Things I Learned in Madison, Wisconsin

* The UW campus and state capitol are located on an isthmus between two lakes with confusingly similar names, Mendota and Monona. My brain keeps translating both into "Mendoza." 

* In April, a single day can feature three full seasons worth of weather, going from freezing rain to collar-loosening sunshine in the space of a few hours. To adapt, many students have set their minimum temperature threshold for cargo shorts and flip-flops at roughly 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

* UW students and faculty are interested enough in higher education policy to not only show up in good numbers for my lecture but indulge a lengthy analogy between the educational practices of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries and America in the present day. And let's face it, I'm not exactly David Sedaris when it comes to wit and drawing a crowd. The WISCAPE program here does a lot of interesting work and they're not afraid to ask tough questions, even when those for whom the questions are tough includes the Madison campus and UW system itself.  

* The good local CD store (you know the one I'm talking about) is still in business! I buy a Rodriguo y Gabriela live album that I didn't know existed, which of course is the whole point of the good local CD store.

* Students today: more socially aware or more debauched than ever before? Judging by the place I had coffee, both. On the one hand, the woman sitting next to me laughingly tells her friend an alcohol poisoning-related story from last weekend that was so outrageous I can only assume it's entirely true. On the other hand, here's a verbatim sample of restroom graffiti:

WE NEED:

 (not prioritized numerically)

1) A vast, new deal-type public works program

2) Stop wasting $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan

3) Increase the tax burden on $250,000 plus incomes

4) Repeal tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs abroad

5) 5 million TRULY green jobs.

The "not prioritized numerically" qualifier makes this twice as awesome. 

* Judging from what stores on State Street are selling, here's what today's college students like to buy: Beer, coffee, used books, sandwiches, posters, ice cream, university-themed T-shirts, video games, CDs, sneakers, elaborate paraphenalia for smoking "flavored tobacco," beer.

* Get up early and you can watch the crew team practice on Lake Mendoza Mendota. This is so pleasingly collegiate that I think all colleges should subsidize crew, if only for purely aesthetic reasons. 

* I spent a free hour in the campus art museum, which is first-rate. Highlight: Peter Gourfain, "Fate of the Earth Doors," and contemporary sculpture generally, as well as Dutch painting from the 17th Century. I pretty much had the place to myself until 70 local high school students arrived to learn in small groups, one of which was conducted in French. Clearly they didn't get the memo about No Child Left Behind outlawing art and foreign language.  

* The campus contains not one but two buildings that were designed to repel violent assault by people pursuing a progressive agenda. The "Red Gym" opened in 1894 as a combination gymnasium / armory. In 1886, a Chicago rally in support of striking workers turned into a deadly confrontation with police, which became known as the Haymarket Affair (or Riot, or Massacre, depending on your point of view.) Nervous about worker uprisings, the Wisconsin legislature (located less than a mile away) decided that the thing to do was train male college students into a local militia and house them, along with their weapons, in a massive, medieval-style castellated fortress, complete with those little slots in the top of the walls, presumably so laborers advocating for an eight-hour work day could be shot down with crossbows and the like. (Later, the Gym hosted key meetings of the Wisconsin Progressives led by Robert LaFollete.) 

Similarly, the Mosse Humanities building was constructed in the brutalist style in the late 1960s, when Madison, like many campuses, was wracked by demonstrations against the Vietnam war. The windows are narrow, shielded, and 20 or so feet off the ground, above concrete embankments tilted in a sharp, hordes-of-students-repelling angle. (Fears of violence weren't entirely unjustified; on August 24, 1970, a group of anti-war activists exploded a huge car bomb in an attempt to destroy Madison's Army Mathematics Research Center, killing a research scientist (and father of three young children) named Robert Fassnacht who was working late at night in a non-AMRC part of the building.) The Mosse building is unpopular and hasn't aged well and they're thinking about tearing it down. 

* Vitamin D is naturally produced when people are exposed to sunlight. Without it, they're prone to rickets and other diseases. In 1923, a UW-Madison professor named Harry Steenbock discovered that Vitamin D could be produced in food, including milk, by irradiating it with ultraviolet light. After patenting the process with his own money, Steenbock was offered a huge payout from the private sector. Instead, he helped found the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the first such "technology transfer" entitity, which splits revenues between researchers, industry and the university. Vitamin D soon found its way into cereal bowls everywhere and rickets was cured. Steenbock's original work has been extended and refined by Madison researchers over the decades, and Vitamin D has generated literally hundreds of millions of dollars for the university. 

Can you Get Seniors to Work Harder?

Many high school students headed to college tend to check out during their senior year, especially the second half of their senior year. By that time, they have applied for colleges and will either get accepted or not based on the work that they have already done, but the work that they do in their senior year does not matter much in that calculation. Yet, many of these same students then enter college unprepared and have to spend their first term taking remedial courses in math and language arts. Beside driving up the cost of a college education for the state and the individual, those taking remedial courses are also less likely to make it through to graduation. In California over half of students entering the state university system (CSU) have to take either remedial math, remedial English or both.

So several years back, the CSU system partnered with K-12 to see if they could identify students at risk and help them avoid remediation. The Early Assessment Program created an augmentation to the 11th grade standard assessment that students could take to see if they were ready for college work. If a student passed this test then they would not have to take remediation in college. If they failed the test, they had their entire senior year to fix their issues before they get to college.

So, can you get seniors to work harder? Early results on the program are just starting to be available. The early results suggest that the program was able to reduce the probability of needing remediation by 6 percent in English and 4 percent in math (news article on study). Not off the charts, but this is enough of an improvement that the program probably paid for itself. It will be interesting to track this work to see if the reduction in remediation also helps increase college graduation rates.

Stimulating Stimulus Discussion

The Department of Education is in the process or has distributed the first $44 billion of K-12 stimulus funding. Most of this funding will flow to school districts based on established formulas. Clearly this funding provides a great opportunity for local education leaders to do the right thing with the funds and make investments that will improve educational opportunities for students. But, many in the education reform community fear that most of this funding will be used to support business as usual. This should not be surprising especially in states where the new federal funds will largely be used to backfill reductions in state and local school funding. Yet, the educational investments made in the stimulus package have been marketed as supporting both jobs and reform. Round 1 has been heavy on the jobs, and light on reform. But in Round 2, the reformers get their shot.

The Department of Education has $4.3 billion in Race to the Top and $650 million in What Works Innovation funds which provide a historic opportunity to reward states, school districts, and entrepreneurs doing good work for kids. The stakes are extremely high for these pots of fund because this might be the most important opportunity school reformers get in the foreseeable future to make a difference. (If the Administration is serious about beginning to balance the federal budget, then there is not likely to be a lot of discretionary funds for the education world. And, without additional funding, the NCLB reauthorization debate may not be able to buy desired reforms like previous reauthorizations.) So this may be the education reformers shot. As some have questioned, can $5 billion leverage a $600 billion industry to change?

For these two pots us funds to leverage the types of changes necessary, the Secretary will need to ensure that he gets the governance and accountability structures accompanying these funds right. Here are some of the questions the Secretary will face. How should the department distribute these funds? What criteria should be used? How should the department evaluate recipients and ensure that the process is fair and transparent? And, importantly, how can the administration support educational entrepreneurs without the perception of cronyism?

Hear the answers to these questions and more! Join Education Sector next week, Weds. April 29 10:30 – 12:30 for:

Ensuring Accountability for Federal Incentive and Innovation Funds.


Panelists include: Ted Mitchell, CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund; Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI; and Andrew Rotherham, Education Sector co-founder. Education Sector Senior Policy Analyst Rob Manwaring, as moderator. To be held from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the Capitol Hilton (16th and K Street, NW) in the South American Room. To attend you must RSVP to: http://www.educationsector.org/events/events_show.htm?doc_id=863218

Teach For America Growth

There's a cottage industry of journalists and commentators who criticize Teach for America (TFA) as being unscalable. Their main complaint is that, while a worthy program (and they always acknowledge TFA's success), the number of teachers entering the profession through this route is tiny compared to the total workforce. In a piece that is typical of this view, Dan Brown writes in today's Huffington Post (emphasis his):

Over 99.8 percent, a near-total, of America's teachers are not part of Teach For America. If we are serious about repairing our education downslide-- and I believe President Obama is-- we cannot look to TFA as our crucial beacon. Teach For America is a triumph of private sector innovation that should continue to be heartily supported and responsibly expanded, but its embedded exceptionalism innately limits it from modeling nationwide reform.

This type of logic has several errors. First, the TFA-phenomenon is not just exclusive to TFA. TFA has also spawned New Teacher Project (TNTP) programs currently operating in 18 cities. These must be counted in any honest assessment of TFA's impact, because they are essentially individual districts that have decided to run their own TFA-like programs.

Second, TFA has only been in existence since the early 1990s. There are teachers in the classroom who've been teaching for 40 years. So no, TFA teachers do not represent a large portion of all teachers. A proper metric would be to look at the percentage of all new teachers entering through TFA, and on that measure, it has a larger market share. Approximately 170,000 teachers left the profession altogether in 2002. They were replaced, in part, by 3,300 TFA and TNTP teachers. This is only two percent of new teachers, but ten times higher than Brown's .16 figure for all teachers.

Third, Brown ignores growth and demand. TFA and TNTP roughly tripled their numbers between 2002 and 2008, a time when the size of the teaching workforce stayed relatively constant. We don't have great data on the number of new teachers every year, but TFA and TNTP could have supplied up to five or six percent by now. And this year, applications for the programs are up 42 and 44 percent, respectively. College graduates from our nation's elite postsecondary institutions are clamoring to get into teaching through these programs, to the point that their acceptance rates are now down to 15 percent. That's a big deal, and suggests there's room for expansion.

Fourth, as evidence mounts that these programs work, there will be an even greater push for expansion. In a large sample of North Carolina teachers, researchers found that the effect of having a TFA teacher was greater than the effects due to experience. It concluded that, "programs like TFA that focus on recruiting and selecting academically talented recent college graduates and placing them in schools serving disadvantaged students can help reduce the achievement gap, even if teachers stay in teaching only a few years." Such findings matter, and they'll only propel the growth of TFA and TFA-style programs faster. We should be careful not to underestimate its growing impact.

State DREAM Acts Work

Two forthcoming journal articles show that controversial policies allowing illegal immigrant high school graduates to attend college at in-state prices work. In the nine states with policies (a tenth, Nebraska, did not have theirs in place long enough to study), foreign-born noncitizen Latinos were 1.54 times more likely to enroll in college than peers in states without such assistance. And, despite being ineligible for federal financial aid and legally prohibited from working after they graduate, they persist in college at rates similar to Latino peers with citizenship. Now, if only there was something Congress could do...

Another Piece of Evidence for Mayoral Control

There's a short video going around the Internets of Michael Bloomberg speaking about mayoral control of a city's public education system. Here's the video in full:



Most of it is general arguments for mayoral control, bolstered by Bloomberg's claims at the beginning about rising test scores in New York City. Whatever you feel about the authenticity of those, I'm most struck by this passage that starts at the :16 mark:

When I came into office we had 12,000 teachers quit on a base of 80,000 every year. Today that's down to 5,000 teachers that quit or retire. In the old days, seven years ago, we couldn't recruit enough teachers to fill those slots. Today between 50 and 60,000 teachers apply for those 5,000 slots.

If true, those teacher retention numbers are pretty striking. They say something about teacher satisfaction. And, since it costs a lot of money to recruit and train a new teacher, the district is experiencing some savings there. Not to mention the benefits to student learning of having less teacher turnover. Bloomberg doesn't cite the starting numbers of teacher applicants, but it's a good thing that the district now has a larger pool of applicants to choose from. Instead of evaluating a district leader solely on the basis of student test scores, it would be nice to know more information like this, on the quality of the work force.

Goldilocks and Pell Grants

It's hard to make everyone happy on federal financial aid. Postsecondary institutions and state legislators decry the declining value of the Pell Grant over time. They're right; it does buy less than it used to. But, federal legislators argue the Pell, the primary vehicle for student aid for low-income students, has been regularly increased and it is tuition increases that have caused its value to decline. For a vibrant discussion on whether colleges and universities desperately need new federal funding or simply absorb it, see the comments section from this article. The only group that's left out of this discussion is students.

In February I wrote about a smart new proposal in President Obama's budget that would have guaranteed Pell Grant funding and indexed them to the consumer price index (CPI), a Bureau of Labor Statistics calculation based on the change in price of common goods and services, plus one percent. I wrote that such a step would curtail political debates and ensure stability for a program that should not be subject to annual haggling. And the one percent above the CPI is an allowance that higher education suffers from Baumol's cost disease and thus faces some additional costs that other industries might not.

Yet, somehow, no one seems to be fighting for this proposal. Congress doesn't like it because it takes away their annual authorizing power (even though they've already given away much of their power by approving non-discretionary tuition tax credits that primarily benefit middle- and upper-income families). Tax hawks don't like it because it makes another program an entitlement, even if it's one we approve every single year anyway.

Most puzzling, voices representing colleges and universities, and their interests, have been mostly silent. Until today, that is, when the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article titled, "Even Under Obama's Plan, Pell Grants Trail Tuition." In says even the Obama plan, which would raise the Pell one percent more than the consumer price index would still lag behind the cost of tuition, fees, room and board. It says, instead, "A simple solution would be to index the maximum award to tuition growth." Simple, yes. Smart, no.

The chart below shows the Pell's actual value over time and what it would have been had it been indexed to inflation, compared to tuition increases by sector. Had the Pell been indexed to inflation, it would indeed be higher than it is today. But it would not have been nearly enough to cover college tuition costs, because those have outpaced inflation by enormous amounts. Unlike the article would have us believe, that's not the fault of the Pell, or federal legislators. It's the fault of colleges and universities that have been unable and unwilling to control costs.

The Oddly Selfless Use of University Endowments

Like many organizations, colleges and universities are feeling the effects of the battered economy--revenues are down or growing less quickly, forcing higher education leaders to confront the possibility of layoffs and other painful austerity measures. A relatively small number of institutions, however, have the good fortune to be sitting on gigantic piles of money in the form of endowments that swelled to record size when times were good. There's reason to think that, for some, the aggressive investment strategies that added so much lucre to the treasury are now shrinking the hoards of cash at an equally rapid rate. But they still have a lot of money left, much more than they had even 10 years ago. Yet, as Harvard freshman and ace blogger Dylan Matthews writes (via Matt Yglesias, an alum):

Harvard has tens of billions of dollars. How many tens of billions they won't say, but it's in that ballpark. However, because they're slightly less obscenely wealthy than they were before the economy went to hell, the Harvard administration has started laying people off without cause. Some students, like the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) and its supporters (like me and Perspective), think that this is uncalled for. We think that Harvard should be more forthcoming about its financial situation, so that students and other members of the community can evaluate whether we really need to lay off workers to weather the recession. And until Harvard releases the information that would allow such a debate to take place, it should stop cutting jobs and find other ways to make up the shortfall. After all, if they're going to cut the jobs of valued members of our community, we have a right to know why that's happening, and how necessary or unnecessary that is. I, for one, kind of doubt that a university that can pay for massive concerts/carnivals can't cough up the cash necessary to pay its workers.

This raises a larger, intriguing question of how university administrators and trustees balance their personal interests against the long-term welfare of the institution. From a selfish perspective, it's in the best interests of college leaders to aggressively spend the endowment in the short term--to avoid layoffs and angry students when times are bad, and to pay for new buildings and famous professors and various other things that cover the institution--and thus the leaders--in glory when times are good. 

And yet, this doesn't tend to happen. Instead, most institutions are pretty conservative when it comes to endowment spending--to the point where they had a tremendous conniption fit when Congress mulled over the idea of requiring them to adhere to the modest five percent annual payout requirement currently imposed on other non-profits. Even when the investment and donor dollars were pouring in, the typical university only spent about 3.9 percent of its endowment on actual stuff other than the cost of managing the endowment itself.

Partly, I imagine even the wealthiest universities haven't quite come to grips with the reality of owning assets larger than the annual GDP of a typical developing nation. But mostly I think this is just one symptom of a larger way of thinking that seizes the minds of college leaders everywhere--a kind of institution-centric view of things that dominates their thinking in profound and important ways.

By that I mean: the institution comes first--before the students, before the faculty, before even the people in charge. In many ways, it's an admirable way of doing business. Universities are among the most long-lasting, essentially virtuous institutions in all of human society. They've preserved crucial values and knowledge in times of great unrest, adapting and improving along the way. The particularly American philosophy of institutional self-reliance--foreign universities often get proportionately larger state subsidies but are more tightly regulated and have far less capacity to raise money on their own--has resulted in an elite higher education sector of great standing, longevity and wealth. For example, I'm writing this from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I'll be knocking around for the next couple of days and speaking on Thursday. The university is really kind of awesome, full of museums and theaters and grand buildings, packed with bright, energetic people trying to make the world a better place. 

But there's a downside to all of this: Institutional and societal interests aren't always aligned. For example, it's good for a university's reputation and bottom line to focus on enrolling lots of rich smart kids, but frankly what we need are more colleges that are good at, and want to be good at, teaching students at the median (among the population of potential college students, which isn't the whole population) or below. Institutions tend to want to grow into fully autonomous city-states when we actually need a more interconnected, cooperative higher education community. Institutions often take a dim view of employee unionization. Belief in the greatness of the institution can also become a little cultish and weird, disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the outside world. And so on. 

And I suspect the perpetual building of the institution causes college leaders to inappropriately discount the urgent needs of today in favor of a more abstract tomorrow. Which isn't to say that universities should blow out their endowments for short-term benefit, but there is a balance to be struck. Harvard's been around for over 370 years. It's future is pretty secure. It's gotten steadily richer and more famous over time, and those long-term trends will probably continue. Future leaders will likely be better positioned to deal with future crises--just as the university today is better off than it was 25 or 50 or 100 years ago.  But the people the university employs today need jobs right now. Universities might be among the few--perhaps the only--institutions that have become too adept at taking the long view. 

Salary Schedule Slopes

At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union, then-Senator Barack Obama endorsed changing teacher compensation structures from traditional single salary schedules—where teachers are paid based only on their educational credentials and years of experience—to one reflecting the performance of individual teachers in the classroom. His mention of pay for performance elicited boos from the assembled members of an organization that eventually endorsed his candidacy for president. Proposals for performance plans have caused controversy in cities like Washington, DC, but, while it's a worthwhile goal to more directly link individual performance to individual pay, traditional single salary schedules are likely to remain in place for some time. Some reflect what we know about teacher effectiveness, but many do not.

Research shows that teachers have steep learning curves—they become much more effective in their first few years on the job and then level off. And a great deal of research shows the link between teacher effectiveness and educational credentials to be minor or nonexistent. A district designing their salary structure based on these findings can more effectively attract and reward high-quality teachers without increasing the overall amount of money spent on compensation.

The slope of teacher salary schedules is likely to have a significant impact on the quality and character of the teacher work force in any given district. Higher starting salaries are more likely to attract high-quality candidates into the profession. A district with only small returns for experience is likely to face retention issues as teachers leave for more lucrative positions or grow frustrated because their pay increases aren't commensurate with their increasing effectiveness in the classroom. Each of these decisions, made at the local level, helps shape a district's teacher work force by influencing its ability to attract and retain quality teachers.

New York City is an example of a city that rewards teachers with large raises when they meet certain experience milestones (teachers earn large raises at seven, 10, 15, 20, and 22 years) and smaller or nonexistent raises in other years. Such policies are likely to distort teacher decision-making, giving teachers too little reason to stay when they are far from the "step" and too much reason to stay when they are near—a teacher in New York is unlikely to leave after 19 years, for example, because they stand to earn an 11 percent raise, more than $8,000, if they stay one additional year.

The chart below compares New York City's current schedule to one that's based on what research says about teacher effectiveness in general. (Scroll over the dollar signs embedded in the chart to read descriptions of the differences between the current system and the proposed schedules). The costs of these schedules are comparable, in that they generate the same total expenditures on teacher salaries, assuming the national averages of the percentage of teachers who have bachelor's and master's degrees and who are in various stages of experience in their careers. The schedules are in present dollars and would be adjusted annually for cost of living increases.



The proposed salary schedules begin with a relatively high starting salary in order to recruit high-quality candidates into the field. They front-load salaries so as to reward early career gains to teacher effectiveness and to provide financial rewards to the teachers most likely to leave the profession. But, unlike districts with hard plateaus, the proposed schedules reserve small bonuses from years 11-25. And, instead of large arbitrary increases before and after multiple years of stagnation, the new schedules follow a gentle, predictable curve that places no extra emphasis on any one year. Teachers who felt burned-out after year 19, for example, would feel no strong financial compulsion to stay an additional year.

Because there is little compelling evidence suggesting teachers with master's degrees outperform their bachelor degree-holding peers, the proposed schedules eliminate the more than $5,000 in bonuses New York awards for master's degrees. Instead, the proposed schedules give only a small bonus to teachers with master's degrees—calculated to cover the cost of obtaining 32 graduate-level credits at the nearby Teachers College at Columbia University.

With finite resources, these choices matter. Single salary schedules will likely continue to be used in most school districts for some time. Districts should construct these schedules in a way that will attract and retain the most effective classroom teachers. To read more about the ways districts structure their teacher salary schedules and to see more cool charts, check out the full report here.

Many thanks to Abdul Kargbo for creating the interactive charts like the one you see above.

B.U.: Boo Hoo

Sunday's New York Times had an article about the Boston University admissions and financial aid offices. We learn a lot about how these offices work, and it's mostly unflattering. See if you can find what I mean in the passage below:

For example, last year, Boston University gave $43 million in institutional aid to incoming freshmen. To end up at that figure, it offered $150 million to accepted students (27 percent took the offer). This year, despite a budget deficit for the university and freezes on hiring and new construction projects, the school is offering even more — $160 million — with hopes of spending $45 million. Ms. McGuire says the higher aid figure recognizes that more people need help, that B.U. raised tuition by $1,370 (almost 4 percent), and that it will very likely need to offer more aid to get enough students to attend. “We are assuming not as many people will take the offer in this economy,” she says. “We are building that in.”

Did you find it? The trick is to do a little mental math and know where to get accurate information. Boston University allocated $43 million in financial aid last year, and plans to raise that to $45 million this year, an increase of 4.65 percent. At the same time, they're also raising tuition $1,632 (the article's figures are wrong), from $35,418 to $37,050, which calculates out to a 4.61 percent increase. In other words, in possibly the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Boston University, with endowment assets of $1.1 billion, is generously increasing financial aid by a net of .04 percent.

Fire Rich Rodriguez

University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez was profiled over the weekend:

He arrived on the tradition-rich Michigan campus last year and glumly kicked off his tenure with a 3-9 season. It represented the most losses in a season in the program’s 129-year history and the first year without a bowl game since 1974.

All along, Rodriguez said the first season would be the toughest.

“I wish I could sit here and say I know that we’re going to do this and that this year, but I’m still a little nervous because we’re going to have a lot of youth still there,” he said. “The vision of this program is taking steps each and every year. We’re on track.”

I went to graduate school at Ohio State. As such, I'm legally required (as enumerated in binding language included in the standard OSU diploma) to hate the University of Michigan, particularly the football team. This is a golden age for Michigan haters--recent years have featured a humiliating home defeat at the hands of a Division 1-AA team, five consecutive losses to OSU, and the catastrophic nine-loss season. To put that in perspective: the last time Michigan lost as many as seven games was 1962. Ohio State has never lost more than seven football games in a year, and it last happened in the 19th century. OSU coach Earl Bruce was fired because he only won nine games for six consecutive years in the 1980s. 

The point being, winning in college football is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You assemble a dominant program that always wins, and so all the good recruits want to go there, and so the program always wins. Managed correctly, this can continue more or less forever--OSU hasn't had a losing season since the Johnson administration. But a key part of that management is psychological, creating an iron-clad expectation of permanent victory. "We don't rebuild, we reload," etc. 

And here Rich Rodriguez is talking about "taking steps each and every year"? Why not just call them baby steps and be done with it? Pre-excusing another season of mediocrity by blaming the "youth"? If you're going to coach in the Big House, you are required to promise greatness. And if you don't deliver, you get carried out on your shield. As an Ohio State fan, the only thing more painful than a resurgent Wolverine squad would be a team that's not good enough to be worth hating.