In the private sector when an enterprise gains customers it's a good thing. Apparently that is not the case in Philadelphia School District, where their chief budget officer says charter schools are costing the district $105 million because 27% of their students were previously home-schooled or educated in a private school. Putting aside the idea that a 5% increase in market share is a bad thing, let's do some math. Stay with me here.
The city's chief budget officers claims charters, because of increased market share, are costing the city an extra $105 million. Charters educate 34,4000 students in the city and receive $320 million in reimbursements (including some state funds) for a total per-pupil expenditure (excluding private money) of $9,302.33.
The city reimburses charters $8,088 for every student in general education and $17,658 for every student in special education. Assuming charters took the same percentage of special education children as traditional public schools (13.2% in Philadelphia), how much should the city be spending on these new charter students?
13.2% of children in special ed. * $17,658 per student = $2,330.86
86.8% of children in regular education * $8,088 per student = $7,020.38
$2,330.86 + $7,020.38 = $9,351.24
So charters are actually getting less than they should. More students, less money, and the city complains?
Friday, November 21, 2008
Bailout Back and Forth
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson set off a flurry of activity when he suggested last week that some of the $700 billion bailout money might go to help companies issue private student loans. Higher Ed Watch explains in this post why Paulson's plan is a bad idea.
NASFAA (the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators), though, seems to think it's a great idea, saying that "stricter loan eligibility requirements and higher interest rates and fees on non-federal loans are jeopardizing educational opportunity." A letter sent Wednesday from representatives of colleges, students, and organizations like the Project on Student debt explains why NASFAA is wrong, and Higher Ed Watch explains what colleges can do to ensure educational opportunity without any government bailouts. Inside Higher Ed has all the back and forth here.
But while everyone has been talking about private loan eligibility, one of the biggest, most genuine threats to college access--reductions in public college funding--has actually been happening. The California State University system got approval on Wednesday to turn away at least 10,000 eligible students next fall because of overcrowding and underfunding.
NASFAA (the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators), though, seems to think it's a great idea, saying that "stricter loan eligibility requirements and higher interest rates and fees on non-federal loans are jeopardizing educational opportunity." A letter sent Wednesday from representatives of colleges, students, and organizations like the Project on Student debt explains why NASFAA is wrong, and Higher Ed Watch explains what colleges can do to ensure educational opportunity without any government bailouts. Inside Higher Ed has all the back and forth here.
But while everyone has been talking about private loan eligibility, one of the biggest, most genuine threats to college access--reductions in public college funding--has actually been happening. The California State University system got approval on Wednesday to turn away at least 10,000 eligible students next fall because of overcrowding and underfunding.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Cash-strapped Colleges
With headlines predicting a steep recession, colleges and universities are already making budget cuts. Compare what some schools are saying about the financial crisis:
with what others are already doing:Morton Schapiro, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, which has long had a commitment to accepting students without considering their financial situation, said he doubted that all colleges with such full need-blind policies would be able to hold to them.
“The major dial you turn for most financial crises is that you admit more students who can pay, as a way of increasing revenues,” Mr. Schapiro said. “With the tremendous decline in wealth, I think fewer people will hold on to needs blind.”
In October, Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., increased its fund-raising campaign goal for undergraduate scholarships to $350 million from $225 million, which has "helped reinvigorate giving" specifically for this priority, says Simeon Moss, press office director at Cornell. While overall giving is down, donations directed toward undergraduate aid have soared to $63.4 million in fiscal-year 2008, from $13.7 million in fiscal-year 2007, he says.There are good and bad ways colleges and universities can manage their budgets during tough times. Tying fundraising efforts to student financial aid seems to be one of the good ones. Kudos to Cornell for taking proactive action.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Stalking the Iron Sheik
Last night I saw an advance screening of Darren Aronofsky's new movie, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging, down-on-his-luck professional wrestler and Marisa Tomei as a local stripper who may or may not have a heart of gold. It's a very good movie that you should definitely go see when it's released in theaters next month. The Wrestler is a human drama first and foremost, but it's also about the cold reality of working life, the aesthetics of late-80s hair metal (musical and otherwise), and the strong bonds of subculture brotherhood. It was shot on a shoestring $6 million budget in hand-held documentary style, and the contrast with the precise, controlled visuals of Requiem for a Dream and the criminally-underrated The Fountain is pretty amazing.
I'm not giving much of the plot away in revealing that the movie revolves, in part, around the possibility of the protagonist, one Randy "Ram" Robinson, participating in a 20th anniversary rematch of an epic 1989 pay-per-view showdown with a wrestler named "The Ayatollah." As we all know, this is a thinly-veiled reference to the classic 1984 title bout between Hulk Hogan (Randy basically looks what Hogan would have looked like if he'd spent the last 20 years on a crystal meth bender, or living the life that Mickey Rourke actually lived) and Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, a.k.a The Iron Sheik. And this, in turn, is all the excuse I need to tell my Iron Sheik story.
The Sheik, now retired, was born in Iran and had real wrestling skills, competing on the national team (Iran has some of the best wrestlers in the world) in the late 1960s. By the 1970s he had moved to the U.S., where he wrestled under names like The Great Hussein Arab (insert joke about McCain campaign rallies here). Certain contemporaneous developments in geopolitics made his status as the designated "heel" or bad guy in the pro wrestling ring more or less inevitable, and he went on to a successful career, winning the heavyweight title before losing it to Hogan while awing fans in mid-sized regional municipal auditoriums across the land with the power of his patented finishing maneuver, the "camel clutch."
Anyway, it was some time in the late 1990s, and I was in the Indianapolis airport waiting for an outbound flight. I was hungry so I went to the scary food court, grabbed something greasy and marginally edible, and went to find a table--only to see, sitting right in front of me, the Sheik himself, amiably chatting with another really large dude who was obviously a fellow wrestler. They'd been in town the previous night for a match at the since-demolished Market Square Arena (site of Elvis' last concert, fyi). I didn't want to interrupt them--the 12-year old in me still found him extremely scary--so I sat nearby to eavesdrop. Their conversation went something like this:
Another Really Large Dude: "Hey, did you hear that The Undertaker bought a place on a golf course in Myrtle Beach?"
Sheik: "Real estate is always a smart place to invest."
ARLD: "Yeah, Hacksaw Jim Duggan told me he cleared $100,000 on his place in Florida last year."
Sheik: "If Jake the Snake had at least put his money in T-bills like I told him to, he could have retired five years ago."
And so on and so forth, the most mundane conversation imaginable, except they referred to everyone, and each other, by their stage names. It was surreal. Eventually they finished their burgers and walked to airport security, at which point the security guys started jumping and down, pointing, and yelling "the Iron Sheik!" (airport security jobs were close to minimum wage gigs back then, as you'll recall). We ended up on the same plane, but the Sheik and ARLD were in first class so I didn't get a chance to hear more.
No real point to this story other than a brush with semi-greatness, and you should really go see The Wrestler.
Dear President-Elect Obama...
NCLB reauthorization may not be at the top of the next administration's to-do list, what with the economic meltdown and two wars, but President Obama will need to tackle President Bush's signature education law eventually. And he'll need all the good ideas he can get.
Today, ES releases two briefs offering ideas on how the Obama administration can reform NCLB. Title 2.0 focuses on how President Obama can revamp the federal role in human capital by focusing Title II dollars on higher impact reforms. And In Need of Improvement offers a number of steps Congress and the Obama administration can take to strengthen NCLB's choice provision.
Today, ES releases two briefs offering ideas on how the Obama administration can reform NCLB. Title 2.0 focuses on how President Obama can revamp the federal role in human capital by focusing Title II dollars on higher impact reforms. And In Need of Improvement offers a number of steps Congress and the Obama administration can take to strengthen NCLB's choice provision.
Not-So-Great Expectations
Higher education is haunted by a formula, which goes something like this: P/R=G.
The P stands for student preparation, broadly defined — the combination of innate ability and elementary-school and secondary-school preparation that students bring to college. Imagine those attributes normalized on a scale going from 0 to 1, with 1 describing the smartest, most well-educated student in the world.
The R stands for rigor, defined by individual colleges and universities — academic requirements, placement-exam cut scores, and the general difficulty of the work. R increases as standards become more rigorous, with the top values at places like the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The G stands for the odds of a student's earning a degree. An intelligent, well-prepared student attending a college with typical standards would be very likely to graduate. An ill-prepared student who enrolls somewhere with unusually tough standards would not.
The P/R=G formula dominates the way people think about college graduation rates and student success. And, not coincidentally, it puts colleges in the position of having no real responsibility or efficacy when it comes to making G higher. They can't make P higher, because raw ability is what it is, and the elementary and secondary schools are someone else's problem. And they can't make R lower, because that would betray their scholarly ideals and dumb things down for the best students. A low G is regrettable, but really, what can be done?
It's a pretty depressing conclusion. So I was glad to read a report on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, known as Cessie, which says that the formula is all wrong.
The P stands for student preparation, broadly defined — the combination of innate ability and elementary-school and secondary-school preparation that students bring to college. Imagine those attributes normalized on a scale going from 0 to 1, with 1 describing the smartest, most well-educated student in the world.
The R stands for rigor, defined by individual colleges and universities — academic requirements, placement-exam cut scores, and the general difficulty of the work. R increases as standards become more rigorous, with the top values at places like the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The G stands for the odds of a student's earning a degree. An intelligent, well-prepared student attending a college with typical standards would be very likely to graduate. An ill-prepared student who enrolls somewhere with unusually tough standards would not.
The P/R=G formula dominates the way people think about college graduation rates and student success. And, not coincidentally, it puts colleges in the position of having no real responsibility or efficacy when it comes to making G higher. They can't make P higher, because raw ability is what it is, and the elementary and secondary schools are someone else's problem. And they can't make R lower, because that would betray their scholarly ideals and dumb things down for the best students. A low G is regrettable, but really, what can be done?
It's a pretty depressing conclusion. So I was glad to read a report on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, known as Cessie, which says that the formula is all wrong.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Hot Boys (With Audio)
If you missed Education Sector's talk last week with author Peg Tyre you can listen to it below. The discussion features Tyre, best-selling author of The Trouble with Boys, New America Foundation Senior Analyst Sara Mead, and USA Today columnist Richard Whitmire. Topics ranged from gender differences in NAEP scores and ADHD diagnoses to boy-girl brain differences and why boys like the video game World of Warcraft.
Last Week, Next Up on Testing
The paper we released last Monday is the first in a series to explore what the next generation of assessments might look like. I received many many emails and comments over the past week, some via our online discussion. A quick recap from all of that:
First, there is a surprisingly strong reaction to the term “21st century skills.” Most wanted to say something about how important and significant these skills are to the students they teach or know. And in general there was agreement that there is a set of “21st century” skills that students need more now than before. But the term “21st century skills” seemed like an unpromising default to many, a way of avoiding specificity. One comment was particularly pessimistic but perhaps a fair point: “It’s a meaningless term—by the time we figure out what it means, it will be the 22nd century. Then what?” As an aside, I initially avoided the term but decided to take it on to see if I could push past the platitudes.
Second, there is a lot of interest at the local level in the new assessment tools and quite a few questions came in about which ones worked best, which ones should teachers/schools/districts use. My response is that there isn’t one tried and tested (sorry for pun) assessment that districts and schools should adopt and start using. The CWRA, which I profiled in the report, is one example—and I think a good one—of how schools are trying out new forms of assessment that measure reading, writing and math skills and problem-solving, inquiry and decision-making skills. The larger point is not that this is the right test for every school or district, but that this is the right direction for assessment.
Related to this is the problem of cost. There was a lot of concern about finding funds for assessments like the CWRA. “Even if my school wanted to try this,” wrote one teacher about the CWRA, there’s no way they would spend any extra money on it. This isn’t surprising, wrote Jack Beirwirth, who is the superintendent of Long Island’s Herricks Public Schools, the first public school district to use the CWRA. We’re all cutting back, he said, on programs, services and jobs. But the CWRA is well-worth the extra cost--teaching and measuring critical thinking and analytical reasoning are among our goals, he explains. Herricks also became one of four school districts participating independently in the 2006 PISA.
There were also a lot of comments about breaking down the distinction between instruction and assessment. Can we “embed” assessment in teaching, so that teachers can learn how their students are doing and improve their practice at the same time. So that assessment is not seen as a series of burdensome tests but also a tool for continuous learning. This isn’t easy—it requires teachers who know how to use assessment both for generating summative information and to inform their daily practice. But it can be done--see Paul Curtis’ description of New Tech High's approach.
Emerging technologies play a big role in this (I received several emails asking “what about technology?”). Our next paper on assessment--this one by Bill Tucker-- will examine how information technology can be used to improve assessment.
First, there is a surprisingly strong reaction to the term “21st century skills.” Most wanted to say something about how important and significant these skills are to the students they teach or know. And in general there was agreement that there is a set of “21st century” skills that students need more now than before. But the term “21st century skills” seemed like an unpromising default to many, a way of avoiding specificity. One comment was particularly pessimistic but perhaps a fair point: “It’s a meaningless term—by the time we figure out what it means, it will be the 22nd century. Then what?” As an aside, I initially avoided the term but decided to take it on to see if I could push past the platitudes.
Second, there is a lot of interest at the local level in the new assessment tools and quite a few questions came in about which ones worked best, which ones should teachers/schools/districts use. My response is that there isn’t one tried and tested (sorry for pun) assessment that districts and schools should adopt and start using. The CWRA, which I profiled in the report, is one example—and I think a good one—of how schools are trying out new forms of assessment that measure reading, writing and math skills and problem-solving, inquiry and decision-making skills. The larger point is not that this is the right test for every school or district, but that this is the right direction for assessment.
Related to this is the problem of cost. There was a lot of concern about finding funds for assessments like the CWRA. “Even if my school wanted to try this,” wrote one teacher about the CWRA, there’s no way they would spend any extra money on it. This isn’t surprising, wrote Jack Beirwirth, who is the superintendent of Long Island’s Herricks Public Schools, the first public school district to use the CWRA. We’re all cutting back, he said, on programs, services and jobs. But the CWRA is well-worth the extra cost--teaching and measuring critical thinking and analytical reasoning are among our goals, he explains. Herricks also became one of four school districts participating independently in the 2006 PISA.
There were also a lot of comments about breaking down the distinction between instruction and assessment. Can we “embed” assessment in teaching, so that teachers can learn how their students are doing and improve their practice at the same time. So that assessment is not seen as a series of burdensome tests but also a tool for continuous learning. This isn’t easy—it requires teachers who know how to use assessment both for generating summative information and to inform their daily practice. But it can be done--see Paul Curtis’ description of New Tech High's approach.
Emerging technologies play a big role in this (I received several emails asking “what about technology?”). Our next paper on assessment--this one by Bill Tucker-- will examine how information technology can be used to improve assessment.
A Financial Aid Shake Up
Last Friday, FastWeb, a free, online scholarship search service, released the results of a survey it conducted on student borrowing, showing that half of students applying for private loans, parent PLUS loans, and home equity loans were denied access to funds. If this number is accurate, it means that a large number of students will need to adjust their college choices--from a private to a public institution and from a 4-year to a 2-year institution--because of financial constraints.
There's good reason to be skeptical of FastWeb's high numbers--the survey was sent out to users of the website (people already looking for additional financial aid) and the response rate was low (1,202 responses out of 7 million invitations). It's likely that those who took the time to fill out the survey were also the ones having the most trouble finding financial aid.
But we do know that private student loans, because of the tightening of credit markets, are more difficult to get. While the actual percentages of students being denied private loans may not be as high as FastWeb reports, it's still higher than in previous years, when easy access to credit helped fuel a boom in private lending.
So what are policymakers to do?
Tuition levels have risen to the point at which federal lending limits are insufficient to cover tuition at pretty much all private colleges and even some public, 4-year institutions. As a result, some congressional members are talking about raising federal loan limits again to make up for some of the lost private loan dollars. But that would be a mistake.
Tuition levels were able to get as high as they are partly because of easy debt--in an era of loose borrowing requirements, students were able to access large amounts of private loans. This was a great situation for colleges--students took out large amounts of loans, the institutions got paid, and students were left to bear the debt burdens. While lip service was paid to the need to reduce tuition prices, there wasn't much real pressure - enrollments stayed high and tuition bills were paid. Now that private lending is more limited, there may be some real price pressure on colleges to reduce tuition rates, or at least limit increases.
Adding to the argument against raising federal loan limits is a recent admission by the University of Phoenix that it sets tuition partly based on federal loan limits. And it actually cut tuition in its two-year Axia college division after seeing that students were dropping out because they maxed out their loan eligibility. So maybe less borrowing and more pressure to lower prices isn't such a bad thing in higher education, and could lead to more reasonable tuition rates.
Even when the credit markets loosen up, we (hopefully) won't return to the wild west days of lending that led to our current problems. Just like subprime mortgates aren't really good for home ownership, subprime student lending isn't really good for college access or success. Tighter private loan markets might result in a more cost-consciousness, on the part of students and parents, and institutions.
There's good reason to be skeptical of FastWeb's high numbers--the survey was sent out to users of the website (people already looking for additional financial aid) and the response rate was low (1,202 responses out of 7 million invitations). It's likely that those who took the time to fill out the survey were also the ones having the most trouble finding financial aid.
But we do know that private student loans, because of the tightening of credit markets, are more difficult to get. While the actual percentages of students being denied private loans may not be as high as FastWeb reports, it's still higher than in previous years, when easy access to credit helped fuel a boom in private lending.
So what are policymakers to do?
Tuition levels have risen to the point at which federal lending limits are insufficient to cover tuition at pretty much all private colleges and even some public, 4-year institutions. As a result, some congressional members are talking about raising federal loan limits again to make up for some of the lost private loan dollars. But that would be a mistake.
Tuition levels were able to get as high as they are partly because of easy debt--in an era of loose borrowing requirements, students were able to access large amounts of private loans. This was a great situation for colleges--students took out large amounts of loans, the institutions got paid, and students were left to bear the debt burdens. While lip service was paid to the need to reduce tuition prices, there wasn't much real pressure - enrollments stayed high and tuition bills were paid. Now that private lending is more limited, there may be some real price pressure on colleges to reduce tuition rates, or at least limit increases.
Adding to the argument against raising federal loan limits is a recent admission by the University of Phoenix that it sets tuition partly based on federal loan limits. And it actually cut tuition in its two-year Axia college division after seeing that students were dropping out because they maxed out their loan eligibility. So maybe less borrowing and more pressure to lower prices isn't such a bad thing in higher education, and could lead to more reasonable tuition rates.
Even when the credit markets loosen up, we (hopefully) won't return to the wild west days of lending that led to our current problems. Just like subprime mortgates aren't really good for home ownership, subprime student lending isn't really good for college access or success. Tighter private loan markets might result in a more cost-consciousness, on the part of students and parents, and institutions.
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