Maybe Alaska Should Use the Stimulus Funds to Settle Adequacy Lawsuit?

Last week Governor Palin declared that Alaska would only apply for around half of the stimulus funding for which it is eligible; largely funding for infrastructure projects, but not for operational programs like education (here). This of course was seen much more as a political move than a policy one, and as you would expect, the education community in Alaska is not very happy about it (here). It appears that the court agrees that the Alaska education system has enough money. In a unique school finance adequacy lawsuit, the court in Alaska ruled that the state had provided sufficient funding to meet the constitutional requirement of funding an adequate system. But the court ruled in 2007 that the state has not provided sufficient state oversight and assistance for underperforming schools (Gleason%202-4-09%20Decision.PDF) (commentary here). That lack of oversight appears to have continued, and the court is starting to push the state to improve its oversight role giving it 60 days to make improvements. Maybe Governor Palin should consider accepting some of the federal funding to start to address their unconstitutional oversight system instead of trying to position herself for a 2012 presidential run.

Illegals Get All the Breaks

The DREAM Act was just reintroduced in the House and Senate…again. First time was in 2001 and last time was in 2007, when its passage fell short by just a handful of votes. And again this bill, which is essentially about a "path to citizenship" for youth who were brought to the U.S. as children, has broad bipartisan support--introduced by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Representatives Howard Berman (D-CA), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA)along with many others who have been pushing for the legislation for years. The 2007 round led to quite a debate, much about the in-state tuition portion of the act, the implications of which are captured well here at MPI. Debate will be heated this year too, again with many "no" votes driven by fear and anger that the bill gives illegals a better deal than real Americans. But as suggested here, this legislation isn’t only the right thing to do for children who are undocumented by no fault of their own but it is frankly the smarter approach for a nation that invests in these kids for their entire elementary and secondary school education (by law). Why give up on them, and this incredibly expensive investment, once they’ve successfully completed high school? To do so is inconsistent, illogical and economically irresponsible. And to think they might "go home" is just silly.

Some things you can't explain, like why we're all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that's so unconvential

The longer I work in public policy, the more I think about conventional wisdom. 

These little nuggets of thought--some essentially correct, others partially so, others not at all--are the building blocks of a shared narrative that profoundly shapes how we see the world, and thus how we act within it. While some methods of changing public policy involve directly influencing key decision-makers through persuasion, bribery, etc., most amount to engaging in a chaotic struggle to force ideas through the hourglass-center aperture that controls access to conventional wisdom and as such the public mind. It's a low-success rate / high-payoff business. The vast majority of ideas and findings die lonely, anonymous deaths. But if, by dint of force or accuracy or plain dumb luck, you can maneuver an idea past the point of increasing returns, the result is close to miraculous. The web of human communication begins to exponentially multiply its force and breadth. Suddenly the idea is everywhere, and having gotten there, it's very hard to extract. Depending on your point of view, it becomes a constant asset or a persistent obstacle. Either way, it's difficult to ignore. 

Really getting a grip on the present state of conventional wisdom can be tricky. Newspapers and general interest magazines are reliable sources, but they're still influenced by personal idiosyncrasies--a particular reporter or editor may have certain opinions and experiences that shape the tenor of coverage and commentary. Political platforms and the views of politicians are another good measure, but they're also individual-dependent. If a Senator's husband happens to be a special ed teacher, her view of IDEA will no doubt be affected.

No, to really get a piece of unadulterated education zeitgeist circa the present day, you have to find a popular and basically unserious media outlet that only bothers to think about education in any way shape or form while assembling some sort of essentially ridiculous "100 Agents of Change" list that includes among the Top Twenty world-historical figures like Judd Apatow, Tina Fey, and the guy who invented Twitter. I refer, of course, to Rolling Stone magazine. Coming in at number 98 we find U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Here's what RS has to say:

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The expectations for public education in America. The ex-CEO of Chicago's public schools has the resources — $100 billion in stimulus funds — to turn the crisis in our schools into opportunity. Duncan is committed to removing obstacles to innovation — including bad teachers — and intercepting at-risk kids before kindergarten.

FRIENDS SAY: "He just wants to find and scale the ideas that work, period," says Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America.

NEXT FIGHT: Working with the politically powerful teachers' unions to match pay to classroom performance.

That last sentence would be made a lot more accurate by changing the word "Working" to "Fighting" (or the word "with" to "against"), but otherwise this is probably a pretty good snapshot of Secretary Duncan CW as of right this minute. And he should be worried. $100 billion is a lot of money in nearly every context except public education, where it represents only about 1/6th of what we spend on K-12 schools every year. And it's really only 1/12th, because it's $100 billion over two years. And it's really much less than 1/12th, because a big chunk of that money is for universities and Pell grants. And it's really much less than that, because most of what's left isn't for education reform but basic macroeconomic stabilization, keeping teachers and professors from being laid off. 

In reality Duncan has a little more than $5 billion to influence states that have a long and sordid history of taking federal money and then actively working to subvert the goals for which the money was allocated. It's hard, slogging, bureaucratic work and it's not going to catalyze a sea change in the way our massive, decentralized education system operates. Education isn't energy or health care, issues where federal initiatives can have an immediate and transformative effect on national policy. This is a case where sky-high expectations on the front end almost guarantee some level of disappointment down the road. 

Backfilling Cuts? Not at the State Level

In California, the state took action last month to address an over $40 billion budget gap through a combination of program cuts, new taxes and a whole lot of other manipulations. The voters will decide what they think about the package in a special election on May 19th. While the actions taken were historic, they addressed the budget hole identified at the end of 2008. Oh course the economy has gotten worse since then, and recent reports have suggested that there is still an additional $8 billion hole that needs to be filled in 2009-10 that grows larger in the out years. Education’s share of that $8 billion hole based on a state constitutional funding formula is around $3.6 in more cuts.

So, it came as no surprise when the legislature’s fiscal advisors proposed several steps that the state could take to use the various streams of education stimulus funds to basically backfill their state general fund budget problems (here). Clearly the purpose of the budget stabilization funds was to do just that. But the stabilization funds are not enough to backfill the holes in California, so the legislature’s advisors suggested going after as much of the rest of the education funding as possible including Title I, special education and state mandated activities. They suggest the state should use these funds to fill the holes in their future budgets at the state level.

The California Congressional Delegation was not pleased (here). They make it very clear, that these funds are not for the state to use to solve their own problems, these funds are to be passed through as quickly as possible to keep California teachers from getting laid off now (current count of layoff notices given to teachers in the state is over 27,000). It appears that the congressional intent has been heard, and the Governor intends to get these funds out as quickly as possible (here). What about next year’s continued budget hole? I guess that is a problem for next year. The message is clear, use the funds now, and worry about the fiscal cliff later. Unfortunately, it looks like California schools are facing one fiscal cliff after another until the state starts to balance revenues and expenditures. (here is a prior discussion on fiscal cliffs)

Points for Style?

Nick Kristoff's recent column about Michelle Rhee brings up a common trope in school reform controversies: "leadership style," with Kristoff averring that "Ms. Rhee’s weakness is her bedside manner." Per Eduwonk--really? Is that all? Read Dana Goldstein's informative new TAP article about UFT President Randi Weingarten, Rhee's chief antagonist, who "speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist," who is "known as a guns-blazing New York power broker," who "came up as a New York City labor lawyer" and "ended the political career of City Councilmember Eva Moskowitz." Does she sound like the kind of person who's going to be swayed one way or another by bedside manner? Of course not--frankly, it's an insult to Weingarten more than anyone to suggest otherwise. 

Rhee has been described at various times as "abrasive," "mean-spirited," "confrontational," and many other words that can't be reprinted on a PG-13 blog. But these are just distractions--deliberate ones--from the real issues at play. Rhee clearly believes that a not-insignificant number of teachers currently employed by DCPS aren't doing a good enough job and should be replaced by better teachers. Most of those current teachers, I'm guessing, see things differently. They're well-organized and represented (at the national level, at least), and so these divergences of opinion and interest are going to get fought out in the realms of politics and public opinion. That's as it should be. But let's not fool ourselves by thinking that this is an argument about manner and style.  

The Talented Tenth

Since 1996 Texas has had a law on the books guaranteeing admission to any of the state's public higher education institutions for any student graduating in the top ten percent of his or her high school class. The law is credited with remarkable results in enhancing diversity at the state's most prestigious public institutions, and students admitted under the rule consistently outperform those who are not, yet state legislators have repeatedly tried to kill the bill. The latest attempt is expected to pass the state Senate today.

Legislators want to kill the ten percent rule mainly because of its impact on the state's flagship, the University of Texas at Austin. There, the percent of students admitted under the ten percent rule has climbed rapidly, from 43.2 in 2000 to 69.9 in 2008. This prompted Texas at Austin's president to write in an op-ed last fall, without any sense of irony, that, "if this trend continues unchecked...we will be required to admit more than 100 percent of our class under this rule." He also warned, in reminiscence of the Washington Monument Gambit, that the rule may force the school to cut its football program.

The original bill was intended as a way to expand diversity without imposing quotas, and it's worked. At the same time more students have been admitted under the rule, Austin's racial/ ethnic diversity has improved. For some context, consider that black and Hispanic graduates make up 48.9 percent of all Texas high school graduates, but only 20.5 percent of the enrollment at UT-Austin. In the last eight years, thanks mostly to the ten percent rule, black and Hispanic enrollment has begun to close that gap.

This would all be some feel-good diversity policy if the ten percent students failed to produce results. In fact, they earn higher freshmen grades and stay in school and graduate at higher rates than students accepted by all other methods, even ones with higher SAT scores. In other words, the ten percent admissions policy does a better job of screening applicants than the university's own admissions office.

What this really is, like plans in other states, is a ploy to get more students in from certain in-state locales. The ten percent rule has opened UT-Austin to students from all over the state and from high schools that never used to send students there. At the same time, coveted spots have been lost from suburban and wealthier areas. Legislators who want to kill or reduce the ten percent rule primarily come from these districts.

To end the rule would be short-sighted. There would be no stopping the institution from deciding that it needed more out-of-state students, who pay more tuition, to cover expenses. There are already headlines like, "Texas May Allow More Marylanders Into UT." Moreover, the policy creates a sense that Texas higher education institutions are for Texans. It creates buy-in with state taxpayers and legislators that the higher education institutions they finance are opening their doors to students from across the state. Hopefully the Texas Legislature continues to see the policy's merits.

Murray Vs. Murray

Earlier this month Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, gave this year's Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of it reads like an Ayn Rand objectivist diatribe against socialist democratic states using"Europe" as the code word for all that is wrong with the world. Apparently that sort of thing is popular again. While Murray, to a certain extent, is playing on the political mood, his logic is extraordinarily flawed. Here he is railing against what he calls the equality premise:

The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, this premise has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation that has reached into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase "politically correct" eventually comes back to the equality premise. Every form of affirmative action derives from it.

While Murray is clearly conflating equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes, what's most interesting, and entirely hypocritical, is that he later goes on to mourn how equality of opportunity is diminishing:

Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers--and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn't gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There's nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

In other words, the focus on equality is a bad thing, Murray says, and it's wrong because we've gotten more unequal over the last half century. Huh?

The College Admissions Lottery

It's a cruel irony that the more people buy into the notion that there's a "right" college or university out there for them (a myth that's perpetuated by the schools themselves), the harder it is for students to get in. Kids and their parents see how hard it is to get into "good" schools so they apply to more colleges, which in turn lowers the chances of acceptance for everybody.

This makes the admissions process far more random than colleges would like us to believe. And it makes the myth of a meritocracy, on which the selective admissions system is built, substantially a lie.

Selective colleges did not mean for this to happen; rather, they are victims of their own success, along with the emergence of a truly national higher education market and the rise of a rankings-driven consumer culture. But, there is no going back now, so colleges should embrace the unavoidable randomness and go from a lottery-like system to a true lottery. For more on why and how this might work, read my piece in today's InsideHigherEd.

The Rich Get Richer

Per Sam Dillon's New York Times article about how education stimulus funds are being distributed through funding formulas that advantage rich states over poor states, it's all true, there's no excuse for it (note the lack of anyone offering a policy justification), for a more detailed (but not boring!) explanation see this from Marguerite Roza and yrs. truly.