A Narrowed Point of View

Since it looks like NCLB isn't going to reauthorized until 2010 or so, we should probably all hunker down and prepare for a steady stream of stories like this one, about a Montgomery County elementary school that spent an entire morning focused on art in protest of the curriculum narrowing effects of the federal law. The story then pivots, as all such stories do, to recent studies from CEP:

Her sentiments echoed a report released last month by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, which found that many elementary schools across the country have allotted more time to reading and math by cutting time for social studies, science, art and physical education. The issue of "curriculum narrowing" has become a key part of the debate over reauthorizing the 2002 federal law, which is designed to improve reading and math proficiency.

It's worth noting, first of all, that reporters routinely misinterpet the CEP data or present it in ways that aren't really accurate. Sometimes they just botch the numbers entirely; in other instances--like this one--they're vague to the point of being misleading. All we're told here is that "many" districts have cut a range of subjects, including art. But a quick look at the actual CEP report, which was released a few weeks ago, shows that the percent of districts that reduced time on art--the entire subject of this story--was 16%. The number is right there on Table 1, on the second page of an eight-page report. So either the reporter (or her editor) didn't bother to read it, or read it and chose not include the number in the story. Why? I imagine because it calls the story's premise into question; 16% doesn't feel so much like "many." The CEP reports, moreover, suggest that districts most likely to cut time in subjects like art to increase time for reading and math are chronically low-performing districts that are really under the NLCB gun--districts not like Montgomery County.

More broadly, this whole conversation about the impact of NCLB on curricula needs to get beyond the simple formulation of "Curricula narrowed; ergo NCLB bad." There are only so many hours in the school day. Priorities need to be set and choices must be made. The 16% of districts that cut art in favor of reading and math didn't necessarily make a bad choice, unless you think that all districts had, pre-NCLB, miraculously arrived at the precise optimal mix of subjects and time. Reducing time for art in order to ensure that elementary school student can read might be exactly the kind of hard decision those students need.

Update: AFTie John nods approvingly, saying:

If you're an NCLB lover, there's no use trying to contact the reporter She's too far gone. She writes that the morning of art focused attention on "a national reality: that art is often squeezed out of the curriculum by the academic rigors of the No Child Left Behind law."

This is just a matter of definition, then. If you think 16% is "often," then it's a fair piece. If not, it's not. John?

Update 2: John responds:

Well, a little extrapolating and back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggests that 4 million students (16% of ~ 25 million public K-6 students) are missing more than 30 hours of art instruction per year. So, yes, Kevin, I think that's a lot of lost art instruction. But the art of defending NCLB against all comers is alive and well at Education Sector.

This is the "if you multiply some number times some other number times some other number times the entirety of the American public education system, the result is a non-trivial number" excuse, i.e. the last refuge of scoundrels. Again, those 30 hours of art and music instruction weren't poured down a rat hole somewhere. They weren't "lost," they were replaced by 30 hours of instruction in reading and math. The result, presumably, is students who are better able to read and do math but have less skill in and appreciation of art and music. Is that--as John seems to believe--obviously a bad thing?

Update 3: John juxtaposes the statement above about the last refuge etc. with the following from a paper that Education Sector published last year:

Taken in isolation, some of the provisions described above may seem inconsequential, amounting to 1 percent or less of school spending. But when the costs of these provisions are added together, they amount to a significant percentage of all school resources. As Table 9 shows, the eight provisions described above add up to almost 19 percent of all school spending. This amounts to roughly $77 gazillion* in school spending per year nationwide.

30 hours is about 2.7 percent of the roughly 1,100 hours of instruction schoolchildren get per year. That's for the 16 percent of districts made cuts in art and music (the percent that cut art is presumably less). So, once again, this is a matter of definition. If you think that four tenths of one percent (.027 X .16) is comparable to 19 percent then John's comparison is apt. If not, it's not. 

See also this thread at D-Ed Reckoning, whose commenter says:

As a musician and composer, I can say that trading some time teaching music for time teaching reading, assuming they're actually teaching reading, is a perfectly OK tradeoff. Why? Because one can't perform written sheet music without being able to read. One's decoding skills have to be good enough to recognize words from English, Italian, French, and German.I'm looking at a piece right now that has the following words on it, just on the first line: Trompete, Langsam, Con Sordino, crescendo, Senza Sordino. If I couldn't read those words, I wouldn't be able to play the music, even if I could perfectly execute the instructions encoded on the staff itself. Music and art are valuable for both the heart and mind, but reading and math are necessary for success in anything, including music and art.

Tough Questions about UDC

One of the Washington Post's best columnists doesn't publish on the op-ed page, but in the Business section: Steven Pearlstein. I've become a regular reader over the last few years, not just because he provides a lot of insightful, well-informed commentary on business and economic issues, but because he's written some really good pieces on higher education. A few months ago he wrote a pair of smart columns on the University of Maryland's recent efforts to become more efficient, and yesterday he took on a topic that doesn't get enough attention here in DC: The University of the District of Columbia, which he describes as:

...a poorly run institution that is driven more by political imperatives than economic ones and spends too much money doing the wrong things badly.To put it bluntly, the District doesn't need -- and probably can't support -- a quality land-grant university. Its population is too small and its tax base too narrow. Most of its public school graduates are unprepared to do college-level work. And the most pressing need of its businesses and its unemployed residents is for an effective teaching machine that can make up for the deficiencies of the public school system and train its residents for the tens of thousands of "middle skill" jobs offered by the regional economy. In other words, what the District needs is a community college.

This is true. UDC is a particularly glaring example of problem that, to varying degrees, crops up repeatedly in higher education. There is one established model for organizing a high-prestige institution of higher education. It's been in place since the late 19th century, when Harvard president Charles Eliot led the push to adopt the German research university model, and it involves hiring faculty who have been extensively trained as researchers and then organizing them into semi-autonomous departments defined by the major academic disciplines. As the nation has evolved over the last 120 years from giving only a small percentage of students a higher education to where we are today, with almost 70 percent of high school graduates going to directly to college, we've basically just stamped out copies of that model and built them in every major population center. The problem is that while that model works pretty well for the top students, it becomes progressively less effective as the mission of the university necessarily becomes more and more focused on providing more basic, vocational classes to students who didn't get a great high school education. And of course there are few cities providing a worse high school education than Washington, DC.

So when a city like DC decides, as it did some years ago, to invest in a public university, there's a natural inclination to want to build the "best," most prestigous institution it can, something that can be a source of civic pride, something that represents high aspirations for the community and its students. But what you end up with is a bad mismatch between organizational design and purpose, lots of wasted money, and students not getting the education they need.

Research for Richard Simmons

From USA Today: “Time spent in physical education does not detract from elementary school students' ability to excel in the classroom and may even help improve girls' academic performance, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.”

Wait, I thought that boys were the ones that had to move around to learn, not girls. I’ll just leave that one for Sara Mead to ponder.

The CDC report does show that children, boys or girls, should move around during the day—no surprise to anyone who has been around a child. And “the study indicates that trimming physical education programs may not be the best way to raise test scores in schools.” In the article, this leads to a lot of bemoaning NCLB and the resulting curriculum narrowing. But I find this encouraging—schools can teach reading and math and keep physical education, it’s not a zero sum game after all. Someone call Richard Simmons and make sure he sees this report.

Generation X Grows Up

I graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in May 1992, with a B.A. in political science. Things felt uncertain then. Early in my first semester in 1988, my poli-sci teaching assistant calmy explained why she was a communist and how the revolution was on its way; by the time I graduated the Berlin Wall was a memory. The recent recession was just wrapping up and it seemed likely that the Reagan / Bush administration would continue for at least four more years. The value of a liberal arts degree in the job market was quickly demonstrated by my first four quasi-full time jobs after graduation: camp counselor; sporting goods salesman; waiter in a rib restaurant; camp counselor again.

The class of '92 also fell smack-dab in the middle of the "Generation X" demographic, so people like me were fed a steady of magazine articles and movies describing our alleged apathy, cynicism, and fondness for flannel. It wasn't all b.s.; as a younger member of the generation, Chuck Klosterman, once observed with only slight exaggeration:

Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b)they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true.

But this begs a question that is never asked enough: Were we right, in retrospect? Things worked out fine for me, I went to grad school, got a job, got married, got a better job, made more money, stayed married, bought a house, travelled to some places, and so on and so forth. So did almost all of my friends from high school and college.

But of course you can't responsibly generalize from your own experiences or those of people you happen to know. To really answer that question, you'd have to go to the trouble of identifying a large, statistically representative sample--say roughly 10,000 people who earned a bachelor's degree in 1992 or 1993--gather a lot of baseline data about each person, and then diligently keep track of them as the years passed, following up with more detailed surveys every few years or so for the next decade. It would cost a lot money and you wouldn't really know the answer to the question for a good 15 years, which is roughly 14.5 years after the magazines and movies got bored and started talking about something else.

Thankfully, the federal government did just that, and released the latest results today. This is from the National Center for Education Statistics' "Baccalaureate and Beyond" longitudinal study, which began with students who finished college during the 92-93 academic year and followed up in 1994, 1997, and 2003. I'm not sure there are any blockbuster findings, but in a way that's the point: studies like this do mundane but crucial work of providing empirical foundations for our sense of things, clarifying and updating the common wisdom. A few highlights:

• People go to school so they can work. Roughly two-thirds of the original grads majored in what the report calls "career-oriented" fields: business, education, engineering, health, etc., as opposed to "academic" fields like my poli-sci degree, arts and humanities, math, biology, etc. While colleges rightly see themselves as much more than vocational, the plain truth is that most students go to college with pretty straightforward ambitions to get a decent job and thus life.
  
• Things are different for men and women. At the the three follow-up points--94, 97, and 03--the percent of men who were neither employed nor enrolled in grad school was 6, 4, and 5 percent, respectively. For women the numbers were 7% in 1994, 8% in 1997, and 18 percent in 2003. As people get older, marry, and start families, the arcs of their careers and lives continue to diverge by gender.
  
• Things get better as you get older. The average graduates' salary nearly doubled from 1994 to 2003, from $30,800 to $60,600, in constant 2003 dollars. From graduation to 1994, 29% of graduates were unemployed at least once. That percentage fell to 22% in 94 -97, and 13 percent from 97-03, despite the latter time period being twice as long. Among those with a full-time job, the percent in jobs they considered to have definite career potential went from 44% in '94 to 59% in 97 and 90% in '03.
  
• For college grads, the business of America is business--and education. In 2003, 28% of working 92/93 grads were "business workers and managers," while another 19% were "educators."
  
• There's more than one way to get a good job. Career-oriented majors were quicker to get a job and less likely to be unemployed, but by the time 2003 came the academic majors had mostly gotten through grad school and caught up; there was no statistically significant difference in 2003 earnings between career and academic majors, after controlling for other factors.

What I and my fellow Gen-X grads didn't know, of course, was that our pessimism was mostly unwarranted. We knew were post- a lot of things: modern, Cold War, etc. We just didn't know what we were pre-, yet. Luckily, it turned out to be prosperity; the economy was just beginning a historic expansion during which nearly all the new money went to college graduates like us. In general, if you made it through college, things worked out, if not in the short term than probably the mid- and most likely the long. All the more reason to make sure that more students have similar opportunities today.

Filling in the Research Gap

A report released today by the National Consumer Law Center is worth looking at if you follow student loan issues. The report examines the terms, including interest rates and fees, of 28 private student loans issued between 2001 and 2006. The growth in private student loans over the past few years has gotten a lot of attention, but what has been missing from the discussion is an accounting of the actual terms of these loans. Until now, most of that information has been anecdotal.

The report's title, "Paying the Price: The High Cost of Private Student Loans and the Dangers for Student Borrowers" makes its conclusions pretty clear. And it's worth keeping in mind that the National Consumer Law Center is a consumer advocacy group, so it approaches the topic from a consumer protection perspective. Even so, this is the first real look at the terms of these loans, and, much like the anecdotal evidence has indicated, it's a marketplace where students need to tread carefully.

And Missing a Few Other Things...

Per Kevin’s post below, a few notes on today’s Washington Post article on student loans in today’s volatile credit markets:

The Post, unlike some other publications, made an effort in this piece to distinguish between federal loans, those guaranteed by the federal government and that carry a fixed interest rate, and private loans, which are completely separate from the government and act like any commercial loan that requires a credit check and carries a variable interest rate. But the Post article switches back and forth between describing what’s happening in these two related but distinct markets, adding to confusion over where students are most likely to see an impact on loan availability.

Private loans are where most of the action is. Prior to this tightening in the credit markets, loan providers were offering private loans, often with extremely high interest rates and fees, to students with poor credit histories or at colleges with poor graduation and job placement track records. Loan companies are curtailing this practice because of the higher default rates among these students. This could actually be a positive development—private student loans are not eligible to be discharged in bankruptcy, and a loan with a high interest rate made to a student with a low chance of graduating or getting a job is more a recipe for life-long indebtedness and a destroyed credit history than it is an educational opportunity.

The potential for decreased private loan availability is cause for concern, though, if it spreads to students with better credit histories. At many institutions, private loans have become an essential part of the financial aid package as tuition prices have continually outpaced increases in federal aid. But, for many students, the additional availability of federal loans for parents (PLUS loans), additional loans for graduate students (Grad-PLUS loans), and increases in loan amounts for students whose parents can’t get PLUS loans should help to cover shortfalls in the private loan market.

On the federal loan side, the industry is seeing less change. The second paragraph in the article points out that students with federal loans (the fixed interest rate, government guaranteed ones) could see higher upfront borrowing fees. The fees the government charges for new loans are nothing new. What’s happening is that private loan companies, which have in the past waived these fees as an incentive to get schools to choose them as a lender, are less likely to offer this incentive in the wake of reduced guaranteed profits from the government and a tightening credit market. But before students fret about increased upfront fees, they should consider that recent legislation also reduced interest rates on subsidized federal loans, a benefit they will see through the life of the loan.

And, it seems that this credit crisis is hurting some student loan companies more than others. Sallie Mae, the biggest, and PHEAA, also a giant in the industry, have announced plans to reduce the federal loans they offer. These two banks were also in the top ten of the student loan securitization market—the market for auctioning student loans to raise money to make new loans and also the market that is having the most trouble. On the other hand, J.P. Morgan Chase, a large bank that is less susceptible to changes in the securitization markets, announced that it would be cutting both fees and interest rates on student loans.

The tightening of the private loan market may help shake out some loans that shouldn’t have been made in the first place and could force some colleges to lower their reliance on easy access to private loan debt. On the federal loan side, the Department of Education should certainly keep an eye on this situation and needs to be prepared to step in as a lender of last resort if the current debt markets worsen and student loan eligibility is genuinely threatened. Right now, though, despite media efforts to sound the alarm, it looks like there are a few worrisome signs, but no real crisis in student loans.

Same Sax Story (And Some Sense From Sara)

Leonard Sax, self-described as "uniquely unqualified to lead the single-sex public education movement" (but doing it anyway) continues to play the hero of journalists everywhere wanting to write about separating girls and boys in schools. Here he is again in this long article in the NY Times magazine. I can't say how glad I am that Sara is back blogging. Her take on this article (gender-based education dressed up as single-sex schooling) is right on point.

Missing the Big Picture

The Post went on the front page this morning with news of how the credit crunch is making student loans less available and more expensive. One student explained the consequences:

Andrew Helms, 24, a master's student in Arab studies at Georgetown, said he had to take out $50,000 in loans to cover the first of his two years of graduate studies. He still has undergraduate debt to pay off. His federal loan is fixed at a 6.3 percent interest rate, while his private loan rate has reached 7.8 percent. Any rise in the latter would be "a substantial concern," he said. School debt "determines what you'll do after graduation," he said. "People who want to go into humanitarian work will have to wait until 10 to 15 years down the road until after you have paid off your loans. . . . I might have to sell my soul to an oil company."

It's worth mentioning--since the Post doesn't--that the odds of Mr. Helms having to prostitute himself to Exxon/Mobil are less a function of marginal interest rate changes than the fact that he just borrowed $50,000 for one year of graduate school. 

Long-term trends rule the world. It's those simple straight lines, steadily ascending from the lower left to the upper right, that define the basic nature of our lives. Even more so when the change is exponential, like compound interest or global population growth over the last hundred years. But paradoxically, the steadier--and thus more important--the trend, the less likely it is to be "news" because news is new and long-term trends are well-known and always happening. There's no "ta-da" moment, no intriguing hook, no fresh angle. So it is with steeply rising college tuition,  which had become so regular and unchanging that we've come to accept it as inevitable, and thus not newsworthy in anything but the most general way. Less important, temporary changes like interest rate fluctuations make headlines, the massive sums to which those rates are applied don't. 

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 9

MY NAME IS MY NAME!  I think I want that to be my ringtone.

That's also Marlo, all of him, in five words. The longer the Game goes on, the more the logic of it means that the only winners will be those who ignore money, loyalty, family, honor, delusions of respectability, anything, and play it strictly for its own sake. All you get is your name on the corners, at least for a while. 

When HBO sent preview copies of Season Five around before the season started to generate advance coverage, they only distributed the first seven episodes. I'm guessing that was to keep the news of Omar's shocking murder by Kenard under wraps, which in understandable, but I think they could have saved David Simon some mixed review by releasing all ten, because eight and now nine were great, vintage great. On some level all five seasons have worked this way, with patience at the beginning paying off at the end. 

Summary: Gus is on the hunt for Templeton, while Lester finally pulls off the big bust, taking down Marlo, Chris, Cheese, and Monk, with handshakes and photo-ops all around. Steintorf tells Rawls and Daniels to juke the stats. Clay Davis puts Lester onto Levy. Bubbles makes it to his anniversary, and frankly this has all been worth it for that alone. Kima is true to her word, and McNulty's days seem numbered.  

It's interesting how the Stanfield crew have adopted almost a predestinationalist view of the the world. When Snoop was staring down the barrel of the gun, did she really believe that deserve had nothing to do with it, that it was just her time? There was a lot in those last few moments, telling Michael that their promise to him--you're part of our family--was always a lie, pausing at the end to wonder if she looked pretty, knowing she wouldn't anymore. 

This week's past-season role call: Namond, Bunny, and the Deacon, leaving only Prez...yep, there he is in preview for the finale. Well done. Also, who was the guy in the evidence room? 

One of the interesting things about The Wire is the way certain elements of the story kind of sneak up on you. With all the hubbub about fabulism earlier in the season, I had kind of assumed that the parts with Dukie and Chris were mostly texture, just a way to provide continuity from last season. Nope, it's all connected--I should have known. 

Union Busting

AFTie Ed flags this story from Illinois, where it appears that when teachers in a newly-opened charter school attempted to unionize, the school responded with various heavy-handed and probably illegal tactics including loyalty oaths, etc. In my mind, if a charter school opens its doors, the teachers are happy working there without being represented by a union, and (most importantly) the students get a high-quality education, then that's fine. If, however, the teachers decide they want to unionize, then the only morally defensible response is to accept it, embrace it, bargain, and move forward. The right to organize is non-negotiable. Union-busting tactics like these are just as odious in public education as in Wal-Mart or anywhere else, if not more so. Any responsible teaching of history in the public schools will include the prominent role of labor in creating the way of life that all workers, union and non-union alike, currently enjoy, as well as the vicious, sometimes deadly struggles that those gains required. Schoolchildren shouldn't be taught those lessons even as their school administrators repudiate them. 

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.