Britney Spears and College Rankings

I'm in Miami Beach this weekend, sitting out by the pool while my lovely wife attends a conference on utility regulation. It turns out that Britney Spears is also staying at our hotel (sans Fed-ex, naturally), which I guess makes me either famous or trashy by association, I'm not sure which.

As some of you may know, I've been spending a lot of time recently writing and talking about college rankings. This gist of the report we published on the subject: rankings--specifically the U.S. News & World Report rankings, have a big influence on how colleges and univerisities behave. And because the rankings are primarily based on wealth, fame, and exclusivity, they cause higher education institutions to focus on those things, instead of what's best for students. Rankings can't be eliminated--the public wants them, so someone will always publish them. Thus, we need new rankings based on better information, such as how much college students actually learn while they're in school.

Several critics have responded along the lines of, "The rankings aren't as influential as you think. Sure, universities pay attention, but they're not the be-all and end-all." I thought of this as I read the Miami Herald this morning, out by the pool (it's funny how they build a hotel next to the beach and then everyone sits by the pool, where you can't even see the beach), and came upon an article on the front page of the Metro section, beginning as follows:

University of Florida leaders have been so obsessed with rankings in college guide books that they initiated a national advertising campaign to persuade academics around the country to give the school more respect. But as the ads went out last year, the state's flagship university was racking up a multimillion-dollar debt in its College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, where most students take their core classes.

The fallout -- proposed cuts in math, English and other humanities teaching positions -- has critics arguing that UF is undermining its efforts to bolster its image. Cuts could lead to larger classes and the perception of diminishing quality, prompting the best professors to leave, critics say.''You're not going to become a top 10 school if you start gutting the humanities,'' said Donovan Hulse, a 32-year-old philosophy graduate student whose department is slated to lose a fourth of its grad student slots.

Actually, that's entirely wrong. You could gut the humanities 'til kingdom come and still become a top 10 school, because the rankings have nothing to do with the quality of education in the humanities, or anywhere else. The only real "academic" measure is a reputational survey, which is all about the research reputation of your faculty. As the article goes on to note:

T.K. Wetherell, the president of rival Florida State University, is promoting his own bold plan: to recruit 200 ''superstar'' professors within 10 years in an attempt to put the school in league with UF as a top research university.

How many of the those "superstars" attained that status because they're good at teaching? Without knowing anything about them, I'm confident that the number is, give or take a few, and accounting for the statistical margin of error, none.

I've also noted that the U.S. News rankings contribute to the endless escalation of college costs, because they're substantially based on how much money colleges spend. It doesn't really matter how they spend it, other than lowering class sizes, which is a crude measure with no proven link to learning at the collegiate level. The important thing is just that you get more money, and spend it somewhere.

Last week I made this point on the PBS Nightly Business Report, which also featured Brian Kelly, executive editor of U.S. News. He disagreed, saying, "We're not the problem." But here's what the University of Florida wants to do:

UF has argued that it cannot reach its own aspirations without a lot more money. President Bernie Machen has led the campaign among state university presidents to wrest power from the appointed Board of Governors and the Legislature to set the school's tuition -- and perhaps double it from its current $3,200 a year.

Maybe--just maybe--the rankings actually do have something to do with out-of-control increases in spending and tuition. Just a guess.

But the larger issue is that the U.S. News rankings, divorced as they are from the core educational mission of higher education, create strong incentives for colleges and universities to pursue unworthy goals--wealth, superficial attractiveness, and fame for fame's sake. That's what the rankings are based on, so that's what colleges try to acquire.

In other words, U.S. News makes colleges try to be like Britney Spears. As long as the rankings continue to be so influential, this pervasive and growing Spearsification of higher education is sure to continue.

Some of the Best School Films

Sid Davis died earlier this week. For folks who don't know, he produced some of the most popular "social guidance" films for youth in the 50s and 60s, also called "mental hygiene" films that praised the joys of conformity and domesticity and warned of the perils of drugs and reckless behavior anywhere and everywhere (on the road, on the bus and yes even in the lunchroom).

Davis' were low-budget films- most made for less than a grand- but he made enough money selling them to schools and police departments to keep making more and more of them. Some of the best include
Girls Beware in which a young girl, "Judy Miller", is murdered because she's careless about who she trusts (produced with the help of the Inglewood School District and Inglewood Police Department), only to be topped by Boys Beware, which actually came first, about a boy named Jimmy Barnes who also trusts a stranger who is "sick" ("you see he was a homosexual" and "one never knows when a homosexual is about- he may appear normal"). Davis was also big into the anti-drug message and although his films weren't as terrifically comedic as Reefer Madness, his Seduction of the Innocent (not to be confused with the more recent same-named song by KISS) is a pretty over the top account of a young girl whose experimentation with marijuana leads to addiction, death and destruction. Of course, the decade that followed its 1961 release is most known for drug use among youth, which makes you wonder about its effectiveness. And it describes the effect of pot as "everything speeds up to 100 miles per hour", which also clarifies that Davis was not himself experimenting with the drug. At any rate, Davis' films were seen by millions of public school kids in the 50s, 60s and 70s and were chock-full of societal ne'er-do-wells and blood and guts and violence. Reminding us that the good old days had its troubles too. As well as some great film-making.

The Wire, Week Eight: Does Not Compute!

A Wire-watching buddy tells me, “Man, I’d never teach in a city school. The eighth graders can’t even do fractions!” When I ask him why he thinks that is, he cites the usual litany of family and neighborhood challenges kids face in West Baltimore, the ones portrayed so vividly and heartbreakingly in The Wire itself. But the scene my friend was referring to illustrated what the real culprit is: Our schools often do a terrible job teaching math. When one of Prez’s students says he can’t complete the fractions worksheet because “we never did one-thirds,” Prez responds, “One-fourth, one-fifth, one-third: Follow the same steps.” He’s right in one sense: Certain steps will produce correct answers. But he’s doing nothing to address the much larger problem: Many of his students clearly have no grasp of what fractions are or what “doing arithmetic” with them really means. They've studied a set of steps, but they don't understand how those steps apply to different denominators or problems that don't involve food items.

To illustrate, let’s assume they were dividing fractions, e.g. problems like “10 / ½ =”. Most of the kids might recall from studying division by whole numbers that when you divide, you get a smaller number. Their elementary school teachers might even have encouraged them to check their work by looking to make sure their answer is smaller than the number they started with. But when you divide by a fraction, you get a bigger number, in this case 20. Instead of working with students to help them understand why, many teachers simply drill them in a rote, two-step procedure for dividing by fractions: “invert and multiply.” Students are asked to memorize the word “invert” and told that it means “to flip,” and then asked to memorize and practice those two steps. Sure, that produces the correct answer, but simply memorizing a procedure does little to develop real mathematical understanding. They’ve simply been drilled to follow a seemingly arbitrary set of steps that produces a counterintuitive result. No wonder they’re confused!

Math doesn’t have to be taught that way. In 1999 a young researcher named Liping Ma published a book that caused a huge stir in math education circles (though, sadly, very little buzz in the education policy arena). She found that Chinese teachers help their elementary students develop a much deeper conceptual understanding of math and offer them a broader repertoire of strategies for solving problems than do their American counterparts. That's partly because American teachers themselves tend to have a much shallower grasp of math concepts than Chinese teachers, despite spending more years in formal education to become a teacher. In fact, fewer than half of the American teachers in Ma’s study fully and accurately answered the problem “1¾ / ½ =”. It wasn't simply a matter of forgetting the steps but also a lack of conceptual understanding about what it means to divide by a fraction. Some teachers told her they divided 1¾ by 2 because they understood the problem as asking them to “divide something in half” rather than to figure out, say, how many halves there are in 1¾. One teacher admitted, “I can't really think of what dividing by a half means.” (Ma’s sample included only 21 American teachers, but others who have replicated her research with a larger numbers of teachers have found similar results.)

Ma’s book also sheds light on another perceptive element of that Wire scene. She found that poor conceptual understanding made it difficult for many American teachers to find helpful and accurate ways to represent fractions. U.S. teachers mainly used either food or money to represent fractions, while “those used by the Chinese teachers were much more diverse” and included many examples students would be familiar with from their daily lives, “such as what happens in a farm, in a factory, in a family, etc.” Recall that another of Prez’s students tells him she can’t do the fractions problems on the worksheet because they involve cars: “All that stuff we did in practice was about food!” Again, Prez's response isn't very helpful. He tells her it doesn't matter and to just “pay attention to the number.” Huh?

Such difficulties are not limited merely to teaching fractions in the upper elementary and middle grades; Ma documents how poor conceptual understanding can impede instruction in something as simple as subtracting two-digit whole numbers (e.g., 53 - 26 =). In fact, a hugely important study published last year (also summarized and discussed here) by several University of Michigan researchers found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge has a big impact on how much their students learn over the course of a year—even at the first grade level. They also documented that disadvantaged students—particularly minority youngsters—are more likely to have teachers with lower levels of mathematical knowledge and understanding, a finding they call “shameful.”

Although the full breadth of this problem and its implications have been largely ignored in policy circles, that might change soon. Liping Ma and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, one of the U. Michigan researchers, are both serving on the new, high-profile National Mathematics Advisory Panel. But getting traction won't be easy: This is an uncomfortable topic for many people, including teachers, who sometimes feel it amounts to “teacher bashing.”* Let's be clear: It’s the system that should come under fire. Teachers are themselves the products of the same shallow elementary math instruction they pass on to their students, and deficiencies in their mathematical understanding seldom get addressed later on, either during their time in ed schools or after they start teaching. In contrast, Ma says that Chinese teachers get lots of opportunities to build their math knowledge over the course of their careers. The good news? Another study by Ball demonstrated that “teachers can learn math for elementary school teaching in the context of a single professional development program.”

Of course, that would require a system that works thoughtfully to nurture knowledge and cultivate capacity. Ironically, says The Wire, Marlo and his colleagues are much better at doing those things in the system they run!

* Ball and a colleague discussed some of the negative feedback they’ve received for even conducting such research (e.g., testing teachers for research purposes is inherently wrong because it “de-professionalizes” them, etc.) in a must-read article for American Educator, the excellent magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers, last year.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Virtual Schools=Mainstream Reform?

I just returned from Plano, TX, where I spent the past three days with virtual school teachers, researchers, and program managers at the North American Council for Online Learning Virtual School Symposium. Virtual schools take a variety of forms, from district- or state-led schools that are primarily or entirely supplemental—offering students the option of taking one or more courses to supplement their traditional school experience—to fully online "cyber" schools.

I returned to Washington convinced that the growth in K-12 virtual schooling is even more dramatic than our recent Chart You Can Trust on state virtual schools detailed. And, I learned that growth is not the only reason that we need to pay attention.

Most interesting was the subtext underlying both the formal presentations and my informal conversations. If you think that virtual schooling is just about learning online, you've missed the real potential impact. While not explicit, it is clear that the technology is only a means that offers an opportunity to start from scratch and re-think many traditional assumptions. The end goal is school reform. Two anecdotes:

• In separate conversations with representatives from two different state-based programs, I learned how state-led virtual programs are exposing wide gaps in expectations for learning within a state. These program managers explained how students that were at the top of their class in their local schools were overmatched in courses at the statewide virtual school. It's hard to imagine a more concrete (and sad) example of accountability than when the virtual school teacher has to explain to the student and his/her parents that their ace student is woefully under prepared.


• Former classroom teachers, now managing one state's program, talked about the "culture change" required to teach in that state's virtual school: "In the online world, what they [the teachers] do is more transparent. There is an expectation that you can and will be observed....We will evaluate you....There is a quantitative goal for student achievement." Likewise, in the same presentation, a detailed program for initial online teacher preparation, mentoring, and professional development was also in place.

Many people have compared the virtual school movement to the charter school movement at a similar stage. While I was not involved in the early charter school movement, I can see parallels: The majority of persons I met this week were education entrepreneurs; there are fully-online "cyber" charter schools; and competition for funding is an issue. One lesson that the more experienced virtual school leaders understand is the critical need at this early stage to rigorously protect quality so that the field is not defined by its bad apples. Even the most ardent proponents concede that virtual schooling is still the "wild, wild, West."

But, there are also key differences that could allow the virtual schools to reach a higher level of impact than charters. While reaching scale is still difficult, it is much more possible in the virtual environment—Florida Virtual School may already offer more students classes than any charter management organization. And, choice can consist of a mouse click rather than a new school in a new place (and, as noted above, the comparison is very evident). Finally, the people leading and teaching in many of these programs are public school classroom veterans. And many of the new institutions are actually state- or district-run. These entrepreneurs have found a niche within the system. They are the ones talking about culture change—not union foes or voucher proponents. Very interesting.

Election Miscellany

Yesterday turned out to be an even bigger day than lots of pundits expected, with Democrats picking up 28 seats for a majority in the House of Representatives and a good chance at a majority in the Senate, too, if two races still in the balance come down the way it looks like they're going to. Dems also picked up 6 governorships. (btw, Mike Antonnucci is funny in re: wrong election predictions) DCEdublog has results for the D.C. races I mentioned Monday. Edspresso's got a run-down of races around the country they felt were particularly relevant to education. Ed at NCLBlog proclaims the defeat of all three state TABOR initiatives (but cut it out with the midwest-mocking, already!). CNN's got results for all races here.

Andy and Alexander Russo say the implications for education aren't much to talk about. I agree: a George Miller-led Ed-Workforce committee isn't going to eviscerate NCLB. Apparently Edspresso's Ryan Boots didn't get the message, though.

And, Joe Williams wonders why we close schools on election day. In D.C., at least, we didn't--yesterday was a school day for DCPS students. But most D.C. polling places aren't located in schools. As far as Joe's question is concerned, my guess is that it probably has to do with patronage, but also concerns about student safety with lots of random adults in a school and just general logistical hassels.

UPDATE: Ed had more to say this afternoon about TABOR (Ezra Klein also discusses TABOR over at TAPPED) and other state initiatives, including a failed "65% solution" initiative in Colorado, which reminds me that my former colleague Alexander Wohl has an American Prospect piece on the stupidity of the whole "65 % solution" idea.

Get Out the Vote

Most of the people I know in D.C. are so preoccupied with who'll control the House and Senate following tomorrow's election, you wouldn't even know that we're also voting on several important D.C. government races tomorrow. That's partly an artifact of political class transience, and also of Democratic dominance in D.C. politics that means most of the major D.C. government races are already decided. (Adrian Fenty will be the next mayor.) But tomorrow D.C. voters have a chance to decide on three very important non-partisan offices that are still very much up in the air. Voters city-wide are voting on school board president, and voters in wards 5, 6, 7 & 8 are voting for school board members to represent their school board districts (wards 5 & 6 are on district, and wards 7 & 8 are another). These races are important because the D.C. school board has substantial power to impact education for children in D.C. And this year the race is particularly important because DCPS is at a critical juncture: with more than a quarter of the city's kids in charters, troublingly poor academic performance, an ambitious but slow-moving reform plan from Superintendent Janey, and incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty proclaiming his intention to take over the schools, the new school board is going to face some serious challenges and major decisions. So, if you live in D.C., take a second away from the national races to learn about the school board race and cast an informed vote tomorrow. I can't tell you who to vote for (like you'd listen to me anyway), but I will suggest you heed the advice of the Washington Post on this issue.

Review!

This week's Washington Post Magazine features their semi-annual Education Review. The cover story relates the experience of African American students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, who were denied an education for several years in the 1960s when the county closed all its public schools as an act of massive resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education. Important reminder of how little space and time there really is between today and a shameful history of de jure segregation that denied opportunities to generations of African Americans. On a positive note, Jay Mathews tells how Montgomery County, Maryland, is using all day kindergarten to help close achievement gaps for disadvantaged youngsters early.

William Styron, 1925 - 2006

The main character in Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity is constantly mulling over and revising a series of personal Top Ten lists, most related to music: "Greatest Songs to Appear on Side One, Track One," etc. One of the reasons I enjoyed the book was the discovery that I'm not the only person who has these internal conversations. My personal music lists are pretty basic, of the "Top Ten Desert Island Albums" type. The more involved lists run toward baseball and, especially, writing: Best writers, non-fiction (Michael Lewis), essays and criticism (Adam Gopnik), graphic novels (Alan Moore, obviously), observation of pop culture (Chuck Klosterman), and so on.

But the most extensively considered list has always been in the prime category of Novelist. Different authors have come on and off as I've gotten older and my tastes have changed, but there have always been two constants: all of the writers were alive, and William Styron was always somewhere on the list. I decided that until I read a better book than "Sophie's Choice," he wasn't moving. I haven't, and neither has he.

So the news of his death last week, while not surprising, was still unavoidably sad. Few 20th century writers wrote with his elegance and power, and fewer still--particularly American writers in Styron's mid-century cohort--chose to apply their gifts to the wrenching moral questions that defined the age. Styron didn't produce a lot--for years, articles would suggest that he was working on a final novel based on his experiences as a Marine in World War II, but one always had the sense that it would never come. Now it never will, but what he did give us was more--much more--than enough.