Giving an Inch?

In a rare moment these days, Bush administration officials and Congress are being applauded for their quick and measured response to problems (or, more accurately, the threat of problems) with student loan availability. Spurring lawmakers along was a looming Sallie Mae conference call with college officials, in which some speculated that Sallie Mae--the nation's largest student loan company--might announce it was pulling out of the federal student loan program, or severely limiting its participation.

But in the Sallie Mae call, held yesterday, the company announced that they would continue to make student loans and praised the government's recent action as "quite helpful." This, no doubt, came as a relief for many lawmakers, but the lingering question is whether this is the inch that will eventually become a mile.

As Stephen Burd at the New America Foundation points out today, one of Sallie Mae's best friends on Capitol Hill is already pushing for more. And it's difficult to disentangle genuine concern about student well-being from empty rhetoric coming from the many lawmakers and lobbyists who stand to benefit from a more profitable student loan industry.

On a positive note, though, it looks like Secretary Spellings, the Treasury Department and Congress have managed to separate rhetoric from reality this time. Let's hope they continue to focus on helping students and not just bailing out lenders.

Higher Ed Hypocrisy

We live in a time of information abundance. It's now possible to track and record most of what happens to an individual student over their entire educational lives, from the time they enter kindergarten to the day they graduate from college, and beyond. This isn't something we could do, it's something a growing number of states are doing, right now. So the real sticky issues aren't technical but normative: Who should control this information? How should it be used? How do we balance the obvious benefits for understanding and improving educational systems with individual rights to privacy?

All of these issues surfaced a couple of years ago, when the U.S. Department of Education proposed modernizing its long-established systems of gathering information about individual colleges and universities, in a way that involve gathering privacy-protected data about individual students. But instead of engaging in a serious conversation about the issues above, the association of private colleges went into full-blown the-apocalypse-is-nigh mode, shouting "Big Brother" from every available rooftop and getting Congress to include language in the soon-to-be-enacted Higher Education Act that would make the system illegal.

Yet at the very same time they were recruiting guileless students to joing their alleged crusade on behalf of student privacy, the private colleges were happily sending privacy-protected data about those same students to a massive national database of individual college student records. This one just happens to be run by a non-profit organization founded by the student loan industry. To be perfectly clear: I think there's nothing wrong with the organization, which is called the National Student Clearinghouse. But its very existence shows just how hypocritical the private colleges have been. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today.

This, by the way, will be a regular gig. The column now has a title, "Outside the Circle," and will be published twice a month at InsiderHigherEd, with a home where past columns can be accessed and read. Of course, at some point in the future--my best guess at the moment is late November, early December--I'll have exhausted my mental list of higher ed-related grievances, so if you have ideas for columns that I can steal use, please send them my way.

A Wrong Turn for Virtual Education in Florida

Last December I flew to Tallahassee to testify as part of the Florida State Legislature's K-12 Virtual Education Workshop. As a native Floridian, I've been proud of my home state's leadership in virtual schooling. Florida Virtual School is the largest and one of the most successful state-run virtual schools in the country. It's widely regarded as a nationwide model. And, while I'm less intimate with the details of the state's two full-time K-8 programs, Florida Connections Academy and Florida Virtual Academy, they have consistently achieved As and Bs in Florida's state accountability system. At the legislative workshop in December, most participants emphasized that Florida was doing things the smart way.

So, I was shocked to read the new virtual education bill that has just recently cleared the legislature (the governor has not yet signed the bill). The bill has a number of flaws, but the most egregious is its mandate that each of Florida's 67 school districts contract with a provider or develop its own program to provide a full-time K-8 virtual schooling program, beginning in the 2009-10 school year. Thus, Florida will move from a well-run, successful, state-authorized program to a system that forces each district to manage and authorize its own program.

This is a horrible idea for a number of reasons:

1. Reduced Accountability and Quality: From the charter movement, we've learned that high-quality authorizing is one of the essential components leading to high-quality educational experiences. Moving to a district-by-district model, especially when many of the districts have neither the capacity, nor desire, to authorize this type of program, almost ensures that there will be much weaker authorizing and relatively little oversight for these programs.


2. Reduced Competition and Fewer Student Options: Ironically, this change will likely reduce student options. Under the current statewide model, families in Florida have at least two options. And, there's no reason that this number couldn't grow. But, it's highly unlikely that districts will provide multiple options. It's almost certain that they will contract with either one of the current providers or start their own program. So, not only do students have fewer programs to choose from, but it's likely that a mini-monopoly will develop in each individual district.


3. Wrong Emphasis: A district-by-district scheme makes sense if it allows each district to customize virtual education programs to integrate and strengthen its current educational offerings. But, districts can already do this by working with the state's existing supplemental program, the Florida Virtual School. This bill addresses full-time virtual education--a parallel system that does not integrate with the district's current programs. And, as noted above, it's very likely that the providers and offerings will be the exact same.

To date, Florida has been wise in its virtual education program design, avoiding the problems in a number of states such as Colorado, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. While almost every other state looks to Florida's current programs as a model, this bill takes that model in the opposite direction.

Money-Sucking Flagship Universities

I went to an event at the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday morning which was keyed to the release of a new book from the College Board, titled College Success: What It Means and How to Make It Happen. It was well above average as such events go and I'm looking forward to reading the book, which was edited by two economists: Morton Schapiro, president of Williams College, and Michael McPherson, former president of Macalester College and current president of the Spencer Foundation.

At one point in the discussion, (which also featured the president of Miami-Dade College, a gargantuan (i.e. 100,000 + students) community college in Florida, as well as the dean of student affairs at the University of Maryland) President Schapiro noted some of the findings from the book's first chapter, which found that a disturbing number of reasonably well-prepared graduates of Chicago Public Schools attend non-selective public universities like Chicago State University, where their odds of graduating on time are about the same as being hit by a bus on the way to Grant Park. (I exaggerate only slightly; the six-year graduation rate at Chicago State is less than 20 percent.)

But Schapiro was quick to follow this by saying that (A) this is probably because Chicago State doesn't have very much money, and (B) while lack of resources at big urban campuses is ususally in part of a function of more prestigious flagship campuses going to the legislature and grabbing all of the money for themeselves, he would not (nodding to the University of Maryland person on the panel) argue against that. So when the event turned to Q&A, I stood up and and asked, in so many words, "Why not argue against that? Resources are limited and graduation rates at CSU and its ilk are terrible; why not spread the wealth more evenly?"

Normally people in higher education will answer this question with some vague allusion to the need for a better world where there's more than enough money for everybody and we all hold hands in peace and harmony. But Schapiro is an economist, and one of the virtues of economists is that they're trained to think about things from the perspective of limited resources and unavoidable choices. So he did what most people won't do, which is actually answer the question honestly. He said, (I'm paraphrasing, here and below) "I take your point, it's a tough question, but I think about how the state of Wisconsin has let the flagship UW-Madison campus decline relative to Michigan-Ann Arbor over the last couple of decades in favor of its regional campuses, and I can't honestly say I think that was the right choice."

Similarly, McPherson spoke about how important it was that states like Michigan have managed to maintain an elite world-class research university, how it was just intrinsically important that such institutions be supported, beyond even the many research benefits they provide, and that they're a tremendous source of pride, both within the state and nationwide.

What I found most striking was that here you have two extremely knowledgeable, smart, and accomplished researchers, people of good faith who have experienced higher education from the president's perch and studied it extensively from an empirical perspective, and yet their opinion on this issue seemed significantly informed by a gut feeling that the traditional elite research university should take precedence, come what may. There was nothing utilitarian about it, no calculus of best return on public investment or cost / benefit in terms of student outcomes, graduation rates, earnings, or what have you at different campuses. Instead it was: These are the flagship universities!

All of which is to say that there's a tremendously powerful underlying psychic investment within higher education in the traditional status hierarchy, a sense that the comprehensive tier-one research university represents a kind of pinnacle of thought, virtue, even civilization. And I understand why. But at some point we're going to have to fully come to grips with the fact that the large majority of citizens and workers in this country need a high-quality postsecondary education of some kind, most of them will never get anywhere near a flagship research university, and if we continue to seriously short-change their education, the consequences will often be (e.g. Chicago State) very dire.

Fudging The Numbers

Technical Career Institute, a for-profit college in New York City, has found a new and creative way to keep its students from defaulting on federal student loans--paying off the debt. Inside Higher Ed reports today on an audit report released this week by the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, which found that TCI paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to loan companies to keep their cohort default rates (the percent of students defaulting on federal student loans) below the cut-off for participating in the federal student loan program.

Unfortunately for the students, TCI wasn't being generous. The college paid off the students' federal loans, but then tried to collect the loan amounts and even reported the students to collection agencies when they didn't pay. Because the federal loans were technically repaid, TCI did not report these students as having defaulted, thereby keeping it's cohort default rate artificially low and ensuring it had continued access to federal loan and grant money--a big source of income for for-profit institutions.

Because the federal 'cohort default rate,' which determines eligibility to participate in the federal student aid programs, is based on the first two years after a student enters repayment on a loan, for-profit institutions have big incentives--millions of dollars in federal money--to keep students out of default for those first two years. TCI's actions are an extreme example, but other practices include encouraging students to enter forebearance or deferment on their loans until the two-year cut-off has passed, or employing default aversion companies to heavily track students for the first two years.

Default aversion is not necessarily a bad strategy, so long as it helps students avoid default over the life of their loan and not just those first two years. But data released by the Department of Education earlier this year, indicates that this isn't the case--for-profit institutions' default rates nearly double in the third year. This is a higher rate of increase than any other higher education sector, which see increases of 50 to 75 percent.

The current default rate calculation is a poor indication of students' ability to pay off student loan debt and can obviously be artificially lowered with some funny business practices. The Higher Education Act amendment to extend the cohort default rate calculation to three years is a step in the right direction and will make it a little harder for these institutions to fudge their numbers. But the Department of Education also needs to start publishing lifetime default rates for institutions. The purpose wouldn't be to sanction institutions for high lifetime default rates, but to give students an accurate picture of their risk of defaulting when they enroll--a picture that will be harder for institutions to distort.

False Positives, Seed Corn, Etc.

This story in today's Post about the 27 schools in DCPS that are in "restructuring" mode under NCLB is well worth reading. Faced with a federal mandate to choose among various reforms--charter school conversion, private management, replacing teachers and principals, etc.--Chancellor Rhee decided to send groups of outside teachers, parents, students and educators into the schools in order to gather some qualitative data beyond what the test scores say. Their conclusion: many of these schools are very bad.

This illustrates an important point about correlation. NCLB is often criticized for relying almost exclusively on standardized test scores in reading and math. Beyond the fact that this ignores many other important subjects and broader educational goals, the tests themselves can only measure certain domains within reading and math, with imperfect accuracy. The efficacy of NCLB, therefore, is heavily dependent on the correlation between school-level test scores and school-level performance on everything that tests don't measure. If the correlation is high--if schools with terrible test scores also tend to be terrible in many other ways--than the system works. If the correlation is low, it doesn't.

This article suggests that, in DC anyway, the correlation is pretty high. I'm not surprised. The "tests don't measure everything" argument has always struck me as semi-convincing in terms of false negatives--one could plausibly imagine a school using some kind of maniacal eat-your-seed-corn test prep strategy to make AYP, even though it's actually not any good. It's a futile strategy in the long term, but it might work for a few years.

It seems very unlikely, by contrast, that non-correlation is going to produce a lot of false positives. In other words, if you miss AYP for six consecutive years--that's the criteria for ending up in restructuring, like the 27 DC schools--there's very likely a legitimate reason involving poor educational practices that need to be fixed. And for the most part, that's what the teams found. I realize this wasn't a formal study and so the observers may have gone in looking for problems. But it's hard to get past comments like these, from the students:

The question to a focus group of Dunbar High students was: What did they like best about going to school there? "Freedom," said one who takes Advanced Placement classes at the school in Northwest Washington. "We can do whatever we want at this school. That's the only good thing about this place."

The report notes that "In many cases, [the reviews] depict rudderless and cheerless institutions where students wander the halls with impunity during class and staff members have all but given up trying to maintain order." It also says:

But the theme resonating most powerfully in the reports is student frustration with the lack of academic rigor. Although there are always a few inspiring instructors, students -- none of whom were named -- said too many teachers approached their jobs with indifference and low expectations. "Teachers don't teach us a thing throughout the entire period," said one Lincoln student. "When visitors come, they start working." At Anacostia High in Southeast, evaluators described a history class exercise where students were prompted to respond to the question, "Where is your favorite place to shop?" None of the randomly selected students at Dunbar High responded positively when asked whether the school was preparing them for college. Pressed further, they said they didn't even feel ready for the workforce beyond high school.

Here's the one phrase I'd encourage you to keep in mind: "lack of academic rigor." Lack. There's a common way of thinking about school reform in urban areas like DC that goes something like this: These students come from tough home lives and have many barriers to learning, and as a result they're not doing very well academically under the standards we have. Increasing those standards and raising expectations is, therefore, punitive and counterproductive, a case of making a hard life harder still, and will result in more dropouts and further disengagement from education.

But when you talk to actual students--and this is by no means an isolated incident--they tend to make the opposite point, which is that low expectations are the problem. Lack of rigor isn't just symptomatic of bad teaching, it is bad teaching. The state of adolescence is such that you know enough to know that you should be held to high standards, but you also need adult supervision to enforce those standards. If NCLB is identifying and fundamentally changing schools where students get nothing but the freedom to do whatever they want, it must be doing something right.

The Saga of Professor X

The Atlantic article I wrote about last week, from Professor X, has generated a lot of discussion over the last week or so. (Brief aside: is there a more pseudonym-inspiring profession than non-tenured college professor? Seriously, these folks don't seem able or willing to order pizza using their own names. I'm sure there are good reasons for this, but whatever those reasons are, they don't reflect well on academia.). E.g: Matt Yglesias, Sherman Dorn, Michael Ayers, EdPolicyThoughts, Armed Liberal, Flypaper, Ross Douthat.

Consider the Snark

In cataloguing blog-related irritations, Sherman Dorn says, "Your snark isn't nearly as funny as you obviously think it is, and it's going to be less funny tomorrow." My first reaction was "The funniness of my snark will live FOREVER, dammit!" but of course Sherman is mostly right. Snark is at best a means of making a point and amusing your audience simultaneously, at worst a particularly belittling and divisive kind of discourse. This reminded me of a passage in a book I was reading over the weekend, Consider the Lobster (And Other Essays), by David Foster Wallace. The essay was Wallace's lengthy (of course), footnote-laden (also, of course) and altogether brilliant (see prvs.) review of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, originally published in Harper's earlier in the decade.  As is the case with most of his essays -- and most great essays in general, come to think of it -- Wallace uses the occasion to touch on a variety of deeper and more generalized truths about the human condition, including: 

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

There's a truncated version of the essay here (I think this is what was actually published in Harper's) but in addition to missing lots of good material it puts the footnotes at the end, rendering it semi-unreadable, so really you should buy the book and read the whole thing, along with Wallace's similarly profound reflections on the pornography industry, John McCain, talk radio, Dostoevsky, Tracy Austin, 9/11, John Updike and, of course, lobsters. 

More From / About Cato

Over at the Cato @Liberty blog (which, I must admit, is one of the better blog names going), Andrew Coulson responds to this post about Cato's recent conversion from advocacy for bad voucher ideas to advocacy for even worse education tax credit ideas by pointing out that he's actually been peddling this really terrible idea for quite some time now. Fair enough -- I stand corrected.

Coulson also doesn't seem to like being described as an "extremist libertarian." That word--extremist--is not one that I use lightly, particularly given modern connotations. But here's the mission statement of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, which Coulson directs, in full:

Cato's Center for Educational Freedom was founded on the principle that parents are best suited to make important decisions regarding the care and education of their children. The Center's scholars seek to shift the terms of public debate in favor of the fundamental right of parents and toward a future when state-run schools give way to a dynamic, independent system of schools competing to meet the needs of American children.

Working toward a future when state-run schools give way to an "independent" system is, by my reading, advocacy for the destruction of public education as we know it. If that's not an extremist position within the context of education policy, I don't know what is.

On a personal level, I'm actually fairly sympathetic to the libertarian perspective. But it's not the only perspective I value, and it has limits. The struggle for a single-perspective organization like Cato is staying principled while retaining efficacy and legitimacy. In other words, while it's all well and good in theory to stick to your intellectual and ideological guns, as a rule most people don't like being objects of scorn and ridicule, or (if they're in the think tank business) having the doors to the corridors of power slammed in their face. So they make compromises to stay part of maintstream conversation. Cato's education policy proposals reflect this.

There is, after all, a coherent, principled libertarian position on public education: There shouldn't be any. People managed to become educated for millenia with out massively expensive state-run school systems, one might argue. There's plenty of precedent for the market providing education to those who want to pay for it--roughly 10 percent of K-12 students are are in private school already. Without public schools, religous and non-profit organizations would also step in to fill the void. Freeing up all that tax money would redirect capital toward more productive purposes, increasing economic output, creating new jobs, and giving people more money they could use to purchase education, which would be more effective and less expensive due to the salutory effects of market competition. Some children would get less, but some children get less of lots of things--books, computers, travel--already. That's the way of the world. And this way parents would have greater incentives to work and provide for their children's education, rather than depending on the state to do it for them.

The problem with this position, of course, is that it's deeply un-American and basically absurd. It puts you in the door-slamming-and-ridicule position described above. So Cato has to make provisions for giving all students an education while eschewing the most sensible way of doing so, which is to raise money through taxation and spend it through government support of public schools. Which is not to say the current model can't stand improvement; I happen to think it's too bureaucratic and inhospitable to innovation, excellence and parental choice. But you can fix these problems without losing the essentially public nature of schooling.

But since Cato's extremist libertarian principles run the opposite direction, it ends up having to create a nightmarishly complex set of tax credit policies that would require parents to annually piece together some combination of credits and "scholarships" granted by various purely theoretical non-profits, instead of just enrolling their child in a good, free public school nearby.