Limited English (and Spanish) Proficiency

The National Council of La Raza's Annual Conference starts tomorrow at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It kicks off with a morning speech from Bill Clinton and since it's in L.A., it's only fitting that conference-goers will also hear from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (for the Gadfly, that's veeya-RAI-gosa and c'mon, take a class).

The workshops are free and open to the public so they usually attract a pretty interesting crowd of people. If you're in L.A., drop in and check out the workshop on Sunday morning on ELL students in public schools. It should be a good one since the issue of how to educate ELL students (inaccurately perceived to be an entirely immigrant population) is only getting bigger. The ELL population is rising in nearly every state and most schools still don't know what to do to meet the NCLB requirements for these students. Even with added “flexibility” provisions, states are hard-pressed to develop decent assessments and to demonstrate improvement. With a serious shortage of teachers qualified to teach ELL students, pressure is mounting and there is a high demand for teacher training programs across the country.

What Private Colleges Don't Want You to Know

Let's say you're a long-established industry that enjoys enviable immunity from the rigors of the free market. Demand for your product is rock-solid, you don't pay corporate taxes, government subsidies pad your finances, you raise prices every year with relative impunity, and while your members compete with one another, barriers to entry are so high that no new competitors ever enter the market. The general public thinks highly of you, and you keep a tight lid on public information about your performance to make sure it stays that way.

Then someone comes along with a proposal that could potentially change some or even all of that, by creating new public information about how well you're actually serving your customers. How do you respond? Do you:

(A) Live up to your professed committment to the public interest by supporting the proposal, understanding that in the long run both your industry and its customers are best served by more honest information.

or

(B) Pay for a misleading public opinion poll in an attempt to kill the proposal before it ever sees the light of day.

If you're the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the answer is definitely (B).

For the past year or so, NAICU has been leading the charge against the creation of a new federal higher education data system. For many years, all colleges and universities have been required to submit annual data reports to the U.S. Department of Education, detailing information about enrollment, financial aid, degrees awarded, graduation rates, and other factors. The process is the higher education equivalent of requirements that publicly-traded companies file quarterly financial results with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Unfortunately, the current data reporting system, called IPEDS (Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System) is outdated and inefficient. Colleges and universities have to internally add up data about individual students into a series of separate, unconnected data reports. This greatly reduces the amount of information the reports can provide to the public. For example, while one survey shows the percent of students who graduate in six years, and another shows the percent of students who receive Pell grants, the two can't be linked to show the percent of Pell grant recipients who graduate in six years.

IPEDS recently proposed modernizing the system by consolidating the various reports into a single, streamlined process, whereby institutions would simply submit one report with all the neccessary information tied to data about individual students, called "unit records." That would allow for both new and more accurate measures (like the previously mentioned graduation rates for lower-income students, or giving institutions credit for students who start at one institution and transfer to graduate elsewhere). While the data would be transmitted and stored as unit records, public information about individual students would never be disclosed, protected by long-established federal privacy laws and secure data systems.

The associations of public universities largely supported the proposal because--well, because it's obviously a good idea, a modernized data submission process and more abundant, accurate information for the public.

NAICU, on the other hand, fought the proposal from day one. For them, increased transparency and greater public information apparently warrants opposition on general principle. Higher education lobbyists successfully convinced the House of Representatives to pass legislation banning the unit-record system earlier this year. But the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently released a draft report endorsing the unit-record system. Thus, the poll results released today.

The poll seems to indicate strong opposition to the system. But as is always the case when interpreting polls commissioned by parties with a vested interest in the results, it's crucial to examine the wording of the questions. The first question was:

The federal government has proposed a system where colleges and universities would be required to report individual student’s academic, financial aid, and enrollment information. This data would be linked to individual students through a unique identifier, and potentially to information from the student’s high school and elementary records. Would you support or oppose requiring colleges and universities to report individual student information to the federal government?

This question makes the intent of the survey clear, by (1) failing to mention that the information would be kept strictly confidential, and (2) asserting, appropos of nothing, that the information could "potentially" be linked to K-12 records, even though nothing in the proposal itself suggests anything of the sort.

The second question was:

Statement A: (Some/Other) people say that having more detailed information about college students would promote greater accountability for colleges and universities.

Statement B: (Some/Other) people say that enough data is already collected at the college and university level, and that reporting individual data is a breach of privacy that could result in abuses of people’s personal information.

Which statement do you agree with more?

Like question #1, question #2 is two is designed to elicit negative reactions to an unsupported, hypothetical problem. Release of almost any personal information of any kind "could" result in a breach of privacy and "could" result in some kind of abuse, the question is whether such an outcome is intended or likely in any way.

The third question was:

Statement A: (Some/other) people say that collecting data on individual students makes colleges and universities more transparent, so people can see if these institutions are being well-managed.

Statement B: (Some/other) people say that collecting individual student data is just costly and intrusive and does not address or solve any pressing public policy issue.

Which of these positions comes closest to your own position?

This question goes directly to the rhetorical bait-and-switch driving NAICU's opposition to the unit-record system. The proposed system was not designed as a way to monitor and study individual students. It's designed to monitor and study individual institutions. NAICU has cleverly conflated student privacy with institutional privacy.

Moreover, the idea that there are no "pressing public policy issues" addressed by the new information the system would provide is simply incorrect. There are many, most of which are documented convincingly in the Commission's draft report. They deal with the failure of many higher education institutions, including the members of NAICU, to provide students with the high-quality education they need. It is the unwillingness of those institutions to be held accountable for those failures that lies at the heart of their opposition to the unit record system.

In a press release accompanying the poll results, NAICU President David Warren said:

“It is ironic that we are considering such an assault on Americans’ privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July, when we celebrate the American values of freedom and choice.”

The fact that NAICU would go so far as to frame this as a security issue, in this day and age, shows just how entrenched their opposition to transparency and accountability really is. If anyone on the the Commission needed convincing that they must take a strong stand on behalf of more transparency and public information for students and taxpayers, this misleading, self-serving poll surely provides all the evidence they need.

Weighted Student Funding: A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?

Last week, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a lengthy new manifesto promoting the idea of “weighted student funding.” Endorsed by an ideologically diverse collection of education policy bigwigs (including my current and former employers), the report essentially combines some very important ideas about correcting resource inequities within school districts with a plan to pave the way for vouchers.

But left-leaning education advocates should nonetheless consider holding their fire. In endorsing the proposal, conservatives may inadvertently provide the most potent ammunition yet to those want to use lawsuits as a lever to raise taxes and increase funding for education.

In a nutshell, the report proposes that every student should be assigned a certain amount of money, which would vary--or be "weighted"--depending on their educational needs. That money should go to the school in which they choose to enroll.

This idea isn’t quite as novel as it’s made out to be, in that this is basically the way states fund their school finance systems today. Parents decide where to send their children to school by deciding where to live, and school districts receive money from the state based on how many students they enroll. Virtually all states weight those allocations already according to the same factors—disability status, economic disadvantage, etc.--mentioned in the report.

So the “weighting” is not the innovation here. The new twists are: (1) The money follows the students to the school, not the school district, and, (2) The school might not be a traditional public school.

The first piece, school-based funding, is a great idea. The papers catalogues a range of little-known and pernicious ways that certain schools in larger districts—usually disproportionately full of low-income, low-performing, and minority children—get the short end of the funding stick. Guaranteeing those schools a fair share of the funding designated for their students, and providing more money for harder-to-educate students, is an important and necessary challenge, and all the signees deserve credit for taking it on.

But it’s also not hard to see how well this fits into the voucher agenda. While the proposal takes care to limit the conversation to public schools, it also expands the definition of “public” as far as it can, referring to public schools as including “schools of choice.”

This definitional stretching is not an accident. Voucher proposals founder rhetorically on the distinction between the public and private spheres. People believe, rightly, that public dollars should be used for public purposes. So when a proposal is framed as diverting those resources to private entities like private schools, people recoil.

Weighted student funding is arguably a three-step strategy for blurring that distinction. First, get people used to the idea that education funding is first and foremost connected to real live students, not bureaucratic legal entities like school districts. Second, give students more school choices, first within the public school system and then expanding outward to include less traditional options like charter schools, building the sense that choice is an ordinary and necessary component of public education.

Third and finally—this isn’t an official recommendation, but some of the signatories make their intentions about it explicit in the footnotes—expand the sphere of eligible schools even further to include what are now thought of as private schools. At this point, the whole distinction between “public” and “private” schools starts to lose meaning, because all a “public” school means is a school that enrolls “public” students. And since all students receive vouchers, all students—and thus, all schools—are public.

This is sure to draw the ire of voucher opponents. But before they attack weighted school funding, they might want to reconsider. In supporting the plan, some conservative education advocates may be inadvertently weakening their position in another key area: opposition to new, court-mandated funding for public education.

School funding in the United States has been and in many states continues to be deeply inequitable, to the detriment of disadvantaged students, resulting in lawsuits in nearly every state. But some state courts have historically been reluctant to force legislatures to spend specific amounts of money on education, for two reasons. First, there was no consensus as to what, exactly, schools are supposed to accomplish. Second, there was no consensus as to how much money meeting those goals—whatever they are—should reasonably cost.

The standards movement has pretty much taken care of the first problem. Legislatures have defined exactly what students are supposed to know and be able to do. But the second issue—reasonable cost—remains tricky. Conservatives constantly argue that the education system gets plenty of money already to meet established goals; it just needs to spend what it has more efficiently.

Weighted school funding would put that contention to the test. As the report says:

“Under weighted school funding, if weights are implemented properly, schools will have powerful incentives to serve more disadvantaged kids. Schools may begin to vie for these populations to gain increased funding, rather than shun them as is often the case today.”

This makes the setting the weights properly crucial. While there are a number of ways to set weights, in the long run the best way is probably to let the market decide. As the report says:

“Just as the free market sets prices for goods and services, the market for hard-to-educate children can determine their weighting. Principals and schools should seek to educate hard-to-educate children because they know that with the money accompanying the child they can show improvement trends and reach performance levels. If this doesn’t happen, the district or state should adjust weights until it does.”

This market approach for setting weights would be particularly effective if there was an element of hard accountability to the system—if, for example, a school received a standard amount of money per student enrolled up front, but only received the additional, “weighted” amount once students actually met academic standards. In other words, incentives for schools to not just enroll hard-to-educate students but actually educate them successfully.

Here’s a guess—under such a system, the market-determined weight for disadvantaged students would be a whole lot higher than people realize. So high, in fact, that it would put a lot of the counter-arguments to "adequacy"-based lawsuits to rest.

In other words, weighted student funding could give school finance litigants the final, missing piece of the puzzle: solid, market-based evidence for exactly how much it costs to educate disadvantaged students up to established academic standards. How could conservatives disagree, once the market, in all its wisdom, has spoken?

So voucher opponents should be cautious about criticizing weighted student funding. The report contains a lot of valuable ideas and perhaps even the seeds of grand bargain between liberal and conservative factions in the fight over school finance—choice in exchange for adequate funding. For a system that currently has too little of both, this would be a welcome step indeed.