topics that don't conform to any single pre-set ideology or position. And, they get excellent writers to contribute. (I'm particularly partial to an article by Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, that they published in 2004 about why women's rights aren't just for westerners.) This quarter's issue, now available on the AFT website, features an essay by E.D. Hirsch, excerpted from his new book, The Knowledge Deficit, about why a knowledge-rich core curriculum is important for all children.

And some blogs to check out, too...

Yesterday I was in Orlando, Florida, to accept a "2006 Best of the Education Blogs" award from eSchool News on behalf of my colleague Andrew Rotherham (whose wife was delivering twins at the time) for his blog Eduwonk, which I played a small role in helping launch.

In addition to a nice framed plaque I got to meet and chat with some of the other recognized bloggers: Frank LaBanca, whose blog Applied Science Research was recognized for best classroom instruction blog for students (LaBanca actually uses it as an instructional tool to facilitate students' thinking and writing about the topics they study in class and allow them to see each others' work.), Bill MacKenty, who was recognized for his blog MacKenty.org, and Wesley Fryer, whose blog Moving at the Speed of Creativity was recognized for best education theory blog. Also recognized were Tim Stahmer, whose blog Assorted Stuff was recognized as best classroom instruction blog for teachers, Darren Cannell, who writes Teaching and Developing Online, and David Warlick for his blog 2 Cents Worth.

My initial exposure to blogs was through the world of political blogs as the "netroots" emerged on the scene, and I still tend to think about blogging primarily in terms of journalism, politics, and punditry. So it was interesting to me to realize that these other bloggers I met don't view blogging that way: They're actual classroom practitioners and see blogging in large part as a tool to share what they're doing with others, collaborate, get feedback, and grow professionally. LaBanca, as noted above, actually uses it as an instructional tool. And there are a growing number of teachers, through various channels, who are using blogging this way. (Steve Dembo, who manages one of those channels for Discovery Education, which sponsored the event, also has a pretty interesting blog.)

Because of the type of organization Education Sector is, Quick and Ed and Eduwonk look and will continue to look, much more like political or media blogs than the blogs I learned about yesterday, but it's interesting to learn about how other people are using this tool.

Downsizing in D.C.

DC Education Blog's Nathan comments that the D.C. Board of Education's guidelines for superintendent Janey's efforts to close or consolidate underutilized DCPS buildings sound "byzantine."

Yup. But that's to be expected here. There's no question that D.C. really needs to get rid of some of the millions of un- and underutilized space in the system. The District's been shedding enrollment for decades, DCPS' enrollment losses have been sped up by the growth of charter schools here, and the excess space is an enormous financial drain on the system (not to mention a major thorn in the side of growing charter schools struggling to find adequate space to operate in). The Board's committed to lose one million square feet of excess space by the end of this August, en route to three million by 2008.

But school closures, even in the best of situations, are always an incredible political minefield, and that's particularly the case in a place like D.C., where issues of geography, and which parts of the city get what public services are incredibly charged along racial and economic lines. Hence, a byzantine process is created to seek to balance all these competing interests and concerns.

As the debate appears to be shaping up, parents with children in small but high performing schools are understandably nervous about Janey's minimum enrollment goals for schools, which led some to believe he's simply going to close down small schools. On the other hand, activists in predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River are concerned their communities will again face the brunt of the cuts.

This is an extremely delicate situation, one well worth watching as things continue to develop, and I'd be loath to make any sweeping suggestions here. But I do have a few observations:

1. This is an opportunity to DCPS to address quality issues: Closing low-performing schools is something that rarely happens in the public education sector, because of the obvious political and practical difficulties. But if enrollment declines and financial concerns are forcing DCPS to close schools, Janey should use this as an opportunity to close down or completely overhaul chronically low-performing schools.

2. DCPS should incorporate the alternative use value of buildings into closure decisions: News reports have named a variety of factors, including academic performance, neighborhood demographic trends, geographic equity/balance, and school size, to be considered in closure decisions. Because the drive for closures here is largely financial, though, DCPS ought also to take into account the economic value of alternative uses for school buildings or sites. All else equal, if DCPS can get more money by renting out or selling a school in one neighborhood versus another, that should be taken into consideration. This can also help balance the concerns of residents in some of the city's more disadvantaged neighborhoods that they will unfairly bear the brunt of closures.

3. Why won't the Board allow buildings to be sold? According to the Post, the Board's guidelines would not allow any closed school buildings to be surrendered to the city to be sold, but buildings would instead be leased to charter schools or city agencies. DCPS's refusal to turn buildings over to the city for sale has long been a major irritation to charter school advocates who would like to purchase the buildings, and I confess, I don't see the logic of such a limitation. There's no expectation that DCPS will need or be able to use all these buildings again in the near future, and refusing to make them available for purchase limits the range of potentially beneficial economic activities and developments that could be undertaken in closed school sites.

4. Charter schools can help here: Freeing up millions of underused DCPS space could potentially be a boon to charter schools, many of which have been struggling to obtain acceptable facilities in the city. But the charter community has learned from hard experience not to get its hopes up too high about new opportunities to access DCPS space. And the fact that the Board appears not to intend to sell the buildings is a major disappointment. That's too bad, because charter schools can also really help with some of the political challenges of school closures that the Board and Janey are facing right now. After all, recruiting a well-regarded charter school to locate in or expand to fill the site of a closed school could alleviate parents' and community members resistance to the loss of the existing neighborhood school. In addition, chartering also offers an option for parents in high-performing small schools slated for closure: at least in theory, these schools could perpetuate their existence by converting to charter status. Right now, D.C. has only one charter school, Paul Public Charter School in Northwest, and the political battle over Paul's conversion years ago has dissuaded other schools from attempting to convert. But potential closure could spark more conversions.

A New Twist on Summers

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published juicy sections of the conclusion to former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis' forthcoming book Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. Lewis, the Dean from 1995 until he was forced out by Larry Summers because of "organizational restructuring" in 2003 (though still a computer science Prof.), sheds important new light on the recent Summers fiasco. Lewis' insider/outsider perspective comes across as both reliable and sharply critical, especially in passages where he excoriates Summers for what most people think of as his saving grace: his intellect. In Lewis' opinion:

"Summers presented no imaginative program, envisioned no educational ideal, carried no flaming torch that students or faculty members wanted to follow. Because whatever agenda he had was advanced so ineffectively and unconvincingly, Summers will be remembered as a weak president, not a strong one."

"The reality is that the ideas summers offered did not meet the Harvard standards. He expressed his "controversial" ideas as one-liners in brief talks, not in essays in which ideas struggled against contrary ideas. There was in his presidency a striking absence of the balanced, thoughtful, and informed analysis that characterizes the academy at its best."

"Lawrence Summers's principal failing was not that he was too strong or too uncongenial, but that the wisdom, knowledge, and judgment he lent to faculty affairs were too feeble…his intellectual contributions as president failed to meet Harvard's high standards and to bring honor to the institution."

Ouch.

But seriously, this is an angle that has gone totally unreported because most pundits think his downfall was due either to the fact that he was an un-pc politician or the notion that he was a brilliant guy done in by the power-hungry leftist faculty ($).

As a member of Harvard class of 2005, the first class to have Summers as president for all four years, I have to admit that Lewis' points feel surprisingly true. Like most other folks, I don't really know what went on between Summers and the faculty, but there was never a time when I thought, gee, that Larry cat's one inspirational leader. As Lewis points out, most of the big ideas attributed to Summers (expansion into Alston, curricular review, raising financial aid support for poor students) were conceived before he came and often suffered from chronic and debilitating mismanagement in how they were brought to life.

So why does this matter to the vast, vast, vast majority of people who don't go to Harvard? Harry Lewis would be glad that you asked. After all, his book is not about Larry Summers; it is about the way that higher education is becoming less interested in the business of educating and more interested in the business of business. Harvard is a brand, and Larry Summers was its rock star icon: the product of this culture, not the cause of it.

Lewis' says, "Universities did not create the consumer culture, but they have been overtaken by it. What universities have not done is to resist societal forces where resistance would be right and proper." Lewis' note to university leaders across the country: Don't forget that all the fundraising, glad-handing, politicking, and sound bite manufacturing is for a larger purpose, and that larger purpose has a lot to do with good ideas – something Larry Summers apparently didn't have that many of. What institutions need "more than anything" Lewis argues, "are ideas and idealism, and those have to be articulated from the top."

- Posted by Ethan Gray

Wake Up Call

Educators are finally waking up to the reality that high schoolers need to sleep later. High schools have traditionally started their days in the wee hours of the morning in deference to football coaches, band leaders, and others who run the after-school schedule. But the school systems in Milwaukee, Tulsa, Minneapolis and several other cities have pushed back their high-school start times from as early as 7:15 to as late as 8:45. The reason? Reseach revealing that students are routinely "substantially sleep deprived" when they show up to school much before 8:15. A big study in Minneapolis, which made the move several years ago, found that the city's later start time (8:40 vs 7:15) improved attendance, reduced the amount of napping students did in classes, and lowered the reported incidences of student depression. Why don't all high schools read and heed such research? Football coaches and band directors are powerful people in the school world, and tradition rules in public education. I know, I know, if only educators did what's best for kids.

The Higher Education Finance Squeeze

The association of State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) has a new report showing how per-student state and local financial support for higher education declined in real dollar terms from $7,121 in 2001 to $5,833 in 2005.

This is an important issue to keep track of. In the realm of public fiscal priorities, higher education is getting squeezed from all sides by the competing demands of national security, Medicaid, public safety, K-12 education, and much more. Unlike those areas, higher education has an independent revenue source (tuition). So when fiscal downturns come along, as they did during the last recession, universities tend to take a harder hit because policymakers reason that tuition can make up the difference.

The result is greater stress on lower-income students and a kind of creeping privatization of higher education. Some of the big-name public universities are becoming quasi-private on the financial side, with public support making up only a small minority of their funding base. That can have real consequences for the attitudes and values that drive those institutions, not all which serve the public interest.

It is, however, also important to interpret these numbers in the context of the economic cycles that drive public finance. SHEEO chose 2001 as the base year of their comparison for a reason: that was the high-water mark for state budgets at the end of the last economic expansion. I worked in a state capitol during the late 1990s, helping write budgets for higher education. Those were giddy fiscal times, with states literally awash in new revenues generated by the long economic expansion and the income taxes on capital gains realized during the stock market boom. Higher education got a big chunk of that money, which is reflected in the peak-year 2001 per-student amount.

So while the decline in real dollar per-student expenditures partly reflects some troubling long-term trends, it's also a natural result of inevitable economic up-ands-downs. And there's some reason to think that in the immediate future, more ups are on the way.

Anyone interested in this issue should also take some time to read this report. Published in 1999 by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and written by the late Hal Hovey, it predicted with Nostradamus-like accuracy almost exactly what would happen between then and now, with higher education getting squeezed financially by a combination of poor state budget policy, rising Medicaid costs, structural budget deficits, and the aforementioned tendency to shift the burden to students in tough times. It came out a time when nobody but nobody was thinking that way, what with Dow 36,000 and the end of the business cycle etc. etc.. A great example of a brilliant mind carefully examining all the evidence and making predictions that all came true.

Schools Channeling Goldilocks?

Given the frequency with which "more parental involvement" is cited as a panacea in education debates, I was shocked--shocked!--to read in today's Washington Post that some schools are now facing a problem with too much parent involvement. So-called "millennial parents," the Post tells us (apparently this is jargon for the parents of anyone born after 1982), are just too wrapped up in their kids' lives. They feel a need to monitor every aspect of their children's lives, they are obsessed with ensuring Junior miss no educational opportunity that might improve his chances as landing a slot in the Ivy league, and, once he's there, they might have trouble letting go. They are pesky and sometimes downright abusive to teachers, sometimes so much so that some D.C.-area private schools are implementing policies to keep such parents out of schools and classrooms.

Coming from a family of educators, I've heard plenty of anecdotes about overinvolved parents and how they can be a pain in the neck. But in general, accounts of widespread parental overinvolvement and the enormous stress it's putting on parents, children, and schools strike me as falling into the same category as those stories about the competitive elite preschool admissions race* or the allegedly ever-tightening college admissions race: It may reflect reality for the elite, well-educated, upper middle class folks to whom education coverage seems mostly to be targeted, but it's not the reality for most parents and children in this country.

Take a look, for instance, at the American Time Use Survey, which the government conducts to measure the amount of time people spend doing various things, such as working for pay, participating in leisure activities, and, yes, caring for their children. There's not a category in the American Time Use Survey for time spent pestering child's teachers, but we can look at the amount of time adults report under the "education-related activities" subcategory under "time spent caring for children as a primary activity" (time spent supervising children while focusing on something else, such as preparing dinner, is counted separately).

According to the September 2005 Survey, the average adult in a household that included children under 18 spent 1.34 hours caring for children as a primary activity, of which 0.1 hours was education related activity, and 0.07 hours time attending children's events. Even women in households with children between the ages of 6 and 17, who averaged the most time spent on education-related childcare activities, spent only .16 hours of education-related activities, and 0.08 hours attending child's events. Does this really suggest an epidemic of parental overinvolvement in children's education?

*I'm sorry to hear that some well-off parents are having trouble getting their kids into Ethical Culture. But as long as wealthy children are more likely that poor children to attend preschool, less than half of poor children attend preschool, and the quality of preschool and childcare options available for many low-income and working families remains abysmal, I'm going to focus my attentions on these issues.

The Allegedly Ever-Tightening College Admissions Rat Race, Part MCMDLXVII

The New York Times has an article today with a pile of anecdotes and a small amount of data suggesting that many high school students are now applying to as many 20 elite colleges, in some cases just for fun. Predictably, it's already up on their list of most emailed articles. Why? Because this is a bread-and-butter education piece that neatly feeds the status anxieties of upper middle class parents (that is, Times readers) convinced that getting their daughters and sons into a good college is getting tougher by the day.

But the fact of the matter is that the admissions rat race covered so extensively here and elsewhere in the media is largely irrelevant to the experiences of the vast majority of college students. Consider: Of this year's class of college-bound high school seniors, only one out nine will enroll at a college or university with an acceptance rate of less than 50 percent. Of the remaining eight, three will enroll at an open admissions institution. Two more will go to a school with an acceptance rate of 80 percent or higher. Joe College goes to Local State University, not Stanford or MIT.

Moreover, the statistics used to back up this trend analysis are pretty shaky. Consider this graf:

"An annual survey of college freshmen indicates that students bound for all kinds of institutions are filing more applications these days. In 1967, only 1.8 percent of freshman surveyed had applied to seven or more colleges, while in 2005, 17.4 percent had done so, according to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A., which conducts the survey. The survey began asking recently
if the students had applied to 12 or more colleges; that proportion increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2005"

If this is such an up-and-coming trend, why go all the way back to 1967 to examine it? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to tell the reader how the percent of freshmen applying to seven or more colleges changed from 2001 to 2005, since CIRP has that data too?

The graf also conspicuously omits the single most important piece of data in the entire piece--the actual percent of students who filed 12 or more applications. Instead, it just says "that proportion increased by 50 percent"? What proportion? Did it go from 10 to 15 percent? 4 to 6? 2 to 3? 0.1 to 0.15? I wasn't able to find it after a quick look through the CIRP Web site. Worldwide recognition to the first Quick+ED reader who tracks down the answer.

UPDATE: Ace Education Sector researcher Ethan Gray wins the prize by looking up the CIRP phone number and asking. The answer: the percent of freshmen who applied to 12 or more institutions increased from 1.4 percent in 2001 to 2.1 percent in 2005.

In other words, five years ago a tiny fraction of high school students applied to a large number of colleges. Four years later, a slightly larger but still tiny fraction of students applied to a large number of colleges. Hopefully, future articles on the other 98 percent of the student body are forthcoming.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Quick and the ED, a new blog from Education Sector. Over the coming weeks and months, you can expect to see this space filled with what we hope is smart, provocative, and witty commentary about a wide range of issues in American education, from preschool through graduate school, and including both today's hot topics and more off-the-beaten-path stories. You may not always agree with our perspectives on these issues (heck, we don't always agree amongst ourselves), but you'll certainly find us willing to grapple with the complexities of tough education questions, and committed to being clear, transparent, and evenhanded in our analysis.

For more about who we are and why we're doing this, look here.