Price-Fixing for the Good of Students

In the early 1990's, a Department of Justice antitrust investigation, along with subsequent court rulings, changed how many private colleges conducted their financial aid dealings, and not necessarily for the better.

The DOJ investigation resulted in a suit against the Ivy Overlap Group, a group consisting of 8 Ivy League schools plus MIT which met annually to discuss students' financial aid packages and prevent bidding wars over students. The DOJ argued that this was an antitrust violation--that the colleges were engaged in price-fixing by deciding on a common family contribution amount for individual students admitted to multiple Overlap Group schools.

The DOJ suit essentially ended communications among colleges about their financial aid practices, which has escalated the bidding wars for top students (precisely what the Overlap Group sought to avoid). For colleges, this means more and more money is spent on merit-based financial aid to woo the most desired students and less aid is available for students who actually need it.

Policymakers aren't happy about the shift away from need-based aid and colleges aren't happy about spending their money to compete with other schools. And so The Institute for College Access and Success has responded with a white paper talking in more depth about the intersection of antitrust law and higher ed financial aid, and also offering a potential compromise that would allow colleges to collaborate on financial aid policy and hopefully end current bidding wars, while not violating any laws (see IHE's article on the TICAS proposal here).

If more collaboration shifted money from merit aid to need based aid, the results could be pretty dramatic. According to TICAS's analysis of financial aid data from the College Board Annual Survey of Colleges, the 946 institutions that participate in the College Board survey provided $3.3 billion in financial aid that was in excess of student need, while $2.4 billion in unmet need remained.

The P Stands for Public

This week's Gadfly has some really interesting nuggets: Fordham Foundation President Checker Finn discusses international benchmarking and the organization's move to the future, and apparently Bill Bennett is launching an entire history curriculum. The latter seems particularly ripe for comment, but I really have beef with only one word in the entire issue: safe.

As in, "a safer and sounder private education," in reference to the DC voucher program. The voucher program's evaluation found no such thing. Parents thought the schools were safer, but the students reported no differences. What I said last summer bears repeating:

...to hold up parental support as evidence of success here is pretty superficial, especially when we consider who made up the control group in the study. The authorizing legislation mandated the “strongest possible research design for determining the effectiveness of the program,” so the Institute of Education Sciences adopted a lottery system for the program, so that the results of the voucher recipients could be compared to the results of non-recipients, while controlling for motivation and other factors. The control group consisted of students who applied but were rejected for the vouchers. This makes for a valid comparison for student achievement, but not necessarily for parental happiness. All of the parents wanted their child educated outside of the DC public schools; it only makes sense that the ones who achieved this goal were happier than the ones who didn’t, especially after only one year.

Moreover, who is the best judge of violence and overall school quality—parents, or the students themselves? On violence, students reported no statistically significant difference between public and private schools. In other words, the people who actually witness and experience violence, the students themselves, reported no increases in seeing weapons; being offered drugs; or being victims of theft, physical assault, or bullying.

Furthermore

Expanding a little more on yesterday's post about "Bigger, Bolder," which presented a lot of good ideas, both educational and non-educational, as an alternative to the current accountability regime, but never quite got around to saying what we should do with the current regime.

Why didn't they? There are plenty of alternatives to having the federal government impose a regulatory accountability scheme on states and school districts. One could say, "Uncle Sam should get out of the accountability business altogether and simply provide enough Title I money to compensate for the negative effects of poverty while leaving it to local school boards and perhaps states to ensure quality; existing governance structures are there for a reason and the nation has managed to prosper under their leadership for quite some time."

Or, one could strike a more moderate pose and say "NCLB is unrealistic and inflexible; we should back off of both the 100% proficiency goal and the 2014 deadline and switch to a system whereby schools are expected to make incremental improvement toward a goal that would be less than 100%, the amount less varying by school based on student demographics and other external factors that influence achievement and are out of educators' control. Districts should also be allowed to opt out of strictly test-based accountability measures and instead present alternative, locally-developed assessments of student achievement in both core subjects and other vital skills like leadership and critical thinking. If achievement as measured by local assessments is good enough, then districts with low standardized test scores shouldn't be identified for improvement or other other regulatory interventions."

I don't agree with either of these policies, but I'm guessing lots of other people do. You could easily imagine a large, well-funded coalition of groups rallying behind them. You could also imagine writing them down and asking a group of well-respected education experts to sign them.
And yet in all the hue and cry about NCLB, all the denunciations and appeals and calls to action, very few people or organizations have been willing to actually put pen to paper and say precisely what policymakers should do. Goals and principles don't count; these are often deliberately vague or amount to artfully-worded statements that the world would be a better place if unavoidable tradeoffs and tough decisions could be avoided. The NEA's NCLB agenda, for example, including items like "Accountability should be based upon multiple measures of student learning and school success," a goal that sounds reasonable and could easily accomodate both policies to strengthen accountability and to destroy it entirely.

So what's stopping people? Perhaps it's not as easy as it seems?

Popping The Tuition Bubble

One of the problems with college student loans is that students assume nearly all of the risk of default. Colleges have no risk -- they get paid up-front -- while lenders participating in the federal student loan program (which controls a large, albeit shrinking, majority of all loan volume) get bailed out by the taxpayers if students don't repay. That means the taxpayer assumes some risk, of course, but the costs are so non-transparent and buried within the federal budget that they don't really influence behavior in any way. As college becomes more and more expensive and students borrow more and more money, this problem is getting worse. As Erin Dillon showed last year, 10-year default rates for students who borrow over $15,000 are nearly 20 percent.

The solution? Allow students to sell a percentage of their future earnings to investors, thus shifting the risk from financially vulnerable and unsophisticated young individuals to financially sophisticated markets that can manage risk appropriately. This would also have the side benefit of creating new market incentives for the colleges themselves to do a better job of helping student graduate and prosper in their careers. This the subject of this new piece from yrs truly and Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI, called "Popping the Tuition Bubble."

A Blank Slate

I think it's fair game to debate the merits of the Broader, Bolder approach to education, but it's like watching a called third strike to assume the new initiative will sway the presumptive Democratic nominee into a certain education policy.

Why? Because, unlike his opponent, he already has one.

It's not too bad either. There's some minor tweaks here and a major proposal there, and it all adds up to a pretty comprehensive education plan.

First, as a caveat to my previous post on the McCain-Obama surrogate debate on education: McCain does not really have a serious education policy at this point. While Obama has two .pdf files totaling 17 pages and nearly 9,000 words, the Republican nominee has a spartan 500 word essay on his website. That's it.

The two senators' legislative history on this issue do not compare either. While Obama chose to serve on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, McCain did not. While Obama introduced 20 bills pertaining to education in the latest Congress, McCain proposed none.

Obama's legislative history paired with his campaign plans draw a fairly clear outline for what he'd like to do as president. Legislatively, he's focused on things like summer and after-school programs for high-needs kids, STEM advancements, and innovation zones (districts that track students longitudinally, reward teachers based on student performance and teacher evaluations, and establish career ladders. His plan has a few clever policy tweaks, things like eliminating the cumbersome FAFSA in favor of a check box on federal tax forms, that make a lot of sense. It also tackles the big issues by proposing mentoring programs and career ladders for teachers, a refundable tax credit for college students, and service scholarships for new teachers who agree to teach in a high need field or location for four years.

These are not minor proposals, and they are not the sign of someone waiting for an education policy savant. McCain, on the other hand, could use some help. His entire education platform is a little more than the length of this post. Now that's a blank slate.

Er...

The K-12 blog topic du jour is clearly the "Broader, Bolder" education agenda that was released today via large ads in the Post and Times. A lot of the agenda items are very worthwhile in their own right, and the signatories include many smart, thoughtful people from across the ideological spectrum. But the individual ideas aren't what really matter here--you can find them all elsewhere. The framing is the thing, and in this respect I think the agenda falls short. The key sentence comes at the beginning of the second paragraph:

"Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning."

I think this incorrect. Rather, education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that education policy can help poor children primarily by improving education. Similarly, labor policy is often crafted around the idea that American families, including schoolchildren, would benefit from higher wages for working-class households; health policy has focused on extending coverage to the uninsured, etc. In each of these fields people tend to stress the importance of their agenda to a point of some exaggeration. But nobody seriously claims to have the single solution for poverty, and this no less true in education than anywhere else.

So the real question is what the signatories mean by the "er" in "Broader" and "Bolder." This suffix implies differentiation, but it's not clear what kind. Broader in the sense of "in addition to"? If that's the case, I have no quarrel, other than to say that there's probably some value in having experts in discrete fields focus on policy issues aligned with their expertise. The agenda calls for an increased investment in health services, for example, which I wholeheartedly support. But I also recall a gigantic battle over exactly this issue last year, featuring massive advocacy efforts, newspaper headlines, Presidential vetos, and all the rest. So it's not like people don't understand this is a problem. And, per Eduwonk, where was this statement then, when it might have mattered? Perhaps the signatories felt like their energies were best confined to education? Moreover, it's not like those policymakers who actually have multiple jurisdictions don't understand that poor children need more than a good school. Ted Kennedy and George Miller, if I'm not mistaken, support NCLB and SCHIP and EITC and WIC and a higher minimum wage.

If, on the other hand, the "er" means "instead of," then I'm opposed. Again, this brings us back to framing--the first big subhead says: "The NCLB Framework Cannot by Itself Meet the Challenge," implying a certain kind of side-taking relative to many well-understood controversies and decision points involving NCLB reauthorization, particularly given the subsequent nods toward concerns about curriculum narrowing, the impossibility of 100% proficiency, etc. But the agenda itself basically ignores these and all other accountability issues, other than to say that "new accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods," a perfectly reasonable goal that's also vague to the point of near-meaninglessness.

There are reasoned positions on both sides of the NCLB and larger school accountability debate, and the signatories all know what they are. By failing to address those issues or weigh in on the knotty decisions that must be made, the reader is left with the sense that the real message here is that students would ultimately benefit from less hard attention to the quality of their schools--a dispiriting idea coming from education experts and a wrong one as well. Yes, the first bullet point is "continue to pursue school improvement efforts," and the ideas mentioned are perfectly legit. But if you're going to frame your agenda in terms of the accountability elephant in the room, you have to tell the world where you think that elephant should go.

Further commentary from Mead , Colvin, Petrilli and Hoff.

Free Advice

Eduwonkette writes:

In this month's issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a new study by UT-Austin professor Julian Vasquez-Heilig and Linda Darling-Hammond, "Accountability Texas-Style: The Progress and Learning of Urban Minority Students in a High-Stakes Testing Context," revisits the Houston miracle by analyzing years of student-level test score and graduation data (1995-2002). There's no version up on the web yet, but here are some key findings: Growth on scores on TAAS exam outpaced scores on the Stanford exam. This appears to be prima facie evidence of test score inflation.

I've always been puzzled by this line of reasoning. NCLB was designed to give states a free hand to set academic standards and adopt tests as they like. Schools are then put under considerable pressure to help students achieve those standards as measured by those tests. And the evidence is incontrovertable that student achievement as measured by state NCLB tests has increased substantially. Evidence from other tests, by contrast, is much less clear. NAEP scores have increased, but not nearly at the same rate as state tests. Ditto tests like the Stanford exams.

But that's to be expected, isn't it? If the entire state system is purposefully geared toward teaching a certain set of standards, wouldn't we expect more improvement there than on a test that measures some other standards? Wouldn't test scores logically go up on the test that matters, instead of the one that doesn't? I can see how some kind of wild divergence would seem suspicious--e.g. a 50% increase on the state test while SAT-10 scores plummet--but shouldn't our baseline expectation be greater progress on the signficant tests aligned to curricula? But to say such divergence is prima facie evidence of test score inflation seems strange.

Maybe Vazquez-Heileg and Darling-Hammond explain all of this, but I can't tell since "there's no version up on the Web yet" and given that Eduwonkette in her day job is not exactly a disinterested observer in what she blogs about, I'm not going to take her word for it. Which brings me to my second point, regarding the research / policy divide.

This chasm of understanding, in which evidence from research fails to permeate the policymaking process, is constantly lamented and discussed, particularly at mass convocations like AERA. I don't understand why. Not because it doesn't exist, but because the solution strikes me as obvious. Here, free of charge, I present my secret methods for bridging the gap, based on time spent on both sides of the divide:

1) Write well. As everyone knows, research written in academese is often hard to read. Some of this can be solved be applying universal principles of good writing, which can be found in various books and guides and thus won't be rehashed at length here, other than to say: writing is a request to be a guest in someone else's consciousness. So be polite, and don't overstay your welcome. Write clearly and briefly, keeping in mind what the reader wants and needs, not what you want and need.

Beyond the above, there are also some important issues of structure to understand. Academic writing tends to be structured something like this:

1) Lit Review
2) Methods
3) Results
4) Conclusions (Possibly--"More research is needed" does not count as a conclusion.)

This is a terrible way to communicate with policymakers. They don't care about the lit review and the methods. You're the expert; they trust that you know what you're talking about and conducted the analysis correctly. (Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.) They're interested in context, results and conclusions. By that I mean: What did you find, and why does it matter? To present this information, you should write like this:

1) Context: why is this issue important?
2) Results: what did you find?
3) Conclusions: what do these results mean? (This should flow logically from the context)

Put the methods in an appendix, and only include stuff from the lit review if it helps establish context or supports your conclusions. I understand that this means writing in a different way than is appropriate for peer-reviewed academic research. Which is fine; different audiences and purpose, different format. To repeat: write for the reader, who wants the good stuff at the beginning, not the end. In fact, all he or she wants is the good stuff. So give that, and nothing else.

2) Let people know. The world is an extremely busy place and nobody is waiting for your next great idea or my next great idea with bated breath. So figure out who needs to know what you've discovered and call them on the phone. Or send them an email, or write them a letter. Reach out -- you'd be surprised how often this works. As long as your message is short and cogent, they'll probably appreciate it and ask for more.

3) Don't make things harder than they already are. Even if you follow steps one and two, getting traction in the policy sphere is still difficult. Politics, limited attention spans, competitors grasping for that same sliver of mindshare--it's not easy. So keep in mind some realities of the 21st Century, such as: If people can't find it on the Internet within two minutes, for free, it doesn't exist. Don't make more work for busy people, and don't try to sell them something that other people are giving away.

Vazquez-Heileg and Darling-Hammond got Step 2 right--getting your paper mentioned in a well-read blog like Eduwonkette is smart. But then--ack!--the paper isn't available. This cuts the potential Eduwonkette-driven audience by 90%. Most policymakers are not going to check back every day waiting for the free Internet version to show up, nor are they going to go buy a subscription to Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, or pay some kind of absurdly expensive per-article fee on a Web site. They'll just move on to other things.

Here's a Simple Rule of Thumb...

...if you're a news organization with some pretensions of respectability, and you're trying to decide whether or not to run an article that, while certain to boost traffic and advertising revenue, clearly stretches the boundaries of good taste:

1) Collapse the title of of the article into a single run-on phrase, then add "www." to the front and ".com" to the end, like this: http://www.titleofarticle.com/

2) Ask yourself this question: Would creepy middle-aged men pay $29.95 a month in exchange for access to this Web site? If the answer is "Yes" then don't run the article.

Application of this rule could have saved the AP and MSNBC from this.

School Choice Trifecta

The Post turns in not one, not two, but three noteworthy school choice stories today. The first suggests that DC's voucher program may be eliminated by an unfriendly Congress. While I don't think the program should be expanded or continued in the long run, the first obligation is to the kids here and I think Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton owes them more than just an "FYI, I'll be taking your voucher away." 

The second story is titled "Charter Schools to Close Over Academics." Ask yourself: How many times you have read this headline without the word "charter" in it? That tells you most of what you need to know. Also, it's not a coincidence that all of the charter revocations in DC have been applied to stand-alone "mom and pop" schools, not schools like KIPP that benefit from a fine-tuned model and the support of larger regional or national non-profit charter management organizations. In the not-too-distant future, both research findings and charter school growth patterns will likely show that this is the future of public school choice. The article also includes commentary from Ross Wiener at the Ed Trust, which is unusual in that they normally don't weigh in on choice issues. I've always been puzzled by this; objectively speaking charter schools have done exponentially more to improve education for low-income and minority students in DC than reforms like NCLB, so you'd think that an organization premised on helping those children would be more engaged... 

The third story (like the second from Jay Mathews) focuses on New Orleans where over half of public school enrollment is in charters. One critic faults charters there for creating an environment of "entrepreneurial opportunism" whereby providers rushed in in the weeks and months after the flood, recruiting good teachers, founding new schools in empty public school buildings, etc., etc. Right. Because clearly the big problem in post-Katrina New Orleans has been an overabundance of resources and attention focused on providing vital public services to the city's poor children.