CAP on School Time

Newest report on expanding learning time by the Center for American Progress. CAP is an ardent supporter of more school time so it's not surprising that the report serves to bolster the argument that increasing school time is a necessary strategy for improving low-performing, low-income schools. It provides a great framework for understanding the promise of more school time, describing four main constructs: time as an enabler (helps us to get it all done w/o narrowing curriculum), time as a catalyst (helps schools move toward reform), time as a unifer (brings together community and school b/c it relies on outreach and collaboration); and time as a preference (increases choices for parents/students a la "if you want more school, you can have it"). It also includes examples of "model ELT programs" and a chart of characteristics that these models share- bold leadership, teacher prep and leadership, use of data, community support and partners and focused, aligned use of time that engages students.

Elena Rocha, the author of this CAP report, is right that expanded school time can make a difference for a lot of kids (although it stands to benefit low-income kids most- an important point since many middle class parents will fight increased school time in their districts and states b/c of this). But I have three concerns about the wholesale endorsement of more school time. First, our worst performing schools- the ones that really need help- will have to find that bold leadership (and data and community support, etc) before they can even think about extending the school day or year- otherwise it won't work. Look to Mass2020 for clues about how long this process takes and how careful we need to be in selecting schools and districts that are prepared to do this. Second, those bold leaders and the teachers they bring on board and try to support are going to burn out if we don't look outside of the school for resources to expand learning opportunities. Community-school collaborations are part of this but we need to think harder about how we can create more and better learning opportunities for kids inside and outside of school. Not all learning has to happen inside those same walls. And finally, we can't shy away from the real and very high cost of extending school time. Depending on scope (statewide, districtwide) we're talking about hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars to add two hours to the day, or two weeks to the year for public schools. We don't yet know if this works and certainly have reason to believe it won't w/o other reforms in place (e.g. KIPP is successful not b/c of more time but b/c of time plus its four other core strategies).

Rocha knows this and makes all the right references to the need for quality learning time and well-implemented programs. Still, I feel compelled to remind us that quality learning time is not easy to come by, particularly in low-performing high poverty schools and that well-implemented programs take, well, time. Both to carry out successful school reform, and to evaluate if it works. With that said, kudos to CAP and Rocha for keeping school time alive on the reform agenda. There's something there- I'm just not so sure we really know what it is.

No Secrets in Cyberspace

There's this cool new Web site called Wikipedia scanner that reveals how different organizations are editing Wikipedia. While Wikipedia edits are technically anonymous, the site keeps track of the IP address from which the edits were made. IP addresses, in turn, can be matched up with specific organizations. So while you can't tell exactly what person made a change, you can pretty reliably figure out where they were working when they did it.

For example, on June 18th, 2007, at 6:32 PM, somebody using the National Education Association's IP address changed the following paragraph in the "National Education Association" Wikipedia entry from:

In recent decades the NEA has greatly increased its visibility in party politics, endorsing almost exclusively Democratic Party candidates and contributing funds and other assistance to political campaigns. The NEA asserts itself "non-partisan", but critics point out that the NEA has endorsed and provided support for every Democratic Party presidential nominee from Jimmy Carter to John Kerry and has never endorsed any Republican Party or third party candidate for the nation's highest office.

To this:

NEA has played a role in politics since its founding, as it has sought to influence state and federal laws that would have a positive impact on public education. Every political position adopted by NEA was brought by one of its members to the annual Representative Assembly, where it was considered on the floor, debated, and voted on by elected delegates.

They also changed this:

Furthermore, based on required filings with the federal government, it is estimated that between 1990 and 2002 ninety-five percent of the NEA's substantial political contributions went to Democratic Partycandidate [http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=11785]. Although this has been questioned as being out of balance with the more diverse political views of the broader membership[http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000771], the NEA maintains that it bases support for candidates primarily on the organization's interpretation of candidates' support for public education and educators.

To this:

The Association tracks legislation related to education and the teaching profession and encourages members to get involved in politics through a comprehensive Legislative Action Center on its website.[http://www.nea.org/lac/] Because of its large membership, the NEA is extremely well-funded and exercises substantial power in the political process.

Interestingly, if you look at the entry today, somebody has gone in and changed them all back. (It wasn't us! We've only got two changes registered, both on a non-education topic. Gotta give those interns more work to do...)

Personally, I think it's fine if the NEA wants to support only Democrats; majorities matter in electoral politics and if a group judges that one party best represents its interests, it should be able to support them how it pleases. But there's no reason to be less than up-front about it.

I also note that three years ago someone from the NEA IP address also changed the this sentence in the "Thor" entry:

Much later, his father Odin decided that Thor had to be taught humility, and so transformed into '''Donald Blake''' (aka '''Don Blake'''), a human medical student who was lame in one leg, and erased his memory.

to this:

Much later, his father Odin decided that Thor had to be taught humility,
and so transformed into '''Donald Blake''' (aka '''Chad Don Blake'''), a human medical student who was lame in one leg, and erased his memory.

Arcane knowledge of comic book minutiae! That's the basis for shared understanding...

Memo to Future Greedy University Presidents

The criminal prosecution of former Texan Southern University president Priscilla Slade for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of university funds on "personal luxuries" like a "$1,000 silk canopy for a four-poster bed" immediately recalls the recent ouster of American University president Ben Ladner on similar grounds (The Washingtonian published the definitive account, here.) Ladner's not going to jail because the university board approved paying for things like lavish vacations, a chauffeur and full-time chef.

It also highlights a fundamental principle that college presidents, being smart people, should understand: take cash, not perks.

The American people believe in both success and excess, and there's hardly any amount of money in straight compensation that can shock their conscience. $500,000; $750,000; $1 million -- it's all good! Gordon Gee just got hired back by Ohio State at a seven-figure rate, and few people batted an eye.

But a $1,000 canopy? Well, that's just not right. Perks feel vaguely aristocratic--unearned. People are irrationally attracted to getting free stuff, and thus irrationally angry when other people get free stuff. If Priscilla Slade's salary had been equal to her actual salary plus double what she spent on home renovations, she could have bought whatever crazy useless stuff she wanted, pocketed the difference, and still be president. Instead, she might be going to jail.

This isn't just a higher ed phenomenon -- people got all bent out of shape when the details of former GE CEO Jack Welsh's retirement package, which included free use of a Manhattan apartment and the corporate jet, were revealed. Again, if they'd just added another zero to the end of some number involving his annuities or stock options, nobody would have cared.

So the message to future Priscilla Slades and Ben Ladners is: take the cash and buy your own needless luxuries; everyone will be happier.

The Case for Community Colleges

In all the hubbub over this, that, or the other ranking of four-year colleges, the 45 percent of American undergraduates who attend a community college are left out. Those students are lower-class citizens in the higher ed world, the wide bottom layer of the status pyramid that ascends to the peaks of the Ivy League. The unquestioned assumption--both for students and faculty--is that every four-year school is better than every two-year school. Resources and attention follow accordingly.

Which is too bad, both as a matter of policy and fact. As policy because in higher education--just as in K-12--it's pretty clear that sensitivity to education quality is inversely proportional to preparation. The rocket-fueled high achievers who attend the richest and most exclusive schools will do well anywhere, so their colleges mostly just have to stay out of their way--which not coincidentally, is often about all they do. It's the first-generation students, the lower-income students who got a bad high school education, the students with jobs and families--the community college students, in other words--for whom quality education matters most. Yet their schools get what's left over after the research university with the Div. I football team is paid for.

As fact because some community colleges are much better than four-year schools, despite the lack of money. This is the gist of two articles I've written for the newest issue of the Washington Monthly. The first, America's Best Community Colleges, uses publicly-available data from the Communitiy College Survey of Student Engagement to identify 30 community colleges that are outperforming not only other two-year schools but also many four-years in the educational practices research says students need most.

The second, Built to Teach: What Your Alma Mater Could Learn from Cascadia Community College explains how one of those top schools, which didn't even exist ten years ago, was designed from the ground up to be give students what they need to do well in college--and how sadly unusual that approach really is.

The idea of ranking community colleges is controversial--the CCSSE people themselves don't like it. Their objections are registered in this InsideHigherEd article, followed by an opinion piece on the same topic from yrs. truly in this morning's edition. But regardless of your stance on rankings, community colleges deserve more attention then they've been getting.

Gifted Children and the Scourge of "Unintended Consequences"

A few thoughts on today's WaPost op-ed arguing that No Child Left Behind is ruining public education for gifted students:

1) The authors assert that the law is having "unintended but disastrous consequences" for gifted kids. Can I just say -- a pox on "unintended consequences." They're the Lay's potato chips of argumentation, a cheap, substance-free rhetorical device that newspaper editors are apparently helpless to resist consuming, even though (I hope) they know they should. It's not that unitended consequences don't exist, but if you're going to assert them you should have to offer some evidence that what you're saying is actually true. Which leads to:

2) Is there any reputable, empirical evidence to support the contention that NCLB is hurting the education of gifted students? If there is, I haven't seen it, and it's certainly nowhere in this op-ed. NAEP scores, SATs, some kind of "ceiling" effect on high-end scale scores -- anything? One thing I am 100 percent sure of: next spring I'm going to be reading a spate of newspaper articles about how a record number of students managed to--somehow--overcome the depradations of NCLB, ace the SATs, accumulate a freakishly accomplished resume of extracurricular activities, and yet get turned down by Harvard.

3) NCLB was enacted over five years ago, and it way too late to be criticizing the law without offering anything in the way of solutions. Yet right at the point this op-ed should be telling the reader what Congress should do, if not try to help all students attain at least minimal proficiency in reading and math, it veers off into a wholly unrelated discussion of...vouchers. Huh? I imagine this is because actually proposing solutions would lay bare the fact that NCLB's authors made a conscious choice to focus attention on the lowest-performing, most disadvantaged students, because, unlike the gifted, and more or or less by definition--they need those resources the most. That's not to say some kind of growth-model approach isn't warrented, it is. But life is about hard choices, and op-eds like this simply don't have the courage to admit that they're advocating for a return to the days where the least got the least and the most got the most. Which leads to:

4) Between this, complaints about affirmative action, and the so-called "boys crisis," we've reached the point where people are actually arguing, with a straight face, that the real crisis in American education is the shameful neglect--the injustice--of how we educate smart white men. There's only one more place to go here--somewhere in the depths of the Heritage foundation lurks a 22-year old policy analyst who is undoubtedly preparing to launch a career in wingnuttery on just this issue--and it's this: how NCLB discriminates against rich people. Surely it's the smart white wealthy man who's the true victim here, kept down by a law and a nation that refuses to recongnize his special needs.

America's Worst Colleges

According to RADAR Online, via TNR. In an alternate universe where I can't besmirch the good name of Education Sector, I get to freelance the 2008 version of this....

The Gray Area Between Church and State

Today’s New York Times has a thought-provoking article about a Hebrew charter school in Florida that is sparking debate over the separation between church and state.

As charter schooling has grown, so too have the number of schools that teeter on the border between church and state or that could be considered exclusionary because of an intense focus on one culture or language. It’s an issue that is likely to gain prominence as the growth of choice in schooling allows parents and students to choose more customized schools—to some, this allows students to find a school that meets their academic and social needs, to others it means the re-segregation of public schooling. As usual, the answer is probably a little bit of both.

Compete or Litigate?

Earlier this week I received a press release from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) annoucing, with enthusiasm, that "a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates sued the United States Department of Education and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for violating the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act."

The essence of the suit is this: NCLB requires all teachers to be "highly qualified," the components of which include full certification by the state in which the teacher happens to live. In most states, a prerequesite for full certification is completion of an approved teacher training program--i.e. the programs represented by AACTE. But some states also have "alternative certification" programs that allow teachers to skip the teacher prep program, or start teaching first and complete the program while they're on the job. Alt-cert is what allows programs like Teach for America, which puts freshly-minted graduates of top colleges directly into the classroom (after an intensive summer training program run by TFA itself, not an AACTE institution), to exist. AACTE is saying that under the NCLB "highly qualified" definition, alt-cert programs are illegal.

Leaving the legal issues aside (and as the Gadfly pointed out this week, NCLB is ambiguous and perhaps even contradictory on this point), here's what this boils down to:

We have a group of colleges and universities, represented by AACTE, who are selling a service.

We have a group of people who want to be teachers who don't want to buy the service.

We have a group of school districts who want to hire those teachers, knowing full well that they haven't bought the service.

We have a lot of research, like this, saying that the service, and the certification process to which it's tied, seems to have very little impact on the likelihood of a teacher succeding in the classroom.

Faced with this situation, AACTE members have two options: 1) Improve the quality of their service and convince people it's worth buying. 2) Sue the federal government to compel people to spend a lot of time and money on something they don't want and which research says they don't need.

That they chose (2) says a lot.

Lies My Teachers Told Me

Over at the Huffington Post, Marc Lampkin from ED in 08 notes that the NEA's characterization of the merit pay conversation at the recent Democratic presidential debate in Iowa was...less than accurate. The NEA press release said:

"Democrats running for president reject any mandatory pay-for-performance schemes as part of the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The candidates also reject any plan to tie teacher pay to student test scores. The candidates stated their opposition to merit pay during a nationally
televised debate in Des Moines, Iowa."

But Lampkin points out that:

...one candidate who stated his support for performance pay said teachers "can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not [...]." To me, the word "simply" means he's against using test scores as the only way to evaluate teacher performance. And the words "don't take into account whether children are prepared" mean he's open to performance pay based on "value-added" gains in student test scores -- a method that takes into account how much students know when they enter a teacher's classroom.That candidate was very careful on Sunday to say he is only for performance pay plans that get buy-in from teachers. But that is happening in many places across the country. Denver's teacher union led the effort to win support for a new performance-based compensation system for teachers there -- one that includes gains in student test scores as one measure. And just last week the New York Times published a story with the headline, "Teachers Say Yes to Pay Tied to Scores." Just because the national NEA opposes something doesn't mean that teachers in general -- or even their local affiliates -- do too.

In the long run, I think this militant anti-merit pay stance is going to be very, very bad for the NEA.

The optics are terrible, first of all. While it's true that there are few jobs where pay is tied to performance in a purely meritocratic way, it's equally true that fewer and fewer people have jobs likes those in teaching where (A) your employer is prohibited from even taking merit into consideration when setting pay, and (B) your above-inflation pay increases occur automatically based on longetivity. Highlighting this difference isolates teachers from everyone else. There's a reason this is the issue where Democrats are increasingly likely to challenge union doctrine.

In the long run, moreover, opposition to merit pay is bad for individual teachers. The unionization of teachers that occurred in the 1960s was undeniably beneficial for teacher pay, raising compensation up to at least a decent standard of living. But that flattened out in the 1970s, and since then the average teacher salary has been stagnant. While other professions shared in the huge increase in national wealth that's occured since then, teachers were left out.

But at the same time, the overall amount of money spent on teacher pay has increased enormously, because while we haven't been paying teachers more, we've been paying a lot more teachers--the ratio of students to teachers is lower than it's ever been. This makes perfect sense--if you treat something like a commodity, and people want more of it, they're going to buy quantity, not quality. The only way the public is going to spend more money than they are now on an individual teacher is if they feel like they're getting something back in return--merit. And of course there are literally tens of thousands of unusually meritorious teachers out there right now who can't be paid what they're worth because the contracts under which they work don't allow it.

The NEA's problem is that it's so big and so rich that it can get away with the kind of thing Lampkin describes. It can bully Democrats trying to win primaries and have an impact, at least for a while. But there's a difference between a group politicians have to listen and a group politicians want to listen to, and the distinction tends play out in a lot of subtle but important ways down the road. To be clear, I don't think teachers shouldn't have a powerful national union--they should. But sometimes power gives you the ability to avoid hard choices, and becomes its own worst enemy in the end.

College Rankings Fiesta

I'm back from Costa Rica after 10 blissfully email / Internet / news-of-the-outside-world-free days, and while I'd still much rather be there than here, it's nice to be here.

Right to business: the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings were released in my absence. The news cycle around this is funny, because there's never really any news -- as long as the way the rankings are calculated stays the same, the top schools never, ever change. Yet again, Princeton and Harvard are #1 and #2 -- yawn.

That forces the news outlets to search for different stories, and the Times went with the straightforward "dodgy practices designed to juice the rankings" angle. But in focusing on things colleges do to drive down acceptance rates (mostly by increasing applicants), the Times is looking in the wrong place. Acceptance rates make up only 1.5% of a college's rankings (see our paper on the subject here), so even you used every trick in the book to knock your rate down by five or 10 points, it wouldn't make much difference.

The biggest factor driving rankings that a college can realistically change (reputations being difficult to budge) is money. 30 percent of each college's rankings is based on either direct measures like spending per student or measures of things that cost money to buy, like higher faculty salaries and smaller class sizes. And that's one of the big reasons the rankings never change; our increasingly-winner-takes-all-society is reflected in the higher education sector, where a few elite colleges accumulate Scrooge McDuck-like mountains of cash in their endowments and pick among the brightest students, while everyone else scrambles for the leftovers. They more they have, the more they get, and so on.

InsiderHigherEd notes that U.S. News made a small change in the methodology, incorporating the percent of students on Pell grants for the first time into the "expected graduation" rate component, which rates colleges based on the difference between their actual and statistically predicted graduation rate. It's a nice gesture, but that's all it is. The expected grad rate measure is only 5% of the rankings, and based on some analyses I've done of graduation rates, the Pell percentage is probably only about 10% of that -- in other words, one half of one percent of the total. This won't make anyone redouble their efforts recruit more low-income students. They'd be better off recruiting rich students who pay full tuition and whose parents will donate to the endowment.

The Washington Monthly, by contrast, makes the Pell percentage a much more prominent part of their newly-released annual college rankings. That's the difference between rankings focused on what colleges do for society at large and the U.S. News rankings that are, in the end, mostly about what colleges do for themselves.

College Knowledge

Here's a funny and frightening list of what today's college students know (and don't know). It's also startling to learn that most first-year college students this year were born in 1989. Which explains why they think that leg warmers and spandex are hot new trends in fashion. Bi-level hair-dos coming to a campus near you- see Ice Cube's poodle cut, The Human League hair, and the gender neutral Ziggy Cut.

Pre-K in Virginia and Beyond

Washington Post reports on Virginia's pre-k debate: targeted or universal, which is better? Virginia's only the latest of a string of states trying and testing different pre-K models. Education Sector's solution here.

A Quality Teacher In Every Classroom

A California-based coalition of parents and community members is suing the USDOE for violating teacher quality provisions. Press release from Public Advocates, which is representing the coalition, provides details about the lawsuit, which is supported by AACTE (pdf statement).

Meanwhile, UFT leader Randi Weingarten guest-blogs at length on Eduwonk about the teacher role in data-driven accountability.

Business Schools

British journalist Peter Curran hosts a series of half-hour videos on American public schools. In this one, "Education USA- Profiting from School", he examines the corporate role in public education, visiting an Edison school in Las Vegas, talking with Lowell Milken in Los Angeles, and visiting D.C. to meet with ES's own Tom Toch.

Baby Achievement

Newsweek reports on a Journal of Pediatrics study that says babies shouldn't watch too much TV. Apparently, television doesn't improve babies' vocabulary but talking to them does. Was anyone under the impression that TV (even those Baby Einstein videos that are marketed as baby brain food to gullible and guilt-ridden new parents) actually helps babies' vocabulary? According to the study, TV Baby may gain eight to ten fewer words than No TV Baby. Uh-oh. If we had a "baby achievement" measure I guess that would be it. But I don't really think we need one.

US News' College Rankings

NYTimes reports on the college rankings frenzy. Inside Higher Ed weighs in. And, don't worry, Kevin will be back mid-week with plenty more to say about higher education and the whole rankings game.

Then Again, What Do They Know?

Zip Zilch Nada (what students know about preparing for college) posters and student brochure by KnowHow2Go , a national college access campaign supported by Lumina Foundation* and American Council on Education.

*so is Education Sector

Hispanic Students Are Smarter

Miami Herald reports that Latino students are more likely to choose colleges based on sticker price and convenience, according to a study by Excelencia in Education. They care a lot about how they're going to pay for college, they want to stay closer to home and avoid debt. OK, I added the smarter part but seriously that just seems smarter.

Dual Immersion in Texas

English language learner (ELL) students are not doing well. Last month a federal judge ruled that Texas's bilingual education programs are not to blame. Indeed, there are plenty of other reasons for ELLs' poor performance but in fairness to LULAC, MALDEF and the GI Forum who argued that ELL education is not being well monitored or evaluated, our education programs for ELLs need a lot of work.

The judge's ruling has prompted a renewed debate over what type of programming is best for ELLs. For educators of ELLS, this is a fair debate. It's hard to figure out the best way to teach these kids, mostly because there isn't one best way (ELLs are a diverse group-a recent immigrant with few years of formal schooling is very different from a U.S.-born student who is struggling with English). But there are some things we do know. For instance, there's ample evidence from research that shows that language-minority students who are instructed in both languages (native and English) perform better on average in English reading proficiency than those taught in English-only, for early grades and secondary school levels, as was reported by The National Literacy Panel in their study of language-minority children last year.

There are many philosophical and political arguments for why we support English-only instruction and remove all native language from U.S. public school curricula, but none is supported by research. So it's promising to read that Texas educators are looking into dual immersion.

Rest in Peace, Dr. Hilliard

Very sad to report that Asa G. Hilliard died earlier this week while traveling on a study tour in Egypt. Dr. Hilliard was the Fuller E. Calloway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Department of Educational Psychology/Special Education. Prior to that, he taught psychology, math and history in the Denver Public Schools, worked as a superintendent of schools and school psychologist in Monrovia, Liberia, and served as a professor and then dean of education at San Francisco State University.

More recently, Dr. Hilliard has been speaking out with other scholars about the problems facing black male youth. He has openly questioned the promise of single sex schools to improve the education of black male students. Single sex schools, he argued, can be high-performing or low-performing just like any other schools.

Folks in Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, pay attention. You too, USDOE. If you're really interested in helping the kids who need it the most, single sex is a distraction not an answer.

Tonight! PBS Merrow Report #2

Airing tonight on the NewsHour, the second in a series of reports on NCLB. This one takes us to San Diego, where two schools- Keiller and Gompers Middle Schools-broke off from the school system and converted to charters. How'd they do it? Did it work?

At the same site, you can also get podcasts featuring school leader Patricia Ladd, parent Michelle Evans and former S.D. Superintendent Alan Bersin (disc: Bersin chairs ES board) to learn more details. And see our 2006 ES report , "Extreme Makeover", for more analysis and lessons on Gompers and Keiller.

The Hottest Schools

Jay Mathews profiles the "25 Hottest Schools" in Newsweek. Some picks seem related to learning: Hottest for Science and Engineering (Cal Inst of Tech), Hottest for Liberal Arts (Princeton U), Hottest for Business (Babson), Hottest for International Studies (Univ of Richmond). Some are mostly about demographics and special pops: Hottest Mega University (UCLA), Hottest for First Gen Students (Queens College, also alma mater of Ugly Betty, which no doubt gives it extra points on the hot scale), and Hottest Women's College (chance to take a cheap shot at the gender imbalance in college-going rates by picking any college but stuck to the spirit and picked Smith College).

Some are ridiculous: Hottest Liberal Arts School You Never Heard Of (Centenary College of Louisiana). How can it be hot if we've never heard of it? or Hottest for Sports Fans (UFlorida- too obvious, Ohio State would be better- get the sparks flying again) or Hottest for Loving the Great Outdoors (St. Mary's College of MD- the sailing/crabbing/fishing/beach thing, sure, but otherwise, Maryland? I was outside more in my eight years in NM and CA than the rest of my life here in MD but hey, shout out for Maryland can't be a bad thing).

Others are just downright scary- Hottest in the War on Terror (New Mex Tech).

And my favorite? Drumroll.....
Hottest Catholic School. Can a Catholic school be hot? Fortunately my family doesn't read this blog so they won't see me referencing "hot" and "Catholic" together. But I guess Fordham's got something good going on there b/c it wins this prize.

PBS Merrow Report on NCLB

Last night, PBS aired the first of three special reports on NCLB. John Merrow interviewed Education Secretary Spellings, Chester Finn of Fordham and ES's own Kevin Carey on how some school districts are getting around NCLB requirements. Read the transcript or download audio file here. More from Kevin on this in his Hot Air report.

School Time Update

Massachusetts is still leading the way with extended school time plans. Governor Patrick recently doubled funding for Massachusetts' Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative in the state budget. And Mass2020 and the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy have created a joint national venture to support extending learning time in schools across the country. They're also looking for someone excellent to help lead this effort as their National Network Director- contact if you're interested.

Oklahoma State Superintendent Sandy Garrett just called for a longer Oklahoma school year in her State of Education speech. The Sooner state only has 175 days a year of public schooling,five days less than the 180 national average so they really are playing catch up in this case. Still, it's enough to spark debate. There are folks who can't stand the idea of school in the summertime (i'm guessing they either had really great times at Camp White Pine or really bad times in summer school). So despite moves to extend learning, there are still plenty of legislative moves to "save summer".

Dare To Compare

I was on the NCES website recently and found myself lured away from the "what's new" research links to the bright colorful bubbly font of the NCES Kids Zone. It's full of educational games and graph-making capabilities that I'm pretty sure no kids are actually using. Are they? Let me know if you know kids or classrooms that are using this site.

Anyway, there's a "dare to compare" tab that lets you try out questions from international tests to see if you really are smarter than 4th graders. You can try out NAEP questions, CivEd questions, or TIMSS- trends in math and science study- questions, the latter of which I find funny since getting kids to try out the TIMSS questions in the Kids Zone is the closest we'll get this time around to actually participating in the next TIMSS. Evidently, participation is expensive (and all the other cool countries aren't doing it either) so we dropped out this time. I find that amusing too- in a depressing sort of way- since we don't have a problem with testing and are otherwise so committed to Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science.

Don't get me wrong- I really enjoyed "daring to compare" in the Kids Zone. But if competing is so important now, as it was then and then, we should spend more time collecting and analyzing comparative data.

Happy August!

I'm leaving for vacation on Sunday, so if you see a post from me here in the 10 days after that, it means that (A) Wi-fi access in the jungles of Costa Rica is suprisingly good, and (B) I need to get a life.

Not-So-Brainy Babies

A study out of the University of Washington indicates that Baby Einstein videos—despite Presidential accolades—might actually hurt children’s language development. Researchers found that the more videos infants watched, the fewer vocabulary words they knew.

Former Senior Policy Analyst Sara Mead was on this story back in April - check out her report on what the evidence does—and does not—say about brain development from ages zero to three.

That Can't Be a Good Thing

Washington insiders will doubtless be chatting for days about Matthew Scully's tell-all takedown($) of his former colleague, lionized Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in the new Atlantic Monthly. Seriously, you'd have to be saint or one of the 2.6% of Americans who still approve of the President to not a least kind of enjoy it. But I found this to be disquieting:

Even on the dreariest days—slogging through a tax, education, or Chamber of Commerce speech—Mike and John and I endlessly entertained one another, with all the running jokes and gags you’d expect three guys in a room to develop. Education speeches in particular—with their endlessly complicated programs and slightly puffed-up theories, none of which we could ever explain quite to the satisfaction of our policy people—were always good for a laugh. As John observed in late 2003, around draft 20 in the typically chaotic revising of an education speech, “We’ve taken the country to war with less hassle than this.”

Education is really so boring and complicated that it can't be made interesting by the spin-meisters and wordsmiths in the Bush Administration?!! I think that's really depressing.

Pre-K Notes

Wall Street Journal online covers pre-k, just as Harvard Press releases a new book on the same subject by Berkeley professor and Education Sector nonresident senior fellow David Kirp. Check out Sara Mead's review of The Sandbox Investment in last month's American Prospect. Sara, we miss you here in the policy pod.

But How Do You Really Feel About It? Poll Results from EdNext

Check out the 2007 Education Next survey on what American's think about public schools here. Press release from Harvard's Kennedy school here. In all, it includes another look at how the public feels about national standards, accountability, choice, teacher pay and the reauthorization of NCLB. Compare to ETS poll 2007 and Scripps Howard poll 2006.

Gadfly to the Disenfranchised: Drop Dead

Per Edwize, James Forman Jr. rightly takes the Gadfly to task for the "illogical, bizzare, and offensive" notion that District of Columbia residents don't deserve representation in Congress because our current elected non-voting representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, opposes a Congressionally-mandated school voucher program opposed by most DC residents. Nothing to add, other than to note that the original legislation authorizing the DC voucher program passed Congress by one vote -- the one vote that we, the only capital city residents of any democracy in the world who are unrepresented in the national legislature, don't have.

Dispatch from Virgin Fest 2007

Education, as we all know, is about the young people. Accordingly, every summer we at The Quick and The ED leave the air-conditioned comforts of our DC offices and go forth into the sweltering heat to take the pulse of America's youth. Last year we went to Lollapalooza in Chicago. This year our destination was closer to home: Virgin Festival 2007, at Baltimore's Pimlico Race Track. Our motto: We sweat and pay $9.00 for beer so you don't have to.

Day One

A rocky start. We're late out of the house and traffic is snarled for miles on I-695. By the time we get onto the track, we've completely missed Fountains of Wayne. What genius put them in the noon slot? If someone's got to play at such an un-rock-and-roll hour, how about someone who sucks, like Incubus? But my spirits are lifted as we emerge from the tunnel onto the infield and "I Want You To Want Me" blasts from the nearby North Stage. Despite the fact that I own no Cheap Trick albums, I'm actually looking forward to the set quite a bit. It's funny--there were surely lots of other bands just as famous back in the day, but only the Trick are here now. Fashions come and go, but great pop hooks last forever.

We wander to the other end of the track, past the de riguer collection of booths manned by One Campaign-type advocacy groups and signs telling us not to feel guilty about the inevitable mountains of garbage the festival will produce, because all the plastic cups are made from corn (really). A Scottish band called--naturally--The Fratellis is up on the South Stage. They're pretty good; I buy the CD at the Virgin Megastore, which is in a mini-tent. When the band talks to the crown between songs, their accents border on Trainspotting-level incomprehensibility, but when they sing, you wouldn't know if they were from America, the U.K., or elsewhere. This is a common phenomenon--why? Does the act of singing naturally flatten out the accent, or does everyone unconsciously mimic the vocalizations of rock bands that came before?

We walk back to see Amy Winehouse, who, defying her media image, appears on-time and relatively sober. Although she seems distracted up close on the big TV screens, she sounds great; highlights include a cover of the Zutons' "Valerie" and the inevitable set-closing "Rehab." We skip Incubus (see above re: sucking) and grab lunch. There's a dance tent off to the side where the audience trends younger and more...frenzied. You can walk across to track and sit in the grandstand, which we do, because by mid-afternoon it is, according to Ad-Rock, "hot as a mofo in this mofo." Truer words, Ad! He and the other Beastie Boys turn in a strong set that more than lives up to expectations; "Sabotage" lets me check one off my mental list of 100 songs to see performed live before I die.

Evening falls and we get close to the stage for The Police. I am, as they used to say, stoked. Synchronicity was the first album I ever bought, during the summer between 7th and 8th grades, and I'd hole up in my room with the headphones on listening to Side 2 (albums had sides then) over and over again. Sadly, the band broke up soon after, so while I've been to several Sting concerts with the attendant lute solos and free-form jazz explorations, I've never seen the original lineup until now. They open strong with "Message in a Bottle," then wander a little, before snapping into a groove about halfway through "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and never looking back. "De Do Do Do De Da Da Da" turns out to be much better live than the studio version, and the rest is, well, pretty awesome. Seen through the soft light of nostalgia, sure, but so what? That's what youthful memories are for.

Day Two

Parking is easier today, and we arrive in plenty of time for Regina Spektor. She's one of those artists whose music is very tied up with her persona--in this case, the smart, casually hip girl from the city who'd probably be in med school at Columbia right now if she hadn't taken to her piano lessons instead. I don't know if that's actually who she is or not, but the image worked for me and the other few thousand people who gather by the stage in the early afternoon sun. She walks out smiling, demure and unaccompanied, and sings a capella before moving to the piano for an hour of soulful, intricate numbers including the deceptively catchy "Fidelity." It's a great way to start the day.

Spoon have no persona at all, but make up for it with good set heavy with songs from Gimme Fiction and their excellent new album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Highlights: "Don't Make Me a Target," plus "Small Stakes" from Kill the Moonlight. We skip Panic! At the Disco and take a nap by the South Stage as Bad Brains plays with the kind of serenity that only decades as a legend of hardcore punk / reggae fusion can give you. Then we walk back past some kind of professional wrestling exhibition that is either hysterical or disturbing, depending on whether it is or is not performance art.

Next up, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Two takeaways here. First, there aren't very many real rock stars in the world, but Karen O is one of them. She comes onstage looking like a cross between Chrissie Hynde and Cher circa the 1986 Oscars, prowling, prancing, grinning and growling in a way that absolutely bleeds charisma. Second, there are two kinds of live acts. Most--Spoon is a good example--sound more or less like they do recorded, just marginally looser, longer, and louder. A few, however, are transformed in concert to the point that they sound like an entirely different--and much better--band. The Yeah Yeahs Yeahs are the second kind.

Interpol has neither a persona nor a rock star, but they do have an image--stylish, modern, unemotional--that matches their music to an obviously calculated but nonetheless effective degree. That said, it's been a long weekend and their songs start to sound the same. We're on the right side of the stage in front of this ridiculously huge fenced-in "VIP area" that is never more than 10 percent full, since most people are apparently smart enough not to pay extra for the privilege of looking like a zoo animal with more money than sense. It starts to rain, just enough to tamp down the heat, and soon The Smashing Pumpkins hit the stage for the festival's final show.

Billy Corgan has apparently purchased a Stepford bass player to replace D'arcy, but the Pumpkins still rock out to large degree. In the long run, every band, regardless of greatness, reaches a point where it has made all the music it will make that really matters. Corgan knows this, and he's clearly unwilling to go gently into the rock and roll good night of reunion tours and greatest hits sets. So for every stellar version of an older song like "Zero" there was a rushed-through "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" or "the next single" from the new album, Zeitgest. It made for an uneven finish to long, fun weekend--but good for him anyway. Better to fight obsolescence and lose than never fight at all.

All in all, another good research trip -- I'm thinking Austin City Limits next year.

The UnTruth Comes Out

The NEA would like to be seen as an intellectually serious contributor to the discussion about No Child Left Behind, and at the level of individual members and state and local affiliates, this is often quite true. But then you see this (via Matt Yglesias), which looks like something a glassy-eyed Lyndon LaRouche supporter would try to shove in your hands as you're coming up off the Metro, and you wonder why anyone should bother listening to a word the national NEA has to say. The "Halliburton-ization" of the public schools? Neil Bush? Shouldn't the grassy knoll be on there somewhere?

However, reading this wasn't a total loss. I looked at the fine print at the bottom and saw --the NEA has an NCLB blog! Who knew? It's called NCLB - It's Time for a Change!, and features the following hilarious /sad disclaimer:

NCLB - It’s Time for a Change! is a blog written and maintained by a group of writers employed by the National Education Association. They are responsible for the content — what you read on this blog does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Education Association or its affiliates.

In other words, "We've bought and paid for this blog, but won't take responsibility for anything the anonymous writers have to say." Not that I entirely blame them, when the posts tend to begin along these lines:

Joel Packer, NEA Education Policy and Practice director, represented NEA and showed off his legendary encyclopedia knowledge of the law. Packer expertly fielded questions on a host of topics...

So as near as I can tell, there are only three differences between this and the AFT's NCLB Blog:

1) The AFT stands behind what it writes.
2) The people from the AFT who write the posts actually sign their names.
3) Posts at the AFT blog often have something worthwhile to say.

Other than that, pretty similar.

Professor, Teach Thyself

There's an excellent article$ by Jeffrey Brainard in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week about the way science is taught in most research universities. Basically, people have known for a long time--decades or more--that some ways of teaching science are better than others. When classes are designed in way that requires a lot of inter-student collaboration, hands-on learning, and regular feedback from the faculty, students learn more. When students are stuck in the back of a lecture hall passively listening someone drone through notes they've used for years, they learn less.

But many research universities have been slow to adopt best practices in teaching, if they adopt them at all? Why? Because research universities aren't designed to care about teaching. All the incentives--financial, professional, and institutional--are for (surprise) research. So even as Congress is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into financial aid programs designed to induce students to major in science, universities refuse to give those students the kind of education that the universities themselves have determined students need. For example:

Innovators...are limited in what they can achieve, says Susan B. Millar, a senior scientist in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies teaching in science and engineering. "I don't know that you can take these kinds of programs to scale when the unit of change is the individual," she says. "You can only do that for so long, until you get tired or retire. And then it doesn't spread."

Top administrators are loath to force change on departments. "I'm very reluctant to define successful and unsuccessful ways in which this can be done," says Patrick V. Farrell, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Madison, where some of the new teaching methods were developed. "I don't want to say, 'Lectures don't work, but group learning does.' In some contexts that's true; in other contexts, it's not. I'm looking for effectiveness in helping students learn."

I'm not sure which is worse: the anti-empiricism, or the total disregard for students? The only reason the University of Wisconsin provost "doesn't want to say" what the education researchers at the University of Wisconsin know to be true is that would mean having an argument with the faculty that he'd rather not have. One of the unfortunate side effects of giving college professors academic freedom when it comes to their speech and scholarship--and those are undeniably good things--is that the concept has been extended to their teaching to a degree that produces absurd reasoning like this. Obviously, college professors should be given a lot of lattitude to innovate and teach, but to say that the subject essentially can't even be discussed is nuts, and bad for students.

But hey, I could be wrong. If someone sends evidence that UW-Madison is actually evaluating its faculty for their "effectiveness in helping students learn" in any kind of reliable, empirical, public way--not just student evaluations, but something tied to real evidence of learning--I'd be more than happy to retract everything above.

To Teach or Not to Teach

New report (pdf) released by NCES that describes which college grads decide to teach, which don't, and why. It's a statistical report, using data from the 1993-2003 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, "B&B 93/03", so it can be long and boring unless you like that kind of thing. Here's the quick and easy if you don't:

1. Teachers stay put more than we think. Teachers have relatively low attrition rates and are actually leaving the profession at lower rates than their peers in other professions. So caution the characterization of teachers as a bunch of fickle ship-jumpers. Or at least no more so than the rest of us.

2. When they leave, it's mostly for family reasons or to go into an entirely different field. Not surprisingly, it's the ladies who leave for family and the men who leave for business and engineering, often for pay reasons. See #s 4 & 5.

3. Teachers don't test well (but probably raise their hands a lot in class). College entrance exam scores are lower for those who go into teaching. Sadly, there's actually an inverse relationship between these exam scores and the likelihood for teaching (16 percent of grads with the lowest scores went on to teach vs. 6 percent of those with the highest scores). That said, the same pattern is not true for grades. As college grade point average increases, grads are more likely to go on to become teachers. So, are they smarter or not? Depends on how you use testing and GPA to measure smarts.

4. Teachers like teaching. Ninety-three percent said they were satisfied overall with their profession and 90 percent said they'd choose it all over again. But they do have complaints- the richest ones are heard in the teacher's lounge but the report summarizes more politely: Nearly half (48 percent for each) said they're dissatisfied w/pay, parent support, and student motivation.

5. Still more women in teaching- and don't expect this to change. Women earned most of the bachelor degrees in education (79 percent vs. 21 percent for men) so of course more female grads ended up as teachers. Women may have more options now in the workforce than ever before, but the work-life balance issue is going to ensure that we keep coming in droves to teaching. More on the gender differences in the NCES report but also in this AAUW report on the pay gap for college grads from a few months ago *.

Education Week's got more easy to read info about the NCES report here.

* Disc: I was the dir of research at aauw when we designed the study. It can't escape its advocacy but it's good research, conducted by some of the same folks who did the NCES report.

Grad Rate Follies

A new report from Daria Hall at the Education Trust, my former employer (BTW, what's the statute of limitations on that in the blogosophere, vis a vis disclosure? It'll be two years in September, I'm thinking that's the limit. If you agree / disagree, email)--covered here in the NYTimes--makes a point that's not made often enough, namely that the No Child Left Behind Act's provisions related to high school graduation rates are more or less a complete joke. In nearby Virginia, for example, the goal is 57 percent. What? How does a number like that even get chosen? Was there a conversation when some state education official said, "Hey, how about fifty-eight percent?" and somone else said, "C'mon now, these people aren't miracle workers!"

Update: Turns out Virginia upped its target to 61 percent earlier this year, which I think moves the state from an F to a D-minus. Also, more disclosure: Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education. He voted against this target, saying it was too low.

Cracks in the NCLB Foundation

In a speech earlier this week, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, staked out his vision for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Much of the subsequent discussion focused on the Miller's proposal for what are commonly called "multiple measures." He said:

Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills. But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to determine how well schools and students are doing.

This is one of those issues where a few words here or there can outweigh the hundreds of pages that comprise the rest of the law. It's so important that a group of NCLB supporters sent Miller a letter a few weeks ago (link via This Week in Education) saying, essentially, "Please, please don't screw this up."

As this gets discussed in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years, it's important to understand what's at stake. Nearly all the back-and-forth will be about what gets measured. But equally important--perhaps more important--is who does the measuring.

The multiple measures idea stems from one the most common--and correct--criticisms of NCLB: schools are rated almost exclusively based on state assessments in reading and math. This system can be inaccurate and reductive--not only are we limited to one way of measurement, via standardized tests, but we're also limited in what's measured. Subjects like art, music, social studies, etc. are left out, along with the non-academic skills and character traits that schools are charged with teaching students. By expanding school measures beyond once-a-year tests, the thinking goes, we can get a broader, more nuanced, more accurate sense of what schools are really doing for their students.

A worthy goal, to be sure. But here's the problem: in many multiple measure scenarios, it's the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they're judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can't be wholly accountable to themselves.

The people here at Education Sector who handle accounting, for example, are scrupulously honest. Nonetheless, we're required to have our books audited by an outside accounting firm every year. Nobody disputes the necessity of this, just like nobody disagrees with having line judges call serves in and out at Wimbledon. When the stakes are high--as with money, championship tennis, and the educational lives of the nation's schoolchildren--measurement must be independent.

Local measurement will also inevitably create huge inconsistency and variance among schools and districts. People are already confounded by the fact that there are essentially 50 versions of NCLB, one for each state. What's the law going to look like if there's one version for each of the nation's 14,000 school districts, or 90,000 schools? A lot like having no accountability at all.

These are the reasons that we're stuck, for the moment, with standardized tests, their many flaws and limitations notwithstanding. And it's why this single issue has the potential to make various cliched dam-related metaphors come to life. Crack open NCLB with misguided multiple measures, and the entire vast enterprise will collapse.

Fish-y Logic on Higher Ed

In his Times column($) today, Stanley Fish begins by making a perfectly reasonable observation:

Whenever I’m asked, and sometimes even before I’m asked, I advise parents of college-age children to not send their sons and daughters to private schools, but to send them to public institutions, at least if there are any good ones in their state. I say this for the obvious reason. The tuition/fee difference between a good private school and a good state school can be as much as $40,000, and, aside from the dubious coin of prestige, it’s hard to see what you would be buying.

before going on to discuss the state of higher education in Florida, saying some things that aren't true, and then contradicting himself:

Florida is not even in the second tier of university systems in this country. Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, nevermind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina...Five straight years of steadily increased funding, tuition raises and high-profile faculty hires would send a message that something really serious is happening. Ten more years of the same, and it might actually happen.

Virginia doesn't really have a university "system" per se; it has the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech and a bunch of other loosely governed individual campuses. The University of Florida is in the bottom half of the "First Tier" of national university according to U.S. News, just like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Georgia Tech (UVA just makes the top half with a tie for #24).

And if public universities really do offer a similar quality of education at a fraction of the cost of privates, why does Fish want them to become...more like privates? Hike tuition, raise more money, and then spend it on a bunch of faculty who made their reputations as scholars and researchers, not teachers? That's exactly the kind of status-obsessed, students-be-damned behavior that public universities should be avoiding.

Update: Sherman Dorn, who works at a public university in Florida, comments here.

Clintonian Education Policy

In Nashville yesterday and today for the annual DLC National Conversation. Interesting fact: like most conferences, you get a canvas tote bag full of stuff when you register. Unlike most conferences, the bag includes a 100 ml. bottle of Jack Daniels. Which is kind of a good one in principle, except 100 ml. is too big to bring back through airport security, which means you either have to drink it alone in your hotel room a la David Hasselhoff or during the conference itself, which, even in a meeting of elected officials, might be kind of rude.

President Clinton gave a great speech at lunch, offering a full-throated defense of his legacy and of the continued relevance of the DLC. That said, his education comments were short and disappointing--his only recommendation for NCLB is essentially, "fewer tests, but based on national standards," which would make it impossible to implement the growth model reforms that seemingly everyone supports these days.

Paying More for More Valuable Degrees

The NYTimes has an article on an interesting higher ed policy issue: whether colleges should charge more for some degrees than others. Most don't, but there's any argument to be made that this is unfair: some degrees--like engineering--are both more valuable in the job market and more expensive to provide in terms of equipment and labor. By contrast, an education degree is both less lucrative and less costly. Why should teachers implicitly subsidize the education of engineers who suck up more college resources and then turn around and make twice as much money out of school? The flip side argument is that we don't want short-term costs to influence long-term life decisions (particularly since people tend to be quite econonmically irrational about such things), or to warp college curricula around limited considerations of economic value.

A key question to answer, then, is the extent to which student choices of major are influenced by variations in price. If demand for given majors is relatively inelastic, then colleges could probably differentiate up to a point without significant negative side effects and thus make pricing more efficient and fair. On this point, the Times reports:

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.

“We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,” said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. “The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.”

This is maddening. The program has been in place for 15 years and all they have is "purely anecdotal" evidence? How about some actual evidence? Universities know precisely what decisions their students make in terms of selecting courses and majors. For most of them, they have detailed financial records. At an institution the size of the University of Kansas, they have tens of thousands of cases to study. Isn't there an economist or PhD candidate on staff who could answer this question? One of the remarkable--and disquieting--things about universities is how they so infrequently apply their tremendous capacities of analysis and inquiry to themselves.

Miserly Colleges

Lynne Munson of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity turns in a thought-provoking op-ed at Inside Higher Ed today. She takes colleges to task for hoarding vast sums of money in endowments while still charging students high tuition rates:

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

With all the talk in Congress about how much money loan companies (including “non-profit” loan companies) are making off of student loans, it might be worth also taking a look at how colleges spend their endowments. As Munson points out, taxpayers are helping to fund the federal grants and subsidized loans that allow many students to afford the high tuitions at these institutions (and allow these institutions to charge such high tuitions). Meanwhile, donors receive tax breaks for adding to these large endowments. It’s worth asking what the public is really getting out of this deal.

The Onion, Predictably, Sees the Truth

From a story in this week's Onion (Interestingly, not on-line yet, another reason to be psyched they're publishing the print edition in DC now):

New Theories Suggest Kennedy Wasn't Shot - A controversial new book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has raised questions not about the role of a lone gunman or a conspiracy of shooters, but about whether the late president was even shot at all.
While the book, Outside the Crosshair, does not dispute the fact that a massive portion of Kennedy's skull was separated from his head during the 1963 Dallas visit, it maintains that the president suffered fatal explosive-cranial trauma through means completely unrelated to gunshots.
"Certain extreme force was involved in this tragic death," said Dr. Horace Musashi, the book's author and professor of computer science at Mount Union College in Alliance, OH. However...Musashi favors an explanation known as the single-massive-spike-in-blood pressure-theory. After 11 years of painstaking research, Musashi uncovered testimony from anonymous eyewitnesses who claimed that unopened packets of duck sauce and soy sauce were hastily removed from Air Force One..."

The crucial detail is that Musashi is a college professor. Despite the democratization of access to information and expertise, it's still the case that society bestows considerable--albeit undifferentiated--intellectual status on university faculty. As long you have a PhD in something and faculty appointment somewhere, you get a significant added presumption of knowing what the heck you're talking about--if even if what you're talking about has nothing whatsoever to do with your training and field of study.

Not that this is altogether a bad thing, it's good to maintain academic standards and credentials in era where simple assertion of expertise is easier than ever before.

But it has the negative byproduct of lending undue credence to Harvard psychologists who believe in alien abduction, BYU physics professors promoting wacky 9/11 conspiracy theories , University of Minnesota philosophers who see sinister government plots behind the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 and the death of Paul Wellstone, etc. etc.

Churchillian Speech

Ward Churchill was fired by the University of Colorado yesterday because he said that the maintenance workers and secretaries who were burned and buried alive in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were a bunch of Nazis who had it coming. The official reason for the firing was academic misconduct, which has the ACLU in a snit. Churchill's speech, they said was "protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action."

I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and close to a free speech absolutist, but in this case I don't buy it.

For various reasons including limited resources and the need to maintain an atmosphere of collegiality and trust, universities can't go around conducting in-depth investigations into the scholarly conduct of every professor on campus. But they certainly have the right to do so on a case-by-base basis, and it seems more than fair to assume that a person so deranged that he can't see the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of monstrous crimes against humanity might also be a less-than-scrupulous scholar. Sure enough, that's what they found.

The ACLU seems to be saying that liars and plagiarists can innoculate themselves against the consequences of their actions if they can manage to offend enough people to bring scorn and infamy upon themselves and the university that employs them. Plus, who thinks that if Churchill had, for example, been publicly espousing the principles of Nazism--rather than simply ascribing them to innocent victims of terrorism--he'd still have a job? Of course not, because he never would have gotten his job in the first place. Nobody is saying Ward Churchill should be arrested for saying what he said, just that no decent institution of higher education should pay him to do so.

All Competition is Not the Same

Ezra Klein critiques a recent WSJ op-ed$ about income inequality and the return on human capital from Cato's Brink Lindsey, which concludes:

Those interested in reducing meaningful economic inequality would thus be well advised to focus on education reform. And forget about adding new layers of bureaucracy and top-down controls. Real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition.

Ezra says:

Responding to that sort of despair by trying to break the teacher's unions is truly an astonishingly narrow and inadequate solution

I don't put any stock in Cato's voucher-mania, but it's a mistake to assume that every call for more competition in education, challenging the monopoly, etc., is necessarily about breaking teachers unions. For an example, look no further than today's front-page New York Times story about former Democratic fundraiser and Rock the Vote founder Steve Barr, who's challenging urban school districts by opening new charter schools with unionized teachers. Barr says, "If the district doesn’t work with me, I’ll compete with them and take their kids."

The point being, while one could probably accurately surmise that Lindsey wouldn't mind breaking teachers unions, its perfectly possible to accomplish what he advocated for in a pro-union context. Not all attempts to introduce competition into the education system mask a dastardly anti-labor agenda. Plus, given that most serious education observers--left and right--agree that many school systems suffer from moribund bureaucracies in need of reform, implicitly putting unions on the wrong side of that argument isn't doing them any favors.

Doing the Math on Borrower Benefits

As the financial aid legislation in both the House and Senate have moved forward over the past couple of weeks, lobbyists for loan companies have been going full throttle trying to derail efforts to cut subsidies to lenders. They are even using the new legislation to intimidate borrowers into consolidating their loans—my mailbox has been inundated with letters from loan companies threatening rising student loan costs because of the proposed legislation (there have been plenty more since this).*

A recent advertisement in The Politico by the “Campaign to Reform Student Loans” highlights one of their most popular arguments, that the proposed subsidy cuts will “wipe out the interest rate discounts currently available to borrowers.” And then they give some scary calculations: a student with a $20,000 loan will pay an additional $5,000 over 20 years as a result of this legislation, and a student with a $60,000 loan will pay an additional $38,000 over 30 years.

And this is true. A very, very small percent of students would end up paying more on their loan over the course of repayment without these borrower benefits. But, according to FinAid.org—a great source of independent information on financial aid—less than 1 in 29 borrowers will see the full discount from these borrower benefits.

The most common benefits are a .25 percent discount on the interest rate for automatic debit payments and a 2 percent interest rate discount for 48 on-time payments. But less than 15 percent of students sign up for the direct debit, and less than 10 percent qualify for the on-time payment discount for the entirety of their loan. It is not easy to make 48 consecutive on-time payments, and if a borrower misses just one, he or she loses the benefit for the life of the loan.

FinAid writes:

A review of lender SEC filings reveals that the combined cost of all the discounts, including the direct debit and prompt payment discounts, averaged less than 10 basis points (0.10%) over the past decade. That's less than 5% of the nominal "full" 2.25% discount and less than $50 per borrower on average.

Using FinAid’s handy loan discount analyzer, a student with a $20,000 loan that gets the direct debit discount and has a 1 in 36 chance of being late with a payment (a much more realistic expectation) could expect to save $592. For the student with $60,000 in loans, it would be around $1,700. A much lower benefit than loan company lobbyists advertise.

Beyond the mathematics of loan discounts, it’s worthwhile to think about the lenders’ argument: that they should receive more in subsidies so that they can then pass some of the money along to some students as discounts. In essence, lenders are asking for a smaller cut to their subsidies because they want to act as middlemen for this money.

But wouldn’t it make more sense for Congress to just give this money directly to students, either in the form of interest rate cuts or increased grant aid?

* Lenders are interested in getting students to consolidate before the legislation takes effect because, if this legislation works like past changes to subsidy rates, lenders will be able to collect the old, higher subsidy rate for the life of the loan on any loans consolidated before the new subsidy rate takes effect.

Maverick Leads Charge

For those of you intrigued by today's front-page NYTimes story on Steve Barr, the guys who's shaking things up out in L.A., Education Sector was on the story a year ago with this report.

Compacts & Contracts: A Colorado Case

The National Governor’s Association released a report over the weekend calling on states to implement compacts with colleges and universities. It’s a growing trend in higher education, and it deserves a closer look.

The most innovative higher education funding scheme comes from Colorado. In 2005, the state began allocating higher education money based on a student-stipend program called the College Opportunity Fund. Money follows in-state undergraduates to their chosen institution. Students complete a short application in order to be eligible, and the stipend is good for only 145 credits. All stipends to public institutions are equal, and privates get about half that amount. Every institution that opts to participate must agree to a performance contract with the state. The state may purchase fee-for-service contracts for graduate schools, rural education, economic development services, and dual enrollment programs.

Advocates argued the stipend program would increase college attendance for traditionally underserved populations. They argued these students and families suffered more from lack of information about the affordability of higher education than from actual financial limitations. Publicizing the stipend as a use-or-lose system would theoretically address this problem. Accountability schemes in higher education struggle with the principal-agent problem--who exactly is the “client,” students or the state? By setting all stipends equal and allocating funding entirely based on student enrollment, the state has effectively said students are.

National CrossTalk published an in-depth look on Colorado’s stipend program last winter, and they found some things working and some not: the 145 credit limit appeared to be pressuring students to complete college quicker, colleges had almost immediately raised tuition levels to compensate for years of inadequate funding, and the fee-for-service measure had been implemented in such a way that state funding levels remained almost exactly constant. Most important to the program’s success, although current students failed to comprehend the reason for the change, students as young as eighth grade are already registering for the stipends.

Choice requires information, and there will not be symmetry in who has it. Part of the state’s role, then, should be to inform the consumers of their options, or mandate the producers (universities) provide enough data for real choices. That doesn’t appear to be happening. Another gaping hole in this design is that it is entirely state-based. Institutions have no incentive to attract international scholars or high-caliber students from other states, because they’ll receive $0 for enrolling these “clients.”

Before switching to performance contracts with individual institutions, Colorado had a performance-based funding mechanism in place. About 2% of the total general funds in FY2001 were allocated to the governing boards based on performance results. Moving away from this funding scheme to a contractual system means the accountability mechanism has shifted from (admittedly limited) financial consequences to legal ones. The devil is in the details, and we’ll have to wait and see how enforceable the four-year contracts turn out to be.

Contracts are not a panacea. More states should experiment with various accountability tools to better manage this country’s higher education institutions. Kudos to the NGA for featuring various state attempts to do so.

The Box Theory

I am a product of the blue box theory of American History. Flipping through my 10th grade U.S. history text book, it is impossible to ignore the takeover of the special interest box: little blue boxes, outlined and shaded, each one condensing minority perspectives and contributions into half a page or less: Women in the civil war, Immigrants and the railroad.

This weekend, the blue box theory struck again.

The Israeli Education ministry announced Sunday that Israel’s war of independence will now be referred to as a “catastrophe” for the state’s Arab population. A New York Times article notes:

Ms. Fenig, who is the national supervisor of homeland, society and citizenship studies, said, “Pedagogically, it is not right to hide facts and ignore Arab sensitivities if we want to live together and build something in common.”

Though applaud Ms. Fenig’s commitment to marginalized views, I cannot help but wonder if this is an impossible task. Can history text books ever succeeded in incorporating all sides into a coherent narrative, or will minority history never encroach further than boxes?

Flexing Our Way Towards Reform?

Just like during NCLB’s creation, the issue of local control over federal dollars is brimming to the surface again. While far less sexy than highly effective teachers or growth models, flexibility may be another looming battle in the fight over if/when/how to reauthorize NCLB. Recently, Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon introduced the State and Local Flexibility Improvement Act, designed to give state and local officials more authority over federal dollars. In describing the legislation, McKeon used the ever-popular federal-government-ruins-everything refrain in advocating “removing Washington constraints on federal dollars.” The bill proposes expanding flexibility authority for states and local school districts to use federal funding in ways that better match their needs.

Sound familiar? NCLB had four new provisions that provide for this exact type of flexibility. What’s happened since? A new series of reports from the U.S. Department of Education looks at participation rates in each program and how and why districts use (and don’t use) the various provisions.* The newest Education Sector Chart You Can Trust analyzes how these provisions have been used and why participation has been lower than expected.

Interestingly, rural districts have the highest participation rates. These small districts get very small allocations under some Title programs and pooling those funds for other purposes makes a lot of sense for them. Other districts are not quite as enthused with flexibility. Only 16% of districts report using Transferability, a flexibility provision available to all districts. And even fewer districts—one to be exact—used the new Local-Flex program, which was intended to provide even more flexibility to districts.

The reasons that participation isn’t higher vary-and some have to do with uneven implementation and a lack of information. Some districts also reported being frustrated with the small amount of money eligible to transfer—a problem that McKeon’s proposal aims to address. However, a sizeable percent of districts (44%) that didn’t use the program reported choosing not to participate because they already had sufficient existing flexibility in how to use funds.

None of this is to suggest that flexibility isn’t a good idea that could use some tweaking, or that local control isn’t important. It does provide a caution however, that like many education catch-phrases, just “removing Washington,” doesn’t necessarily lead to the kind of dramatic change we all want.

*Full disclosure: I recently left the Department of Education, where I served as the contracting officer’s representative on the contract that produced this evaluation, but an independent contractor conducted all analyses and wrote these reports.