I Couldn't Resist

I just love this, prompted by Erin's last post of course. Almost as much as I love the word "islandize", used most recently by NCAA President Myles Brand in remarks about his presidential task force report on D1 athletics while describing the fiscal "stress" that higher ed is facing. College sports needs to be more aligned with the academic pursuits of higher education, says the report. Even if it seems impossible, Charlie Brown, it's a goal worth all the energy it will take.

Never, ever, ever give up

I love stories like this one in today’s Washington Post about the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas. While the name may conjure images of contraband cigarettes and a behind-bars drug trade, it’s, well, kind of about that. It’s about the fact that skills involved in setting up a complex, underground system for trading contraband items in jail may just be skills that are useful in setting up a successful, independent business.

The organization selects soon to be released inmates for an intensive business course, where they must complete assignments, are mentored by business executives, and eventually propose their own business plans. The program boasts a high success rate, including 93 percent employment, which is critical in preventing recidivism. The most heartening aspect of the program is the fact that it shows that these inmates, generally considered “undesirables” in society, are able to rise to the challenge and do the hard work necessary to succeed.

These programs serve as evidence that people (including students) respond to expectations - if we, as a society, expect former inmates to act like criminals, then that's likely what we'll get, but if we challenge ourselves to expect more, we might just get a group of people with the kinds of entreprenuerial skills our society relies on.

His spirit continues to drool...

Responding to this, Cato's Adam Schaeffer claims that

But the thing is, school choice through tax credits provides an education system more accountable to parents and the public than charters, voucher, or anything else.

Unfortunately, his own arguments undermine his case. In the next paragraph, he says:

Personal-use tax credits allow parents to spend their own money on schools that they choose . . . and school accountability to parents is the most effective kind of accountability. Donation tax credits let people choose the kinds of Scholarship Granting Organizations they think do the best job educating lower-income children. In both cases, the people with the most interest in holding schools accountable for results are the ones with the power to actually hold them accountable – parents and the people funding the schools.

But wouldn't tax credits actually weaken the incentives for donors to be serious about holding accountable the scholarship granting organizations they funded? Right now, people who donate to scholarship funds are doing so as acts of charity--they forfeit some other use of the money. But with a tax credit, they don't have to forfeit anything--if they get a dollar for dollar deduction in tax liability for their donation, the donation suddenly becomes free, thereby reducing its cost to the donor and his or her incentive to hold scholarship foundations accountable.

More significantly, Adam's point here acknowledges that the people who fund schools have a clear interest in holding those schools accountable. Guess what--when we're talking about education that's supported from public coffers, then the people funding the schools are all of us taxpayers, and we all have an interest in holding schools accountable for serving the public good. Adam might counter that we're not talking about education that's funded from the public coffers here, because education tax credits offer a subsidy on the tax side of the budget rather than the spending side--taxpayers get to choose how to use their own money. But it's still a publicly-supported subsidy for a specific behavior, and the difference between tax expenditures like education tax credits and government outlays on the spending side is more an accounting and timing difference than a practical one. In fact, the illusion that taxpayers/the public/the government isn't really paying for these scholarships or private school tuitions is one of the reasons I think that tax credits for private education are less desirable than flat-out vouchers, which make expenditures much more transparent.

Even if you don't buy the public interest in how kids educated on our dime are learning, there's still a case to be made here for a government accountability role in providing information needed to run a well-functioning education market place where parents and donors can make good decisions. Kind of like how you can buy whatever food you want, but the government mandates that all the packaged foods in the grocery store have comparable nutrition labels. As Kevin Kosar wrote recently on Edspresso, it's difficult for even a savvy parent to make sense of the information available on the performance of different schools. Good public accountability systems that provide comparable information for parents across available schools are essential to help parents make good decisions. Should accountability systems be designed to be more responsive to parent demands for information? Probably. But considering the angst with which middle-class suburban parents await test scores for their neighborhoods, I'd argue that there's a significant amount of parent demand even for the suboptimal test-based accountability information we have now.

I'm arguing this as a supporter of increased choice in publicly-supported education. I think families should have more freedom to choose the schools to which they send their kids and that a greater diversity of choices should be available to them. I don't care if you want to send your kid to a Montessori school, a single-sex school, a military school, a religious school, or a billingual Esperanto immersion school. But I do care, as a taxpayer, that schools using my tax money meet basic health and safety standards, don't discriminate, and teach kids sufficient math and verbal/literacy skills to contribute to the economy and have a decent shot in life. That's why we need both parent choice and public accountability. And it's why education tax credits just don't cut it.

Speaking of Mayoral Control

WaPo reports on what D.C. residents think of incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty's ambition to take over DC's troubled school system. The general verdict: people want change, so they're down for pretty much anything, but some are skeptical Mayoral control will fix the problem.

DC PTA president Darlene Allen sure doesn't: "It's not the structure that causes the problem, it's the people who are being elected," she told the Post. But if DC school board politics play out in such a way that either the people voters have to choose from are not very good or voters consistently pick people who don't run the board well, doesn't that at some point suggest a broader structural problem with how we select our school boards and maybe the need for alternatives?

More Spitzer

NYT today looks at education issues in the NY state gubernatorial race between Democrat Eliot Spitzer and Republican John Faso. Both support raising the cap on charter schools in the state and extending Mayor Michael Bloomberg's control over the NYC schools. But they disagree about how much more money the state should give to NYC schools in response to the CFE lawsuit. Spitzer wants to give NYC and other poor districts $8.5 billion more a year. Faso doesn't.

Credit where Credit's Due?

Ryan at Edspresso and Adam Schaeffer at Cato-at-Liberty are both drooling over NY gubernatorial candidate Elliot Spitzer's support for school choice. Joe Williams also notes that Albany, NY, charter founder Thomas Carroll is psyched about Spitzer's school reform cred. I'm quite happy to see a prominent Democrat like Spitzer embracing charter schools, but I can't share Ryan and Adam's enthusiasm about his support for education tax credits.

It particularly troubles me to see these tax credits being hyped by Schaeffer as a "third way" alternative to vouchers. If you're a moderate on these issues, you should actually find tax credits more troubling than straight-out vouchers, mainly because tax credits for private education have even less public accountability for how public funds are used than do vouchers. The second issue is a more wonky one, but in general, doing education spending indirectly through tax credits is less transparent and more complicated than spending funds for vouchers outright would be. There's also distribution: Unless tax credits are refundable and capped, you wind up subsidizing affluent people who are already sending their kids to private schools rather than expanding educational options for disadvantaged families. Basically, the only reason to go this route is to get around Blaine Amendments or because it's somewhat less politically controversial (for all the wrong reasons) than regular vouchers.

There could be a silver lining in all of this, however: The last attempt to create an education tax credit in New York got transformed, for political reasons, into a broad child tax credit. In contrast to education-specific tax credits, generalized child tax credits (particularly if they are refundable for low-income families) are a good idea, because they provide a general supplement to parents' incomes that they can use to help defray the costs of childrearing in whatever way best serves their families' unique needs (including in the early years when children are particularly costly and parents' incomes are often low). In these days of stagnating incomes, parents, particularly lower on the income scale, need all the help they can get.

Tarnishing a Silver Bullet?

It's become sort of a truism in education that parent involvement is critical to student achievement--But what does that mean when a parent works two jobs to make ends meet, doesn't speak English well-enough to communicate with school officials, or has little or no formal education herself? That's the question Joseph Berger asks in an NYT article about the obstacles to parent involvement for Latino immigrant families in Newburgh, N.Y. It's not that these parents don't care about their kids' education. Many of them came here in part to give their children a better life and have high aspirations for them, but lack skills and resources to give them the educational supports schools that serve middle-class students often take for granted.

Cultural perspectives about the roles of educators and parents are also an issue, notes researcher Pedro Noguera. "In many Latin American countries there’s a tendency to defer to authorities in school, an assumption that educators know what they’re doing.” Affluent white parents often monitor children's progress closely and don't hesitate to advocate with school authorities on their children's behalf. But “many immigrants parents don’t understand that this is a role they need to play,” instead defering to educators as experts. This is also true for working-class and poor parents more generally, as sociologist Annette Lareau demonstrates in her book Unequal Childhoods. The conflict between schools' expectation that parents should act like affluent and middle-class parents do, and lower-class parents' own views on what appropriate parental involvement means, can create tension between parents and schools, further pushing parents away and leading students to view school as an alien culture hostile to their own. No one denies that parents are incredibly important, but it's unrealistic to expect low-income parents to start acting like more affluent parents. Parent involvement isn't a silver bullet.

The Wire Week Seven: A Man's Got to Have a Code

The signal moment in this week's episode of The Wire came during the prison exchange between Omar and Bunk. Omar's been framed by Marlo for killing an innocent citizen. Bunk knows that Omar only robs and murders drug dealers, but begins by saying "Hey, even if you didn't kill this woman you've killed lots of other people, so that's justice one way or the other." To which Omar responds, "If Omar didn't kill that woman, then someone else did," and moreover, "A man's got have a code."

Like so much on The Wire, this has meaning on multiple levels, one related directly to the characters at hand, and one resonant with the larger themes that the creators are developing this season.

In the first sense, Omar is talking about the nature of manhood. To Omar, a man can't be a man unless he lives by a code. The nature of the code itself isn't the issue, the important thing is giving the code fidelity, whatever it may be. In other words, nothing is more important than integrity. Omar and Bunk, who came from the same neighborhood and went the same high school, took opposite paths in life, but they share this core belief. Omar knows this about Bunk, and thus it's no surprise later in the episode to see Bunk trying to get Omar transfered to a safer jail and suggesting to the other homicide detectives working the case that Omar might not be guilty. Bunk's code, like Omar's, is rooted in a sense of justice: bad people deserve to be punished. But Bunk also believes that justice demands truth, and that truth can't be suberted to punish the wicked.

That's why the virtuous characters in The Wire like Bunk and McNulty respect Omar while despising many of their colleagues--like Omar, they believe that integrity matters most. Contrast Omar with the corrupt police officer who steals from criminals, children, even poor Bubbles. He's a minor, one-dimensional character; his only purposes is to serve as the anti-Omar, a man defined by his lack of integrity. Rationally speaking, one could argue that he's still doing more to make the world a better place than Omar, a murderer and a thief. But let's be honest--if he and Omar met in a dark alley, which of the two would you, the viewer, really want to walk away? I think you'd pick Omar, and not just because he's more interesting to watch on TV.

Omar's credo can also be interpreted a very different way: codes are unavoidable. A man's got to have a code in the sense that he can't not have one. It's the nature of the human condition to look for rules to live by. The corner boys rushing toward some kind of manhood in The Wire are all struggling to define themselves. The misadventures of rookie teacher Prezbo and the vignettes of poorly managed public schools represent only a small facet of this season's focus on education. The much larger issue is how children growing up on the streets of west Baltimore internalize social codes that have been warped and degraded by the social anarchy caused by the drug trade. That's really what Colvin and the professor are after--understanding the codes that cause students like Namond to be who they are, and changing them before they become written in blood and stone.

Suffer the Children II

This NYT article about child trafficking and forced labor in Africa is incredibly sad. UNESCO reports that youngsters in Sub-Saharan Africa are the least likely of anywhere in the world to attend primary education. The share of Sub-Saharan youngsters attending elementary schooling has increased 27% since 1999, but one third of youngsters still do not attend school, often because they must work or cannot afford school fees.

While this child's story is heartbreaking on a human level, there's a broader problem here than individual suffering. When very young children must work instead of learning basic skills like reading, writing and math; when their health and nutrition are sacrificed because their families lack adequate provisions for them or value them less than adults, you essentially have a society that is cannibalizing its future--physically, cognitively and psychologically. The labor these small children provide is not particularly efficient, and it comes at severe costs in terms of their long-term potential as workers and contributors to their society. These children's parents are in an untenable situation with few choices, but the choices they are making lock generations in a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty. One of the long-term benefits of agricultural advances and industrialization was that, despite some serious abuses of child labor to begin with, eventually the resulting productivity gains allowed adult family members to support the family without child labor, freeing children to attend school, allowing the development of a more educated population, which increased productivity, raised living standards, and led to a virtuous cycle of more education, productivity and better living standards.* Improving basic health, education and nutrition for children in the developing world is critical.

(*As Jonathan Chait points out in the latest New Republic, this cycle has seemed in some ways to be a bit less virtuous of late in the U.S., since the wages of productivity gains in recent years flow almost entirely to the very richest Americans, while everyone else's living standards stagnate. But that doesn't detract from the broader point that getting the virtuous cycle started by equipping kids with basic skills is an important first step to building decent lives for people.)

Don't Breathe Easy

NYT reports on a new study looking at Bronx schoolchildren's exposure to pollution and its impact on their asthma. The picture is not pretty. In the Bronx, there are 9.3 asthma-related hospital admissions annually per 1,000 children. And in Harlem, which has one of the country's highest asthma rates, a 2003 study found one in four children has asthma. Nationally, asthma is the leading cause of missed days of school, accounting for nearly 15 million missed school days annually. Asthma rates are increasing. And, disadvantaged kids, because of lack of access to health care, poor housing, and living in polluted urban areas, are among those who experience the most severe consequences from asthma, exacerbating achievement gaps.

Negative consequences from asthma are particularly frustrating because a lot of asthma-related problems could be prevented if more children had proper preventative health care to manage their asthma. Teaching kids to manage their asthma is relatively cheap. Uninsured kids winding up in the emergency room when they have an asthma attack is expensive. The costs of missed school days and difficulty learning because you can't breathe are harder to estimate, but kids and society pay for them as well.

Professional College Football

Selena Roberts' column($) about big-time college football in the NYTimes yesterday echoes a piece George Will wrote last week, each relying heavily on a recent letter from Rep. Bill Thomas, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to the president of the NCAA. Thomas wants to know why, exactly, it's okay for tax-exempt colleges and universities to be running massive, for-profit professional sports leagues. It's a good question.

I have nothing against pro sports. Like lots of people, I'm a big fan, particularly of the professional football team owned and operated by my grad school alma mater, Ohio State. The Buckeyes are kicking eleven kinds of butt this year and I'm enjoying every minute of it. When we spank Michigan next month on our way to the national title game, it will be a great day for all right-thinking Americans.

At the same time, in the 11 years since I left Columbus I've been treated to a regular diet of scandals and unsavory reports of how the university has consistently bent and broken its policies and values in support of the franchise. Academic misconduct, grading scandals, riots led by drunken fans, ex-players arrested upon being found driving erratically in a truck loaded with a bullet-proof vest, a loaded AK-47 type assault rifle, three loaded handguns, a hatchet, and an open, half-drunk bottle of vodka--the list goes on.

Every one of these incidents embarrasses the university and stains its good name. And if could trade them in for fewer wins on the field--if a clean program meant more Saturdays on the receiving end of the 44-0 drubbing OSU gave Minnesota last weekend--I'd do it in a minute.
There's a place for pro football teams that put winning above all else: the NFL.

The real question is why universities don't see things the same way, why they routinely sell their higher ideals and institutional values for the fame, money, and thrills that go with big-time sports. In one sense the question answers itself -- fame, money, and thrills have always tempted people, and some people are always too weak to resist. But the answer also lies with the complex, insular nature of the institutions themselves.

Colleges and universities do much more than teach. They provide community and a powerful sense of shared identity in a world where those things can hard to come by. Sports augment and focus that process. There's something undeniably great about sitting in a stadium with a 100,000 other people that all want what you want, that for at least a few hours see the world just like you. The problem is when those shared desires are so in conflict with the basic mission of education that we all end up coming together to support something that shames us in the end. As long as colleges continue own pro sports franchises, the danger of that will be hard to avoid.

Advising Mr. Fenty

Writing in the Washington Post Outlook section, T. Robinson Ahlstrom, headmaster of Washington Latin School, a recently-opened public charter school in the District, asserts that "DCPS is dead. It's time to bury it," by replacing the elected Board of Education with a NYC-style Department of Education Accountable only to Mayor-to-be Fenty.

I don't disagree with Ahlstrom that DCPS' failure to educate many children is a tremendous tragedy for these children individually and the city as a whole. I'm not sure I buy his argument, though, that political will alone is the problem here. Suppose someone, say, a newly elected Mayor, had the political will and political capitol to enact whatever agenda he sought to renew the public schools in DC. (This would be an incredible feat because so many entities--Congress, the city Council, the CFO, Board of Education, etc.--are involved in making decisions about DC's governance, but it might actually be possible given the current dismay with DCPS' performance and the fact that Superintendent Janey seems to be losing some of his luster.) Even then, there's still the issue of what to do.

And, when you're dealing with a system that has DC's problems, that's not an easy question. There's nothing wrong with Ahlstrom's ideas (heck, I proposed moving DC's public school facilities into the control of an independent agency all the way back here), although I do think he overstates the case a bit when it comes to DCPS' financial inefficiency and teachers unions (and I'd love to see Leo Casey take him on about the latter set of arguments). But I doubt they're enough.

There are basically two schools of thought on how to fix DCPS and other troubled urban school systems. One is a sort of radical decentralization approach, which argues that the thing to do is to dramatically cut bureacracy, radically constrain the authority of school boards or central administration, give school site managers control over their budgets and schools, encourage and foster the growth of charter schools and other autonomous options, and push existing schools to become more charter-like. Paul Hill's portfolio model is something along these lines. This is particularly appealing in a place like DC, where 25% of the students are already in charter schools. The other idea is much more centralized. It focuses on centralizing and coordinating curriculum, professional development, and other key activities so that they are aligned across the system.

These two alternatives seem opposite, but they are not entirely at odds. The NYC efforts, for example, with which Mr. Fenty seems quite enamored, contain elements of both. As will, likely, any effective approach for DC. Certainly, expanding the number of high-performing charter schools, creating a more hospitable atmosphere for them, and giving more autonomy and budgetary control to better-performing DCPS schools would be a positive step. But the performance of many DCPS schools (as well as rapid principal turnover in DCPS) doesn't inspire confidence that their leadership should be given more autonomy. At least in the short to medium run, addressing the problems in these schools will require some sort of central bureaucracy that can align standards and curriculum in these schools, diagnose and address problems, and provide high-quality leaders and teachers. At a minimum, some sort of central leadership needs to make sure that the district's most basic systems--things like payroll, procurement, student data collection--function properly for these schools. There's also a critical central role for addressing DC's special ed crisis. Making the trains run on time won't improve student achievement, but if teachers and principals are spending all kinds of time trying to work their way around basic operational issues, that's a huge barrier to improving student learning.

The Williams administration was successful in addressing a lot of these issues elsewhere in the DC government, so capacity on these issues exists in the city, and perhaps moving control of DCPS to the Mayor's office can lead to progress here. But there are two concerns. The first is churn. The District's educational system has suffered from incredible instability in the past decade. It's been governed by an elected school board, the federally-appointed control board, and a hybrid appointed-elected school board. It's had seven superintendents during that time period. With this kind of governance and leadership turmoil, is it any wonder not many improvement efforts gained traction or produced results for DC's kids? One reason that DC's charter schools, on average, are doing better than DCPS schools is that the best charter schools have actually had a lot more stability in DCPS. In his book Spinning Wheels, AEI's Rick Hess writes about the dangers of reform churn, a never-ending cycle of reform efforts in urban school districts that are abandoned before they are even fully implemented, let alone have a chance to succeed. Shifting control of the schools to the Mayor would create tremendous turmoil and churn. That's not to say it may not be a good idea, but the potential benefits need to be weighed against the costs of churn, and the people Fenty selects to manage the process need to strive to reduce the negative impacts of churn.

The second danger is that governance changes can create the appearance of change without really improving anything. Giving the Mayor control of the schools is not in itself a good reform strategy. It's what he does with the control that matters. And there are a lot of good things a Mayor can do, like better connecting education and other social services in the District to address the many health, family, and other problems kids carry with them to school.

A lot of what needs to happen to improve schooling in DC is not flashy, bullet-pointable, initiatives. A lot of it is pretty basic, day-to-day stuff: making the trains run on time, hiring and developing good people, holding people accountable, getting a good curriculum, sticking with it and refining it to make it work.