Blessed are the Tastemakers

I went shopping for indie rock CDs in Canada, and figured out what's wrong with higher education in America.

Specifically, I was in a CD store on Rue St. Denis in Montreal, where my lovely wife and I were on vacation over the holiday weekend. Since the Canadian good bands per capita ratio is, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, at least 50 times greater than the American ratio, I had high hopes upon entry. But it soon became clear that I was out of my league. I'm one of those people who's heard of all the good Canadian bands that everyone's heard of (the New Pornographers alone have made three of my 25 favorite albums of the decade) but none of the bands that nobody's heard of. This store seemed exclusively dedicated to the latter. There was an obligatory copy of Neon Bible for sale, but that was hardly the point.

After getting over being confronted with the limits of my coolness, I noticed some interesting things about the store itself. Even though it wasn't very big, they were only using about 20% of the available floorspace. Most of the CDs were on single row of tables in the middle. They could have easily fit 10 times as many CDs into the store if they had wanted to, but they obviously didn't, because this store wasn't selling access to music. They were selling taste.

Our younger readers may not believe this, but there was a time not so long ago when you could know that a CD (or LP) existed, want to buy it, have the money to buy, but be unable to buy it, simply because you couldn't find anyone to sell it to you. There was no Amazon or eBay or iTunes; if they didn't have it at the local Strawberrys or Tape World, you were out of luck. That's why a visit to someplace like Tower Records in New York City was always so great--it was a whole building full of music, where you'd spend hours flipping through the racks looking for the early Smiths album you were missing or--even better--the fabled "European import" of some Neil Young concert from the early 70s.

The point being, Tower records was selling access to stored information, in this case sonic information. Then the Internet came along and opened up that access to everyone, everywhere. Not surprisingly, Tower went bankrupt. But the store on Rue St. Denis is still open, because the challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgement and taste, which only people can provide. The value of the Montreal CD store was as much in the albums that weren't on sale as in those that were. In that context, only using 20% of your floor space makes a lot of sense.

The store also had a single wall rack that took this principle to even further extremes. While the rack was built to hold CDs about 10 deep, only the first three rows were in use. They were devoted exclusively to the gods and giants--Hendrix, Bowie, Neil Young, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen (this being Canada), the New York Dolls, etc. (Although this last selection strikes me as somewhat false; I think it was Chuck Klosterman who noted that while everyone can recite the one-paragraph version of the Dolls' seminal place in the late '70s NYC punk scene and thus life as we know it, no one other than self-serious rock critics ever listens to their music, owns their albums, or even knows what they sound like. The image and idea of the Dolls were infinitely more important than any music they actually made).

Moreover, the CD store wasn't just selling the standard "essentials" catalogue for each artist. Instead, there was a carefully selected combination of iconic works, under-appreciated studio albums (i.e. Axis: Bold as Love), obscure concerts, BBC session outtakes, etc. It was pretty cool.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with higher education?

Beyond the obvious point that Hendrix appreciation is a higher education in and of itself, this CD store embodied the promise--and in many cases, the failure--of the undergraduate curriculum at the contemporary American university.

In some ways, universities went through all this a long time ago. While recorded music wasn't widely available until the mid-20th century, recorded words have been in circulation since Guttenberg. But even until recently, universities were judged by their prowess in storing and providing access to information, embodied in statistics like the number of books and journal subscriptions held by the library. They're still judged by the percentage of professors with PhDs--information stored in human form.

But these assets are--and really, always were--essentially irrelevant to the needs of your average undergraduate. Those students don't need access--they need taste. In other words, they need the university to apprehend the vast array of human knowledge and make some very smart, considered judgments about where to start and where to focus in building an education. They need the equivalent of the CD rack of gods and giants for the realm of ideas instead of music.

Unfortunately, most big universities moved away from this kind of core curriculum a long time ago. Instead they set students loose in the equivalent of Tower Records, with instructions that amount to "Buy at least one CD from Rock/Pop, Jazz, Classical, Soul / R&B, Folk, and Country. Then pick one of those categories and buy 10 more CDs from that section, plus another 10 from that section or any others."

In fact, it's worse than that, because universities are more limited than Tower in terms of what they can offer, and their offerings tend to skew toward what the faculty want to teach, not what students need to learn. It's like the above scenario, except there are only 50 CDs in each section, selected by a socially maladjusted record store clerk who looks down on the clerks in charge of the other sections (who feel the same way about him) and who has decided that the 50 albums in Rock/Pop will include the complete Yngvie Malmsteen catalogue, but not Exile on Main Street.

This doesn't mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.

Statistics with Meaning

NCES released their annual report this morning on the condition of education in the U.S. They took the opportunity to highlight high school coursetaking trends. More states are requiring more coursework for graduation, and overall, the average number of course credits completed by graduates increased from 21.7 in 1982 to 25.8 in 2004. More students are taking more math, science, and English courses with no declines in art or social studies, but to the detriment of study halls, vocational education, and career training. They’re taking more advanced courses as well. The number of students taking at least one AP exam doubled between 1997 and 2005.

Great news. Bust open the bubbly. Surely additional credit hours in the basics translates to higher test scores, right? That is the assumption behind the drive for the basics, no? Actually, the data suggests there was minor, incremental, or even no change. On NAEP in 1971 in reading, 17 year olds averaged a scale score of 285. On NAEP in 2004 in reading, 17 year olds averaged a scale score of 285. That’s not a typo. During the same time frame, math scores increased from 300 to 307, a 2.3% increase over 33 years. For some comparability, the coursetaking trend discussed above is a 19% increase since 1982. The numbers don’t quite compute.

When asked about this conundrum, Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, admitted there was a “legitimate concern” that courses had been watered down. He labeled it a top priority to analyze what exactly these courses are teaching, and said data including course syllabi and the textbooks used in the classes exists, but has yet to be fully analyzed. That’s why I left “the condition of education 2007” feeling like I had been bombarded with statistics without much context.

Special Treatment for Private Loans, No Way Out for Students

Robert Shireman, President of The Institute for College Access and Success, is guest blogging over at New America Foundation—check out his post today on how private student loans (not the government-backed loans) can’t be eliminated in bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy allows people who have serious financial problems a chance to start over by relieving them of most of their debt and preventing creditors from pursuing lawsuits and garnishing wages. But these protections do not extend to private student loan debt. Private student loan debt is in a special category of debt, along with child support, taxes, criminal fines, and government-backed student loans, that can't be eliminated with bankruptcy.

How did private student loans end up in that category? Well, apparently no one is quite sure. But one thing is sure -- preventing students from discharging private student loans eliminates a valuable safety valve for students with the most serious financial problems.

New Quick-and-Edster

The post below comes from Chad Aldeman, who's spending the summer at Education Sector in our higher ed department. Chad is a University of Iowa alum, currently working on a graduate degree in public policy at William and Mary. Welcome!

Valuing Education

My colleague Abdul Kargbo just published a terrific article comparing his educational experiences as a child in Sierra Leone to his later high school and college experiences in the U.S. His analysis makes some provocative points for both educators and the broader community of folks interested in using education, social and economic reforms to enhance equity and social justice.

Taxing Priorities

An event Wednesday at the joint Urban- Brookings Tax Policy Center highlighted how unnecessarily complex and ineffective the federal student aid programs are, and offered simple solutions for progress.

It has been well-documented that the U.S. is beginning to fall behind in accessibility of college and completion of degrees. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that we have been overtaken in the percentage of young people pursuing post-secondary degrees. By failing to target financial aid dollars to the students who need it most, our tax policy has been enabling this decline.

To fully understand how our system of tax credits and educational grants functions (or doesn’t, depending on your view), see Wednesday’s report. The duplicity, mutual exclusivity, and poor targeting of the Hope credit, the Lifetime Learning Credit, and the tuition and fees deduction leave families confused. Never mind the current scandals in the student loan industry. A 2005 GAO report found “suboptimal use of the postsecondary tax preferences” by students and families arose, at least in part, from their complexity.

Beyond complexity, there are serious fundamental problems with the system we have in place. Most glaringly, there is no linkage between tax credits and grants administered by the Department of Education. The tax credits are administered by the IRS; a student must fill out the laborious Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to be eligible for Pell grants. Additionally, the tax credits are non-refundable, meaning those families with income below the threshold for paying net federal income taxes receive nothing, and the tax structure penalizes students who must work to pay for school.

These issues need to be ameliorated to regain our status as an international leader in higher education. We must target our financial aid programs better to the students who need them most. We need to stop penalizing working students. The students who must work their way through college are the same ones who we need to graduate. We should fix the issue of refundability. Tax credits with this restriction end up going to middle- and upper-class families, which is fine, but it doesn’t address the issue of affordability.

We should also make the FAFSA simpler. Susan Dynarski, a professor at Harvard University, showed an enlightening chart at the event comparing the FAFSA with the 1040, the 1040A, and the 1040EZ. The FAFSA had more questions and more pages and asked for more financial information than all of them (see a full explanation here). Legally, students cannot fill out the FAFSA until after January 1 of their senior year in high school, and they likely will not know their aid package until March or April. Imagine a situation where the aid was predictable based on income. Students and families could have a reasonable estimate of their financial aid before looking at colleges or applying. Better yet, imagine a system like that of the Social Security Administration, where the family of every child would receive a letter in the mail every year after birth letting them know how much financial aid they could expect. These steps would allow for greater transparency in the financial aid system, and target more directly the portion of the population least likely to attend college.

You're Fired (Not!)

This post by AFTie Ed last week was laugh-out-loud funny but also made a point well worth remembering:

Wait, you mean you can’t just snap your hand and get rid of non union employees you don’t like? Wow!

There are lots of reasons lousy and downright horrid people often don't get fired, and most of those reasons would remain even if there were no tenure or unions in public education.

Preschool in the Primaries: Score one for Senator Clinton

Campaigning in Florida today, Senator/Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton put forward an ambitious policy proposal to move the U.S. towards universal preschool education. This is the first major education proposal rolled out by the Clinton campaign, and it's a good one. The plan would provide states with matching grants (starting at $5 billion federal investment and scaling up to $10 billion) to expand publicly-funded preschool programs, with a priority on low-income and English language learners, and requires state preschool programs to meet high quality standards as a condition of funding.

This strategy (which might look familiar) capitalizes on the incredible state-level momentum around preschool and early childhood education, while also creating a much needed incentive for laggard states to get in gear and addressing the two major shortcomings of state preschool programs right now: they serve too few children and are often too low in quality to have significant impacts on those they do serve.

So far, we haven't seen a lot on education from the candidates, in part because it's less a key priority for voters this year than Iraq, national security, or the economy, but also because it's pretty early and candidates are just beginning to put meat on formal policy proposals. I hope other campaigns will follow Clinton's lead in proposing bold action on early childhood: It's right on the merits and also plays well politically. And even though significant preschool programs are expensive, they're a steal next to some of the health and security expenditures on the table.
For example, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who officially joined the race today, has a strong record of leadership on early childhood in New Mexico, where he created the state's first statewide preschool program, and should translate that same advocacy for early learning into his presidential campaign.

Stay tuned her for more coverage and comment as the campaigns start putting more ink on the page on their education platforms.

Selling EdFund

Via New America Foundation, Schwarzenegger is considering selling California’s state guarantee agency, EdFund, to a private, potentially for-profit, loan company. In the federal loan program, guarantee agencies not only insure student loans, they also provide oversight by ensuring that lenders perform the required due diligence to collect loans and prevent defaults.

The Institute for College Access and Success put out a brief on the potential sale of EdFund back in 2005—a must read if you’re interested in this issue. In it, they describe why EdFund’s sale could be detrimental to California’s taxpayers.

I describe (shameless plug) in my recent report on the student loan industry how close ties between private, for-profit loan companies and guarantee agencies create a serious conflict of interest in the oversight of the federal loan program. With recent headlines on abuses within the industry, the Department of Education needs to keep a close eye on this exact kind of transaction.

Blame Foucault

Almost a month ago, I noted a bizzare post at the National Review Online's higher education blog laying blame for the Virginia Tech killings at the feet of the postmodern English department. Apparently, Foucault made him do it, because if you question conventional ways of thinking about truth and morality, people will naturally be driven to murderous rampages, which, as we all know, is why the Modern Language Association shut its doors 30 years ago. It simply couldn't manage the attrition.

My only mistake was in assuming this was just an example of ill-conceived, one-time riffing off the top of the new cycle. Apparently not. The discussion is still going strong over there, with this post approvingly quoting a recent column from--seriously, you can't make this up--Phyllis Schlafly, where she notes that while she has no idea what Cho actually studied, he "could have" read selections from various--horrors!--feminist courses.

Or, notes Schlafly, he could have taken a senior seminar titled "The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature." Right! By all means, let's purge Macbeth from our institutions of higher learning, because if we keep teaching Shakespeare to these kids...oh, wait a minute....(John Miller gets this right).

Historic(al) NAEP Results

New NAEP history & civics results were released yesterday. To the seeming surprise of many, history scores were up across the board, while civics scores are up in grade 4 and flat elsewhere.

I'm guessing a lot of pre-written newspaper articles and blog posts beginning with some basic historical fact that most students don't know, followed by a general bemoaning of our collective ignorance of our shared past, heritage, etc., etc., are sitting in various electronic and physical dustbins this morning.

The New York Times still went with the overly-pessimistic "Students Gain Only Marginally on Test of U.S. History." That's real glass-is-half-emptyism, no?

The top-line policy context is, as always, NCLB. Along with the recent upswing in 4th grade NAEP science scores, these results seem to, if not puncture, at least fail to support the widely held notion that NCLB's focus on reading and math is creating collateral damage in other subjects, as teachers make time for the basics by cannibalizing subjects like history and science.

The consensus unverified speculative opinion is that because NCLB is helping more students with reading, they're learning more in other subjects, because it's awfully hard to learn if you can't read. Which makes perfect sense, that's why NCLB was designed to focus on core subjects in the first place. What's interesting is the begrudging, backhanded way this gets discussed. For example:

Peggy Altoff, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, suggested that the intensified reading instruction in primary grades might disguise a failure to teach much history and civics in fourth grade. Social studies test scores might be climbing, she said, because fourth-graders are more likely to understand simple questions that do not require much knowledge of history, such as interpreting pictures.

Or:

“It’s heartwarming that the test organizers have found positive things to say, but this report is not anything to break out the Champagne over,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton who advocates devoting more classroom time to the subject.

Look, if it turns out that history and science instruction in this country have been fatally hamstrung by a more generalized lack of reading skills, then shouldn't advocates for those fields be first the barricades to support NCLB-like reforms, given the initially paradoxical yet increasingly plausible idea that increasing basic skill instruction at the expense of history and science may actually lead to more learning in those subjects? Or is this just all about using the public policy arena to jockey with the other disciplines for status?

Spring Awakening...

...a Broadway musical based on a 19th century German morality play set to rock music by Duncan Shiek, received 11 nominations for the 2007 Tony awards. Admittedly tenuous edu-connection: the main characters are high schools students and some of the scenes take place in school. I saw it last month and liked it a lot, although its R-Ratedness came as kind of a shock. Also, I almost bumped into Mandy Moore walking out of the show; she's taller than you'd think given that most Hollywood actresses / singers are practically munchkin-sized.

Back to education policy now.

Admissions Impossible Continued

From the New York Times, in an article titled "Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier," about the idea that ever-more-selective elite universities are driving students to apply to less-elite universities, which are as a result becoming more elite:

The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession. High-achieving students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, primarily because of uncertainty over where they will be admitted. Supply, however, has remained constant. Most of the sought-after universities have not expanded their freshman classes.

While the spread of the "Northeastern obsession" is probably an accurate characterization of the last 20 or 30 years of college admissions, I don't think things have changed much in recent years. Moreover, the idea that supply is constant simply isn't true. Per the U.S. Department of Education, here's the percent change in enrollments at Ivy League campuses (in descending order of U.S. News ranking) from 2003 to 2006:

Princeton: +6.1%
Harvard: + 3.0%
Yale: +1.6%
Penn: -1.6%
Columbia: +1.0%
Dartmouth: +0.4%
Cornell: +1.7%
Brown: +5.4%

Seven out eight have increased the number of enrollments, at rates comparable to the overall national increase in the number of high school graduates. As the Times itself reported($) just a couple of weeks ago, Yale is considering a signficant expansion.

The Education Tax Credit Endgame

Andrew Coulson tries again to convince us that education tax credit's aren't the same thing as public funding, and fails because he ignores my key points: Education Tax Credits have the same impact on individual and government budgets as would government expenditures for the same purpose, and unlike broad tax cuts, the linkage of tax credits to specific behaviors has a distorting impact on individual incentives. But at this point I'd imagine we're talking past each other, because we have fundamentally different perspectives on taxation.

There's a broader point worth making here, and it involves the seeming contradiction between Cato-types' recent preference for education tax credits and their more general stance on tax issues. Libertarians have traditionally argued that tax systems should be both simple (count the number of posts on their blog extolling the flat tax) and behavior-neutral, to avoid ingintroducing incentives that distort behavior and markets. Education Tax Credits violate both of those principles.

But what's particularly interesting is how education tax credits interact with the much more important libertarian contention that tax rates and tax revenues should be low. As tax rates are lowered, the value of non-refundable tax credits (and thus the amount of support education tax credits would generate for scholarships, or the amount of tuition they offset for parents) declines. Were both Coulson and his colleagues in Cato's tax policy shop to succeed, the ultimate result would be to virtually eliminate any public role in encouraging support for education. This is an important point: The ultimate aim of Coulson's views is not simply to destroy "public education" but to eliminate any social commitment to supporting children's education, leaving responsibility to fund children's schooling entirely in the hands of their parents and, for children with the bad judgement to be born to poor parents, the vagaries of individual charity.

Obviously, this is a view that is very far out of the mainstream not just of American culture but also of the school choice movement (of which I consider myself a part). So it's no wonder Cato's education policy team would prefer to talk about the benefits of choice for poor parents and for reducing social conflict. (To his credit, Coulson has written that he believes parent responsibility to pay for education is a core principle of his ideal education system.) But it's entirely disingenuous of them to present tax credits as a "third way" on school choice--they're actually a much more radical alternative, leading ultimately to an utter abdication of any social or communal responsibility or committment to children.

"and they look at us like we are demented..."

So says my former employer Kati Haycock in today's NYTimes article about a recent study from ACT documenting the lack of rigor in high school curricula. Kati's talking about her suggestion that some analysis might be in order. I've got nothing to add, other than to say that (A) there's every reason to believe things are as bad as the report says they are (look at remediation rates and learning outcomes in college), and (B) "and they look at us like we are demented" cries out to be the name of an emo band of some kind.

Aim First, Then Fire

John Edwards’ recently announced college plan gets it right on one of the big college affordability issues: the need for a simpler, straightforward financial aid application, and more support to students and their families when they are applying to college and figuring out how to afford it. Unfortunately, his tuition plan—which promises to pay the first year of college for 2 million students—doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Yes, a more generous and simplified grant program targeted to low-income students is needed in our federal financial aid system (although it isn’t clear if Edwards’ plan is targeted to low-income students). Experience shows that when students know that they can afford college, they are more likely to see college as an attainable goal, and therefore more likely to apply and enroll. Edwards’ plan, while it gives students that assurance their first year, does not give them any help in the years after that. Rather than offer this grant program for only one year to “any student who is willing to work hard and stay out of trouble,” I’d like to see the program targeted to students who need it most and offer them grant aid for their entire undergraduate careers.

It also contains vague, merit-based language – they have to take a ‘college prep’ curriculum and ‘stay out of trouble’. Experience with other grant programs with a merit component, like Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program, shows that the students who end up losing the money because of these criteria are generally the neediest students. They don’t always have the strong support systems needed to make sure they take all the required college prep classes and, be honest, would you have wanted your college financial aid dependent on ‘staying out of trouble’?

I worry that this program would end up leaving out the students who need the most help, and inadvertently shift grant aid to students who tend to receive more in other forms of financial aid, like tax credits, loans, and merit-based institutional aid.

Incomparable

Since there's obviously not much else going on in the world, the Post published its third front-page story today on the DC school reform plan plagiariasm "scandal," wherein Mayor Fenty produced a school reform plan partially copied from the school district in Charlotte, NC. Read about days one and two here and here. After the obligatory intro, the article begins--and for all intents and purposes, ends--here:

Although there is plenty to admire about Charlotte's schools, there is also a growing chorus of critics who question whether Charlotte's successes reach beyond an academic elite.

Charlotte's students overall perform well in elementary school, for instance, but those gains largely disappear by high school, where many arrive needing remedial work. In the latest round of statewide tests, the yawning achievement gap between black and white students widened.

It is also unclear how much Charlotte's experience applies to the District. Charlotte's sprawling system of 129,000 students has more than twice as many pupils as the District and includes suburban and rural schools. The District's enrollment has declined for more than a decade; Charlotte is growing by 5,000 students a year. In national tests, Charlotte's fourth- and eighth-graders topped the list for urban schools in reading and math, while the District brought up the rear.

These differences raise questions in Washington about whether Charlotte's performance is broad enough or relevant enough for the Fenty administration to follow.

Let me get this straight.

An alleged "growing chorus of critics," who are named nowhere in this article, are concerned that the Fenty administration, in trying to reform a school district that is bleeding enrollment and has rock-bottom test scores, has erred in copying parts of the school reform plan of another district with growing enrollment and much higher test scores. Their concerns are based on the fact that the two districts are in some ways dissimilar. How are they dissimilar? The other district has growing enrollment and much higher test scores!

Alternatively, copying is a bad idea because Charlotte, like DC, hasn't solved some of public education's most vexing problems, like reforming high schools and closing the achievement gap.

In other words, to the extent that Charlotte is like the District, copying was wrong. To the extent that Charlotte is different from the District, copying was wrong. This is what happens when you start with a "scandal" and then fill in the blanks afterwards.

Meanwhile, the Post still hasn't asked or answered the only questions that matter: Are the reforms copied from Charlotte any good? Are they likely to help District students learn?

Coming soon to the front page, no doubt.

New Voices for the Summer

Please welcome Michael Dobson, whose first Quick and Ed post appears below. Dobson, who just completed his first year of law school at George Washington University, will be interning with Education Sector this summer, researching legal issues around public school choice. As the D.C. weather continues to get hotter and muggier, look out for most posts from him and other summer ES interns.

The Greatest Good

As a first-day intern at Education Sector with minimal background experience in the field of education policy, yesterday’s Center for American Progress/Century Foundation forum on “The Future of School Integration” offered me an interesting glimpse into the current state of debate about school integration. Most of the panelists, including John Brittain (a veteran civil rights attorney), Susan Eaton (research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School whose recently published book served as the fulcrum for the panel discussion), Richard Kahlenberg (author and Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation), and Cynthia Brown (Director of Education Policy at the Center for American Progress), agreed that, while racial integration remains a important goal, the current legal climate requires a shift of focus and tactics away from race to emphasize the need for socioeconomic integration.

The dissenter from this consensus was Rick Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who, in his accustomed role as devil’s advocate, argued that parents in middle-class schools will resist socio-economic integration efforts—not because they’re heartless racists or elitists, but simply because efforts to bring more low-income children into their schools conflict with what middle-class parents view as their interests in a zero-sum game.

The concerns Hess suggested these parents might have—that problems typically associated with majority low-income schools (disruptive behavior in the classroom, violence, negative peer influence, etc.) will simply travel with the kids, or that the presence of children whose previous, underperforming schools have not prepared them to perform at grade level will damage instruction for other children—are valid. And, for the most part, the other panelists failed to address what I conider the strongest argument against the concerns voiced by Mr. Hess: the utilitarian benefit of socioeconomic integration.

Studies suggest that children from low-income families perform better in majority middle-class schools than their counterparts in majority low-income schools, with no noticeable detriment to the middle-class students they are placed among. If socioeconomic integration produces the same results at scale, then the ultimate result of more socioeconomic integration programs would be a better educated workforce, a more robust economy, less intergenerational poverty, and an overall stronger America. Obviously, there’s no guarantee of such results, but the potential returns for the nation as a whole seem to outweigh the narrow concerns of self-interested parents— particularly since studies also suggest little negative impact to middle-class children from socioeconomic integration.

Regardless of appeals to utilitarian principles, however, many middle-class parents will still mount political opposition to socioeconomic integration plans for the reasons Hess mentioned. So what’s the solution? Well, as Mr. Hess himself pointed out, the first step is to not demonize those parents for feeling the way they do. Their concerns, from their perspective, are valid, and an approach dismissive of those concerns will only lead to acrimony. Their fears must be allayed, and as another panelist, Mr. Khalenberg, pointed out, the only way to do that is with assurances that a strict disciplinary scheme will be sewn into any integration strategy. Parents being asked to accept a socioeconomic integration plan have to know that their children’s education will not be undermined by repeat student offenders gifted with an unlimited number of chances.

Those parents also have to know that children coming from underperforming schools and dysfunctional homes will not simply be dropped into middle-class schools and left to their own devices. A support structure of counselors and engaged teachers and administrators should also be in place within schools to lend guidance and encouragement, which would not only benefit the children coming from low-income schools, but their middle-income classmates as well. Children from middle-income families would also reap the benefits of the greater influx of tax dollars coming into their schools behind their new classmates, money that could be used to refurbish facilities like gyms and libraries.

All of this takes a certain degree of political will to invest the necessary resources and engage in the oversight needed to make sure the job is done right. Undoubtedly many parents would still have doubts, and some might even still oppose the plans, but many would probably see the effort being expended and appreciate it enough to at least give it a chance.

Flying Blind

Richard Vedder makes a good point about the information deficit in higher education. He thinks the president of Ohio University--where he teaches--should be fired. But in making his case, he's got a problem:

Yet the President has his supporters. And, frankly, some of the critical information that would be useful in evaluating the state of the university under his leadership is simply unavailable. Do students graduate knowing more than when they entered? Are graduates of the university leading fulfilling lives five years after attending the school? Do new graduates feel their education was a good investment? And has the answers regarding any of these questions changed materially over the years the current president has run the institution? Honestly, I don't know the answers to these questions. Nor do the Trustees who hire the leaders of our institutions --they operate with far less information than is desirable. That is another reason why the Spellings Commission calls for more assessment and transparency in university operations is important.

Most people in higher education seem to have deep misgivings about the Spellings Commission and its call for more assessment, transparency, and accountability for the nation's colleges and universities. These are not illegitimate concerns; accountability done badly is worse than none at all.

But these conversations hardly ever fully account for the true costs of the information deficit Vedder describes. Without solid information, we're left with opinions, personal relationships, institutional power, and ideology. This is true not just of evaluating presidents but a whole host of other decisions in higher education, everything from where students choose to enroll to how professors are hired and trained to how universities are organized and funded. Each of these processes would benefit from more information about institutional quality, but none of them have it, and they're worse as a result.

DC Plagiarism "Scandal" Part III : The Conclusion (I Hope)

On the third day, the Post proved that the editorial / news firewall is alive and well, running a lead editorial condemning recently-elected Maryland Senator Ben Cardin for putting a "hold" on the "all-important restructuring of the District's public schools" because of an unrelated dispute with the District. They concluded:

The House, recognizing the true state of emergency at the District's schools, quickly approved the bill transferring authority to the mayor. But until the law is enacted, the schools are in a kind of limbo. Mr. Fenty is constrained in what he can do. Each day of delay forestalls the start of any improvement. Mr. Cardin says he doesn't intend to imperil congressional approval of the schools takeover. Actions, though, speak louder than words.

So true! The only way Senator Cardin could have done more damage to the school takeover plan yesterday is if he'd run a headline in a major American newspaper criticizing the mayor and the plan for an essentially bogus reason, something like, let's see, "Fenty Regrets Copied Proposal: School Takeover May Be In Doubt."

Unfortunately, this will all fit neatly into the pre-written Fenty meta-narrative. Plagiarism is generally a youthful offense, after all, the refuge of striving students in over their heads. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that in another month or so, as the "first six months of the Fenty administration" retrospectives start to roll in, you'll read something like this:

"After a landslide victory where he won every precinct in the city, Mayor Fenty remains popular with District residents, who praise his energy and can-do spirit. But observers are increasingly questioning whether the youthful mayor, in his rush to implement a broad-reaching agenda, has overextended himself. In May, the mayor was embarrassed by revelations that many parts of his much-touted school reform plan were copied wholesale from a similar plan in Charlotte, North Carolina. Said one long-time District activist, who asked to remain anonymous, 'This scandal is a sign of things to come.'"

This is complete nonsense, but that won't stop it from becoming conventional wisdom. That's why politicians pay consultants huge amounts of money to build the frame of reference through which they're seen--one it's established, there's not a lot you can do to change it, and it affects the way people see not just the politicians themselves, but everything around them.

Excellent Questions About Preschool

Richard Colvin asks some good questions in response to recent reports about poor quality in Boston's preschool program.

The first is about bachelor's degree requirements and the relative value of bachelor's degrees compared to specific training and experience in early education. It's really tempting to think that if we just required all preschool teachers to have bachelor's degrees (or bachelor's degrees with early childhood certification), we could ensure high quality. But two of the biggest and best studies of state preschool implementation, the SWEEP and Multi-state studies, didn't find bachelor's degrees were a reliable predictor of, teacher behaviors known to support students' early learning, and children's outcomes. This shouldn't be shocking when we consider that virtually all K-12 teachers have a bachelor's degree and no one believes that this makes all K-12 teachers highly-effective. As in K-12, teacher quality is probably the most important program factor for determining preschool quality and impacts, and it's clear that many public and private preschool programs do not have sufficiently high-quality teachers right now. But the bachelor's degree, and even certification, is just too blunt an instrument.

Second, Richard asks if states are jeopardizing quality by expanding their preschool programs too fast. This is a reasonable concern, and I think it's worth a broader discussion. Some of the problems with Head Start quality have their roots in the effort to expand the program very rapidly in its early years to build political support (which the program was successful in gaining). It would be a shame for states to replicate that error in their preschool programs.

Reality Rears Its Ugly Head

Cato's Andrew Coulson, in the process of arguing that I'm wrong to assert that tax credits are a form of public funding, makes the critical mistake of conflating legal opinions on education tax credit programs with the realities of tax credits' practical impacts. I know libertarians sometimes have difficulties with "reality," so I'll explain: Yes, tax credits are appealing to many people because courts have ruled that giving parents or corporations a tax credit for money spent to send a child to a religious school can't be construed as public support for religion. But the critical distinction there is really more about accounting than reality. In terms of practical impact, giving individuals a tax credit for a specific behavior or expenditure is virtually indistinguishable from writing them a check to pay them for the same activity. It has the same impact on both government and individual budgets, and, as libertarians well know, tax credits for specific behaviors can have the same distorting impact on individual incentives. And it's impacts, more than accounting or legal details, that are critical to the public policy question here. If Coulson feels so strongly that I'm wrong about this, he should first trot down to his own organization's fiscal policy shop and explain to them why they're wrong to criticize ethanol tax credits as....a government subsidy.

Btw, I don't know if the Cato education men have a crush on me or think I'm a fool: This is the third time this week they've gone after something I've written. While I'm flattered by the attention, I'm sorry, guys, that I can't actually respond to everything you write about me. There are three of you but only one of me, and I've got actually, you know, work, to do.

The DC Plagiarism "Scandal," Day Two

And on the second day, the Post made the Fenty school reform plan plagiarism "scandal" front-page news again. The story basically consists of the requisite statements of regret from the administration, quotes from the mayor's political and ideological opponents taking easy--if nonsensical--shots at the mayor and the plan, and various others insightfully observing that it's never good to have your reform plan subject to scandal stories in the Post.

Which just goes to show how completely self-contained the news cycle is in cases like this. Once the first story runs, you have a problem, which then becomes the subject of the second story, and so on. Whether the original story was legit or not doesn't matter; the fallout from the story becomes the story itself. (A separate profile of the "whistleblower" is here.)

Here are some questions that haven't been asked or answered in two days and thousands of words of coverage: What, exactly, are the policies that were copied? Are they good policies? Would DCPS students be better off if they were adopted? The Post makes much of the fact that Charlotte-Mecklenburg, source of the copied ideas, is bigger and different in composition than DCPS, calling into question whether its ideas are readily transferrable. Good question -- but what's the answer? Here, from yesterday's story, are the only actual published details of the copied ideas:

In Fenty's document, with "DRAFT" stamped on each page, strategies to create reading and math classes for middle school students, recruit teachers and use "secret shoppers" to judge how parents are treated by school employees come directly from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg plan.

Intensive reading and math instruction in middle school, enhanced teacher recruitment, more focus on customer service to parents--while those wild, crazy notions might work in an urban / suburban district of 130,000 student in North Carolina, they obviously have no place whatsoever in an urban district of 57,000 students in DC. In fact, it's well-known within the research community that there's a point between 57,000 and 130,000--I believe the exact number is 94,583--where hiring better teachers and providing better math and reading instruction to at-risk students simply doesn't work anymore. You can look it up.

The Post has always been tough on DCPS, both in its news coverage and on the editorial page, and rightly so. But you can bet that all the problems the paper has covered and condemned--crumbling schools, high drop-out rates, sub-standard teaching, and more--aren't getting the full attention of the mayor and his staff today.

Best Practice?

The Post went above the fold this morning with a story detailing how Mayor Fenty's reform plan for DC Public Schools contains numerous passages copied verbatim from the strategic plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.

This is front-page news?

Seriously, as far as I'm concerned Mayor Fenty can rename the entire school district after Charlotte-Mecklenburg if that would help the kids in DC's many low-performing schools. Charlotte-Mecklenburg was a finalist for the 2004 Broad Prize for urban education. It also had the highest test scores among all the large urban districts surveyed in the 2005 National Assessement of Education Progress Trial Urban District Assessment. Do we want the mayor to sit around for a couple of years re-inventing various wheels, or do we want him to move quickly and adopt practices that have worked elsewhere? This story is so busy amalgamating the elements of two standard-issue news stories--the plagiarism scandal and the urban school scandal--that it manages to miss all the important issues at play.

The Cost of Being a Teacher

Neil McCluskey at the Cato Institute takes issue with a comment I made on Washington Journal over the weekend, to the effect that when we force more and more college students to borrow larger and larger sums of money, we're limiting the ability of recent graduates to enter socially beneficial but relatively low-paying professions, like teaching. That's why Education Sector recently proposed a program to tie loan repayments to a percentage of person's income.

McCluskey overstates and oversimplifies what I said, characterizing my comment as "there’s no way on his salary a new teacher could comfortably afford to make his monthly debt payments." He proceeds to "refute" this notion by showing that a new teacher with an average debt load living in Indianapolis could manage to get by without declaring bankruptcy or eating Ramen noodles three meals a day. I can attest to the truth of this, since I myself moved to Indianapolis directly after grad school, and took a public sector job that paid less than what new Indy teachers make today (it was probably about the same in inflation-adjusted terms).

I didn't starve or miss any loan payments. But that's not the point. There's no single bright-line dollar amount where a loan becomes affordable or not. Every person has a unique set of resources, priorities, and concerns that add up to a decision about what field to enter. But on a macro basis, it is entirely predictable that as debt burdens rise, a larger number of new college graduates will choose not to enter relatively low-paying professions. That just Econ 101, which someone from Cato of all places should understand.

So not only is the overall pool of potential teachers reduced, but if there's any relationship between price and quality in higher education (admittedly, this is a very debatable point), we're losing a disproportionate number of students graduating with unusually high debt loads from more expensive and thus "better" colleges.

AFTBlog's Ed makes some of the same points here, while expressing surprise that we agree. C'mon, Ed, we agree on lots of things -- tax policy, most labor issues writ large. We just don't blog about them, because what's fun about that?

Can New Teachers Afford Their Student Loans?

AFT's Ed Muir calls bullsh*t on the dopey back-of-the-envelope calculations Cato's Neal McCluskey offered Monday to try to show that starting teachers are rolling in cash. I'll add that neither McCluskey or Ed took into account of a big financial drain on many young-ish teachers: tuition payments for the masters degrees many states require them to get to maintain their certification.

I'm also not sure that starting teachers are the best place to focus in thinking about this issue. When my sister started her first teaching job out of college, she made more than I or most of our liberal-artsy friends did in our first jobs. But over time, those of us who didn't go into teaching have gotten promotions and increases in responsibilities that raised our salaries more rapidly than hers has grown. $34k to teach in Indianapolis may look good to a kid right out of school but the picture is a lot less appealing 10 years down the road when he wants to start a family and his salary has grown less than those of his classmates who pursued other career options.

Narrowing Curricula -- Or Not?

The Post ran an article over the weekend about how elementary schools have been cutting back on instructional time in science to meet NCLB demands in reading and math, and how this might, possibly, come back to bite them when NCLB starts holding them accountable for science. A logical enough starting point, but the story is mostly based on local anecdote and the obviously-not-neutral views of people like the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. The only real hard data is this:

Between the 1999-2000 academic year and 2003-04, the most recent date available, the average time spent weekly on science instruction in elementary schools dipped from 2.6 hours to 2.3, according to the U.S. Education Department.

But of course, the majority of that time period was pre-NCLB, so that doesn't tell us much. Then, near the back of the piece, the author notes:

National science performance has not declined in the elementary grades under the No Child act, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only ongoing national effort to test public school students. The percentage of students rated proficient or better in fourth-grade science increased from 24 percent to 27 percent in Maryland from 2000 to 2005, perhaps a reflection of more rigorous instruction across the curriculum. In Virginia, proficiency rose from 32 to 40 percent in the same span.

To which AFTie Beth wonders, after criticizing curriculum narrowing as "shockingly shortsighted,":

But what to make of the fact that NAEP science scores rose at exactly the same time that schools were supposedly decreasing time allotted for science instruction? Maybe the increased focus on language arts has increased students’ comprehension so much that they’re doing better on the comprehension-dependent science questions. Or maybe we can conclude that we don’t have to add science to AYP in order to see scores rise. Or maybe two years of test data is not enough from which to draw major conclusions?

Or maybe--just maybe--when the premise of an article is one thing, and the data suggest the opposite, the premise might be, you know, wrong. Maybe curriculum narrowing is happening, and maybe it's bad for science learning, I don't know for sure. But nobody else--at least, nobody involved in the Post article--seems to know either.

Really Bad Children's TV from Hamas

Matt pointed me to this clip (thanks also to Dave Weigel and Andrew Sullivan) from a Palestinian "children's" TV show that uses a Mickey-Mouse-like character to indoctrinate children in Islamist extremism. Creepy stuff. But what I couldn't get over watching the clip was how developmentally inappropriate and, frankly, boring the show is. I can't imagine any child I know sitting through this crap. (Based on the color scheme, Mickey-Mouse kock-off, and the age of the little girl co-host, I assume this is targeted at preschool age kids, the same age that Sesame Street is intended for.)

Sure, there's a Mickey Mouse-like figure and a little girl, but they're not doing anything to actually engage or interest the kids. The show's structured like a bad adult talk show (down to the call-ins, which I think would confuse a lot of preschoolers). And, if the English traslation is any guide, the vocabulary and syntax hasn't been adjusted to children's development and comprehension level. Even the songs are dirge-like and incredibly dull. Contrast to good children's programming. In short, this isn't just scary indoctrination, it's terrible children's TV and, as a result, probably not as effective as indoctrination as if it were more developmentally appropriate.

Seems like there's some work to be done on the "hearts and minds" front by offering more appropriate and engaging, non-indoctrinating children's entertainment content to parents in the Middle East. USAID has already funded an Arabic-language Sesame Street, Alam Simsim, in Egypt. More of that might be beneficial. Or perhaps President Bush, having endorsed Baby Einstein in the 2007 SOTU, could persuade the Walt Disney Company to ship a few tons of Baby Einstein CDs and DVDs to the Middle East. The company's developmental claims are wack, but damned if the kids don't eat that stuff up. If the young mothers I know are any judge, we'd at least have some mothers there grateful for something to entertain their children better than this garbage.

UPDATE: I missed the fact that there is a Palestinian Sesame Street, as well, Hikayat Simsim. You can see the full list of international Sesame Street programs, including programs in Israel and Jordan, here.

Marginalizing Education Research

Got a press release from the Great Lakes Center for Education for Education & Practice today that reads like the headline from some alternate-universe edition of the The Onion where all they write about is education policy:

May 7, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONFLICTING STUDIES ABOUT SCHOOL REFORM ARE INCONCLUSIVE

Policy makers urged not to use RAND and Harvard studies as basis for decision making about school restructuring

Researchers often complain about the disconnect between their findings and real-world policy. Some blame academese and the esoteric nature of university-based research. Others find fault with politicians and policy types who are uninterested / unwilling / unable to dig into complex findings and parse fine distinctions. There's plenty of truth in both arguments. But part of the problem is that researchers tend to assume that their standards for whether research is good enough to add to the canon of knowledge should also apply to whether research is good enough to be used to make policy. As a result, the author of the report concludes, in language that is basically pre-written into the last paragraphs of every study ever written, "Further analysis and research is needed before drawing any definitive conclusions."

It's important for researchers to be judicious and accurate in describing the limitations of their findings, and I'm not arguing that this should change. But education policymakers don't have the luxury of waiting until every possible data element has been gathered and argument addressed. The public schools will be open tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. They'll be governed by policies that exist, and will continue to exist until someone changes them. Not changing them is not a neutral or low-stakes act; it's the same as endorsing their continuation.

In that environment, policymakers have to make judgments--to change or not to change--based on incomplete information. The alternative is deciding based on no information at all and deferring what your spouse or barber or best friend or 3rd grade teacher or biggest campaign donor tells you. Of course, some studies are so bad that they should be roundly ignored, but I don't believe that's the case with the RAND and Harvard studies in question here.

So when representatives of academia (or non-profits closely associated with academia) come along and say "Don't listen to what we have to say," the response from policymakers is predictable: "Sure."

Choice and Accountability: Better Together Yet Again

Not surprisingly, Cato's Adam Schaeffer and I drew quite different lessons from Jay Mathews' article today about schools that push parents away. Adam says school choice is needed to even the power relationship and force schools to take parents seriously. That's true. But Jay's article also suggested to me the importance of a government role in ensuring school transparency and protecting parent rights. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act requires public schools inform parents about the qualifications of their children's teachers, and the testing it requires provides parents with information about how well the school is educating their child. These regulations help empower parents. Private schools, on the other hand, often aren't subject to public disclosure or accountability and can quash parent dissent by expelling kids whose parents demand information challenge school decisions. Choice and public accountability must go hand in hand to empower parents, rather than being at odds.

Arabic Schools and Social Conflict Over Education

Fascinating NYT article about NYC DoE's efforts to open an Arabic immersion school in Brooklyn and the opposition it's facing. I'm not sufficiently familiar with all the context to know whether or not there are legitimate issues here, but the level of racist venom some right wing opponents are spewing about the school is absolutely disgusting. And it's really rich when the same people pushing military adventurism in the Middle East also vehemently oppose efforts to equip kids with the language skills and knowledge our country needs to engage with the region.

There's another lesson here: People who support choice and diversity in delivery of publicly-funded education need to come to terms with the reality that real choice includes some schools that not everyone will like. The most radical and evangelistic school choice supporters like to argue that choice will reduce social conflict around education because people who want schools to serve different social purposes can send their kids to different schools. But this ignores the fact that the mere existence of certain types of schools is offensive to some people, all the more so if those schools get public funding (and, yes, vouchers or tax expenditures in the form of tax credits are public funding). To the extent that greater choice leads to a greater diversity of educational options, we're going to be seeing more controversy and conflict over these issues--at least in the near term--not less.

This story also put me in mind of Star International Academy, a Detroit-area charter school, founded by Lebanese-born Muslim Nawal Hamadeh. The curriculum includes Arabic and multi-cutural content. While the school serves many Muslim, Arab, and immigrant students, who are concentrated in its community, it's also diverse, with about 8 percent African-American or Hispanic students, and has strong academic performance considering that 90% of its students qualify for free and reduced price lunch. Hamadeh Educational Associates, which runs SIA and two sister schools, was identified in 2006 as a promising charter school network by the Charter School Growth Fund, and given advice and support to expand its model.

Educational Television

Still pretty tired my Schwarzenegger experience and subsequent red-eye flight back from LA Friday night, I walked over to C-SPAN headquarters Saturday morning to appear on Washington Journal and talk about Education Sector's recently-published slate of education policy ideas for presidential candidates. There's a link to the video here. One thing I learned when watching the program afterward: when you're staring into a television camera, you can't break eye contact for even a moment, or you look distracted and shifty. All in all it was fun; the host and call-in guests asked some good questions, and I got a free coffee mug to take home.

Then I hopped in the car with my lovely wife and drove up to Philadelphia to see Arcade Fire at Tower Theater, which is so vastly superior to D.A.R. Constitution Hall as a venue that even the three-hour drive and expense of staying in a hotel made missing their DC date seem like a wash, at worst. The concert was fantastic, and we spent this morning at the Barnes Foundation art school / museum. Edu-connection: the foundation's original program and charter, which has been subject to bitter court battles in recent years as the foundation has tried to break Barnes' will and move the museum to downtown Philadelphia, was heavily influenced by John Dewey.

Schwarzenegger Speaks

Along with billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, Governor Schwarzenegger spoke at the Education Writers Association annual meeting in Los Angeles today (I'm here as a panelist). As someone who's seen the The Terminator more times than I'd care to admit (okay, 30), I have to say it was kind of cool.

The panelists were seated in a single row on the stage, with a big wooden podium on the side. About halfway through the session, after Broad had finished speaking, the governor suddenly sat up, walked over to the podium, grabbed it, and deliberately hauled it back about five feet. Then he says (turn on your mental Schwarzenegger accent now), "I wanted to be sure the podium wasn't blocking the view of the people over on the side there." (It was.) Then he continues, "Plus my chest is sticking out so people can't see Eli here." Everyone laughs.

So, in the space of about 15 seconds, the governor shows awareness, robust physicality, uncommon concern for the people relegated to the side of the room, spontaneity, unpredictability, light self-deprecation, and good humour. When the governor sees a problem, he doesn't wait for permission or ask for help--he fixes it, with his bare hands. How do you go from Conan the Destroyer to the California governor's office? Like that.

A lot of the discussion focused on ED in 08, the new $60 million initiative funded by the Gates and Broad Foundations (both of which have funded Education Sector) to put education reform in the center of the 2008 presidential election agenda. Broad said his goal is to raise the standard of discourse, to not let candidates get away with the "pablum" of simply saying "I'm in favor of better schools and better teachers." This strikes me as an important goal. Political candidates often free-ride on the public's broad support for education without ever putting any concrete proposals on the table and owning up to their monetary or political price tag.

One complication, however, is that ED in 08 (also known as Strong American Schools), isn't just pushing candidates to have some real education agenda; it also wants them to support a specific trio of policies: more learning time for students, common academic standards across states, and tying teacher pay to things like subject specialty, performance, and working in high-poverty schools.

The politically controversial aspects of some of these issues aside, I wonder how ED in 08 will react if a major political candidate puts forth an education agenda that meets the test of seriousness, but doesn't focus on these issues. Is a genuine commitment to education as a first-tier issue enough, or does the policy agenda have to fall in line too?

Strong American Schools is being led by former Los Angeles Unified Schools Superintendent and Colorado governor Roy Romer, who has a blog. Perhaps we'll find out on the postings there as the campaign heats up.

Education in the Campaign

Alexander Russo has an uncharacteristically long post about why he doesn't think much of Eli Broad's and Bill Gates' efforts to make education a core issue in the 2008 campaign. I don't think his general point is totally crazy, but a lot of his analysis is off-base. For example, Alexander says:

But education has a long track record for being discussed only intermittently, and for being influential only in the rarest of circumstances. Nearly every candidate has an education plan but few races are influenced by education issues (unless you count social issues like prayer in the classroom, creationism, support for private and parochial schools, etc.)

True, presidential campaigns, even the unprecedented 2000 campaign in which education was a central issue, aren't won or lost on education as an issue per se. Having a better teacher performance pay plan probably isn't going to give one campaign a huge leg up on another, for example. But, as Andy and I have written previously, the way candidates choose to talk about education, and the proposals they make, have a symbolic value in shaping voters' perceptions of them as candidates and people that can impact the core dynamics of the race. Bush didn't win in 2000 because people thought the specific proposals in his education plan were awesome. But Bush's education plan in 2000, and the rhetoric it allowed him to employ about closing achievement gaps and helping disadvantaged kids, was critical to supporting his claims of being a "compassionate conservative" and convincing middle-class white women it was ok to vote for the guy because he wasn't a mean, Gingrich-style conservative. (Funny how that all ended up, eh? Not to mention that Gingrich himself is now seen in some corners as a viable '08 candidate, but I digress.) Similarly, Democrats who are willing to take on some of their own interest groups and make hard decisions on education can show they've got cojones in a way that doesn't involve treatening to attack other countries. Wonks have a tendency to think of education policy disputes as being about technical issues and competing interests, but we have to remember that at heart debates about education are debates about our deepest-held values and how we transmit them to the next generation. They're about the thing many voters love most--their children--so they have tremendous emotional power if they're deployed effectively.

There's a pretty wierd paradox operating here, though: Just as candidates can use the education issue to help define perceptions of themselves and their values, they can also use their prominence to fundamentally reshape the parameters of public debate around education, challenging old assumptions and putting new ideas on the table (this goes for other issues, too). But the federal government, including the president, actually has precious little real say in most of the really gritty education policy decisions that directly impact kids' lives. Federal policy does make a difference, and the presidential campaigns have an impact beyond simply the policies they might enact in office, because they shape public opinion and perceptions on the issue, but it's an oddly indirect kind of impact.

btw, check out Education Sector's "8 for 2008" for 8 (who'da thunk it?) education policy ideas we think would be smart for candidates to adopt in the 2008 campaign, both for what they'd say about the candidates and because they're substantively good ideas for kids and the country.

I Love My Laptop, but.....

New York Times has a good look at the limitations of programs giving every student in a school or grade a laptop. Maine, Michigan and a number of school district have been among those experimenting with such programs. There are lots of problems: laptops break and need to be repaired; teachers often have limited technological savvy, and even those who are computer wizzes often have little idea how to use the computers effectively for instruction; kids are good at figuring out how to abuse the technology for non-educational purposes (or, at least, acquiring an education in matters adults might prefer they didn't). Moreover, equipping every kid with a laptop can be expensive, and those resources might be better spent on other activities. But the biggest reason I've been skeptical of these proposals when they've appeared in the states is that they always seem heavy on the "gee-whiz-technology-is-awesome" compenent and the "big-ideas" component, but light on any coherent theory of change about how technology is really going to improve instruction. Yes, there are a lot of cool things that teachers could potentially do with computers, but just being cool isn't enough: the activity has to produce real improvements in kids knowledge, understanding, or abilities; and those benefits have to be weighed against the benefits of alternative, possibly cheaper, investments.

Off-topic: Check out the t-shirt on the kid in the middle of the big picture at the top of this article (NYT says his name is Jeff Hendel). I think it's inappropriate for school, and am pretty sure that if one of my dad's students showed up in it, they'd be wearing their gym clothes (or at least the shirt inside out) for the rest of the day. But it kinda cracks me up.

A Clear Day in D.C.

Nelson Smith reports that the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation is contracting with the See Forever Foundation, the people who run D.C.'s nationally recognized Maya Angelou Public Charter School, to take over operation of the city's infamous Oak Hill Youth Center. The See Forever folks have their work cut out for them, but this is a promising sign. As Mayor Fenty takes control of the D.C. Public Schools, I hope he'll consider a similar approach and seek out charter and other school operators with a record of success, both in D.C. and elsewhere, to create and run schools in neighborhoods and for populations that have historically been ill-served by the city's schools.

If You're Healthy and You Know It

A new study from the Children's Health Fund finds that one in four children lacked health insurance at some point last year. It's crazy that a country as affluent as the United States doesn't guarantee health care for all its children. Children's health care is pretty cheap, and failure to identify and properly treat common childhood health problems, such as ear infections, can have serious and lasting negative consequences. This is a real issue for schools: Kids who have a lot of absences due to untreated asthma, or who can't concentrate because of an untreated toothache, are going to have a harder time learning.

The Children's Health Fund uses mobile medical units to deliver health care services to children who lack access to health care. Schools are also doing interesting things to try to help address this problem: Community Academy, a charter school in Washington, D.C., has a pediatrician on staff; Young Women's Leadership Academy, a charter school in Chicago, has an onsite clinic that provides health care, including reproductive health care, for its students. These are innovative responses to an important problem, but they're still stopgaps against a much bigger problem.

Longhorns' Lender Lists

Via New America Foundation, some pretty eye-opening documents (pdf) coming out of Texas. Apparently, The Daily Texan, the University of Texas--Austin student newspaper did some digging into their preferred lender lists and found that “number of lunches, breakfasts, and extracurricular activities for entire OSFS (that’s Office of Student Financial Services) staff” was one of the criteria used to select preferred lenders.

I mean, who wants interest rate reductions and zero fees when you can have “Hula Hut happy hour” or “TX Land and Cattle Dinner”?

College Admission, Continued

Jay Mathews' weekly Class Struggle column focuses on college admissions, referencing the piece on the same topic I wrote for the American Prospect Online a couple of weeks ago. In short: the declining college admissions rates you read about in the newspaper every year aren't an accurate measure of whether it's actually getting harder to get into an elite college. Matt Yglesias weighs in here.

Jay raises a legitimate question in wondering whether the increase in the number of college admissions might actually be a function of colleges adjusting their policies in the face of declining yield (the ratio of enrollments to admissions). In the context of this analysis, the answer is no. During the same time period that Ivy League admissions rose by 10.6%, as noted in the Prospect article, Ivy League enrollments increased by 10.8%. (All the data comes from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, nces.ed.gov/ipeds) In retrospect, I probably should have found a way to work that number into the original piece.

I can't help but note that on the same day Jay's thoughtful column runs, the Post print edition features a brand-new article about...drumroll...how colleges are rejecting more applicants than ever before. It concludes thusly:

And in the end? Even after all those rejection letters, things have a way of working out. Every fall, UCLA does a national survey of freshmen.

Most of them say they're at their first choice college.

Such a contradiction. Why might that be....

Truth on Teacher Quality

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.

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)

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:

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

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.