Pearlstein is Right

Steven Pearlstein, that is, the Washington Post business columnist. You can learn most of what you need to know about why higher education costs so much and what to do about it by reading his two columns on the subject this week (here and here). Today's piece focuses on University of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kerwan:

Kirwan's singular achievement has been to fundamentally change the mind-set on campus, from one that reflexively equated spending with quality to one that is open to measuring inputs and outputs and welcomes the challenge of delivering more for less.

Anyone can now go to the University of Maryland Web site, for example, and call up a report on how each campus, and the system as a whole, is performing on 31 measures, such as acceptance and graduation rates, average faculty salaries and the percentage of operating expenditures going for administration and instruction.

A funny thing happens when you start collecting and publicizing data like these: They expose inefficiencies and get people thinking about how to do things differently. After reviewing the comparative data, for example, Maryland regents decided to concentrate growth on the campuses with the lowest costs.

And once it became apparent that low-income students were graduating with more debt than more well-off students, the university was forced to face up to the embarrassing fact that it was giving out 60 percent of its scholarship money on the basis of "merit" -- financial-aid-speak for using scholarships to buy higher SAT scores and winning athletic teams. The regents have decreed that much more of the aid will be awarded on the basis of financial need.

Higher ed needs more people like this.

Maybe I'm Being Too Nice

The Pangloss Index isn't the first report I've written criticizing state implementation of NCLB (here's one from a few years back focused on the teacher quality provisions), and when I talk to the press--particularly at the state level--I usually get some variant on the question, "If this is so bad, why are people doing it?"

As a rule, I don't like to speculate, because, how would I know? Motivation isn't the issue, what matters is the policy. I only have detailed knowledge of one state department of education, and they're all good people, so generally I attribute avoidance of NCLB provisions to a deeply-ingrained compliance mentality combined with what Eduwonk likes to call the "dual client problem," whereby state officials are charged with looking out for the interests of both adults and children in the school children--interests which are often, but not always, aligned.

But then I read stuff like this comment on our report at This Week in Education, and I wonder if I'm being too nice. He says:

I participated in the first wave of tricks to avoid accountability. What we did was not wrong. It was our responsibility to protect schools so they could protect children. And our logic was explicit: creating loopholes to delay the damage until the Republican governors came to our rescue.

This is a widely held--if seldom so clearly stated--conceit, the idea that education officials who game the system or break the law are engaging in some kind of virtuous civil disobedience on behalf of the children. Others in the edublogosphere have correctly taken issue with sloppy use of the "children vs. adults" meme, but sometimes that is, in fact, the way it is. "Protecting" schools is not always synonymous with protecting children. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of a press release issued by the Alabama Department of Education a few months ago:

Montgomery, Ala. ─ More positive news for Alabama schools following the release of the 2007 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report. The data indicates a 70 percent decrease from last year in the number of Title I schools (high poverty schools that receive federal funding) identified for School Improvement. That means fewer schools in Alabama must offer School Choice for the upcoming school year. School Choice provides parents alternatives on where their children can attend school.

The 70 drop was a result of Alabama's loophole-ridden system, not any great improvement in education. The "positive" news for Alabama schools was negative news for Alabama parents, who now have fewer options to send their students to better schools. There's nothing ambiguous about the dynamic here, the only unusual thing is that state departments are usually a little more circumspect about their intentions.

Later in the post, the commenter says:

Where we crossed a moral line was when districts adopted tricks that directly damaged children. For instance, we abruptly merged high poverty schools creating disastrously high concentrations of poor kids, in order to claim we had "reorganized" failing schools. (and by redrawing boundaries without regard to gang turf, we probably intensified gang wars, so I have to ask if one or more of my students might still be alive if we hadn't thrown the schools into complete chaos.) We forced parents to re-enroll their kids just before school - thus dropping hundreds of kids from the rolls and disrupting the first few weeks of school - so they will be excluded as highly mobile. Among the most damaging was the gutting of our attendance policies by having kids pick up trash in lieu of attending class in order to drop absences from the computer. when And, of course, we drove hundreds of students out of school by imposing high stakes standardized testing that was years over their skills.

That's reprehensible. There's nothing in NCLB that forces anyone to do any of these things, these are just immoral actions that hurt students.

Poverty, Schooling, and the Urban NAEP

One of the foundational arguments in education centers on poverty and schooling. All reasonable people agree that poverty has a negative influence on education, just as all reasonable people agree that quality schooling has a positive influence. The point of argument is how much these things matter, relative to one another. Some people think the negative effects of poverty overwhelm anything schools--even good schools--can do, while others believe schools make a big difference in how much poor students learn.

I tend toward the latter camp, and I think one of the strongest pieces of evidence lies with the National Assessment of Education Progress, which in recent years has been expanded from the national and state levels to include a group of large city school districts like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and DC. The 2007 results were released today (math here, reading here). As in previous years, they indicate that different school districts achieve very different results for poor students.

Here, for example, is the percent of low-income (eligible for the National School Lunch program) 4th graders who are "proficient" in math:

New York City: 31%
Boston: 24%
Charlotte: 23%
Austin: 22%
Houston: 22%
San Diego: 22%
Los Angeles: 15%
Chicago: 12%
Cleveland: 10%
DC: 7%

Low-income fourth graders in New York City are more than four times as likely as low-income students in DC to be proficient in math, twice as likely as Los Angeles, and significantly better than all the rest. The NAEP proficiency standard is unusually tough, but significant differences persist when we look at the percent of students who met the much easier, "Basic" standard:

Charlotte: 77%
Houston: 77%
New York City: 77%
Boston: 75%
Austin: 74%
San Diego: 65%
Los Angeles: 55%
Chicago: 54%
Cleveland: 53%
Atlanta: 52%
DC: 43%

Now, one might reasonably speculate that poverty concentration plays a big role here, that a district with a relatively small number of poor kids would have an easier time helping those kids than a district where poverty is rampant. Except that doesn't seem to be the case; New York City and DC, which bookend these lists, have almost exactly the same percentage of students living below the poverty line, 29%. Charlotte, which is different from the rest of the cities in being a unified urban-suburban district, has by far the lowest poverty rate on the list, 14%, yet does no better than (and in some cases worse than) cities with many more poor children. This is true in other grades (8th) and subjects (reading) as well.

The real source of these large differences in performance is, pretty obviously, that some of these districts are just a lot better than others. New York City, Boston, and Houston, which are consistently in the top half of cities on the NAEP, have all won the Broad Prize for Urban Education in recent years. The cities in the bottom half haven't, and for good reason.

How do these differences stack up against the overall effects of poverty? Below, see the difference between the performance of poor and non-poor 4th graders nationwide on the 2007 NAEP math test, measured three different ways: percent proficient, percent basic, and average scale score (for an explanation of how the scale scores are calculated, and everything else you need to know about NAEP, see this recent Ed Sector "Explainer")

Percent Proficient: Non-poor (53) minus Poor (22) = 31 percentage points
Percent Basic: Non-poor (91) minus Poor (70) = 21 percentage points
Scale Score: Non-poor (249) minus Poor (227) = 22 scale score points.

By contrast, the differences between the highest- and lowest-scoring cities on those three measures were 24 percentage points, 34 percentage points, and 27 scale score points.

Very comparable, in other words. The scale score difference between poor kids in DC and poor kids in New York is bigger than the difference between poor kids nationwide and non-poor kids nationwide. There's no single reason for this; success (or lack thereof) in schooling is a function of many things--management, resources, personnel, etc. etc. It all adds up.

Moreover, I think these city NAEP numbers underestimate the effect of differences of schooling quality on poor students, because they don't represent the whole range of quality. New York City and Boston (the last two Broad Prize winners) are manifestly better school districts than DC, Cleveland, etc. But nobody thinks they're as good as they could be--many, many problems remain to be solved. NYC just got a big influx of money from a school funding lawsuit, for example, which will hopefully lead to further improvement, and there's a lot more work to be done in many other areas.

Poverty creates terrible problems, but schools can help--a lot.

Update: Matt Yglesias provides needed chartification here, while Ezra Klein weighs in here. There's also a long post on Kansas City in Ezra's comments section that's worth reading, refuting the idea that because Kansas City wasted vast amounts of money trying to help urban children, ipso facto school funding doesn't matter and other districts can't do better.

Update 2: If you you want to ask NCES Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr questions about this data, send questions to tuda2007questions@ed.gov until Monday at noon. Dr. Carr will post her answers on Nov. 20 at 3 p.m at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/2007tudachat.asp.

Well Said!

More follow-up on our recent report focusing on how states game the NCLB accountability system, with coverage from the Birmingham News here and Stateline.org here. The latter story concludes,

"Alabama’s [Dr. Gloria ] Turner [the state's director of assessment and accountability] questioned the report’s methodology, saying that out of the 11 data measures [used to create the "Pangloss Index"], only about half have to do with making adequate yearly progress under NCLB, yet most of the study “is about how Alabama and the other states and the Department of Education have been in cahoots to usurp NCLB.”

It's true that AYP only makes up two of the 11 measures. But we focused on Alabama because it had the single biggest increase in its Pangloss Index rating from 2006 to 2007, and--as the report clearly states--that increase was primarily driven by huge gains in the percent of schools and districts making AYP.

Still, I have to say, "how Alabama and the other states and the Department of Education have been in cahoots to usurp NCLB" is hard to improve on, we should have made that the tag-line for the report when we sent out the press release.

Nixon Returns

Congress is currently working on a new version of the federal Higher Education Act, and the issue of rising college costs is predictably front-and-center. As Scott Jaschik reports today at InsideHigherEd, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to like the idea of a federal "watch list" comprised of those colleges and universities that post the largest annual tuition increases, in percentage terms.

This is a bad idea. It smacks of Nixon-era federal price controls, which I think everyone agrees seem pretty wacky in retrospect. It's flaws are obvious: a college that jacked up tuition a few years ago and is now just maintaining inflated costs would look good, while a college that waited until this year to increase prices would be identified as a bad actor--even tough the former would end up charging students more over the same time period.

Moreover, while the overall trend of increasing college costs is clearly a problem, a yearly increase in tuition at an individual college isn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe all the money is being poured back into student services or targeted for financial aid for low-income applicants. Blunt-instrument policy levers like a simple tuition increase "watch list" can't make that distinction.

The real issue Congress should be worried about isn't price but value. If price was rising 6 percent a year while quality was increasing by 10 percent, I'd be thrilled, as long there was enough need-based financial aid to maintain access and keep student debt burdens managable. (Of course, need-based aid programs are expensive, one reason Congress is drawn to non-solutions like watch lists, which are free.)

The problem is that value is ratio--quality divided by cost--and we lack data for the numerator of that equation. This is one of the reasons why proposals to generate more comparable, institution-level data about student outcomes are so important. Indeed, the lack of value information is one of the main reasons prices are rising in the first place, because when there are no real independent measures of quality, the market tends to assume that price and quality are the same, giving institutions incentives to raise prices more than necessary.

Leaving Birmingham Behind

People have their differences of opinion about No Child Left Behind, but even the law's supporters would concede that it sets extremely ambitious goals for improvement. NCLB requires states to establish a series of escalating performance targets for schools and districts, rising from wherever they were when the law was enacted in 2002 to 100 percent proficiency by 2014--a pace and scope of improvement without precedent in American history. Everyone knows this to be true.

But it's not.

While the law was written to raise performance targets every year, in many states the actual standards for schools to make "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, have gotten easier every year, because Congress made the mistake of allowing state departments of education to annually alter the definition of AYP. Every year since the law was enacted, the 51 state departments of education have, en masse, submitted hundreds of requests to the U.S. Department of Education to water down their accountability systems. Some were rejected but--inevitably, due to political and bureaucratic pressures--some were approved.

The end result, five years and counting into NCLB, is that objectively, abjectly failing school distrticts like Birmingham, Alabama are making AYP, even as the district is hemorrhaging students and money, even as students in most grades and most subgroups fail to meet NCLB proficiency standards. Nearly half a century after bombs and protests in Birmingham helped catalyze the civil rights movement, Birmingham is failing poor black students on every dimension except NCLB. And this isn't unusual--the same is true in states and cities across the nation.

To read the whole sorry tale, see this report by yrs. truly released today by Education Sector.

Update: While the report focuses on the Alabama and Birmingham story, it contains ratings for all 50 states, and for the second year in a row it singled out Wisconsin for special scrutiny. Alan Borsuk of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, who's one of the best state education journalists out there, and I say that not just because he covered our report, covers the Wisconsin angle here.

Free Rice

Although in the back of my mind I suspect this is actually re-directing mental energy toward comparatively less productive purposes, which in the long run would reduce output available to be redistributed toward reducing global hunger through more traditional means, I nonetheless agree with TNR's Britt Peterson that Free Rice is a small act of genius, by allowing people like me to simultaneously avoid real work, feel smart, and--crucially--feel like we're saving the world in the process. That's like the holy trinity for left-leaning policy types who tend toward procrastination.

No Conspiracy To See Here

I went to the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting over the weekend, to present a paper on a panel focused on college classification, rankings, and peer grouping. Afterwards I was chatting in the lobby of the Louisville Marriot with a nice fellow who worked for an academic publishing house. We agreed on a lot of issues including the need to provide colleges with better incentivs to focus on undergraduate education, but when I mentioned the recent Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, he basically said, "Yeah, but that's just a bunch of Republicans from Texas trying to undermine public higher education so they can please their corporate masters," or something along those lines.

It's important to understand that this is not true. At all. I spent a fair amount of time attending meetings of the Commission over the last couple of years, presenting testimony, reading reports, and talking to various folks involved, including the Chairman, Charles Miller, who's from Texas and raised a lot of money for the Bush campaign. It's all on the up and up, there's no hidden anti-education agenda. Really.

(This just shows one of the unfortunate side effects of the Bush Administration--over the last two or three years, a whole lot of intellectually lazy and half-paranoid conspiracy theories about things like warmongering and destruction of civil liberties and what have you turned out to be more or less true. Which gives credence to other facile theories that aren't true. I realize this isn't nearly as problematic as the actual foreign policy fiascos, assaults on the Constitution, etc., but it still makes my life difficult.)

Miller and I co-wrote an op-ed on higher education funding and reform that appeared in yesterday's Houston Chronicle. It begins:

It's an article of faith that free markets have given America the greatest higher education system in the world. Unlike K-12 schools, colleges and universities have to compete for students and resources. As a result, the thinking goes, we're blessed with vibrant institutions that operate relatively free of government control and provide a crucial advantage in the global contest for economic supremacy.

Unfortunately, this is wrong on all counts. When it comes to their most important mission — helping students learn— American colleges and universities are badly underperforming and overpriced. That's because they don't operate in anything like a true free market. And the solution to this problem isn't less government involvement, but a stronger role of a different kind.

You can read the rest here.

Teachers In Need of Improvement

Richard Kahlenberg* writes about peer review as the better way to get rid of DC's worst teachers. Since teachers are harder on each other than any principal, he says, having them review each other's teaching practice, assignments, exams and lesson plans would result in evaluations that "weed out the incompetent while preserving the basic idea of tenure." I think he's right. Peer review means getting teachers involved in developing and participating in evaluation. This doesn't mean it waters down evaluation or makes it easy on teachers. But it does make it more meaningful. In Montgomery County, MD, for example, to be "put on PAR"– the county's peer assistance and review (PAR) program– means you've been evaluated by master teachers (not at your own school) as needing some form of remediation. For new teachers, this means more targeted professional development, which is often welcome. For veterans, this sometimes works as a reality check and a decision point– it either lights a fire under them to teach in new and better ways (pride swallowed) or reminds them that they forgot to retire or find a second career. I know a teacher who left after 20 years of teaching b/c she was put on PAR- it was the first time, she said, that she really "heard" the problem– she was a good teacher for the honors kids and a horrible one for the on-level kids, which is where she'd been placed by a well-meaning principal who was trying to put the experienced teachers with the kids who needed the most help. She didn't want to go through the program after 20 years of teaching, so she left. This is too bad for the honors kids she might have taught but, in the end, she says she's happier and says she had been thinking about leaving for years. And it's definitely better for the on-level kids who she was failing. She counsels kids for elite college placement now– probably what she should be doing.

Getting rid of tenure, to Kahlenberg's point, may open up some doors to kick some bad teachers out but it won't improve teaching. To be sure, peer review won't solve DC's teaching crisis but it's the better bet for ensuring that teachers are held– and hold themselves– accountable for their work.

*one of ES's non-resident senior fellows, featured at a recent ES event to highlight his book on Shanker.