Friday, April 06, 2007
Selective Opinion Gathering
I can't believe this WaPo "What do you think of the takeover?" piece with comments from parents and educators doesn't include a single voice representing schools East of the River. And three out of four speakers are linked to schools West of Rock Creek Park.
Competition and Standards: Better Together
Andrew Coulson's WaPo op-ed today is fundamentally flawed because it treats standards and choice/competition/customization in education as mutually exclusive competing policy approaches, rather than what they really are--complements that are both more effective when combined. It's no coincidence that the percentage of children attending publicly-funded schools of choice in the United States has increased significantly in the past 15 years--at just the same time as the standards movement has taken off. Standards, by shifting the focus of public accountability from the inputs schools use and what they do to the outcomes they achieve for students, enable schools to have greater autonomy and flexibility in their operations, allowing greater educational diversity and meaningful options. A focus on outcomes also demands greater educational customization to achieve those outcomes for kids with differing learning styles, interests, and innate abilities. At the same time, some form of standards and public reporting of student and school performance are essential for a well-functioning education market, because they address the principal agent problem and provide parents with useful information to make informed educational choices. Coulson's own examples demonstrate this: For-profit tutoring systems in the U.S. and Japan are independent of government, but they damn well are judged by parents based on the results they produce for students on nationally-administered college and, in the case of Japan, high school entrance exams. Like peanut butter and jelly, choice and standards are just better together.
Panic! Some More
Since the college admission panic story has already been beaten to death by Reuter's, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, the Washington Post obviously had no choice but to go above the fold with exactly the same story today. This is what happens when there's a big education story that (A) writes itself, and (B) everybody knows is coming months in advance.
Jay Mathews hits all the standard notes--lead with crestfallen high school senior, dreams crushed by a blizzard of rejection letters, quote the outraged parent, pivot to the big picture, throw in some statistics, use words like "frantic" a lot.
The article also makes the same mistake the rest of them make, noting that "many students apply to as many as a dozen schools, often the ones least likely to accept them," without making the connection that this contradicts the idea that the admissions rate race is getting harder to run. Once more, with feeling: the overall difficulty of getting into an elite college is a function of two things. (1) the number of slots in elite colleges; and (2) the number of qualified applicants to elite colleges. Not applications. Applicants. If the same number of well-qualified applicants submits more applications for the same number of slots, admission rates will decline, but the odds of getting into college will not. The same is true if more people apply to elite schools who have no chance of getting in.
Mathews also throws in the delicously ironic but almost surely bogus idea that retired baby boomers will, in an act of cliche-confirming selfishness, be "shoving aside some of their children and grandchildren to take up university spaces" once they're retired.
Then, in the last four grafs, Mathews goes all Columbo by saying "Just one more thing--none of this really matters." The average college admissions rate is stable at 70 percent, you can always transfer, and research says it doesn't really matter where you go to college anyway. Great--but then why are we reading this article again?
Jay Mathews hits all the standard notes--lead with crestfallen high school senior, dreams crushed by a blizzard of rejection letters, quote the outraged parent, pivot to the big picture, throw in some statistics, use words like "frantic" a lot.
The article also makes the same mistake the rest of them make, noting that "many students apply to as many as a dozen schools, often the ones least likely to accept them," without making the connection that this contradicts the idea that the admissions rate race is getting harder to run. Once more, with feeling: the overall difficulty of getting into an elite college is a function of two things. (1) the number of slots in elite colleges; and (2) the number of qualified applicants to elite colleges. Not applications. Applicants. If the same number of well-qualified applicants submits more applications for the same number of slots, admission rates will decline, but the odds of getting into college will not. The same is true if more people apply to elite schools who have no chance of getting in.
Mathews also throws in the delicously ironic but almost surely bogus idea that retired baby boomers will, in an act of cliche-confirming selfishness, be "shoving aside some of their children and grandchildren to take up university spaces" once they're retired.
Then, in the last four grafs, Mathews goes all Columbo by saying "Just one more thing--none of this really matters." The average college admissions rate is stable at 70 percent, you can always transfer, and research says it doesn't really matter where you go to college anyway. Great--but then why are we reading this article again?
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Panic! At the Rich Suburban High School
Q: When does a tiny statistical change in a number that affects a miniscule number of people merit breathless coverage in the New York Times?
A: When the number has something--anything--to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.
In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it's annual exercise in college admissions scaremongering on Page A14 yesterday, but it remains the most-emailed article on this site as of 2PM today. Due to the "frantic" and "ferocious" competition for admission and an "avalanche of applications to top schools," this was "the most selective spring in modern memory at America's elite schools," resulting in "brutally low acceptance rates" at schools like Harvard, which accepted 9 percent of applicants, the "lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."
Nine percent! Man! Why, just last year, the admit rate at Harvard was....
Actually, it was nine percent then too.
Technically, 9.3 percent, as compared to this year's rate of 9.0 percent. Funny how that didn't make it into the article; I guess there just wasn't room with all those adjectives and adverbs. The Wall Street Journal made the same omission when it ran exactly the same story($) two days ago, although on the whole the WSJ piece had better data and did include previous-year data for other schools. Only Reuters provided the helpful context of how much Harvard's admission rate has changed when it ran exactly the same story a week ago.
These stories, which appear every year at the same time and with about the same degree of predictability as cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, are based on the premise that it is much, much harder than it used to be for smart kids to get into a top-flight college. But is that what the numbers actually say? It's true, as the Times article notes, that the number of high school graduates increased from 2.4 million in 1993 to 3.1 million last year. But that's a very selective timeline; 1993 and 1994 were--not coincidentally--the years with the fewest graduates since the early 1960s. One could just as easily note that the number of high school graduates today is almost exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.
Since the number of slots in elite schools is basically a constant, the real culprit is the denominator, the number of applications. An increase in applications isn't the same thing as an increase in applicants--if the same number of qualified applicants doubled the number of applications they submitted for the same number of slots, institutional admit rates would drop even though the odds of a given student being admitted would not. The article notes that students are filling out "ever more" applications, but seems not to notice, or care, that this undermines the logic of the piece.
Similarly, not all of the people who apply to Harvard have a realistic chance to get in. If the marginal increase in applications is disproportionately comprised of people who are treating the Harvard application like a $65.00 Powerball ticket, then falling admit rates are a mirage.
But there's no room for these kind of uncertainties when you're focused on scaring the bejeezus out of striving parents who wrongly believe that elite colleges are the alpha and omega of opportunity for their children.
A: When the number has something--anything--to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.
In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it's annual exercise in college admissions scaremongering on Page A14 yesterday, but it remains the most-emailed article on this site as of 2PM today. Due to the "frantic" and "ferocious" competition for admission and an "avalanche of applications to top schools," this was "the most selective spring in modern memory at America's elite schools," resulting in "brutally low acceptance rates" at schools like Harvard, which accepted 9 percent of applicants, the "lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."
Nine percent! Man! Why, just last year, the admit rate at Harvard was....
Actually, it was nine percent then too.
Technically, 9.3 percent, as compared to this year's rate of 9.0 percent. Funny how that didn't make it into the article; I guess there just wasn't room with all those adjectives and adverbs. The Wall Street Journal made the same omission when it ran exactly the same story($) two days ago, although on the whole the WSJ piece had better data and did include previous-year data for other schools. Only Reuters provided the helpful context of how much Harvard's admission rate has changed when it ran exactly the same story a week ago.
These stories, which appear every year at the same time and with about the same degree of predictability as cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, are based on the premise that it is much, much harder than it used to be for smart kids to get into a top-flight college. But is that what the numbers actually say? It's true, as the Times article notes, that the number of high school graduates increased from 2.4 million in 1993 to 3.1 million last year. But that's a very selective timeline; 1993 and 1994 were--not coincidentally--the years with the fewest graduates since the early 1960s. One could just as easily note that the number of high school graduates today is almost exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.
Since the number of slots in elite schools is basically a constant, the real culprit is the denominator, the number of applications. An increase in applications isn't the same thing as an increase in applicants--if the same number of qualified applicants doubled the number of applications they submitted for the same number of slots, institutional admit rates would drop even though the odds of a given student being admitted would not. The article notes that students are filling out "ever more" applications, but seems not to notice, or care, that this undermines the logic of the piece.
Similarly, not all of the people who apply to Harvard have a realistic chance to get in. If the marginal increase in applications is disproportionately comprised of people who are treating the Harvard application like a $65.00 Powerball ticket, then falling admit rates are a mirage.
But there's no room for these kind of uncertainties when you're focused on scaring the bejeezus out of striving parents who wrongly believe that elite colleges are the alpha and omega of opportunity for their children.
Amazing Girls
I'm a bit late in commenting on this Sunday NYT article about the tremendous stresses on affluent girls in a Boston suburb, but since it's still the 3rd most e-mailed article on the Times' site, I guess it's still relevant. Author Sara Rimer's writing seems to fluctuate between trying to make you feel sorry for these girls and awed by their "amazingness" (they speak Latin!, they do experiments with DNA!), but the major emotional response triggered in me was annoyance at yet another NYT article bemoaning how hard it's become to get into the Ivy League and other elite universities.
I don't want to dismiss these girls' feelings--being a teenager is lousy no matter who you are, and I certainly would never want to go through that again--but failing to get into an elite university of your choice, while crummy in the near term, not only won't ruin your life, it's as issue that only impacts a tiny percentage of the teen population. The constant focus on the problems of a small subset of affluent, predominantly white students has real negative impacts on public debate about education in this country. Sure, it's stressful to feel like you have to take 5 AP classes and participate in a variety of extracurriculars--but a bigger problem is the larger numbers of young people who don't even have access to AP classes or the kinds of extracurriculars available to students at this high school.
The question of stress on teenage girls deserves a bit more consideration: One thing I didn't mention in the paper I wrote last year about educational gender gaps is that the improving achievements of young women--which are the major driver of gender gaps favoring girls in college-going and some other measures, because boys haven't lost ground--do seem to have come with a cost, in that girls (and not just privileged girls) report high levels of stress, more so than boys. Of course, it's possible young girls have always felt more pressure than boys to be perfect or, as a coach quoted in the NYT article says, please everyone. In the past, this might have meant hiding your intelligence and being meek and docile. Today, at least for daughters of professional parents, it means being accomplished and academically successful. I'm troubled we've set up a world where some girls (and I'm sure also some boys and plenty of adults) feel they have to please everyone, but a world where girls please people who are important to them by compiling accomplishments that have long-term educational and professional payoffs is still a better world than one where girls please others by doing things--playing dumb, getting pregnant--that have negative long-term impacts.
Reading this article, I couldn't help thinking about the paper I have out this week about parental anxieties around early childhood development and the growing market in educational infant and toddler toys and videos that claim--with little evidence--to help parents build "smarter" brains in their children. I'd be willing to bet that many of the girls who are stressed out about extracurriculars, AP, and getting into elite schools were raised in homes where parents worried about fostering their children's brain development and played classical music to stimulate neuron growth. And I suspect they'll grow up to be mothers who carry these same anxieties into raising their own children. At the same time there are enormous inequities and these girls have had opportunities, experiences that are dramatically different from those of their less-advantaged peers, and that have produced real academic and life outcome disparities that favor affluent girls.
As Annette Lareau illustrates compellingly in her book Unequal Childhoods these inequities are linked to dramatic differences in childrearing approaches between professional and disadvantaged families--and both approaches have costs for the families that use them and their children. I'd like to believe there's a possible world in which we can give all kids access to the benefits of the professional approach to childrearing--confidence, strong verbal skills, cultural competencies and knowledge--without some of the costs that appear to be associated with it, and with some of the benefits--strong family connections, independence, more free time for adults and children--that are connected with the less advantaged approach. Pipe dreams? Probably. But, while I'm older than the "amazing girls" and wasn't as amazing a teen as they, like them I was raised to believe in a world of limitless possibilities. So I'll keep hoping.
I don't want to dismiss these girls' feelings--being a teenager is lousy no matter who you are, and I certainly would never want to go through that again--but failing to get into an elite university of your choice, while crummy in the near term, not only won't ruin your life, it's as issue that only impacts a tiny percentage of the teen population. The constant focus on the problems of a small subset of affluent, predominantly white students has real negative impacts on public debate about education in this country. Sure, it's stressful to feel like you have to take 5 AP classes and participate in a variety of extracurriculars--but a bigger problem is the larger numbers of young people who don't even have access to AP classes or the kinds of extracurriculars available to students at this high school.
The question of stress on teenage girls deserves a bit more consideration: One thing I didn't mention in the paper I wrote last year about educational gender gaps is that the improving achievements of young women--which are the major driver of gender gaps favoring girls in college-going and some other measures, because boys haven't lost ground--do seem to have come with a cost, in that girls (and not just privileged girls) report high levels of stress, more so than boys. Of course, it's possible young girls have always felt more pressure than boys to be perfect or, as a coach quoted in the NYT article says, please everyone. In the past, this might have meant hiding your intelligence and being meek and docile. Today, at least for daughters of professional parents, it means being accomplished and academically successful. I'm troubled we've set up a world where some girls (and I'm sure also some boys and plenty of adults) feel they have to please everyone, but a world where girls please people who are important to them by compiling accomplishments that have long-term educational and professional payoffs is still a better world than one where girls please others by doing things--playing dumb, getting pregnant--that have negative long-term impacts.
Reading this article, I couldn't help thinking about the paper I have out this week about parental anxieties around early childhood development and the growing market in educational infant and toddler toys and videos that claim--with little evidence--to help parents build "smarter" brains in their children. I'd be willing to bet that many of the girls who are stressed out about extracurriculars, AP, and getting into elite schools were raised in homes where parents worried about fostering their children's brain development and played classical music to stimulate neuron growth. And I suspect they'll grow up to be mothers who carry these same anxieties into raising their own children. At the same time there are enormous inequities and these girls have had opportunities, experiences that are dramatically different from those of their less-advantaged peers, and that have produced real academic and life outcome disparities that favor affluent girls.
As Annette Lareau illustrates compellingly in her book Unequal Childhoods these inequities are linked to dramatic differences in childrearing approaches between professional and disadvantaged families--and both approaches have costs for the families that use them and their children. I'd like to believe there's a possible world in which we can give all kids access to the benefits of the professional approach to childrearing--confidence, strong verbal skills, cultural competencies and knowledge--without some of the costs that appear to be associated with it, and with some of the benefits--strong family connections, independence, more free time for adults and children--that are connected with the less advantaged approach. Pipe dreams? Probably. But, while I'm older than the "amazing girls" and wasn't as amazing a teen as they, like them I was raised to believe in a world of limitless possibilities. So I'll keep hoping.
Universal Pre-K?
Good discussion between Richard Colvin and Bruce Fuller about the movement towards universal pre-k and whether publicly-funded preschool for all kids is a desirable policy goal. They're both smart and thoughtful about this, so it's worth checking out, as is this debate we hosted between Bruce and NIEER's Steven Barnett last spring on the question of universal vs. targeted preschool. Joanne Jacobs weighs in here. I'm looking forward to reading Bruce's book (still waiting to get a copy), so more on this issue when I've had a chance to do that.
Tangentially: Joanne posts about a Tennessean article on "outsourcing parenting." I understand why this bothers some people, but it's worth noting that one of the benefits of modern economies is the achievement of greater efficiency through comparative advantage. There's no reason to believe this isn't also the case for at least some elements of child care and child rearing. I certainly have sympathy with folks who hire someone to teach their children to ride a bike, since I can't ride a bike, so if my hypothetical future kids are going to learn to ride a bike, I'll probably have to hire someone to teach them.
Tangentially: Joanne posts about a Tennessean article on "outsourcing parenting." I understand why this bothers some people, but it's worth noting that one of the benefits of modern economies is the achievement of greater efficiency through comparative advantage. There's no reason to believe this isn't also the case for at least some elements of child care and child rearing. I certainly have sympathy with folks who hire someone to teach their children to ride a bike, since I can't ride a bike, so if my hypothetical future kids are going to learn to ride a bike, I'll probably have to hire someone to teach them.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
DC Schools Takeover: Probably a Good Thing
It looks like DC mayor Adrian Fenty will be allowed to take over the city schools. As my colleague Sara Mead has written (when she's not busy in her day job as conventional wisdom-busting provocateur), all mayoral takeovers aren't created equal--they can be done well, or badly. But specifics aside for the moment, I think this is a good idea, for a couple of reasons.
First, mayoral takeover creates a whole new kind of accountability. Critics of school-focused accountability systems like NCLB rightly note that the people writing the laws are never subject to the kind of tough accountability measures they impose on educators. And for various reasons--low voter turnout, fractured responsibility--people seem to get re-elected to urban school boards on a regular basis even when the schools are a dismally run as they have been here.
Mayoral takeover is different. Mayor Fenty is tying his political fortunes to school improvement in a deliberately high-profile way. That means that the smart people whose job it is to get him re-elected in 2010 won't be sleeping well the night before the 2009 test scores are released. Those kinds of incentives and pressures can be a good thing in a lot of ways.
Second, when mayors assume responsibility for the schools, they send an important message, both to the general public and the educators and students within the system: "Our schools are not a lost cause." Urban education and urban students have long been written off as irredeemable, victims of greater forces perhaps, but beyond saving in the end. That kind of attitude can infect the culture of a school system and become self-sustaining. Mayoral takeover send a very different signal: someone with a lot to lose is willing to take a risk on an uncertain but vitally important proposition. That's a good thing too.
First, mayoral takeover creates a whole new kind of accountability. Critics of school-focused accountability systems like NCLB rightly note that the people writing the laws are never subject to the kind of tough accountability measures they impose on educators. And for various reasons--low voter turnout, fractured responsibility--people seem to get re-elected to urban school boards on a regular basis even when the schools are a dismally run as they have been here.
Mayoral takeover is different. Mayor Fenty is tying his political fortunes to school improvement in a deliberately high-profile way. That means that the smart people whose job it is to get him re-elected in 2010 won't be sleeping well the night before the 2009 test scores are released. Those kinds of incentives and pressures can be a good thing in a lot of ways.
Second, when mayors assume responsibility for the schools, they send an important message, both to the general public and the educators and students within the system: "Our schools are not a lost cause." Urban education and urban students have long been written off as irredeemable, victims of greater forces perhaps, but beyond saving in the end. That kind of attitude can infect the culture of a school system and become self-sustaining. Mayoral takeover send a very different signal: someone with a lot to lose is willing to take a risk on an uncertain but vitally important proposition. That's a good thing too.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Big Lending Speaks
Today’s Washington Post business section has a front-page article discussing big lending’s efforts to fend off proposed cuts to student loan subsidies. Two thoughts:
First, Sallie Mae and its fellow big-lenders need to move on from trying to sway policy through lobbying pushes, public relations campaigns, and campaign contributions. Instead, it’s time they propose some policy solutions they would be willing to accept—solutions other than maintaining the status quo. There are already ideas out there for market-based methods to establish subsidy rates—for one example, check out New America’s loan auctions idea. Lenders will be better served in the long run by helping to design a system that allows market-forces instead of politics to establish subsidy levels.*
Second, let’s embrace the current dual-program structure rather than continue the endless back-and-forth between proponents of Direct Lending (in which the federal government provides loans to students directly) and the Federal Family Education Loan Program (in which private banks make loans to students, and the federal government subsidizes those loans). Granted, this dual-program structure is unusual, but the tension between the two programs is likely the best method of ensuring both are efficient, effective, and innovative. If either fails in one of those criteria, there will be lots of people calling for its removal, and another program ready and willing to take its place—that’s good motivation to stay competitive.
*Any good policy will balance the need for low subsidy levels with the need to keep smaller lenders in the student loan industry. Loan giants, like Sallie Mae, will be at a huge competitive advantage in any market system, and without special consideration for smaller lenders, a market-based policy risks pushing small banks out of the student loan industry. This would reduce options for students, and small, local banks that provide personal service are a great option to have. Also, industries that consist solely of corporate behemoths (think cell phones) generally don’t have five-star customer service.
Hell? No.
The Chairman of the House Education Committee in Colorado resigned from his chairmanship after the Rocky Mountain News published an email to a colleague in which he said, "There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherziers."
The tendency of some people to conflate the privatization, voucher, and charter movements is one of the more tedious things you have to deal with in talking about important issues like choice and the place of education in the public and private spheres.
To be clear, there really are people out there who want to privatize and destroy the public schools. They're all voucher supporters, and a lot of them are quite sympathetic to charters, not because they actually care about--or even understand--charters per se, but because they see charters as a step in their direction. I don't know that I'd go so far as to condemn them to Hell, but they're no friends of public education
But tarring charter schools with other people's bad intentions is wrong. The commonly-made distinction between charter schools and public schools is inaccurate; charter schools are public schools. I guarantee that if you were teleported into the classroom of a good charter elementary school here in DC, there would be nothing to tell you that it was anything other than a particularly well-run public school. Same predominantly minority and low-income DC kids, same base funding source, same accountabily under No Child Left Behind. If, on the other hand, you were teleported into a DC private school, believe me, you would know.
The tendency of some people to conflate the privatization, voucher, and charter movements is one of the more tedious things you have to deal with in talking about important issues like choice and the place of education in the public and private spheres.
To be clear, there really are people out there who want to privatize and destroy the public schools. They're all voucher supporters, and a lot of them are quite sympathetic to charters, not because they actually care about--or even understand--charters per se, but because they see charters as a step in their direction. I don't know that I'd go so far as to condemn them to Hell, but they're no friends of public education
But tarring charter schools with other people's bad intentions is wrong. The commonly-made distinction between charter schools and public schools is inaccurate; charter schools are public schools. I guarantee that if you were teleported into the classroom of a good charter elementary school here in DC, there would be nothing to tell you that it was anything other than a particularly well-run public school. Same predominantly minority and low-income DC kids, same base funding source, same accountabily under No Child Left Behind. If, on the other hand, you were teleported into a DC private school, believe me, you would know.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)