DC Teacher Chic

Is one of the more interesting teacher blogs up right now, providing a ground-level perspective on how things are playing out in DCPS amidst all the national attention, ongoing reforms, tense contract negotiations, general tumult, and of course the day-to-day challenges of a very difficult job. Check it out. 

In other news, preliminary 2008 enrollment numbers indicate that 37 percent of all DC public school students are now enrolled in charter schools. In part, this is because some formerly private Catholic schools converted to charters. But it also reflects the ongoing loss of students from DCPS and continued growth in and parental demand for charters. Charters continue to enroll a very small percentage of all student nationally, but in some areas they are now clearly established as by far the most influential school reform model. The numbers also serve as a reminder to those who think the current DCPS reforms are going too far, too fast. The days of unlimited time horizons for turning around failing school systems are, thankfully, starting to fall behind us. 

Baseball Metaphors in the Edu-sphere

People in Boston are fretting over losing education talent to New York City, comparing it to the Red Sox losing Babe Ruth and Johnny Damon. Let's hold off on the Ruth comparisons until they're able to call their own shots, literally.

The Damon comparisons are just ridiculous and show these writers are not baseball fans. Since the good-bat-no-arm Damon signed a four-year, $52 million contract with the hated Yanks, the Sox have two fewer regular season wins but a whole lot more money to spend.

Oh, and a World Series title.

Grindhouse

The "issues" section of official McCain-Palin campaign Website has a page devoted to "John McCain's Plan for Strengthening America's Schools." The first of his Education Principles reads as follows:

John McCain Will Enact Meaningful Reform In Education. Now is the time to demand real, new reform earned through discipline, grinding work, tough choices and leadership. John McCain has dedicated his career in public service to the hard and sometimes unpopular work of achieving meaningful reform.

"Grinding"? Really? That's an awfully strange choice of words. Merriam-Webster offers several definitions, including "to weaken or destroy gradually," which I hope wasn't the intent, to "rotate the hips in an erotic manner"--no, that's probably not it--and "drudge ; especially : to study hard ." I'm guessing that's what they were shooting for, although I have to say it's not the most inspiring message for America's youth: "I will reform education so as to ensure that you are required to spending countless hours engaged in the kind of academic drudgery that forever extinguishes your love of learning!" Probably, the intent was to signal a certain old school toughness and anti-whippersnapper attitude on McCain's part, and who knows, there are a probably lot of fellow elderly voters out there who share that point of view. In any case, students always have other options if grinding doesn't work out, like goofing off a lot, finishing near the bottom of your academic class, and marrying a rich person. 

Update: A reader suggests via email that by "grinding" McCain is referring to the process of reform, not the educational experience he wants that reform to achieve. That's a fair point. I'm skeptical that, given his historical inattention to education, McCain actually intends to do such grinding work, but nonetheless that seems to be what he's saying. Lesson: don't blog before the first cup of coffee. 

Don't Blame the Weather

On Tuesday the Department of Education released its annual report on student loan default rates. Under their official calculations, the rate jumped from 4.6 to 5.2 percent. In the press release announcing the increase they attribute the rise to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Media coverage bought this line, most obviously the Chronicle of Higher Education, which titled its story ($), "Hurricanes Blamed for 13-Percent Jump in Student-Loan Default Rate," without questioning whether this assertion were true. It's not, and here's why:

To begin with the most minor but the most obvious criticism, the timing is off. In Secretary Spellings' press release she attempts to help news writers understand which students were counted in this year's default rates. She explains:

The FY 2006 default rates represent the percentage of borrowers in the Federal Family Education Loan and William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan programs who began loan repayments between Oct. 1, 2005, and Sept. 30, 2006, and who defaulted before Sept. 30, 2007.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, and Rita came on September 24, 2005, so technically the cohort Secretary Spellings is talking about had not yet entered repayment. Default rates are currently calculated as the percent of students who enter repayment in a given year who, two years later, have been more than 270 days late for a payment. We know that student loan defaults rise linearly at a pretty steep clip for the first five years, so there's no particular reason the 2006 cohort, who would have been impacted by the storms during their first year of payments, should have struggled any more than the ones from 2005, who were in their second year of being counted.

Second, the default rates in hurricane-ravaged states simply are not the problem. Here's a graph I assembled using the Department of Ed's own data. The blue line represents student loan defaults from all colleges and universities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas--the states hardest hit by the hurricanes. The red line represents the number of student loan defaults nationwide. Total defaults increased a lot faster than the ones in hurricane-ravaged states, making Spellings' claim more than dubious. Which brings us to the real issue: while the student loan default rate, as currently calculated, remains "historically low," as the Dept. of Ed put it, the number of loans continues to skyrocket. Look at the graph below and decide which line looks out of place. The blue and red lines are the same as in the first graph, but I've added lines for the total number of borrowers entering repayment for those particular states (yellow) and for the US as a whole (green).
The 2006 cohort of students broke the record of the number of students entering loan repayment, set the year before. We had nearly four million citizens who began paying student loans in 2006. That's twice as many as ten years ago.

Instead of talking about the "historically low" student loan default rate, we need to shift the conversation to a more realistic picture. A 2003 report from the Department of Education Inspector General suggested looking at the lifetime of the loans, especially given their evidence that the default rate is more like 20-30 percent at four-year colleges and 40-50 percent at for-profit institutions. Granted, the recent Higher Education Act reauthorization did take us a step in the right direction by changing default rates from two to three years time, but that's a far cry from a ten year or a lifetime analysis. The number of students on loans continues to escalate, and we need a better measurement tool to compensate. And we certainly can't blame the weather.

The Teacher Autonomy Paradox

In addition to the longer article on How the Dems Lost on Education, the American Prospect also published a shorter semi-companion piece I wrote today, on-line, called "The Teacher Autonomy Paradox." Unlike the longer article, it hasn't appeared in any format before today. The argument is that while at first it might seem like the interests of elevating teaching to the ranks of the most well-respected, well-paid professions would involve granting teachers more autonomy, in fact the opposite is true: Only by relinquishing some autonomy will teachers finally be able to attain the true professional status they deserve. Think of it like a really good DVD extra, i.e. not the normal kind, with the blooper reels and 10-minute "making of" documentary that mostly consists of the star and director sitting in folding chairs on the set congratulating one another, but rather one of those extended out-takes that's as good or better than the actual movie (This is Spinal Tap being an excellent example) and makes you think they could have made the movie twice as long and it would have been just as awesome. 

What Works

Since its creation in 2002, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), housed at the Institute of Education Sciences, has been quietly putting out reports on the efficacy of education policy programs. Every couple days I get a new evaluation in my inbox, most often telling me that program X showed "no discernible effects" or the studies of intervention Y fail to meet "WWC evidence standards**."

This is unquestionably a good thing, as we move the field of education towards a more empirical science. It makes sense to have an unbiased resource for principals and superintendents to be able to find objective analyses of programs. They have neither the time nor the inclination to sort through long research reports on individual programs. Let alone picking the best out of all that are available. Instead of relying on this process or research peddled by textbook or program developers (who have a strong vested interest in their products), we have an outside body reviewing the research and demanding high quality experimental designs. We're introducing rigor into our analysis.

Of course, we're moving at a snail's pace. Pick any of the topic areas in the WWC website, and you'll see mostly "no studies identified" or "no studies meeting evidence standards." Of 74 interventions listed on the elementary school math page, only five passed the WWC screens to even merit a review. Of those five, four were found to have no discernible effects on mathematics achievement. One and only one program, Everyday Mathematics, is able to demonstrate potentially positive effects. Teachers, principals, district administrators should all be out buying it. It's developers and publishers should be citing this distinction on their homepages and in all their sales materials. But the news that it is the only rigorously evaluated and proven mathematics curriculum is nowhere to be found.

Implementation of what works is likely to be slow. The affiliated Doing What Works site will help, but getting the right research into the hands of decision-makers will inevitably take time. But we're moving in the right direction, and I'm always happy to see a new WWC review. Keep them coming.

**Last week a popular literacy textbook published by Houghton Mifflin earned such a rating. Although nine studies had been conducted on the textbook, none met WWC standards for experimental design. Education Week story ($) here.

Update: Catherine, in her effervescent post about "new math," made me realize I forgot to point out that we're not living in a policy bubble here. Everyday Math is used in 175,000 classrooms and 2.8 million children nationwide. That includes the District of Columbia. DC Teacher Chic has the scoop on how it plays out in District classrooms.

How the Dems Lost on Education

I wrote an article for the new issue of The American Prospect titled "How the Dems Lost on Education." It's the story of how "Democrats have been stumbling on education policy for years, fracturing the progressive coalition, tainting the party brand, creating undeserved political opportunities for Republicans, and, worst of all, standing in the way of school reforms that primarily benefit low-income and minority children." You can read the whole thing here.

Because of the lead time involved in writing for a print magazine, I wrapped up the article in late July, about a week before Senator McCain decided to take to the pages of the New York Daily News and endorse the Klein / Sharpton Educational Equity Project. In one sense this was a bummer because it fit my thesis exactly and would have brought the story all the way up to the present moment, but now at least I can claim credit for prescience. 

I think it's fair to say that education policy has never been a priority for John McCain. He's taken highly public positions (and, lately, counter-positions, but that's another story) on a number of important issues: foreign policy, campaign finance reform, immigration, etc. But never education. Why, then, the sudden interest in what amounts to an intra-progressive dispute over the relative efficacy of education and social services for the poor?

Simple: it's good politics. McCain concludes his op-ed as follows:

I am proud to add my name to the growing list of those who support the Education Equality Project. But one name is still missing: Barack Obama. My opponent talks a great deal about hope and change, and education is an important test of his seriousness. The Education Equality Project is a practical plan for delivering change and restoring hope for children and parents who need a lot of both. And if Sen. Obama continues to defer to the teachers unions, instead of committing to real reform, then he should start looking for new slogans.

The aim here is not to win over people who care deeply about education to McCain's side. It's to muddy the larger waters by suggesting that, if elected, Obama will abandon the promise of his lofty rhetoric and sell out to the parochial concerns of traditional Democratic interest groups. Republicans have been using education this way for years, and not without some justification. Even without directly attacking their opponents, Republicans have also periodically seized the open ground of education reform to translate the public's justifiable dissatisfaction with public education into political gain. As the article notes, President Reagan and then-Governor Bush did this to great effect. The end goal isn't to make education a Republican issue per se but to neutralize it as a potent Democratic issue--which, given the party's ideological sympathy for egalitarian, public institutions like the schools and the nation's strong collective belief in education, it should be. 

If you want to hear more about this and comment / heckle in person, the Prospect and the New America Foundation are sponsoring an event on the topic this Friday at 11AM at 210 Cannon House Office Building, featuring Representative Artur Davis (D-Ala.) and yrs truly along with others with various interesting and alternative points of view.  You can sign up here. 

Step aside U.S. News

In the next month, the Boeing Company will release its own college rankings, based on data from internal evaluations of its 160,000 employees. Boeing plans to keep the results private - it will only release them to individual institutions, but institutions are free to make them public. And you can bet that "ranked #1 by Boeing" will show up on the front page of some lucky college's website.

If other employers follow Boeing's lead, this could have some interesting implications for the world of higher ed accountability, and you can bet institutions will pay attention to how they're ranked by big employers. Richard Vedder, from the Center on College Affordability and Productivity has some interesting thoughts Boeing's announcement here.

Fiddling

It was a little strange to be sitting in the Mayflower Hotel this morning listening to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings say that "Rome is burning!" with respect to American educational outcomes when Wall Street really does seem to be burning, but these events get scheduled far in advance and her larger point that perpetual achievement shortfalls and large socio-economic educational disparities will seriously weaken American competitiveness is sound. The topic is always a little tricky to talk about, though, given America's pre-eminent global economic standing and unique combination of size and educational attainment.  Given that, politicians tend to pick which dimension happens to be convenient for their argument. So last week Barack Obama lamented the growth in the overall number of PhDs in China and India compared to declining U.S. numbers, while this morning Secretary Spellings noted that we're "behind Denmark and Finland" in terms of the percent of younger working-age adults with post-secondary degrees, and both things are true. But it remains the case that the United States is, relative to other countries, both unusually large (third biggest in both land mass and population) and extremely well-educated, and it will be some time before India and China catch up in educational attainment in percentage terms--or, I imagine, before Scandinavian countries (or other small high achievers like Singapore) manage to bring their success to U.S.-size scale. (One of) our big economic advantages is enjoying the advantages of high absolute numbers and perentages simultaneously. The more useful perspective, which really came out in Sir Michael Barber's lunchtime  presentation (note: American audiences can't get enough of references to Winston Churchill, George III, Charles I, etc.), is to focus on the U.S. position in terms of comparable learning results via international tests like PISA, because that gets you past international differences in secondary and postsecondary credentialing systems, and indeed this is an area where there's real cause for concern.