The Higher Education Lobby 1, Students 0

When special interests subvert good public policy, they usually try to cover their tracks. While people in the know can guess what really happened, both the influencers and the influencees usually create enough plausible deniability to escape blame.

But sometimes it all happens right out in the open, and that in itself tells you a lot about the lobby and the issue at hand. So it was yesterday with the announcement--first reported yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Education and also this morning in Inside Higher Education-- that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) will be pulling back on an initiative to gather better education statistics about higher education.

Here's what happened: Over the last five years or so, many colleges have begun to collect information about how well they teach their students and how much their students learn, through survey instruments like the National Survey of Student Engagment (NSSE) and tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). While most institutions keep the results confidential, some make them publicly available. NCES proposed that those institutions submit the link to the Web page containing the results. That way NCES could include that link on it's free College Opportunities On-Line Web page, so that high school students choosing colleges could see the information.

In a response, the higher education lobby had a cow.

And so it was depressing but unsurprising to hear Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Institute for Education Sciences, say, in so many words, "The people who made this decision were just trying to do the right thing and fulfill the NCES mission of gathering education information in the best interests of the public. They didn't realize that sometimes people in positions of greater authority within the government have to compromise the public interest in order to placate special interests." Thus, the requirement to submit links to the already-public teaching and learning data will be removed.

Just to be clear: The Department of Education wasn't requiring any institution to participate in NSSE, the CLA, or any other survey or assessment process. Nor was it requiring institutions that participate but choose to keep the results confidential to disclose their results. All it said was that if you do disclose them, let us know where, so students choosing colleges can see them.

Why is higher education acting like it has something to hide? Because it does. The plain truth is that a great many institutions are doing a mediocre or worse job of educating undergraduate students. Everyone knows this, but nobody wants to say so, because fixing that problem would require a lot of hard choices. Thus, any attempt to raise the issue--or to disclose data about the issue--is quickly squashed. Or, as Whitehurst said (this is an actual quote):

“We understand in the current environment that people see this as a foot in the door for a potential move some time in the future to require some kind of student learning outcome, by providing strong incentives to collect that. We think that’s a state or association role to move in that direction. It exceeds the response of a federal authority or control to be incentivizing that kind of collection.”

The federal government provides higher education with tens of billions of dollars in the form of tax preferences, research grants, and student aid, but it "exceeds the response of a federal authority" to even create incentives for institutions to possibly disclose information that would indicate whether or not they're using all of that money to help the students and families who are paying those taxes.

That says it all.

NCLB Higher Ed? No, Not Really

Alex Kingsbury has an informative state-of-play piece in U.S. News & World Report about measuring student learning in higher education, and how that information might be used to hold colleges and universities accountable for doing a good job teaching their students.

There's an extremely reductive way of talking about these issues, which goes something like this:

"The Bush Administration, which ruined K-12 education by imposing an insulting, simplistic, wrong-headed NCLB accountability system based on low-level standardized tests, is now trying to screw up higher education in the same way. This is wrong."

That's really not what's going on. There will be no NCLB-HE. But there are things the federal government can and should do to start getting more information about higher education quality out into the hands of the public, and to create incentives for universities to do a better job of teaching undergraduates. The difference between this and the accountability nightmare described above is mostly a matter of being smart, judicious, and reasonable--qualities that are admittedly not exactly in surplus within the Bush administration on the whole. But overall I think the Secretary Spellings is doing the right thing here. There was no great political outcry for her to take on the difficult issue of higher education reform, that she did so anyway is to her credit, and her efforts so far have been worthwhile.

Teaching Religion

Boston University Professor Stephen Prothero's new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't, argues that, despite high levels of religiousity, Americans on average are shockingly ignorant about both the religions they profess to believe and world religions. Prothero further argues that this ignorance is dangerous at a time when religion is playing an increasing role in both domestic politics and in conflicts around the world, and recommends that schools begin teaching religion as history and culture to counteract this ignorance. (Sound familiar, eduwonk readers?)

Prothero has a good point: you only have to look at the debate among political pundits over whether or not Mitt Romney is a Christian, or the inability of many of our nation's political and foreign policy leaders to differentiate Shiite from Sunni Muslims to understand the seriousness of this ignorance. Prothero explains American's lack of religious literacy largely in terms of American protestant revivalism's historical emphasis on a personal relationship with God over theology. Susan Jacoby, writing in The Washington Post, suggests it's actually a reflection of a broader deficit in Americans' civic and cultural knowledge. I'll take a step further and suggest its part of a general lack of knowledge, period, among even many educated Americans, because, as E.D. Hirsch has written, our schools do not focus on inculcating cultural knowledge in students and often even disdain teaching of a defined body of core knowledge in literature, history, and, yes, religion. It's worth noting that Hirsch's Dictionary of Cultural Literacy includes a lot of religious literacy, too.

One could draw an interesting parallel between, on the one hand, progressivist education's emphasis on process, thinking skills, and shaping children's self-esteem and values, over inculcating knowledge, and, on the other hand, American religion's emphasis on personal emotional experience, personal moral behavior, and a relationship with Christ over theology.

I actually think both sides of the equation are important, in both education and religion.

A false choice is often posed in education between Hirsch-style content knowledge and progressivist-style higher-order thinking skills. A Newsweek article about Prothero actually makes an important point about this debate, as well as accountability:

When he began teaching college 17 years ago, Prothero writes, he discovered that few of his students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels. Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture. Almost no one could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Prothero, who went to Yale in the early 1980s and speaks of his all-night bull sessions on politics and religion with reverence, realized that to re-create that climate in his classroom, his students first had to know something. And so he made it his job to (1) figure out what they didn't know and (2) teach it to them. He began giving religious literacy quizzes to his students, and, subsequently, to everyone he knew. Almost everybody failed.

Note that in this story, content knowledge didn't compete with higher-order thinking, but was a prerequisite to it. Note also Prothero's straightforward approach to making sure his students got that content knowledge: first find out what they don't know, then teach it to 'em. Seems straightforward enough, but it's all too often not what happens for kids. Accountability also plays a key role in this formula: testing (quizzes) is critical to find out what the kids don't know and, presumably, to determine whether or not they've learned it after it's taught. Note nobody's whining about how devastating it was for Prothero's students to take these quizzes they couldn't pass.

All that said, I share Jacoby's skepticism about Prothero's proposal to require high school students to take courses in religious history. She writes "given the failure of so many schools to inculcate the most elementary facts about American history, it is hard to imagine that most teachers would be up to the task of explaining, say, the subtleties of biblical arguments for and against slavery." I have similar concerns, although the obvious answer--in this or any area where schools aren't getting kids content knowledge they need--is not to give up, but to figure out how policies can give schools the resources and support they need to teach kids this knowledge. More important to me, there are limited hours of the day and there are trade-offs in the things we decide to emphasize in our curricular requirements: How should we weigh learning about religious history against American history, against other literature, against math and science? I don't know, but I do agree that we need to do a better job in passing on to our students their cultural patrimony, in history, literature and, yes, religion.

CER-fing Web 2.0

Sometime when I wasn't looking, the Center for Education Reform decided to try to get all Web 2.0 and such.

Winning the Lottery

Via Crooked Timber, controvery in England over student assignment to schools (which they refer to as admissions). The Department for Eduction and Skills, equivalent of the U.S. Department of Education, has established new regulations that try to make student assignment to schools fairer through a variety of measures. Admissions criteria, such as interviews and requested donations, that were disproportionately a barrier to less advantaged students have been banned. Most radical, families can no longer guarantee their child a slot in a school by purchasing a home nearby.

These changes are understandably controversial, and the controversy has focused on the city of Brighton and Hove. In response to the new regulations, the local school authority there instituted a system that divides the city into six catchment areas and uses a lottery to assign children to a school within their cathment area. Previously, preference for slots in a particular school went to children living closest to it, prompting more affluent families to purchase homes as close as possible to popular schools, and raising the prices of homes in those neighborhoods. The goal of both the national policy changes and the specific lottery policy in Brighton is to increase equity and transparency in school admissions, but whether the policy will actually do this is subject to debate.

In many ways, England is farther down the choice road in public education than the United States, having instituted a national "open enrollment" policy under the Tory government in 1988. English schools have also typically had more freedom to choose students than most American schools. Strikingly, given the many differences between our two countries and education systems, many of the fears about increased choice are the same on both sides of the Atlantic--potential increases in social stratification, inequity for disadvantaged students, concerns about the impact on communities, etc.--as is the hope by choice proponents that it will increase educational customization and equity for disadvantaged children who are ill-served by residentially-based assignments. Americans who are interested in the interplay between choice and equity should keep an eye out to the debate there. This forthcoming paper on the subject from the Institute for Public Policy Research, an English think tank that falls somewhere between the Brookings Institution and my previous employer, also looks well worth checking out. Although most American schools and districts don't have "admissions" in the same way that English schools do, their idea of a local-area-wide "admissions authority" to handle the school assignment process for all students and schools would make a lot of sense in the growing number of American cities, like D.C. and New York, that have a growing array of public (and, in the case of D.C., private) school choice options.

Shameless Plug: If you want to know more about England's experience with education reform and what the U.S. can learn from it, check out this interview I did with Blair education reform architect Sir Michael Barber last winter.

Accountability, Responsibility, and Enron

Sherman Dorn notes the upcoming release of Collataral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, a collection of anecdotes about educators making morally dubious choices when faced with the pressures of test-based educational accountability. Dorn says:

The plural of anecdotes is not representative data, but there are enough concerns over the past 5 years that we can say those who ignore test preparation and other side-effects of high-stakes testing are ignoring reality

... unless any of those happened to say that the fraud at WorldCom and Enron wasn't a reason to be concerned about corporate misdeeds. Then at least they can say they were consistent.

The Enron analogy comes up a lot in these conversations. It's worth examining, because it says a lot about the way people think about educators and public schools.

The people who ran Enron worked in an environment of high-stakes accountability. In their case, accountability was based on their financial performance, as reported in mandatory filings to a federal government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the numbers were good, their stock price went up, the company grew, and they all got rich. If the numbers were bad, the stock price went down, the company was damaged, and they could lose their jobs.

Unfortunately for the employees and shareholders of Enron, the people running the place made a series of spectacularly bad business decisions (Kurt Eichenwald's book, Conspiracy of Fools, has all the sordid details and is well worth reading). Even more unfortunately, they chose not to own up their incompetence. Instead, they tried to cover up their misdeeds with accounting shenanigans. They got caught, the company was destroyed, and a bunch of them went to jail.

In response, numerous pundits blamed the federal government for creating the financial accountability system, arguing that the otherwise-honest businessmen at Enron had been corrupted by the high-stakes pressure of filing quarterly SEC reports about their performance....

Oops, forgot we weren't talking about education.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. People called for more accountabilty, not less. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act over the objections of big business. And even as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, et. al., were excoriated far and wide as liars and thieves, they were at least given the respect implict in being held responsible their moral choices.

College Rankings Dirty Tricks

Richard Vedder of Ohio University, an outspoken member of the recent Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, has a higher education blog called "Center for College Affordability and Productivity." It's smart, provocative and well worth reading. If there's ever an award for "Least Bland Blog With the Most Bland Name," it would definitely be a contender.

In this post, Vedder comments on a recent Wall Street Journal article$ from the invaluable Dan Golden about the way some colleges are manipulating the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This says it all:

ALBION, Mich. -- Adrian Jean Kammerer hasn't given Albion College a dime since she graduated in 2004. "I don't have money to be giving to Albion," says the law-school student. "I'm living off student loans."

Yet Albion counted Ms. Kammerer as an alumni donor to the school in 2004, 2005, and 2006. School officials keep her on the donor roll by treating the $30 she gave as a college senior as a $6 annual gift for five years. Ms. Kammerer isn't scheduled to drop off Albion's donor list until 2009.

Such fiddling -- which helped boost the percentage of donating Albion alums to 47% in 2006 from 36% in 1998 -- paid off handsomely. U.S. News & World Report's annual higher-education survey puts Albion's alumni-giving rate at 14th among liberal-arts colleges, contributing to an overall ranking of 91st among 215 such schools. In 2003, Albion boasted of its alumni-giving rate, among other credentials, in a cover letter for a grant application to the Kresge Foundation, which ultimately awarded the school $4.7 million.

This kind of shameful book-cooking is nothing new; a few years ago it was all about dropping low-scoring students out of the average SAT numbers (the WSJ busted colleges on that one too). Implicit in all of this is a certain "it's all just a game" ethic--most colleges think the U.S. News rankings are illegitimate to begin with, so by that logic there's no harm in looking for an edge. Sort of like Gaylord Perry throwing spitballs or Michael Waltrip cheating in NASCAR.

Which is exactly why the college rankings need to be more aligned with what actually matters in higher education -- teaching, learning, things like that.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This past Saturday, the Washington Post ran a pointed op-ed by Colbert King describing the dismal state of disrepair in one of the district’s elementary schools. With a proper amount of outrage and incredulity, King correctly asks, who is responsible for this and how do we hold them accountable?

Good questions that need to be answered immediately. Part of the trouble with facilities maintenance is that it gets little political play (compared to, say, a jump in test scores), meaning that few politicians give facilities upkeep the attention it deserves. Schools aren’t the only places this happens—the Post’s recent series of articles about Walter Reed show that our veterans also suffer from a lack of political attention to facilities maintenance.

The facilities we ask our students to learn in (and our teachers to work in)—like the facilities we ask our veterans to recover in—are a sign of respect. If we ask children to attend schools with broken tiles, unusable bathrooms, and peeling paint, what are we telling them about how much we value their education? Can we honestly expect them to respect the education system when we provide them with buildings that we, ourselves, wouldn’t work in?

Tenure Wars

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame has some sensible ideas about tenure for college professors ("Let's Just Get Rid of Tenure (including mine)"). He notes that instances where professors might be unjustly fired for politically unpopular views--one of the main justifications for tenure--"rarely" occur. My father--formerly the chairman of the computer science department at a mid-sized public university and therefore somone who had to deal with the hassles of unfireable bad professors on a day-to-day basis--made the same point to me a few years ago. "What could be politically controversial," he asked, "about designing integrated circuits?"

Sherman Dorn responds to Levitt's post by citing a case where people really did try to sack an economics professor for standing up to business interests--in the 1940s. I'm sure he's right, but doesn't that still qualify as "rare"?

Levitt is too dismissive in saying that someone who gets unfairly fired can just go back into the job market and find another job elsewhere. Most professors don't have the juice that comes with being a best-selling author and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, etc. But as with any policy, there's a basic utilitarian standard that has to be addressed here. Tenure has benefits and costs. Levitt is saying the former outweight the latter. I don't think Dorn's reply really refutes that.