Breaking the Greed / Virtue Dichotomy in Teacher Pay

Commenting on the new issue of Quality Counts, which compares states on teacher pay measures and suggests that teachers make less than comparable professions, AFTie Ed says:

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..." I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure. If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field. People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

This is a variant on the baseline teachers union position on money, which is, "We're not in this for the money; give us more money."

Let me be first to say that this isn't actually an absurd concept on its face. There's no good reason that people should be forced into penury just because they're doing socially valuable work in the public sector. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's not the strongest rhetorical case, and more to the point, it's not necessary. Look at the two doctors on the front page of the Post this morning, identical African-American twins from PG County named Vince and Vance who look just exactly like you'd think a Vince and Vance would look, and also happen to be Army reservists who volunteer in Afghanistan. They're clearly not doing that for the money (although I'm guessing the elapsed time between the story hitting the newstands and getting optioned for TV/movies could be measured in fractions of a second), but as a cardiologist and urologist, I'm guessing they have plenty of money. In medicine, you can do good and well at the same time.

But you've also got to go to medical school, which as we discussed here a few days ago, was thoroughly Flexnerized almost a century ago. Much higher, more uniform standards, longer, more difficult to get into, extended clinical induction model, etc. etc. Also, fewer practitioners and less organized labor. I don't know if all those factors necessarily have to go together, but the fact that they do in medicine has to be meaningful on some level.

The problem with the "we do this for the children not the money" line is that it paints teachers as the kind of professionals that provoke admiration but not aspiration -- people appreciate them but are glad someone else is doing the work. Ed himself goes on to say that "I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall." I wonder he's thought through just how much things would have to change for that to become true.

Disconnected Youth

Disconnected, disengaged, at-risk. All terms to describe the kids who aren't in school, don't have jobs, can't find purpose. Plenty of work out there that argues that we need to reconnect these young people to school, work and civic life. The Campaign for Youth (CFY) is an alliance of about a dozen youth-focused organizations (including the National Youth Employment Commission, American Youth Policy Forum, Forum for Youth Investment) that's recently developed A National Investment Strategy for Reconnecting America's Youth. Check out the summary of their recommendations (pdf).

Spellings Stands Firm

I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back--has to have been more than a year ago--and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone's just a top-line manager/figurehead type or if they actually pay attention and know what they're talking about, and she's the latter. Her friendly, folksy demeanor is a real asset in environments like that; it puts people at ease while also making them less likely to ask really sharp questions.

Her basic message on NCLB was that the President would veto any reauthorization that waters down accountability, and that if Congress won't move she's going to go ahead and implement stuff on her own during the 11 months she has left. It's never been entirely clear to me why the U.S. Department of Education is legally allowed to let some states and not others (or, for that matter, any states at all) implement accountability systems that clearly diverge from NCLB requirements, as it has with the state "growth model" pilots. I suspect the answer is that it's not legal, but since nobody's ox was gored, they just did it anyway. Back in my first job in state government, I remember asking our staff attorney"Are we allowed to do that?" and she said, "We do what we want, and if people don't like it they can sue us. Which is unlikely, because they probably won't know we did it, and even if they find out, suing a government agency is harder than you think. You need standing, you need money to pay for a lawer, and it takes forever. Our lawyers are free and we're not going anywhere."

What about the little guys?

Top colleges—Harvard, Yale, Davidson, University of Virginia—have all made great headlines in the past year by dramatically expanding the financial aid they offer to students and eliminating or significantly shrinking the debt students will graduate with. Yale announced Monday that it will be spending another $307 million from its endowment for increased financial aid and research. This is great, but what about all those colleges, especially the small, private ones, that don’t have the endowment money to keep up with Harvard and Yale?

InsideHigherEd reported this week (The Harvard Trickle-Down Effect) on a session at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute which focused on exactly this question. Despite the fact that most of these schools—small, liberal arts colleges—don’t compete directly for students with Harvard-type schools, they are still worried about the ripple effect from Harvard’s aid announcement, primarily the pressure from students and parents to provide similarly generous aid packages.

While Harvard’s aid plan is great for Harvard students, it’s just not a realistic way to address the problems of rising tuitions and rising student debt at most institutions. And, as we’ve shown here and here, generous aid policies at the most elite institutions can have a negative impact on need-based aid because lower-tier institutions respond by offering tuition discounts to recruit high-performing students. Or, as InsideHigherEd summarizes:

C. Brent DeVore, president of Otterbein College and the session’s moderator, briefly and cogently laid out the financial aid picture leading up to and including Harvard’s announcement. He described how many small private colleges turned to financial aid based on students’ academic or other merit (as opposed to purely financial need) to compete for students’ attention, both against the prestige advantage of the elite colleges and the price advantage of most public colleges. That trend was exacerbated as states, particularly in the South, embraced lottery-driven scholarships that in some places have made an education at a public university virtually free.

As parents’ have become increasingly accustomed to such tuition breaks, merit-based aid has often been replaced by “want-based” aid, “demand-based” aid, and “match the scholarship down the street” based aid, DeVore said, to knowing nods from the presidents in the room.

The presidents’ concerns about the new trend in super-aid policies from elite institutions ranged from lowered expectations about how much financial responsibility a family should bear for a college education to even higher tuition increases and more competition for faculty. Presidents’ ideas for countering this competition ranged from broadening the recruitment pool of students to doing a better job of promoting the academic advantages of a small institution.

But there was no mention of what kinds of budgeting changes schools could make to keep their tuition increases down and make them more price competitive. It seems like a budgeting response may be just as important as a PR response. What I'd like to know is whether there are any small, independent colleges without gigantic endowments that are doing innovative and smart things to keep tuition increases and debt-levels reasonable and maintain need-based aid, but without hurting the institution's bottom line.

New Leader at Carnegie

Stanford's Tony Bryk, a member of Education Sector's research advisory committee, was recently appointed the new President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many people don't realize just how influential Carnegie has been since it was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906. It developed the Teachers Annuity and Insurance Association, which become the TIAA in TIAA-CREF, the giant educator's retirement and insurance company. It founded the Educational Testing Service, ETS, which publishes the SAT, GRE, and AP tests. It sponsored the Flexner Report, which completely revolutionized medical education in America, moving medical schools from a group of semi-professional, unregulated institutions with dodgy, inconsistent standards and questionable quality to the much more uniformly high-quality, well-regulated institutions we have today.

The Carnegie classifications, which put higher educaiton institutions into categories like "Research I," "Research II," "Comprehensive / Master's"," etc.(they've since altered the names) remain the dominant way of categorizing colleges and universities, and define the research status hierarcy that institutions try to climb. It played a signficant role in the discussion that led to the creation of Pell grants in the early 1970s. Former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer's books High School and College, published in the 1980s, were very influential and remain (somewhat depressingly) accurately description of the challenges those institutions face.

Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation's history suggests that higher education is arguably more subject to positive influence via philanthropic/foundation initiative than K-12. This is partly a matter of scale and governance. The vast majority of college students attend one of about 3,500 two- and four-year colleges--compared to 90,000 schools--with more concentrated governance and control. But I also think higher education is inherently more sensitive to the things that philanthropies are in a position to change: public perception, the consensus of research--information, in other words. Colleges are also intensely status- and peer-conscious, so if you can leverage a few key actors, the rest will follow of their own accord.

Most education philanthropy focuses on K-12, because those challenges seems more urgent, but I think that many organizations--particularly the big new foundations getting into the game--are missing a chance to make a lasting difference in the higher ed arena. If they achieve only a fraction of what the Carnegie Foundation has over the last century, it will be time and money well spent.

Update: A reader points out that refering to the Carnegie Foundation as a "philanthropy" is confusing, since it doesn't give out money like, for example, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an ES funder), but rather does most of its work in-house. Good point, I was thinking about non-profit policy-focused organizations generally, many of which operate with some mix of in-house and sponsored work, but that wasn't clear.

The reader also notes that the Carnegie Foundation developed the "Carnegie Unit," which is still the standard way that high school courses are categorized and measured. When someone says that high school students who want to go to college should take at at least three "units" of math, four English, etc., etc., they're talking about Carnegie units. Apparently this was an outgrowth of the development of TIAA -- they needed a standard way of measuring how many courses teachers taught. This illustrates a larger point--also inherent in the story of the Carnegie classification of colleges and universities--which is that defining the way things are measured often has more lasting influence than the measurement itself.

Democracts and NCLB

Sam Dillon's Times front-pager on NCLB-bashing among Democratic presidential candidates came out a few days before I hit the road to spend Christmas with the fam, but apparently I'm not the only one who didn't get to it until after the New Year. As Eduwonk notes, the buried lede in that piece was the major thought division between the candidates and House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller. Now Miller's counterpart in the Senate, Ted Kennedy, comes with a Post op-ed saying the same thing, in stronger words:

The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.

So what gives? I actually think there's no mystery here. The politics of NCLB suck for Obama, Clinton, et al because a certain number of people really hate the law and those people disproportionately vote in the primary, while there's no comparable counter-contingent with strong feelings running the other way. But the candidates don't actually want to engage in "all-out opposition not just to specific details but to the entire thrust and ideology of NCLB," to quote Jonathan Kozol quoting NEA President Reg Weaver on the union's position, because they don't actually think that way. That's why the end of Dillon's article is a litany of "buts"

Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he said. When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability. And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.” But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”

That's classic pre-general campaign hedging. To say that we need to radically overhaul or jettison the law while maintaining accountability makes no sense; accountability is where the core meaning of the law begins and ends. The candidates are just pandering as much as they think they can get away with, and Kennedy and Miller are sending public signals about where those limits lie. Given the way things are going for Senator Clinton, winner of the New Hampshire NEA's endorsement and strongest NCLB basher among the major candidates, my guess is that the high water mark of anti-NCLB rhetoric from the D side has passed, with relatively little effect on the public discourse in the long run.

Some things are just what they seem.

Blogging and So Much More

Education Sector has a new position open for a policy associate. It's a great opportunity to join ES and work on a range of ed policy projects. Q&Ed blogging rights included. More details here.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 1

After more than a year's hiatus, the final season of The Wire debuted tonight. By popular demand, we're back with the weekly blogging. If you've been catching up on the DVDs recently--and if you haven't been, you should start--see here for the final post from last season (or just search for "wire" in the search box at right for the whole list), and here at the Guardian Unlimited for my take on why it's the greatest American television program (sorry, "programme") ever made. Matt Yglesias also wrote a good post last week arguing that while series creator David Simon's pessimistic worldview may be objectively overstated, it's essential for the series' artistic success. Bonus: a response from Simon himself in the comments thread.

Episode 1 summary: Carcetti shuts down the Major Crimes Unit investigation of the Marlo / Chris / Snoop organization and rowhouse mass murders because he's sucking money of out the police budget to cover the school fiscal crisis (and because he won't take school money from the governor he plans to unseat). McNulty is drunk and angry again, which is bad for his relationship with Beadie but good for the viewership generally. Bubbles is clean, and if there's an ounce of sympathy in David Simon's soul, which there may not be, which may be a good thing, he'll end up okay.

Herc is gone from the force and working for Levy, which means he's working for the criminals he used to incompetently try to put in jail. Whether this is a net plus for the murderers and drug dealers of Baltimore remains to be seen. Herc is so dumb that he can't even figure out how to abuse his expense account. (A lobbyist friend of mine taught me this a long time ago, when I tried to beg off his paying for lunch on the grounds that we had discussed nothing business-related. "I don't care if my clients pay for your lunch" he said. "But if they don't pay for yours, they don't pay for mine.") Marlo is scheming against Prop Joe and Method Man.

The Baltimore Sun, meanwhile, is apparently much like all the other important instutitions in the city: declining, absurd, and led by incompetents, but populated by a few smart, flawed-but-noble individuals who haven't stopped fighting for the greater ideals the institution represents. In this case, that would be Meldrick Lewis from Homicide:Life on the Streets, who's now ten years older and more of a stickler for usage.

In many ways, however, there's not a lot to say about Episode 1, because not a lot happens, which is the way every season of The Wire begins, which is one of the many reasons it's so great. The Wire is only the only show I've ever seen that fully takes advantage of long-form television's greatest asset: time. The typical movie runs 120 minutes, 200 at most. That's more time than a 44-minute TV episode, but you've still got to accomplish a great deal of character and narrative development in a small space. A series has more potential in theory, but for a long time every TV episode was structured like a 44-minute movie, with the additional burden of having to structure the plot around commercial breaks. The 1980s saw the introduction of season-long story arcs in the better dramas, but even those only went halfway, interspersing stand-alone episodes and continuing to give every episode some kind of beginning, middle, and end. Even critically-hailed series like The Sopranos still work this way.

The Wire, by contrast, is essentially one story in five chapters, a season per. The first few episodes are all about establishing characters, settings, and themes, and only as the story progresses do you start to see how it's all connected. The Wire also packs much more into each minute, simply by not wasting time explaining things to the viewer. Most TV shows are absolutely clogged with clunky expository dialogue (Typical C.S.I. scene: Grissom: "The body is completely exsanguinated." Coroner: "You're right, Grissom, all the blood has been drained from the body.") The Wire does you the favor of assuming you're not stupid. Like all art worth experiencing, it asks you to pay attention. The result is a cumulative dramatic force that's unmatched. It also leaves room for lots of small, understated moments pregnant with meaning, like when Beadie decides she's left the light on for McNulty long enough...and then changes her mind, for at least a little while longer.

Next week: The Sun's dubious editor decides to gin up an expose of the school systemm. which mean's we'll get to go all meta on TQATE by discussing fictional critiques of shaky education news coverage right along side the real thing.

Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style

The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.

In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, it begins with an anecdote, follows with confirming quotations, and only then gets around to providing any actual data:

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council...The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003

First of all, if you reduce 98,700 by 5.2%, you get 93,568. Reduce that by 6.7% and you get 87,299. Even accounting for rounding errors, that's not 83,500. Copy editors are supposedly maniacal about English usage, which is fine, but what about arithmetic?

More to the point, the "evidence" that both law and medicine are simultaneously becoming less attractive is that law school applications dropped by 15.4% from 2004 to 2006, while medical school applications increased by 27.3% from 2003 to 2006.

If newspapers insist on squeezing copy into the standard trend-story mold, then I guess there's little one can do to stop them. But if the numbers don't back the alleged trend up, then just leave the numbers out. It makes this stuff (a little) less aggravating.