Orwellian? Not Really

My take on higher education data systems, student privacy, and yesterday's article in the NYTimes about the F.B.I. accessing federal student loan records, over at Washington Monthly.

Colleges Giving Even More Financial Aid to Wealthy Students

Way back in the earliest history of Education Sector--I believe it was January 2006--we published our first "Chart You Can Trust." It described how colleges are increasingly funneling scholarship money away from lower-income students and instead giving it to wealthy applicants who are more useful for boosting both colleges' standing in the U.S. News college rankings and their financial bottom line.

That chart used data from the federal National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey, gathered in 1992, 1995, and 1999. Yesterday, the Education Trust (my former employer) released an excellent new report titled "Promise Abandoned: How Policy Choices and Practices Restrict College Opportunities." It contains a similar analysis, but uses newer data from the 2003 NPSAS survey.

Their conclusion: things have gotten even worse.

From 1999 to 2003, private colleges increased the average aid to students from families making less than $20,000 per year from $4,027 to $5,240, an increase of $1,213, or 30%.

During the same time period, private colleges increased the average aid to students from families making more than $100,000 per year from $3,321 to $4,806, an increase of $1,485, or 45%.

This is on top of even larger disparities in earlier years. Over the last decade, both public and private institutions have devoted a hugely disproportionate share of new scholarships to the most privileged students. The whole principle of awarding financial aid according to financial need appears to be rapidly disappearing from our colleges and universities.

Higher education institutions enjoy a wealth of benefits in our society, ranging from social standing to direct and indirect financial support from the government. Those benefits are based on the notion that these institutions serve a higher social purpose than a typical private enterprise. Colleges are supposed to be more than businesses, they're supposed to represent the best of what our society is, and aspires to be.

But when those institutions start to put their own interests of status and money ahead of the pressing need to help lower-income students earn a college degree, it calls those basic assumptions into question.

Addendum #1: Welcome, Talking Points Memo readers. For those of you reading the Quick and the Ed for the first time--and I'm guessing that's more or less all of you--this blog is published by Education Sector, an independent, nonpartisan education policy think tank located in Washington, DC. If you're looking for a smart, fresh perspective on education that's not tied down by predictable orthodoxies, give us a try.

Addendum #2: A few readers have emailed to point out that institutions like Harvard and Yale have taken steps in recent years to cut tuition for low- and middle-income students. True enough. But that's just another example of how the national sense of what's going on higher education is warped by the actions of a few elite, high-profile institutions that educate only a tiny percentage of all students.

It's great if universities with multi-billion dollar endowments finally do the right thing and stop charging the families of the few low-income students they enroll (75% of all students at elite colleges and universities come from the top income quartile, only 3% from the bottom quartile) tens of thousands of dollars of tuition. But if those actions don't alter the overall averages -- and the new data clearly indicate that they don't -- then the basic problem is unchanged.

Wah, Wah, Good One

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in today's Washington Post:

for people who say, 'Wah, wah, we can't have spelling bees because we have to focus on math and reading' -- let's measure the spelling"

It's an arguable position on an issue of central importance to the coming reauthorization of NCLB. A lot of NCLB criticisms boil down to the same basic complaint: because the law is designed to increase focus on the things that federal policymakers believe are most important--reading and math, defined proficiency levels, the performance of traditionally disadvantaged students--it inevitably decreases the focus on every other thing, like other academic subjects, performance levels, and student groups.

While this is a real concern, most critics don't like to grapple with one obvious response--let's test those things too--since they tend to also be unhappy about the current amount of testing, or testing generally. Too much testing is obviously problematic, but you also can't hold schools accountable for things without objective information about them. It's a tremendously tricky problem.

That said, it's hard not to like a member of the Cabinet--particularly in this administration--who's willing to go on the record and talk like a real person.

Gender, Race and the SAT

The College Board just released its report on national and state average results from the first-ever cohort of college students (the high-school class of 2006) to take the new SAT, first offered in March 2005, which ditched the old "verbal" section for "critical reading," added more advanced math content, and added an essay-based writing section.

Most media reports seem to be focusing on the state horserace or the fact that this year's critical reading subtest averages are somewhat lower than last year's verbal score averages. I'm not sure either of these is very informative, since the population of kids taking the SAT differs from state to state, and the new SAT the college board started administering in March 2005 is a different test from that administered in previous years.

Also gaining attention is the impact of the new writing section on average male-female SAT score differences. Historically, men have had higher average scores than women, not just on the SAT overall but also on both its verbal and math subsections--a departure from other assessments where men tend to do better than women on math (with a few caveats), but women tend to do better on verbal skills. But women did do better than men, on average, on the new writing section, lowering the the male-female score gap from 42 points in 2005 to 26 points this year. In addition to the writing section, the new critical reading section, which eliminated the infamous verbal analogies, probably also made the test more female-friendly, since verbal analogies are one of the few areas of verbal skills in which men typically outperform women, and the difference between men's critical reading scores this year and their verbal skills last year is larger than that for women.

Because women's improved SAT performance relative to men reflects changes in the assessment and not simply changes in students' skills, it shouldn't be taken as evidence of a boy crisis. But is men's continued higher average SAT performance--in both reading and math--evidence against a boy crisis? The answer is no. First, the difference between male and female reading scores on the SAT is tiny. More significant, the populations of men and women taking the test are different. More females than males take the SAT--54% of SAT-takers in the 2006 college-bound cohort were girls--and, because students in the highest segments of the achievement distribution for each gender are already pretty likely to take the SAT, the larger pool of women taking it probably means more women from lower on the achievement are taking the test--and a look at the gender breakdowns of students by score distribution backs this up.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, once again, gender gaps are much smaller on the SAT than are racial and ethnic gaps. And the SAT results seem to buttress the notion that we should be particularly concerned about African-American males, who are the lowest-performing racial/gender subgroup, trailing their sisters in math and, unlike males from other racial/ethnic groups, reading, even as males make up a smaller percentage of African-American SAT-takers than they do any other racial/ethnic group.

By the Way...If you want to hear and talk more about gender gaps in education from K-12 through higher ed, please join Education Sector on Tuesday, September 12 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, for a discussion with USA Today's Richard Whitmire, Georgetown and the Urban Institute's Harry Holzer, and yours truly. It's free, but space is limited, so RSVP quickly!

College Presidents for Transparency and Accountability

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that one of my somewhat obsessive hobbyhorse issues areas of signficant interest is the ongoing debate about establishing a national "unit record" higher education data system.

Put simply, the federal government wants to improve the ways it collects information about college performance, using privacy protected data about individual students. The associations of private colleges have fought a scorched-earth P.R. campaign against the system, basically calling it the precursor to an Orwellian police state.

That tactic has been pretty successful--the House of Representatives passes legislation banning the system earlier this year--partly because supporters of the system from within higher education, of which there are many, haven't been as focal in presenting the opposing view.

That's why its was great to open up the Washington Post this morning and read an excellent, well-reasoned Op-ed supporting the system written by Thomas Hochstettler, President of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety, but here's his case in a nutshell:

Where some see the specter of Big Brother looking over colleges' and students' shoulders, I see a potential for a robust (and privacy-protected) set of metrics that would yield essential data with tremendous potential for advancing our individual institutions and for identifying with greater precision those areas where our national education policy needs to be strengthened. Where some see the specter of government intrusion, I see the possibility of transforming our current separate data-reporting schemes into a streamlined system that is beneficial to students and useful to faculty and administrators.

Contrary to what critics of the database plan might have the public believe, we in academia know remarkably little about what emerges from the vast and diverse system of higher education. Why do students drop out? Where do they go when they do? What factors in primary and secondary school, beyond grade-point averages, class rankings and standardized test scores, best predict their success or failure in college? What impact does their educational experience have on our students' success or failure after graduation?

We are ill-equipped to answer these questions. Without comprehensive information, both individual institutions and society lack the tools to assess how the system is working, how it is failing and how it might be improved.

Why would the president of a private college like Lewis and Clark--along with most of the major associations of public institutions--support the new data system? I'm guessing because they know that they're ill-served by the current higher education market, which is starved for real information about quality. When the public has no good data about which institutions are actually serving students best, it naturally falls back on the long-established, written-in-stone higher education pecking order, which favors elite private institutions. Getting more good information into the hands of the public--precisely the goal of the data system in question--would allow all the other institutions to be judged more fairly on their merits.

$200,000 bonuses, it's a start

Martin O’Malley has a new plan for improving Maryland’s low performing schools - $200,000 principal bonuses, paid out over four years. That’s an impressive sum, and refreshing to see someone putting real money on the table - as the plan states, “Half-hearted measures will not work.” However, it is only a start. There are two key elements missing from this plan:

First, a strategy for identifying and recruiting exceptional principals from school districts within Maryland and across the country. Relying solely on money as a carrot to recruit high performing principals is insufficient; the state needs to actively recruit principals that will do the best job.

Second, there is no accountability. Base annual bonuses on principals’ gains, not only in test scores, but also in recruiting high quality teachers, improving the curriculum, ensuring students receive additional supports, and involving parents. The plan uses the analogy of a CEO hiring an exceptional manager to turn around a store. However, that CEO would do more than hire the manager for the store, he would carefully watch sales data to ensure improvements were happening. Certainly, he would do that before paying out a large bonus.

O’Malley should be focusing not simply on luring principals into schools with financial incentives, but actively recruiting principals who think they are up to the challenge of earning those bonuses with large gains in student achievement.

Of course, holding principals accountable also requires giving them the freedom to make the necessary hiring, curricular, and scheduling changes to build the school they envision. If Maryland will be recruiting principals worth $200,000 bonuses, then they should entrust those principals to make the school level decisions necessary to earn that money.

A Bit Too Much Editorial Freedom

I couldn't help read the The New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorials on charter schools over the last couple of days without injecting into the conversation a publication on the status of big-city charters issued recently by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE).

The two newspaper editorial pages squared off over a new study of charter school performance conducted for the U.S. Department of Education by researchers at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. The study found that students in traditional public schools outperformed their counterparts in charter schools in reading and math. The Times declared the study to be evidence that charter schools are not a "cure-all" for what ails American public education. The Journal cried foul, declared the study unreliabled, and insisted that other studies "have repeatedly shown charter school students outperforming their counterparts in traditional public schools."

Both papers "marshalled" evidence on charters aggressively. But there's another assessment of charter schools out from a far more credible source, CRPE, a University of Washington think tank headed by the respected researcher Paul Hill. Hill and his colleagues recently published a summary of a symposium on the state of the charter school movement involving 22 charter advocates and researchers.

The gathering, organized by CRPE, was a who's who of the national charter school movement. And their take on the charter movement was sobering. "I think the issue of attaining academic quality was highly underestimated by all of us," said Ted Mitchell, head of the NewSchools Venture fund, a non-profit organization that invests in charter school management organizations. "We can only grow as fast as we can find good people, and we are not able to find all the people we need," said Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP Academies, which has opened over 50 charter schools nationwide. "This isn't McDonalds," added Nelson Smith, the head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy organization. "The process of replicating a good school isn't easy or predictable." The report on the symposium concluded that "all agreed that the road to scale is much rockier than anyone imagined."

There are some truly inspiring charter schools run by smart, committed people who would probably shun education rather than put up with the stifling bureaucracy of many traditional public schools. But creating good schools of any sort is hard work, these earnest educational entrepreneurs have discovered. Admitting that reality, and that many charters have not emerged as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools, as Paul Hill's conferees have done in a public report, is a gutsy step for charter leaders to take, and a step towards increasing the supply of stronger charters. Someone call the polemicists that the Journal and the Times and tell them to take the rest of the day off.

See This Movie

Saw a very, very good movie over the weekend--Half Nelson, about an 8th grade history teacher with a drug problem and his friendship with one of his students. No real policy takeaways, just an unusually smart, honest, and well-acted film about real people struggling to make sense of a world damaged by the illegal drug trade in countless ways.