The Allegedly Ever-Crazier College Admissions Rat Race, Continued Ad Infinitum

The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post ran near-identical articles last week focusing on the declining percentage of applicants being accepted by elite colleges and universities. Both focused on single-digit acceptance rates at Ivy League institutions, along with various quotes from admissions officers and anxious parents emphasizing that getting into the Ivies these days is tougher than getting a straight answer from the Bush White House about the war in Iraq. The Post summarized the phenomenon as follows:

About 3 million students are expected to graduate from high school this year, and about two-thirds of them are looking for college spaces. The number of rejections is further inflated by the increased number of applications sent out by each student, reacting to the uncertainty of admission and the ease of online and common applications. This produces a self-perpetuating cycle: It is harder to get in, so seniors apply to more schools, which makes it even harder to get in, at least for the most sought-after schools."

This quote--and the article generally--seems to miss the distinction between perception and reality. The declining admit rate at elite schools is, as the article notes, being driven entirely by the denominator in the equation. It's not that the elite schools are admitting fewer students--in fact, they're admitting more. It's that the number of applications is rising even faster, driving the percentage down.

If the increasing number of applications reflected a corresponding increase in the number of qualified applicants, then it would be fair to say that it's harder to get into an elite college. But this article, and others like it, says that a big factor here is the same pool of applicants simply submitting more applications.

That would make it seem harder to get in, because students would be rejected more often. But the net result, in terms of the total number of qualified students getting spots, wouldn't change. From 2004 to 2005, the Top 50 four-year institutions in terms of SAT scores saw a 6.5% incease in applications, and accepted 2.2% more students, driving their aggregate admit rate down by one percentage point. So unless the number of qualified applicants increased by more than 2.2%, this whole "it's harder to get into college" phenomenon is mostly a mirage.

History is not Math

Not to "rehash" Andy's already extensive coverage of the "narrowing the curriculum" hysteria, but Mike Petrilli's bite at the apple in the latest Education Gadfly recommended a predictable--but I think dead wrong--response to the issue that I need to rant a bit about.

Petrilli--like a lot of folks in the edworld--argues that history, science, and other subjects are getting pushed out of the curriculum because NCLB holds school accountable for math and reading only, and not for other subjects (although the law doesn't preclude states from including other subjects in AYP). Petrilli's response, then, is to say the feds should require states to test students in science (which they're already must do in three grade levels come 2007, as Petrilli notes) and history, AND incorporate the results of those tests in determining whether or not schools are making adequate yearly progress under the law.

I think this is a terrible idea, for three reasons.

The first is a technical issue: There's a trade-off, in designing accountability systems, between complexity and transparency--the more stuff (different subjects, different grades, disaggregated subgroups, etc.) you try to incorporate into coercive accountability system, the more unwieldy they become, and the harder for folks who don't crunch policy for a living to understand. (Jay Mathews, for example, already claims that AYP is too confusing--I don't agree with him, but I do think adding many more variables would make the system too confusing). Adding two additional subjects to the AYP determination would make the system much more complex, and harder to explain or defend to parents and the public. I don't think that's a good idea. (Apologies to Kevin, from whom I'm cribbing a bit here, although less eloquently than him.)

Second, while I generally hate this type of argument, I AM concerned about a slippery slope here. I think that art and music are just as important for children to be well-educated as science or history--should we add standards and testing and make those subjects part of AYP, too?

My third concern is more fundamental. I think subjects like history and science are fundamentally different from reading and math. Although there are still some folks--primarily in ed schools--who haven't bought into it yet, there's actually a pretty clear, well-defined research consensus about how children learn to read, and what educators need to do when for kids to become proficient readers. There's not the same level of research and consensus in math as in reading, but there is a body of research here, and math, like reading, is an area in which kids need to learn specific skills in a particular sequence in order to become proficient and move to the next level. In both reading and math, we can study what and how kids need to learn in order to become proficient because--calculator debates aside--there's some general agreement about what, ultimately, kids need to know. Everyone agrees that kids need to learn how to read, and there's not a lot of debate about what that means. And, while we might disagree about how far kids need to develop their mathematical knowledge and skills, we can generally agree on what algebra is and what computation is.

That's not true in history or science. What children need to learn in these fields is fundamentally a values issue. Should kids study the history of the state in which they live, or the history and cultures of Africa? Even if we can all agree that kids need to know something about U.S. history, what should the focus be, and whose history should they learn? Why the heck do kids have to learn what a stamen and pistil are (does anyone reading even remember learning this in middle school)? Is there really any reason they need to know the names of the planets in the solar system? These aren't questions that research can answer. And, even if we could all agree on what kids should know in history or science* how would anyone justify one sequence for when kids need to know which ideas over a different order?

Because these questions are values issues, without a clear cut "right" answer, the process of standards-setting in these fields has been incredibly politically charged, culture-war issues, in the states that have undertaken it. (See, for instance, Kansas and evolution, or the debate over Virginia's history SOLs when they were initiated.) I think such debates are really a distraction from real educational questions. Since these questions are less clear cut, I think the standards for them are best set by local communities (loosely defined), combined with parental choice.

This doesn't mean that I don't think history and science are important--I do. But I don't think the nature of these subjects is well-suited to state standards accountability systems. And I think that's ok. There's this tremendous temptation to hang everything on the single accountability system, to act as if that's the only way of indicating to schools what's important or getting them to do it.

I think shows a tremendous lack of imagination. Schools and people who work in them are driven by tons of different competing incentives, not just the state accountability system, and there are lots of ways to get them to do things that we want them to do without tying it to the accountabilty system. There is, of course, the time-tested federal approach--that dominated federal policy before NCLB--of giving schools money, in the form of federal grants, for doing something we want them to do. Programs like the Teaching American History grant program, which was part of Petrilli's portfolio at the Department of Ed, take that approach. (In general, I'm not a fan of these types of small programs, a topic for another day, but this is one alternative.) One could also use an accreditation model: For example, a variety of scientific organizations (NSF, AAAS, professional associations in the various fields, etc.) could establish criteria for identifying schools that are doing a good job teaching science, and schools could seek these accreditations. States could even require that schools receive one of a variety of possible accreditations. These are just a few ideas.

*I think we might ultimately be able to reach some minimal consensus on scientific concepts--such as the scientific method, human biology, and some basic principles of physics--that kids need to know to function in an increasingly science-driven culture.

Politics-free Accountability is like Calorie-free Chocolate

Thanks to the good leaders of Maryland and Baltimore for providing a case study in how messy the interaction of politics with public school accountability can be.

On March 29, the Maryland state board of education voted to transfer management of 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore middle and high schools away from the Baltimore City School Board to third-party groups. State-imposed management takeovers and private management of public schools are always contentious, but Baltimore is particularly contentious because Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and the current governor, Bob Ehrlich, is a Republican.

O'Malley accused Ehrlich, State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, and the Maryland state board of education of playing election year politics with the school takeovers; O'Malley's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, seized on the issue as evidence that he is better on education than O'Malley; Democrats in the state legislature passed a last-minute bill to block the takeover (Ehrlich says he will veto the bill; it's not clear whether Democrats have the votes to override him.); and Ehrlich fired back at the Democrats opposing the takeover. Expect more fireworks around this issue ahead.

Messes like these drive education policywonks and more pragmatic reformers to curse politics and wish it out of education altogether...

Some policy wonks seem to devote a lot of energy to trying to protect public education accountability systems from politics. In some ways, that was a major force driving the authors of No Child Left Behind, who had seen the way states flouted or deliberately watered down accountability requirements in the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act and were determined to write the law so as to narrow states' leeway and force them to do the right thing. As we lurch towards the coming debate on NCLB reauthorization, I sense a similar yearning in some conversations about what NCLB 2.0 should look like--this sense that, if we just get the policy details, if we just get the legislative language right, if we can just come up with the ideal way to identify schools, we can create an accountability system that works on its own, unsullied by and without dependence upon politics.

But trying to make accountability work without politics is like trying to make calorie-free chocolate. Accountability--real accountability--is inherently political. For accountability systems to have substance, there have to be consequences. Having consequences requires some person or entity to make a decision, to flip the switch that sets those consequences into action. We can't create an automated accountability machine that swings into action without a second thought whenever a school crosses x-defined accountability threshold--these decisions are important enough that they require human judgement.

For this decision-maker to have legitimate authority, there must be evidence that the public has placed its trust in this entity, either through election or because the entity is accountable to an elected official. Even when elected leaders choose to vest authority for school accountability in an ostensibly independent entity, that entity still operates in a politicized climate, subject to the will of the elected officials who created it and the public. But this means that accountability decision-makers are also subject to political pressure from organized interests that stand to benefit or lose from the consequences they have the power to impose, and this makes accountability decisions highly politicized.

The only way I know of to really isolate accountability from politics is by abdicating public responsibility for public education altogether--devolving all educational decision-making, through vouchers, to parents, with no public oversight of the schools to which they choose to send their children. Some voucher supporters think the evils of politics in education are sufficient to justify this trade-off, but it's one that I, ultimately, cannot accept. To paraphrase Churchill, educational accountability is the worst option, except for all the others we've tried.

Rather than railing about the influences of politics on education policy and accountability, the only real solution is to change the politics itself, to create a new politics that gives policymakers the right incentives to hold schools accountable in ways that are good for children. The most obvious way I see to do this is by organizing and empowering parents and children whose voices often go unheard in political power struggles over education. Steve Barr is doing this with the Jefferson High School movement in Los Angeles. At a more macro, much less grass-roots level, I think Education Sector's goal of "making the debate about public education public" is a part of this, too. But there are a lot of other ways to change the politics here, too, and I'd welcome any suggestions or comments for ones I'm not thinking of now.

Sensationalism 101

Cnn.com, one of the most widely-read news sites in the world, features at the top of its home page a list of "Top Stories." There are usually about 13 stories there. As of 11:47 AM EDT this morning, there are two education-related stories among the top 13. They are:

"Teacher charged with raping student 28 times"

and

"Teacher, crushing bug with gun shell, blows up hand"

There are millions of teachers in the United States. People being people, on any given Wednesday a few of them are going to do something illegal or monumentally stupid. The same is undoubtedly true for lawyers, truck drivers, certified public accountants, and every other profession of considerable size. But their foibles and sins don't generate coverage like this, because those stories don't play into the simplistic "even in our public schools!!!" narrative at work here. Instead of substantive education journalism, we get stories making it seem like the nation's classrooms are chock-full of morons and sexual predators.

So, we at the Quick and the Ed are hereby establishing the "Cnn.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism." Readers who email examples will win lasting fame.

Education Majors Less Literate

AIR released an important new study in January detailing the literacy levels of students about to graduate from college. While most of the press coverage focused on the headache-inducing, depressingly-low overall scores (e.g. only 4 in 10 students finishing 4-year degrees scored as "proficient" in prose and document literacy; quantitative scores were even worse), there's a lot of additional good information to be found deeper in the report, particularly in the tables that break down the numbers by various student characteristics.

Some of the most telling data relate to the gaps between white and black students; there's a new Chart You Can Trust detailing those numbers on the main Web site today, along with the transcript of our recent national standards debate, new ideas on preschool implementation, and an interesting story from a community college professor in New York.

The college student literacy report also calculated average literacy scores by students' college major. The results:


*Significantly different from students majoring in math, science, or engineering

This is an unfortunately familiar taxonomy of which majors attract and graduate the highest-caliber students, and which don't. For all the recent focus on attracting more talent into science and mathematics, it's arguably the future teachers of America who need the most attention. As the chart shows, education majors have significantly lower levels of document and quantitative literacy than students who major in math, science, and engineering (prose literacy scores were also lower, but not at a statistically significant level).

While future science and math types beat out all other majors at various levels of significance in all three categories (not only, it should be noted, in quantitative skills but also in the ability to comprehend and use information from texts and documents), education and health majors appear to have the overall lowest levels of literacy. There's a deeply-rooted dynamic at work here in terms of who is drawn into the profession. Changing that is a major challenge for everyone working to boost talent in the classroom.

Schools, relative poverty, and social mobility

Interesting New Yorker article by John Cassidy looks at where the method by which the poverty rate is measured comes from (if you haven't heard this before, it's rather interesting), some concerns folks on both left and right have with the way we currently calculate poverty, and whether other measures--including measures of relative poverty--might be better. All relevant to education, particularly since poverty plays a role in some funding formulas.

But this is what got me:

Research by Tom Hertz, an economist at American University, shows that a child whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has only a six-per-cent chance of attaining an average yearly income in the top fifth. Most people who start out relatively poor stay relatively poor.

Now, there are a lot of factors that contribute to this--health care, housing policy, differences in parental support, lack of access to social networks, just to name a few--but the fact remains that the quality of education our public school systems provide to low-income students is often dramatically lower than that provided to more affluent students, and these disparities in educational opportunity seriously undermine social mobility.