New Year's Update

On vacation until Friday, thus the light, blackberry-based posting. Stay tuned for exciting features such as gratuitous Ohio State boosterism and why Diane Ravitch is wrong about comic books.

Best of 2007 (Colleague Edition)

Continuing in the "Best of" spirit of the times, here's the list of 2007's best songs from Daria Hall, Assistant Director for K-12 Policy at the Education Trust. Daria knows substantially more about NCLB implementation than I do, a fact I note in sympathy as much as in admiration. Daria is also trusted source of new music recommendations, so--as with NCLB policy--similarity between this and previous posts is generally a function of my availing myself of her expertise and not the other way around.

Keep the Car Running- Arcade Fire
Fans- Kings of Leon
Imitosis- Andrew Bird
Impossible Germany- Wilco
Paper Planes- M.I.A.
All the Old Showstoppers- New Pornographers
Breakin’ Up- Rilo Kiley
Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)- Robert Plant and Allison Krauss
Nude- Radiohead
I Feel It All- Feist
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window- The Hold Steady (I’m Not There Soundtrack)
Stronger- Kanye West
Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car- Iron & Wine
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
Rehab- Amy Winehouse

The Testing Quandary

ES Co-Director Tom Toch answers a tough test question posed by the NYT's Freakonomics blog:

Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more? Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?

Other respondents include Fair Test's Monty Neill and Gaston Caperton, the President of the College Board (for some reason, he really likes the SAT...). Read all of the responses here.

It's (Not) So Easy

The Post ran a useful article a few days ago ("Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick For Schools") about one of the more interesting challenges of NCLB reauthorization and education policy generally: expanding the scope of educational accountability beyond standardized test scores in reading and math to include many other important things--mastery of other subjects, more generalized abilities like critical thinking and analytic reasoning, "soft" skills like leadership and teamwork, graduation and success in college and the workforce, etc. etc. But it leaves the central question answered: if nearly everyone thinks this is a good idea, why aren't we doing it already ?

Mostly, I think, because this imperative bumps up against other imperatives, and nobody has figured how to adequately reconcile their inherent conflicts.

NCLB was designd to make the assessment of schools objective, universal, and unavoidable. In other words, all schools within a state are assessed according to the same standards and in the same way. There are very good reasons to put a premium on this. Without objectivity and universality, it's a short road back to the default judgment that most schools render upon themselves: "We're doing the best we can, given the students we have." Given how badly some schools and students are failing, that's just not good enough.

The way that NCLB achieves objectivity and universality, however, has significant shortcomings. It's a mechanistic process, based on rules intead of human judgment. The problem is that it's really hard to developing rules that (A) accurately assess something as complicated as a school and (B) people can understand.

For example, here's a by-no-means-exhaustive list of some of the important categories of information we might want to gather about a school and its students, along with the number of possible values for each:

Student Race/Ethnicity: 5 (White, Blank, Hispanic, Asian, Indian)
Student Gender: 2 (Male, Female)
Student LEP status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Disability status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Economic status: 2 (Low-income, Not Low-Income)
Student Gifted status: 2 (Yes, No)
Subjects: 5 (Math, Reading/LA, Social Studies, Science, Art/Music)
Proficiency Status: 4 (Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced)
Value-Added Growth: 3 (Below Expected, Expected, Above Expected)
Attainment (i.e. graduation, progression to next year in school): 2 (Yes, No)
Grades: 4 (Typical grade configuration)
Timeframe: 4 (Now, Short-Term, Medium-Term, Long-Term)

Keep in mind that this is, in many ways, a very conservative estimate of the number of possible variables. There are more than five significant racial/ethnic groups, more than five important academic subjects, more than four potential levels of academic proficiency or value-added growth to consider, far more than one category of disability, gifted status, etc. Heck, you could even argue about gender.

But even this highly simplified model produces 307,200 possible outcomes. Each of them tells us something different, and as such could theoretically merit a different response. This throws the decisions of NCLB's authors into a fairly sympathetic light. They knew that a 307,200-element accountability system wouldn’t fly, so they started narrowing things down.: Two subjects and five racial/ethnic categories. One category each for LEP, special ed, and economic status, but no combinations—in other words, we measure the performance of white children and low-income children, but not white low-income children. Gender and gifted status are out. One proficiency level, no value-added. Only seven of 12 grades, and multiple grades can be combined. Include one growth measure (safe harbor), but make it either/or so you don’t create extra variables. Each of the 16 distinct outcomes (two subjects X eight student categories, although very few schools will have all eight) has equal and overriding status as an indicator of school success. Miss one, miss all, it doesn’t matter—your identification as not making AYP is the same. Then, having rolled the entirety of a school’s success into the single binary AYP variable, put it on a four-level time scale: 0-1 years in a row, 2-3, 4-5, 6 or more. Each level corresponds to a collection of mandated and optional responses—None, In Need of Improvement, Corrective Action, Alternative Governance.

Even this relatively small level of complexity seems barely manageable. The testing industry is popping rivets trying to handle two academic subjects in seven grades. State Department of Educations struggle, some mightily, to gather all the required data and turn school ratings around on time. There are constant complaints about the expense and bureaucracy of compliance and time lost to preparing for and taking one test in two subjects per year.

And even with all the compromises and simplifications, most people still don't know how the NCLB system actually works. That diminishes the capacity of the law to act as a catalyst for change, since educators and policymakers can't constructively respond to signals they don't understand.

The article quotes Ed Trust's Amy Wilkins saying maybe this is okay: "Proponents of multiple measures say it will give a richer, fuller view of a school, but this isn't about a rich view of a school. It's about failures in fundamental gate-keeping subject areas." That view reflects Title I's origins in and continued focus on compensatory education for low-income children, and I agree this needs to remain the first priority. But like it or not, NCLB has come to be about all students and all schools, and that demands a richer view on some inescapable level.

Adding more information to the existing rules-based system will consume even more scarce resources and create even more hard-to-manage complexity. Not adding more information will leave us with an accountability system that reflects only a fraction of what we want for schools. That argues for a non-rules-based approach, one that relies more heavily on human judgment, since people are much better at making sense of vast amounts of information from disparate sources than rules. But that, in turn, threatens universality and objectivity. Perhaps one could mitigate this problem by aggregating many judgments through more robust market-focused systems, but then we're opening up a whole new can of worms...

Anyway, it's tricky. Anyone who thinks the shortcomings of the existing system are a result of obvious choices not made should think again.

Best of 2007 (Wife Edition)

In addition to being smart, beautiful, and possessing the most spouse-friendly hobby imaginable (cooking), my wife Maureen also has fine taste in music. She looks at blogging with suspicion, particularly having read this and last year's special music festival posts and noting that at least of half of the insightful critical opinions and observations, such as they are, were hers, not mine. I tried citing the timed-honored principle of spousal communal ownership of intellectual property, but she didn't buy it. So, here's Maureen's iPod "Best of 2007" playlist:

Arcade Fire, "(Antichrist Television Blues)"
The National, "Apartment Story"
Radiohead, "Bodysnatchers"
LCD Soundsystem, "North American Scum"
Band of Horses, "Is There A Ghost"
Wilco, "Impossible Germany"
Bloc Party, "Hunting for Witches"
Spoon, "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"
The White Stripes, "Icky Thump"
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, "The Sons of Cain"
Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining"
Iron & Wine, "Boy With a Coin"
The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour"
Stars, "Take Me to the Riot"
The Apples in Stereo, "Can You Feel It?"
White Rabbits, "While We Go Dancing"
Andrew Bird, "Fiery Crash"
Buffalo Tom, "You'll Never Catch Him"

I might have gone with different selections in some cases-- "Woman King " or "Jezebel" for the Iron & Wine song, for example -- but overall this is a fine way to spend 90 minutes driving to your parent's house for the holidays.

"Best of" lists are often a good way to identify your critical / genre weak spots; I bought The Hold Steady's "Boys and Girls in America" a year ago solely because it was on top of a lot of Ten Best lists from respectable sources. On first listen I was like "Not bad," on second, "Pretty good," on fifth, "Kind of great!" and so on and so forth. By the time I saw them at the 9:30 club last month I was three/fourths convinced they're authentic American geniuses; it was certainly one of the ten best concerts I've ever seen.

Fire This Time

Last week the Post reported the following:

A technology manager for District schools who stuck schoolchildren with his tabs for thousands of dollars worth of lavish restaurant meals, nightclub jaunts and a visit to a strip club was charged yesterday with filing fraudulent expense reimbursement requests.

The story ran in the Metro section, below the fold. That's because municipal corruption in DC is like lake effect snow in Cleveland--the fact of it isn't news, only the magnitude. Compared to the property tax office, teachers union, and charter school board officials who stole hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, this guy is the equivalent of a small flurry.

I note this in light of the ongoing efforts of DC mayor Adrien Fenty and schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to get legislation through the City Council that would allow Rhee to fire central office employees "without cause," which in gov-speak means "if she thinks they're doing a bad job." Fenty and Rhee are getting a fair amount of pushback from the council and the civil service and teachers unions, but it looks like the plan will go through.

To be clear, even the current sclerotic civil service system can manage to fire convicted felons. Similarly, "Work hard or I'm going to fire your a--" is not, in and of itself, a comprehensive management strategy. It's equally important to identify and support high-performing--or even normal-performing--employees, to create a constructive, collaborative work environment that attracts talent.

That said, incompetence and corruption are two sides of the same coin, flowing from a generalized organizational culture of indifference--or even opposition--to things like excellence, accountability, and service to the public. That's what Fenty and Rhee are after, I think, and given the catastrophic failure of the system they're trying to change, they deserve a great deal of latitude in how they try to get there.

"School Choice on Steroids"

NPR’s Larry Abramson takes a trip to Mapleton school district outside of Denver, Colorado, where they are “trying to offer school choice on steroids.” But (unlike in baseball) this isn’t magic. Test scores are still low, and the idea of school choice hasn’t fully permeated the mindset of students and parents in Mapleton.

Despite offering everything from a hands-on, project-based school modeled after New Tech High in Napa, California to an International Baccalaureate school complete with uniforms, many parents still base their choice decisions on convenience. Many of the school improvements promised by choice theorists depend on parents choosing schools with the best academics. But reality shows that parents and students make decisions based on a host of other factors—where their friends go, how close the school is to home or work, and some very important, if not academic, criteria, like school safety.

The research and advocacy around school choice often focuses on building the supply of schools and reducing barriers to choice for parents and students, but not much has focused on what is needed to build a knowledgeable consumer base. There is a bit of a “build it and they will come” attitude about school choice reform. But without a culture of informed choice, school choice reforms might either see little to no impact, or might see choice (somewhat like the higher education market) shifting priorities to things like sports or fancy facilities and away from the quality of teaching and learning in schools.

Listen to the segment here. And if you want more NPR segments on school choice, check out these two pieces—one on Green Dot Public Schools’ takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles, and the other profiling Green Dot’s founder, Steve Barr.

The Post Fails Math

One of the ways you know a particular story has really embedded itself in the public consciousness is when it becomes a genre. As in the "People who think public education should teach X blame NCLB for reduced attention, resources, etc. for X" story, of which roughly 632,000 have been published in major media outlets in the last five years. Today's version in the Post focuses on music education, and contains a significant error. It says:

Despite research showing that students who study music have better attendance, achievement and lifetime earnings, music classes are struggling to survive. Supporters of such classes place some of the blame on the federal No Child Left Behind law....As instructional time in math, language arts and other subjects students must achieve proficiency in has risen, time devoted to other subjects has declined. Time spent on arts and music in 2007 is about half what it was before No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, according to a report recently released by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy.

The sentence I've italicized above is not even close to being right.

You can read the Center on Education Policy report referred to in the article here. It only shows detailed data for changes in instructional time for elementary schools. According to the report, the districts surveyed devoted 110 minutes per week to art and music in 2007. Districts that reduced time for art music reported an average reduction of 57 minutes. 110 minutes is not "about half" of 167 minutes, it's 65.8%, a hair below two-thirds.

Much more importantly, only 16 percent of districts reported reducing time for art and music at all.

Needless to say, this is a hugely important distinction. The plain meaning of the sentence printed in the Post is that NCLB has caused a 50% reduction in the total time spent teaching art and music. The report suggests that the actual number is closer to five percent (.34 X .16). In other words, the story is wrong by as much as an order of magnitude.

This seems like a classic symptom of the objectivity / accuracy value imbalance in the media -- newspapers will go to great lengths to make sure that a political reporter's spouse's friend's cousin's college roomate didn't buy lemonade from a stand in front of the candidate's neighbor's house, yet they make math mistakes like this all the time.

A More Selective Pool of Teachers

ETS released a new research report on teacher quality last week showing that the teacher pool seems to be improving, at least on academic measures. The researchers compared the 1994-1997 and 2002-2005 Praxis test takers and found that the SAT scores and GPAs of teacher candidates have increased from one cohort to the next. Why? They credit a combination of policies, both federal and state, including alternative pathways to teaching, higher standards (and standards in general) for academic qualifications, and tougher admissions and licensing requirements. The research suggests that it's a more selective process now–minimum passing scores have been raised and, as a result, Praxis passing rates are down. And the proportion of test takers with prior teaching experience has risen, suggesting a change in the traditional undergraduate education degree route to teaching.

Less rosy are the results for elementary, special education and physical education candidates. Except for special education, where there appears to be some decline, these teacher candidates have better grades and scores too. But they still lag far behind their subject-matter-certified peers for secondary education. And the typical teacher, demographically, isn't much different than a decade ago. There are still disproportionately low numbers of African American and Latino teacher candidates (with the K-12 school population now less than 60 percent white, it's a little startling to still see the teacher pool hovering near 90 percent white). And the male-female ratio hasn't budged at all- still holding at only a quarter male).

The research can't say anything about the classroom effectiveness of these teachers. That's a whole other can of worms. But the direction overall- toward a more selective and perhaps respected pool of teachers- seems positive. The next question for researchers, then, is whether there is some state or federal policy that matters most for this change, or if it is some strange combination of policies that make the difference for teacher quality.

Clemens, Cheater

Since today seems to be non-education-related blog post day, let's just roll with that a little longer and discuss the fact that Roger Clemens apparently began using steroids in 1998.

If true, Clemens deserves all the scorn currently being heaped on Barry Bonds. They both did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time in their careers, for exactly the same reason, with exactly the same result. The prima facie evidence of steroid abuse, in terms of freakishly prolonged greatness, was just as strong. Instead of natural decline in their mid-to-late 30s, each began to rack up additional MVPs and Cy Youngs. Instead of merely being the best position player and pitcher of their generation, they cheated their way into becoming among the greats of all time. Clemens' 354 career wins is, in the context of the modern five man rotation, nearly as impressive as Bonds' all-time homerun record. If Clemens goes to the Hall of Fame and Bonds doesn't, that's racism pure and simple. And Dan Duquette, the Boston Red Sox general manager who infamously said that Clemens was in the "“twilight of his career" before letting him go to the Blue Jays, is owed a lot of apologies right about now.

NCLB Face-Off

The CATO Institute’s Andrew Coulson and I face-off at the Reason Foundation’s Reason Roundtable over whether NCLB should be scrapped or mended.

Coulson argues that NCLB is a federal intrusion on states’ rights and blocks the way for more meaningful, market-based education reforms. I argue that NCLB is critical to getting the kind of information on school performance we need in a market-based system, and that it can help build the supply of quality schools—a first step to any true, equitable school choice market.

Check it out here, and better yet, weigh in with your own comments.

Wyclef for President

I went to the annual RIAA holiday party last night at Ibiza, headlined by Wyclef Jean. Whatever Wyclef gets paid for shows like these, he's worth it, particularly when the job is to engage a crowd full of rythmically challenged Hill staffers and DC types. At one point he invited all the women in the audience to come on stage and dance, and then just let them stay there for the rest of the show. Why don't all concerts work this way?

Getting to the show took me through the new New York Avenue Metro stop and involved walking past the new headquarters of the ATF. Except its not really the ATF, it's the ATFE, as in "Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives." Apparently they added the "E" during the whole Homeland Security reorganization, but decided to stick with that magical ATF brand so as not to confuse people. The building itself was obviously constructed with an acute awarness of the "E" problem; the actual structure is set back a good 50 yards from the street behind large barriers semi-concealed by landscaping etc. One suspects this the future of governmental architecture in the nation's capital, which is understandable but also a shame.

The Laws of Men

In the past few months I've seen numerous citations of Campbell's Law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Given current debates about high-stakes testing, NCLB, higher ed accountability, etc. the relevance to education policy is pretty obvious. David Berliner wrote a whole book flowing from this premise.

Campbell was a social scientist who, in declaring an eponymous, universal statute of sorts, joined a long tradition. The trick is to notice some interesting and fundamental relationship between important things, and explain it in a way that's memorable and easy to understand. Sometimes the observation is explicitly framed as a law, e.g. Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

In other cases the observation is so inextricably tied with the observer that the effect is roughly the same, as with Acton on power and corruption or Santayana on remembrance and repitition of history. Getting your name attached to one these things is one road to minor immortality, albeit a particularly reductive kind.

The form is usually pretty similar: As X, Y. Or in slightly different form: As X, not Y. The historical examples people are trying to emulate, I suspect, are the ageless mathematicians and philosophers--Pythagoras, Archimedes, et al. Newton seemed to exlain the entire universe in three short laws of motion. That's why these laws are so popular. The world is a complicated place, more so all the time, and people are always hungry to accumulate a set of inviolable principles with which to make sense of things.

But here's the thing: just because someone makes an observation and calls it a law doesn't mean it's always true. I've heard people refer to Campbell's Law as if it were etched into the marble facade of the Supreme Court of Social Science, right up there with "correlation doesn't imply causation." It's not, nor are all the rest. Lots of people become powerful while avoiding corruption and make new history while remaining ignorant of the old. Heck, even Newton was eventually overtaken by quantum physics.

It'd be comforting if we could ascertain the world with nothing more than a few nostrums and easily remembered laws, but that's not the world we live in.

In Defense of College Rankings

I've spent a fair amount of time over the last year having various conversations and arguments about college rankings, and one of the problems with the discussion is a tendency to intermingle critiques of rankings per se and critiques of specific rankings, e.g. those produced by U.S. News. For example, people often say things like "Rankings are reductive, overly-simplistic and create perverse incentives for colleges to engage in an arms race for money, status, and student." While the first critiques--reductiveness and over-simplification--apply to all rankings, the perversity of the incentives is wholly a function of what you happen to base your rankings on. If you rank colleges based on good measures, then the incentives could be constructive.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with universities trying to climb the rankings ladder if the ladder leads to the right place. An 2006 Education Sector report explaining how to build such a construct is here.

As a rule, generalized anti-rankings arguments are a lot weaker than those levelled at specific rankings like U.S. News, because the arguments tend to stem from a broader aversion to accountability, competition, and public scrutiny. To read more on this topic, see this paper, "In Defense of College Rankings," which I presented last month at the Association for the Study of Higher Education annual conference.

Also, for a lively ongoing discussion of college rankings, check out Morse Code, a blog written by Bob Morse, the U.S. News rankings guru. Even though U.S. News has an obvious interest in this debate, the blog is actually quite thoughtful and non-propagandizing.

Winerip on Poverty, Etc.

Micheal Winerip covers a new ETS report in the Times today, exploring the relationship between out-of-school factors like single parenthood, TV watching, reading at home, etc. and student achievement. The report--which I have no quarrel with, Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham was a reviewer--finds, to the surprise of no one, that these things make a difference, in the way that one would expect they would.

Therefore, what?

Because this is the question that matters. Those of us who work on education policy for a living have endured listened to a seemingly endless series of arguments around these issues in recent years, where one side says "of course schools are important" and the other side says "of course poverty (or whatever other non-school issue interests them) is important," as if these are debatable questions. So let's state, unequivocally and for the record, that educational outcomes are significantly influenced by things that happen both in school and out of school. Anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot, and anyone who implies that someone else believes otherwise is arguing in bad faith.

Therefore, what?

If you're not willing to answer this question concretely, you really doesn't deserve a seat at the table. Winerip is clearly not up to the challenge. He says "What’s interesting about the report...is how much we know, how often government policy and parental behavior does not reflect that knowledge, and how stacked the odds are against so many children." This--"reflects"--is typical; variants include "recognizes," "acknowledges," "takes into account," etc.

But what would government policy that "reflects" knowledge of the ETS report look like? Winerip appears to have no interest in answering this question, and that makes the statement itself essentially meaningless, since it's clearly written in the context of a policy debate.

NCLB, by contrast, reflects an identifiable perspective and set of resulting policy conclusions that goes something like this: Poverty (I'll use this as a proxy for all outside factors, since it's the issue that comes up the most) matters, but estimates of how much it matters are often overstated, because they don't fully account for two things:

1) The extent to which impoverished students get fewer educational resources like money, highly effective teachers, challenging curricula, etc. This underestimation is not function of dishonest or sloppy research, it's a function of the fact many of these things are hard to fully quantify.

2) The extent to which overall educational quality is sub-optimal, a problem that disproportionately affects low-income, low-achieving students, since they're more sensitive than higher-income, higher-achieving students to differences in educational quality even if those differences are evenly distributed (which of course they're not).

NCLB supporters believe, therefore, that poverty-based barriers to achievement are surmountable, provided that we (A) give poor students more educational resources instead of less, and (B) define "surmountable" in terms of fixed goals, not relative performance. In other words, nobody believes (Richard Rothstein's frequent assertions to the contrary) that schools can, by themselves, make the achievement of poor children indistinguishable from non-poor children, in the sense that they would be equal in all ways. Rather, people believe schools, properly resourced and run, can do enough to help poor children learn essential knowledge and skills. Therefore, it's reasonable to hold schools accountable for that goal. Ergo, NCLB.

The logic is certainly debatable--in the sense that reasonable people can debate it in good faith--and the supporting data is far from conclusive. But it's backed up by significant real-world evidence of the efficacy of schools in general and of some high-poverty schools in particular. And the policy implications are right there on the table, which is what matters most in the end.

On the other hand, Winerip and those like him who have devoted years of their lives to mounting counter-arguments against the current accountability regime are unified in their resolute unwillingness to explain what actual policy conclusions we are meant to draw from their ideas. Again I ask: If not this, what? The NEA and AFT have at least produced some fairly detailed outlines of principles for a different federal law. But when God and the devil are in the details, that's not good enough.

While NCLB in totality is lengthy, the parts that generate most of the controversy are actually pretty short and written in plain English. If you don't like them, fine--serious people can disagree. But if you're not willing to say how they should be different and take responsibility for that position, then you're not, in this debate, a serious person.

Update: Side Effects May Vary, which seems to come at these issues from a libertarian / voucher perspective, complains that post above "seems to imply that there is simply no solution that does not involve the state." So let me clarify: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if you don't like the current law, be specific about what you want instead. The author says children are "languishing in a cruel trap guarded jealously by social planners like Carey and his ilk who venerate the contraption while condemning those of us who wish to extricate their unwilling subjects." Sure, okay. "Extricate"? What does that mean? Universal vouchers? I can't tell. Enlighten us.

Race and IQ

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece forays into the IQ-race debate most recently scandalized by the declaration by James Watson, co-winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, that Watson is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because of Africans’ general lack of intelligence. Gladwell’s article reviews a new book by James Flynn that shows Watson’s comments are almost certainly wrong.

Gladwell starts with a discussion of the Flynn effect, which has documented a steady but gradual rise in IQ scores over time. In order to compensate for the observed 3-point rise every decade, the main measurement instrument, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, has been updated four times to ensure that a score of 100 still equals the absolute average of peers. Without a process called “norming,” the average rises over time. And a score of 70 on the fourth version of the WISC would be much higher on the original version. This matters especially when considering arbitrary cutoff scores for admission to special education or gifted programs. The article cites a study on the 1991 introduction of the WISC III that found that the revision doubled the number of American children labeled mentally retarded if all states followed strict IQ score cutoffs and adopted the new test.

Flynn has also compiled a host of studies showing the effects of culture on IQ. Studies of mixed marriages offer Gladwell a compelling point,

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father.

He also talks about one popular study that looked at births by American GI fathers and German mothers after WWII. African-American GIs sired children who scored almost identically to those of Caucasian fathers.

In a recent Manhattan Institute debate between Flynn and Charles Murray, author the The Bell Curve, Flynn pointed out that black-white IQ score gaps expand as children age. As infants, they score almost identically; the margin increases to 4.5 points by age 4, and then an additional .6 of a point every year until age 24. Murray may ascribe this widening gap as manifestation that genes matter more in the long run, but a more credible argument posits that cultural differences and the availability of stimulating cognitive environments make the difference.

Evidence supports this latter hypothesis. Flynn began dissecting the “model minority” hypothesis for Asian-Americans—that they were naturally smarter and thus became successful—by looking at data from a widely circulated 1975 study. It turned out that research relied on an intelligence test that hadn’t been updated in 20 years, meaning they were taking an easier version and biasing their scores upward. Flynn actually found they scored lower and achieved success despite the disparity. Even more interesting, their children, apparently absorbing a much more enriching childhood, scored 3% higher than average, reversing the prior numbers. This means that effort and the availability of enriching educational opportunities dictate future success. More importantly, as opposed to IQ, these are things educational policymakers can actually address.

The last point to glean from this topic is on the subject of immigration. In the 1920s and 30s, immigrants from Southern Italy scored more than one standard deviation below Americans and Western Europeans on IQ tests. Their scores, in the 70s and 80s, were comparable to those of blacks and Hispanics and fueled discussion about supposed inferiority of Italian genetics. Their scores have risen, and they are no longer the source of isolationist fervor, but maybe the debates of today should be injected with the lessons of the past.

--Guestblogger Chad Aldeman

Undeserved Publicity for Harvard

The Wall Street Journal is flashing the headline "Harvard Cuts Undergrad Prices" at the top of its Web site at the moment, along with an article that begins:

Harvard University sweetened its financial aid for middle class and upper middle-class families, responding to criticism that elite colleges have become unaffordable for ordinary Americans.

That's almost right, except the correct word would be unaccessible not unaffordable. It's good that an unimaginably wealthy institution like Harvard is only going to be charging rich people full freight. But that doesn't mean all that much when your student body is made up primarily of rich people. In the University's prepared statement, President Faust says "This is a huge investment for Harvard." Is it? Compared to what? How much does this increase the university's annual need-based aid expenditures? Will it increase the percentage of student eligible for such aid, and if so by how much? How much more aid will students receive, in percentage terms, compared to what they're getting now?

Harvard's statement concludes by noting that "With the new initiative fully in place this coming year, more than 90 percent of American families will be eligible to benefit from Harvard's exceptionally generous financial aid." I'm sure that's true, but it's also essentially meaningless, since only a tiny minority of that 90 percent attend high schools like these, identified just last week by the WSJ as those that offer the best odds of getting graduates into school like Harvard, often in exchange for tuition in excess of $25,000 per year.

Harvard has been getting a ton of great publicity over the last five years by cannily staying one step ahead of the curve in announcing new programs to cut tuition for it's small number of low- and middle-income students. But it until it actually does something to admit more of those students--not just help them once they arrive--it won't deserve headlines like these.

UPDATE: I see walking into work this morning that this is making the front page of all the big newspapers. Sigh. Some have reported, per above, the actual cost of the change, $22 million. That is (A) less than 0.4% (four-tenths of one percent) of what Harvard earned on its endowment last year, and (B) a small price to pay for this kind of publicity.

According to InsideHigherEd, "because Harvard officials said that they hoped the plan would attract new, less wealthy applicants, the share of undergraduates eligible could grow over time." Similarly, the New York Times reports that "Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, William R. Fitzsimmons, said [previous changes targeted to families earning less than $60,000 per year] had increased the number of low-income students by 33 percent in three years."

Both of these statements are premised on the idea that the economic makeup of Harvard's student body is essentially a function of the economic makeup of the student who apply. That's nonsense. Harvard, like all selective colleges, decides who to admit. It rejects 90% of applicants, so it could easily put together a freshman class of smart, well-qualified students who better represent the economic diversity of the nation if wanted to. It just doesn't want to, because a lot of the admissions spots are reserved for athletes, legacies, children of the rich, famous, and powerful, and students who come through the quasi-aristocracy of east coast private schools.

The makeup of the overall applicant pool, moreover, isn't outside of the university's control. What if Harvard took $10 million and used it to create an office of people who'se only job was to identify and recruit the best and brightest low- and moderate-income students from across the nation, with a specific goal of substantially increasing the number of slots for such students and thus decreasing the number set aside for the children of wealthy donors? THAT would be front-page news.

Financial Aid and a Get Away Car

"Two college students say the high cost of tuition led them to rob a bank." That's a new one.

Yes, the high cost of tuition, difficulty finding financial aid, and stress over taking out loans is enough to break anyone, but robbing a bank just isn't the answer. Of course, they might qualify for some free college classes in prison...

Exposing the Teachers Unions' Corporatist Pro-NCLB Agenda

The new issue of Phi Delta Kappan is well worth reading, and not just because it reprints an article I wrote about high-performing community colleges early this year. There's also a priceless debate (not online, unfortunately) between Susan O'Hanian, self-styled "educational activist," and Joel Packer, head lobbyist for the NEA, wherein O'Hanian--along with University of Alabama professor Philips Kovacs--accuses the NEA of selling its members down the river by not being anti-NCLB enough. Apparently, this is because the union is just a lapdog for its corporate masters.

No, really.

Packer reaffirms that the NEA opposes NCLB and wants to gut its core accountability provisions, but also notes that NCLB is, in fact, just the name given to the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which contains a lot of worthwhile programs and also provides billions of dollars in funding to help educate poor children. So just standing on the fringe yelling for NCLB to be "dismantled," as O'Hanian does here, doesn't do much good; groups like the NEA are much more effective when they engage in the political and legislative processes in a substantive way. That involves a certain level of moderation and willingness to talk and compromise with those who disagree with you--although you'd hardly know it from the NEA's current scorched-earth campaign on the Hill, which includes demanding that Democrats sign an anti-NCLB loyalty oath, and their California affiliate running ads attacking George Miller and Nancy Pelosi.

But if you think critiquing Speaker Pelosi from the left represents the extremes of political discourse, you clearly haven't read this month's Kappan. O'Hanian and Kovacs respond by grasping for the moral legacies of, variously, Woody Guthrie, Rosa Parks, women's suffrage, abolitionists, Galileo, and Malcom X while offering a combination of anecdote, childish sentiment and gratuitous insult, such as:

We call on union leaders, members of Congress, and their Business Roundtable allies to do something radical: we ask them to listen the highly qualified teachers who work with children every day.

and

the NEA leadership's decision to side with corporate reformers rather than with the teachers who pay their salaries--but certainly not their dinner bills--says a great deal about the priorities of the organization.

Packer responds with remarkable restraint, reiterating the NEA's anti-NCLB talking points before concluding that "we will not apologize for our decision to step up to the plate and actually do the hard and painstaking work work of directly influencing the policy makers who will write the next version of ESEA."

This type of exchange actually has some value beyond entertainment purposes. First, because the fact that Kappan--the second-largest education publication in the nation by circulation, after Educational Leadership--chose to print it suggests that there are a substantial number of people who actually think this way. You see it sometimes in the more leftish/academic blogs as well. Second, because, like the writings of those who believe the principal failure of the Bush administration has been insufficient war-mongering and imperialist zeal, it serves to establish boundaries of seriousness in the NCLB debate. That's useful, if nothing else.

Another Way to Give Green This Holiday

You probably know about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative, aimed at getting his MIT-created super-sturdy, super-cheap, super-cool (happy green kid-friendly design, no glare in the sun, impenetrable by water or dust) XO computer design to the world's poorest children (w/WiFi). Well, some people and some companies don't like this idea.

I get that it might not work technically (can't say, I'm not that fluent in computers). But I don't get the "give them food instead" critique. Sure, they need food. They need a lot of things, mostly contingent on systemic change that no bag of rice will change either. And you know the saying, give a fish... eat for a day, teach to fish...lifetime. Maybe it's not a good analogy- fishing (although Eduwonk might like it). And we can't know if the XO computer will be well-received, or a tool that results in any sustainable change. But I think these kids and families should get that chance and that experience. So if it works- if those computers and WiFi really get to those kids and creates opportunity and not some unfortunate waste (computers arriving but not WiFi, or vice versa), it seems like an investment that developing countries should at least be able to consider.

BTW, until Dec 30th, for $200 you can buy one of these XO computers, as they're called, for your own kid or for any other kid you know or for yourself I guess, and OLPC will send another one to a child in a developing nation. See OLPC's give one, get one campaign here.

Is There a College Tuition Bubble?

Andrew Gillin at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity released an interesting paper this week exploring the parallels between the housing bubble and ever-rising college tuition.

The comparison is imperfect, because the higher education market lacks the crucial leavening ingredient of naked greed--you can't get rich quick by speculating on a college education, since you can't sell your ownership of the asset. And while student loans are often securitized, government guarantees against default reduce the dynamic of banks and rating agencies conspiring to develop and sell exotic, over-valued financial instruments with a hidden risk of collapse.

But, as Gillin explains, there are a number of similarities. As with the (recent) mortgage market, higher education lenders have little incentive to enforce lending standards, since the government pays off on loans that go bad. Student loan interest rates, like mortgages, also enjoy substantial public subsidies. As a result, demand increases and more people want to buy higher education than otherwise would.

This, of course, is precisely the point, and there's a powerful societal and moral argument for expanding access to higher education. But it has consequences that ultimately play out in the form of inflated tuition, largely because higher education doesn't behave like a normal market.

When the government subsidizes a normal market, the end result is greater production and consumption with both the producer and consumer getting some of the government money. But that depends on a reasonably elastic supply--the ability and willingness of the producer to ramp up production to meet increased, subsidy-driven demand.

Higher education doesn't work that way--the sector is substantially unable and unwilling to increase supply, particularly in the short term. Unable because there are major regulatory and cost barriers to entry--building a new college or university is massively expensive and time-consuming, and involves jumping through a lengthy, hoop-laden accreditation process. Unwilling because the vast majority of higher education institutions aren't profit-maximizing institutions--they're prestige maximizers. Their response to increased demand is to keep production (enrollment) constant, thus improving their admissions selectivity and the "caliber" of student they educate and as a result becoming a more elite institution. Meanwhile, the lack of objective information about quality makes price and quality synonmous, so institutions have to raise prices in order to compete.

So in the end, all the subsidies ultimatlely go to the institutions in the form of increased prices, and the consumer is no better off than when he or she started. Consumers who lack subsidies, meanwhile (mostly middle-income students who don't qualify for need-based financial aid) are worse off. So political pressure mounts to increase subsidies through aid, interest rate reductions, etc. in order to amelioriate spiralling prices, and the whole cycle repeats itself.

This can't go on forever, because there's a limit to how much money the government can or will spend to subsidize higher education. In the meantime, the negative impact of constantly increasing higher education costs are being hidden in part by an overly-simplistic conception of what higher education financial aid is for.

The goal of aid is nearly always framed as access, as in "all students deserve an opportunity to go to college." The problem (only in the sense of an already hard-won success) is that the large majority (nearly 80%) of high school graduates are in fact going to college, a number that has changed little even as costs have risen, a number which is (more or less by definition) an understatement of the percent of people who should go to college who do.

The real issues of concern relating to increasing college prices are threefold:

1) Where students go to college
2) Whether they graduate
3) What happens to them once they leave

Rising prices push non-wealthy students out of presitigous, expensive four-year colleges into cheaper, less-prestigous four-year colleges, and out of the four-year sector into the two-year sector. They also reduce the chances that people who begin college will graduate, because they force students to work nearly full-time (a major risk factor for dropping out) and increase the cost in the cost/benefit equation of staying in school. Finally, they force more borrowing, which narrows post-graduation (or non-graduation) career choices, increases the risk of costly loan default, and simply takes money out of the pocket of people who need it more than their alma mater.

A crucial element of solving the college cost problem lies with policymakers recognizing the link between rising costs and the lack of data about quality, and talking about the issue in more than just simple access terms.

Great idea! But haven't we heard this before?

Christina Samuels at EdWeek turns in another great piece on special education, this time focusing on the over-representation of minority students in special education, particularly in disabilities that require the most subjective assessments. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission will be looking into the issue over the next year and hopefully issue some solid recommendations to address the problem.

Of course, the National Academies looked into this back in 2002 and recommended that teachers be better trained to identify students with disabilities, that resources should be focused on early intervention, and that preschool could provide needed help and support for low-income students before they enter school. I’m not sure what else the Civil Rights Commission will come up with, except maybe some ideas on how to make sure these steps are actually taken.

Our take on this here.

Speaking as Someone...

...who used to regularly take the Greyhound bus from Binghamton to Schenectady back in college, I can tell you that this is just about right.

Pre-K Nearly Everyday

Preschool policy is constantly hitting the headlines these days, this time in NJ. Check out Education Sector's policy course curriculum unit on pre-K policy, great for education and public policy students and anyone wanting to learn about the key issues in the pre-k debates. And if you tell us what you think, you could win a $40 Border's gift card. Good timing for the holidays.

Muddying the Waters

In a column about Blaine Amendments and the efforts of a former Liberty University official to open religiously-oriented charter schools in New York City, George Will writes:

Now he wants to create a charter school -- a public school enjoying considerable autonomy from, among other burdens, teachers unions. It would be affiliated with his New Horizon Church.

This kind of reflexive anti-teachers union commentary make things more difficult for everyone.

It's true that there are places, like Los Angeles and Detroit, where teachers unions are actively on the wrong side of the charter school issue. But how do you write about charters, unions, and New York City without noting that the United Federation of Teachers has opened its own charter school?

Moreover, it's simply not the case that a desire to evade dealing with unions is the principal force, or even a significant factor, driving people to open charter schools. A lot of the "burdens" they're trying avoid come from adminisration, not teachers. Mostly they're just really motivated to create and run a public school, because they see it as a way to make the world a better place.

But that depth of understanding is beyond George Will, who never misses an opportunity to take a shot at labor. I've been free with criticism of unions on this blog and elsewhere, but there's a big difference between being a union critic and a union opponent. This kind of rhetoric just politicizes and polarizes the issue, which in turn makes it harder to create and sustain charter schools--an agenda Will supports.

Christina Hoff Sommers: New Success for Girls Clearly a Horrible National Crisis

Got an email from AEI today which begins as follows:

The New York Times reported yesterday that girls swept the team and individual honors for the prestigious Siemens Competition in Math, Science, and Technology. Two 17-year-old girls split first prize, a $100,000 scholarship, for their work on creating a molecule to block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. Young women have also been doing well in the older contest, the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search). Both the accomplishments of young women generally and the progress women are making in the sciences are subjects AEI resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has been studying. In October, she hosted a conference at AEI on the National Academy of Sciences report that examined the claim that women are the victims of widespread bias in the fields of engineering and science. Her book, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Touchstone, 2000), looks at the gains young women have been making and argues that society needs to pay attention to how boys are faring as well.

Let me get this straight: Women are vastly under-represented in the sciences, particularly at the highest levels. This is substantially a function of the fact that girls have traditionally been steered away from the sciences, both explicitly but also as a result of broader social norms. As a result, boys have traditionally dominated things like science fairs. Now, in 2007, for the first time ever, girls sweep the top awards at a prestigous science fair. In the past, when boys won all these awards, it was seen as unremarkable at best and at worst as evidence that girls were either unsuited for or ininterested in the sciences.

And AEI and Christina Hoff Sommers see this as further evidence that we must immediately start paying more attention to boys. I assume that when the first Fortune 500 company hired a black CEO, similar memos were circulated announcing the end of racism and the need to address the burgeoning crisis of anti-white discrimination.

President Bush's Secret $5 Billion Anti-Poverty Program

The Bush Administration hasn't exactly been a friend to low-income Americans. Vetoing health insurance for poor children, undermining labor protections, squandering resources on tax cuts for the super-rich--the list goes on. But as David Hoff reports in Education Week, there's one area where both the President and Congress have consistently pursued what can only be described as progressive public policy focused on the welfare of the neediest children: the formulas used to distribute Title I funding.

Title I is the main funding program under No Child Left Behind, and as such has been highly controversial, because of wide-spread perception that NCLB is "under-funded." This largely a matter of perspective--Title I gets a lot more money, almost $5 billion per year, than it did pre-NCLB. But Title I funding has also fallen far short (over $10 billion in the current year) of what Congress could have provided under the law's authorization targets. Congressional Democrats see this as a broken promise, and by any measure it's a wasted opportunity to build bipartisan support for the law.

But lost in the debate over total Title I funding has been the issue of how Title I money is distributed. Before NCLB, Title I funds were squandered using the so-called "Basic" formula, which essentially gave districts a flat dollar amount per poor student, even if district poverty rates were very low. That's a good strategy for spreading funds among as many Congressional districts as possible, but a lousy way to target resources to those who need it most.

Since NCLB, all the considerable new money has gone into a different set of formulas that are far more targeted, either by limiting eligibility to districts with a minimum poverty rate, or by increasing funding per low-income student on a sliding scale tied to poverty rates. The new formulas also give states incentives to distribute additional state and local resources based on poverty.

As Ed Sector wrote in a policy brief last year, the result has been substantial new funding targeted to the progressive ("Targeted," "Concentration," and "Incentive") formulas (FY 2007 looks much the same):





























There's no secret political calculus here; much of the impetus for this reform back in 2001 came from Democrats like Senators Kennedy, Landrieu, and Bayh, along with Representatives George Miller, Adam Smith and Cal Dooley. The net effect is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into places like New York City and reduce what would have otherwise gone to Republican-leaning suburbs.

And while President Bush, to his discredit, vetoed the recent education and labor appropriations bill that would have provided the first major increase in Title I funding since 2003, both his proposed budget, that bill, and all the other funding proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike have stuck to principle of focusing new federal education resources on the districts with the most poor students. If you believe school funding levels matter, this has made a significant difference in the lives of the most disadvantaged children. In a time when such consensus is hard to come by, this deserves more attention.

Default Rate Amendment a Step in the Right Direction

Inside Higher Ed’s article on student loan “cohort default rates”—the percent of students not repaying their student loans as calculated by the Department of Education—is well worth reading for a good background on how we ended up with the current 2-year calculation. It also talks about the potential implications of a proposed amendment by Rep. Raul Grijalva to change the calculation to a 3-year default rate. Currently, the cohort default rate is calculated as the percent of students who default in the first two years of repayment—the proposed amendment would extend this to the first three years of repayment. Adding another year to the calculation could increase the default rate by as much as 62 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the student loan program.

Possibly the most interesting part of the article is the extensive comments section at the bottom, which shows the contentious nature not just of this amendment, but of student lending and defaults in general. A few selections:

As a colleague once observed back in the early 90s, institutions don’t default, borrowers do. The observation is still valid today.

There are definitely suspect people in every profession, but this pointing the finger business has got to stop. You can find many ways to calculate the default rate, but instead of wasting the time of the congress to manipulate these numbers, why don’t they take that time to fix the economy? Stop pointing fingers in the wrong direction. Instead, see what you can do to improve your immediate area.

If enacted, this will put financial aid offices on the defensive for matters they have little if any control over. The schools who this type of policy punishes are inevitably schools who admit a large number of students who have been poorly served by the K-12 system and from lower economic backgrounds (often the same group).

Low default rates are not evidence that elite universities are good schools, they’re evidence that their students have economic advantages to begin with. High default rates reflect the opposite.

The highly charged nature of this debate is even more reason to have more, and better, information on loan defaults. Yes, there are student risk factors that impact default rates, but as Education Sector’s recent policy brief showed, total debt levels also have a big impact, and institutions can go a long way to ameliorating that risk factor.

In the end, default rates are a symptom, though, not the problem. To truly address the problem of growing student debt, we need to figure out a way to keep college costs in line with inflation. Until that happens, all federal student debt policy will be just a stopgap solution.

Depressing Education-Related Newspaper Correction of the Day

From the Post:

A Nov. 25 Outlook article on young people's knowledge of American history and government incorrectly said a survey found that U.S. high school students had missed almost half the questions on a civic literacy test. The students were in college.

School Choice in Little Beirut

I’m traveling in Portland, Oregon right now and noticed the December, “Best Schools” issue of Portland Monthly magazine, with 631 private and public schools rated. I picked it up, curious to see what characteristics they felt were important when ranking schools, figuring this might hold some relevance to the characteristics parents consider important. Now, this is taken with a giant grain of salt—the target demographic for this magazine isn’t exactly the one policy wonks usually think about when discussing school choice (a $114K 2008 Maserati made their gift guide recommendations, and I picked up the magazine in the checkout line at Whole Foods).

First interesting thing to note is that they highlight the Portland public school transfer system as an option for parents interested in living in one school zone, but sending their kids to school in another. Apparently, about a third of Portland Public School students don’t attend their neighborhood school. Looks like I might need to come back out here to do some school choice research. The first step they recommend? To attend “Celebrate” at the Portland Expo Center, where parents can meet representatives from every school in the district.

Second interesting thing is that the information in their “Best Schools” public school guide included a mix of federal measures of school performance, state ratings, and additional information, like teacher-student ratio, that parents consider important. Ethnic diversity, the percentage of “non-Caucasian” students attending a school, was also one of the characteristics listed. This just underscores that, despite what people might say in surveys, demographics do play a part in school decisions and it’s important for policymakers to be aware of that when designing school choice programs.

Third, compared with the variety of information on school performance available for public schools, the private school guide looked a little paltry. Most of the categories were descriptive—tuition range, percent receiving financial aid, religious affiliation. The only student performance measures available were average SAT reading and math scores, and those were only available for schools with a 12^th grade. If I were shopping for a school, this would leave me a little unsatisfied after the abundance of information about public schools.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised when I read this magazine. In the city where I grew up, a magazine catering to people who buy Rolexes would not even bother ranking the public schools, much less focus most of the print space on them. So it’s encouraging to see a city—even if it’s arguably one of the more progressive places in the country (dubbed “little Beirut” by Bush I)—where public schools warrant multiple pages of description.

The Same Same-Sex Story

Peter Meyer, writing in the newest Education Next, tells us a familiar story of same-sex schools. He cites NAEP statistics that show boys aren't doing as well as girls, spotlights a handful of successful single-gender schools and quotes people who reference but do not cite "study after study" that demonstrates that both boys and girls in single-gender schools are more academically successful and ambitious than their peers in co-ed schools. He uses the also-familiar hook of choice saying that choice brings opportunity. He is right about this--choice does bring opportunity-- but he is wrong to equate the single-sex education movement to a "liberation from prejudice", just as the Gadfly was wrong to call it a "matter of basic civil rights."


The "civil right" is a good quality education. Not the choice to be educated with any particular population. And the fact that Martin Luther King III really likes Brighter Choice charters, which Meyer and Davis (for Gadfly) can't help but point out, does not make single-sex education inherently better for black and Latino kids. Nor does it make it "the affirmative action for the sexes," as Meyer, who also can't help but write about his own experience at an all-boys Catholic school, refers to it.

Absolutely, we have a race and gender problem in our schools. The h.s. grad rate for black and Latino males is somewhere below 50 percent and far far worse in central city schools. But that doesn't mean race- and gender-specific schools are the solution. I have my own set of anecdotes about black male students who thrived in an all-black all-male setting. But we currently have no empirical evidence to support that the race/gender characteristic matters most, or if at all, for student learning. And that is the point, right? Student learning. There is some new research on the efficacy of single sex schools in the pipeline and if it shows that separating kids by sex is what makes the difference, I'll be the first to say so. But please let's offer choices because they really do make a difference for these kids, not just because it seems to make sense on the surface or because it appeals to our need to feel like civil rights workers.

Sooner or Later

There's a pretty strong consensus among ed-reform types that the goal of high school--and by extension, K-12 education as a whole--should be to prepare students to "succeed in the workplace and/or higher education." The words vary, but usually that's what people say. One of the problems with NCLB is that it's not really focused on this goal, because it's essentially an elementary / middle school law, testing kids in every grade from 3 to 8, but only once in high school. Moreover, students usually take the high school test in the 10th grade, and the passing standards aren't that hard, often at the 8th grade level or so. That means that we're effectively holding schools accountable for making sure students have the skills and knowledge they need when they begin high school, not when they finish.

Not surprisingly, a lot of students leave high school unprepared for work or higher education, and it doesn't take long for this to become apparent. Over 75 percent of high school graduates go to college, and colleges have their own standards for what students need to know in order to begin college work. If students don't meet them--usually by failing an entrance test--they're stuck in non-credit-bearing, remedial courses. Essentially, they end up borrowing money to pay the local public university or community college to teach them what their high school should have taught them for free.

The scale of this problem becomes pretty obvious when you look at something like the Spring 2008 schedule of classes at the University of the District of Columbia, the only public university in DC and the destination for many graduates of our sorry local school system. The math department is offering:

16 sections of "Basic Mathematics"
13 sections of "Introduction to Algebra"
9 sections of "General College Math I"
7 sections of "General College Math II"
4 sections of "Intermediate Algebra"
2 sections each of "Pre Calc with Trig I," "Pre Calc with Trig II," "Calculus I," "Calculus II," and "Calculus III"
1 section each of "Differential Equations," "Number Theory," "Linear Algebra," "Advanced Calculus," etc. etc.

Section after section of courses covering material that a lot of the students attending DC private colleges finished before they even got to high school.

Gifted Children, Remedial Editing

The Washington Post has taken a perfectly reasonable article on an important subject--the challenge of differentiating instruction for children of variable abilities--and ruined it by forcing it through through the tube of the standard-issue NCLB controversy. While it's a good idea to use different method to teach diverse children, apparently all K-12 education stories in 2007 must be framed in exactly the same way. The article begins:

Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.

Once again we're confronted with the bone-tired cliche of "unintended consequences," the hook for at least 50% of all education policy stories ever written. They tried to do one thing, but then some other thing happened! Ooooh...interesting!

After the requisite quote from the advocate for gifted children saying exactly what you would expect an advocate to say, we get more detail about what "some scholars" are saying:

"We don't find any evidence that the gifted kids are harmed," said Chicago economist Derek A. Neal. "But they are certainly right, the gifted advocates, if they claim there is no evidence that No Child Left Behind is helping the gifted."

Except that's not what the advocates are saying. They're saying, how to put this...oh right, they're saying NCLB is "diverting resources and attention from the gifted." Making things worse than however they were before NCLB, in other words.

I'm not debating the underlying issue here--heck, I hope NCLB is diverting resources and attention from the gifted to the non-gifted; if it's not, it isn't working very well. Resources and attention are limited and the low-performing children need them more.

But if you're going to frame an article this way, you have to make sure that your lede, in addition to having a clear thesis and a connection to the events of the day, isn't directly contradicted by the evidence you present to readers later in the piece.

Knocking Some Vegans Together to Start a Mosh Pit

Carrie Brownstein, of the late, lamented, forever awesome Sleater-Kinney, has a new blog. Here's a sample:

Each of us has a deal-breaker when it comes to songs, albums, or musicians....My deal-breaker is preciousness: when the music is a tiny, baby bird that needs us to be nurturing and respectful, otherwise it can't spread its wings. I like quiet music, folk music, solo artists--it's not a matter of volume or numbers, but it is a matter of art being able to stand on its own two feet. I don't think music needs to be coddled, no matter how delicate or soft it sounds. When a band or singer makes me go "awwww," as I would at the sight of a newborn child, then that is a band that needs a pacifier not an amplifier. Other indicators of preciousness include, but are not limited to: matching old-timey outfits; mumbling, soft-spoken stage banter that trails off and is quickly followed by a cutesy smile, which for some reason garners huge cheers from the audience; being so nervous on stage that someone in the crowd has to yell "you can do it!" or "we love you" (exception made here for child performers); asking people to lie down on the floor for the next song; and any audience sing-along or participation so complicated that it needs to be explained BEFORE the song starts. When I am at an overly precious show, I am often filled with contrarian, immature urges: suddenly banging a gong, stepping on a whoopee cushion, or knocking some vegans together to start a mosh pit. I think what bothers me the most about preciousness is that it takes good form and reduces it to good manners, and turns performance into charade. I have no trouble taking music seriously or considering it special, but I don't need to be instructed about why it is.

Normally I'd take the time to invent some half-plausible thematic connection between the underlying ideas of this post and various trenchant education policy issues as a means of justifying this being written on company time, but everyone's already left for Thanksgiving and seriously, who am I kidding? I miss Sleater-Kinney! Plus, I kind of think there's an entire life philosophy lurking inside this post.

Have a great holiday.

Don't Just Blame the Football Players

Via Inside Higher Ed, Rainy River Community College in International Falls, Minnesota decided to end its football program because of high student loan default rates. According to the International Falls Daily Journal article, Rainy River has the highest student loan default rate in the country at 31.1 percent—that means that one-third of Rainy River’s students that take out federal student loans default on those loans within two years of leaving the college. And as I showed in an October Charts You Can Trust, it is very likely that Rainy River’s 10-year loan default rate is actually much higher.

With such a high default rate, Rainy River is at risk of losing its eligibility to participate in the federal loan program completely, meaning that no students could receive federal loans. But what do student loan default rates have to do with the football program?

Apparently the school had a difficult time getting football players to find the right balance between athletics and academics. And so they cut the football program to remove the distraction. I hope, though, that they are planning more significant changes to address the high default rate. As I also showed in the October Charts You Can Trust, default rates are much higher for students with large amounts of debt or low salaries after graduation. Rainy River can make a big impact on its default rate by finding ways to reduce the amount students are borrowing, increase their graduation rate, and ensure students have marketable job skills when they leave.

As my colleague, Kevin Carey, showed in his Washington Monthly article on community colleges, some are doing a better job than others. And it looks like Rainy River has a lot to learn from community colleges like top-rated Cascadia Community College in Washington, which boasts a two-year default rate of just 5.6 percent.

On "Privatization"

According to the Post, DCPS Chanchellor Michelle Rhee is thinking about hiring some outside organizations to manage the district's lowest-performing schools. The article begins as follows:

As Rhee Weighs Privatization, Doubts Abound

By Theola Labbe and V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 18, 2007

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, in considering turning over the management of 27 failing public schools to nonprofit charter education firms, is sending a clear signal that she intends to shake up the moribund bureaucracy that has failed generations of students.

But experts and school advocates say they are uneasy about the lack of details surrounding her idea, particularly given evidence across the country that charters and schools under private management sometimes fare no better than traditional public schools.

"There's nothing in the literature [to suggest] that privatization will get you revolutionary results," said Henry M. Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College.

It's worth noting that the word "privatization" means different things in different contexts. In health care, for example, it can mean selling public or non-profit hospitals to private companies, which then own them outright and run them at a profit. That seems like a reasonable use of the word "privatize."

What Rhee is considering, by contrast, is hiring either a for-profit or a non-profit organization to take over certain administrative and management functions for a fixed period of time, with the schools, teachers, and students remaining firmly in the public realm--accountable to public officials, paid with public funds, remaining public employees, etc. That's a lot different then selling off a hospital, to the point where I'm not sure using the same word to describe both scenarios is useful.

As to whether this would be good for DCPS, I imagine that depends mostly on who they hire and how they structure the arrangement. If I said, "Hey, I'm thinking about renovating my bathroom, any advice?" and you said "There's nothing to suggest that hiring someone to renovate your bathroom guarantees that you'll end up with a great bathroom, or a better bathroom than you'd get if you did the work yourself. Historically, people who have hired bad bathroom renovators tend to end up with, statistically speaking, bad bathrooms." I'd think you were either an idiot or a jerk being deliberately obtuse. Of course. Doesn't that go without saying?

Perspectives on Immigrant English Learners

Edward Gresser is an expert on trade policy at PPI*, but he also spends his time tutoring first generation immigrant students. He offers his perspective on teaching these students in Education Sector's newest First Person essay. More practical ideas for educators of ELLs here.

Btw, Gresser also just released a new book on American liberalism and globalization.

*EdSector and Eduwonk leader Andy Rotherham is a senior fellow at PPI.

After Five-Year Absence, International Students are Returning to American Colleges & Universities

In March, 2007, Margery Yeager and I reported on the overall downward trend in foreign student enrollment at American colleges and universities. Of the many factors contributing to this decline, perhaps the most significant were the strict, hastily enacted F-1 student visa restrictions implemented in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. This led to a steep drop-off in the number of foreign students coming to the US, but the effects were especially pronounced for students from the Middle East. Political and diplomatic tensions with China also resulted in a decline in the number of students from that country, not to mention the fact that the subjects Chinese students were often most interested in—mainly in the physical sciences—were seen by the US government as being sensitive from a national security standpoint.

As a result of these new restrictions, fewer student visa applications were approved, resulting in a significant decline in the number of international students coming to the US. Coincidentally, this all happened as other countries were getting more aggressive in their efforts to recruit international students. In addition, some of the top sending countries, like China, Korea, and Japan were experiencing domestic transformations that resulted in fewer of their students seeking educational opportunities abroad.

However, the downward post-Sept. 11 trend appears to be ending. The Chronicle of Higher Education—citing the most recent "Open Doors" report put out by the Institute of International Education (IIE)—reports that the number of foreign students pursuing higher education in the United States is rebounding to pre-Sept. 11 levels. For the 2006–07 academic year, the number of new foreign students was 582,984, just shy of the all-time high of 586, 323, reached in the 2002–03 school year. Together, these new international students contributed about $14.5 billion to the US economy.

This upward trend has been attributed to several factors, the most prominent of which was the loosening of the post-Sept. 11 student visa restrictions that had resulted in the denial of many F-1 visa applications. The top 5 sending countries were the same as for the previous year, although the orders had switched somewhat, with India and China having replaced South Korea and Japan in first and second place respectively. Also, a Saudi government-funded scholarship program placed Saudi Arabia in the top 20 sending countries for the first time ever. Another newcomer to the top 20 is Viet Nam, where a growing middle class has produced a 30-percent jump in enrollment for Vietnamese students in the US.

The "Open Doors" report also reveals a changing pattern in enrollment among international students as more of them are enrolling in non-4-year programs. For example, in 2006, 6.7 percent of F-1 visas issued went to students enrolled at community colleges. The figures are even more striking in the case of Vietnamese students. Over 50 percent of approved visas went to students who were planning to attend community colleges in the US. Also, a sizeable portion of new enrollments have been in non-degree-granting institutions like English-language schools and professional-certificate programs. This particular category of student numbers around 39,000, a 27-percent increase over the previous year. This change in enrollment patterns is at least partly due to high tuition costs, since all international students have to pay the out-of-state rate at the institutions they attend.

But despite the positive trend in the overall student enrollment numbers, the "Open Doors" report contains some words of caution. It reports a 1.5 percent drop in undergraduate enrollments and no increase in Ph.D.-level enrollments. Also, the number of European students fell by 2.3 percent, a drop attributed to more European colleges and universities offering courses in English. Perhaps most seriously, a brief produced by the American Council on Education shows that other countries are increasing their efforts to recruit international students, and thus drawing potential students away from the US. From 1999 to 2004, international-student enrollment growth rates were: 108 percent for Japan; 81 percent for France; 46 percent for Germany; 42 percent for Australia; 29 percent for Britain; but only 17 percent for the US. And, while the numbers of students coming to the US is on the rebound, many international students are frustrated that there is no coordination among different agencies in the US. Victor C. Johnson, associate executive director for public policy at an international educators' association, says that although American colleges and universities are successfully recruiting more international students, some recently enacted rules and regulations make it harder for students to, for example, get drivers licenses or Social Security numbers once they are in the US.

Ultimately, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the authors of the "Open Doors" article are right to celebrate the return of foreign students to American universities and colleges. In addition to the money they put into the US economy through tuition payments and living expenses, foreign students represent a large and diverse talent pool that becomes even more valuable if international students choose to remain in the US after completing their studies. Demonstrating an understanding of the value of international students, the US government has eased many of the post-Sept. 11 visa restrictions that had kept so many away. That is a good first step. But as other countries are becoming more and more aggressive in recruiting international students, the US cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It's not enough to simply let students into the country and hope they can fend for themselves. The next step would be to put in place a streamlined system within which the various agencies foreign students have to deal with—Social Security Administration, Departments of Motor Vehicles, insurance companies—work more efficiently to make life easier for international students in the US.

--Posted by Abdul Kargbo