Viva Las Vegas

I did a radio interview with KNPR today (the "N" actually stands for "Nevada" and was issued a long time ago, well before they knew what a great call sign that would turn out to be) focused on the Clark County (Las Vegas) school district's latest results under NCLB. Here's the beginning of the story in this morning's local newspaper:

The Clark County School District gave itself an "A" for its 2007-08 performance under federal standards, even though the number of schools needing improvement increased over the previous year and the number of schools showing improvement declined. In 2007-08, 186 schools made adequate yearly progress under the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act, 32 fewer than in 2006-07 when 218 schools showed adequate yearly progress. The number of schools on the state's watch list almost doubled, going from 35 in 2006-07 to 66 in 2007-08.

Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Lauren Kohut-Rost emphasized the rigor of the standards Thursday when the district released its annual report. Schools are judged by 37 separate targets. Falling short of just one target places a school on the watch list for failing to make adequate yearly progress. As a whole, the district met 94 percent of 12,987 benchmarks and expects to qualify for a second consecutive year as a district showing adequate yearly progress.

"That's an A grade we're giving ourselves," Kohut-Rost said. "We're extremely proud of the Clark County School District for making AYP for the second year in a row. That's almost unheard of for a very large urban and very diverse school system. So we're incredibly proud of that."

First, it's by no means unheard of for a large urban school district to make AYP two years in a row; most of them in fact are doing so, primarily because district-level AYP rules have been interpreted by states in extremely lenient ways.

Second, the oft-repeated idea that a school has to meet 37 out of 37 separate targets under NCLB (or some number in the same range, it varies a little by state) is for nearly all schools basically wrong. It's true that NCLB creates a two-dimensional matrix for each school crossing two performance measures (math and reading) plus two participation rates (95% of students have to be tested) with multiple student sub-group categories. So, for example, on one axis you'd have the four measures above, and on the other you'd have various student categories (white, black, Latino, asian, native american, low-income, special education, English language learner, all). 4 X 9 = 36, plus one additional measure (almost always attendance or graduation rates) equals 37.

But--and this is the crucial thing--very few schools have enough students to qualify in all 37 categories. For that to happen, a school would have to be large and enjoy some true United Colors of Benneton kind of diversity. In Nevada, subgroups aren't counted unless there are at least 25 students in the school, so to reach the full 37 you'd need at an absolute minimum of 125 (25 times each of the five racial/ethnic subgroups, with that population also containing significant numbers of poor, special education, and ELL students). Probably you'd need many more. Practically speaking, very, very few schools hit every box--and keep in mind, almost half of the boxes are simply test participation measures that have nothing to do with learning.

So a typical school is more likely to have between six and ten real marks to hit: reading and math performance for all students, one or two racial subgroups, and one or two among poor, special ed, and ELL. This is a lot less unreasonable-sounding than 37. It's why, six years into the law and counting, most schools haven't been labeled as failures. It also means that the "12,987 benchmarks" number is in all probability wildy overstated--I'll bet dollars to donuts that's the number of benchmarks against which Las Vegas schools could have been measured in an alternate universe where every single school in Clark County looks like the "It's A Small World" ride at Disneyland, not the number that was actually relevant after knocking out every subgroup under 25.

Third, the quotes from the school district officials illustrate an underappreciated point about the rationale behind NCLB. Holding schools accountable for test scores is usually characterized as a way to impose some uniformity to the education system, to make sure we bring all students up to the same high standards in a global economy, avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations, etc.-- all of which is true. But it's also a way to make judgment external to those being held accountable. That's what makes recent discussions about locally-designed assessments under a new version of NCLB so problematic. It's not so much what locals would be assessing as the fact that they'd be assessing themselves.

And when you give public officials in high-pressure, high profile jobs that kind of discretion, you tend to get responses along the lines of "That's an A grade we're giving ourselves."

Teaching in the Digital Age

Earlier this month, the Quick & Ed team discussed (here and here) what schools might look like in the future, as online learning continues to take hold. Today, the Washington Post takes a look at how virtual learning changes how teachers teach. According to the article, online teaching jobs can be highly competitive - because of the flexibility in hours, but also because of how it changes the role of the teacher. As the program director for Virginia's virtual schools stated, "People are intrigued and realize its pure teaching--you're not worrying about cafeteria duty."

The Baby Borrowers Last Night

The back-to-back episodes of The Baby Borrowers last night proved my earlier assertion that the show was not about teens taking care of children, but about teens taking care of themselves and their relationships.

Although Baby Borrowers intends to act as a deterrent to would-be teen parents (the show's slogan is "it's not parenting; it's birth control"), the reality is that the teens, as parents, are getting better. They've learned how and when to apply discipline, if still a little raw at both, and they're practicing the skills of running a family household—cooking healthy meals, going to work and balancing budgets, imposing timeouts and bedtimes, etc. If anything, the parenting/ household portions of the episodes show the opposite of what the producers intend. When called upon, the teens mostly step up.

The couples, in contrast, are failing one by one. Daton and Morgan came on the show as a way to test the strength of their relationship, so it was no huge surprise when he became the first of the teens to leave. Kelly has deep doubts about her relationship to Austin, and they are now in limbo, with a promise to break up after the completion of the entire experiment. It just makes for awkward television. Poor David, whose real-life parents are going through a divorce, to have to watch the drama and feel the tension between Austin and Kelly.

Even the couples with prior difficulties have rebounded. Kelsey and Sean seem to have settled in, and they're barely seen in the two hours of show last night (which, in this drama-laced show, means they're doing just fine). Cory and Alicea did the best job of parenting seen yet with troubled teen Sam. After Sam dumped all of Alicea's clothes on the floor, the teen "parents" stood strong, together, against the angst-ridden boy. And Sasha and Jordan returned to their place at the top of the couple/ parent rankings. When one member of each couple was treated to a visit by a friend, Jordan and his best friend hung out with Sasha too. Tellingly, Daton and his friend went to a skating rink, alone, to commiserate about Morgan.

I'm glad the show is almost over—they take care of the elderly next week, before presumably some type of wrap-up—because NBC has made this a painful ride. Unlike the original show, lauded as a success across the pond, NBC made this just another teen drama roller coaster. By selecting struggling couples made up of teens that had never worked a day in their life, they thought they'd get instances of bad parenting. Instead, they got pouty teens and malfunctioning couples who just happened to be babysitting. It's not birth control; it's couples counseling.

That's Funny, But Not Ha-Ha Funny

The Fordham Institute's Liam Julian has vowed to spend his entire summer pounding out overlong responses to this blog, so that we won't "let fly with a barrage of blog blather like none yet seen, safe in [our] assumption that [our] ill-founded fulminations would go unopposed."
Okay.....first of all, it's really a disservice to William F. Buckley's memory to mock his prose style this way. The man's been gone less than six months, show some respect. Also, Liam's posts would be better if he knew what he was talking about. In a lengthy anti-affirmative action screed, he says:

Thus, we have this: Yale accepts a black student whose qualifications are average for the University of Michigan, Michigan accepts a black student whose resume would be appropriate at Florida State, and Florida State fills its classes with black and Latino students whose credentials reflect those of their community college peers.

Yes, imagine what would happen if Florida State made a practice of admitting academically less qualified black and Latino students, some with SAT scores in the 900s or below. Oh wait, we don't have to imagine, because Education Sector published an entire policy paper on exactly that topic just three months ago. It turns out that black students at FSU do just as well as white students. Last year, they did better. Why? Because the university has a great program in place designed to help first-generation college students succeed. Liam has a degree from FSU, yet seems not to have noticed this. Must have been too busy watching the football team slide into scandal and mediocrity.

Then there's this gem from an earlier post about "theory" and the practice of teaching:

Is it not true that much of this theory and methodology is a relatively modern invention, one that did not exist a half-century ago, when fine teachers surely did?

If my calculations are correct, a half-century ago was in 1958. John Dewey published Democracy and Education in 1916. The first half of the 20th century (i.e. the pre-1958 half) featured a series of intense ideological debates about the meaning and practice of public education. Whole educational movements rose and fell, each grounded in theory, with a significant impact on schooling for millions of students. How do I know this? Because I--unlike, apparently, Liam--read Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by noted education historian Diane Ravitch. Liam shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy--Ravitch is on the Fordham Institute's Board of Trustees.

Suggestions for summer reading: less blogging and God and Man at Yale, more education policy and history.

Get Thee Some Graduate Students!

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon writes about the recent shift among school districts to integration policies based on economic status - not race - in light of last June's Supreme Court decision. Bazelon's review of the research on the impact of integration on student achievement highlights a serious problem for integration proponents - there just isn't much good research out there showing student achievement benefits from integration policies, whether they’re based on race or economic status.

I, unlike some people, find the logic behind creating “middle class schools” compelling – concentrated poverty brings with it a host of problems at the school-level, including fewer school resources and less qualified teachers, that tend to exacerbate any problems students are bringing with them from home. But I have yet to see any convincing research to show that busing students to create middle class schools will improve student achievement, at least as measured on standardized assessments.

In Bazelon’s article, for example, she cites research showing that low-income students in middle class schools score better than low-income students in majority low-income schools. That’s interesting, and indicates that concentrated poverty may have an effect on achievement, but it’s impossible to disentangle those results from other things that may be happening—the students in the middle class school may also live in more socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods, or, while they may qualify as low-income, their parents may have higher education levels or hold full-time (albeit low-paying) jobs. This type of anecdotal evidence leaves a lot to be desired, and leaves those who support integration policies with few genuine facts to grab hold of.

The evidence supporting gains beyond test scores, such as graduation rates, college attendance, and employment, also hint to positive outcomes from integration plans, but are frustratingly weak when it comes to research design. METCO, for example, Boston’s long-running integration program, which buses students from the city into neighboring suburban districts, reports that 87 percent of METCO students attend college, compared with 54 percent of Boston public school students as a whole. That’s great, but considering that there are 12,000 students on the waitlist for METCO and students are assigned to the program by lottery, why hasn’t anyone conducted a study comparing the students randomly selected to participate in METCO with those who were not selected? The results from that study would be taken much more seriously and would hold up better to scrutiny than simply reporting comparisons with Boston’s general student population.

Integration proponents' biggest hurdle may not be the recent Supreme Court case, instead, it may be the lack of rigorous research on integration and student achievement. While KIPP and other charter school networks are investing in longitudinal studies on student outcomes, those who would like to see resources spent on integration, rather than building new schools, will need to pursue similarly rigorous research efforts. If they don’t, public support for integration policies may wane in favor of efforts to create new neighborhood schools, segregated or not.

Self-Tying Logical Knots

Reporting from the recent AFT convention, Sherman Dorn makes an important point w/r/t a discussion led by Susan Ohanian (who is waaaay out there on the fringes of anti-NCLB absolutism, to the point where she recently took to the pages of Kappan to denounce the NEA for being too moderate on No Child):

Ohanian worried about the statement by Obama that "the single most important factor in determining a child's achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it's not who their parents are or how much money they have. It's who their teacher is." Ohanian argued that this statement is rhetoric that sets up blaming teachers for all sorts of problems they are not responsible for. A few minutes later, she claimed that the real danger of high-stakes accountability was the destruction of children's imaginations and the creation of a compliant workforce. But there's a logical inconsistency here: how can schools create worker robots if they are not powerful in shaping the lives of children?

I worry (and I said towards the end of the event) that Ohanian's criticism undercut arguments about the importance of the public sphere. You can say that teachers are not crucial to children's lives, but then it's hard to argue that schools should be well-funded. You can say that teachers are not crucial, but then it's hard to argue against all sorts of problematic policy proposals that take authority away from teachers or that position teachers' professional judgment as irrelevant. Ohanian was nodding in acknowledgment at the time, so I think (or I hope) she knows that her impromptu remarks were not consistent with either her deeper views of schooling or that of most teachers.

Dorn is being entirely too generous; this inconsistency is deliberate and sits at the heart of everything Ohanian and her ilk have to say. At the risk of being simplistic, one can divide attitudes about public education within the policy sphere into three basic camps. The first is "Public education doesn't work so let's get rid of it." This is your arch-conservative John Derbyshire-type stuff, which consists of various loosely coupled theories involving IQ determinism, the miracle of free markets, the evils of taxation and organized labor, etc. It enjoys durable appeal in some circles but is almost wholly marginalized in policymaking, owing to the fact that it's completely dumb.

The second is the basic reformist position: "Public education works so let's make it work better." It's the view that informs this blog, one that begins with a belief in the importance of public schools as tremendously vital and fundamentally egalitarian institutions, but proceeds to a fairly critical stance that's centered on ideas like increased accountability for results. It's sympathetic to the need for more educational resources but skeptical that the money we're spending now is being put to maximum use.

While the two positions don't have equal value (in that the first is wrong and the second is right) both have the advantage of logical consistency. If you really believe half of all students are uneducatable and we'd be better of in an all-vouchers-all-the-time world, than destroying public education as we know it makes sense. Similarly, if you believe that schools and teachers have great potential to help students, particularly disadvantaged students, then we should invest in them while also tying that investment to real accountability for student learning.

Then there's third position--the Ohanian position--which is really less a coherent position at all than a set of attitudes and individual agenda items rooted in defensiveness and a desire to maintain established institutions and arrangements as they are. To be clear, some of this defensiveness is quite justified -- there really are first position adherents out there who wish public education harm. But much of it boils down to the idea that while public education needs substantially more funding and teachers deserve much more respect (both of which ideas are, in and of themselves, true) it's unreasonable to suggest that either the funding or the respect ought to be accompanied by any commensurate expectation of enhanced, concretely defined educational results. Or, similarly, the idea that we have to protect children from policies that will either deliberately or inadveratently turn them into dead-eyed grist for the capitalist machine a la Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, yet at the same time schools have little or no upside potential to help economically disadvantaged students learn enough to lead a fulfilling, productive life.

This position is based on no core beliefs regarding the efficacy of public education, but rather shifts back and forth on that question depending on the issue at hand. Of course it's possible to be too optimistic about what schools can do in the face of large social problems, but the Ohanian position seems unwilling to give an inch here, or admit under any circumstances that a not-insignficant percentage of schools and teachers could be much better than they are.

Fear for Your Daughter's Virtue

"Boys crisis" promoter Richard Whitmire has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed offering a new reason to be upset about the higher education gender imbalance: it's turning college girls into, um, women of easy virtue, allegedly because of "what biologists refer to as the operational sex ratio, which in the animal kingdom refers to the changes in mating habits that occur when one sex outnumbers the other." Sherman Dorn does a good job of pointing out the numerous flaws in this argument here (see also Sara Mead from a couple of years ago on the same topic here). I'll just note that this once again raises the issue of affirmative action for men, a terrible discriminatory practice that colleges and universities should abandon.

Race-based affirmative action is a complex issue; on balance I support it for reasons explained here. But whether you're pro or con, I think everyone would agree that it evens out the racial distribution of students among colleges. Because minority students are less likely to attend well-funded schools and less likely to get strong college prep curricula in high school, on average they enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students, and thus end up disproportionately attending less selective colleges. Affirmative action counteracts this, with the result being within-college racial/ethnic makeups that are more representative of the college student body as a whole. Crucially, race-based affirmative action as practiced by selective colleges doesn't hurt non-selective colleges, because it simply brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance.

This isn't true for gender-based affirmative action, because the underlying rationale is very different. Race-based affirmative action makes up for numerous historical and contemporary inequities that obviously don't apply to men. When it comes to gender, however, balance is everything and the only thing, with colleges scrambling to avoid an allegedly catastrophic 60/40 female-to-male ratio which somehow causes previously chaste female collegians to behave like extras in a Motley Crue video.

But gender preferences at a given selective college do nothing to fix the overall problem of more women in college than men. Instead, they merely push that problem down the higher education food chain, from the selective colleges to the non-selectives. If a selective college rejects a more qualified woman in favor of a less qualified man, she's still going to college somewhere. So the net result is that that less selective institutions that by definition don't have as much leverage to shape their class makeup end up having to deal with the problem of bacchanals in the dorm rooms or what have you. In other words, gender-based affirmative action isn't just immoral and possibly illegal under Title IX, it's also selfish.

Plus, I really don't get the logic: colleges are essentially saying they have to not admit women because otherwise women won't want to go there. Isn't this problem inherently self-correcting? If high female/male ratios are a turn-off for women, won't fewer women apply to colleges where the ratio is out of whack? It's kind of like what Yogi Berra said about the restaurant that nobody goes to anymore because it's too crowded.

Forget Something?

The recent New York State Commission on Higher Education report contains a number of recommendations for making New York public colleges and universities globally competitive, and has some good ideas for improving connections with K-12 education and workforce development. But much of the report sounds like the arms race rhetoric common in higher education, and misses out on an important purpose of colleges and universities: educating undergraduates.

The report includes several ideas on ways to improve the research standing of certain NY state universities, including devoting more funds to support research, recruiting “top flight” faculty and graduate students, and enhancing entrance requirements (e.g. raising SAT scores) at these institutions. In fact, the 100-page report mentions “research” a total of 175 times.

“Learning” is mentioned 18 times, “Undergraduate” 11 times. And teaching? Twice.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t valuable recommendations in the report, and ones that benefit undergraduates. The proposal for a seamless transfer system—allowing students to move from one state university to another without risking losing credit hours—is particularly good. But the focus of the report is clearly on research and graduate-level studies.

While US News rankings - much of which are based on the research and "entrance requirements" the Commission seeks to enhance - are seen as the marker of success in much of higher education, the New York State Commission on Higher Education would have done well to eschew that rhetoric in favor of what will likely become an area of increasing concern—improving the quality of undergraduate education.