Nicholas Kristoff gets everything right in his Times column($) about teacher policy, which basically re-summarizes the findings and conclusions of Gordon, Kane, and Stager's widely-discussed Hamilton Project paper. Long-time Quick and ED readers know all about the report, of course, since we blogged about it on April 14th...of 2006. But better late than never, I say. To quote our post from last year:
"For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers--certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master's degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat; some (like having a Masters' degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.
But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name--old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.
The Gordon paper simply takes these finding to their logical conclusion: instead of shaping teacher policy around things we know don't matter very much, let's shape teacher policy around things we know matter a lot. Instead of fighting a losing up-front battle to filter and sort prospective teachers based on qualities that may have a tenuous connection to success in the classroom, let's filter and sort them based on actual success in the classroom.
This would be a seismic change in the way teachers are prepared, hired, and treated as professionals. Really, an earth-spins-backward-on-its-axis, time-reverses-direction, Margot-Kidder-flies-up-out-of-a-ditch magnitude of change. It would mean taking seriously a fact that most educators know intuitively yet is largely absent from teacher policy: teaching is an extraordinarily complicated endeavor, and people find different ways to be good at it. You can train and test prospective teachers, give them knowledge and skill, and those things are important, but once they get into the classroom some teachers bring additional talents, work ethic, intelligence, drive, etc. to bear, and others don't. Those differences matter a lot to student learning.
This report has the courage to take seriously plain facts that many people know but are unwilling to act upon, because doing so would be a huge challenge to the status quo."
Also, along the same lines, see this Chart You Can Trust up on the EdSector home page today, focusing on how states have largely failed to hold teacher preparation programs accountable for preparing teachers to succeed in the classroom.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Monday, April 30, 2007
Creeping Big Brotherishness
Objectively speaking, I'm sure that new tools like Edline, which gives parents up-to-the-minute information about their children's academic progress--class attendance, quiz grades, the whole megillah--are probably a good thing. Identify problems early, keep families engaged with the school community, etc.
But I can't help but think that if such a tool existed when I was a senior in high school, my 17th year would have been a whole lot less fun. Once I got accepted into college, I basically stopped going to class and instead spent all my time with my buddies and girlfriend, playing ultimate frisbee and applying all of my analytic skills to calculating the precise combination of date, time of day, convenience store location, and apathetic/bribeable clerk that would most likely result in my being able to buy beer. My parents didn't discover this until my report card accidentally got mailed home six months later. Of course, being parents, they immediately panicked and assumed that the abundance of Cs, Ds, and Fs were evidence of a debilitating addiction to LSD and/or crack cocaine, which in retrospect I feel kind of bad about. That aside, I don't regret my decision for a moment; those were good times. Whence the next generation's "Dazed and Confused" if this trend is left unchecked?
Speaking of scary Internet monitoring and beer (and really, you can't do this often enough), can it really be true that Millersville University of Pennsylvania denied a 25-year old student a teaching certificate on the grounds that her MySpace page has a picture of her drinking a presumably alcoholic beverage at a party, along with the caption "Drunken Pirate"? (Hat tip: This Week in Education)
But I can't help but think that if such a tool existed when I was a senior in high school, my 17th year would have been a whole lot less fun. Once I got accepted into college, I basically stopped going to class and instead spent all my time with my buddies and girlfriend, playing ultimate frisbee and applying all of my analytic skills to calculating the precise combination of date, time of day, convenience store location, and apathetic/bribeable clerk that would most likely result in my being able to buy beer. My parents didn't discover this until my report card accidentally got mailed home six months later. Of course, being parents, they immediately panicked and assumed that the abundance of Cs, Ds, and Fs were evidence of a debilitating addiction to LSD and/or crack cocaine, which in retrospect I feel kind of bad about. That aside, I don't regret my decision for a moment; those were good times. Whence the next generation's "Dazed and Confused" if this trend is left unchecked?
Speaking of scary Internet monitoring and beer (and really, you can't do this often enough), can it really be true that Millersville University of Pennsylvania denied a 25-year old student a teaching certificate on the grounds that her MySpace page has a picture of her drinking a presumably alcoholic beverage at a party, along with the caption "Drunken Pirate"? (Hat tip: This Week in Education)
The Kids Are All Right
Peggy Noonan's "We're Scaring Our Children to Death" op-ed in Friday's WSJ is both nauseating and totally nonsensical. The latter, because Noonan fluctuates between suggesting that the world is actually a more dangerous place for kids these days, and suggesting the "culture" is exposing kids to too much scary (and vulgar!) stuff to early. But there's a huge difference between these two potential problems, and without clarity around that, Noonan's views on the subject are meaningless.
Then there's this: "But another reason is that, for all our protestations about how sensitive we are, how interested in justice, how interested in the children, we are not. We are interested in politics. We are interested in money. We are interested in ourselves." I'm sorry, but modern Americans are living at a time of a-historical protection of children and preoccupation with children and their needs. I'm not saying we shouldn't protect kids, but for most of human history, close quarters and lack of privacy meant children were exposed early and regularly to the realities of sex, violence and death. Today's parents are spending more time with their kids than anytime since researchers started keeping track, and fathers in particular are spending more time with their kids than they did in the fabled 1950s 1960s. Educational toys and services for kids from birth on are rapidly-growing, multi-billion dollar industries. Child and youth indicators have been improving, not getting worse (although in recent years they've hit a troubling plateau). Kids are inherently vulnerable, growing up is really hard, and I believe strongly that society needs to do more to support parents and kids--but we shouldn't be nostalgic about some mythical past golden age of innocent childhood.
There is a real problem with media overhyping of threats to children, many of which are relatively rare or not as deadly as they're made out to be. Everyone from the producers of Dateline's seemingly constant airings of "To Catch a Predator," to NYT editors who feel the need to daily proclaim the difficulty of getting into Ivy League schools knows that scaring the beejezus out of parents is one of the best ways to gain readership and make a buck. But this kind of overhyping has bad consequences for parents, kids, and sometimes public policy.
But the most offensive thing is the class spin Noonan tries to employ here:
Apparently Noonan doesn't understand that TV sets don't come with a meter that requires you to pay in order to turn off the set or change the channel. More to the point, this faux concern with inequality is downright nauseating coming from someone who thinks that cutting taxes for the rich is more important than providing health care for poor kids or decent childcare for low-income working folks. Noonan's unwillingness to raise a finger or voice concern about child wellbeing other than when it's a convenient excuse to chastise (presumably, liberal) "makers of our culture" demonstrates that she is the one who really cares more about politics and money than children.
Then there's this: "But another reason is that, for all our protestations about how sensitive we are, how interested in justice, how interested in the children, we are not. We are interested in politics. We are interested in money. We are interested in ourselves." I'm sorry, but modern Americans are living at a time of a-historical protection of children and preoccupation with children and their needs. I'm not saying we shouldn't protect kids, but for most of human history, close quarters and lack of privacy meant children were exposed early and regularly to the realities of sex, violence and death. Today's parents are spending more time with their kids than anytime since researchers started keeping track, and fathers in particular are spending more time with their kids than they did in the fabled 1950s 1960s. Educational toys and services for kids from birth on are rapidly-growing, multi-billion dollar industries. Child and youth indicators have been improving, not getting worse (although in recent years they've hit a troubling plateau). Kids are inherently vulnerable, growing up is really hard, and I believe strongly that society needs to do more to support parents and kids--but we shouldn't be nostalgic about some mythical past golden age of innocent childhood.
There is a real problem with media overhyping of threats to children, many of which are relatively rare or not as deadly as they're made out to be. Everyone from the producers of Dateline's seemingly constant airings of "To Catch a Predator," to NYT editors who feel the need to daily proclaim the difficulty of getting into Ivy League schools knows that scaring the beejezus out of parents is one of the best ways to gain readership and make a buck. But this kind of overhyping has bad consequences for parents, kids, and sometimes public policy.
But the most offensive thing is the class spin Noonan tries to employ here:
I am not sure the makers of our culture fully notice what they are doing, what impact their work is having, because the makers of our culture are affluent. Affluence buys protection. You can afford to make your children safe. You can afford the constant vigilance needed to protect your children from the culture you produce, from the magazine and the TV and the CD and the radio. You can afford the doctors and tutors and nannies and mannies and therapists, the people who put off the TV and the Internet and offer conversation.
Apparently Noonan doesn't understand that TV sets don't come with a meter that requires you to pay in order to turn off the set or change the channel. More to the point, this faux concern with inequality is downright nauseating coming from someone who thinks that cutting taxes for the rich is more important than providing health care for poor kids or decent childcare for low-income working folks. Noonan's unwillingness to raise a finger or voice concern about child wellbeing other than when it's a convenient excuse to chastise (presumably, liberal) "makers of our culture" demonstrates that she is the one who really cares more about politics and money than children.
Who I'll Be Rooting for May 5
This month's ESPN The Magazine may have Floyd Mayweather on the cover, but I was more interested in the article profiling Oscar De La Hoya, who'll be fighting Mayweather on PPV May 5.
The article focuses on De Lay Hoya's efforts to become not just a fighter but also a major boxing promoter and in the process to transform the business to make it a respectable part of mainstream American sports. I couldn't help but see a resemblance between De La Hoya's efforts to take on powerful promoters and change some of the seedier--and unfair to boxers--aspects of the industry, and his support for public charter schools that challenge the status quo and powerful interests in education to try to deliver a more equitable education for disadvantaged kids.
In ads for the fight
The article focuses on De Lay Hoya's efforts to become not just a fighter but also a major boxing promoter and in the process to transform the business to make it a respectable part of mainstream American sports. I couldn't help but see a resemblance between De La Hoya's efforts to take on powerful promoters and change some of the seedier--and unfair to boxers--aspects of the industry, and his support for public charter schools that challenge the status quo and powerful interests in education to try to deliver a more equitable education for disadvantaged kids.
In ads for the fight
De La Hoya narrates street scenes from his hometown of East Los Angeles: "Life was a struggle -- for myself, for my family, for those who need someone to believe in, like I did. I can give back. I'm living the American dream. Estoy viviendo el sueño Americano."One of the ways that De La Hoya has given back is by putting up bank to support the founding of the Oscar De La Hoya Animo Leadership Public Charter School, an East LA charter high school (mascot: The Boxers) operated by Green Dot Public Schools. ESPN The Magazine describes him as "a natural-born politician," and his promoting efforts as "his most ambitious campaign yet," but if De La Hoya's looking for a real challenge, I'd love to see him put more of that political talent to work on behalf of charters and other promising education reforms. In any case, I know who I'll be rooting for this Cinco do Mayo.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
The Be-All End-All College Credential
M.I.T. Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones was fired after revelations that she lied about having a college degree 28 years ago when she first applied for an entry level job that didn't require a college degree. Everyone at M.I.T. seems to think she was doing a fantastic job and will be sorely missed.
If that's the case, why fire her?
Misrepresenting credentials is dishonest and obviously a serious offense. But people do a lot of stupid things when they're younger and trying to make their way in the world. One could say she should have come clean before, but she probably knew that if she did, M.I.T. would demonstrate the same degree of forgiveness they're demonstrating now--namely, none.
This shows how rigid the credentialing mentality has become in higher education, trumping three decades of undisputed good work. It wasn't always that way. When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they simply accepted his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a doctoral thesis. The knew that forcing him to go through a formal course of study to earn a credential would be absurd. They were acting in their role as certifiers of learning, which is (see yesterday's post) not necessarily the same thing as being a provider of learning.
At the modern university, that distinction doesn't exist--you have to be certified by the institution that taught you. Indeed, since degrees aren't based on any objective, verifiable evidence of learning, that's all they're certifying--that you've been taught. So I wonder if in addition to deterring future resume-fudgers, M.I.T. wasn't exactly comfortable with the idea of employing someone who is living proof that you don't need a university degree to be really good at a complex, challenging, difficult job--particularly one at a university.
If that's the case, why fire her?
Misrepresenting credentials is dishonest and obviously a serious offense. But people do a lot of stupid things when they're younger and trying to make their way in the world. One could say she should have come clean before, but she probably knew that if she did, M.I.T. would demonstrate the same degree of forgiveness they're demonstrating now--namely, none.
This shows how rigid the credentialing mentality has become in higher education, trumping three decades of undisputed good work. It wasn't always that way. When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they simply accepted his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a doctoral thesis. The knew that forcing him to go through a formal course of study to earn a credential would be absurd. They were acting in their role as certifiers of learning, which is (see yesterday's post) not necessarily the same thing as being a provider of learning.
At the modern university, that distinction doesn't exist--you have to be certified by the institution that taught you. Indeed, since degrees aren't based on any objective, verifiable evidence of learning, that's all they're certifying--that you've been taught. So I wonder if in addition to deterring future resume-fudgers, M.I.T. wasn't exactly comfortable with the idea of employing someone who is living proof that you don't need a university degree to be really good at a complex, challenging, difficult job--particularly one at a university.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
How Much is That Degree Really Worth?
An interesting debate about the value of a college education starts here, on the Becker-Posner blog, Richard Posner's response here, and then follow-up from Richard Vedder here. In summary: Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker says that all the evidence points to the fact that a college education is worth more today than ever before. Posner and Vedder are skeptical, wondering if colleges are merely selecting and certifying smart people, and that smartness is actually what's more valuable than ever before.
It's a legitimate question, but Posner and Vedder don't offer any evidence to support their skepticism. I hear this point made fairly often, and in every single case it's made by an older white guy with multiple college degrees. That doesn't automatically make them wrong, but there's an unavoidable elitism to people who benefit from a hugely valuable privilege like higher education questioning whether other, less fortunate people would benefit from the same thing.
Moreover, higher education isn't just for the Top 10 percent anymore. Most college students are somewhere in the middle of the smartness distribution, and all the statistics pointing to a high return on education apply to them too.
The reason this debate even exists, of course, is that there's very little good data out there about how much colleges actually increase student learning between students arrive as freshman and leave at seniors. That data void is what keeps debates like this in the realm of informed speculation, rather than something that can be resolved empirically.
The debate also highlights an under-appreciated fact about contemporary higher education--universities have effectively merged two functions that are conceptually and historically distinct: education and certification. There's no particular reason that the institution that provides you with a curriculum and teachers has to be the same institution that grants you a degree certifying that you've mastered a certain body of knowledge and skills. In other higher education sectors--like IT certification--they're handled separately.
Because there's no hard data about how much students at a given institution actually learn, the job market values the degree in ways that are logical given that lack of information. If you get a degree from a selective college, the degree's primary value is a signal that you were smart enough to get admitted. If you (like most students) went to a non-selective school, the degree says that you had the work ethic and discipline necessary to accumulate 120 or so credits. Those qualities have value, which is why employers care about degrees. But the lack of data about learning creates distortions in the labor market that work to the detriment of the students who learn the most, particuarly at non-selective colleges.
It's a legitimate question, but Posner and Vedder don't offer any evidence to support their skepticism. I hear this point made fairly often, and in every single case it's made by an older white guy with multiple college degrees. That doesn't automatically make them wrong, but there's an unavoidable elitism to people who benefit from a hugely valuable privilege like higher education questioning whether other, less fortunate people would benefit from the same thing.
Moreover, higher education isn't just for the Top 10 percent anymore. Most college students are somewhere in the middle of the smartness distribution, and all the statistics pointing to a high return on education apply to them too.
The reason this debate even exists, of course, is that there's very little good data out there about how much colleges actually increase student learning between students arrive as freshman and leave at seniors. That data void is what keeps debates like this in the realm of informed speculation, rather than something that can be resolved empirically.
The debate also highlights an under-appreciated fact about contemporary higher education--universities have effectively merged two functions that are conceptually and historically distinct: education and certification. There's no particular reason that the institution that provides you with a curriculum and teachers has to be the same institution that grants you a degree certifying that you've mastered a certain body of knowledge and skills. In other higher education sectors--like IT certification--they're handled separately.
Because there's no hard data about how much students at a given institution actually learn, the job market values the degree in ways that are logical given that lack of information. If you get a degree from a selective college, the degree's primary value is a signal that you were smart enough to get admitted. If you (like most students) went to a non-selective school, the degree says that you had the work ethic and discipline necessary to accumulate 120 or so credits. Those qualities have value, which is why employers care about degrees. But the lack of data about learning creates distortions in the labor market that work to the detriment of the students who learn the most, particuarly at non-selective colleges.
Charters and Fenty's Mission
A front page Washington Post story yesterday looked at the large and growing share of District of Columbia students served by public charter schools. One-in-four D.C. students currently attends a charter, and slots for thousands more charter students are expected to come online in the next few years--even as the number of students in District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) system continues to decline.
The growth of D.C.'s charter schools reflects the very real dissatisfaction of parents and many city leaders with years of poor performance by DCPS--the same dissatisfaction that led the council to vote last week to give Mayor Adrian Fenty control over DCPS. Not all of the charter schools are an improvement: several have been closed due to poor performance, and several others are struggling or mediocre. But research shows that parents in general are happier with their charter school choices, and the fact that bad charter schools are being closed stands in sharp contrast to DCPS, which continues to operate schools that are unsafe, underperforming or dying a slow death of attrition. And D.C. is also home to a handful of really wonderful charter schools. As Mayor Fenty faces the daunting challenge of figuring out how to fix education in the District of Columbia, he should learn from the city's best charter schools and use charter schooling as a tool to address the desperate educational needs in many of our city's neighborhoods. "Fixing DCPS" is an important goal, but it's NOT how Fenty should define his mission. His real mission should be ensuring that all of D.C.'s kids can attend, free of charge, a high-quality school--DCPS, charter, or private--that prepares them to become a contributing citizen of the District of Columbia.
The growth of D.C.'s charter schools reflects the very real dissatisfaction of parents and many city leaders with years of poor performance by DCPS--the same dissatisfaction that led the council to vote last week to give Mayor Adrian Fenty control over DCPS. Not all of the charter schools are an improvement: several have been closed due to poor performance, and several others are struggling or mediocre. But research shows that parents in general are happier with their charter school choices, and the fact that bad charter schools are being closed stands in sharp contrast to DCPS, which continues to operate schools that are unsafe, underperforming or dying a slow death of attrition. And D.C. is also home to a handful of really wonderful charter schools. As Mayor Fenty faces the daunting challenge of figuring out how to fix education in the District of Columbia, he should learn from the city's best charter schools and use charter schooling as a tool to address the desperate educational needs in many of our city's neighborhoods. "Fixing DCPS" is an important goal, but it's NOT how Fenty should define his mission. His real mission should be ensuring that all of D.C.'s kids can attend, free of charge, a high-quality school--DCPS, charter, or private--that prepares them to become a contributing citizen of the District of Columbia.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Blame the English Department
Over at the National Review Online's higher education blog, Phi Beta Con, Carol Iannone speculates that the Virginia Tech English department is to blame, on the grounds that (A) Cho Seung-hui was was an English major; (B) English departments are awash in postmodernism; and (C) postmodernism teaches students that there is no absolute truth, and thus no right or wrong.
This idea is so transparently foolish that even the other Phi Beta Con bloggers quickly knocked it down. The larger question is why someone smart enough to string words together into coherent sentences would say such things in the first place. The answer, I think, lies with the intersection of hard-line conservatism and Internet-age intellectual combat.
The type of conservatism espoused at NRO Online is founded on a small number of foundational, easily-understood truths, such as:
1) "Liberalism is bad."
2) "Moral relativism is bad."
3) "People need to know their place."
The upside to this approach is that it gives you a handy, wallet-sized set of intellectual principles that can be applied to any situation. The downside is that you quickly run out of new things to say. One solution to that problem is to locate new arenas in which to fight your ideological battles--thus, Phi Beta Con, which is really not a higher education blog at all. It's just an excuse to give principles 1,2, and 3 above a new spin--for #1, railing against the professoriate; for #2, mocking postmodernism; and for #3, nodding with approval at Charles Murrayesque arguments that we're sending too many kids to college who really don't have the intellectual chops for it and should, for their sake and ours, resign themselves to domestic servitude instead.
But even this strategy runs its course after a while--there are (thankfully) only so many Ward Churchills out there to be made of fun of. The only thing left is the popular news cycle. Once Virginia Tech was beset by tragedy, it was just a matter of time before someone at Phi Beta Con connected the familiar dots. The narcissism of the truth-teller also comes into play here--I imagine Carol Iannone believes she's the only one brave enough to speak what others only dare to think.
In reality, the logic of ideological warfare and the constant need to say old things in new ways simply drove her to espouse ideas that are not just facile, but indecent. This is real moral relativism, a kind much more damaging than anything taught in the English Department at Virginia Tech or anywhere else.
Update: In another example of tasteless, tenditious hobbyhorse-riding, a different Phi Beta Con poster offers an alternate culprit : the fake boys crisis that Sara Mead debunked last year.
This idea is so transparently foolish that even the other Phi Beta Con bloggers quickly knocked it down. The larger question is why someone smart enough to string words together into coherent sentences would say such things in the first place. The answer, I think, lies with the intersection of hard-line conservatism and Internet-age intellectual combat.
The type of conservatism espoused at NRO Online is founded on a small number of foundational, easily-understood truths, such as:
1) "Liberalism is bad."
2) "Moral relativism is bad."
3) "People need to know their place."
The upside to this approach is that it gives you a handy, wallet-sized set of intellectual principles that can be applied to any situation. The downside is that you quickly run out of new things to say. One solution to that problem is to locate new arenas in which to fight your ideological battles--thus, Phi Beta Con, which is really not a higher education blog at all. It's just an excuse to give principles 1,2, and 3 above a new spin--for #1, railing against the professoriate; for #2, mocking postmodernism; and for #3, nodding with approval at Charles Murrayesque arguments that we're sending too many kids to college who really don't have the intellectual chops for it and should, for their sake and ours, resign themselves to domestic servitude instead.
But even this strategy runs its course after a while--there are (thankfully) only so many Ward Churchills out there to be made of fun of. The only thing left is the popular news cycle. Once Virginia Tech was beset by tragedy, it was just a matter of time before someone at Phi Beta Con connected the familiar dots. The narcissism of the truth-teller also comes into play here--I imagine Carol Iannone believes she's the only one brave enough to speak what others only dare to think.
In reality, the logic of ideological warfare and the constant need to say old things in new ways simply drove her to espouse ideas that are not just facile, but indecent. This is real moral relativism, a kind much more damaging than anything taught in the English Department at Virginia Tech or anywhere else.
Update: In another example of tasteless, tenditious hobbyhorse-riding, a different Phi Beta Con poster offers an alternate culprit : the fake boys crisis that Sara Mead debunked last year.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
If you're not the lead dog...
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports($) this morning that the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), the trade organization for financial aid officers, will ban lenders from sponsoring events at their national conference. This news comes only two weeks after a Wall Street Journal report($) on close financial ties between lenders and NASFAA.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Admission Impossible?
Over at The American Prospect Online, here's my take on why it's not actually getting harder and harder for high school students to get into a good college, despite what you read in the newspaper every year.
Making Nice with Newsweek
Over the past year or so, you could sort of say that a significant share of my work has focused on criticizing Newsweek: Andy and I wrote a paper questioning their ranking of "America's Top High Schools," a Newsweek cover story on the "boy crisis" got me to look into the issue and eventually write a paper that challenged that article's take on the issue, and the zero-to-three hype I criticize in a recent paper grew in part from a late-1990s Newsweek article. It's not something I planned, but I do seem to have created an odd little subgenre for myself here. But I'm pleased to report that my latest paper on the overhyping of the first three years got a positive mention in a recent Newsweek story on the same topic. Since Newsweek played a role in sparking this hype, I'm glad to see them play a role in correcting some of the misinformation parents and the public have received about the first three years. You can also hear me discuss the topic further for Newsweek on Air.
An Important Day for D.C. Schools?
Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty will sign legislation today adding him to the ranks of mayors who have taken control over their cities' public education systems. The D.C. Council passed the legislation last Thursday. Congress must also approve the law before it takes effect, but is expected to do so with no problems.
I want very much to believe Fenty and his team can bring meaningful improvement to my city's public schools, which so desperately need it. And there are reasons to be hopeful: The team Fenty has assembled to work on this is good. And the hearings that led up to this legislation gave voice to public and political leader frustration with the city's schools that I hope can translate into political will for reforms.
But public education in the District of Columbia faces serious challenges, and the city has a history of failed reform initiatives and governance changes that failed to deliver promised improvement. And the hard work only begins when Fenty takes the reigns. I have two main causes for concern right now.
The first is with the "let's all get along" attitude Fenty's projected throughout this process: offering the City Council increased control over the school budget, the press conference he had Friday with school board chair Robert Bobb and current superintendent Janey, at which they all expressed a desire to hold hands and work together. Now, obviously this approach makes sense if you're trying to pass legislation giving you the right to take over the schools. And there are ways in which Fenty's willingness to play well with others on this is admirable. Too often efforts to improve urban schools get killed by personal and political feuding among individual elected officials trying to advance their own agendas. Fenty's efforts to make nice with the council, the current board and Janey suggest he's rejecting the dictatorial and polarizing approach NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken in running that city's schools. BUT, one of the major challenges to improving education in D.C. has been that too many entities and individuals--the superintendent, the school board, the council, the chief financial officer, the mayor, Congress--have both an agenda and a say in how the schools are run, and that mess of competing forces has made it virtually impossible for the school system to get sustained focus on a coherent reform agenda. One of the major benefits of mayoral control would be to give the system a single ultimate point of authority and accountability, but that benefit disappears if Fenty lets himself get pulled in a bunch of directions trying to keep all those groups on board with his reforms. So far, the only people who've really had a lot at stake here have been the school board, Janey and a handful of home rule activists. But what happens when the Mayor needs to do something that's controversial and counter to the interests of significant groups within the school system, and they get their councilmembers involved? Improving the city's schools will require the political will to do difficult things even in the face of serious political opposition. What Fenty's encountered in the takeover ain't got nothing on what he could face when it comes time to actually take action: Does he have the will to stand up to that?
But that's nothing compared to my second concern: What is Fenty's team going to do? I don't believe there's anyone on this earth who can honestly say that they know how to fix the mess that is DCPS today. I've got some thoughts on things that might be beneficial; so do a lot of other people. But no one's ever fixed an entire system like D.C. to the point where we can honestly say we're happy with the outcomes it's delivering for most kids. There are no guarantees any of these things people might propose will actually work. When I think about what this all means forthe futures of kids in this city--which is what really matters here--that's what really worries me.
Two things worth reading this week if you're interested in this issue:
Rick Hess on Mayoral Control
Andy Smarick on Urban Superintendents
I want very much to believe Fenty and his team can bring meaningful improvement to my city's public schools, which so desperately need it. And there are reasons to be hopeful: The team Fenty has assembled to work on this is good. And the hearings that led up to this legislation gave voice to public and political leader frustration with the city's schools that I hope can translate into political will for reforms.
But public education in the District of Columbia faces serious challenges, and the city has a history of failed reform initiatives and governance changes that failed to deliver promised improvement. And the hard work only begins when Fenty takes the reigns. I have two main causes for concern right now.
The first is with the "let's all get along" attitude Fenty's projected throughout this process: offering the City Council increased control over the school budget, the press conference he had Friday with school board chair Robert Bobb and current superintendent Janey, at which they all expressed a desire to hold hands and work together. Now, obviously this approach makes sense if you're trying to pass legislation giving you the right to take over the schools. And there are ways in which Fenty's willingness to play well with others on this is admirable. Too often efforts to improve urban schools get killed by personal and political feuding among individual elected officials trying to advance their own agendas. Fenty's efforts to make nice with the council, the current board and Janey suggest he's rejecting the dictatorial and polarizing approach NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken in running that city's schools. BUT, one of the major challenges to improving education in D.C. has been that too many entities and individuals--the superintendent, the school board, the council, the chief financial officer, the mayor, Congress--have both an agenda and a say in how the schools are run, and that mess of competing forces has made it virtually impossible for the school system to get sustained focus on a coherent reform agenda. One of the major benefits of mayoral control would be to give the system a single ultimate point of authority and accountability, but that benefit disappears if Fenty lets himself get pulled in a bunch of directions trying to keep all those groups on board with his reforms. So far, the only people who've really had a lot at stake here have been the school board, Janey and a handful of home rule activists. But what happens when the Mayor needs to do something that's controversial and counter to the interests of significant groups within the school system, and they get their councilmembers involved? Improving the city's schools will require the political will to do difficult things even in the face of serious political opposition. What Fenty's encountered in the takeover ain't got nothing on what he could face when it comes time to actually take action: Does he have the will to stand up to that?
But that's nothing compared to my second concern: What is Fenty's team going to do? I don't believe there's anyone on this earth who can honestly say that they know how to fix the mess that is DCPS today. I've got some thoughts on things that might be beneficial; so do a lot of other people. But no one's ever fixed an entire system like D.C. to the point where we can honestly say we're happy with the outcomes it's delivering for most kids. There are no guarantees any of these things people might propose will actually work. When I think about what this all means forthe futures of kids in this city--which is what really matters here--that's what really worries me.
Two things worth reading this week if you're interested in this issue:
Rick Hess on Mayoral Control
Andy Smarick on Urban Superintendents
Friday, April 20, 2007
Why Choice Alone is Not Enough
NACSA's Greg Richmond has a terrific Education Week op-ed about what the charter school movement must do to build quality at scale. You should read it. Conveniently for me, it's also directly applicable to the point I made in the previous post. Richmond's key graph:
If we are to establish high-quality charter schools at scale, it is not sufficient to simply knock down barriers and get out of the way. We must create new systems of support based on innovation and flexibility.As Richmond explains: "The prevailing 1990s philosophy was that the best role for government was to eliminate barriers and get out of the way," but that approach led to serious quality problems in states like Texas and Ohio. As charter school leaders and others who care about both improving outcomes for poor students and improving choice in education think about how to expand choice, we need to take seriously the lessons of the charter movement to date that removing barriers and increasing choice alone don't solve the problem: We need accountability and concerted effort, by a diverse coalition of private, public, and community organizations, to build and support quality schools at scale
More arguing with libertarians!
I'm pleased that Cato's Adam Schaeffer agrees with me that special education voucher programs, like Florida's McKay program, are a bad idea. Still he feels compelled to make a few feeble defenses of the program: there are already perverse incentives for overidentification in the current system (my response: yes, but programs like McKay exacerbate those incentives), and choice makes a lot of parents happier (Schaeffer seems to misunderstand my point that an uptick in the number of parent challenges to district special education decisions means McKay isn't providing recourse for parents unsatisfied with district special ed offerings--if it were we'd see a reduction in challenges as families opted for McKay rather than cumbersome due process).
More significantly, Schaeffer seems to misunderstand, or willingly mischaracterize, the nature of my concerns with vouchers and other pure free market reforms. He presents the issue as if the only choice we face were a choice between a pure market and the status quo. That's obviously bullshit. There are lots of ways to increase choice and customization and inject more market incentives into the system. Since I believe the goal should be to increased choice and competition in a way that has the best outcomes for kids and leaves the fewest behind, rather than simply to dismantle the existing system of government run schools, I don't think simply handing parents a check and saying "go find a school" is good enough.
Just think of it this way: If we created vouchers or tax credits today to the full extent Schaeffer wants, most of the kids who are in bad public schools today would still be in bad schools. That's because there's nowhere near the supply of quality schools--public, private, charter, what have you--to serve all the kids who need them. Increasing choice without a concerted effort by public, private, philanthropic and community groups to increase the supply of high quality schools serving poor kids is a marginal reform and little improvement over the status quo.
****
Briefly, on the sex-ed question, which I agree with Schaeffer is small bore: Schaeffer says that the seemingly contradictory support of conservative groups for both abstinence only requirements and school choice reflects the fact that, absent choice, the only way to get the sex ed you want for your own child is by forcing schools to provide that type to everyone. I'll give you that at the local level; it's one reason I'd rather the task of sex ed be eliminated from schools altogether and handed off to community-based groups that are really more equipped for this anyway. But when you are supporting federal policies that impose abstinence-only education on the wide diversity of states and communities across the country the only reasonable conclusion is that you really do believe it should be an important federal policy to force other people's children to receive the kind of sex education you prefer.
More significantly, Schaeffer seems to misunderstand, or willingly mischaracterize, the nature of my concerns with vouchers and other pure free market reforms. He presents the issue as if the only choice we face were a choice between a pure market and the status quo. That's obviously bullshit. There are lots of ways to increase choice and customization and inject more market incentives into the system. Since I believe the goal should be to increased choice and competition in a way that has the best outcomes for kids and leaves the fewest behind, rather than simply to dismantle the existing system of government run schools, I don't think simply handing parents a check and saying "go find a school" is good enough.
Just think of it this way: If we created vouchers or tax credits today to the full extent Schaeffer wants, most of the kids who are in bad public schools today would still be in bad schools. That's because there's nowhere near the supply of quality schools--public, private, charter, what have you--to serve all the kids who need them. Increasing choice without a concerted effort by public, private, philanthropic and community groups to increase the supply of high quality schools serving poor kids is a marginal reform and little improvement over the status quo.
****
Briefly, on the sex-ed question, which I agree with Schaeffer is small bore: Schaeffer says that the seemingly contradictory support of conservative groups for both abstinence only requirements and school choice reflects the fact that, absent choice, the only way to get the sex ed you want for your own child is by forcing schools to provide that type to everyone. I'll give you that at the local level; it's one reason I'd rather the task of sex ed be eliminated from schools altogether and handed off to community-based groups that are really more equipped for this anyway. But when you are supporting federal policies that impose abstinence-only education on the wide diversity of states and communities across the country the only reasonable conclusion is that you really do believe it should be an important federal policy to force other people's children to receive the kind of sex education you prefer.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Gadgetry
Fellow blogger Erin Dillon and I are at SAS headquarters in North Carolina today, visiting with value-added guru Bill Sanders. Why is this worth noting? Because it's an excuse to blog from my new Blackberry. As someone who preceded the cell-phones-and-flip-flops generation, I find this to be inordinately cool.
The Great Child Care Cost Shift
Special all-libertarian day here at quick and ed!--No, not really.
Kerry Howley makes the case in the recent issue of Reason that illegal immigration is particularly benefical to women because the supply of cheap, undocumented domestic labor makes child care more affordable, helping women balance work and family. It's an interesting argument, but I think overstated, considering that only 4% of children under 5 with working mothers are cared for by domestic workers in their homes, and fully 45% are cared for by relatives.
This ties into something I've been thinking about lately. The opening of employment opportunities to women and resulting shift of women from home to market labor over the past few decades has also shifted traditionally female labor into the market. Rather than being unaccounted for economically and therefore appearing "free" (despite the enormous cost it carried for women), that work is now visible, quantifiable, and has a clear cost attached to it--a seemingly new cost that families and society must bear. This is particularly the case for childcare. When we talk about childcare quality, cost, and "work-family" balance, what we're really talking about is who--society, families, women only, children themselves--should cover the costs that emerged when society could no longer assume that women, having few other options, would bear that entire cost themselves. As Howley shows, illegal immigration helps postpone reckoning on this question, because it imports another class of women who have few other options and will therefore provide childcare at an artificially low cost. But this stopgap clearly has its own limitations. The reckoning is still coming, and no one seems ready for it.
Kerry Howley makes the case in the recent issue of Reason that illegal immigration is particularly benefical to women because the supply of cheap, undocumented domestic labor makes child care more affordable, helping women balance work and family. It's an interesting argument, but I think overstated, considering that only 4% of children under 5 with working mothers are cared for by domestic workers in their homes, and fully 45% are cared for by relatives.
This ties into something I've been thinking about lately. The opening of employment opportunities to women and resulting shift of women from home to market labor over the past few decades has also shifted traditionally female labor into the market. Rather than being unaccounted for economically and therefore appearing "free" (despite the enormous cost it carried for women), that work is now visible, quantifiable, and has a clear cost attached to it--a seemingly new cost that families and society must bear. This is particularly the case for childcare. When we talk about childcare quality, cost, and "work-family" balance, what we're really talking about is who--society, families, women only, children themselves--should cover the costs that emerged when society could no longer assume that women, having few other options, would bear that entire cost themselves. As Howley shows, illegal immigration helps postpone reckoning on this question, because it imports another class of women who have few other options and will therefore provide childcare at an artificially low cost. But this stopgap clearly has its own limitations. The reckoning is still coming, and no one seems ready for it.
More On Why Having a Hammer Doesn't Make Everything a Nail
Cato's Adam Schaeffer takes issue with my post earlier this week about the incredible tediousness of pro-voucher groups' assertion that choice is the solution to every imaginable educational problem.
He actually has a somewhat reasonable point. To the extent that increased choice and customization in education can make the entire educational system more effective and efficient, then yes, we should expect that "rising tide" to "lift all ships" (to offend Adam with yet another cliche), with positive impacts for groups of students we're concerned about. But this is different from some voucher supporters' recent tendency to recommend choice as a targeted solution to specific educational problems that are gaining national attention.
From a political point of view, it's understandable why voucher supporters would propose small, targeted voucher programs that purport to solve very specific or narrow needs, in response to public attention focused on those needs. But from a policy perspective such programs are often much more problematic than wider voucher programs. Take, for example, Florida's McKay Scholarships for children with disabilities and the programs like them that are springing up around the country. They're appealing because no one wants to be seen opposing increased choice and customization for kids with disabilities, and they seem to be working ok as school choice (despite an abundance of shady operators, at least in Florida, that are taking advantage of vulnerable kids and stealing taxpayer and parent $$). But they kind of suck as special education reform. As Andrew Rotherham and I have shown, they don't seem to be solving the problem they ostensibly were intended to solve--parent difficulties getting needed services or out-of-district placements for their children--as evidenced by the fact that parent appeals of district special education decisions have increased rather than decreasing since the program was created. Further, they create perverse incentives for parents and schools that could exacerbate one of the biggest problems in special education: overidentification of students with disabilities.
Voucher supporters promote these targeted programs because they know that there's not political support in most places for the larger universal programs they'd prefer. But it's disingenuous to pretend that these targeted programs solve the problems they purport to when they're really just a strategy to get a foot in the door for larger voucher programs. If they're going to be forced to traffic in incrementalism anyway, why don't libertarians like Schaeffer spend a little bit more time talking about other ways--such as elimination of teacher certification or of building codes that make it expensive to build schools--where libertarian views might have bearing on educational debates? I'm not saying I'm on board with those ideas, but it would be more interesting.
There's a larger difference of opinion here, of course, and that regards the adequacy of school choice as education reform. There's a compelling case that building an education system more premised on choice will have significant benefits, in terms of efficiency but more so in terms of customization and parent and student satisfaction and engagement. But, just as economic policies that improve economic growth overall leave some workers behind, it's also likely that educational policies that improve student achievement on average will end up leaving some children behind. Libertarians like the folks at Cato tend to think this is ok: it's the price of a well-functioning market that ultimately benefits everyone, and the people who are most deserving will eventually get ahead anyway. Like most progressives and centrists, I don't accept that argument, but believe society has a collective obligation to prevent or redress the harms that accrue to specific individuals as a result of collectively beneficial policies: Particularly when those individuals are children. That's why I think increased choice needs to be accompanied by both some form of public accountability to set a floor for school performance and an ambitious set of public, private, charitable and community-based initiatives to build the supply of high-quality schools in underserved neighborhoods.
Btw, at the top of his post Schaeffer makes an odd comment about my noting that some pro-voucher groups think choice is awesome except when it comes to sex ed. Counter Schaeffer's assertion, I'm not remotely confused about what choice means. He, on the other hand, seems to be unaware that there are a lot of non-libertarian conservative organizations--The National Review, Heritage Foundation, and IWF, the organization my original post was about--that do endorse educational "choice" in the form of vouchers while also arguing that schools should be required to restrict sex ed to "abstinence only," which, as he suggests, is a somewhat inconsistent position.
He actually has a somewhat reasonable point. To the extent that increased choice and customization in education can make the entire educational system more effective and efficient, then yes, we should expect that "rising tide" to "lift all ships" (to offend Adam with yet another cliche), with positive impacts for groups of students we're concerned about. But this is different from some voucher supporters' recent tendency to recommend choice as a targeted solution to specific educational problems that are gaining national attention.
From a political point of view, it's understandable why voucher supporters would propose small, targeted voucher programs that purport to solve very specific or narrow needs, in response to public attention focused on those needs. But from a policy perspective such programs are often much more problematic than wider voucher programs. Take, for example, Florida's McKay Scholarships for children with disabilities and the programs like them that are springing up around the country. They're appealing because no one wants to be seen opposing increased choice and customization for kids with disabilities, and they seem to be working ok as school choice (despite an abundance of shady operators, at least in Florida, that are taking advantage of vulnerable kids and stealing taxpayer and parent $$). But they kind of suck as special education reform. As Andrew Rotherham and I have shown, they don't seem to be solving the problem they ostensibly were intended to solve--parent difficulties getting needed services or out-of-district placements for their children--as evidenced by the fact that parent appeals of district special education decisions have increased rather than decreasing since the program was created. Further, they create perverse incentives for parents and schools that could exacerbate one of the biggest problems in special education: overidentification of students with disabilities.
Voucher supporters promote these targeted programs because they know that there's not political support in most places for the larger universal programs they'd prefer. But it's disingenuous to pretend that these targeted programs solve the problems they purport to when they're really just a strategy to get a foot in the door for larger voucher programs. If they're going to be forced to traffic in incrementalism anyway, why don't libertarians like Schaeffer spend a little bit more time talking about other ways--such as elimination of teacher certification or of building codes that make it expensive to build schools--where libertarian views might have bearing on educational debates? I'm not saying I'm on board with those ideas, but it would be more interesting.
There's a larger difference of opinion here, of course, and that regards the adequacy of school choice as education reform. There's a compelling case that building an education system more premised on choice will have significant benefits, in terms of efficiency but more so in terms of customization and parent and student satisfaction and engagement. But, just as economic policies that improve economic growth overall leave some workers behind, it's also likely that educational policies that improve student achievement on average will end up leaving some children behind. Libertarians like the folks at Cato tend to think this is ok: it's the price of a well-functioning market that ultimately benefits everyone, and the people who are most deserving will eventually get ahead anyway. Like most progressives and centrists, I don't accept that argument, but believe society has a collective obligation to prevent or redress the harms that accrue to specific individuals as a result of collectively beneficial policies: Particularly when those individuals are children. That's why I think increased choice needs to be accompanied by both some form of public accountability to set a floor for school performance and an ambitious set of public, private, charitable and community-based initiatives to build the supply of high-quality schools in underserved neighborhoods.
Btw, at the top of his post Schaeffer makes an odd comment about my noting that some pro-voucher groups think choice is awesome except when it comes to sex ed. Counter Schaeffer's assertion, I'm not remotely confused about what choice means. He, on the other hand, seems to be unaware that there are a lot of non-libertarian conservative organizations--The National Review, Heritage Foundation, and IWF, the organization my original post was about--that do endorse educational "choice" in the form of vouchers while also arguing that schools should be required to restrict sex ed to "abstinence only," which, as he suggests, is a somewhat inconsistent position.
Fairfax Gives In To Testing ELLS
As the Post reports today, Fairfax County Virginia has backed down in its battle with the Dept of Ed and will administer grade level reading tests to all of its ELL students (minus those who've been in the country for less than a year). This struggle was hard-fought and district officials in Fairfax and elsewhere still say it isn't fair to give a reading test in English to kids who don't know the language. But $17 million in federal funds is a lot to let go of so it's not surprising that the county finally gave in. Still, no real winner in this one- both sides still have to figure out how to fairly and accurately measure the performance of language learners or the fights are sure to continue in VA and elsewhere.
*Disc on VA: ES's Rotherham is a member of the State Board of Ed.
*Disc on VA: ES's Rotherham is a member of the State Board of Ed.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Closing the Expectations Gap?
Are state efforts to raise standards and accountability making a difference? That question came to the fore at this morning's Achieve forum on the progress the group's American Diploma Project has made in its efforts to advance high school reform at the state level.
The American Diploma Project seeks to improve alignment of state high school standards, graduation requirements, assessments, and accountability with one another and with what students need to know to succeed in college and the workplace. Achieve president Michael Cohen and CCSSO executive director Gene Wilhoit argued that ADP has had success in convincing states to change or consider changing curriculum and standards along lines suggested by ADP to better ensure that students are college/work ready. For example, 13 states now require students to complete the roster of courses that ADP calls a "college- and work-ready" curriculum in order to graduate high school.
Respondent Check Finn is less optimistic about the project's impacts, however, arguing that the entire approach of aligning standards and getting students to take more rigorous sounding courses aren't adequate in themselves to boost what students are actually learning. Finn's criticism seems particularly salient in light of recent NAEP evidence that high school seniors are taking harder classes but learning less. As a relatively recent graduate of a high school that ranks in the top 15 on Jay Mathews' challenge index, I can vouch that, in my experience, curriculum and standards that look good on paper do not necessarily translate into preparation for the real world.
That's not to discount the hard work being done by folks at ADP: Aligning standards, curriculum and assessment is difficult and sometimes tedious work that's essential to improving education. But it's not enough in itself, and it's important for the education community not to get too wrapped up in giving a big pat on the back to progress that may look good, but absent evidence that students are actually learning more, may reflect intent more than real improvement.
The American Diploma Project seeks to improve alignment of state high school standards, graduation requirements, assessments, and accountability with one another and with what students need to know to succeed in college and the workplace. Achieve president Michael Cohen and CCSSO executive director Gene Wilhoit argued that ADP has had success in convincing states to change or consider changing curriculum and standards along lines suggested by ADP to better ensure that students are college/work ready. For example, 13 states now require students to complete the roster of courses that ADP calls a "college- and work-ready" curriculum in order to graduate high school.
Respondent Check Finn is less optimistic about the project's impacts, however, arguing that the entire approach of aligning standards and getting students to take more rigorous sounding courses aren't adequate in themselves to boost what students are actually learning. Finn's criticism seems particularly salient in light of recent NAEP evidence that high school seniors are taking harder classes but learning less. As a relatively recent graduate of a high school that ranks in the top 15 on Jay Mathews' challenge index, I can vouch that, in my experience, curriculum and standards that look good on paper do not necessarily translate into preparation for the real world.
That's not to discount the hard work being done by folks at ADP: Aligning standards, curriculum and assessment is difficult and sometimes tedious work that's essential to improving education. But it's not enough in itself, and it's important for the education community not to get too wrapped up in giving a big pat on the back to progress that may look good, but absent evidence that students are actually learning more, may reflect intent more than real improvement.
Identifying Mental Health Problems in Schools
As details about the Virginia Tech shooter's history of mental health problems and disturbing behaviour begin to surface, it's worth a reminder that teachers are often positioned to be among the first to note signs that a student has some sort of mental health problems. Many educators have saved lives by alerting parents or authority figures to signs of trouble and getting young people referred to professionals for help they need. Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake offers a list of red flags of which to be aware. Some school districts, community-based organizations, and partnerships--like this program in Montgomery county, Maryland--are also doing innovative things to make sure kids at risk have access to mental health treatment at or through their schools.
Too Soon to Call Victory for Charters
Jay Mathews has a great post over on edspresso about why he thinks charters are a more promising long-term strategy than vouchers to expand meaningful, quality school choice for low-income children and parents. The basic point is that, while vouchers can help some kids move into better public schools, what we really need is to create a lot more, better schools in the communities where poor families live--and charter schools, which are already doing this, are a more effective mechanism here.
The one complaint I have is with Jay's comment, towards the end, that "Charters are no fun for the parties. They make too much sense to both Republicans and Democrats, and cannot be used to spark big fights." It's easy to get the impression, working in D.C., where charters are growing rapidly and benefit from strong support by predominantly-Democratic city leaders as well as bipartisan Congressional backing, that everyone's on board with charters. But if you take a look around the country it's clear that in many states charter schools remain politically polarizing and face a constant battle to fend off legislative attacks from education interests and ideological opponents. To wit, edspresso featured a link to news reports of the latest political wars over charter schooling in Ohio on their front page with Jay's post. Or what about this lovely incident two weeks back when the Chairman of the Colorado House Education Committe said charter supporters belonged in hell? Some of the blame here can be laid at the feet of quality problems within the charter school community itself, but even if I could wave my magic wand and suddenly make all charter schools high-performing, that wouldn't change the views or fury of die-hard opponents. In too many places the ability of charter schools to achieve the promise both Jay and I see in them remains hobbled by knee-jerk and narrow-minded political opposition.
The one complaint I have is with Jay's comment, towards the end, that "Charters are no fun for the parties. They make too much sense to both Republicans and Democrats, and cannot be used to spark big fights." It's easy to get the impression, working in D.C., where charters are growing rapidly and benefit from strong support by predominantly-Democratic city leaders as well as bipartisan Congressional backing, that everyone's on board with charters. But if you take a look around the country it's clear that in many states charter schools remain politically polarizing and face a constant battle to fend off legislative attacks from education interests and ideological opponents. To wit, edspresso featured a link to news reports of the latest political wars over charter schooling in Ohio on their front page with Jay's post. Or what about this lovely incident two weeks back when the Chairman of the Colorado House Education Committe said charter supporters belonged in hell? Some of the blame here can be laid at the feet of quality problems within the charter school community itself, but even if I could wave my magic wand and suddenly make all charter schools high-performing, that wouldn't change the views or fury of die-hard opponents. In too many places the ability of charter schools to achieve the promise both Jay and I see in them remains hobbled by knee-jerk and narrow-minded political opposition.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
When You Have A Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail
That pretty much describes the pro-voucher conservative insistence that choice will solve any and all educational problem one can imagine*, and a new Independent Women's Forum publication on the "boy crisis" is the latest example of this. Leave aside that the piece cherry-picks data points that support the notion of a boy crisis,** ignores the historical context for some gaps (but not others), and glosses over subgroup differences and racial and ethnic gaps much larger than gender gaps.*** Even ignore the scant page devoted to uncritically accepting flawed "brain science" arguments about how differences in male and female brains**** require schools to use different teaching methods for the different sexes, and schools today discriminate against boys. What really takes the cake after all that brilliant analysis is the recommendations. How do we solve this terrible boy crisis? School choice, of course!
Don't get me wrong; I like school choice more than just about anybody. And I think that choice should include single-sex as well as coed options if that's what parents want for their kids. D.C.'s Septima Clark Charter School, created to help close achievement gaps for black boys--a group that really is in crisis--is a great example here. But specific problems often require solutions that are matched to them. And choice supporters who persist in claiming that choice is some kind of magical panacea for every educational problem imaginable demonstrate their unseriousness and raise false expectations for choice initiatives in a way that ultimately undermines their case.
Btw, for a more thorough explanation of why the "boy crisis" hype gets it wrong, and a more sound take on this issue that IWF's, check out this paper I wrote last year.
*Except when it comes to sex ed, of course, where abstinence-only must be mandated, despite virutally no evidence of its effectiveness.
**Why else would you devote an entire section of the relatively short paper to afterschool activities and less than a sentence to the significant gains for elementary boys that are catching them up to girls in reading?
***I'm eagerly awaiting an IWF report on how we must do more to help close achievement gaps for poor and minority kids.
****Brain science is another hammer that never lacks for a nail here, even when its used in ways that seem contradictory. For IWF and likeminded groups, somehow whenever women get the short end of a stick, that's because of brain differences, and since it's because of brain differences that means it's ok and society shouldn't do anything to help them. But when men get the short end of the stick on something, that's also because of brain differences but in this case requires that we automatically declare a crisis and take action to address the problem.
Don't get me wrong; I like school choice more than just about anybody. And I think that choice should include single-sex as well as coed options if that's what parents want for their kids. D.C.'s Septima Clark Charter School, created to help close achievement gaps for black boys--a group that really is in crisis--is a great example here. But specific problems often require solutions that are matched to them. And choice supporters who persist in claiming that choice is some kind of magical panacea for every educational problem imaginable demonstrate their unseriousness and raise false expectations for choice initiatives in a way that ultimately undermines their case.
Btw, for a more thorough explanation of why the "boy crisis" hype gets it wrong, and a more sound take on this issue that IWF's, check out this paper I wrote last year.
*Except when it comes to sex ed, of course, where abstinence-only must be mandated, despite virutally no evidence of its effectiveness.
**Why else would you devote an entire section of the relatively short paper to afterschool activities and less than a sentence to the significant gains for elementary boys that are catching them up to girls in reading?
***I'm eagerly awaiting an IWF report on how we must do more to help close achievement gaps for poor and minority kids.
****Brain science is another hammer that never lacks for a nail here, even when its used in ways that seem contradictory. For IWF and likeminded groups, somehow whenever women get the short end of a stick, that's because of brain differences, and since it's because of brain differences that means it's ok and society shouldn't do anything to help them. But when men get the short end of the stick on something, that's also because of brain differences but in this case requires that we automatically declare a crisis and take action to address the problem.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Shootings at Virginia Tech
This is terrible. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Virgina Tech community, students and their families.
Debating NCLB with Progressives
I'm late in getting to this interesting conversation that Ganesh Sitamaran and Jason Spitalnick have been having over at TPM Cafe about NCLB and the future of education reform thinking. I don't know whether to think that AFTie Ed's and many of their commenters' conclusions that the posts are somehow teacher or union-bashing is a reflection of narcicism ("it's about me and my issues, damnit") or a reflexive defensive posture that so many teachers have taken on--sometimes with good reason--in response to the growth of NCLB, accountability, and to some extent choice.
But whatever it is it's a little goofy because Ganesh and Jason actually seem to share many of teachers' typical concerns with NCLB: it's too complex, it's overly simplistic, it doesn't address the underlying social problems that really account for achievement gaps, etc, etc. In their broader critiques of the law, Ganesh and Jason are both onto something and missing an important points here.
They fail to give NCLB adequate credit because they lack a historical sense about what a radical shift NCLB, and even the 1994 IASA, really represented in thinking about education reform generally and the federal role in education in particular. The standards and accountability movement's shift in policy focus from dictating inputs and processes to accountability for student results is a big deal, as is the idea that we actually should expect most students to reach high standards. That Sitamaran and Spitalnick don't fully get that is actually a reflection of how dramatic the seac change in thinking has been. And this change is an absolutely essential precondition for both the thinking in their posts and the policy shifts that would move education reform to the next level.
The truth is that NCLB hasn't been able to actually deliver on its eponymous promise. Sure, the technical aspects of testing problems, measuring student achievement and AYP that dominate current debates are a part of that. More significant is the fact that NCLB never delivered fully on either the increased resources or--and this was a much larger-scale failure--flexibility that were supposed to accompany greater accountability to get the job done. It's also true that the consequences in the law and the incentives they provide probably aren't as powerful as needed to be effective. But the core issue beyond all these--and I think this is where Sitamaran in particular is onto something--is that NCLB shows pretty devastatingly the limitations of a pure accountability and incentives strategy for student achievement. Don't get me wrong: NCLB's success in getting schools to focus resources and attention on struggling and previously ignored student groups shows incentives make a difference. But all the incentives in the world don't do a hill of beans of good if you don't know how to get where you want to go. The horror movie victim getting chased by the lunatic with a chainsaw has a hell of an incentive, but it can't save her if she doesn't know how to get out of the funhouse. And unfortunately that's the situation a lot of low-performing systems feel like they're in. (FWIW, this limitation is also the fundamental problem with pure market-based education reform proposals like vouchers and tax credits.)
Of course, schools were never supposed to be left on their own to figure out how to improve student achievement, but the reality is that a lot of school districts and states that were supposed to help them don't have any more capacity than they do. It's pretty safe to say that no one really knows right now how to build large-scale, effective urban school systems that serve all kids at the level they deserve and society requires. That should scare the bejeezus out of all of us. But it should also get us hopping to invest in R&D and capacity building so schools, districts and states can start doing what we do know works.
More fundamentally, we need to rethink how we structure and deliver public education so that we can replace existing failed institutions with better ones designed to be able to meet the educational comitments we've made in NCLB and other standards documents. I don't know what this looks like, but there's plenty of interesting thinking going on here, though none of it is ready quite yet for national policy prescriptions (an idea that itself might not be all that useful here, I don't know). My biggest disappointment with Sitamaran and Spitalnick is that they don't engage with these issues at all; they just offer vague statements about universal health care and addressing underlying social conditions. These issues are tremendously important and, as this week's Washington Post magazine noted, some school districts and community groups are doing really powerful and innovative things to address them. But just talking about social issues doesn't kick the can further down the road. In fact, it doesn't even remain stagnant in today's debate but regresses to the pre-NCLB liberal position in a way that's ultimately not helpful to education reform, kids, or progressives.
But whatever it is it's a little goofy because Ganesh and Jason actually seem to share many of teachers' typical concerns with NCLB: it's too complex, it's overly simplistic, it doesn't address the underlying social problems that really account for achievement gaps, etc, etc. In their broader critiques of the law, Ganesh and Jason are both onto something and missing an important points here.
They fail to give NCLB adequate credit because they lack a historical sense about what a radical shift NCLB, and even the 1994 IASA, really represented in thinking about education reform generally and the federal role in education in particular. The standards and accountability movement's shift in policy focus from dictating inputs and processes to accountability for student results is a big deal, as is the idea that we actually should expect most students to reach high standards. That Sitamaran and Spitalnick don't fully get that is actually a reflection of how dramatic the seac change in thinking has been. And this change is an absolutely essential precondition for both the thinking in their posts and the policy shifts that would move education reform to the next level.
The truth is that NCLB hasn't been able to actually deliver on its eponymous promise. Sure, the technical aspects of testing problems, measuring student achievement and AYP that dominate current debates are a part of that. More significant is the fact that NCLB never delivered fully on either the increased resources or--and this was a much larger-scale failure--flexibility that were supposed to accompany greater accountability to get the job done. It's also true that the consequences in the law and the incentives they provide probably aren't as powerful as needed to be effective. But the core issue beyond all these--and I think this is where Sitamaran in particular is onto something--is that NCLB shows pretty devastatingly the limitations of a pure accountability and incentives strategy for student achievement. Don't get me wrong: NCLB's success in getting schools to focus resources and attention on struggling and previously ignored student groups shows incentives make a difference. But all the incentives in the world don't do a hill of beans of good if you don't know how to get where you want to go. The horror movie victim getting chased by the lunatic with a chainsaw has a hell of an incentive, but it can't save her if she doesn't know how to get out of the funhouse. And unfortunately that's the situation a lot of low-performing systems feel like they're in. (FWIW, this limitation is also the fundamental problem with pure market-based education reform proposals like vouchers and tax credits.)
Of course, schools were never supposed to be left on their own to figure out how to improve student achievement, but the reality is that a lot of school districts and states that were supposed to help them don't have any more capacity than they do. It's pretty safe to say that no one really knows right now how to build large-scale, effective urban school systems that serve all kids at the level they deserve and society requires. That should scare the bejeezus out of all of us. But it should also get us hopping to invest in R&D and capacity building so schools, districts and states can start doing what we do know works.
More fundamentally, we need to rethink how we structure and deliver public education so that we can replace existing failed institutions with better ones designed to be able to meet the educational comitments we've made in NCLB and other standards documents. I don't know what this looks like, but there's plenty of interesting thinking going on here, though none of it is ready quite yet for national policy prescriptions (an idea that itself might not be all that useful here, I don't know). My biggest disappointment with Sitamaran and Spitalnick is that they don't engage with these issues at all; they just offer vague statements about universal health care and addressing underlying social conditions. These issues are tremendously important and, as this week's Washington Post magazine noted, some school districts and community groups are doing really powerful and innovative things to address them. But just talking about social issues doesn't kick the can further down the road. In fact, it doesn't even remain stagnant in today's debate but regresses to the pre-NCLB liberal position in a way that's ultimately not helpful to education reform, kids, or progressives.
Categorical Imperatives
Per Friday's back and forth between Beth, Kevin and John, isn't the real culprit here the class size reduction policy itself and, more broadly, categorical programs that condition schools' receipt of funding on undertaking specific activities that may not actually be the best use of funds for that particular school? Just because conservatives have tried to capture the rhetoric of flexibility and putting decision-making in the hands of people closest to the child doesn't actually mean it's a bad idea or that progressives should surrender that ground.
Movement on Urban High School Chartering in Detroit
Good to see, particularly following this. For backstory, see this paper I wrote last fall about charter schooling in Michigan.
Money Matters
As someone who came to education policy through the financial side of things, Eric Hanushek has always loomed as outsized figure on the policy landscape. From the perspective of those--like myself--who are left-leaning politically and who favor aggressive measures to correct education funding disparities, Hanushek has always been Bad Guy #1, the person who laid the intellectual foundation for the arguments, widely repeated by conservatives and states defending their school funding systems in court, that "money doesn't matter" in education.
I didn't buy a lot of those arguments then, and still don't, as you can see in the review I've written of Hanushek's recent edited volume on education lawsuits, Courting Failure. But I've come to appreciate the value of Hanushek's perspective on things--somebody needs to ask hard questions and tell uncomfortable truths about the way school districts spend money. As I found when I interviewed Hanushek last year, he's a smart, thoughtful person whose arguments are richer and more complicated than they're sometimes made out to be.
I didn't buy a lot of those arguments then, and still don't, as you can see in the review I've written of Hanushek's recent edited volume on education lawsuits, Courting Failure. But I've come to appreciate the value of Hanushek's perspective on things--somebody needs to ask hard questions and tell uncomfortable truths about the way school districts spend money. As I found when I interviewed Hanushek last year, he's a smart, thoughtful person whose arguments are richer and more complicated than they're sometimes made out to be.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Moral Education
From the AFTBlog: "Yes, deliberately falsifying documents is wrong, but...."
Rule of thumb in sentence construction: the word "but" does not belong after the words "falsifying documents is wrong." Whatever you're writing is sure to go downhill from there.
In this case, AFTie Beth is excusing a California school district that appears to have engaged in some paperwork shenanigans in order to get more class-size reduction money out of the state. Beth's excuse--and the district's--seems to begin and end with "we needed the money."
Back when I was assistant state budget director in Indiana, one of my jobs was to look after the giant pot of money the state set aside to support K-12 education. Every two years, the legislature would appropriate that money based on a projection of how many students would be enrolled in each school district. If the actual enrollment was higher than the projection, the legislature would either have to appropriate extra money (which it didn't like) or pro-rate funding distributions to districts (which they liked even less).
One year the actual enrollments came in unusually high, and when we looked to see where we'd gone wrong, we found a district where, despite the fact that enrollment had been declining steadily for years, over 1,000 new students had suddenly been added to the rolls.
Expect they hadn't, really. It turns out the district had discovered a loophole in the state funding law that was designed to foster cooperation between public and private schools. Some small private schools--particularly low-revenue parochial schools--don't have the resources to hire teachers for, say, AP Physics. So the state allowed districts to adjust their enrollment counts upward if they helped out and enrolled private school students in public courses.
This district had cut a deal with a local private school whereby it would provide mini-courses lasting two weeks to 1,000 students, putting the state on the hook for something like $10 million in extra funding.
Another district tried to count a 16-year old girl who had dropped out of school after having a baby as a student, on the grounds that she was engaged in "self-directed study" at home. The subject she was allegedly studying? Child care.
In each case, their excuse was, "we needed the money." Which was true, but not an excuse, any more than it would have been if the superintendant had knocked over a bank on the way into work. For some things, right is right and wrong is wrong. Isn't that what we teach in school?
Rule of thumb in sentence construction: the word "but" does not belong after the words "falsifying documents is wrong." Whatever you're writing is sure to go downhill from there.
In this case, AFTie Beth is excusing a California school district that appears to have engaged in some paperwork shenanigans in order to get more class-size reduction money out of the state. Beth's excuse--and the district's--seems to begin and end with "we needed the money."
Back when I was assistant state budget director in Indiana, one of my jobs was to look after the giant pot of money the state set aside to support K-12 education. Every two years, the legislature would appropriate that money based on a projection of how many students would be enrolled in each school district. If the actual enrollment was higher than the projection, the legislature would either have to appropriate extra money (which it didn't like) or pro-rate funding distributions to districts (which they liked even less).
One year the actual enrollments came in unusually high, and when we looked to see where we'd gone wrong, we found a district where, despite the fact that enrollment had been declining steadily for years, over 1,000 new students had suddenly been added to the rolls.
Expect they hadn't, really. It turns out the district had discovered a loophole in the state funding law that was designed to foster cooperation between public and private schools. Some small private schools--particularly low-revenue parochial schools--don't have the resources to hire teachers for, say, AP Physics. So the state allowed districts to adjust their enrollment counts upward if they helped out and enrolled private school students in public courses.
This district had cut a deal with a local private school whereby it would provide mini-courses lasting two weeks to 1,000 students, putting the state on the hook for something like $10 million in extra funding.
Another district tried to count a 16-year old girl who had dropped out of school after having a baby as a student, on the grounds that she was engaged in "self-directed study" at home. The subject she was allegedly studying? Child care.
In each case, their excuse was, "we needed the money." Which was true, but not an excuse, any more than it would have been if the superintendant had knocked over a bank on the way into work. For some things, right is right and wrong is wrong. Isn't that what we teach in school?
An AERA Newbie
I just finished my first trip to AERA and, while shocked by the sheer number of people there, I was generally impressed with the research, presentations, and thoughtful comments. Consistently, people expressed a desire to make research a critical part of both ground-level action and the policy decision-making process.
While the discussion at AERA about relevance and getting research into the hands of decision makers was encouraging, it doesn’t change the fact that much of the research coming out of the education research community is inaccessible. It is inaccessible because of the overly-complicated, technical language used, and also is literally inaccessible—locked away in journals too costly for anyone but universities to access on a large scale. Researchers who shake their head in wonder when policies are enacted that directly contradict what is currently known about say, student learning or assessment, need to remember that they are, in essence, selling their research to policymakers and practitioners. And if you’re trying to sell something, you take the product to your customer and you sell it in their language, not expect your customer to start speaking yours.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Communications Mastermind Needed
My brief excursion to AERA went well (Standing room only in my session! Okay, it was a small room...), but is ending on a bad note as I am currently stranded in Hell on Earth the American Airlines terminal at O'Hare, waiting for a flight that may or may not be leaving for National Airport this month, if ever.
However, it does give me a chance to let our fearless readers know that Education Sector is in the market for a communications manager. If you want to change the education world (in a good way) at a place where communications is an integral part of the organization, not an afterthought (I promise you will never, ever be handed a finished paper that you've never seen or even heard of before along with vague instructions along the lines of "we're releasing this in 20 minutes, see if you can get people to, you know, read it or something..."), then give us a look.
However, it does give me a chance to let our fearless readers know that Education Sector is in the market for a communications manager. If you want to change the education world (in a good way) at a place where communications is an integral part of the organization, not an afterthought (I promise you will never, ever be handed a finished paper that you've never seen or even heard of before along with vague instructions along the lines of "we're releasing this in 20 minutes, see if you can get people to, you know, read it or something..."), then give us a look.
New Dealing
Andy and I propose a New Deal for Urban Public Schools, as part of a Harvard Law and Policy Review online symposium that also features work by Joel Klein, Stefanie Sanford and Steven Seleznow, and Charles Ogletree, Jr. and Susan Eaton.
More About That Smart Baby
Earlier this week, on the Guardian's website, I explained why educational baby toys won't make your infant smarter in England, either.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Drawing the line
The Wall Street Journal reports today($) that in 2004 the National Association for Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), the trade organization for financial aid officers, “considered setting clear rules to curb gifts from lenders—and decided against it”. While NASFAA may have had that choice in 2004, it no longer does—either NASFAA takes action or Congress will.
Currently, the ethical line for financial aid officers is more like a fuzzy bar, with a lot of wiggle room. In the news coverage, I have heard quotes ranging from aid officers who aren’t willing to accept pens or paper from lenders, to aid officers who feel that it’s okay to accept Broadway tickets, a nice dinner, or a fully paid conference trip. I don’t doubt that the majority of aid officers are conscientious about keeping lenders at an arms length. For these aid officers, however, there are no national guidelines to help guide their behavior, or to provide a basis for reporting the unethical behavior of colleagues.
After missing the opportunity in 2004, NASFAA now has a second chance to be proactive about setting industry standards for ethical behavior. But this window is closing quickly.
Senator Kennedy has proposed legislation to regulate relationships between lenders and colleges, and Attorney General Cuomo is leading the charge by compelling schools and lenders to adopt a code of conduct in return for dropping lawsuits against them. Multiple colleges have already signed on to Cuomo’s code of conduct, along with Citibank, and—as of today—Sallie Mae (both banks also agreed to pay $2 million into a fund to educate students about the financial aid industry). I doubt there will be a third opportunity for NASFAA. As the organization responsible for representing financial aid officers, they need to be willing to draw the ethical line on what is, and is not, acceptable behavior in relationships between lenders and colleges.
My Very Smart Baby
Have you read Sara Mead's report, Million Dollar Babies? You should. It will tell you all about how we, as parents, future parents, educators and policymakers, shouldn't get caught up in the mass marketing hype around baby products that claim to make our babies smarter. Disclaimer: if you search my home you will find evidence that I have used some of these products, namely Baby Einstein videos and CDs. I admit that I may have even purchased them-- in the sleep-deprived haze of those first few months I bought a lot of things that I thought might make it all easier. And yes, they did make things easier and might have been worth the $29.99 or whatever I paid.
Now, on a trial basis (not having plunked down the $149 for my very own) I have the distinct pleasure of using the Baby Plus "Prenatal Education System", which promises on its website to make my soon-to-be born baby more alert, interactive, and just all around smarter upon birth. If you can picture it, I'm wearing a fanny pack-type belt around my stomach that has 16 settings ("lessons"), each providing a slightly different rhythmic beat. Sounds like a drum beat or, I imagine to the baby, like I'm working in a factory or at a construction site. I'm supposed to wear this thing twice a day for an hour to "stimulate brain growth". The science of it, explained under a section of the website called "The Science", is complete with a timeline beginning with Confucius and carrying on through the Quing dynasty all the way to the "fetal enrichment technology" introduced somewhere around the 1970s and 80s.
I'll let you know the results when my baby comes out smarter than yours.
Now, on a trial basis (not having plunked down the $149 for my very own) I have the distinct pleasure of using the Baby Plus "Prenatal Education System", which promises on its website to make my soon-to-be born baby more alert, interactive, and just all around smarter upon birth. If you can picture it, I'm wearing a fanny pack-type belt around my stomach that has 16 settings ("lessons"), each providing a slightly different rhythmic beat. Sounds like a drum beat or, I imagine to the baby, like I'm working in a factory or at a construction site. I'm supposed to wear this thing twice a day for an hour to "stimulate brain growth". The science of it, explained under a section of the website called "The Science", is complete with a timeline beginning with Confucius and carrying on through the Quing dynasty all the way to the "fetal enrichment technology" introduced somewhere around the 1970s and 80s.
I'll let you know the results when my baby comes out smarter than yours.
Off to AERA
I'm heading to Chicago tonight to attend the annual American Education Research Association conference, where I'll be participating in a symposium titled Implications of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education: The Challenges of Assessing Quality in Postsecondary Education -- Thursday at 10:35 in the Marriot, Huron room, 10th floor. If you saw the op-ed Tom Toch and I wrote for the Post last week, you'll have a pretty good sense of what I'll be saying.
After the symposium wraps up at noon, you can grab lunch and head to the Marriot ballroom at 2:15 for "Bitch Barbies Love Bully Boys": Transgressive Femininities and Gender Hierarchies in Schools.
I know, I know -- too easy.
After the symposium wraps up at noon, you can grab lunch and head to the Marriot ballroom at 2:15 for "Bitch Barbies Love Bully Boys": Transgressive Femininities and Gender Hierarchies in Schools.
I know, I know -- too easy.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Intended Consequences
There's an old saying: "Beware of unintended consequences." It's good advice for long-term planning. It's also an important principle for identifying facile policy arguments, like those in this WaPost op-ed, in which a local second-grade teacher claims that the No Child Left Behind Act, written to help low-income and minority students, actually harms them.
This kind of sudden logical inversion has a long and ignoble history, outlined well in Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction, which anyone who makes or cares about policy debates should read. For centuries people have been saying things like "welfare makes people poor" or "suffrage will hurt women," and for just as long people have nodded their heads with enthusiasm. The evidenciary bar should be incredibly high for saying things like this, but somehow it never is. I think people assume that nobody would say something so obviously silly with a straight face if it weren't somehow true. Editors also have a fatal weakness for this stuff, which is a lot punchier than carefuly parsing the actual truth.
The op-ed is garden-variety: Rich white kids get things from their home environment that poor and minority kids don't; thus, achievement gaps are unavoidable. But that doesn't mean that poor and minority kids bring nothing to school, they "speak foreign langauges, make music, tell vivid stories, and have other skills not typical of their peers."
Minority students "make music" and "tell vivid stories"? Seriously? I thought people stopped saying things like that in public a while ago.
Because poor and minority students come to school behind, schools have created a "caste system" where disadvantaged children are relegated to classes that are low-level, test-prep, drill-and-kill, and presumably many other bad hyphenated things.
Now, there was a time, not so long ago, when there was no No Child Left Behind Act, when there were no consequences for schools where low-income and minority students did poorly. Presumably, the caste system in question didn't exist back in that halcyon era of authentic education. You know, those palmy days when schools gave a rich, high-quality education to all their students, black or white, rich or poor.
If you believe that, I've got an op-ed to sell you.
This kind of sudden logical inversion has a long and ignoble history, outlined well in Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction, which anyone who makes or cares about policy debates should read. For centuries people have been saying things like "welfare makes people poor" or "suffrage will hurt women," and for just as long people have nodded their heads with enthusiasm. The evidenciary bar should be incredibly high for saying things like this, but somehow it never is. I think people assume that nobody would say something so obviously silly with a straight face if it weren't somehow true. Editors also have a fatal weakness for this stuff, which is a lot punchier than carefuly parsing the actual truth.
The op-ed is garden-variety: Rich white kids get things from their home environment that poor and minority kids don't; thus, achievement gaps are unavoidable. But that doesn't mean that poor and minority kids bring nothing to school, they "speak foreign langauges, make music, tell vivid stories, and have other skills not typical of their peers."
Minority students "make music" and "tell vivid stories"? Seriously? I thought people stopped saying things like that in public a while ago.
Because poor and minority students come to school behind, schools have created a "caste system" where disadvantaged children are relegated to classes that are low-level, test-prep, drill-and-kill, and presumably many other bad hyphenated things.
Now, there was a time, not so long ago, when there was no No Child Left Behind Act, when there were no consequences for schools where low-income and minority students did poorly. Presumably, the caste system in question didn't exist back in that halcyon era of authentic education. You know, those palmy days when schools gave a rich, high-quality education to all their students, black or white, rich or poor.
If you believe that, I've got an op-ed to sell you.
More Blame For Title IX
The College Sports Council, self-defined as a "national coalition of coaches, athletes, parents, and fans" that is trying to "reform Title IX regs that have led to the widespread elimination of opportunities for male athletes" has put out a report that says the NCAA's stats undercount the number of men's teams that have been cut over the past 15 years. The Independent Women's Forum thinks this is great and re-posts a host of charts and graphs (with subtitles like "Football's Not the Problem") that tells a basic story that no one really disagrees with, although we might squabble over the numbers a little. In short, CSC says the average number of male teams offered by an NCAA Division I institution fell from 10.2 in 1981-82 to 8.9 in 2004-2005 while the average number of women’s teams rose from 7.3 to 10.2. The NCAA will give you slightly different numbers but agrees that men's teams are down and women's are up. And so?
So the story goes that men's teams, namely wrestling and gymnastics and other "small interest" sports, are going extinct because of Title IX, "sacrificed" to make room for female athletes. Yes, these sports are in jeopardy. And yes, Title IX's proportionality standard (that women's sports opportunities correspond with the percentage of women on campus) does have a role in this- it's pushing institutions to make hard choices about how to invest their resources (and with more women on campus every year, it does get harder).
But scapegoating Title IX and letting the universities off the hook is inaccurate and certainly isn't going to help male or female "student athletes". The real problem? Faced with hard decisions about how to invest equitably in men's and women's athletics, institutions are simply not willing to touch the glory sports: football and men's basketball. These budgets, including coaches salaries, are higher than they've ever been, and rising. Lay that over the framework of having to spend equally (yes, that is where Title IX comes in since men's hoop and football support male athletes) and something's gotta give. Should we cut the 6-figure video play-back machine for the football team (we really need it if we want to be good) or should we cut some other sports? Hmmm...
JMU is the most recent best example- they cut 10 teams (7 men's, 3 women's) last fall and started a big debate over how and why Title IX was at fault. The fact is that JMU tiered all of its sports (tiers 1, 2, and 3 depending on funding, alumni support, and other factors) and then chose to cut spending by cutting all tier 3 sports. This included men's teams (7) and women's teams (3) and was a decision made for pretty obvious reasons: they had to cut and they weren't willing to cut into the big teams. Even JMU, which initially named "compliance problems" as the reason for the cuts later admitted it was a financial decision. Message to those blaming Title IX for all athletic cuts: it's almost always about economics and rarely about compliance.
So if institutions aren't willing to cut into (not cut out, just cut into) football and men's basketball, don't blame Title IX. And the argument that these sports are the financial backbone of college athletics doesn't wash either. Most football teams- even the big D I-A schools- don't even pay for themselves. They run deficit programs while their budgets keep rising. No one's trying to cut men in favor of women (male collegiate athletes still outnumber female athletes)- they're cutting what doesn't matter to them in exchange for what does.
So the story goes that men's teams, namely wrestling and gymnastics and other "small interest" sports, are going extinct because of Title IX, "sacrificed" to make room for female athletes. Yes, these sports are in jeopardy. And yes, Title IX's proportionality standard (that women's sports opportunities correspond with the percentage of women on campus) does have a role in this- it's pushing institutions to make hard choices about how to invest their resources (and with more women on campus every year, it does get harder).
But scapegoating Title IX and letting the universities off the hook is inaccurate and certainly isn't going to help male or female "student athletes". The real problem? Faced with hard decisions about how to invest equitably in men's and women's athletics, institutions are simply not willing to touch the glory sports: football and men's basketball. These budgets, including coaches salaries, are higher than they've ever been, and rising. Lay that over the framework of having to spend equally (yes, that is where Title IX comes in since men's hoop and football support male athletes) and something's gotta give. Should we cut the 6-figure video play-back machine for the football team (we really need it if we want to be good) or should we cut some other sports? Hmmm...
JMU is the most recent best example- they cut 10 teams (7 men's, 3 women's) last fall and started a big debate over how and why Title IX was at fault. The fact is that JMU tiered all of its sports (tiers 1, 2, and 3 depending on funding, alumni support, and other factors) and then chose to cut spending by cutting all tier 3 sports. This included men's teams (7) and women's teams (3) and was a decision made for pretty obvious reasons: they had to cut and they weren't willing to cut into the big teams. Even JMU, which initially named "compliance problems" as the reason for the cuts later admitted it was a financial decision. Message to those blaming Title IX for all athletic cuts: it's almost always about economics and rarely about compliance.
So if institutions aren't willing to cut into (not cut out, just cut into) football and men's basketball, don't blame Title IX. And the argument that these sports are the financial backbone of college athletics doesn't wash either. Most football teams- even the big D I-A schools- don't even pay for themselves. They run deficit programs while their budgets keep rising. No one's trying to cut men in favor of women (male collegiate athletes still outnumber female athletes)- they're cutting what doesn't matter to them in exchange for what does.
Friday, April 06, 2007
Selective Opinion Gathering
I can't believe this WaPo "What do you think of the takeover?" piece with comments from parents and educators doesn't include a single voice representing schools East of the River. And three out of four speakers are linked to schools West of Rock Creek Park.
Competition and Standards: Better Together
Andrew Coulson's WaPo op-ed today is fundamentally flawed because it treats standards and choice/competition/customization in education as mutually exclusive competing policy approaches, rather than what they really are--complements that are both more effective when combined. It's no coincidence that the percentage of children attending publicly-funded schools of choice in the United States has increased significantly in the past 15 years--at just the same time as the standards movement has taken off. Standards, by shifting the focus of public accountability from the inputs schools use and what they do to the outcomes they achieve for students, enable schools to have greater autonomy and flexibility in their operations, allowing greater educational diversity and meaningful options. A focus on outcomes also demands greater educational customization to achieve those outcomes for kids with differing learning styles, interests, and innate abilities. At the same time, some form of standards and public reporting of student and school performance are essential for a well-functioning education market, because they address the principal agent problem and provide parents with useful information to make informed educational choices. Coulson's own examples demonstrate this: For-profit tutoring systems in the U.S. and Japan are independent of government, but they damn well are judged by parents based on the results they produce for students on nationally-administered college and, in the case of Japan, high school entrance exams. Like peanut butter and jelly, choice and standards are just better together.
Panic! Some More
Since the college admission panic story has already been beaten to death by Reuter's, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, the Washington Post obviously had no choice but to go above the fold with exactly the same story today. This is what happens when there's a big education story that (A) writes itself, and (B) everybody knows is coming months in advance.
Jay Mathews hits all the standard notes--lead with crestfallen high school senior, dreams crushed by a blizzard of rejection letters, quote the outraged parent, pivot to the big picture, throw in some statistics, use words like "frantic" a lot.
The article also makes the same mistake the rest of them make, noting that "many students apply to as many as a dozen schools, often the ones least likely to accept them," without making the connection that this contradicts the idea that the admissions rate race is getting harder to run. Once more, with feeling: the overall difficulty of getting into an elite college is a function of two things. (1) the number of slots in elite colleges; and (2) the number of qualified applicants to elite colleges. Not applications. Applicants. If the same number of well-qualified applicants submits more applications for the same number of slots, admission rates will decline, but the odds of getting into college will not. The same is true if more people apply to elite schools who have no chance of getting in.
Mathews also throws in the delicously ironic but almost surely bogus idea that retired baby boomers will, in an act of cliche-confirming selfishness, be "shoving aside some of their children and grandchildren to take up university spaces" once they're retired.
Then, in the last four grafs, Mathews goes all Columbo by saying "Just one more thing--none of this really matters." The average college admissions rate is stable at 70 percent, you can always transfer, and research says it doesn't really matter where you go to college anyway. Great--but then why are we reading this article again?
Jay Mathews hits all the standard notes--lead with crestfallen high school senior, dreams crushed by a blizzard of rejection letters, quote the outraged parent, pivot to the big picture, throw in some statistics, use words like "frantic" a lot.
The article also makes the same mistake the rest of them make, noting that "many students apply to as many as a dozen schools, often the ones least likely to accept them," without making the connection that this contradicts the idea that the admissions rate race is getting harder to run. Once more, with feeling: the overall difficulty of getting into an elite college is a function of two things. (1) the number of slots in elite colleges; and (2) the number of qualified applicants to elite colleges. Not applications. Applicants. If the same number of well-qualified applicants submits more applications for the same number of slots, admission rates will decline, but the odds of getting into college will not. The same is true if more people apply to elite schools who have no chance of getting in.
Mathews also throws in the delicously ironic but almost surely bogus idea that retired baby boomers will, in an act of cliche-confirming selfishness, be "shoving aside some of their children and grandchildren to take up university spaces" once they're retired.
Then, in the last four grafs, Mathews goes all Columbo by saying "Just one more thing--none of this really matters." The average college admissions rate is stable at 70 percent, you can always transfer, and research says it doesn't really matter where you go to college anyway. Great--but then why are we reading this article again?
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Panic! At the Rich Suburban High School
Q: When does a tiny statistical change in a number that affects a miniscule number of people merit breathless coverage in the New York Times?
A: When the number has something--anything--to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.
In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it's annual exercise in college admissions scaremongering on Page A14 yesterday, but it remains the most-emailed article on this site as of 2PM today. Due to the "frantic" and "ferocious" competition for admission and an "avalanche of applications to top schools," this was "the most selective spring in modern memory at America's elite schools," resulting in "brutally low acceptance rates" at schools like Harvard, which accepted 9 percent of applicants, the "lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."
Nine percent! Man! Why, just last year, the admit rate at Harvard was....
Actually, it was nine percent then too.
Technically, 9.3 percent, as compared to this year's rate of 9.0 percent. Funny how that didn't make it into the article; I guess there just wasn't room with all those adjectives and adverbs. The Wall Street Journal made the same omission when it ran exactly the same story($) two days ago, although on the whole the WSJ piece had better data and did include previous-year data for other schools. Only Reuters provided the helpful context of how much Harvard's admission rate has changed when it ran exactly the same story a week ago.
These stories, which appear every year at the same time and with about the same degree of predictability as cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, are based on the premise that it is much, much harder than it used to be for smart kids to get into a top-flight college. But is that what the numbers actually say? It's true, as the Times article notes, that the number of high school graduates increased from 2.4 million in 1993 to 3.1 million last year. But that's a very selective timeline; 1993 and 1994 were--not coincidentally--the years with the fewest graduates since the early 1960s. One could just as easily note that the number of high school graduates today is almost exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.
Since the number of slots in elite schools is basically a constant, the real culprit is the denominator, the number of applications. An increase in applications isn't the same thing as an increase in applicants--if the same number of qualified applicants doubled the number of applications they submitted for the same number of slots, institutional admit rates would drop even though the odds of a given student being admitted would not. The article notes that students are filling out "ever more" applications, but seems not to notice, or care, that this undermines the logic of the piece.
Similarly, not all of the people who apply to Harvard have a realistic chance to get in. If the marginal increase in applications is disproportionately comprised of people who are treating the Harvard application like a $65.00 Powerball ticket, then falling admit rates are a mirage.
But there's no room for these kind of uncertainties when you're focused on scaring the bejeezus out of striving parents who wrongly believe that elite colleges are the alpha and omega of opportunity for their children.
A: When the number has something--anything--to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.
In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it's annual exercise in college admissions scaremongering on Page A14 yesterday, but it remains the most-emailed article on this site as of 2PM today. Due to the "frantic" and "ferocious" competition for admission and an "avalanche of applications to top schools," this was "the most selective spring in modern memory at America's elite schools," resulting in "brutally low acceptance rates" at schools like Harvard, which accepted 9 percent of applicants, the "lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."
Nine percent! Man! Why, just last year, the admit rate at Harvard was....
Actually, it was nine percent then too.
Technically, 9.3 percent, as compared to this year's rate of 9.0 percent. Funny how that didn't make it into the article; I guess there just wasn't room with all those adjectives and adverbs. The Wall Street Journal made the same omission when it ran exactly the same story($) two days ago, although on the whole the WSJ piece had better data and did include previous-year data for other schools. Only Reuters provided the helpful context of how much Harvard's admission rate has changed when it ran exactly the same story a week ago.
These stories, which appear every year at the same time and with about the same degree of predictability as cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, are based on the premise that it is much, much harder than it used to be for smart kids to get into a top-flight college. But is that what the numbers actually say? It's true, as the Times article notes, that the number of high school graduates increased from 2.4 million in 1993 to 3.1 million last year. But that's a very selective timeline; 1993 and 1994 were--not coincidentally--the years with the fewest graduates since the early 1960s. One could just as easily note that the number of high school graduates today is almost exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.
Since the number of slots in elite schools is basically a constant, the real culprit is the denominator, the number of applications. An increase in applications isn't the same thing as an increase in applicants--if the same number of qualified applicants doubled the number of applications they submitted for the same number of slots, institutional admit rates would drop even though the odds of a given student being admitted would not. The article notes that students are filling out "ever more" applications, but seems not to notice, or care, that this undermines the logic of the piece.
Similarly, not all of the people who apply to Harvard have a realistic chance to get in. If the marginal increase in applications is disproportionately comprised of people who are treating the Harvard application like a $65.00 Powerball ticket, then falling admit rates are a mirage.
But there's no room for these kind of uncertainties when you're focused on scaring the bejeezus out of striving parents who wrongly believe that elite colleges are the alpha and omega of opportunity for their children.
Amazing Girls
I'm a bit late in commenting on this Sunday NYT article about the tremendous stresses on affluent girls in a Boston suburb, but since it's still the 3rd most e-mailed article on the Times' site, I guess it's still relevant. Author Sara Rimer's writing seems to fluctuate between trying to make you feel sorry for these girls and awed by their "amazingness" (they speak Latin!, they do experiments with DNA!), but the major emotional response triggered in me was annoyance at yet another NYT article bemoaning how hard it's become to get into the Ivy League and other elite universities.
I don't want to dismiss these girls' feelings--being a teenager is lousy no matter who you are, and I certainly would never want to go through that again--but failing to get into an elite university of your choice, while crummy in the near term, not only won't ruin your life, it's as issue that only impacts a tiny percentage of the teen population. The constant focus on the problems of a small subset of affluent, predominantly white students has real negative impacts on public debate about education in this country. Sure, it's stressful to feel like you have to take 5 AP classes and participate in a variety of extracurriculars--but a bigger problem is the larger numbers of young people who don't even have access to AP classes or the kinds of extracurriculars available to students at this high school.
The question of stress on teenage girls deserves a bit more consideration: One thing I didn't mention in the paper I wrote last year about educational gender gaps is that the improving achievements of young women--which are the major driver of gender gaps favoring girls in college-going and some other measures, because boys haven't lost ground--do seem to have come with a cost, in that girls (and not just privileged girls) report high levels of stress, more so than boys. Of course, it's possible young girls have always felt more pressure than boys to be perfect or, as a coach quoted in the NYT article says, please everyone. In the past, this might have meant hiding your intelligence and being meek and docile. Today, at least for daughters of professional parents, it means being accomplished and academically successful. I'm troubled we've set up a world where some girls (and I'm sure also some boys and plenty of adults) feel they have to please everyone, but a world where girls please people who are important to them by compiling accomplishments that have long-term educational and professional payoffs is still a better world than one where girls please others by doing things--playing dumb, getting pregnant--that have negative long-term impacts.
Reading this article, I couldn't help thinking about the paper I have out this week about parental anxieties around early childhood development and the growing market in educational infant and toddler toys and videos that claim--with little evidence--to help parents build "smarter" brains in their children. I'd be willing to bet that many of the girls who are stressed out about extracurriculars, AP, and getting into elite schools were raised in homes where parents worried about fostering their children's brain development and played classical music to stimulate neuron growth. And I suspect they'll grow up to be mothers who carry these same anxieties into raising their own children. At the same time there are enormous inequities and these girls have had opportunities, experiences that are dramatically different from those of their less-advantaged peers, and that have produced real academic and life outcome disparities that favor affluent girls.
As Annette Lareau illustrates compellingly in her book Unequal Childhoods these inequities are linked to dramatic differences in childrearing approaches between professional and disadvantaged families--and both approaches have costs for the families that use them and their children. I'd like to believe there's a possible world in which we can give all kids access to the benefits of the professional approach to childrearing--confidence, strong verbal skills, cultural competencies and knowledge--without some of the costs that appear to be associated with it, and with some of the benefits--strong family connections, independence, more free time for adults and children--that are connected with the less advantaged approach. Pipe dreams? Probably. But, while I'm older than the "amazing girls" and wasn't as amazing a teen as they, like them I was raised to believe in a world of limitless possibilities. So I'll keep hoping.
I don't want to dismiss these girls' feelings--being a teenager is lousy no matter who you are, and I certainly would never want to go through that again--but failing to get into an elite university of your choice, while crummy in the near term, not only won't ruin your life, it's as issue that only impacts a tiny percentage of the teen population. The constant focus on the problems of a small subset of affluent, predominantly white students has real negative impacts on public debate about education in this country. Sure, it's stressful to feel like you have to take 5 AP classes and participate in a variety of extracurriculars--but a bigger problem is the larger numbers of young people who don't even have access to AP classes or the kinds of extracurriculars available to students at this high school.
The question of stress on teenage girls deserves a bit more consideration: One thing I didn't mention in the paper I wrote last year about educational gender gaps is that the improving achievements of young women--which are the major driver of gender gaps favoring girls in college-going and some other measures, because boys haven't lost ground--do seem to have come with a cost, in that girls (and not just privileged girls) report high levels of stress, more so than boys. Of course, it's possible young girls have always felt more pressure than boys to be perfect or, as a coach quoted in the NYT article says, please everyone. In the past, this might have meant hiding your intelligence and being meek and docile. Today, at least for daughters of professional parents, it means being accomplished and academically successful. I'm troubled we've set up a world where some girls (and I'm sure also some boys and plenty of adults) feel they have to please everyone, but a world where girls please people who are important to them by compiling accomplishments that have long-term educational and professional payoffs is still a better world than one where girls please others by doing things--playing dumb, getting pregnant--that have negative long-term impacts.
Reading this article, I couldn't help thinking about the paper I have out this week about parental anxieties around early childhood development and the growing market in educational infant and toddler toys and videos that claim--with little evidence--to help parents build "smarter" brains in their children. I'd be willing to bet that many of the girls who are stressed out about extracurriculars, AP, and getting into elite schools were raised in homes where parents worried about fostering their children's brain development and played classical music to stimulate neuron growth. And I suspect they'll grow up to be mothers who carry these same anxieties into raising their own children. At the same time there are enormous inequities and these girls have had opportunities, experiences that are dramatically different from those of their less-advantaged peers, and that have produced real academic and life outcome disparities that favor affluent girls.
As Annette Lareau illustrates compellingly in her book Unequal Childhoods these inequities are linked to dramatic differences in childrearing approaches between professional and disadvantaged families--and both approaches have costs for the families that use them and their children. I'd like to believe there's a possible world in which we can give all kids access to the benefits of the professional approach to childrearing--confidence, strong verbal skills, cultural competencies and knowledge--without some of the costs that appear to be associated with it, and with some of the benefits--strong family connections, independence, more free time for adults and children--that are connected with the less advantaged approach. Pipe dreams? Probably. But, while I'm older than the "amazing girls" and wasn't as amazing a teen as they, like them I was raised to believe in a world of limitless possibilities. So I'll keep hoping.
Universal Pre-K?
Good discussion between Richard Colvin and Bruce Fuller about the movement towards universal pre-k and whether publicly-funded preschool for all kids is a desirable policy goal. They're both smart and thoughtful about this, so it's worth checking out, as is this debate we hosted between Bruce and NIEER's Steven Barnett last spring on the question of universal vs. targeted preschool. Joanne Jacobs weighs in here. I'm looking forward to reading Bruce's book (still waiting to get a copy), so more on this issue when I've had a chance to do that.
Tangentially: Joanne posts about a Tennessean article on "outsourcing parenting." I understand why this bothers some people, but it's worth noting that one of the benefits of modern economies is the achievement of greater efficiency through comparative advantage. There's no reason to believe this isn't also the case for at least some elements of child care and child rearing. I certainly have sympathy with folks who hire someone to teach their children to ride a bike, since I can't ride a bike, so if my hypothetical future kids are going to learn to ride a bike, I'll probably have to hire someone to teach them.
Tangentially: Joanne posts about a Tennessean article on "outsourcing parenting." I understand why this bothers some people, but it's worth noting that one of the benefits of modern economies is the achievement of greater efficiency through comparative advantage. There's no reason to believe this isn't also the case for at least some elements of child care and child rearing. I certainly have sympathy with folks who hire someone to teach their children to ride a bike, since I can't ride a bike, so if my hypothetical future kids are going to learn to ride a bike, I'll probably have to hire someone to teach them.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
DC Schools Takeover: Probably a Good Thing
It looks like DC mayor Adrian Fenty will be allowed to take over the city schools. As my colleague Sara Mead has written (when she's not busy in her day job as conventional wisdom-busting provocateur), all mayoral takeovers aren't created equal--they can be done well, or badly. But specifics aside for the moment, I think this is a good idea, for a couple of reasons.
First, mayoral takeover creates a whole new kind of accountability. Critics of school-focused accountability systems like NCLB rightly note that the people writing the laws are never subject to the kind of tough accountability measures they impose on educators. And for various reasons--low voter turnout, fractured responsibility--people seem to get re-elected to urban school boards on a regular basis even when the schools are a dismally run as they have been here.
Mayoral takeover is different. Mayor Fenty is tying his political fortunes to school improvement in a deliberately high-profile way. That means that the smart people whose job it is to get him re-elected in 2010 won't be sleeping well the night before the 2009 test scores are released. Those kinds of incentives and pressures can be a good thing in a lot of ways.
Second, when mayors assume responsibility for the schools, they send an important message, both to the general public and the educators and students within the system: "Our schools are not a lost cause." Urban education and urban students have long been written off as irredeemable, victims of greater forces perhaps, but beyond saving in the end. That kind of attitude can infect the culture of a school system and become self-sustaining. Mayoral takeover send a very different signal: someone with a lot to lose is willing to take a risk on an uncertain but vitally important proposition. That's a good thing too.
First, mayoral takeover creates a whole new kind of accountability. Critics of school-focused accountability systems like NCLB rightly note that the people writing the laws are never subject to the kind of tough accountability measures they impose on educators. And for various reasons--low voter turnout, fractured responsibility--people seem to get re-elected to urban school boards on a regular basis even when the schools are a dismally run as they have been here.
Mayoral takeover is different. Mayor Fenty is tying his political fortunes to school improvement in a deliberately high-profile way. That means that the smart people whose job it is to get him re-elected in 2010 won't be sleeping well the night before the 2009 test scores are released. Those kinds of incentives and pressures can be a good thing in a lot of ways.
Second, when mayors assume responsibility for the schools, they send an important message, both to the general public and the educators and students within the system: "Our schools are not a lost cause." Urban education and urban students have long been written off as irredeemable, victims of greater forces perhaps, but beyond saving in the end. That kind of attitude can infect the culture of a school system and become self-sustaining. Mayoral takeover send a very different signal: someone with a lot to lose is willing to take a risk on an uncertain but vitally important proposition. That's a good thing too.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Big Lending Speaks
Today’s Washington Post business section has a front-page article discussing big lending’s efforts to fend off proposed cuts to student loan subsidies. Two thoughts:
First, Sallie Mae and its fellow big-lenders need to move on from trying to sway policy through lobbying pushes, public relations campaigns, and campaign contributions. Instead, it’s time they propose some policy solutions they would be willing to accept—solutions other than maintaining the status quo. There are already ideas out there for market-based methods to establish subsidy rates—for one example, check out New America’s loan auctions idea. Lenders will be better served in the long run by helping to design a system that allows market-forces instead of politics to establish subsidy levels.*
Second, let’s embrace the current dual-program structure rather than continue the endless back-and-forth between proponents of Direct Lending (in which the federal government provides loans to students directly) and the Federal Family Education Loan Program (in which private banks make loans to students, and the federal government subsidizes those loans). Granted, this dual-program structure is unusual, but the tension between the two programs is likely the best method of ensuring both are efficient, effective, and innovative. If either fails in one of those criteria, there will be lots of people calling for its removal, and another program ready and willing to take its place—that’s good motivation to stay competitive.
*Any good policy will balance the need for low subsidy levels with the need to keep smaller lenders in the student loan industry. Loan giants, like Sallie Mae, will be at a huge competitive advantage in any market system, and without special consideration for smaller lenders, a market-based policy risks pushing small banks out of the student loan industry. This would reduce options for students, and small, local banks that provide personal service are a great option to have. Also, industries that consist solely of corporate behemoths (think cell phones) generally don’t have five-star customer service.
Hell? No.
The Chairman of the House Education Committee in Colorado resigned from his chairmanship after the Rocky Mountain News published an email to a colleague in which he said, "There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherziers."
The tendency of some people to conflate the privatization, voucher, and charter movements is one of the more tedious things you have to deal with in talking about important issues like choice and the place of education in the public and private spheres.
To be clear, there really are people out there who want to privatize and destroy the public schools. They're all voucher supporters, and a lot of them are quite sympathetic to charters, not because they actually care about--or even understand--charters per se, but because they see charters as a step in their direction. I don't know that I'd go so far as to condemn them to Hell, but they're no friends of public education
But tarring charter schools with other people's bad intentions is wrong. The commonly-made distinction between charter schools and public schools is inaccurate; charter schools are public schools. I guarantee that if you were teleported into the classroom of a good charter elementary school here in DC, there would be nothing to tell you that it was anything other than a particularly well-run public school. Same predominantly minority and low-income DC kids, same base funding source, same accountabily under No Child Left Behind. If, on the other hand, you were teleported into a DC private school, believe me, you would know.
The tendency of some people to conflate the privatization, voucher, and charter movements is one of the more tedious things you have to deal with in talking about important issues like choice and the place of education in the public and private spheres.
To be clear, there really are people out there who want to privatize and destroy the public schools. They're all voucher supporters, and a lot of them are quite sympathetic to charters, not because they actually care about--or even understand--charters per se, but because they see charters as a step in their direction. I don't know that I'd go so far as to condemn them to Hell, but they're no friends of public education
But tarring charter schools with other people's bad intentions is wrong. The commonly-made distinction between charter schools and public schools is inaccurate; charter schools are public schools. I guarantee that if you were teleported into the classroom of a good charter elementary school here in DC, there would be nothing to tell you that it was anything other than a particularly well-run public school. Same predominantly minority and low-income DC kids, same base funding source, same accountabily under No Child Left Behind. If, on the other hand, you were teleported into a DC private school, believe me, you would know.
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