Standards

The DC Board of Elections publishes a voter guide that includes brief statements from each of the candidates. Here's one from a Ward Eight candidate for the State Board of Education. Ward Eight is the poorest area in the city. 

The statement of a candidate that declares my information deemed necessary to protect the qualified experiences of/and the integrity for the School Board's Participation are the 10 years of experience Teaching in the Public Schools and the priorities which process the stature of qualified participation to support the focus of the school's mission and accomplishments that defend the appropriate education-with rights to an adequate education.

Another begins like this:

Hello, I am...an inspiring, intelligent, phenomenal Washington with great ambitions, infinite achievements and life long experiences. I was a student in the DC Public School system.

Let me be the first to note that this post is immediately preceeded by one in which I condemn the practice of mocking DCPS employees whose jobs are much harder and more important than mine. But there's nothing funny about this, not for DC teachers, graduates, or students currently enrolled. It's deadly serious -- we need to do better. 

Helping

A couple of weeks ago, Eduwonkette wrote a long snarky post about job openings in the NYC and DC school chancellor's offices, challenging her readers to propose absurd titles like "Senior Finder of Efficiencies," "Senior Blackberry Correspondent" etc. It included the following:

Do all superintendents of big districts get drivers? I had no idea. But just think about the splashy, tell-all book you could write! I'm out of the running as I have no license, but you can find the job posting here. Or if you're in the market for something different, you might apply for the "Critical Response Team."

As it happens, I spent some time at the DCPS offices earlier this year, following members of the Critical Response Team around to see how they work. You can read the story I wrote about it here. In short, their job--their only job--is to help people, all day long, from the crack of dawn until late at night. Most of the people they help are teachers and parents.  They also work with administrators, vendors, members of the general public--anyone who picks up the phone or writes an email, they listen to and try to assist. As a result, they deal with literally every thorny, intractable, heartbreaking problem a struggling urban school district can encounter. They work much harder than any Ivy League graduate student, think thank analyst, or blogger I could name. They deserve appreciation, not cheap mockery at the hands of people who should, but don't, know better. 

A Fox Guarding The Hen House

Paul Basken's article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education does a great job of laying out the conflicts of interest and perverse incentives in the student loan industry that can lead to unsavory business practices.

As the article describes, a former Sallie Mae employee has filed a lawsuit alleging that the company engaged in fraudulent debt collection practices resulting in ballooning debt for some students. At the heart of the issue is the increasingly interwoven relationships between guarantee agencies and loan companies. Guarantee agencies are supposed to be independent entities that oversee the collection activities of loan companies like Sallie Mae in order to protect both students and the federal government from fraud. But, at least in Sallie Mae's case, this relationship has gotten a little too close for comfort:

Most guarantee agencies are independent of the lenders they oversee. Sallie Mae, however, has a contractual arrangement with USA Funds, the nation’s largest guarantee agency, that gives Sallie Mae extensive financial and operational control over the guarantor that oversees its work. USA Funds, with only about 75 employees of its own, pays Sallie Mae about $250-million a year to provide hundreds of workers to perform most of its guarantor operations. That effectively has left Sallie Mae since 2000 in the role of overseeing its own lending activities.

Whether the lawsuit is legitimate or not, it's clear that the safeguards and oversight in the federal loan system designed to protect students and taxpayers have broken down, putting everyone at risk. And this guarantee agency-loan company entanglement is only the beginning - to understand the extent of the troubles, read the whole article here.

Governor Palin and Higher Education

Over the last seven weeks, numerous people have tried to find meaning in Governor Palin's college career. Being mindful of the likely 13-day expiration date on this particular conversation, let me summarize and offer a few thoughts. We know that over five years Palin came in contact with five different colleges, enrolled in four, and transferred four different times before earning a bachelor's degree in 1987. The order goes like this: 

1) University of Hawaii - Hilo (never enrolled)

2) Hawaii Pacific University

3) North Idaho College

4) University of Idaho

5) Matanuska-Susitna Community College, Alaska

6) University of Idaho (2nd time)

Some have suggested that there's a relationship between the relatively non-selective, non-elite nature of these institutions and Palin's much-noted struggles in television interviews. That's nonsense; lots of articulate people graduate from public universities. Sarah Vowell graduated from Montana State, and let's face it: Idaho, Montana, tomato, tomahto. 

The Los Angeles Times made a big deal about the fact that nobody at those colleges seems to remember much about Sarah Heath circa 1982-87, as if that's somehow strange or even vaguely sinister. As Sherman Dorn rightly notes, it's actually completely typical. Public universities tend to be large and impersonal and often do a poor job of engaging their students. "I don't remember her," said Roy Atwood, Palin's academic advisor at the university. I guarantee you my academic advisor doesn't remember me, because we never once met. He (she?) was just a name and a phone number that I could call if I wanted advice, and I never did. Colleges that have succeeded in boosting student retention rates talk a lot about "intrusive" advising, reaching out to students proactively, but that clearly wasn't happen back at the U of I in the mid-80s. 

The LA Times also notes:

Palin's parents -- a high school science teacher and school secretary -- could not afford the college tours so common today. Their four children were expected to, and did, work their way through college."We didn't have the luxury of spending a week driving around visiting universities to see what they're like," said Kim "Tilly" Ketchum, a high school friend. "We were looking at pictures of campuses."

Palin and Ketchum picked the University of Hawaii at Hilo from a brochure. Only after arriving in Hawaii did they realize that Hilo had rainfall approaching 100 inches a year. "The rain," Ketchum said, "was disturbing.

This is right, except for the part about "so common today." Remember those weekends when you and your parents spent all that time driving around visiting colleges, getting on each other's nerves? Most people don't, because most students don't apply to lots of colleges, and that's as true now as it was then. In this sense, Palin is just guilty of being an average American college student. (And it does rain a lot in Hilo; I've been there. The Big Island of Hawaii is the most climactically diverse place on the face of the Earth. In a few hours you can drive from the beach through a desert that gets less than 10 inches of rain per year, over a 14,000 foot lava-spewing volcano, through a rain forest, to an area that gets over 125 inches of rain per year--Hilo.) 

Governor Palin worked in food service jobs over summers to help pay college expenses, and again that's very typical; most college students work. Most don't make money from beauty pageants, but heck, that sure sounds a lot better than the night shift at Kinko's. 

Palin's transfer activity was definitely above the norm, but as Sara Goldrick-Rab notes, it's hardly unheard of, and that includes transferring down from a four-year institution to a two-year community college, which happens more than you might think. What's a little more unusual is then getting back to a four-year institution and managing to complete the whole process within five years. Only 41 percent of all students who start college at a four-year institution earn a bachelor's degree within five years, whether they transfer or not. 

This suggests an above-average level of discipline and determination on the governor's part, which certainly isn't inconsistent with her subsequent career. As to what she learned there--who knows? Nobody really understands how much students at any college learn, since as a rule colleges don't try to measure that sort of thing, and if they do they don't make the results available to the public. In any event, it all happened over 20 years ago, and like most other professional people her age, most of what Governor Palin has--or hasn't--learned in life came outside the walls of an educational institution.  

In other words, Governor Palin's college career doesn't really tell us much about her, other than reinforcing her goal-oriented-ness and supporting her claims of being in touch with the average American experience. 

Double-Take

Kevin yesterday posted a nice piece on Colorado's innovative new strategy of rating schools both by the percentages of students who meet the state's achievement standards in math and reading (required by NCLB) and by individual student achievement gains over the course of a school year (a "value-added" approach).

Combining the two school-rating strategies is the only way to accurately reflect schools' contributions to student learning while preserving the law's commendable commitment to getting low performers up to proficiency and giving schools meaningful incentives to improve the achievement of all students.

Doug Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I discuss the two-track accountability concept in a commentary we did for Education Week a couple of weeks ago.

Dreary News on Student Debt

The Project on Student Debt just released its third annual report on student debt trends, this one looking at the Class of 2007. Not surprisingly, student debt loads continue to rise—the report found that debt levels rose 6 percent from 2006 to 2007 to an average debt load of $21,900. This report, though, includes a data point that should worry students more than just the cost of college or their total student loan bill: while debt levels rose 6 percent for recent graduates, salaries only rose by 3 percent.

It hasn’t always been this way—in the past, salaries helped to mitigate the impact of increases in student debt. According to this report by NCES, while debt levels rose substantially between 1993 and 2000, the monthly payments students were making didn’t take up a significantly higher percent of their salaries, mostly because salary increases were able to keep pace with debt levels. But that’s old data, and it’s likely that students’ debt burdens have increased recently and will only get worse as the economy slows down.

According to FinAid.org’s loan repayment calculator you need a minimum salary of $30,243.60 to afford to repay the average $21,900 loan of a student graduating in 2007. Considering that the average starting salary of a liberal arts graduate in 2007 was $30,502, a lot of graduates will need to consider alternative repayment options to afford their monthly payments. Fortunately federal loans provide those options—income based repayment schedules, extended repayment terms, and graduated repayment. Unfortunately, private student loans don’t, and as students continue to rely on private loan debt, a larger share of their monthly income will be going to pay for their college education.

And alternative repayment plans aren't intended for the average student. According to this NCES report, only 11 percent of 1993 graduates repaid their loans with an alternative repayment plan. The remaining students were on the typical, 10-year schedule. Longer repayment schedules are a great option for students entering low-paying careers, but they also have their downsides—for one, students are repaying loans for up to 30 years of their working lives, they end up paying more in interest, and longer repayment schedules have the potential to make the federal loan program more expensive by extending the amount of time the federal government is subsidizing student interest rates.

As the credit crunch worries higher education administrators, parents, and students about access to loans to attend college, the larger economic woes we’re facing should worry the country about students’ abilities to meeting their growing debt obligations. College graduates are supposed to be one of the biggest economic engines in this country—excessive student loan debt hinders graduates’ abilities to fulfill that role.

A Thousand Words

The graph above shows a group of schools in Denver, Colorado, courtesy of the State Department of Education. The numbers have some interesting implications for how to think about poverty, achievement, growth, and accountability in K-12 education.

Each of the circles represents an individual school. The size of the circle is a function of enrollment--the bigger the circle, the more students enrolled. The color is tied to poverty, with blue schools having less than 20 percent of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, red schools more than 80 percent, and green, yellow and orange in between.  

The Y-axis represents a snapshot of achievement, based on the percent of students who scored as proficient or advanced on the state test. Schools closer to the top scored the highest. The X-axis represents yearly growth in achievement for the students in the school, in percentile terms, compared to other students who started the year in the same place academically. Schools farther to the right on the X-axis saw more achievement growth than most of their peers. 

What does the graph suggest? Several things. First, a clear relationship between poverty and overall achievement. All of the lowest-poverty schools (which presumably have a disproportionate number of high-income students, although this isn't always the case) have above-average achievement, and most have above the median growth. The high-poverty schools, by contrast, are closer to the bottom.  This shouldn't surprise anyone; most such education graphs look like this in some way, which leads many people to see poverty as determinative. 

But look closer. What this really suggests is the income is indeed pretty determinative--but only at the top of the income distribution. In other words, if you put a bunch of well-off students together in a school with few or no poor students, it's extremely likely that they'll do well. They have a lot of advantages outside of school, and their schools tend to be better-funded and staffed. One would be hard-pressed to find the inverse of the classic "beating the odds" school--someplace where, despite high income and low poverty, achievement is terrible. They just don't exist. 

Among high poverty schools, by contrast, there's a lot more variation. In terms of absolute performance, some are at the bottom, many are in the middle, and a few are closer to the top. And in terms of variation in growth, they're all over the map, from below the 20th percentile to above the 90th. 

In other words, it'd be tough to blunt or reverse the impact of socioeconomic status on educational achievement at the top of the income spectrum. But that's okay--why would you want to? On the other hand, there's a lot of potential to help high-poverty schools, particularly if we look at overall achievement and growth simultaneously. 

Graphs like this also point to the need to react to achievement data in a more sophisticated way. Under NCLB, all of the schools near the bottom of the distribution get treated the same, regardless of growth. That doesn't make much sense. Instead what we need to do is take the schools on the bottom left, the low-achieving / low-growth schools, and accelerate the process by which they either improve or are shut down. There's no point in waiting six years to close a school where achievement is low and students are learning less during the year than most other students who also started the year with low achievement. 

At the same time, we should be pouring resources into the high-poverty, high-growth schools, so we can support success and build on it.  Labeling is important, too: NCLB doesn't actually label schools as "failing" despite what you read in the newspaper, but it ought to for low-status/low-growth institutions. On the other hand, high-growth schools should be complimented and described in very different ways. 

Missing the Big Picture

In comments below, a reader trots out a main pillar of the Sol Stern Ayers-does-too-matter argument: "Ayers serves a prestigious role in THE association for education professionals." By which Mr. / Mrs. Anyonymous means: Bill Ayers was recently elected "Vice President of Curriculum Studies" for the American Education Research Association. 

Let's be sure to clear this up in the short time we have left before everyone suddenly stops caring: AERA is THE association for education researchers. Thus, the "R." It's large and conducts an annual meeting every year in which lots of research is presented, some of it good, some not.  I've been several times and always learned something. But while they pick a different annual "theme" (2008: "Research on Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility," 2007: "The World of Educational Quality," etc.) the real big theme every year is actually "How Can We Get Policymakers and Pratictioners to Pay More Attention to Our Research?"

The truth of the matter is that the VP of Curriculum Studies at AERA has about as much influence over your average public school classrom as the VP of Whatever for the American Political Science Association has over your average Congressional committee hearing. I'm not saying that's good or bad (probably both, depending on the circumstances), but that's the way it is. 

Waiting for Sputnik

Over at Flypaper, Stafford Palmieri asks, "What will be the next Sputnik?" Readers who aren't full-time policy types may not realize just how often this question is asked in education circles. The story, as it's (endlessly re-)told, goes like this: American schools were soft and complacent in the 1950's until the nation was shocked into attention by the launch of the 1957 Soviet satellite, whereupon President Eisenhower pushed through a series of teacher training and curricular reforms designed to breed a new generation of scientists so the United States would never be caught so unawares again. Sputnik became synonymous with "Huge important event that suddenly causes the general public to care a whole lot more about K-12 education than they did."

The answer to Stafford's question, however, is pretty obvious: Nothing. Sputnik was a once-in-a-lifetime happening, as evidenced by the fact that we're still waiting for the next one, most of a lifetime later. It was, almost literally, a deux ex machina event.  The "whither Sputnik" question tends to come at the end of a long process whereby a person or group of people chooses to tackle a particular education problem, spends a lot of time and effort arriving at a series of preferred solutions, tries mightily to enact that agenda, and fails. Having failed, they appeal to the heavens for help, which never comes.

Waiting for Sputnik is a waste of time. If the public won't embrace certain ideas, then the ideas need to be improved, or the communications effort augmented, or the political environment changed. These things are difficult and frustrating and take time--but not as much time as waiting for deliverance from God and/or a machine.