In Defense of College Rankings

I've spent a fair amount of time over the last year having various conversations and arguments about college rankings, and one of the problems with the discussion is a tendency to intermingle critiques of rankings per se and critiques of specific rankings, e.g. those produced by U.S. News. For example, people often say things like "Rankings are reductive, overly-simplistic and create perverse incentives for colleges to engage in an arms race for money, status, and student." While the first critiques--reductiveness and over-simplification--apply to all rankings, the perversity of the incentives is wholly a function of what you happen to base your rankings on. If you rank colleges based on good measures, then the incentives could be constructive.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with universities trying to climb the rankings ladder if the ladder leads to the right place. An 2006 Education Sector report explaining how to build such a construct is here.

As a rule, generalized anti-rankings arguments are a lot weaker than those levelled at specific rankings like U.S. News, because the arguments tend to stem from a broader aversion to accountability, competition, and public scrutiny. To read more on this topic, see this paper, "In Defense of College Rankings," which I presented last month at the Association for the Study of Higher Education annual conference.

Also, for a lively ongoing discussion of college rankings, check out Morse Code, a blog written by Bob Morse, the U.S. News rankings guru. Even though U.S. News has an obvious interest in this debate, the blog is actually quite thoughtful and non-propagandizing.

Winerip on Poverty, Etc.

Micheal Winerip covers a new ETS report in the Times today, exploring the relationship between out-of-school factors like single parenthood, TV watching, reading at home, etc. and student achievement. The report--which I have no quarrel with, Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham was a reviewer--finds, to the surprise of no one, that these things make a difference, in the way that one would expect they would.

Therefore, what?

Because this is the question that matters. Those of us who work on education policy for a living have endured listened to a seemingly endless series of arguments around these issues in recent years, where one side says "of course schools are important" and the other side says "of course poverty (or whatever other non-school issue interests them) is important," as if these are debatable questions. So let's state, unequivocally and for the record, that educational outcomes are significantly influenced by things that happen both in school and out of school. Anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot, and anyone who implies that someone else believes otherwise is arguing in bad faith.

Therefore, what?

If you're not willing to answer this question concretely, you really doesn't deserve a seat at the table. Winerip is clearly not up to the challenge. He says "What’s interesting about the report...is how much we know, how often government policy and parental behavior does not reflect that knowledge, and how stacked the odds are against so many children." This--"reflects"--is typical; variants include "recognizes," "acknowledges," "takes into account," etc.

But what would government policy that "reflects" knowledge of the ETS report look like? Winerip appears to have no interest in answering this question, and that makes the statement itself essentially meaningless, since it's clearly written in the context of a policy debate.

NCLB, by contrast, reflects an identifiable perspective and set of resulting policy conclusions that goes something like this: Poverty (I'll use this as a proxy for all outside factors, since it's the issue that comes up the most) matters, but estimates of how much it matters are often overstated, because they don't fully account for two things:

1) The extent to which impoverished students get fewer educational resources like money, highly effective teachers, challenging curricula, etc. This underestimation is not function of dishonest or sloppy research, it's a function of the fact many of these things are hard to fully quantify.

2) The extent to which overall educational quality is sub-optimal, a problem that disproportionately affects low-income, low-achieving students, since they're more sensitive than higher-income, higher-achieving students to differences in educational quality even if those differences are evenly distributed (which of course they're not).

NCLB supporters believe, therefore, that poverty-based barriers to achievement are surmountable, provided that we (A) give poor students more educational resources instead of less, and (B) define "surmountable" in terms of fixed goals, not relative performance. In other words, nobody believes (Richard Rothstein's frequent assertions to the contrary) that schools can, by themselves, make the achievement of poor children indistinguishable from non-poor children, in the sense that they would be equal in all ways. Rather, people believe schools, properly resourced and run, can do enough to help poor children learn essential knowledge and skills. Therefore, it's reasonable to hold schools accountable for that goal. Ergo, NCLB.

The logic is certainly debatable--in the sense that reasonable people can debate it in good faith--and the supporting data is far from conclusive. But it's backed up by significant real-world evidence of the efficacy of schools in general and of some high-poverty schools in particular. And the policy implications are right there on the table, which is what matters most in the end.

On the other hand, Winerip and those like him who have devoted years of their lives to mounting counter-arguments against the current accountability regime are unified in their resolute unwillingness to explain what actual policy conclusions we are meant to draw from their ideas. Again I ask: If not this, what? The NEA and AFT have at least produced some fairly detailed outlines of principles for a different federal law. But when God and the devil are in the details, that's not good enough.

While NCLB in totality is lengthy, the parts that generate most of the controversy are actually pretty short and written in plain English. If you don't like them, fine--serious people can disagree. But if you're not willing to say how they should be different and take responsibility for that position, then you're not, in this debate, a serious person.

Update: Side Effects May Vary, which seems to come at these issues from a libertarian / voucher perspective, complains that post above "seems to imply that there is simply no solution that does not involve the state." So let me clarify: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if you don't like the current law, be specific about what you want instead. The author says children are "languishing in a cruel trap guarded jealously by social planners like Carey and his ilk who venerate the contraption while condemning those of us who wish to extricate their unwilling subjects." Sure, okay. "Extricate"? What does that mean? Universal vouchers? I can't tell. Enlighten us.

Race and IQ

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece forays into the IQ-race debate most recently scandalized by the declaration by James Watson, co-winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, that Watson is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because of Africans’ general lack of intelligence. Gladwell’s article reviews a new book by James Flynn that shows Watson’s comments are almost certainly wrong.

Gladwell starts with a discussion of the Flynn effect, which has documented a steady but gradual rise in IQ scores over time. In order to compensate for the observed 3-point rise every decade, the main measurement instrument, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, has been updated four times to ensure that a score of 100 still equals the absolute average of peers. Without a process called “norming,” the average rises over time. And a score of 70 on the fourth version of the WISC would be much higher on the original version. This matters especially when considering arbitrary cutoff scores for admission to special education or gifted programs. The article cites a study on the 1991 introduction of the WISC III that found that the revision doubled the number of American children labeled mentally retarded if all states followed strict IQ score cutoffs and adopted the new test.

Flynn has also compiled a host of studies showing the effects of culture on IQ. Studies of mixed marriages offer Gladwell a compelling point,

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father.

He also talks about one popular study that looked at births by American GI fathers and German mothers after WWII. African-American GIs sired children who scored almost identically to those of Caucasian fathers.

In a recent Manhattan Institute debate between Flynn and Charles Murray, author the The Bell Curve, Flynn pointed out that black-white IQ score gaps expand as children age. As infants, they score almost identically; the margin increases to 4.5 points by age 4, and then an additional .6 of a point every year until age 24. Murray may ascribe this widening gap as manifestation that genes matter more in the long run, but a more credible argument posits that cultural differences and the availability of stimulating cognitive environments make the difference.

Evidence supports this latter hypothesis. Flynn began dissecting the “model minority” hypothesis for Asian-Americans—that they were naturally smarter and thus became successful—by looking at data from a widely circulated 1975 study. It turned out that research relied on an intelligence test that hadn’t been updated in 20 years, meaning they were taking an easier version and biasing their scores upward. Flynn actually found they scored lower and achieved success despite the disparity. Even more interesting, their children, apparently absorbing a much more enriching childhood, scored 3% higher than average, reversing the prior numbers. This means that effort and the availability of enriching educational opportunities dictate future success. More importantly, as opposed to IQ, these are things educational policymakers can actually address.

The last point to glean from this topic is on the subject of immigration. In the 1920s and 30s, immigrants from Southern Italy scored more than one standard deviation below Americans and Western Europeans on IQ tests. Their scores, in the 70s and 80s, were comparable to those of blacks and Hispanics and fueled discussion about supposed inferiority of Italian genetics. Their scores have risen, and they are no longer the source of isolationist fervor, but maybe the debates of today should be injected with the lessons of the past.

--Guestblogger Chad Aldeman

Undeserved Publicity for Harvard

The Wall Street Journal is flashing the headline "Harvard Cuts Undergrad Prices" at the top of its Web site at the moment, along with an article that begins:

Harvard University sweetened its financial aid for middle class and upper middle-class families, responding to criticism that elite colleges have become unaffordable for ordinary Americans.

That's almost right, except the correct word would be unaccessible not unaffordable. It's good that an unimaginably wealthy institution like Harvard is only going to be charging rich people full freight. But that doesn't mean all that much when your student body is made up primarily of rich people. In the University's prepared statement, President Faust says "This is a huge investment for Harvard." Is it? Compared to what? How much does this increase the university's annual need-based aid expenditures? Will it increase the percentage of student eligible for such aid, and if so by how much? How much more aid will students receive, in percentage terms, compared to what they're getting now?

Harvard's statement concludes by noting that "With the new initiative fully in place this coming year, more than 90 percent of American families will be eligible to benefit from Harvard's exceptionally generous financial aid." I'm sure that's true, but it's also essentially meaningless, since only a tiny minority of that 90 percent attend high schools like these, identified just last week by the WSJ as those that offer the best odds of getting graduates into school like Harvard, often in exchange for tuition in excess of $25,000 per year.

Harvard has been getting a ton of great publicity over the last five years by cannily staying one step ahead of the curve in announcing new programs to cut tuition for it's small number of low- and middle-income students. But it until it actually does something to admit more of those students--not just help them once they arrive--it won't deserve headlines like these.

UPDATE: I see walking into work this morning that this is making the front page of all the big newspapers. Sigh. Some have reported, per above, the actual cost of the change, $22 million. That is (A) less than 0.4% (four-tenths of one percent) of what Harvard earned on its endowment last year, and (B) a small price to pay for this kind of publicity.

According to InsideHigherEd, "because Harvard officials said that they hoped the plan would attract new, less wealthy applicants, the share of undergraduates eligible could grow over time." Similarly, the New York Times reports that "Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, William R. Fitzsimmons, said [previous changes targeted to families earning less than $60,000 per year] had increased the number of low-income students by 33 percent in three years."

Both of these statements are premised on the idea that the economic makeup of Harvard's student body is essentially a function of the economic makeup of the student who apply. That's nonsense. Harvard, like all selective colleges, decides who to admit. It rejects 90% of applicants, so it could easily put together a freshman class of smart, well-qualified students who better represent the economic diversity of the nation if wanted to. It just doesn't want to, because a lot of the admissions spots are reserved for athletes, legacies, children of the rich, famous, and powerful, and students who come through the quasi-aristocracy of east coast private schools.

The makeup of the overall applicant pool, moreover, isn't outside of the university's control. What if Harvard took $10 million and used it to create an office of people who'se only job was to identify and recruit the best and brightest low- and moderate-income students from across the nation, with a specific goal of substantially increasing the number of slots for such students and thus decreasing the number set aside for the children of wealthy donors? THAT would be front-page news.

Financial Aid and a Get Away Car

"Two college students say the high cost of tuition led them to rob a bank." That's a new one.

Yes, the high cost of tuition, difficulty finding financial aid, and stress over taking out loans is enough to break anyone, but robbing a bank just isn't the answer. Of course, they might qualify for some free college classes in prison...

Exposing the Teachers Unions' Corporatist Pro-NCLB Agenda

The new issue of Phi Delta Kappan is well worth reading, and not just because it reprints an article I wrote about high-performing community colleges early this year. There's also a priceless debate (not online, unfortunately) between Susan O'Hanian, self-styled "educational activist," and Joel Packer, head lobbyist for the NEA, wherein O'Hanian--along with University of Alabama professor Philips Kovacs--accuses the NEA of selling its members down the river by not being anti-NCLB enough. Apparently, this is because the union is just a lapdog for its corporate masters.

No, really.

Packer reaffirms that the NEA opposes NCLB and wants to gut its core accountability provisions, but also notes that NCLB is, in fact, just the name given to the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which contains a lot of worthwhile programs and also provides billions of dollars in funding to help educate poor children. So just standing on the fringe yelling for NCLB to be "dismantled," as O'Hanian does here, doesn't do much good; groups like the NEA are much more effective when they engage in the political and legislative processes in a substantive way. That involves a certain level of moderation and willingness to talk and compromise with those who disagree with you--although you'd hardly know it from the NEA's current scorched-earth campaign on the Hill, which includes demanding that Democrats sign an anti-NCLB loyalty oath, and their California affiliate running ads attacking George Miller and Nancy Pelosi.

But if you think critiquing Speaker Pelosi from the left represents the extremes of political discourse, you clearly haven't read this month's Kappan. O'Hanian and Kovacs respond by grasping for the moral legacies of, variously, Woody Guthrie, Rosa Parks, women's suffrage, abolitionists, Galileo, and Malcom X while offering a combination of anecdote, childish sentiment and gratuitous insult, such as:

We call on union leaders, members of Congress, and their Business Roundtable allies to do something radical: we ask them to listen the highly qualified teachers who work with children every day.

and

the NEA leadership's decision to side with corporate reformers rather than with the teachers who pay their salaries--but certainly not their dinner bills--says a great deal about the priorities of the organization.

Packer responds with remarkable restraint, reiterating the NEA's anti-NCLB talking points before concluding that "we will not apologize for our decision to step up to the plate and actually do the hard and painstaking work work of directly influencing the policy makers who will write the next version of ESEA."

This type of exchange actually has some value beyond entertainment purposes. First, because the fact that Kappan--the second-largest education publication in the nation by circulation, after Educational Leadership--chose to print it suggests that there are a substantial number of people who actually think this way. You see it sometimes in the more leftish/academic blogs as well. Second, because, like the writings of those who believe the principal failure of the Bush administration has been insufficient war-mongering and imperialist zeal, it serves to establish boundaries of seriousness in the NCLB debate. That's useful, if nothing else.

Another Way to Give Green This Holiday

You probably know about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative, aimed at getting his MIT-created super-sturdy, super-cheap, super-cool (happy green kid-friendly design, no glare in the sun, impenetrable by water or dust) XO computer design to the world's poorest children (w/WiFi). Well, some people and some companies don't like this idea.

I get that it might not work technically (can't say, I'm not that fluent in computers). But I don't get the "give them food instead" critique. Sure, they need food. They need a lot of things, mostly contingent on systemic change that no bag of rice will change either. And you know the saying, give a fish... eat for a day, teach to fish...lifetime. Maybe it's not a good analogy- fishing (although Eduwonk might like it). And we can't know if the XO computer will be well-received, or a tool that results in any sustainable change. But I think these kids and families should get that chance and that experience. So if it works- if those computers and WiFi really get to those kids and creates opportunity and not some unfortunate waste (computers arriving but not WiFi, or vice versa), it seems like an investment that developing countries should at least be able to consider.

BTW, until Dec 30th, for $200 you can buy one of these XO computers, as they're called, for your own kid or for any other kid you know or for yourself I guess, and OLPC will send another one to a child in a developing nation. See OLPC's give one, get one campaign here.

Is There a College Tuition Bubble?

Andrew Gillin at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity released an interesting paper this week exploring the parallels between the housing bubble and ever-rising college tuition.

The comparison is imperfect, because the higher education market lacks the crucial leavening ingredient of naked greed--you can't get rich quick by speculating on a college education, since you can't sell your ownership of the asset. And while student loans are often securitized, government guarantees against default reduce the dynamic of banks and rating agencies conspiring to develop and sell exotic, over-valued financial instruments with a hidden risk of collapse.

But, as Gillin explains, there are a number of similarities. As with the (recent) mortgage market, higher education lenders have little incentive to enforce lending standards, since the government pays off on loans that go bad. Student loan interest rates, like mortgages, also enjoy substantial public subsidies. As a result, demand increases and more people want to buy higher education than otherwise would.

This, of course, is precisely the point, and there's a powerful societal and moral argument for expanding access to higher education. But it has consequences that ultimately play out in the form of inflated tuition, largely because higher education doesn't behave like a normal market.

When the government subsidizes a normal market, the end result is greater production and consumption with both the producer and consumer getting some of the government money. But that depends on a reasonably elastic supply--the ability and willingness of the producer to ramp up production to meet increased, subsidy-driven demand.

Higher education doesn't work that way--the sector is substantially unable and unwilling to increase supply, particularly in the short term. Unable because there are major regulatory and cost barriers to entry--building a new college or university is massively expensive and time-consuming, and involves jumping through a lengthy, hoop-laden accreditation process. Unwilling because the vast majority of higher education institutions aren't profit-maximizing institutions--they're prestige maximizers. Their response to increased demand is to keep production (enrollment) constant, thus improving their admissions selectivity and the "caliber" of student they educate and as a result becoming a more elite institution. Meanwhile, the lack of objective information about quality makes price and quality synonmous, so institutions have to raise prices in order to compete.

So in the end, all the subsidies ultimatlely go to the institutions in the form of increased prices, and the consumer is no better off than when he or she started. Consumers who lack subsidies, meanwhile (mostly middle-income students who don't qualify for need-based financial aid) are worse off. So political pressure mounts to increase subsidies through aid, interest rate reductions, etc. in order to amelioriate spiralling prices, and the whole cycle repeats itself.

This can't go on forever, because there's a limit to how much money the government can or will spend to subsidize higher education. In the meantime, the negative impact of constantly increasing higher education costs are being hidden in part by an overly-simplistic conception of what higher education financial aid is for.

The goal of aid is nearly always framed as access, as in "all students deserve an opportunity to go to college." The problem (only in the sense of an already hard-won success) is that the large majority (nearly 80%) of high school graduates are in fact going to college, a number that has changed little even as costs have risen, a number which is (more or less by definition) an understatement of the percent of people who should go to college who do.

The real issues of concern relating to increasing college prices are threefold:

1) Where students go to college
2) Whether they graduate
3) What happens to them once they leave

Rising prices push non-wealthy students out of presitigous, expensive four-year colleges into cheaper, less-prestigous four-year colleges, and out of the four-year sector into the two-year sector. They also reduce the chances that people who begin college will graduate, because they force students to work nearly full-time (a major risk factor for dropping out) and increase the cost in the cost/benefit equation of staying in school. Finally, they force more borrowing, which narrows post-graduation (or non-graduation) career choices, increases the risk of costly loan default, and simply takes money out of the pocket of people who need it more than their alma mater.

A crucial element of solving the college cost problem lies with policymakers recognizing the link between rising costs and the lack of data about quality, and talking about the issue in more than just simple access terms.

Great idea! But haven't we heard this before?

Christina Samuels at EdWeek turns in another great piece on special education, this time focusing on the over-representation of minority students in special education, particularly in disabilities that require the most subjective assessments. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission will be looking into the issue over the next year and hopefully issue some solid recommendations to address the problem.

Of course, the National Academies looked into this back in 2002 and recommended that teachers be better trained to identify students with disabilities, that resources should be focused on early intervention, and that preschool could provide needed help and support for low-income students before they enter school. I’m not sure what else the Civil Rights Commission will come up with, except maybe some ideas on how to make sure these steps are actually taken.

Our take on this here.

Speaking as Someone...

...who used to regularly take the Greyhound bus from Binghamton to Schenectady back in college, I can tell you that this is just about right.

Pre-K Nearly Everyday

Preschool policy is constantly hitting the headlines these days, this time in NJ. Check out Education Sector's policy course curriculum unit on pre-K policy, great for education and public policy students and anyone wanting to learn about the key issues in the pre-k debates. And if you tell us what you think, you could win a $40 Border's gift card. Good timing for the holidays.

Muddying the Waters

In a column about Blaine Amendments and the efforts of a former Liberty University official to open religiously-oriented charter schools in New York City, George Will writes:

Now he wants to create a charter school -- a public school enjoying considerable autonomy from, among other burdens, teachers unions. It would be affiliated with his New Horizon Church.

This kind of reflexive anti-teachers union commentary make things more difficult for everyone.

It's true that there are places, like Los Angeles and Detroit, where teachers unions are actively on the wrong side of the charter school issue. But how do you write about charters, unions, and New York City without noting that the United Federation of Teachers has opened its own charter school?

Moreover, it's simply not the case that a desire to evade dealing with unions is the principal force, or even a significant factor, driving people to open charter schools. A lot of the "burdens" they're trying avoid come from adminisration, not teachers. Mostly they're just really motivated to create and run a public school, because they see it as a way to make the world a better place.

But that depth of understanding is beyond George Will, who never misses an opportunity to take a shot at labor. I've been free with criticism of unions on this blog and elsewhere, but there's a big difference between being a union critic and a union opponent. This kind of rhetoric just politicizes and polarizes the issue, which in turn makes it harder to create and sustain charter schools--an agenda Will supports.

Christina Hoff Sommers: New Success for Girls Clearly a Horrible National Crisis

Got an email from AEI today which begins as follows:

The New York Times reported yesterday that girls swept the team and individual honors for the prestigious Siemens Competition in Math, Science, and Technology. Two 17-year-old girls split first prize, a $100,000 scholarship, for their work on creating a molecule to block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. Young women have also been doing well in the older contest, the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search). Both the accomplishments of young women generally and the progress women are making in the sciences are subjects AEI resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has been studying. In October, she hosted a conference at AEI on the National Academy of Sciences report that examined the claim that women are the victims of widespread bias in the fields of engineering and science. Her book, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Touchstone, 2000), looks at the gains young women have been making and argues that society needs to pay attention to how boys are faring as well.

Let me get this straight: Women are vastly under-represented in the sciences, particularly at the highest levels. This is substantially a function of the fact that girls have traditionally been steered away from the sciences, both explicitly but also as a result of broader social norms. As a result, boys have traditionally dominated things like science fairs. Now, in 2007, for the first time ever, girls sweep the top awards at a prestigous science fair. In the past, when boys won all these awards, it was seen as unremarkable at best and at worst as evidence that girls were either unsuited for or ininterested in the sciences.

And AEI and Christina Hoff Sommers see this as further evidence that we must immediately start paying more attention to boys. I assume that when the first Fortune 500 company hired a black CEO, similar memos were circulated announcing the end of racism and the need to address the burgeoning crisis of anti-white discrimination.

President Bush's Secret $5 Billion Anti-Poverty Program

The Bush Administration hasn't exactly been a friend to low-income Americans. Vetoing health insurance for poor children, undermining labor protections, squandering resources on tax cuts for the super-rich--the list goes on. But as David Hoff reports in Education Week, there's one area where both the President and Congress have consistently pursued what can only be described as progressive public policy focused on the welfare of the neediest children: the formulas used to distribute Title I funding.

Title I is the main funding program under No Child Left Behind, and as such has been highly controversial, because of wide-spread perception that NCLB is "under-funded." This largely a matter of perspective--Title I gets a lot more money, almost $5 billion per year, than it did pre-NCLB. But Title I funding has also fallen far short (over $10 billion in the current year) of what Congress could have provided under the law's authorization targets. Congressional Democrats see this as a broken promise, and by any measure it's a wasted opportunity to build bipartisan support for the law.

But lost in the debate over total Title I funding has been the issue of how Title I money is distributed. Before NCLB, Title I funds were squandered using the so-called "Basic" formula, which essentially gave districts a flat dollar amount per poor student, even if district poverty rates were very low. That's a good strategy for spreading funds among as many Congressional districts as possible, but a lousy way to target resources to those who need it most.

Since NCLB, all the considerable new money has gone into a different set of formulas that are far more targeted, either by limiting eligibility to districts with a minimum poverty rate, or by increasing funding per low-income student on a sliding scale tied to poverty rates. The new formulas also give states incentives to distribute additional state and local resources based on poverty.

As Ed Sector wrote in a policy brief last year, the result has been substantial new funding targeted to the progressive ("Targeted," "Concentration," and "Incentive") formulas (FY 2007 looks much the same):





























There's no secret political calculus here; much of the impetus for this reform back in 2001 came from Democrats like Senators Kennedy, Landrieu, and Bayh, along with Representatives George Miller, Adam Smith and Cal Dooley. The net effect is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into places like New York City and reduce what would have otherwise gone to Republican-leaning suburbs.

And while President Bush, to his discredit, vetoed the recent education and labor appropriations bill that would have provided the first major increase in Title I funding since 2003, both his proposed budget, that bill, and all the other funding proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike have stuck to principle of focusing new federal education resources on the districts with the most poor students. If you believe school funding levels matter, this has made a significant difference in the lives of the most disadvantaged children. In a time when such consensus is hard to come by, this deserves more attention.

Default Rate Amendment a Step in the Right Direction

Inside Higher Ed’s article on student loan “cohort default rates”—the percent of students not repaying their student loans as calculated by the Department of Education—is well worth reading for a good background on how we ended up with the current 2-year calculation. It also talks about the potential implications of a proposed amendment by Rep. Raul Grijalva to change the calculation to a 3-year default rate. Currently, the cohort default rate is calculated as the percent of students who default in the first two years of repayment—the proposed amendment would extend this to the first three years of repayment. Adding another year to the calculation could increase the default rate by as much as 62 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the student loan program.

Possibly the most interesting part of the article is the extensive comments section at the bottom, which shows the contentious nature not just of this amendment, but of student lending and defaults in general. A few selections:

As a colleague once observed back in the early 90s, institutions don’t default, borrowers do. The observation is still valid today.

There are definitely suspect people in every profession, but this pointing the finger business has got to stop. You can find many ways to calculate the default rate, but instead of wasting the time of the congress to manipulate these numbers, why don’t they take that time to fix the economy? Stop pointing fingers in the wrong direction. Instead, see what you can do to improve your immediate area.

If enacted, this will put financial aid offices on the defensive for matters they have little if any control over. The schools who this type of policy punishes are inevitably schools who admit a large number of students who have been poorly served by the K-12 system and from lower economic backgrounds (often the same group).

Low default rates are not evidence that elite universities are good schools, they’re evidence that their students have economic advantages to begin with. High default rates reflect the opposite.

The highly charged nature of this debate is even more reason to have more, and better, information on loan defaults. Yes, there are student risk factors that impact default rates, but as Education Sector’s recent policy brief showed, total debt levels also have a big impact, and institutions can go a long way to ameliorating that risk factor.

In the end, default rates are a symptom, though, not the problem. To truly address the problem of growing student debt, we need to figure out a way to keep college costs in line with inflation. Until that happens, all federal student debt policy will be just a stopgap solution.

Depressing Education-Related Newspaper Correction of the Day

From the Post:

A Nov. 25 Outlook article on young people's knowledge of American history and government incorrectly said a survey found that U.S. high school students had missed almost half the questions on a civic literacy test. The students were in college.

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.