Departure Lounge

Five years after sketching the contours of Education Sector with Andy Rotherham at the Oceanaire restaurant in downtown Washington, I’m leaving the organization at the end of June to become executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington (AISGW), a vibrant consortium of 84 private and independent parochial schools, where I’ll have the opportunity to do a wide range of very interesting work. AISGW announced my appointment yesterday in a generous press release.

Launching Education Sector has been a tremendous experience. I’ve learned an immense amount. I’m more than a little proud of what our team has accomplished. And I’m looking forward to continuing my affiliation with ES once I start at AISGW in July.

I also want to mention another transition at Education Sector. Marshall (Mike) Smith has resigned from our board of directors because he has started working as a senior advisor to Secretary Duncan at the U.S. Department of Education, a perfect job for him. Education Sector wouldn’t exist without Mike. As the director of education programs at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, he was our first funder, giving me the opportunity to spend six months as Education Sector's first full-time employee and encouraging other foundations to support us. Hewlett continued to be our leading funder during Mike’s tenure at the foundation. And along the way he has been an invaluable mentor to me. There's no one working in American education policy today who has had a more distinguished career than Mike.

Scraping Rock Bottom

The higher education accreditation process is successful in a number of ways. If you attend an accredited instiution, it's unlikely that your money will be outright stolen or that you'll be given a fraudulent degree. Credentials and credits from accredited institutions are broadly recognized, portable and non-expiring. The underlying confidence and flexibility this brings goes a long way toward making the American higher education system work as well is does.

That said, accreditation is also opaque and insider-y and only guarantees a minimum level of quality. Accreditors are also very reluctant to actually pull the trigger and de-accredit institutions because doing so cuts off the flow of money from the federal financial aid system and as such consigns institutions to certain financial doom. But whose interests, exactly, are being served by that approach? Take, for example, Southeastern University, in Washington, DC, which is in the final stages of losing accreditation, because of:

deficiencies that include financial instability, dwindling enrollment and a lack of academic rigor...in the current fiscal year, the school spent $57,000 more on fundraising than it collected in gifts, according to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The six-year graduation rate for first-time students seeking bachelor's degrees is just 14 percent. And the faculty has shrunk to just 10 members for more than 30 academic programs at a school attended by 637 undergraduate and graduate students this winter.

It sounds pretty terrible and given the reluctance of accreditors to invoke a de facto death penalty, combined with the horrible institutional dysfunction that's more or a less a way of life in the nation's capital, I'm assuming it is. But failure of this magnitude doesn't just happen overnight. How did it come to this? Well....

Accreditors noted that they had given considerable latitude to Southeastern because of its mission to educate a diverse and underserved student population but that the same problems had persisted for 30 years.

I'm sorry but that makes no sense whatsover. Accreditation is not an outcomes-based process, which we know because colleges and universities generally don't track student outcomes and among those outcomes that are tracked, like graduation rates, there is literally no floor below which you can fall and lose accreditation. Instead, accreditation is mostly a process-based process. Which is arguably a defensible approach for institutions like Southeastern; one could imagine looking at a college that educates a diverse and underserved population located in a distressed urban environment and saying, "You've got a strong faculty and a solid set of academic programs, the resources are adequate and the management is sound, so we're okay with the fact that not all of your students are succeeding because on some level that's inevitable given where you are and who you serve." 

Instead, Middle States apparently let various chronic academic and management deficiencies at Southeastern persist for three decades precisely because it serves an academically and economically marginalized student population. That's just backwards. These are the students who are most vulnerable to a bad education. Plus, Southeastern is a private university that charges $12,000 per year so I imagine students are borrowing a great deal to attend. Debt and poor education in combination are absolutely toxic for low-income students; accreditors ought to act faster to intervene on their behalf, rather than use that marginalization as an excuse to let the colleges of the hook for decades on end. 

If It's Random, Say It's Random

Jay Matthews is gearing up for the college admissions process with five tips on surviving the April crunch. His first is how to handle happy, grieving friends. His recommendation:

The college admissions system, at least for our most selective schools, has become as rational as who wins bingo night at church. Nobody, including the college admissions officers, has a clear idea why certain students are admitted and others are not. Some rejected applicants are just as good as the accepted. Through no fault of their own, some of your closest friends will get into their first-choice college and some will not. You should put aside your own worries for a moment and practice two short speeches. To those who win this lottery, you should say: “That’s terrific. You worked so hard. You earned it. You are going to have a wonderful time.” To the losers you should say: “Of course you realize this is totally random. It has nothing to do with you. You will have a great time at East Pecos State. You will be running the place, and as you know, the research shows the name of your college has no effect on your success in life. All you need is great character and drive, and you have that.”

Besides being entirely rational and sound advice, Jay uses one word that hits the issue more than any other: lottery.

I have a friend who's worked for two college admissions departments. One was a traditional liberal arts college in the Northeast, and the other a highly competitive college in the greater DC area. At the former, she says it was a mostly sane process where they more or less knew the high schools of students, had time to read the student's personal statements, and truly thought about whether the student would be a good fit for this particular institution. Here in DC, at the competitive school, it was totally different. Mainly because of the sheer size of the applicant pool, they had to rely much more heavily on the all-important numbers--high school GPA and SAT score--rather than thinking holistically about the student. The admissions office, even after setting a relatively high standard, had thousands of applicants to choose from, and very little time to do so. During admissions season, each officer was given 50 applications per day. At eight hours a day and 60 minutes an hour, not counting breaks and meetings, the admissions officer had 10 minutes to make a decision about an applicant. Ten minutes (unless, as my friend points out, they're athletes or legacies).

What this becomes, more or less, is a lottery. And if it's a lottery, and everyone treats it that way except the students who invest their time, money, and emotions, maybe we should just start treating it that way. No more pretending it's about student activities, their essay, recommendations, or their devotion to the school. We've all heard about the perfect 4.0 student with excellent extracurriculars who gets rejected from their dream school. Instead, let's just institute a lottery. Schools set their baseline, kids submit their numbers, and then we run a giant lottery for the spots. Poof, like magic. Such a system operates in other fields that we're perfectly comfortable with--medical residency programs or coveted charter schools, for example--so maybe it's time to give it a shot for college applicants.

Update: I had my numbers slightly wrong, and I've updated them in the text. My friend reviewed 50 applications per day, not 500 per week, as I had written. That's where I got the 10 minutes/ applicant figure: 8 hours per day times 60 minutes per hour, divided by 50 applicants equals 9.6 minutes/ applicant.

Default

Thanks to Abdul Kargbo for pointing to me to this segment from today's Democracy Now! broadcast focusing on Reverend Jesse Jackson's new campaign to reduce student loan interest rates and restore consumer protections. The broadcast also mentions a new documentary coming out: Default: The Student Loan Documentary that looks to be chock-full of scary facts about the debt levels students are facing and the debilitating consequences of loan defaults (see the trailer below).

As the Obama administration is proposing billions of dollars in stimulus funds to help homeowners and banks, it should consider the negative consequences for our economy of having millions of college-educated students who are scraping by because of student loan debt. If student loans are truly going to be a way to access a college education and a more prosperous adult life, the federal government needs to offer more flexible repayment options, caps on the amount of loans students are required to repay, more student rights to negotiate payment terms, and bankruptcy protections. Public policy can go a long way to making the student loan system a more humane, and more effective, way to get a college degree.

And improved student loan policy is a way the federal government can directly reduce the cost of college. A student paying off the maximum $31,000 in federal loans over 25 years spends an additional $33,000 for school at a 6.8% interest rate (the current rate for unsubsidized federal loans). Reducing the interest rate for all student loans to, say, 3% would mean the student pays an additional $13,000 - still a lot, but a big reduction in the total cost of college for that student.


DEFAULT - The Student Loan Documentary from Default on Vimeo.

Taking the Environment Seriously

Chase Nordengren flags a recent Brookings paper from Tom Loveless about environmentalism-related questions on the PISA. Loveless is concerned about what he perceives to be ideological bias in questions related to "responsibility for sustainable development." Students taking the test are asked if they agree or disagree with the following statements:

• Industries should be required to prove that they safely dispose of dangerous waste materials.
• I am in favor of having laws that protect the habitats of endangered species.
• It is important to carry out regular checks on the emissions from cars as a condition of their use.
• To reduce waste, the use of plastic packaging should be kept to a minimum.
• Electricity should be produced from renewable sources as much as possible, even if this increases the cost.
• It disturbs me when energy is wasted through the unnecessary use of electrical appliances.
• I am in favor of having laws that regulate factory emissions even if this would increase the price of products.

Loveless says that these statements:

...embrace a superficial view of responsibility. None of the prompts asks students whether they are willing to take personal responsibility for sustainability. They ask whether someone else should—industries, car owners, factories, and society as a whole.

It's wrongheaded to define seriousness about environmentalism in this manner. In what conceivable way could a student "take personal responsibility" for protecting the habitats of endangered species, regulating factory emissions, or disposing of toxic waste? It's the equivalent of taunting someone who's concerned about the national debt by asking if they'd be willing to tithe an extra 10 percent of their paycheck to the federal government. If you're concerned about budget deficits, the best way to "take personal responsibility" for that is to vote for politicians who will promote policies that combine economic growth with spending restraint and sufficient levels of taxation. Just like if you're concerned about carbon emissions, the best thing you can do is elect someone who supports CAFE standards and a real cap-and-trade plan. Or if you're concerned about toxic waste, someone who will regulate toxic waste. The idea that your committment to the public policies that actually matter is "superficial" unless you've also got a compost heap in your back yard is just a way to deflect attention from the real issues at hand.

It's also worth remembering that PISA is run out of France, and Europeans have different baseline views on various issues, including environmental issues. In America, for example, it's taken as a given that everyone should be allowed to vote and get married and attend public school regardless of their race, gender or religion. It wasn't always that way, of course, and still isn't that way in many other parts of the world. And there are still a small number of Americans, your white supremacists and whatnot, who have a different opinion. But those opinions aren't respected or given credence; rather they're deliberately marginalized by our education system and the way we inculcate civic values circa 2009. Similarly, certain attitudes toward sustainable development that are considered controversial here are more or less settled issues elsewhere. Many of the fiercest public debates involve struggles to move ideas back or forth across the line that bounds topics considered to be legitimate subjects of debate, for obvious reasons. 

Ending the Four-Year Charade

We tend to think of college as four discrete years--freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior--when the truth is far from it. But our national four-year graduation rate, as of yesterday, stands at only 36 percent. The six-year rate climbs to 57, but this means a full 43 percent of students entering a four-year institution as full-time students are either still in school 6+ years after entering, or they have dropped out. It is time to end the notion that "four-year institutions" actually graduate their students in four years and time to think of alternative definitions of college success.

The federal government requires all so-called four-year institutions to report one-year retention rates and four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates for all first-time, full-time students. Six-year rates are separated for race/ ethnicity and gender. It doesn't require the data to be broken down by income or for part-time students. Nor does it count transfer students.President Obama wavers between pushing on access and pushing on completion. It's not an either/ or decision necessarily, but the Georgia example shows that completion is the harder to achieve and easier to forget. His big education speech yesterday focused on access and affordability, but his policies have wisely pushed on completions too. And he's addressed pitiful graduation rates in prior speeches.

Some states are already looking at completions data more comprehensively. The University System of Georgia (USG) has a publicly available data warehouse where users can look at one, two, three, four, five, and six-year retention rates, and graduation rates for four through fifteen years, for all public "four-year" institutions. These can be sorted by gender, race/ ethnicity, and whether the student entered as full- or part-time. They aren't even limited to the same institution: the data gives credit if a student graduates at another USG institution.

The following is not to be taken as a knock against Georgia--rather, they should be applauded for making the data available--but the numbers are not pretty. They show the four year standard is no more than a cruel joke. After four years, only three out of 20 institutions have more graduates than dropouts. Never mind the four-year graduation rate: of students that entered a Georgia "four-year institution" full-time in 1992, eight out of 18 institutions had 15-year, system-wide graduation rates under 40 percent. Only four saw more than half their students graduate. These numbers are worse for minorities, part-time students, and low-income students.

We would be wise to learn from Georgia and stop pretending the four year standard exists for most students. Stop collecting static percentages and instead collect raw numbers for if and when students graduate. Calculate a total graduation rate, calculated by dividing all entrants by all graduates regardless of time. Cap it at 15 years, or something insanely high, to give institutions and students the understanding that partial credit (those students self-identifying as "some college, no degree") does not count for much in the workforce. This would give institutions credit for the slow trickle of graduates, and it would paint a more accurate picture than snapshots taken at four, five, and six years. Instead of holding onto cherished notions of four years of college, total graduation rate would give students an honest assessment of their likelihood to finish. Then, use the raw data on student graduations to calculate time-to-degree for every college in America. Of the students that finish, how long does it take them?

We'd be removing the notion that students should graduate in four years (even though most don't already). This could lead to students taking longer than they do now, but colleges and universities have an incentive to get students out as quickly as possible. Students enrolled in low-level courses consume fewer resources, because their classes are larger and the professors are typically lower paid. A strong focus on time-to-degree would strengthen this incentive. It would also re-frame the notion of college. Instead of the dirty secret that college is supposed to take four years but actually takes six, institutions would have to begin competing on lowering this rate, and we wouldn't have this slow backslide into six being the new four. These two rates would focus on precisely what students want to know: what are my chances of finishing? and how long will it realistically take me if I do?

What’s So Scary about a Survey?

The 2008 Brown Center report, authored by Tom Loveless, takes a close look at PISA – the math, reading and science test delivered to 15-year-olds by the OECD – and raises five objections to the test’s methodology and implementation.

The 2006 PISA tests more than 400,000 students from 57 countries representing 90% of the world economy. PISA differs from its main international competitor, the TIMSS math and science test administered by the US Department of Education, in its focus on policy recommendations and emphasis on the application of knowledge to novel problems. Out of the 30 OECD countries tested in PISA, the United States ranked 21st in science and 25th in mathematics (a printing error led to unusable results in reading).

Loveless raises five objections to the PISA test. First, he notes the lack of nongovernmental participation in the test’s policy recommendation process. Second, he criticizes the test’s alignment as overly broad for assessing the effectiveness of schools in particular. Third, he argues that PISA analyses selectively choose variables used in scatter plots, distorting the nature of the relationship between variables. Fourth, he suggests that PISA’s policy recommendations are disconnected from the assessment data. Loveless’ strongest critique, however, is reserved for a series of survey questions in the test which gather students’ self-assessment of their awareness of issues and attitude towards public problems.

PISA asks test-takers questions about their “values, motivational orientations and sense of self-efficacy.” It’s not hard to understand why a student’s career motivations might be closely tied to their abilities. PISA finds, not surprisingly, that a student’s success in science is moderately related to whether the student finds science useful and scientific problems worth solving. Loveless objects, however, to questions on values: students who disagree with government protection of endangered species or regulations on factory emissions are labeled as lacking a sense of environmental responsibility by the test. “It is difficult to see how declaring support or opposition to a policy without knowing the details is a sign of responsible citizenship,” Loveless writes. “It may in fact be exactly the opposite.”

Citizenship is not necessarily ideologically neutral. PISA’s responsibility questions are part of a broader effort to understand issues of student motivation and attitudes which may shed light on differences between nations. PISA doesn’t just measure schooling in math, reading and science, it measures literacy. True literacy, at least in part, means students who can and will use their education as a form of economic mobility and social empowerment. At the very least, PISA’s questions are another attempt to understand what motivates students to do well and what social factors line up with good educational outcomes. What’s so wrong with a little more data?

By Chase Nordengren.

Student Loan Ponzi Schemes

Nevada's Attorney General recently issued a press release warning students about student loan "ponzi" schemes involving sham for-profit colleges and complicit lenders.*

Meanwhile, Higher Ed Watch describes a recent consumer victory against KeyBank for the exact lending practices that the Nevada AG warns against.

* hat tip to Student Lending Analytics, a great blog for staying up to date on student loan issues.

Sophisticated Growth

Over at Swift and Changeable, Charles Barone writes about his new Education Sector report on growth models:

All growth models have strengths relative to the status and safe harbor models laid out in the ESEA statute, and Tennessee's model is no exception. But, as the paper points out, the Tennessee model (variations of which are also being employed in Ohio and Pennsylvania and are under debate in Texas) also has some serious shortcomings.

The Tennessee model is highly technical, using multivariate, inferential statistics. And therein lies a good deal of the problem. More statistical sophistication means less transparency. And it's not clear to me that all that sophistication actually buys you much relative to other, simpler methods of measuring growth.

Some of the methodology and most of the data are proprietary, meaning they are privately owned, i.e., no public access. This all makes it very difficult for even Ph.D. and J.D.-level policy experts to get a handle on what is going on (which I found as a peer-reviewer last year), let alone teachers, parents, and the general public.

Read the full report here.

President Obama Joins the Bubble-Bursting Bandwagon

"And I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test..."

I couldn't agree more, Mr. President. But, as always, the devil is in the details. The Education Sector report Beyond the Bubble details how technology, along with greatly improved cognitive models, can help us build much better assessments that move beyond bubble-filling -- and at the same time offer rigorous and reliable evidence of student learning.

Sherman Dorn, in his friendly critique, warns of overly enthusiastic technology boosterism and fascination with bells and whistles. It's easy to see how a report subtitled Technology and the Future of Student Assessment could be characterized this way.

While the report details the potential for technology as a tool to significantly improve student assessment, the report also offers strong warnings that technology on its own will not get us past the bubble:

Just over half the states, for instance, use computers to deliver a portion of the annual state testing programs mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But, for the most part, these states' investments in technology have not led to fundamental changes in our approaches to testing. Mostly, these investments have simply made old approaches to assessment more efficient. Even the most technologically advanced states have done little except replace the conventional paper-based, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests with computerized versions of the same. Overall, the types of skills tests measure, and what the test results can tell us, have remained essentially the same....without a sound evidentiary model and conceptual underpinning, technology-enabled assessment tools are just more efficient, faster, and accessible versions of the same old tests.

We also need to remember that the use of technology, the Internet in particular, does not necessarily or immediately transform. Businesses, for example, first applied technology in administrative pursuits, improving efficiencies in areas such as purchasing, payroll, and accounting. Forecasts of technology-based paradigm shifts almost always overestimate how quickly change will occur, but more importantly, underestimate the impact of the alterations. John Seely Brown, founder of the Institute for Research on Learning and former director of the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), underscores this point. He writes, "that initial uses of new media have tended to mimic what came before—early photography imitated painting, the first movies the stage, etc."

The large infrastructure investments that states such as Virginia or Oregon have made to digitize testing are very important. They just can't be seen as the end goal.

Obama: Lift Charter School Caps

One of the most specific and meaningful proposals in President Obama's big education speech this morning was his call to reduce artificial restrictions on the supply of charter schools while simultaneously strengthening accountability for charter school success:

But right now, there are many caps on how many charter schools are allowed in some states, no matter how well they're preparing our students. That isn't good for our children, our economy, or our country. Of course, any expansion of charter schools must not result in the spread of mediocrity, but in the advancement of excellence. And that will require states adopting both a rigorous selection and review process to ensure that a charter school's autonomy is coupled with greater accountability –- as well as a strategy, like the one in Chicago, to close charter schools that are not working. Provided this greater accountability, I call on states to reform their charter rules, and lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools, wherever such caps are in place.

It's a completely sensible idea and represents what I think is the only reasonable approach to charter schools. The fact that the best charters schools have long waiting lists of parents and children who they're legally prevented from serving is inexcusible; with all the talk of needing greater parental involvement in education the last thing we should be doing is rebuffing parents who really want to be involved. At the same time, it's clear that we can't rely on market forces alone to regulate charter schools; strong, results-driven public oversight is needed to ensure that low-performing charter schools are shut down and the others have incentives to not be shut down. Andy Rotherham was all over this tradeoff back in 2007 and it's good to see it become part of the president's agenda.

The politics of this are obviously tricky but the Times oversimplifies things by flatly reporting that "Teachers’ unions oppose [charter] schools, saying they take away funding for public schools." It's true that unions have oppposed and continue to oppose expansion of charter schools in many states and cities, but they haven't acted monolothically and don't always oppose charters, there are union-run charters right in New York City, for example.  

Let the Politics Begin

Via the Student Lending Analytics blog, the Hill reported yesterday on the debate between lawmakers over President Obama's proposal to eliminate subsidies to private student loan companies and shift all student loans to the federal government's Direct Loan Program. According to the article, the proposal is facing "stiff bipartisan resistance" from lawmakers, many of whom have received generous campaign donations from private loan companies.

This isn't surprising - the President's proposal threatens to put student loan companies out of business, or at least take away the vast majority of their business, leaving them to make private student loans (which are hard to finance these days) and to service federal loans distributed through the Direct Loan Program. Student loan companies are not likely to go down without a long, hard fight, and have a strong lobbying force for the battle, honed by many years of fighting subsidy cuts and promoting increased loan volume. And they have contributed an impressive amount in campaign donations, which I'm sure opens the ears of some lawmakers to their arguments. From the article:

Nelnet and Sallie Mae, the country’s largest student lender, have traditionally been big campaign donors. Sallie Mae gave out more than $583,000 to lawmakers and political action committees in 2008, dividing the funds nearly equally between the parties. That’s the highest total of any company in the finance/credit sector, which includes credit card companies American Express, Visa and MasterCard, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. NelNet gave out $142,000 in political donations.

But if there was a time to take on the student loan lobby, now is it. With the tight credit markets, student loan companies have had to turn to the government for money to make new loans, strengthening the argument that companies like Sallie Mae and NelNet are just expensive middlemen in the student loan system.

But the question still remains as to whether the Direct Loan Program could smoothly process loans for an additional 6 million students. And it is a high stakes question - the federal loan program touches the lives of many families in the U.S., across the income spectrum, and any hiccup in loan availability will be felt throughout the country. The President, Senators and Congressmen will all hear from their constituents if there is trouble getting loan money for college.

As the article notes, Obama is proposing a lot of change, and very quickly. While lawmakers argue about the idea and student loan companies lobby for their survival, I hope someone at the Direct Loan Program is planning for some big changes to come.

Professional in All But Name, and Paycheck

Myles Brand, president of the NCAA, argues against proposals to give college athletes the option of taking a salary in lieu of free college courses they don't want in pursuit of a degree they'll never obtain, because:

Paying even a few student-athletes would turn universities into entertainment corporations and misses the point that, for most, some college is better than none.

Yes, what a sad day it would be if our great institutions of higher learning were to compromise their academic ideals in pursuit of the fame and money that come with being in the sports entertainment business. Before you know it, they'd be paying the heads of their sports divisions multi-million dollar salaries while simultaneously raising student tuition and freezing faculty salaries, or--even worse--banding together to form some sort of national college sports entertainment monopoly, led by a former university president to give it respectability, which would negotiate multi-billion dollar licensing fees with giant publicly-traded entertainment corporations. Brand concludes by saying:

No one has to go to college to play professional sports. But if you do go to college, you have to be a student.

This would be true if there were no such thing as the "National Football League," which prohibits its teams from drafting players who aren't at least three years removed from high school. In theory, a star prospect could sit at home for three years playing Xbox in between workouts, or play in the Arena Football league, but everyone understands that for all intents and purposes the NFL requires players to play three years of unpaid college ball, or two years after redshirting. A few years ago a talented young halfback from Ohio State named Maurice Clarett thrilled the nation by leading the Buckeyes to the 2003 national championship as a freshman. Operating under the mistaken impression that this is a free country, Clarett decided to abandon his faux studies and enter the NFL draft, as opposed to playing for free for two more years, abandoning his faux studies, and entering the NFL draft. The NFL went to court and blocked the move. After years in legal limbo, Clarett went into a downward spiral that culminated in a high-speed police chase in a vehicle that was later found to contain an open bottle of vodka, an AK-47, two loaded handguns, and a samurai sword. He's currently in the middle of a seven-year contract with the Toledo, Ohio Correctional Institution; you can read his blog here. But it was all worth it, because the NFL and NCAA were able to maintain their agreement to collectively exploit free labor standards. 

The Origins of Summer Vacation

President Obama gave a sharp, comprehensive speech on education today, in many ways his most detailed and ambitious statement on the subject yet. It included strong language on charter schools, early childhood education, and the way teachers are evaluated and paid. We'll have a chance to explore these topics in more detail soon, but one quick note on a piece of oft-repeated conventional wisdom that found its way into the speech. The President said:

We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy. That is why I’m calling for us not only to expand effective after-school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time – whether during the summer or through expanded-day programs for children who need it.

The thing about the origins of summer vacation is one of those factual tidbits that everyone knows, a useful shorthand piece of evidence to use in emphasizing how our education system hasn't changed with the times. But as Elena Silva noted in her Education Sector report on school time, it misses a key part of the story:

Time in school has been added and subtracted in many ways throughout our country’s history, although not always for obvious reasons. School schedules varied considerably by locality early in our country’s history with some schools open nearly year round and others open only intermittently. In large cities, long school calendars were not uncommon during the 19th century. In 1840, the school systems in Buffalo, Detroit, and Philadelphia were open between 251 and 260 days of the year. New York City schools were open nearly year round during that period, with only a three-week break in August. This break was gradually extended, mostly as a result of an emerging elite class of families who sought to escape the oppressive summer heat of the city and who advocated that children needed to “rest their minds.” By 1889, many cities had moved to observe the two-month summer holiday of July and August. Rural communities generally had the shortest calendars, designed to allow children to assist with family farm work, but they began to extend their school hours and calendars as the urban schools shortened theirs.

Turns out that our irrational school calendar is more a function of what was convenient for rich people than is commonly understood, which all things considered isn't surprising.  

Measurement of Growth (Models)

Only three short years ago, our nation's students were measured as either/ or: either they met the "proficiency" standard for academic achievement, or they didn't. Two states, Tennessee and North Carolina, began a pilot program measuring student growth from year to year. No longer were students measured against an arbitrary benchmark; instead they would be measured against themselves and their progress followed year-to-year.

In the 2006, a total of seven schools nationwide met No Child Left Behind's Adequate Yearly Progress standard due to counting student growth. As more states began measuring individual student growth as an alternative, that number grew, to 353 in 2007 and 1,571 last year.

As this trend continues, there has not been much study of what this means for accountability. Until now. Education Sector has just released a report from Charles Barone, director of federal policy for Democrats for Education Reform (and a blogger extraordinaire), looking at how the choices states make in implementing growth models impact accountability. It found some real downsides to growth models like Tennessee's:

• By setting an interim goal short of proficiency, in a state judged by the U.S. Department of Education to have among the lowest standards of any state, it may be setting the bar so low as to evoke fairly small gains in student achievement.
• While the “expected score” system estimates a student’s path to proficiency in three years, in fact, many students will not make it to proficient in three years or ever because of a statistical phenomenon known as Zeno’s paradox.
• Finally, because this model relies on multiple regression analysis, one must be a statistician to understand it. Although complexity may be a necessary trade-off for more accuracy, there is a loss of simplicity and transparency for parents and the general public.

Zeno's paradox is troublesome but interesting to think about. Picture a loaf of bread. Cut it in half. Then cut it in half again. And one more time. The loaf of bread has been cut in half three times, but there's still bread to cut. In fact, you could, with a very sharp knife, cut the bread in half an infinite amount of times. That is Zeno's paradox: you can make progress towards something indefinitely without ever erasing the original. For a student short of meeting proficiency thresholds, they could theoretically make "progress" every year without ever completing the path to proficiency.

Go here to read the entire report.

Friday the 13th – A California Educational Horror Story

The California Teachers Union (CTA) has declared next Friday to be Pink Friday in honor of all of the teachers that will be given pink slips by that day. I think they made an error in naming the event. This Friday is Friday the 13th, and the educational horror story may be scarier than the 8 horror movies made about Jason and this ominous day (ending with Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan). Perhaps a better name for their event would be Friday the 13th Part IX: The Educational Horror Is Unleashed.

Friday the 13th of March is the deadline for local school board to notify teachers whether they have a guaranteed job for the following year. A record number of pink slips are likely to be issued. CTA already estimates that over 20,000 teachers have received pink slips and that number will grow in this last week as the deadline approaches, I would guess in the range of 25,000 when the dust settles. To put this in some perspective, if my prediction is accurate more California teachers will be given layoff notices than the entire state teaching force in 17 different states. Prior to these layoffs, California had some of the largest classes in the nation (only Utah and Arizona have larger), and fewer other adults (librarians, administrators, counselors…) on campuses than virtually any other state. Now some of these teachers will end up being offered their jobs back some time in the summer when the budget dust settles. Basically, districts tend to over-cut positions in the spring to give themselves flexibility, and then hire back some of the teachers as they get more budget certainty in the summer. But unfortunately, many of the best and brightest of these 20,000 will be on to other things before they get hired back. Clearly with better school staffing policies, school districts could target these reductions at less effective teachers, but virtually all districts will make these decisions based on subject areas and then seniority. Districts will generally eliminate positions like librarians, vice principals, art and music teachers… But, then they will start cutting core teachers and increasing class size. Many have argued that class size reduction doesn’t matter much. In this case, we may want to hope that they are right because then this increase may not have a large impact. None the less, March 13 will mark a dark day for California education, and will likely take years to recover.

Doubling Down

Depending on how one counts, over $120 billion of the $787 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—a.k.a. the “stimulus package”—is targeted at the nation’s preschools, schools and colleges—a staggering sum that will double the Department of Education’s budget and increase the federal government’s leverage in education. Much of the funding is earmarked for existing programs, including $17 billion for Pell Grants for college students, $11 billion to expand special education services, and $40 billion for teachers and professors facing layoffs. But there’s also a lot of spending that’s left to the discretion of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Here's one way to spend some of the cash: Build a new generation of full-service facilities for poor kids.

A host of studies makes clear that public schools are going to be a lot more successful with disadvantaged kids if they collaborate more closely with health clinics, parenting projects, and other community resources that counter the devastating consequences of poverty on student achievement. Secretary Duncan has an intuitive sense of this reality, having spent many hours growing up at his mother’s after-school tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago. “The more schools become community centers the better,” he told senators at his confirmation hearing. And on the campaign trail and since, President Obama has touted the logic of comprehensive strategies for urban students, frequently praising the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit supplying a range of services to 7,000 students in central Harlem.

So why not marry the stimulus goal of creating new construction jobs with a comprehensive approach to raising student achievement in impoverished neighborhoods by building facilities that combine schools with a range of youth and family services under a single roof? A great model is THEARC—The Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus—a $27-million, 110,000 square-foot facility that opened in Washington, DC’s, impoverished Anacostia district in 2005.

Funded with public and private monies and run by a non-profit organization, it supplies some of Washington’s neediest students and their families with immunizations, state-of-the-art dental and heath care, psychological services, legal aid, job training, music and fine arts instruction by the Levine School of Music and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Catholic middle school for girls, a full gymnasium run by the city’s Boys and Girls Clubs, and a 356-seat community theater that’s used for everything from graduations to fashion shows.

Why not build a network of these public-private ventures nationwide that includes traditional public schools and charter schools? It would help jump-start the economy and give inner-city kids the comprehensive help they need.