Charter Schools Rising

Big front-page WaPo story today about charter schools in the District of Columbia--which enrolled about 25 percent of the District's public school students in 2005-06 and will likely increase their share with the opening of 6 new schools this fall. For the most part, this was a pretty good article about the growth of charter schools in the past decade (D.C.'s charter movement turns 10 this year) and the impacts, positive, negative and minimal on DCPS.

I was a bit annoyed, though, by the amount of traction the Post gave Save our Schools, a DC-area anti-charter group. The article presented three of SOS's major arguments: First, that charter schools are hurting public schools by taking away funds; second, that charters are resegregating DC schools; and finally, as SOS leader Gina Arlotto so eloquently expressed it in the Post, "the charters stink, too."

Let's look at these arguments one by one. D.C.'s per-pupil weighted funding formula means that, yes, when a child switches from a DCPS school to a charter, the funding follows. But, DCPS also no longer has to bear the costs of educating that child. Certainly from the perspective of an invididual school, which may lose only a few students and has fixed costs, this is cold comfort. But it's important not to forget that spending on DCPS has also increased substantially since the charter law was passed, meaning that most DCPS schools are getting more per pupil now even though they serve fewer pupils. Not to mention analysis showing that, SOS rhetoric about pro-charter favoritism aside, charters actually receive less public funds per pupil than DCPS. (For various reasons, it may not seem like that at the individual school level within DCPS, but that's a DCPS system problem, not a charter school problem).

Then there's the resegregation issue. I find the claim inherently bizarre, since it would be pretty darn hard for DCPS to get more segregated than it already is. The real criticism isn't that charter schools are resegregating DCPS so much as that a few charter schools are attracting some white students. Both charter critics and the Post article ignored the vast majority of DC charters that serve a higher percentage of minority kids than the District at large to focus on two--Two Rivers and Capital City--that, at least in part because of where they are located, serve a much higher percentage of white students than the District's schools overall. But it's not like either of these schools is a lily-white enclave: Two Rivers, on Capitol Hill, is more than half black and 7 percent Hispanic, and Capital City, which is located in Columbia Heights, is about one-third each white, black, and Hispanic. And given that DCPS's nearly 85 percent African American enrollment and housing patterns mean most black kids in DCPS will be attending nearly all-black schools, attracting more white kids into the system seems like a way to reduce segregation for at least some DCPS students, not increase it.

Not to mention that for a lot of more affluent families choosing charter schools, the alternative wouldn't be to attend a DCPS school, unless they're among the fortunate few that can get into highly-regarded programs like the Capitol Hill Cluster School (where, by the way, Arlotto and other SOS activists send their kids--they wouldn't send them to a run of the mill D.C. school either, for all they want to deny parents who can't afford to live in their school boundaries better options) or the schools west of Rock Creek Park--instead it's sending their kids to an expensive private school or moving to Virginia or Maryland.

It's worth noting a major point the Post's analysis of declining DCPS enrollments overlooked: DCPS enrollment was falling long before charters came on the scene, and when you combine charter and DCPS enrollment, the decline in D.C.'s public school enrollment has actually slowed since charters came on the scene, suggesting that charters are helping D.C. keep more of the young families it needs to grow and thrive. This is why, as long as there's no definitive evidence that charters are discriminating in admissions or counseling out some kids, I don't have a problem with charter schools seeking to attract middle-class families of any race back into the city's public schools. Building more of the kind of public schools those families want to send their kids to also expands opportunities for less advantaged kids in D.C., and keeping those families in the District is important for long-term economic development, civic life, and stability. And, I have to admit, I have a bit of a personal interest here: I love this city, I love living here, and, if I'm ever so fortunate as to have children of my own, I'd really like to be able to send them to a public school in D.C.--and NOT one that's west of Rock Creek Park.

The strongest criticism folks can level against charter schools in D.C. right now is on quality--like DCPS the District's charter schools, on average, are performing far less well than they need to be. But the most recent data shows that charters are outperforming DCPS across the board; the District's authorizers are making progress closing down the lowest-performing schools, which should also improve quality; and some of D.C.'s charter schools are very good schools. But it's still not good enough, and everyone involved in the District's charter school community needs to keep working to improve quality and performance, because our kids and our city depend on it.

Teacher Certification Smack-Down

I'm debating David Ritchie, Executive Director of the Association of Teacher Educators, over at Edspresso this week. The topic is teacher certification--he's for, I'm against, although I think the debate will end up being a little more nuanced than that. Come have a look.

Mathews Gets It Right

Don't miss Jay Mathews' terrific op-ed in the Post this morning, which comprehensively debunks the "academically over-stressed teenager" meme as expressed in Alexandra Robbins' new book, "The Overachievers." Mathews notes that the allegedly typical high schooler consumed by homework, academics, and other activities focused on admission to an Ivy League school is largely a mirage, confined to the small fraction of the overall population, and that many of the statistics used to support that idea are mistaken or overblown. "The real national problem," Mathews says, "is not that we ask most teens to do too much, but too little."

Harvard slips in new U.S. News college rankings - Larry Summers' revenge?

The new U.S. News college rankings were released this week, to the usual amount of fanfare. Harvard and Princeton flip-flopped on the top of the national university list, with Princeton now at #1. The numbers for the two universities are almost identical so this slight shift means virtually nothing. I do note, however, that Harvard slipped a little bit in alumni giving from last year. Maybe that was enough to push them over the edge--the final legacy of the Larry Summers' contretemps?

The larger issue is that the U.S. News rankings are based almost entirely on institutional reputation, spending, and admissions selectivity. They have little or nothing to do with who actually provides the best education. Expect much more on this subject from Education Sector in coming weeks.

Time Magazine's handy guilt-alleviation service for wealthy parents

In an article this week, Time magazine notes that colleges are giving more financial aid to the families of wealthier students (see a recent Ed Sector "Chart You Can Trust" on this topic here). But then, presumably after being reminded of the correspondence between said families and Time magazine's readership--it invents a logically tortured excuse for why this is actually okay:

...for middle- and upper-middle-class families, the sticker shock at an élite university can be overwhelming. And the recent interest-rate hike of almost 2% on government-backed loans only increases the distress.

Fortunately for those families, a growing number of public colleges and less élite private schools are waiting for them with a bushel of new scholarships that used to be based on need but now are based on merit. The schools are simply following the times: these days even public colleges are obsessed with improving their rankings, which can be done in part by attracting high-scoring students with offers of an all-expenses-paid education. Although need-based grants still make up the overwhelming majority of all scholarships, the giving has been tilting slowly but surely toward the best and the brightest. A decade ago, 90% of state-college grants were need-based. Today it's barely 75%.

What's wrong with giving a bright kid a free ride? Well, consider what happens to the students who used to get those grants. Maybe they weren't the best students, but they still belonged in college. Now they may not be able to afford it, says Sandy Baum, an analyst with the College Board. "We need to have a national discussion of our priorities," she says. "Why do our state schools throw money at the highest-scoring students? What happens to the other kids?"

There is a possibility, however, that the shifting financial-aid priorities could result in a kind of virtuous mixing of the college gene pool. High-achieving kids are going to lesser-known schools and public institutions in greater numbers, drawn by the generous offers. They will inevitably bring higher academic standards with them. And lower-income communities are finding that their gifted kids can gain entry to the most expensive schools, perhaps helping pry open the austere gates of Harvard Yard a little wider in the process.

I'm not sure what's more ridiculous/offensive--the nonsensical logic or the condescending assertion that wealthier students are necessarily smarter and more worthy. "Consider what happens to the students who used to get those grants. Maybe the weren't the best students, but they still belonged in college." Maybe they weren't the best students?Maybe they were. Why should we assume that low-income students aren't also good students, or the best? Many colleges don't give wealthy students financial aid because they're bright--they give them aid because they're wealthy, and still contribute more money to the bottom line than poor, equally smart students.

But that's okay, apparently, because it results in "virtuous mixing" whereby the poor (and therefore less smart) students at public universities will be granted the rare privilege of going to school with wealthier (and therefore smarter) students and the "higher academic standards" that they will "inevitably" bring. How fortunate that the plebes from public colleges will be allowed to mix with their social betters and enjoy the leftover results of the new academic standards they bring. Remember that guy from college with the new Saab who didn't have to work to pay tuition and partied at the frat house all weekend? That was really great, how he would spend his spare time sharing his knowledge with the ignorant lower classes and insisting that the administration increase the rigor of classroom teaching.

Moreover, the wealthy recipients of undeserved college scholarhships should feel not even a twinge of guilt, because "lower-income communities are finding that their gifted kids can gain entry to the most expensive schools." Translation: because a small number of phenomenally wealthy institutions like Harvard are belatedly doing the right thing by devoting more financial aid to their less privileged students, that makes it okay that a whole lot of other universities are doing the opposite by steering more financial aid away from those students. As long as a few more low-income students are admitted to a few more wealthy schools, everyone else is morally in the clear.

Janey Calls for Moratorium

Today's Washington Post reports that D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford Janey wants a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools in the District. This is something of a blow to some members of the District's charter and school reform communities, who had high hopes for Janey and who had seen many promising signs, in his master plan for education released this spring, that charter competition was having a positive impact on efforts to improve DCPS.

"We have not delivered on quality education here in D.C., both with respect to charter schools and to DCPS. That's why I would advocate for a moratorium," Janey said. "This is not a push back against charter schools. It's rather a reclaiming of the purposeof public education to be one of quality. It would be a mistake to continue to grow without having a handle on quality."

In one way, Janey is right. Too many of D.C.'s charter schools haven't met their promise to improve student performance, a point many in the charter school community have made, including me last fall. But the solution isn't to stop authorizing new charters--it's to close down existing charters that are low-performing--something the Public Charter School Board has started doing--and replace them with better-performing charter schools. Given that, as Janey acknowledges in the interview, most of the DCPS schools children would be attending in the absence of charter schools are themselves low-performing, a moratorium on additional charters might actually work against improving charter school quality, by making it more difficult--politically and pragmatically--for authorizers to close down low-performing charter schools without the opportunity to charter new, better, schools to replace them.

What are the practical implications of Janey's position? That's not entirely clear. Janey has no official authority regarding charter authorizing in DC. The Board of Education, one of the District's authorizers, has been very supportive of Janey's reform efforts so far, so they might seriously consider a moratorium on their own authorizing if Janey wants one. But this is something they were already considering anyway in the wake of scandals involving the Board of Ed's charter school office (sidenote: a WaPo editorial today calls for a quick investigation of those scandals) and something that, quite honestly, might be good for the charter school movement in the District. (One might wonder if that's what Janey was really aiming for to begin with.)

But Janey most certainly has no authority regarding the District's other charter school authorizer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, whose chairman, Tom Nida, has been quite clear that the Public Charter School Board has no intention of curtailing its authorizing in response to Janey. Leading mayoral candidates, Linda Cropp and Adrian Fenty, have also expressed opposition to the idea of a moratorium, although Cropp has supported such a notion in the past. And D.C.'s charter continue to have strong congressional support.

One might also wonder how this will affect Janey's standing in D.C. more generally. Just about everyone in the city has been rooting for him because DCPS needs positive change so desperately. But the call for the charter moratorium is going to cause a rift between Janey and some pro-charter folks in the school reform community and office in D.C., and possibly also undermine support with parents and community members among who charters are clearly popular (you don't get to have 25% of kids in the city enrolled in charters without building a decent base of public support for them). I'm still wishing him success improving DCPS, because I care about the fate of the kids in this city, but I'm concerened his inability to see the potential of charters as a tool to support this goal--by filling niches DCPS isn't currently serving well, whittling down the DCPS population to make a more manageable system, and providing potential renters to help DCPS recoup funds from its millions of square feet of excess space--may undermine his efforts.

More from Charter Blog and Mark Lerner here.

Teachers Unions: Good, Bad, or???

Matt Yglesias says teachers unions get a bad rap. To a degree, I agree with him. Teachers unions have been a force for good in education policy in many ways, particularly in defending public education and maintaining or increasing funding for it. And, the availability (and abuse) of teachers unions as a scapegoat does allow too many folks, especially on the conservative side of policy debates, to slip off the hook without addressing their own responsibility for many tough problems in education.

But Yglesias is wrong to dismiss this issue or the idea of union power out of hand. Part of the problem is his DC-centric perspective. If you follow education policy and politics at the state and local level (where most of the decisions that really matter for kids are made), there's plenty of evidence of union power, as well as examples where the positions teachers unions have taken seem questionable from a social justice perspective. And drawing attention to this oughtn't to get one labeled as "anti-union," "conservative," or "anti-public education." After all, there's a reason SEIU's Andrew Stern is quoted on the back of this book.

Update: Yglesias says more here. Key quote:

People sometimes talk about this as if there was a brilliant will-solve-all-our-problems school reform agenda just waiting to be implemented that's being stymied purely through the awesome might of the teachers' unions. That's just not the case. The policy questions here are genuinely different, lots of different actors have interests and priorities pulling in all sorts of directions, etc., etc., etc.

Yup. That's why education policy is an incredibly intellectually interesting but often heartrendingly frustrating field to work in.

One of these things is not like the others...

Remember that Sesame Street Segment? Well a trip to People for the American Way's (PFAW to Eduwonk) Public Education web page had that tune playing in my head again. Here are the five headlines that appeared today in their Education News section:

Don't pay kids to flee schools
New Jersey Voucher Lawsuit Is Latest Clint Bolick Cut-and-Paste Job
State Sen. Rod Smith draws momentum from GOP opposition in Democratic bid for governor
D.C. Charter Schools Chief Investigated
Evolution backers seek to influence Ohio elections

Can you guess which of these articles is not like the others? I've included the links to help.

It's the one about federal officials investigating D.C. Board of Education Charter School Office Director Brenda Belton, who is suspected of inappropriately guiding federal grant funds towards educational contractors with whom she had personal connections (the feds are investigating whether she also benefited financially as a result).

Why doesn't this story belong? First, it's not about church-state issues. Three of the other articles PFAW highlights are about vouchers, which PFAW opposes on, among other things, church-state grounds, and the fourth is about the evolution/intelligent design debate which is, again, a church-state issue. More significantly, while the other four stories are about broader policy, legal and political debates, the Belton story is not--its just a case of one person who may or may not have done something wrong. Even if Belton is guilty, this scandal would not be an argument against charter schools in themselves so much as another example of a public official falling prey to temptation (something that's hardly unheard of in traditional school districts), and further evidence that the Board of Education doesn't do a very good job overseeing its charter school operation or some of its employees more generally.

But what really bothers me is seeing charter schools get lumped in with vouchers and opposition to evolution. In both their public accountability and their nonsectarian nature, charter schools are fundamentally different from vouchers, even as they have the potential to offer parents even more choices than vouchers do. And when the charter movement can count folks like the late Eric Rofes, Democratic Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, former Clinton operative Steve Barr, and the National Council of La Raza among its supporters, lumping it in with intelligent design as some kind of conservative religious plot to destroy public education and critical thinking is patently ridiculous. Almost as silly as calling Kevin Carey a "real conservative."*

*I've spent much of the past year sharing office space with Kevin and I can assure you he's no conservative. He worked at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He's more of a feminist than even my boy-hating self. He's still heartbroken over Sleater-Kinney's break-up. He's a vegetarian, for crying out loud!

Good Op-Ed, Bad Numbers

William E. "Brit" Kerwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post today that hits all the right notes when it comes to gives students better odds of graduating from college. But it should be noted that some of the statistics aren't correct. Kerwan writes:

Of every 100 current eighth-graders in America, just 18 will receive a college degree during the next 10 years. Based on current participation and completion rates, the education pipeline reveals alarming holes.

This overstates the problem. As the Post itself noted in an article published last year, an analysis of a U.S. Department of Education survey that tracked a cohort of eighth-graders for 12 years found that 34 percent had earned a college degree during that time.

34 percent isn't a great number, but the difference between that and 18 percent is huge, and most of it isn't a function of giving students an extra two years to earn a degree. It's important to draw attention to the need to increase educational attainment, but it's equally important to use accurate data to do so.

Rothstein Continued

Ed from AFT disagrees with my criticisms of Richard Rothstein.

He starts with a charge that is, unfortunately, quite common among left-leaning folks concerned about poverty: Because NCLB is designed to help improve the education provided to poor children, it takes away pressure to make those children not poor. As evidence of this, he cites the fact that child poverty increased from 2000 to 2004. In other words, because we've decided that schools can help poor children, we're less concerned that they are poor, and thus more have become poor.

Let's put aside the fact that NCLB wasn't enacted until 2002 and didn't really get up and running until well after that. 2000 was a historic low for child poverty, a fact that's almost entirely a function of larger economic trends. Here are child poverty rates from 1995 to 2004, according to the U.S. Census:

1995: 20.2%
1996: 19.8%
1997: 19.2%
1998: 18.3%
1999: 16.6%
2000: 15.6%
2001: 15.8%
2002: 16.3%
2003: 17.2%
2004: 17.3%

I'm by no stretch of the imagination a supporter of the economic, taxation, wage, or spending policies of this administration or Congress. But the recession that began in 2001--and the resulting, inevitable increase in child poverty that followed--wasn't their fault, any more than the previous expansion was of their making. They could have done a lot more to help those poor children, but they by and large didn't make them poor to begin with. If you believe otherwise, than you'd logically have to give the current Congress credit for the overall reduction in child poverty over the last decade, even though their attitudes toward welfare, housing, nutrition, the minimum wage, etc. are no better now than they were then.

More to the point, I think Ed's characterization of the essential debate here is mistaken. He says:

...the policy disagreement that reformers like Kevin have with reformers like Richard is over the role that maximizing the quality of a given minute of instruction can play in closing the achievement gap vs reforms that add minutes or otherwise address poverty head on.

Why is it maximizing quality vs more minutes and addressing poverty head on? I'm whole-heartedly in favor of doing both, and there is no reason that both cannot be achieved. I'm not saying that increasing the minimum wage is getting in the way of holding schools accountable for performance or increasing the quality of classroom teaching, because if students' parents can earn a fair, decent wage, it doesn't matter if their schools are any good. Why Ed and Rothstein believe the converse is puzzling, to say the least.

Ed asks for evidence: how about all the data from the urban NAEP and the Council of Great City Schools that show that some big-city urban schools systems are much more effective than others when it comes to student learning, even though they have similarly poor students, and that some systems have already succeeded in improving performance for poor students despite the barriers that Rothstein says are insurmountable? Or the myriad studies that show that some teachers are far more effective than others, and that poor students are amost always more likely to be assigned to the least experienced, least qualified, and least effective teachers? Or the incontrovertable success of schools like KIPP? Or plain examples of school mismanagement, incompetence, and--rarely, to be sure--illegal conduct, like that perpetrated by the leadership of the AFT's affiliate here in Washington, DC?

Strong leadership, recruiting and supporting good teachers, more appropriate reading instriction, aligning curricula to teaching, effective unions--all these things can, and do, help poor students learn. But they're not easy to implement, and they're made harder still when people like Rothstein argue that they won't matter much in the end, or might actually hurt poor students by diminishing the imperative to alleviate their poverty. This kind of attentuated argument of perverse consequences is a staple of reactionary discourse, and simply makes the hard job of educators harder still.

Nauseating

Alexander Russo writes pretty much what I've been thinking for a long time about these anecdotal reports of kids throwing up from the pressures of high-stakes testing: It's not the fault of NCLB, or testing; It's the fault of adults in the schools who are creating an environment where kids feel so much stress and pressure about tests that, in many cases, don't even have consequences for them. And adults doing that to kids really is nauseating, IMHO.

Not only that, it's irrational and counterproductive. If you want kids to take on a challenge and do well on it, you don't freak them out. You try to create an environment where the kid feels comfortable and supported, make him feel like it's no big deal, tell her you know she can do it. Getting a kid all worked up and stressed about a test is like spending the whole time in the car taking your kid to get his shots telling him how much it's gonna hurt.

Universal Coverage, but not Universal Preschool

So last week Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney vetoed a bill to create universal preschool for all three- and four-year-olds in the state, arguing that the proposal would be too costly. Right now Massachusetts is sort of in the middle of the states in terms of preschool--about 8 percent of Massachusetts 4-year-olds and 7 percent of 3-year-olds currently attend state-funded preschool programs, but the quality is not particularly high, with the major weaknesses related to teacher credentials.

The bill Romney vetoed passed both legislative houses unanimously and had the support of a very strong preschool advocacy coalition, which suggests there's a good chance it will be resurrected--and potentially passed--next year.

I generally support expanding public investment in early childhood education, and hope Massachusetts does move next legislative session to expand and improve the quality of publicly-funded preschool there. But I think Romney may have done the right thing. Although this legislation would have required the state to establish a universal preschool access program, it didn't actually provide funding for it. This made it an easy vote for legislators because they get to look like the good guys who support preschool right now while putting off the hard decisions about how to fund it for later. I don't think this is a responsible approach or one that's all that likely to result in high-quality programs or good results for kids. Case in point: Florida, where voters passed a referendum requiring the state to put in place UPK without creating a mechanism to fund it. When the state legislature there had to actually put the program in place they did it on the cheap, and many outside observers fear the quality standards for the program are too low. It's also worth noting that Massachusetts just committed to making universal health care coverage available to all its citizens (something that should also help youngsters there), and putting another massive initiative like UPK on top of that would have been a lot for the state to handle.

For reasons I don't understand (other than the lack of celebrity involvement) this hasn't gotten a lot of attention outside Massachusetts, despite Romney's political ambitions beyond the state.

Guess All that "Learning to Think Critically" Didn't Pay Off for You, Huh?

Continuing her guestblogging stint on Eduwonk, Newoldschoolteacher rips into common "good liberal" arguments (in this case, typed by Peter at Schools Matter) against KIPP and other high-performing, highly-structured urban charter schools, with both righteous anger and humor. I'm kinda surprised, though, that she missed this doozy:

KIPP schools are basically charged with raising these children. That in itself may or may not be a good thing, e.g., should a publicly-funded educational institution overseen by the state be charged with unofficially raising children? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if yes, what kinds of parents are these KIPP schools? And whose interests do they have in mind? Biological parents have an investment in the well-being of their children that differs on several different orders of magnitude from the interest that a state-controlled parent might have. In some instances, the KIPP parent might actually be better than the biological parent. But in other cases, the biological parent might do a better job inculcating in the child the values that are important to his/her family, race, religious tradition, and practices of ethnic origin.

Did Peter somehow miss the fact that because KIPP schools are schools of choice, BIOLOGICAL PARENTS ARE MAKING A CHILDREARING DECISION TO SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO THESE SCHOOLS (in some cases, of course, family breakdown means foster parents, grandparents, and other relatives are the ones making this decision, but you get the picture)? Does he think parents can somehow be simultaneously too dumb to choose a school that supports "values that are important" to them and better at inclucating those values?

There's also incredible irony in the fact of a blog entitled "Schools Matter" making the following argument:

Until we look at the totality of education reform and stop insisting that education reform should be exclusively about school reform, we will never come close to closing the gap.

Maybe they should retitle their blog "Lots of things matter more than schools."

I think there are reasons to wonder how broadly the KIPP model can really be taken as urban school reform. The resources it requires are very intense; it's not clear how large a supply of high-quality teachers exist that are willing to do the work KIPP demands; and some families are, unfortunately, too dysfunctional to live up to the parent side of the KIPP contract. But that is no excuse to dismiss the incredible blessing KIPP is for large numbers of children and their families.

Rothstein Redux

In today's NyTimes, Diana Jean Schemo writes about a "growing body of evidence" supporting one side of an argument that doesn't actually exist. But she also, perhaps inadvertently, provides an important glimpse into one side of a debate that's all too real. She writes:

The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students — whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms — fail to make sufficient progress every year.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.

Schemo frames No Child Left Behind as one side of an argument between people who believe that factors outside schools affect students, and believe who don't believe that factors outside schools affect students. There is no such debate. No reasonable person believes that students' economic, social, and family circumstances are irrelevant to educational progress.

To say that NCLB "holds a school alone responsible" for student progress is to ascribe far more power to the law than it, or any law, could possibly have. There are whole worlds of responsibility for the dire circumstances of disadvantaged students who aren't learning well. All No Child Left Behind does is create a system that identifies which schools those students attend, and insists that we should try to make those schools better.

The real debate is whether trying to give disadvantaged students better schools is worth the effort. Some people clearly think the answer is no:

In his 2004 book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap,” Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.

A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children.

“I would never say public schools can’t do better,” Mr. Rothstein said. “I’d say they can’t do much better,” unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.

That's the whole issue in a nutshell. The debate is not between those who thinks schools can do almost everything and those who don't. It's between those who think schools can do hardly anything and those who don't.

Rothstein presents an essentially defeatist, anti-school reform argument. At its core, it's an attack on the value and efficacy of educators. It's also simply divorced from reality--what reasonable person could spend even a little time in one of the deeply dysfunctional schools that many urban students are forced to attend and say "they can't do much better," or spend time in one of the great schools serving those students and conclude that they already have?

Creating better schools is one part of a larger challenge to give marginalized, disadvantaged students better nutrition, housing, health care, and ultimately better lives. To set those individual goals against one another -- to argue that one should be ignored until some far-off day when all the others are solved -- harms no one more than the students themselves.

Obstructing Preschool on Capitol Hill

Kevin, fresh from demonstrating that he is soooooooooo much cooler than I can ever hope to be, offers such a spot-on and funny take down of this week's WaPo article on one slightly hysterical mom's quest to get her two-year-old into the "right" preschool that I hate to add anything to it. But I gotta. You see, the mom in question, Petula Dvorak, indicates she lives on Capitol Hill where, apparently, she and other yuppie moms are encountering a shortage of preschool slots for their offspring. But Capitol Hill is exactly the neighborhood where NIMBY neighbors are trying to prevent the creation of additional preschool spaces that parents like Dvorak crave!

AppleTree Early Learning Charter School (full disclosure: I'm on AppleTree's board), which owns property on 12th Street NE near Lincoln Park and wants to build a charter preschool there (expanding on the high-quality charter preschool it already operates in my Southwest DC neighborhood) has been locked in a costly battle with so-called Northeast Neighbors for Responsible Growth, a group of neighborhood homeowners who do not want the school there. And emergency DC zoning commission enactedearlier this year would make it harder to open charters, private schools, preschools, or daycare programs in residential neighborhoods throughout the city. It sure would be nice to see moms like Dvorak spending a little less time trying to figure out how to game the system to get their kids in existing preschools and a little more time speaking out against restrictions that keep the supply of high-quality preschools on the Hill (and elsewhere in the DC metro area) artificially tight.

Parental High Anxiety

In addition to the usual materials about nutrition and health care, new parents are apparently also getting glossy four-color brochures titled "Your Child is Only in the 30th Percentile and Getting Dumber By the Day," which opens up to a second page headlined "25th Percentile...20th....Panic Would Be Appropriate Right About Now" and concludes with "Don't Even Bother, He's Going to Be Living in the Basement Until You Die."

Or so I would guess from reading articles like this one from last weekend's Washington Post magazine, which chronicles one mother's travails in finding the "right" preschool for her 20-month old son. Typically, the article starts with this scene:

It felt like I finally had the working mom thing nailed. Then one morning this past March, when my son, Milo, was 20 months old, I overheard a conversation at the neighborhood playground among some mom acquaintances that ran a Mack truck through my bring-home-the-bacon-and-fry-it-up-in-a-pan reverie.

"What lists are you on?" one of the moms asked.

"We're definitely trying for Aidan," said the one whose weekend outfits always matched.

"Hill Preschool sounds great; we're in for that one," added the one whose child was always too well-dressed for the park.

Umm, what lists?

In all seriousness, I don't mean to belittle the struggles of working parents, of which I am not one, nor the very serious problem of giving parents and children access to high quality early education and child care.

But these articles are always written from the same perspective: a college-educated women struggling to hold on to her values and sense of self as she confronts a strange, upper middle class, child-obsessed surburban culture. The cues are right there: "the one whose weekend outfits always matched," that is, one of those mothers.

The key is to give the reader permission to mock people like that while not feeling ashamed to follow their lead, to tell them it's possible to play the child competition game without internalizing, or representing, the values the little person rat race embodies.

That's a comforting message, which is why articles like this are such a staple of the parent- anxiety-stoking literature. But I'm not sure it's particularly honest. Personally, I'd rather read a first person account from the parent who decided not to blow a gasket trying to find the perfect preschool and is fine with the decision. Or I'd like to hear what the mom with the too-well-dressed child has to say, someone who's perfectly comfortable working hard to give her child every opportunity and doesn't feel the need to apologize for it. I don't know if I'd agree with her, but I'd probably learn from what she has to say.

Is Our Students Learning?

New article in The Washington Monthly from yours truly focusing on the wealth of new data about how well colleges and universities are educating their students--and why you can't see it. Part of the Monthly's annual alternate college rankings issue, already causing a ruckus at The Political Animal.

Dispatch from Lollapalooza

People who work in Washington, DC are sometimes accused of having a warped, inside-the-beltway perspective on things. So I decided to get in touch with the mood of America's youth with a weekend in Chicago at Lollopalooza. In summary, most of the music was great and the kids are generally all right, albeit defaced by too many bad tattoos.

Day One

We amble around Millenium Park and gawk at reflection of selves, city, in the giant stainless steel jelly bean. Arriving at Grant Park around 4PM, we walk to see Ryan Adams play by far the worst set of the entire three days. A few good songs from "Cold Roses" are interrupted by frequent inaudible and (I assume) stoned ramblings from Ryan, who gives the music less energy than the guy who sold me beer a few minutes before.

Things pick up when we walk to the other end of the park (almost a mile!) and catch the last half of The Secret Machines, who rocked hard and made me want to run out and buy their album. Next were The Raconteurs, with Jack White more than living up to his reputation as a not-to-miss live act. Unfortunately we had to leave 20 minutes early to walk back and get a good spot for the greatest band of their generation, Sleater-Kinney.

Having seen them less than 24 hours earlier at the 9:30 Club I was a little worried that the one-hour time limit and outdoor venue would dull their effect. How wrong I was. If anything, they were better, giving some of their more epic songs like "Entertain" more room to expand, ditto other songs from The Woods like "Jumpers" and "Rollercoaster." "Sympathy" killed, as always. At 9:30 they finished with "Dig Me Out," here they capped the show with "Turn It On" and both were worthy codas. The only song I really missed from both shows was "One More Hour," which would have been appropriate given the band's tragic, imminent demise.

The downer mood of the impending S-K breakup made the immediate start of Death Cab For Cutie an easy transition. I like Death Cab but they're essentially a studio band and hearing them live doesn't add to the music, enjoyable though it is. The encore is "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," and as the first chords play all the teenage girls nearby squeal in high-pitched unison.

Day Two

We spend the morning at Art Institute (favorites: Daumier sculptures, Natalia Goncharova's Spanish Dancer) before heading to the park. There's a scene in "The Devil Wears Prada" where Meryl Streep explains how a few people people of influence in the fashion world made a decision years before that resulted in the eventual mass-marketing of cerulean blue. I can only assume a similar thing happened at some point in the last decade when Tom Ford or someone said "cargo shorts," which were worn by roughly 90 percent of the male Lollapaloozans, myself included. Narrow wicker cowboy hats and plastic garden clogs also seem to be in fashion these days.

The musical day starts well with a solid set from Built to Spill, including much from their very worthwhile new album. Although one guy in the band makes a halfhearted attempt to note that while, yes, the band is playing on the "Bud Light" stage festooned with the logo "Delivered by AT&T," he is personally still down on the corporate man. You made that decision when you decided to play, dude, you can't have it both ways.

Our next band is Sonic Youth, not that young but still as loud and uncompromising as ever. We watch The Dresden Dolls for a while, who I hadn't heard but were interesting -- think Ben Folds meets Cabaret. Then back to get a good seat for The Flaming Lips. A typical Lips shows, meaning it featured copious ballons and streamers, huge inflatable astronauts, scores of dancing space aliens and Santa Clauses, and Wayne Coyne rolling through crowd in a giant inflatable ball. Making the sensible decision that the best way to please a crowd is to play lots of crowd-pleasing songs (sort of the reverse-Ryan Adams approach) Wayne sings liberally from the last two albums, with the highlight being a huge, sung-along-to "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots."

We run across the park to get a good seat for The New Pornographers, who after three nearly flawless albums can fill an hour set with nothing but great songs and do, although the absence of Neko Case turns songs like "The Bleeding Heart Show" from transcendent to merely awesome. We stay for the first three songs of Kanye West before admitting once again that we don't really get hip-hop, and leave for dinner.

Day Three

A note on tattoos: I've got nothing against them, believing that it's a free country and people should be who they want to be. I do, however, object to really bad tattoos of the neo-Frank Frazetta school. Getting a picture permanentally attached to your body is a big decision, people -- pick a good one! Shell out out for someone who knows what they're doing!

After a late start we arrive for The Shins, who may or may not have played a good show, but we'll never know due to some kind of catastrophic sound mixing failure. Like Death Cab, the Shins don't have a built-in live act advantage, and even the Garden State anthem "New Slang" fails to win over a frustrated crowd. Later that night we run across the band drinking tequila in our hotel bar, they seemed to have gotten over the disappointment.

Wilco, by contrast, sounds terrific, even mixing in a liberal helping of new material with no dampening of crowd enthusiam. Although Jeff Tweedy is starting to look like he watched a Blues Traveller video circa 2001 and said "Hey, that John Popper looks sharp--ditch my Norelco and super-size those fries!" After walking by the actual Blues Traveller (Popper looks less like Popper than Tweedy does these days) and an enthusiastic if over-loud Broken Social Scene, we settle in for the Red Hot Chili Peppers festival finale.

Closing a show of this magnitude is no easy task; your set not only has to be worthy in it's own right but worthy of all the bands that came before you. The Chili Peppers pull it off and then some, with high energy and great Flea-Frusciante back-and-forth. The show wraps up and the 60,000 plus crowd leaves in a good mood. All in all a worthy show; we may have to check the pulse of nation's students again next year.

Blog post on blog posting

It's become fairly commonplace within the edublogosphere for teachers to keep weblogs about the ups and downs of education in the trenches; to name just one example, NewOldSchoolTeacher, temporary Eduwonk-in-residence, kept a very funny record of her trials and tribulations during ed school and while student teaching. But it's not every day that you see a school superintendent keeping a daily blog.

Well, the times they are a-changin'. New Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools superintendent Peter Gorman, newly arrived from California this summer, is shaking things up not only by winning school board support for potential forced teacher transfers this school year, but also by launching his very own blog on the CMS website. He blogs about his family, the community members he's met with each day, and some of his ideas about how to improve the school system, and he does a surprisingly good job at updating every business day. His updates for August 3 and 4 were a few days late, but perhaps he can be forgiven, because his calendar, which is also publicly available, shows that he had a State Board of Education meeting. His calendar also verifies what the Charlotte Observer has attested to anecdotally: Gorman's making quite the effort to establish a connection with community members and leaders. Last Tuesday he had ten different meetings on his calendar, and this week he's launching a series of public forums in each of the county's six electoral districts.

Sure, there's probably some political calculation to Gorman's blogging efforts. And the blog isn't perfect; for one thing, there's no syndication feed to allow you to subscribe, which means you have to check back every day for updates. On the other hand, getting a blog up and running (and even knowing what a blog is) shows some technological savvy and a genuine desire to be accessible to the community. Even more, it seems to me like another step towards transparency and accountability when an urban school superintendent is publicly describing and archiving what he's doing every single day to make his school system better. And that can only be a good thing.

-Laura Boyce

Sobering History

Israel. Lebanon. What's going on? Yesterday, a group of us gathered around to debate what it all means. We agreed on some things, disagreed on others. I think we settled on the fact that the histories of these places are tied to other histories, including our own. And that to understand what's happening today, we need to be reminded of what happened in years past.

So it seemed fitting to point out that NCES just released a new study about who's teaching history to the nation's high schoolers. In short, it says that most high school students (86 percent) are taught by teachers with state certification in social studies. Poor kids get short shrift again and are more likely to be taught by uncertified or "out-of-field" teachers, but the numbers still aren't bad. On the other hand, the study also reports that fewer than half of high school history students are taught by teachers who majored or minored in history.

I wondered, are there fewer college students majoring in history? I checked and it seems that, in terms of bachelor's degrees, history has declined a lot since the 70s. It actually hit its all time low in 1985, and has inched up slowly since then. Still, the numbers are low- just 2 percent of all degrees earned.

Of course, you don't necessarily need a history degree to teach history well. But still I think we might all be better served by paying a little more attention to history.

Blogging at its Best

Sometimes the blogosphere (I try to peruse both its education and parts of its political subspheres with some regularity) seems so nasty, trivial, personal, and reactionary that I wish it would go away. But two recent posts by Joe Williams (at the Chalkboard) and Leo Casey (at EdWize), both men I respect very much and know are deeply committed to the wellbeing and education of children (particularly disadvantaged youngsters), remind me why this is a worthwhile medium. In a post Monday, Joe asked why teachers are still treated with so little respect, what respect in the workplace really means for teachers, and why unions haven't been more successful in raising the status of and respect for teachers. Leo responds by arguing why unions are necessary to protect teachers, students, and public education. Whether or not you agree with them, both posts are thoughtful, humane, and the combination exemplifies the kind of dialogue blogging--at its best--enables.

Free to Be, You and Me (Vouchers, evolution, and other stuff edition)

In a fascinating example of appropriating the arguments of one's opponents and subverting them to his own aims, Cato's Neal McCluskey posits vouchers as a solution to the evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design brouhaha that's been getting so many panties in a twist in states (esp. Kansas) and school districts lately. Matthew Yglesias (from whose blog I came across the piece, not myself being in the habit of perusing Cato's website, since I already know exactly what they're going to say--vouchers are the solution!--in response to every imaginable educational issue), has an interesting take on this.

My response is that this is a great example of why vouchers or other forms of increased choice must be accompanied by public accountability. I strongly believe it's a good thing for parents to be able to choose schools for their children that match with youngsters' unique personalities and itnerests, respect families' values and heritages, and use teaching methods that the parents endorse. But I also believe, even more strongly, that the public has both an equity and economic interest in ensuring that all children master essential knowledge and skills--particularly when they're being educated on the taxpayers' dime. If my neighbor wants to send her kid to an Esperanto bilingual school that organizes instruction around organic farming, I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I wouldn't send my hypothetical kids there, but, then, I'm not her. But I do have a huge problem if the kids aren't learning to read and do math at the level they need to be. That's where state standards and accountability systems come into play.

Similarly, I don't necessarily have a problem if my neighbor wants to send her kids to a school that teaches intelligent design. But I do have a problem if they aren't getting adequate instruction in biology to think about the increasingly complex issues--stem cell research, DNA evidence, the impacts of environmental change on biological diversity--that adults need to be able to think about to engage in public debates in our society today.

This is a little difficult because science standards are inherently a more complicated idea than standards in reading and math, particularly when it comes to issues of curriculum sequencing, and Kansas illustrates the political difficulty in establishing quality science standards. There's a bit of a tension here between my desire to avoid politically toxic and distracting state level debates over things like evolution, and my conviction that choice needs to be accompanied by accountability. But, ultimately, I think there's a way to square this circle if we think well about it and allow our concept of accountability to broaden somewhat.

Finally, Matt also points out an odd quirk of education policy debates that's one of the reasons I find the topic intellectually interesting. In a culture and goverment based strongly around principles of individual liberty, rights, and freedom, children occupy an unusual position. Because children's immaturity prevents them from being able to fully exercise their freedoms, certain adults (parents), have the right to make decisions for them. But these parental rights are also mixed with remnants of a long common law history that treated children essentially as chattel. And, in the past century there's been an increasing recognition that society at large has an interest in children's well-being and in developing their abilities to fully participate in the economy and democracy as adults. As a result, issues involving children force us to struggle with what we really mean when we think and talk about freedom, how to reconcile the competing claims of different individual rights and public interests, and what society's role should be in defending those who cannot speak for themselves.

More Signs of the Apocalypse

Speaking of child's play, I was really freaked out to read this article (via Cranky Professor) about how Parker Brothers is replacing the multi-colored paper Monopoly money with fake plastic Visa cards and a card-swiping calculator that keeps track of how much cash the players have. First, I thought it was a joke, but after careful googling confirmed the story was not, in fact, from the Onion, and I even found the online site to purchase the game, I started to fear that maybe those people who think current events in the Middle East herald the end of the world are onto something.

Fear not, though, Q&E readers--So far the "Here and Now Electronic Banking" version of Monopoly is available only in Britain. And Parker Brothers promises the paper money version will still be available even if the "Here and Now..." version is expanded to the provinces.

Kids' Play

Newoldschoolteacher, guestblogging at Eduwonk, isn't sympathetic to NYT letter-writers' (responding to Clara Hemphill's July 26 "On Education" column) complaints that schools are smooshing all the play out of kindergarten and thereby stifling children's "creative potential." I tend to view the hysteria here as another example of how the media's focus on the concerns and fears of white, affluent parents, while entirely sensible from a market perspective, has a negative impact on our discussions about education that works to the disadvantage of poor and minority kids.

There's also a false choice being posed here between academics and play that is incredibly harmful to efforts to improve early childhood education. Early childhood traditionalists resist proposals to strengthen the academic/verbal/early literacy aspects of preschool and early childhood programs or put in place curriculum standards because they argue that the most important thing for little kids to do is to play. But that's not really a choice--effective preschool programs use play and play-like activities to teach children pre-literacy, math, and social/emotional skills. If you go into an early childhood classroom where high-quality early literacy and verbal development are going on, you see children having fun. And, more explicit adult efforts to develop children's verbal and social/emotional skills can actually help give children the tools to play well.

1-800-FAKE-DIPLOMA

This conversation, with a sales rep from fake diploma provider "Glenndale University," from yesterday's NYTimes Education Life supplement, is a riot: Exerpts:

Q. Can you tell me a bit about the program?

A. What we have is a credentialing program that will reward you for your work, private study and life experience. This is a non-accredited degree and cannot be used for transferringcredits to another institution of higher learning. However, you most certainly can use them for business and employment purposes and almost everything else. The way it works is that we will take your word on your qualifications, and we will base your degree on what you tell us. So assuming you’re a professional in your field and all you are missing is the documentation of the degree, you can comfortably use this diploma to fill that obligation.

Upon our discretion, you will receive, within 7 to 10 business days, a bachelor’s degree, an M.B.A., a master’s degree or even a Ph.D. The degree will be made to your specifications. If your past achievements support it, then you can graduate summa cum laude, the greatest distinction. If you feel your achievements deserve a more modest grade point average, then that can be reflected on your transcript. It looks very much like the degree of U.C.L.A.

You are allowed to assume any titles that come with your degree. If you are to get a Ph.D., you could legally call yourself doctor. And when we receive an inquiry from a prospective employer we will verify your degree and send off certified copies of the transcript you receive. It will be coming from Glenndale University, located in London, England. I’m prepared to offer you the unheard-of price of $500.

Q. Wow. Do you get anything else with it?

A. With a bachelor’s, you get a four-year transcript; with a master’s you get a three-year transcript. Each class is listed, graded, and the transcript conforms to standards in your major. In addition, you would be receiving a laminated, wallet-sized replica of your diploma.

And:

Q. You don’t have any classes, even online?

A. No, but our Web site makes it look like we do.

Plus:

Q. You said someone could pick their grade point, too? What’s the highest?

A. It’s 3.8 to be summa cum laude. You already have a bachelor’s degree, right? I think we should give you the 3.8.

I'm guessing it's the laminated, wallet-sized replica that really puts them over the top.

Now, it goes without saying that the people running "Glenndale University" are nothing but fraudsters, and anyone trying to pass off such a degree as legit deserves to be found out.

But it does highlight a couple of interesting issues related to higher education. First, the high demand for services from accredited colleges and universities is partly a function of their exclusive franchise: they're the only providers of a product that holds great and growing value in the modern economy: permanent, portable, universally-accepted credentials of knowledge and skills. Even though people often acquire most of their useful knowledge and skills on the job, there are no legitimate, rigorous assessors or credentialers of "work, private study, and life experience" Why not? Should there be?

Second, college degrees are more of a commodity than higher education folks would like to admit. Outside of well-known or elite schools--which educate only a small fraction of all students--a B.A. is a B.A. is a B.A. There are many hundreds of public and private degree-granting institutions that are basically unknown outside of their region. The only guarantor of their quality is accreditation, and that process is opaque and only establishes a quality floor. Nobody really knows if a degree from relatively anonymous university A is any better or worse than a degree from relatively anonymous university B. That's what allows the "Glenndale Universities" of the world to stay in business.

Men in the Classroom

Via the EdWonks, an interesting story about efforts in Florida to recruit more black male teachers. Both men and people of color are underrepresented in teaching, and the numbers from Florida presented in this article are truly astounding--it says the state's teacher preparation programs produced only 61 black male teachers last year!

There are real reasons to be very concerned about the achievement of black male students as a group. Educators and policymakers are eager to attract talented black men to teaching to provide role models for black male students and send the message that academic achievement is not inconsistent with being a black man. But it's difficult because talented black men are very much sought after in the workforce, so young black men who would make excellent teachers often opt for more lucrative and prestigious options in business, law, etc. There's also something of a vicious cycle at work, too. Because so many young black men are not receiving a good education that prepares them to succeed (according to the Manhattan Institute, the national 4-yr high school graduation rate for black males in only 48%), we're losing out on a lot of potentially good black male teachers who've never had the opportunity to reach that potential.

It's also worth noting that alternative routes to teaching, such as Teach for America, Teaching Fellows programs and Troops for Teachers, seem to be having more success attracting males and members of minority groups to the profession, although still not enough.

Your Sara Mead Fix for the Day

If you're really bored this afternoon, or you just can't get enough of The Truth About Boys and Girls, or you're dying to know what I look like when I'm not channeling a punk-rock fairy, you can watch the web feed of me on C-SPAN this past weekend here (I'm about 2 hours into the July 29 episode). But, really, I hope you have something better to do with your time.

Update: And if you're still bored, this is really fun.

David Brooks on College Aid

Someday, David Brooks will write a tight, well-reasoned column on education policy, and we will praise it here on the Quick and the Ed.

Today is not that day.

In today's NYTimes piece($), Brooks critiques a recent proposal to increase college financial aid from Hillary Clinton and the DLC, making the familiar Brooksian argument that it's all about culture, stupid. He says:

Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

There are two basic challenges to increasing the percentage of people who earn college degrees: getting more students to go to college, and getting more students to graduate once they get there. Brooks mixes and muddles these issues throughout the column, but as it happens he's got his facts wrong no matter how you look at it.

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau, the percent of high school graduates who immediately enrolled in college the fall after graduation increased from 49% in 1972 to 67% in 2004.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who completed at least some college increased from 36% to 57%.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who earned a bachelor's degree increased from 19% to 29%.

All of those numbers can and should be better. But it's foolish to say that the federal student aid money spent during that time did no good.

Brooks criticizes the DLC proposal for new tuition tax credits by citing Harvard Professor (and Education Sector research advisory board member) Bridget Terry Long's research questioning the effectiveness of the Clinton administration's HOPE and lifetime learning tax credis. But the whole point of the DLC proposal is to reform those credits by making them more generous, streamlined, and targeted.

Brooks notes, correctly, that the college completion problem isn't all about money, that we need to do a better job of preparing students for college and engaging them once they get there. But that's why the DLC ties funding for its program to state success in getting students into and through college, to create incentives to fix those problems.

There's one area where both Brooks and the DLC miss the mark: asserting that college dropouts are a growing problem. Way too many students drop out of college, hundreds of thousands every year. It's a terrible problem and a huge waste of opportunity and talent. But the percentage of students who enter college and don't finish isn't going up; the best research suggests it's actually gone down slightly in recent years. College dropouts are a bigger percentage of the population than they once were, but only because more people go to college in the first place.

In the end there are a lot problems to tackle when it comes to getting more students through college. Preparation, attitude, engagement, culture--these things matter. But money matters too. An extra $5,000 for college might not seem like a lot of money if you're a rich guy from suburban Maryland. For a lot of students, that kind of money makes all the difference in the world.

Kirp on Preschool

Education Sector senior non-resident fellow David Kirp published two articles of note recently. One uses new research to suggest that early-childhood education is even more important than you might have thought, while the other uses Illinois as a case study of the many political obstacles to achieving it.

In "After the Bell Curve," published in last weekend's New York Times Magazine, Kirp brings new research about heredity and environment to bear on the long-running debate about nature and nurture. Several studies of low-income twins and adopted children have complicated the conventional wisdom that I.Q. is almost solely a function of genetic—it appears that for poor children, the detrimental developmental impact of poverty can overwhelm heredity and prevent those children from reaching their genetically-determined intelligence potential. In other words, "how genes are expressed depends on the social context" and "if heredity defines the limits of intelligence, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached."

Kirp notes, for example, that the average 4-year-old growing up poor has heard a total of 32 million fewer spoken words than the child of professionals. Such a language-poor environment is a serious setback to realization of intellectual potential. Kirp argues that early-childhood education, namely universal preschool, is the way to create a stimulating environment for all children to help them "max out" their I.Q.

In "Sandbox Cum Laude," published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Kirp and Donna Leff examine the state of preschool education in Illinois in light of Governor Rod Blagojevich's new "Preschool for All" initiative. The article spotlights several successful state- and district-funded pre-K programs for at-risk tots and reviews the research that supports high-quality preschool as a sound investment, such as estimates that the economic return to society of preschool programs is between $7.14 and $17.07 for every dollar invested. But implementation of the Illinois initiative hasn't always been smooth, and several issues remain unresolved, including whether this expensive project will continue to be supported by a governor accused by an opponent of having "policy attention deficit disorder," how it will incorporate existing federally and locally funded preschool programs, and how it will function in an era of high-stakes testing and accountability.

-Laura Boyce

Private College Campaign Against Accountability, Contd.

The Washington Post ran an Op-ed yesterday by the Katherine Haley Will, President of Gettysburg College, criticizing the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education for supporting a new, improved system of collecting information about the nation's colleges and universities.

I won't bore you with the whole back-story about how this is part of an orchestrated campaign led by private colleges to avoid being held accountable for whether or not they're doing a good job, having done so recently here and also a few months ago here. So just some additional comments:

If you feel like you've read this all before, you have: the same person ran essentially the same Op-ed on the same topic in the same place (the WaPo) last year, read it here if once just wasn't enough. She even managed to get the phrase "Big Brother" into both titles. Shouldn't there be some kind of policy against that, some sort of editorial statute of limitations?

The big misrepresenations in this piece remain the same as always: failing to mention that (A) Data about individual students would never be released in any form, protected by strict federal privacy laws established over 30 years ago, (B) The system is not designed to monitor students, it's designed to monitor institutions, and (C) Many higher education folks, including the major organizations of public universities, support the plan.

There are also some more specific misrepresentations of note. For example, the first graf says:

Does the federal government need to know whether you aced Aristotelian ethics but had to repeat introductory biology? Does it need to know your family's financial profile, how much aid you received and whether you took off a semester to help out at home?

The system wouldn't actually collect data about the grades you received in specific courses. It's never a good sign when you have to exaggerate and dissemble in the lead sentence of your piece to make your point.

Moreover, think about the question: "Does the federal government...need to know your family's financial profile" for a second. Of course, the federal government already does know that, because your family fills out a detailed series of forms every year with all kinds of information about income and spending and submits it to the IRS.

That data remains confidential and doesn't get used for any "Orwellian schemes" (her words) because to do so would be a federal crime punishable by time in prison--as would releasing data submitted under the system in question here. The Op-ed also says:

This proposal is a violation of the right to privacy that Americans hold dear. It is against the law. Moreover, there is a mountain of data already out there that can help us understand higher education and its efficacy.

What law does this proposal violate? Surely President Will can't mean the recent bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives banning the system, a bill that hasn't been passed by the Senate nor signed by the President. I hope this debate hasn't sunk to the point that it misses distinctions I learned when I was six years old watching "Schoolhouse Rock."

And to the claim that there is a "mountain of data" out there about higher education efficacy, here's an open challenge: Someone, anyone send me information that shows the following about Gettysburg College:

How much do students there learn between the time they arrive as freshmen and the time they leave as seniors? How does that compare to other colleges?

If you do, I'll publish it here along with an apology to President Will.

Separate by Sex

Well it looks like Michigan will soon be set to try out single-sex public education. There are some important caveats, that entrance to classes be voluntary and that a school that offers single-sex classes must provide "substantially equal" co-ed classes.

In its best light, it seems that parents and students will have choices. Who's against choice? If you think your kid will do better in an all-boy environment, you ought to have that as a publicly-funded choice. And if you think your kid will do better in an all white environment, well you ought to have that as a choice too….Well, wait a minute. Starting to get uncomfortable now.

My problem with publicly funded single-sex schools is two-fold. First, there's no real evidence that it's better and second, we are racing forward with no attention to the past.

Regarding evidence, I thought we were focused on rigor and empiricism. The U.S. Department of Education research on single-sex education calls its own results "equivocal" and concludes that:

"There is some support for the premise that single-sex schooling can be helpful, especially for certain outcomes related to academic achievement and more positive academic aspirations. For many outcomes, there is no evidence of either benefit or harm. There is limited support for the view that single-sex schooling may be harmful or that coeducational schooling is more beneficial for students."

Translated, we don't know much, and taken with a grain of salt, we do not expect that any children will be harmed by single-sex education and we think that maybe they might like it. But then again maybe not. Hard to say.

A recent study in the UK revealed similar findings- no discernable educational benefit from single-sex schooling. Important to note that the UK is experiencing a reverse trend in single-sex schooling (30 years ago the UK had 2,500 single-sex schools and now has only about 400 remaining).

In sum, there are no major rigorous research studies that find single-sex works better. Still, we're plowing ahead and a lot of people are pushing hard for this, including parents who understandably are desperate for better education for their children. My concern about our attention to history is quite simple: "separate but equal" means something in this country for a reason. If single-sex public schools feel uncomfortably familiar maybe it's because we're recalling that we used to segregate by sex and race and decided against that path for very good reasons. I'm not against alternatives to traditional public schools. I'm against quick fixes that ignore what we do know and rely on what we don't.

Voucher Madness

The most important thing to know about the new $100 million voucher proposal trotted out by Republicans in the House and Senate earlier this week is that it fails the accountability litmus test.

If you're willing to propose a voucher plan that requires private schools accepting voucher students to be held accountable for their success in educating those students, using the same tests and same proficiency standards used to judge public schools, then as far as I'm concerned you deserve a seat at the table for a serious conversation about funding, choice, and how to help students trapped in chronically under-performing schools. I might not agree with all of the specifics of your approach, but we can talk--particularly if you might be so bold as to make part of that funding contingent on performance.

If you're not willing to tie funding to accountability, then you're just grandstanding, trotting out the education equivalent of constitutional amendments to ban flag-burning or discriminate against gay people. That's all this recent proposal really is.

Tortured Logic from Teachers Unions, Cont'd.

The National Education Association has been circulating some talking points trying to refute findings in the paper Education Sector released last week describing how the NEA has been giving money to a wide range of organizations, not always in a transparent manner, in its fight against NCLB. (See the comments section here). Some are absurd on their face ("Myth 1: The NEA opposes the No Child Left Behind Act), others adhere to the time-honored strategy of "refuting" allegations the report doesn't actually make.

But one point is worth discussing at more length, because it sheds some light on the logic and psychology governing the way teachers unions engage with those who disagree with them. It says:

MYTH 7: Education Sector is an independent think tank.

FACT: Contrary to its claims, it is not an independent think tank. One of Education Sector’s founders and a co-director is Andrew Rotherham. Formerly with the Progressive Policy Institute at the Democratic Leadership Council, Rotherham regularly wrote pieces highly critical of NEA. The other cofounder and co-director, Thomas Toch, has also written many pieces critical of NEA and teachers unions. Education Sector’s board of directors also lacks the representation of teachers or other public school employees.

Last week the AFT blog made the unfortunately familiar assertion that people who disagree with teachers union positions on public policy issues are, by definition, anti-union.

This goes a step further down the rabbit hole. It seems to say that an organization staffed by people who have been critical of teachers unions are, by definition, not independent. Since the NEA's positions are apparently infallible, any disagreement with them is, ipso facto, a sign of being compromised or unduly influenced.

What accounts for this mind-bending logic? I think the culprit is what I'll call "moral altitude sickness."

Teachers unions, by their nature, have extremely strong moral standing. First, by being a labor union, and thus being on the right side of history when it comes to the struggle for worker's rights. Second, by being supporters of public education, and thus strong advocates for one of society's most important and egalitarian institutions.

To be clear, I don't dispute that status. But the rarified air on that moral high ground appears to be pretty oxygen-poor, leading to bizzare flights of logic like the one shown above. The downside of being above everyone else is that there's nobody else to talk to, nobody to let you know that you're steadily cutting yourself out of the mainstream discourse. Everyone else starts to seem smaller, lower, and far away. Eventually you stop listening, and nobody can hear what you have to say.

Ritalin Madness

Sunday's much-discussed NYT front-page story on kids taking their ADHD/depression drugs to summer camp really bothered me, in particular the graphic accompanying the story. The graphic appears to indicate that 40 percent of kids at camp this summer are taking prescription drugs and, given the article's almost exclusive focus on drugs for ADHD, depression, and psychiatric disorders, this understandably freaks people out.

But there are some problems here. For starters, the graphic NYT used to show that 40 percent of campers take prescription drugs came not from a rigorous research study but from data supplied by a company called CampMeds that distributes prepakaged medication to summer camps. Leave aside for a second the obvious interest CampMeds has in overhyping the number of kids taking drugs. Its data is based on the limited sample of 100 camps it serves (the American Camp Association has over 6,700 members and accredits some 2,300 summer camps nationwide), and it's quite likely the camps that find it worth their $$ to hire CampMeds have a disproportionate number of kids taking prescription medication.

Further, the data provided by CampMeds and the NYT graphic don't match with public data available from other, more rigorous sources. For example, NYT's graph has 8 percent of kids at camp taking ADHD meds. But a study from the Centers for Disease Control found just under 8 percent of kids ages 4-17 had ever had ADHD diagnosed, and only 4.3 percent of kids were currently taking meds for it.

And then there's the fact that the chart itself doesn't match with the angle of the article, which starts with this humdinger:

The breakfast buffet at Camp Echo starts at a picnic table covered in gingham-patterned oil cloth. Here, children jostle for their morning medications: Zoloft for depression, Abilify for bipolar disorder, Guanfacine for twitchy eyes and a host of medications for attention deficit disorder.

Funny how not a single asthma or allergy drug is mentioned, despite it being far more common for kids to take drugs for these conditions than for depression or ADHD. But I've given up expecting problems that disproportionately affect poor and minority kids to make the front page of the NYT. That just doesn't sell papers like the "they're drugging the [white, affluent] kids" hysteria does.

It's not that I think we should be handing out meds like candy. When the numbers of kids taking psychiatric drugs have increased dramatically and we now have more kids diagnosed with ADHD than asthma (despite rapid growth of both), I think we should wonder what the heck is going on. I'm particularly concerned if, as the NYT article suggests (I'm taking the whole thing with a grain of salt), a lot of kids are getting prescribed these meds from their family doctor or general pediatrician, rather than a psychiatrist. Some of these drugs can have serious side-effects and/or haven't been tested in children. People taking them need good medical supervision by a psychiatrist who can adjust dosages, address side-effects, monitor for signs of trouble, etc. Of course, psychiatrists are damn expensive, and most insurance companies (if you've even got health insurance) are very reluctant to pay for mental health care, to say the least--all factors that work against kids or adults getting good care for these conditions. I'm also a bit concerned the "overmedication" hype may make some parents hesitant to get their kids treatment they need--with potentially tragic results in some cases.

It also bothers me that media, policymakers, and educators are paying so much more attention to the "overmedication" issue than the at least as, if not more, serious problem of kids who aren't getting enough maintenance medication and other treatment for their asthma. Asthma is the third leading cause of hospitalization for kids under 15, it accounts for 14 million days of missed school annually, and the number of kids dying from asthma has trippled since 1979. Many of these negative consequences could be avoided with proper preventative health care and maintenance education and medication for kids with asthma, but since poor and minority kids are both disproportionately diagnosed with asthma and less likely to have access to good health care, a lot of them don't get the preventative treatment they need. There are some interesting things going on around the country to build awareness and help address this problem, but it's still a big one, both for schools and for health care policy. It's also the kind of issue I'd love to see a front page Times story about--but I'm not holding my breath.

The Boys and Girls Debate Rages On

You may have read Christina Hoff Sommers' Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing my paper questioning the "boy crisis" in America's schools. A letter-to-the-editor I wrote ($-sorry) responding to some misinformation in Sommers' piece ran in last Thursday's WSJ.

A number of people who don't like my take on the boy crisis issue have made arguments something along the lines of "So if you don't think the boy-girl achievement gap matters because both genders are increasing but girls are increasing faster, does that mean you don't think the male-female wage gap matters?"

I think this is a silly argument for multiple reasons, most significantly that it's completely divorced from what's really happening with male-female wage gaps, which have been declining recently, but because of falling average male wages, rather than increasing wages for women. Women's groups have, rightly, not been celebrating this kind of gap narrowing, which is a win neither for men nor women. Gaps are important--but this situation illustrates the problems with looking at them alone, rather than looking at how the achievement of both groups between whom a gap exists have changed over time, too.

This argument also seems to undercut itself--if men still earn more than women, why should we be that upset about gender achievement gaps? Remember, gaps favoring girls in reading are longstanding. Men currently in the workforce did worse than the women they currently outearn on school reading tests by pretty close to the same margin as today's boys do worse than today's girls in reading. And even the supposedly aimless young men right out of college are earning more, controlling for field, than their female peers. Until we have much clearer evidence that these gaps produce negative results for men and society (which we do for specific subgroups, such as low-income and African-American men, but not for men overall), I'm just not going to panic.

Change in D.C.?

Because of D.C.'s unique situation--it's neither a state nor part of any other state--many D.C. agencies carry out both state and local functions. The D.C. Board of Education, for example, fills the role of local school district for Washington, D.C., residents, but it is also responsible for functions carried out by state departments of education in most states (such as designing and managing the accountability system and administering certain federal grants). This is problematic for two reasons: First, there are instances when the responsibilities of local school district and state department of ed conflict, such as dealing with charter schools or sanctions for low-performing DCPS schools. Moreover, the D.C. Board of Ed. hasn't exactly proven itself competent at carrying out either set of its responsibilities.

WaPo reports that the Senate Appropriations Committee is trying to address these issues with a provision in the D.C. Approps bill that would require the D.C. Board of Education to shift some of its state-level functions to another (new or existing) agency. (Full text here, about 2/5 of the way down.)

Normally, this is the kind of thing that would set off a home rule controversy, but at least some Board and Council members quoted by the Post appear amenable to the idea. Clearly, the Board of Education and its governance and oversight of D.C. schools have their problems. Shifting state-level functions to another entity may help a little (although there are also potential problems), but it doesn't address the fundamental issues in D.C. schools.

I'm interested to see what implications this might have for the Board of Education's future as a charter authorizer in the District (Could the entity that takes over state functions also assume the Board of Ed's chartering authority?). And, while I doubt this issue would have much impact on the mayor's race, it's interesting that the Post floats the mayor-controlled State Education Office (run by the excellent Deborah Gist) as a candidate to take over the state-level role. I'm also linking to Nathan at DC edblog, even though he hasn't posted on this yet, because I assume he will at some point and his opinions and analysis on D.C.-related education issues are valuable.

Also of note in the Senate committee version of D.C. approps: The bill would fund the D.C. resident tuition support program (which allows kids graduating from D.C. schools to attend universities in other states at in-state tuition rates) at current funding, maintain the current cap on attorneys' fees for special ed, and allow students currently receiving vouchers under the federally-funded D.C. voucher program to continue to receive vouchers if their family incomes rise to up to 300% of poverty (currently students are out once their parents earn more than 200% of poverty).