Dummies for Dummies

Via Russo, let me heartily endorse Greg Toppo's article in USA Today about people who preface this or that agenda with the assertion that students today are stupider than they've ever been, which they know because some study indicates that many students are ignorant of some historical or geographical fact that they happen to care about. To wit, Toppo begins:

In her new book, The Age of American Unreason, cultural critic Susan Jacoby tells of a dinner conversation with a student who was about to graduate with honors from Michigan State University in 2006. After Jacoby dropped a reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "fireside chats," she watched as the student "looked absolutely blank" in response.

According to Wikipedia, Susan Jacoby was born in 1945. She grew up in the years immediately after the Roosevelt presidency, among, one presumes, people who had personally listened to his fireside chats. As her Web site details, she's spent the last four decades as a public intellectual, during which time I imagine she's learned a tremendous amount. The honors student, by contrast, was probably born around 1985, and has no personal memory of presidents before George H. W. Bush. Prior to their dinner conversation, she had spent 40 fewer years than Jacoby living and learning.

Which is to say that (1) A person's sense of what facts and ideas matter most is inevitably influenced by their personal history and frame of reference, and (2) People are lousy at maintaining an accurate sense of what they knew, when. Without direct evidence to the contrary, as in "I didn't know that then because it hadn't happened yet," I think we unconsciously assume that we've always known what we now know. At the very least, our sense of this is biased in a way that inaccurately minimizes our previous ignorance, and thus convinces us that we were smarter then than people of a similar age are now.

I'm guessing, for example, that had Susan Jacoby been unlucky enough to have dinner with a professional scold in 1966, she might have shocked him with her ignorance of some noteworthy detail of Grover Cleveland's second administration.

Toppo's article also highlights the sin of attributing the alleged ignorance of today's youth to whatever trendy phenomenon is mostly likely to get people's attention and offer opportunities for facile analogies and unsupported assertions. You know, the kids today with their MTV hippity-hop music Ipods Myspaces Internet chat rooms:

[Mark] Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, due in May, blames digital technology, which distracts kids in ways their parents could never imagine. "When we were 17 years old, social life stopped at the front door," says Bauerlein, 49. Now teens can continue their conversations online, on Facebook, by instant messaging or on cellphones in their bedrooms — all night. "Peer-to-peer contact … has no limitation in space or time."

On some level, this is understandable. Bauerlein was 17 in 1976, well before the Federal Communications Commission lifted its now-infamous ban on the installation of telephones in teenagers' bedrooms.  

Now, there are people out there with legitimate things to say on this topic, people like E.D. Hirsch (who Toppo quotes) and his ideas about the role that knowledge plays in learning. Hirsch, it should be noted, is not as conservative as people think based on the conservative embrace of Cultural Literacy; his work focuses less on knowledge for specific knowledge's sake than knowledge as an essential building block for learning to read and gaining higher conceptual skills.

But there are plenty of others who bemoan the fact that some large percentage of high school seniors got the wrong answer on a multiple choice question of historical fact and then quickly proceed to denounce educational reforms that emphasize rote memorization skills as measured by multiple choice tests.

With Your Weekend Coffee

Via This Week in Education, NPR's This American Life will focus this week on human resources, with a segment on NYC's infamous "rubber rooms". So, enjoy your weekend coffee with Ira Glass's oddly soothing voice and what will, no doubt, be an entertaining but depressing look at a baffling institution.

If I Only Had a Gun

Various Nazis have been apocryphally quoted as saying "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun." When people like Cato's Brink Lindsey, writing in the New Republic($), identify culture as the chief source of educational inequality, I feel the same way.

The "riddle" Lindsey purports to solve is why low-income people are less likely to graduate from college. It is not, says Lindsey, because the government isn't doing enough to help them. Shocking to hear this from Cato, I know. He frames the specifics thusly:

As of 2003, 80 percent of high school seniors from families in the top 20 percent of income enrolled in college the fall after graduation, while only 49 percent from families in the lowest 40 percent did so. That class divide translates directly into big disparities along ethnic lines. In 2006, 34 percent of white Americans aged 25- 29 held college degrees, compared to 19 percent of African Americans and only 10 percent of Hispanics.

Note that in pivoting from class to race, Lindsey switches from a measure of college enrollment to one of college completion. Why? Perhaps because if he had kept his measures consistent, they wouldn't be so dramatic. According to this table, the rolling three-year average rates of immediate college going (which are preferable given small sample size issues with the Census data from which these numbers are derrived) in 2003 for white, black, and Hispanic students were 66%, 60%, and 58%, respectively. This U.S. Department of Education study of high school sophomores found (Table 34) that the white / black difference in college-going expectations varies by less than three percentage points. Black students are more likely than white students to aspire to achieve a PhD, MD, or other advanced degree. It turns out that, despite the allegedly pernicious "acting white" stigma, etc. etc., minority students want to go to college pretty much just like everyone else.

Lindsey acknowledges that the differences that do exist are rooted in different levels of high school achievment. He also acknowledges that low-income and minority student go to worse high schools--before asserting that two aren't connected. Yeah, quite a coincidence, that. As evidence, he cites the Coleman Report. For the non-education wonks in the audience, let me offer some advice. Anytime you read the words "As we have known since the 1966 Coleman Report...." or some variation thereof, immediately discount the likelihood that the author is arguing in good faith by 50%. I'm not talking down Coleman, who was quite a social scientist, but it's been 42 years and we've learned some things since then. Conservatives and Cato types will constantly tell you that "money isn't the answer" just before they drive home and write a $25,000 check to the private school where they send their kids, or to mortgage company to pay for the house in the wealthy suburbs with the good schools.

Lindsey concludes by conceding that because poor children don't have the capacity to act as autonomous agents, "government intervention to improve [their] circumstances could actually expand the scope of individual autonomy." Programs like "preschool enrichment programs along the lines of Head Start, but more intensive and beginning with even younger kis." That's an interesting endorsement from the vice president for research of an organization with the stated goal of destroying public education as we know it, but okay. Must be Sara Mead's influence.

Lindsey is not wrong to say that culture matters. Of course it does. It just doesn't matter as much as he thinks, relative to the influence of schools. This is just the latest in a long history of agenda-driven arguments against the efficacy of public education. Cato makes it because public education is expensive and popular; people like to pay taxes to support government schools, and Cato is against taxes and government. Others make similar arguments from the left, because they're worried that a belief that schools can help poor students will undermine efforts to make fewer students poor. It's all of a piece.

It's too bad that on the relatively rare occasion that putatively left-leaning magazines like TNR and others decide to write about education, they don't have much to say other than it's not important. It really is.

Real Issues, Real Learning

Adam Doster, in an article in the 25 Feb. 2008 issue of The Nation, discusses several schools across the country that are using social issues to teach basic concepts. For instance, in Social Justice High School (SJHS) in Chicago (part of the brand new Little Village Lawndale High School, where 98% of students qualify as low-income), students participate in weekly colloquiums about social issues that affect their lives (like the income gap), designed to spark them to deeper inquiry, covering basic standards requirements (like reading) along the way. For instance, Doster quotes Rico Gutstein, a math professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who recommends using the unequal distribution of wealth or racial profiling as backdrops for math lessons.

Doster notes that some conservative groups (City Journal and the New York Sun) have argued against this type of teaching, saying that it imparts liberal politics in the place of a “general education.” (Some believe teaching social issues to be even more pervasive and destructive.) But this is a red herring: the issue is not so much about politics, but educating students, and students learn better when they can relate to the subject matter and the manner in which it is taught. The 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) reports that 98% of students reported being bored in school, and 39% of them said that was because the “material wasn’t relevant” to them while 75% percent said they were bored because the “material wasn’t interesting” – two intimately related problems. E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, stresses the necessity of a high-quality curriculum here, here, and here, among other places, but successfully teaching our students is at least as much about methods/pedagogy as curriculum. Good methods often hinge on teaching skills via a relatable curriculum.

Whether students learn math by analyzing the achievement gap or understand Central Place Theory by looking at White Flight, the learning is the key, and this type of learning requires critical thinking that will allow students to demonstrate this knowledge. And in the age of accountability, another end – passing the test – is just as important as the means.

Some may argue that teaching math is great, but shouldn’t be done vis-à-vis topics of questionable existence or unwieldy or unconfirmed political charge. In response, I would ask why we use “widgets” to explain the principles of mean, median, and mode, and how we can have political science courses at all.

There is a debate over whether or not inadequate teaching methods are the result of inappropriate reactions to NCLB by teachers and schools and the persistence of poor teaching, or of direct, logical results of NCLB mandates. But either way, effective instructional methods shouldn’t be challenged based on political-ideological grounds – like whether or not the methods at SJHS are imparting liberal politics over a “general education.” To raise the achievement of all students, we need to meet them where they are, not wish they were where we want them to be, and present topics to them in ways that they can understand and from which they can benefit.

Posted by Sumner Handy

Sara Returns

Former Education Sector staffer Sara Mead not only authored many of this blog's best posts in its first year of existence, she also came up with the name. I've always harbored a secret, irrational hope that she'd come back to the Q&E fold but now that she's launched a brand-new early education blog at the New America Foundation, that seems unlikely. Our loss is the gain of small children everywhere.

1,000 Words, or More

Via Ross Douthat, these pictures of the long-abandoned Detroit School Book Depository are oddly beautiful in a very sad kind of way.

Eggs

Firing another salvo in the baseball / teaching debate in response to this post from Matt Tabor, Leo Casey begins with an ode to the pastoral nature of the game, pivots to a defense of baseball unionization and Curt Flood--which no one is disputing--before seizing on word that Tabor quotes someone else using: commodity. "We Are Not Commodities" declares Leo--that's the title of the post--"we are men and women, proud of our profession, skilled in our craft, dedicated to our students. As long our our union is standing...." etc., etc. You get the drift.

Hmmmm.....commodities. Let's talk about those for a moment. Merriam-Webster's definition of commodity includes the following:

"a mass-produced unspecialized product"
"a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price"
"one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market"

That sounds pretty bad, I can see why Leo would take umbrage at the mere suggestion that teachers be treated like a commodity. I mean, eggs are a commodity, right? And that has a lot of implications. Most importantly, there was until recently hardly any market for quality eggs. Ironic, given that people say "he's a good egg," when at many supermarkets you cannot, in fact, buy a good egg, in the sense that it tastes better than any other egg. Eggs are only differentiated one one, easy-to-measure scale: size. There are six official sizes or "grades"--Jumbo, Extra- Large, Large, etc., with prices to match.

Commodification leaves the market vulnerable to quality problems--people selling inferior eggs for the same standard price--so we've developed a government-controlled inspection system whereby minimum standards are established that eggs must meet before they enter the market. Because you can't crack all the eggs open to see how they taste before selling them, those standards are mostly tied to the means of production. When you see a U.S. Department of Agriculture grade on an egg carton, that means the plant processed the eggs following USDA's sanitation and good manufacturing processes.

When something is a commodity, quantity matters more than quality. This affects the basic way we think about the product. If, for example, I was baking a quiche and felt like it needed more egg, it probably wouldn't occur to me to buy better, more eggy eggs. How could I? Instead, I'd throw in bigger eggs, or more of them--increase the egg/quiche ratio, in other words.

Commodification also means that producers are mostly competing on price, which tends to keep prices down. But that's okay if you're a producer, you can make it up on volume. It's okay if you're the government quality regulator, since it maintains your reason for being. And it would actually be a plus if you were running an organization whose finances were based on getting a fixed amount of money for every every egg sold. For you, the more the better.

It's a problem for consumers, though. If I'm frying up an egg in a pan, I don't much care whether it's Jumbo or Extra-Large. I'm glad the government is enforcing some baseline safety standards by trying to ensure that my egg isn't full of salmonella, although I'm disturbed that the regulators often bend to political pressure to ease off on the quality controls. But what I really want is a great-tasting egg. This is doubtless why there's been a big increase in the market for organic eggs in recent years. But since the USDA is in charge of certifying eggs as organic, there are concerns that the process is becoming subject to the same problems of regulatory capture, and once again consumers are getting the shaft.

But hey, not to worry, because of course teachers are not eggs and, as Leo has clearly explained, the very last thing the United Federation of Teachers wants is for its members to be treated like commodities.

Also, this post is worth reading.

Selection Effects and...What?

In the comments section of Matt Yglesias' response to this morning's post on improving the higher education market, several readers raise the issue of selection and peer effects in higher education. This comes up a lot. Essentially the argument is that very selective colleges provide a lot of value to students, and are thus worth paying for and trying to get into, because:

A) It's good to go to college with a lot of other very bright students, from whom you'll learn a lot and strive to compete against.

B) Hanging out with those peers for four or more years is also valuable because you're accumulating a great deal of social capital in the forms of networks that will help you later in life.

C) The simple fact that you attend a selective college sends strong signals to the job market that you had what it takes to get admitted in the first place.

All of these things are true. By themselves, they're probably enough reason for people to rationally pursue an elite college education. But they have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of education those colleges provide.

By this line of reasoning, if everyone collectively decided that the most elite college in America was the University of the District of Columbia, then UDC would, in fact, be the "best." Heck, if all a college did was provide a place for the smartest students to eat, sleep, socialize, listen to music, read books, watch sports, blog, and talk among themselves for four years, without ever offering a single course or actual formal educational experience of any kind, it would still provide all the benefits listed above.

In other words, if the best arguments in favor of elite higher education institutions are completely divorced from the actual practice of higher education, then that's a problem. And it's particularly problematic if that ethos influences national higher education policy, because of course the vast majority of students attend colleges that provide little or no peer or selection benefits and thus really need their institution of higher learning to actually teach them stuff and help them earn a degree.

Perversity

Sherman Dorn says of a new Washington State initiative that would give community colleges financial rewards for students completing college credits, passing basic skills tests, and earning degrees:

I worry that such an incentives structure will affect standards in institutions with weak faculty governance and protection of academic freedom: "We need these students to pass these credits, or we lose money." Better incentive structure: if public funding plus current tuition is sufficient for an institution's operating expenses (a rather big if, as I'm aware in Florida), keep the hands off the potential perverse incentives inside the curriculum and give students an incentive to do well by keeping tuition stable for students as long as they make steady progress towards degrees. In other words, tuition stability (or a cap on rising tuition) is guaranteed if students are doing well. The institutional incentives then can be geared towards summary graduation measures, to some extent.

I'd like to propose that people be more judicious and precise in their use of the term "perverse incentives" by not applying it to any incentive that could theoretically cause someone to act in bad faith. Sherman is a college professor so I assume he assigns students to write papers and then grades them. Student have strong incentives to get good grades, or at least good enough grades, so they can earn a degree, go to grad school etc. The problem of plagiarism in higher education is well-known, made much easier by the Internet. Does that mean the Sherman or his university have created "perverse incentives" for cheating by grading papers? Of course not.

"Perverse incentives" are those that logically compel people to act in bad faith, or offer incentives so compelling that they overwhelm others. I don't think that's at all what's going on in Washington State. Sure, a community college could, in theory, betray its ideals and its students by watering down curricula and standards. Or it could do the right thing, look to its high-performing peers, and try to do a better job teaching them. I don't think the incentives to take the former, dishonorable path are nearly strong enough to warrant the term "perverse." And I'm always amazed that educators are so quick to assume that great numbers of their peers will sell their students down the river whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Improving the Higher Ed Market

One of the frustrating thing about working on higher education policy issues is that DC is pretty much a one-issue town: all anyone cares about is costs. From the average politician's perspective, our higher education system is fantastic with one exception: it costs too much, and costs more every year. This is reflected in the version of the Higher Education Act now moving toward final passage up on the Hill, with lots of new provisions designed to hold down the cost of college. Congress has thrown huge amounts of money at the problem over the last year or so by boosting funding for Pell grants and lowering student loan interest rates. Now there are proposals to shame colleges that have the highest annual tuition increases and force them create internal task forces to ask themselves tough, probing questions about why they made the decision they just made. Because if there's one thing colleges don't have enough of, it's committees.

None of these things are going to work. There's no amount of money that the government can throw into student aid that the higher education system can't absorb, and then some. The only way to hold down costs in the long run is to change the system of incentives under which individual colleges make pricing decisions. Currently, price and quality are seen as synonymous in the market. Colleges have every incentive to raise prices and none to lower them--in fact, they can't lower them, because it would reduce demand. High barriers to entering the traditional market keep price-undercutting competitors out, and students keep coming because there's almost no amount of money you could pay for a four-year degree that's not worth it over the course of a lifetime.

Higher education is also in the peculiar position of being dominated by non-profits that sell extremely valuable and expensive services for lots of money. Being non-profit means there's no incentive to increase margins by being more efficient; all the incentives run toward simply raising as much money from as many sources as possible--students, governments, and donors, primarily--and spending it willy-nilly.

The key then, is to introduce more quality information into the market and shift from a price=quality dynamic to a value = quality / price dynamic, which is the way normal markets work. Unfortunately, the DC higher educaton lobby has pressured Congress into putting a series of provisions into HEA that would limit the ability of the federal government to produce such information. In other words, Congress is actually making it harder to solve the expensive cost problem it's so worried about.

For more, see this ($) from yrs truly in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 8

At this point, I think the major weakness of Season Five is clear: David Simon didn't have the good sense to repeat himself. Imagine this: There is no Scott Templeton. Instead, the season revolves around Alma Gutierrez. She's young,  a little naïve, and wants to write about Baltimore's rapidly-growing Latino population (according to Simon, the likely focus of Season Six if there had been one), which remains largely invisible in city that still sees everything in terms of black and white. Then, in the course of reporting a prize-bait series on the Dickensian lives of the homeless, she runs across a man in a soup kitchen whose life seems to sum up everything that needs to be said about Baltimore's past, present, and future. But when she brings these ideas to her boss, Gus Haynes, he's reluctant. Gus is an essentially decent man who's been ground down by relentless budget cuts and has started to give into cynicism. He sees a little of his old self in Alma, but he has one eye on retirement, has to think of his family, and knows her ideas won’t fly with the idiots running the show. So Alma has a choice to make, about herself, her profession, and her city.

Instead we get the lengthy Templeton story, which is strange given that of the myriad flaws and problems with the news media today, outright fabrication isn’t one of them.

Similarly, while I enjoy Isaiah Whitlock Jr. as much as the next person, what does the story of Clay Davis’ baroque corruption really tell us? Better to focus on someone with a more complex mix of self- and public-interest, like Council President Campbell. Fortunately, the show seems to be moving back to its roots in the final three episodes, because this was easily the best episode of the season. 

Summary: McNulty discovers that he’s an open book, and that after years of railing against The Man, actually being The Man isn’t as easy as he thought. Carcetti continues to sell out the schools piece by piece, first to the police and then to PG County pols, in a way that’s particularly terrible if you think about education for a living. Even as Marlo and Chris get ready to celebrate in A.C., people are closing in from all sides.  There were a lot of great notes and moments—Kima’s stubborn integrity, Dukie on the junk cart, Lester throwing down on Senator Davis, McNulty finally having an honest conversation with Beadie. Poot, meanwhile, emerges from hiding at last, disguised as a Foot Locker salesman. The fan part of me enjoys the extended roll-call / where-are-they-now thing, but it does pull you out of the narrative slightly.

Also, Omar dies. After years of watching The Wire, I can’t say the moment or manner of his death was a surprise. The scene before it, with him hobbling around, shouting for Marlo in the bright, empty, quiet streets, was terrific. Omar’s survival as a lone predator depended on him living within the system. He served as a kind of natural Darwinian check on the inefficiencies of the Game, probably making it stronger in the long run. Once he decided to fight against it directly, he was doomed, because even the baddest man in Baltimore can’t stop a bullet, and your rep doesn’t carry to little men with guns. R.I.P, Omar Little. Even the coroner knew your name.

Next week: The previews are too spoilerish by half, but the next episode looks kind of awesome. 

Again With the Not Understanding Baseball

Look: If people want to challenge the premise of comparing baseball to teachers in New York, fine. But if you're going to make the argument on baseball terms, then have your facts in order. First there was this, then Leo Casey says:

It now appears that “Billyball,” as its advocates called Beane’s statistical approach, doesn’t have quite the track record of success Carey reported. The most famous account of Beane’s method was Michael Lewis 2004 book Moneyball, which looked closely at Beane’s 2002 draft picks, since the Athletics had accumulated an unusually large number of such picks that season. As New York Times sports columnist Murray Chass recently recounted, the Beane’s 2002 choices chronicled in the Lewis book have proven less than felicitous. Statastically speaking, the other teams which picked based on scouting reports did better than the Athletics. You can count us among the skeptics that evaluating teachers is a process akin to judging baseball talent. But it is interesting to know that the baseball model being proffered as a basis for judging teaching performance was not even successful on its own terms.

As people who have actually read the book know, the premise of Moneyball was that Billy Beane was able to exploit inefficiencies in the baseball labor market created by the difference between what people believed was important in a baseball player and what, statistically speaking, was actually important. Some of those biases were between different kinds of statistics--people overvalued stolen bases and undervalued on-base percentage. Other biases were between human observations and statistics--people believed they could identify talent by looking at it, and were often wrong. People also tended to gamble high draft picks on high school pitchers, even though such choices rarely pan out. Beane's approach was particularly valuable to the A's because they were, and are, a small market team with relatively low revenues. Teams like the Yankees could overvalue players and still win a lot of baseball games because they had money to waste. The A's didn't, and so it was critically important to maximize the number of wins per dollar spent. Beane's success in this respect is completely irrefutable; under his management the A's have consistently won more games than most teams while spending less money.

The Murray Chass column Leo references is about one small slice of that overall strategy, the 2002 amateur draft, which forms a lot of the narrative of Lewis' book. Chass' suggestion that the long-term result of that draft doesn't support Beane's strategy is based primarily on the following:

Four of the seven players picked by Oakland (57 percent) among the first 39 picks in that draft have played in the majors, including [Jeremy] Brown. Of the other 32 picks, 20 have played in the majors (62.5 percent).

The A's first pick in that draft wasn't until 16th. So their average draft position among the first 39 picks was lower than the average position of the other teams teams. More importantly, that draft was a success. Three of the four players--Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, and Mark Teahen--have become successful major leaguers, which is a fine rate given the small percentage of draftees who succeed. Chass notes that only one is still with the A's as if that's a negative, which is silly--I don't think any believes the Red Sox were wrong to sign Babe Ruth just because they eventually sold him to the Yankees.

Chass also notes that Prince Fielder, one of the players chosen before the A's first pick, turned out to be quite good. Sure--but most of the other players drafted before the A's first pick, Swisher, didn't do nearly as well. In fact, the first round of the 2002 draft is littered with high school pitchers who went bust because of injury problems--precisely the kind of player Beane rightfully avoided, one of the many reasons the strategy Leo derides has in fact worked so well.

Update: A reader points out that "Billyball" is the term for the way Billy Martin managed the Yankees, not the way Billy Beane runs the A's. Another strike against Leo.

Update 2: Matt Tabor has a good post in response to Leo here.

College Transfer Blues

Laura Dempsey, a civil rights lawyer and Army wife, writes in the Washington Post about the many reasons it's hard for her to maintain a career. Among them:

Wives attending college when their service members transfer must choose between paying exorbitant out-of-state tuition if they stay behind or losing a substantial number of credits if they move. Although many smaller and online universities admirably volunteer to accept transferred credits for military wives, most of the country's larger public universities and almost none of the top-tier private schools do.

This is a good opportunity to point out that the "system" of tranferring college credit in this country is a mess, much more so than most people realize. Colleges start with the baseline presumption that credits earned at other colleges are no good. Then they intermittently create "articulation" arrangements with other institutions, often on department-by-department ore even course-by-course basis, most commonly within state university systems or between systems within states. Absent those arrangements, they just decide which credits they'll accept however they like. It's a completely non-transparent and idiosyncratic process, and the worst thing about it is that students don't find out how many of their credits will be accepted by the college they're transferring to until after they apply and decide to go.

This is partly because we live in a big country with a lot of colleges that are governed in a very decentralized way, so there's no clean public policy solution from a national perspective. But there's also an element of institutional hubris -- departments tend to think that the standards for introductory Econ or what have you at that other institution just aren't up to snuff, when in fact most of the courses students take as undergraduates aren't all that different regardless of where they're taught.

There's also a financial element -- it's not in a college's best interests to make it really easy for students to transfer out, and when they accept students who transfer in, every credit they reject is a credit students will have to pay to re-take. Market pressures don't fix the problem because students don't usually transfer many times, so it's a case where they don't know they're going to get the shaft until they've gotten it, and once they've gotten it they're never in a position to avoid getting it again.

Only students in special circumstances that result in serial transfers--like Army wives--come to realize just how absurd and inefficient the system is, likely resulting in billions of dollars per year of wasted time and money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Other Than That, Spot-On

Mike Klonsky takes issue with my recent baseball / education comparison:

But Carey equates Bloomberg’s N.Y. testing mania with 1990’s Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane’s supposed reliance on statistics (“crunching numbers without prejudice”) to pilot his team to the World Series. What a stretch! No team has better individual player stats than the current Yankee team which can’t quite make it to the top. If statistics decided everything, there would be no need to play the game. Good managers crunch numbers, but often make their most important decisions based on intangibles, gut feelings, and connoisseurship. One more thing—A’s star power hitter Jose Conseco, the first major leaguer ever to hit at least 40 homers and steal at least 40 bases in a season-- was also one of the first admitted steroid users. Steroids may have ultimately done great damage to Conseco’s body as well as to the integrity of MLB. But it sure was good for his stats. Maybe Beane should have been looking past the numbers and Carey looking for a better metaphor.

A few observations:

1) The Oakland A's have not gone to the World Series under Billy Beane, which is the main reason I didn't say that they did.

2) Billy Beane is the general manager of the A's, not the manager, which is not at all the same thing.

3) Yankees players indeed have excellent statistics, which likely one of the reasons that the Yankees have, over the last 12 years, gone to the playoffs 12 times, won the American League East 10 times, won the American League pennant 6 times, and won the World Series 4 times. They haven't won the Series in the last few year because--unlike basketball and football--baseball is a sport where even the greatest teams only win 60-some percent of their games, so the odds of winning three consecutive short series against good opponents are always against you. The Yankees didn't need Moneyball techniques to win all those games, because they have more money than Brunei.

4) Nobody named Jose Conseco has every played major league baseball. Conseco is a large insurance company based in Indianapolis, where I used to live.

5) Jose Canseco did indeed go 40-40, in 1988, nine years before Billy Beane became the general manager of the A's. He left the A's in 1992, returned briefly in '97, and never played for them again, no doubt in part because his on-base percentage for the A's that year was .325, making him exactly the kind of player Billy Beane did not want to hire.

6) There are no equivalents of steroids in teaching--no dangerous illegal substances that boost your classroom performance at the expense of your fellow teachers. So I have no idea what the steroid scandal is supposed to demonstrate here, other than when you give people strong incentives to boost their performance, they try very hard to boost their performance, which is more or less my point.

8 1/2 Million Dollars an Hour

Philanthropist Donald Bren just gave $8.5 million to THINK Together, an L.A.-based nonprofit group that runs afterschool programs, to extend the school day by an hour in 30 or so Santa Ana and East LA schools. That is one huge private donation to expand THINK's afterschool programming, which stands to really help these kids--largely low-income and English-learning--gain the extra learning they probably need. Still that's one seriously expensive hour so I hope a chunk of that goes to evaluate the program's impact . Anecdotes and testimonials are nice but they won't be enough to sustain that kind of expansion beyond Bren.

Please Stop

Acknowledging that few observations are more banal than the soul-deadening nature of airline travel, for me the single worst thing is the televisions BLARING cable news around departure gates. Yesterday -- I'm not making this up -- I sat in the Detroit airport across from a nun while CNN ran an extensive piece investigating the critical issue of why celebrities cheat on their hot wives, complete with references to Divine Brown, Jude Law's nanny, and constant use of words like "hot," "erotic," etc.At the moment it's something about whether Britney Spears is somewhat as opposed to completely insane.

Back to education tomorrow, promise

The Ivy League Just Keeps Getting Greener

But not the trendy, Al Gore kind of green—the old-fashioned, John D. Rockefeller kind of green.

I received an email this morning from Stanford University announcing that it (like Harvard, Princeton, etc.) will be expanding its financial aid program. Now a family with an income of less than $100,000 will not need to pay tuition, and a family with less than $60,000 will not pay tuition or room and board fees. It’s great that wealthy institutions like Stanford are starting to one-up each other on generous financial aid packages, but it also points to some troubling issues.

Stanford’s aid will provide free tuition to households with incomes in the top 20 percent of incomes in the United States, and the offer of free tuition and free room and board will go to households with incomes in the top 40 percent. Something seems wrong when a college’s tuition—even an elite private school—is beyond the financial capacity of those defined by the New York Times to be “upper class” and “upper middle class”. Suddenly, there is a lot of aid money going to students who, when looking at the income distribution in the United States, shouldn’t need it.

And this aid money is not distributed evenly across colleges—most institutions don’t have the financial resources to offer these generous aid packages. The Council for Aid to Education released today its “Voluntary Support of Education” report, which tracks private donations to colleges. These donations have increased for the 4^th year in a row, totaling $29.8 billion in 2007. But even more interesting is that the top 20 institutions, representing 2 percent of responding institutions, raised over a quarter of all the money going to higher education. Topping this list? Stanford University with $832 million last year.

The Brookings Institution, meanwhile, released a report today indicating that—while a college degree is still a powerful ticket to upward economic mobility—the growing gap in college attainment between the rich and poor in the United States threatens the ability of those from low-income families to climb the income ladder. And our most recent Chart You Can Trust shows that if you’re from a low-income family, it’s still much harder to get into the most elite institutions, even if you have high test scores, than someone from the “upper middle class”.

So while students that attend an elite institution can increasingly be assured that college will be affordable, this assurance does not extend to the vast majority of students who attend less wealthy or open-access institutions. And since low-income students are much less likely to attend an elite institution like Stanford, they might end up paying a higher tuition bill than someone who can attend--even if that person is from the top quintile of household incomes.

Brrrrrr......

I'm in Grinnell, Iowa, at the moment, visiting Grinnell College, giving a presentation / speech about NCLB. There's a lot I could discuss -- the friendly people, pleasant accomodations, lively dialogue before and after the speech, the fact that Grinnell has the 6th largest endowment per-student of any college or university in the nation, larger than Stanford, Amherst, or M.I.T., but all I can really concentrate on at the moment is the fact that it's very, very cold. I mean, REALLY COLD. When I accepted the invite to come here last Fall, I knew it was cold in theory in Iowa in February, but to actually step into this upper midwestern maelstrom of coldness is to be reminded that it's never, ever, actually cold in Washington, DC. Chilly perhaps, nippy from time to time, occcasionally on the cool side, but never cold like it is here, now. The drive from Des Moines takes a little over an hour and on the way I must have seen 100 cars buried in the median or on the side of the road in the ice and snow. It's cold, I say!

Update: Temperature when I walked out the door at 8AM this morning: Minus 12 degrees. Just to put that in perspective, I'd say the typical resident of DC would regard 30 degrees as cold. The difference between here and that is the same as the difference between 30 and warm spring day of 72.

How We Deal

Eduwonkette’s recent post on linkages between leading education think tanks poses a couple of important questions: Do the leading education policy shops amount to “multiple organizational outposts” for a small and insular group of thought leaders? And can think tanks claim to be independent evaluators when they share board members and funders?

Since Eduwonkette included Education Sector in her post and accompanying chart, it’s worth discussing how we deal with the issues that she raises.

To start with, we eschew government money and we don't do fee-for-service work. We are funded not by one or two foundations but by many different ones. We list them on our web site and we name them in individual reports if they fund that work specifically, though a substantial percentage of our funding is general-operating support rather than project-specific grants. Our contractual agreements with foundations give us editorial control over the work we produce. We’ve found that what our funders value most is good work—thoughtful analysis, clear writing, and an ability to advance our ideas effectively.

To further promote transparency, our web site includes biographies of all of our team members, directors, research advisory board members and non-resident senior fellows. In each instance, our goal is to draw on the expertise of smart people with differing backgrounds and perspectives. The fact that some of these people are also affiliated with other organizations means only that others recognize their talents as well.

What drives our work at Education Sector is a set of core principles about the purposes of education and the nature of educational reform. We posted them on our web site early in our history under the heading What We Believe. These principles undergird all of our research, analysis and commentary and they make it easy to tell where we’re coming from on policy questions. Agree with them or not, you know what they are.

We also have a Transparency Policy that governs potential conflicts of interest. Every Education Sector employee has sign the document anew every year. And we are developing for our web site documents that describe our “theory of action”—our sense of how to improve American education and how we as an organization propose to promote those improvements happen—in the policy areas where Education Sector does the bulk of its work.

In often makes sense in the course of doing our work to collaborate with other organizations. Such networking sharpens our thinking and helps us have impact. It’s what every good think tank and policy organization does in every field. Conversely, Education Sector does not as an institution sign policy manifestos or other multi-organization documents. Nor do we take institutional positions in policy debates, in contrast to membership and advocacy organizations, which frequently do. Each of us shares Education Sector’s organizing principles, but we often have very different takes on issues. It keeps us sharp.

Ooh, Good News

It seems that a new Neal Stephenson book will be published in September. Apparently, "It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit." Exciting! I've read objectively better books over the last five years, but I probably haven't enjoyed any books as much as Cryptonomicon and the time it took to plow through the entire 2,500 page Baroque cycle was well spent. I believe this may put me in common company with Instapundit, which is kind of disturbing, but what can I do. Stephenson's Snow Crash remains one of the more prescienct novels in recent memory, he basically described Second Life in 1991.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 7

In which Clay Davis plays every card in the race deck, except, presumably, the King of Diamonds, because that's McNulty.

Summary: Davis beats the rap with the help of real-life Baltimore criminal defense attorney Billy Murphy, who once got Don King acquitted, so I'm guessing this wasn't much of a stretch. McNulty gets everything he ever asked for, with predictable results. Steintorf tells Carcetti he has no choice but to continue the homeless initiative, recalling the immortal words of Slim Charles at the end of Season Three.

Omar continues killing his way through the Stanfield organization, but is looking less invincible by the hour, with Kenard, as usual, calling out the truth. Saint Gus says to hell with the nut graf, go talk to the people! Kima sings the traditional Baltimore classic "Goodnight Fiends, Goodnight Hoppers" lullabye to Elijah, which the writer of this episode, Richard Price, borrowed from his book Clockers. I'm loading that into the MP3-enabled crib I buy for my kids, if and when I have some. I wonder if they'll sell it at IKEA?

Gratuitous, slightly jarring cameo of the week: Munch from Homicide. Poot, meanwhile, is clearly finalizing plans for his Michael Corleone-style simultaneous assassination of the entire board of the former New Day Co-Op.

Earlier in the season, State's Attorney OBonda turned down the opportunity to take the Clay Davis case federal with the "head shot" real estate charge. Oops! Lest anyone think the acquittal is implausible, I know several people who have worked in the Baltimore federal court system, and they all say this is the main reason cases up there go federal--avoiding jury nullification. While the state jury pool is local, federal cases draw juries from the whole northern half of the state, which means a black man from West Baltimore like Clay Davis who avails himself of his Constitutional right to a jury of his peers ends up being tried by an all-white jury comprised of people from the Eastern Shore and the westernmost rural counties of the state.

Also, there's a been a fair amount of bloggy discussion about whether Prop Joe really would have let himself get played like that. I think the answer is: sure. He wasn't ominiscient, he was thinking two steps ahead and Marlo was thinking three. Every day you play the Game, you put yourself in harm's way; Joe was lucky he lasted that long. Plus, much as I enjoyed Joe as a character, let's not forget that he was just as much of a dirtbag drug-dealing murderer as all the rest. He was smart, his families had roots in the community, he could have done a lot of things with his life and he decided to spend it spreading violence and poison throughout East Baltimore. Think about it: what was the practical result of Joe and Stringer's Co-op innovation? A smoother running heroin and crack distribution network, resulting in a more consistent supply of product, higher profits for the dealers, and lower prices and greater availability for the consumers. In other words, the worst possible thing for the community. Think of people like Bubbles, or Jonny (RIP), or the drug prostitute who kicked off an earlier episode this season. The Co-op meant more addiction, more death, more people becoming those people, and Joe was responsible. He got what he deserved.

Caught in the Tangled Web

I've been doing some background reading for a policy paper about minority college graduation rates this morning, and I ran across a interesting paper written by George Kuh and his colleagues at the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) at Indiana University about the effect of student engagement on students' grades and likelihood of staying in school. I notice that it references a paper I wrote on the subject four years ago. I, in turn, am planning on referencing Kuh's paper in my new report. George and I have had drinks together on several occasions, and were both members of a panel that testified to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education last year. The new director of NSSE recently asked me to participate in a panel discussion on college rankings. In 1998 and 1999, I worked for the state senator from Bloomington, Indiana, where Indiana University is located.

Clearly, I am inextricably caught up in a web of undisclosed relationships and inherent conflicts of interest that must be fully disclosed in exhaustive, graphically-aided detail in my upcoming report. Either that or Education Sector will be morally obligated to change its logo and destroy any stationary containing the word "independent." Alas, if only someone had made me aware of this before.

Hearts and Unicorns

January’s Phi Delta Kappan featured three different authors commenting on the state of democracy in public education today. The last article entitled, “Democracy and Education: Empowering Students to Make Sense of Their World” linked education and democracy with a cogent premise—learning theory. William Garrison views instructional practice or the way students are taught to learn, as the conduit to prepare young people for democratic citizenship. Garrison asserts that the core connection between democracy and education is formulated by testing understanding through experience.

“Learning is the process of constructing meaning or structuring reality…Formal education, as a system by which society transfers its knowledge and customs from generation to generation, generally does a poor job of teaching students how to learn, specifically a poor job of helping students to develop as self-directed learners, which is so critical in a rapidly changing world.”

So, where is this “self-directed” learning taking place in today’s public school system? I would point to Napa Valley’s New Technology High School as one such place. NTHS genesis began in Napa but has now spread across nine different states and has a total of 35 schools. NTHS uses “project-based learning” as their model. Students present tech-based projects, work in teams, and create products on the subject at hand. Students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning. I’ll concede “project-based” learning can at times become synonymous with new-age educational centers that award hearts instead of A's and Unicorns in place of an F. But, I would also argue that NTHS is imparting advanced levels of learning and communication skills that need to be applied to real-world problems. The learning environment at New Tech stimulates a workplace environment, helping students achieve greater analytical skills through autonomy and experience. Find more on NTHS here.
Posted by: Claire Williams

The Wages of Wynn

In a race that received a significant amount of national attention and an influx of outside money, Donna Edwards defeated eight-term incumbent Albert Wynn for the Democractic nomination to represent Maryland's overwhelmingly big-D Democratic 4th Congressional district. Edwards was heavily backed by progressive labor interests, including the SEIU, who saw Wynn as too pro-business. Not all labor groups took the same tack, however. A month ago, Wynn was endorsed by the Maryland teachers unions:

Congressman Wynn has shown political courage in raising major concerns about the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Law," Clara Floyd, president of the Maryland State Teachers Association, said in a statement. "If we want to make sure that every child has access to great public schools, then Congress must provide the flexibility and resources needed to make that happen."

Which just goes to show that there's no so such thing as a free lunch in politics. If you're going to throw your weight around Congress pursuing this or that legislative agenda--in this case, opposing parts of the proposed NCLB reauthorization legislation that was considered late last year--then you have no choice but to step up and support the candidates you're leaning on when they're politically vulnerable; if you don't, the premises of your pressure tactics fall apart. This wasn't just an education phenonomena, some other AFL / CIO affiliated unions endorsed Wynn as well. The problem with taking the short-term benefit of influencing someone to your cause is that in the long term the quo always comes back to the quid and you end up crosswise with people who should be your allies while alienating the new person who kicks your guy out of office.

The Suspense is Killing Me

I'm going to be at Grinnell College in Iowa next week speaking at an event focused on accountability, NCLB, etc. The commissioner of the Nebraska Department of Education will also be there, giving a presentation titled No Child Left Behind: A Vision for the Future...A Roadmap to Disaster? Hmmm, I wonder what the opening betting line would be on his answer to that question?

That Seems Like a Good Idea

I went to the Phillips Collection over the weekend to see their new exhibit of acquisitions from the last ten years. I didn't quite realize the extent to which "acquired" is museum-ese for "convinced a rich art collector to donate this in theoretical increments over a multi-year period so as to maximize their tax deductions," as opposed to "bought." I imagine running a successful museum must involve spending an awful lot of time drinking weak coffee in senior citizens' living rooms while pretending to like their small yappy dogs.

More to the point, instead of handing out audioguides to walk around with or hang on a lanyard around your neck, the exhibit just had a cell phone number where you would call and then hit a certain number plus # to hear the recording corresponding to a given painting. This seems like a remarkably obvious and good idea in the age of ubiquitous cell phone ownership. There must be some kind of edu-application, albeit one that will be subsumed by ubiquitious broadband-connected miniature computer ownership in a few years.

More Time Movement

The After-School Corporation (TASC) is partnering with the NYC Department of Education and the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development on a 3-year demonstration program for Expanded Learning Time. They, like the Massachusetts model, want to increase student learning time by at least 30%. And like Mass2020, TASC is going to serve as the intermediary for the 10-15 pilot programs.

An RFP with details here.

Meanwhile, on the national front, we're still kicking around the Expanded Learning Time Demonstration Act (H.R. 3642) that was introduced by Representative Payne (D-NJ) last year and showed up in the Miller/McKeon draft NCLB legislation. The grants would provide funds for expanded learning time through longer school days, additional school days, or a combination of longer school days and additional school days.

Population Projections Per Pew's Passel (& Cohn)

The Pew Hispanic Center has a new report by Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn projecting national immigration trends to 2050. Since most know that immigrants make up an increasingly big slice of the American pie, it may not be surprising to learn that nearly one in five Americans will be an immigrant in 2050 (vs. one in eight in 2005). But here are a few other things you should know:

First, if you thought the last major immigration wave was big, get ready for bigger. This 21st century wave of foreign born will hit 18% of the population by 2050 (compared to 14% at the turn of the 20th century).

Second, the Latino share of the population will rise to 29% (from 14% in 2005). The Asian population will nearly double from 5% to 9%*, the Black population will grow slightly and the white population will decline from 67 to 47%.

But, it’s not the kids that will make up most of that growth. The child population will grow slowly compared to the elderly one. Check out Fig. 22 (couldn't upload it, sorry) where you'll see a fast-growing elderly population compared to a slow-growing child population. Still more working-age adults projected, but the dependency ratio that Passel and Cohn lay out will get worse over time (59 dependents for every 100 workers in '05 versus 72/100 in 2050).

Overall, for schools, this means we need to be prepared to serve not only a more ethnically and linguistically diverse population of kids—many of whom will be English-language learners and many more of whom will be 3rd and upward generations--but we also need to be prepared to do a better job communicating with their parents and grandparents. We’re getting away with not paying attention to this right now but, as this report reminds us, need to get better quicker.

*correction: apologies for earlier error on asian pop growth- the asian pop will triple in number, double in % of total U.S. population.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 6

Last week, we noted that Omar is apparently Superman. This week, Marlo clarifies: Omar is Spider-Man, albeit more of the rage-filled alien black suit variety.

Summary: The New Day is done, as Marlo takes control of the B'more drug trade with Omar hobbled but bent on revenge. Nancy Grace does a hilarious cameo suggesting she has either less self-awareness or more of a sense of humour than I'd have thought. Scottie, who for the first few episodes was shaping up to be the biggest tool since Black and Decker, manages to get some real reporting done before reverting back to his lying ways. Executive editor Whiting III bust out his all-that's-wrong-with-newspapers-today Dickensian thing again. Nick heckles the groundbreaking of the yuppy development at the freight elevator (or something) that was supposed to save the union. Carcetti reminds us--and perhaps himself--how he got elected in the first place. Daniels shows his chops in front of the press, while Prop Joe's mole in the D.A.'s office comes to light. There are like 600 characters on this show but I actually have no idea who it could be. Bunk comes this close to getting Chris for the murder of Michael's stepfather, but is stymied by McNulty's fake serial killer investigation, which becomes a victim of its own success, depriving McNulty of dead homeless guys and thus leading him to--naturally--steal a live one instead. Randy appears and has about three lines, each of which is enough to break your heart.

Three more past-season alums come off the no-show list:

Randy
Nick
Judge Phelan

This lends further credence to my Poot-as-Keyser-Soze theory. Simple process of elimination, really.

After spending the first half of the season establishing characters, themes and plot lines, Episode Six gave the season some much-needed momentum. And hey, what do you know, maybe it's not going to be quite as simple-minded as the critics fear. What if there's truth waiting underneath all the lies and cynicism? What does it mean when politicians do the right thing for the wrong reason, and when police do the wrong thing for the right reason? Hopefully, we'll find out.

On Kozol

A few years ago, Jonathan Kozol and I were among a group of people giving presentations at an event in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. He spoke first and gave the kind of eloquent, morally severe speech one would expect, asserting that the nation's increasingly segregated schools were an insult to the memory of Brown. He also had unkind words for the contemporary school reform movement, citing in particular those who would point to "miracle schools," as he called schools with high poverty and high achievement, as evidence that education could serve as a counter-weight to larger problems of race and class. "We can't depend on miracles," he concluded. There was much applause.

I was working at the the Education Trust at the time, which specializes in identifying high-poverty, high-performing schools. So at the end of my presentation, which was about school funding disparities between rich and poor (they're particularly large in Illinois), I said, "Like most of the people in the audience, I've read and greatly benefitted from Jonathan Kozol's books. But I think he's wrong about the promise of high-performing schools. They're not miracle workers, they just do their jobs uncommonly well. Saying that their success is somehow supernatural denigrates their real accomplishments."

After the final speaker, an unreconstructed Marxist professor from DePaul who explained (really) that there could be no school reform until the revolution comes, we broke for lunch. I was making small talk with someone from the Chicago school district, when Kozol walked up and asked, without preamble, "Do you really think there all these schools out there that can overcome poverty?" Thus began a fascinating, hour-long conversation that continued as the room emptied out and the waiters cleared the dishes around us, before going outside where he could smoke. He was smart, wry, and more willing than he is in public to concede that some of public education's failures originate from sources other than societal racism, corporate-controlled goverment, and economic inequality. He was particularly interested in the school finance stuff, and we exchanged FAXs (he didn't do email) for a few months thereafter.

Kozol has been in the news a lot lately, first with his much-discussed diet to protest NCLB, and now with the publication of a new book, "Letters to a Young Teacher." The Weekly Standard has a review here, which contains most of the elements of the standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself: a lengthy section focusing on Kozol's admiration for Castro, standard pro-voucher and anti-school spending arguments, etc. There are also more than a few exaggerations and factual errors, which is problematic given that the author, Jonathan Leaf, accuses Kozol of the same sloppiness, as well as (citing no evidence) outright fabrication. Leaf says:

Kozol's impact has been enormous. The national phenomenon of judges' compelling states to change their tax codes to increase funding for schools in poor districts was driven by the widespread credence given to his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, which sold over 250,000 copies in hardcover alone.

That's nonsense. School funding lawsuits have been going on without interruption since the early 1970s, and the seminal Kentucky case that kicked off the "adequacy" movement in school finance, Rose v. Council for Better Education, was decided in 1989. Leaf also says:

As academics have known for many years, states that spend more on their schools often have the worst educational performance and some of the states that spend the least per pupil--like North Dakota and Utah--have among the best.

While North Dakota does pretty well, Utah ranks in the bottom half of states on the latest NAEP reading test. Hardly "some of the best."

Leaf does, however, hone in on what I think is the essential criticism of Kozol, which is that in his righteous anger and dark pessimism, he's become blind to all evidence of progress and possibility with our public schools. This point is made in Sandra Tsing Loh's much more worthwhile review in latest issue of The Atlantic, which isn't online yet, where she confesses to being:

"a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol. Yea, I could show you my tower of dog-eared Kozolalia...I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequality in public education...Pfizer should develop a special anti-depressant--"Zokol: for when you've read too much Kozol."

But she's also the mother of a white child who attends the predominantly minority, often low-income Los Angeles Unified Public Schools. She says:

I was pleasantly surprised (steeped in Kozolalia as I was) to discover that it was not a blasted wasteland...While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like...I have yet, for instance, to trip over a crack-addicted parent in the parking lot...

Tsing Loh relates how she had her own Jonathan Kozol moment recently, and tried to talk to him about what these things might mean:

But he wasn't interested. What we need are moral leaders! he roared mightily. This is a civil rights issue! We need a religous leader, a prophet...thundering from the pulpit!

Kozol's critics often complain that he's been writing the same book, over and over, for forty years. I've never understood this--if the book needs to be written, if the message needs to be heard, then what else should he do? People need reminding of what's important--that's why church is every Sunday--and there's no surplus of well-known authors who can focus attention on the deep structural and social inequities that plague the education of the most vulnerable children.

But somewhere along the way, the burden and exhilaration of all those decades of righteousness seem to have narrowed Kozol's vision to point that he can longer see reasons to hope. True prophets provide more than just portents of doom; they stand up and show the faithful a path to a better place.

Don't Be Questioning My Bill James-itude

Calling my Daily News editorial on the NYC value-added controversy "outlandish and mathematically inept," Steve Koss says:

True baseball aficionados -- those familiar with the work of Bill James, for example -- also understand that these now-famous analytical models are almost exclusively multivariate regression models. In other words, baseball general managers like Billy Beane use mathematical models that predict a player’s value or performance from many different variables simultaneously, each variable clearly measurable and each contributing a portion of the total “value added.” These models are mathematically complex, fraught with issues of relevance, cross-interference among variables, and time series interdependencies (respectively called statistical significance, multicollinearity, and autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) that must be carefully considered in their formation and use.

Contrast this approach with the DOE’s under Chancellor Klein, where a teacher’s ostensible “value added” is derived entirely from a single variable, standardized test scores, that is itself an arguably spurious measure. Imagine baseball owners paying their players on the basis of just one variable, such as number of home runs. Within a few years, it would hard to tell the New York Yankees from the New York Giants – every Yankee would be 6’6”, weigh 275 pounds, bench press 500 pounds, and hit 40+ home runs per year. With players judged and rewarded on any single variable, the game of baseball would be rendered unrecognizable, grossly perverted from the multiple-skill game it is today.

Okay, people can say what they like about my credentials, education policy papers, or what have you, but I started buying the Bill James Baseball Abstract in the mid-1980s. These accusations will not stand.

Moreover, Koss doesn't know what he's talking about. The NYC value-added measures are not "derived from a single variable," they're exactly the kind of complicated multi-variate measure he describes. As the NY Times reported.

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.

The NYC model uses something like 12 discrete variables, and the HLM version of value-added pioneered by Bill Sanders is so complicated that you need a PhD in statistics and a special computer at SAS headquarters to run it. It's more complicated that anything Bill James does, as it should be.

As for baseball, yeah, imagine if the Yankees started throwing untold million of dollars at players based primarily on their home run totals, leading to players shooting themselves full of steroids and turning into musclebound, home run producing freaks. It's a good thing that never happened! Instead, the Yankees continue to dominate the American League East and add to their historic World Series victory total by sticking to the tried-and-true Yankee tradition of paying players strictly on the basis of the number of years since they left the minor leagues, regardless of what position they play, how well they hit, or the number of games they win.

Enlightened Leadership

We released a report recently on the troubled state of teacher evaluation in public education, in which we suggested that a few local teacher unions are supporting comprehensive evalution systems with teeth, but that most aren't. So it has been encouraging that a number of union leaders have written to compliment the report. One union-created organization, the new Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership in Washington, DC, has linked to the report on its website.

But perhaps that's not so surprising, since the institute, named after the former president of the Cincinnate Federation of Teachers and funded by several foundations that also support Education Sector, is working to groom a new generation of progressive, reform-minded teacher unionists. "Our goal," the organization writes, "is to help local union leaders to be bold, collaborative and creative advocates for the improvement of public education."

No one can object to that mission.

education, baseball, tomato, tomahto

Those who couldn't get enough of my extended baseball metaphor vis a vis the recent NYC teacher evaluation contretemps can read a new version in the New York Daily News here.

Hoosier Taxation

Michele McNeil reports in Education Week:

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, who is facing re-election this year along with the entire House and some of the Senate in that state, has made property-tax relief his top priority this legislative year and wants to remove funding for schools’ general operating budgets from the property-tax rolls. That plan, coupled with a legislative proposal to fund the costs of student transportation—except the purchase of school buses—with state dollars and not property taxes, would mean a $1.3 billion annual shift of school costs to the state. The state, in turn, would raise the 6 percent sales tax by a percentage point, and use other money set aside for property-tax relief to make up the lost funding to schools.

This isn't a very good idea. The Indiana general fund property tax functions essentially like a state--not local--property tax, in that the state sets local property tax rates, then determines the total amount of general fund revenue school districts get, and then fills in the difference between that amount and what the local property tax raises with state money, which comes from combination of sales and income taxes. When property values rise, the state benefits in the form of reduced obligations to school general funds; when property values fall the state is on the hook for the lost revenue. School budgets aren't affected either way. That creates a fairly stable three-legged property/sales/income revenue stool for local schools, with the volatility of one source being offset by the others. If the Daniels proposal is enacted, they'll be down to two legs and subject to increased risk of sales tax volatility tied to the business cycle, which is precisely what the Ed Week article describes happening in Florida.

In other words, this isn't really an education issue at all, it's just a question of whether the state of Indiana wants to change its revenue mix in a way that relies more on sales taxes and less on property taxes. Another consequence woudl be redistributing some of the tax burden down the income ladder, since poor people consume their entire income, more or less by definition, and thus pay sales taxes on it, while wealthier people invest part of their income in stuff like property, which would be taxed at a lower rate.

The "Trans-Classroom" Teacher

The new issue of Innovate: The Journal of Online Education features a thoughtful article by Teachers College's Susan Lowes about the possibilities arising from an emerging cohort of "trans-classroom" teachers:

...Although face-to-face and online courses do indeed take place in separate environments, the social field of the teacher who teaches them increasingly includes both. And as a teacher moves, either simultaneously or serially, from one environment to the other, the course being taught will also be transformed as it is shaped and reshaped to fit first one context and then the other....This research, exploratory though it is, suggests that giving more teachers the opportunity to teach online, as well as deliberately encouraging those who do teach online to share what they have learned with their fellow classroom teachers, provides an opportunity to strengthen teaching in both environments.

As I wrote last week, the future for education is neither a fully virtual nor a parallel system, but an integrated one. Dr. Lowes' research focuses us in the right direction: Away from the false online vs. classroom dichotomy and towards an understanding of how to improve teaching practice across a multiplicity of learning environments.

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.