Courting Unfulfilled Promises

I'm an editor, not a blogger. And I often cringe at the lengthy prose of many blog posts, saying to myself, "they sure could use a good editor." But the recent Supreme Court ruling on race and schools has brought out the blogger in me. First, I do respect our justice system, the Supreme Court, its justices, their decisions and all. But I can't help scoff at the futility of this decision in light of what many refer to as "the promise of Brown."

In 2004 there were celebrations all over to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, the landmark 1954 desegregation case. Many books were published and conferences held. As associate editor of a higher education magazine at the time, I helped guide the publication down this road, interviewing the Brown plaintiffs, school officials in Topeka, Kan., scholars and activists that were involved then and now.

But what stood out among the commemorations and celebrations was the reality that after 50 years, the promise of Brown had not yet been realized. The court had ruled in 1954, but it took until the mid-1970s for the public to begin to act and then, only after court orders, much like the court-ordered desegregation ruling in Louisville, which along with Seattle's integration plan, prompted yesterday's High Court decision. And still, even after 30 years of court-mandated desegregation efforts, the consensus among educators was that there was still more to be done.

Thanks to yesterday's ruling, however, it will have to be done some other way. Even though the ruling allows for a limited use of race, which has sparked hope among some, to put that limitation into practice will take more resolve than many will demonstrate. If the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on race and college admissions, Grutter v. Bollinger, is any indication-and it is-many of those who have started to act will now start to retreat. Soon after that ruling, race-conscious programs all over the country began folding, in fear of potential lawsuits.

Brown's reality of a quality education for all seems less likely in court rulings and more so in the voluntary actions of a public that is truly and deeply committed to this goal. I see more of Brown's reality in innovative school reform efforts, such as charter schools and public school choice, which have their drawbacks but are initiated in a spirit of free will and not obligation. And I see more of Brown's reality in the D.C. mayor's radical move to charge someone with nontraditional, but proven experience with the task of turning around a struggling public school system. I recognize that these efforts have to be proven, but after 50 plus years of waiting for the promise of Brown, I'm ready to put my hopes in something else.

- Posted by Robin V. Smiles, Editor, Education Sector

Segregation is unconstitutional, so desegregation must also be?

Cruel irony dripped from the Supreme Court’s decision today to declare unconstitutional the school assignment plans in Seattle and Louisville. In Brown v. Board the Court ruled that districts could not segregate schools based on race. Today’s ruling says, in effect, districts can not desegregate based on race either. I respectfully disagree with Liz in arguing that the ends in this instance do justify the means, and that the race-blind language in Brown should not be understood so literally as to ignore the larger social issues the case addressed.

From 1975 to 2000, under court order to desegregate, Louisville assigned students to schools based on a number of categories, including race. When let go from court supervision, the district voluntarily chose to keep the racial classification as one factor in its school assignments. Today’s decision essentially makes the same tools used to desegregate schools only seven years ago now unconstitutional, as if de facto segregation had been permanently overcome.

The Court erred tremendously in considering the school assignment plans from Louisville and Seattle together. True, both plans utilized a numeric race window as a consideration for assigning children to schools, but the similarities stop there. The majority, written by Chief Justice Roberts, repeatedly cited the fact that a Seattle school with 30% Asian-American, 25% African-American, 25% Latino, and 20% white students would not be allowed under their plan. In an effort to create diversity, Roberts is surely correct in asserting such a school should qualify.

The majority faulted both districts for assigning students based on either/ or racial classifications: white/ nonwhite in Seattle and black/ other in Louisville. But the demographics in the two districts are not comparable. In Louisville, the dichotomy was real; only a tiny percentage of students did not fall into one of these categories. Seattle, on the other hand, had significant percentages of students of Hispanic and Asian descent.

Roberts also repeatedly emphasized the infrequency of Louisville’s usage of race as a reason for it to be abolished. His logic was that, since it was a small factor (only about 3% of the school assignment decisions employed race at all), it was expendable. But small usage does not mean small importance. Today, over one third of black and Latino K-12 students still attend schools where at least 90% of the students are considered a minority. More than one in six African-American students attends a school with a minority population greater than 99%.

These concentrations manifest in poor schools. Blacks are considerably more likely to
attend schools with lower average academic skills than whites are. And they are more likely to be enrolled in schools with larger class sizes and with teachers who are less prepared than their counterparts in predominantly white schools. Compared with tenth grade whites, tenth grade black students are more likely to attend schools with security guards (71 vs. 47 percent), metal detectors (21 vs. 3 percent), and bars on the windows (9 vs. 2 percent).

In Louisville, a district with an African-American concentration of 34%, the plan required blacks to make up between 20-50% of each school’s students. This is a fairly large window, and the fact that 70% of its schools fell more than five percentage points away from the average indicates flexibility in the plan’s implementation. Furthermore, some schools went over the 50% maximum, meaning it was not a strict “quota” by any definition.

Opponents of using racial guidelines suggest socioeconomic status (SES) as a proxy for race, but targeting by SES alone does not achieve the desired results. In 2004-2005, the US Department of Ed. highlighted five districts (Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County, NC; San Francisco, CA; Brandywine, DE; and La Crosse, WI) that had implemented SES-based school assignment plans. None of the five eliminated racial segregation. Both North Carolina districts saw substantial hikes in their racial concentrations; Charlotte-Mecklenburg's percentage of students in racially segregated schools increased 25%. The other three districts achieved only modest gains. La Crosse's meager 3.25% reduction scored top marks, and had the advantage of nine extra years.

Near the end of the majority decision in the Michigan law school affirmative action case, the Court suggests that 25 years from now racial preferences will no longer be necessary. While this is an admirable goal, it should not be constrained by a given number of years. Instead, we must continue to utilize racial considerations until the statistics begin pointing to a world where race is neutral.

Desegregation: Does the end justify the means?

An article in the BBC reports that the Supreme Court has just narrowly decided that the race of a student cannot be a factor in determining where they are to attend school. Stemming from affirmative action plans in Louisville and Seattle, the case was brought by white parents whose children were denied entry to their public school of choice because of racial quotas.

Opposition to the desegregation programs was not one sided, either. Parents of black students also expressed frustration at seeing their kids shipped all over the city according to where quotas of black students needed to be filled, rather than to their local school. One mother is quoted saying: "I prefer to have my kid go to a school for poor black people across the street rather than spend hours on a bus to go to a school for poor white people on the other side of town."

So what does this ruling imply in the light of open interdistrict choice, a current hot topic in education reform? The choice to transfer out of district is generally seen to be a liberating and valuable option to poor, minority, inner city students whose dismal local schools are sabotaging their life chances. However, studies on open interdistrict choice policies in Massachusetts and Minnesota , among others, have shown that it actually increases social stratification, with white students significantly overrepresented in the percentage of students who utilize the option. Also, the already underperforming schools that lose students lose money as well. The results? Schools increasingly divided along the lines of race and quality.

Although the repercussions of this ruling combined with the growing popularity of interdistrict choice policies may exacerbate inequalities in education, I cannot bring myself to disagree with the ruling. You cannot fix inequality with inequality. We must not be telling children that they can't attend their school of choice because of their race, be they white or black, no matter how admirable our intentions are; in this case, the end doesn’t justify the means.

This case also brings to light an issue that needs to be addressed: Do choice and equality run counter to one another in education? And if so, how can policy address this under the shadow of the Constitution and this recent ruling?

The Debate over Student Loan Auctions

At the Higher Education Finance Working Group policy briefing yesterday, the discussion, in true financial aid style, was lively, a little snarky**, and, at times, thoroughly confusing. One area where it did shed some light was the debate over loan auctions in the federal loan program (Inside Higher Ed writes it up here).

In the current system, Congress decides how much of a subsidy (called “special allowance payments”) the federal government will pay to lenders in the federal loan program. Critics argue that letting Congress decide that number, which impacts lender profits, allows too much political influence in the system.

Auction proponents claim that loan auctions would allow the market, and not politicians, to determine bank profits. With loan auctions, each year loan companies would bid on the ability to make federal student loans. The ‘best’ bids would be those that offer to make loans for the lowest subsidy rates.

Lenders don’t like this idea, which they claim would create too much instability in the loan market—schools would not know which lenders they will be working with from year-to-year. Lenders also claim that it would drive out smaller lenders unable to match the bids of larger lenders, and it would hurt students, who would see fewer benefits and worse service from lenders that are working off of smaller profit margins.

These are all reasonable concerns, but I’m still skeptical. Lenders usually end this argument by saying that the current system is perfectly fine, works great for everyone and should be left alone. That makes me think that the party it really works best for is the lenders, since they are the ones interested in keeping the status quo.

I haven’t seen good evidence yet that we can’t devise a loan auction that allows the market to determine subsidy rates while also protecting smaller lenders (they could bid in groups) and ensuring that lenders maintain the service necessary to keep default rates low (we could start by cutting the amount the government pays lenders on defaulted loans). There must be good policy solutions out there that balance the interests of all three parties—taxpayers, students, and lenders—better than the system we have today.

**I get a little cranky on the opinion page of yesterday’s USA Today about a mailing I got from Sallie Mae—it is misleading and points to the need for more oversight and regulation in the student loan industry.

Local Teachers Union Leaders Speak

Teachers unions are at the center of many raging education policy debates, and opinions about them are as strident and varied as they could be. But while representatives of the national unions, along with unions in big city schools districts, get most of the press covereage, the experiences and ideas of the leaders of the nation's thousands of smaller local unions are often left out. Which is a shame, because the local collective bargaining table is where many of the most important education decisions are actually made.

In a new Education Sector report, "Leading the Local," Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 30 recently-elected local union leaders from a diverse group of districts across the country. Their thoughts, on a range of topics from teacher pay to union-management relations to leading multiple generations of teachers in an era of increasing competition and accountability, show that local union leader positions on these issues are much more complex and varied than people commonly understand. Regardless of where you stand on the issues, if you care about teacher policy, you should read this report.

Intersecting Interests in College Rankings

Ever since a number of small liberal arts colleges announced their intention to abstain from this year’s rankings by U.S. News & World Report, the debate about the ranking’s merits has been reinvigorated. Commenting today on the university presidents’ decision, Robert Samuelson contends:

“What their students will learn, if they're paying attention, is a life lesson in cynicism: how eminent authorities cloak their self-interest in high-sounding, deceptive rhetoric.”

It is highly likely that there are self-interested motivations behind this decision. The presence of ulterior motives, however, does not change the fact that the rhetoric may, to a certain extent, be true. In the case of the U.S. News rankings, a little information could be a dangerous thing.

I decided where to go to college two years ago based upon many of the U.S. News criteria: percentage of small classes, acceptance rate, and retention rate. I got lucky. None of these factors quantify why Brown University has actually been a good fit for me. The majority of the reasons that I love Brown are things I knew nothing about before I arrived; the potential for a large 10am lecture to be dynamic, or the impact of a school’s grading system on its overall academic culture.

The statistics are not going away. They will live on in books, college brochures and college counseling offices, and they do have their place in the application process. But the U.S. News suggestion that colleges can be summarized and ranked by these characteristics alone does more to add to the clutter of the admissions process than to sort through it. Placing colleges and universities on such an absolute scale perpetuates the misconception that there is a universal set of wealth and prestige based qualities that make a school better or worse for every student.

Let students pick a school that is number one on something that will actually matter to them once they get there - whether that is one of the U.S. News variables or the number of on campus coffee shops. They really are up to the challenge.

(For more on potential alternatives to the U.S. News paradigm, see Kevin Carey’s article, “College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education”)

Best. Job. Ever.

Sara Mead, gender warrior, scourge of the infant education industry, frequent commentator on the DC schools scene, expert on all things regarding small children, founding Quick & ED contributor, genuinely nice person, and policy analyst par excellence, is leaving us to begin an inevitably successful stint at the New America Foundation. It's a sad moment for everyone at Education Sector; Sara wrote many of the organization's first and best reports, and she leaves behind an example that will be hard to follow.

But follow it someone shall. We're now hiring for a new senior policy analyst to fill Sara's (metaphorically) large shoes. All the requisite qualifications apply--we're looking for a smart, innovative thinker who's great at research and analysis and even better at writing, someone with significant experience and expertise in a range of policy areas and environments.

More broadly, we're looking for someone who wants to tackle one or more of the big-picture education policy challenges of the day--making the K-12 accountability systems of today work better for all students while inventing the accountability systems of tomorrow; giving all students and parents more choices of high-quality public schools; increasing the supply of top-notch teachers, particularly for the students who need them the most. We need an analyst who not only has great ideas in these areas but also has the will and strategic vision to translate them into real-world improvement on behalf of student and society at large.

If you're that person, let us know. And don't forget the job comes with the keys to this blog, along with a full tank of gas, unlimited mileage, and no-fault insurance. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

School Time

I've been on leave but not so far gone that I haven't managed to talk to reporters about lengthening the school day, an issue that is proving to have legs. Bolstered by the Gates/Broad "Ed in '08" effort, more school time is hotter than it has been in decades. Reporters have consistently asked "what's the biggest obstacle to extending school time?" The short answer is money, although of course it's more complicated, as I explain here. Folks balk at the cost of adding hours or days, which is fair considering a single extra day of public school would cost a state millions of dollars. If it is a worthwhile expense (yes, it's got promise but no, it's certainly not a wholesale national solution to poor quality schools and low student performance), the money has to flow in and out of somewhere, so who gets it and where it comes from are the toughest questions. School districts, for example, are eyeing 21st Century Community Center funds as an innovative way to fund more school hours just as many existing afterschool programs are becoming wary of losing this funding. Here's hoping this doesn't devolve into a school versus afterschool battle since, in the end, it's going to take a well-coordinated effort by both for kids to get the learning opportunities they need to make it in and out of school. More from me (including some baby bragging) when i return later in July.

Too Few Teachers, Too Many Consultants?

The Post ran two education stories yesterday, both unsatisfying, albeit in different ways. (Although it's possible that my mood was altered after reading that great/scary profile of the Vice President...)

The front-page piece, about teacher shortages, reads like the prologue to a good article about big-picture teacher policy issues. I just wish they had written the actual article. In summary: the current generation of retiring teachers entered the profession in a time when women had few career options other education. Thus, schools got a disproportionate share of really smart women, who stayed in the classroom for their entire career. Once the economy opened up, the best and brightest women started going into law, medicine, business, etc., and the teacher talent pool declined in quality. At the same time, NCLB has raised the bar for entering the profession, and new teachers are less likely to see teaching as a 30-year career, leading to frequent turnover and exacerbating the challenge of replacing the older smarter generation.

In broad strokes, all true, although the article should have pointed out that teachers shortages vary widely by region and subject. Some states still produce more new teachers than they need, and schools of education continue to graduate a surplus of elementary education majors even though the shortages are concentrated in secondary education, special education, and science and math.

But the more interesting question is where you go from here, and the article misses most opportunities to explore those issues. Some people, for example, see the shortage and the move to raise the bar for entering the profession as in opposition. Others think that the only way to attract all those women back out of law school is to provide an even higher bar, on the ground that ambitious people want to see themselves as part of a profession that implicitly denotes high standards for entry. Unions point out, correctly, that teachers get paid less than the professions to which smart women now flock. Others see this as a reason to support Teach for America-like alternate routes into the classroom. The article could have put some or all these issues on the table and helped readers sort through them, but for the most part they were nowhere to be found.

The other article, about management consultants hired by DC Public Schools, begins as follows:

Two dozen high-priced consultants have set up shop on three floors of the D.C. public schools' headquarters, wearing pinstripe suits, toting binders and BlackBerrys and using such corporate jargon as "resource mapping" and "identifying metrics."

That lede pretty much gives the game away, doesn't it? "High-priced suits," "pinstripe suits," and "jargon" -- oh my! And even Blackberrys, which would have been a meaningful signifier if this was 2001, not 2007. Newsflash: everyone and their Mom sends wireless email these days.

A couple of weeks ago, the Post ran a great, important series of articles making the case, in excruciating detail, that many of the woes of DCPS lie with comically incompetent bureaucracy that will never, ever, be able to reform itself. A problem of management, in other words. Now the same paper write a cynical article criticizing DCPS for hiring management consultants who, according to the article, have already saved the district $7 million to $9 million. What, exactly, is the problem? The article notes that DCPS has previously hired consultants at great cost, and then ignored their advice. Does that mean that if your doctor puts you on an exercise program to lose weight, and you ignore it, it was stupid to go to her in the first place and you never should again?