Maybe I'm Being Too Nice

The Pangloss Index isn't the first report I've written criticizing state implementation of NCLB (here's one from a few years back focused on the teacher quality provisions), and when I talk to the press--particularly at the state level--I usually get some variant on the question, "If this is so bad, why are people doing it?"

As a rule, I don't like to speculate, because, how would I know? Motivation isn't the issue, what matters is the policy. I only have detailed knowledge of one state department of education, and they're all good people, so generally I attribute avoidance of NCLB provisions to a deeply-ingrained compliance mentality combined with what Eduwonk likes to call the "dual client problem," whereby state officials are charged with looking out for the interests of both adults and children in the school children--interests which are often, but not always, aligned.

But then I read stuff like this comment on our report at This Week in Education, and I wonder if I'm being too nice. He says:

I participated in the first wave of tricks to avoid accountability. What we did was not wrong. It was our responsibility to protect schools so they could protect children. And our logic was explicit: creating loopholes to delay the damage until the Republican governors came to our rescue.

This is a widely held--if seldom so clearly stated--conceit, the idea that education officials who game the system or break the law are engaging in some kind of virtuous civil disobedience on behalf of the children. Others in the edublogosphere have correctly taken issue with sloppy use of the "children vs. adults" meme, but sometimes that is, in fact, the way it is. "Protecting" schools is not always synonymous with protecting children. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of a press release issued by the Alabama Department of Education a few months ago:

Montgomery, Ala. ─ More positive news for Alabama schools following the release of the 2007 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report. The data indicates a 70 percent decrease from last year in the number of Title I schools (high poverty schools that receive federal funding) identified for School Improvement. That means fewer schools in Alabama must offer School Choice for the upcoming school year. School Choice provides parents alternatives on where their children can attend school.

The 70 drop was a result of Alabama's loophole-ridden system, not any great improvement in education. The "positive" news for Alabama schools was negative news for Alabama parents, who now have fewer options to send their students to better schools. There's nothing ambiguous about the dynamic here, the only unusual thing is that state departments are usually a little more circumspect about their intentions.

Later in the post, the commenter says:

Where we crossed a moral line was when districts adopted tricks that directly damaged children. For instance, we abruptly merged high poverty schools creating disastrously high concentrations of poor kids, in order to claim we had "reorganized" failing schools. (and by redrawing boundaries without regard to gang turf, we probably intensified gang wars, so I have to ask if one or more of my students might still be alive if we hadn't thrown the schools into complete chaos.) We forced parents to re-enroll their kids just before school - thus dropping hundreds of kids from the rolls and disrupting the first few weeks of school - so they will be excluded as highly mobile. Among the most damaging was the gutting of our attendance policies by having kids pick up trash in lieu of attending class in order to drop absences from the computer. when And, of course, we drove hundreds of students out of school by imposing high stakes standardized testing that was years over their skills.

That's reprehensible. There's nothing in NCLB that forces anyone to do any of these things, these are just immoral actions that hurt students.

Poverty, Schooling, and the Urban NAEP

One of the foundational arguments in education centers on poverty and schooling. All reasonable people agree that poverty has a negative influence on education, just as all reasonable people agree that quality schooling has a positive influence. The point of argument is how much these things matter, relative to one another. Some people think the negative effects of poverty overwhelm anything schools--even good schools--can do, while others believe schools make a big difference in how much poor students learn.

I tend toward the latter camp, and I think one of the strongest pieces of evidence lies with the National Assessment of Education Progress, which in recent years has been expanded from the national and state levels to include a group of large city school districts like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and DC. The 2007 results were released today (math here, reading here). As in previous years, they indicate that different school districts achieve very different results for poor students.

Here, for example, is the percent of low-income (eligible for the National School Lunch program) 4th graders who are "proficient" in math:

New York City: 31%
Boston: 24%
Charlotte: 23%
Austin: 22%
Houston: 22%
San Diego: 22%
Los Angeles: 15%
Chicago: 12%
Cleveland: 10%
DC: 7%

Low-income fourth graders in New York City are more than four times as likely as low-income students in DC to be proficient in math, twice as likely as Los Angeles, and significantly better than all the rest. The NAEP proficiency standard is unusually tough, but significant differences persist when we look at the percent of students who met the much easier, "Basic" standard:

Charlotte: 77%
Houston: 77%
New York City: 77%
Boston: 75%
Austin: 74%
San Diego: 65%
Los Angeles: 55%
Chicago: 54%
Cleveland: 53%
Atlanta: 52%
DC: 43%

Now, one might reasonably speculate that poverty concentration plays a big role here, that a district with a relatively small number of poor kids would have an easier time helping those kids than a district where poverty is rampant. Except that doesn't seem to be the case; New York City and DC, which bookend these lists, have almost exactly the same percentage of students living below the poverty line, 29%. Charlotte, which is different from the rest of the cities in being a unified urban-suburban district, has by far the lowest poverty rate on the list, 14%, yet does no better than (and in some cases worse than) cities with many more poor children. This is true in other grades (8th) and subjects (reading) as well.

The real source of these large differences in performance is, pretty obviously, that some of these districts are just a lot better than others. New York City, Boston, and Houston, which are consistently in the top half of cities on the NAEP, have all won the Broad Prize for Urban Education in recent years. The cities in the bottom half haven't, and for good reason.

How do these differences stack up against the overall effects of poverty? Below, see the difference between the performance of poor and non-poor 4th graders nationwide on the 2007 NAEP math test, measured three different ways: percent proficient, percent basic, and average scale score (for an explanation of how the scale scores are calculated, and everything else you need to know about NAEP, see this recent Ed Sector "Explainer")

Percent Proficient: Non-poor (53) minus Poor (22) = 31 percentage points
Percent Basic: Non-poor (91) minus Poor (70) = 21 percentage points
Scale Score: Non-poor (249) minus Poor (227) = 22 scale score points.

By contrast, the differences between the highest- and lowest-scoring cities on those three measures were 24 percentage points, 34 percentage points, and 27 scale score points.

Very comparable, in other words. The scale score difference between poor kids in DC and poor kids in New York is bigger than the difference between poor kids nationwide and non-poor kids nationwide. There's no single reason for this; success (or lack thereof) in schooling is a function of many things--management, resources, personnel, etc. etc. It all adds up.

Moreover, I think these city NAEP numbers underestimate the effect of differences of schooling quality on poor students, because they don't represent the whole range of quality. New York City and Boston (the last two Broad Prize winners) are manifestly better school districts than DC, Cleveland, etc. But nobody thinks they're as good as they could be--many, many problems remain to be solved. NYC just got a big influx of money from a school funding lawsuit, for example, which will hopefully lead to further improvement, and there's a lot more work to be done in many other areas.

Poverty creates terrible problems, but schools can help--a lot.

Update: Matt Yglesias provides needed chartification here, while Ezra Klein weighs in here. There's also a long post on Kansas City in Ezra's comments section that's worth reading, refuting the idea that because Kansas City wasted vast amounts of money trying to help urban children, ipso facto school funding doesn't matter and other districts can't do better.

Update 2: If you you want to ask NCES Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr questions about this data, send questions to tuda2007questions@ed.gov until Monday at noon. Dr. Carr will post her answers on Nov. 20 at 3 p.m at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/2007tudachat.asp.

Well Said!

More follow-up on our recent report focusing on how states game the NCLB accountability system, with coverage from the Birmingham News here and Stateline.org here. The latter story concludes,

"Alabama’s [Dr. Gloria ] Turner [the state's director of assessment and accountability] questioned the report’s methodology, saying that out of the 11 data measures [used to create the "Pangloss Index"], only about half have to do with making adequate yearly progress under NCLB, yet most of the study “is about how Alabama and the other states and the Department of Education have been in cahoots to usurp NCLB.”

It's true that AYP only makes up two of the 11 measures. But we focused on Alabama because it had the single biggest increase in its Pangloss Index rating from 2006 to 2007, and--as the report clearly states--that increase was primarily driven by huge gains in the percent of schools and districts making AYP.

Still, I have to say, "how Alabama and the other states and the Department of Education have been in cahoots to usurp NCLB" is hard to improve on, we should have made that the tag-line for the report when we sent out the press release.

Nixon Returns

Congress is currently working on a new version of the federal Higher Education Act, and the issue of rising college costs is predictably front-and-center. As Scott Jaschik reports today at InsideHigherEd, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to like the idea of a federal "watch list" comprised of those colleges and universities that post the largest annual tuition increases, in percentage terms.

This is a bad idea. It smacks of Nixon-era federal price controls, which I think everyone agrees seem pretty wacky in retrospect. It's flaws are obvious: a college that jacked up tuition a few years ago and is now just maintaining inflated costs would look good, while a college that waited until this year to increase prices would be identified as a bad actor--even tough the former would end up charging students more over the same time period.

Moreover, while the overall trend of increasing college costs is clearly a problem, a yearly increase in tuition at an individual college isn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe all the money is being poured back into student services or targeted for financial aid for low-income applicants. Blunt-instrument policy levers like a simple tuition increase "watch list" can't make that distinction.

The real issue Congress should be worried about isn't price but value. If price was rising 6 percent a year while quality was increasing by 10 percent, I'd be thrilled, as long there was enough need-based financial aid to maintain access and keep student debt burdens managable. (Of course, need-based aid programs are expensive, one reason Congress is drawn to non-solutions like watch lists, which are free.)

The problem is that value is ratio--quality divided by cost--and we lack data for the numerator of that equation. This is one of the reasons why proposals to generate more comparable, institution-level data about student outcomes are so important. Indeed, the lack of value information is one of the main reasons prices are rising in the first place, because when there are no real independent measures of quality, the market tends to assume that price and quality are the same, giving institutions incentives to raise prices more than necessary.

Leaving Birmingham Behind

People have their differences of opinion about No Child Left Behind, but even the law's supporters would concede that it sets extremely ambitious goals for improvement. NCLB requires states to establish a series of escalating performance targets for schools and districts, rising from wherever they were when the law was enacted in 2002 to 100 percent proficiency by 2014--a pace and scope of improvement without precedent in American history. Everyone knows this to be true.

But it's not.

While the law was written to raise performance targets every year, in many states the actual standards for schools to make "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, have gotten easier every year, because Congress made the mistake of allowing state departments of education to annually alter the definition of AYP. Every year since the law was enacted, the 51 state departments of education have, en masse, submitted hundreds of requests to the U.S. Department of Education to water down their accountability systems. Some were rejected but--inevitably, due to political and bureaucratic pressures--some were approved.

The end result, five years and counting into NCLB, is that objectively, abjectly failing school distrticts like Birmingham, Alabama are making AYP, even as the district is hemorrhaging students and money, even as students in most grades and most subgroups fail to meet NCLB proficiency standards. Nearly half a century after bombs and protests in Birmingham helped catalyze the civil rights movement, Birmingham is failing poor black students on every dimension except NCLB. And this isn't unusual--the same is true in states and cities across the nation.

To read the whole sorry tale, see this report by yrs. truly released today by Education Sector.

Update: While the report focuses on the Alabama and Birmingham story, it contains ratings for all 50 states, and for the second year in a row it singled out Wisconsin for special scrutiny. Alan Borsuk of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, who's one of the best state education journalists out there, and I say that not just because he covered our report, covers the Wisconsin angle here.

Free Rice

Although in the back of my mind I suspect this is actually re-directing mental energy toward comparatively less productive purposes, which in the long run would reduce output available to be redistributed toward reducing global hunger through more traditional means, I nonetheless agree with TNR's Britt Peterson that Free Rice is a small act of genius, by allowing people like me to simultaneously avoid real work, feel smart, and--crucially--feel like we're saving the world in the process. That's like the holy trinity for left-leaning policy types who tend toward procrastination.

No Conspiracy To See Here

I went to the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting over the weekend, to present a paper on a panel focused on college classification, rankings, and peer grouping. Afterwards I was chatting in the lobby of the Louisville Marriot with a nice fellow who worked for an academic publishing house. We agreed on a lot of issues including the need to provide colleges with better incentivs to focus on undergraduate education, but when I mentioned the recent Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, he basically said, "Yeah, but that's just a bunch of Republicans from Texas trying to undermine public higher education so they can please their corporate masters," or something along those lines.

It's important to understand that this is not true. At all. I spent a fair amount of time attending meetings of the Commission over the last couple of years, presenting testimony, reading reports, and talking to various folks involved, including the Chairman, Charles Miller, who's from Texas and raised a lot of money for the Bush campaign. It's all on the up and up, there's no hidden anti-education agenda. Really.

(This just shows one of the unfortunate side effects of the Bush Administration--over the last two or three years, a whole lot of intellectually lazy and half-paranoid conspiracy theories about things like warmongering and destruction of civil liberties and what have you turned out to be more or less true. Which gives credence to other facile theories that aren't true. I realize this isn't nearly as problematic as the actual foreign policy fiascos, assaults on the Constitution, etc., but it still makes my life difficult.)

Miller and I co-wrote an op-ed on higher education funding and reform that appeared in yesterday's Houston Chronicle. It begins:

It's an article of faith that free markets have given America the greatest higher education system in the world. Unlike K-12 schools, colleges and universities have to compete for students and resources. As a result, the thinking goes, we're blessed with vibrant institutions that operate relatively free of government control and provide a crucial advantage in the global contest for economic supremacy.

Unfortunately, this is wrong on all counts. When it comes to their most important mission — helping students learn— American colleges and universities are badly underperforming and overpriced. That's because they don't operate in anything like a true free market. And the solution to this problem isn't less government involvement, but a stronger role of a different kind.

You can read the rest here.

Teachers In Need of Improvement

Richard Kahlenberg* writes about peer review as the better way to get rid of DC's worst teachers. Since teachers are harder on each other than any principal, he says, having them review each other's teaching practice, assignments, exams and lesson plans would result in evaluations that "weed out the incompetent while preserving the basic idea of tenure." I think he's right. Peer review means getting teachers involved in developing and participating in evaluation. This doesn't mean it waters down evaluation or makes it easy on teachers. But it does make it more meaningful. In Montgomery County, MD, for example, to be "put on PAR"– the county's peer assistance and review (PAR) program– means you've been evaluated by master teachers (not at your own school) as needing some form of remediation. For new teachers, this means more targeted professional development, which is often welcome. For veterans, this sometimes works as a reality check and a decision point– it either lights a fire under them to teach in new and better ways (pride swallowed) or reminds them that they forgot to retire or find a second career. I know a teacher who left after 20 years of teaching b/c she was put on PAR- it was the first time, she said, that she really "heard" the problem– she was a good teacher for the honors kids and a horrible one for the on-level kids, which is where she'd been placed by a well-meaning principal who was trying to put the experienced teachers with the kids who needed the most help. She didn't want to go through the program after 20 years of teaching, so she left. This is too bad for the honors kids she might have taught but, in the end, she says she's happier and says she had been thinking about leaving for years. And it's definitely better for the on-level kids who she was failing. She counsels kids for elite college placement now– probably what she should be doing.

Getting rid of tenure, to Kahlenberg's point, may open up some doors to kick some bad teachers out but it won't improve teaching. To be sure, peer review won't solve DC's teaching crisis but it's the better bet for ensuring that teachers are held– and hold themselves– accountable for their work.

*one of ES's non-resident senior fellows, featured at a recent ES event to highlight his book on Shanker.

Need Extra Cash? Work for the D.C. Government

The lesson from the news this week is that if you want to embezzle money without anyone taking notice, work for the Washington, D.C. government. The headlines, of course, have belonged to the two D.C. tax office employees who embezzled $20 million by issuing fake tax refund checks. What did they do with all that money? Nothing particularly creative—they bought the typical furs, expensive purses, jewelry and cars that must be fashionable in the embezzler social circle these days.

The Washington Post follows up today with a disheartening story about vanishing school activity funds in D.C. public schools—read the story if you can stomach it. Apparently, no one is accurately keeping track of this money, making it all too easy for employees to deposit checks into their own bank accounts instead of schools’. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, “poor record keeping and the absence of internal controls at D.C. schools often make it difficult to prosecute thieves”. The story details one tale after another of ‘lost’ activity funds—grant money, personal donations, even student dues that just disappear.

Appropriately enough, this weekend $800,000 of purses, furs and electronics purchased by the ex-teacher’s union leader Barbara Bullock will be up for sale on EBay in an attempt to recoup some of the over $4 million she embezzled from the union. Too bad these folks don’t have better taste.

Sad, Sad, Sad.

I moved to DC in early 2001 from Indianapolis, where I had worked in the Statehouse for the previous six years as a Democratic staffer for the state Senate and then the governor. That meant, necessarily, working at various times in close concert with the state teachers union. The union reps were by and large smart, committed people who fought hard for public education, and I have a very clear memory of all of us gathered in a downtown hotel ballroom on a cold election night in November 1999 celebrating the election of Bart Peterson as the new Mayor of Indianapolis.

It was a watershed moment. Indiana is a red state by inclination, and Republicans had dominated the mayoralty and city council in Indianapolis ever since the city and surrounding county governments had merged in 1970. Blowout losses in city-county elections became a habit and Republican dominance a foregone conclusion, until Peterson arrived as young, dynamic candidate who ran a smart campaign against the sitting Secretary of State and won by double digits. It was what candidates often promise and rarely deliver: A new day, a sense that things are different now.

And Bart followed through. He was a strong, sensible mayor who brought a lot of great ideas to the table, particularly on education. Legally, Indianapolis mayors have little say over the budget or administration of the city-county schools, which are split into eleven separately-governed and financed school districts, a legacy of racial segregation. But where other mayors ran away from the public schools as a money pit and an insoluble mess, Bart took responsibility for the success of public charter schools that he personally authorized. No blaming poverty or the school board or circumstances beyond his control. He said, I stand by these schools; judge me by judging them.

So it was a shock to learn that Bart narrowly lost his bid for re-election on Tuesday to a little-known, under-financed challenger. Frankly, I didn't even bother to check yesterday morning, I assumed winning was a foregone conclusion. Initial news coverage lay the blame on turnout, voter fatigue, and anti-tax anger. But now, via Eduwonk, we learn that lack of support from a city teachers union angered by charter schools played a role:

The Indianapolis Public Schools Teacher's Union did not endorse a mayoral candidate, but Indianapolis Education Association President Al Wolting believes many IPS teachers and employees voted against Peterson because of his support for charter schools.

"All they're doing is taking our students, taking our money and they're taking away all our efforts we're trying to make with public schools," said Wolting.

Wolting admits however that he doesn't know the mayor-elect's position on charter schools. [Mayor-elect] Ballard admits he rarely was asked about education on the campaign trail.

"Yes, I plan to continue charter schools," said Ballard. In fact, Ballard sounds as if he may start one of his own. "I have a model that I'd like to try but if that's ineffective then we'll move to something else because every kid in this city deserves a fair shot."

This should be said until nobody says otherwise: Charters schools are public schools. Public. Schools. That doesn't mean all charter schools are good public schools, but guess what--Indianapolis charters turn out to among the good ones, overall, at least compared to the traditionally-governed public schools from which students voluntarily left were "taken."

So what can we expect, educationally, from the conservative Republican mayor my former teachers union colleagues helped put in office? Who knows? It's hard to tell from reading his education agenda, other than charter schools are the one Peterson initiative he supports. Indianapolis will apparently be getting some kind of "public-nonprofit partnership" involving "the faith community" and "character education starting in the 5th grade." Hopefully the local union has socked away some money because more school funding is decidedly not on the way. Says the mayor-elect, apparently unaware that Indiana has these things called academic standards:

Do we have any goals for our school systems? Not that I can tell. Without defined goals, we really don’t know how many resources we need. We do know that our graduation rates and literacy rates throughout the city are unacceptable, and I don’t believe more money is the answer.

Sad, sad, sad.

Pondering Richard Simmons

Editing Q&E's worldwide exclusive interview with Richard Simmons (below) yesterday led me to ponder what seems like the essential Richard Simmons question: is this guy serious, or what?

I think he is. The mistake with Richard is to equate ridiculousness with lack of seriousness, which is usually a safe assumption, but not in this case. Think of it this way: here you have a guy who'se NCLB proposal is, objectively speaking, just as serious as many of those being put forth by various legit organizations, advocates etc.--in some cases, more so. He goes on national TV in front of millions of people to pitch his ideas, and as a result generates a lot of public response, letters to Congressman, and gets people like us, Education Week, etc., to publicize his ideas. Public Advocacy 101. The only difference between Richard and everyone else with an NCLB agenda is that he's doing a better job of promoting his. It's frivolity with a purpose, in other words. The voice and frizzy hair, the short shorts and outsized persona--those are all just a means to an end, and should be considered in those terms. Unlike most people, Richard is willing to be mocked if that furthers his goals, which makes him more serious, not less.

"We're Leaving Our Children's Behinds Behind" -- An Interview with Richard Simmons

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about Richard Simmons, the fitness guru who first rose to multi-media fame in the 1980s as a TV personality and purveyor of excercise videos like "Sweatin' to the Oldies," parts 1, 2, and 3. Ostensibly, the post was about his plan--which I called "silly"--to include physical education as part of school accountability under NCLB. But it was really just an excuse to tell one of my favorite stories, which takes place during a year of shiftless wandering between undergrad and grad school in the early 1990s, wherein my best friend and I went--for purely ironic purposes--to see Richard at an event in a North Carolina shopping mall, made fun of his promotional materials, and were publicly chastised (in a friendly way) by the great man himself.

Well, because Richard Simmons is clearly a better man than I, he not only took all of this in good humor but personally reached out to the Quick and the ED and offered to talk to us about his education plan. We spoke on the morning of November 6th, and here's what he said:

RS: Kevin…

Q&E: Richard!

RS: How have you been, you little devil you? Look at you, how far you’ve come!

Q&E: I've come a long away since my irresponsible youth.

RS: Never lose a little bit of that. I’m so proud of you, you actually help get things done, you actually put things in the forefront of peoples’ minds, and that's the main reason I wanted to talk with you, to ask for your help. I know that in your blog you said the work that I was doing on the NCLB was really silly…

Q&E: I did say that, but I’d like you to tell me why I’m wrong.

RS: Here’s where I’m coming from. I don’t want the kids today to grow up and be me. Because I was the kid who hated PE (physical education), I was the kid who hated exercise, and I was not introduced to it in a palatable way, it was only in the schoolyard where people picked teams and I was never on one. And about two years ago, a colleague of mine said, "Richard, what is your legacy?” I said, "I want to keep people healthy and I want people to continue to exercise." I want to get PE back in the school system, because to me it’s never really been introduced properly in the majority of schools.

Here’s my dream: To get a bill passed where we can get PE back in the schools. And we tried those bills but they didn’t go anywhere, because they weren’t attached to anything. To get a brand-new bill going is, as you know, very difficult. I was just in Washington recently, and I got a taste of that hectic, crazy life, and—Wow! I don’t know why everyone isn't on more Tums.

Q&E: We're on stronger things than Tums.

RS: (Laughs) So I met with Congressman Wamp and then Chairperson George Miller and other people and they said, "Look, NCLB is going to be up for reauthorization, let’s see if we can get something in there." So—as you said in your little blog—I went to David Letterman, trying to get as many people interested as I can, and thousands of people went to my Web site and sent emails to Chairperson George Miller and Senator Kennedy. I was very strong in what I was saying even though David was trying to drive me crazy.

The people in Washington said, "There are these things called 'multiple measures,' and this is where the school gets a report card and if the report is good and they get kids to excel, their grade goes up for the school." So I said, "Great--but where’s PE? Let’s make that a multiple measure." That’s where we are right now. They all said there’d be a vote, but now it looks like this will not be really addressed until next year.

Q&E: I looked at your legislation, and the standard is based on time—schools would have to offering 150 minutes per week of phys ed for all students in elementary school, and 225 minutes a week in high school. What about quality?

RS: Before I answer that, you tell me—how do we get PE back in the school system?

Q&E: Frame it terms of health problems, like childhood obesity, and the long-term financial consequences—spend a little money now, get big returns down the road in terms of reduced health care costs. That's the single biggest fiscal problem the federal government has, the long-term cost of health care.

RS: You'd think that the health world would embrace us, but…I’m the one the mother’s write to. They write to different TV personalities for different reasons, and I have here a group of emails from people who have had weight loss surgery and they’ve gained all their weight back. I have another group writing me about their daughters or sons who are morbidly obese, and they have type II diabetes, and they are taking medication for blood pressure—and they are 11 years old. Our kids are going to die, they are going to end up morbidly obese with no future and no dreams, and if we do something now we can save all those health costs. But I’ve tried all the different avenues, so let me ask you again: how do we get PE back in the school system?

Q&E: Putting it in the NCLB debate seems to be working for you, because now people are paying attention. I agree with your goals, but I’m worried that if we put so many things in NCLB it gets hard for schools to navigate...

RS: Well, we have to have some priorities here. Our kids are in school longer than they are any place else for that many consecutive hours. You know the kids are not getting up and exercising, because they're eating and getting ready for school and finishing their homework, and all these silly tests and the crazy math and reading…

Q&E: We want them to be physically fit and be good at math and reading, right?

RS: But where do we carve out the time for PE? When some the new things are added to NCLB—a lot more science, more reading and more math—when are we going to find time for the kids to go out and socialize, for the kids to go out and move? I just talked to this wonderful lady, Catherine Davis. She’s amazing. She has proven that when kids go outside, socialize, work up a sweat—she did two different studies, one 20 minutes of working out and one 40 minutes and most of the test scores went up. And so doesn’t that show us this is important? Why does everybody in Washington have blinders on?

Q&E: I think they see phys-ed as a marginal activity, compared to other things.

RS: It’s more than phys-ed.

Q&E: Right, that's an important distinction for you to make.

RS: It’s creating and planting the seed of a healthy lifestyle in a child’s mind. Kevin, what percentage of the parents of these kids do you think are overweight?

Q&E: 20 percent?

RS: I can only tell you from sitting at this desk for 34 years and doing this, I’m going to say close to 60 – 70 percent of overweight children have one or both overweight parents. If the mother is getting up and having a Pop Tart, and the father’s having one, guess what the kid's having? And what percentage of these people who have overweight children, or even regular-size children, exercise on a regular basis?

Q&E: I think part of the problem is in the language you're using, the legislation talks about "physical education," When I was in school, phys-ed was pretty useless, the teachers said "go play dodge ball" or whatever, and then sat on the sidelines. People may think you're trying to mandate something that isn’t very effective, so you need a new way to talk about it. Re-brand physical education.

RS: I’d love that, but what a hard sell. Now it looks like Chairperson George Miller won't be able to move the legislation because everything is rushed right now, and next year is an election year. How many laws get passed in an election year?

Q&E: It’s a tough environment.

RS: We've left our children's behinds behind. That really is the sad part, it's just heartbreaking. I go through so many airports and still teach at shopping malls like where I met you last time, and you should see the size of these children and the size of their parents.

Q&E: Have you talked to Governor Schwarzenegger? Isn't he a big phys-ed guy?

RS: I have not talked to Governor Schwarzenegger, he has a lot on his plate. But I’ll tell you, here in California, our kids are in desperate need of moving. I have taught classes for the Unified School District and I see what’s out there. Some schools have nothing; some schools have PE once a week for 15 minutes.

Plus, it has to be part of a curriculum. We test our kids in math and science based on a curriculum, but when we test our kids on physical activity, we say get down and give me 100 crunches, 100 push ups, give me 500 jumping jacks, and these kids don’t know how to do it because their bodies are not prepared. They have no stamina, no lung capacity, their hearts aren't strong.

How do I say this nicely—of the people who work for Congress and all the rest of the government, what percentage of these men and women are healthy? What percentage are so stressed out, just like plumbers and people that work in a bank, that they don’t take care of themselves, they don’t eat properly, because they're always on the go in meetings, grabbing things here and there? Does this sound familiar?

Q&E: Dinners with clients…

RS: Dinners with clients, no time for exercise, what percentage of the people who make the decisions in our government are healthy?

Q&E: President Bush seems pretty healthy. Say you what you want about George Bush, he seems genuinely committed to physical fitness. Have you talked to any of his people?

RS: Yes, I actually had some conversations with his publicist, and he said he didn’t really want to talk to me.

Q&E: What about the teachers unions? You're going to be talking to the National Education Association soon, right? They invited you?

RS: Either next month or in February, they're flying me in for their meeting.

They didn't think I was silly, Kevin.

Q&E: Fair point! What are you going to tell them?

RS: I have an idea to incorporate all the PE teachers and certified aerobic instructors--there are more than 300,000 in our country. When you want to be a certified aerobic instructor, you go through a certification through IDEA or AFA or ACE or the ACSM. And then you teach at Bally's and 24-Hour Fitness and all these other studios. Well, guess what? The studios are starving. They're closing left and right, so the majority of certified aerobic instructors aren't working. So let's take the expertise from the PE teachers at the NEA and the expertise of these individuals that are certified instructors and bring them into a melting pot and come up with a way that they can work together and teach at the schools.

Q&E: That seems like a good idea.

RS: Well, that's my big idea. I believe if I addressed every Congressman and Senator, not one would doubt my plan for our school system, because they are all very concerned about health care and our future. We've got a huge, expensive problem. That's why there are so many weight loss surgeries. Overweight people tended to be chronically ill; it was breaking the insurance company's bank. So they give them the surgery, cut their intestines—easy, quick! Well, guess what? They're gaining the weight back, they're having a second and third surgery, finding a blood clot or a burst hernia, and now the insurance companies are saying, "Oops! Wait a minute. I think we made a mistake."

Q&E: There's the long-term cost issue again—Medicare and Medicaid are becoming unbelievably expensive.

RS: I can help turn the whole thing around. I have the support of hundreds of thousands of people. If I went to PTA meetings I could put a hat out and people would give me money to pay these aerobic instructors and the PE teachers at NEA so you they could make a living and we could have healthy kids.

Q&E: The aerobic instructors could become members of the NEA, they'd love that.

RS: They would! I'm working with the NEA, and I'm working with the National School Board, I'm trying to gather up as many gold charms on my bracelet as I can, so that we can go and take this bracelet to President Bush. And if it doesn't get done by then, we'll take it to the next president.

Q&E: Are there any particular states, school districts or schools that you think have exemplary physical education programs that other schools should look to as an example?

RS: Well, here's what happens. You get a school district that says, "Let's start a walking program!" And everyone gets excited and flies to these places to look at the role model, and by the time they've flow there, it's over. It has to be long-lasting, but everyone only does it for a short period of time. It's like the weight loss surgeries—there is no research done for the long-term care and future of someone who has the surgery, and we may find in three years the whole thing was wrong. Yet there are schools—you see them in USA Today—where people say, "Look at this! These children picked up trash on the highways and lost two pounds." That's great, but it's temporary, it's just a quick fix.

Q&E: So we need more long-term, systemic reforms?

RS: Right. And people will say, "That silly little guy in the tank top and shorts knew what he was saying, because look at our kids now." He helped introduce them to moving and activity and social time together, and now instead of them learning how to exercise in their 20's, 30's, or 40's, and suffering from obesity and health problems, they'll get a taste of it at an early age and continue to believe in themselves.

Q&E: Are there any other areas we should look at, junk food advertising on children's television, that sort of thing?

RS: You know, everyone writes me: "Richard, they should close McDonald's. Richard, Burger King, KFC!" There will always be fast food, none of those foods will ever be illegal. People just don't have the right focus and the right food program, because our country does not educate people about eating. Plus, the food industry is a huge, huge monster. It turns out and churns out exactly what the public wants, and that's quick, fast, processed food that has a nice taste to it. Sadly enough, that taste is trans-fatty acids, grease, cream, butter and salt.

Q&E: What about sports? My gym classes were terrible, but I ran track and cross-country, so I did a lot of physical activity after school. Should we give schools credit for that?

RS: Kids should have a choice about physical activity. A certain percentage of children can't wait to play soccer, or hoops and loops, or run track. But that's not the majority of people. If you look at a football stadium, you see 60,000 people in the stadium eating hot dogs, French fries, popcorn and a soda pop. Then you see a select few people with little helmets on that run around the field and entertain everybody. That's just like the world. Most people don't want to play sports, they don't feel comfortable, they don't have the body, the strength, they don't have the self-worth. So the school should offer sports, but they should offer alternative programs for people who are not jocks. It has to be balanced, giving children a choice of physical activity.

Q&E: You've been great. What's next?

RS: I want you to stay in touch, because you know you have your pulse there, this is your life. Like a vampire, all this is your blood. We need to continue this, because if NCLB is not reauthorized it'll mean another five years of our kids being denied physical activity and their parents taking them to the doctor. Our kids need more.

Speak Up

So here's a great tool for your school or district:

Project Tomorrow (formerly NetDay) has opened its fifth annual online "Speak Up" survey of teachers, students, parents and school leaders. The survey focuses broadly on "21st century education" and asks a whole range of questions about how students and teachers feel about different forms of technology, what they think about math and science classes and how these classes could be better, and how, in an ideal world, they would change their schools.

All districts and schools, K-12, in the U.S. and Canada are pre-registered-- an adult just needs to sign up the school or district and let the community know about it so students, teachers, parents and leaders can go online to take the survey.

School and/or district results are available, free and online, to any school and district that participates (national survey data available also). Register your school or district now--you've only got until Dec 15th when the survey closes.

Fame and Fortune are Only an Excel Spreadsheet Away

Today's your lucky day. You, personally, can join the elite circle of infamous college rankers, and accrue all the notoriety it entails.

Here's why: a few months ago, I wrote an article for Washington Monthly that included a ranking of "America's Best Community Colleges," along with a profile of Cascadia Community College, one of the best. The rankings were primarily based on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), a student-based survey of best educational practices, with some graduation rate data thrown in. The personal responses I received from two-year education folks have been almost universally positive; they were glad to see a discussion of the importance of community colleges and the recognition of excellence in a sector that gets very little attention despite enrolling 45 percent of college freshmen every year. The only negative feedback was from the adminstrators of CCSSE itself, who believe rankings are an inappropriate use of their data. I disagree, and explained why here.

I was able to create the rankings because CCSSE (much to its credit) makes its data available to the public. The same is not true for the the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which administers a very similar survey to 4-year colleges. That data is only released with the permission of individual colleges. Recently, USA Today asked all the universities that have participated in the survey (currently almost 700 per year, and over 1,200 total since the survey began eight years ago) for such permission. 257 institutions agreed, and you can see the results here. There are ten data points for each institution, showing their NSSE score on five "benchmarks" (an aggregation of individual survey questions, converted to a 100-point scale) of good practices like student-faculty engagement, active and collaborative learning, etc., for both freshman and seniors.

You're thinking: USA Today has beat me to the punch. No! Part of the deal was that USA Today wouldn't display all the data in a rankings format, listing the universities in numerical order from highest to lowest. NSSE's FAQ about the USA Today effort makes this explicit, saying:

2. Will institutions be ranked?

No. The project is intended to respond to calls for greater institutional transparency and to underscore the idea that educational quality is more complex than typically reported elsewhere, such as in rankings. The focus will be on informing people with an interest in collegiate quality about the indicators of educational effectiveness represented by NSSE benchmarks and survey items, as well as distinctive patterns of engaging educational activities offered by different types of institutions around the country.

This doesn't make sense. "Rankings" in general aren't inherently complex or non-complex, it just depends on which rankings you're talking about. The U.S. News rankings, for example, are quite complex, based on fifteen separate measures, some of which use regression equations and the like. You can argue about whether those are the right measures (I have; they're not), but that's a different argument. And NSSE can't say that it's inherently wrong to boil down multiple indicators into a single number, since that's exactly what the NSSE benchmarks themselves do--summarize multiple survey questions into one number.

The best way to "inform people with an interest in collegiate quality about indicators of educational effectiveness" is to compare institutions--i.e., rank them. And while USA Today and NSSE won't do that, you can. Just open up a new Excel spreadsheet, set your iPod to shuffle, and type in the ten numbers for each university. It's an afternoon's work, max. Then add them up, press "sort," and voila--new rankings, which will be much more interesting and informative than anything from U.S. News. Issue a press release, name them after yourself--go crazy!

You should, of course, do the right thing and include the appropriate caveats that your list doesn't include all institutions and that there's bound to be some upward bias because of self-selection. But don't be too humble about it, because frankly the institutions who (A) are doing the best job educating their students, and (B) are willing to released their data deserve all the attention they get. And don't feel too guilty about outing the institutions at the bottom, because while it might create some heartburn in the administrative offices, their students really need to know. The good institutions--and these are more likely to be good, since they've chosen to release the data--will do the right thing and use this as an opportunity to improve.

Student Loans Are Not Financial Aid

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Erin Dillon wrote a short policy brief about student loan default rates, pointing out that they're far higher than commonly-reported government statistics indicate, particularly for student of color, students who borrow a lot of money, and students who go into careers that don't pay very much. As college costs continue to skyrocket and students borrow more and more money, this under-recognized problem will become worse and worse. While the college cost / debt crisis has many origins, I think one source of the problem lies with language: Student loans are routinely characterized as "financial aid." They're really not.

Some background data: Over the last 20 years, tuition and fees at private 4-year universities (measured in enrollment-weighted, inflation-adjusted dollars) have almost doubled. At public 4-year institutions, they've more than doubled. Higher education folks are quick to point out that these figures don't include discounted tuition rates or alternate price deflators or the effect of Baumol's cost disease, and there's truth in all of these things. But trust me when I tell you that no matter how you look at it or what allowances you make, college is getting more expensive, period.

Obviously, this hits poor students the hardest. While need-based aid programs like Pell grants have increased in size, they haven't grown nearly as fast as the cost of college. The resulting gap has been filled largely with student loans. In 1992, the average student's grant aid was double what they borrowed; today loans exceed grants. In just the last ten years, the total annual amount of student loans has nearly doubled, from roughly $38 billion to $75 billion (also in constant dollars). The risk and consequence of student loan defaults have increased accordingly.

Colleges have gotten away with this for a lot of reasons. People like higher education, and there's really no alternative to getting a college degree. Plus, as we're often told, higher education pays, to the tune of $1 million in extra earnings over a lifetime. A few extra thousands dollars in debt seems to pale by comparison.

But there's also a subtle language game going on, whereby the higher education industry likes to talk about grants and loans as if they're the same thing. The College Board, for example, says "Today, loans are the largest form of student aid, making up 54 percent of the total aid awarded each year." This is typical, everyone in higher education talks about aid this way, as if loans and grants are just too different flavors of the same beneficent gift, student financial aid.

They're not. The only parts of student loans that are "aid" are the subsidized parts. This comes mainly in the form of reduced interest rates, with lower-income borrowers who receive subsidized Stafford loans also getting their interest paid while they're in school. How much is the subsidy worth? On average, in percentage terms, low single digits. Stafford loans come at a fixed interest rate of 6.8 percent. With a decent credit history, you can go into the private loan market and borrow at less than 10 percent. For people with good credit considering the PLUS loan program for parents of students in college, the 8.5 percent rate can be more expensive than what you can get on the open market. There are certainly some cases, like a low-income student with poor credit, where the subsidy is higher. But on average, we're talking pennies on the dollar. Which means that students aren't getting nearly as much "financial aid" as we tell them they're getting. They're just paying more for college, plus interest.

One of the reasons loans are described as aid is that historically the benefit was thought to be the availability of the loan. When the federal student loan program was created back in the mid-60s, there was no private student loan market to speak of, and the assumption was that nobody would lend money to students with no assets and credit history, particularly when they thing they were borrowing money to buy (a diploma) can't be repossessed if they default. But the rapid growth in the private loan market shows this is becoming less and less true. In 1997, private loans made up 6% of all student loans. That percentage doubled to 12% by 2001, then doubled again to 24% in 2007.

Now, referring to the total amount of the loan as aid--rather than the small fraction of the aid that is the subsidy--mainly serves to obscure the rising cost of college. You apply to college and wonder how the heck you're going to afford tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the college says "Don't worry! We will provide you with a financial aid 'package' to make up the difference between what we're charging and what you can afford." But more and more of that package is just a loan, which means the price of college is actually even more than the gut-wrenching price of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars you've been quoted, once you add the interest, never mind the opportunity cost of having your career decisions determined by the size of your monthly nut once you graduate.

It's time to call student loans what they are: debt, and little more.

Shanghai Diary, Part 2

More thoughts from last week's trip to Shanghai for the 3rd Meeting of the International [College] Rankings Expert Group (IREG-3):

* You know how every time you go to some conference, they give you a little canvass tote bag filled with papers, folders, ID badges, and other sundry meeting materials, and you throw the bag away because (A) you'd look pretty silly walking down the street with an "American Education Research Association 2002" tote bag, and (B) if you didn't you'd have a closet full of them at home? Well, here's the tote bag you get in Shanghai:

China 1, USA 0.

* It's not until you attend a conference conducted in English, attended primarily by people who don't speak English as their first language, held in a city halfway around the world where all the signs are printed in both the native language and English, that you realize what an absurd luxury it is to be English-speaking in this day and age.

* On a related noted, one of the interesting ways people are using to compare colleges these days is through "bibliometrics," which involves using huge commercial databases of scholarly journal articles to count up the number of times articles published by scholars from different universities are cited, giving more weight to more prestigous journals, etc. It's interesting and one of the many things that have been theoretically possible for some time, but practically far too expensive and time-consuming to implement, until cheap fast computing and the Internet made it otherwise. Like most measures, however, bibliometrics have bias--in this case toward the sciences over the humanities, since the scholars in the former publish more cited journal articles than the latter, and toward English language journals, which are much more widely read than journals in other languages. One conference attendee was a humanities professor from Sweden (and who thus wrote in Swedish) who basically said, re: bibliometrics, in a very down-to-earth Swedish way, "So I guess we're out of luck, then."

* Something I saw walking down an alley full of random street vendors in the older, soon-to-be-demolished-to-make-room-for-another-exotic-glass-skycraper section of Shanghai:

I'm not quite sure what this means, but I don't think it's good.

Dem Candidates on Extending School Time

During the Democratic presidential debate a few nights ago, host Brian Williams asked a question about extending the school day or year. Since this is an issue I've been following, I thought I'd update you on what the candidates think about the idea of a longer school day or school year. The full transcript is here.

Williams asked: Do you believe we in this country need to extend the school day and/or extend the school year? And will you commit to it?

Some excerpts from their 30-second responses included:
Kucinich saying there's a statue above the House of Reps entitled "Peace Protecting Genius", that there's a connection b/w global warring and global warming, and that pre-k and college should be free to all. I'm not getting the connection to school time but maybe it's got something to do with more bake sales and books?
Richardson saying he'll commit to "it" by hiring 100,000 new science and math teachers, getting rid of NCLB, and integrating civics, language and art back into the curriculum. The last point tangentially hits the problem of a narrowing curriculum, which more school time could address, so he's ahead so far.
Obama saying we need more instruction in the classroom, and more money for math and science research. Talking about "more" in general I guess means he's good with the "more school" thing too.
Clinton saying "a family is a child's first school" and that we need to support "it" through "nurse visitation or social work or child care" and that we need pre-k and an "innovation agenda". Also, something about Sputnik and more math and science. She gets a demerit just for bringing up Sputnik.
Edwards saying we still have two public school systems, we need pre-k, better nutrition, a national teaching university, incentive pay, and second-chance schools for dropouts. A lot of interesting education ideas, pre-k the only one that hits on extending school time and even that is not really what the extended school debate is about at this point.
Dodd saying how proud he was to be Head Start's Senator of the Decade, says the feds need to be a better partner with locals, and that community colleges should be tuition-free. Again, invoking head starters and then maybe something meaningful is hidden in his comment about fed-local supports?
And there was Biden saying: Yes. We should go to school longer, we should have a minimum of 16 years of education, and we should focus these efforts on the poorest kids.

This was a lightening round (30 sec limit) and the issue of extending school time is complicated so I didn't expect anyone to get into the many pros and cons of implementing and paying for this type of reform. But it was, after all, a yes or no question. So the prize goes to Biden on this one.

Small (podlike, academy-style, learning community, schools-within-a) School

Small schools are not the hot topic anymore, at least not like they were ten years ago. This is unfortunate because it is now, after more than a decade of experimentation and research and writing, that we really have something to learn from. But so goes education reform.

Still, small schools reform has a little (I won't say small) stream of federal funding in the Small Learning Communities Initiative–$93 million this past year). And they are still touted by philanthropists and ed reformers as a "modernization" approach for high schools and middle schools (in crowded company with early college, dual enrollment, IB programs, et al).

So it seems we still clearly value the goal of small for our schools. It's hard to find a high school out there that isn't trying, somehow, to get smaller. Small schools, schools-within-schools, small learning communities (SLCs), "houses" or "families" or "pods" or "academies", as well as charters and magnets, which both often highlight their smaller size as a benefit–the one sure thing is that there is great variation in how we intend to get small. I would add that, depending on the model, there is also great variation in the degree to which small really means small. I've seen SLCs- and dare admit that I've been a part of creating them- that bring teachers and kids together into a "learning community" in the same huge building with the same huge 2000+ population and with the same average 30+ class size. I can't say that the "school" or the "learning community" seemed much smaller, to the kids or to the teachers. And I know principals who nearly pulled their hair out over the scheduling nightmares it created. But I've also seen it work, even for large traditional high schools. Albeit with a lot of staff and community support, large schools that break into small schools really can function as separate small organizations, where the students and parents and staff create a new structure and a new culture. And, like charters, these have a sense of new vision and purpose and "small community" that seem to work. But, again like charters, there are also a whole host of questions about cost and space and sustainability.

Edweek captured these and other worthy comments and questions about small schools–what the term actually means and what it looks like in practice– in an online chat on Tuesday, transcript here worth reading.

Scholarly Spirits

In the spirit of the holiday, today’s Inside Higher Ed has an interview with the author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Gets you thinking about hauntings at your own alma mater.

Shanghai Diary

Greetings from the other side of the world. I'll post pictures and offer lengthier observations that aren't clouded by the effect of the 12-hour time difference on my mental state when I get back later this week. A few notes in the meantime:

*Shanghai is vast. Once you get outside of the Bund and the older touristy areas like the French Concession, it's just huge swathes of helter-skelter construction, wide boulevards, and liberal use of neon. It's like Houston crossed with Las Vegas except ten times bigger and everyone is Chinese.

*There's really been an explosion in activity internationally around college rankings. Twenty-five years ago it was pretty much just U.S. News & World Report; now there are multiple global higher education rankings (like those produced by Shanghai Jia Tong University, host of the event), as well as lots of countries doing internal rankings, continental rankings, etc. Apparently the Malaysian equivalent of Margaret Spellings got canned a few years ago when the state university dropped 19 places in the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (even though the decline was entirely a function of a switch in the methodology).

*I wish I could say that I was able to listen to a half-hour presentation from the very nice woman from the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education describing their new, quite sophisticated college rankings system without mentally composing various snarky blog posts with titles beginning "Cultural Learnings of...." But that would be a lie.

More later this week.

The Gifted Island

New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is starting his revamp of the city’s gifted education program by limiting admission to only those students who score in the top 5 percent on two citywide exams. According to the NYT article, one of the tests used, the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, “gauges students’ understanding of colors, letters, numbers, sizes, comparisons and shapes.” But according to the results of an NCES study released today, sorting students based on a test is unlikely to address problems of equal access in NYC’s “gifted and talented” system.

Findings highlighted from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which assessed preschoolers’ knowledge and skills, included:

Children with two-parent families scored higher than children with single-parent families in several aspects of early literacy: letter recognition, or children’s ability to identify letters of the alphabet; phonological awareness, or understanding of the sounds and structure of spoken language; and conventions of print, or understanding such aspects as the reading of English text from left to right.

The percentage of children demonstrating proficiency in numbers and shapes ranged from 40 percent among lower socioeconomic status (SES) families to 87 percent in higher SES families.

Given these results, won’t the tests Chancellor Klein wants to use only reinforce existing socio-economic divisions among who participates in "gifted" programs, maintaining the heaviest concentration of “gifted and talented” in the wealthy Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Also, do we want to be testing and sorting kids before they even start school? Research from social psychologists indicates that labeling kids as “gifted” impacts both student and teacher expectations, and subsequently student academic success. It seems to me that offering a “gifted and talented” curriculum (i.e., engaging, challenging, creative) to all students wouldn’t be such a bad idea, rather than reserving these "islands of relatively happy functionality" for students who test well.

Obama's Plan(ning) for Education

So it looks like Obama's going to announce a plan on education. Good. Now, c'mon. With a record of ideas and nearly a year now on the Education Committee, you've got plenty of good stuff to work with. We're waiting and we're expecting something better than this.

Cloud-y Thinking

Via This Week in Education, Time's John Cloud says:

Harvard professor Martin Feldstein used to tell students in his introductory economics class that economists agree on 99% of the issues in the field. From the nature of monopolies to the basic laws of inflation, Feldstein asserted, economists of all political stripes are in accord on the same principles. He claimed that what we read about in the popular press are the 1% of economic issues where the data support no clear-cut conclusion.

I'm pretty sure Feldstein was exaggerating the 99-1 split in economics, but I have often thought that education research shows precisely the opposite ratio of agreement to disagreement. Education experts seem to concur on almost nothing. Research in the field is so politicized and contradictory that you can find almost any study to support your view. If economics is a 99-1 science, education is a 1-99 circus.

Cloud's characterization of education research is exaggerated and, frankly, kind of obnoxious. Education is more politicized than I'd like, but I don't see how that makes it different from other fields. Alas, what a shame that education research doesn't enjoy the pristinely empirical, de-politicized, consensus-rich environment that characterizes debates over tax policy, entitlement reform, and other issues studied by economists like Martin Feldstein.

Most of Cloud's piece is about the relative efficacy of public schools vs. private schools. Conventional wisdom, along with a fair amount of research, has it that private schools are marginally better. But then the Center on Education Policy comes out with a study that suggests otherwise. Aha! says Cloud. Apparently, if education research were a "science" not a "circus" there would be no such disagreement. Moreover, CEP is allegedly an "advocacy group for public schools" (they're not), so they can't be trusted.

I reality, the tendency for education researchers to draw the differing conclusions that so frustrate Cloud stems from the fact that the things education researchers often compare are, obectively speaking, not that different from one another. When you aggregate lots of private schools together and compare them to lots of public schools, the two populations are pretty similar. The same is true when comparing public schools to charter schools, certified teachers to non-certified teachers, fourth graders nationwide in 2006 to fourth graders nationwide in 2007, etc. When actual variance is small, legitimate differences in methodology, population, etc. can put one study on the plus side of zero and the other on the minus--not because one researcher is lying for political reasons and one isn't, but because they're both trying to quantify effects that are objectively de minimis.

Apparently, this frustrates journalists who crave certainty and simple answers.

Note: Erratic blogging over the next week from me as I'm leaving tomorrow morning for the "3rd Meeting of the International [College] Rankings Expert Group" in Shanghai. I missed the first two and I hear the after-parties are insane. Assuming various electronic connections and conversions work as planned, I'll be posting pictures and random observations.

Everyone is Wrong About Vouchers

Both Ezra Klein and Megan McCardle post about vouchers today, and both are wrong, albeit in completely different ways. Megan says:

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they've made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.

Vilest? In the age of Dick Cheney, Larry Craig, et al.? More to the point--from a policy standpoint, I'm very supportive of giving parents more educational choices within a public school context. I think charter schools are clearly the right way to do this, not vouchers, but at the same time I believe that while some voucher supporters really do want to destroy public education by privatizing the schools, others really do want to help desperately disadvantaged kids get a decent education. It's not a simple issue, and if you're going to take a voucher away from a low-income mother who chose to put her child in a better private school, you'd better have a damn good alternative lined up for her. Not some hypothetical set of principles or general wish that she wasn't poor, but another, better school, today.

But to say that any well-off parent who exercises school choice by moving to the suburbs has a moral obligation to support vouchers--and is a vile hypocrite if they oppose vouchers--is silly. Voucherizing a whole city like DC wouldn't work. There aren't enough good private schools to teach all those students in the short run, and--more importantly--there wouldn't be enough in the long run. Look at how the private sector provides other services to low-income communities. Not banks, but check cashing outlets and pawn shops. Not decent grocery stores (much less Whole Foods), but convenience stores. The only sit-down restaurant in all of Ward 7 in DC is a Denny's. A Denny's. Why does anyone believe education would be any different? Particularly since--unlike with banks, grocery stores and restaurants--low-income kids don't just need parity, they need something better than what non-poor kids receive.

Well, one might respond, we there are good schools in the suburbs--lets send them there. Leaving aside the obvious massive logistical and political challenges that would entail, that's still a bad solution. Well-functioning communities need local schools that interact with and support the institutions and people around them. Why is it so hard to imagine that we could improve education for city students by building them good public schools where they live? This failure of imagination is also where Ezra falls short, when he says:

...white parents fleeing pockets of poverty is not an argument for school vouchers. What they're fleeing is the poverty -- which, at a certain density, dissolves just about any school.

No, no, no. I know lots of white, relatively affluent parents, here in DC, who are trying to figure out where to educate their young children. They're not fleeing poverty, they're fleeing bad public schools. It's not that they don't want their kids to grow up around other children of different races or income--heck, they'd like that, they're DC liberals for goodness sake. But their higher priority is a safe, quality education, which the city schools do not provide.

Moreover, this idea that poverty inevitably "dissolves" schools just isn't true. There are good charter schools in DC within walking distance of the U Street neighborhoods where the "new blogging elite"--to use Ezra's term($) for people like Megan and himself**--tend to live and socialize. Most of the children in these schools are minorities and qualify for the federal free lunch program. I challenge Ezra to spend an hour, or a day, or however long in one of those schools and then explain how poverty invariably "dissolves" anything.

The single biggest education-related failure of the contemporary left--and the folks like Ezra who write at The American Prospect are guiltier than most--is a willful refusal to recognize that while poverty matters, schools matter too, and some schools are much better than others. Since they're generally smart folks, I can only assume that this refusal is purposful and a function of the fact that they see good schools for poor children as compromising some larger narrative or effort aimed at reducing the number of poor children in the first place. For the sake of future generations, I hope they succeed, but I wish they weren't making education worse for this generation in the meantime.


**UPDATE 1: Ezra notes here that this quote was taken out of context and wasn't intended, as I state above, as a self-aggrandizing label for himself and his friends. My bad.

UPDATE 2: Dana Goldstein offers some thoughtful comments here, and points out that TAP's range of work on education is more intellectually diverse than I imply. She says:

What I would like to see is public school choice that regionalizes education in such a way as to encourage kids from more affluent families to attend high quality public magnet and public charter schools in nearby poorer neighborhoods or cities. This provides a good, close-to-home education for poor kids and integrates schools without having to wait for concentrated poverty and wealth to be wiped off the map. It also encourages average or under-performing urban schools to catch up with better specimens within their system, and provides them with models for success.

That seems reasonable.

The Dangers of Defaulting

FinAid.org has a loan default calculator on its website that calculates how much it costs to default on student loans. I calculated the default costs with my current federal loan and the results were startling. In my situation (long repayment term, low interest rate), the total cost of my loan after 12 months of non-payment would increase nearly 80 percent.

And if after defaulting I paid the minimum each month for the life of the loan, the added collection costs would mean paying off my loan until I am SEVENTY. I’d be cashing in social security checks before I paid off my student loan debt.

FinAid.org also has a calculator that looks specifically at the impact of collection costs on how long it takes to pay off student loan debt after a default. Right now, maximum collection costs—fees charged by collection agencies—are not well-defined in the federal loan program, but can be as high as 40 percent. If I defaulted and a 40 percent collection cost were added to my loan, I would have to live until 104 to pay off my loans. Well, at least student loan debt is discharged when you die.

Student Loan Debt through Rose-Colored Glasses

The College Board made news this week with the release of its latest Trends in College Prices and Trends in Student Aid reports, which showed tuition rising faster than inflation and student grant aid lagging behind. The reports also showed continued growth in student borrowing, particularly in private education loans that are not guaranteed or subsidized by the federal government. And so the trend continues—higher college prices and higher debt for students.

But how much of a burden is this growing student loan debt? If you look at the Department of Education’s student loan default rates—the percentage of students not repaying their loans—student loan debt isn’t much of a problem. The Department of Education’s reported default rates are still remarkably low. The logical conclusion from these low default rates is that students must be just fine managing their debt – or are they?

A recent Education Sector CYCT shows that some students—those with high debt, low incomes, and minority students—are at much higher risk of defaulting on their loans than overall default rates indicate. And the average time from graduation to the first default is four years—two years longer than the Department of Education follows students for its calculations. According to this Business Week article, even loan companies don’t put much stock in the Department of Education calculations and prefer to look at lifetime default rates.

If lawmakers, college officials, and the general public want an accurate picture of student loan defaults—an important indicator of how well students are handling their debt—we need default rates disaggregated by student characteristics and data that follows students over the life of their loan. While this might paint a less-rosy picture of student loan debt, it will be a far more accurate indicator of how well students are managing their debt.

Money's Worth for New Teachers

Spend your money on mentoring new teachers, says a new report by the New Teacher Center. Not surprising that a center that provides training to new teachers would issue a report saying we should provide training to new teachers... But the findings by themselves are compelling. Their cost-benefit analysis, released yesterday at a Hill briefing, finds that for every $1 spent on new teacher induction, the return to society by year 5 is an impressive $1.66. At the district level, that translates to $1.88 for every dollar invested. The report adds to a growing body of work that supports beginning teacher induction as a cost-effective strategy to improve the overall quality of the teacher workforce.

For district and state leaders thinking about this approach, which they should, the Center's report estimates a per teacher cost of about $6,600 for a program that supports 119 new teachers (total cost of $786,000 for the district program). There's a much more detailed breakdown of costs, and benefits, in the full report here.

More Good Education Labor News from NYC

It's been a good month for education labor in New York City.

First there was the announcement of an important new merit pay plan supported by both the district administration and the United Federation of Teachers. Now, as reported in the New York Times, "In the largest successful organizing drive in New York City in half a century, 28,000 child care providers will join the city’s teachers’ union as the result of an overwhelmingly pro-union vote."

This strikes me as good news all around. For the child care workers surely, who are currently paid less than $20,000 a year on average, often without health care and other benefits. But also for parents, children, and society at large. The transition to an economy where women are becoming fully engaged in the workplace has been, in historical terms, remarkably rapid. We're still catching up on the long-term ramifications, one of which is the need for a much more robust, high-quality child care infrastructure. And an important part of that is making sure that child care workers are well-supported, trained, represented, and compensated.

Godless Educrats?

The Atlantic's 150th Anniversary issue arrived at my house last week, and I've been leafing through the selection of short essays at the front about "The Future of the American Idea." The quality varies a lot--Edward O. Wilson's 400 words are a model of economy and clarity, the policiticians, not so much. One of the contributors is Tim LaHaye, minister and author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series. Given the chance to say anything he wanted about religion and America, he decided to focus his scarce resources by writing about($) ...vouchers, concluding:

Until we break the secular educational monopoly that currently expels God, Judeo-Christian moral values, and personal accountability from the halls of learning, we will continue to see academic performance decline and the costs of education increase, to the great detriment of millions of young lives. This could easily be changed if parents were empowered to spend their tax dollars at schools of their choosing—and not at schools chosen by anti-God, anti-Christian humanist educrats, like those who now control public education from kindergarten through graduate school.

It's not so much the ideas themselves that are noteworthy (other than how extreme they are), but the choice of topic. I'm guessing LaHaye has a wide range of grievances when it comes to American laws, society, and culture. I had always assumed that choice and school prayer issues were relatively far down on that totem pole, more the thing you say when you have to say something about education than a core part of the ideological agenda. But maybe I was wrong.

Least Surprising Education Headline of the Year

The Center on American Progress sponsored an event last week focused on college rankings. I was on the panel along with a representative of U.S. News & World Report, and recent late-night comedy star Paul Glastris. During the Q&A, I made a point that I try to make whenever someone gives me a chance, and sometimes even when they don't, which is that the problem of constantly-rising college costs is actually more connected to the U.S. News rankings than people commonly understand. It's well-known that colleges engage in various shenanigans to boost their rankings, like counting a $15 donation a student given by a senior as three $5 donations over the subsequent three years, in order to boost the "alumni giving rate." But that's small potatoes in terms of what drives the rankings; the big opportunities are tied to money. 10 percent of the rankings are a function of spending per student (by contrast, admissions rates are only 1.5 percent), while an even larger percentage is driven by things that cost money to buy, like small class sizes and well-paid professors.

That translates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you're a selective college), its ranking would go up. All of this stems from a deficit of reliable, comparable, institution-level measures of quality. Thus we have this crazy higher education market with no value proposition, one where cost and quality are assumed to be the same thing -- and in the sense that high-end higher education is a luxury good that primarily serves to signal your exclusive ability to acquire and pay for it, they are the same thing.

Like many higher education problems, U.S. News exacerbates this problem but didn't create it; there are a whole host of long-established values and incentives that reward institutions for raising as much money as possible and spending it with little care for efficiency.

Therefore, it comes as a surprise to absolutely no one to see this headline in the New York Times: "College Costs Rising Rapidly." Once again, average tuition and fees for public and private universities rose at more than double the rate of inflation. Higher ed folks can--and will--make whatever excuses and caveats they like about net prices, public appropriations, appropriate price deflators, etc., but the bottom line is that by whatever measure you choose--percent of GDP, median income, anything--higher education simply costs more today than it ever has before, and there is precious little evidence to show that those resources are being spent in a way that correspondingly increases benefits for the students and taxpayers who foot the bill.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias comments here, Unfogged here.

Richard Simmons, No Child Left Behind, and Me

Via the NEA's anti-NCLB blog, we learn that Richard Simmons wants phys-ed to be included as a "multiple measure" in the reauthorized version of NCLB. Really! He even went on Letterman (Remember Letterman? Those were the days. The '80s, to be specific) to promote the plan. This is good news--not in an education policy sense, of course, but because it gives me a reason to tell my Richard Simmons story.

The year: 1993. The setting: Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Having graduated from college the previous spring, I'm taking a year off before starting grad school. Not for any good reason, mind you, I just forgot to sign up for the GRE in time to apply for the '92-'93 school year. I've got 12 months to expand my personal, cultural, an intellectual horizons before heading back to academia, but my first priority is to find a place to live, since my room in the fraternity house is spoken for. I consider moving home, but my Dad starts throwing ugly words like "rent" into the conversation. My friend Jon had just finished up at UNC-Chapel Hill, and suggests I move there for the year, on the grounds that (A) the weather is great, and (B) the social life is even better. Unable to refute this air-tight logic, I pack up everything I own, which takes up roughly 40 percent of the space in my Honda Civic hatchback, and drive south. We move into a two-bedroom apartment in a complex on the outskirts of town where the police have established a sub-station to save time and fuel expenses and the rent is $200 a month, total. We get jobs as waiters at a chain barbecue restaurant, where we work two lunches a week and Friday and Saturday nights from 6PM to midnight. The rest of the time is spent playing pickup basketball and Sega Genesis, as well as availing ourselves of the afore-mentioned social life. I become a devoted, life-long Tar Heels fan for the entirety of the 1992-93 basketball season. Life is sweet.

When we're awake in the morning, we listen to Howard Stern. I know, I know. This was, I must emphasize, Stern in his prime, before he got tired and copied and his moment as King of All Media came and went. He had a kind of rude greatness back then. Richard Simmons was a frequent guest, and he was always hilarious. One day I'm reading the sports page and I see an advertisement for some kind of Richard Simmons event, where he will be live in person at the local mall. Since my schedule is clear for, roughly, the next 175 consecutive days, we hop in the Civic and rush to meet the great man in person. Sure enough, it's a huge event in the mall atrium, with a line of people circling the fountain under the skylight with the fake plants (you know the one I'm talking about). Someone is handing out these little laminated wallet-sized cards with Richard's list of ten personal affirmations printed on both sides. They read like a verbatim transcript of future Minnesota Senator Al Franken's Stuart Smalley's "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and people like me" SNL sketch. We begin laughing uncontrollably. Again, let me remind you of the year and suggest that this sort of obnoxious behavior had not yet been definitively branded as the oh-so-typically-Gen-X conceit it surely was.

Suddenly, ringing out across the Mall atrium, we hear, in that unmistakable Simmons whine, a piercing cry: "You!"

We stop. Who, us?

"Yes, you. Come over here. Come here."

Richard is yelling at us! In the mall! It may be the greatest thing ever! We rush across the atrium, dodging various Simmons devotees as we go.

"Richard!" we say. Not sure what to say next. It's Richard Simmons!

"I saw you making fun of the personal affirmations. Tch! You should be ashamed!"

"Richard! We listen to you on Howard Stern all the time!"

"Oh! I don't know why I go back there. He's so mean. Isn't he mean?"

"Richard! You're awesome!"

"Thank you. But you you shouldn't make fun..."

And that was about it, as the people in line behind us were starting to get restless. Up to that point (heck, maybe still) my closest brush with greatness. Richard didn't stop going on Howard Stern, of course, or Letterman, or trying to make people feel better about themselves and be healthy at the same time. It's 14 years later, his NCLB proposal is silly, and we probably won't meet again. But I'm glad I met him then, I'm glad he's still doing his Richard Simmons thing now.