Breaking the Greed / Virtue Dichotomy in Teacher Pay

Commenting on the new issue of Quality Counts, which compares states on teacher pay measures and suggests that teachers make less than comparable professions, AFTie Ed says:

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..." I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure. If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field. People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

This is a variant on the baseline teachers union position on money, which is, "We're not in this for the money; give us more money."

Let me be first to say that this isn't actually an absurd concept on its face. There's no good reason that people should be forced into penury just because they're doing socially valuable work in the public sector. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's not the strongest rhetorical case, and more to the point, it's not necessary. Look at the two doctors on the front page of the Post this morning, identical African-American twins from PG County named Vince and Vance who look just exactly like you'd think a Vince and Vance would look, and also happen to be Army reservists who volunteer in Afghanistan. They're clearly not doing that for the money (although I'm guessing the elapsed time between the story hitting the newstands and getting optioned for TV/movies could be measured in fractions of a second), but as a cardiologist and urologist, I'm guessing they have plenty of money. In medicine, you can do good and well at the same time.

But you've also got to go to medical school, which as we discussed here a few days ago, was thoroughly Flexnerized almost a century ago. Much higher, more uniform standards, longer, more difficult to get into, extended clinical induction model, etc. etc. Also, fewer practitioners and less organized labor. I don't know if all those factors necessarily have to go together, but the fact that they do in medicine has to be meaningful on some level.

The problem with the "we do this for the children not the money" line is that it paints teachers as the kind of professionals that provoke admiration but not aspiration -- people appreciate them but are glad someone else is doing the work. Ed himself goes on to say that "I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall." I wonder he's thought through just how much things would have to change for that to become true.

Disconnected Youth

Disconnected, disengaged, at-risk. All terms to describe the kids who aren't in school, don't have jobs, can't find purpose. Plenty of work out there that argues that we need to reconnect these young people to school, work and civic life. The Campaign for Youth (CFY) is an alliance of about a dozen youth-focused organizations (including the National Youth Employment Commission, American Youth Policy Forum, Forum for Youth Investment) that's recently developed A National Investment Strategy for Reconnecting America's Youth. Check out the summary of their recommendations (pdf).

Spellings Stands Firm

I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back--has to have been more than a year ago--and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone's just a top-line manager/figurehead type or if they actually pay attention and know what they're talking about, and she's the latter. Her friendly, folksy demeanor is a real asset in environments like that; it puts people at ease while also making them less likely to ask really sharp questions.

Her basic message on NCLB was that the President would veto any reauthorization that waters down accountability, and that if Congress won't move she's going to go ahead and implement stuff on her own during the 11 months she has left. It's never been entirely clear to me why the U.S. Department of Education is legally allowed to let some states and not others (or, for that matter, any states at all) implement accountability systems that clearly diverge from NCLB requirements, as it has with the state "growth model" pilots. I suspect the answer is that it's not legal, but since nobody's ox was gored, they just did it anyway. Back in my first job in state government, I remember asking our staff attorney"Are we allowed to do that?" and she said, "We do what we want, and if people don't like it they can sue us. Which is unlikely, because they probably won't know we did it, and even if they find out, suing a government agency is harder than you think. You need standing, you need money to pay for a lawer, and it takes forever. Our lawyers are free and we're not going anywhere."

What about the little guys?

Top colleges—Harvard, Yale, Davidson, University of Virginia—have all made great headlines in the past year by dramatically expanding the financial aid they offer to students and eliminating or significantly shrinking the debt students will graduate with. Yale announced Monday that it will be spending another $307 million from its endowment for increased financial aid and research. This is great, but what about all those colleges, especially the small, private ones, that don’t have the endowment money to keep up with Harvard and Yale?

InsideHigherEd reported this week (The Harvard Trickle-Down Effect) on a session at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute which focused on exactly this question. Despite the fact that most of these schools—small, liberal arts colleges—don’t compete directly for students with Harvard-type schools, they are still worried about the ripple effect from Harvard’s aid announcement, primarily the pressure from students and parents to provide similarly generous aid packages.

While Harvard’s aid plan is great for Harvard students, it’s just not a realistic way to address the problems of rising tuitions and rising student debt at most institutions. And, as we’ve shown here and here, generous aid policies at the most elite institutions can have a negative impact on need-based aid because lower-tier institutions respond by offering tuition discounts to recruit high-performing students. Or, as InsideHigherEd summarizes:

C. Brent DeVore, president of Otterbein College and the session’s moderator, briefly and cogently laid out the financial aid picture leading up to and including Harvard’s announcement. He described how many small private colleges turned to financial aid based on students’ academic or other merit (as opposed to purely financial need) to compete for students’ attention, both against the prestige advantage of the elite colleges and the price advantage of most public colleges. That trend was exacerbated as states, particularly in the South, embraced lottery-driven scholarships that in some places have made an education at a public university virtually free.

As parents’ have become increasingly accustomed to such tuition breaks, merit-based aid has often been replaced by “want-based” aid, “demand-based” aid, and “match the scholarship down the street” based aid, DeVore said, to knowing nods from the presidents in the room.

The presidents’ concerns about the new trend in super-aid policies from elite institutions ranged from lowered expectations about how much financial responsibility a family should bear for a college education to even higher tuition increases and more competition for faculty. Presidents’ ideas for countering this competition ranged from broadening the recruitment pool of students to doing a better job of promoting the academic advantages of a small institution.

But there was no mention of what kinds of budgeting changes schools could make to keep their tuition increases down and make them more price competitive. It seems like a budgeting response may be just as important as a PR response. What I'd like to know is whether there are any small, independent colleges without gigantic endowments that are doing innovative and smart things to keep tuition increases and debt-levels reasonable and maintain need-based aid, but without hurting the institution's bottom line.

New Leader at Carnegie

Stanford's Tony Bryk, a member of Education Sector's research advisory committee, was recently appointed the new President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many people don't realize just how influential Carnegie has been since it was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906. It developed the Teachers Annuity and Insurance Association, which become the TIAA in TIAA-CREF, the giant educator's retirement and insurance company. It founded the Educational Testing Service, ETS, which publishes the SAT, GRE, and AP tests. It sponsored the Flexner Report, which completely revolutionized medical education in America, moving medical schools from a group of semi-professional, unregulated institutions with dodgy, inconsistent standards and questionable quality to the much more uniformly high-quality, well-regulated institutions we have today.

The Carnegie classifications, which put higher educaiton institutions into categories like "Research I," "Research II," "Comprehensive / Master's"," etc.(they've since altered the names) remain the dominant way of categorizing colleges and universities, and define the research status hierarcy that institutions try to climb. It played a signficant role in the discussion that led to the creation of Pell grants in the early 1970s. Former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer's books High School and College, published in the 1980s, were very influential and remain (somewhat depressingly) accurately description of the challenges those institutions face.

Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation's history suggests that higher education is arguably more subject to positive influence via philanthropic/foundation initiative than K-12. This is partly a matter of scale and governance. The vast majority of college students attend one of about 3,500 two- and four-year colleges--compared to 90,000 schools--with more concentrated governance and control. But I also think higher education is inherently more sensitive to the things that philanthropies are in a position to change: public perception, the consensus of research--information, in other words. Colleges are also intensely status- and peer-conscious, so if you can leverage a few key actors, the rest will follow of their own accord.

Most education philanthropy focuses on K-12, because those challenges seems more urgent, but I think that many organizations--particularly the big new foundations getting into the game--are missing a chance to make a lasting difference in the higher ed arena. If they achieve only a fraction of what the Carnegie Foundation has over the last century, it will be time and money well spent.

Update: A reader points out that refering to the Carnegie Foundation as a "philanthropy" is confusing, since it doesn't give out money like, for example, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an ES funder), but rather does most of its work in-house. Good point, I was thinking about non-profit policy-focused organizations generally, many of which operate with some mix of in-house and sponsored work, but that wasn't clear.

The reader also notes that the Carnegie Foundation developed the "Carnegie Unit," which is still the standard way that high school courses are categorized and measured. When someone says that high school students who want to go to college should take at at least three "units" of math, four English, etc., etc., they're talking about Carnegie units. Apparently this was an outgrowth of the development of TIAA -- they needed a standard way of measuring how many courses teachers taught. This illustrates a larger point--also inherent in the story of the Carnegie classification of colleges and universities--which is that defining the way things are measured often has more lasting influence than the measurement itself.

Democracts and NCLB

Sam Dillon's Times front-pager on NCLB-bashing among Democratic presidential candidates came out a few days before I hit the road to spend Christmas with the fam, but apparently I'm not the only one who didn't get to it until after the New Year. As Eduwonk notes, the buried lede in that piece was the major thought division between the candidates and House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller. Now Miller's counterpart in the Senate, Ted Kennedy, comes with a Post op-ed saying the same thing, in stronger words:

The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.

So what gives? I actually think there's no mystery here. The politics of NCLB suck for Obama, Clinton, et al because a certain number of people really hate the law and those people disproportionately vote in the primary, while there's no comparable counter-contingent with strong feelings running the other way. But the candidates don't actually want to engage in "all-out opposition not just to specific details but to the entire thrust and ideology of NCLB," to quote Jonathan Kozol quoting NEA President Reg Weaver on the union's position, because they don't actually think that way. That's why the end of Dillon's article is a litany of "buts"

Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he said. When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability. And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.” But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”

That's classic pre-general campaign hedging. To say that we need to radically overhaul or jettison the law while maintaining accountability makes no sense; accountability is where the core meaning of the law begins and ends. The candidates are just pandering as much as they think they can get away with, and Kennedy and Miller are sending public signals about where those limits lie. Given the way things are going for Senator Clinton, winner of the New Hampshire NEA's endorsement and strongest NCLB basher among the major candidates, my guess is that the high water mark of anti-NCLB rhetoric from the D side has passed, with relatively little effect on the public discourse in the long run.

Some things are just what they seem.

Blogging and So Much More

Education Sector has a new position open for a policy associate. It's a great opportunity to join ES and work on a range of ed policy projects. Q&Ed blogging rights included. More details here.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 1

After more than a year's hiatus, the final season of The Wire debuted tonight. By popular demand, we're back with the weekly blogging. If you've been catching up on the DVDs recently--and if you haven't been, you should start--see here for the final post from last season (or just search for "wire" in the search box at right for the whole list), and here at the Guardian Unlimited for my take on why it's the greatest American television program (sorry, "programme") ever made. Matt Yglesias also wrote a good post last week arguing that while series creator David Simon's pessimistic worldview may be objectively overstated, it's essential for the series' artistic success. Bonus: a response from Simon himself in the comments thread.

Episode 1 summary: Carcetti shuts down the Major Crimes Unit investigation of the Marlo / Chris / Snoop organization and rowhouse mass murders because he's sucking money of out the police budget to cover the school fiscal crisis (and because he won't take school money from the governor he plans to unseat). McNulty is drunk and angry again, which is bad for his relationship with Beadie but good for the viewership generally. Bubbles is clean, and if there's an ounce of sympathy in David Simon's soul, which there may not be, which may be a good thing, he'll end up okay.

Herc is gone from the force and working for Levy, which means he's working for the criminals he used to incompetently try to put in jail. Whether this is a net plus for the murderers and drug dealers of Baltimore remains to be seen. Herc is so dumb that he can't even figure out how to abuse his expense account. (A lobbyist friend of mine taught me this a long time ago, when I tried to beg off his paying for lunch on the grounds that we had discussed nothing business-related. "I don't care if my clients pay for your lunch" he said. "But if they don't pay for yours, they don't pay for mine.") Marlo is scheming against Prop Joe and Method Man.

The Baltimore Sun, meanwhile, is apparently much like all the other important instutitions in the city: declining, absurd, and led by incompetents, but populated by a few smart, flawed-but-noble individuals who haven't stopped fighting for the greater ideals the institution represents. In this case, that would be Meldrick Lewis from Homicide:Life on the Streets, who's now ten years older and more of a stickler for usage.

In many ways, however, there's not a lot to say about Episode 1, because not a lot happens, which is the way every season of The Wire begins, which is one of the many reasons it's so great. The Wire is only the only show I've ever seen that fully takes advantage of long-form television's greatest asset: time. The typical movie runs 120 minutes, 200 at most. That's more time than a 44-minute TV episode, but you've still got to accomplish a great deal of character and narrative development in a small space. A series has more potential in theory, but for a long time every TV episode was structured like a 44-minute movie, with the additional burden of having to structure the plot around commercial breaks. The 1980s saw the introduction of season-long story arcs in the better dramas, but even those only went halfway, interspersing stand-alone episodes and continuing to give every episode some kind of beginning, middle, and end. Even critically-hailed series like The Sopranos still work this way.

The Wire, by contrast, is essentially one story in five chapters, a season per. The first few episodes are all about establishing characters, settings, and themes, and only as the story progresses do you start to see how it's all connected. The Wire also packs much more into each minute, simply by not wasting time explaining things to the viewer. Most TV shows are absolutely clogged with clunky expository dialogue (Typical C.S.I. scene: Grissom: "The body is completely exsanguinated." Coroner: "You're right, Grissom, all the blood has been drained from the body.") The Wire does you the favor of assuming you're not stupid. Like all art worth experiencing, it asks you to pay attention. The result is a cumulative dramatic force that's unmatched. It also leaves room for lots of small, understated moments pregnant with meaning, like when Beadie decides she's left the light on for McNulty long enough...and then changes her mind, for at least a little while longer.

Next week: The Sun's dubious editor decides to gin up an expose of the school systemm. which mean's we'll get to go all meta on TQATE by discussing fictional critiques of shaky education news coverage right along side the real thing.

Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style

The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.

In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, it begins with an anecdote, follows with confirming quotations, and only then gets around to providing any actual data:

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council...The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003

First of all, if you reduce 98,700 by 5.2%, you get 93,568. Reduce that by 6.7% and you get 87,299. Even accounting for rounding errors, that's not 83,500. Copy editors are supposedly maniacal about English usage, which is fine, but what about arithmetic?

More to the point, the "evidence" that both law and medicine are simultaneously becoming less attractive is that law school applications dropped by 15.4% from 2004 to 2006, while medical school applications increased by 27.3% from 2003 to 2006.

If newspapers insist on squeezing copy into the standard trend-story mold, then I guess there's little one can do to stop them. But if the numbers don't back the alleged trend up, then just leave the numbers out. It makes this stuff (a little) less aggravating.

Comic Book Guy Can Read

Back from a two-week hiatus, will be catching up on various edu-related stories that occured in my absence.

Starting with the most significant, that of course being this NYTimes piece about schools using comic books as an instructional tool:

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

It all sounds good, but edu-eminence Diane Ravitch throws cold water on the idea, saying "If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool. What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step."

This reflects two common assumptions about comic books, both which are wrong. First, that comic books are fundamentally unsophisticated as a medium. Second, that supporting a youthful enthusiasm for comic books reduces the likelihood of students moving to more serious, legitimate literary forms.

Comic books seem simple, but they're not. This mistake stems from confusing the form with the genre. The most popular American comic books have long been superhero stories, featuring lots of explosions, skin-tight costumes, and tales of good vs. evil. But the most popular forms of all media tend toward pop-culture, lowest-common demoninator fare; whether it's Transformers at the box office, American Idol on television, Chris Daughtry in music, or Harry Potter in the book store. Don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but J.K. Rowling ain't Henry James. The fact that the number one movie of 2007 was Spider-Man 3 doesn't lead anyone to conclude that film as a medium is always and irredeemably low culture.

The comic book form is actually very complex. First you have all the challenges of story, pace, characterization, narration, and dialogue that are inherent to writing. Then you have a whole separate set of challenges related to creating visual art -- tone, perspective, color, mood, composition, etc. Then you have to figure out how to present a host of images in sequence, understanding the way readers will mentally fill in the transitions from one perspective, scene, and point of view to another. Finally (and most importantly) you have to understand how the words and pictures fit together, the manner and impact of readers rapidly switching back and forth between reading words and seeing pictures, two very different cognitive experiences. Comic books incorporate elements of writing, painting, illustration and film, but it's really the combination of forms that make them unique and complex. As Umberto Eco once said, "Comic books have a language of their own."

The mistaken idea that comic books are simple leads to the second, Ravitchian idea that introducing students to comic books is educationally dangerous. This is wrong. Reading comic books is reading, first of all, not watching TV or playing Halo 3 or listening to Chris Daughtry. I don't think there's some kind of substitution effect at work where students who read comic books will read fewer books; rather they'll read more of everything and not read less of everything else.

Case in point: I've been reading comic books regularly since I was nine years old and now I essentially read and write for a living. More broadly, when I think of the typical comic book reader, "illiterate" isn't the word that comes to mind. Sartorially and socially challenged, maybe, but as a rule comic readers tend to be much more intellectual and word-focused that the average Jane or Joe. Rather than continuing the ignoble tradition of Fredric Wertham, education scholars faced with the massive problem of illiteracy should support every promising avenue they can find.

Update: Sherman Dorn makes many good points about the generally shoddy, ahistorical nature of the education reporting in this piece here.

Paying and Evaluating Teachers

The Denver Post reports on Obama as the next great supporter of ProComp, Denver's highly praised pay-for-performance, or merit pay, program. This issue of teacher pay has become one of the big education debates among Democrats in the 2008 presidential campaign (both Clinton and Edwards are against merit pay but support differential pay–extra for teachers in high-need schools and teaching shortage subjects).

Merit pay is usually couched as a recruitment and retention issue–let's attract and keep good teachers by giving bonuses for performance– but the real question on merit pay is about teacher evaluation–if we're going to pay extra for the best performance, how do we fairly and accurately assess performance? Education Sector is hosting an event on this very question next Tuesday. Details here.

Ringing in the New Year

The student loan industry is likely hoping for a better start to 2008 than they experienced in 2007, when New York Attorney General Cuomo started off the year with an investigation into improper relationships between financial aid offices and loan companies.

Jonathan Vogel speculates over at Inside Higher Ed on what colleges and lenders can expect in 2008, as the fallout continues from Cuomo’s investigations.

New Year's Update

On vacation until Friday, thus the light, blackberry-based posting. Stay tuned for exciting features such as gratuitous Ohio State boosterism and why Diane Ravitch is wrong about comic books.

Best of 2007 (Colleague Edition)

Continuing in the "Best of" spirit of the times, here's the list of 2007's best songs from Daria Hall, Assistant Director for K-12 Policy at the Education Trust. Daria knows substantially more about NCLB implementation than I do, a fact I note in sympathy as much as in admiration. Daria is also trusted source of new music recommendations, so--as with NCLB policy--similarity between this and previous posts is generally a function of my availing myself of her expertise and not the other way around.

Keep the Car Running- Arcade Fire
Fans- Kings of Leon
Imitosis- Andrew Bird
Impossible Germany- Wilco
Paper Planes- M.I.A.
All the Old Showstoppers- New Pornographers
Breakin’ Up- Rilo Kiley
Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)- Robert Plant and Allison Krauss
Nude- Radiohead
I Feel It All- Feist
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window- The Hold Steady (I’m Not There Soundtrack)
Stronger- Kanye West
Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car- Iron & Wine
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
Rehab- Amy Winehouse

The Testing Quandary

ES Co-Director Tom Toch answers a tough test question posed by the NYT's Freakonomics blog:

Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more? Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?

Other respondents include Fair Test's Monty Neill and Gaston Caperton, the President of the College Board (for some reason, he really likes the SAT...). Read all of the responses here.

It's (Not) So Easy

The Post ran a useful article a few days ago ("Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick For Schools") about one of the more interesting challenges of NCLB reauthorization and education policy generally: expanding the scope of educational accountability beyond standardized test scores in reading and math to include many other important things--mastery of other subjects, more generalized abilities like critical thinking and analytic reasoning, "soft" skills like leadership and teamwork, graduation and success in college and the workforce, etc. etc. But it leaves the central question answered: if nearly everyone thinks this is a good idea, why aren't we doing it already ?

Mostly, I think, because this imperative bumps up against other imperatives, and nobody has figured how to adequately reconcile their inherent conflicts.

NCLB was designd to make the assessment of schools objective, universal, and unavoidable. In other words, all schools within a state are assessed according to the same standards and in the same way. There are very good reasons to put a premium on this. Without objectivity and universality, it's a short road back to the default judgment that most schools render upon themselves: "We're doing the best we can, given the students we have." Given how badly some schools and students are failing, that's just not good enough.

The way that NCLB achieves objectivity and universality, however, has significant shortcomings. It's a mechanistic process, based on rules intead of human judgment. The problem is that it's really hard to developing rules that (A) accurately assess something as complicated as a school and (B) people can understand.

For example, here's a by-no-means-exhaustive list of some of the important categories of information we might want to gather about a school and its students, along with the number of possible values for each:

Student Race/Ethnicity: 5 (White, Blank, Hispanic, Asian, Indian)
Student Gender: 2 (Male, Female)
Student LEP status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Disability status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Economic status: 2 (Low-income, Not Low-Income)
Student Gifted status: 2 (Yes, No)
Subjects: 5 (Math, Reading/LA, Social Studies, Science, Art/Music)
Proficiency Status: 4 (Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced)
Value-Added Growth: 3 (Below Expected, Expected, Above Expected)
Attainment (i.e. graduation, progression to next year in school): 2 (Yes, No)
Grades: 4 (Typical grade configuration)
Timeframe: 4 (Now, Short-Term, Medium-Term, Long-Term)

Keep in mind that this is, in many ways, a very conservative estimate of the number of possible variables. There are more than five significant racial/ethnic groups, more than five important academic subjects, more than four potential levels of academic proficiency or value-added growth to consider, far more than one category of disability, gifted status, etc. Heck, you could even argue about gender.

But even this highly simplified model produces 307,200 possible outcomes. Each of them tells us something different, and as such could theoretically merit a different response. This throws the decisions of NCLB's authors into a fairly sympathetic light. They knew that a 307,200-element accountability system wouldn’t fly, so they started narrowing things down.: Two subjects and five racial/ethnic categories. One category each for LEP, special ed, and economic status, but no combinations—in other words, we measure the performance of white children and low-income children, but not white low-income children. Gender and gifted status are out. One proficiency level, no value-added. Only seven of 12 grades, and multiple grades can be combined. Include one growth measure (safe harbor), but make it either/or so you don’t create extra variables. Each of the 16 distinct outcomes (two subjects X eight student categories, although very few schools will have all eight) has equal and overriding status as an indicator of school success. Miss one, miss all, it doesn’t matter—your identification as not making AYP is the same. Then, having rolled the entirety of a school’s success into the single binary AYP variable, put it on a four-level time scale: 0-1 years in a row, 2-3, 4-5, 6 or more. Each level corresponds to a collection of mandated and optional responses—None, In Need of Improvement, Corrective Action, Alternative Governance.

Even this relatively small level of complexity seems barely manageable. The testing industry is popping rivets trying to handle two academic subjects in seven grades. State Department of Educations struggle, some mightily, to gather all the required data and turn school ratings around on time. There are constant complaints about the expense and bureaucracy of compliance and time lost to preparing for and taking one test in two subjects per year.

And even with all the compromises and simplifications, most people still don't know how the NCLB system actually works. That diminishes the capacity of the law to act as a catalyst for change, since educators and policymakers can't constructively respond to signals they don't understand.

The article quotes Ed Trust's Amy Wilkins saying maybe this is okay: "Proponents of multiple measures say it will give a richer, fuller view of a school, but this isn't about a rich view of a school. It's about failures in fundamental gate-keeping subject areas." That view reflects Title I's origins in and continued focus on compensatory education for low-income children, and I agree this needs to remain the first priority. But like it or not, NCLB has come to be about all students and all schools, and that demands a richer view on some inescapable level.

Adding more information to the existing rules-based system will consume even more scarce resources and create even more hard-to-manage complexity. Not adding more information will leave us with an accountability system that reflects only a fraction of what we want for schools. That argues for a non-rules-based approach, one that relies more heavily on human judgment, since people are much better at making sense of vast amounts of information from disparate sources than rules. But that, in turn, threatens universality and objectivity. Perhaps one could mitigate this problem by aggregating many judgments through more robust market-focused systems, but then we're opening up a whole new can of worms...

Anyway, it's tricky. Anyone who thinks the shortcomings of the existing system are a result of obvious choices not made should think again.

Best of 2007 (Wife Edition)

In addition to being smart, beautiful, and possessing the most spouse-friendly hobby imaginable (cooking), my wife Maureen also has fine taste in music. She looks at blogging with suspicion, particularly having read this and last year's special music festival posts and noting that at least of half of the insightful critical opinions and observations, such as they are, were hers, not mine. I tried citing the timed-honored principle of spousal communal ownership of intellectual property, but she didn't buy it. So, here's Maureen's iPod "Best of 2007" playlist:

Arcade Fire, "(Antichrist Television Blues)"
The National, "Apartment Story"
Radiohead, "Bodysnatchers"
LCD Soundsystem, "North American Scum"
Band of Horses, "Is There A Ghost"
Wilco, "Impossible Germany"
Bloc Party, "Hunting for Witches"
Spoon, "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"
The White Stripes, "Icky Thump"
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, "The Sons of Cain"
Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining"
Iron & Wine, "Boy With a Coin"
The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour"
Stars, "Take Me to the Riot"
The Apples in Stereo, "Can You Feel It?"
White Rabbits, "While We Go Dancing"
Andrew Bird, "Fiery Crash"
Buffalo Tom, "You'll Never Catch Him"

I might have gone with different selections in some cases-- "Woman King " or "Jezebel" for the Iron & Wine song, for example -- but overall this is a fine way to spend 90 minutes driving to your parent's house for the holidays.

"Best of" lists are often a good way to identify your critical / genre weak spots; I bought The Hold Steady's "Boys and Girls in America" a year ago solely because it was on top of a lot of Ten Best lists from respectable sources. On first listen I was like "Not bad," on second, "Pretty good," on fifth, "Kind of great!" and so on and so forth. By the time I saw them at the 9:30 club last month I was three/fourths convinced they're authentic American geniuses; it was certainly one of the ten best concerts I've ever seen.

Fire This Time

Last week the Post reported the following:

A technology manager for District schools who stuck schoolchildren with his tabs for thousands of dollars worth of lavish restaurant meals, nightclub jaunts and a visit to a strip club was charged yesterday with filing fraudulent expense reimbursement requests.

The story ran in the Metro section, below the fold. That's because municipal corruption in DC is like lake effect snow in Cleveland--the fact of it isn't news, only the magnitude. Compared to the property tax office, teachers union, and charter school board officials who stole hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, this guy is the equivalent of a small flurry.

I note this in light of the ongoing efforts of DC mayor Adrien Fenty and schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to get legislation through the City Council that would allow Rhee to fire central office employees "without cause," which in gov-speak means "if she thinks they're doing a bad job." Fenty and Rhee are getting a fair amount of pushback from the council and the civil service and teachers unions, but it looks like the plan will go through.

To be clear, even the current sclerotic civil service system can manage to fire convicted felons. Similarly, "Work hard or I'm going to fire your a--" is not, in and of itself, a comprehensive management strategy. It's equally important to identify and support high-performing--or even normal-performing--employees, to create a constructive, collaborative work environment that attracts talent.

That said, incompetence and corruption are two sides of the same coin, flowing from a generalized organizational culture of indifference--or even opposition--to things like excellence, accountability, and service to the public. That's what Fenty and Rhee are after, I think, and given the catastrophic failure of the system they're trying to change, they deserve a great deal of latitude in how they try to get there.

"School Choice on Steroids"

NPR’s Larry Abramson takes a trip to Mapleton school district outside of Denver, Colorado, where they are “trying to offer school choice on steroids.” But (unlike in baseball) this isn’t magic. Test scores are still low, and the idea of school choice hasn’t fully permeated the mindset of students and parents in Mapleton.

Despite offering everything from a hands-on, project-based school modeled after New Tech High in Napa, California to an International Baccalaureate school complete with uniforms, many parents still base their choice decisions on convenience. Many of the school improvements promised by choice theorists depend on parents choosing schools with the best academics. But reality shows that parents and students make decisions based on a host of other factors—where their friends go, how close the school is to home or work, and some very important, if not academic, criteria, like school safety.

The research and advocacy around school choice often focuses on building the supply of schools and reducing barriers to choice for parents and students, but not much has focused on what is needed to build a knowledgeable consumer base. There is a bit of a “build it and they will come” attitude about school choice reform. But without a culture of informed choice, school choice reforms might either see little to no impact, or might see choice (somewhat like the higher education market) shifting priorities to things like sports or fancy facilities and away from the quality of teaching and learning in schools.

Listen to the segment here. And if you want more NPR segments on school choice, check out these two pieces—one on Green Dot Public Schools’ takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles, and the other profiling Green Dot’s founder, Steve Barr.

The Post Fails Math

One of the ways you know a particular story has really embedded itself in the public consciousness is when it becomes a genre. As in the "People who think public education should teach X blame NCLB for reduced attention, resources, etc. for X" story, of which roughly 632,000 have been published in major media outlets in the last five years. Today's version in the Post focuses on music education, and contains a significant error. It says:

Despite research showing that students who study music have better attendance, achievement and lifetime earnings, music classes are struggling to survive. Supporters of such classes place some of the blame on the federal No Child Left Behind law....As instructional time in math, language arts and other subjects students must achieve proficiency in has risen, time devoted to other subjects has declined. Time spent on arts and music in 2007 is about half what it was before No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, according to a report recently released by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy.

The sentence I've italicized above is not even close to being right.

You can read the Center on Education Policy report referred to in the article here. It only shows detailed data for changes in instructional time for elementary schools. According to the report, the districts surveyed devoted 110 minutes per week to art and music in 2007. Districts that reduced time for art music reported an average reduction of 57 minutes. 110 minutes is not "about half" of 167 minutes, it's 65.8%, a hair below two-thirds.

Much more importantly, only 16 percent of districts reported reducing time for art and music at all.

Needless to say, this is a hugely important distinction. The plain meaning of the sentence printed in the Post is that NCLB has caused a 50% reduction in the total time spent teaching art and music. The report suggests that the actual number is closer to five percent (.34 X .16). In other words, the story is wrong by as much as an order of magnitude.

This seems like a classic symptom of the objectivity / accuracy value imbalance in the media -- newspapers will go to great lengths to make sure that a political reporter's spouse's friend's cousin's college roomate didn't buy lemonade from a stand in front of the candidate's neighbor's house, yet they make math mistakes like this all the time.

A More Selective Pool of Teachers

ETS released a new research report on teacher quality last week showing that the teacher pool seems to be improving, at least on academic measures. The researchers compared the 1994-1997 and 2002-2005 Praxis test takers and found that the SAT scores and GPAs of teacher candidates have increased from one cohort to the next. Why? They credit a combination of policies, both federal and state, including alternative pathways to teaching, higher standards (and standards in general) for academic qualifications, and tougher admissions and licensing requirements. The research suggests that it's a more selective process now–minimum passing scores have been raised and, as a result, Praxis passing rates are down. And the proportion of test takers with prior teaching experience has risen, suggesting a change in the traditional undergraduate education degree route to teaching.

Less rosy are the results for elementary, special education and physical education candidates. Except for special education, where there appears to be some decline, these teacher candidates have better grades and scores too. But they still lag far behind their subject-matter-certified peers for secondary education. And the typical teacher, demographically, isn't much different than a decade ago. There are still disproportionately low numbers of African American and Latino teacher candidates (with the K-12 school population now less than 60 percent white, it's a little startling to still see the teacher pool hovering near 90 percent white). And the male-female ratio hasn't budged at all- still holding at only a quarter male).

The research can't say anything about the classroom effectiveness of these teachers. That's a whole other can of worms. But the direction overall- toward a more selective and perhaps respected pool of teachers- seems positive. The next question for researchers, then, is whether there is some state or federal policy that matters most for this change, or if it is some strange combination of policies that make the difference for teacher quality.

Clemens, Cheater

Since today seems to be non-education-related blog post day, let's just roll with that a little longer and discuss the fact that Roger Clemens apparently began using steroids in 1998.

If true, Clemens deserves all the scorn currently being heaped on Barry Bonds. They both did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time in their careers, for exactly the same reason, with exactly the same result. The prima facie evidence of steroid abuse, in terms of freakishly prolonged greatness, was just as strong. Instead of natural decline in their mid-to-late 30s, each began to rack up additional MVPs and Cy Youngs. Instead of merely being the best position player and pitcher of their generation, they cheated their way into becoming among the greats of all time. Clemens' 354 career wins is, in the context of the modern five man rotation, nearly as impressive as Bonds' all-time homerun record. If Clemens goes to the Hall of Fame and Bonds doesn't, that's racism pure and simple. And Dan Duquette, the Boston Red Sox general manager who infamously said that Clemens was in the "“twilight of his career" before letting him go to the Blue Jays, is owed a lot of apologies right about now.

NCLB Face-Off

The CATO Institute’s Andrew Coulson and I face-off at the Reason Foundation’s Reason Roundtable over whether NCLB should be scrapped or mended.

Coulson argues that NCLB is a federal intrusion on states’ rights and blocks the way for more meaningful, market-based education reforms. I argue that NCLB is critical to getting the kind of information on school performance we need in a market-based system, and that it can help build the supply of quality schools—a first step to any true, equitable school choice market.

Check it out here, and better yet, weigh in with your own comments.

Wyclef for President

I went to the annual RIAA holiday party last night at Ibiza, headlined by Wyclef Jean. Whatever Wyclef gets paid for shows like these, he's worth it, particularly when the job is to engage a crowd full of rythmically challenged Hill staffers and DC types. At one point he invited all the women in the audience to come on stage and dance, and then just let them stay there for the rest of the show. Why don't all concerts work this way?

Getting to the show took me through the new New York Avenue Metro stop and involved walking past the new headquarters of the ATF. Except its not really the ATF, it's the ATFE, as in "Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives." Apparently they added the "E" during the whole Homeland Security reorganization, but decided to stick with that magical ATF brand so as not to confuse people. The building itself was obviously constructed with an acute awarness of the "E" problem; the actual structure is set back a good 50 yards from the street behind large barriers semi-concealed by landscaping etc. One suspects this the future of governmental architecture in the nation's capital, which is understandable but also a shame.

The Laws of Men

In the past few months I've seen numerous citations of Campbell's Law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Given current debates about high-stakes testing, NCLB, higher ed accountability, etc. the relevance to education policy is pretty obvious. David Berliner wrote a whole book flowing from this premise.

Campbell was a social scientist who, in declaring an eponymous, universal statute of sorts, joined a long tradition. The trick is to notice some interesting and fundamental relationship between important things, and explain it in a way that's memorable and easy to understand. Sometimes the observation is explicitly framed as a law, e.g. Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

In other cases the observation is so inextricably tied with the observer that the effect is roughly the same, as with Acton on power and corruption or Santayana on remembrance and repitition of history. Getting your name attached to one these things is one road to minor immortality, albeit a particularly reductive kind.

The form is usually pretty similar: As X, Y. Or in slightly different form: As X, not Y. The historical examples people are trying to emulate, I suspect, are the ageless mathematicians and philosophers--Pythagoras, Archimedes, et al. Newton seemed to exlain the entire universe in three short laws of motion. That's why these laws are so popular. The world is a complicated place, more so all the time, and people are always hungry to accumulate a set of inviolable principles with which to make sense of things.

But here's the thing: just because someone makes an observation and calls it a law doesn't mean it's always true. I've heard people refer to Campbell's Law as if it were etched into the marble facade of the Supreme Court of Social Science, right up there with "correlation doesn't imply causation." It's not, nor are all the rest. Lots of people become powerful while avoiding corruption and make new history while remaining ignorant of the old. Heck, even Newton was eventually overtaken by quantum physics.

It'd be comforting if we could ascertain the world with nothing more than a few nostrums and easily remembered laws, but that's not the world we live in.

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.