Hey, It's Just How Business is Done

There seems to be an attitude among lenders and bankers that all of this ‘scandal’ about lenders offering kickbacks and inducements to financial aid officers to get on preferred lender lists* is really just ‘how business is done’. And all of us education-types just don’t understand how the world of business works.

They’re probably right about a lot of industries, where free lunches and free trips for customers are just part of selling your product, but those rules of business don’t apply when it comes to student lending—an industry supported heavily by federal (read: taxpayer) money, and that exists to promote college access and choice among those who couldn’t otherwise afford it. If the kickbacks and inducements increase the cost of loans to students OR to taxpayers, they undermine the public policy goals of the program and shouldn’t be part of business-as-usual in the student loan industry.

Of course, the question then is: have students really been harmed by these arrangements between lenders and financial aid officers? That’s a tricky question and we don’t (and might not be able to get) accurate information to answer it, but what is obvious is that these arrangements have the potential to harm students, and that potential for harm is serious enough that we need regulations to preemptively protect students. Let me offer up an analogy.

The healthcare industry has faced a similar predicament with doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Both the medical community and the federal government have established guidelines to curb the “gifts, meals, and consulting fees” pharmaceutical sales reps offer to doctors as part of their marketing strategy. But why even bother with guidelines it’s just how business is done? We want guidelines on pharmaceutical marketing because we all want to know that our doctor is prescribing medicine based on our medical needs and scientific research, and not which company offered the best lunch.

The same logic applies to student loans. Every parent and student wants to know that they can rely on the advice and guidance of their financial aid officers, without worrying about which lender happened to stop-in at the financial aid office before they got there. Just as the medicines you take can have a big impact on your health, so too can student loans have a big, long-term financial impact. For that reason, the argument that it’s just “how business is done” is both unacceptable and insulting to the concerns of parents and students who need the most affordable student loans possible.

*While this is clearly an egregious example of this kind of behavior, this email from a Bank of America representative (click on the image to the left) about what was ‘required’ of lenders to get on the University of Texas-Austin preferred lender lists is astonishing. At the very least, read about the tequila and wine.

New House Bill's Right on the Money

Like many college students across the country, I dread the fateful summer day where I receive the ominous “Financial Aid Award Letter” email in my inbox. Too often have I experienced Homer Simpson-esque “Doh!” moments as I count the ever-increasing loan amounts listed by my name.

Well fret no more (or at the very least, fret less), as the House education committee passed a bill Wednesday that seeks to cut subsidies to student lenders and halve the interest rates on a key student loan program over the next five years. The bill also includes provisions that allow for increases in Pell grants, tuition assistance, and loan forgiveness. And better yet, the Senate committee is expected to offer even more extensive reform measures. It’s about time.

ES has shown that the recent controversy surrounding Sallie Mae and other student lending companies has been a long time coming, and it’s truly refreshing to see that Congress is finally getting its act together:

“For far too long, college costs have grown faster than families’ ability to pay them,” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. “With this bill, we are saying that help is on the way.”

But of course not everybody is celebrating. According to the New York Times, the Consumer Bankers Association was bold enough to claim that the bill was an “anti-student bill in pro-student clothing”, and they’re even playing dirty. Excuse me? Since when is an estimated $18 billion in expanded benefits to students considered “anti-student”? Surely you’re mistaken.

I guess the moral of the day is “better late than never,” and though the future of student loan reform remains to be seen, it gives hope to millions of debt-mired students that there is indeed (some) light at the end of the tunnel.

Too Stressed by Tests?

Critics of standardized testing often tell harrowing tales of children breaking down on tests, crying, throwing up, or too nervous to sleep for weeks on end. These tales make me angry--not at standardized testing itself, but at the adults who've made kids so nervous about these tests. How kids feel about tests comes down to two things: 1) The messages adults give them about tests, and 2) How well adults have taught them the material the test covers. As Sophia Pappas points out, teachers can even make tests seem fun for kids, a far more productive strategy than getting them all worked up and freaked out:

I try to reduce the potential for inaccuracies by identifying the assessments as “fun games to play with the teacher,” which can help the children feel more at ease and less stressed by the experience. I ask students if they would like to play with me, and many times they jump at the chance to spend some one-on-one time with the teacher, especially since they get to press the “easy” button (thanks, Staples) when they finish. I remember Tyrique expressing sadness that he could not play our “game” a second time.

Appletree Early Learning Public Charter School, on whose board I serve, uses a similar approach to administering the tests that we use to track students' progress and inform and improve our educational practice.

Priorities

Even as D.C. politicos and residents are trying to decide what they think about Mayor Fenty's new pick to run the schools, Michelle Rhee, today Fenty's office announced his pick for another important position: D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission CEO Allen Y. Lew will head up a new, independent facilities authority created by the school reform law to oversee contruction and renovation of DCPS's stock of public school buildings. Over the last few years, DCPS has proved itself woefully incompetent when it comes to managing its facilities, and I thought that plans to create a separate school facilities authority were one of the promising elements of Fenty's school reform plan. Taking construction and maintenance out of DCPS will allow Rhee and her team to better focus on the core goal of improving student achievement. And the new facilities authority is able to bring in new talent that has a proven record on big public construction projects, rather than random people who rose through the dysfunctional DCPS system.

That's the case with Lew, who's well regarded for his successful work on the D.C. Convention Center and Stadium projects. His success with these complicated and contenious projects also suggests Lew has the bureacratic and political maneuvering skills to deal with the challenges of implementing the massive DCPS Master Facilities Plan. Fenty's willingness to move Lew off the high-profile and high-stakes stadium project to focus on schools also suggests he's got his priorities in the right place. If only that could be said for everyone in D.C. government:

Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) praised Lew but voiced concern about the fate of the stadium project. The ballpark's high public cost could rise further if it is not completed on time because penalties would be owed to the team owners.

"Do you want to take the main guy out of the picture, the guy who is able to get it done on time and on budget on opening day?" Evans said. "If you take him out of it, who will replace him? Getting the stadium done is not automatic."

Look, I live four blocks from the stadium, so I have a huge personal interest in seeing the project completed well and on time. But nothing is more important to the future welfare of this city than improving our youngsters' education.

And don't get me started on the "community activists" who are finding fault with Lew because he lacks experience in education. The guy's in charge of buildings, not instruction. He needs construction background, project management skills, and political and bureacratic savvy. The evidence suggests he's got them. What he needs to know about education he can figure out on the job. Did you hear the Nats owners bitching that Lew never played pro baseball?

What Will Rhee Do?

Many thanks to Kevin, Sara, Erin, and Eduwonk on leading the discussion on the DC Public Schools mess. But for those of you who had never heard of Michelle Rhee until yesterday when she was named DCPS Chancellor, or see no hope in her and Mayor Fenty overcoming the disarray that’s been exposed, I’ve got a quick primer on what she can (and probably will) do.

As the founder and President of The New Teacher Project (TNTP), Rhee has helped major urban districts across the country, including DC, attract and certify 23,000 “highly qualified” teachers in ten years of work. In my estimation, they’re an exceptional, not-for-profit human resources contractor that happens to focus on public schools.

What will Rhee likely tackle? In a district with well-documented problems ranging from school violence, high turnover, and inadequate personnel records (they’re storing them in boxes!! And they’re five years behind!!), Rhee will likely focus on staffing. TNTP has issued two major reports to date, both of which focus on the timeline for teacher hiring. In Missed Opportunities they discovered that many districts simply hired too late to get high-quality candidates. Thirty to sixty percent of candidates withdrew their applications, but “had significantly higher GPAs and were 40% more likely to have a degree in their teaching field than new hires.” These are the teachers we most need in struggling schools.

Both reports point to several bureaucratic blockages as the reason for the late hiring. The most important of these included:

• State budget processes taking too long into the summer, leaving funding for schools up in the air.
• Senior teachers being given priority in transfer. A new job opportunity would open and existing teachers would have a first shot at it, regardless of what the principal wanted.
• Principals gaming the system. They’d ask retiring teachers to wait until summer to announce so they would have first pick of incoming teachers, and they would label a teacher as “excess” staff those who were not performing well. Those “excess” teachers would be given priority over new hires.
• The almost complete inability for a teacher to be fired. Principals claimed they would need 15% of their time to address ONE under-performing teacher. Interviews with legal counsel determined that these processes would rarely lead to termination, let alone removal from that school.
• Experienced teachers being able to “bump” novice ones. Because districts considered jobs filled in the last year as “vacant,” between 10-50% of all teachers with a full year’s experience could get bumped by more senior teachers.

In a discussion hosted by Education Sector a little over a year ago, Rhee was adamant on the importance of fixing these problems. Now appointed to lead from the inside, Rhee will likely start by checking out the transfer and seniority provisions in the Washington Teacher’s Union contract. I’m anxious to see what she can do.

Virtual Reality

Every day, internet users send over 170 billion emails. For comparison, the U.S. postal service delivers 213 billion pieces of mail – in a year. Could a similar transformation take place in education? 700,000 public school students took online classes a year ago, enough to form the third largest school district in the country. Most did it to supplement traditional “brick-and-mortar” schooling. To get a better idea what it’s all about, test drive some sample lessons.

Bill Tucker explores a myriad of issues related to virtual schools in a new Education Sector report, showcasing their innovations in personalized learning, teacher quality and support, and funding. He makes a number of interesting points, like how virtual schools are recruiting retirees and stay-at-home parents who wouldn’t otherwise be teaching at all. The report makes recommendations about how to best encourage virtual schools and virtual innovation.

From a teacher’s perspective, I see tremendous potential here for engaging students, especially as these programs get bigger and better. My students love computer games, myspace, and text messages. I’ll be watching to see if virtual schools can leverage those interests into meaningful learning opportunities.

Budget: Deficit Thinking

After setting trade deficit records five years running, it was heralded as good news last week that our trade deficit may fall to only $705.9 billion and our budget deficit to only $150-200 billion this year.

Part of the joy of being an intern is the ability to attend events to put those monstrous numbers in context, like this panel discussion yesterday on balanced budgets, hosted by Democracy. The subtitle of the event, “Debating the Future of Progressive Fiscal Policy,” tells pretty much all the necessary details about the panelists’ political leanings. To varying degrees, all were bullish on the American economy, but they were also quick to point out that the type of deficits we’re currently running are not wholly advisable.

They all seemed to be in agreement that the type of spending mattered more than the actual amount of spending. That is, deficits can be used for positive purposes. This is where it relates to education. When mentioning good types of investments in the future, almost all of them referenced education, training, or some type of human capital investment.

Several of the panelists argued that progressives need to make the case for government in general. When conservatives attack the government and launch “starve the beast” type campaigns, the losers are inevitably the worst-off elements of society. Not coincidentally, they are also the least politically powerful. Investments in infrastructure like roads, water and air quality, transportation, energy, and yes, education, are things worthy of defending. They provide economic stimulus and keep the economy growing. There were a lot of investment metaphors thrown out, but my favorite is fairly simple. Think of an average American family. We’d say it would be a good thing for them to borrow to finance a mortgage or a child’s education. It probably would not be so prudent to purchase consumer goods like iPods, cell phones, or clothes. The same types of spending principles should be applied to the federal government.

For as much attention that is paid to balanced budgets, there is actually relatively little political will for it. Everyone thinks it’s a fine idea in principle, but no one’s for it when their pet program is on the chopping block. One of my college professors suggested this exercise: think of four priorities, like balancing the budget, cutting taxes, funding education, and keeping Social Security solvent. Which party is going to rank balancing the budget as their top priority in that list? The point is that balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility are principles for everyone, but priorities for no one.

The Absent Progressive Voice

Thanks to Sara for bringing a much-needed historical perspective to the question of the progressive role in education reform. Her post about Jonah Goldberg's blindered anti-public education rant, keyed to the Post series about DCPS incompetence, underscores my point--while conservatives like Goldberg may have foolish things to say about this problem, liberals too often have nothing to say, and that silence speaks volumes.

For some excellent thoughts on this topic, see this post from Georgetown Law professor James Forman, Jr. An exerpt:

In 2007, the civil rights community and, in particular, black folks, ultimately are going to have to make a decision: is the civil rights movement vindicated by having upper and middle-class black people (like me) run school systems that disserve poor black children? I believe the answer is no. My father gave most of his life to the movement, and I know that all the marching and the dying that people did was not so that some of us could have jobs. It was so that all of us could read, do math, develop a love for learning, feel the power that comes from knowing your brain can solve tough problems, and get a job you enjoy. Until we become clear on this question nothing else will get fixed.

That's the most progressive thing I've read in quite a while.

Let's Not Do Away with Public Education

It's hard to know where to start on conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg's recent column arguing that the U.S. ought to "do away with" public schools. Goldberg comes to this conclusion based on the Washington Post's recent series focusing on the horrible state of the District of Columbia Public Schools--which is sort of like concluding we should abolish the U.S. military because of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

There's no disputing that DCPS is a horrible mess, and that too many other school districts nationally are doing a grave injustice to the poor and minority kids they're failing serve. But it's hard to see where Goldberg's proposed solution would help.

Goldberg quotes Milton Friedman saying government is bad at providing services but good at cutting checks. But another thing government has been good at is ensuring that every child had a school to attend--an important achievement that could be lost in a purely market system. Obviously, that's not enough if the schools suck, but there's no reason to believe imploding the public schools would generate huge quality improvements.

The biggest problem in education today is an insufficient supply of good schools--public or private--particularly in high-minority, low-income communities. Simply cutting parents a check isn't going to fix that. We need a dramatic expansion of the supply of high-quality schools serving disadvantaged youngsters. Market mechanisms, combined with charity, can do (and are doing) some of that, but the woes of for-profit education management companies, combined with the inherent limits on the number of altruistic school founders, suggest there are serious limitations to what a purely market strategy can accomplish without a more aggressive public role.

In casting the debate as a choice between "greater funding" and "blow the whole thing up" Goldberg betrays a woeful ignorance about today's education policy landscape. What about the standards movement, which has for the first time given parents and the public meaningful information about student and school performance and focused educators on the goal of improving student performance? What about successful school turnaround efforts in San Diego, Sacramento, and elsewhere? What about Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, and other programs that aim to bring a much needed dose of new talent into the education system? What about performance pay, career ladders, and other efforts to make teachers truly accountable professionals and link teachers incentives more closely to actual public goals for schools? What about the charter school movement, which in barely 15 years has created nearly 4,000 new PUBLIC schools nationally, including, yes, too many bad ones, but also including some incredible successes--such as the KIPP and Achievement First networks--and expanded real choice for parents? Goldberg needs to take a look at Education Sector's website.

Yes, there are too many bad schools in the U.S. And, yes, too many reform efforts have failed. But imploding the current system, simply sending poor parents out to fend for themselves with a check and a wish good luck, would be just as great an abdication of public responsibility as anything in the current system.

Mapping D.C. Schools

Per Kevin's post below, if you're following the Washington Post's in-depth series on D.C. schools (or if you like cool interactive online tools), check out their online map tool here. A great way to see how school performance, teachers, and facilities problems are distributed throughout the district -- and you can layer all of that information with poverty data, street names, and wards. Good stuff.

More on the Progressive Solution

Kevin asks below what the progressive solution is the the entrenched, dysfunctional bureacracies that stifle progress and success in too many of our urban school systems. I don't presume to have the credentials to speak for progressives of liberals on this or any issue: I'm hoping Leo or Matt or Ed Muir and John See or Teacher Ken might be up for this.

It's important to realize, though, that historically progressives have been--far from defenders of dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent school bureacracies--some of the most radical advocates for dismantling schools systems when they disempower poor families and communities and perpetuate inequity for poor and minority children. James Forman, Jr. writes:

The late 1960s also saw the public school bureaucracy challenged by the community control movement, the topic of Part IV. Community control advocates included civil rights organizations, black nationalists, and some members of the liberal political establishment. They demanded that ghetto residents have more control over their neighborhood schools. While not itself a school choice initiative, the community control movement is an important part of the narrative. Like some choice proposals, it was premised on the notion that the public system was unwilling or unable to meet the needs of poor and working-class black children. Community control supporters also shared choice advocates’ belief that taking control from the bureaucracy and giving it to community members was an important part of the solution.

The Community Control movement faced some of the same challenges as other 1960s-era efforts to empower poor communities and foundered due to internal conflict as well as conflict between community activists, school boards, and unions--The latter of which, while often (and sometimes rightly) maligned as a source of urban bureacratic dysfunction, have also been advocates on behalf of teachers and communities against dysfunctional management. Between the high point of 1960s era activism and the 1980s, however, liberalism itself shifted to become much more defensive and invested in protecting the entrenched interests of its allies--including urban bureacrats--rather than expanding opportunity and social justice for the disadvantaged--a phenomenon that Charlie Peters, in his influential "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" cited as a core failing of late 20th century liberalism.

I would argue that a progressive vision of education reform needs to return to principles of parent and community empowerment. Ironically, the people who are doing the most to carry that banner these days are charter school operators and supporters who are often seen as centrists or even conservatives.

Understanding this--the need to empower poor families and communities and the potential of new, community-driven public schools of choice to do that--is why I became a charter school convert. Several years ago, the C.S. Mott Foundation arranged for a group of education policy analysts to visit a group of "small, autonomous schools," (not charters) created by the Oakland school district in response to the activisim and parent organizing efforts of a local community organization whose members were angry about the terrible conditions the Oakland schools had placed their children in. These working class and poor, largely black and Hispanic families were alienated from and disempowered by the local public schools, which had no meaningful connection to the community. Organizing, and persuading the district to create new schools the parents wanted, was the only way for these parents to get not only much better schools for their children, but also the type of ownership of public education that middle-class families take for granted. Those parents in turn became empowered to make other changes in their and their children's lives, and those schools became a cornerstone for building functioning communities in those neighborhoods.

It's important to understand that this is a different, and I believe richer, account of how choice empowers parents than standard market-based arguments, which ignore the importance of community and broader political forces, and tend to cast empowerment solely in terms of increasing poor parents' purchasing power and making them competent consumers, rather than helping them get real political power to influence institutions that affect their lives. Further, it's a view that's not in tension with the progressive belief that improving schools alone is insufficient without broader social and political changes to address the myriad other factors contributing to poor life outcomes for disadvantaged kids, since gaining power to influence public education instiutitons also puts parents in a position to influence other issues that impact their and their children's lives.

I'll admit this is a much messier strategy than the centrist and conservative approaches Kevin describes, and the potential it has to threaten certain established liberal consituencies may actually doom it as a progressive education agenda. But it's happening in places like Los Angeles, where Green Dot charter schools founder Steve Barr has organized thousands of parents to advocate for better schools for their kids, and I'd like to see what it could do, alongside more centrist and conservative reforms already underway, in a place like D.C., where God knows the parents and community need all the empowerment we can get.

Where's the Progressive Solution?

Day two of the Post's exhaustive series on the decades-long failure of DC Public Schools traces the history of constant leadership turnover and unfulfilled reform efforts. It also features more examples of corruption, recalcitrant bureaucracy and mind-boggingly inept management, such as this from former superintendant Arlene Ackerman:

Ackerman obtained extra federal money and pressed ahead with the summer school plan. But the school system's personnel office functioned too poorly to recruit additional teachers. Early in her tenure, for example, Ackerman came across a motorized filing system that had broken long ago, trapping hundreds of personnel records behind a wall.

"Somebody told me, 'Oh, this has been this way for years,' " Ackerman said. "Years! I'm thinking, no wonder people are telling me that they can't get data or records."

Ackerman and a few aides worked the phones to contact summer school teacher prospects. "One night, we were calling people until so late that I finally said, 'It's 11 o'clock. We can't call anybody else tonight and ask them if they want to work in D.C. They will know we're desperate,' " she recalled.

Ackerman puzzled over the central office culture. Late one night, after attending a meeting, she returned to headquarters to see a line of people in a hall waiting to see one of her subordinates. She said she eventually came to believe that the man, a longtime employee who no longer works in the system, had amassed great power through his ability to hand out jobs, award contracts and outlast superintendents. "He was like the godfather," Ackerman said.

So here's my question: what's the progressive / left-wing solution to the DCPS incompetence problem? I know what the libertarian / right-wing solution is: blow up the system and replace it with vouchers. I know what the centrist solution is: standards, accountability, and choice in a public context, i.e. charter schools. What's the liberal solution?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is one. That's not to say there's no progressive education agenda at all--left-wing folks reliably support things like funding equity and smaller class sizes, and there are places where those reforms are badly needed.

But those aren't solutions to the problem of an entrenched, dysfunctional educational bureaucracy. The biggest failure of the traditional liberal education agenda--and the main reason that vouchers and other dodgy ideas persist--is total silence in the face of educational problems like those in DCPS, failures that are literally ruining the lives of tens of thousands of low-income and minority students--the very students liberals are supposed to care about the most.

Understanding "Standards"

There has been much discussion of standards in the last week, fueled by the release of two major reports. The National Center for Education Statistics raised some interesting questions about the rigor of state standards and variation between the states. Their report compelled Secretary Spellings to argue against national standards on the editorial pages of the Washington Post.

There is some ambiguity in the use of the word "standards" in this debate. In terms of curriculum, standards are a specific description of what students should know and be able to do by the end of a course or grade level. This is what we mean by "national standards." In terms of assessment, standards are the level of performance to which students are held accountable -- the difficulty of the test. This is what we mean by "high standards" (which, incidentally, is also the reason women say they won’t go out with me). It's the difference between what a student should learn and how well they need to learn it to pass the test.

The distinction is subtle but important. As a high school math teacher, I immediately noticed a significant gap between my state’s curriculum standards and what was expected on the state test, and I often wished they were more aligned. There was more depth and more breadth in the curriculum standards. Of course, even these did not account for everything I wanted to teach my students, like mental toughness or the importance of going to college.

In policy discussions, we should be aware of the two types of standards and be clear about which we are referring to. It is crucial that all states have high assessment standards, which is why the NCES report is troubling (though in my view mitigated by flawed methodology). But this does not necessarily mean that all states must have equivalent curriculum standards. In theory, states can exercise discretion in what students learn and when they learn it while also ensuring that all students benefit from a rigorous and complete curriculum. The question is how to make sure it happens.

Nightmare on the Potomac

A few years ago, I took a tour of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle outside of Prague (if you've seen The Illusionist, a lot of the scenes were shot there). After a while, it became apparent that our tour guide, while friendly, polite, and knowledgeable, was also completely insane. Not "kind of eccentric" insane but "I am the Messiah" insane. Years of living under the utter absurdity of life in the former Eastern Bloc had driven him over the edge, never to return.

After reading today's Washington Post article about DC Public Schools, I wonder how many DCPS employees are at risk of a similar affliction. More than anything, it's a portrait of a school system where common sense goes to die.

The article, which is worth reading in full, is a litany of bureaucratic incompetence. It also highlights one of the real challenges of urban school reform. When new leaders are hired, they naturally focus on reforms tied directly to classroom learning. You'll never hear a new superintendant say something like this at his or her first press conference:

"We're not going to adopt any innovative or fashionable reforms. Nor are we going to implement wholesale changes to the curriculum or recruit new learning specialists and teachers. Instead, we're going to start by getting to a basic level of competence in running this place. There are no new ideas here, we're just going to work at not doing things that will make us subject to ridicule. Only after we've gotten there--and it's going to take some time--will we move ahead with the rest."

Yet that might be exactly the right thing to do. Most people are able to keep their sanity in the face of constant absurdity, but it tends to sap their motivation and will, breeding cynicism and hopelessness. It prevent legitimate reforms from taking root. And, as the Post shows in some great graphics, it leads to a school system--pay attention, those who think demography is destiny--where the average 8th grade math score for non-poor students is the same as the average score for poor students nationwide.

Or to look at it a slightly different way--there's a gap of 23 scale score points (225 to 248) between the scores of poor and non-poor students nationwide in 4th grade math. That gap is only marginally bigger than the 19 point gap between the national average score for poor students (225) and the DCPS score for poor students (206).

In other words, poverty is drag on educational attainment, but so is gross incompetence, and the effects of the two seem to be pretty comparable. And of course, most DCPS students have the soul-crushing misfortune of experiencing both at the same time.

It's enough to drive you crazy.