What Private Colleges Don't Want You to Know

Let's say you're a long-established industry that enjoys enviable immunity from the rigors of the free market. Demand for your product is rock-solid, you don't pay corporate taxes, government subsidies pad your finances, you raise prices every year with relative impunity, and while your members compete with one another, barriers to entry are so high that no new competitors ever enter the market. The general public thinks highly of you, and you keep a tight lid on public information about your performance to make sure it stays that way.

Then someone comes along with a proposal that could potentially change some or even all of that, by creating new public information about how well you're actually serving your customers. How do you respond? Do you:

(A) Live up to your professed committment to the public interest by supporting the proposal, understanding that in the long run both your industry and its customers are best served by more honest information.

or

(B) Pay for a misleading public opinion poll in an attempt to kill the proposal before it ever sees the light of day.

If you're the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the answer is definitely (B).

For the past year or so, NAICU has been leading the charge against the creation of a new federal higher education data system. For many years, all colleges and universities have been required to submit annual data reports to the U.S. Department of Education, detailing information about enrollment, financial aid, degrees awarded, graduation rates, and other factors. The process is the higher education equivalent of requirements that publicly-traded companies file quarterly financial results with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Unfortunately, the current data reporting system, called IPEDS (Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System) is outdated and inefficient. Colleges and universities have to internally add up data about individual students into a series of separate, unconnected data reports. This greatly reduces the amount of information the reports can provide to the public. For example, while one survey shows the percent of students who graduate in six years, and another shows the percent of students who receive Pell grants, the two can't be linked to show the percent of Pell grant recipients who graduate in six years.

IPEDS recently proposed modernizing the system by consolidating the various reports into a single, streamlined process, whereby institutions would simply submit one report with all the neccessary information tied to data about individual students, called "unit records." That would allow for both new and more accurate measures (like the previously mentioned graduation rates for lower-income students, or giving institutions credit for students who start at one institution and transfer to graduate elsewhere). While the data would be transmitted and stored as unit records, public information about individual students would never be disclosed, protected by long-established federal privacy laws and secure data systems.

The associations of public universities largely supported the proposal because--well, because it's obviously a good idea, a modernized data submission process and more abundant, accurate information for the public.

NAICU, on the other hand, fought the proposal from day one. For them, increased transparency and greater public information apparently warrants opposition on general principle. Higher education lobbyists successfully convinced the House of Representatives to pass legislation banning the unit-record system earlier this year. But the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently released a draft report endorsing the unit-record system. Thus, the poll results released today.

The poll seems to indicate strong opposition to the system. But as is always the case when interpreting polls commissioned by parties with a vested interest in the results, it's crucial to examine the wording of the questions. The first question was:

The federal government has proposed a system where colleges and universities would be required to report individual student’s academic, financial aid, and enrollment information. This data would be linked to individual students through a unique identifier, and potentially to information from the student’s high school and elementary records. Would you support or oppose requiring colleges and universities to report individual student information to the federal government?

This question makes the intent of the survey clear, by (1) failing to mention that the information would be kept strictly confidential, and (2) asserting, appropos of nothing, that the information could "potentially" be linked to K-12 records, even though nothing in the proposal itself suggests anything of the sort.

The second question was:

Statement A: (Some/Other) people say that having more detailed information about college students would promote greater accountability for colleges and universities.

Statement B: (Some/Other) people say that enough data is already collected at the college and university level, and that reporting individual data is a breach of privacy that could result in abuses of people’s personal information.

Which statement do you agree with more?

Like question #1, question #2 is two is designed to elicit negative reactions to an unsupported, hypothetical problem. Release of almost any personal information of any kind "could" result in a breach of privacy and "could" result in some kind of abuse, the question is whether such an outcome is intended or likely in any way.

The third question was:

Statement A: (Some/other) people say that collecting data on individual students makes colleges and universities more transparent, so people can see if these institutions are being well-managed.

Statement B: (Some/other) people say that collecting individual student data is just costly and intrusive and does not address or solve any pressing public policy issue.

Which of these positions comes closest to your own position?

This question goes directly to the rhetorical bait-and-switch driving NAICU's opposition to the unit-record system. The proposed system was not designed as a way to monitor and study individual students. It's designed to monitor and study individual institutions. NAICU has cleverly conflated student privacy with institutional privacy.

Moreover, the idea that there are no "pressing public policy issues" addressed by the new information the system would provide is simply incorrect. There are many, most of which are documented convincingly in the Commission's draft report. They deal with the failure of many higher education institutions, including the members of NAICU, to provide students with the high-quality education they need. It is the unwillingness of those institutions to be held accountable for those failures that lies at the heart of their opposition to the unit record system.

In a press release accompanying the poll results, NAICU President David Warren said:

“It is ironic that we are considering such an assault on Americans’ privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July, when we celebrate the American values of freedom and choice.”

The fact that NAICU would go so far as to frame this as a security issue, in this day and age, shows just how entrenched their opposition to transparency and accountability really is. If anyone on the the Commission needed convincing that they must take a strong stand on behalf of more transparency and public information for students and taxpayers, this misleading, self-serving poll surely provides all the evidence they need.

Weighted Student Funding: A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?

Last week, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a lengthy new manifesto promoting the idea of “weighted student funding.” Endorsed by an ideologically diverse collection of education policy bigwigs (including my current and former employers), the report essentially combines some very important ideas about correcting resource inequities within school districts with a plan to pave the way for vouchers.

But left-leaning education advocates should nonetheless consider holding their fire. In endorsing the proposal, conservatives may inadvertently provide the most potent ammunition yet to those want to use lawsuits as a lever to raise taxes and increase funding for education.

In a nutshell, the report proposes that every student should be assigned a certain amount of money, which would vary--or be "weighted"--depending on their educational needs. That money should go to the school in which they choose to enroll.

This idea isn’t quite as novel as it’s made out to be, in that this is basically the way states fund their school finance systems today. Parents decide where to send their children to school by deciding where to live, and school districts receive money from the state based on how many students they enroll. Virtually all states weight those allocations already according to the same factors—disability status, economic disadvantage, etc.--mentioned in the report.

So the “weighting” is not the innovation here. The new twists are: (1) The money follows the students to the school, not the school district, and, (2) The school might not be a traditional public school.

The first piece, school-based funding, is a great idea. The papers catalogues a range of little-known and pernicious ways that certain schools in larger districts—usually disproportionately full of low-income, low-performing, and minority children—get the short end of the funding stick. Guaranteeing those schools a fair share of the funding designated for their students, and providing more money for harder-to-educate students, is an important and necessary challenge, and all the signees deserve credit for taking it on.

But it’s also not hard to see how well this fits into the voucher agenda. While the proposal takes care to limit the conversation to public schools, it also expands the definition of “public” as far as it can, referring to public schools as including “schools of choice.”

This definitional stretching is not an accident. Voucher proposals founder rhetorically on the distinction between the public and private spheres. People believe, rightly, that public dollars should be used for public purposes. So when a proposal is framed as diverting those resources to private entities like private schools, people recoil.

Weighted student funding is arguably a three-step strategy for blurring that distinction. First, get people used to the idea that education funding is first and foremost connected to real live students, not bureaucratic legal entities like school districts. Second, give students more school choices, first within the public school system and then expanding outward to include less traditional options like charter schools, building the sense that choice is an ordinary and necessary component of public education.

Third and finally—this isn’t an official recommendation, but some of the signatories make their intentions about it explicit in the footnotes—expand the sphere of eligible schools even further to include what are now thought of as private schools. At this point, the whole distinction between “public” and “private” schools starts to lose meaning, because all a “public” school means is a school that enrolls “public” students. And since all students receive vouchers, all students—and thus, all schools—are public.

This is sure to draw the ire of voucher opponents. But before they attack weighted school funding, they might want to reconsider. In supporting the plan, some conservative education advocates may be inadvertently weakening their position in another key area: opposition to new, court-mandated funding for public education.

School funding in the United States has been and in many states continues to be deeply inequitable, to the detriment of disadvantaged students, resulting in lawsuits in nearly every state. But some state courts have historically been reluctant to force legislatures to spend specific amounts of money on education, for two reasons. First, there was no consensus as to what, exactly, schools are supposed to accomplish. Second, there was no consensus as to how much money meeting those goals—whatever they are—should reasonably cost.

The standards movement has pretty much taken care of the first problem. Legislatures have defined exactly what students are supposed to know and be able to do. But the second issue—reasonable cost—remains tricky. Conservatives constantly argue that the education system gets plenty of money already to meet established goals; it just needs to spend what it has more efficiently.

Weighted school funding would put that contention to the test. As the report says:

“Under weighted school funding, if weights are implemented properly, schools will have powerful incentives to serve more disadvantaged kids. Schools may begin to vie for these populations to gain increased funding, rather than shun them as is often the case today.”

This makes the setting the weights properly crucial. While there are a number of ways to set weights, in the long run the best way is probably to let the market decide. As the report says:

“Just as the free market sets prices for goods and services, the market for hard-to-educate children can determine their weighting. Principals and schools should seek to educate hard-to-educate children because they know that with the money accompanying the child they can show improvement trends and reach performance levels. If this doesn’t happen, the district or state should adjust weights until it does.”

This market approach for setting weights would be particularly effective if there was an element of hard accountability to the system—if, for example, a school received a standard amount of money per student enrolled up front, but only received the additional, “weighted” amount once students actually met academic standards. In other words, incentives for schools to not just enroll hard-to-educate students but actually educate them successfully.

Here’s a guess—under such a system, the market-determined weight for disadvantaged students would be a whole lot higher than people realize. So high, in fact, that it would put a lot of the counter-arguments to "adequacy"-based lawsuits to rest.

In other words, weighted student funding could give school finance litigants the final, missing piece of the puzzle: solid, market-based evidence for exactly how much it costs to educate disadvantaged students up to established academic standards. How could conservatives disagree, once the market, in all its wisdom, has spoken?

So voucher opponents should be cautious about criticizing weighted student funding. The report contains a lot of valuable ideas and perhaps even the seeds of grand bargain between liberal and conservative factions in the fight over school finance—choice in exchange for adequate funding. For a system that currently has too little of both, this would be a welcome step indeed.

Movin' On Up!

Expect light or no posting from us here the next few days, as Education Sector moves to our new office. We'll be back posting after the 4th of July holiday. New address and phone number:

1201 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Suite 850
Washington, DC 20036
(202/552-2840)

(It's actually west--not east--of our old location, but I like the song anyway...)

Snakes, and Snails, and Puppy Dog tails

Who knew this would spark so much sound and fury? Certainly not me.

Of course, not everyone likes my arguments about why we shouldn't be panicking about a so-called "boy crisis." This John Leo blog post provides a pretty good example of some of the less positive feedback I've been getting. I have to admit, I was at a loss when I first read it because, aside from calling my report "basically an op-ed piece," Leo doesn't say word one about the actual substance of the report: he doesn't challenge the data I cite or explain why he thinks we should ignore it or interpret it differently than I did.

His biggest complaint seems to be that...I'm a feminist who doesn't want people to talk about the boys crisis because it distracts attention from girls? I'm still not really sure.

I know I shouldn't be surprised that some people think I'm writing that the boy crisis is overhyped because of some gender politics agenda, or that I want people to focus on girls' problems, or that I hate boys--or something. But it still seems strange to me.

I started looking the this issue because the some of the articles I was reading about the boy crisis earlier this year seemed to rely heavily on individual anecdotes, "expert" quotes that didn't seem to be backed up with evidence, and a few provocative pieces of evidence about how boys were doing relative to girls--most notably the now near-universally known fact that girls make up 56 percent of undergraduate college enrollment. After all, if boys are in trouble, we should be using data--not anecdote--to figure out how to deal with the problem. I was particularly perplexed because the arguments these articles and experts put forward for why boys weren't doing well in school seemed to be all over the place, too, and even contradicting each other.

So I started looking at the data: NAEP data; college enrollment figures; statistics on disabilities, drug use, disciplinary problems--wherever I could find national sample data or statistics from reputable sources. But I found evidence that, contrary to the articles I'd been reading, boys and young men were actually improving on a lot of measures. Sure, there are areas where there are problems--particularly high school--and areas where girls are doing better than boys. But the evidence doesn't suggest that boys--certainly not all boys--are on some kind of train that's speeding rapidly over down* a cliff. And ignoring this fact doesn't help us to think or talk reasonably about how to improve education--for boys or girls.

*My colleague Kevin Carey points out that, while speeding over a cliff is a common phrase, speeding down one really doesn't make much sense. On a purely anecdotal note, one guy who certainly has better verbal skills than this gal.

More Munchkin Love

A new CED report makes the economic case for greater public investment in universal preschool, looks at how much different policy alternatives here would cost, and also discusses some interesting alternative funding mechanisms. Some of this will not be new to early childhood geeks, but the analysis around policy and funding alternatives is worth checking out.

Charter Operators Pulling a Wal-Mart?

If true, this is troubling. NYC charter school teacher Nichole Byrne Lau says she was fired for trying to organize teachers at her school. The school's chief executive says she was fired for making racist comments to students. It's not clear yet--and may never be--who's telling the truth here, but either way this situation is FUGLY. Charter schools that behave in illegal and wrong ways to quash employee efforts to unionize deserve to be dealt with harshly by their authorizers and the state. After all, charter teachers have a right to unionize if they want to, there are some highly successful unionized charter schools, and when charter operators act like Wal-Mart towards employee efforts to unionize, it only gives amunition to charter foes.

Joe Williams has more here.

UPDATE I: Edwize and NCLBlog also have more, and it's pretty fiery. I couldn't agree with them more that if the school fired Lau just for trying to organize, it should be dealt with seriously. Joe suggests it should be closed. I think firing the individuals who thought this was acceptable (including eliminating board members) and continuing to monitor labor rights in the school might be adequate. But first the school's authorizer needs to make a serious effort to ferret out what actually went on here. Not having been in the school I'm not going to judge based solely on media coverage. And the fact that some schools are or may be acting badly here is not a case for requiring all charter schools in the state to unionize as Ed and Leo seem to think**.

UPDATE II: This Steve Gilliard post on the subject, to which Lindsay linked, is atrocious. To whit:

Charter schools sound like a great idea, until you hear about the games the schools play. Nest+m finally didn't have to share their school with the minority kids, but it cost them their principal. Which is the new deal many of these schools cut: you get your way, but you lose the principal.

What the devil does Gilliard mean there? NEST+m is not a charter school, but an elite NYC traditional public school that wanted to keep Ross Global Academy Charter School (aka the "minority kids" to which Gilliard refers) out of excess space in NEST+m's underutilized facility. So is Gilliard accidentally aiming his anti-charter barbs at a "good" traditional public school? Or does he think NEST+m's students should have been protected from those pesky minority students--which would indeed be a novel position for a so-called progressive.

More significantly: Yes, some charter schools play games. And that's bad. But that's what authorizers and public accountability are for, to catch when charter schools are playing games and make them stop or shut them down. And that's why the authorizer should crack down--hard--on Williamsburg Charter High School if they did fire Lau for trying to organize.

UPDATE III: From an NYC-based reader who's worked with Williamsburg Charter School High School students (but is an independent observer as far as the school is concerned):

From what I have seen and heard from students, it seems like a good school that is providing students with a unique, positive experience, especially considering that their high school options are limited in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn community. It would be a loss for the students and their parents if the school were closed because of bad actions by the CEO. I just hope that as this unfolds people remember that there is more at stake than just the interests of the adults involved and the political implications for charter schools, that there are students and parents whose lives will be greatly impacted by any decisions. If the school is closed, parents will be scrambling to find good alternative high schools for these students.

This gets back to one of the knottiest issues in charter schooling, and school accountability more generally: What do you do with a school that has problems but is still the best alternative available for some of the students it serves? Obviously, long term the solution is to build LOTS MORE HIGH QUALITY ALTERNATIVES (hint to NY state legislators: that would be one reason it's GOOD to raise the charter school cap--then the threat to close down schools that don't respect labor laws will be a much more real one). In the short term, these balances are a little difficult--but it's not an excuse for not holding charter schools accountable for both student performance and following the rules.

**UPDATE IV (Really, this would be getting ridiculous if it weren't such an important subject): Ed at NCLBlog elaborates further on his position towards charters and unions, which I appreciate because I did misunderstand him the first time I read his post, and I probably read Leo's comments at the end of his post as a policy prescription they weren't intended to be. Thanks for straightening me out on that. In general I would be in favor of making it easier for charter school teachers to unionize, although I do think it's important that individual charter schools remain separate bargaining units.

Fluff wins!

Yesterday marked the end of the Fluffergate saga, a heated battle over whether to serve Fluffernutters in Massachusetts schools.

The Fluffernutter, a popular New England sandwich made of peanut butter and Fluff marshmallow creme, became a topic of contention earlier this month, when Massachusetts state Senator Jarrett Barrios learned that his third-grade son was being served Fluffernutter sandwiches at school and proposed legislation to limit the serving of Fluffernutters statewide. State Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein vowed to "fight to the death for Fluff" and began a campaign to designate the Fluffernutter, which originated in Massachusetts, the "official sandwich of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Impassioned Fluff fans called anti-Fluff politicians "anti-Massachusetts" and "almost anti-American," and the head of Fluff's parent company argued that obesity could not be legislated and begged to be allowed to make Fluff in peace. Yesterday Barrios, who admitted that he "loves Fluff as much as the next legislator," announced he would abandon the proposed amendment, saying that it had gotten to the point where his original goal, which was "to have a discussion about what is a healthy and nutritious meal for kids in school," was overshadowed.

Fluff is produced by family-owned Durkee-Mower Inc., which churns out 30,000 pounds of Fluff a day and 1.7 million pounds a year. Evidently, the company's motto—"First you spread, spread, spread your bread with peanut butter; add Marshmallow Fluff and have a Fluffernutter"—has been effective; Fluff is now distributed across North America and Europe and rivals Skippy's most popular peanut butter product as the best-selling item in the sandwich-spread sections of New England supermarkets. October 8th has even been designated as National Fluffernutter Day. "There are many who say you haven't really lived until you've taken a bite out of one of these distinctly American treats!" said Durkee-Mower Inc. president Don Durkee.

From a dietary standpoint, it seems clear that Fluff has no nutritional value whatsoever. However, it's also unclear whether it deserves to be singled out from other junk foods. The creme, made of only four ingredients—corn syrup, sugar syrup, vanilla flavoring and egg whites—is 50 percent sugar, prompting Barrios to state, "I'm not sure we should be even calling it a food." On the other hand, Fluff has no preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers, or colorings and is gluten-free and kosher.One school food service director pointed out that the Fluffernutter appeases finicky eaters, boosts students' daily calorie intake, and encourages them to eat peanut butter, a good source of protein and vitamin E. A Fluffernutter sandwich on wheat bread packs about 328 calories, about the same as PB&J, and some lawmakers argued that jelly was no better than Fluff on sandwiches.

In seriousness, the Fluffernutter debate is entertaining but silly—a bunch of Fluff, if you will. An informal poll by Barrios' staff found that only one in 14 Massachusetts schools even serve Fluffernutters, so PB&J is probably a greater threat to Massachusetts children's health. Barrios can take solace in the fact that the school district in Cambridge, his home district, has decided to remove Fluff from its menu this September. The failed amendment, however, does bring up a few important questions for education policymakers: What role should schools play in the fight against skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity and diabetes? Can nutrition in schools be legislated? And is the Fluffernutter ultimately a force for good or for evil in American society?

--By Laura Boyce

More Sad News

Eric Rofes passed away on Monday. Rofes, 51, is best known as an activist for gay and lesbian rights, HIV/AIDS awareness, and gay men's health. He played a critical role in building organizations that responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis in San Francisco and elsewhere in the 1980s, and has written influential books on the AIDS epidemic, gay culture, and the effect of the former on the latter.

Rofes was also a lifelong educator. In the 1970s he was fired from public school teaching for being an "out" gay man, his activism continued his work as an educator in a different context, and in the 1990s he earned a Ph.D. and became a professor of education. His in addition to work on race, gender, sexuality and social justice in education, he also researched and wrote extensively on charter schools. His 2004 book, The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools, co-edited with Lisa Stulberg, presents a Progressive argument for supporting increased public school choice and charter schools. I was fortunate to meet Dr. Rofes when he and Dr. Stulberg spoke about their book at the Progressive Policy Institute last year, and was very sad to learn of his death. Charter schools--and Progressive supporters of bold, outside the box thinking about how to realize social justice in public education--have lost an important ally. His family and friends will be in my prayers.

Spellings Commission Pulls no Punches

A draft report from Sec. Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education was released yesterday. Most of what I have to say about it is here, at the always timely and informative InsideHigherEd.com. One point to add: over the course of the months in which the commission has been meeting, the chairman, Charles Miller, has leveled a number of sharp critiques at the American higher education system. While the report runs to 27 pages, it's actually quite succinct in laying out all of those criticisms along with evidence to support them.

Yet while both Miller and the report have been heavily criticized by various members of the higher education establishment, virtually none of the criticisms actually address, or refute, the charges he's made. Instead, everyone has complained about issues of "tone," calling the report "mean-spirited," "hostile," "confrontational," etc. etc. Despite the fact that the stakes of this debate are enormously high, both for the millions of students attending college and society at large, people seem most concerned that a frank discussion of the issues is somehow...impolite.

As they say in law, if you've got the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you've got the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law on your side, pound the table. The chorus of table-pounding from the defenders of the higher education status quo is very telling.

Terrible Sleater-Kinney Breakup News

Sleater-Kinney, arguably the greatest rock and roll band in the entire world, announced that they're breaking up. They'll be playing the 9:30 club here in DC in August and then a final show at Lollapalooza in Chicago. On the off chance that there's any significant crossover between Quick+ED readership and S-K fandom, I'll be at both shows.

No education angle here, just bad news.

More on children and media: Vin Rouge d’Hollywood

It appears that the television-refrigerator analogies of the post below have struck a chord with one American Psycho fan, and I want to applaud the sentiment of his response post. While I can’t claim to be an American Psycho fan myself, I agree with Yglesias' argument that too many movies with artistic or social value get dismissed on the basis of violent content.

This said, when it comes to children's programming, I still believe we can draw a distinction between the value of educational shows like Blue's Clues and Sesame Street versus movies like American Psycho, regardless of their artistic value. I have a hard time believing that children would benefit as much from studying American Psycho as from watching serious, curriculum-based educational programs—though perhaps its value would increase with age as they grow into astute, culture scrutinizing bloggers. If I may, another food analogy: most parents would probably prefer to serve their six year olds nutrition-infused grape juice than red wine, even if most of us enjoy an occasional glass of merlot with dinner as adults and aren’t hoping for a revival of prohibition.

I agree, as I expressed in my own post, that media regulations by the FCC have little value (and potential detriment to free speech.) I also agree with the observation that American Psycho might have serious value, but let’s be clear about whose palette it will benefit. Kids still need their grape juice and Wishbone. It seems to me that when it comes to media, the market has a lot more brands of wine than grape juice. So let’s enjoy our vin rouge d’Hollywood, but make sure kids don’t go thirsty while we defend the artistry of blood baths.

--By Carolynn Molleur-Hinteregger

Children and media: time to restock the fridge?

We constantly blame electronic media for negatively impacting children: violent video games cause school shootings, Myspace facilitates stalking, and television leads to childhood obesity. Considering the average American spends over 4 hours a day watching TV, the effects of media warrant serious attention. But what sort of attention? Since the first congressional hearings on television violence in 1952, legislators have engaged in free-speech-versus-censorship tug-of-wars focused on restricting what we don’t want children watching. Meanwhile, too little has been said about what we do want them watching.

The New America Foundation recently hosted a conference called, "Beyond Censorship:
Technologies and Policies to Give Parents Control Over Children’s Media Content."
Panelists avoided government censorship but continued to focus on censorship at the level of individual households, talking instead about tools like TV ratings and v-chips.

They admitted that television, movie, and video game ratings, each a different system, can feel like alphabet soup, and they acknowledged the difficulty of extending ratings to increasing internet and wireless media. They also reported that only 15% of parents use the v-chips now included in almost all televisions. Since children often surpass their parents in technologic know-how, the chip begs analogy to the childproof pill bottles that I unscrewed for my grandmother at age five.

Even if we perfect such technologies, Americans will probably continue to spend a great deal of time consuming media; if we don’t want kids watching the likes of American Psycho and the Playboy Channel, we need to provide alternatives. It’s like junk food. If parents want their child to stop eating junk food, do they empty refrigerator and let their children starve? Hopefully not. They stock the shelves with milk and apples. We will continue to use media, so let’s start stocking the channels with beneficial programs.

The conference briefly addressed children’s programming when a representative from TiVo demonstrated TiVo’s “KidZone.” “KidZone” allows parents to find and queue up children’s shows helping avoid inappropriate content while harnessing TV’s educational potential—provided that quality educational programming actually exists. This is not the only technology using media positively. The Play Station craze, Dance Dance Revolution, has couch potatoes dancing vigorously, transforming inactive screen-time into exercise.

But such innovations are rare and often expensive. Anyone looking for enlightening alternatives to reality TV shows and American Idol take-offs knows the frustration of settling for History Channel reruns.

The Children's Television Act of 1992, the same act that regulated v-chips, requires all broadcasters to air a minimum of 3 hours per week of educational children’s programming. Congress included the mandatory educational programming because they recognized that market forces alone wouldn’t provide an adequate supply of quality programs.

Their support stopped there. As a panelist from PBS reported, PBS has developed curriculum-based programming but lacks the funding to air it. We should be increasing, rather than cutting, the budgets of public broadcasters who bring us the likes of Sesame Street, viewed by 6 million children a week. And if Americans watch 4 hours of TV a day, 3 hours of educational programming seems pretty puny.

Media has as much power to do good as to do harm, a possibility we overlook in all this negative attention. Focusing on the media we want, rather than creating ever more complicated tools for parents, is the real way around censorship quicksand and media's negative effects.

--By Carolynn Molleur-Hinteregger

World Cup 2007, Thanks Title IX

Today marks the 34th anniversary of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. I didn’t realize that I was a Title IX baby (the law passed just three months after I was born), until I was an adult. But I know I reaped the benefits, along with millions of other little girls who were given new opportunities to play hard and learn more.

I hope by now there’s some common knowledge about Title IX, but just in case, here’s a quick reminder. Title IX is not just for girls. The law actually protects male and female students and employees from sex discrimination at all elementary schools, high schools, and colleges and universities that receive federal funding, as well as educational programs and activities that are affiliated with any of these schools.

And it’s not just about sports. Title IX covers all arenas of public education. Enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Title IX covers recruitment, admissions, course offerings, financial aid, scholarships, housing facilities, and the list goes on… It is intended to guarantee equal access and opportunity for both genders for the entire educational experience. It is wide-reaching, and that’s why it has made such a difference.

So I hate to return to sports on a Title IX blog, since most of the public attention to Title IX has been chronicling the woes of “at-risk” men’s wrestling teams rather than the many other more important educational issues. But I watched the U.S. men’s team sadly lose to Ghana in yesterday’s World Cup match (Ghana, by the way, seems like the underdog team to cheer for now that the U.S. is out of it- this is Ghana’s first World Cup appearance and they are now the only African team remaining).

I know U.S. soccer fans are really depressed. But all is not lost for four more years. The women will be back next year for the FIFA 2007 Women’s World Cup, to be held in China.

And thanks to Title IX, the U.S. women’s team is a pretty good shot on goal.

David Brooks on Higher Education: First, Maybe Second Stomach of Cow

David Brooks' column($) about higher education in today's NYTimes doesn't sink to the fourth-stomach-in-cow level of his previous piece on gender and education. But it still misses the mark. For some reason, Brooks thinks higher education systems should be judged on their success in achieving every conceivable goal except...education.

After trying (and mostly failing) to set up the piece with a World Cup hook, Brooks proceeds to his main contention: the American higher education system is the best in the world because, unlike its inferior European counterparts, it's unregulated by the government:

[American universities are] spirited competitors in the marketplace of ideas, status, talent and donations. The European system, by contrast, is state-dominated and uncompetitive. During the 19th century, governments in Spain, France and Germany abolished the universities' medieval privileges of independence. Governments took over funding and control, and imposed radical egalitarian agendas. Universities could not select students on merit, and faculty members became civil servants. The upshot is that the competitive American universities not only became the best in the world — 8 out of the top 10 universities are American — they also remained ambitious and dynamic. They are much more responsive to community needs.

Not only have they created ambitious sports programs to build character among students and a sense of solidarity across the community, they also offer a range of extracurricular activities and student counseling services unmatched anywhere else. While the arts and letters faculties are sometimes politically cloistered, the rest of the university programs are integrated into society,performing an array of social functions. They serve as business incubation centers (go to Palo Alto). With their cultural and arts programs, they serve as retiree magnets (go to Charlottesville). With their football teams, they bind communities and break down social distinctions (people in Alabama are fiercely loyal to the Crimson Tide, even though most have not actually attended the university).

There are two words missing from this long list of virtues: learning and teaching.

Universities compete for "ideas, status, talent and donations." That's basically true. Competing for ideas and status means recruiting faculty who are distinguished in their academic field. Talent means recruiting students with high SAT scores. Donations means begging for money. None of these things have much to do with how well universities teach students or how much students learn while they're there.

Brooks' further list of good things universities do--character building, extracurricular activities, business incubation, retiree attraction, community integration, sports--is also accurate, and full of admirable qualities. But none of them matter when it comes to the most important thing universities are supposed to do: educate students.

Brooks sinks to fourth-stomach mode in blithely asserting that "8 out of the top 10 universities are American." The criteria used to generate that list are as follows:

Number of alumni winning Nobel Prizes or Field medals: 10%
Number of faculty winning Nobel Prizes or Field medals: 20%
Number of faculty who are "highly cited researchers": 20%
Research output (articles published): 40%
Size: 10%

Again, I'm glad we've got lots of big universities that are filled with highly-cited Nobel prize winners. The more the better. But again, these things have nothing to do with teaching students. Nor does the presence or absence of the top eight in the world have any impact on the 99% of American college students who don't attend one of those institutions. Saying we're the best because we have Cal Tech is like saying New York City has the best K-12 system in the nation because it has Bronx Science.

Brooks is right to celebrate the lively competition in our higher education market. But when the terms of competition aren't related to learning, institutional incentives are skewed. Colleges and universities have every reason to engage in morally dubious practices like giving more financial aid to rich students and less to poor students, and no reason to make sure that faculty actually know how to teach. As long as higher education is judged by every factor except learning, too many students won't get the education they need.

Contraband!

Via the Education Wonks (who also add some amusing comments of their own), NEA has a silly list of odd things teachers have confiscated from students in their careers. Since I'm pretty sure that every watergun I had as a kid had been confiscated by my dad, a high school principal, from some student or other, this made me happy.

The Unbearable Randomness of Policy

Per the AFT blog, the Indianapolis Star reports that policymakers in Indiana are once again talking about funding full-day kindergarten for all Hoosier students. Considering that many states have done this for decades and are now concentrating on giving all students access to pre-kindergarten, this is welcome, if belated, news.

It also reminds me of one the formative "A-Ha!" lessons I've learned : education policy, and public policy generally, is often a lot more random than you'd ever want to believe.

In 1999, I worked as a fiscal analyst for the Democratic caucus of the Indiana Senate. I've had jobs with better titles and more responsibility, but never one that was as much fun--it was basically a front-row seat for politics and democracy in all their messy, fascinating glory.

Indiana was writing a new, two-year state budget in 1999. Tax revenues had swelled due the stock market run-up and long economic expansion, and the state had accumulated a huge budget surplus. Most of it would be gone within a few years as Indiana would be hit particularly hard by the 2001 recession. But we didn't know that then, so the session was dominated by one big question: "How the heck are we going to spend all this money?"

Republicans, being Republicans, wanted to cut taxes. But they only controlled the Senate; Democrats had the House of Representatives and the governor's office, which was occupied by the late Frank O'Bannon. He was a popular governor with a genuine committment to education, and his announced number one budget priority for 1999 was full-day kindergarten.

Officially, the Indiana budget process starts in the December prior to the budget year with the submission of the governor's proposed budget. The legislature convenes in January and over the next four or five months each chamber holds lengthy hearing and debates considering that proposal before passing their own versions of a budget bill.

In reality, that's all prelude to the start of the real budget-writing process, which begins about 48 hours before the session is scheduled to end, and continues for two straight sleepless days and nights of non-stop negotiating and wrangling. Sweaty lobbyists lurk behind the Indiana Statehouse's huge granite pillars trading gossip and looking for last-minute chances to put a word in for their clients while staff members run marked-up budget bills and spreadsheet printouts back and forth from one chamber to the other across the top, fourth floor of the building, as well as up and down to the governor's office two floors below. The whole thing runs on adrenaline, caffeine, and--when things start to get really tense--the occasional bottle of rejuvinating spirits strategically located in the bottom of legislative desk drawers.

The 1999 negotiations wore on into the second night, until eventually nearly everyone involved was crammed into a back room in the fourth floor office of the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was an old-school Democrat from South Bend form a political family who would eventually go on to to become Speaker of the House. While it was late and the governor had already left for the night, his representatives were in the room and insisted on full-day kindergarten. But the price tag was high--at least $100 million in year one and upward from there--and despite projections of robust future revenues (which would turn out to be wildly incorrect) there were problems getting all the budget numbers to add up.

And then--and I've never quite been able to figure out exactly how this happened--some process of missed, botched, or willfully ignored communication led the chairman to leave the room for a final, one-on-one, no-staff-present deal-making session with his equally crusty, old-school Republican Senate counterpart, thinking that full-day kindergarten was off the table. A few hours later the deal was done.

The governor was woken and notified, at which time he came back to the building for an emergency 3AM staff meeting where he reportedly used language that to this day I can't fully believe given that he was, both in public and in person, one of the most decent, genial, down-to-earth people I've ever met in my life. But it was too late; 5-year old Hoosiers were stuck with substandard education policy for what turned out to be seven years and counting.

The point being that it all could just as easily gone the other way. Everyone was tired, emotional, frustrated, honestly not thinking particularly straight or well. The policymaking process in extremis is like an billiard ball with dozens of cues pushing on it from different directions all at once. It sits static under all that countervailing pressure until the slightest shift sends it flying off in a direction that not one of the cue-holders can completely predict or control.

That doesn't mean that organized efforts can't do a great deal to position the ball and increase the odds for students. But as in all things there are moments where circumstances shift unpredicatably for good or--unfortunately in this case--ill, and it can take a long time to get those moments back.

Margaret Spellings, World Traveler

Speaking of thinking about the problems facing children in other countries...CNN.com reports on the seven overseas trips Margaret Spellings has taken since becoming U.S. Secretary of Education a year and a half ago. Some conservatives are criticizing these trips as "junkets;" other commentators say the importance of education to America's global "competitiveness" requires education leaders to pay more attention to what's happening abroad. I'm in no position to judge the merits of Secretary Spellings' foreign travel, but I do think there are important lessons we can learn from other countries.

UPDATE: Alexander Russo and the Edwonks have a bit more to say about this.

World Refugee Day

I spend most of my time thinking about problems with public education and other services for children here in the U.S. and how to solve them, so it's easy to forget sometimes how serious the problems are facing children and families in many other parts of the world. Every so often, though, I get jolted with a troubling reminder of how bad the circumstances are for many children around the world.

Today is one of those days. It's World Refugee Day--a day set up to draw attention to the plight of the over 20 million people around the world who are refugees. Nearly half--more than 9 million--are children. Many of these children are orphans or separated from their families, many have survived truly horrific experiences, and many are struggling to survive on a daily basis. And many face bleak futures, without any homes to return to or clear legal status and limited or no access to economic opportunities or education (this is particularly the case for girls).

As we work to improve education in this country, it's important not to forget these children. Click here, here, here, or here to learn about some of the many opportunities--through donations of money or good, volunteering, or advocacy--to support work on behalf of refugees. In addition, the UN Commission on Human Rights offers a variety of resources for educators to help the children they work with learn about these issues and how they can make a difference for other children.

Another One Bites the Dust?

WaPo reports that the District of Columbia Board of Education is thinking of getting out of the charter authorizing business in D.C. My colleague Andrew Rotherham and Mark Lerner both think this is a good thing. I'm not so sure.

Don't get me wrong: Quality authorizing is critical to the success of charter schooling, bad authorizers do the movement no favors, the Board of Education has some significant problems as an authorizer, and if it has neither the will nor the capacity to become a top-notch authorizer, then it should get out of the business.

But I would be sorry to see that happen because I think that, if the Board of Education would get its act together, chartering could become a powerful part of an overall strategy to help reform DCPS.

Bear with me here: Fixing DCPS is a Herculean task, and I'm increasingly convinced that the system is just too dysfunctional in too many ways for any kind of top-down, one-fell-swoop reform to solve the underlying problems there. The best chance of achieving real, positive educational results for D.C. kids may be to hive off large parts of the system until what remains is a manageable, semi-functional core into which the Board of Education and DCPS leaders can pour reform energies. The ultimate result would look like the portfolio model Paul Hill has been talking about. And chartering--specifically converting traditional schools to charter status, or closing them down and opening new charters in their place--is the obvious tool for achieving this kind of radical paring down the system needs to thrive.

Moreover, there are a lot of gaps in D.C.'s current educational system--neighborhoods with no good schools, lots of kids who need alternative placements but have nowhere to go, and the like. High-quality chartering--in which the Board of Education would request proposals and recruit successful charter operators to open the kind of schools the city currently lacks--strikes me as an efficient way to address this problem.

It's important to note that both of these functions are ones that the Board of Education is uniquely situated to perform. The D.C. Public Charter School Board is a good (though not perfect) authorizer, and it has been critical to the growth of D.C.'s strong charter sector. But it can't help DCPS pare down or diagnose and fill gaps in the existing DCPS options. The Public Charter Schools Board's strength is its ability to independently create space for new schools in the District. The Board of Education's potential strength as an authorizer would be using chartering to complement and support DCPS reform efforts.

That's not to say it would be easy for the Board of Education to shift to this role. Even though it's become much more effective since the institution of the hybrid board in 2000, the Board of Education still behaves too often as if it were designed to be dysfunctional (and, in some ways, it is). Moreover, the Board still has an "us versus them" attitude towards charter schools, seeing them as competition rather a potential complement to DCPS reform, and its charter monitoring responsibilities as a distraction from running DCPS, rather than a potential tool to help the system work better.

While there are some very smart and talented board members who support high-quality charter schools, I'm not sure the Board of Education overall has the will to change its perspective on charter schools or the capacity to manage charter school oversight effectively. If this is the case, then it would be best for the Board to get out of the business entirely. But I'm still holding out hope they can find the will and ability to prove their critics wrong.

UPDATE: Andy Smarick at Charter Blog has some good comments on this. But I also think he's wrong about the KIPP deal. (Sorry, Andy!)

House Budget Makes Value-Added Harder

The House Appropriations committee passed a version of the FY 2007 federal education budget earlier this week (details here). There weren't a lot of differences from the budget President Bush submitted earlier this year. But one small change is worth noting.

The administration's proposal to increase funding for state data systems from $24 million to $54 million was reduced to an increase to $35 million. This is one of those low-profile items that's not going to generate a lot of news coverage--there won't be legions of data system administrators marching on Washington to protest (too bad--that'd be pretty funny). But it actually has potentially far-reaching implications for some of the biggest K-12 issues of the day.

There's a great deal of talk right now about the potential for altering the core accountability provisions of NCLB to include "value added" measures, to shift attention from absolute performance levels to the change in performance from year to year. It's an important and complicated debate. But for many states it's also largely theoretical, and will remain so for some time. Why? Because they don't have the longitudinal data systems needed to calculate value-added measures accurately.

Those are precisely the systems this money is designed to develop and support. By failing to do all it can to build state data capacity today, Congress is potentially severely limiting its options to reform and improve NCLB in the future.

The Democrat's Dilemma: Leftist Hooey in Higher Education

InsideHigherEd reported a few days ago on recent paper from a conservative advocacy group titled "How Many Ward Churchills?", referring to the University of Colorado professor who basically said that the thousands of innocent victims of 9/11 got what was coming to them. The report suggested that the halls of academia are rife with similar folk.

Now, I generally don't give much credence to conservatives moaning about liberal bias in higher education, not because I don't accept the basic premise that the academy leans left but because I don't think it matters nearly as much as they think it does.

That said, there's a big, big difference between garden-variety liberalism and extreme Churchillian leftist nonsense. The unwillingness of Democrats to confront this distinction is a problem.

For example, a few years ago I presented at a conference in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. My subject was school funding, specifically how Illinois has among the largest funding gaps in the nation for school districts serving low-income and minority students, and how that was probably one of the reasons Illinois has the largest achievement gaps in the nation for the same kids. Lots of numbers and PowerPoint charts, followed by a few audience questions and polite applause.

Next up was a professor from DePaul. We had chatted briefly while waiting for our turn to go up on stage. I told her what I was going to say, she nodded and said she was going focus more on the "larger context." She was friendly but kind of reserved. Her speech went something like this:

"All those things the previous person said about funding inequities this and property tax rates that is all well and good, but it doesn't really matter, because as I tell my students, what we really need to address is capitalism and the racist, hegemonic patriarchy (which are, of course, the same thing), because none of this is going to change until the revolution comes. I want to be clear, just in case anyone working for Attorney General Ashcroft is in the room, that I'm not suggesting violence in the streets is needed to start that revolution, I'm not inciting anyone, but you know, that wouldn't be the worst thing." And so on and so forth in that vein for another half hour; I'm really not doing the sheer militant craziness of the speech justice.

I remember thinking "I didn't know people still said stuff like that," and then "man, her poor students."

To be sure, universities should be places of maximum diversity when it comes to different ways of seeing the world. They should support people with unpopular ideas, because the radical thinkers of today sometimes become the dominant paradigm-setters of tomorrow.

But what about the radical thinkers of yesterday, or decades ago, whose wacky ideas have been found wanting? Should college campuses be the last refuge of discredited Marxist thinking? Universities should be bastions of debate and thriving marketplaces of ideas, but at some point the market needs to be allowed to do what markets do--sort out ideas that exceed a certain threshold level of ridiculousness.

And Democrats and liberals have to admit that the population of college professors espousing such ideas is not evenly split between the right and the left. If they're not willing to say so, other people certainly will.

Curdled Cheese, Continued

Last Friday, the Commission on No Child Left Behind met in Madison, Wisconsin to discuss "how NCLB is impacting schools which are academically struggling (not making AYP)." The subject was worthy but the choice of venue strange, given that last year Wisconsin, through a series of statistical manipulations, identified fewer schools (on a percentage basis) as not making AYP than all but a handful of states, and identified only one out of 426 districts (Milwaukee).

Wisconsin Superintendant of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster was on the agenda to speak at the meeting, so I was looking forward to hearing her elaborate on Wisconsin's super-efficient approach to tackling the difficult, contentious issue of what do with under-performing schools and districts: pretend that virtually none of your schools and districts are under-performing.

Instead, she offered a "spirited defense" of the state's policies, insisting that "We have in no way tried to game the system." She also promised that the new list of schools missing AYP, due out this week, would be longer.

She was right, the new list is longer, upping the number of schools identified from 49 to 92. But before any congratulations are offered, it's important to keep in mind that this mostly just represents an extension of the state's general attitude/approach to public education, which is "Everything here is just fine, in fact fact better than fine, except for Milwaukee, which doesn't really count, in that Milwaukee is (A) A city, and (B) Populated with people who aren't...like the rest of us."

Of the 92 schools identified, the majority (58) are in Milwaukee. And the number of districts identified statewide changed from 1 out 426 to...(drum roll)...1 out 426. Still just Milwaukee.

David Brooks on Gender=Fourth Stomach in Cow

Yesterday's David Brooks column on "The Gender Gap at School" ($-sorry) manages to combine three elements that are guaranteed to make me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration: sweeping generalizations about gender; gross oversimplification (and abuse) of brain research; and sweeping, non-empirically correct generalizations about public education. Goody!

To paraphrase Brooks: "Golly, isn't it interesting that men's and women's favorite books are different? Completely ignoring any social or cultural reasons why this might be the case [like, I don't know, most guys I know would be subjected to serious abuse if their friends caught them reading Jane Eyre], I'm going to blame their brains. You see, modern science has shown us that men and women are not identical!!! Unfortunately, schools are still stuck in the mindset of the seventies--the dark ages before we realized that men and women are different--and insist on subjecting boys to a girly, "sensitive" curriculum that forces them to read books about girls and their feelings. What red-blooded young American male would put up with that? Clearly our schools are forcing boys to HATE READING."

I'm not kidding. (Seriously, if you have access to Times Select, read it yourself.)

Leave aside the dubious wisdom of taking educational advice from someone who thinks that "Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain," are the kind of books we should be using to turn boys on to reading (Tolstoy?!? Really, Dave? Have you read Tolstoy? Do you know any teenage boys?). A quick look at recommended and required summer reading lists for schools in Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, reveals that Twain, Hemmingway and other "boy-friendly" authors like Jon Krakauer or Stephen Crane have hardly been excluded from public schools. By a similar token, recent research from the Department of Education finds that, contrary to Brooks' assertions and everyone's common knowledge, recess hasn't been eliminated from public schools--nearly 90 percent of elementary schools have recess and most do so daily.

But these are quibbles. The real irritant about this piece, for me, is the way Brooks lightly tosses out some pop culture factoids about brain research and the proceeds to make sweeping recommendations for the education system based on them. Never mind that the full body of research is a lot more complicated than Brooks makes it out to be (check out this excellent book by Diane Halpern if you want an honest picture here), that the practical implications of many findings are far from clear (what would the practical implications of differences between little girls' and little boys' crayon color preferences be, anyway?), or that variations within each gender are typically much greater than the difference between the averages for each gender. David Brooks has read the pop literature on gender differences, and he is now going to pass this information (which has already been redigested from the original research more times than if it had passed through a cow's digestive system--with about the same result) on to the rest of us.

And it's not just Brooks--the basic flavor of Brook's article is the same one that permeates the current spate of articles about why boys are falling behind in school. Contrary to Brooks' assertions, plenty of people--including educators--seem plenty willing to talk about how boys and girls are different and boys are in crisis. They're just not talking about it all that thoughtfully.

UPDATE: It's come to my attention that David Brooks has a teenage son, suggesting Brooks does, in fact, know at least one teenage boy. Guess the kid must love him some Anna Karenina...

The Summer Escape

Most teachers are as excited as their students about the end of the school year. After 36 weeks of school and an average of 53 hours per week , teachers are ready for a break. But I can’t help but think that the escape that summer vacation provides might be working against schools, and the students and teachers who might otherwise rally for what needs to be changed.

Jay Mathews makes this point by describing a decade-old example of an unconventional approach to change. Basically, the story is a teacher training students to call en masse (albeit politely) to complain to an adminstrator and ultimately affect change. Mathews seems convinced that sometimes teachers and students just need to let their anger show.

Normally, I would focus on the outcome of this effort, both in terms of the administration's response and on the civil disobediance lesson imparted to the students. But right now this strategy resonates with me, mostly because of an email I received earlier in the week from a friend who teaches 3rd grade in Detroit. She’s “elated” that the year is almost done and she can “escape” from her school and the district’s “insane policies”. I understand her need for a break. She teaches in one of those schools that no one really wants to teach in, and she’s been there longer than most (just finishing up her 5th year). She loves teaching, she reminds me, but “by the end of March, I just surrender because I know I can hang on for ten more weeks…Then I can start fresh in the fall.”

There are a lot of teachers and students organizing for change, but I'm curious to know if these efforts diminish as we near June each year. Or if some cries for change just flicker out as teachers and students realize that school's out in just 10, 5, or 2 weeks. I don't believe it is the teachers' responsibility to change schools, but I know they play an undeniably important role and may make the difference. What would change if the school year were restructured, continuing year-round with smaller breaks along the way, avoiding the “surrender” that seems to occur toward the end of the year? Of course, it's possible that teachers might burn out and quit altogether, but perhaps they might be motivated to keep up a consistent stream of teaching and learning, and to push the leadership to make fundamentally important changes.

Right now, there are more than 3 million teachers who are finishing up and preparing for summer school and for some much-needed time off. Come fall, they will be rested and ready for a new year. Unfortunately, they will face many of the same problems.

Teaching Inequality

Since the early 1970s, many states have been convulsed with high-profile crises and lawsuits focused on school funding. School districts and advocates have gone to the barricades on behalf of low-income students, fighting for their fair share of society's educational resources.

But no one every learned anything (or at least, anything worth knowing) from a stack of money. Dollars are a means to an end in education; good teachers are the end. Without them, disadvantaged students face long odds of catching up with their peers and succeeding in a world where the penalty for a poor education grows by the day.

That's why the distribution of good teachers to disadvantaged students is one of the most important education policy and civil rights challenges of our time. And why a new report from the Education Trust, titled: Teaching Inequality How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality and written by Heather Peske, is so welcome. (Disclosure: I helped with some of the research that led to this report while employed at the Education Trust).

Filled with a wealth of brand-new data from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio, the report shows how schools with the highest numbers of low-income, minority, and low-performing students consistently employ the fewest number of teachers with characteristics associated with classroom effectiveness, such as experience, certification, and knowledge of the subject being taught.

It's true that these are only proxy measures which don't always correspond with the best classroom instruction. But as the report notes:

"When all of the proxies tilt one way—away from low-income and minority students—what we have is a system of distributing teachers that produces exactly the opposite of what fairness would dictate and what we need to close
achievement gaps."

Illinois, for example, rolled a range of teacher characteristics into a single composite index, and compared those figures to school poverty levels. It found that 84 percent of the highest-poverty schools in the state—the top 10 percent—fell in the bottom quartile of teacher quality. That's compared to 5 percent of the lowest-poverty schools. As Illinois Senator Barack Obama said about the report:

"..if we do nothing about this problem, we will face a future that is both morally unacceptable for our children, and economically untenable as we face a globalized world."

It's also why teacher maldistribution could be--and should be--the next frontier in the struggle for fairness on behalf of disadvantaged schoolchildren. There are millions of schoolchildren out there who are just a few good teachers away from the life they need and deserve. Changing these numbers on their behalf is an obligation we all share.

Proposition 82 Failed

On Tuesday, Californians voted against Proposition 82, the "Preschool for All" Act that would have established publicly-funded, universal preschool for all four-year-olds in the state. This is a major blow to universal preschool advocates, both in California and nationally, who had been putting a great deal of stock in the proposal.

Most observers blame Prop 82's loss on the controversies around Rob Reiner and the state's First 5 Commission, from which Reiner was forced to step down earlier this year due to conflicts of interest between his leadership of both the state-funded Commission and the campaign to promote Prop 82. That's certainly part of it.

But Prop 82's opponents were incredibly effective at seizing on (and driving into the ground) weak spots in the proposal that caused voters to have concerns about it. Some of the opponents' points were, of course, misinformation or deliberate misrepresentation of the policy here. But the opponents were able to seize ground, at least in part, because there were real policy shortcomings in how Prop. 82 would have implemented universal preschool that didn't sit well with voters.

Ironically, I think this may actually have been the best possible outcome for preschool advocates. Proposition 82's passage would have focused national attention on the implementation and impacts of universal preschool in California. If the program had failed to deliver the results preschool advocates promised--or if implementation had been a fiasco--that would have had a strong chilling effect on the preschool movement nationally. And there was a real risk of this, because some of the flaws Prop 82 opponents kept harping on really would have undermined the program's chances of success and popularity.

There's a broader lesson here for the preschool movement--over the past decade, preschool supporters (including major national foundation)--have focused there efforts primarily in three areas: building public support for universal preschool, building the research base on preschool quality, and cost-benefit analysis showing that preschool investments pay off for the public. These have all been important contributions. But if we've learned anything from the past 40 years of K-12 school reform, it's that regulating inputs and processes isn't enough to guarantee good educational results. Structures and systems--things like governance, incentives, culture--are also critical.

But the preschool movement has spent shockingly little time thinking about how publicly-funded preschool systems should be structured, in terms of governance, monitoring, oversight, parent choices, and how preschool providers should be selected (and who should be allowed to be one), among other factors. In fact, the preschool movement has been deliberately agnostic on such questions. There's a good case to be made that the structure of universal preschool will need to be different in different states to match unique local conditions. The two states that currently have universal Pre-K--Oklahoma and Georgia--demonstrate that very different structures can both be effective. But some structural characteristics are more likely to produce and support high-quality preschool than others. And without more clarity about what these conditions are from the preschool movement, state policymakers are likely to simply adopt the most politically expedient program design. That's basically what happened with Prop 82, and as a result there were clear flaws that undermined public support for it politically and would have undermined its chances of success if enacted. It's time for the preschool movement to start thinking about these questions.

Shooting the Wounded

Before he began writing his influental On Education column for the New York Times, Fred Hechinger was an editorial writer at the paper. He used a military metaphor to describe his work, and he did so only partly tongue-in-cheek. While the battle between opposing intellectual forces waged in the valley below, he would say, he took in the scene from the safety of the hillsides above. Only when the firing had ended and the smoke had cleared did he come down and fire away at the wounded.

I can't help but think that Hechinger, who died in 1995, would have done exactly that in the wake of the latest fight between education researchers over the nation's high school graduation rates.

As happens again and again in the education policy world, researchers identified with the two great galaxies in the education universe--those who support public education and those who attack it--have published competing findings, this time about the the nation's graduation rates or, more to the point, the percentages of students who fail to graduate.

On one side is political scientist Jay Greene, who argued recently that public school dropout ratese are higher than widely believed, 30 percent of the entire high school population.

Not so, says Larry Michel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. The national dropout rate is about 20 percent, Michel and colleagues contend.

The ensuring fight between the two researchers and their enemies and allies is a perfect illustration of why many policymakers can't comprehend much of the conversation about education research, and why, when they can understand it, they don't trust it.

Like so many others in education, the Greene-Michel debate quickly devolved into a jargon-filled intellectual food fight.

Michel's organization takes money from teacher unions with a vested interest in casting public schools in a positive light, Greene's supporters charged. Greene is a voucher advocate with an anti-public education ax to grind, countered Michel's defenders. Greene runs a new, $20-million research center at the University of Arkansas-Fayettesville funded by the private school voucher-advocating Walton Family Foundation and another Arkansas foundation endowed largely by Wal Mart stock, they pointed out.

In truth, who's right in the Greene-Michel debate is largely irrelevant. Both Michel and Greene report that very high percentages of African American and Hispanic students fail to earn regular high school diplomas (Greene pegs the numbers at 50 percent for Hispanic and black students in high poverty urban school systems; Michel says the average dropout rate for blacks is 25 percent and 26 percent for Hispanics). Regardless of whether one buys Greene's numbers or Michel's, the nation has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

But rather than focusing on this larger picture, the national conversation is mired in an unproductive, highly politicized debate over methodology. Where's Fred Hechinger when we need him.

62 percent

In addition to being the day of the Devil, today's also (some would say fittingly) the California primary, with voters choosing Democratic and Republican nominees for a variety of state offices, a replacement for disgraced Rep. Duke Cunningham, and also voting on Prop 82, the "Preschool for All Act." Since I've been writing a lot about this issue lately, I'm a little excited today (or possibly tomorrow) is the last time I'm going to be writing on it.

But before the door closes on Prop. 82 commentary, there's one thing I have to get off my chest. A lot of articles about the initaitive say something like this: "The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office calculates that about 62 percent of the state's 4-year-olds already attend some kind of preschool or day care, and reports from other states indicate a free program would attract about 70 percent of 4-year-olds." A lot of people are then saying "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the share of kids in preschool just eight percentage points*." Seems reasonable enough to me.

Except the whole analysis is based on a faulty notion. The number from the Legislative Analyst's Office is four-year-olds in preschool OR center-based child-care. Repeat after me: Child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool. It constantly amazes me that these two things continue to be conflated in public and policy debates. For those who don't understand the difference: Childcare is any setting in which a child is cared for by someone other than a parent, typically while parents are at work. Preschool programs specifically focus on preparing children for school. To do this, preschool programs use curricula focused on developing children’s early reading, math, social, and emotional skills and are taught by qualified teachers. Center-based childcare is simply childcare that takes place in a child-care center, rather than the home of the child or the care-giver. To be sure, some child care providers do provide high-quality, stimulating care that does support children's cognitive and emotional growth and prepare them for school. But there is tremendous variation among childcare providers, and many providers are of very low quality--essentially warehousing children. It's simply inaccurate to include children in these settings in a count of children in "preschool" just because they're not being cared for in a home.** A lot of those 62 percent of kids aren't in anything remotely like preschool, let alone high-quality preschool.

Unfortunately, a lot of analysis tends to take the stats on kids in "center-based care" (which does include preschool) as a proxy for the number in preschools, because "center-based care" happens to be what the government collects data on. As an analyst working on early childhood education, this is a huge frustration to me. But as until we stop conflating the two and define a minimum benchmark for preschool, good data here is going to be hard to come by.

*Actually, most of these people are saying, "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the number of kids in preschool just eight percent," which is WRONG, since and increase from 62 percent to 70 percent is actually a 13 percent increase, but I don't have time to get into the difference between percent increases and percentage point increases here.

**It's also troubling, to me, that all home-based care is generally lumped together in policy discussions as being of low quality. On average, center-based care is higher quality than other types of childcare, but some family-care providers probably are very good, and many families prefer them.

Quotes versus Facts

NCLBlog's John praises AJC blogger Patti Ghezzi, but I'm not sure the post he links to backs up his case. Ghezzi describes her conversation with Andrea Spreter, a young high school science teacher in New Orleans who works at "Math and Science High," which Ghezzi reports was a selective magnet program prior to Katrina (this gets a little confusing--at times Ghezzi makes it sound as if the school is still selective, and John clearly read it that way, but, as is almost always the case for charters, the school is not selective). And here's where I start getting irritated: It's a tiny quibble, but the name of the school isn't actually Math and Science High; it's New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School--like I said, tiny quibble, but if she's going to write a post on it, you'd think she could at least bother to get the name right. Further, even before Katrina, the school wasn't "selective" in the typical sense of the word. A quick glance on its website turns up the following:

For over 12 years, the New Orleans Center for Science & Math has operated as a district school providing an open door to any New Orleans high school student with an interest in pursuing the study of science, mathematics and technology. There were no barriers in the form of test, grade point requirements, or student fees for admission. This positioned the school as one of only two specialty science and math schools in the country with an open admissions policy and with a majority of African American students.

Sure, an ostensibly non-selective school can manipulate the system to choose its students, but this suggests Ghezzi didn't check out what her source told her at all. Again, I'm being pretty nitpicky, but I'm pointing these things out because Ghezzi then goes on to draw broad conclusions about the problems with charter schools--which make up most of the public schools open in New Orleans since Katrina:

So she [Spreter] is leaving Math and Science and speaking out about problems she sees with charter schools, such as lack of consistent policies, lack of oversight, absence of veteran teachers. She also craves the kind of professional development a school district can offer.

These things may very well be true--in fact, given the larger context in New Orleans and the problems any school has getting off the ground in its first year, I'd be shocked if they aren't. But to draw all this from the comments of one individual--who can really only speak for her experience and the individual school in which she works--is irresponsible.

I'm not trying to pick on Ghezzi here. Several of the posts on her blog provide interesting perspectives and/or thoughtful analysis. And I think it's important to bring the voices and experiences of individual educators into the public debate--as what they are. But this post illustrates a common and, to me, very troubling, phenomenon in education coverage.

It's simply incredibly common to read a news article about charter schools, or NCLB, or a host of other educational topics, in which someone quoted--either directly or indirectly--says something that is inaccurate, misleading, just plain wrong, or something that their personal experiences and knowledge really don't give them the authority to say. But no information is offered to prevent the reader from thinking it's the absolute truth. The attitude seems to be "if someone said it, and it's attributed to them, then it's ok to write it, and it's not the reporter's job to figure out or explain what the reality actually is." To be fair, this isn't a trend restricted to education coverage; it's an approach that's come to dominate coverage of political and policy debates to, I think the detriment of both. (If you're interested, this Jonathan Chait piece is well worth reading.)

In a related note, John and Patti are both upset that Ms. Spreter doesn't have health or retirement benefits. I'll be the first to acknowledge that, in our screwed up healthcare and social insurance system, that's an incredibly crappy position to be in. But it's important to note that Ms. Spreter is NOT in this position simply because she works in a charter school. In fact, Louisiana law requires charter schools to participate in the state retirement system. But, as Ghezzi notes, Ms. Spreter is not a full-time employee of the school. It's possible the school deliberately avoided making Spreter's job a full-time position because it didn't want to pay benefits--something a lot of private businesses do all the time--and I would also find that wrong. But it's equally possible current enrollment didn't justify a full-time physical science teacher. The point is it's impossible to judge based on the information Ghezzi presents.

Curdled Cheese

Last week the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran an article about our recent report, Hot Air, which analyzed state performance reporting under NCLB and suggests that a lot of states are gaming the system by using their standard-setting flexibility to inflate the performance of their students, schools, and districts, with Wisconsin one of the worst offenders. The state Deputy Superintendant of schools objected, saying:

"The intent of the law wasn't to rank states on gaming the system. The intent of the law was to have no child left behind, and I believe absolutely it has brought a significant focus on that issue." He said the DPI[Department of Public Instruction] was committed to doing everything it could to close the gap in achievement between high performing and low performing schools and groups of students. He said everything Wisconsin has done has been approved by federal officials and "every district in the state has made a good faith effort to implement No Child Left Behind."

Technically he's right; the intent of NCLB wasn't to rank states on gaming NCLB. That was the intent of our report. It's great that he thinks every district in the state has made a good faith effort, but that's also beside the point--the report didn't address district compliance, it said that the state department of education, where he works, wasn't acting in good faith.

And while the department may believe it did "everything it could" to help close the achievement gap, let me add one thing it may have forgotten: identifying school districts with achievement gaps. Last year Wisconsin identified one (1) district out of 426 as not making adequate yearly progress under NCLB.

I also received this email from an irate Wisconsin librarian:

Regarding your opinion that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction manipulates the "No Child Left Behind" mandates to side-step the law -- ludicrous. Wisconsin is a modern-day Utopia with high academic standards and success. Wisconsin high school students have had the highest ACT scores in the nation for years. Do you really think our education system is that flawed if our students are that successful? Wisconsin and Minnesota have the best educational systems and teachers in the nation. The students that they serve are hindered by the "No Child Left Behind" mandates. If you were that concerned about the students in this nation, you would make sure that the students in the private schools were meeting educational standards - oops, there are none!

I've spent some time working on education issues in Wisconsin over the last couple of years and this is rock-solid conventional wisdom up there--everything's great, we're the best, leave us alone. But ACT scores are a bad measure because the percent of students taking them varies hugely from state to state. Here's where Wisconsin ranks on the most recent NAEP tests (based on the average scale score):

Reading 2005:

4th Grade: 20th (tied with four other states)
8th Grade: 17th (tied with one other state)

Math 2005:

4th Grade: 15th (tied with four other states)
8th Grade: 7th (tied with two other states)

In other words, Wisconsin is above average, but it by no means has the best test scores in the country. Moreover, when we turn to low-income students, it looks worse. Here are the rankings for students who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch:

Reading 2005:

4th Grade: 30th (tied with one other state)
8th Grade: 26th

Math 2005:

4th Grade: 27th (tied with five other states)
8th Grade: 26th (tied with one other states

Mediocre at best.

Are White Students Dragging Down Our International Standing?

Last week the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the 2006 Condition of Education, a congressionally mandated annual report of trends in American education. This year’s special analysis compared U.S. student performance to our global counterparts on a series of recent international assessments in reading, mathematics, and science. The study shows that while 4th and 8th graders perform relatively well, American high schoolers fail to keep up with their international peers. Though the international comparisons rely primarily on assessments administered to 15-year-olds, national assessments administered to 12th graders (17-18 year-olds) reveal a similar pattern of poor performance on average.

Interestingly, the demographics of America’s high school population who are failing to achieve might not be what one would expect.

As the immigration debate rages on, many are quick to cite the growing number of Hispanic immigrants as contributing to our nation’s poor academic performance. Yet Hispanics are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States to drop out of high school, with a dropout rate of 25%* compared to slightly over 10% of Blacks and less than 10% of Whites. Furthermore, the dropout rate for Hispanics born outside the United States is 38%, more than double the drop out rate of 15% for second-generation Hispanics. If Hispanics and Blacks are more likely to drop out of high school than Whites, one would expect that high schools are “more white” than are elementary or middle schools.

While scholars debate whether or not these dropout statistics are accurate, most agree that the gap in dropout rates for whites versus minority students is real, and some argue that dropout rates may be even higher than the census data suggest.

According to a recent Charts You Can Trust posting by my colleague, Kevin Carey, Hispanics make up 54% of immigrants coming to the United States (as of 2000). Thus given their high dropout rate, foreign-born Hispanic high school youth seem to be disproportionately missing from this NCES report of high school student performance. The implication is that more diverse elementary and middle schools are performing better on national and international assessments than are our more homogenous high schools.

NCES projects that public school enrollment will increase by 2.5 million students over the next 10 years, largely due to immigration and an increase in the number of children born to immigrants. Yet if our public high schools are struggling to educate an unrepresentative, whiter-than-average student body, how will they cope with these changing demographics?

-Posted by Margaret Price

* The status dropout rate indicates the percentage of 16-through 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in high school and who lack a high school credential relative to all 16-through 24-year-olds. High school credential includes a high school diploma or equivalent credential such as a General Educational Development (GED) certificate.

Prop 82 in Trouble?

With the California primary this coming Tuesday, a new Field poll has 46 percent of likely voters saying "no" on the proposed "Preschool for All" referrendum, with 41 percent saying "yes." Thirteen percent say they remain undecided. This is down from over 50 percent support in the last Field poll in April, and the first time Prop 82 has trailed in the polls.