Gender, Race and the SAT

The College Board just released its report on national and state average results from the first-ever cohort of college students (the high-school class of 2006) to take the new SAT, first offered in March 2005, which ditched the old "verbal" section for "critical reading," added more advanced math content, and added an essay-based writing section.

Most media reports seem to be focusing on the state horserace or the fact that this year's critical reading subtest averages are somewhat lower than last year's verbal score averages. I'm not sure either of these is very informative, since the population of kids taking the SAT differs from state to state, and the new SAT the college board started administering in March 2005 is a different test from that administered in previous years.

Also gaining attention is the impact of the new writing section on average male-female SAT score differences. Historically, men have had higher average scores than women, not just on the SAT overall but also on both its verbal and math subsections--a departure from other assessments where men tend to do better than women on math (with a few caveats), but women tend to do better on verbal skills. But women did do better than men, on average, on the new writing section, lowering the the male-female score gap from 42 points in 2005 to 26 points this year. In addition to the writing section, the new critical reading section, which eliminated the infamous verbal analogies, probably also made the test more female-friendly, since verbal analogies are one of the few areas of verbal skills in which men typically outperform women, and the difference between men's critical reading scores this year and their verbal skills last year is larger than that for women.

Because women's improved SAT performance relative to men reflects changes in the assessment and not simply changes in students' skills, it shouldn't be taken as evidence of a boy crisis. But is men's continued higher average SAT performance--in both reading and math--evidence against a boy crisis? The answer is no. First, the difference between male and female reading scores on the SAT is tiny. More significant, the populations of men and women taking the test are different. More females than males take the SAT--54% of SAT-takers in the 2006 college-bound cohort were girls--and, because students in the highest segments of the achievement distribution for each gender are already pretty likely to take the SAT, the larger pool of women taking it probably means more women from lower on the achievement are taking the test--and a look at the gender breakdowns of students by score distribution backs this up.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, once again, gender gaps are much smaller on the SAT than are racial and ethnic gaps. And the SAT results seem to buttress the notion that we should be particularly concerned about African-American males, who are the lowest-performing racial/gender subgroup, trailing their sisters in math and, unlike males from other racial/ethnic groups, reading, even as males make up a smaller percentage of African-American SAT-takers than they do any other racial/ethnic group.

By the Way...If you want to hear and talk more about gender gaps in education from K-12 through higher ed, please join Education Sector on Tuesday, September 12 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, for a discussion with USA Today's Richard Whitmire, Georgetown and the Urban Institute's Harry Holzer, and yours truly. It's free, but space is limited, so RSVP quickly!

College Presidents for Transparency and Accountability

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that one of my somewhat obsessive hobbyhorse issues areas of signficant interest is the ongoing debate about establishing a national "unit record" higher education data system.

Put simply, the federal government wants to improve the ways it collects information about college performance, using privacy protected data about individual students. The associations of private colleges have fought a scorched-earth P.R. campaign against the system, basically calling it the precursor to an Orwellian police state.

That tactic has been pretty successful--the House of Representatives passes legislation banning the system earlier this year--partly because supporters of the system from within higher education, of which there are many, haven't been as focal in presenting the opposing view.

That's why its was great to open up the Washington Post this morning and read an excellent, well-reasoned Op-ed supporting the system written by Thomas Hochstettler, President of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety, but here's his case in a nutshell:

Where some see the specter of Big Brother looking over colleges' and students' shoulders, I see a potential for a robust (and privacy-protected) set of metrics that would yield essential data with tremendous potential for advancing our individual institutions and for identifying with greater precision those areas where our national education policy needs to be strengthened. Where some see the specter of government intrusion, I see the possibility of transforming our current separate data-reporting schemes into a streamlined system that is beneficial to students and useful to faculty and administrators.

Contrary to what critics of the database plan might have the public believe, we in academia know remarkably little about what emerges from the vast and diverse system of higher education. Why do students drop out? Where do they go when they do? What factors in primary and secondary school, beyond grade-point averages, class rankings and standardized test scores, best predict their success or failure in college? What impact does their educational experience have on our students' success or failure after graduation?

We are ill-equipped to answer these questions. Without comprehensive information, both individual institutions and society lack the tools to assess how the system is working, how it is failing and how it might be improved.

Why would the president of a private college like Lewis and Clark--along with most of the major associations of public institutions--support the new data system? I'm guessing because they know that they're ill-served by the current higher education market, which is starved for real information about quality. When the public has no good data about which institutions are actually serving students best, it naturally falls back on the long-established, written-in-stone higher education pecking order, which favors elite private institutions. Getting more good information into the hands of the public--precisely the goal of the data system in question--would allow all the other institutions to be judged more fairly on their merits.

$200,000 bonuses, it's a start

Martin O’Malley has a new plan for improving Maryland’s low performing schools - $200,000 principal bonuses, paid out over four years. That’s an impressive sum, and refreshing to see someone putting real money on the table - as the plan states, “Half-hearted measures will not work.” However, it is only a start. There are two key elements missing from this plan:

First, a strategy for identifying and recruiting exceptional principals from school districts within Maryland and across the country. Relying solely on money as a carrot to recruit high performing principals is insufficient; the state needs to actively recruit principals that will do the best job.

Second, there is no accountability. Base annual bonuses on principals’ gains, not only in test scores, but also in recruiting high quality teachers, improving the curriculum, ensuring students receive additional supports, and involving parents. The plan uses the analogy of a CEO hiring an exceptional manager to turn around a store. However, that CEO would do more than hire the manager for the store, he would carefully watch sales data to ensure improvements were happening. Certainly, he would do that before paying out a large bonus.

O’Malley should be focusing not simply on luring principals into schools with financial incentives, but actively recruiting principals who think they are up to the challenge of earning those bonuses with large gains in student achievement.

Of course, holding principals accountable also requires giving them the freedom to make the necessary hiring, curricular, and scheduling changes to build the school they envision. If Maryland will be recruiting principals worth $200,000 bonuses, then they should entrust those principals to make the school level decisions necessary to earn that money.

A Bit Too Much Editorial Freedom

I couldn't help read the The New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorials on charter schools over the last couple of days without injecting into the conversation a publication on the status of big-city charters issued recently by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE).

The two newspaper editorial pages squared off over a new study of charter school performance conducted for the U.S. Department of Education by researchers at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. The study found that students in traditional public schools outperformed their counterparts in charter schools in reading and math. The Times declared the study to be evidence that charter schools are not a "cure-all" for what ails American public education. The Journal cried foul, declared the study unreliabled, and insisted that other studies "have repeatedly shown charter school students outperforming their counterparts in traditional public schools."

Both papers "marshalled" evidence on charters aggressively. But there's another assessment of charter schools out from a far more credible source, CRPE, a University of Washington think tank headed by the respected researcher Paul Hill. Hill and his colleagues recently published a summary of a symposium on the state of the charter school movement involving 22 charter advocates and researchers.

The gathering, organized by CRPE, was a who's who of the national charter school movement. And their take on the charter movement was sobering. "I think the issue of attaining academic quality was highly underestimated by all of us," said Ted Mitchell, head of the NewSchools Venture fund, a non-profit organization that invests in charter school management organizations. "We can only grow as fast as we can find good people, and we are not able to find all the people we need," said Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP Academies, which has opened over 50 charter schools nationwide. "This isn't McDonalds," added Nelson Smith, the head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy organization. "The process of replicating a good school isn't easy or predictable." The report on the symposium concluded that "all agreed that the road to scale is much rockier than anyone imagined."

There are some truly inspiring charter schools run by smart, committed people who would probably shun education rather than put up with the stifling bureaucracy of many traditional public schools. But creating good schools of any sort is hard work, these earnest educational entrepreneurs have discovered. Admitting that reality, and that many charters have not emerged as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools, as Paul Hill's conferees have done in a public report, is a gutsy step for charter leaders to take, and a step towards increasing the supply of stronger charters. Someone call the polemicists that the Journal and the Times and tell them to take the rest of the day off.

See This Movie

Saw a very, very good movie over the weekend--Half Nelson, about an 8th grade history teacher with a drug problem and his friendship with one of his students. No real policy takeaways, just an unusually smart, honest, and well-acted film about real people struggling to make sense of a world damaged by the illegal drug trade in countless ways.

Teacher Certification Slug-Fest, Final Rounds

Days 4&5 of my back-and-forth on the merits of teacher certification are now posted at Edspresso. In all seriousness, less of a fight than an interesting conversation, for which my fellow debater deserves much credit. There are also some worthwhile extra perspectives in the comments section.

SMART Snags

There have been a lot of stories this week about the no-so-smart federal SMART grants. The National Science and Mathematics Access to Retaining Talent (SMART) grant program offers $4,000 to eligible students who are majoring in an eligible field of study. It's these devilish "eligibility" details that have caused the recent problems.

First, as detailed by InsideHigherEd.com, more than a hundred students at Utah State University were told they were eligible for the $4,000 grants only to hear a week later that they were not. Apparently they are ineligible because they had taken too many credit hours to qualify (seniors are eligible only if they've taken between 90-120 credits). So it seems seniors are only seniors if they've taken just the required number of credits. The Utah State U website now clarifies this for prospective SMART grantees.

And in other SMART grant mishaps, you'll be happy to know that evolutionary biology is back! The Chronicle's articles on Tuesday and then today provide the full story, which is basically that the list of eligible majors for the SMART grant managed somehow to leave out evolutionary biology. Tough one to miss considering how hot the topic of evolution has been lately. But all's well that end's well. The Dept of Ed has released a statement explaining the oversight and evo-bio is now happily sandwiched between marine biology and environmental biology on the revised list.

New Quick-and-Edster

Note: the post below is the first on the Quick and the Ed from Erin Dillon, a newly-arrived policy analyst at Education Sector. Erin comes to the organization from New York, NY, where she worked as a research associate at the Beginning with Children Foundation, helping with a college preparatory program for high school students and managing a research project examining charter school students' academic achievement. Prior to that, she received her master's in Social Sciences in Education at Stanford University. Look for more posts from Erin in the future.

Help for High Performing Schools

The Washington Post ran an article today on how students in Montgomery County, Maryland did on the state's High School Assessment (HSA), which for the first time is being used as a high-stakes exit exam for this year's sophomore class. The good news is that the school system plans to implement special programs at low-performing schools, and that the evidence suggests that such programs can be greatly beneficial. But those plans also raise the question of whether some students will be short-changed because, paradoxically, they have what every parent wants for their child: a place in a high-performing school.

In 2005, only 26.5% of students at Kennedy High School passed algebra. After a year of interventions, including extra instructional time before and after school and at lunch, and a $150,000 program designed specifically to target algebra, that rate jumped dramatically, to 67.6%, the schools’ highest scores since 2002. The moral being that there is hope in intensive interventions and additional resources for students who need them. High school exit exams don’t necessarily have to result in low-income and minority students missing out on a high school diploma.

At Walt Whitman high school, by contrast, the 2006 passing rate in Algebra was much higher, 80.7%. Scores for most specific groups of students were strong: 70% of Hispanic females passed, as did 100% of Asian females. But the African American passing rate at Whitman was 33.3%, a decrease from 2004 and 2005.

A spokesman for the school system said that "special programs will be put in place at schools where significant numbers of students failed to pass the exams." Let's hope those programs are also extended to students at schools like Whitman where high averages mask huge achievement gaps. The numbers at Kennedy High School suggest that interventions work. Students shouldn't miss them simply because they're lucky enough to be in a "high performing" school.

College Is Not a Dating Service

Andy tries to lure me into commenting on this U.S. News story (in the much-critiqued "America's Best Colleges") about the increasing female dominance on college campuses. Ok, I'll take the bait. Here's how the story kicks off:

The University of La Verne sits on 26 acres of suburbia between the city of Los Angeles and the mountains. It's a small place, with just over 1,600 students, most of whom live in three drab and boxy-looking dormitories. A decade ago, one was exclusively male, one was female, and one was coed. But faced with a surge in women students (who made up 65 percent of the student body last year, up from 58 percent a decade ago), the school had to convert two thirds of the male facility for women's use. "Everyone knows guys are scarce on this campus," says Nick Solis, a sophomore, who adds that the women in his coed dorm have taken to using the men's room out of convenience.

For starters, let's just point out that this school is an anomaly. Across all colleges and universities in the U.S., the average male-female breakdown for traditional-age undergraduates is about 55% female to 45% male. (Women strongly outnumber men among older, non-traditional students, which is part of why the CUNY system, to which the author refers in the piece and which has 35% of students over 25, is about 2/3 female.) That's still not parity, and the 60/40 female/male ratio among black students is concerning to many people. Butthis school is clearly an extreme.

The article trots through all the typical statistics and explanations about why women outnumber men in college, but it's main focus is on how (and why) some colleges are now going out of their way to recruit more men, and, in some instances, appear to be using pro-male affirmative action to do so.

Why are colleges trying to recruit more men?

The university experience, after all, is only partially about academics, and students strongly consider campus climate when choosing where to apply. Anecdotal evidence suggests that once a campus reaches a certain ratio, say 60-40 women to men, both females and males are less likely to apply. "Frankly, students care about the dating scene on campus and no one wants to be outnumbered," says Bari Norman, a former admissions counselor at Barnard College who now runs mycollegecounselor.com.

You see, college isn't really about getting an education. It's about the social life. And that means dating. And, potentially, finding a future mate. (As U.S. News so helpfully points out, "already researchers are thinking ahead to the long-term implications of a shortage of suitably educated peers for women to marry.") Leave aside that most college students today don't actually "date." They hook up. And, while I certainly knew girls in college who were really there to get the MRS. degree (I went to Vanderbilt), that's not why most people go to college (after all, no one ever argued that the Citadell or VMI should go co-ed because the crappy dating scene and lousy chances of finding a wife there were hurting male recruitment). People do still talk about college as if it's a place to find a future mate, but that's not the reality for most people: The median age at first marriage in the U.S. is 25 for women and 27 for men, and it's older than that for those who completed college.

Of course, as Kevin and others have pointed out, since prospective college students don't currently have access to information to tell them which college they might learn the most at, or which has the best record placing people in good jobs in their desired field, they've got to rely on other information, such as reputation, wealth and selectivity (what U.S. News measures), how nice the dorms or rec center are; and, yeah, the potential dating scene.

But the real meat of the story (to the extent there is any) is in the discussion of whether colleges are accepting less-impressive male applicants over more qualified women in an effort to maintain gender parity. For obvious reasons, no college wants to admit that they're doing this, but the differential acceptance rates for males and females that the author trots out from several schools are quite striking. There are reasons, though, to proceed with some caution here. For starters, the competitive colleges the article cites represent only a tiny share of the college market. Top-ranked schools like the Ivies have near-parity in applicants and admissions rates for the genders. And the vast majority of college students in the U.S. go to noncompetitive schools that accept pretty much everyone who applies. Its also possible that some of these colleges are rejecting more women because more women from lower on the academic achievement distribution are applying to them.

But I wonder if articles like this contribute to something of a vicious cycle. Although there's no evidence, a persistent theme--on both sides--in debates about why women are outstripping men on some academic indicators seems to be that at least some groups of women are more determined and are working harder because they've gotten a message that they need to do so in order to compete economically, provide for their future families, etc. It would be ironic if, as a result, prestige colleges really did start requiring women to be much better than men to be admitted.

Teacher Certification Brouhaha

Day 3, at Edspresso. Ritchey and Carey duel over Teach For America, whether or not teacher certification has entered the 21st--or even 20th--Century. Carey lays down an evidentiary challenge.

Teacher Certification Ultimate Fighting Championship

Round 2 between me and David Ritchey, in the eight-sided ring.

NCLB Makes Children Fat

Or so says Cnn.com, which as of 3:00PM EST today is leading with a story titled "P.E. shrinks, waistlines bulge," complete with this picture of President Bush:

Just to make sure the point is clear, the teaser paragraph is as follows:

School-age children are growing fatter, but most states are failing to provide them with enough physical education, according to a report by the American Heart Association and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. Critics contend the legislation meant to bolster academic standards -- President Bush's No Child Left Behind program -- may be a culprit.

The article recites the standard-issue "narrowing" critique of NCLB: because it focuses more attention on the core skills of math and reading, it focuses less attention on everything else, like, for example, phys-ed. It's a reasonable problem to worry about, and on some level probably an unavoidable consequence of working harder on basic skills. But as is often the case, there's less here than meets the eye.

The article quotes the report's citation of this statistic: "The percentage of students who attend a daily physical education class has dropped from 42 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2003." But this isn't an original finding, the report cites a previous study published by the Centers for Disease Control in 2004. You can see that study here. It found the following:

1) the proportion of students attending PE class daily declined significantly during 1991--1995 and did not change during 1995--2003 and 2) the proportion of students exercising or playing sports for >20 minutes during PE class 3--5 days per week did not change significantly during 1991--2003.

In other words, the decline in daily PE class attendance that Cnn.com is prominently hanging on NCLB concluded seven years before NCLB was enacted. And by another measure PE hasn't declined at all.

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.