History Repeating Itself

Congress, the White House, presidential candidates, and student loan companies have all proposed ideas on how to ensure that recent problems in the credit markets don’t limit college-bound students’ access to federal loan money. Tight credit markets, in which investors are wary of buying any type of bundled debt, have made it difficult for student loan companies and banks to find new money to lend. While there haven’t been any instances to date of students being unable to get federal student loans, lawmakers are rightfully concerned about the possibility and are looking for ways to prevent it.

Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company, has been pushing to allow the Treasury department to purchase bundled student loan debt. Student loan companies would then have access to cheap capital, giving them money to lend and making federal student loans more profitable. The problem with this solution is that we’ve already done it, and it worked well until the company responsible for using Treasury funds to ensure market liquidity—Sallie Mae—decided it could make more money by only going through the private markets.

When Sallie Mae privatized, part of the deal was that it would act as a “lender of last resort” for students who could not get access to federal student loans. The provision was part of Sallie Mae’s repayment for years of taxpayer support and access to cheap Treasury funds. Now that the time has come for Sallie Mae to act as a lender of last resort, it’s not in a position to do so and has come back to the government asking for more Treasury funds. That’s not how Sallie Mae’s privatization plan was supposed to work—the goal was to save the federal government money by transitioning Sallie Mae into a fully private company.

The federal student loan program has a history of providing incentives to student loan companies to ensure their continued participation in the loan program—that’s why loan companies get subsidies and loan guarantees, and why the federal government created Sallie Mae in the first place. But these incentives also have a history of going awry as market conditions change and loan companies use loopholes and lobbying to increase profits (note the 9.5 percent loan scandal).

The House has already passed a bill aimed at addressing potential problems in the student loan market, including increasing the federal limits on student loans by $2,000 and giving the Department of Education the authority to buy student loans in order to free up money to make new loans. This last provision includes the caveat that any loan purchases must not incur any cost to the federal government—a good and important goal. But, as history has taught us, student loan companies are good at figuring out how to get the best deal out of these types of changes to the student loan program. This means that clear responsibility for oversight of the program and legislative language that leaves few loopholes will be critically important to ensuring that, once credit markets recover, student loan companies aren't reaping all the profits while taxpayers are holding the bag.

It's A Lot More Than Culture, Stupid

Over at the New Republic, Josh Patashnik jumps into this conversation about the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that student tests scores seem to be highly correlated with proximity to Canada. The problem, of course, is that lots of other things that influence educational outcomes, like per-student spending and per-capita income, are also correlated with distance from our neighbors to the north. As we all learn in Stats 101, there's a statistically significant relationship between male baldness and yearly salary--men with less hair earn more, not because firms value hairlessness, but because both baldness and salary are independently linked to a third variable: age.

While conceding that spending matters, Patashnik sees the essential truth of Moynihan's Canada theory as cultural. Thus, the title of the post: "It's the Regional Culture, Stupid." Apparently, the real driving force behind high performance in these states isn't high-quality curricula, good teachers, adequate funding, well-educated parents, etc., but rather beneficent influence of virtuous Christian white people:

these states are all part of David Hackett Fischer's "Greater New England" region, the homogeneous, white, Protestant northern tier of the country settled by New England Yankees and northern European migrants, which I've referenced before. This region is sort of the goody two-shoes of America in a variety of quantitative social-science measures: Great test scores, very low crime rates, a historical aversion to violence (nearly all the states with no death penalty are Greater New England states), a tradition of clean, nonpartisan reformist politics...

But to prove this point, you have to find a way to disentangle the allegedly virtuous white person factor from everything else, like spending, parent's education, etc. As evidence, Patashnik cites...a 1992 newspaper article, which begins by asking: "where do students do best on standardized math tests? In North Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin."

Here's the problem with citing test scores from 16 year ago: they've given that same test (the NAEP) a bunch of times since then. According to the 2007 NAEP--which is perhaps more relevant to a discussion occurring in 2008--the top six states in 8th grade math were, in descending order: Massachusetts, North Dakota, Minnesota, Vermont, Kansas, and New Jersey. I'm not sure which theory of regional culture encompasses both Kansas and New Jersey, but somehow they've managed to overcome the handicap of being unable to scoot over the border for maple syrup and done pretty well in math.

Another way to examine culture is to try and factor out other things that matter, like poverty. So let's look at the same test, but this time only at scores for students who aren't eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch. Now the top six are Massachusetts, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, New Jersey, and Vermont. Texas! Maybe if Senator Moynihan were alive today, he'd be developing some kind of proximity-to-Mexico theory...

Okay, one might reply, but don't forget--this is the virtuous Christian white person theory we're talking about here. With the solitary blond-haired kid, sitting in an ice-fishing shack studying differential equations on Sunday after the Lutheran service gets out--Garrison Keillor stuff! What do the numbers look like if we exclude, you know, those other people? Well, if we look just at the NAEP scores for white students, the top six turn out to be: Massachusetts, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Virginia.

In other words, this regional culture determinism is pretty stupid. Of all the things that matter in education, some kind of mystical connection to the Protestant work ethic isn't high on the list. Massachusetts, for example, doesn't have the best NAEP scores in the country because of who landed on Plymouth Rock. It has the best NAEP scores in the country because it has high per-student spending (equitably distributed to high-poverty school districts) high parental education levels, unusually rigorous academic standards, top-quality assessments, good teachers, and strong accountability systems--today.

Patashnik is joining George Will in advancing the "what matters in education isn't education" theory of education, which is one of the more damaging conceits held by people who should know better.

5 Days Left...

If you're smart, motivated and just can't learn enough about education policy, then you have 5 more days to apply for the Fordham Fellows program, which promises to open the doors to the D.C. education policy world. For 9 months, you'll be doing substantial, interesting work in some of D.C.'s best policy organizations (including us, of course). Last year's ES Fellow is already doing great things in Boston, maybe you could be next...

Risk Appraisal

My take on the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk here.

Will Not

When you've been in the column-writing business as long as George Will, I imagine things start to settle into a pretty workmanlike routine: open up the planning calendar, select a slot a few months in advance, and pencil in: "Another terrible, terrible education column. For material, see: previous terrible, terrible education columns, slightly rephrased." Sadly, today is that day. Indeed, this particular iteration of the Terrible, Terrible George Will Education Column, is, improbably, worse than most. 

Will informs us that teachers were "members of a respected profession" until the advent of collective bargaining in the early 1960's, displaying his total ignorance of the paltry salaries and often degrading working conditions teachers experienced at that time. And in an anecdote that he has been paid to republish on roughly eight thousand separate occasions, Will says:

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.

Moynihan was a smart guy, so I suspect that's not what he meant with the Canada crack, given how education spending actually relates to geography in this country. Click through for a moment to Matt Miller's recent Atlantic article, for example, and scroll down to the map showing per-pupil expenditures broken down by county. The light-colored (low-spending) counties are clustered in the South, while the dark-colored (high-spending) counties are disproportionately in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and northern parts of the country in general, i.e. the places closer to Canada. 

The underlying theme of Will's infinitely repeatable Terrible, Terrible Education Column is pessimism. He believes that public education is irredeemable, that efforts to improve it are basically useless. He calls attention to it only to urge others to look away. The one new element of this column is high praise for Checker Finn's new memoir, Troublemaker. But Will essentially argues that Finn's lifetime of engagement with the difficult and worthy cause of education reform has been wasted, and was likely doomed to fail in any case. Finn has a blog now. I wonder if he agrees? 

Grad Rate Round-up

There's been a lot of good commentary and coverage of the new Education Sector minority college graduation rates report over the last few days:

• The comments thread for the InsideHigherEd piece goes okay for a while, although anonymous Internet commenters and critics continue to bug me. If you're going to go posting some crazy nonsense, at least identify yourself so I can tell you why you're wrong! Then the whole thing swerves off the rails as the topic turns to affirmative action with counter-accusations of racism, etc. More on this later.
  
  
• U.S.News has an excellent article here. The report profiles the success of Florida State's CARE program in helping first-generation students graduate. In the article, FSU provost Larry Abele says:
  
  "Everyone's involved. Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, Outreach—everybody just pays attention. We have very immediate and aggressive follow-up for any student who has difficulties." "It's not a cheap program," Abele adds. "But it's really a great program. And the truth is, if something is really important, you can find money for it."
  
  Amen to that.
  
  
• Sherman Dorn offers his usual thoughtful commentary here, praising parts of the report but disagreeing with the recommendation for a national student-record data system to improve the scope and accuracy of graduation rates. This raises an important point: there are some basic tradeoffs here between accuracy and disclosure. If colleges want to be judged by complete, accurate graduation rates, then they're going to have surrender more student-level information to some third party, probably the government, so that party can track students who move from one institution to another. If colleges don't want to do that, they can't expect to be judged by complete, accurate graduation rates. It's one or other.
  
  
• Richard Vedder offers kind words while also raising the affirmative action quesition, which I started to talk about yesterday. Let me say this: I'm perfectly willing to concede that if a college has a very poorly designed affirmative action program, by which I mean a program that (A) brings students to campus who are much less academically prepared than their peers; and (B) abandons them to the fates once they arrive; that could contribute to graduation rate gaps. That said, it's important to remember that (1) affirmative action programs only impact a fraction of minority students, most of whom would be admitted anyway, (2) there are many other more important factors impacting graduation rates, and (3) affirmative action programs don't have to be poorly designed.
  
  
• Over at the brand-new Education Optimists blog, Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor at UW-Madison, has a lengthy response that's well worth reading in full (as is the blog in general). The gist: while it's true that graduation rates are a big problem, the current research base doesn't let us conclude for sure how big an influence individual institutions actually have. Focusing exclusively on institutional practices could distract attention and resources from more effective solutions. I think there are some false choices embedded in this argument, and I'm more willing to move ahead based on the preponderance of existing evidence, but it's an important perspective to consider.

College Graduation Rates and Affirmative Action

The National Review faults my new report on minority college graduation rates because "the words "affirmative" and "preference" appear nowhere in the document." Well, yes, that's true. And I have to admit, in the course of my analysis, I observed one group of students that consistently struggles in graduating compared to their peers. At college after college, this faction is apparently enjoying the benefit of identity-based admissions preferences and dragging down all the rest.

I refer, of course, to white men.

There are over 550 colleges and universities in America that reported higher graduation rates for black women in 2006 than for white men. They include Princeton, Yale, Georgetown, Pomona, Rice, Northwestern, Cornell, Davidson, Vanderbilt, Cal Tech, Wake Forest, Villanova, RPI, West Point, Virginia Tech, George Washington, BYU, Air Force, The University of Texas-Austin, Georgia Tech, SMU, Baylor, Miami, Rutgers, Julliard, Tulane, American, Purdue, Coast Guard, Florida State, UMASS, SUNY-Albany, South Carolina, Bowling Green, Oklahoma, George Mason, West Virginia, and many more.

There are a number of private colleges in the report that have very selective admissions, take race into account when considering applicants, and have no graduation rate gap. There are also lots of public institutions in the report that admit most students who apply regardless of race or anything else--some located in states that have outlawed affirmative action--yet still have very large graduation rate gaps.

So, no, I don't think the report offers damning evidence against affirmative action that we somehow failed to come clean about.

Colleges admit lots of different kinds of students. Some have more barriers to graduation than others. Statistically speaking, students are less likely to graduate if they work full-time, have children, come from low-income households, enroll part-time, don't enroll immediately after high school, struggle with reading and math, have parents who didn't graduate from college, or have a Y chromosome. Responsible institutions understand this, and support individual students depending on their invidual needs, whatever they might be. That's not a practice specfic to race or anything else, it's about devoting resources and attention to students who need them most.

Brace(y) Yourself

Gerry Bracey takes to the pages of the Huffington Post to declare that the authors of NCLB are "like the Nazis at Nuremberg" and wonders when they, too will be called to account. Then--perhaps worrying that someone out there remained unoffended--he likens high-stakes testing to slavery, in the historical sense. (Hat tip: This Week in Eduction.)

It would be a mistake to conclude that says anything about the NCLB debate itself. There are people of good faith on both sides of the argument; Bracey just isn't one of them. 

It's also striking how banal this ten millionth proof of Godwin's Law really is. I've seen Bracey speak in public on a number of occasions. In his more lucid moments, he's actually a pretty intelligent guy.  Surely he's got more up his sleeve than cliched reductio ad Hitlerum argumentation? This stuff barely shocks anymore, Gerry! And isn't that the point?

The more interesting question is whether he can keep it up. Bracey is not an obscure figure in education. He's published numerous op-eds in the Washington Post and elsewhere on the subject and has written extensively in Phi Delta Kappan and other well-respected publications. He's taught at George Mason and has been a Fellow at the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University. He gets paid to speak before many mainstream education groups. 

One wonders: is there anything someone can say that's so patently offensive and obviously deranged that it precludes further participation in respectable conversation? I guess we'll find out. 

The Minority College Graduation Rate Gap

Over the last five years or so, there's a been a huge push among private foundations and public policymakers to focus on the problem of high school graduation. Only half of minority students graduate on time, we are told, a national disgrace. And it's true. Yet far less attention is paid to the fact that there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country where a 50 percent minority graduation rate would be a major improvement. This is the subject of a new report from Education Sector, released this morning.

Consider this table:

It shows the distribution of six-year graduation rates for black students at over 1,000 colleges and universities. Only 20 of those institutions, representing 1.1% of black students who started college as first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen in 2000, graduated 90 percent of those students within six years. 2.3% of the students attended an instiutions with a black graduation rate between 80% and 90%, etc.

As you can see, the big numbers are in the 30% to 39% range, and some go even lower. Overall, black students starting college at the beginning of the millennium were two-and-a-half times more likely to enroll at a school with a 70 percent chance of not graduating within six years than at a school with a 70 percent chance of earning a degree. Overall, black graduation rates are nearly 20 percentage points lower than rates for white students.

This is partly because black students are disproportionately enrolled in colleges with low graduation rates. It's also because most colleges have an internal graduation rate gap, usually around 10 percentage points or so, between white students and students of color. But that's just the average--some institutions have gaps of 20, 30 percentage points or more, others graduate black students at a higher rate than their white peers.

College graduation is a complex phenomenon. It's partly a function of high school preparation, which for many students is substandard. It's also related to income, gender, aptitude, stick-to-it-iveness, available financial aid, and other things. But, crucially, the institutions themselves also play a role here. Some of them do a good job of supporting minority and first-generation students, particularly during the often-difficult transition to college. Others--too many others--don't. Therefore, we need stronger incentives--financial, governmental, and otherwise--for institutions to focus on helping as many minority students as possible earn degrees. Otherwise, we're going to continue to squander the aspirations of tens of thousands of minority college students every year.

Coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education here, InsideHigherEd here, and Diverse Issues in Higher Education here.

Also, if you want to look up the numbers for your alma mater and they're not in the report, you can find them at the U.S. Department of Education's College Navigator site. Select your college and then scroll down and click on "Retention/Graduation Rate"

NYC Tenure Cont'd

NYC Educator disagrees with my take on the NYC tenure debate, and a previous post in which I cited his recitation of the many transcendently bad teachers with which he's had the misfortune to work as evidence that the tenure process in New York should be improved. 

For the most part, I like NYC Educator's take on things; it's a good blog and he's correct in saying that he "specifically told [me] that the city has been negligent in enforcing existing tenure rules for over thirty years." I should have noted that in the previous post. 

However, even his assertion of past negligence is true--and it may be--I'm not sure why it's an argument against the new proposed tenure policy. If the administration has neglected to enforce tenure in the past, why is it bad that they're trying to do so now? NYC Educator thinks they don't need value-added to weed out the bad teachers; the administration obviously thinks they'd be better off with the additional student performance data. Why are they wrong? I'm having a hard time figuring out what the administration's agenda here could be, if not to deny tenure to teachers who shouldn't get it. 

The Coin of the Realm

David Leonhardt turns in an unsatisfactory cover story in the Times Education Life supplement today about recent high-profile moves by elite universities to offer more generous financial aid to low- and middle-income students. Its starts with a dramatic moment in 2003, set in one of higher education's iconic spaces, the Thomas Jefferson-designed Rotunda of the University of Virginia. Just as a high-level meeting is about to start, the UVA President Casteen is handed a note from the press office: the University of North Carolina has just announced a new aid program for low-income students:

The program touched a nerve with Mr. Casteen. The son of a shipyard worker from Portsmouth, in the southeastern corner of the state, he was the first member of his family to attend college. But during his 13 years as president, tuition had risen significantly, as it had at many colleges, and the Virginia campus had become even more dominated by upper-middle-class students. North Carolina’s new policy, which had the potential to lure students away from Virginia, could aggravate the situation.

Before the meeting had ended, Mr. Casteen announced to the room that he wanted the financial-aid staff to come up with a response. He wanted it quickly, he said, and he wanted something bigger than what North Carolina was doing. Four months later, at the board’s next meeting, it approved a plan that was similar but somewhat more generous than North Carolina’s. Making sure everyone had a chance to attend college, Mr. Casteen would say, was “a fundamental obligation of a free culture.”

The article goes on to describe similar announcements in subsequent years from the likes of Harvard, Yale and others, chronicling an escalating oneupsmanship of generosity. 

The problem with this narrative is the implication that the socioeconomic makeup of a given college is primarily a function of who chooses to apply to go there. It's not. It's a function of who the college chooses to let in.  This is not to say that these programs aren't a step in the right direction, in and of themselves--they are. And all else being equal, they've probably had some effect on increasing the economic diversity of the applicant pool -- although it would be nice to see some hard numbers to back this up.

But increasing aid to needy students amounts to elite colleges spending a small amount of what is, for them, an abundant resource--money. The real scarce coin of the realm in elite higher education is admissions. According to Institute for College Access and Success, only seven percent of UVA students received need-based Pell grants in 2005-2006, two years after that fateful day in the rotunda. That's the lowest rate for any public university in America. If President Casteen announces that UVA will no longer provide admissions preferences to legacies, the children of rich people, or recruited athletes in upper-income sports like crew and polo, and will fill those slots with first-generation and low-income students, then I'll start to believe UVA is taking it's "fundamental obligation" seriously. 

The funny thing is, Leonhardt obviously understands this, since the back half of the article is filled with caveats about why, for the aforementioned and other reasons, this whole story isn't such a big deal after all. You see this sometimes, when someone sets out to write a story with a particular thesis, reports the issue thoroughly and represents the opposing point view fairly, but can't quite come to grips with the fact that maybe the thesis should have actually been something else. 

There's also this odd justification for recent policies at Harvard and elsewhere extending aid to the upper middle-class:

Expanding the pool of aid recipients may also make the policies more popular among students. It would be rather counterproductive if the children of midlevel corporate executives, who were paying $50,000 in tuition and fees, ended up resenting the children of police officers, who were paying nothing.

Is that what we're worried about now? Not enflaming class resentment among the children of corporate executives? That doesn't say much for the influence of an elite college education, does it?

Teaching, the Null Hypothesis, and the Status Quo

I've had a couple of off-line conversations in the last week--one about measuring teacher effectiveness, the other about college graduation rates--that both led me to try answer the eternal question of : Why are academics so often wrong about public policy questions?

The short answer is: they're trying to answer the wrong question.

The somewhat longer answer is this: Academics and researchers are trained to think about evidence in a specific way. Their default position is the null hypothesis: unless you can prove something is true, it's not true. This is a completely appropriate way to approach the kind of work that academics do. If your job is to add bricks to the edifice of collective human knowledge, you want to make sure they can stand some weight--otherwise, the whole thing can come crashing down. The generally accepted standard for "statistical significance," for example, is 95% confidence, which means that at least 19 times out of 20, the relationship you're observing is real and not the result of random variation. Nobody disputes this standard, and indeed people sometimes hold out for 99% confidence or more.

The essential public policy question, by contrast, is not: "Is the null hypothesis true?" It's: "Should we keep doing what we're doing, or do something else?" It's a choice between change and the status quo. Neither of those alternatives deserves any special consideration; we should (allowing for the transition costs of change) choose whichever is most likely to achieve whatever policy goals we may have. In other words, the standard in public policy isn't 95%, it's whatever is most likely to be best: 51%. Of course, something closer to 95% would be better, but policy choices are rarely that obvious.

Crucially, in the policy world, choices cannot be delayed or avoided, because not changing is, itself, a choice. A vote against change is a vote for the status quo. Take public education. There are 50 million students in public school today in this country. They're going to be there again on Monday morning, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and in the days and weeks after that. Their schools will likely remain as they are unless we change them. Not changing them endorses that sameness. And I think most reasonable people agree that for too many students, the schools aren't working well enough.

Yet academics consistently treat policy questions like academic questions. They mistake the status quo for the null hypothesis. For example, one alleged social scientist recently concluded that, given some unresolved questions about a proposed value-added teacher effectiveness method, "it's not ready." From her perspective, the question is: can we be really, really sure--say, 95% sure--that value-added measures are accurate?

If we had infinite time and resources to construct the perfect teacher evaluation process, this might be the right question. But of course, we don't. Instead, we have schools--which will, I must emphasize, re-open their doors in less than 72 hours, whether we resolve these issues over the weekend or not--where the status quo process for evaluating teachers is perfunctory, inaccurate, and all but useless. It is a process that allows very bad teachers to stay in their jobs (If you don't believe me, read this). In that context, "it's not ready" is exactly the same as saying "let's keep the current terrible system," because that's the policy choice currently on the table, today.

In this way, the academic approach to public policy, where all changes must meet academic standards of proof, is biased toward the status quo in a huge and damaging way. We're sticking with policies that everyone knows are bad because some people aren't quite sure enough that changes would be good.

Draining the Pool

The news that Lynn Olson, Education Week's senior correspondent, is decamping to the Gates Foundation after more than two decades of writing thoughful trend pieces and news analyses reflects a disquiting trend in American education: the number of experienced journalists writing about schools and colleges for national newspapers and magazines is reaching a disturbingly low level.


Peg Tyre, who has covered the beat for seven years at Newsweek is leaving the magazine at the end of the month under a buy-out program that's going to leave the newsmagazine with over 100 fewer staffers. Claudia Wallis, who has written many of Time's education covers, has left the magazine. Ben Wildavsky departed U.S. News a few years ago for the Kauffman Foundation. And The New York Times has reportedly spiked its regular Wednesday education coverage.


Such cuts are part and parcel of the financial woes inflicted on print media by the advent of Internet advertising. But the collateral damage to education journalism is substantial. There are today very few journalists with the knowledge and experience to write authoritatively for national, non-specialist audiences. There's been a proliferation of education bloggers ready to share their opinions (yes, I'm writing this on a blog). But smart, analytic long-form writing on education's big themes, the sort of work that Lynn did for a long time from her independent perch at Education Week, is becoming harder and harder to find. As Eric Alterman wrote recently in The New Yorker about journalism generally in the Internet era: "We are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation [via blogging], but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism."


The news industry's economic woes eventually may sort themselves out. Until then, we need to find new ways to support the production of first-rate writing about education in national general-interest publications. Several foundations have taken steps in that direction by funding a new "public editor" position at the Education Writers Association and education fellowships at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. But we need to do much more if want to elevate education to the status it deserves in the national public policy conversation.

Finn Speaks

Proving once again (as if it were even necessary at this point) that when The Quick and the ED speaks, people listen, Fordham's Checker Finn dips his toe in the blogosphere for the first time, by calling foul on the "bizzare piggybacking and ahistoricism" of an upcoming Heritage Foundation event titled "25 Years After A Nation at Risk: Returning to President Reagan's Vision for American Education." The event description says:

When [A Nation At Risk] was released in 1983, President Reagan outlined a bold vision for reforming education. He called for increasing parental choice, limiting federal government involvement, and restoring state and local control in education. But conventional wisdom and education reforms have followed a different path over the past quarter-century – increasing federal authority and expanding government control of education.

As Finn notes, Reagan may have said some stuff about vouchers and whatnot when the report was originally released, but he quickly realized that A Nation at Risk advocated for a completely different agenda--an agenda that he then embraced, an agenda that in fact tracks fairly closely with the past quarter-century of education reforms that Heritage derides.

This is a good illustration of the deep philosophical division among right-of-center folks when it comes to the public schools. On the one hand, you've got the Heritage / Cato types who basically see public education as a gigantic, unreformable black hole exerting immense gravitational pull on the public treasury, a prime generator of demand for the taxation they hate above all else and a revenue source for the unions that are a close second. Thus: vouchers, privatization, abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, whatever.

Then there's the Fordham / Checker Finn / A Nation at Risk perspective, which also starts from a very critical view of the present public education system, but concludes that the answer lies in more rigorous standards and greater governmental accountability for results. There are elements of the basic libertarian / authoritarian divide here; Cato trusts in the magic of the market and parental choice, while Finn thinks the answer lies in more rigor, seriousness, professionalism, and tough accountability.

One of the major findings of A Nation at Risk, for example, was that high school students were taking a mish-mash of low-level courses that didn't prepare them for college or anything else. The report called for students to take a "new basics" curriculum -- four years of English, three years of math, three years of science, etc. The libertarian would leave this up to local schools and parents to decide, while others would say no, everyone needs to learn these things whether they like it or not, and it's the responsibility of society and schools to enforce these standards.

While there are some commonalities between the Heritage and Fordham approaches to education--suspicion of unions, good feelings toward choice-based reforms, and a general sense that the schools waste vaste amounts of money--there are also areas that are fundamentally irreconcilable, and it's silly to pretend otherwise.

Hearing Back on Benwood

I've been getting a lot of feedback on the report about the Benwood Initiative that we recently released. Some who appreciated the "nuance" of the findings, others who had great methodological questions, and a smattering of folks who offered terse commentary that can be summed up as "you're saying it takes everything to change the culture of schools and raise student performance, which in turn says nothing and makes it impossible to make choices and so basically there's nothing we can do." Well, I don't know about everything but yes, you do have to change the culture of schools and that does take a whole lot more than any single policy change. And I would hope that could help inform the choices that schools and districts make--so they don't put all their eggs into one basket and expect immediate hatching. I've heard from a few district and school leaders too, and have engaged in some back-and-forth with them. This I find the most heartening-- to hear their thoughtful comments and their ideas about how this relates to their own schools and districts.

The findings have also been misread and misreported. The Baltimore Sun ran a story about Baltimore County teachers who may have to reapply for their jobs as part of restructuring. In it, they reported, "Education Sector, has a new report studying inner-city schools in Chattanooga, Tenn., that made dramatic gains. While those schools replaced some staff members, the report found, the teachers who were most successful were veterans who went through extensive professional development."

To clarify, our research found that about 2/3 of teachers who were teaching in Benwood schools were rehired during the reapplication process. These were not necessarily veteran teachers nor is there any evidence to suggest that veteran teachers who were rehired were more successful than newer non-veteran teachers. What the report shows is that a group of mostly the same teachers improved over time, debunking the notion that the slate was wiped clean of existing teachers and replaced with new and better ones.

Flypaper Cometh

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has launched a new education blog, Flypaper. This is a welcome addition to the edublogosphere and one that I imagine will quickly become a staple of most people's daily edublog shortlist. Why I don't always agree with the folks at Fordham, they're smart and have a lot of interesting, often provocative ideas about education, generally from a kind of reformist center-right perspective. I note, however, there have been no posts from Fordham head honcho Checker Finn as of yet. Finn may not want to admit this to himself, but he was born to blog. Give in to the inevitable, Checker!

It Must Be Mine...Oh Yes...

I was at a concert at the 9:30 Club tonight and saw some guy wearing this T-shirt as I was walking out. Now, as you all know, we work pretty hard here to bring you the best education policy analysis going, and this is part of our job. But the TV recaps? The travelogues and concert reviews? That stuff pretty much happens on my own time. So this seems like a good opportunity for some enterprising readers to band together and do me a solid in return by buying me one of these T-shirts. I'm a size Large, send it to me c/o

Education Sector

1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite 850

Washington, DC 20036

Shafting Poor Students in Higher Education

There's been a fair amount of analysis in recent years about the various ways that low-income students are getting short-changed by higher education financial aid systems, with both states and individual institutions devoting a larger percentage of financial aid dollars to so-called "merit aid" programs that disproportionately benefit well-off students, i.e. those who need the least help. Crucially--and I can't emphasize this enough--much of this aid is not based on merit but rather amounts to colleges throwing $5,000 to $10,000 towards a rich student in the hopes that he/she will be flattered into enrolling and his/her parents will write a check for the remaining thirty-five grand, plus additional donations to the alumni fund down the road.

But there's been surprisingly little attention given to an arguably bigger and more important funding inequity: the public colleges and universities that lower-income, lower-achieving students tend to attend receive and spend a lot less money than the public universities where the wealtheir higher-achieving students go to school. In some states, the financial disparity, even after excluding spending on research, can run close to $10,000 per student or more. In K-12 education, number like that frequently get states thrown into court where they face, and lose, huge school funding lawsuits resulting in billion dollar settlements. In higher education, we think it's justice. This is the subject of my column in today's InsideHigherEd.

Donor Quirks

Yesterday's New York Times article about the strings some donors attach to their gifts to universities reminded me of my own alma mater. Thanks to two dog-loving donors, William and Mary houses the second largest collection of cynogetica: books about dogs. From the Swem Library website, "This is the second largest collection of books about dogs in this country and continues to grow through its own endowment. It contains scholarly work that dates back to the sixteenth century as well as children's literature, breed guides, and the records of the American Kennel Club."

Now there's a good use of an endowment. Hey, it's the reason I went there.

The Diversity Dodge

In the Post, Jay Mathews writes about the long-standing practice among Virginia public universities of discriminating against applicants from Northern Virginia.  No one denies it; a UVA spokesman said "Our primary goal is to enroll an academically strong and diverse class of first-year and transfer students each year. As a state institution, we are interested in enrolling students from all areas of the commonwealth."

This is a clear case of universities taking a worthy and important value--diversity--and rendering it meaningless by using it as cover for their acquiescence to a political spoils system. 

I understand the need to have diverse perspectives on at an institution of higher learning. While I probably wouldn't give that concern as much weight as universities typically do, it's not an illegitimate goal. But a student who grew up in Roanoke isn't exactly bringing the same kind of diversity to the table as a student from Madagascar or Tibet.  The "all areas of the commonwealth" justification also doesn't make much sense; those areas clearly don't include the quarter-acre of land on which the rejected student featured in the piece happens to live. 

This amounts to selfish legislators from Southern Virginia imposing a confiscatory, redistributionist educational opportunity tax on unsuspecting teenagers in Northern Virginia, and universities that would rather go along with it and hide behind the diversity excuse than stand up to public officials who might cut their funding. 

Teacher Tests in Peru

What if teacher applicants had to take a national test? How many would pass? If this were Peru that would be less than 1 percent. Way less. NPR ran a quick story last week on the Peruvian Ministry of Education's attempts to get a handle on poor teacher performance, covered in more detail here (thx to Abdul for the heads-up). As reported, Peru does a relatively good job getting its kids through school--most graduate from its high school equivalent--but the quality of learning is low. Peru was the worst performer of 43 countries on reading, math and science on the 2000 PISA test. So to improve teacher quality, the ministry of education established a test and required all public school teacher applicants to take it. Test takers needed to score at least 14 out of 20 points to pass. Only 151 of over 180,000 teachers in Peru managed to pass the test.

That's one hundred and fifty one teacher applicants out of 180,000 that passed. That’s an astoundingly low number. So I emailed a friend of mine who lives in Lima. She’s not a teacher but she works with kids in an arts program and I figured she might have an interesting take on what’s happening down there. Here’s what she said:

The whole thing seems way out of hand. Was the exam exceptionally difficult? I don’t know- maybe it was. But from what I’ve heard, it was basic. I think the people we’ve got preparing to teach are just really underqualified to teach children. This is a major problem in the long term but even right now it’s a big mess. Last year it was crazy. They declared a huelga indefinida [indefinite strike] because they wouldn’t accept that they might have to take a test. School started but there were still local strikes and teachers didn't show up. So my kids were hanging around a lot, doing nothing. But Macio [teacher friend] is pissed because he’s insistent that this isn’t really even about the testing. They want more money for the whole education system here and more training and support. So my kids are in school now again but it’s still a big mess and there’s a lot of hostility.

The strike last summer was reportedly pretty violent and brought the school system to a standstill. An agreement was reached after 15 days but it didn't end the controversy over how best to improve teacher quality in Peru. In all, it seems pretty clear that the pressure is building on both the labor side and the school management side. This isn't surprising given that we’re talking about a major labor problem if the majority of teachers and teacher applicants lack the knowledge and skills they need to teach kids well. The teachers and the union, are going to have to do more than strike if they hope to improve their profession and the education of Peruvian children. But it cuts both ways and the ministry of education is going to have to acknowledge that testing the teachers may help to diagnose the gravity of the problem but it’s not going to solve it. And they’re going to have to deal with the fact that improving teaching will not happen over night (on the bright side, we see some efforts underway here and with help from outside Peru here and here).

Simple Headlines for a Complex Issue

Declaring a crisis in student loans certainly makes good headlines and it's a great front page piece in April, when many families are reviewing financial aid offers and figuring out how to finance college. But, as the last quote in yesterday's Washington Post piece on the issue pointed out,

"The congressional action and the media coverage on this issue is doing a massive disservice to students and families, many of whom are concerned about paying for college already," said Luke Swarthout, higher education advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "We know many of them are adverse to debt, and for lenders to be sending out a message of crisis in order to secure themselves a bailout potentially could dissuade families from seeking available financing options."

Of course, that didn't stop the Post's editors from using a headline that read, "Exit of College Lenders Sets Off Scramble to Fill Breach." While it's important to report on the problems many student loan companies are facing right now, it is equally as important to point out that the federal government has tools at hand--the lender of last resort program and the Direct Loan program--to address the problem. And that there are many lenders that are still offering student loans.

Another issue that often is missing from current news reports on student loans is whether it's a good idea in the first place to allow institutions to include tens of thousands of dollars in loans, especially high-interest private loans, in their 'aid' packages. The New America Foundation does a great job in this post of pointing out how the easy availability of high-cost private loans, loans that don't have a government guarantee or a fixed interest rate, has allowed colleges to raise tuitions and shift from need-based to merit-based aid (e.g., more grant money going to higher income students).

I also can't help noting that the largest guarantor of these private loans, the Education Resources Institute (TERI), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. TERI credited their financial troubles to disappearing demand among investors for bonds backed by student loans. But you also have to wonder if investors are worried about the potential for high default rates among these private student loans in light of their recent rapid growth, particularly among students with poor credit histories and attending institutions with low graduation rates. Much like the sub-prime mortgage markets, these sub-prime student loans are ripe for default. But unfortunately for students, unlike TERI, they won't get any relief in bankruptcy from student loan debt.

If Only All College Students Were Educated Like Athletes

That's the thesis of Education Sector Co-Jefe Andy Rotherham's op-ed in USA Today. Many undergraduates struggle to succeed and graduate with very little in the way of counseling or academic attention from their institutions. But that's not because those institutions are incapable of providing such support; they often spend lots of time and money helping the subset of students whose continued enrollment they actually care about: major-sports athletes.

Crucially, Andy's piece also contains an element that all experienced op-ed writers know virtually guarantees placement in a major newspaper, something so compelling that persuasive writing instructors absolutely drill this into their student's heads: name-check Kevin Carey. Seriously, no opinion page editor can resist, I swear.

It's All About Tennessee

We just released a report about the teacher-centered Benwood initiative in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In it, I argue that the successful turn-around of eight failing elementary schools was not because the schools rid themselves of their existing teaching staffs but because they put forth an all-hands-on-deck effort to improve teaching and learning in those schools. It’s a tale of teacher improvement. You can read about it here or see the whole thing here.

Also in Tennessee, Memphis may have lost but the Vols took the title over Stanford. As someone who’s learned a lot of good things about UT recently (UT-Chattanooga as one of many partners in the Benwood initiative) and as a former Cal Bear, I couldn’t be happier about that.

Tenure Cont'd

Ed Notes offers a justification for banning the use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions: Using test scores to estimate teacher effectiveness is methodologically complicated. (This is true). Therefore, it should be outlawed. (This is absurd).

Most important things, including teaching, are complicated. If we squelch every attempt to understand such things and act on that knowledge, we'll be left knowing very little about very little, which more or less describes the state of knowledge about teacher effectiveness today. Indeed, most teacher policy failures are a function of privileging easily measurable unimportant things, like master's degrees and state certification, over difficult-to-measure important things, like effectiveness in boosting test scores.

Ed Notes also offers the "it hasn't been tested" argument, i.e. the chicken-and-egg theory of policy obstructionism: it can't be tried because it hasn't been proven; it can't be proven because it hasn't been tried.

Meanwhile, some unknown person who claims to be a social scientist but isn't willing to offer any credentials to prove it labels all critiques of the union's role in legally banning evidence of student learning from judgments of teacher effectiveness as "union bashing." Because if you criticize unions, ipso facto, you're a union basher--as is, apparently, the famously conservative, union-hating New York Times editorial page, which said:

The ban is so nonsensical that lawmakers clearly decided that the only way to get it passed was to keep it hidden deep in the budget documents. Nobody in Albany would say who is behind this language. The driving force, however, is the powerful teachers’ union that gives lots of money and time to state campaigns.

I'd always been under the impression that "science," and thus "social science," involved certain values of empiricism, evidence, and transparency of information., as opposed to endorsing late-night money- and power-driven legislative skullduggery that's antithetical to those things. But maybe "science" means something different wherever they hand out anonymous, theoretical social science degrees, I don't know. 

There It Is

The Times is reporting that, at the behest of the teachers unions, last-minute language was snuck into the New York State budget providing that "teacher[s] shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data."

There's really not much one can add to that; it's hard to imagine a more unambiguous declaration of the union's total disregard for student learning when its members' jobs are at stake.

Community College Conundrum

I took the train up to Philadelphia yesterday to sit on a panel at the American Association of Community Colleges annual convention. The topic was "Community Colleges: Who Should Judge Them And How." My position was that insofar as the main purpose of community colleges is to prepare students to succeed in further education and work, the best way to judge them is to see if their students succeed in further education and work, taking into account where those students were academically and economically when they arrived in college. In the information age, when it's never been cheaper or easier to gather large amounts of data and track this kind of thing over time, there are really no resource or logistical barriers to comprehensive, long-term evaluations of college success. The only thing standing in the way is the colleges themselves, who are deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of this kind of evaluation.

I've made the same argument about four-year colleges and universities many times. It's often not well-received, and I understand why: a lot of these institutions aren't really in the education business. They're in the sorting business, or the prestige business, or the research business, or the professional sports business (great game last night, btw). The status quo method of judging colleges puts them at the top of the heap in terms of status and resources, so they have nowhere to go but down.

Community colleges, by contrast, are at the bottom of the heap. They get fewer public resources to do a more difficult job. They're selling what economists call an inferior good--something people consume less of the more money they have. To most people, every four-year college is better than every two-year college.

This is, of course, completely wrong: there are community colleges out there that are clearly teaching better than many if not most four-year institutions, precisely because they're in the education business. Two-year institutions have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by shifting to a way of judging higher education institutions that puts more emphasis on student learning and success in the workplace. Even if it turned out that the flagship university really is doing better than the the local community college, the actual difference between them is almost surely less than the current perceived difference.

Yet while the overall tenor of the conversation in Philadelphia was less openly hostile than I've seen from the four-year crowd, and a bunch of people came up to me afterward to say "I think you're right," it was obvious that few people were comfortable standing up in a room full of their peers and saying "We should embrace this approach." I think that's because there's something in higher education that's even more powerful than rational self-interest: a culture of politeness, where administrators are loathe to ever speak ill (in public) of their peer institutions, or to embrace any kind of measurement system that would, inevitably and properly, identify some institutions as low-performing.

Hopefully the time will soon come when the two-year institutions, along with the many less selective four-year universities, realize that they have nothing to lose but their chains.

A Simple Change And A Storm of Lobbying

A simple, seemingly technical, amendment to the Higher Education Act has set off a storm of lobbying from for-profit colleges. The lobbying push, which began earlier this year, is targeted toward an amendment that would change the way the Department of Education calculates student loan default rates. Currently, the federal student loan “cohort default rate” is the percentage of students who default on their student loans within two years of leaving school. The amendment would change this to the percentage of students defaulting within three years of leaving school. That one additional year has put many for-profit colleges and their collective representative, the Career College Association (CCA), on the offensive.

Why is the for-profit sector so concerned? Because changing the way the default rate is calculated puts them at risk of losing access to federal student loan money. Changing the calculation will cause the default rate for all colleges to go up, but it is especially bad news for for-profit colleges and could put hundreds of schools at risk of running afoul of the default rate cut-offs for participating in the federal student loan program. Currently, if an institution has a default rate above 25 percent for three years or a one-year default rate above 40 percent, the institution is no longer eligible to participate in the student loan program. And for-profit institutions are heavily reliant on federal loan funds.

The most recent National Post-Secondary Student Aid Survey report shows just how dependent for-profit colleges are on loan money. Seventy-two percent of students enrolled in for-profit institutions took out loans in 2003, compared with 53 percent at private, 4-year non-profit institutions and a mere 11 percent at public, 2-year institutions, the for-profit sector’s most direct competitors. And, students at for-profit colleges borrowed more money—an average annual loan amount of $5,800, slightly higher than the average annual amount for students enrolled in private, 4-year institutions ($5,100).

If for-profit colleges are going to continue to graduate students with heavy debt loads, they need to prove that the degrees are worth it—and default rates are one measure of the value of a degree. Sure, race, income, etc. are a big factor in a student’s likelihood to default, but institutional factors also play an important role. Of course, if you just listened to the CCA, you wouldn’t realize this—they argue that students’ failure to repay loans is not an indication of institutional quality. They even put out a research report to prove it.

In January, the CCA released a study, prepared by Indiana University, purporting to show that default rates “do not reflect on the quality or type of institution attended”. But this conclusion depends on what you characterize as a ‘student’ characteristic versus an ‘institution’ characteristic. If, as the report does, you characterize earning a degree as solely a ‘student’ characteristic, then the fact that this is a top predictor of loan default would simply reinforce the conclusion that default risk falls squarely on the shoulders of students.

But a student’s likelihood of graduating depends heavily on the academic support, financial aid package, and counseling the student receives from an institution. Given what we know about the ability of institutions to influence a student’s academic success and likelihood of graduating, the report actually supports the importance of institutions in lowering student loan default rates. The report concludes that, “…students’ academic trajectories throughout postsecondary education—credits attempted, credits completed, grades earned, transferring, enrolling continuously, time to degree/certificate, and failing credit hours—emerge as strong predictors of loan default. It is this constellation of student academic success variables that consistently represents the strongest set of predictors of loan default.”

But it is important to the for-profit sector that lawmakers don’t reach this conclusion. The amendment to change the default rate calculation has already been softened in response to lobbying efforts—the cut-off for participation in the student loan program will be raised to a 30 percent default rate over 3 years and schools will have until 2012 before the amendment takes effect. These changes will help for-profit institutions, which would see the greatest increase in default rates with the change. According to Department of Education calculations, for-profit colleges would, on average, see their default rates double with the addition of just one year, compared with a 50 to 75 percent increase in other sectors.

For-profit colleges often argue that their sector provides students that otherwise would not attend college—primarily minority, low-income students—with the opportunity to earn a degree. But this opportunity cannot end when a student enters the door and pays his bill, it must include the opportunity to receive needed academic supports and the opportunity to earn a degree. And it's not just for-profit colleges that need to pay attention to student academic success—many public institutions and private, non-profit colleges can do a lot more to support student learning and student success.

Student loan default rates are one measure of the extent to which institutions are providing a real opportunity—with high cut-offs for participating in the loan program, the default rate measure helps to protect students from colleges that simply provide them with the opportunity to pay a bill, rather than the opportunity to earn a valuable degree.

More Than Checking a Box

TEACH Grants, the new grant/loan program (some have called it a ‘groan’) created in the College Cost and Reduction Act is through the rule-making process and is now open for comment (hat tip to Sara Godrick-Rab at the University of Wisconsin who has been feeding us great tips on this issue). According to a January report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the program is proving popular among students, with 30,000 checking a box on their financial aid forms indicating an interest in the program.

But it will take a lot more than checking a box, for both students and financial aid officers, to make sure that this program works as intended and doesn’t end up saddling students with thousands of dollars in unexpected debt.

The intentions of the program are great: to provide an incentive in the form of financial aid to high-achieving students committed to teaching in a high-risk school and in a high-need subject area. And it wouldn’t work to simply give out grants and hope that students follow through—there needs to be some policy mechanism to encourage students to stick with the program. Under the TEACH Grants program students receive grants of up to $4,000 per year in exchange for promising to follow through on the required teaching commitment, but if they don’t follow through the grants are converted (permanently) to loans with interest accruing from the day the grants were provided.

With many requirements (students must teach four years out of eight after graduating, must teach in a high-need subject area and in a school serving low-income students, and students need to check-in to confirm their employment every year) to fulfill the commitment, it will take some excellent counseling from colleges to make sure that each student understands what is required of them, understands their odds of fulfilling the requirement (currently, the Department of Education expects only 20 percent of students to complete the program) and understands the consequences of failing to complete the program.

Counseling for students is required under the TEACH Grants program, but given that higher education administrators have expressed concerns about the added administrative burden of the program, there’s no guarantee students will receive the kind of comprehensive, continual counseling they will need. And without that counseling, we could see many students who thought they were receiving a grant, as the TEACH Grants name implies, but are suddenly getting a bill for additional student loan debt.

Measurement Man

Dan Koretz, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of Education Sector's Research Advisory Board, has a new book out from Harvard University Press called Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It's a great primer, written in plain English, on the important but often opaque subject of standardized testing. Koretz illuminates the complexities of "sampling error," "statistical significance," "reliability," and a host of other tough terms. And he ends with a chapter on "the sensible uses of tests." At a time when standardized tests are the single more influential force in at every level of education, roadmaps like Measuring Up are a valuable comodity.

Law School Confidential

My wife is a lawyer, and so we get the ABA Journal in the mail every month. As a rule, I never read it, because I don't even have time to read all the magazines we get that cover issues I'm interested in knowing more about. But this month's issue features a big picture on the front cover of someone I happen to know: Bob Morse, czar of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.

I've confined most of my rankings analyses to four-year and two-year colleges, but the law school story is similar: the rankings are very influential, which makes law school deans very anxious and upset. The piece kicks off with the story of the dean of the University of Houston law school, who managed the school through the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison, only to resign six years later when Houston dropped five spots on the list.

There are many good reasons to criticize the U.S. News methodology for ranking four-year institutions. But it strikes me that if any segment of higher education has the least cause to complain here, it's law schools, which completely embrace the logic and justice of rankings in the way they evaluate their own students. The legal profession in general is one pecking order after another, ranking everything from schools and students to law firms and judicial clerkships in hierarchies of great consequence. The letter grades that law schools give out hardly matter; performance relative to--i.e. ranked against--other students is everything.

It was only a few years ago that my wife expended a great deal of effort on and experienced a considerable amount of anxiety about the issue of whether she would graduate in the top ten percent of her class at Georgetown Law. (She did.) She was right to worry; some judges explicitly say they won't consider clerkship applications from applicants without this credential. It's particularly important to distinguish yourself if you're coming from a school like Georgetown, which is in the lower half of what most people consider the best schools.

But while she was anxious, much like a law school dean waiting for the new rankings list, she never thought the student rankings process was unfair. Far from it--it's close to a pure meritocracy, giving every student something that at least resembles an equal shot at distinction and opportunity, regardless of where you come from or who you know. That's all she wanted, or expected, and it worked.

The point being, there's nothing wrong with rankings per se, only bad rankings. And the article actually doesn't provide a lot in the way of persuasive critiques of the U.S News law school method. Numerous law schools complain that other law schools lie and cheat on the data they submit, but that's not an argument against rankings, it's evidence that some law schools are apparently run by liars and cheats. While I'm sure the rankings aren't perfect, their focus on selectivity, employment, and reputation seems reasonably appropriate for status- and job-focused colleges of law.

The article comes back to the former Houston dean at the end, where she says their employment placement services (job placement is an element of the rankings) were disrupted after the storm, negatively affecting their score. But that's just telling the truth, isn't it? I imagine any fair ranking of America's most livable cities would have knocked New Orleans down a few spots from 2005 to 2006. You can't shoot the messenger -- or in the case of law school rankings, Bob Morse.

The Wisdom of Galactica

With the conclusion of The Wire, the mantle of "best show on television" falls on Battlestar: Galactica, which bows for its fourth and final season on the Sci-Fi channel tonight. Like The Wire, Galactica features exceptionally strong writing and acting, and has been freed by its relatively small cable audience to explore issues with a depth and sophistication that you never see on network television. Galactica is similarly sustained by focusing on a single, defining theme. On The Wire, it was the dehumanizing effect of modern institutions. On Galactica, it's the absolutely corrupting influence of war. 

There are few more dangerous illusions than the notion that people can survive war unscathed as long as the cause is just. The humans on Galactica are fighting the most just war imaginable: a race of evil cyborgs ambushes a relatively peaceful human society living on a group of planets in the distant future, annihilating billions of people with nuclear weapons and chasing a small band of survivors through space toward the only refuge left to them: the long-lost homeland of Earth. 

Yet instead of making the show about the triumph of the human spirit, Galactica's creators show how that spirit is crushed, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, under the weight of the impossible moral decisions war inevitably brings. That was the essence of Lee Adama's defense of Baltar's collaboration in the final episode of last season. "It was an impossible situation," he says. "When the Cylons arrived, what could he possibly do? What could anyone have done?" You see it in Sol Tigh, who rejected collaboration and ended up promoting suicide bombing, executing his own wife, and was left ruined as a result.  You see it in the pointed contrast between Adama's pilot-episode speech to the troops and Admiral Cain's parallel speech from the between-season movie, Razor, where she gave into the need for revenge and was ultimately undone by it. 

Like any show, the beats and themes on Galactica have started to become more obvious as time goes on; it wasn't hard to guess where Kendra Shaw came from on Razor and where she would go in the end. So while I'll miss the show, I'm glad they're wrapping it up this year. As the creators have made clear, even the best of women and men can only survive war's inhumanity for so long. In this day and age, that can't be said enough. 

Notes on SES

Newly released interim report (pdf) from the Department of Education shows that the number of kids in chronically low-performing schools who are getting free tutoring through NCLB’s Supplemental Educational Services (SES) is rising but still only reaches 17 percent of all those eligible. Same kids also have the option to switch from their school to a better performing school but only a paltry one percent of eligible students are taking advantage of this. Why such low participation rates for SES and public school choice? Mostly because parents don’t seem to know or understand that they have these options (only half of those surveyed said they had been notified about the SES option, and less than a 1/3 said they’d heard about the public school choice option). [By the way, it's increasingly unlikely that SES will survive NCLB reauthorization, at least not without big changes. It's ironic, really, that as an NCLB provision (albeit now the ugly stepsister) SES is not really held accountable in any meaningful way for student outcomes. So changes should ensure that we can at least tell whether or not SES or SES providers (which have tripled in number in the past 3 years) actually improve learning opportunities for kids. Proposals to get rid of SES or lump it together into another pot don't address the participation/access issue or the questionable quality issue.]

The A.J. Soprano Factor

This discussion over at the The Atlantic and at G-Spot about merit and college admissions seems as good a reason as any to reprint, in its (relatively short) entirety, a policy brief co-blogger Erin Dillon and I wrote a few months ago:

Tony Soprano, patriarch of the eponymous crime family on the HBO drama "The Sopranos," had a son named Anthony Jr.—A.J. for short. A.J. was a terrible high school student. None too bright to begin with, he skipped class, experimented with drugs and alcohol, vandalized school property, and eventually got expelled. Nonetheless, A.J. went to college. His mother, Carmela, devoted countless hours to monitoring his grades, scouting for colleges that might accept him, buttonholing guidance counselors, managing the application process, and constantly reminding him of the importance of higher education. For Carmela, the question was not if her son would go to college, but where. In the end, she got her wish, practically dragging A.J. to school.

A.J. Soprano is a fictional character, but the intersection of social class and college access that he illustrates is all too real. Despite a wide range of programs dedicated to increasing access to higher education for all students, college is far more accessible for upper-income students like A.J. than for students of modest means. Chart 1, which is based on newly available data from the U.S. Department of Education's ongoing Education Longitudinal Survey, illustrates this fact.


All of the students in the survey were high school sophomores in 2002 and were given standardized tests in reading and math at that time. Each bar on Chart 1 shows the percent of students with different test scores and levels of family income who had enrolled in college by 2006, two years after their expected high school graduation.

The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores and came from families earning more than $100,000 per year. Despite their academic shortcomings, 58.4 percent of these students went on to college. For high-income students in the second achievement quartile—still below the median—the college-going rate was significantly higher, 85.3 percent.

This is a higher rate than that for those directly opposite A.J.—students from the highest achievement quartile and the lowest income level, less than $20,000 per year. 80.3 percent of these meritorious poor students went to college, which means that nearly 20 percent did not. High-achieving wealthy students, in contrast, went to college at a 96.2 percent clip. In other words, high-achieving poor students are five times more likely than high-achieving rich students to skip college in the first two years after high school.

Some observers have argued that there is no real college-access problem for the brightest students. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 [the top 10 percent] who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high school graduates to the most prestigious schools."

Chart 2 suggests otherwise. Aptitude and achievement play a significant role in college-going, but class matters too. Chart 2 is based on the same group of students as Chart 1, but shows only the percent of students whose first college was a highly selective four-year institution.

The odds of a poor, low-achieving student going to a highly selective institution are 0.2 percent, practically non-existent. Among the A.J. Sopranos, however, 3.5 percent managed to sneak into an elite school, suggesting that admissions preferences for athletes, legacies, and the children of the rich are alive and well.

This contrast between students with similar test scores and different incomes persists across Chart 2. In each achievement quartile, students from the wealthiest families are far more likely than their similar-scoring peers to attend the kind of high-status college or university that often serves as a gateway to personal and professional success.

There are a host of factors contributing to this phenomenon, not all of them involving anxious mothers or college admissions committees giving a leg up to the scions of wealthy alumni. Low-income students frequently attend under-resourced high schools that don't provide good guidance counseling or college preparatory curricula. College tuition is rising much faster than available need-based financial aid, which may lead some college-ready poor students to believe that higher education is beyond their financial reach. But whatever the reasons, it's clear that equal access to college remains an unmet promise in America. When it comes to higher education, it's an advantage to be rich like A.J.

If you want to see the footnotes and standard errors, the original brief is here.

Supply-Side Education Policy, Continued

Expanding on yesterday's post: Tests can be thought of as a kind of tax on the public education system. They consume scarce resources that could be used for teaching purposes. The tens of millions of dollars a year states spend on standardized tests represent funds that could have been used to reduce class size or increase teacher pay. The same is true for the money needed to create data systems that track students who move between school districts, an essential component of calculating accurate high school graduation rates. More importantly, tests consume time, both in the actual taking and in pre-test preparation, reducing the hours available for instruction and thus, presumably, the amount that students learn.

But, as with taxes, tests are necessary because they create a resource--detailed, comparable information about school success--that serves the broad public interest. Tests are compulsory, not voluntary, because otherwise people would have an incentive to free-ride and enjoy the benefit without the tax. The trick is to strike the right balance of taxation, so the short-term negative consquences are minimized (they can't be eliminated) while the public benefit is maximized. If the public resources are used wisely, they support the overall quality of the system and thus the quality of education provided. Individually, the dry cleaner across the street from my house would benefit if he didn't have to pay taxes. But he's better off operating under a system of taxation, because it pays for the sidewalks and roads that bring customers to his door.

People don't like taxes. As a result, they're susceptible to arguments that taxes can be lowered without consequences. Yet many of loudest critiques of NCLB imply the need for more information resources, not less. Fair accountability systems, we are told, will measure value-added growth. They will take into account social studies, art, music, foreign language, critical thinking, creativity, parental satisfaction, etc., etc. It's true, accountability systems would be better if they measured these things. But they can't be measured for free. And they certainly can't be measured using fewer resources than we use today.

Arguments that we could fix this whole mess simply by having less of what people don't like (taxes) and more of what people do like (public resources) are dishonest. In the long run, they breed cynicism and distrust, because they teach people to expect a combination of taxes and services that's impossible to achieve.

Supply-Side Education Policy

As part of a Slate series of policy briefs for the next president, UVA law professor Jim Ryan offers a fix-NCLB agenda. But he fails to notice that his proposed solutions completely contradict one another.

We are told, for example, that because NCLB "requires schools to test the bejeezus out of elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math," we should "Administer fewer tests. National tests should be given less often, perhaps in only fourth, eighth, and 11th grades."

We are also told that "Current test results don't tell us all we need to know about schools" because they ignore subject like "social studies, history, literature, geography, art, and music," and that "What we can't tell from scores alone, because they don't tell us where students started or how much they progressed over the year, is the value that a particular teacher or school has added to a student's education." Therefore, "School quality should also be measured using value-added assessments, crediting schools that make exceptional progress with their students, regardless of where those students started."

Which is it? If the NCLB is to be faulted because it causes schools to "downplay if not ignore subjects not tested," how does fewer tests in the same subjects fix that problem? And you can't have value-added measures without annual testing, which Ryan wants to eliminate.

This is, to use a bloggy cliche, a classic "and a pony" policy agenda. NCLB can be improved, no doubt, but the people who wrote it weren't morons; there are some very real and difficult tradeoffs to contend with in formulating accountability policy, and one of them is the tension between the costs and burdens of assessment and the need for comprehensive information. This is the equivalent of promises to cut taxes and increase services. Call it supply-side education policy: the less we test, the more we'll know.

Madlibs!

You know you want them.

Graduation Day

As the Times reported this morning, Secretary Spellings announced a new policy today that all states must calculate high school graduation rates in the same way under NCLB. It's a good idea, and illustrates several important things about national standards and state / federal relations.

First, if you give states broad discretion to define how their educational success is measured, it's a sure bet that at least a few of them will, with a straight face, put forth definitions and standards that are so lax and self-serving that they'd be funny if they weren't so sad. For example, when you read the words "on-time high school graduation rate" you probably think it means "percent of students who start high school who graduate on time." You'd think this because you're not insane, or running a state Department of Education. But for years North Carolina has interpreted this phrase to mean "percent of students who graduate from high school who graduate on time."

To repeat: Instead of calculating graduation rates as (on-time graduates / entering freshmen), North Carolina has, until this year, calculated graduation rates as (on-time graduates / all graduates). So a high school could see two-thirds of its students drop out in the 10th grade to go work at Chick-Fil-A, but still post a 100% graduation rate as long as the remaining third graduated on time. Other states have adopted fun policies like reporting the percentage of 12th graders who graduate, etc., etc.

The second thing to consider is that this new policy is a kind of national standard. There are lots of people around town who will tell you that national educational standards are a total non-starter politically and will never happen. But that's not really true; the palatability of national standards depends, as it ought to, on what is being standardized. There's no logical reason for different states or localities to adopt different defintions of "high school graduation rate," a term that has only one logical meaning. That's why today's announcement probably won't create a massive hue and cry about federal power grabs and the homogenization of the public schools. Graduation rate means what it means.

The same logic can, and should, be applied to academic subjects. Should middle schools in Richmond, VA be teaching American history from 1860 to 1870 in the same way as their counterparts in Juneau, Alaska? Probably not. But for other subjects, particularly basic computational and language skills in the early grades, there's no earthly reason for 50 different sets of standards and assessments. I can't imagine there's ever been a parent who, upon discovering that their 2nd grader couldn''t add 2 and 3, said "no problem--we'll just move somewhere with different standards."

Empty Threats

I was having lunch with a friend last week, super-smart guy but not an education person, when he mentioned that Arizona was about to opt out of the No Child Left Behind Act. He was surprised when I said it was the first I'd heard of it, because here I'm supposed to be the person who gets paid to keep track of this stuff. So I went ahead and looked for it and sure enough: "The Arizona House of Representatives is on the verge of opting out of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's premier educational accomplishment."

Huh! Of course they'll have to get it passed the State Senate and the governor, but still...whoops, wait a minute...few grafs later..."Some of the support stems from a change [the author] added to the bill Wednesday. If the state would not reimburse local school districts for the amount of lost federal dollars, Arizona would stick with No Child Left Behind." Ah.

That amount being $600 million per year. In the state with the worst budget deficit in the nation.

So my policy of ignoring all state threats to boycott NCLB on the grounds that they never come to anything turned out to be solid after all; this is no different than the Arizona House passing a resolution expressing the sense of the membership that the Cardinals should stop losing so many football games.

It seems fair to say that over the past five years, the leaders of the 50 states have collectively weighed the consequences of (A) cutting school spending by 5% to 10%, (B) raising taxes or cutting spending on other things in order to raise an amount equal to 5% to 10% of school spending, or (C) implementing NCLB, and they've all decided that (C) is the best option. You may disagree, but that's what they believe.

Paying for Public School

It may seem strange to pay to attend a public school, but this article in Sunday's Washington Post reports on parents who do just that. In most public school choice arrangements additional costs are absorbed by the school district or state, but in some cases parents are willing to pay 'tuition' for their child to attend the public school of their choice. And apparently D.C. parents, who only have one, urban district to choose from, can opt to cross state borders to send their child to school in Maryland or Virginia. This option isn't cheap, though--Maryland's Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School costs $13,627 a year, a price most D.C. parents can't afford.