Investing in Harvard Graduates (for real)

Richard Vedder offers some fairly radical ideas about how higher education financial aid could be different, particularly at elite schools:

Rich schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton should let students in for free in exchange for a share of student earnings beyond subsistence for X number of years after graduation. In other words, Harvard should buy equity in the "human capital" that it allegedly creates, include it as an asset in its endowment, and there should be no student loans. Alternatively, students should be given the option of paying tuition now with no future obligation. However, I see no reason why Harvard, Yale and Princeton charge any tuition at all given that they earn at the minimum $75,000 per student in sustainable endowment income annually. There is a fairly decent case that can be made that, given the huge value of tax exempt status to them, these should not be allowed to charge tuition, although I would not go that far.

I probably would go that far. Barring some kind of catastrophic collapse of the nation's financial markets, it seems likely that at some point in the next 10 - 20 years, at least one university--probably Harvard--will reach the theoretical limit of the size of a non-profit university's endowment beyond which some combination of internal and external pressure makes charging tuition untenable.

On the other point, I wonder how much a sufficiently-sized group of Ivy League freshmen could raise per person on the open market if they securitized a portion of their future collective income over a given time period -- a percentage big enough to be worth buying but small enough to avoid massive disincentives to earn? Is that even possible, legally?

EduCap: A For-Profit Company in Non-Profit Clothing

The next time someone says you can't get rich working in non-profits, just show them the story on EduCap in today’s Washington Post. EduCap is a “non-profit” private student loan company, whose CEO receives $1 million in annual compensation. This story makes you rethink what it means to be a non-profit, and it also underlines how much money—and how little oversight—is in the whole student financial aid game.

The article details (although it still left me a little confused…) the corporate structure of EduCap—a nonprofit lending company that owns both the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation and Loan to Learn, it’s lending brand.

Despite it’s non-profit status, which exempts it from paying federal income taxes, EduCap reaps enough profits to buy a Gulfstream IV Jet, to take its board on retreats to the Bahamas , and to offer to fly financial aid officers and their spouses to a Carribean island for an all-expense paid conference (which did not happen after intense media scrutiny).

The CEO claims that EduCap helps students by offering private loans to bridge the gap between federal loans and the cost of college. But I have to wonder how offering a high-risk student (probably low-income, and with little or poor credit history) a large amount of loan money at a high interest rate (18 percent in some cases) is helpful. It’s more likely to put these students at risk of bankruptcy or a lifetime of student loan debt.

If EduCap really wanted to help these students, it would, like a true non-profit, cut down on the perks and the million-dollar CEO salary and use its profits to offer at-risk students grants and/or loans at very low interest rates. If it doesn’t want to do this, then it should call itself what it is—a for-profit private loan company.

*An illustrated example of how non-profits in the student loan industry get rich: StudentLoanFollies.pdf

Monopolizing the Mantle of Public Education

Via Joanne Jacobs:

New Detroit Public Schools superintendent Connie Calloway said Thursday that she does not support charter schools, and she intends to present ideas that will help draw students back to the struggling school system.

"Charter schools mean suicide for public schools," said Calloway during her first board meeting, causing the crowd at Kettering High School to erupt in applause.

Calloway said Detroit Public Schools must get to the root of the persistent enrollment loss plaguing the 116,000-student district.

She identified two immediate reasons: ongoing disputes the district faces and the desire of parents to have safe, clean and orderly schools.

There are legitimate arguments to be had about charter schools--how they should be expanded, funded, governed, and held accountable. Some charter schools are great, others aren't, and no one should think they're an educational cure-all. But surely the most dishonest trope among charter opponents is the deliberate attempt to put charter schools outside the boundaries of "public" education.

Charter schools are public schools. They're governed and funded by the public and they enroll public students, free of charge. I've been in a bunch of charter schools here in DC--again, some great, some not--and I would defy anyone to walk in the front door and explain what makes them less than fully public.

Perhaps new superintendant Calloway understands this better than she lets on, with her odd "suicide" construction. Suicide comes from within, after all, so the question is what essentially public element of schooling is at risk here--something other than an inability to provide "safe, clean, and orderly" schools, I assume? If so, what is it? If not, what are we losing that's worth mourning for?

(Student) Slip 'n Slide®

I’ve been around long enough to understand that one new study shouldn’t be cause for celebration. But yesterday when EdWeek wrote up a study on summer learning deficits [subscription required for the full article] that carried tremendous policy implications, I was a little taken aback when I got to this section:

Daria L. Hall, the assistant director for K-12 policy development for the Washington-based Education Trust, a nonprofit group that promotes high academic standards for disadvantaged children, worries that the findings will take policymakers’ focus off the need to close a different kind of gap.

“We can’t allow the problems of the out-of school inequities to overshadow the problems of the in-school inequities,” she said. “However way you look at it, low-income kids and kids of color get less than their fair share of quality teaching, curriculum, and resources.”

The study traced about two-thirds of the gap in achievement between high SES and low SES students in 9th grade to elementary school summer deficits. The remaining third was traceable to differences already evident before the students began 1st grade. The study, conducted by Karl Alexander and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, found no statistically significant differences between the gains of high and low SES kids during the school year.

Presumably, Hall is taking issue with the conclusion that SES, accumulated, made all the difference. We know poor kids get fewer advantages in education (as evidentiary support see here or here), but this study says that, at least in urban districts with high concentrations of poverty, there isn’t a large difference between one bad school and another. Further, since Baltimore’s population mirrors many cities across the country, urban districts could implement new school calendars to ameliorate within-district achievement gaps. Hall’s point is well-taken that this step wouldn’t fix all achievement disparities, but it too casually dismisses what a district can do.

While it isn’t a new concept for researchers to argue for restructuring school calendars, this study utilized the best dataset available. Past investigations analyzed summer learning loss between kindergarten and first grade; Alexander included fall and spring tests (to measure summer and school-year learning) from 1st-5th grades, and continued to follow the students until they were 22. This allowed him to track whether students completed high-level coursework in high school or went on to college. Previous studies haven’t gone this far; past analyses found that summer learning differences matter, but they hadn’t yet systematically traced those effects over time. Alexander shows empirically what we’ve all assumed: home life matters in educational attainment, and, if the numbers are generalizable, it matters more. I’m not ready to lump this study in as just one more for the pile.

Sundaes on Sunday

President Ronald Reagan might have given the cold shoulder to the Department of Education, but he was sweet on ice cream.

“Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food…Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim July 1984 as National Ice Cream Month and July 15, 1984, as National Ice Cream Day, and I call upon the people of the United States to observe these events with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

That makes July National Ice Cream Month, and the third Sunday (that's this weekend) official National Ice Cream Day. Celebrate appropriately.

Sure...

At NROnline, Bill McMorris writes about legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives to cut student loan interest rates:

This bill also fails to deliver on the Democratic promise to make college more accessible to lower-income students. Cutting interest rates and forgiving debt serve to benefit college graduates, not perspective students. The Republican proposal, which would aid lower-income families by increasing Pell Grants without relieving individuals of their responsibility to repay their loans, was rejected along partisan lines.

Assuming for the sake of argument that he means prospective students, I still don't know what this means. If a low-income student goes to college, graduates, and gets a break on their loan repayment, that's not helping low-income students because they're technically not students anymore? And while using the money to fund Pell grants instead of cut interest rates is actually a pretty good idea, I can't help but note that the House Republicans had markedly less enthusiasm for taking money from the student loan companies who contribute generously to their campaigns and giving it to the poor college students who don't vote for them back when they controlled Congress and were in a position to actually do it.

More Financial Education

Along the lines of Kevin’s post below about financial literacy, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story yesterday about a pastor who’s stuck in the never-ending cycle of default and repayment on his student loans. The pastor took out $15,000 in loans in 1984, owes nearly twice that amount now, and will still be repaying them in 2029. Since I’ve started doing work on student loans, I’ve heard many stories like this.

When most students are taking out loans, no one is there to counsel them on the salary they will need to make the minimum payments, or even to warn them of the serious financial consequences of defaulting on the loan. In my experience, getting over $30,000 in loans is as easy as signing a few pieces of paper, with absolutely no discussion of your plans for future income and only minimal loan counseling (an online ‘class’ that you can complete without even reading the information).

A student who defaults on their loan can see the amount they owe grow exponentially. Each time the borrower defaults, an 18.5% collection fee is added to their loan balance plus any accrued interest. If a borrower defaults multiple times, the loan balance can easily double. This increase is enough to ensure that many of these borrowers will never be able to repay their loans.

Current legislation includes both income-based repayment, which helps borrowers to stay out of default by pegging payments to their income, and loan forgiveness for borrowers working in public service fields. Both of these will likely help students in the future avoid the financial devastation of defaulting on their loans. But for the borrowers who do default, we need to address the punitive nature of how student loan defaults are handled, and find a better way to both encourage personal responsibility and also provide a means for these borrowers to repay their debt and recover financially.

(This comic is all too appropriate, but the reality is that it is not a joke for a lot of people.)

Financial Education Needed

There's an ad for LowerMyBills.com ("As Featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show") running along the side of the article I'm reading on the New York Times Web site right now which says, and I quote, "Mortgage Rates Fall Again In Washington DC! $510,000 mortgage for under $1,498/Month!"

If you were to buy a house today for $510,000 and put five percent down on a 30-year fixed mortgage at the going rate (6.33%), the monthly payment would be $3,008 per month.

This is one of the reasons people are losing their homes right now. I'm not saying there aren't others, or that consumers bear no responsibility for knowing what they're getting into when they borrow. But come on.

Consultants Earning Their Keep

Alexandar Russo, June 25th:

Kevin Carey mystifyingly defends the management consultant crowd by blaming incompetent management for DC schools' problems.

The Washington Examiner, today:

Communications breakdown caused boxes of sporting goods, computers and other essential equipment to be left padlocked in a shuttered District of Columbia junior high school for almost an entire year while a neighboring school was starved for supplies, a city consultant told The Examiner.

Souljah-ing the Teachers Unions

Ezra Klein follows up on last week's discussion of the lamentable tendency of left-leaning pundits to burnish their independent credentials by mindlessly bashing teachers unions and/or adopting other conservative eduction tropes.

As regular Quick & ED readers know, that doesn't mean teachers unions should be immune from criticism--far from it. I myself have engaged in a fair amount of what I'd like to think was mindful bashing of objectionable union policies (this post about teacher pay is an example, with the union response here and my counter here). The difference being that the debate was about an actual issue, involving research findings, real-world contract issues, etc.

By contrast, the generalized teachers union bashing from the left is, as Ezra notes, much more in the vein of then-candidate Bill Clinton's famous Sister Souljah denunciation. That's remembered as a canny political move that signaled Clinton's independence from traditional Democratic interest groups to moderate voters, so at first the parallel to pundits who aren't running for office might seem inexact. But of course they are running for an office of a kind--Grand Champion of Brave Intellectual Integrity.

The thing to remember is that it wasn't entirely obvious at the time that Clinton could get away with saying what he said in a speech to the Rainbow Coalition. The risk is what made it effective. Being the 735th person to point out that teachers unions are sometimes an obstacle to sensible school reform, by contrast, isn't going to get anyone into the Liberal Apostasy Hall of Fame. If you're going to criticize teachers unions, get your facts straight and have something meaningful to say. Otherwise, you're not impressing anyone but yourself.

School Names, Again

More on school names from Jay Mathews at the Washington Post, this time focusing on North Virginia. Evidently, presidents and well-known people “tend to be controversial, whereas few Americans have bad things to say about rivers, lakes, forests or freedom.” And don’t forget sea creatures!

Mathews thinks it would be better to name schools after people. He quotes the Manhattan Institute: “Teachers at Lincoln Elementary, for example, can reference the school name to spark discussions of the evils of slavery and the benefits of preserving our union.”

Teachers could spark the same discussion by displaying a five dollar bill or a penny, not to mention dozens of other great ways to excite students about a lesson on the civil war. In other words: Anything a name can do, we can do better.

Slap Them In Irons

There are times when I think that the the universe of generally-recognized post-secondary credentials is far too time-bound and monopolized by traditional education organizations. The fact that degrees are so standardized and derivative of time spent learning--two years for an associate's degree, four years for a bachelor's degree, too many years and the flower of your youth for a doctorate, etc.--instead of being based on actual objective evidence of learning strikes me as terribly limiting. It stays that way in large part because the current system is in the best interests of traditional colleges and universities, which dominate both the teaching and credentialing functions of higher education--and thus have a financial interest in basing the credential on how long (and thus, how much money) you've spent being taught by them.

Then I read articles like yesterday's Times expose of so-called financial advisors who steal from old people under the guise of paper-thin credentials:

[Scammer guy] is one of tens of thousands of financial advisers working hand-in-hand with insurance companies to market themselves to older Americans using impressive-sounding credentials like “certified elder planning specialist,” “registered financial gerontologist,” “certified retirement financial adviser” and “certified senior adviser.”

Many of these titles can be earned in just a few days from for-profit businesses, and sound similar to established credentials, like certified financial planner, that require years of study, difficult tests and extensive background checks.

The clear lesson here--beyond the obvious fact that people who effectively rob senior citizens of their life savings by tricking them into investing in ridiculously inappropriate investment vehicles are nothing more than common thieves who should be slapped in leg irons and send away to lengthy prison sentences--is that a wholly unregulated market for educational credentials would surely produce more abuses along these lines. That doesn't mean we should be stuck with the standard year-based degree system forever, but it does mean that loosening up the market should be accompanied by a commensurate increase in oversight.

The Special Education Accountability Debate

Today’s Ed Week article on NCLB and special education accountability is a great discussion of the two sides of this debate: states want more flexibility under NCLB to establish different standards and assessments for special education students, and special education advocates want NCLB to stay where it is—holding states accountable for getting special education students, with a few exceptions, to the same grade-level standards as other students.

I’m siding with the special education advocates on this one.

This report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities outlines the big reason why—most special education students aren’t diagnosed with a disability that precludes them from reaching grade-level standards. Instead, the diagnosis is meant to ensure that students receive the supports they need to achieve at grade-level. In addition, the current flexibility under NCLB already excuses approximately 30 percent of special education students from regular state assessments and standards. That’s already a higher percentage than the Aspen Commission on NCLB found reasonable.

Making this debate stickier is the fact that minority and low-income students are overrepresented in most disability categories. Studies have shown that the process of diagnosing a disability isn’t color-blind, and minority student have a higher chance of being diagnosed with a disability. This makes reducing the accountability for educating special education students an even riskier proposition, because it will disproportionately reduce accountability for minority and low-income students.

More to come from ES on this topic, but this Ed Week article makes a great primer.

Another Student Loan Scandal? Or Not?

In a fresh blow to the beleaguered student loan industry, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has charged some companies in the fast-growing private student loan market of charging students higher interest rates because they attend colleges where students are more likely to default on their loans. In uncovering yet another scandalous lender practice, Cuomo...

Hey, wait a minute.

Isn't that what lenders are supposed to do, price their loans based on risk? InsiderHigherEd reports,

Taking a specific college, or type of college, into account as a factor in determining a credit score could theoretically mean that loans to students at, say, Harvard could be seen by lenders as less risky and therefore more desirable than those made to students at community colleges, for-profit institutions and historically black colleges.

It's not a matter of lenders "seeing" anything, Harvard students are less risky and more desirable than other students, obviously so. Yet Senator Dodd has responded by introducing legislation to "Prohibit lenders from using any data in their underwriting that may have disparate impact on the loan products, terms, or conditions available to student borrowers based on race, age, and other personal factors, or the institution they attend."

So if you're a poor student with an IQ of 180 who gets into Harvard and you need a private loan to make ends meet, you have to pay above-market interest rates in order to subsidize the rates other, riskier students? Is that fair? Are we going to make that student pay higher rates on her Visa bill too, to avoid "disparate impact" in that credit market?

Clearly, it's important to give people a way to borrow money for college without having to pay usurious interest rates that will limit their choices later in life. But that's why we already have a massive, federally subsidized student loan program, where everyone pays the same interest rate regardless of race, age, personal factors, or the institution they attend. Cuomo is going after the private loan market, the whole point of which is to offer credit as credit is due. As the article notes, tying loans to institutional default rates will disadvantage the credit-worthiest students at high-default institutions, but in the long run a private market should be expected to sort that out, because it's in the lender's financial interest to do so.

The student loan industry has been subject to plenty of harsh, deserved criticism of late. But this seems like crossing the line into political opportunism.

Moderate Democrats' Original Sin

In his Post column today, Richard Cohen commits the original sin of moderate Democrats writing about education.

Cohen slams the Democratic candidates in last week's DC-based presidential debate for calling for more school funding without acknowledging that the DC school system is reasonably well-funded and still does a terrible job. Fair enough. But then he continues:

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything close to a call for real reform.

The salient fact about DC is not that it has education problems. Every big city in America has those. The overriding issue is that our schools are worse than other big cities that also have kids, parents, and teachers unions. In fact, the Washington Teachers Union has kept a pretty low profile since being humbled by a massive corruption scandal a few years back. In DC at least, they're not the big issue.

But that kind of nuance is lost on Cohen. He's doing what far too many center-left types do when discussing education: playing off the conservative agenda, rather than taking time to come up with an agenda of his own.

The standard right-wing education agenda has three and only three principles, which have stood unchanged for decades:

1) More money won't fix education.
2) Teachers unions are the problem.
3) Vouchers are the solution.

The great advantage of these principles--in addition to being easy to remember--is that they fit like a glove with, respectively, conservative anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-government principles. And since this country is never going to actually de-fund and privatize public education while breaking the teachers unions, you never have to come up with something new to say. George Will, for example, clearly has a column on each of these topics on file, which he republishes once a year after a few minutes of updating names and dates with, one assumes, the "find and replace" function in Microsoft Word.

That said, there are elements of truth in each case. Money obviously matters in education, but many public school systems, like the DC schools, are terribly inefficient. Teachers unions are strong advocates of public education and protect rights that teachers deserve, but they also stand in the way of sensible ideas like tying teacher pay to performance. And issues of constitutionality and larger public policy concerns aside, there are plenty of disadvantaged students in bad public schools who would, in the short term, be much better off in a private school.

This, in turn, creates space for people with an independent image to maintain--your Cohens and Mickey Kauses--to burnish their street cred by selectively adopting one or more of the conservative education principles. So Cohen denounces calls for school funding, Kaus is always looking for a chance to take shots at teachers unions, contrarian-by-design publications like The New Republic trumpet their support for vouchers, etc. As with the three principles themselves, little of this is about education policy per se. Rather, it's about using education policies as a proxy for other things. Maybe there was a time when this came across as gutsy truth-telling, but at this point it all feels like pro forma gesturing and nothing more.

The sad thing is that there are plenty of ways to apply the center-left mindset to education without simply adopting simplistic right-wing bromides. Instead of simply supporting or denouncing more school funding, reform the way funding is distributed within school districts, or adopt a "weighted funding" approach where money follows the student. Instead of being for or against vouchers, support expanded choice in the context of public education, with charter schools. Instead of being reflexively pro- or anti-union, work with unions to reform things like teacher pay and help create a labor-management relationship for 21st century schools.

There are ways to do all of these things, and to talk about them sensibly. But that would mean paying attention to education for its own sake, something too few pundits and politicians seem willing to do.

CNN, So-Called Legitimate News Organization

Cnn.com has revamped its site, including a shakeup of its front-page news categories. "Education" has traditionally had its own spot, usually--this being America--near the bottom under Celebrity News, but still on par with Science, Health, etc.

Well, no more. Education has been nixed as stand-alone category and has been replaced by "Funny News." As of this writing, 2:20 PM EDT, the two stories in this new category are:

"Stealing Another Man's Wife Costs $4,802"

and

"Larry the Cable Guy Gets Own Beer"

As a wise man once said, it's not that you can't make this stuff up, it's that you wish you had to.

A School By Any Other Name...

Researchers have discovered a new culprit for low academic achievement: school names. The Salt Lake Tribune reports, “in Florida, five schools are named after George Washington although 11 honor manatees, also known as sea cows.”

God forbid that schools be named after animals known as sea cows. Let’s hope that no manatees read the Salt Lake Tribune this morning – probably a safe bet, but who knows what will happen if the story gets picked up on the Atlantic coast.

The article describes a study that found that schools are less likely than ever to be named after civic heroes and more likely to be named after natural features. The authors think this trend may be linked to poor civic education.

Does the name of a school really affect the education of its students? I don’t know, and I don’t think there is any research on the question. But if the connection does exist, wouldn’t Manatee Elementary do a better job educating its students about biology and sea life than Jefferson Elementary?

I guess the real way to fix American education is to name schools like this: “Roosevelt Amino Acids a² + b² i-before-e Hyperbole High School”

NCLB (R)Evolution?

The SCOTUS desegregation decision sucked up all the ed policy air last week, but other issues still moved ahead, e.g. NCLB reauthorization (subject of today's lead WaPost editorial), to which Sec. Spellings added some new ideas as reported by USA Today's Greg Toppo:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday proposed "a more nuanced" way of evaluating schools under President Bush's No Child Left Behind school reform law — one that would differentiate between schools that are close to meeting state math, reading and science standards and those that are "chronic, chronic underperformers."

Under the proposed change, public schools with just a few struggling students could help students without being labeled underperforming. In the bargain, they'd avoid sanctions that can include firing staff, privatizing or even closing their doors.

A lot of the discussions around changes to the core AYP formula have focused on the "growth model" concept currently being piloted in some states, whereby schools are rated not by the percent of students meeting an absolute standard but by the percent of students on a growth trajectory to meet the absolute standard at some point in the future. The idea is to give schools credit for making a lot progress, even if the end result is still below par.

Spellings is talking about a different idea: creating nuance around the degree and scope of underperformance. A common--and essentially correct--criticism of NCLB is that it treats schools that miss the bar by a little with a few students in the same way as schools that miss the bar by a lot with a whole bunch of students. This proposal would make life easier for schools in the former category.

Probably a good idea, as approving quotes in the article from various NCLB proponents suggest. However -- We need to make sure that achievement gaps for vulnerable student subgroups -- low-income, minority, special ed, and LEP -- can't be tolerated indefinitely. Moreover, if we're going to go down this road, there should be a corollary: if we're going to go easier on the schools that miss by an inch, we need to do more, sooner, for students in schools that miss by a mile. If a school is far below the proficiency line with little growth for nearly all of its students, then there's no point in waiting six years to take action. Those kids need something different and better today.

.

Courting Unfulfilled Promises

I'm an editor, not a blogger. And I often cringe at the lengthy prose of many blog posts, saying to myself, "they sure could use a good editor." But the recent Supreme Court ruling on race and schools has brought out the blogger in me. First, I do respect our justice system, the Supreme Court, its justices, their decisions and all. But I can't help scoff at the futility of this decision in light of what many refer to as "the promise of Brown."

In 2004 there were celebrations all over to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, the landmark 1954 desegregation case. Many books were published and conferences held. As associate editor of a higher education magazine at the time, I helped guide the publication down this road, interviewing the Brown plaintiffs, school officials in Topeka, Kan., scholars and activists that were involved then and now.

But what stood out among the commemorations and celebrations was the reality that after 50 years, the promise of Brown had not yet been realized. The court had ruled in 1954, but it took until the mid-1970s for the public to begin to act and then, only after court orders, much like the court-ordered desegregation ruling in Louisville, which along with Seattle's integration plan, prompted yesterday's High Court decision. And still, even after 30 years of court-mandated desegregation efforts, the consensus among educators was that there was still more to be done.

Thanks to yesterday's ruling, however, it will have to be done some other way. Even though the ruling allows for a limited use of race, which has sparked hope among some, to put that limitation into practice will take more resolve than many will demonstrate. If the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on race and college admissions, Grutter v. Bollinger, is any indication-and it is-many of those who have started to act will now start to retreat. Soon after that ruling, race-conscious programs all over the country began folding, in fear of potential lawsuits.

Brown's reality of a quality education for all seems less likely in court rulings and more so in the voluntary actions of a public that is truly and deeply committed to this goal. I see more of Brown's reality in innovative school reform efforts, such as charter schools and public school choice, which have their drawbacks but are initiated in a spirit of free will and not obligation. And I see more of Brown's reality in the D.C. mayor's radical move to charge someone with nontraditional, but proven experience with the task of turning around a struggling public school system. I recognize that these efforts have to be proven, but after 50 plus years of waiting for the promise of Brown, I'm ready to put my hopes in something else.

- Posted by Robin V. Smiles, Editor, Education Sector

Segregation is unconstitutional, so desegregation must also be?

Cruel irony dripped from the Supreme Court’s decision today to declare unconstitutional the school assignment plans in Seattle and Louisville. In Brown v. Board the Court ruled that districts could not segregate schools based on race. Today’s ruling says, in effect, districts can not desegregate based on race either. I respectfully disagree with Liz in arguing that the ends in this instance do justify the means, and that the race-blind language in Brown should not be understood so literally as to ignore the larger social issues the case addressed.

From 1975 to 2000, under court order to desegregate, Louisville assigned students to schools based on a number of categories, including race. When let go from court supervision, the district voluntarily chose to keep the racial classification as one factor in its school assignments. Today’s decision essentially makes the same tools used to desegregate schools only seven years ago now unconstitutional, as if de facto segregation had been permanently overcome.

The Court erred tremendously in considering the school assignment plans from Louisville and Seattle together. True, both plans utilized a numeric race window as a consideration for assigning children to schools, but the similarities stop there. The majority, written by Chief Justice Roberts, repeatedly cited the fact that a Seattle school with 30% Asian-American, 25% African-American, 25% Latino, and 20% white students would not be allowed under their plan. In an effort to create diversity, Roberts is surely correct in asserting such a school should qualify.

The majority faulted both districts for assigning students based on either/ or racial classifications: white/ nonwhite in Seattle and black/ other in Louisville. But the demographics in the two districts are not comparable. In Louisville, the dichotomy was real; only a tiny percentage of students did not fall into one of these categories. Seattle, on the other hand, had significant percentages of students of Hispanic and Asian descent.

Roberts also repeatedly emphasized the infrequency of Louisville’s usage of race as a reason for it to be abolished. His logic was that, since it was a small factor (only about 3% of the school assignment decisions employed race at all), it was expendable. But small usage does not mean small importance. Today, over one third of black and Latino K-12 students still attend schools where at least 90% of the students are considered a minority. More than one in six African-American students attends a school with a minority population greater than 99%.

These concentrations manifest in poor schools. Blacks are considerably more likely to
attend schools with lower average academic skills than whites are. And they are more likely to be enrolled in schools with larger class sizes and with teachers who are less prepared than their counterparts in predominantly white schools. Compared with tenth grade whites, tenth grade black students are more likely to attend schools with security guards (71 vs. 47 percent), metal detectors (21 vs. 3 percent), and bars on the windows (9 vs. 2 percent).

In Louisville, a district with an African-American concentration of 34%, the plan required blacks to make up between 20-50% of each school’s students. This is a fairly large window, and the fact that 70% of its schools fell more than five percentage points away from the average indicates flexibility in the plan’s implementation. Furthermore, some schools went over the 50% maximum, meaning it was not a strict “quota” by any definition.

Opponents of using racial guidelines suggest socioeconomic status (SES) as a proxy for race, but targeting by SES alone does not achieve the desired results. In 2004-2005, the US Department of Ed. highlighted five districts (Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County, NC; San Francisco, CA; Brandywine, DE; and La Crosse, WI) that had implemented SES-based school assignment plans. None of the five eliminated racial segregation. Both North Carolina districts saw substantial hikes in their racial concentrations; Charlotte-Mecklenburg's percentage of students in racially segregated schools increased 25%. The other three districts achieved only modest gains. La Crosse's meager 3.25% reduction scored top marks, and had the advantage of nine extra years.

Near the end of the majority decision in the Michigan law school affirmative action case, the Court suggests that 25 years from now racial preferences will no longer be necessary. While this is an admirable goal, it should not be constrained by a given number of years. Instead, we must continue to utilize racial considerations until the statistics begin pointing to a world where race is neutral.

Desegregation: Does the end justify the means?

An article in the BBC reports that the Supreme Court has just narrowly decided that the race of a student cannot be a factor in determining where they are to attend school. Stemming from affirmative action plans in Louisville and Seattle, the case was brought by white parents whose children were denied entry to their public school of choice because of racial quotas.

Opposition to the desegregation programs was not one sided, either. Parents of black students also expressed frustration at seeing their kids shipped all over the city according to where quotas of black students needed to be filled, rather than to their local school. One mother is quoted saying: "I prefer to have my kid go to a school for poor black people across the street rather than spend hours on a bus to go to a school for poor white people on the other side of town."

So what does this ruling imply in the light of open interdistrict choice, a current hot topic in education reform? The choice to transfer out of district is generally seen to be a liberating and valuable option to poor, minority, inner city students whose dismal local schools are sabotaging their life chances. However, studies on open interdistrict choice policies in Massachusetts and Minnesota , among others, have shown that it actually increases social stratification, with white students significantly overrepresented in the percentage of students who utilize the option. Also, the already underperforming schools that lose students lose money as well. The results? Schools increasingly divided along the lines of race and quality.

Although the repercussions of this ruling combined with the growing popularity of interdistrict choice policies may exacerbate inequalities in education, I cannot bring myself to disagree with the ruling. You cannot fix inequality with inequality. We must not be telling children that they can't attend their school of choice because of their race, be they white or black, no matter how admirable our intentions are; in this case, the end doesn’t justify the means.

This case also brings to light an issue that needs to be addressed: Do choice and equality run counter to one another in education? And if so, how can policy address this under the shadow of the Constitution and this recent ruling?

The Debate over Student Loan Auctions

At the Higher Education Finance Working Group policy briefing yesterday, the discussion, in true financial aid style, was lively, a little snarky**, and, at times, thoroughly confusing. One area where it did shed some light was the debate over loan auctions in the federal loan program (Inside Higher Ed writes it up here).

In the current system, Congress decides how much of a subsidy (called “special allowance payments”) the federal government will pay to lenders in the federal loan program. Critics argue that letting Congress decide that number, which impacts lender profits, allows too much political influence in the system.

Auction proponents claim that loan auctions would allow the market, and not politicians, to determine bank profits. With loan auctions, each year loan companies would bid on the ability to make federal student loans. The ‘best’ bids would be those that offer to make loans for the lowest subsidy rates.

Lenders don’t like this idea, which they claim would create too much instability in the loan market—schools would not know which lenders they will be working with from year-to-year. Lenders also claim that it would drive out smaller lenders unable to match the bids of larger lenders, and it would hurt students, who would see fewer benefits and worse service from lenders that are working off of smaller profit margins.

These are all reasonable concerns, but I’m still skeptical. Lenders usually end this argument by saying that the current system is perfectly fine, works great for everyone and should be left alone. That makes me think that the party it really works best for is the lenders, since they are the ones interested in keeping the status quo.

I haven’t seen good evidence yet that we can’t devise a loan auction that allows the market to determine subsidy rates while also protecting smaller lenders (they could bid in groups) and ensuring that lenders maintain the service necessary to keep default rates low (we could start by cutting the amount the government pays lenders on defaulted loans). There must be good policy solutions out there that balance the interests of all three parties—taxpayers, students, and lenders—better than the system we have today.

**I get a little cranky on the opinion page of yesterday’s USA Today about a mailing I got from Sallie Mae—it is misleading and points to the need for more oversight and regulation in the student loan industry.

Local Teachers Union Leaders Speak

Teachers unions are at the center of many raging education policy debates, and opinions about them are as strident and varied as they could be. But while representatives of the national unions, along with unions in big city schools districts, get most of the press covereage, the experiences and ideas of the leaders of the nation's thousands of smaller local unions are often left out. Which is a shame, because the local collective bargaining table is where many of the most important education decisions are actually made.

In a new Education Sector report, "Leading the Local," Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 30 recently-elected local union leaders from a diverse group of districts across the country. Their thoughts, on a range of topics from teacher pay to union-management relations to leading multiple generations of teachers in an era of increasing competition and accountability, show that local union leader positions on these issues are much more complex and varied than people commonly understand. Regardless of where you stand on the issues, if you care about teacher policy, you should read this report.

Intersecting Interests in College Rankings

Ever since a number of small liberal arts colleges announced their intention to abstain from this year’s rankings by U.S. News & World Report, the debate about the ranking’s merits has been reinvigorated. Commenting today on the university presidents’ decision, Robert Samuelson contends:

“What their students will learn, if they're paying attention, is a life lesson in cynicism: how eminent authorities cloak their self-interest in high-sounding, deceptive rhetoric.”

It is highly likely that there are self-interested motivations behind this decision. The presence of ulterior motives, however, does not change the fact that the rhetoric may, to a certain extent, be true. In the case of the U.S. News rankings, a little information could be a dangerous thing.

I decided where to go to college two years ago based upon many of the U.S. News criteria: percentage of small classes, acceptance rate, and retention rate. I got lucky. None of these factors quantify why Brown University has actually been a good fit for me. The majority of the reasons that I love Brown are things I knew nothing about before I arrived; the potential for a large 10am lecture to be dynamic, or the impact of a school’s grading system on its overall academic culture.

The statistics are not going away. They will live on in books, college brochures and college counseling offices, and they do have their place in the application process. But the U.S. News suggestion that colleges can be summarized and ranked by these characteristics alone does more to add to the clutter of the admissions process than to sort through it. Placing colleges and universities on such an absolute scale perpetuates the misconception that there is a universal set of wealth and prestige based qualities that make a school better or worse for every student.

Let students pick a school that is number one on something that will actually matter to them once they get there - whether that is one of the U.S. News variables or the number of on campus coffee shops. They really are up to the challenge.

(For more on potential alternatives to the U.S. News paradigm, see Kevin Carey’s article, “College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education”)

Best. Job. Ever.

Sara Mead, gender warrior, scourge of the infant education industry, frequent commentator on the DC schools scene, expert on all things regarding small children, founding Quick & ED contributor, genuinely nice person, and policy analyst par excellence, is leaving us to begin an inevitably successful stint at the New America Foundation. It's a sad moment for everyone at Education Sector; Sara wrote many of the organization's first and best reports, and she leaves behind an example that will be hard to follow.

But follow it someone shall. We're now hiring for a new senior policy analyst to fill Sara's (metaphorically) large shoes. All the requisite qualifications apply--we're looking for a smart, innovative thinker who's great at research and analysis and even better at writing, someone with significant experience and expertise in a range of policy areas and environments.

More broadly, we're looking for someone who wants to tackle one or more of the big-picture education policy challenges of the day--making the K-12 accountability systems of today work better for all students while inventing the accountability systems of tomorrow; giving all students and parents more choices of high-quality public schools; increasing the supply of top-notch teachers, particularly for the students who need them the most. We need an analyst who not only has great ideas in these areas but also has the will and strategic vision to translate them into real-world improvement on behalf of student and society at large.

If you're that person, let us know. And don't forget the job comes with the keys to this blog, along with a full tank of gas, unlimited mileage, and no-fault insurance. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

School Time

I've been on leave but not so far gone that I haven't managed to talk to reporters about lengthening the school day, an issue that is proving to have legs. Bolstered by the Gates/Broad "Ed in '08" effort, more school time is hotter than it has been in decades. Reporters have consistently asked "what's the biggest obstacle to extending school time?" The short answer is money, although of course it's more complicated, as I explain here. Folks balk at the cost of adding hours or days, which is fair considering a single extra day of public school would cost a state millions of dollars. If it is a worthwhile expense (yes, it's got promise but no, it's certainly not a wholesale national solution to poor quality schools and low student performance), the money has to flow in and out of somewhere, so who gets it and where it comes from are the toughest questions. School districts, for example, are eyeing 21st Century Community Center funds as an innovative way to fund more school hours just as many existing afterschool programs are becoming wary of losing this funding. Here's hoping this doesn't devolve into a school versus afterschool battle since, in the end, it's going to take a well-coordinated effort by both for kids to get the learning opportunities they need to make it in and out of school. More from me (including some baby bragging) when i return later in July.

Too Few Teachers, Too Many Consultants?

The Post ran two education stories yesterday, both unsatisfying, albeit in different ways. (Although it's possible that my mood was altered after reading that great/scary profile of the Vice President...)

The front-page piece, about teacher shortages, reads like the prologue to a good article about big-picture teacher policy issues. I just wish they had written the actual article. In summary: the current generation of retiring teachers entered the profession in a time when women had few career options other education. Thus, schools got a disproportionate share of really smart women, who stayed in the classroom for their entire career. Once the economy opened up, the best and brightest women started going into law, medicine, business, etc., and the teacher talent pool declined in quality. At the same time, NCLB has raised the bar for entering the profession, and new teachers are less likely to see teaching as a 30-year career, leading to frequent turnover and exacerbating the challenge of replacing the older smarter generation.

In broad strokes, all true, although the article should have pointed out that teachers shortages vary widely by region and subject. Some states still produce more new teachers than they need, and schools of education continue to graduate a surplus of elementary education majors even though the shortages are concentrated in secondary education, special education, and science and math.

But the more interesting question is where you go from here, and the article misses most opportunities to explore those issues. Some people, for example, see the shortage and the move to raise the bar for entering the profession as in opposition. Others think that the only way to attract all those women back out of law school is to provide an even higher bar, on the ground that ambitious people want to see themselves as part of a profession that implicitly denotes high standards for entry. Unions point out, correctly, that teachers get paid less than the professions to which smart women now flock. Others see this as a reason to support Teach for America-like alternate routes into the classroom. The article could have put some or all these issues on the table and helped readers sort through them, but for the most part they were nowhere to be found.

The other article, about management consultants hired by DC Public Schools, begins as follows:

Two dozen high-priced consultants have set up shop on three floors of the D.C. public schools' headquarters, wearing pinstripe suits, toting binders and BlackBerrys and using such corporate jargon as "resource mapping" and "identifying metrics."

That lede pretty much gives the game away, doesn't it? "High-priced suits," "pinstripe suits," and "jargon" -- oh my! And even Blackberrys, which would have been a meaningful signifier if this was 2001, not 2007. Newsflash: everyone and their Mom sends wireless email these days.

A couple of weeks ago, the Post ran a great, important series of articles making the case, in excruciating detail, that many of the woes of DCPS lie with comically incompetent bureaucracy that will never, ever, be able to reform itself. A problem of management, in other words. Now the same paper write a cynical article criticizing DCPS for hiring management consultants who, according to the article, have already saved the district $7 million to $9 million. What, exactly, is the problem? The article notes that DCPS has previously hired consultants at great cost, and then ignored their advice. Does that mean that if your doctor puts you on an exercise program to lose weight, and you ignore it, it was stupid to go to her in the first place and you never should again?

Goodbye, for now

This is a sad post for me to write, since it's probably going to be my last here for a while.

As Andy mentioned in an incredibly kind post over at Eduwonk, today is my last day at Education Sector. In a few weeks I'll be starting a new job at the New America Foundation, where I'll be leading their Early Education Initiative and also contributing to their work on federal education policy. This is an exciting opportunity for me to work with some great people on an issue I care a lot about.

At the same time, I'm sad to be leaving Education Sector: It's not often you get an opportunity to be a part of creating an incredibly successful and dynamic organization from the time it's just a spark in someone's eye, and I've really enjoyed and grown incredibly during the last two years I've been here. I'll particularly miss the incredible staff I've had the opportunity to learn from and work with here--especially Andy Rotherham. As Andy mentioned, he and I have worked together for almost seven years. I'm very grateful that he saw potential in me back then and for the incredible professional opportunities he's given me since then. He's a great policy thinker and entreprenuer, but he's also a great boss, mentor and friend.

I've also really enjoyed blogging here at the Quick and the Ed. I've enjoyed the back and forth with various folks, and I know I'm a better writer and thinker for it. While I won't be blogging here any more, I'm not entirely going to be gone from the blogosphere. You'll find me posting from time to time at the New America Foundation's Higher Ed Watch blog, and as Andy mentioned, I'll be guest-blogging for him at Eduwonk later this summer. And you may occassionally find updates on my doings at my boyfriend's blog, which, if you're not already reading, you should be.

So: Good-bye for now, but just for now, and don't be a stranger.

Are Men More Cleverer Than Women?

A new study just released in the UK claims that intelligence gaps do innately exist between the sexes, with men scoring an average of 5 points higher on IQ tests than women, and outnumbering women more than 5 to 1 in the “genius” category. The researchers found this interesting, given that "this is against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement."

How revolutionary: scientists once again amazing themselves, Arthur Jensen style, by proving that white, upper class males perform best on a test designed by white, upper class males. Who defines intelligence? How exactly are we measuring it? The issue of intelligence test-bias has been debated for decades, with no agreed upon resolution. Although tests today are surely a great deal less biased then those of say, 1984, I dare say that what an IQ test is best at is measuring how well a person performs on IQ tests, and we should be weary in generalizing the results to represent the mental capacity of an entire race or gender.

Voucher Use in Washington Wins No Praise from Students

The title of this entry is a wordplay off Cato’s Adam Schaeffer's latest post, where he criticizes the NY Times and Washington Post coverage of the recent DC voucher program study, arguing the media outlets made too much of the report’s conclusion that voucher students fared no better than public school counterparts in the first year of the DC program, while downplaying the news that parents of voucher recipients were happier with schools than a control group. In calling the parental support a “wild success,” Schaeffer misses a key aspect of the analysis.

Compared to a control group, parents of students enrolled in the voucher program gave higher grades to their child’s school and believed the school had less violence. James Forman Jr. argues that parental satisfaction, if it matters in voucher program success, should be factored in public school accountability. Still, to hold up parental support as evidence of success here is pretty superficial, especially when we consider who made up the control group in the study. The authorizing legislation mandated the “strongest possible research design for determining the effectiveness of the program,” so the Institute of Education Sciences adopted a lottery system for the program, so that the results of the voucher recipients could be compared to the results of non-recipients, while controlling for motivation and other factors. The control group consisted of students who applied but were rejected for the vouchers. This makes for a valid comparison for student achievement, but not necessarily for parental happiness. All of the parents wanted their child educated outside of the DC public schools; it only makes sense that the ones who achieved this goal were happier than the ones who didn’t, especially after only one year.

Moreover, who is the best judge of violence and overall school quality—parents, or the students themselves? On violence, students reported no statistically significant difference between public and private schools. In other words, the people who actually witness and experience violence, the students themselves, reported no increases in seeing weapons; being offered drugs; or being victims of theft, physical assault, or bullying. On school quality, the only sub-group who noticed a difference was the lowest performing students. They rated private schools worse, not better, than traditional public schools.

Honestly, there’s not really that much to be excited about here one way or the other. The voucher law passed, it’s being implemented and studied, and one year’s worth of data probably isn’t enough time delay to evaluate its effectiveness. While I’m a little less optimistic about the program than Schaeffer (who makes the mighty claim that, “all scientific assessments of choice programs show positive gains, and nearly all of those studies show statistically significant gains”), I’ll wait for more evidence before jumping ship or onto the bandwagon.

What can TPS reports teach us about education?

At a Business Roundtable event today featuring rockstars Wendy Kopp, Mike Feinberg, Chris Barbic, Jon Schnur, and Tim Daly, I was most struck by a small caveat that Feinberg made when comparing his KIPP teachers’ schedules to those of average business workers. They both work 7:30-5:00 days, but the teachers are working with kids. There’s no slacking off. They can’t exactly pull a Peter Gibbons of Office Space fame. When asked by the consultants, the infamous Bobs, to describe his daily schedule, he responds:

Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

Anyone who’s worked in an office knows what Peter is talking about here. And anyone who’s worked with kids knows that teachers can’t “just sorta space out” for a while.

The event today focused on taking the still relatively small reforms that TFA, TNTP, YES, KIPP, and New Leaders have implemented and taking them to scale. For example, how do we attract and retain enough teachers and principals willing to give up the Peter Gibbons moments for a career raising student achievement levels?

One of the panelists mentioned something about how quality teachers and principals are like all good leaders in that they set high goals and constantly assess their progress, and then they quickly said “like generals.” The conversation moved on, but I got stuck on that. What if we were to recruit and train teachers like the Army does for soldiers? Of course, teaching does not equal war, but there are lessons in recruitment and training. The Army gives large signing bonuses, especially for educational attainment and specific organizational needs. They train members in a relatively short period of time by building teamwork and getting recruits to buy into the mission and accept a common purpose. Members must demonstrate mastery before advancing in pay or rank, and when they finish their commitment, they are either given more bonuses to stay on, or take their occupational prestige with them to the private sector.

Granted, this is essentially the TFA/ TNTP model, but the key difference is the relative lack of integration within organizations. The military is absolutely seamless in comparison, while local, state, and federal governments, in addition to teacher colleges, non-profits, national councils, and unions all meddle in teacher issues. Maybe there’s something there. Maybe we need some sort of national teaching cadre a la the Peace Corps or the Army. Heck, maybe we should make service in one of the agencies required, like Israel, Denmark, and Germany. The Peter Gibbons lifestyle is just too tempting.

Preschool and School Choice Movement Leaders Combine Forces to Form New Pornographers-style Education Advocacy Supergroup

(No, not really, but keep reading)

Cato's Adam Schaeffer highlights a debate within the school choice community: On one side are activists pushing targeted voucher programs to help kids with specific needs--kids with disabilities (as in Florida), foster kids (Arizona), and poor kids in urban districts with crappy schools (in Wisconsin, Ohio, D.C.). On the other are those, like Schaeffer and Howard Rich (to whose WSJ column Schaeffer's piece is pegged), who actually think the whole public education system is the problem and want to replace it with a tax credit and/or voucher regime for all families. Curiously, this debate actually has a lot of similarities the debate among early childhood advocates on the merits of targeted versus universal preschool programs. And it's not the only thing these two issues have in common.

I believe that the school choice movement (in which I include the charter school movement) and the preschool movement are the two most vital movements in education today. For starters, they're both actual movements, with grassroots advocacy bases committed to moving the ball on the issues. While federal policymakers are hemmed in by the policy cage of NCLB and difficulties of its implementation, these state and local level advocates are driving real, on-the-ground change on choice and early learning.

Both are also terribly ambitious. They're questioning long-accepted relationships, roles, and responsibilities--In the case of school choice, breaking district educational monopolies and giving parents more control over their children's education; in the case of preschool broadening the understanding of public and communal responsibility to small children and their families. They're redefining the boundaries of publicly-supported education--In preschool, to include younger children; in school choice to include private, charter, and other non-traditional schools. And they're both building new institutions and infrastructure to deliver new types of education in new ways.

Both movements also rely on similar authority to make the case for their preferred reforms: A combination of arguments based on economic theory (each even has its own Nobel Prize winning economist in Milton Friedman and James Heckman!), program evaluation and effectiveness research aimed at showing their programs deliver positive results for kids and the public, and social justice arguments focused on the needs of historically underserved children. Both augment these arguments and research with savvy PR campaigns and grassroots advocacy to move the ball on their goals. And both movements have been driven by the strategic investments of committed patrons in the philanthropic world (both individuals and foundations).
And both, as their agendas advance and states start implementing their policy prescriptions, are having to deal with quality problems in the preschool programs and schools of choice that emerge.

In my experience, there's not a lot of love lost or perceived shared ground between the leading lights of the preschool and school choice movements. Conservative and libertarian choice advocates tend to hate the idea of public preschool funding, and preschool supporters have good reason to be wary of the market based on their experience with poor quality in unregulated private preschool and daycare programs. That's unfortunate, because they could learn a lot from one another and there are some natural synergies between their goals.

So, how do we get the preschool and choice movements talking? I don't think there's really much chance that they'll combine forces and form a New Pornographers-style education advocacy supergroup, but if folks were willing to lay down their biases, I think we might see some interesting conversations and collaborations emerge.

The Community College Transfer Problem

Give the New York Times' Sam Freedman credit for a good choice of topic today -- a program that helps community college students transfer to four-year universities. The story of Viviana Alcazar's journey from a local two-year school to a degree from Stanford also underscores the particular importance of community colleges to the nation's rapidly-growing population of Hispanic colleges students, who are more likely than both white and other minority students to attend a two-year school. That's because the states with large Hispanic populations, like California and Florida, also tend to be the states that chose to accomodate the mid-20th century surge in college enrollment by building highly-stratified higher education systems (in part because they didn't have an existing infrastructure of private schools) whereby only a small proportion of students go to presitigious four-year research universities while most go to local two-year schools. California alone has something like 1.4 million community college students, two-thirds of all the undergrads in state, public or private.

But I wish the column wasn't--like so much higher education media coverage--shot through the lens of super-elite institutions like Stanford. Two-year to four-year transfer is a huge problem in this country; while two-year transfer students tend to perform just as well in four-year colleges as students who start in four-year colleges, less than 40 percent ever transfer in the first place. In other words, the important goal isn't so much to get two-year students to transfer to Stanford as it is to get them to transfer somewhere in the four-year system, so they have a decent shot a bachelor's degree, increasing the dividing line of economic attainment in this country.

Private Colleges

Members of the Annapolis Group, comprised of about 80 liberal arts colleges including Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, and Reed, announced yesterday they will opt out of the US News college rankings. It is the latest example of a failure to understand what the college accountability movement is all about.

While the US News ranking system is by no means perfect, there isn’t a lot of useful information on colleges and universities accessible for students and parents. It’s a pretty simplistic argument, but doesn’t the success and ubiquity of the magazine rankings indicate the huge demand out there?

The worst argument against accountability put forth by leaders of the Annapolis Group is that this is about privacy. As Thomas J. Hochstettler, President of Lewis and Clark College, argued last summer in an op-ed against the Spellings Commission:

Much of my colleagues' criticism centers on the perception that we can't trust the federal government with such sensitive data. Do we want Uncle Sam knowing every class our students are taking, every grade they earn, every course they drop? Critics have also noted the apparent ease with which the federal government could link data to students' Social Security numbers and, presumably, to their complete life stories.

Maybe Hochstettler forgot that the federal government has successfully conducted income tax, Social Security, and gun background check systems without breaches of privacy for years. For an even more apt comparison, consider that state education departments can now track individual K-12 student achievement year-to-year through student identification numbers.

No, this is a power grab. Some colleges in the Annapolis Group, like Amherst and Pomona Colleges, are able to graduate students in six years (the new four) around 95% of the time, but peer institutions are often well below this figure. The aforementioned Reed College (one of the leaders in the anti-rankings movement) succeeds at a 20% lower clip. Other members of the Annapolis Group, like Transylvania University and Hampden-Sydney College, graduate less than two-thirds of their entering students.

Graduation rates are crude measures of student success, but colleges provide us with little else. Imagine if a prospective student could know how hard they would be expected to work, or how successful the school is in placing graduates into jobs. Some of this data exists already, but it’s kept under wraps. Two of the seven colleges mentioned above (not the ones you’ve heard of) participated in the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement, a survey that measures things like how much time a student spends studying, how many papers they write of what length, and how approachable faculty are. It costs institutions of this size only $3,375 to conduct the survey, but still not all of them do it, and they are not required to release any of the data.

There has to be some sort of side-by-side comparisons for students to make educated decisions on where to go to college. US News may honestly be the best we’ve got right now. With tuition skyrocketing and loan scandals rocking the industry, the least policymakers can do is help students make a good choice.

Get Your Daily Dose of Virtual Reality

Do you have any burning but unanswered questions about virtual schools? Have you always wanted to attend one of Education Sector's awesome events but happen to live way outside the D.C. metro region? Are you going to be stuck on a really boring conference call around 3:00 P.M. this afternoon and need something to keep you amused?

Well, then, we've got a deal for you: Education Sector's first ever virtual forum on--appropriately enough--the topic of virtual schooling, this afternoon at 3:00 P.M. Join in the discussion with Education Sector's Bill Tucker, author of a recent report on virtual learning, Liz Pape, CEO of Virtual High School, and the NEA's Barb Stein. More info and registration here.

All About the Benjamins

I was at first appalled when I heard about Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer’s proposal to provide a cash reward for students who perform well on tests.

The plan seems a brutal affirmation of the financial incentives that seem to control this country. Is the only way to succeed in motivating our children by hanging dollar bills in front of their face? What kind of values would that teach? Like Danny said, shouldn’t we be able to instill in children the desire to learn, rather than initiating some mad goose chase for a wad of cash?

But let’s be honest with ourselves: What do we want for our economically disadvantaged students? Why do we push them to succeed? What images do we use to motivate them? The answer is, more often than not, we hope that their performance in school will allow them to obtain a scholarship to college, to continue their education, allowing them choice in the job market and in their future, choice that is provided by, you got it, money. Many adolescents (and more in poor areas where there isn’t much exposure to college, different career paths, or success in an academic sense) have a hard time visualizing abstract concepts such as their life ten years down the road, and molding their actions in the present accordingly. They do, however, have a compelling desire for the twenty dollar bill sitting on the table. Is there really a fundamental difference between pushing our students to succeed financially in the future and rewarding them with cash right now?

And it seems to work. A similar cash incentive program for teachers whose classrooms perform well on tests in Tennessee has proven a success and experiments done in the United Kingdom and Kenya have shown that cash incentive raises student achievement across the board, not just in students in the top percentile.

Of course, I am not arguing that cash incentives are a panacea by any stretch of the imagination, and if anything would act as a band-aid while larger problems with the education system are addressed. I will argue, however, that in a system where money and success are (albeit unfortunately) so synonymous, the proposal is more appropriate than it may appear at first glance.

NCLB, Version 2.0

What’s better than the original No Child Left Behind act? No Child Left Behind, version 2.0!

Yes, ladies and gentleman, it has almost come that time to reauthorize the 21^st century’s most controversial educational reform act. In anticipation for the looming congressional debate ahead, ETS presented its poll results at the seventh annual “Americans Speak” forum entitled, “Standards, Accountability and Flexibility: Americans Speak on NCLB Reauthorization”.

Despite the negative media attention NCLB has received in recent times, the poll showed that the public supports its reauthorization, with favorable attitudes strong among K-12 parents (48% in favor vs. 40% opposed).

But perhaps the most surprising finding of the ETS poll was the public knowledge of NCLB itself: only 32% of adults correctly identified NCLB as an education reform bill that has been signed into law.

Much of America remains in the dark about NCLB:

• 28% of the American public thinks that NCLB is simply “talk”, but so far has been no action.
• 13% of the American public thinks that the President/Congress has put together NCLB proposals, but that no deal has been reached.

And for further confusion; only 47% of Americans correctly identified the NCLB plan out of a 4 answer multiple choice question.

• 26% of the American public thought that NCLB meant “making sure that students keep progressing onto the next grade level until they reach graduation.”
• 12% of the American public thought that NCLB meant “requiring all students to pass a national test in twelfth grade in order to graduate from high school and go on to college.”
• 8% of the American public thought that NCLB meant “giving parents vouchers so that their child can attend the school of their choice.”

Whether it’s misinformation of lack of information, this data demonstrates a critical need for sound, balanced, and coherent information regarding NCLB. Why?

The ETS poll showed that while only 41% of the uninformed general public looked favorably upon NCLB, 56% of the general public approved of NCLB when presented with a clear definition of the law. Understanding NCLB is half the challenge.

Despite these complications, the other results presented by ETS make it clear that Americans believe that NCLB Version 1.0 (and soon to be NCLB Version 2.0) can be utilized as an effective means to achieve a greater end goal of improving the state of American education. Perhaps the anonymously-quoted policymaker said it best:

“Version 3.0, which is down the road, will be where you start to see the big shift, whether it’s things like national standards or really new forward-looking ways to doing accountability . . . we may be in a position to really go in a new direction.”

ETS’s poll results serve as a fresh reminder that greater transparency and access to education policy information is crucial in the NCLB debate. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to remain a bit cautious about ETS’s own motivations within the high-stakes testing industry during a time of increasing emphasis on accountability. ETS at its core is a business, and the company retains a clear interest in promoting measures like NCLB when they can benefit from a substantial increase in the demand for state testing.

$600

Last February, I told my geometry class about their upcoming state test. I said it was a chance to show what they had learned. I explained my new Saturday tutorial program and daily review problems. Luisa interrupted me.

"Mr. Rosenthal, the TAKS test doesn't even matter this year."

We were at a large urban high school in Houston and Luisa was in tenth grade. The TAKS test would matter next year, in eleventh grade. It would determine if she graduated. But the tenth grade test wouldn’t even determine if she passed geometry.

After the test, Luisa told me she had hadn't really tried. Other students said they started guessing half way through. They were tired. The test didn't matter, not to them. But it mattered a great deal to their school and their teacher. We would be judged on their scores.

I thought of Luisa when I heard about New York's pilot program to pay students for achievement. Among other incentives, the program would pay high school students $600 for passing standardized tests. The idea is to align their short term interests with their long term interests, while alleviating poverty and making test data more meaningful. I’m not convinced.

Maybe $600 could make Luisa care, but I think she wanted to pass all along. Like all of my students, she had a natural desire for knowledge and an affinity for success. I saw it in her eyes when she learned how to find the volume of a cylinder. But she had failed TAKS four years in a row and expected to fail again. She didn’t see the point of trying, and money couldn't address the root of her indifference. I have great financial incentive to play in the NFL, but I'm not practicing my spiral.

Maybe $600 could make Luisa care, but I could have made her care too. I could have convinced her that success was possible, inspired her to work harder. I could have shown her the value of striving for excellence, even against long odds. I think the fact that we're offering $600 means we didn’t do our jobs.

Maybe $600 could make Luisa care, but at what cost? (Besides $600, of course.) What would we teach her about the purpose of education? How would we change the way she sees school?

As Edwize (somewhat sarcastically) says, it's a very cool experiment. I'm really curious, but I'm even more wary.