School Choice in Little Beirut

I’m traveling in Portland, Oregon right now and noticed the December, “Best Schools” issue of Portland Monthly magazine, with 631 private and public schools rated. I picked it up, curious to see what characteristics they felt were important when ranking schools, figuring this might hold some relevance to the characteristics parents consider important. Now, this is taken with a giant grain of salt—the target demographic for this magazine isn’t exactly the one policy wonks usually think about when discussing school choice (a $114K 2008 Maserati made their gift guide recommendations, and I picked up the magazine in the checkout line at Whole Foods).

First interesting thing to note is that they highlight the Portland public school transfer system as an option for parents interested in living in one school zone, but sending their kids to school in another. Apparently, about a third of Portland Public School students don’t attend their neighborhood school. Looks like I might need to come back out here to do some school choice research. The first step they recommend? To attend “Celebrate” at the Portland Expo Center, where parents can meet representatives from every school in the district.

Second interesting thing is that the information in their “Best Schools” public school guide included a mix of federal measures of school performance, state ratings, and additional information, like teacher-student ratio, that parents consider important. Ethnic diversity, the percentage of “non-Caucasian” students attending a school, was also one of the characteristics listed. This just underscores that, despite what people might say in surveys, demographics do play a part in school decisions and it’s important for policymakers to be aware of that when designing school choice programs.

Third, compared with the variety of information on school performance available for public schools, the private school guide looked a little paltry. Most of the categories were descriptive—tuition range, percent receiving financial aid, religious affiliation. The only student performance measures available were average SAT reading and math scores, and those were only available for schools with a 12^th grade. If I were shopping for a school, this would leave me a little unsatisfied after the abundance of information about public schools.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised when I read this magazine. In the city where I grew up, a magazine catering to people who buy Rolexes would not even bother ranking the public schools, much less focus most of the print space on them. So it’s encouraging to see a city—even if it’s arguably one of the more progressive places in the country (dubbed “little Beirut” by Bush I)—where public schools warrant multiple pages of description.

The Same Same-Sex Story

Peter Meyer, writing in the newest Education Next, tells us a familiar story of same-sex schools. He cites NAEP statistics that show boys aren't doing as well as girls, spotlights a handful of successful single-gender schools and quotes people who reference but do not cite "study after study" that demonstrates that both boys and girls in single-gender schools are more academically successful and ambitious than their peers in co-ed schools. He uses the also-familiar hook of choice saying that choice brings opportunity. He is right about this--choice does bring opportunity-- but he is wrong to equate the single-sex education movement to a "liberation from prejudice", just as the Gadfly was wrong to call it a "matter of basic civil rights."


The "civil right" is a good quality education. Not the choice to be educated with any particular population. And the fact that Martin Luther King III really likes Brighter Choice charters, which Meyer and Davis (for Gadfly) can't help but point out, does not make single-sex education inherently better for black and Latino kids. Nor does it make it "the affirmative action for the sexes," as Meyer, who also can't help but write about his own experience at an all-boys Catholic school, refers to it.

Absolutely, we have a race and gender problem in our schools. The h.s. grad rate for black and Latino males is somewhere below 50 percent and far far worse in central city schools. But that doesn't mean race- and gender-specific schools are the solution. I have my own set of anecdotes about black male students who thrived in an all-black all-male setting. But we currently have no empirical evidence to support that the race/gender characteristic matters most, or if at all, for student learning. And that is the point, right? Student learning. There is some new research on the efficacy of single sex schools in the pipeline and if it shows that separating kids by sex is what makes the difference, I'll be the first to say so. But please let's offer choices because they really do make a difference for these kids, not just because it seems to make sense on the surface or because it appeals to our need to feel like civil rights workers.

Sooner or Later

There's a pretty strong consensus among ed-reform types that the goal of high school--and by extension, K-12 education as a whole--should be to prepare students to "succeed in the workplace and/or higher education." The words vary, but usually that's what people say. One of the problems with NCLB is that it's not really focused on this goal, because it's essentially an elementary / middle school law, testing kids in every grade from 3 to 8, but only once in high school. Moreover, students usually take the high school test in the 10th grade, and the passing standards aren't that hard, often at the 8th grade level or so. That means that we're effectively holding schools accountable for making sure students have the skills and knowledge they need when they begin high school, not when they finish.

Not surprisingly, a lot of students leave high school unprepared for work or higher education, and it doesn't take long for this to become apparent. Over 75 percent of high school graduates go to college, and colleges have their own standards for what students need to know in order to begin college work. If students don't meet them--usually by failing an entrance test--they're stuck in non-credit-bearing, remedial courses. Essentially, they end up borrowing money to pay the local public university or community college to teach them what their high school should have taught them for free.

The scale of this problem becomes pretty obvious when you look at something like the Spring 2008 schedule of classes at the University of the District of Columbia, the only public university in DC and the destination for many graduates of our sorry local school system. The math department is offering:

16 sections of "Basic Mathematics"
13 sections of "Introduction to Algebra"
9 sections of "General College Math I"
7 sections of "General College Math II"
4 sections of "Intermediate Algebra"
2 sections each of "Pre Calc with Trig I," "Pre Calc with Trig II," "Calculus I," "Calculus II," and "Calculus III"
1 section each of "Differential Equations," "Number Theory," "Linear Algebra," "Advanced Calculus," etc. etc.

Section after section of courses covering material that a lot of the students attending DC private colleges finished before they even got to high school.

Gifted Children, Remedial Editing

The Washington Post has taken a perfectly reasonable article on an important subject--the challenge of differentiating instruction for children of variable abilities--and ruined it by forcing it through through the tube of the standard-issue NCLB controversy. While it's a good idea to use different method to teach diverse children, apparently all K-12 education stories in 2007 must be framed in exactly the same way. The article begins:

Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.

Once again we're confronted with the bone-tired cliche of "unintended consequences," the hook for at least 50% of all education policy stories ever written. They tried to do one thing, but then some other thing happened! Ooooh...interesting!

After the requisite quote from the advocate for gifted children saying exactly what you would expect an advocate to say, we get more detail about what "some scholars" are saying:

"We don't find any evidence that the gifted kids are harmed," said Chicago economist Derek A. Neal. "But they are certainly right, the gifted advocates, if they claim there is no evidence that No Child Left Behind is helping the gifted."

Except that's not what the advocates are saying. They're saying, how to put this...oh right, they're saying NCLB is "diverting resources and attention from the gifted." Making things worse than however they were before NCLB, in other words.

I'm not debating the underlying issue here--heck, I hope NCLB is diverting resources and attention from the gifted to the non-gifted; if it's not, it isn't working very well. Resources and attention are limited and the low-performing children need them more.

But if you're going to frame an article this way, you have to make sure that your lede, in addition to having a clear thesis and a connection to the events of the day, isn't directly contradicted by the evidence you present to readers later in the piece.

Knocking Some Vegans Together to Start a Mosh Pit

Carrie Brownstein, of the late, lamented, forever awesome Sleater-Kinney, has a new blog. Here's a sample:

Each of us has a deal-breaker when it comes to songs, albums, or musicians....My deal-breaker is preciousness: when the music is a tiny, baby bird that needs us to be nurturing and respectful, otherwise it can't spread its wings. I like quiet music, folk music, solo artists--it's not a matter of volume or numbers, but it is a matter of art being able to stand on its own two feet. I don't think music needs to be coddled, no matter how delicate or soft it sounds. When a band or singer makes me go "awwww," as I would at the sight of a newborn child, then that is a band that needs a pacifier not an amplifier. Other indicators of preciousness include, but are not limited to: matching old-timey outfits; mumbling, soft-spoken stage banter that trails off and is quickly followed by a cutesy smile, which for some reason garners huge cheers from the audience; being so nervous on stage that someone in the crowd has to yell "you can do it!" or "we love you" (exception made here for child performers); asking people to lie down on the floor for the next song; and any audience sing-along or participation so complicated that it needs to be explained BEFORE the song starts. When I am at an overly precious show, I am often filled with contrarian, immature urges: suddenly banging a gong, stepping on a whoopee cushion, or knocking some vegans together to start a mosh pit. I think what bothers me the most about preciousness is that it takes good form and reduces it to good manners, and turns performance into charade. I have no trouble taking music seriously or considering it special, but I don't need to be instructed about why it is.

Normally I'd take the time to invent some half-plausible thematic connection between the underlying ideas of this post and various trenchant education policy issues as a means of justifying this being written on company time, but everyone's already left for Thanksgiving and seriously, who am I kidding? I miss Sleater-Kinney! Plus, I kind of think there's an entire life philosophy lurking inside this post.

Have a great holiday.

Don't Just Blame the Football Players

Via Inside Higher Ed, Rainy River Community College in International Falls, Minnesota decided to end its football program because of high student loan default rates. According to the International Falls Daily Journal article, Rainy River has the highest student loan default rate in the country at 31.1 percent—that means that one-third of Rainy River’s students that take out federal student loans default on those loans within two years of leaving the college. And as I showed in an October Charts You Can Trust, it is very likely that Rainy River’s 10-year loan default rate is actually much higher.

With such a high default rate, Rainy River is at risk of losing its eligibility to participate in the federal loan program completely, meaning that no students could receive federal loans. But what do student loan default rates have to do with the football program?

Apparently the school had a difficult time getting football players to find the right balance between athletics and academics. And so they cut the football program to remove the distraction. I hope, though, that they are planning more significant changes to address the high default rate. As I also showed in the October Charts You Can Trust, default rates are much higher for students with large amounts of debt or low salaries after graduation. Rainy River can make a big impact on its default rate by finding ways to reduce the amount students are borrowing, increase their graduation rate, and ensure students have marketable job skills when they leave.

As my colleague, Kevin Carey, showed in his Washington Monthly article on community colleges, some are doing a better job than others. And it looks like Rainy River has a lot to learn from community colleges like top-rated Cascadia Community College in Washington, which boasts a two-year default rate of just 5.6 percent.

On "Privatization"

According to the Post, DCPS Chanchellor Michelle Rhee is thinking about hiring some outside organizations to manage the district's lowest-performing schools. The article begins as follows:

As Rhee Weighs Privatization, Doubts Abound

By Theola Labbe and V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 18, 2007

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, in considering turning over the management of 27 failing public schools to nonprofit charter education firms, is sending a clear signal that she intends to shake up the moribund bureaucracy that has failed generations of students.

But experts and school advocates say they are uneasy about the lack of details surrounding her idea, particularly given evidence across the country that charters and schools under private management sometimes fare no better than traditional public schools.

"There's nothing in the literature [to suggest] that privatization will get you revolutionary results," said Henry M. Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College.

It's worth noting that the word "privatization" means different things in different contexts. In health care, for example, it can mean selling public or non-profit hospitals to private companies, which then own them outright and run them at a profit. That seems like a reasonable use of the word "privatize."

What Rhee is considering, by contrast, is hiring either a for-profit or a non-profit organization to take over certain administrative and management functions for a fixed period of time, with the schools, teachers, and students remaining firmly in the public realm--accountable to public officials, paid with public funds, remaining public employees, etc. That's a lot different then selling off a hospital, to the point where I'm not sure using the same word to describe both scenarios is useful.

As to whether this would be good for DCPS, I imagine that depends mostly on who they hire and how they structure the arrangement. If I said, "Hey, I'm thinking about renovating my bathroom, any advice?" and you said "There's nothing to suggest that hiring someone to renovate your bathroom guarantees that you'll end up with a great bathroom, or a better bathroom than you'd get if you did the work yourself. Historically, people who have hired bad bathroom renovators tend to end up with, statistically speaking, bad bathrooms." I'd think you were either an idiot or a jerk being deliberately obtuse. Of course. Doesn't that go without saying?

Perspectives on Immigrant English Learners

Edward Gresser is an expert on trade policy at PPI*, but he also spends his time tutoring first generation immigrant students. He offers his perspective on teaching these students in Education Sector's newest First Person essay. More practical ideas for educators of ELLs here.

Btw, Gresser also just released a new book on American liberalism and globalization.

*EdSector and Eduwonk leader Andy Rotherham is a senior fellow at PPI.

After Five-Year Absence, International Students are Returning to American Colleges & Universities

In March, 2007, Margery Yeager and I reported on the overall downward trend in foreign student enrollment at American colleges and universities. Of the many factors contributing to this decline, perhaps the most significant were the strict, hastily enacted F-1 student visa restrictions implemented in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. This led to a steep drop-off in the number of foreign students coming to the US, but the effects were especially pronounced for students from the Middle East. Political and diplomatic tensions with China also resulted in a decline in the number of students from that country, not to mention the fact that the subjects Chinese students were often most interested in—mainly in the physical sciences—were seen by the US government as being sensitive from a national security standpoint.

As a result of these new restrictions, fewer student visa applications were approved, resulting in a significant decline in the number of international students coming to the US. Coincidentally, this all happened as other countries were getting more aggressive in their efforts to recruit international students. In addition, some of the top sending countries, like China, Korea, and Japan were experiencing domestic transformations that resulted in fewer of their students seeking educational opportunities abroad.

However, the downward post-Sept. 11 trend appears to be ending. The Chronicle of Higher Education—citing the most recent "Open Doors" report put out by the Institute of International Education (IIE)—reports that the number of foreign students pursuing higher education in the United States is rebounding to pre-Sept. 11 levels. For the 2006–07 academic year, the number of new foreign students was 582,984, just shy of the all-time high of 586, 323, reached in the 2002–03 school year. Together, these new international students contributed about $14.5 billion to the US economy.

This upward trend has been attributed to several factors, the most prominent of which was the loosening of the post-Sept. 11 student visa restrictions that had resulted in the denial of many F-1 visa applications. The top 5 sending countries were the same as for the previous year, although the orders had switched somewhat, with India and China having replaced South Korea and Japan in first and second place respectively. Also, a Saudi government-funded scholarship program placed Saudi Arabia in the top 20 sending countries for the first time ever. Another newcomer to the top 20 is Viet Nam, where a growing middle class has produced a 30-percent jump in enrollment for Vietnamese students in the US.

The "Open Doors" report also reveals a changing pattern in enrollment among international students as more of them are enrolling in non-4-year programs. For example, in 2006, 6.7 percent of F-1 visas issued went to students enrolled at community colleges. The figures are even more striking in the case of Vietnamese students. Over 50 percent of approved visas went to students who were planning to attend community colleges in the US. Also, a sizeable portion of new enrollments have been in non-degree-granting institutions like English-language schools and professional-certificate programs. This particular category of student numbers around 39,000, a 27-percent increase over the previous year. This change in enrollment patterns is at least partly due to high tuition costs, since all international students have to pay the out-of-state rate at the institutions they attend.

But despite the positive trend in the overall student enrollment numbers, the "Open Doors" report contains some words of caution. It reports a 1.5 percent drop in undergraduate enrollments and no increase in Ph.D.-level enrollments. Also, the number of European students fell by 2.3 percent, a drop attributed to more European colleges and universities offering courses in English. Perhaps most seriously, a brief produced by the American Council on Education shows that other countries are increasing their efforts to recruit international students, and thus drawing potential students away from the US. From 1999 to 2004, international-student enrollment growth rates were: 108 percent for Japan; 81 percent for France; 46 percent for Germany; 42 percent for Australia; 29 percent for Britain; but only 17 percent for the US. And, while the numbers of students coming to the US is on the rebound, many international students are frustrated that there is no coordination among different agencies in the US. Victor C. Johnson, associate executive director for public policy at an international educators' association, says that although American colleges and universities are successfully recruiting more international students, some recently enacted rules and regulations make it harder for students to, for example, get drivers licenses or Social Security numbers once they are in the US.

Ultimately, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the authors of the "Open Doors" article are right to celebrate the return of foreign students to American universities and colleges. In addition to the money they put into the US economy through tuition payments and living expenses, foreign students represent a large and diverse talent pool that becomes even more valuable if international students choose to remain in the US after completing their studies. Demonstrating an understanding of the value of international students, the US government has eased many of the post-Sept. 11 visa restrictions that had kept so many away. That is a good first step. But as other countries are becoming more and more aggressive in recruiting international students, the US cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It's not enough to simply let students into the country and hope they can fend for themselves. The next step would be to put in place a streamlined system within which the various agencies foreign students have to deal with—Social Security Administration, Departments of Motor Vehicles, insurance companies—work more efficiently to make life easier for international students in the US.

--Posted by Abdul Kargbo

Ohio State Football and the Fallacy of Self-Accountability

A few weeks ago, I successfully predicted the exact number of points the University of Michigan would score against arch-rival Ohio State in their annual football showdown, thus outperforming legions of so-called sports experts while inadvertantly illustrating the fallacy of self-accountability in K-12 and higher education.

The prediction came at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), where I presented a paper on college rankings. The point of the paper, which we'll be re-publishing here at Education Sector in a few weeks, was to parse criticisms of the U.S. News and World Report rankings and criticisms of rankings per se. I wrote:

Reasonable consumers of rankings understand...that the real-world difference between institutions on a ranking list doesn't necessarily correspond to the ordinal difference.... If Ohio State's football team finishes the season ranked #1 in the country due its 14-0 record and 17-point average margin of victory, including a crushing 56-3 defeat of Michigan in front of 107,501 heartbroken fans in Ann Arbor, while the #2 and #3 ranked teams both finished at 12-2, people understand that the difference between #1 and #2 is bigger than the difference between #2 and #3.

The paper was scheduled for a late afternoon symposium, and I spent the preceding hours listening to discusions like "Community Colleges as a Critique of Neo-Liberalism." So when my turn to speak arrived, I didn't realize that my beloved Buckeyes had suffered a grievious home loss to Illinois, curse them and all they hold dear, just a few hours earlier, ending my hopes for an undefeated season. The Michigan game was yesterday, and I was way off on the first part of the score -- Ohio State managed only 14 points, not 56.

BUT--I was exactly right about Michigan. They scored only 3 points in losing to OSU for the fourth consecutive year and the sixth time in the seven-year career of OSU coach Jim Tressel, ending a regular season that began with humiliating home loss to a Division I-AA school, putting Michigan coach Lloyd Carr's career in jeopardy and vaulting the Buckeyes to their third consecutive Big Ten championship and a spot in the Rose Bowl. Clearly, I need to put together a chart comparing my on-the-record prediction with those of all the alleged football experts and pundits, as a means of selling a subscription-only tout newsletter to gamblers and pigskin junkies.

The point being, if you let individuals or organizations define how they'll be publicly evaluated, this is what you get. People are people, and few are going to be reliably objective about owning up to their successes and failures in a neutral way, particularly when the stakes are high. That's really what The Pangloss Index is all about, as well as this recent piece on higher education accountability I wrote for Change.

This principle was also in display on the front page of this morning's Washington Post, which documented how many states have defined "persistently dangerous" school (one of the eleven Pangloss components) in such a way that even the most violence-wracked schools aren't identified. This shows how nominally holding someone accountable for something, but letting them define how that something will be measured, is worse than not holding them accountable at all, because it creates the illusion of accountability that doesn't exist. When California education officials say "there are no persistently dangerous schools in this state," as they have every year since NCLB was enacted, someone might actualy believe them.

This also deserves comment:

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) has introduced a bill that changes "persistently dangerous schools" to "schools which do not have a safe climate for academic achievement," on the grounds that the name alone was causing anxiety over the policy.

"It's not going to be as threatening for schools," she said. "This will remove the stigma associated with high violence."

Chuck Buckler, Maryland's director of student services and alternative programs, said the original term is unpleasant -- akin to telling parents that they were sending their children to a war zone.

"I don't like the title at all," he said. "When this all came about, I said, 'This is something that's going to be a death knell for a school. Everybody will transfer out.' "

He said he was surprised to find that most parents at the six persistently dangerous schools in Baltimore didn't transfer their children to other schools.

The designation, he found, caused communities to rally around their schools and try to make them safer, an effort he said had brought improvements.

Do we really want to remove the stigma associated with high violence? Because that strikes me as one of the more useful stigmas to have. Maybe parents will try to pull their kids out of persistently dangerous schools, or maybe--as in Baltimore--they'll try to make the school less dangerous. But surely both outcomes are better than pretending the school isn't violent, and leaving students to suffer the consequences.

Pearlstein is Right

Steven Pearlstein, that is, the Washington Post business columnist. You can learn most of what you need to know about why higher education costs so much and what to do about it by reading his two columns on the subject this week (here and here). Today's piece focuses on University of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kerwan:

Kirwan's singular achievement has been to fundamentally change the mind-set on campus, from one that reflexively equated spending with quality to one that is open to measuring inputs and outputs and welcomes the challenge of delivering more for less.

Anyone can now go to the University of Maryland Web site, for example, and call up a report on how each campus, and the system as a whole, is performing on 31 measures, such as acceptance and graduation rates, average faculty salaries and the percentage of operating expenditures going for administration and instruction.

A funny thing happens when you start collecting and publicizing data like these: They expose inefficiencies and get people thinking about how to do things differently. After reviewing the comparative data, for example, Maryland regents decided to concentrate growth on the campuses with the lowest costs.

And once it became apparent that low-income students were graduating with more debt than more well-off students, the university was forced to face up to the embarrassing fact that it was giving out 60 percent of its scholarship money on the basis of "merit" -- financial-aid-speak for using scholarships to buy higher SAT scores and winning athletic teams. The regents have decreed that much more of the aid will be awarded on the basis of financial need.

Higher ed needs more people like this.

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.