The Indefensible Position

Esquire has a semi-regular feature called "The Indefensible Position" wherein authors try to explain that "car wrecks are good for you," or "Shakespeare was a hack." Continuing in this proud tradition, Flypaper's Liam Julian bravely defends rich Manhattanites who are mad that it's getting harder to buy your kid into Harvard.  Says Liam:

It would be a shame, though, if America’s best colleges were to accept large numbers of pupils who are less academically able than are many to whom they, the colleges, deny entry.

Yes, that would certainly be terrible. Why, if this kind of things keep up, pretty soon elite colleges will be turning down the most academically able students in favor of legacies, recruited athletes, professor's offspring, and the children of powerful politicians, famous celebrities, and rich people who donate large amounts of money to the endowment, while simultaneously enforcing a de facto cap on high-achieving Asian students. Thankfully the perfect meritocracy of the Ivy League admissions process has defenders at the Fordham Institute, so that, quote, "lesser minds" won't sully Harvard Yard. 

Seriously, I have to wonder if Liam even read the article.  Clearly there are lots of unusually smart students enrolled in New York private schools, some of whom deserve to go to Princeton, etc.  At the same time, it's just as obvious that part of what you're paying those schools for is an established pipeline into the Ivies that increases your child's chances of admission beyond what merit brings, and that's certainly the case if you spend 40 grand on a private Ivy League admissions counselor.  Cutting down on this stuff and broadening the admissions pool will bring in more smart students, not less.

Perhaps Liam was too busy quoting reading a Thomas Sowell NRO column that blames the French defeat by Nazi Germany on...wait for it...teachers unions.  You can't make this stuff up. 

The End of Liberal Professors?

The comments section for yesterday's most-emailed Times front-pager about the wave of retiring liberal boomer professors seems to consist mostly of "good riddance, dirty hippies" etc. etc.  And like many people I'm occasionally amazed and appalled by the way the academy seems to provide a comfortable home for various unrepentant terrorists, unapologetic Stalinists, conspiracy nuts, and fraudsters/morons. But it's also obvious that such people are few and far between--most liberal professors, I'm guessing, are a lot like the retiring UW-Madison scholar in the article, Michael Olneck, who is described as follows:

His father was a Socialist. Right out of high school, in 1964, Mr. Olneck organized support for the Mississippi Project’s black voter-registration drives. Later, he took a bus to Washington to protest the war in Vietnam, served on the strike coordinating committee atHarvard during the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and demonstrated atPresident Nixon’s inauguration in 1973.

In other words, he fought for civil rights when many people were trying to extend the nation's centuries-long subjugation of minorities. Then he fought for getting the country out of a war it ruinously decided to extend, followed by protesting the criminal Nixon administration. Frankly, I'm glad someone who ended up so decisively on the right side of history chose to spend his career teaching young Americans. Better professor Olneck than one of the many people, still alive today, who were wrong on all counts. 

The article contrasts Olneck with one his colleagues, Sara Goldrick-Rab, a 31-year old assistant professor in the same department. But, oddly, the author focuses as much on differences in their methods as their politics:

Like many sociologists and education researchers, Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research. Ms. Goldrick-Rab has embraced such experiments..."

I kind of see where the author is going with this, but I don't think it really holds water. Dealing exclusively with theories and narratives isn't necessarily radical (see Broder, David) and there's nothing inherently moderate or non-ideological about data-focused research. It all depends on what kinds of questions you're trying to answer and how you talk about results.

And in point of fact Dr. Goldrick-Rab happens to be liberal by any conventional use of the term. I first met her a few years ago during a conference here in DC. It's true that she likes data -- I couldn't help but notice during our group "break-out session" (boy, do I hate break-out sessions) that while everyone else was offering anecdotes and opinions, she kept citing actual research and actual results to support her positions. Later she came up to me at lunch, introduced herself, and told me in the nicest possible way that she was going to be publishing a paper in which she concluded that many of my recently-voiced ideas about college graduation rates were wrong. She's since published some really interesting work on student transfer and community colleges, among other things, and her new financial aid project, mentioned in the Times article, looks to be ground-breaking. But at the same time it's pretty clear from reading the blog she co-writes with her husband Liam that she's very focused on social justice and other liberal priorities; she's just using the best available quantitative methods to do her work. 

So it appears that the liberal professoriate is alive and well. And if younger faculty members like Sara are any indication, that's a good thing. 

Schools of the (Very Near) Future

At least one district in South Carolina is ahead of the Jetsons, per Erin's post below. Anderson School District #4 is proposing its own model for the school of the future, which they say is coming in the next year or two. They call it the Inside Out Learning Center and it stands out as quite different from traditional schools--no grade levels, personalized instruction and a flexible schedule. Anderson County Superintendent Jim Rex and Assistant Superintendent Joanne Avery are going to be here for the NCTAF conference in 2 weeks to say more about the model. This year's NCTAF conference is dedicated to building a 21st century education system so look for a lot of people with school of the future visions. My bet for (high) school of the future is New Tech High, where they've taken project-based learning to the next level with technology--so students are assessing themselves and each other on a wide range of outcomes as a regular part of their learning. Started as one school in Napa and now there are dozens all over and outside of California. New Tech folks will be at the NCTAF event too.

Schools of the Future

In the intro to the 1980’s TV show The Jetsons, the eponymous futuristic family is shown traveling in a bubble-like flying car, walking on floating moving walkways, and being shuttled to their destinations in little flying saucers. But when the son Elroy and the teenage daughter Judy are dropped off at school, their saucers fly into a brick and mortar school—it may be floating several miles above the Earth, but it would be identifiable by someone from the 1880’s as a school.

The former Edison Schools, now edisonlearning, is betting that the TV writers for the Jetsons are wrong. As Tom Toch writes, Edison is now joining the education software world and intends to become a player in the crowded field of companies offering curriculum and instruction online. I sat in on a conference call about Edison’s recent change and noted that the “future” came up several times, along with anecdotes about teachers sitting in a warehouse in front of computers, teaching and advising students remotely, and visions of highly differentiated instruction fostered by technology.

If this education future is coming to traditional school systems—Clayton Christensen is betting on it, and as Bill Tucker notes below, the growing number of students learning online is an indicator that change is happening—it has some powerful implications for school reform. Virtual education and highly differentiated instruction allow for a much more customized learning experience in which students have more control over how their instruction is delivered—fully online, in a hybrid classroom/computer-based system, etc.—but with that control, accountability needs to follow. Our current accountability system is based on the premise that brick and mortar schools will continue to exist—that there will be principals and teachers to hold accountable for the entirety of a students’ learning. But what if a student learns algebra online from a teacher in the UK, and English literature in a storefront classroom near home? How should accountability be distributed to ensure that students are getting quality instruction? As choice increases and students have more control over where and how to learn algebra or English lit., accountability for results will need to be distributed more widely than it is today, and more of the accountability burden will need to fall on the students and parents making those choices.

Or perhaps all of these questions are moot, and—as 1980’s TV writers envisioned—brick and mortar schools won’t fundamentally change. There’s no question that Edison understands the often slow, laborious process of reforming the traditional public school system, but they're betting, along with many others, that change is coming to education—the only question is when this "future" will happen. According to The Jetsons, it'll be sometime after we get those flying cars.

This Week on The Baby Borrowers

For a show being lauded some places as the "antidote" to teen pregnancy and for "educating teens about unplanned pregnancy," The Baby Borrowers focuses far too much on teenage drama to be taken seriously.

In my review of last week's first episode, I panned NBC for resorting to stereotypes, referring to Kelly and Austin as the "preppy southern couple" and Daton and Morgan as "California surfers." But what was cheesy in the introductory phase of the show became downright obnoxious as they continue it. That alone may be enough to make me stop watching.

Last night's episode showed two days of the social experiment. In it, the teens spent their first nights with the babies, and then one of the parents had to get up and go to work in order to earn money for food and rent. We learn from the announcer that for most of the teens, this is the first real day of work they've ever done. Eight of the ten participants are 18 and the other two are 20, so the fact that they've never worked says something about which types of teens the show's producers picked. I digress.

For the most part, last night focused on the drama of two couples. Alicea and Cory fight and bicker, but mostly we see Alicea avoiding responsibility and acting like the spoiled child she is. She refuses to help at all with the baby, she goes to work at a sawmill dressed to go clubbing, and cannot even muster the patience to figure out how to make the baby's formula in the morning. Cory, for his part, tries his best. He stays up all night with the crying baby, but, when the baby's diaper needs changing on a playdate, Cory tries to pass the duty off to Kelly (one of the other teens) simply because she smelled it first.

Sean and Kelsey face similar problems. Kelsey had great confidence in her parenting skills before coming onto the show, but now cannot deal with the real, crying baby. Her anxiety gives her stomach problems, and she shuts down, locking herself in the bathroom. This leaves Sean with the baby, and no one to go to work. The next day, Kelsey goes to work, not because they need the money (somehow I doubt NBC will let either the babies or the teens starve), but because she wants to escape the baby burden.

We get to see barely any successes. We do see that Kelly has rebounded nicely from her panic attack over the pregnancy vest. The moments we get to see Jordan and Sasha (my favorites by far) are rare, but they do provide (again) the one truly heartening moment of the entire episode. When the mothers of the teen girls come to visit for a few hours, Sasha's mom begins crying after seeing how well the couple are working as a team and managing the new responsibilities. She realizes she harbored doubts about her daughter's ability that turn out to be unfounded.

These extremely brief moments are not what the show is about though. Instead, we're watching teenagers who've never worked before try to handle the tough task of raising children. The producers want us to see failure and drama, and that's mostly what we get.

The Company Formerly Known as Edison Schools

After 16 years, endless controversy, and a sea of red ink, Edison Schools is no longer. CEO Terry Stecz, who replaced Edison founder Chris Whittle as chief executive in early 2007, announced yesterday that Edison Schools would henceforth be known as edisonlearning, and that the company intends to become a player in education software, focusing on student tracking systems and other "achievement management solutions." Whittle predicted the company would be managing 1,000 school with a million students by 2010 when he lured Benno Schmidt away from the Yale presidency to help launch Edison in 1992. But Whittle and Schmidt could never make the company profitable and after reaching a financial high water mark in February 2001, when the company's stock was worth nearly $2 billion, things went South in hurry when venture capital dried up with the Dot Com Bust, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of Edison's revenue reporting, the company lost a string of contracts, a teacher union-led attack on for-profit school managers intensified, and the work of running schools for mostly disadvantaged kids in poor neighborhoods proved a lot tougher, and less profitable, than the company had expected. Nor has the company been able to scare up much new business in the No Child Left Behind era, a period where states and schools systems have scrambled to find help in turning around the many failing schools identified by the law.

Edison's competitors haven't fared much better. Of the dozen or so other substantial for-profit school management companies that sprung up in the 1990s, most have disappeared, switched to non-profit status, or are limping along. Only one or two companies are profitable and they haven't expanded as far or as fast as expected.

So Edison's executives and majority owner, a New York-based private equity firm called Liberty Partners, are hoping that rebranding the company will lead potentinal clients in the education world to give the company a fresh look, to put aside Edison's troubled past and the legacy of it flamboyant founder. But changing the name on the door and moving into the educational software business doesn't alter the fact that Edison spent 16 years and nearly half a billion dollars trying to find a way to run high-quality public schools for disadvantaged kids as a viable business--surely one of the most important experiments in American educational history--and failed. More than anything else, the announcement of edisonlearning is a sobering commentary on school reform.

That's Good News

The world is complicated place -- a lot of grey areas, a lot of ins, outs, and what-have-yous. It's hard to be sure. Yet I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's unambiguously a good thing that it's apparently getting harder for rich Manhattanites to push their children into Harvard by spending vast sums of money on expensive private schools, $46,000 private Ivy League admissions consultants (that's not a typo), etc. etc. The reason (anecdotal, to be sure): all the criticism of the Ivies' plutocracy-sustaining admissions policies and near-total lack of economic diversity seems to be paying off, at least a little. I've said previously that all the hoopla surrounding Harvard's more generous aid policies is only justified if it results in more equity as defined by the real coin of the realm in elite higher education: admissions. If this is legit, great--hopefully in the future we'll be reading more stories about people with too much money losing their minds because it turns out there are still a few things that money can't buy.

Oh What A Tangled Web

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Paul Basken reported last week on a leaked document which spells out the contractual relationship between Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student loan company, and USA Funds, the nation's largest loan guarantee agency. On the surface, a contractual relationship sounds pretty boring, but considering that guarantee agencies are responsible for overseeing lenders in the federal loan program, this type of relationship poses some serious conflict-of-interest problems.

Guarantee agencies must be non-profit or state-based entities, and, in addition to being the primary insurer of federal loans, they are responsible for ensuring lenders perform due-diligence on loans before filing a claim for repayment on a defaulted loan. This helps to protect against fraud in the federal loan program by ensuring lenders don't file false default reimbursement claims.

Because of their oversight responsibilities, guarantee agencies are supposed to maintain an arms-length relationship with lenders. When Sallie Mae purchased USA Group, of which USA Funds was one part, it could not, as a for-profit company, also acquire USA Funds. Instead, USA Funds remained a separate entity, but Sallie Mae contracted with the company to provide guarantee services on all of its loans. And a good chunk of Sallie Mae's fee-based revenues come from this arrangement.

Both the GAO and Inspector General have issued reports advising against this type of close-knit relationship between guarantee agencies and lenders, but in 2004 the Department of Education overruled the Inspector General's recommendation that USA Funds and Sallie Mae end their relationship. Perhaps leaks like this will spur the Department of Education to re-think its position.

For more information on the history of Sallie Mae and its relationship with USA Funds, check our report from last year here.

Creep

No Child Left Behind took a big hit today. Secretary Spellings' formal approval($) today of six "differentiated accountability" state pilot plans solidifies what I wrote a month ago: these are little more than ways to avoid consequences.

The name of the pilot program, "differentiated accountability," bugs me. While suggestive of reasonableness and perspective, it really hits at the core of NCLB. It provides flexibility in acknowledging that schools with all their students failing are different that ones with only a portion. But isn't that the exact opposite of what we needed? Wasn't No Child primarily urging us to not be satisfied with overall averages but instead look at all types of students?

When we take data and parse out how African-American, Latino, special education, or other small categories of students are doing, we gain information that we didn't have before. NCLB required this disaggregation of data, it held schools accountable for making sure every single category of students reached proficiency, and it made achievement gaps prevalent in our national dialog more so than ever before.

The new flexibility backtracks from that. All six of the approved plans (for Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio) feature some type of simple arithmetic formula based on the number of categories in which a school fails. So, for example, schools in Ohio with 31% of their sub-groups failing are treated differently than ones with 29%. These numbers are completely arbitrary. That they vary widely by state shows they were made randomly or with political considerations in mind.

Secretary Spellings, in approving the plans, said this:

As the person who sees and approves state accountability plans under NCLB, I can tell you there is strong pressure to weaken, water down, find loopholes, and delay real accountability. Some of these efforts often have fancy names like "multiple measures" or "authentic assessments." Others efforts are not so fancy, like when opponents spend millions to tarnish NCLB.

Millions weren't spent today to tarnish NCLB. The Secretary did it herself.

Update: David Hoff finds the comments made by expert peer reviews. It's chock full of quotes like this:

The methods appeared largely to be based on methods of convenience rather than a focus on the underlying causes of schools inability to meet AYP. [bold original]

and this:

Very few of the proposals included a backstop to ensure that schools in milder levels of intervention did not allow any single group to persistently under-perform.

Data that Makes Clay Christensen Happy

Clayton Christensen, author of a new book that predicts an explosion in K-12 online learning, has another data point for his projections spreadsheet. Top line from Friday's National Center for Education Statistics report on K-12 technology-based distance education is that enrollments increased by 60 percent, from an estimated 317,070 in 2002-03 to 506,950 in 2004-05.

The trend lines are becoming clearer, as these figures reinforce last year's Sloan Consortium estimates of 700,000 K-12 students engaged in online courses in 2005-2006. (Yes, the Sloan data was released last year and covers a more recent time period. Sigh.)

The NCES data is mostly as expected, with a few interesting tidbits.

As Expected:

• While the NCES data covers all forms of technology-based distance education, the survey finds a significant shift away from two-way video delivery to Internet-based delivery. Have to believe this shift has continued to accelerate from 2005 to 2008.
• As expected, the vast majority of enrollments are at the high school level. Moreover, 39 percent of public high schools offered technology-based distance education courses in 2004-05.

Going Against Conventional Wisdom:

• Common perception is that online learning serves mostly advanced students. The NCES survey finds that AP and dual-credit enrollments are only a small part of total enrollments, at 3% and 12% respectively.
• They're not all homeschoolers. In districts with students enrolled in online courses, 86% of students accessed these courses from school. In a subset of higher poverty districts, the number of students accessing from school rose to 92%.

Of Concern:

The table below shows course completion rates and passing grades by district characteristic (click table for larger image). Both large districts and urban schools had exceptionally low percentages of students that completed courses with a passing grade. Urban schools reported 39% of students completing with passing grades and didn't know the course completion status for an additional 46% of their students. My guess is that these are credit recovery students and the districts only really keep track of who gets a credit. Interestingly, poverty concentration was not a significant driver of course completion status.

**PS: Edison Schools, granddaddy of private education management organizations, gets into the online learning business (via EdWeek $). The article cites Terry Stecz, Edison's CEO, describing the company's “hybrid” school design model "that would enable students to learn both through traditional classroom and newer technological means."

Mapping Preschool

I've been spending a lot of time lately working with geographic information systems (GIS) mapping technology - it's a great tool that gives you a whole new way to look at information by mapping education data and neighborhood demographics, including school district boundaries, school locations, income data, and school performance information. And currently it's sorely under-used in education research and policy. Education Sector is working on changing that and you can expect some cool maps from us in the coming months, but in the meantime I'm sharing an application that just arrived in my inbox via my GIS newsletter.

The state of Illinois, as part of implementing its 2011 preschool for all goal, has created an Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map. The goal is to allow agencies to better match services with needs. Users can map the distribution of early childhood services, including Head Start, state agencies, and private sector care, along with demographic information related to population and federal poverty levels.