Comparable Difficulties

New York City is full of high profile, compelling education controversies. Mayoral control! Rubber room! Budget cuts! Swine flu! So it won’t be surprising if little attention is paid to the recent announcement that a plan to phase in the use of actual teacher salaries in the city’s Fair Student Funding budgeting system has been postponed. In part, it’s because the problem is obscure and confusing (what were we using before, one might wonder, fake salaries? No wonder the teachers are so cranky!). But the decision to postpone the phase-in of actual teacher salaries has important implications for one part of the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind act.

The battle is over Title I’s comparability provision. Title I is intended to target poor children with federal funds to provide additional educational resources to combat the effects of poverty. The comparability provision applies within a given school district (not across district lines) and is designed to ensure that districts spend roughly the same amount on all of their schools, then use Title I money to add extra resources for poor children. But districts can meet the comparability requirement using instructional staff-to-student ratios and budget for salaries using the district’s average teacher salary, not the actual salaries paid to specific teachers. That means in schools with lots of veteran and highly-credentialed teachers, whose salaries are higher than novices, the actual cost of paying twenty teachers may be significantly higher than the cost of paying twenty teachers in the school down the road. The schools full of veteran, expensive teachers are usually schools with the most affluent students. Researcher Marguerite Roza has proven that such disparities can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually between schools.

These intra-district spending disparities may pale in comparison to larger inter-district differences (see Roza and Kevin Carey for more), but they are compelling and quantifiable, which makes them an appealing target for federal intervention. During the 2007 Congressional NCLB reauthorization hearings, Amy Wilkins, vice president of governmental relations and communications at the Education Trust, declared in written testimony that “if Congress does nothing else in this reauthorization…it should amend the comparability provisions to ensure true funding equity at the district level.”

But the spending inequities that the comparability provision allows practices that comparability are deeply integrated into the budgeting practices of most districts. Roza also found that “despite the honest attempts of many district leaders, those in large- and mid-sized urban districts are generally not aware of the inequities revealed in dollar-to-dollar spending comparisons of non-targeted resources.” The most obvious remedy, redistributing teachers to even out the average salaries among schools, is not especially appealing.
So where does New York City fit in? Forcing transfers of teachers is not the only way to achieve comparability. Robert Gordon, now Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor at OMB, helped design the city’s Fair Student Funding plan. He has suggested that tightening the comparability provision should be paired with increasing flexibility around local and federal funding streams. That would free districts to compensate for teacher salary disparities in a variety of ways, instead of being limited to forcibly redistributing teachers. A handful of districts, including New York City, are moving in this direction with budgeting practices often referred to as “weighted student funding.” These districts determine a dollar amount of funding for students, weighted by characteristics like grade level, disability and even past performance, and then allocate that money directly to schools. The model ensures equitable per-pupil spending and allows schools to adjust spending without being limited to balancing teacher salaries among a fixed number of positions.

New York City’s decision not to transition to actual teacher salaries makes the Oakland Unified School District the only one using actual teacher salaries. This follows a transition period where schools that were benefiting from salary differences were “held harmless” with the help of a special local property tax to prevent involuntary teacher transfers or sudden shortfalls. The current economic climate makes that kind of supplemental spending seem unlikely.

The 2007 Miller discussion draft of NCLB included a proposal to require comparability compliance based on actual teacher salaries within three years. At first glance, sure, intra-district spending equity seems like a no-brainer. New York City’s decision demonstrates that the change might be harder than it looks.


(This is my last post as the Fordham Fellow at Education Sector. Many thanks to both organizations.)

Lie To Me Frame Policies With Human Nature in Mind

Kevin Drum responds to this post about school funding, futility, etc:

It sounds to me like Kevin C. is agreeing that suburban parents will protect their schools like crazed weasels, and the only way to overcome this is to lie to them early and often. And he thinks I'm the pessimistic one?

In retrospect, titling that post "Lie To Me" and talking about hiding information from parents was a bad idea--as is blogging at 4 AM after a night on the town. So let me take another shot. The point I was trying to make wasn't so much about dishonesty as framing and communication. 

If parents and taxpayers were purely rational people, then only two things would really matter when it comes to public finance: the total amount of money they pay in taxes and the way the government chooses to spend that money on services. The basis of taxation and the means by which tax dollars are collected and distributed should matter much less, if at all. (Assuming certain underlying conditions like democratic governance and lack of corruption, of course, i.e. not living in DC.) 

So let's say your household makes $100,000 a year, of which you pay $30,000 in taxes. Of that, $20,000 goes to Uncle Sam via federal income and payroll taxes, $6,000 goes to the state via income and sales taxes, and $4,000 goes to a number of local governments, including your school district, based on property taxes. (You're also paying some corporate, excise, and other taxes but to keep this simple we'll stick with the big ones). You have one child, for whom your school receives $10,000 per year, in total, from local, state, and federal sources.  

If your elected officials came along and said "Hey, were going to revamp the tax code and the school funding formula, so some of your taxes will go up and others down and the money will flow in very different ways, but in the end you still owe $30,000 in taxes and your kid's school still gets $10,000," then you shouldn't really care. A dollar's a dollar and they're all green. 

But in fact people don't think this way. They tend to be much more proprietary about local taxes and proportionately much less interested in taxes paid to and spent by governments that are far way--even though the latter collect most of the taxes. Local finance is much more tangible. Automatic payroll deduction is regular and abstract; the money disappears in small chunks before you ever see it. Ditto with sales taxes--a little nick, one transaction at a time. Property taxes, by contrast are based on a physical thing, and even if they go into escrow every month with your mortgage payment, you still get a large annual bill from the local government that spells out the total. Similarly, a lot of federal money is spent on things that happen in other places to other people. Federal spending is also complicated and thus opaque. Local spending is immediate, straightforward, and easy to identify--fire protection, police, sanitation, and most of all schools. 

So when you tell people that you're going to take a chunk of their child's locally-generated, locally-spent property tax revenue and give it to other people's children in other school districts, they get angry. That's why so-called "Robin Hood" school funding programs have been unpopular. When their kid is involved, everyone turns into Prince John. 

Yet when the state implements a school funding formula with precisely the same effect in terms of total tax burden and total school spending, but does so using sales and income taxes distributed via formula, people get much less angry. Indeed, they're generally supportive. As I should have made clearer in the original post, there's nothing revolutionary about the Indiana formula--all states do this to some degree (although Indiana more than most.) 

All ethical people recognize a general obligation to the well-being and education of all children. At the same time, parents are intensely protective of their own children's well-being. If you ask them to choose between their kid and someone else's, they'll choose theirs. That doesn't make them weasels--just humans. But that also means that when a certain class of parents wields more political power than others, there's a high likelihood of injustice. 

To guard against that, we have to be smart about how issues are framed. We need to understand the foibles of human cognition and act accordingly. If property taxes are irrationally hard to redistribute, than redistribute something else. Appeal to larger ideals of child welfare and the   economic benefits of universal education. This works--most states have adopted policies that level out local wealth-based spending differences, and the trend has improved over time. We shouldn't lie to parents. But there are better and worse ways to tell them the truth. 

Choice gone bad

Generally school choice is a good thing except when it is not. Some districts have struggled with school choice open enrollment policies running the risk of further desegregation of schools if transportation options are not provided. These two districts, however, have taken school choice to a whole new level. These two districts have created legacy policies that provide preference to out of district students whose parents are alumni. This is a bad enough idea in higher education where it has long been a practice. Bringing it to K-12 seems like a step back in the equity world. Lets hope that this is not a trend. One of the district trustees sums it up best

"What's wrong with being elitist? We're Beverly Hills"

State Budgets Vary

The Center on Reinventing Public Education last night released an interesting analysis of state budgets under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus bill). The biggest takeaway is that the current economic crisis, combined with the federal government's response, will impact states in very different ways. The chart at left shows expected state K-12 expenditures in 2009 and 2010, including stimulus funds.

You can click on the chart or follow the link to see where your individual state falls on the continuum, but the most important thing to recognize is just how different the budget picture is in California, facing deficits in excess of 10 percent, than it is in New Hampshire, Mississippi, Nebraska, Montana, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota, which each have double digit surpluses. This makes a great case that reform efforts should be focused on the places that actually have the capacity to do so, as opposed to the places focused on just digging themselves out of giant financial holes.

Lie To Me

As a rule I enjoy Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones. But his occasional forays into education generally descend into naysaying and pessimism--Kevin's one all-purpose insight on the subject is that education policy is hard and as such not worth trying to solve. For example:

But to some extent education is a zero-sum game. If we invest more money in inner-city schools, it means less for the suburbs. If we try to attract the best teachers to urban schools, it means that suburbs get weaker teachers. If we do it anyway, suburban parents will start sending their kids to private schools. And the point at which public support for No Child Left Behind evaporates is the point at which suburban schools start "failing" in large numbers. That isn't something suburban parents will tolerate, and they'll simply vote out of office anyone who tries to make them.

First, education isn't a zero-sum game. It's not like there's an immutable fixed quantity of teachers out there--we can improve training and recruitment, among many things. Moreover, there's a very consistent pattern in the research: whether you're looking at class size, teacher quality, or various other generally agreed-upon interventions, student sensitivity to education quality varies with educational need. If you're a well-off suburban student with two college-educated parents and an enriching home environment, class size doesn't matter that much. If you're a low-SES student with none of those advantages, class sizes matters a lot. This is common sense: the more the rest of your life deprives you of educational opportunities, the more what you get in school matters. A straight redistribution of resources from the current state of things (where wealthiest students get the most resources) to resource equity or even providing the neediest students with more would create a net increase in aggregate education outcomes.

Second, Kevin's sense of the essential selfishness of suburban parents (he says that "One of the great third rails of education policy debates is acknowledging the fact that suburban parents will flatly never go along with anything like [allowing children from poor districts to transfer into wealthier suburban districts]) is simplistic and overstated. 

Your typical suburban parent / voter has two competing impulses. On the one hand, most decent people recognize a general societal obligation to provide all students with a free public education. That's why every state constitution guarantees such services and nobody is in a hurry to repeal those provisions. On the other hand, when asked, parents will jealously guard the resources available to their own children.

So the key thing is to not ask.  For example, back when I worked on education funding in Indiana, we created a formula that allowed local school districts to keep all of the revenue they generated through property taxes, but then distributed state funds inversely to local property wealth, equalizing the overall funding level. The effect was to redistribute hundreds of millions of dollars of sales and income tax revenue from the wealthiest school districts to the poorest. But because that transfer occured in the context of an immensely complex formula understood by less than half a dozen people and negotiated in a back room long after the official hearings had finished and the press had gone home, nobody really got upset by it, because nobody knew exactly how much money they were losing, and we were in no hurry to tell them.  

The point being, sometimes too much information is detrimental to fair public policy. States that have tried to explicitly transfer local property wealth between districts have had a horrible time of it, because the extent of the redistribution was too obvious. Sometimes it's better to hide the true extent of people's contributions to the common good. Otherwise they'll start asking questions and from there it's a slippery slope all the way back to every family huddling alone in a cave and foraging for fruits and nuts. 

Harlem Miracles?

Elizabeth Green asked for my thoughts on a recent study of the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), especially in relation to two counter-claims on its findings: either the HCZ is, as David Brooks posited, a "Harlem Miracle," or, as argued by Aaron Pallas over at Gotham Schools, Brooks is "gullible" and "dumbstruck," and it's just too early to draw conclusions on HCZ's merits.

The (preliminary) research by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie attempted to separate any gains (or losses) due to HCZ activities (it provides free clinics to expectant mothers, after-school programs, a college-success office, community health programs, and so on) from accomplishments attributable to HCZ's Promise Academy schools alone. It's not easy to separate these things, but Fryer and Dobbie took special care to do so. They compared HCZ children not just to city or state averages, but took advantage of the oversubscription of the schools (more devoted parents wanted to enroll their kids in the schools than there were available seats) in order to compare lottery winners to lottery losers. In addition, they compared students who attended Promise Academy to siblings who did not (because the parents of such children received the same support services, the researchers were able to separate the effects of the services and the effects of the schools combined with the services).

The chart at left shows how the 2005 cohort of entering 5th graders have fared over time. Losers of the lottery actually had higher fourth and fifth grade scores on the state math exam, but Promise Academy students have erased the small gap by 6th grade, opened a lead on their peers in 7th, and are well above by 8th grade. They have not quite closed the black-white achievement gap, but they have narrowed it significantly.

These results come after controlling for gender and income. This is key, and one of the biggest things critics of the study have missed. Pallas attempts to show the report's errors by presenting Promise Academy's scores on state math and English tests for the same cohort. His graph shows only modest gains in gap narrowing, but it's because he doesn't control for anything. It might seem insignificant to only close the black-white gap and not the income gap, but the charts clearly show the former to be sizable and persistent.

Pallas also argues that the results are invalid because they come on the high-stakes but less-valid state tests. That may be, but his own bias comes out in the comments when he writes that,

As a general rule, I think it’s a bad idea to rely on a single assessment to make judgments about the efficacy of schools, or educational programs or policies. We expect public schools to contribute in so many ways to the social and intellectual development of children and youth, and no single measure can come close to capturing the full spectrum of goals that we have for our public schools.

In other words, he criticizes the HCZ for not showing their effectiveness on "good" standardized tests, but even if they had, it wouldn't be enough because test scores are bad.

Moreover, Pallas says, Promise Academy children don't score nearly as well on more rigorous exams. His alternate data comes from low-stakes exams that students might not work hard on, but this criticism would still work if we saw evidence of some sort of ceiling effect. If Promise Academy did a really good job of raising kids just to a bare minimum, just above the "proficient" line on state tests, the school's scores would jump but the kids wouldn't have learned much.

This chart shows that's not happening. The entire (blue) curve of Promise Academy students shifts to the right over time, indicating that all are making progress, not just the "bubble kids." The red line is the lottery losers, and it shows that Promise Academy children advanced at much faster rates than children from other motivated families who entered the lottery and lost. The results were not just limited to math, either. Promise Academy children made statistically significant gains in English Language Arts compared to their peers, albeit smaller ones than in math.

These findings are all well and good, but how do we disentangle the effects of schooling from the effects of everything else? Fortunately, there's a natural experiment already occurring. The lottery winners and losers, both made up of HCZ students, show that there's something additional gained by attending the Promise Academy. Also, Promise Academy parents have access to all of the programs mentioned above plus nutritious food, pre-made meals, travel vouchers, and general advice about supporting their children in school. These parents have children who are enrolled in Promise Academy and those who are not. The parents and families are the targets of these programs, which means their benefits should accrue relatively evenly among their children. They don't. The siblings of Promise Academy students do achieve slightly higher than their peers and miss fewer days of school, but these effects are nowhere near the ones observed in the Promise Academy students. There must be something about the combination of services and schooling to account for such differences.

David Brooks has a political agenda and only 750 words to write about it, so he takes these findings and runs with them. He sees the school as the one extra element and takes that to mean that the school is what made the difference. He might be right, but in the process he ignores the possibility that the combination of intense services and intense schooling made the difference.

It's fair to criticize Brooks for coming to the wrong conclusion. What isn't fair is to attack Promise Academy or the study itself.

Grocery Stores, Banks, and...Schools?

It costs money to be poor. As the feature article in yesterday's Washington Post Style section lays out, individuals living below the poverty line pay more for many things middle and upper income people consider basics, including food and banking services.

These markets--for fresh food from grocery stores, and checking and savings accounts from mainstream banks--have failed in many low-income, urban neighborhoods. Despite a high number of customers and sufficient wealth to support large, full-service grocery stores and mainstream bank branches, many of these neighborhoods haven't seen either in decades. The result is what some advocates call "food deserts"--communities with little or no access to fresh food, like fruits and vegetables. And it means that the little money low-income families may have to save at the end of the month goes to check cashing fees and outrageous annual interest rates for short-term loans.

Given the failure of these other markets in low-income, urban neighborhoods, why should we expect education markets to succeed in bringing higher quality schools to these communities?

This is the question that started our research for Food for Thought - the Education Sector report released today. And what we found was that we shouldn't expect education markets to do a better job of serving low-income families - not without dedicated attention from community leaders, policymakers, school operators and entities like charter school authorizers to actively building a quality supply of education providers and also establishing the informed demand necessary support a market focused on school quality.

As it turns out, advocates working to improve the markets for fresh foods and mainstream banking have some lessons for education and can provide strategies for establishing a marketplace that is focused on quality and meets the needs of individual communities. To find out more about these strategies, read Food for Thought here.

Dispatch from Bates College

I spent last Friday at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, talking about how technology will (and won't) change liberal arts colleges. The gist: well-regarded, selective institutions like Bates will be fine as long as they don't price themselves out of existence, but the future is bound to have a lot more technology-enabled transparency around student outcomes, and small colleges should think seriously about how IT can expand their service and educational reach beyond 1,700 disproportionately well-off undergraduates.  

The whole day was enlightening. As the graduate of two well-regarded but large and inevitably depersonalized public universities, I'm always attracted to the greener grass of the liberal arts college. They seem like civilization in perfect miniature--library, church, theater, meeting place, carefully placed beneath a canopy of trees. Whenever I visit one, I'm struck by the depth and quality of student-faculty interaction (with the caveat that I probably never end up meeting with a representative sample in either case.) 

Bates is a particularly good place to make jokes about the oft-predicted demise of "brick-and-mortar" institutions, since, architecturally speaking, it features little else. Lewiston itself is straight out of a Richard Russo novel--square, block-long former textile buildings next to a strong river crossed by steel bridges and only now shaking off the effects of industrial pollution from days gone by. Maine is a relatively poor state that's suffered through the ups and downs of fishing, shipbuilding, and logging through the years. But the decision to nurture a small collection of superior liberal arts colleges looks better all the time. 

Maureen and I decide to make a weekend out of it since neither of us had travelled in Maine before. I'm of the opinion that while some iconic tourist destinations (e.g. Times Square) should be avoided at all costs, others should be embraced. So we head to the gigantic L.L. Bean mothership in Freeport, where I purchase a parka for my two-year-old nephew, a microfiber towel for my dog (What? He gets wet when it rains!), and pair of titanium camping sporks. Think about it: titanium is so light and strong that until recently stockpiles were held in strategic reserve by the Defense Department. Now they use it to to make utensils for eating ramen noodles outdoors. This is either the whole point of modern society or a sign of its imminent demise--I'm not sure which.   

Maureen, meanwhile, laughingly accuses me of spending $18.00 just so I can have an excuse to use the words "titanium camping spork" in conversation and/or on blogs. This kind of irrefutable spousal insight is, frankly, disconcerting.  

We spend the rest of the weekend driving up and down peninsulas that will apparently be choked with vacation traffic in another few months. The wind and fog alternate with sunshine and I have a greater appreciation for why people buy all those L.L. Bean sweaters. The Irish pub in Bath serves a killer pastrami sandwich, consumed before driving past the hulking Bath Iron Works to the nearby maritime museum, where we learn just how complicated building a ship really is. All non-Mainers are from "away," we're told. I sort of like the blunt, all-encompassing nature of that; it speaks to a stubborn--and increasingly rare--American sense of place.  

I Think Maybe It's Both

Ten days ago David Brooks wrote a column praising Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone, citing dramatic achievement gains of its students, and calling it a miracle of the no-excuses model of education. Brooks took the opportunity to praise reformers who believe schools should be the focus of education policy, angering those who think our education system cannot be fixed without addressing society's larger ills. This second camp has jumped on Brooks for ignoring all the things the Harlem Children's Zone does for kids besides schools: high-quality pre-kindergarten, health screenings, counseling, arts and media programs, a fitness and nutrition center, etc.

We could spend a week debating which side Canada really falls on, or we could just read the book written on Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone. It has a passage where Canada answers this question directly:

And where did Canada stand? He agreed with [Richard] Rothstein that the public school system needed more money, not less. But on the other basic principles of the education debate, Canada found himself with [Abigail and Stephan] Thernstrom, on the right. "I'm for vouchers, I'm for charter schools--I'm for anything that blows up the status quo," he told me. Canada felt that liberals' hearts were in the right place on poverty and education, but something--maybe it was their dependence on teachers' unions, maybe it was an overly idealistic view of how public education worked--had led them astray on this issue. "It is my fundamental belief that the folk who care about public education the most, who really want to see it work, are destroying it," he said. Anyone who looked at the urban public school system not as an abstract idea but up close, every day, the way Canada had for the past twenty years, would want to blow it up too.

So, Canada wants to spend more money, institute vouchers, reduce teachers union's influence, and blow up public schools. Which side wants to endorse all of those things? In other words, Canada doesn't fit neatly into either camp. Let's keep arguing about it though.