Hot Boys

Education Sector non-resident senior fellow Peg Tyre, a former education correspondent at Newsweek, is streaking towards the best-seller lists with her just-published book, The Trouble with Boys, a thoroughly researched and deftly written contribution to the raging national debate over if--and if so, why--boys are strugging to stay up with girls in today's increasingly competitive educational culture. Published just three days ago, the book is already among the top two dozen sellers on the both the Amazon and Barnes and Noble lists. An essay Peg wrote for Newsweek's got more than a million hits in 48 hours. She'll be at our offices in Washington on November 13 to discuss the boys crisis, an event that also features former Education Sector policy analyst Sara Mead, who has written extensively about the issue as well.

Roll Tide

Buzz Bissinger, he of Friday Night Lights fame, turns in a very worthwhile read on college football and Nick Saban, head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide. Bissinger thinks our priorities are a little askew when a football coach earns $3.75 million in base salary, 25 hours of non-commercial airline flights, a free country club membership, two cars for use by his family, and incentive bonuses for reaching a bowl, winning the game, and being named coach of the year. And, oh yeah, graduating his players.

Saban's team went 6-6 last year, meaning he made $583,000 per win. Average faculty salaries at Alabama are $116,00.

The Google and The Internets

Are you a Virginia resident looking for more information about higher education? Need information on financial aid? The State Council on Higher Education in Virginia has an excellent resource list including the "Internet" and "Libraries." According to the site, libraries, "have resource books with information about national financial aid programs" and the "Internet" provides:

free electronic searches for information about different types of grants and scholarships available to students.

Free electronic searches!! I want free electronic searches. Can someone tell me where I can find this "Internet" thing?

It sure is nice to see our states buckle down and handle the big issues in college affordability with such great resource lists.

And the Real Problem Is...

Now that it's September and most college students are back in their dorms, the press has quieted down about the looming "student loan crisis" that made for great headlines a few months ago. As this article, online at the American Prospect, explains, this is because there hasn't been much of a crisis after all. As many people tried to explain amidst the loan crisis hubbub, this is an area where the federal government actually has a functioning back up system in place -- the Direct Loan Program.

The article also touches on the actual loan crisis in higher education - the ever-larger amounts of debt students are graduating with, the growing dependence on private student loans, and the lack of real debt counseling for students (often still teenagers) who sign on the dotted line for tens of thousands of dollars in loans.

McCain on Obama on Education

In a new John McCain adverstisement, an announcer says the following about Barack Obama's record on education:

Education Week says Obama "hasn't made a significant mark on education". That he's "elusive" on accountability. A "staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly."

You have to watch the ad carefully to pick up the sourcing, which doesn't exactly follow the text. Education Week only said the first thing, about the "significant mark." The "elusive" line is actually from the Washington Post, and the last, "staunch defender" part is from the Chicago Tribune. And in that case from a Tribune columnist, Steve Chapman, writing here. 

Are there any rules or accepted practices about this kind of thing? Can you quote some crazy thing from a Bill Kristol or Maureen Dowd column in a political ad and simply source it to "The New York Times."? Obviously, I understand there's no honor among thieves etc., but still...

The Obama Education Speech

Barack Obama delivered what his campaign billed as a "major policy address" on education today in Dayton, Ohio. Excerpts from the prepared remarks and comments below:

Every four years, we hear about how this time, we’re going to make [education] an urgent national priority. Remember the 2000 election, when George W. Bush promised to be the “education President”?

This is an odd criticism. An awful lot of people would probably argue that Bush has been the wrong kind of education President, but he's undeniably been an education President. No Child Left Behind was one of his signature domestic policy achievements and the administration has steadily pushed the issue, for good or ill, ever since. 

The rising importance of education reflects the new demands of our new world.

I suspect these folks would have liked more nuance here. 

"...children here in Dayton are growing up competing with children not only in Detroit, but in Delhi as well."

The likelihood of your city being singled out for attention on education and workforce issues is now crucially dependent on its name beginning with the same first letter as a major Indian and/or Chinese city filled with Friedmanesque software engineers willing to work for ten bucks an hour. See also: Baltimore / Bangalore; Seattle / Shenzen, etc. etc. 

If we want to keep building the cars of the future here in America, we can’t afford to see the number of PhDs in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as it’s dropped here in America.

I'd like to see this and similar sentiments phrased so it's clear that more PhDs in China, South Korea, Japan, and elsewhere is a good thing that will help America in the long run. The world has many vexing problems and the more smart, well-educated people to solve them, the better. An expanded well-educated class in China and elsewhere will create new markets for the kind of high-value goods and services that America produces, and they'll make newer, better products that we'd like to buy. Perhaps most importantly, they'll improve the lives of people in those countries, which we should all care about. Many countries in Europe plus Canada, Australia and others have comparable levels of college degree attainment to the United States and I don't think anyone wishes that weren't the case; indeed it's not a coincidence that those countries are also our military allies, trading partners, etc. And of course Japan already falls into this category. 

The question of whether America is producing enough advanced degree-holders to support a vibrant auto industry or what have you should really be considered on its own terms--terms that I suspect don't have much to with the total number of PhDs (a metric one would anticipate China and India eventually dominating in that they have many more people) or even PhDs per capita, but rather the quality of PhDs plus the many other factors influencing the competitiveness of various industries i.e. health care costs, intellectual property law, infrastructure, integrity of the financial markets, etc. 

If we want to see middle class incomes rising like they did in the 1990’s, we can’t afford a future where so many Americans are priced out of college; where only 20 percent of our students are prepared to take college-level English, math, and science; where millions of jobs are going unfilled because Americans don’t have the skills to work them; and where barely one in ten low-income students will ever get their college degree.

My favorite paragraph thus far. Out-of-control college price increases are a vexing problem that grows worse every year. Low levels of college preparation among college-goers points to the need to greatly improve curricula, instruction, and guidance in high schools. And socioeconomic disparities in higher educaiton should always be defined as they are here, not as the percent of low-income students who go to college but the percent who graduate. 

Lincoln created the land grant colleges to ensure the success of the union he was fighting to save.

A bit of an overstatement. Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 into law, but I don't think he had much to do with it's conception; Presidents didn't really pursue legislative agendas back then as they do now. 

In the past few weeks, my opponent has taken to talking about the need for change and reform in Washington, where he has been part of the scene for about three decades.
And in those three decades, he has not done one thing to truly improve the quality of public education in our country. Not one real proposal or law or initiative. Nothing.

While Virginia Walden Ford did a nice job of making the case for McCain on education over at Eduwonk a couple of weeks ago, in the end this criticism is fair. John McCain has pushed a lot of issues in Congress, both foreign and domestic, but education has never been one of them and was virtually absent from his campaign agenda until relatively recently. 

You don’t reform our schools by opposing efforts to fully fund No Child Left Behind.

True, although Democrats have been running Congress for coming up on two years now and they haven't proposed to fully fund it either. 

Obama's education plan will "finally put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one by providing a $4,000 tax credit to any middle class student who’s willing to serve their community or their country."

There are plenty of worse ways to spend money than tying college aid to national service. But (per above re: college prices) history suggests that there's no amount of federal student aid that colleges and unviersities can't absorb--and then some--by raising tuition. I'm also not a fan of financial aid via tax credit; the Clinton-era HOPE and Lifetime Learning credits cost the treasury billions of dollars per year, they're not nearly as well-targeted to (per above re: socieconomic attainment disparities) low-income students as are other forms of aid. 

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Forcing our teachers, our principals, and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong. And by the way – don’t tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test.

Unsatisfying. Fundamentally, the NCLB debate is not about resources. Even a "fully funded" NCLB would provide less than five percent of what it costs to run the nation's K-12 school system. The debate is about how best to measure educational success and what do when we determine that success is insufficient. Reasonable people can differ profoundly on those questions, but I'm pretty sure nobody is for "throwing up your hands and walking away from them." Similarly, re: "don't tell us..."--who, exactly, is telling us this? That's just a straw man and a flimsy one at that. 

We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy.

Yes, we do! Education Sector will be releasing a new report on this very topic next month. Watch this space for details.

It’s time to ask ourselves why other countries are outperforming us in education. Because it’s not that their kids are smarter than ours – it’s that they’re being smarter about how to educate their kids.

An important acknowledgment that educational failures are often the result of educational problems, which is surprisingly hard for some people to admit. 

A while back, I was talking with my friend Arne Duncan, who runs the Chicago Public Schools. He was explaining how he’d managed to increase the number of kids taking and passing AP courses in Chicago over the last few years. What he said was, our kids aren’t smarter than they were three years ago; our expectations for them are just higher.

Right on.  

...as President, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.

Arguably the most significant line in the speech. I take this as a clear commitment to public school choice and multiple ways of building and governing public schools, BUT with a strong emphasis on quality and accountability, i.e. "responsible," or as Obama goes on to say, "Charter schools that are successful will get the support they need to grow. And charters that aren’t will get shut down." This is one of those issues where I think there's really not much room for reasonable debate:  Of course we should give parents choices among public schools and create new pathways for entrepreuneurialism and innovation, and of course that should only happen in a context of meaningful public accountability beyond simple market forces.  As Eduwonk notes, the fact Obama delivered this kind of sharp message in Ohio, where charters have been very controversial, is meaningful.

And when our teachers succeed in making a real difference in our children’s lives, we should reward them for it by finding new ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. We can do this. From Prince George’s County in Maryland to Denver, Colorado, we’re seeing teachers and school boards coming together to design performance pay plans.

This is another step toward the new consensus around teacher pay, which is that everyone now concedes that some kind of differentiation beyond the standards steps-and-lanes experience + credentials system is needed, so the real debate is about paying teachers for what other things and how. The politically safe approach is to limit this to teaching in shortage areas and hard-to-staff schools, so just by using the phrase "performance pay," Obama sends a good signal.

teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don’t improve, they’ll be replaced. Because as good teachers are the first to tell you, if we’re going to attract the best teachers to the profession, we can’t settle for schools filled with poor teachers. 

Again, simply talking about "poor teachers" and the general idea of firing teachers for poor performance is, in and of itself, valuable for the purposes of moving this debate to reasonable ground. Since these issues tend to play out district-by-district at the contract neogotiation level, there's little a President can do to influence them on the policy front, but the bully pulpit affects the tenor of highly public negotiations like those that are going on DC right now, in terms of how the press reacts, how the national unions choose to intervene, how much political capital local leaders are willing to expend, etc. 

I’ll create a parent report card that will show you whether your kid is on the path to college. We’ll help schools post student progress reports online so you can get a regular update on what kind of grades your child is getting on tests and quizzes from week to week. If your kid is falling behind, or playing hooky, or isn’t on track to go to college or compete for that good paying job, it will be up to you to do something about it.

The college prep part of this is, if properly implemented, a very good idea. The speech notes above that only 20 percent of student who go to college are fully prepared to succeed there. That's a frightening number, and most students and parents simply don't know if they're on that track until it's too late. They take classes in high school, pass them, earn their diploma, apply to college, get accepted, and enroll, and only then find out that they should have taken a whole different set of course, years before. 

The speech finishes off with more China and India stuff. Again, we need to talk about these competitive threat issues in more sophisticated non-zero-sum terms. 

Doing School Choice Wrong

Today, ES released a Charts You Can Trust (a Maps You Can Trust, really) showing the failures of Massachusetts' interdistrict choice program--failures which mean that affluent students are more likely to benefit from the interdistrict choice law. Problems with the law include a lack of transportation to get students to their new schools; a lack of outreach to parents to inform them of their new options; and allowing school districts to opt-out of the program, which means that only one of the districts surrounding Boston has opened its doors to new students.

These problems are not unique to Massachusetts. Many states with open enrollment laws that allow students to cross attendance boundaries and school district lines to attend the school of their choice have similar shortcomings--and similar results.

But this isn't to say that interdistrict choice can't be done well--it can, but it costs more money to provide transportation and outreach to families. And it means making the politically difficult decision to require all districts to participate. As we reported a couple weeks ago, interdistrict choice has potential to help students in some areas, but there are limits to what it can achieve and it needs to be done well to avoid the pitfalls of policies like Massachusetts'.

Why the U.S. News Peer Survey Will Never Die, and Probably Shouldn't

The Yale Daily News reports that, in a "major statement," Yale refused to fill out the U.S. News & World Report college rankings peer reputation survey this year, while also refusing to join other private colleges and universities in signing a letter promising to boycott said survey. To begin, this is only true if by "major" you  mean "cautious, difference-splitting and not particularly important." Moreover, those who think the declining participation rate in the U.S. News survey will eventually render it inoperable and thus de-legitimize the rankings are kidding themselves, for two reasons. 

First, because U.S. News can always survey someone else. (Note: there's a nugget of conventional wisdom out there that U.S. News changes its methodology every year so the rankings will be shuffled and thus generate news. While there were changes in the past, this is at least the fifth or sixth consecutive year in which there have been virtually no alterations, so that meme should be laid to rest.)  

Second, because for every institution that's hurt by the survey, which makes up 25 percent of each college's score, another benefits and will thus likely continue filling out the form. And looking at which are which, the survey probably makes the rankings better, not worse. 

Among the "first tier" Top Fifty national universities, here are the ten with the biggest negative difference between their peer reputation ranking and overall ranking, with the ordinal difference in parentheses. In other words, these are the top schools whose U.S. News ranking most exceed the esteem of their peers:

Lehigh (-14)
Wake Forest (-13)
Emory (-12)
Notre Dame (-12)
University of Rochester (-12)
Tufts (-11)
Brandeis (-10)
Washington University in St. Louis (-8)
Rice (-7)
Boston College (-7)

Here are their counterparts on the flip side, those whose rankings are lower than the peer survey would indicate:

UNC-Chapel Hill (+10)
UC - Davis (+10)
Penn State (+10)
University of Florida (+10)
Georgia Tech (+11)
Washington University (+11)
University of Michigan (+13)
UC - Berkeley (+15)
UW - Madison (+15)
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (+16)
UT - Austin (+23)

The difference is obvious -- all of the over-ranked universities are private, while all of the under-ranked universities are public. That's because public universities, being large and on some level committed to enrolling a diverse student body, tend to fall short on other components of the rankings that favor a small, wealthy student body: alumni giving rates, percent of applicants who are rejected, median SAT scores, percent of students from the top 10 percent of their high school class, etc. 

While the peer survey is in many ways rooted in unexamined reputations that go back decades or more (and  the entire U.S. News methodology should of course be replaced with something completely different and much better), it at least has the effect of limiting the ability of universities to spend their way up the rankings through pure marketing and fundraising tactics. That's a good thing, and the reason you'll never see a Rose Bowl Coalition of Big Ten and Pac Ten universities joining the boycott. 

Michelle Rhee's "Plan B"

It looks like Michelle Rhee wants to bypass the teacher’s union and link teacher licensure to “effectiveness” as determined by OSSE. The union has already tripped up, in my opinion, by rejecting the principle of the idea and upsetting people like Kevin.

But really, they have a point about the nuts and bolts problems of teacher evaluation in DC. In all the coverage of the DC contract negotiations, no one seems to have noticed or cared that this year’s DC-CAS scores didn’t come back in time to be used for teacher ratings. That means teachers couldn’t be evaluated by the standards for success they set for themselves in September. Evaluations were done anyway, regardless of the fact that the system didn’t provide teachers with the evidence they needed to prove their effectiveness.

Would you want to bet your teacher’s license on the OSSE bureaucracy’s ability to fix the teacher evaluation process all at once? Or would you ask that they demonstrate a working system of evaluation before they tie it to your livelihood? I don’t think it’s asking too much that teachers at least be able to examine the evaluation process the Chancellor wants to use before she uses it to fire them.

The Competition Effect Emerges

I like the Council of Great City Schools and it's director, Mike Casserly, but I confess I'm not really sure what he's getting at here. He's right that muddled governance and Congressional meddling have done DCPS no favors through the years. But his thesis that the lack of coordination between DC's three-part arrangement of a regular district, charters schools, and vouchers is the big problem (really two-and-a-half parts; the voucher program is small, thus far ineffective, and unlikely to grow) strikes me as off. He says:

The issue here is neither the voucher program nor charter schools themselves. It is a Congress and other political leaders who have established two alternative systems that now run parallel to the D.C. school district without boosting its capacity to get better. If this arrangement created competitive pressures to improve, it would have worked in the students' favor. But there is little to suggest that is happening here or in other cities. Instead, D.C.'s educational system is more fractured than ever, with little common ground among boosters of either strategy.

"Little to suggest"? That's hard to square with the following excerpt from an interview with George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union (from NCTQ per Flypaper):

Have your views of the role of the union changed over time? How?

I think it has a lot to do with the landscape in the system right now. We have the second highest number of charter schools-56 or 57 charters. So we are in a competitive market here in D.C.

The union has now had to take on a dual role. Previously our main concern was bread and butter issues—to make sure teachers have good benefits and working conditions. We didn’t have to be that concerned about keeping children in [D.C. schools]. But now around 21,000 of our students are in charters and around 45,000 in public schools. We lost 6,000 students last year. The charter schools have created a competition where the very survival of the union and the job security of our teachers is not dependent on the language in our contract. It is dependent on our ability to recruit and maintain students because we are funded pretty much by the number of students we have enrolled in the public system.

It puts the union in a different light. It’s not just the contract that protects jobs but also student enrollment. We are expanding our professional development because that impacts student achievement and if parents perceive we improve student achievement then we stand a better chance of getting students back who moved to charter schools. The more students we have, the more teachers we can employ, and the more security we can develop in terms of jobs.

Meanwhile, this is Michelle Rhee being interviewed by John Merrow:

JOHN MERROW: What is your relationship with these charter schools, with these KIPP schools? Are they your competition?

MICHELLE RHEE: Well, I mean, I certainly think that, in some ways, you know, they are, but we have 100,000 school-age kids in Washington, D.C. I want every single one of those kids in an excellent school.

JOHN MERROW: But you are losing students. You've 100,000 school-age kids, but you're now at around 50,000.

MICHELLE RHEE: Correct.

JOHN MERROW: You're hemorrhaging students. Is that a concern?

MICHELLE RHEE: I believe that, when we begin to, on a consistent basis, have schools that have compelling, and engaging, and rigorous programs for kids, will we begin to attract back and see our numbers start to go in the other direction? I absolutely think so.

Anything's possible but when the head of the teachers union says we need to do A, B, and C to respond to competition from charter schools and the chancellor says we need to do X, Y, and Z, to win back students we lost from charters school, perhaps some kind of competition is in fact occuring.

And while "fractured" has an inherently negative ring to it, one could argue that giving charter schools space to develop in a way that's wholly insulated from DCPS and all its problems has not been such a bad thing.