Shorting the Shorties

Normally, I find stories about the preschool admissions rat-race even more annoying (if that's possible) than Kevin finds stories about increasingly competitive college admissions.

But this WaPo article on the increasing scarcity of high-quality preschool spaces in the D.C. Metro Area is actually pretty good*. The author is focusing on a real concern: The population of kids in the D.C. Metro Area is growing, in part due to immigration, and parents, increasingly aware of the educational benefits of preschool, are more likely to send their children to preschool. But the supply of quality preschool programs isn't growing as rapidly. This means it's harder for parents to find quality preschool programs for their children, because there simply aren't enough spaces to meet demand. It's difficult for preschool programs to expand, because of a lack of both facilities, due to rapid growth and still-tight real estate markets in D.C., and qualified teachers.

Yet the underlying problem here is the economics of preschool itself. Running a high-quality preschool is not particularly lucrative. The margins are low. Many centers barely break even. Ability to raise prices in response to increased demand is limited because of limits on the amount most parents can pay: Affluent families can pay preschool tuitions in excess of what most private colleges charge, but working and middle class parents are already pretty strapped financially, so they are forced to choose lower quality care rather than paying more.

Ironically, while federal, state, and local governments provide a lot of support for K-12 and higher education, government aid for education is hardest to come by at time in children's lives--early childhood and preschool years--when parents may be least likely to make educational investments themselves. Parents of young children tend to be younger and earlier in their careers (and in the case of women, more likely to be working only part time) than parents of older children--meaning they have less ability to pay for education than when their children are older. Further, research shows that investments in early learning have lots of positive externalities--reductions in public education remediation and special ed costs, prevention of future crime and welfare dependency--that parents don't take into account when making choices about preschool.

These market conditions are classic rationales for increased government intervention and investment in helping parents provide high-quality early learning opportunities for their children. Yet only Georgia and Oklahoma now have universal pre-k statewide, and Head Start and childcare subsidies are chronically underfunded. As we're seeing in California right now, critics of increased preschool investments often argue that providing greater government funding for preschool will exacerbate the shortage of preschool spaces. But, while this may be true in the short run, particularly if policymakers guarantee publicly-supported programs are high-quality (as they should), in the long run increased government support may be the only way to ensure an adequate supply of quality preschool--both for families that need assistance and those that are able to pay the full cost.

*(One gripe: The author conflates preschool and child care in several instances, a serious, but unfortunately all too common, error in both media coverage and policy debates about early childhood education.)

Additional Thought: The difficulty many parents face finding affordable, quality preschool for their children in the D.C. area makes stuff like this even harder to swallow. (Disc: I'm on Appletree's board.)

Shameless Self-Promotion

Nope, I'm not complaining about CNN's latest sensationalist "teacher-does-stupid-things" headline. I'm just putting in an utterly shameless plug for folks to come see me perform in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream this weekend (more info and tickets here).

It's a family-friendly production, so if you have children (or just know some) and want to a.) Build their cultural literacy (if you're an E.D. Hirsch fan), or b.) compensate for drama cutbacks due to the narrowing of curriculum in schools due to NCLB (despite Andy's efforts to debunk this), this is a terrific (and relatively affordable) opportunity to do so.

Feed Me!

Among the usual policy debates in the education think tank world about teacher quality, statistical accuracies, or value-added, it's easy to forget that there are kids facing every-day struggles that are more fundamental to basic survival that anything we usually address.

When you come across a story like this, it's an important reminder that sometimes teachers help kids in ways that we don't always recognize or appreciate.

Teacher Kayla Brown realized that some of her Texas elementary school students' underperformance was due to the stark reality that they were literally too hungry to think. In a lesson-filled example of public/private partnership, Kayla teamed up with other teachers and her local church to start a Backpack Buddies program in which teachers snuck brown bags of donated food into students' backpacks when the kids were out at recess. What were the results? The kids got more food, their performance and attitudes went up, and they were saved the social embarrassment of being seen taking handouts.

It's shocking that in this land of plenty some kids don't get enough to eat. And while the government provides food stamps and a free and reduced price lunch program in some public schools, both require a level of agency (on the part of parents or students) that doesn't always make it possible for kids to stave off hunger. What do kids who rely on meals at school do on weekends? How useful are food stamps if kids' parents don't bother to sign up for them? Just as bad, sometimes the food that kids do get from parents or schools is of such low quality, that kids still end up with nutritional deficiencies or—ironically—obesity problems.

Since there's an obvious limit to the efficacy of public welfare, especially in the context of using education policy to address all facets of poverty, we should hope that programs like Backpack Buddies will inspire more partnerships between schools and the community groups that help students in these most basic but profound ways.

For all we think and talk about test scores and accountability, sometimes we need a little reminder that it's hard to measure the value added by a teacher like Kayla Brown.

Posted by Ethan Gray

Spellings Calls Testing Execs on Carpet: Just a Photo Op or Start of Real Reform?

CNN reports that U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings called in executives from major testing companies--including ETS, maker of the error-plagued SAT--for a meeting to discuss the industry's ability to meet the growing demand for standardized tests.

It's great that the Secretary is addressing this issue, which Education Sector's Thomas Toch analyzed in a recent paper suggesting that the testing industry is buckling under the pressure of meeting the new demand for tests created by NCLB. But two questions remain unanswered:

1) Is this meeting merely a chance for the Secretary to show public concern? Or will she use the opportunity to advocate for needed reforms at the federal level, including more financial support for state testing, incentives for colleges to train new psychometricians, and a national oversight board to monitor test quality?

2) Is she only worried about test accuracy? Because while high-profile SAT errors have put the focus on scoring accuracy, the biggest long-term problem with the assessment industry is arguably test quality. States and testing companies struggling to test more students in more subjects in less time seem to be falling back on inexpensive, quick-to-score multiple choice tests that don't assess the higher-order thinking skills students need to learn.

NYTimes Account of Mobile College Students Inaccurate and Overblown

The cover article for the New York Times Education Life section this weekend dealt with the allegedly fast-growing phenomenon of mobile college students. Like all well-written articles, it makes it's main point succinctly in the first two paragraphs:

ERIN MADDEN laughs a little self-consciously referring to what she calls "my college tour." Not the kind that high school students take to look at potential campuses; hers started after she went to college and discovered she didn't like her choice. She transferred to another, and another, and another, and another, ultimately ending up with five colleges on her transcript when she graduated last year.

It wasn't collegiate life as she once imagined it. But it wasn't so unconventional, either. These days, a majority of students take a similarly nomadic path to a degree; about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades.

This is a great example of education journalism that takes a complicated issue and boils it down to a message that's clear, understandable, and mostly wrong.

The biggest mistake lies with the key supporting statistic: "60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution." This is incorrect. 60 percent of graduating students earn credits from more than one institution. This includes students who study abroad for a semester, earn credits at a local college while in high school, or pick up a few classes at a community college over the summer.

In other words, 60 percent of graduates could be characterized as multi-institution students. There are signficantly fewer mobile students who actually transfer from one institution and "attend" another. It is simply wrong to say that the "majority" of students take a "nomadic" path that is any way similar to that of Erin Madden.

For example, the same report that provides the data source for the 60% figure shows that 67% of people who earn a B.A. get it from the first institution in which they enrolled. That includes people who began in 2-year colleges and transferred; if you look at students who, like Erin Madden, began their college careers at 4-year institutions, 80% get their degree where they started.

Moreover, the assertion that the phenomenon of the multi-institution student has "risen steadily over at least the last two decades" is, at best, a broad overstatement. Again, going back to the data source for the key 60% number, here's the percent of B.A. recipients who earned credits from more than one institution in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's:

1970s: 57.2%
1980s: 58.0%
1990s: 59.4%

In other words, the net impact impact of this alleged sea change in the behavior of college students is 2.2 percentage points over 20 years. Why, then, all the attention to this issue?

Partly because it seems so consistent with other pop-culture notions of what those crazy young people are doing these days, offering opportunities for the kind of easy analogies that are too often irresisitable to journalists. The article says:

[It]makes sense for the so-called millennial generation, students famously lacking in brand loyalty, used to having things their way, and can-do about changing anything they don't like. As with other commodities, students are looking for that magic combination of quality, affordability and convenience. They shun CD's to create their own iPod playlists; is it any surprise they shape their own course catalogs? "Everybody can customize it the way they want it," says Ms. Madden, now 24 and working at a Cape Cod media company that runs radio stations and a Web site. "In the world we live in, with the Internet making things so accessible, we try to find what we like."

College attendance patterns and iPods? Really, it's all the same thing, man.

More importantly, higher education institutions have a vested interest in promoting the idea that most students jump willy-nilly from campus to campus, even though that's in no way true. Why? Because it provides a powerful-counterargument against those who want to hold institutions more accountable for whether college students graduate and how much they learn.

If college students start at one institution and either succeed or fail there--and make no mistake, this is still the typical pattern for most people who attend 4-year institutions--then it's reasonable to say that the institution bears some responsibility for that success or failure.

If, however, most students attend multiple institutions, than institutional responsibility is safely diffused. That's why representatives of the higher education establishment love citing the 60% number, it's their way of saying "Students these days, they come, they go--what can we do?"

50% X 33% X 35% = Total Systemic Failure

The Consortium on Chicago School Research issued a comprehensive and important report last week studying how Chicago Public School students succeed or fail in finishing high school, going to college, and earning a bachelor's degree.

On a basic level, the results could not be worse. Literally. Only about half of all students who enter CPS graduate from high school on time. Of those, only about one-third immediately enroll at four-year colleges and universities. Of those, only 35% earn a B.A. within six years. Multiply those three numbers together and you get the B.A. attainment rate for Chicago high school freshmen cited by the Chicago press here and here: 6%.

For black students, particularly men, the results were even worse: only 22% of black male college entrants graduated in six years, which combined with low high school graduation and college entrance drives their overall B.A. attainment rate measured from the beginning of high school forward to near 3%.

Think of it this way: if you sat down and deliberately created an education system designed to prevent disadvantaged students from getting through college, the difference between that system and the one we've got would pretty much be within the statistical margin of error.

There's also some great data showing how some colleges and universities are much more successful than others in helping CPS graduates earn degrees, even after controlling for students' high school academic characteristics. For example, while over 70% of CPS students with a 3.5 high school GPA graduated from Loyola University Chicago, less than 50% of similar students graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. And less than 20% of 3.5 GPA students graduated from Northeastern Illinois University.

When asked to account for low graduation rates, colleges and universities tend to put the onus on financial aid, high school preparation, student motivation--pretty much everything except themselves. These data show that what institutions do matters too, and some are far better destinations for Chicago students than others.

To their credit, CPS leaders avoided the defensiveness and denial that often accompanies critical education reports and vowed to use the results as guide for improvement. Here's one suggestion: give every CPS guidance counselor a copy of the chart with the institution-by-institution graduation rates broken down by GPA (it's on page 81 of the report) and suggest that they steer their brightest students away from places like Urbana Champaign and Northern Illinois.