It's A Lot More Than Culture, Stupid

Over at the New Republic, Josh Patashnik jumps into this conversation about the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that student tests scores seem to be highly correlated with proximity to Canada. The problem, of course, is that lots of other things that influence educational outcomes, like per-student spending and per-capita income, are also correlated with distance from our neighbors to the north. As we all learn in Stats 101, there's a statistically significant relationship between male baldness and yearly salary--men with less hair earn more, not because firms value hairlessness, but because both baldness and salary are independently linked to a third variable: age.

While conceding that spending matters, Patashnik sees the essential truth of Moynihan's Canada theory as cultural. Thus, the title of the post: "It's the Regional Culture, Stupid." Apparently, the real driving force behind high performance in these states isn't high-quality curricula, good teachers, adequate funding, well-educated parents, etc., but rather beneficent influence of virtuous Christian white people:

these states are all part of David Hackett Fischer's "Greater New England" region, the homogeneous, white, Protestant northern tier of the country settled by New England Yankees and northern European migrants, which I've referenced before. This region is sort of the goody two-shoes of America in a variety of quantitative social-science measures: Great test scores, very low crime rates, a historical aversion to violence (nearly all the states with no death penalty are Greater New England states), a tradition of clean, nonpartisan reformist politics...

But to prove this point, you have to find a way to disentangle the allegedly virtuous white person factor from everything else, like spending, parent's education, etc. As evidence, Patashnik cites...a 1992 newspaper article, which begins by asking: "where do students do best on standardized math tests? In North Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin."

Here's the problem with citing test scores from 16 year ago: they've given that same test (the NAEP) a bunch of times since then. According to the 2007 NAEP--which is perhaps more relevant to a discussion occurring in 2008--the top six states in 8th grade math were, in descending order: Massachusetts, North Dakota, Minnesota, Vermont, Kansas, and New Jersey. I'm not sure which theory of regional culture encompasses both Kansas and New Jersey, but somehow they've managed to overcome the handicap of being unable to scoot over the border for maple syrup and done pretty well in math.

Another way to examine culture is to try and factor out other things that matter, like poverty. So let's look at the same test, but this time only at scores for students who aren't eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch. Now the top six are Massachusetts, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, New Jersey, and Vermont. Texas! Maybe if Senator Moynihan were alive today, he'd be developing some kind of proximity-to-Mexico theory...

Okay, one might reply, but don't forget--this is the virtuous Christian white person theory we're talking about here. With the solitary blond-haired kid, sitting in an ice-fishing shack studying differential equations on Sunday after the Lutheran service gets out--Garrison Keillor stuff! What do the numbers look like if we exclude, you know, those other people? Well, if we look just at the NAEP scores for white students, the top six turn out to be: Massachusetts, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Virginia.

In other words, this regional culture determinism is pretty stupid. Of all the things that matter in education, some kind of mystical connection to the Protestant work ethic isn't high on the list. Massachusetts, for example, doesn't have the best NAEP scores in the country because of who landed on Plymouth Rock. It has the best NAEP scores in the country because it has high per-student spending (equitably distributed to high-poverty school districts) high parental education levels, unusually rigorous academic standards, top-quality assessments, good teachers, and strong accountability systems--today.

Patashnik is joining George Will in advancing the "what matters in education isn't education" theory of education, which is one of the more damaging conceits held by people who should know better.

5 Days Left...

If you're smart, motivated and just can't learn enough about education policy, then you have 5 more days to apply for the Fordham Fellows program, which promises to open the doors to the D.C. education policy world. For 9 months, you'll be doing substantial, interesting work in some of D.C.'s best policy organizations (including us, of course). Last year's ES Fellow is already doing great things in Boston, maybe you could be next...

Risk Appraisal

My take on the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk here.

Will Not

When you've been in the column-writing business as long as George Will, I imagine things start to settle into a pretty workmanlike routine: open up the planning calendar, select a slot a few months in advance, and pencil in: "Another terrible, terrible education column. For material, see: previous terrible, terrible education columns, slightly rephrased." Sadly, today is that day. Indeed, this particular iteration of the Terrible, Terrible George Will Education Column, is, improbably, worse than most. 

Will informs us that teachers were "members of a respected profession" until the advent of collective bargaining in the early 1960's, displaying his total ignorance of the paltry salaries and often degrading working conditions teachers experienced at that time. And in an anecdote that he has been paid to republish on roughly eight thousand separate occasions, Will says:

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.

Moynihan was a smart guy, so I suspect that's not what he meant with the Canada crack, given how education spending actually relates to geography in this country. Click through for a moment to Matt Miller's recent Atlantic article, for example, and scroll down to the map showing per-pupil expenditures broken down by county. The light-colored (low-spending) counties are clustered in the South, while the dark-colored (high-spending) counties are disproportionately in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and northern parts of the country in general, i.e. the places closer to Canada. 

The underlying theme of Will's infinitely repeatable Terrible, Terrible Education Column is pessimism. He believes that public education is irredeemable, that efforts to improve it are basically useless. He calls attention to it only to urge others to look away. The one new element of this column is high praise for Checker Finn's new memoir, Troublemaker. But Will essentially argues that Finn's lifetime of engagement with the difficult and worthy cause of education reform has been wasted, and was likely doomed to fail in any case. Finn has a blog now. I wonder if he agrees? 

Grad Rate Round-up

There's been a lot of good commentary and coverage of the new Education Sector minority college graduation rates report over the last few days:

• The comments thread for the InsideHigherEd piece goes okay for a while, although anonymous Internet commenters and critics continue to bug me. If you're going to go posting some crazy nonsense, at least identify yourself so I can tell you why you're wrong! Then the whole thing swerves off the rails as the topic turns to affirmative action with counter-accusations of racism, etc. More on this later.
  
  
• U.S.News has an excellent article here. The report profiles the success of Florida State's CARE program in helping first-generation students graduate. In the article, FSU provost Larry Abele says:
  
  "Everyone's involved. Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, Outreach—everybody just pays attention. We have very immediate and aggressive follow-up for any student who has difficulties." "It's not a cheap program," Abele adds. "But it's really a great program. And the truth is, if something is really important, you can find money for it."
  
  Amen to that.
  
  
• Sherman Dorn offers his usual thoughtful commentary here, praising parts of the report but disagreeing with the recommendation for a national student-record data system to improve the scope and accuracy of graduation rates. This raises an important point: there are some basic tradeoffs here between accuracy and disclosure. If colleges want to be judged by complete, accurate graduation rates, then they're going to have surrender more student-level information to some third party, probably the government, so that party can track students who move from one institution to another. If colleges don't want to do that, they can't expect to be judged by complete, accurate graduation rates. It's one or other.
  
  
• Richard Vedder offers kind words while also raising the affirmative action quesition, which I started to talk about yesterday. Let me say this: I'm perfectly willing to concede that if a college has a very poorly designed affirmative action program, by which I mean a program that (A) brings students to campus who are much less academically prepared than their peers; and (B) abandons them to the fates once they arrive; that could contribute to graduation rate gaps. That said, it's important to remember that (1) affirmative action programs only impact a fraction of minority students, most of whom would be admitted anyway, (2) there are many other more important factors impacting graduation rates, and (3) affirmative action programs don't have to be poorly designed.
  
  
• Over at the brand-new Education Optimists blog, Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor at UW-Madison, has a lengthy response that's well worth reading in full (as is the blog in general). The gist: while it's true that graduation rates are a big problem, the current research base doesn't let us conclude for sure how big an influence individual institutions actually have. Focusing exclusively on institutional practices could distract attention and resources from more effective solutions. I think there are some false choices embedded in this argument, and I'm more willing to move ahead based on the preponderance of existing evidence, but it's an important perspective to consider.

College Graduation Rates and Affirmative Action

The National Review faults my new report on minority college graduation rates because "the words "affirmative" and "preference" appear nowhere in the document." Well, yes, that's true. And I have to admit, in the course of my analysis, I observed one group of students that consistently struggles in graduating compared to their peers. At college after college, this faction is apparently enjoying the benefit of identity-based admissions preferences and dragging down all the rest.

I refer, of course, to white men.

There are over 550 colleges and universities in America that reported higher graduation rates for black women in 2006 than for white men. They include Princeton, Yale, Georgetown, Pomona, Rice, Northwestern, Cornell, Davidson, Vanderbilt, Cal Tech, Wake Forest, Villanova, RPI, West Point, Virginia Tech, George Washington, BYU, Air Force, The University of Texas-Austin, Georgia Tech, SMU, Baylor, Miami, Rutgers, Julliard, Tulane, American, Purdue, Coast Guard, Florida State, UMASS, SUNY-Albany, South Carolina, Bowling Green, Oklahoma, George Mason, West Virginia, and many more.

There are a number of private colleges in the report that have very selective admissions, take race into account when considering applicants, and have no graduation rate gap. There are also lots of public institutions in the report that admit most students who apply regardless of race or anything else--some located in states that have outlawed affirmative action--yet still have very large graduation rate gaps.

So, no, I don't think the report offers damning evidence against affirmative action that we somehow failed to come clean about.

Colleges admit lots of different kinds of students. Some have more barriers to graduation than others. Statistically speaking, students are less likely to graduate if they work full-time, have children, come from low-income households, enroll part-time, don't enroll immediately after high school, struggle with reading and math, have parents who didn't graduate from college, or have a Y chromosome. Responsible institutions understand this, and support individual students depending on their invidual needs, whatever they might be. That's not a practice specfic to race or anything else, it's about devoting resources and attention to students who need them most.

Brace(y) Yourself

Gerry Bracey takes to the pages of the Huffington Post to declare that the authors of NCLB are "like the Nazis at Nuremberg" and wonders when they, too will be called to account. Then--perhaps worrying that someone out there remained unoffended--he likens high-stakes testing to slavery, in the historical sense. (Hat tip: This Week in Eduction.)

It would be a mistake to conclude that says anything about the NCLB debate itself. There are people of good faith on both sides of the argument; Bracey just isn't one of them. 

It's also striking how banal this ten millionth proof of Godwin's Law really is. I've seen Bracey speak in public on a number of occasions. In his more lucid moments, he's actually a pretty intelligent guy.  Surely he's got more up his sleeve than cliched reductio ad Hitlerum argumentation? This stuff barely shocks anymore, Gerry! And isn't that the point?

The more interesting question is whether he can keep it up. Bracey is not an obscure figure in education. He's published numerous op-eds in the Washington Post and elsewhere on the subject and has written extensively in Phi Delta Kappan and other well-respected publications. He's taught at George Mason and has been a Fellow at the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University. He gets paid to speak before many mainstream education groups. 

One wonders: is there anything someone can say that's so patently offensive and obviously deranged that it precludes further participation in respectable conversation? I guess we'll find out. 

The Minority College Graduation Rate Gap

Over the last five years or so, there's a been a huge push among private foundations and public policymakers to focus on the problem of high school graduation. Only half of minority students graduate on time, we are told, a national disgrace. And it's true. Yet far less attention is paid to the fact that there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country where a 50 percent minority graduation rate would be a major improvement. This is the subject of a new report from Education Sector, released this morning.

Consider this table:

It shows the distribution of six-year graduation rates for black students at over 1,000 colleges and universities. Only 20 of those institutions, representing 1.1% of black students who started college as first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen in 2000, graduated 90 percent of those students within six years. 2.3% of the students attended an instiutions with a black graduation rate between 80% and 90%, etc.

As you can see, the big numbers are in the 30% to 39% range, and some go even lower. Overall, black students starting college at the beginning of the millennium were two-and-a-half times more likely to enroll at a school with a 70 percent chance of not graduating within six years than at a school with a 70 percent chance of earning a degree. Overall, black graduation rates are nearly 20 percentage points lower than rates for white students.

This is partly because black students are disproportionately enrolled in colleges with low graduation rates. It's also because most colleges have an internal graduation rate gap, usually around 10 percentage points or so, between white students and students of color. But that's just the average--some institutions have gaps of 20, 30 percentage points or more, others graduate black students at a higher rate than their white peers.

College graduation is a complex phenomenon. It's partly a function of high school preparation, which for many students is substandard. It's also related to income, gender, aptitude, stick-to-it-iveness, available financial aid, and other things. But, crucially, the institutions themselves also play a role here. Some of them do a good job of supporting minority and first-generation students, particularly during the often-difficult transition to college. Others--too many others--don't. Therefore, we need stronger incentives--financial, governmental, and otherwise--for institutions to focus on helping as many minority students as possible earn degrees. Otherwise, we're going to continue to squander the aspirations of tens of thousands of minority college students every year.

Coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education here, InsideHigherEd here, and Diverse Issues in Higher Education here.

Also, if you want to look up the numbers for your alma mater and they're not in the report, you can find them at the U.S. Department of Education's College Navigator site. Select your college and then scroll down and click on "Retention/Graduation Rate"

NYC Tenure Cont'd

NYC Educator disagrees with my take on the NYC tenure debate, and a previous post in which I cited his recitation of the many transcendently bad teachers with which he's had the misfortune to work as evidence that the tenure process in New York should be improved. 

For the most part, I like NYC Educator's take on things; it's a good blog and he's correct in saying that he "specifically told [me] that the city has been negligent in enforcing existing tenure rules for over thirty years." I should have noted that in the previous post. 

However, even his assertion of past negligence is true--and it may be--I'm not sure why it's an argument against the new proposed tenure policy. If the administration has neglected to enforce tenure in the past, why is it bad that they're trying to do so now? NYC Educator thinks they don't need value-added to weed out the bad teachers; the administration obviously thinks they'd be better off with the additional student performance data. Why are they wrong? I'm having a hard time figuring out what the administration's agenda here could be, if not to deny tenure to teachers who shouldn't get it. 

The Coin of the Realm

David Leonhardt turns in an unsatisfactory cover story in the Times Education Life supplement today about recent high-profile moves by elite universities to offer more generous financial aid to low- and middle-income students. Its starts with a dramatic moment in 2003, set in one of higher education's iconic spaces, the Thomas Jefferson-designed Rotunda of the University of Virginia. Just as a high-level meeting is about to start, the UVA President Casteen is handed a note from the press office: the University of North Carolina has just announced a new aid program for low-income students:

The program touched a nerve with Mr. Casteen. The son of a shipyard worker from Portsmouth, in the southeastern corner of the state, he was the first member of his family to attend college. But during his 13 years as president, tuition had risen significantly, as it had at many colleges, and the Virginia campus had become even more dominated by upper-middle-class students. North Carolina’s new policy, which had the potential to lure students away from Virginia, could aggravate the situation.

Before the meeting had ended, Mr. Casteen announced to the room that he wanted the financial-aid staff to come up with a response. He wanted it quickly, he said, and he wanted something bigger than what North Carolina was doing. Four months later, at the board’s next meeting, it approved a plan that was similar but somewhat more generous than North Carolina’s. Making sure everyone had a chance to attend college, Mr. Casteen would say, was “a fundamental obligation of a free culture.”

The article goes on to describe similar announcements in subsequent years from the likes of Harvard, Yale and others, chronicling an escalating oneupsmanship of generosity. 

The problem with this narrative is the implication that the socioeconomic makeup of a given college is primarily a function of who chooses to apply to go there. It's not. It's a function of who the college chooses to let in.  This is not to say that these programs aren't a step in the right direction, in and of themselves--they are. And all else being equal, they've probably had some effect on increasing the economic diversity of the applicant pool -- although it would be nice to see some hard numbers to back this up.

But increasing aid to needy students amounts to elite colleges spending a small amount of what is, for them, an abundant resource--money. The real scarce coin of the realm in elite higher education is admissions. According to Institute for College Access and Success, only seven percent of UVA students received need-based Pell grants in 2005-2006, two years after that fateful day in the rotunda. That's the lowest rate for any public university in America. If President Casteen announces that UVA will no longer provide admissions preferences to legacies, the children of rich people, or recruited athletes in upper-income sports like crew and polo, and will fill those slots with first-generation and low-income students, then I'll start to believe UVA is taking it's "fundamental obligation" seriously. 

The funny thing is, Leonhardt obviously understands this, since the back half of the article is filled with caveats about why, for the aforementioned and other reasons, this whole story isn't such a big deal after all. You see this sometimes, when someone sets out to write a story with a particular thesis, reports the issue thoroughly and represents the opposing point view fairly, but can't quite come to grips with the fact that maybe the thesis should have actually been something else. 

There's also this odd justification for recent policies at Harvard and elsewhere extending aid to the upper middle-class:

Expanding the pool of aid recipients may also make the policies more popular among students. It would be rather counterproductive if the children of midlevel corporate executives, who were paying $50,000 in tuition and fees, ended up resenting the children of police officers, who were paying nothing.

Is that what we're worried about now? Not enflaming class resentment among the children of corporate executives? That doesn't say much for the influence of an elite college education, does it?