Frosty the Anti-Snow Man

Frosty Hardison, a concerned parent of seven, wants Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" banned from school. In an interesting twist, he objects not because he doesn't believe in global warming, but because the movie doesn't present an alternative explanation for global warming: instead of rising carbon emissions, it's a sign that the biblically ordained end times are upon us. Which seems pretty ridiculous, but then again I did just read that shockingly reasonable Bracey report....

For Lenders, the Trouble Begins

Next week, the house will consider a bill to cut interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans in half--to 3.4%--over five years. The cost of these cuts will come close to $6 billion and, under the new ‘PAYGO’ rules, the Democrats are paying for it with cuts in lender subsidies. While some students will benefit from the lower interest rates, this bill is more about freeing-up money from the heavily-subsidized lending industry than it is about making college more affordable.

Making college more affordable will require broader changes in the lending ‘system’ (although our confusing and complicated financial aid system is hardly a system at all), including targeting aid to students who need it most and providing help to students who are struggling to repay their debt. While interest rate subsidies will alleviate debt payments for some, they are poorly targeted, do not encourage colleges to lower costs, and do not take into account students’ post-graduation income levels and ability to repay debt.

This bill does make some important steps forward, however, in how money is allocated in our lending system. Currently, a lot of money is tied up in lender subsidies and payments. This bill starts to chip away at those subsidies and reallocate the money to students. Hopefully, once it's apparent that lenders can survive reduced government subsidies, it will make room for more lender subsidy cuts and more reallocations to financial aid.

A Sign of the Coming Apocalypse

Jerry Bracey has released his annual "Rotten Apples" awards. Roughly speaking, I agree without about half of the awards. I find this to be an inordinately high and deeply disturbing number. It's some kind of leading indicator of deterioration in the education policy sphere--the more often Bracey is right, the worse things have become.

Down to Brass Tacks on Teacher Pay

Leo Casey has weighed in on "Frozen Assets," Education Sector's recent report on the fiscal consequences of teacher contracts. Or as he puts it, "yet another" Education Sector report. Sorry, Leo--plenty more where that came from! No rest for the wicked!

It seems like just a couple of days ago--oh wait, it was just a couple of days ago--that Leo laid out some sensible ground rules for substantive, informed blogging on education policy, such as the fact that union critics are not wrong by definition. So it's a little disappointing to see him dismiss the research cited in the report as "old thin gruel by the anti-union, anti-public education short order cooks." There have been cease-fires in the Middle East that lasted longer than that....

But Leo's post is nonetheless useful, because he quickly gets down to the heart of the matter: merit pay. "Frozen Assets" isn't a merit pay manifesto by any means, but it does put the idea squarely on the table, and it does criticize the seniority-based single salary schedules used by the vast majority of school districts. Even though research clearly shows that teacher effectiveness tends to stop increasing after about five years in the classroom, salary schedules keep bumping up pay for years or even decades beyond that.

To his credit, Leo concedes this point. But he defends perpetual seniority-based raises on the grounds that they're needed to retain teachers, particularly after all that goes into getting them past the five-year threshold. And to do that, we have to "take into account the mid-life financial pressures faced by teachers, as they pay home mortages and send their own children to college."

In this one sentence, once can learn a great deal about why issues of teacher pay are so contentious and hard to resolve.

I suspect that teachers unions often wonder why people keep obsessing over merit pay, particularly when they concede, as Leo does, that it would be okay to have differential pay for other things, like working in hard-to-staff schools or getting National Board certification.

The answer, I think, is that getting paid based on how well you do your job is so ubiquitous and inherently sensible that to deny it on principle is to fundamentally dissociate onself from both logic and the common experience of workers and professionals in this day and age. In that sense, merit pay is about more than the issue at hand. It's a litmus test for reasonableness, an indicator of whether you're serious about schools and educators being driven by performance, about whether you believe that teachers should or should not be compensated in basically the same way as everyone else who has a job requiring similarly high levels of education, professionalism, and dedication.

Leo can object to merit pay "schemes which seek to replace the entire structure of teacher salary schedules with pay differentials decided by subjective supervisory judgments and by poorly crafted standardized tests." But I think we all know that it goes deeper than that, that even if the schemes became plans and the supervisory judgments became objective and the tests became well-crafted, the basic issue would remain.

The vast majority of people who work, particularly in professional jobs, are paid what their labor is worth in the open job market, no more, no less. That amount can often seem arbitrary or divisive or insufficient or unfair. And all those things are frequently true. But in the end, they don't get paid more than their colleagues who do work of the same value, or more, just because they happen to be of a certain age or have kids in college and a mortgage to pay. That's the world we live in.

Perhaps Leo think that's the problem in a nutshell, that teachers unions have achieved a more enlightened way of doing business, one that keep workers together instead of pushing them apart, one that is more stable, fair, and humane. Which makes merit pay a litmus test of a different kind, an indicator of whether people want to preserve the past victories of labor and build on them, or attack those victories and tear them down.

I believe in unions. As I've said before, I think the final reckoning of the last 100 years will show that unions are disproportionately responsible for much of what's decent and honorable in the working lives of Americans. But on this issue, I think teachers unions are trying to do too much, at too great a cost. The best way to help teachers with kids in college isn't to pay them extra, it's to fully fund Pell grants and keep tuition low. Unions can, and should, push for increasing the overall amount of money teachers are paid, which I think is too low. But the dynamics there are not the same as, for example, increasing the minimum wage. And banding together to collectively fight for higher wages doesn't preclude teachers from making distinctions about those wages based on something as elementary as performance. Unity and uniformity are not the same thing.

In the long run, performance has to matter in education. If you tell a group of people that their status and salary will be determined in a manner that is indifferent to how hard they work or what they ultimately accomplish, they will, collectively, accomplish less. In the long run, teachers unions are going to have to concede this principle. That doesn't mean that there are no difficulties in transforming the principle into practice, or that teachers shouldn't play a major role in making those decisions. They absolutely should. But as long as unions stay on the wrong side of this line in the sand, they're going to be fighting a losing and increasingly lonely battle.

Update: Sherman Dorn comments here. Briefly: Sherman gives Leo (or me, not quite sure which) too little credit here--I actually think Leo does a good job of engaging seriously on the ideas, which distinguishes him from some of his colleagues. I just think his ideas are problematic. I'm not sure what "significant logical flaws" Sherman is talking about--does he mean Leo's comments about the NYC class size limitations? Of course eliminating a class size reduction or limitation policy would increase class sizes. That goes without saying, doesn't it? What else could it mean? What the paper says is that there's little in the way of research to suggest that marginal class size reductions, along the lines the 1.5 or 2 per class that Leo describes, have significant benefits. Big reductions below a certain threshold, yes. Small reductions that don't reach that threshold, no. Therefore, that money could potentially be spent for other, more productive purposes--like increased teacher salaries.

When Mom and Dad Don't Show Up

Sophia Pappas has a really terrific post up about parent engagement and teacher responsibilities. After trying--and failing--to engage the mother of one of her lowest-performing students, Pappas writes:

I grow frustrated and decide instead to focus solely on Tyrique and our work inside the classroom. With our efforts to target his needs in one-on-one, small group, and whole group interactions, Tyrique has now started to identify beginning sounds and some letters in words on his own. He can also write his name and read the names of his friends.

Is family support important? Of course. But what happens when difficulties with parental investment arise, even as early as pre-k? Does the child become a lost cause? Of course not. Should teachers relinquish their own responsibility? Just the opposite.

This strikes me as just about right. Communicating with parents and trying to engage them in their children's learning when appropriate is part of teachers' jobs. But teachers have relatively little leverage to change parent behavior, so focusing on what teachers can do to address children's needs directly often has better returns to effort than trying to engage unresponsive parents.

In an ideal world, we'd want all kids to have engaged, supportive parents who were eager to get information from teachers about how to support their children's learning and to put that information in practice. In reality, that's not always the case, even when parents love their children very much, for a host of reasons. And the kids who are getting the least support at home are also those who can least afford to have their teachers give up on them as a result of their parents' shortcomings.

Anyway, I've really been enjoying Ms. Pappas' blog since it launched in early December, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you should.

Merit Pay is Murder

Per the post below, to get a sense of just how much some local teachers union officials hate the idea of merit pay, here's a quote from local president in Nashville (Hat tip-Joanne Jacobs):

Last fall, the association passed on a $400,000 donation that would have put up to $6,000 extra in the pockets of Inglewood and Alex Green elementary schoolteachers. Any changes to Metro teacher salary or compensation need approval by a majority of the union’s members. Association President Jamye Merritt said the money was rejected because the terms of the gift were unclear, and teachers didn’t know what expectations they would need to meet. “People take money every day for things I would not do ... there are people that are paid to be assassins,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just not worth the sacrifice you would have to make for the money.”

Teachers, Unions, Money

Educaton Sector has released a new report authored by Marguerite Roza of the University of Washington and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, analyzing the fiscal impact of teacher contracts. Titled "Frozen Assets," the paper finds that roughly $77 billion nationwide is tied up in supporting contracts provisions that have a weak relationship with student learning, and could thus potentially be put to better use.

The Washington Post has a good story on the report here. NEA president Reg Weaver offers the standard "object first, figure out what the heck I'm talking about later, or more probably never" non-sequiter response, by saying: "Research has shown us time and time again that low salaries drive committed people from the teaching profession." Had he read the report, he would know that it has nothing to do with cutting salaries for teachers overall. If anything, it would increase teacher salaries by redirecting money that is currently being used for purposes that, according to research, don't contribute to student learning, such as teacher's aides, marginal class size reductions, ineffective professional development, and overly generous non-salary benefits. As the paper notes, that money could be used for proposals that the NEA itself supports, like increasing the average starting salary for teachers.

AFTie Michele posits that one of the provisions analyzed--excessive sick days--may be a function of the fact that teachers, more than most workers, tend to (A) be women, who take time off to go the doctor when pregnant, and (B) spend a lot of time with children, who spread a lot of germs. Seems like a fair point, whether it accounts for all the differences the report notes, I don't know.

Beyond that, her objections mostly boil down to "This is all about not liking seniority and the single salary schedule." Well, sure, it is mostly about those things. The report explains these positions and cites research to back them up (hopefully this will address the concerns of Sherman Dorn). If you disagree, you have to say why you disagree. Noting that private schools have similar policies isn't enough, they may just be making the same bad decisions.

By contrast, I recommend this post from Leo Casey at EdWize, who, unlike his colleagues at AFTBlog, actually offers detailed arguments and evidence to back up his disagreements. In doing so he inadvertently exposes some of the internal contradictions in the way unions talk about teacher salaries, which are apparently vitally important unless we're talking about differential salaries, in which case teachers are suddenly much more motivated by "an altruistic sense of public service and nurturance, to make a positive difference in the lives of children." But it's still a thoughtful post on the topic of wage compression and the history of teacher salaries and collective bargaining, and well worth reading.

Too Many Asians at Berkeley?

In today’s NYTimes Education Life supplement, Timothy Egan writes an unsatisfying story about an interesting issue: the growing number of Asian students at elite universities.

Egan pegs his story to UC-Berkeley, where the percentage of Asian students has grown to 41% in the wake of a statewide ballot initiative prohibiting the consideration of race in public college admissions. But while he gives a sense of the changing atmosphere on the Berkeley campus, Egan doesn’t really dig into the heart of the matter—affirmative action.

Affirmative action comes with serious costs. But on the whole I think it’s a good idea, for three reasons.

First, not all students get the same opportunities in K-12 schools. Black and Latino students, on average, are forced to attend schools that receive less funding, are taught by worse teachers, have less access to advanced curricula like Advanced Placement tests, and generally suffer from the hard bigotry of low expectations. Affirmative action helps students who would have come to the admissions process with better credentials if they’d been given a fair shot to begin with.

Second, affirmative action works, in the words of Yale law school professor Stephen Carter, whose Reflections of An Affirmative Action Baby is required reading on this topic, as a tax. Taxes are necessary for a functioning society, and there’s plenty of precedent for tax policies that treat different people differently. For example, the federal income tax system taxes rich people at a higher rate than poor people. This is a good, workable policy because (A) rich people can afford it, and (B) other people need that money more.

Affirmative action is basically an educational opportunity tax on white people. Like progressive income taxes, it redistributes resources from people who have a disproportionate share to people who need them more. This seems unfair to white people who themselves come from less advantaged backgrounds, and it probably is. But it’s no more unfair than applying the same tax rate to the rich person who earned every dollar from the sweat of his brow as to the person who inherited his money and got a cushy job in the family business. Policies are by nature imperfect, and in the end it’s still better to be rich than poor in America, and white people still enjoy huge advantages that others don’t. Having to settle for a slot in a slightly less competitive college moves the traditional losers in the zero-sum affirmative action game—unusually smart, well-qualified white people—from being in the 99.999th percentile of luckiest people on the face of the Earth to about the 99.998th. They’ll be fine.

The third justification for affirmative action is diversity, which is certainly important—it makes sense for colleges to create an academic environment with broad, differing perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs. But I tend to value diversity less than the first two justifications for affirmative action, mostly because of how the idea gets used and applied in practical terms. Proponents don’t do a good job of explaining the theoretical limits of diversity as a value, the degree of its benefits or cases when it should be subordinate to other things. Nor do they seem eager to discuss the fact that some perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs are more worthwhile than others. As a result, diversity as an idea is routinely diluted and abused by people like the college coach in Dan Golden’s excellent book on the corruption of the college admissions process, The Price of Admission, who justified giving preferences to academically suspect athletes on the grounds that the university would benefit from “academic diversity” in that students who aren’t as smart ask more questions in class.

Moreover, for reasons of constitutional law and, I think, a fair amount of intellectual dishonesty, the diversity benefits of affirmative action are increasingly framed in terms of what’s good for white people, as if the whole point is to give the sons and daughters of privilege a chance to spend a few years in a controlled environment hearing about how what it’s like to be a minority in America, before going back to the economically and racially segregated world from which they came. As Dahlia Lithwick said in a discussion of the Michigan affirmative action case, “Schools are not petting zoos.” Or do we honestly think that the main benefit of affirmative action is to give minority students a once-in-a-lifetime exposure to the white perspective? Don’t they get more than enough of that already?

Asian students make all of this more complicated. Many are striving first-generation immigrants from modest economic backgrounds, the embodiment of the American dream. They belong to ethnic groups that have suffered significant past legal and cultural discrimination. Given the added benefits of diversity, the more in college the better—right?

As it turns out, not so much. As Golden made clear in his book and subsequent articles in the WSJ, a number of elite colleges now have what amount to reverse quotas for Asian students, admitting a smaller percentage of Asian applicants than other groups even though those students have stronger qualifications by basically reviving the racist policies the same colleges first developed in the 1920s to keep out Jewish students. Apparently, a college can become too diverse, or it least it can when diversity is defined as “degree of difference from the white people who run things.” What institutions like Princeton (which is being sued by an Asian student with perfect SATs it rejected) seem to want is enough diversity to keep things interesting, but not so much that it threatens their overwhelmingly white base of wealthy alumni, particularly those who have children up for admission.

This collision of race, class, privilege, and history has led to a lot of confused thinking. Both Egan and one of the students he interviews refer to UC-Berkeley as “overwhelmingly Asian,” a strange thing to say about a university where Asian students are still less than half the population. This is neatly reflected in the cover of the Education Life supplement, which is comprised of 100 identical squares, 41 of which feature a picture of an Asian student, exactly the same as the percent of Asians among Berkeley undergrads. But the other 59 squares don’t feature the white, black, Hispanic, and other non-Asian students that make up the majority of the Berkeley campus. They’re blank, so all you see are Asians. The cover reflects the same skewed perspective as Egan and his interviewee.

Egan also quotes a professor getting several things wrong all at once:

“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”

Most of the Asians interviewed in the article seemed pretty psyched to be enrolled at the top-ranked public university in the nation with lots of other Asian students. To say that getting rid of race-conscious admissions has been a “disaster” for them is bizarre, and represents a common failure among affirmative action advocates--an unwillingness to acknowledge that admissions policies are zero-sum. You can't say there are no winners and losers in affirmative action. You can only say who should win, who should lose, and why.

Moreover, the last thing Latinos and black should want from a purely selfish standpoint is for Asians to not be considered a minority, unless they mean a minority that’s actively discriminated against. Berkeley in 2007 is what happens when race isn’t considered in admissions, not when it is.

It will be a long time before society can consider racial issues or embody them in public policy without considerable pain and controversy. But it strikes me that the difficulties of considering race in higher education admissions could at least be lessened if universities would be more nuanced about their criteria and more disciplined in their decision-making. Treating students from Japan, China, and Korea (much less India, Pakistan, etc. etc. etc.) similarly just because their countries of origin are sort of near one another and they kind of look the same to Western eyes is absurd. It would be better if colleges developed some rational criteria (diversity value, historical discrimination, etc.) for deciding exactly which racial/ethnic groups deserve various degrees of admissions preference and which don’t, using as many categories as it takes—10, 50, 100, whatever makes sense. Then they should be a lot more transparent about how that plays out in the admission process, instead of hiding behind the “we consider the whole student” generalities that act as smokescreen for whatever vague or sinister policies they actually have in place. The Michigan decision is driving things in the opposite direction, of course, but that’s what happens when the Supreme Court resorts to using sketchy constitutional law to try to do the right thing.

The great dilemma of racial and ethnic differences lies with reconciling the need to recognize their value and meaning with the need to heal the wounds that have been and continue to be inflicted in their name. As a result, affirmative action will always be hard to sort out. But as the case of Asian student admissions shows, we can’t stop thinking about it, even if we want to.