This story, detailing Harvard's announcement of increased financial aid for low- and middle-income families, is nothing but good news. As the NYTimes' Karen Arenson correctly notes, "The quest by prestigious colleges to attract more low- and middle-income students is turning into a financial aid arms race." Two important takeaways:
1) Other elite colleges and universities can do more to promote access for students who aren't rich enough to afford a $30,000 tuition bill. Administrators should be prepared to answer the question: Harvard, Stanford, and other institutions are doing this--why aren't you?
2) While the nation's higher education institutions are fiercely independent, often to the point of obstinancy, they're also very sensitive to public perception. That's the dynamic here, as institutions realize that doing well and doing good go hand and hand. The challenge for reformers is to redefine the terms of that perception, shifting the values that inform institutional reputations away from the measures of fame, wealth, and exclusivity that dominate the U.S. News rankings and moving them toward more important things, like institutional success in serving economically disadvantaged students.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Friday, March 31, 2006
Welcome to the Dark Age
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a new version of the federal Higher Education Act yesterday. The floor debate included a lot of back-and-forth about student loans, spiraling tuition costs, affirmative action, and other hot-button issues. Little attention was given to the following provision, which was added last year by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce:
SEC. 132. DATABASES OF STUDENT INFORMATION PROHIBITED.
(a) PROHIBITION. Except as described in (b), nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the design, development, creation, implementation, or maintenance of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance, attending institutions receiving assistance, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this Act, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. (b) EXCEPTION. The provisions of subsection (a) shall not affect the loan obligation enforcement activities described in section 485B of this Act.
But of all the provisions in the law, this is possibly the most shortsighted, damaging, and indicative of the relentless efforts of the private higher education establishment to shield itself from any kind of scrutiny from the outside world.
This is the back-story: The National Center for Education Statistics, an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Education, gathers information about the nation's colleges and universities through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Every year, each institution is required to fill out and submit a series of surveys about themselves and their students, focused on topics such as enrollment, funding, staffing, degrees awarded, financial aid, and graduation rates. This process is the backbone of higher-education data-gathering; it's the only way to consistently know anything about the institutions that compromise a vital segment of the economy.
It's also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and somewhat antiquated process, with institutions filling in thousands of data points across the various surveys. Each survey is separate, greatly reducing the ability to cross-reference information in a useful way. For example, because the graduation rate and financial aid surveys are separate, we know the percent of students at a given institution who graduate within six years, and the percent who receive financial aid, but not the percent of financial aid recipients who graduate within six years.
To modernize this system, IPEDS proposed a new way of submitting information: instead of each institution aggregating it's internal student-level data into a bunch of separate, disconnected surveys, they would instead simply submit that student-level, or "unit record," information to IPEDS directly. In addition to being more efficient from the institutional perspective (after investing in some new data infrastructure), it would also allow for much more accurate calculation of key institutional measures like graduation rates and net student prices.
Institutions have long complained that current federal graduation rate measures are inaccurate because they don't give institutions credit for students who transfer to another institution and graduate there. The unit-record system would fix that problem, because IPEDS would be able to connect enrollment information from one institution to graduation information from another. Institutions have also complained that current measures of the cost of going to college are overstated because they don't show the average "net price" to students after subtracting out financial aid, tuition discounts, etc. The unit record system would have fixed that problem too.
Faced with a system that would have made their graduation rates look higher and prices look lower, what did the private higher education establishment do? It crushed the unit record system like a bug.
While associations of public universities such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) were supportive of the unit record system, the private colleges, represented most prominently by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) attacked the idea from the very beginning. Aligning themselves with far-right privacy nuts like the Eagle Forum, they characterized the idea as the first step toward an Orwellian nightmare dystopia where every student is monitored from cradle to grave by the faceless bureaucrats of some presumably totalitarian regime. The president of Gettysburg College wrote breathlessly in the Washington Post that:
What accounts for this over-the-top reaction? Simple: colleges and universities--particularly private colleges and univerisites--are resolutely opposed to any form of increased public scrutiny. As far as they're concerned, the quality of education they provide to their students and the benefits they give to society in exchange for the substantial public financial support they receive through student financial aid and their tax-exempt status is nobody's business but their own.
They know that any attempt to increase the amount or quality of information about them could be used as a means to form judgments about how well they're doing their job. That could lead to increased competitive pressures, uncomfortable questions, and other various forms of that dreaded word accountability.
And so they embarked on a disingenuous campaign to conflate institutional privacy with student privacy. By pretending to stand up for the latter, they very effectively preserved the former.
This is not to say that privacy is not a real and abiding concern in the modern age of information. It seems like not a week goes by that you don't read some new and horrifying account of security breaches at private database companies, resulting in the release of your social security number, mother's maiden name, cholesterol level, and AMEX card to gangsters located in one or more former Soviet republics.
But the unit record proposal contained every security protocol imaginable, including strict limits on the use and release of the data and harsh legal penalties for any privacy violation. It would be a federal felony punishable by prison time to release the information, at a level actually stricter than releasing data from the IRS. Which, as it happens, is a good example of a government agency that's been gathering "unit record" data far more sensitive than someone's college major for a long time while by and large successfully balancing citizen privacy rights and the government's interest in information. The government is actually quite good at keeping information secret; in fact that's usually the problem.
We live in an era where all large organizations strategically gather data about themselves to understand how they work and improve the services they provide to consumers. Any private company will tell you that such analysis is an essential component of continued improvement and long-term viability. We also live in a country where many colleges and universities routinely fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, where less than half of all college graduates are proficient in tests of literacy, where students and parents are forced to choose colleges with virtually no solid information about which institutions will actually give them a high-quality education, where globalization competition for knowlege-based jobs is growing by the day.
In other words, we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information. Such an action would be a victory for the narrow self-interest of private institutions, and a sound defeat for students, parents, and everyone else.
SEC. 132. DATABASES OF STUDENT INFORMATION PROHIBITED.
(a) PROHIBITION. Except as described in (b), nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the design, development, creation, implementation, or maintenance of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance, attending institutions receiving assistance, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this Act, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. (b) EXCEPTION. The provisions of subsection (a) shall not affect the loan obligation enforcement activities described in section 485B of this Act.
But of all the provisions in the law, this is possibly the most shortsighted, damaging, and indicative of the relentless efforts of the private higher education establishment to shield itself from any kind of scrutiny from the outside world.
This is the back-story: The National Center for Education Statistics, an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Education, gathers information about the nation's colleges and universities through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Every year, each institution is required to fill out and submit a series of surveys about themselves and their students, focused on topics such as enrollment, funding, staffing, degrees awarded, financial aid, and graduation rates. This process is the backbone of higher-education data-gathering; it's the only way to consistently know anything about the institutions that compromise a vital segment of the economy.
It's also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and somewhat antiquated process, with institutions filling in thousands of data points across the various surveys. Each survey is separate, greatly reducing the ability to cross-reference information in a useful way. For example, because the graduation rate and financial aid surveys are separate, we know the percent of students at a given institution who graduate within six years, and the percent who receive financial aid, but not the percent of financial aid recipients who graduate within six years.
To modernize this system, IPEDS proposed a new way of submitting information: instead of each institution aggregating it's internal student-level data into a bunch of separate, disconnected surveys, they would instead simply submit that student-level, or "unit record," information to IPEDS directly. In addition to being more efficient from the institutional perspective (after investing in some new data infrastructure), it would also allow for much more accurate calculation of key institutional measures like graduation rates and net student prices.
Institutions have long complained that current federal graduation rate measures are inaccurate because they don't give institutions credit for students who transfer to another institution and graduate there. The unit-record system would fix that problem, because IPEDS would be able to connect enrollment information from one institution to graduation information from another. Institutions have also complained that current measures of the cost of going to college are overstated because they don't show the average "net price" to students after subtracting out financial aid, tuition discounts, etc. The unit record system would have fixed that problem too.
Faced with a system that would have made their graduation rates look higher and prices look lower, what did the private higher education establishment do? It crushed the unit record system like a bug.
While associations of public universities such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) were supportive of the unit record system, the private colleges, represented most prominently by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) attacked the idea from the very beginning. Aligning themselves with far-right privacy nuts like the Eagle Forum, they characterized the idea as the first step toward an Orwellian nightmare dystopia where every student is monitored from cradle to grave by the faceless bureaucrats of some presumably totalitarian regime. The president of Gettysburg College wrote breathlessly in the Washington Post that:
"The threat to our students' privacy is of grave concern," wondering "at what cost to individual privacy," asserting that such a "mammoth" and "gigantic" project would be a "costly and troubling assault on privacy," and so on. Because "the potential for abuse of power and violation of civil liberties is immense," she said, Congress "must reject this measure."And so Congress did exactly that, inserting the HEA language seen above.
What accounts for this over-the-top reaction? Simple: colleges and universities--particularly private colleges and univerisites--are resolutely opposed to any form of increased public scrutiny. As far as they're concerned, the quality of education they provide to their students and the benefits they give to society in exchange for the substantial public financial support they receive through student financial aid and their tax-exempt status is nobody's business but their own.
They know that any attempt to increase the amount or quality of information about them could be used as a means to form judgments about how well they're doing their job. That could lead to increased competitive pressures, uncomfortable questions, and other various forms of that dreaded word accountability.
And so they embarked on a disingenuous campaign to conflate institutional privacy with student privacy. By pretending to stand up for the latter, they very effectively preserved the former.
This is not to say that privacy is not a real and abiding concern in the modern age of information. It seems like not a week goes by that you don't read some new and horrifying account of security breaches at private database companies, resulting in the release of your social security number, mother's maiden name, cholesterol level, and AMEX card to gangsters located in one or more former Soviet republics.
But the unit record proposal contained every security protocol imaginable, including strict limits on the use and release of the data and harsh legal penalties for any privacy violation. It would be a federal felony punishable by prison time to release the information, at a level actually stricter than releasing data from the IRS. Which, as it happens, is a good example of a government agency that's been gathering "unit record" data far more sensitive than someone's college major for a long time while by and large successfully balancing citizen privacy rights and the government's interest in information. The government is actually quite good at keeping information secret; in fact that's usually the problem.
We live in an era where all large organizations strategically gather data about themselves to understand how they work and improve the services they provide to consumers. Any private company will tell you that such analysis is an essential component of continued improvement and long-term viability. We also live in a country where many colleges and universities routinely fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, where less than half of all college graduates are proficient in tests of literacy, where students and parents are forced to choose colleges with virtually no solid information about which institutions will actually give them a high-quality education, where globalization competition for knowlege-based jobs is growing by the day.
In other words, we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information. Such an action would be a victory for the narrow self-interest of private institutions, and a sound defeat for students, parents, and everyone else.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Fat, Drunk, and Stupid is No Way to Go Through Life
On March 28th, the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution released the newest version of its Child Well-Being Index (CWI), "an evidence based measure of trends in the social conditions encountered by American children and youth since 1975." Written by Duke Prof. Kenneth Land, the report shows evidence that youth smoking, drinking, drug use, crime, suicide, and pregnancy rates are all down. Unfortunately, though, children's health is getting worse, and their educational performance as measured by the national NAEP—which was the predetermined focus of the panel discussion Brookings held to announce the CWI this year—is frustratingly flat considering the number of reform efforts enacted over the past thirty years.
Coinciding with the CWI event was the release of a publication called "The Education Flatline: Causes and Solutions," which offers perspectives from Diane Ravitch, Kate Walsh, Ron Haskins, Isabel Sawhill, David Gordon, Gene Maeroff, and Education Sector board member Bruno Manno. This diverse group of thinkers put forward a number of suggestions for how to raise student achievement, including national standards, an increase in the number of charter schools, improving teacher quality, and reforming Pre-K-3 policies and practices.
Land used the CWI to make a noteworthy connection between the rise in Pre-K enrollment in the 1990's and the rise in NAEP scores for nine-year-olds in the early 2000's. While Land argues that Pre-K enrollment "may be a leading indicator" of later NAEP score improvements, to draw such a correlation requires a methodological evaluation of state—not national—NAEP reports, so that one can take stock of the widely differing state Pre-K programs. The CWI uses the national NAEP.
On a broad scale though, it seems that everyone loves Pre-K these days. It's gotten a lot of buzz, including support from our nation's governors. But any large scale reform effort should be spurred by empirical evidence and will have to make sense of the immensity of the implementation challenges. Watch for
PS – Ironic reaction to the CWI report from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings: "This year's Child Well-Being Index highlights the tremendous gains our students are making, thanks in large part to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act." Really? Thanks "in large part" to NCLB? Minority students have made tremendous gains if you look back as far as fifteen years ago. But they only made marginal gains from 2003 to 2005, which is the time in which NCLB would have had an impact. Given that the CWI event was organized for the express purpose of drawing attention to 30 years of mostly flat NAEP scores, Spellings big ol' NCLB slap on the back seems a bit out of place. It may make for a good quote but it's rooted in a flawed analysis of how the CWI relates to federal policy successes or failures.
- Posted by Ethan Gray
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Push Me, Pull Me
In reporting on new data about the number of schools identified by NCLB as not making adequate yearly progress, Bloomberg News writes:
NCLB was enacted more than four years ago. How long must we wait for the press to report its provisions accurately? First, NCLB does not label schools as "failing." They're labeled as "not making adequate progress" or "in need of improvement." These are not semantic distinctions; the words actually mean what they mean. Second, while the "penalties" can include replacing administrators and teachers, they certainly don't have to. These might seem like fine points, but they actually go right to the heart of what the law does and doesn't do.
The story also goes on to say the following:
Nobody from the National Education Association is quoted here, but one assumes that their take on these numbers hasn't changed since January, when head NEA honcho Reg Weaver said:
To summarize: The Fordham Foundation thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot higher. The NEA thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot lower.
If you ever wondered why the various warring factions in the NCLB debate seem to be talking past, over, through, and behind one another, this is a good place to start.
"The percentage of failing schools rose by one point from the previous school year. Under the 2002 law, schools that do not make sufficient academic progress face penalties including the eventual replacement of their administrators and teachers."
NCLB was enacted more than four years ago. How long must we wait for the press to report its provisions accurately? First, NCLB does not label schools as "failing." They're labeled as "not making adequate progress" or "in need of improvement." These are not semantic distinctions; the words actually mean what they mean. Second, while the "penalties" can include replacing administrators and teachers, they certainly don't have to. These might seem like fine points, but they actually go right to the heart of what the law does and doesn't do.
The story also goes on to say the following:
"The results raise doubts about whether the law is working and its results are fairly calculated, said Michael Petrilli, vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based research group. 'Most people thought that at this point in the law, we'd be seeing these numbers go way, way up' as standards toughen, said Petrilli."
Nobody from the National Education Association is quoted here, but one assumes that their take on these numbers hasn't changed since January, when head NEA honcho Reg Weaver said:
"Four years of President Bush's signature education policy is sufficient to weigh facts, examine data and understand this so-called 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) Act through the experiences of millions of education professionals across America. If we distill these into one observation, it is that the anniversary marks four years of winning rhetoric and failing substance. From its inception, NCLB has been overemphasized, under funded and sugarcoated at the expense of public school children. New data illustrates our conclusion. It shows that more schools failed to achieve 'adequate yearly progress' (AYP) under NCLB in 2005-06 than ever before."
To summarize: The Fordham Foundation thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot higher. The NEA thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot lower.
If you ever wondered why the various warring factions in the NCLB debate seem to be talking past, over, through, and behind one another, this is a good place to start.
Hairy Armpits and Everything
Kevin's already given his take on the French union and student protests over proposed labor law changes that would make it easier for companies to fire or lay off workers under 26 in their first two years of employment. But it occurred to me that these protests also reflect some of the same problems that make progressive policy change difficult in American public education.
Bear with me: French politicos didn't just wake up one morning and decide, "hey, let's make it easier to fire young workers." France has a very high unemployment rate among younger workers--about 25 percent--and it's even higher for disadvantaged groups, such as those of North African and Muslim descent, as last November's riots highlighted. French policymakers hope that making it easier to fire or lay off young workers will help lower unemployment rates for them.
I'm not an economist, so I have no opinion about whether or not the proposed changes would lower unemployment, but if they did, they would have an enormous benefit for individuals who got jobs as a result, as well as a broader positive economic impact. But for the 3/4 of young French workers who are employed, the unions who represent them, and students who expect soon to join their ranks, these social benefits come at a cost of increased risk. So these groups seek to block change.
This strikes me as terribly similar to something that often happens here in public education. A lot of reforms seek to improve educational results for poor and minority students. Improving educational results--and, by extension, other outcomes--for these youngsters would also have broader social benefits. But many reforms--such as those that target resources to high-need schools, increase choice, or seek to enhance racial and socioeconomic integration--also threaten a status quo that works well for many people: not just established education interests, but also middle-class and affluent parents who've used their economic power to get their children into "good" neighborhoods and public schools. As Ted and Nancy Sizer comment in a recent Education Sector interview, affluent parents who've already made--and paid for--their choice of schools when purchasing a home tend to resist charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of school choice.
Part of the problem, both here and in France, is that those who are well-served by the status-quo tend to have more political and social capital and ability to block change than those who aren't. In addition, since those who would benefit from a potential change are often a somewhat hypothetical or unclearly defined group, they have less incentive to organize than those might lose something from the change. That can make education policy frustrating sometimes, but it's also part of what makes it worth doing.
Totally Gratutitous Marginally Related Note: Speaking of France, this week Pearls Before Swine, one of the few comics that regularly makes me laugh out loud, features a storyline involving French women with hairy armpits.
Bear with me: French politicos didn't just wake up one morning and decide, "hey, let's make it easier to fire young workers." France has a very high unemployment rate among younger workers--about 25 percent--and it's even higher for disadvantaged groups, such as those of North African and Muslim descent, as last November's riots highlighted. French policymakers hope that making it easier to fire or lay off young workers will help lower unemployment rates for them.
I'm not an economist, so I have no opinion about whether or not the proposed changes would lower unemployment, but if they did, they would have an enormous benefit for individuals who got jobs as a result, as well as a broader positive economic impact. But for the 3/4 of young French workers who are employed, the unions who represent them, and students who expect soon to join their ranks, these social benefits come at a cost of increased risk. So these groups seek to block change.
This strikes me as terribly similar to something that often happens here in public education. A lot of reforms seek to improve educational results for poor and minority students. Improving educational results--and, by extension, other outcomes--for these youngsters would also have broader social benefits. But many reforms--such as those that target resources to high-need schools, increase choice, or seek to enhance racial and socioeconomic integration--also threaten a status quo that works well for many people: not just established education interests, but also middle-class and affluent parents who've used their economic power to get their children into "good" neighborhoods and public schools. As Ted and Nancy Sizer comment in a recent Education Sector interview, affluent parents who've already made--and paid for--their choice of schools when purchasing a home tend to resist charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of school choice.
Part of the problem, both here and in France, is that those who are well-served by the status-quo tend to have more political and social capital and ability to block change than those who aren't. In addition, since those who would benefit from a potential change are often a somewhat hypothetical or unclearly defined group, they have less incentive to organize than those might lose something from the change. That can make education policy frustrating sometimes, but it's also part of what makes it worth doing.
Totally Gratutitous Marginally Related Note: Speaking of France, this week Pearls Before Swine, one of the few comics that regularly makes me laugh out loud, features a storyline involving French women with hairy armpits.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Mess With Texas
State school finance systems can be horrifically complicated. My first job out of grad school was to be the guy holed up in a back office in the corner of the Indiana Statehouse at 3AM during the legislative session writing long computer programs designed to simulate every tiny nuance and detail of the state's byzantine system for distributing money to and getting taxes from local school districts. It was actually kind of a cool job in an uber-geeky policy wonk way; one thing you figure out is that when you're one of only five people in the entire world who understand how a complex system works, you have a disproportionate--even inappropriate--influence over how that system is shaped.
Big state-level fights over school funding systems can be similarly complex and difficult to unwind. On the surface, Texas seems like a perfect example; the state has been mired in a protracted struggle to reform a funding system that's been ruled unconstitutional and is growing more inequitable by the year--the funding gap between high- and low-poverty districts there has nearly tripled in recent years. There's not enough money in the system, and people are already mad about property tax levels as they stand. Thus, a large injection of state revenues is the only viable option.
But while this article details the range of complicated tax proposals being bandied about in Texas as possible new state revenue sources--mucking around with business franchise and commercial receipts tax structures, going to the cigarette tax well once again--the political contortions and bitter arguments with various undertaxed constituencies are all really unecessary. Texas just needs to do what more than 40 other states already do--enact an income tax.
Everyone in Texas knows this. But income taxes are seen as kind of socialist and inherently un-Texan. So state policymakers are forced to beat their heads against the wall trying in vain to wring money out of the existing regressive and inadequeate tax structure while local schools suffer the consequences. Some things aren't as complicated as they seem.
Big state-level fights over school funding systems can be similarly complex and difficult to unwind. On the surface, Texas seems like a perfect example; the state has been mired in a protracted struggle to reform a funding system that's been ruled unconstitutional and is growing more inequitable by the year--the funding gap between high- and low-poverty districts there has nearly tripled in recent years. There's not enough money in the system, and people are already mad about property tax levels as they stand. Thus, a large injection of state revenues is the only viable option.
But while this article details the range of complicated tax proposals being bandied about in Texas as possible new state revenue sources--mucking around with business franchise and commercial receipts tax structures, going to the cigarette tax well once again--the political contortions and bitter arguments with various undertaxed constituencies are all really unecessary. Texas just needs to do what more than 40 other states already do--enact an income tax.
Everyone in Texas knows this. But income taxes are seen as kind of socialist and inherently un-Texan. So state policymakers are forced to beat their heads against the wall trying in vain to wring money out of the existing regressive and inadequeate tax structure while local schools suffer the consequences. Some things aren't as complicated as they seem.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Rigor, Relevance Reconciled?
In article about a legislative proposal in Florida to require high school students to declare a major, Governor Jeb Bush says:
Anyone looking for a thorough but readable summary of the newest ideas and latest research findings on high school reform should check it out.
"We don't want them to drop out of school or be unprepared to take on the challenges of the 21st century. It's a really smart way to make high school more relevant and prepare young people for what college will hold."I'm not sure if the major-declaration thing itself is a good idea or not. But in framing the issue this way, Bush touches on an extremely important dimension of the latest round of high-profile high school reforms: after more than a hundred years of back-and-forth, the once-competing goals of making high schools relevant enough to keep kids from dropping out and rigorous enough to prepare them for college are being fused into a unified whole. As Craig Jerald writes in a new Education Sector report:
"the most significant improvements in high schools come from combining strategies and solutions long thought to be ideologically disparate or even mutually exclusive. Research suggests that more rigorous curricula and tougher graduation standards might not hurt graduation rates, and might even help improve them. Rigor and relevance are not zero sum tradeoffs, but actually work best in combination."
Anyone looking for a thorough but readable summary of the newest ideas and latest research findings on high school reform should check it out.
Less Is Not More
Lots of buzz about yesterday's page-one NY Times piece on how NCLB's focus on math and reading is leading schools to cut back on art, science, history, and other subjects. This is a troubling trend that Education Sector reported back in January. But today's commentary on the Times report has mis-framed the issue is a couple of big ways.
The Times piece points out that the bulk of the curriculum cuts have come in schools serving underperforming students in disadvantaged schools. But the paper, and many of NCLB's critics, then suggest that many of the schools cutting back non-tested subjects "once offered rich curriculums" in the subjects being cut. In truth, art, music, and science courses in many schools serving the nation's neediest students are next to non-existant. Art is rolled into classrooms on a cart once a week for 30 minutes. Music is 40 kids in a room trying to clap their hands in 4-4 time. A lot of kids never had what the Times says they lost.
NCLB's advocates, meanwhile, defend the focusing of struggling students' time on the core subjects of math and reading. What good is studying history if you can't read, they ask, fairly? Prime Minister Tony Blair's aides in the UK, which implemented test-based accountability in the late 1990s, say quite candidly that they sought to narrow the UK curriculum for exactly this reason.
But learning specialists--and good teachers--will tell you it's not an either-or proposition; it's not reading or history. Rather, they say, it should be reading history. That is, kids should be listening to stories about historical characters and events even before they can read, and once they can decode they should read books, even very simple ones, about science, history, art, and music. The research is very clear on this: the best reading instruction weaves content into skill-building from day one. Unfortunately, far too much of what passes for reading instruction under NCLB is sterile skill-based exercises focused on helping kids pass state tests that focus on low-level skills.
Struggling students need extra help catching up in the building-block subjects of math and reading and NCLB is giving educators strong incentives to provide that help. But that's only half the solution.
The Times piece points out that the bulk of the curriculum cuts have come in schools serving underperforming students in disadvantaged schools. But the paper, and many of NCLB's critics, then suggest that many of the schools cutting back non-tested subjects "once offered rich curriculums" in the subjects being cut. In truth, art, music, and science courses in many schools serving the nation's neediest students are next to non-existant. Art is rolled into classrooms on a cart once a week for 30 minutes. Music is 40 kids in a room trying to clap their hands in 4-4 time. A lot of kids never had what the Times says they lost.
NCLB's advocates, meanwhile, defend the focusing of struggling students' time on the core subjects of math and reading. What good is studying history if you can't read, they ask, fairly? Prime Minister Tony Blair's aides in the UK, which implemented test-based accountability in the late 1990s, say quite candidly that they sought to narrow the UK curriculum for exactly this reason.
But learning specialists--and good teachers--will tell you it's not an either-or proposition; it's not reading or history. Rather, they say, it should be reading history. That is, kids should be listening to stories about historical characters and events even before they can read, and once they can decode they should read books, even very simple ones, about science, history, art, and music. The research is very clear on this: the best reading instruction weaves content into skill-building from day one. Unfortunately, far too much of what passes for reading instruction under NCLB is sterile skill-based exercises focused on helping kids pass state tests that focus on low-level skills.
Struggling students need extra help catching up in the building-block subjects of math and reading and NCLB is giving educators strong incentives to provide that help. But that's only half the solution.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)