Shorting the Shorties

Normally, I find stories about the preschool admissions rat-race even more annoying (if that's possible) than Kevin finds stories about increasingly competitive college admissions.

But this WaPo article on the increasing scarcity of high-quality preschool spaces in the D.C. Metro Area is actually pretty good*. The author is focusing on a real concern: The population of kids in the D.C. Metro Area is growing, in part due to immigration, and parents, increasingly aware of the educational benefits of preschool, are more likely to send their children to preschool. But the supply of quality preschool programs isn't growing as rapidly. This means it's harder for parents to find quality preschool programs for their children, because there simply aren't enough spaces to meet demand. It's difficult for preschool programs to expand, because of a lack of both facilities, due to rapid growth and still-tight real estate markets in D.C., and qualified teachers.

Yet the underlying problem here is the economics of preschool itself. Running a high-quality preschool is not particularly lucrative. The margins are low. Many centers barely break even. Ability to raise prices in response to increased demand is limited because of limits on the amount most parents can pay: Affluent families can pay preschool tuitions in excess of what most private colleges charge, but working and middle class parents are already pretty strapped financially, so they are forced to choose lower quality care rather than paying more.

Ironically, while federal, state, and local governments provide a lot of support for K-12 and higher education, government aid for education is hardest to come by at time in children's lives--early childhood and preschool years--when parents may be least likely to make educational investments themselves. Parents of young children tend to be younger and earlier in their careers (and in the case of women, more likely to be working only part time) than parents of older children--meaning they have less ability to pay for education than when their children are older. Further, research shows that investments in early learning have lots of positive externalities--reductions in public education remediation and special ed costs, prevention of future crime and welfare dependency--that parents don't take into account when making choices about preschool.

These market conditions are classic rationales for increased government intervention and investment in helping parents provide high-quality early learning opportunities for their children. Yet only Georgia and Oklahoma now have universal pre-k statewide, and Head Start and childcare subsidies are chronically underfunded. As we're seeing in California right now, critics of increased preschool investments often argue that providing greater government funding for preschool will exacerbate the shortage of preschool spaces. But, while this may be true in the short run, particularly if policymakers guarantee publicly-supported programs are high-quality (as they should), in the long run increased government support may be the only way to ensure an adequate supply of quality preschool--both for families that need assistance and those that are able to pay the full cost.

*(One gripe: The author conflates preschool and child care in several instances, a serious, but unfortunately all too common, error in both media coverage and policy debates about early childhood education.)

Additional Thought: The difficulty many parents face finding affordable, quality preschool for their children in the D.C. area makes stuff like this even harder to swallow. (Disc: I'm on Appletree's board.)

Shameless Self-Promotion

Nope, I'm not complaining about CNN's latest sensationalist "teacher-does-stupid-things" headline. I'm just putting in an utterly shameless plug for folks to come see me perform in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream this weekend (more info and tickets here).

It's a family-friendly production, so if you have children (or just know some) and want to a.) Build their cultural literacy (if you're an E.D. Hirsch fan), or b.) compensate for drama cutbacks due to the narrowing of curriculum in schools due to NCLB (despite Andy's efforts to debunk this), this is a terrific (and relatively affordable) opportunity to do so.

Feed Me!

Among the usual policy debates in the education think tank world about teacher quality, statistical accuracies, or value-added, it's easy to forget that there are kids facing every-day struggles that are more fundamental to basic survival that anything we usually address.

When you come across a story like this, it's an important reminder that sometimes teachers help kids in ways that we don't always recognize or appreciate.

Teacher Kayla Brown realized that some of her Texas elementary school students' underperformance was due to the stark reality that they were literally too hungry to think. In a lesson-filled example of public/private partnership, Kayla teamed up with other teachers and her local church to start a Backpack Buddies program in which teachers snuck brown bags of donated food into students' backpacks when the kids were out at recess. What were the results? The kids got more food, their performance and attitudes went up, and they were saved the social embarrassment of being seen taking handouts.

It's shocking that in this land of plenty some kids don't get enough to eat. And while the government provides food stamps and a free and reduced price lunch program in some public schools, both require a level of agency (on the part of parents or students) that doesn't always make it possible for kids to stave off hunger. What do kids who rely on meals at school do on weekends? How useful are food stamps if kids' parents don't bother to sign up for them? Just as bad, sometimes the food that kids do get from parents or schools is of such low quality, that kids still end up with nutritional deficiencies or—ironically—obesity problems.

Since there's an obvious limit to the efficacy of public welfare, especially in the context of using education policy to address all facets of poverty, we should hope that programs like Backpack Buddies will inspire more partnerships between schools and the community groups that help students in these most basic but profound ways.

For all we think and talk about test scores and accountability, sometimes we need a little reminder that it's hard to measure the value added by a teacher like Kayla Brown.

Posted by Ethan Gray

Spellings Calls Testing Execs on Carpet: Just a Photo Op or Start of Real Reform?

CNN reports that U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings called in executives from major testing companies--including ETS, maker of the error-plagued SAT--for a meeting to discuss the industry's ability to meet the growing demand for standardized tests.

It's great that the Secretary is addressing this issue, which Education Sector's Thomas Toch analyzed in a recent paper suggesting that the testing industry is buckling under the pressure of meeting the new demand for tests created by NCLB. But two questions remain unanswered:

1) Is this meeting merely a chance for the Secretary to show public concern? Or will she use the opportunity to advocate for needed reforms at the federal level, including more financial support for state testing, incentives for colleges to train new psychometricians, and a national oversight board to monitor test quality?

2) Is she only worried about test accuracy? Because while high-profile SAT errors have put the focus on scoring accuracy, the biggest long-term problem with the assessment industry is arguably test quality. States and testing companies struggling to test more students in more subjects in less time seem to be falling back on inexpensive, quick-to-score multiple choice tests that don't assess the higher-order thinking skills students need to learn.

NYTimes Account of Mobile College Students Inaccurate and Overblown

The cover article for the New York Times Education Life section this weekend dealt with the allegedly fast-growing phenomenon of mobile college students. Like all well-written articles, it makes it's main point succinctly in the first two paragraphs:

ERIN MADDEN laughs a little self-consciously referring to what she calls "my college tour." Not the kind that high school students take to look at potential campuses; hers started after she went to college and discovered she didn't like her choice. She transferred to another, and another, and another, and another, ultimately ending up with five colleges on her transcript when she graduated last year.

It wasn't collegiate life as she once imagined it. But it wasn't so unconventional, either. These days, a majority of students take a similarly nomadic path to a degree; about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades.

This is a great example of education journalism that takes a complicated issue and boils it down to a message that's clear, understandable, and mostly wrong.

The biggest mistake lies with the key supporting statistic: "60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution." This is incorrect. 60 percent of graduating students earn credits from more than one institution. This includes students who study abroad for a semester, earn credits at a local college while in high school, or pick up a few classes at a community college over the summer.

In other words, 60 percent of graduates could be characterized as multi-institution students. There are signficantly fewer mobile students who actually transfer from one institution and "attend" another. It is simply wrong to say that the "majority" of students take a "nomadic" path that is any way similar to that of Erin Madden.

For example, the same report that provides the data source for the 60% figure shows that 67% of people who earn a B.A. get it from the first institution in which they enrolled. That includes people who began in 2-year colleges and transferred; if you look at students who, like Erin Madden, began their college careers at 4-year institutions, 80% get their degree where they started.

Moreover, the assertion that the phenomenon of the multi-institution student has "risen steadily over at least the last two decades" is, at best, a broad overstatement. Again, going back to the data source for the key 60% number, here's the percent of B.A. recipients who earned credits from more than one institution in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's:

1970s: 57.2%
1980s: 58.0%
1990s: 59.4%

In other words, the net impact impact of this alleged sea change in the behavior of college students is 2.2 percentage points over 20 years. Why, then, all the attention to this issue?

Partly because it seems so consistent with other pop-culture notions of what those crazy young people are doing these days, offering opportunities for the kind of easy analogies that are too often irresisitable to journalists. The article says:

[It]makes sense for the so-called millennial generation, students famously lacking in brand loyalty, used to having things their way, and can-do about changing anything they don't like. As with other commodities, students are looking for that magic combination of quality, affordability and convenience. They shun CD's to create their own iPod playlists; is it any surprise they shape their own course catalogs? "Everybody can customize it the way they want it," says Ms. Madden, now 24 and working at a Cape Cod media company that runs radio stations and a Web site. "In the world we live in, with the Internet making things so accessible, we try to find what we like."

College attendance patterns and iPods? Really, it's all the same thing, man.

More importantly, higher education institutions have a vested interest in promoting the idea that most students jump willy-nilly from campus to campus, even though that's in no way true. Why? Because it provides a powerful-counterargument against those who want to hold institutions more accountable for whether college students graduate and how much they learn.

If college students start at one institution and either succeed or fail there--and make no mistake, this is still the typical pattern for most people who attend 4-year institutions--then it's reasonable to say that the institution bears some responsibility for that success or failure.

If, however, most students attend multiple institutions, than institutional responsibility is safely diffused. That's why representatives of the higher education establishment love citing the 60% number, it's their way of saying "Students these days, they come, they go--what can we do?"

50% X 33% X 35% = Total Systemic Failure

The Consortium on Chicago School Research issued a comprehensive and important report last week studying how Chicago Public School students succeed or fail in finishing high school, going to college, and earning a bachelor's degree.

On a basic level, the results could not be worse. Literally. Only about half of all students who enter CPS graduate from high school on time. Of those, only about one-third immediately enroll at four-year colleges and universities. Of those, only 35% earn a B.A. within six years. Multiply those three numbers together and you get the B.A. attainment rate for Chicago high school freshmen cited by the Chicago press here and here: 6%.

For black students, particularly men, the results were even worse: only 22% of black male college entrants graduated in six years, which combined with low high school graduation and college entrance drives their overall B.A. attainment rate measured from the beginning of high school forward to near 3%.

Think of it this way: if you sat down and deliberately created an education system designed to prevent disadvantaged students from getting through college, the difference between that system and the one we've got would pretty much be within the statistical margin of error.

There's also some great data showing how some colleges and universities are much more successful than others in helping CPS graduates earn degrees, even after controlling for students' high school academic characteristics. For example, while over 70% of CPS students with a 3.5 high school GPA graduated from Loyola University Chicago, less than 50% of similar students graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. And less than 20% of 3.5 GPA students graduated from Northeastern Illinois University.

When asked to account for low graduation rates, colleges and universities tend to put the onus on financial aid, high school preparation, student motivation--pretty much everything except themselves. These data show that what institutions do matters too, and some are far better destinations for Chicago students than others.

To their credit, CPS leaders avoided the defensiveness and denial that often accompanies critical education reports and vowed to use the results as guide for improvement. Here's one suggestion: give every CPS guidance counselor a copy of the chart with the institution-by-institution graduation rates broken down by GPA (it's on page 81 of the report) and suggest that they steer their brightest students away from places like Urbana Champaign and Northern Illinois.

It's All So Clear Now

Normally I leave charter school issues to my colleagues Eduwonk and Sara Mead. But this morning's front page article in the WaPo struck me as too obvious to pass up.

It details how DC Public Schools is considering a novel arrangement with KIPP, one of the city's most successful charter schools. KIPP wants to start a new middle school, but is having a hard time finding space. Meanwhile, one the regular DCPS elementary schools is losing enrollment and thus has too much space, to the point that it's in danger of being closed. Thus, the arrrangement: co-locate in the same building, don't overlap grades, and coordinate curricula so students from the elementary school can stay in the building and go to the KIPP middle school if that's what they want to do.

Sounds great, right? Not to DC school board vice president Carolyn Graham, who'se worried that if the district helps expand a popular, high-performing charter school to which lots of parents want to send their children, lots of parents will send their children. She said:

"We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability," she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. "We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students would benefit."

Hmmm. You know, that's kind of wordy, let's tighten that up a little:

"We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability," she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. "We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students I would benefit."

There we go. Much more clear.

It's true that more students in charter schools means less students in DCPS. But if you're going to complain about that, you've got to at least make an attempt to say why that would be bad, particularly wih the test scores, parental demand, and the best judgment of the DCPS superintendant providing evidence to the country. The fact that Graham offers nothing of the kind is enormously telling.

Ignorance is Strength, We Have Always Been at War with Eastasia, Holding Schools Accountable for Minority Achievement Hurts Minority Students

Yesterday the AP continued it's week-long inadvertent expose of muddled thinking about NCLB with an article titled "Law raises fear of more school segregation."

NCLB unexpectedly hurting the very students it's designed to help! Man, that would be quite a story if it were, what's the word...oh, right: true. But the story offers little evidence, starting thus:

No one...disagrees with [the] contention that Connecticut hasn't always given its poor and minority students an education as good as it's given its rich and white students. No one thinks the gap between the two systems is a good thing. And no one wants the disparities to continue. In the past, the main hurdle has been money...But now, [Connecticut state education commissioner and noted anti-NCLB litigant Betty] Sternberg says, there's another hurdle: the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"We've had a reluctance on the part of school districts to accept youngsters who come in with deficiencies because they're concerned that if they get enough of them ... they'll become labeled as failing schools," she says.

It's a problem that many experts believe is confounding an effort to eliminate the racial achievement gap on standardized annual tests. That's because the law requires schools to demonstrate that students in specific racial, social and economic groups are making annual progress. A school fails if even one group fails. The more groups in a school, the greater chance for failure.

How do school districts not admit students who live within the district's legal geographic boundaries? Which districts is Sternberg talking about? What's she doing to prevent that from happening? Or is this all just complete supposition?

Also, "many experts" believe this? Such as? Two are cited. First Jonathan Kozol says:

"The really rich and ritzy suburbs that don't participate in any form of integration...[are] going to be rewarded for their selfishness. They're going to be rewarded for their racial insularity because they're not admitting any kids who are at any academic risk. They're not admitting any kids who had been previously studying, for perhaps the first six years of school, in a rotten, overcrowded school."

Again, how exactly do the ritzy suburbs pull this off? Does anyone have an example, even one, of an actual low-performing minority student being illegally turned away from an actual rich white school district? If they did, don't you think that would have made it's way into the story?Moreover, assuming Kozol is right, are we to believe that NCLB has changed that attitude, that the selfish suburbs were previously welcoming these students with open arms?

Expert #2 is:

Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education, [who] works with Chicago public schools and has heard some parents complain about the treatment of inner city children when they move to suburban schools. "I have heard that there is a resentment toward those kids because they are dragging those schools down in the lists," Radner said.

"I have heard..." Case closed! Remember the end of Ocean's Eleven, where George Clooney purposefully makes up the weakest conceivable story about his knowledge of the casino robbery to fool Andy Garcia? The story begins "I know a guy...."

The rest of the article focuses on some inner-city schools which, contra Sternberg, are succeeding despite having lots of low-income and minority students. To wit:

Wedged in a poor, gritty immigrant neighborhood, Henry C. Dwight Elementary School near downtown Hartford, defies the odds. It harks back to an earlier era of learning. Its ceilings are high, there is a fireplace in the library and students wear uniforms as they dart between classrooms. The oldest public school in one of the nation's oldest cities, Dwight finds itself at the center of a growing national debate over whether the nation's newest education experiment is -- unexpectedly -- encouraging school segregation.

Dwight's population is racially and economically diverse, making its future under the law uncertain even though it is currently meeting its goals. The law stresses getting students proficient in math and reading by 2014, the school's principal, Stacey McCann, says. "They're (federal officials) not validating the incremental successes, but we are making great gains," says McCann, who supports the law. "I believe schools ... are making gains, but they might not make the mark that has been set."

When Congress passed the landmark law in 2001, Dwight was one of Hartford's worst-rated schools and exactly the type of multiracial, underperforming school the government intended to pressure to improve. So far, Dwight has. It has met its annual goals under the law even though it has eight special groups it must report to the government and a student population that hails from 21 countries

Okay. So there's a school full of low-income and minority students. Presumably this was just as true before NCLB as it is today. And despite having lots of disadvantaged students, it's doing well, thus proving that those students can in fact learn, and as such removing the incentive for rich white public schools to not admit those students, which they're not allowed to do legally anyway, and which we've been given no real evidence that they're actually doing, and which they were presumably doing prior to NCLB if they're doing it at all, as evidenced by the fact that they they were then and are now rich and white.

Let's say, purely for the sake of argument, that despite being a good school the malignant forces of poverty eventually catch up with Henry C. Dwight Elementary and it falls short of the 2014 goals. How would that affect segregation, one way or the other? It's already segregated. It's already full of minority students. If the school is labeled as inadequate under NCLB, wouldn't that increase the incentive for parents to say "Hey, I'm going to try to get my kid into that rich white school that isn't labeled as inadequate?"

What am I missing?

N Size Fits All

Monday's AP story about minority students being excluded from NCLB accountability calculations has generated enough commotion among legislators and commentators to warrant...another AP story, about said commotion.

I've been of two minds (or hands) on this. On the one hand, I'm a hard-liner on the various bureaucratic gambits and statistical trap-doors currently being used by state departments of educations to relieve pressure on local school systems to close the achievement gap. They're ridiculous, getting worse, and need to stop.

On the other hand--and this is reluctantly the hand I'm going with--both the article and the subsequent react have an unmistakable (yes, Eduwonk got there first) shocked, shocked air about them that in the long run doesn't help the cause.

The original article plays up the fact that "an Associated Presss computer analysis found..." Wait. A "computer analysis"? As opposed to what, an abacus analysis? Is that supposed to lend the article some kind of super-scientific gravitas? Anyway, the "computer" analysis found that minorities make up the "vast majority of students whose scores are excluded." Well, right. Because the thing about minority students is that there are, you know, fewer of them. If you implement a provision that excludes scores from smaller groups of students, and you base those groups on race/ethnicity, than it's to be expected that smaller racial/ethnic groups will be excluded more.

The react article doesn't add much. Various Congressional leaders pledge to investigate these new revelations of provisions that have been common knowledge for years. The recently-formed Commission on No Child Left Behind issued a press release saying:

"This story by the Associated Press is alarming and, unfortunately, confirmed by much of the Commission's own work. If the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is to ensure that all children meet State standards, then allowing large numbers of the most disadvantaged children to fall between the cracks is unacceptable. The issues raised in this article only further reinforce the need to come up with realistic solutions that actually make NCLB a better tool to close the achievement gap. The practices raised in this article have had the effect of making these children invisible and speak to greater transparency over how this law is implemented."

Small point: transparency is arguably the cause of these problems, not the solution. As states have pushed the envelope on adopting large thresholds for excluding minority students from AYP calculations, other states have noticed and followed suit.

Large point: Neither the Commission nor the various allegedly alarmed commentators nor the authors of either article seem especially interested in grappling with the issue of how many minority students should be excluded from AYP calculations. 1.9 million may very well be too high, but the right number isn't zero. Statistically speaking, it doesn't make sense to hold a school accountable for the scores of a tiny number of students, and when you add up tiny numbers from 90,000 schools nationwide, the sum is not so tiny at all.

Moreover, the issue in question--minimum subgroup sizes--is one of a whole range of factors to consider in constructing AYP calculations, including confidence intervals, grade bands, multi-year aggregation, etc. etc. Depending on how you combine these various adjustments, subgroups of different sizes can be appropriate. A small minimum subgroup size with an ultra-permissive 99-percent confidence interval, for example, could exclude more students than a medium-sized minimum subgroup size with no confidence interval. Taking one element of the AYP calculation in isolation oversimplifies the issue to the extreme.

Final point: The most moderate voice on this issue in either story comes from Ross Wiener at the Education Trust:

"The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students' scores don't have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust. While the exemptions were created for good reasons, there's little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law."

Tip: There is no organization on the planet more adamant about preserving the role of NCLB in identifying schools that aren't serving poor and minority students than the Education Trust (my former employer). If you find yourself farther out on the edge on these issues than EdTrust, you've crossed the line from serious analysis and commentary and need to turn around and make your way back.

Labor vs. Education? Surely Not.

In the Washington Post this morning, Harold Myerson, in criticizing the new "Hamilton Project," has this to say about the project's focus on education:

"The authors place great stress on improving American education -- a commendable and unexceptionable goal, but one that may do little to retard the export of our jobs since, as they acknowledge, it's increasingly the knowledge jobs that are going to India and even China.

How's that?

After all, the conventional wisdom is that we need to invest in the education system precisely because of increased competition for knowledge jobs from India and China. I'm not a flat-earth Kool-aid drinker by any means, but the basic point is right: Mobile capital and advances in telecommunications mean that if companies can hire smart, well-educated people for less money on the other side of the world, they will. Since we can't compete in the global labor market on price, our only option is to be smarter and more-well educated. Thus, education is increasingly important.

Has Myerson uncovered some brilliantly counter-intuitive argument here that he just didn't have the space to share with his readers because he was too busy taking shots at Robert Rubin?

Not really.

This is actually just a somewhat oblique and half-hearted attempt to push an argument that's popular with labor folks these days: education is worth less in the labor market than it used to be (a, shall we say, highly-debatable point), globalization is bad, we can't compete with the Indians and Chinese, so the only alternative is high trade barriers and strong unions.

I'm not against strong unions and frankly I'm glad the Post has at least one columnist who cares about labor issues and talks about them frequently. But to set the interests of workers and the interests of education reform in opposition to one another is a terrible and counter-productive idea, both as a matter of policy and politics.

CNN strikes back

Obviously worried that ABC News was poised to wrest away naming rights to the Quick+ED sensationalism award with last weak's teacher sex/murder double dip, Cnn.com goes down and dirty--literally--and adds an oh-so-topical immigration angle with this story:

"Buckets Used as Bathrooms in School Lockdown"

As a side note, I've got say, big props for whoever writes the headlines at CNN. There are all kinds of jobs in this world, and I've always admired people who take quotidian jobs and inject them with a certain undeniable genius and creativity, simply for their own sake. Even when the net effect is to degrade the national education dialogue and make our world just a little bit coarser and less worth living in, you have to admire the dedication.

Tom Toch Should Be Smiling

While many states are eliminating constructed response and essay questions from their assessments, Washington, D.C.'s new comprehensive assessment system will add them.

(Hat tip to DC Education Blog.)

Egregious Sensationalism Continued

Today's winner of the CNN.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism goes to ABC News, for this headline:

"Alabama Teacher Accused of Sex, Murder Plot"

The only possible silver lining that I can see here is that perhaps this marks some level of media fatique with the tried-and-true, grossly voyeuristic "Female high school teacher has sex with male student" story, the prominence of which is always in direct proportion to the teacher's physical resemblance to Nicole Kidman in "To Die For."

Good looking blonde teacher = front-page national news.
Older, not-so-attractive teacher = page 9 of the Metro section.

In other words, the same process the media use to decide whether or not they care about missing children.

Maybe now there at least needs to be an ancillary murder plot or something else to spice up the story before it runs large like this.

Story tip: Ethan Gray.

Stop. No, STOP. Read this Report.

This report should be ( and I promise this phrase will be used with extreme judiciousness here at the Quick and the Ed) required reading for anyone interested in improving the quality of teachers in American classrooms.

Written by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, the premise is straightforward: school districts should pay less attention to teachers' paper credentials and more attention to actual success in the classroom, reconfiguring their tenure and compensation policies to be more aggressive about not retaining the teachers who are least successful in helping students learn and giving salary bonuses to those who are most successful, particularly with low-income students.

There is powerful logic at work here. For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers--certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master's degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat, some (like having a Masters' degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.

But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name--old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.

The Gordon paper simply takes these finding to their logical conclusion: instead of shaping teacher policy around things we know don't matter very much, let's shape teacher policy around things we know matter a lot. Instead of fighting a losing up-front battle to filter and sort prospective teachers based on qualities that may have a tenuous connection to success in the classroom, let's filter and sort them based on actual success in the classroom.

This would be a seismic change in the way teachers are prepared, hired, and treated as professionals. Really, an earth-spins-backward-on-its-axis, time-reverses-direction, Margot-Kidder-flies-up-out-of-a-ditch magnitude of change. It would mean taking seriously a fact that most educators know intuitively yet is largely absent from teacher policy: teaching is an extraordinarily complicated endeavor, and people find different ways to be good at it. You can train and test prospective teachers, give them knowledge and skill, and those things are important, but once they get into the classroom some teachers bring additional talents, work ethic, intelligence, drive, etc. to bear, and others don't. Those differences matter a lot to student learning.

This report has the courage to take seriously plain facts that many people know but are unwilling to act upon, because doing so would be a huge challenge to the status quo. Read it today.

Not from the Onion

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Young people who adopt the "Goth" lifestyle of dark clothes and introspective music are more likely to commit self-harm or attempt suicide than other youngsters, a Scottish study has found.

I know this is nothing to laugh about, but it seems like investigating the obvious to me.

Fugly

DC Education Blog's Nathan critiques the design of DCPS's new facilities master plan website. Since I have the aesthetic sensibilities of a small wombat, I'll defer to others on this matter. But I do hope this isn't a premonition of things to come when the new facilities plan is released on May 28th.

What I Don't Get (one of many things)

Joe Williams has been blogging at the Chalkboard about this school space smackdown between a NYC school district school, the elite New Explorations in Science, Technology and Math, and the Ross Global Academy Charter School, which the NYC Department of Education wants to co-locate in NEST's building. That this debate is getting ugly is nothing surprising.

But here's what I don't get: NEST is subject to possible co-location because it is underenrolled and has extra space. Yet there are thousands of kids in New York City, in the grades NEST serves, who are entitled under NCLB to transfer out of their low-performing schools but can't because there aren't enough spaces available in higher-performing ones. NEST doesn't have an AYP rating under NCLB because it doesn't receive Title I funds, but it is rated "in good standing" under New York's state accountability system, and has higher-test scores than the average NYC public school. So, if NEST's principal is really that opposed to charter co-location, why doesn't she offer to solve the excess space problem by opening up all the excess space in the school to students who want to transfer out of low-performing schools under NCLB? If NEST's parents and educators don't want to do that, then it's pretty obvious that the excess space would be better allocated to people who ARE trying to expand the number of high-performing school spaces for underserved kids in NYC.

Happy Birthday, Beverly Cleary!

Acclaimed children's book author Beverly Cleary is 90 today. The author of nearly 40 children's books spanning five decades--including Henry Huggins, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and her best-known book, Ramona the Pest--Clearly has helped countless children--including me--learn to enjoy reading through her work, which is amusing, relatable, and fundamentally respectful of children. Happy Birthday, Mrs. Cleary.

What Success in Higher Education Really Means

I spent last Thursday and Friday in my former home town of Indianapolis testifying at the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Some very interesting discussions focused on what higher education quality really means. Which made me look back to the article the Washington Post ran last week reporting that that Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the President of George Washington University, will be stepping down after nearly 20 years on the job. It's worth giving their top-line summary of his accomplishments a careful read:

"During his time as the 15th president of GWU, the school grew physically, financially and in academic reputation. The endowment is nearly $1 billion, almost $800 million more than when Trachtenberg arrived in 1988; undergraduate applications have jumped from 6,000 to more than 20,000 annually (moving it from the ranks of a "safe" school to one that many students now worry about gaining admission to); and a number of the school's programs have climbed in national rankings. In 2004, there were 10,556 undergraduates.

The city's largest private employer, GWU under Trachtenberg also opened the first new hospital in the District in 25 years, created five new schools and elevated athletics.

"He made the school much more national in scope and impression, upgraded the faculty and bettered the tone of the school for everyone," said Charles Manatt, a lawyer and board of trustees chairman."

First, I want to be clear that I have no reason to think that Stephen Trachtenberg is anything other than a very good president, nor that GW is anything other than a very good school.

But it's telling to observe the terms under which the success for institutional leaders in higher education is defined. To summarize, Trachtenberg did a great job of increasing the institution's wealth, exclusivity, and reputation (as gauged by the academic credentials of its faculty), as well as expanding the physical plant.

Nowhere is there a mention of how much better a job GW did in educating its students under Trachtenberg or helping them earn degrees, how much more they learned or how increasingly successful they were as they moved on into further education, the workforce, and their lives.

I'm not saying none of those things happened. But they aren't mentioned, for the simple reason that nobody really knows if they happened or not. Colleges and universities gather and make available virtually no information about the learning outcomes of their students.

Thus, institutions aren't judged on student outcomes. They're judged on the aforementioned measures of wealth, exclusivity, and reputation, which (not coincidentally) are the primary drivers of the rankings published by the likes of U.S. News and World Report. The most succesful higher education leaders--and Trachtenberg seems to have been quite successful--understand these rules of the game and play them well.

Inevitably, this has the effect of marginalizing student success when it comes to institutional priorities and resources. Successful university presidents must raise a lot money, increase the applicant pool, and attract star faculty. They can take steps to improve the quality of teaching and learning. This distinction between mandatory and optional priorities makes a huge difference, generally not to the benefit of undergraduates.

Anecdotes, Suspicion, Discrimination, and How Gender Sterotypes Hurt Early Learning

I think this Tampa Tribune article (hat tip to the EdWonks) about the suspicions unfairly cast on male kindergarten teachers is pretty silly. For starters, it's a prime example of the non-education education story, to steal a phrase coined by Kevin. In March, a local male kindergarten teacher was arrested on charges of "sexual performance with a child," and someone at the Tampa Trib apparently thought that might cause parents and the public to fear all male early childhood teachers--a tiny fraction of kindergarten teachers in the area--are pedophiles. The article offers no evidence that parents are worried about this possibility--even the anecdotes the reporter gathers sorta run against the theme.

But there's also a serious issue here, in the underlying assumption that seems to run through the piece that no normal, healthy young man would choose to work with small children unless he had an ulterior motive. Teacher quality is a huge challenge in early childhood education, particularly for preschool teachers, who are oftern very low-paid, than for kindergarten teachers, who are typically paid on part with other elementary school teachers.

I think a major reason that early childhood workers are so poorly paid is that working with young children has traditionally been seen as a woman's job, and therefore not something that's really worthwhile or should be well paid. (The insistence of some early childhood advocates on conflating educationally-focused and purely custodial care is also part of the problem here, IMHO). I don't think improving the quality of preschool and early childhood education requires having more male teachers, but I also don't think wages for preschool teachers--and therefore quality--are going to raise near as much as they need to until we stop viewing it solely as a "women's job."

What Education Policy Positions Say About Politicians

I'm stepping a bit on Andy's turf with this, but Matthew Yglesias has a great post at TPMcafe about how the issues a candidate for elected office chooses to talk about and how he or she talks about them define who the candidate is for the public.

This is particularly relevant to education. Most voters don't choose a candidate solely based on his or her positions on education topics, but how a candidate chooses to talk about education and the degree to which he or she chooses to emphasize it to send an important message to voters about the candidate's character and values: is he pro-reform?, will she stand up to special interests?, does he care about social justice, opportunity, and helping the weakest in society? etc.

Interestingly, the two examples Yglesias highlights of politicians using an issue to define themselves--John Edwards talking about child poverty in 2004, and George W. Bush's outreach to African Americans (including the emphasis on NCLB and the "soft bigotry of low expectations) in 2000--both focused heavily on children, including education.

In any case, if you're interested in the politics of education, particularly the Democratic side, read the post.

What Does Immigration Mean for Public Education?

Unless you've been living under a rock the last few weeks, it's been pretty obvious that immigration remains a highly contentious issue in the United States. Today, up to 180,000 people are expected to participate in a pro-immigrant demonstration on the National Mall, just a few blocks from my office.

Regardless of what your stance is on the political questions about immigration now before Congress, it's clear that immigrants and children of immigrants have become a significant part of the U.S. population, and that, for both demographic and economic reasons, they're going to continue to be one.

In fact, according to a recent report from the Urban Institute (which I highly recommend reading), nearly one in five school-aged children in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the child of immigrants. The majority of these children were born in the United States, and are proficient English speakers, but such changing demographics do raise new questions for public schools. In particular, many schools lack the resources or expertise to effectively educate the 6 million children who do not now speak English proficiently, and the increasing geographic dispersion of immigrants--who are now settling in non-border states and places not traditionally seen as destinations for immigration--means more schools that lack experience teaching children of immigrants or English language learners must now face these challenges. There's also the question of what role public schools play in equipping immigrants, children of immigrants, and, indeed, all the children they serve, to be good citizens.

Unfortunately, because the conversation about immigration is so polarized (as are questions about public education), there's not a lot of honest public conversation about these issues that isn't laden with political baggage.

The Allegedly Ever-Crazier College Admissions Rat Race, Continued Ad Infinitum

The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post ran near-identical articles last week focusing on the declining percentage of applicants being accepted by elite colleges and universities. Both focused on single-digit acceptance rates at Ivy League institutions, along with various quotes from admissions officers and anxious parents emphasizing that getting into the Ivies these days is tougher than getting a straight answer from the Bush White House about the war in Iraq. The Post summarized the phenomenon as follows:

About 3 million students are expected to graduate from high school this year, and about two-thirds of them are looking for college spaces. The number of rejections is further inflated by the increased number of applications sent out by each student, reacting to the uncertainty of admission and the ease of online and common applications. This produces a self-perpetuating cycle: It is harder to get in, so seniors apply to more schools, which makes it even harder to get in, at least for the most sought-after schools."

This quote--and the article generally--seems to miss the distinction between perception and reality. The declining admit rate at elite schools is, as the article notes, being driven entirely by the denominator in the equation. It's not that the elite schools are admitting fewer students--in fact, they're admitting more. It's that the number of applications is rising even faster, driving the percentage down.

If the increasing number of applications reflected a corresponding increase in the number of qualified applicants, then it would be fair to say that it's harder to get into an elite college. But this article, and others like it, says that a big factor here is the same pool of applicants simply submitting more applications.

That would make it seem harder to get in, because students would be rejected more often. But the net result, in terms of the total number of qualified students getting spots, wouldn't change. From 2004 to 2005, the Top 50 four-year institutions in terms of SAT scores saw a 6.5% incease in applications, and accepted 2.2% more students, driving their aggregate admit rate down by one percentage point. So unless the number of qualified applicants increased by more than 2.2%, this whole "it's harder to get into college" phenomenon is mostly a mirage.

History is not Math

Not to "rehash" Andy's already extensive coverage of the "narrowing the curriculum" hysteria, but Mike Petrilli's bite at the apple in the latest Education Gadfly recommended a predictable--but I think dead wrong--response to the issue that I need to rant a bit about.

Petrilli--like a lot of folks in the edworld--argues that history, science, and other subjects are getting pushed out of the curriculum because NCLB holds school accountable for math and reading only, and not for other subjects (although the law doesn't preclude states from including other subjects in AYP). Petrilli's response, then, is to say the feds should require states to test students in science (which they're already must do in three grade levels come 2007, as Petrilli notes) and history, AND incorporate the results of those tests in determining whether or not schools are making adequate yearly progress under the law.

I think this is a terrible idea, for three reasons.

The first is a technical issue: There's a trade-off, in designing accountability systems, between complexity and transparency--the more stuff (different subjects, different grades, disaggregated subgroups, etc.) you try to incorporate into coercive accountability system, the more unwieldy they become, and the harder for folks who don't crunch policy for a living to understand. (Jay Mathews, for example, already claims that AYP is too confusing--I don't agree with him, but I do think adding many more variables would make the system too confusing). Adding two additional subjects to the AYP determination would make the system much more complex, and harder to explain or defend to parents and the public. I don't think that's a good idea. (Apologies to Kevin, from whom I'm cribbing a bit here, although less eloquently than him.)

Second, while I generally hate this type of argument, I AM concerned about a slippery slope here. I think that art and music are just as important for children to be well-educated as science or history--should we add standards and testing and make those subjects part of AYP, too?

My third concern is more fundamental. I think subjects like history and science are fundamentally different from reading and math. Although there are still some folks--primarily in ed schools--who haven't bought into it yet, there's actually a pretty clear, well-defined research consensus about how children learn to read, and what educators need to do when for kids to become proficient readers. There's not the same level of research and consensus in math as in reading, but there is a body of research here, and math, like reading, is an area in which kids need to learn specific skills in a particular sequence in order to become proficient and move to the next level. In both reading and math, we can study what and how kids need to learn in order to become proficient because--calculator debates aside--there's some general agreement about what, ultimately, kids need to know. Everyone agrees that kids need to learn how to read, and there's not a lot of debate about what that means. And, while we might disagree about how far kids need to develop their mathematical knowledge and skills, we can generally agree on what algebra is and what computation is.

That's not true in history or science. What children need to learn in these fields is fundamentally a values issue. Should kids study the history of the state in which they live, or the history and cultures of Africa? Even if we can all agree that kids need to know something about U.S. history, what should the focus be, and whose history should they learn? Why the heck do kids have to learn what a stamen and pistil are (does anyone reading even remember learning this in middle school)? Is there really any reason they need to know the names of the planets in the solar system? These aren't questions that research can answer. And, even if we could all agree on what kids should know in history or science* how would anyone justify one sequence for when kids need to know which ideas over a different order?

Because these questions are values issues, without a clear cut "right" answer, the process of standards-setting in these fields has been incredibly politically charged, culture-war issues, in the states that have undertaken it. (See, for instance, Kansas and evolution, or the debate over Virginia's history SOLs when they were initiated.) I think such debates are really a distraction from real educational questions. Since these questions are less clear cut, I think the standards for them are best set by local communities (loosely defined), combined with parental choice.

This doesn't mean that I don't think history and science are important--I do. But I don't think the nature of these subjects is well-suited to state standards accountability systems. And I think that's ok. There's this tremendous temptation to hang everything on the single accountability system, to act as if that's the only way of indicating to schools what's important or getting them to do it.

I think shows a tremendous lack of imagination. Schools and people who work in them are driven by tons of different competing incentives, not just the state accountability system, and there are lots of ways to get them to do things that we want them to do without tying it to the accountabilty system. There is, of course, the time-tested federal approach--that dominated federal policy before NCLB--of giving schools money, in the form of federal grants, for doing something we want them to do. Programs like the Teaching American History grant program, which was part of Petrilli's portfolio at the Department of Ed, take that approach. (In general, I'm not a fan of these types of small programs, a topic for another day, but this is one alternative.) One could also use an accreditation model: For example, a variety of scientific organizations (NSF, AAAS, professional associations in the various fields, etc.) could establish criteria for identifying schools that are doing a good job teaching science, and schools could seek these accreditations. States could even require that schools receive one of a variety of possible accreditations. These are just a few ideas.

*I think we might ultimately be able to reach some minimal consensus on scientific concepts--such as the scientific method, human biology, and some basic principles of physics--that kids need to know to function in an increasingly science-driven culture.

Politics-free Accountability is like Calorie-free Chocolate

Thanks to the good leaders of Maryland and Baltimore for providing a case study in how messy the interaction of politics with public school accountability can be.

On March 29, the Maryland state board of education voted to transfer management of 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore middle and high schools away from the Baltimore City School Board to third-party groups. State-imposed management takeovers and private management of public schools are always contentious, but Baltimore is particularly contentious because Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and the current governor, Bob Ehrlich, is a Republican.

O'Malley accused Ehrlich, State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, and the Maryland state board of education of playing election year politics with the school takeovers; O'Malley's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, seized on the issue as evidence that he is better on education than O'Malley; Democrats in the state legislature passed a last-minute bill to block the takeover (Ehrlich says he will veto the bill; it's not clear whether Democrats have the votes to override him.); and Ehrlich fired back at the Democrats opposing the takeover. Expect more fireworks around this issue ahead.

Messes like these drive education policywonks and more pragmatic reformers to curse politics and wish it out of education altogether...

Some policy wonks seem to devote a lot of energy to trying to protect public education accountability systems from politics. In some ways, that was a major force driving the authors of No Child Left Behind, who had seen the way states flouted or deliberately watered down accountability requirements in the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act and were determined to write the law so as to narrow states' leeway and force them to do the right thing. As we lurch towards the coming debate on NCLB reauthorization, I sense a similar yearning in some conversations about what NCLB 2.0 should look like--this sense that, if we just get the policy details, if we just get the legislative language right, if we can just come up with the ideal way to identify schools, we can create an accountability system that works on its own, unsullied by and without dependence upon politics.

But trying to make accountability work without politics is like trying to make calorie-free chocolate. Accountability--real accountability--is inherently political. For accountability systems to have substance, there have to be consequences. Having consequences requires some person or entity to make a decision, to flip the switch that sets those consequences into action. We can't create an automated accountability machine that swings into action without a second thought whenever a school crosses x-defined accountability threshold--these decisions are important enough that they require human judgement.

For this decision-maker to have legitimate authority, there must be evidence that the public has placed its trust in this entity, either through election or because the entity is accountable to an elected official. Even when elected leaders choose to vest authority for school accountability in an ostensibly independent entity, that entity still operates in a politicized climate, subject to the will of the elected officials who created it and the public. But this means that accountability decision-makers are also subject to political pressure from organized interests that stand to benefit or lose from the consequences they have the power to impose, and this makes accountability decisions highly politicized.

The only way I know of to really isolate accountability from politics is by abdicating public responsibility for public education altogether--devolving all educational decision-making, through vouchers, to parents, with no public oversight of the schools to which they choose to send their children. Some voucher supporters think the evils of politics in education are sufficient to justify this trade-off, but it's one that I, ultimately, cannot accept. To paraphrase Churchill, educational accountability is the worst option, except for all the others we've tried.

Rather than railing about the influences of politics on education policy and accountability, the only real solution is to change the politics itself, to create a new politics that gives policymakers the right incentives to hold schools accountable in ways that are good for children. The most obvious way I see to do this is by organizing and empowering parents and children whose voices often go unheard in political power struggles over education. Steve Barr is doing this with the Jefferson High School movement in Los Angeles. At a more macro, much less grass-roots level, I think Education Sector's goal of "making the debate about public education public" is a part of this, too. But there are a lot of other ways to change the politics here, too, and I'd welcome any suggestions or comments for ones I'm not thinking of now.

Sensationalism 101

Cnn.com, one of the most widely-read news sites in the world, features at the top of its home page a list of "Top Stories." There are usually about 13 stories there. As of 11:47 AM EDT this morning, there are two education-related stories among the top 13. They are:

"Teacher charged with raping student 28 times"

and

"Teacher, crushing bug with gun shell, blows up hand"

There are millions of teachers in the United States. People being people, on any given Wednesday a few of them are going to do something illegal or monumentally stupid. The same is undoubtedly true for lawyers, truck drivers, certified public accountants, and every other profession of considerable size. But their foibles and sins don't generate coverage like this, because those stories don't play into the simplistic "even in our public schools!!!" narrative at work here. Instead of substantive education journalism, we get stories making it seem like the nation's classrooms are chock-full of morons and sexual predators.

So, we at the Quick and the Ed are hereby establishing the "Cnn.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism." Readers who email examples will win lasting fame.

Education Majors Less Literate

AIR released an important new study in January detailing the literacy levels of students about to graduate from college. While most of the press coverage focused on the headache-inducing, depressingly-low overall scores (e.g. only 4 in 10 students finishing 4-year degrees scored as "proficient" in prose and document literacy; quantitative scores were even worse), there's a lot of additional good information to be found deeper in the report, particularly in the tables that break down the numbers by various student characteristics.

Some of the most telling data relate to the gaps between white and black students; there's a new Chart You Can Trust detailing those numbers on the main Web site today, along with the transcript of our recent national standards debate, new ideas on preschool implementation, and an interesting story from a community college professor in New York.

The college student literacy report also calculated average literacy scores by students' college major. The results:


*Significantly different from students majoring in math, science, or engineering

This is an unfortunately familiar taxonomy of which majors attract and graduate the highest-caliber students, and which don't. For all the recent focus on attracting more talent into science and mathematics, it's arguably the future teachers of America who need the most attention. As the chart shows, education majors have significantly lower levels of document and quantitative literacy than students who major in math, science, and engineering (prose literacy scores were also lower, but not at a statistically significant level).

While future science and math types beat out all other majors at various levels of significance in all three categories (not only, it should be noted, in quantitative skills but also in the ability to comprehend and use information from texts and documents), education and health majors appear to have the overall lowest levels of literacy. There's a deeply-rooted dynamic at work here in terms of who is drawn into the profession. Changing that is a major challenge for everyone working to boost talent in the classroom.

Schools, relative poverty, and social mobility

Interesting New Yorker article by John Cassidy looks at where the method by which the poverty rate is measured comes from (if you haven't heard this before, it's rather interesting), some concerns folks on both left and right have with the way we currently calculate poverty, and whether other measures--including measures of relative poverty--might be better. All relevant to education, particularly since poverty plays a role in some funding formulas.

But this is what got me:

Research by Tom Hertz, an economist at American University, shows that a child whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has only a six-per-cent chance of attaining an average yearly income in the top fifth. Most people who start out relatively poor stay relatively poor.

Now, there are a lot of factors that contribute to this--health care, housing policy, differences in parental support, lack of access to social networks, just to name a few--but the fact remains that the quality of education our public school systems provide to low-income students is often dramatically lower than that provided to more affluent students, and these disparities in educational opportunity seriously undermine social mobility.

Crimson Financial Tide Lifts More Boats

This story, detailing Harvard's announcement of increased financial aid for low- and middle-income families, is nothing but good news. As the NYTimes' Karen Arenson correctly notes, "The quest by prestigious colleges to attract more low- and middle-income students is turning into a financial aid arms race." Two important takeaways:

1) Other elite colleges and universities can do more to promote access for students who aren't rich enough to afford a $30,000 tuition bill. Administrators should be prepared to answer the question: Harvard, Stanford, and other institutions are doing this--why aren't you?

2) While the nation's higher education institutions are fiercely independent, often to the point of obstinancy, they're also very sensitive to public perception. That's the dynamic here, as institutions realize that doing well and doing good go hand and hand. The challenge for reformers is to redefine the terms of that perception, shifting the values that inform institutional reputations away from the measures of fame, wealth, and exclusivity that dominate the U.S. News rankings and moving them toward more important things, like institutional success in serving economically disadvantaged students.

Welcome to the Dark Age

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a new version of the federal Higher Education Act yesterday. The floor debate included a lot of back-and-forth about student loans, spiraling tuition costs, affirmative action, and other hot-button issues. Little attention was given to the following provision, which was added last year by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce:

SEC. 132. DATABASES OF STUDENT INFORMATION PROHIBITED.

(a) PROHIBITION. Except as described in (b), nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the design, development, creation, implementation, or maintenance of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance, attending institutions receiving assistance, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this Act, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. (b) EXCEPTION. The provisions of subsection (a) shall not affect the loan obligation enforcement activities described in section 485B of this Act.

But of all the provisions in the law, this is possibly the most shortsighted, damaging, and indicative of the relentless efforts of the private higher education establishment to shield itself from any kind of scrutiny from the outside world.

This is the back-story: The National Center for Education Statistics, an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Education, gathers information about the nation's colleges and universities through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Every year, each institution is required to fill out and submit a series of surveys about themselves and their students, focused on topics such as enrollment, funding, staffing, degrees awarded, financial aid, and graduation rates. This process is the backbone of higher-education data-gathering; it's the only way to consistently know anything about the institutions that compromise a vital segment of the economy.

It's also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and somewhat antiquated process, with institutions filling in thousands of data points across the various surveys. Each survey is separate, greatly reducing the ability to cross-reference information in a useful way. For example, because the graduation rate and financial aid surveys are separate, we know the percent of students at a given institution who graduate within six years, and the percent who receive financial aid, but not the percent of financial aid recipients who graduate within six years.

To modernize this system, IPEDS proposed a new way of submitting information: instead of each institution aggregating it's internal student-level data into a bunch of separate, disconnected surveys, they would instead simply submit that student-level, or "unit record," information to IPEDS directly. In addition to being more efficient from the institutional perspective (after investing in some new data infrastructure), it would also allow for much more accurate calculation of key institutional measures like graduation rates and net student prices.

Institutions have long complained that current federal graduation rate measures are inaccurate because they don't give institutions credit for students who transfer to another institution and graduate there. The unit-record system would fix that problem, because IPEDS would be able to connect enrollment information from one institution to graduation information from another. Institutions have also complained that current measures of the cost of going to college are overstated because they don't show the average "net price" to students after subtracting out financial aid, tuition discounts, etc. The unit record system would have fixed that problem too.

Faced with a system that would have made their graduation rates look higher and prices look lower, what did the private higher education establishment do? It crushed the unit record system like a bug.

While associations of public universities such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) were supportive of the unit record system, the private colleges, represented most prominently by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) attacked the idea from the very beginning. Aligning themselves with far-right privacy nuts like the Eagle Forum, they characterized the idea as the first step toward an Orwellian nightmare dystopia where every student is monitored from cradle to grave by the faceless bureaucrats of some presumably totalitarian regime. The president of Gettysburg College wrote breathlessly in the Washington Post that:

"The threat to our students' privacy is of grave concern," wondering "at what cost to individual privacy," asserting that such a "mammoth" and "gigantic" project would be a "costly and troubling assault on privacy," and so on. Because "the potential for abuse of power and violation of civil liberties is immense," she said, Congress "must reject this measure."

And so Congress did exactly that, inserting the HEA language seen above.

What accounts for this over-the-top reaction? Simple: colleges and universities--particularly private colleges and univerisites--are resolutely opposed to any form of increased public scrutiny. As far as they're concerned, the quality of education they provide to their students and the benefits they give to society in exchange for the substantial public financial support they receive through student financial aid and their tax-exempt status is nobody's business but their own.

They know that any attempt to increase the amount or quality of information about them could be used as a means to form judgments about how well they're doing their job. That could lead to increased competitive pressures, uncomfortable questions, and other various forms of that dreaded word accountability.

And so they embarked on a disingenuous campaign to conflate institutional privacy with student privacy. By pretending to stand up for the latter, they very effectively preserved the former.

This is not to say that privacy is not a real and abiding concern in the modern age of information. It seems like not a week goes by that you don't read some new and horrifying account of security breaches at private database companies, resulting in the release of your social security number, mother's maiden name, cholesterol level, and AMEX card to gangsters located in one or more former Soviet republics.

But the unit record proposal contained every security protocol imaginable, including strict limits on the use and release of the data and harsh legal penalties for any privacy violation. It would be a federal felony punishable by prison time to release the information, at a level actually stricter than releasing data from the IRS. Which, as it happens, is a good example of a government agency that's been gathering "unit record" data far more sensitive than someone's college major for a long time while by and large successfully balancing citizen privacy rights and the government's interest in information. The government is actually quite good at keeping information secret; in fact that's usually the problem.

We live in an era where all large organizations strategically gather data about themselves to understand how they work and improve the services they provide to consumers. Any private company will tell you that such analysis is an essential component of continued improvement and long-term viability. We also live in a country where many colleges and universities routinely fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, where less than half of all college graduates are proficient in tests of literacy, where students and parents are forced to choose colleges with virtually no solid information about which institutions will actually give them a high-quality education, where globalization competition for knowlege-based jobs is growing by the day.

In other words, we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information. Such an action would be a victory for the narrow self-interest of private institutions, and a sound defeat for students, parents, and everyone else.

Fat, Drunk, and Stupid is No Way to Go Through Life

On March 28^th, the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution released the newest version of its Child Well-Being Index (CWI), "an evidence based measure of trends in the social conditions encountered by American children and youth since 1975." Written by Duke Prof. Kenneth Land, the report shows evidence that youth smoking, drinking, drug use, crime, suicide, and pregnancy rates are all down. Unfortunately, though, children's health is getting worse, and their educational performance as measured by the national NAEP—which was the predetermined focus of the panel discussion Brookings held to announce the CWI this year—is frustratingly flat considering the number of reform efforts enacted over the past thirty years.

Coinciding with the CWI event was the release of a publication called "The Education Flatline: Causes and Solutions," which offers perspectives from Diane Ravitch, Kate Walsh, Ron Haskins, Isabel Sawhill, David Gordon, Gene Maeroff, and Education Sector board member Bruno Manno. This diverse group of thinkers put forward a number of suggestions for how to raise student achievement, including national standards, an increase in the number of charter schools, improving teacher quality, and reforming Pre-K-3 policies and practices.

Land used the CWI to make a noteworthy connection between the rise in Pre-K enrollment in the 1990's and the rise in NAEP scores for nine-year-olds in the early 2000's. While Land argues that Pre-K enrollment "may be a leading indicator" of later NAEP score improvements, to draw such a correlation requires a methodological evaluation of state—not national—NAEP reports, so that one can take stock of the widely differing state Pre-K programs. The CWI uses the national NAEP.

On a broad scale though, it seems that everyone loves Pre-K these days. It's gotten a lot of buzz, including support from our nation's governors. But any large scale reform effort should be spurred by empirical evidence and will have to make sense of the immensity of the implementation challenges. Watch for Education Sector's Sara Mead to weigh in and offer some innovative suggestions to expand Pre-K access next week. Stay tuned!

PS – Ironic reaction to the CWI report from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings: "This year's Child Well-Being Index highlights the tremendous gains our students are making, thanks in large part to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act." Really? Thanks "in large part" to NCLB? Minority students have made tremendous gains if you look back as far as fifteen years ago. But they only made marginal gains from 2003 to 2005, which is the time in which NCLB would have had an impact. Given that the CWI event was organized for the express purpose of drawing attention to 30 years of mostly flat NAEP scores, Spellings big ol' NCLB slap on the back seems a bit out of place. It may make for a good quote but it's rooted in a flawed analysis of how the CWI relates to federal policy successes or failures.

- Posted by Ethan Gray

Push Me, Pull Me

In reporting on new data about the number of schools identified by NCLB as not making adequate yearly progress, Bloomberg News writes:

"The percentage of failing schools rose by one point from the previous school year. Under the 2002 law, schools that do not make sufficient academic progress face penalties including the eventual replacement of their administrators and teachers."

NCLB was enacted more than four years ago. How long must we wait for the press to report its provisions accurately? First, NCLB does not label schools as "failing." They're labeled as "not making adequate progress" or "in need of improvement." These are not semantic distinctions; the words actually mean what they mean. Second, while the "penalties" can include replacing administrators and teachers, they certainly don't have to. These might seem like fine points, but they actually go right to the heart of what the law does and doesn't do.

The story also goes on to say the following:

"The results raise doubts about whether the law is working and its results are fairly calculated, said Michael Petrilli, vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based research group. 'Most people thought that at this point in the law, we'd be seeing these numbers go way, way up' as standards toughen, said Petrilli."

Nobody from the National Education Association is quoted here, but one assumes that their take on these numbers hasn't changed since January, when head NEA honcho Reg Weaver said:

"Four years of President Bush's signature education policy is sufficient to weigh facts, examine data and understand this so-called 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) Act through the experiences of millions of education professionals across America. If we distill these into one observation, it is that the anniversary marks four years of winning rhetoric and failing substance. From its inception, NCLB has been overemphasized, under funded and sugarcoated at the expense of public school children. New data illustrates our conclusion. It shows that more schools failed to achieve 'adequate yearly progress' (AYP) under NCLB in 2005-06 than ever before."

To summarize: The Fordham Foundation thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot higher. The NEA thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot lower.

If you ever wondered why the various warring factions in the NCLB debate seem to be talking past, over, through, and behind one another, this is a good place to start.

Hairy Armpits and Everything

Kevin's already given his take on the French union and student protests over proposed labor law changes that would make it easier for companies to fire or lay off workers under 26 in their first two years of employment. But it occurred to me that these protests also reflect some of the same problems that make progressive policy change difficult in American public education.

Bear with me: French politicos didn't just wake up one morning and decide, "hey, let's make it easier to fire young workers." France has a very high unemployment rate among younger workers--about 25 percent--and it's even higher for disadvantaged groups, such as those of North African and Muslim descent, as last November's riots highlighted. French policymakers hope that making it easier to fire or lay off young workers will help lower unemployment rates for them.

I'm not an economist, so I have no opinion about whether or not the proposed changes would lower unemployment, but if they did, they would have an enormous benefit for individuals who got jobs as a result, as well as a broader positive economic impact. But for the 3/4 of young French workers who are employed, the unions who represent them, and students who expect soon to join their ranks, these social benefits come at a cost of increased risk. So these groups seek to block change.

This strikes me as terribly similar to something that often happens here in public education. A lot of reforms seek to improve educational results for poor and minority students. Improving educational results--and, by extension, other outcomes--for these youngsters would also have broader social benefits. But many reforms--such as those that target resources to high-need schools, increase choice, or seek to enhance racial and socioeconomic integration--also threaten a status quo that works well for many people: not just established education interests, but also middle-class and affluent parents who've used their economic power to get their children into "good" neighborhoods and public schools. As Ted and Nancy Sizer comment in a recent Education Sector interview, affluent parents who've already made--and paid for--their choice of schools when purchasing a home tend to resist charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of school choice.

Part of the problem, both here and in France, is that those who are well-served by the status-quo tend to have more political and social capital and ability to block change than those who aren't. In addition, since those who would benefit from a potential change are often a somewhat hypothetical or unclearly defined group, they have less incentive to organize than those might lose something from the change. That can make education policy frustrating sometimes, but it's also part of what makes it worth doing.

Totally Gratutitous Marginally Related Note: Speaking of France, this week Pearls Before Swine, one of the few comics that regularly makes me laugh out loud, features a storyline involving French women with hairy armpits.

Mess With Texas

State school finance systems can be horrifically complicated. My first job out of grad school was to be the guy holed up in a back office in the corner of the Indiana Statehouse at 3AM during the legislative session writing long computer programs designed to simulate every tiny nuance and detail of the state's byzantine system for distributing money to and getting taxes from local school districts. It was actually kind of a cool job in an uber-geeky policy wonk way; one thing you figure out is that when you're one of only five people in the entire world who understand how a complex system works, you have a disproportionate--even inappropriate--influence over how that system is shaped.

Big state-level fights over school funding systems can be similarly complex and difficult to unwind. On the surface, Texas seems like a perfect example; the state has been mired in a protracted struggle to reform a funding system that's been ruled unconstitutional and is growing more inequitable by the year--the funding gap between high- and low-poverty districts there has nearly tripled in recent years. There's not enough money in the system, and people are already mad about property tax levels as they stand. Thus, a large injection of state revenues is the only viable option.

But while this article details the range of complicated tax proposals being bandied about in Texas as possible new state revenue sources--mucking around with business franchise and commercial receipts tax structures, going to the cigarette tax well once again--the political contortions and bitter arguments with various undertaxed constituencies are all really unecessary. Texas just needs to do what more than 40 other states already do--enact an income tax.

Everyone in Texas knows this. But income taxes are seen as kind of socialist and inherently un-Texan. So state policymakers are forced to beat their heads against the wall trying in vain to wring money out of the existing regressive and inadequeate tax structure while local schools suffer the consequences. Some things aren't as complicated as they seem.

Rigor, Relevance Reconciled?

In article about a legislative proposal in Florida to require high school students to declare a major, Governor Jeb Bush says:

"We don't want them to drop out of school or be unprepared to take on the challenges of the 21st century. It's a really smart way to make high school more relevant and prepare young people for what college will hold."

I'm not sure if the major-declaration thing itself is a good idea or not. But in framing the issue this way, Bush touches on an extremely important dimension of the latest round of high-profile high school reforms: after more than a hundred years of back-and-forth, the once-competing goals of making high schools relevant enough to keep kids from dropping out and rigorous enough to prepare them for college are being fused into a unified whole. As Craig Jerald writes in a new Education Sector report:

"the most significant improvements in high schools come from combining strategies and solutions long thought to be ideologically disparate or even mutually exclusive. Research suggests that more rigorous curricula and tougher graduation standards might not hurt graduation rates, and might even help improve them. Rigor and relevance are not zero sum tradeoffs, but actually work best in combination."

Anyone looking for a thorough but readable summary of the newest ideas and latest research findings on high school reform should check it out.

Less Is Not More

Lots of buzz about yesterday's page-one NY Times piece on how NCLB's focus on math and reading is leading schools to cut back on art, science, history, and other subjects. This is a troubling trend that Education Sector reported back in January. But today's commentary on the Times report has mis-framed the issue is a couple of big ways.

The Times piece points out that the bulk of the curriculum cuts have come in schools serving underperforming students in disadvantaged schools. But the paper, and many of NCLB's critics, then suggest that many of the schools cutting back non-tested subjects "once offered rich curriculums" in the subjects being cut. In truth, art, music, and science courses in many schools serving the nation's neediest students are next to non-existant. Art is rolled into classrooms on a cart once a week for 30 minutes. Music is 40 kids in a room trying to clap their hands in 4-4 time. A lot of kids never had what the Times says they lost.

NCLB's advocates, meanwhile, defend the focusing of struggling students' time on the core subjects of math and reading. What good is studying history if you can't read, they ask, fairly? Prime Minister Tony Blair's aides in the UK, which implemented test-based accountability in the late 1990s, say quite candidly that they sought to narrow the UK curriculum for exactly this reason.

But learning specialists--and good teachers--will tell you it's not an either-or proposition; it's not reading or history. Rather, they say, it should be reading history. That is, kids should be listening to stories about historical characters and events even before they can read, and once they can decode they should read books, even very simple ones, about science, history, art, and music. The research is very clear on this: the best reading instruction weaves content into skill-building from day one. Unfortunately, far too much of what passes for reading instruction under NCLB is sterile skill-based exercises focused on helping kids pass state tests that focus on low-level skills.

Struggling students need extra help catching up in the building-block subjects of math and reading and NCLB is giving educators strong incentives to provide that help. But that's only half the solution.