Selling EdFund

Via New America Foundation, Schwarzenegger is considering selling California’s state guarantee agency, EdFund, to a private, potentially for-profit, loan company. In the federal loan program, guarantee agencies not only insure student loans, they also provide oversight by ensuring that lenders perform the required due diligence to collect loans and prevent defaults.

The Institute for College Access and Success put out a brief on the potential sale of EdFund back in 2005—a must read if you’re interested in this issue. In it, they describe why EdFund’s sale could be detrimental to California’s taxpayers.

I describe (shameless plug) in my recent report on the student loan industry how close ties between private, for-profit loan companies and guarantee agencies create a serious conflict of interest in the oversight of the federal loan program. With recent headlines on abuses within the industry, the Department of Education needs to keep a close eye on this exact kind of transaction.

Blame Foucault

Almost a month ago, I noted a bizzare post at the National Review Online's higher education blog laying blame for the Virginia Tech killings at the feet of the postmodern English department. Apparently, Foucault made him do it, because if you question conventional ways of thinking about truth and morality, people will naturally be driven to murderous rampages, which, as we all know, is why the Modern Language Association shut its doors 30 years ago. It simply couldn't manage the attrition.

My only mistake was in assuming this was just an example of ill-conceived, one-time riffing off the top of the new cycle. Apparently not. The discussion is still going strong over there, with this post approvingly quoting a recent column from--seriously, you can't make this up--Phyllis Schlafly, where she notes that while she has no idea what Cho actually studied, he "could have" read selections from various--horrors!--feminist courses.

Or, notes Schlafly, he could have taken a senior seminar titled "The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature." Right! By all means, let's purge Macbeth from our institutions of higher learning, because if we keep teaching Shakespeare to these kids...oh, wait a minute....(John Miller gets this right).

Historic(al) NAEP Results

New NAEP history & civics results were released yesterday. To the seeming surprise of many, history scores were up across the board, while civics scores are up in grade 4 and flat elsewhere.

I'm guessing a lot of pre-written newspaper articles and blog posts beginning with some basic historical fact that most students don't know, followed by a general bemoaning of our collective ignorance of our shared past, heritage, etc., etc., are sitting in various electronic and physical dustbins this morning.

The New York Times still went with the overly-pessimistic "Students Gain Only Marginally on Test of U.S. History." That's real glass-is-half-emptyism, no?

The top-line policy context is, as always, NCLB. Along with the recent upswing in 4th grade NAEP science scores, these results seem to, if not puncture, at least fail to support the widely held notion that NCLB's focus on reading and math is creating collateral damage in other subjects, as teachers make time for the basics by cannibalizing subjects like history and science.

The consensus unverified speculative opinion is that because NCLB is helping more students with reading, they're learning more in other subjects, because it's awfully hard to learn if you can't read. Which makes perfect sense, that's why NCLB was designed to focus on core subjects in the first place. What's interesting is the begrudging, backhanded way this gets discussed. For example:

Peggy Altoff, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, suggested that the intensified reading instruction in primary grades might disguise a failure to teach much history and civics in fourth grade. Social studies test scores might be climbing, she said, because fourth-graders are more likely to understand simple questions that do not require much knowledge of history, such as interpreting pictures.

Or:

“It’s heartwarming that the test organizers have found positive things to say, but this report is not anything to break out the Champagne over,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton who advocates devoting more classroom time to the subject.

Look, if it turns out that history and science instruction in this country have been fatally hamstrung by a more generalized lack of reading skills, then shouldn't advocates for those fields be first the barricades to support NCLB-like reforms, given the initially paradoxical yet increasingly plausible idea that increasing basic skill instruction at the expense of history and science may actually lead to more learning in those subjects? Or is this just all about using the public policy arena to jockey with the other disciplines for status?

Spring Awakening...

...a Broadway musical based on a 19th century German morality play set to rock music by Duncan Shiek, received 11 nominations for the 2007 Tony awards. Admittedly tenuous edu-connection: the main characters are high schools students and some of the scenes take place in school. I saw it last month and liked it a lot, although its R-Ratedness came as kind of a shock. Also, I almost bumped into Mandy Moore walking out of the show; she's taller than you'd think given that most Hollywood actresses / singers are practically munchkin-sized.

Back to education policy now.

Admissions Impossible Continued

From the New York Times, in an article titled "Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier," about the idea that ever-more-selective elite universities are driving students to apply to less-elite universities, which are as a result becoming more elite:

The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession. High-achieving students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, primarily because of uncertainty over where they will be admitted. Supply, however, has remained constant. Most of the sought-after universities have not expanded their freshman classes.

While the spread of the "Northeastern obsession" is probably an accurate characterization of the last 20 or 30 years of college admissions, I don't think things have changed much in recent years. Moreover, the idea that supply is constant simply isn't true. Per the U.S. Department of Education, here's the percent change in enrollments at Ivy League campuses (in descending order of U.S. News ranking) from 2003 to 2006:

Princeton: +6.1%
Harvard: + 3.0%
Yale: +1.6%
Penn: -1.6%
Columbia: +1.0%
Dartmouth: +0.4%
Cornell: +1.7%
Brown: +5.4%

Seven out eight have increased the number of enrollments, at rates comparable to the overall national increase in the number of high school graduates. As the Times itself reported($) just a couple of weeks ago, Yale is considering a signficant expansion.

The Education Tax Credit Endgame

Andrew Coulson tries again to convince us that education tax credit's aren't the same thing as public funding, and fails because he ignores my key points: Education Tax Credits have the same impact on individual and government budgets as would government expenditures for the same purpose, and unlike broad tax cuts, the linkage of tax credits to specific behaviors has a distorting impact on individual incentives. But at this point I'd imagine we're talking past each other, because we have fundamentally different perspectives on taxation.

There's a broader point worth making here, and it involves the seeming contradiction between Cato-types' recent preference for education tax credits and their more general stance on tax issues. Libertarians have traditionally argued that tax systems should be both simple (count the number of posts on their blog extolling the flat tax) and behavior-neutral, to avoid ingintroducing incentives that distort behavior and markets. Education Tax Credits violate both of those principles.

But what's particularly interesting is how education tax credits interact with the much more important libertarian contention that tax rates and tax revenues should be low. As tax rates are lowered, the value of non-refundable tax credits (and thus the amount of support education tax credits would generate for scholarships, or the amount of tuition they offset for parents) declines. Were both Coulson and his colleagues in Cato's tax policy shop to succeed, the ultimate result would be to virtually eliminate any public role in encouraging support for education. This is an important point: The ultimate aim of Coulson's views is not simply to destroy "public education" but to eliminate any social commitment to supporting children's education, leaving responsibility to fund children's schooling entirely in the hands of their parents and, for children with the bad judgement to be born to poor parents, the vagaries of individual charity.

Obviously, this is a view that is very far out of the mainstream not just of American culture but also of the school choice movement (of which I consider myself a part). So it's no wonder Cato's education policy team would prefer to talk about the benefits of choice for poor parents and for reducing social conflict. (To his credit, Coulson has written that he believes parent responsibility to pay for education is a core principle of his ideal education system.) But it's entirely disingenuous of them to present tax credits as a "third way" on school choice--they're actually a much more radical alternative, leading ultimately to an utter abdication of any social or communal responsibility or committment to children.

"and they look at us like we are demented..."

So says my former employer Kati Haycock in today's NYTimes article about a recent study from ACT documenting the lack of rigor in high school curricula. Kati's talking about her suggestion that some analysis might be in order. I've got nothing to add, other than to say that (A) there's every reason to believe things are as bad as the report says they are (look at remediation rates and learning outcomes in college), and (B) "and they look at us like we are demented" cries out to be the name of an emo band of some kind.

Aim First, Then Fire

John Edwards’ recently announced college plan gets it right on one of the big college affordability issues: the need for a simpler, straightforward financial aid application, and more support to students and their families when they are applying to college and figuring out how to afford it. Unfortunately, his tuition plan—which promises to pay the first year of college for 2 million students—doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Yes, a more generous and simplified grant program targeted to low-income students is needed in our federal financial aid system (although it isn’t clear if Edwards’ plan is targeted to low-income students). Experience shows that when students know that they can afford college, they are more likely to see college as an attainable goal, and therefore more likely to apply and enroll. Edwards’ plan, while it gives students that assurance their first year, does not give them any help in the years after that. Rather than offer this grant program for only one year to “any student who is willing to work hard and stay out of trouble,” I’d like to see the program targeted to students who need it most and offer them grant aid for their entire undergraduate careers.

It also contains vague, merit-based language – they have to take a ‘college prep’ curriculum and ‘stay out of trouble’. Experience with other grant programs with a merit component, like Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program, shows that the students who end up losing the money because of these criteria are generally the neediest students. They don’t always have the strong support systems needed to make sure they take all the required college prep classes and, be honest, would you have wanted your college financial aid dependent on ‘staying out of trouble’?

I worry that this program would end up leaving out the students who need the most help, and inadvertently shift grant aid to students who tend to receive more in other forms of financial aid, like tax credits, loans, and merit-based institutional aid.

Incomparable

Since there's obviously not much else going on in the world, the Post published its third front-page story today on the DC school reform plan plagiariasm "scandal," wherein Mayor Fenty produced a school reform plan partially copied from the school district in Charlotte, NC. Read about days one and two here and here. After the obligatory intro, the article begins--and for all intents and purposes, ends--here:

Although there is plenty to admire about Charlotte's schools, there is also a growing chorus of critics who question whether Charlotte's successes reach beyond an academic elite.

Charlotte's students overall perform well in elementary school, for instance, but those gains largely disappear by high school, where many arrive needing remedial work. In the latest round of statewide tests, the yawning achievement gap between black and white students widened.

It is also unclear how much Charlotte's experience applies to the District. Charlotte's sprawling system of 129,000 students has more than twice as many pupils as the District and includes suburban and rural schools. The District's enrollment has declined for more than a decade; Charlotte is growing by 5,000 students a year. In national tests, Charlotte's fourth- and eighth-graders topped the list for urban schools in reading and math, while the District brought up the rear.

These differences raise questions in Washington about whether Charlotte's performance is broad enough or relevant enough for the Fenty administration to follow.

Let me get this straight.

An alleged "growing chorus of critics," who are named nowhere in this article, are concerned that the Fenty administration, in trying to reform a school district that is bleeding enrollment and has rock-bottom test scores, has erred in copying parts of the school reform plan of another district with growing enrollment and much higher test scores. Their concerns are based on the fact that the two districts are in some ways dissimilar. How are they dissimilar? The other district has growing enrollment and much higher test scores!

Alternatively, copying is a bad idea because Charlotte, like DC, hasn't solved some of public education's most vexing problems, like reforming high schools and closing the achievement gap.

In other words, to the extent that Charlotte is like the District, copying was wrong. To the extent that Charlotte is different from the District, copying was wrong. This is what happens when you start with a "scandal" and then fill in the blanks afterwards.

Meanwhile, the Post still hasn't asked or answered the only questions that matter: Are the reforms copied from Charlotte any good? Are they likely to help District students learn?

Coming soon to the front page, no doubt.