TEACH Grants: A Misnomer

President Bush’s 2009 budget includes $14 million for a new program established by Congress (introduced by Kennedy and Miller) last year—the TEACH Grants program. The program calls for grants of up to $4,000 to be awarded to approximately 41,000 students each year starting in the 2008-09 school year, and is intended to encourage students to pursue teaching in high-need schools and subjects. According to the budget, the TEACH Grant program,

...awards annual grants of up to $4,000 to eligible undergraduate and graduate students who agree to serve as a full-time mathematics, science, foreign language, bilingual education or other English language program, special education, or reading teacher at a high-need school for not less than 4 years within 8 years of graduation.

Sounds good, right? But these ‘grants’ are mislabeled—if you keep reading the budget description, it becomes clear that these aren’t grants at all. And calling them grants could lead some students into much more debt than they expected:

For students who fail to fulfill this service requirement, grants are converted to Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loans, with interest accrued from the date the grants were awarded. (Italics are mine)

This means that students who don’t meet any one of the requirements—teaching within 8 years of graduation, teaching in a high-need school for at least 4 years, or teaching in one of the subjects listed—will suddenly have as much as $16,000 in loans, and that’s not including the accrued interest. That would certainly be a rude awakening to a student who thought they were receiving a grant. In fact, these aren’t even considered grants in the budget; they’re just, for some reason, called grants:

For budget and financial management purposes, this program will be operated as a loan program with 100 percent forgiveness of outstanding principal and interest upon completion of a student’s service requirement. The Administration currently estimates approximately 80 percent of participating students will not complete the required service and thus will have their grants converted to Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loans. (Italics, again, are mine)

According to the government’s own calculations, only 20 percent of students who sign-up for this program will actually receive the promised benefit. The rest will end up with much higher debt loads than originally expected.

If the government is considering this as a loan program for budget purposes, it should label it as a loan program for clarity and for students’ own budgeting purposes. While 'TEACH Loans' might not sound as generous, the proper labeling will save many students a lot of confusion and also save some students from a potentially distressful financial situation when an unexpected bill comes due at graduation.

Note: Thanks to Sara Goldrick-Rab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison for the tip. And as she points out, "It's not a loan forgiveness program though-- it's a loan, not a grant-- and there's no forgiveness if it turns into a loan."

Knightfall

Legendary basketball coach Bob Knight is retiring from Texas Tech. I met him, briefly, years ago when I worked from the state senator from Bloomington, IN. He's an imposing guy, more so than you realize watching him on TV because there he's surrounded by even bigger players. Even beyond that, he has this palpable physcial presence that's unusual and more than a little intimidating. It's easy to see how that, combined with a brilliant basketball mind, molded three national championship teams and the most wins in history, just as it led to his justified dismissal from IU when his temper got the better of him one too many times. Some suggest that Knight will be remembered as much for his failings as his success, but I don't think that's true; he may have embarrassed himself but he never dishonored the game through the kind of cheating that ran rampant in other programs that couldn't match the talent and execution at IU.

Helicopter Parents and Other Exaggerations

In a refreshing anti-bogus trend story, Eric Hoover reports the following($) in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the alleged growth of "helicopter parents" who supposedly can't let go of their darling children and hover over them in college, thus spoiling them into adulthood and beyond. This meme has grown so prevalent that it was the topic of a week-long series of Tank McNamara, and there is of course no more reliable filter and promoter of bland conventional wisdom than the daily comics.

Surveys of Students Challenge 'Helicopter Parent' Stereotypes

Tales of meddlesome moms and dads are irresistible. Take the one about the mother who asked the dean to make sure her son was wearing his sweater. Don't forget the parent who told the professor his tests were too hard.Then there's the one about the administrator who received a telephone call when someone's kid needed a light bulb replaced.

These and many other true stories have shaped the popular image of modern parents as high-strung nuisances who torment college administrators day and night. Only that description doesn't match reality, according to Marjorie Savage, director of the parent-liaison program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. "Helicopter parents?" Ms. Savage says. "Truly, there aren't that many of them." Several longtime student-affairs officials agree that while helicopter parents are real, their numbers — and behaviors — have been exaggerated.

In admirable anti-bogus trend fashion, Hoover continues by citing actual, solid, verifiable data, namely newly-released results from UCLA's extensive, long-established Survey of the American Freshman, based on responses from over 272,000 students at 356 colleges and universities nationwide. The survey found that a significant number of freshmen--particularly, and not suprisingly, first-generation students, who are disproportionately from low-income and minority backgrounds--complained of not having enough parental involvement, which is consistent with the recent finding from the respected National Survey of Student Engagment that helicopter parenting, to the extent it actually exists at all, is a good thing.

This illustrates two of the more important things to understand about the way higher education is perceived in this country:

1) Everything is filtered through the sensibility of the top 10 percent of college students and institutions, clustered on the coasts and big cities, people who make up a disproporionate share of the consumers of elite media and an overwhelming percentage of the producers of elite media.

2) This filter produces common perceptions of students and colleges that are often 180 degrees from the general truth.

Helicopter parents aren't prevalent and problematic, they're rare and beneficial. The biggest problem facing typical college-bound high school students isn't too much pressure to cram lots of activities and college prep classes into their schedule, it's not enough preparation for the academic rigors higher education. Similarly, college isn't actually a break and a let-down after the hard work of running the admisssions gantlet; for much students it's a lot more work than they experienced in high school, which often leads to academic struggles and dropping out. The biggest problem facing most college bound students isn't getting into college, since anyone can get into college, it's paying for it once they get there. While growth in private school endowments get a lot of attention, many public universities are gearing up for another set of state budget cutbacks. And so on.

This is particularly problematic from a public policy standpoint, because nearly all worthy higher education policy issues concern the bottom 90 percent, particularly the bottom 50 percent. Elite institutions and the people who attend them are fine--more than fine--and don't need any help. It's the students attending community college and relatively open access four-year instiutions--i.e., most students--who deserve resources and attention, but they don't get it because everyone's worried about whether Little Jenny will get into Dartmouth or Smith.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode Five

I which Marlo reminds us that the future ain't promised to no one, as he seizes the crown. When it became clear that Marlo was going to become the new force on the West Side at the end of Season 3, I was relatively non-plussed; I wasn't sure what more could be said after the epic Stringer / Avon story came to conclusion. But I think the steady onset of Marlo's dead-eyed will to power has been one of the strongest elements of Season 5. You can barely understand what he's saying half the time (thank God for Tivo), but it's nearly always meaningful and compelling. Marlo, Chris, and Snoop clearly represent the culmination of the capitalist impulse that David Simon is critiquing, what he chooses to do with Marlo thematically and plot-wise will play a big role in the ultimate success of the final season.

Elsewhere, the Baltimore powers-that-be remind Clay Davis to stop snitching. Come on Clay, didn't you see the Carmelo Anthony video? Train Wreck McNulty and the fabulist meet their destinies in one another--maybe. I'm inclined to give Simon the benefit of the doubt that this plotline may not be as crashingly obvious as it seems. Strangely, nobody in the Sun management says or does anything to invoke the righteous anger of Saint Gus. Managing editor Klabenow in particular seems quite reasonable in his handling of the serial killer case, first in declining to put it on A1 without more reporting and then refusing to let McNulty tap their phones. Maybe not such a one-dimensional bad guy after all? Levy, Lester, Omar, and everyone else continue to underestimate Marlo. Cutty and Dukie have a conversaton that's a bit too didactic for my taste, while Lester and McNulty explain their wire tap plan to the viewer each other. Come on! No exposition allowed. Bubbles wrestles with survivor's guilt. Omar goes in with guns blazing only to be outfought by Chris, Snoop, and Michael. The only thing that saves him is an apparently bullet-proof couch and the fact that he's Superman. But we knew that already.

Based on next week's coming attractions, the yet-to-appear list now looks like this:

Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Elena
Brother Mouzone

I'm assuming that Prez, Bunny, and Namond will show up eventually, and Brother Mouzone will probably stay in NYC. Therefore, I can only conclude that <The Wire will wrap up with the stunning revelation that it was Poot all along, pulling the strings Keyser Soze style to become the unchallenged king of Baltimore.

Let's also return for a moment to the scene between Carver and Herc in last week's Episode Four. To recap: It's nightime, in the back parking lot of the Western District headquarters, and they're having a beer. The two came up in the ranks together, but while Carver has been promoted, Herc was recently kicked out for general incompetence. Carver has decided to bust Colicchio for beating up an innocent schoolteacher. Herc advises Carver that this is going to cause him a lot of problems, people will say he's a snitch. Carver says he's going to do it anyway, because:

Carver: Remember when I gave you that kid to deliver last year, whats-his-name, you were supposed to get him to Bunk Moreland? You remember that?

Herc: Yeah. I f---ed up. So what?

Carver: So, it mattered.

Herc: So what the f--- does this have to do with Colicchio?

Carver: So it all matters. I know we thought it didn't, but...it does.

Herc: So you gotta do Colicchio, huh? Guess you think they had to do me?

Carver: [silent]

Herc: Yeah, probably. [pause] The guys are going to talk s--- about you for a while. But f--- it, Carver. You do what needs done.

This exchange pretty much sums up everything David Simon has been trying to say on The Wire and how it plays out for the characters and story. When asked by Slate to summarize what the show is about, he said:

Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

In other words, Simon believes that while the only decent, moral view of the world holds that all people have value--that everything and everyone matters--the systems that govern the world, particularly Baltimore, are disconnected from this idea. Often, they oppose it. Accordingly, pretty much every character on The Wire is defined along three dimensions:

1) Where this state of affairs has left them.

2) How well they understand it.

3) How they've chosen to respond.

Simon's crucial observation--what elevates The Wire above standard drama--is that understanding the nature of things and choosing to fight back--to do what needs done--is by no means a sure path to happiness of any kind. McNulty, for example, is painfully aware of how the system works, but trying to do something about it destroys him. He can't deal with the absurdity and injustice, it drives him to drink and dissolution. Jay Landsman, by contrast, understands the system just as well as McNulty, but he's long since given over to cynicsim and self-interest. Not in a totally evil kind of way--remember his mercy toward Bubbles last season--but he's completely unwilling to sacrifice any of himself to change a system he didn't make. Other characters, like Bunk, try to split the difference, trying to matter and stay sane at the same time.

Many of the most potent dramatic moments on The Wire revolve around the characters coming to understand Simon's view of reality, the way it changes them, and the choices they make. Bunny Colvin, Carver's mentor, chose to push back, kept his dignity, but lost his pension and job. Bodie was hollowed out by the knowledge that "the game is rigged," but still decided to die on his feet rather than live on his knees. I suspect that in their last moments, both Prop Joe and Stringer Bell understood that their hubris in thinking that The Game--and thus, those playing it--could be anything other than a remorseless death machine was what brought them down.

Simon's underlying pessimisim is reflected in the fact that the farther up the food chain we go, the less likely to find anyone pushing back against the system, because, of course, the game is rigged in their favor. At the same time, he allows most of the characters who fight honorably to live with some integrity and peace of mind. Lacking that would be the one tragedy that even David Simon couldn't bear to show.

More Massive Endowments

I went to an event at AEI on Friday morning, focused on the question of whether Congress should obligate non-profit universities to spend a minimum percentage of their endowments every year, a requirement currently applied to non-profit charities. Parenthetically, it's worth noting that AEI puts on some of the best education-related events in town. The issues are timely, they get the right people in the room, and the discussions are pretty balanced, ideologically. The one downside is that the conference center is on the 12th (top) floor of the AEI building, which houses publications like The Weekly Standard along with organizations like the Project for the New American Century and, well, AEI. That means that if you go to enough of their education events, you inevitably have the experience of glancing at the person standing next to you in the elevator and thinking "Hey, I saw you on TV, you're that guy who seems to be hell-bent on destroying civilization as we know it." Is there an ethical obligation to say something in this situation? This troubles me.

Anyway, while I walked into the event glad that the endowment issue is causing people to scrutinize the much-understudied issue of how colleges spend their money, on balance I was against a minimum payout. Charles Miller, chairman of the recent Commission on the Future of Higher Education, made a principled argument against the feds interfering with institutional spending decisions while also pointing out that university endowments are encumbered by a lot of donor-directed legal restrictions on spending. Plus, he noted, any university financial official with half a brain could shuffle funds around in a way that would meet the letter of the law while leaving actual spending unchanged.

Other panelists, however, made some good counterpoints. For example, did you know that when it's reported that universities spend, on average, 4.6% of their endowments, that number includes the cost of managing the endowments themselves? Or that the single biggest category of donor-restricted spending is financial aid for low-income students? So when politicians suggest that institutions could do more to restrain prices for needy undergraduates if they bumped the payout up to 5%, that's not a crazy idea.

Richard Vedder also raised a larger issue: the generally unquestioned idea that colleges and universities deserve non-profit status because of the positive benefits they provide to society at large. Vedder argues that the empirical case for this, framed in terms of benefits vs. the cost in lost tax revenues, isn't as obvious as one might think. Of course, of course, much of what makes higher education valuable can't be measured in terms of dollars and cents. That said, I think the non-profit sector that most resembles higher education in longevity, attitude, and weakness for monumental architecture is organized religion, in particular the Catholic Church, and while the church spends money running charities and parochial schools for low-income urban students, colleges blow vast amounts of tax-subsidized funding operating professional sports entertainment franchises for the amusement of their students and alumni. There are few, if any, major non-profit sectors that are as fundamentally self-interested as higher education, where we're obligated to assume social benefits on faith in such a diffuse, attentuated way.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for revoking the tax status of your local university. Higher education does a great many things for a great many people, and in countles ways large and small enriches the world around us. But the time when policymakers and the general public simply take higher education's word for it--on spending, learning, and many other things--is, thankfully, coming to end.

NY Times Delivers the Standard Virtual School Story

Today’s New York Times features the standard story on K-12 virtual schooling. The Times deserves kudos for covering this increasingly important topic and for accurately pointing out that there are different types of virtual schools. But, after noting that the vast majority of students participate in supplemental, mostly state-run virtual schools, the article focuses 90% of its copy on the controversies surrounding full-time, cyber schools.

True, cyber school issues are in play in many state courts and legislatures. More importantly, they are full of controversies around unions, home schooling, and privatization—the red meat issues that make for good copy and get the usual suspects going on either extreme of conventional education debates. It all makes for a good story that can be easily covered in the usual way that education is covered. But, there’s a much bigger story still untold.

Just as modern workplaces bridge multiple online and offline communications modes, the future for education is neither a fully virtual nor a parallel system, but an integrated one. The overwhelming majority of students will continue to attend physical schools. However, increasing numbers of students will also take courses or parts of courses online, moving back and forth seamlessly between the traditional and virtual—just as they do in every other aspect of their lives.

Right now, there is an opportunity for the deep structural changes that we’ve seen the Internet spark in almost every other field. In each case, new organizations developed alternative management structures, distribution methods, and work models.

Virtual schooling can drive the same sorts of transforming changes in public education. While the importance of effective teaching and learning has not changed, the Internet has enabled educators to significantly alter the experience of schooling. Virtual schools are personalizing student learning and extending it beyond the traditional school day. They’ve created new models for the practice of teaching—with opportunities to easily observe, evaluate, and assist instructors. And they are pioneering performance-based education funding models.

That is why it is increasingly important to understand the broader innovations that are emerging from online schooling and their potential to leverage reform on a far larger scale in public education.

Cutting it at the Front of the Classroom

The American Federation of Teachers has released a statement on a report we published yesterday. The report's called “Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education.” As the title suggests, it looks at the ways school systems figure out who’s cutting it at the front of the classroom and who isn’t. It’s a pretty important issue, given that the nation spends $400 billion a year on public school salaries and benefits.

The AFT’s statement declares that the report “acknowledges” what the union has “long known,” that “current testing systems are not accurate or strong enough to become the basis of a good teacher evaluation program.” The union went on to say that the report is “thoughtful and balanced.”

I appreciate people saying nice things about my work. I deserve far more compliments than I get. But I suspect that the kind words from my friends at the AFT might have something to do with the fact the union’s largest local, the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, is waging war against a recent proposal by New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein to rate teachers in the nation’s largest school system on the basis of their students’ test scores.

It’s a radical idea in public education, where teachers’ credentials have always mattered more than their performance. For the record, it’s an idea that I support. Teaching is, after all, primarily about student achievement.

But I argue in “Rush to Judgment,” which I wrote with Bob Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, that test scores should play a supporting rather than a leading role in teacher evaluations.

That’s because only about half of public school teachers teach subjects or at grade levels where students are tested, eliminating the prospect of a system that’s applied fairly to all teachers. A second problem is that most standardized tests in use today measure a narrow band of mostly low-level skills and thus disadvantage excellent teachers able to move their students beyond the basics.

Kevin Carey, Education Sector’s policy manager, noted in a post here several days ago the progress that has been made in figuring out how to distinguish individual teachers’ impact on their students’ reading and math scores from the myriad of other influences on student achievement. It’s not defensible to use test scores in teacher evaluations without separating signal from noise in this way. And to their credit, Joel Klein and his deputy, Chris Cerf, the architect of the New York testing plan, are taking steps to do the right thing on this point. But there aren’t a lot of school systems in the country with the technical know-how to do what New York is doing.

As a result, test scores are best suited to play a secondary role in teacher evaluations and school systems should use schoolwide scores in their evaluation calculations, rather than individual teachers’ scores.

A key to stronger teacher evaluations, in both New York and nationwide, is taking a lot more seriously the scrutiny of teachers’ work in their classrooms. The typical teacher evaluation in public education today consists of a quick classroom visit by an untrained principal wielding a checklist that often doesn’t even focus directly on the quality of a teacher’s instruction.

As we argue in our report, evaluations should be based on clear, comprehensive standards of strong teaching practice that have emerged in recent years. And they should be based on multiple observations by multiple evaluators, with a substantial role going to teams of trained school system evaluators free of the inclinations to favoritism and conflicts of interest that plague principal-led evaluations—and that led to the rise of credential- and seniority-based pay scales in public education 80 years ago.

Credible, comprehensive classrooms evaluations supplemented with student test scores used responsibly is a strategy that the AFT should be able to buy into, at least if it likes our report.

The School Budget Crisis That Wasn't

There's something strange about the front-page school budget crisis story in the Washington Post this morning, titled "Housing Downturn Squeezes Schools."

All the major elements are there. "The rapid cooling of the Washington area's real estate market has hit school systems with force," we are told. There are "financial hard times." "As can be seen with jittery stock markets across the world, it is unclear whether the storm is over." "The economic instability could not have happened at a worse time" because NCLB mandates "threaten schools that fail to comply with restructuring and state takeover."

The only thing that's missing is...the budget crisis.

Seriously, I've read the article through twice, and other than a salary freeze in PG County, there's hardly anything there. The article notes that "In the District, next year's budget will probably drop from $796.2 million to $794.6 million because of declining enrollment." In other words, a 0.2% drop for reasons that have nothing to do with the housing downturn. In Fairfax County, the budget is increasing by 3.3 percent, but they may only cover the cost of AP and IB tests for low-income students, instead of everyone--which is likely to result in a 0% change in AP test-taking. Average class size may rise by 0.5 students. The Montgomery County budget is going up $110 million, but "proposals to save $546,060 by asking some teachers in the five secondary magnet programs to teach one more daily class have raised alarm." The Loudon County school budget is increasing by 14%.

It's almost like they decided to write the story first and then sent some staff writers out to do the reporting, and when the facts didn't match the framing, they just went ahead and published it anyway....

The problem here is that the Post doesn't seem to understand how school funding actually works. The article says that "school systems rely mainly on state and county government funding, and those governments draw most of their revenue from property taxes." That's only half true--county governments get their revenue from property taxes, but state governments get their revenue from income and sales taxes. And the dynamics of property vs. income and sales taxation are very different.

The basic formula for state budgeting is this: (Tax Base X Tax Rate) = Revenue = Budget. State income and sales tax rates are fixed and don't change very often. They produce a certain amount of revenue in a year, which the state legislature spends.

The basic formula for local budgeting, by contrast, works like this: Tax Rate = (Budget / Tax Base). In other words, elected officials start by deciding how much money they want to spend, and then set whatever property rate is needed to raise that much money based on the total value of taxable property.

When times are good and property values are rising rapidly--as they did in the DC area before the real estate bubble began to burst--county officials tend to enact generous budgets that increase in the range of 5% - 10% per year. Because property values increase much faster, the actual property tax rate goes down. But homeowners don't care about the rate, they care about the bill, and while they grumble about increased taxes, they also understand that--unlike with state taxes--local property values and school budgets are intimately related. Just as increased property values are good for the Fairfax school budget, a healthy Fairfax school budget is good for property values.

When property values crater, school officials ease up an the annual increases while increasing the property tax rate dramatically, because the tax base is shrinking while the budget is still growing--but again, nobody cares about the rate, only the bill. And people will still pay the increased bill, for the reasons above, and because while property taxes are based on property, they're not payed from property--they're paid from income, and local incomes are not crashing in DC in the same way that housing values are crashing. There's no "income bubble," people still have jobs--particularly when a lot of the economy is government-related--and so for the most part they can still pay their property taxes.

In other words, the Post wrote the story thinking that local budgeting works just like state budgeting--that a decline in the tax base leads to a commensurate decline in tax revenues, and thus spending. As the facts of the story itself show, this just isn't true.

The Higher Ed Lobby Strikes Again

Most of the Presidential candidates, particularly the Democrats, have pledged to do something about the high price of higher education. But while they're busy campaigning, the DC higher education lobby is working behind the scenes on Capitol Hill to sabotage efforts to make higher education more transparent, accountable, and ultimately affordable.

This begins with the recent initiative by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to provide parents and students with more information about how well individual colleges and universities educate their students. Part of this push has focused on accreditation, a voluntary, non-governmental process by which higher education essentially polices itself through periodic inspection and peer review by non-profit accrediting organizations. Accreditation is intricately tied to federal policy, because the feds only allow students to use Pell grants and federal student loans at accredited colleges. In order to ensure that the process has integrity (stay with me here) the U.S. Department of Education periodically reviews and re-certifies the accrediting organizations themselves. In other words, it accredits the accreditors.

Accreditation can have a lot of value in providing colleges with candid feedback, and it's done a good job of building a floor in terms of quality and financial integrity. If you pay your tuition to an accredited college, it's very unlikely they'll steal your money or hand you a worthless diploma. But accreditation does a terrible job of creating or providing any kind of public, comparable information about institution-level academic quality. The process simply isn't designed for this, which is why colleges never lose accreditation because they don't do a good enough job teaching their students. In the end, the academic quality component of accreditation often amounts to this:

Accreditor: Given your academic mission and student population, are you doing a good job educating your students?
College: Yes.
Accreditor: Are you sure?
College: Yes.
Accreditor: Okay then!

This is one reason that less than half of all recent colleges graduates scored as "proficient" on a test of literacy.

Since accreditation is one of the few federal leverage points on issues of learning (as opposed to research or financial aid) in higher education, Sec. Spellings has used it to push for more public information about academic quality. The institutions and accreditors have pushed back--hard. This all came to a head last month, when the federal panel that accredits the accreditors met to review the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), which has been around since 1885 and accredits most of the Ivy League.

In past years, reapproval of NEASC has been basically a formality. But this year, the panel had a new member, Anne Neal, president of the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). As reported in InsideHigherEd, Neal proceeded to ask NEASC a series of discomforting questions that boiled down to "Do you have any standards or objective criteria for deciding if the institutions you accredit are actually teaching well? Do they? If you don't and they don't, how do you actually know?"

To which NEASC replied, in so many words: "No; no; we know it when we see it." And of course, they always see it.

At this point various parties involved started to challenge the entire premise of Neal's line of questioning, saying that it was beyond the purview of the panel to even ask whether accreditors have any kind of transparent process for assessing academic quality that could conceivably produce an answer other than "good enough." Behind the scenes, people started to say that if this kind of talk kept up, they would take the matter directly to Congress, which was (and is) in the middle of reauthorizing the massive federal Higher Education Act (HEA).

Now it appears that's exactly what happened. The talk around town is that the influential higher education lobby (described in this essential Washington Monthly piece from Politico's Ben Adler) has lined up substantial support behind an HEA provision that would short-circuit the Department of Education's entire effort, preventing it from requiring accreditors to require colleges to provide information about whether they're actually teaching their students well. The bill currently in the House says, in section 496:

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes the standards that accrediting agencies or associations shall use to assess any institution's success with respect to student achievement."

In other words: While the federal government spends tens of billions of dollars a year supporting higher education, directly and indirectly through grants, loans, tax preferences, etc., it shall be legally required to take higher education's word for it that all that money is being spent well on behalf of students, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

Keep in mind, this is not No Child Left Behind for higher education. Nobody is proposing that anyone other than the accreditors or the institutions themselves set standards for academic quality. They're just proposing that there ought to be standards or information of some kind that regular people and prospective students can actually understand, and that colleges should explain why they have or haven't met them.

What does this have to do with affordability? Simple: America's intractable college cost problem is actually in large part an information deficit problem. Because there's no real, comparable information about how well different colleges teach or how much their students learn, price and quality have become synonymous in the higher education market. Institutions accumulate prestige by spending their way up the rankings ladder, raising tuition and exclusivity along the way. The lack of data about quality (along with high barriers to entry) keeps competitors at bay. As long as this remains the case, no amount of additional Pell grants or reduced interest rates will be able to keep up with spiraling costs.

The Democratic nominee for president will either be Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, both of whom sit on the Senate HELP committee. That means that in the not-so-distant future, a Senator who may very well be the next President of the United States could be faced with having to vote up or down on a bill that will hamstring the ability of their administration to seriously tackle both the problem of inconsistent academic quality in higher education and out-of-control increases in cost.

Hopefully, someone will step in on behalf of students, taxpayers, and the public interest. But if the higher education lobby's history of short-circuiting needed reforms is any indication, the narrow self-interest of entrenched institutions may prevail once again.

What about the ladies room?

Forget about fancy, high-priced dorms--the University of Colorado at Boulder just sold the naming rights to a men's bathroom, complete with an inspiring quote: The best ideas often come at inconvenient times. Don't ever close your mind to them.

But what about the ladies? Certainly there's a successful businesswoman out there who would contribute her name for the sake of some potty parity. (Via Inside Higher Ed's reliably good quick takes.)

Charts You Can't Trust

Education Sector has a monthly feature called Charts You Can Trust, short policy briefs built around a couple of pieces of interesting data. You can read them all here. They're fun. We've always wanted to run a chart you can't trust, but never got around to it -- and now Sherman Dorn has beat us to the punch, with this piece on dubious graphics from the Friedman Foundation.

Subprime Student Loans?

Last Thursday, Sallie Mae announced a $1.6 billion loss—a bad day capping the end of a bad year for the company. Sallie Mae also announced that it would be cutting back on loans to nontraditional schools, especially schools with low graduation rates. Echoing the sentiments of banks who bet too much money on bad real estate loans, Al Lord, Sallie Mae’s chief executive, said "Sallie Mae has lent too much money to students who have gone to schools without very good graduation records." And now the company is looking to make some changes.

The first schools to feel the hit were for-profit career colleges—Career Education Corp., Corinthian Colleges, and ITT have all announced that Sallie Mae is cutting back on loans for their students. For-profit colleges are understandably nervous about this, and if these cuts start to limit students’ access to federal loans, it could be cause for concern. But right now, it looks like the cuts are mostly focused on the previously fast-growing private loan sector of Sallie Mae’s business—loans that don’t include the protections or guarantees of federal loans. And this may just be a good thing.

It’s not hard to see parallels between subprime mortgages and programs like Sallie Mae’s “opportunity loans” in which private loans were provided to students with poor credit ratings. While these loans might provide students with the money they need to attend college in the short-term, it’s hardly an opportunity if the students don’t have the financial resources to repay the loans. And hopefully it will encourage some of these colleges to shift their focus from simply getting students in the door, to also graduating them and helping them to get a job.

If You Pay Them They Will Pass

Seriously? Baltimore is putting aside nearly a $million to pay students to pass the Maryland state high school exit exams. This has got to be the worst example of how to engage students in their education, if that's in fact the point, although it was easy enough to find students who support this idea. Of course they do- it's $110 in their pocket if they pass- but I'll bet if you probed further you'd get a good number who'd tell you that it's not actually a smart use of funds. Better ways to engage students: make instruction more interesting and challenging, link the materials to their lives and experiences, help them understand why it matters. Not for $100 to pass a test, but the nearly 100 percent increase in earnings that college degrees will get them. Harder to do, yes, but that's what it takes if you want kids to care about school. As for the exit exams? They're gaining momentum in the states (about 1/2 have them now, or will by 2009) but it's not funding gimmicks that will make them work for students.

Frightening Bad Media Trend Convergence

Long-time Q&E readers know that we're particularly aggravated by two types of bad news stories with weed-like properties of propagation and ineradicability: the bogus trend story, and the voyeuristic female teacher / male student sex scandal. Inevitably, the two have now converged:

(AP) -- Heeding a steady drumbeat of sexual misconduct cases involving teachers, at least 15 states are now considering stronger oversight and tougher punishment for educators who take advantage of their students. Lawmakers say they are concerned about an increasingly well-documented phenomenon: While the vast majority of America's teachers are committed professionals, there also is a persistent problem with sexual misconduct in U.S. schools.

"Increasingly well-documented." Yeah, I wonder how that happened.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 4

This week, we learn that Baltimore is no city for old men.

First, Clay Davis continues hurtling toward an indictment, and gets the perp walk treatment from the DA to boot. I almost feel sorry for him, except not really. Then Commissioner Burrell gets the final word on his ouster. He tries to play the Daniels corruption card, but to no avail, because the truth hardly matters when it comes to politics, which he should have learned by now. Finally, Prop Joe's long, long run comes to an end. The Post's Tom Shales draws the parallel to Abe Vigoda's demise in The Godfather, which is a reasonable observation except he made it behind the thinnest of veils nearly a month ago, before the first episode had run. Maybe one reason newspapers are losing revenue and readers to the Internet is that their TV columnists don't know the meaning of "spoiler alert."

Ultimately all three got what was coming to them, and none were truly surprised. Joe's mistake was seeing himself as civilized, with his lawyers, bank accounts, and business-like reasonableness. But he was only a murderer and a drug dealer in the end, just like Marlo, and of the two of them, Marlo was the one smart enough to understand what that meant. Leroy Burrell may be "stone stupid," but he's headed to a full pension and sinecure in DC while Joe rots in a vacant with all the rest.

The rest of the episode was a little slow, I think. It was good to see Kima again, albeit to no real purpose. Beadie confronts McNulty, whose fake serial killer investigation continues like a slow-motion car crash. Lester enlists the help of old partner who got busted out of homicide because of some righteous confrontation with The Man. Hey, isn't that exactly what happened to Lester, almost to the letter? Saint Gus of the Newsroom takes a few more arrows on behalf of American Journalism. Carver decides he has no choice but to bust Colicchio for being a violent SOB, leading to a conversation with Herc that was one of the best moments of the season so far. Daniels barely settles into his new desk as Deputy-Ops before getting a call for Rawls. Maybe someone from the gay bar? Odds on that ever coming up again? Omar confronts Slim Charles but doesn't kill him, because a man's got to have a code.

Years-gone-by reference of the week: Prop Joes buy flowers for Butchie's funeral, telling the florist that he doesn't want one of those gangster arrangements, like the one Bodie (R.I.P.) bought for D'Angelo's funeral back in Season Two, Episode 7.

Next week: Looks like Cutty finally reappears. Dammit, where's Poot?!

This is Probably True

Per The Onion:

TV Critics Admit To Never Having Watched The Wire

NEW YORK—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire, television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show. "The Wire has done what no other television program has come close to achieving—namely, presenting the life of a decaying American city and doing so with the scope and moral vision of great literature," said New York Times critic Virginia Heffernan, who was surprised to hear that the groundbreaking series had already started its fifth and final season in early January. "It sounds fantastic. I really wish I had HBO." Many reviewers from top media outlets assured reporters that they would start watching the Peabody Award–winning show just as soon as the first season reaches the top of their Netflix queues.

"Technical" Objections

Over at the UFT, Leo Casey accuses us of various rhetorical sins involves caricatures, straw men, etc, in recent comments about the NYC value-added project. Their grievances lie with the methodology, says Leo, and it's wrong to say otherwise. Okay, very well. Two questions:

1) What are the basic elements of a UFT-approved methodologically appropriate method for estimating individual teacher effectiveness using value-added measures based on standardized test scores? For example, if the school system were to find a way to fix every problem that Leo mentions--multiple teachers between tests, small numbers of students per teacher, etc.--would that be sufficient to assuage their concerns?

2) Given a UFT-approved value-added methodology, what uses of value-added data would the UFT endorse? Could the results be released to the public? Could they be used as one factor in making tenure decisions or providing performance bonuses? Anything else?

If Leo provides a straight answer to those questions, and if the answer to the second questions is something other than "None," I'll officially apologize for saying that the UFT's reaction to the value-added reflects a principled opposition to evaluating teachers using student test scores.

No Child Tickets

En route to a meeting here in D.C., I walked by the Woolly Mammoth theater this morning and saw this poster for the solo show by former NYC public school teacher, Nilaja Sun. Sounds good, and more fun than most No Child events these days. It opened on Jan 21 and will be around through February 17th.

Massive Endowments

The annual college endowment report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) was released yesterday. Overall, it was a great year for higher education, with average earnings of 17.2 %. The richest institutions (over $1 billion in assets) did even better, earning 21.3%. One consequence of the growth is that institutions are having a hard time figuring out how to spend all the new money; endowment spending as a percent of assets dropped to 4.6%, the lowest rate since 1999. This will probably provide fresh ammunition to those in Congress and elsewhere who have proposed that institutions be required to spend a fixed percent of assets--usually 5%, the legal standard applied to many non-profits already. As Rich Kahlenberg said in the Wall Street Journal, "The price of college is rising and endowments are growing and people are frustrated by those two things going on at once."

On some level, the top schools are victims of their own success. As has already been widely reported, Harvard earned $5.7 billion on its endowment last year, which is by itself larger than the total endowment of all but a handful of institutions. This is the principle of compound interest in action--when you meet with a retirement advisor, they always show you the parabolic curve of expected earnings and point out that you make most of your money in the last 10 years. Universities have a longer investment time horizon than any other institution that currently exists, governments included, so it's no suprise to see their longevity paying off.

But all that money raises some uncomfortable questions, about the price of college as Kahlenberg suggests (it's no coincidence that Harvard and Yale timed the announcement of their new endowment-funded financial aid programs to hit the news in the weeks before the NACUBO report), and--more importantly, in my opinion--why, exactly, all of this is being subsidized by the government in the form of tax preferences for everyone involved. As Richard Vedder pointed out in the Post over the weekend, Princeton recently built a new residence facility, Whitman College (above), named after major donor and alumna Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, which cost a staggering $388,571 per unit, roughly what Donald Trump spends building a luxury resort. Here we have a fabulously wealthy person donating money to a fabously wealthy university to built a fabulously expensive facility for the benefit of students who come from, in many cases, very wealthy families. I have no problem with that personally if that's how they want to spend their money, but why am I, as a taxpayer, footing part of the bill?

Value-Added Comes of Age

About four and a half years ago, I was working on a policy paper focused on a developing and controversial method of measuring teacher effectiveness called "value-added." Created by Dr. Bill Sanders in Tennessee in the mid-1990s, the essence of value-added is pretty simple: Using annual standardized test scores, look at the prior achievement history of a given teacher's students and, based on that, statistically predict how well they're likely to do in the current year. Then calculate the ratio of their actual performance to the predicted performance. Teachers with a ratio greater than 1.0 are more effective than average, those with a ratio of less than 1.0, less. This gives teachers credit for making a lot of progress with previously underperforming students, and doesn't give them progress for coasting with previously high-performing students. Whatever external factors impact performance--poverty, family life, etc.--are implicitly controlled for, because the prediction model is based on the prior performance of the students themselves.

Around the same time, I was reading Michael Lewis's new book, Moneyball, which I had bought the day it was published, being a big fan of both the author and the Bill Jamesian approach to thinking about baseball. And at some point I realized that the underlying premise of Moneyball and the promise of value-added were the same: using empirical data to fundamentally change and improve a labor market. Instead of relying on human observations of characteristics, with all the biases and errors that result, focus on outcomes instead. The paper was released the following year, my first and only real contribution to the teacher quality debate, and while in retrospect I'm kind of embarrassed by the length, I think the ideas hold up pretty well. (The original draft included a whole section explicitly drawing the Moneyball parallel, but it was excised in the editing process, and yes, I'm still bitter.)

So it's interesting to see (I take no credit for this) the New York City school system announcing a plan to start calculating value-added scores for some of its teachers. Just like in Tennessee, the idea is pretty straightforward:

The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors. Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

What they're going to do with the data, however, is unclear. One option is to use it for making tenure decisions, which, research has shown pretty conclusively, is a good idea--it seems clear that if your value-added scores put you among the very worst teachers in your first few years--like the bottom 3%, say--the odds of you ever becoming a good teacher are quite low. As Harvard's Tom Kane notes, "It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom.

Or you could simply put the data out there and let market forces work. Deputy School Chancellor Chris Cerf said:

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward. If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

Crucially, this would be good for the best teachers. One of the biggest problems with the teacher labor market is that the top teachers--the ones who are one or more standard deviations above the mean in terms of effectiveness--are criminally underpaid, and have no way of demonstrating their real value to the labor market. Their unions, however, are totally aghast at the prospect. Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers (and rumoured to be next head the national AFT) said:

“Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective."

This is the equivalent of the scouts and general managers in Moneyball who were always on the lookout for the "good body," the "five-tool guy," the player who just looked like a major leaguer. As everyone now knows, they were profoundly mistaken, and people like the Oakland A's Billy Beane were able to exploit the market distortions that resulted.

What we're seeing in New York City today is all the major challenges of 21st century K-12 teacher policy being played out in real time. Value-added methods are still very much in development, subject to limitations of standardized tests, among many things. But in the long run, there will only be more, better information about student performance, along with newer, faster ways of analyzing that information and drawing increasingly accurate conclusions about how well teachers are doing their jobs. At some point the methodological debates will be resolved and the margins of error whittled down the satisfaction of reasonable people.

That will have profound implications for the way teachers are hired, paid, trained, assigned--perhaps for the nature of the profession itself. Much current teacher policy is logically derivative of extremely limited or absent information--if we can't accurately measure teacher effectiveness, then pay everyone the same. If we can't know how well teachers will perform when they arrive in the classroom, throw up a lot of regulatory and process barriers to entry in terms of training and certification. The shift from information scarcity to abundance will change that logic, and eventually the policies themselves. New York City is a sign of things to come.

Update: Eduwonkette compares this to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and then says she's not actually making the comparison she just made. The privileges of anonymity, I suppose. Sherman Dorn chooses a different horrible disease (botulism) to make his point--which is that the NYC value-added process may or may not have severe methodological flaws. It might, I don't know, I guess we'll find out. But, per above, methodological issues can be worked out, and anyone who thinks the hysterical reaction to the value-added initiative stems from a deep and abiding concern for statistical integrity is willfully not paying attention.

Update II: Dorn updates and points out that the "botulism" reference wasn't hysterical, fair enough, I was referring to the folks at UFT but that wasn't clear. He also says:

The claim that "methodological issues can be worked out" is evidence that Carey hasn't read the writings of professional researchers who point out that growth models are no holy grail.

I've read the research (which the UFT habitually misrepresents) pretty carefully. The people who've looked at the Sanders model have generally concluded that it does what it says it does: identify teacher effects, given appropriate caveats about statistical margins of error. It's true that they say it's no holy grail, which is unsurprising in that there's no such thing as a holy grail. There is not now nor will there ever be perfect information about teacher effectiveness; teaching is far too complicated for that. The only responsible approach to using value-added data--or any other data that purports to gauge teacher effectiveness--is to be cognizant of the amount of likely error and craft policies accordingly. And of course there should also be diligant work to improve the methods themselves, which nobody believes have reached an apex of refinement.

Given that, a fair response to the NYC announcement would be something like this: "We support efforts to fairly evaluate teacher effectiveness and recognize that objective evidence of student learning growth must play an important role in that process. We emphasize that the results of evaluation methods based on standardized test scores will be subject to significant degrees of statistical error, which much be appropriately taken into account, particularly when such information is used in the context of employment matters such as tenure and compensation. The best process will combine information from multiple methods, including peer and principal evaluation, and will preserve teachers' professional rights. We look forward to working in concert with management to develop such policies, which should include rewarding the most effective teachers for the vital work they do."

The actual response from the UFT was nothing like that. Rather, it reflects a principled opposition to the use of test scores of any kind in evaluating teachers. Again, this is not an argument about methodology; it goes much deeper than that. Talking about methods in a good faith attempt to reach the goal of better information is one thing, but the holy grail standard is all about making perfection the enemy of the good.

Wisconsin, Cyberschools, and Virtual Schooling

The publicity following a recent ruling by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals ordering the state to end funding of the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a full-time virtual charter school operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District (just north of Milwaukee), is helping to reinforce the public misconceptions around virtual schooling. Take, for example, this breathless lede in Friday's AP story:

School districts across the United States are watching a court ruling that challenges the existence of virtual schools and could determine the future of online education.

Don't believe the hype and don't think that all virtual schooling looks like Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Many people think that "cyber" charter schools, schools that are responsible for students' entire education experience and that students attend full-time, are the primary sponsors of online learning. But, the majority of students learning online participate in "supplemental" virtual schooling programs. These supplemental programs, many state-run, allow students to take online courses in addition to their regular school-based courses.

The AP story and much of the discourse surrounding the Wisconsin decision confound the ideological and political controversies that surround cyberschools with virtual schooling in general. Despite their growth and popularity, full-time cyberschools are highly controversial—a result of their non-traditional approach to learning, their status as charter schools, the transfer of student funding away from traditional schools, and their enrollment of former home-school students. Many unions, especially state and local- level affiliates, have vehemently opposed cyberschools.

Not only is the story above factually incorrect (the law in question is a very specific Wisconsin state law—Colorado, for example, just recently passed its own cyberschool legislation), but it narrows all of online learning to the cyberschool model. This is particularly dangerous because many of the practices found in supplemental virtual schooling programs are bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools and prompting educators and policymakers to question and change key components of our traditional, classroom-based public system. Limiting the discussion of virtual schooling solely to cyberschools equates virtual schooling with home schooling and bounds the possibilities of online education into the constraints of polarized, non-productive and ideological education battles.

That said, proactive state legislators across the country should take note of the Wisconsin case. Many states' laws, like those in Wisconsin, need to be modernized to reflect an education system that is no longer defined by bricks and mortar schools, seat time, and strict geographic lines. These legislators should heed the lessons of the charter school movement and craft strong laws that provide the regulatory and accountability framework needed for all forms of virtual schooling within the public system.

Specifically, cyberschool options should exist to help serve the vast variety of student and family needs. It's ok for different models to serve different students with differing needs to ensure each of them is successful—that's called personalization.

The key issue is really around public funding. Funding should follow student success and not penalize innovation or efficiency. But, let's also make sure to weight the public funding so that it is sensitive to what the state is actually buying. Many cyberschool models have very limited student/teacher interaction, rely heavily on parents as educators, and are less likely to serve special needs students or those without a stay-at-home parent. With weighted funding, some cyberschools would receive less money. But, more money could also follow to cyberschools that can demonstrate success serving students with higher needs. The more sophisticated conversation is not about whether cyberschools are good or bad, but what role they play in a state's various educational priorities and how the funding follows those priorities.

Funding Gaps

The Education Trust released its annual state report, The Funding Gap, which looks at funding trends from 1999 to 2005 and compares district funding for those serving the highest percentages of poor students and students of color and those serving the lowest percentage of these students. Winners include 10 states that narrowed the gap between funding for low and high-poverty districts: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Minnesota, NJ, NY, New Mexico, Ohio, Wyoming and my own Maryland. Maryland, btw, along with Ohio and Wyoming, not only closed their gap but reversed it and now provides more funding to high-poverty districts. Losers? Illinois, Florida, Texas and more than a dozen more states where the funding gap actually increased from 1999 to 2005. That's right smack in the middle of our strong accountability era, where all school systems are pressed to meet standards for all students. How can we have school financing policies that are so in conflict with this accountability standard? It seems to me that aligning our accountability and finance systems should be a basic must-do.

Also good to note that EdTrust has added an important new piece of analysis to their annual report. Carmen Arroyo, the author of the report, crunched the numbers on percentages of English Language Learner students and found that in the eight states with the highest percentages of ELLs, districts with a lot of ELLs receive less funding than districts with few or no ELL students (I'll have to ask Carmen how many districts in the top ELL states really have no ELL students? Few, I'll bet). This type of ELL analysis is a key addition, as this population of students promises to grow not only in those high-ELL states but in most others too.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 3

Summary: McNulty successfully fakes evidence of a Baltimore serial killer, yet nobody cares. Lester explains that he's failed to include the kind of lurid psycho-sexual element that will bump the story onto the front page. Bunk is increasingly (and amusingly) aghast. Prop Joe gives Marlo money-laundering lessons. The Sun's parent company hands down a new round of budget cuts, forcing the closure of all foreign bureaus and firing / buyout of veteran reporters. The Fabulist makes up some more stuff while acting like even more of a snot. Burrell tries to feed Carcetti fake crime stats, not realizing that Valchek gave the mayor the real stats first, so Carcetti sets the wheels in motion to can Burrell and replace him with Daniels. Clay Davis continues to feel the heat. I think I could watch a whole hour of nothing but Clay Davis. Michael begins to conclude that certain aspects of working for the Marlo organization--such as working seven days a week on the corner and being asked to murder small children--aren't so great. Method Man gives up Butchie to Chris and Snoop, who promptly torture him (Butchie) to death in an effort to smoke out Omar. He was indeed a tough old man. Snoop continues to question the wisdom of the "provoke the baddest man in Baltimore into trying to kill us all" strategy. Omar, blissfully on vacation in the Carribean with his boyfriend, hears the news about Butchie. Duh-duh-DUH!!!!

This episode continues the proud Wire tradition of constructing scenes that assume you've studied every scene in every episode with Talmudic intensity, like when Daniels and his ex-wife fret about Burrell possibly revealing old allegations of Daniels doing something vaguely corrupt back when he was involved in drug investigations, before the show even began. I can't remember the last time this fact was even mentioned, and its never been clear to me whether the allegations are even true, but nothing is ever forgotten on The Wire, because it's all connected. Bonus: Pearlman grilling Clay Davis' driver about the $20,000 he got caught with all the way back in Season One.

Now that Omar has reappeared, the most signicant characters yet to show up are, in no particular order:

Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Brother Mouzone

Episode three seems like as good a time as any to put The Prop Joe Question on the table. To wit: the "prequel" webisode featuring Joe is dated 1962, where he looks to be about ten, give or take. That means Joe is now roughly 55 years old. Allowing for time to work up through the ranks, etc., he's been seriously in The Game for 30 years, minimum. Joe, more than anyone else on the show, has figure out the two essential truths of The Game, and their resulting corollary: 1) Making money is the easy part. 2) Staying alive and out of prison is the hard part. Ergo, the smart play is: Whenever possible, trade money for a reduced risk of being imprisoned or killed. But even given the resulting reduced income, Joe must be fabulously rich; heroin has been in Baltimore since the 70s and crack since the 80s. As we learned this week, to nobody's surprise, Joe knows how to launder money into offshore accounts. His position as the middleman betweent The Greek and the rest of the Co-op members must be extremely lucrative, I assume he's the equivalent of "The Bank," the position Stringer Bell was shooting for before he got shot. Yet Joe must also know that while he can reduce the odds against him, he can't ever eliminate them entirely. Eventually he'll roll snake eyes and get caught in the Marlo-Omar crossfire, or something along those lines. You can have a short run, or you can have a long run, but only The Game remains.

Given all that, what the heck is Proposition Joe doing in East Baltimore? Why does he spend all day in the back of a repair shop in his ratty hoody, dressed liked Kevin Smith, while bad men with guns come and go? He's a smart guy -- why not learn French and retire to Antigua? I don't get it. I suppose the only plausible explanation is that he just enjoys The Game for its own sake. Sam Zell is pushing 70 and has $6 billion, yet he's busy buying media companies, screwing around with Wrigley Field, and imposing real-life cost cuts on newspapers like the real-life Baltimore Sun. Same principle, I guess. The only other explanation is some kind of horrible last season retcon involving numerous heretofore unmentioned losing trips to Atlantic City and Vegas, a la The Sopranos, but I think David Simon is too smart for that.

A Faulty Argument

Back in December, I blogged about a proposed Higher Education Act provision that would change the way default rates are calculated by the Department of Education. I hypothesized that this change could increase default rates by about 60 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the federal loan program because of too-high default rates -- if a school has a default rate of 25 percent or higher over three years or a single-year default rate of 40 percent or higher, it loses eligibility to participate in the federal loan program.

The proposed change is pretty simple. Currently, the Department of Education calculates the student loan default rate as the percent of students defaulting on their student loans in the first two years after entering repayment. The proposed change would extend that window to the first three years after entering repayment. But, as we showed in an October Charts You Can Trust, the percentage of students defaulting on their loans grows considerably with each added year, particularly among students with high amounts of debt.

And now, as Inside Higher Ed reports, the Department of Education released numbers showing that for-profit colleges would see their default rate double on average, and other institutions could see their rates increase by between 50 and 75 percent (check out the article for numbers broken down by institution type). Not surprisingly, for-profit colleges are not happy about this change and are trying their best to resist it.

The Career College Association is quoted as saying, “This is a questionable policy metric because community colleges, proprietary schools and minority serving institutions all accept a much higher percentage of lower income students than do traditional schools, and many have a higher [Cohort Default Rate] as a result. The single best predictor of a student’s likelihood of default is the student’s own socioeconomic status.”

Sure, socioeconomic status impacts a student’s risk of defaulting on loans and students should definitely be held responsible for responsibly managing their debt. But colleges have a responsibility to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to get the jobs that allow them to repay their debt, and for ensuring students graduate on time -- or at all. And schools are also responsible for ethically counseling students on the amount of debt they can realistically undertake for their education and for providing adequate financial aid so that students are not graduating with overly burdensome debt loads. All of these actions are entirely within a college’s purview and would have a large impact on the percent of students defaulting on their loans.

Also, take a look at the Department of Education cut-off default rate numbers: 25 percent default rate over three years or a 40 percent default rate over one year. Is a college that consistently allows one in four of its students default on their loans in the first three years (in reality, two years*) after leaving college really providing a valuable service that the student and taxpayers should be paying for?

* Because it takes nearly a year after a student stops paying on his or her loan for the loan to technically be considered in default, a three-year window is really a two-year window, and a two-year window is really a one-year window. In addition, students with loans in deferment or forbearance are counted as being in repayment.

Crackonomics

On the whole, I'm sympathetic to DC Schools Chancelor Rhee's intiative to shutter 23 DCPS schools. It doesn't make sense for a district that's experiencing long-term enrollment decline, including losing almost 30 percent of students to charter schools, to waste millions of dollars on maintaining a bigger physical infrastructure than it needs. The chancellor and Mayor Fenty had a series of neighborhood meeting yesterday to discuss the planned closings, with many of the attendees voicing their displeasure. And I have to say, while I don't actually agree, this is pretty funny and astute:

"It's like crackhead economics," Jarumi Moore, a Francis Middle School seventh-grader, said at the Wilson Building of the closings plan. "They're thinking short term. We're thinking long term."

Get that kid into an AP econ class! He can write a study calculating the marginal change in the implied discount rate people apply to the resale value of their personal possessions when selling them feed a crack habit at various stages of addiction, and compare that to long-term deadweight loss of public goods resulting from ill-advised education policies that pump up approval ratings at the expense of systemic reform. He'll be the next Roland Fryer. Seriously, I don't think I would have had anything nearly so clever or smart to say in the 7th grade about anything not involving comic books or Larry Bird; there are a lot of bright kids like this in DCPS and we need to get them a better education.

Harvard and the Myth of Tightening College Admissions

The New York Times reports today that applications to Harvard are up an amazing 19% over last year, with other elite schools like the University of Chicago, Amherst, and Northwestern seeing double-digit increases. This allows newspapers to get a jump on the annual circulation-goosing college admissions panic story, which usually doesn't run for another few months, when the same colleges will report record low percentages of student being admitted. So we don't have to wait until April to read some guidance counselor from a suburban high school breathlessly reporting that among his peers "There is a pure level of panic and frenzy like they've never seen before."

As I wrote here last year, and also at the American Prospect, there is less here than meets the eye. The Times reports, correctly, that the number of graduating high school seniors is now reaching a demographic crest, the largest in history. But the year-over-year percentage growth is quite small, nothing close to the double-digit rise in applications to Harvard et al. Similarly, there's no reason to the think that the percent of high school seniors applying to college has risen sharply; those numbers never change much on an annual basis.

What we have, then, is not a big increase in college applicants but a big increase in college applications. Which the Times acknowledges, quoting one consultant as saying, "There was a time when kids applied to three or four schools, then to seven schools, and now, 10 or more is not uncommon." This creates the impression that the odds of a qualified student getting into a good college are dropping faster than they really are.

For example: the article notes that Harvard (as well as Princeton and UVA) has ended its early admissions program. So let's say you're a super-qualified student. You want to go to Harvard, and Harvard wants you to attend. Previously, you would have submitted one application, via early admission, and received one acceptance. Now you've got to go into the general application pool along with everyone else.

Do you still submit just one application? Of course not. Applying comes at relatively little cost in terms of time and money--particularly to you, who are probably from an upper-income family. There's a common application, stuff can be submitted electronically--it's all easier than it once was. So you apply to Princeton, Yale, and most of the other Ivy League schools, along with a few other usual suspects like Chicago, Amherst and the rest. Why not? Harvard's not a lock, after all, you might get bumped for a senator's son, rich legacy, football player, or what have you. A few months pass, and the envelopes arrive. Some of the schools accept you, others don't, but you get into Harvard, and happily enroll.

Q: Under this scenario, what impact has Harvard's elimination of early admission had on the odds of a qualified student getting into an elite school? A: None whatsoever. The number of applicants didn't change, the number of slots didn't change, and the result for the hypothetical you was exactly the same: Harvard. But from the perspective of typical news coverage, it looks like admissions got tighter, because all of those new applications you sent to elite schools drove the total number of applications up, and thus admissions rates down.

It's true that by applying and being accepted to those other schools, hypothetical you gained acceptances that would otherwise have gone to someone else. But you didn't use them, so eventually it all comes out in the wash. Selective colleges set very specific goals for the size of their freshman class, which they meet by statistically estimating the percent of accepted applicants who are likely to enroll. If they miss their guess high, they squeeze a few more people into the dorms. If they miss their guess low, they take a few more people off the waiting list. Either way, the number of individual students who are ultimately admitted doesn't change.

Also: this discussion pertains to qualified students, those with the credentials to have a legit shot at getting in. Some significant percentage of applicants--and thus, some percentage of the 19% increase in applicants at Harvard--are unqualified, submitted by students who are treating the college admissions process like Powerball and have no chance of being admitted. An increase in the number of applicantions from unqualified applicants has no practical effect on the admissions process at all for the qualified student--but it seems to, by driving down the bottom-line admit rate number.

This doesn't mean that the increasing-applications phenomenon has no impact on qualified students. If your competirors are submitting more applications, you need to as well, just like you need to keep up with taking AP classes and accumulating the other current markers of achievement. But in the end, you're still you, they're still them, Harvard is still Harvard, and things haven't gotten as bad as you think they have. When the media tells you to panic, don't.

Ask And You Shall Receive

Last week, I asked whether there were any colleges with unique strategies for controlling tuition and aiding students, but without the help of a gigantic endowment. Lo and behold, Inside HigherEd reports on Blackburn College, a small, private college in Illinois (chances are this school is off the NYT’s radar), that is trying to do something different with tuition and financial aid.

Blackburn College announced that it is both lowering tuition and getting out of the tuition haggling game. Basically, it’s lowering its sticker price by 15 percent but also going with a CarMax-type policy of not bargaining with parents over financial aid packages. A big plus to this new policy is that parents and students know the true cost of Blackburn, even before they apply. And this combination of lower tuition and lower spending on financial aid means that the school won’t be losing any tuition revenue, so the bottom line for the institution stays the same. But what about the bottom line for students?

Blackburn believes that the tuition--$15,000 with room and board—is affordable for low-income students, so long as the students get federal and state aid. If a student received a full Pell-grant and the full amount of Illinois’ need-based grant program the out-of-pocket cost for Blackburn would be approximately $6,000. Not bad, although that still means potentially graduating with over $20,000 in debt. And loans, while they are grouped with grants as part of an aid ‘package’, need to be paid back and aren’t nearly as good at facilitating access to college (CarMax doesn’t say it offers financial aid to buy a car). But loans are an excellent way to facilitate choice—students can opt for a private college instead of a public one, or a four-year instead of a two-year. But how can we know how much debt is too much debt?

The larger problem with financial aid policy is that there is no consensus over what the ‘right’ amount of debt for students is, or how much people should be expected to contribute to their own education. We need a goal—some strategic planning, if you will—for our financial aid system. Is the goal to help low-income students attend any college they like? To help them attend a public, four-year? A two-year? Or to facilitate choice in colleges among everyone, even those that are from upper-income families?

Until we answer these questions, our financial aid policies will always feel like a shot in the dark

Lede of the Day

"Free stuff makes people happy, but free stuff shot from cannons makes them jump and cheer like crazed monkeys."

From an Eric Hoover piece($) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, about a guy who owns a company that makes those portable CO2 cannons that launch rolled-up T-shirts in sports stadiums and arenas across the land.

Teaching Isn't Selling Sporting Goods...Or Anything Else

While we're on the subject of how teacher pay compares to other professions, another issue that often comes up in the debate is the fact that many teachers nominally work less than an eight-hour day, since the average school day is about 6.7 hours long. The usual rejoinder from the teacher perspective is that good teachers put a lot of time in before and after the school day, which is certainly true. The response to that is that lawyers and accountants and other professionals also do their share of work on nights and weekends. Then both sides start snarling at each other.

But what gets less talked about less is the way those hours are spent. I've worked in a variety of jobs since finishing grad school in the mid-90s, both in the public and non-profit sector, the basic components of which are pretty much the same: reading, writing, analyzing numbers, talking on the phone, sending email, going to meetings and events. Before that, stretching back to high school, I worked as a lifeguard, construction worker, department store cashier, waiter, sporting good salesman, camp counselor, etc. All different jobs.

But one thing they all have in common is that you're not actually working every minute of the day. For example, betwen the time I typed the words "the" and "words" in this sentence, I got up, poured a cup of coffee, chatted with a co-worker, and then spent another five minutes reading about how the Wizards somehow beat the Celtics again last night, in Boston no less. To the outside observer, I was working continuously, but actually it ebbs and flows, and this has been true on some level in every job I've ever had.

Spend some time in the classroom of a good teacher, by contrast, and you'll quickly notice that they're working the whole time. Not most of the time, but all of it. That's what it takes to succeed; you have to be constantly paying attention, planning, reacting, making decisions, keeping the whole intricate complex process on track. Somehow this needs to be taken into account in discussions of how much teachers work.

Pay for Performance: Chicken or Egg?

AFTie Ed responds to this post below on teacher pay:

My baseline position wasn’t “we’re not in this for the money, give us more money.” Instead it’s “we don’t have the option of being in it for the money, and trying to introduce that option without making the pie bigger isn’t a smart idea.” What I was trying to argue is that we don’t have in place one of the essential preconditions to having an effective variable pay structure: adequate base compensation...As a result, you get a system where people are being driven to a large extent by the intrinsic rewards of the work, and by the external rewards that come from a kind of cult of teacherdom. I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg, but uncompetitive pay is a factor keeping this dynamic in place.

There's an active argument going on about whether teachers are or aren't underpaid, involving lots of dueling statistics about benefit levels as a percent of salary, the number of hours worked in and out of school, which professions are fairly comparable to teaching, and whether or not a 9-month job with no vacation is really just 3/4ths of a 12-month job with vacation. But I don't think it's actually all that relevant to this discussion. I'm perfectly willing to concede that given stakes involved, and the amount of training, experience, and hard work required to do a good job teaching, public school teachers aren't paid enough, by a significant margin. And it's abundantly clear that individual teachers haven't proportionately shared in the overall growth of the economy over the last 30-plus years, in terms of salary.

That said, insisting that "adequate base compensation" be a prerequisite for pay for performance is, functionally, the equivalent of being against pay for peformance. Raising the total amount of money going to teachers salaries without changing the way teachers are paid would seem like--and to a large extent, would be--investing tens of billions of dollars in the same illogical system with nothing concrete in return. That's why NEA's call for a $40,000 base salary for all teachers, to take one example, is utter fantasy. You can say this is unjust, and you can be right, but that's the way it is. Policymakers have been blithely ignoring calls to substantially raise base tacher pay for decades now and will do it for decades more if nothing changes.

The best and most plausible strategy to increase total teacher pay, therefore, is not to raise the floor, but the ceiling--create a methodologically sound system for evaluating teacher effectiveness, in conjunction with labor, and then send the new money to the most effective teachers. Policymakers would go for that, really they would--instead of more $40,000 teachers, more $140,000 teachers. I know the "methodologically sound" part is tricky and subject to debate, but this is not an unsolveable problem. (Look for more from ES co-director Tom Toch on the subject of teacher evaluation soon).

I also note that class size reduction, heavily favored and promoted by teachers unions, is on some unavoidable level at odds with the adequate base compensation agenda. There's only so much money; every dollar spent on hiring more teachers is a dollar not spent on paying indiviudal teachers more.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode Two

I watched this episode On Demand in the middle of last week, and I have to say it was unsettling to listen to Saint Gus of the Newsroom talk about how life is always tough for Mother of Four, and then listen to characters lament that the only time Baltimore makes national news is when multiple bodies are discovered rotting in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, and then pick up the newspaper the next day and read about how, allegedly, a deranged, down-on-her-luck mother of four killed her daughters and left them to rot in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, which was soon covered on national news. DC the nation's capital is in the news every day, but DC the troubled, mid-sized mid-Atlantic city? Pretty much only with stuff like this.

Episode Summary: Bubbles is troubled. McNulty staggers up to the edge of the deep end, peers over, takes a swig of Jameson, and jumps off. With the investigation down, Marlo quickly resumes having everyone and their mother killed, up to and including that guy who the other guy said looked at him funny back in '93. He's also trying to cut out the middleman on the package and go straight to the Greek, which leads him to...Avon! Hey, Avon. He looks just like he should, the same but more weary, fronting as best he can. It's funny how the universe of Baltimore murderer / drug dealers sort of arranges itself on a purely relative scale--Marlo is such a dead-eyed sociopath that by comparison Avon seems somewhat reasonable, Prop Joe is Santa Claus, and Omar is an avenging angel. Or he would be, if he actually made his way on screen.

Saint Gus, meanwhile, has to deal with his very own Jayson Blair, who can't even squeeze a decent human-interest story out of opening day at Camden Yards. (Aside: It always seemed strange to me that the Jack Kelly fabrication scandal at USA Today received far less attention than the Blair affair, even though Kelly's fabrications were arguably much worse. Relative standing of the papers, I suppose.) Gus' boss, meanwhile, wants to run a prize-bait expose of the school system, one of those series that kicks off Sunday morning with a little box showing the chapters to come (Monday: "Everything is Bad." Tuesday: "Then it Gets Worse"), with each story jumping from page one to a full two-page spread that you feel vaguely guilty for not reading. Gus argues that, sure, the school system is terrible, but so are lots of other things, and shouldn't we tell the real story, the whole story? Or something like that. The Bad Editor says no, we need to dumb it down so people can understand.

Now, I have no doubt that conversations like this happen all the time, complete with facile use of the word "dickensian" and all the rest. But what David Simon Saint Gus seems to be arguing is that anything other than digging deep and exposing the entire underlying system, complete with all the connections and moving parts, is a moral failure and a lie. In other words, the only truly responsible journalistic treatment of Baltimore is...The Wire. Really? I think I disagree. The best treatment, maybe, but that's a helluva high bar. It takes, what, seven years and tens of millions of dollars? What happens in the meantime? If you can pick off a piece of the problem, expose it, and do something about it, what's the argument against that? Or are the children of Baltimore doomed until the revolution comes?