The UnTruth Comes Out

The NEA would like to be seen as an intellectually serious contributor to the discussion about No Child Left Behind, and at the level of individual members and state and local affiliates, this is often quite true. But then you see this (via Matt Yglesias), which looks like something a glassy-eyed Lyndon LaRouche supporter would try to shove in your hands as you're coming up off the Metro, and you wonder why anyone should bother listening to a word the national NEA has to say. The "Halliburton-ization" of the public schools? Neil Bush? Shouldn't the grassy knoll be on there somewhere?

However, reading this wasn't a total loss. I looked at the fine print at the bottom and saw --the NEA has an NCLB blog! Who knew? It's called NCLB - It's Time for a Change!, and features the following hilarious /sad disclaimer:

NCLB - It’s Time for a Change! is a blog written and maintained by a group of writers employed by the National Education Association. They are responsible for the content — what you read on this blog does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Education Association or its affiliates.

In other words, "We've bought and paid for this blog, but won't take responsibility for anything the anonymous writers have to say." Not that I entirely blame them, when the posts tend to begin along these lines:

Joel Packer, NEA Education Policy and Practice director, represented NEA and showed off his legendary encyclopedia knowledge of the law. Packer expertly fielded questions on a host of topics...

So as near as I can tell, there are only three differences between this and the AFT's NCLB Blog:

1) The AFT stands behind what it writes.
2) The people from the AFT who write the posts actually sign their names.
3) Posts at the AFT blog often have something worthwhile to say.

Other than that, pretty similar.

Professor, Teach Thyself

There's an excellent article$ by Jeffrey Brainard in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week about the way science is taught in most research universities. Basically, people have known for a long time--decades or more--that some ways of teaching science are better than others. When classes are designed in way that requires a lot of inter-student collaboration, hands-on learning, and regular feedback from the faculty, students learn more. When students are stuck in the back of a lecture hall passively listening someone drone through notes they've used for years, they learn less.

But many research universities have been slow to adopt best practices in teaching, if they adopt them at all? Why? Because research universities aren't designed to care about teaching. All the incentives--financial, professional, and institutional--are for (surprise) research. So even as Congress is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into financial aid programs designed to induce students to major in science, universities refuse to give those students the kind of education that the universities themselves have determined students need. For example:

Innovators...are limited in what they can achieve, says Susan B. Millar, a senior scientist in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies teaching in science and engineering. "I don't know that you can take these kinds of programs to scale when the unit of change is the individual," she says. "You can only do that for so long, until you get tired or retire. And then it doesn't spread."

Top administrators are loath to force change on departments. "I'm very reluctant to define successful and unsuccessful ways in which this can be done," says Patrick V. Farrell, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Madison, where some of the new teaching methods were developed. "I don't want to say, 'Lectures don't work, but group learning does.' In some contexts that's true; in other contexts, it's not. I'm looking for effectiveness in helping students learn."

I'm not sure which is worse: the anti-empiricism, or the total disregard for students? The only reason the University of Wisconsin provost "doesn't want to say" what the education researchers at the University of Wisconsin know to be true is that would mean having an argument with the faculty that he'd rather not have. One of the unfortunate side effects of giving college professors academic freedom when it comes to their speech and scholarship--and those are undeniably good things--is that the concept has been extended to their teaching to a degree that produces absurd reasoning like this. Obviously, college professors should be given a lot of lattitude to innovate and teach, but to say that the subject essentially can't even be discussed is nuts, and bad for students.

But hey, I could be wrong. If someone sends evidence that UW-Madison is actually evaluating its faculty for their "effectiveness in helping students learn" in any kind of reliable, empirical, public way--not just student evaluations, but something tied to real evidence of learning--I'd be more than happy to retract everything above.

To Teach or Not to Teach

New report (pdf) released by NCES that describes which college grads decide to teach, which don't, and why. It's a statistical report, using data from the 1993-2003 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, "B&B 93/03", so it can be long and boring unless you like that kind of thing. Here's the quick and easy if you don't:

1. Teachers stay put more than we think. Teachers have relatively low attrition rates and are actually leaving the profession at lower rates than their peers in other professions. So caution the characterization of teachers as a bunch of fickle ship-jumpers. Or at least no more so than the rest of us.

2. When they leave, it's mostly for family reasons or to go into an entirely different field. Not surprisingly, it's the ladies who leave for family and the men who leave for business and engineering, often for pay reasons. See #s 4 & 5.

3. Teachers don't test well (but probably raise their hands a lot in class). College entrance exam scores are lower for those who go into teaching. Sadly, there's actually an inverse relationship between these exam scores and the likelihood for teaching (16 percent of grads with the lowest scores went on to teach vs. 6 percent of those with the highest scores). That said, the same pattern is not true for grades. As college grade point average increases, grads are more likely to go on to become teachers. So, are they smarter or not? Depends on how you use testing and GPA to measure smarts.

4. Teachers like teaching. Ninety-three percent said they were satisfied overall with their profession and 90 percent said they'd choose it all over again. But they do have complaints- the richest ones are heard in the teacher's lounge but the report summarizes more politely: Nearly half (48 percent for each) said they're dissatisfied w/pay, parent support, and student motivation.

5. Still more women in teaching- and don't expect this to change. Women earned most of the bachelor degrees in education (79 percent vs. 21 percent for men) so of course more female grads ended up as teachers. Women may have more options now in the workforce than ever before, but the work-life balance issue is going to ensure that we keep coming in droves to teaching. More on the gender differences in the NCES report but also in this AAUW report on the pay gap for college grads from a few months ago *.

Education Week's got more easy to read info about the NCES report here.

* Disc: I was the dir of research at aauw when we designed the study. It can't escape its advocacy but it's good research, conducted by some of the same folks who did the NCES report.

Grad Rate Follies

A new report from Daria Hall at the Education Trust, my former employer (BTW, what's the statute of limitations on that in the blogosophere, vis a vis disclosure? It'll be two years in September, I'm thinking that's the limit. If you agree / disagree, email)--covered here in the NYTimes--makes a point that's not made often enough, namely that the No Child Left Behind Act's provisions related to high school graduation rates are more or less a complete joke. In nearby Virginia, for example, the goal is 57 percent. What? How does a number like that even get chosen? Was there a conversation when some state education official said, "Hey, how about fifty-eight percent?" and somone else said, "C'mon now, these people aren't miracle workers!"

Update: Turns out Virginia upped its target to 61 percent earlier this year, which I think moves the state from an F to a D-minus. Also, more disclosure: Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education. He voted against this target, saying it was too low.

Cracks in the NCLB Foundation

In a speech earlier this week, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, staked out his vision for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Much of the subsequent discussion focused on the Miller's proposal for what are commonly called "multiple measures." He said:

Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills. But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to determine how well schools and students are doing.

This is one of those issues where a few words here or there can outweigh the hundreds of pages that comprise the rest of the law. It's so important that a group of NCLB supporters sent Miller a letter a few weeks ago (link via This Week in Education) saying, essentially, "Please, please don't screw this up."

As this gets discussed in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years, it's important to understand what's at stake. Nearly all the back-and-forth will be about what gets measured. But equally important--perhaps more important--is who does the measuring.

The multiple measures idea stems from one the most common--and correct--criticisms of NCLB: schools are rated almost exclusively based on state assessments in reading and math. This system can be inaccurate and reductive--not only are we limited to one way of measurement, via standardized tests, but we're also limited in what's measured. Subjects like art, music, social studies, etc. are left out, along with the non-academic skills and character traits that schools are charged with teaching students. By expanding school measures beyond once-a-year tests, the thinking goes, we can get a broader, more nuanced, more accurate sense of what schools are really doing for their students.

A worthy goal, to be sure. But here's the problem: in many multiple measure scenarios, it's the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they're judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can't be wholly accountable to themselves.

The people here at Education Sector who handle accounting, for example, are scrupulously honest. Nonetheless, we're required to have our books audited by an outside accounting firm every year. Nobody disputes the necessity of this, just like nobody disagrees with having line judges call serves in and out at Wimbledon. When the stakes are high--as with money, championship tennis, and the educational lives of the nation's schoolchildren--measurement must be independent.

Local measurement will also inevitably create huge inconsistency and variance among schools and districts. People are already confounded by the fact that there are essentially 50 versions of NCLB, one for each state. What's the law going to look like if there's one version for each of the nation's 14,000 school districts, or 90,000 schools? A lot like having no accountability at all.

These are the reasons that we're stuck, for the moment, with standardized tests, their many flaws and limitations notwithstanding. And it's why this single issue has the potential to make various cliched dam-related metaphors come to life. Crack open NCLB with misguided multiple measures, and the entire vast enterprise will collapse.

Fish-y Logic on Higher Ed

In his Times column($) today, Stanley Fish begins by making a perfectly reasonable observation:

Whenever I’m asked, and sometimes even before I’m asked, I advise parents of college-age children to not send their sons and daughters to private schools, but to send them to public institutions, at least if there are any good ones in their state. I say this for the obvious reason. The tuition/fee difference between a good private school and a good state school can be as much as $40,000, and, aside from the dubious coin of prestige, it’s hard to see what you would be buying.

before going on to discuss the state of higher education in Florida, saying some things that aren't true, and then contradicting himself:

Florida is not even in the second tier of university systems in this country. Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, nevermind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina...Five straight years of steadily increased funding, tuition raises and high-profile faculty hires would send a message that something really serious is happening. Ten more years of the same, and it might actually happen.

Virginia doesn't really have a university "system" per se; it has the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech and a bunch of other loosely governed individual campuses. The University of Florida is in the bottom half of the "First Tier" of national university according to U.S. News, just like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Georgia Tech (UVA just makes the top half with a tie for #24).

And if public universities really do offer a similar quality of education at a fraction of the cost of privates, why does Fish want them to become...more like privates? Hike tuition, raise more money, and then spend it on a bunch of faculty who made their reputations as scholars and researchers, not teachers? That's exactly the kind of status-obsessed, students-be-damned behavior that public universities should be avoiding.

Update: Sherman Dorn, who works at a public university in Florida, comments here.

Clintonian Education Policy

In Nashville yesterday and today for the annual DLC National Conversation. Interesting fact: like most conferences, you get a canvas tote bag full of stuff when you register. Unlike most conferences, the bag includes a 100 ml. bottle of Jack Daniels. Which is kind of a good one in principle, except 100 ml. is too big to bring back through airport security, which means you either have to drink it alone in your hotel room a la David Hasselhoff or during the conference itself, which, even in a meeting of elected officials, might be kind of rude.

President Clinton gave a great speech at lunch, offering a full-throated defense of his legacy and of the continued relevance of the DLC. That said, his education comments were short and disappointing--his only recommendation for NCLB is essentially, "fewer tests, but based on national standards," which would make it impossible to implement the growth model reforms that seemingly everyone supports these days.

Paying More for More Valuable Degrees

The NYTimes has an article on an interesting higher ed policy issue: whether colleges should charge more for some degrees than others. Most don't, but there's any argument to be made that this is unfair: some degrees--like engineering--are both more valuable in the job market and more expensive to provide in terms of equipment and labor. By contrast, an education degree is both less lucrative and less costly. Why should teachers implicitly subsidize the education of engineers who suck up more college resources and then turn around and make twice as much money out of school? The flip side argument is that we don't want short-term costs to influence long-term life decisions (particularly since people tend to be quite econonmically irrational about such things), or to warp college curricula around limited considerations of economic value.

A key question to answer, then, is the extent to which student choices of major are influenced by variations in price. If demand for given majors is relatively inelastic, then colleges could probably differentiate up to a point without significant negative side effects and thus make pricing more efficient and fair. On this point, the Times reports:

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.

“We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,” said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. “The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.”

This is maddening. The program has been in place for 15 years and all they have is "purely anecdotal" evidence? How about some actual evidence? Universities know precisely what decisions their students make in terms of selecting courses and majors. For most of them, they have detailed financial records. At an institution the size of the University of Kansas, they have tens of thousands of cases to study. Isn't there an economist or PhD candidate on staff who could answer this question? One of the remarkable--and disquieting--things about universities is how they so infrequently apply their tremendous capacities of analysis and inquiry to themselves.