More From / About Cato

Over at the Cato @Liberty blog (which, I must admit, is one of the better blog names going), Andrew Coulson responds to this post about Cato's recent conversion from advocacy for bad voucher ideas to advocacy for even worse education tax credit ideas by pointing out that he's actually been peddling this really terrible idea for quite some time now. Fair enough -- I stand corrected.

Coulson also doesn't seem to like being described as an "extremist libertarian." That word--extremist--is not one that I use lightly, particularly given modern connotations. But here's the mission statement of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, which Coulson directs, in full:

Cato's Center for Educational Freedom was founded on the principle that parents are best suited to make important decisions regarding the care and education of their children. The Center's scholars seek to shift the terms of public debate in favor of the fundamental right of parents and toward a future when state-run schools give way to a dynamic, independent system of schools competing to meet the needs of American children.

Working toward a future when state-run schools give way to an "independent" system is, by my reading, advocacy for the destruction of public education as we know it. If that's not an extremist position within the context of education policy, I don't know what is.

On a personal level, I'm actually fairly sympathetic to the libertarian perspective. But it's not the only perspective I value, and it has limits. The struggle for a single-perspective organization like Cato is staying principled while retaining efficacy and legitimacy. In other words, while it's all well and good in theory to stick to your intellectual and ideological guns, as a rule most people don't like being objects of scorn and ridicule, or (if they're in the think tank business) having the doors to the corridors of power slammed in their face. So they make compromises to stay part of maintstream conversation. Cato's education policy proposals reflect this.

There is, after all, a coherent, principled libertarian position on public education: There shouldn't be any. People managed to become educated for millenia with out massively expensive state-run school systems, one might argue. There's plenty of precedent for the market providing education to those who want to pay for it--roughly 10 percent of K-12 students are are in private school already. Without public schools, religous and non-profit organizations would also step in to fill the void. Freeing up all that tax money would redirect capital toward more productive purposes, increasing economic output, creating new jobs, and giving people more money they could use to purchase education, which would be more effective and less expensive due to the salutory effects of market competition. Some children would get less, but some children get less of lots of things--books, computers, travel--already. That's the way of the world. And this way parents would have greater incentives to work and provide for their children's education, rather than depending on the state to do it for them.

The problem with this position, of course, is that it's deeply un-American and basically absurd. It puts you in the door-slamming-and-ridicule position described above. So Cato has to make provisions for giving all students an education while eschewing the most sensible way of doing so, which is to raise money through taxation and spend it through government support of public schools. Which is not to say the current model can't stand improvement; I happen to think it's too bureaucratic and inhospitable to innovation, excellence and parental choice. But you can fix these problems without losing the essentially public nature of schooling.

But since Cato's extremist libertarian principles run the opposite direction, it ends up having to create a nightmarishly complex set of tax credit policies that would require parents to annually piece together some combination of credits and "scholarships" granted by various purely theoretical non-profits, instead of just enrolling their child in a good, free public school nearby.

Cato Renounces School Vouchers

My wife and I moved into our house on Capitol Hill almost seven years ago. At first, we got a lot of mail addressed to the previous residents. But over time, people figured out that the old owners had moved to Bethesda so their kids could go to school in Montgomery County (this drives roughly 95% of all home sales in my neighborhood). Gradually, the volume of misaddressed letters and magazines trickled to a stop. As of now, there are only two organizations left that are still sending me someone else's mail. One is a seed catalogue based in the Midwest, which keeps offering free samples of sunflowers and begonias. The other is the Cato Institute.

But I don't mind, because it keeps me up to date with what extremist libertarians say when they think they're talking to one another. For example, today I learned that Greg Anrig was right -- conservatives really are abandoning vouchers. Unfortunately, they're abandoning them for something even worse. From the new Cato's Letter, here's an excerpt from an "interview" with Andrew Coulson, the Director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom:

In your view, what is the most promising proposal for reform in education policy?
The best realistic policy we've developed is a combination of personal use tax credits and scholarship donation tax credits. Basically, if you pay for the education of your own or someone else's children, we cut your taxes. Cato published model legislation along these lines last December and we'll soon be releasing a tool that estimates its fiscal impact. In all five states we've looked at so far, this proposal would generate substantial savings.

Why are tax credits superior to vouchers?
The key benefit of tax credits is that they reduce compulsion. Under vouchers, everyone has to fund every kind of school; that produces battles over what kinds of schools should get vouchers--for instance over the voucher funding of conversative Islamic schools in the Netherlands. With tax credits, people are either spending their own money on their own children, or they are choosing the scholarship organization that gets their donation. No one has to pay for education they find objectionable.

"Substantial savings," is, of course, Cato-speak for "substantial disinvestment in public education." And the problem with tax credits is that they only help people who make enough money to pay taxes. Cato's model legislation includes a credit against sales taxes, but that's still a tiny amount, less than $200 for a family with an income below $20,000 living in DC. So I assume that with this policy shift, Cato will no longer be claiming the moral high ground in this debate by asserting that they're just trying to help poor inner-city children escape the dysfunctional public school system. Their only defense is to assume that some kind of massive, tax credit-financed infrastructure of "scholarship"-granting charities will emerge from the ether to help students in need.

This policy would be slightly better if the tax credit were refundable (it's not; that's how you get the "substantial savings"). But that still wouldn't help a poor family that needs to write a tuition check in August and wouldn't get their tax refund until February. Of course, one could envision some kind of advance-refund system, where the check comes in August--but wait, that's exactly the same thing as a voucher, isn't it?

The political rationale for the policy, meanwhile, rests on the fiction that there's a difference between the government handing you a dollar and the government not making you pay a dollar you would have otherwise owed in taxes. In other words, some conservatives are concerned that parents, exercising their freedom and personal liberty, would use their vouchers to support schools with non-conservative values. The solution? Lie and pretend that tax credits aren't the same thing.

Frankly, I prefer the begonias.

Update: Non-extremist libertarian Megan McArdle offers some smart critiques of tax credits here, while Matt Yglesias notes the futility of attempting to craft good public policy from an essentially anti-government stance here.

School Funding's Tragic Flaw

Public education costs a lot of money -- over $500 billion per year. Over the last century, there have been huge changes in where that money comes from and how it's spent. In 1930, only 17 percent of school funding came from state sources, and virtually none came from the federal government. Today, the state / local / federal split is roughly 50/40/10 (individual states vary). People still say all the time that "most" school funding comes from local property taxes, but that hasn't actually been true since the mid-1970s.

On the whole, this change has been of tremendous benefit to disadvantaged students. As states have assumed the primary role in funding education, they've tended to distribute money in ways that are, on the whole, more equitable. The same is true for federal funding, most of which is spent on behalf of poor students and students with disabilities. (This works because taxpayers have a weird psychological relationship with their tax dollars. Rationally, people should view every dollar they pay in taxes and receive in services as equal, regardless of the basis of taxation or the source of the services. But they don't. People feel very strongly that locally-generated property taxes should be spent locally, while they feel less ownership over state taxes and even less over federal dollars. As a result, they'll tear their hair out if you propose transferring 10 percent of their local property tax dollars to a low-income district across the state, but they're far more sanguine if you propose a state school funding formula with precisely the same net result in terms of the taxes they pay and the dollars their local school district receives. It doesn't make sense, but that's okay, because this irrational jurisdiction-dependent selflessness is what allows for the redistributionist school funding policies that poor students depend on to get a decent education.)

However, there's still a lot of work to do. The transition to more equitable, rational set of school funding policies is far from complete. There is still a basic flaw running through policies at the federal, state, and local levels: money follows money. Students and jurisdictions that have more money still get more. Those that have less still get less. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still a major problem. To explore this in more depth, I've co-written a paper with Marguerite Roza, a professor at the University of Washington and senior scholar at the Center for Reinventing Public Education. You can read it here. It shows how these flawed policies cascade through multiple levels of government to produce vastly different funding results for two essentially similar high-poverty elementary schools, one in Virginia and the other in North Carolina.

Let me also say, by way of further self-promotion, that if you have some interest in school funding equity, but can't imagine wading through mind-numbingly boring scholarly treatises or tables of fine-print numbers, then this is the paper for you. I am willing to state with confidence that this is one of the least boring school funding equity papers out there, and it provides a good general overview of how these policies work and fit together. I'm not promising Entertaiment Weekly here, but if you'd been meaning to learn more about this but don't want to spend more than an hour doing so, this is your lucky day.

Milestones

Greg Maddux won his 350th career game over the weekend. I don't know why people aren't making more of a big deal about it. Only eight other pitchers have done this. Six of them pitched their last game before 1931, long before live balls, modern bullpens, and five-man rotations. Heck, John McCain wasn't even alive back then. One apparently only did it with the help of massive quantities of illegal pharmaceuticals and encouragement from underage country and western stars. Cal Ripken became a national hero just for showing up for work every day. 300 wins usually merits sports page headlines at the very least and occurs at about the same frequency as 500 career homeruns. But 600 homeruns is an even bigger deal, and 700 even more than that. Why the indifference to 350? It's almost as if it's always seemed so unlikely that anyone would ever pull it off that now that it's happened,  people don't quite know what to say. The only other person in the modern era to reach this level cleanly was the immortal Warren Spahn, and he averaged nearly 40 starts a year from 1947 to 1961. The most starts Maddux ever got in a season was 37, and a typical year was closer to 34. So this almost without precedent, a combination of sustained brilliance and unusual longevity that we may never see again. 

Activism, Schmactivism

Via Russo, Education Week reports($) that Senator McCain has cited a 2002 9th Circuit Court decision finding the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional, due to the part about "under God," as the kind of "judicial activism" his appointees will eschew.

This is nonsense. The First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Historically, the courts have interpreted the establishment clause broadly, to the point that the bleeding edge of First Amendment jurisprudence tends to center on questions like "Can the city council of East Podunk spend $75 to place a nativity scene on the lawn in the town square before Christmas, and if not, would including a plastic Santa Claus make it better?"

But this is a case where Congress made a law, in 1954, specifically adding the words "under God." This made the Pledge so clearly unconstitutional that the Supreme Court's only recourse was to throw the case out on a highly dubious technicality (that the plaintiff, who was suing on behalf of his school-age daughter, lacked standing to sue, because he was divorced and didn't have custody).

In other words, McCain is saying "My judges will rule based on popular sentiment and cultural sympathies, constitutional law be damned." That's the definition of judicial activism.

Politics and Student Loans

In today's Washington Post, Kevin Burns, the Executive Director of America’s Student Loan Providers, which represents dozens of student loan companies, takes issue with a May 5th Washington Post editorial supporting the Direct Loan program. It’s not surprising that the leader of an organization dedicated to supporting private student loan companies wouldn’t like an editorial promoting government involvement in the federal student loan program. But Burns doesn't argue for less government involvement--instead, he wants more involvement in the form of higher federal subsidies going to student loan companies.

Burns starts off by scolding The Post for publishing the editorial in the wake of “potentially serious problems facing families in obtaining student loans for the fall” and goes on to fuel the panic by citing that 75 lenders have pulled out of the federal loan program.

The Post editorial actually sought to reassure parents and students by stating, “The Education Department has taken steps to ensure that its direct lending program can fill the gap. The House of Representatives and the Senate have passed bills that would also allow the department to buy federally guaranteed loans from private lenders, a concept President Bush has endorsed.” But somehow The Post editorial, according to Burns, “failed to support efforts by Congress and the Bush administration to avert a crisis.” So The Post, by highlighting recent legislation intended to help students get access to loans, wasn’t supporting Congress or the White House? I’m confused.

Actually, I’m not at all confused. Burns was scolding The Post, not because it didn’t support Congress and the White House or because it was being irresponsible in light of problems in the student loan market, but because it said something other than “Congress should restore the high student loan subsidies lenders received before the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007”—legislation which eliminated $20 billion in student loan company subsidies.

Burns continues in his letter to make the case for a return to higher subsidies. First, he claims that “President Bush’s fiscal 2009 budget confirms that guaranteed loans are more cost-effective.” The 2009 budget was published after the subsidy cuts, and these cuts are a primary reason the FFELP program became more cost-effective than the Direct Loan program (although these estimates are much debated). Burns then argues that because the FFELP program is more cost-effective, Congress should revisit "last fall's budget cuts", i.e. reverse the subsidy cuts that made the FFELP program more cost-effective in the first place.

This is precisely the type of head-spinning rhetoric that has led to a confusing, complicated, and often corrupted student loan program. This isn’t to say that the FFELP program should be eliminated—it has provided the choice, innovation and service, that Burns talks about in his letter. But the subsidy rates that encourage lenders to participate in the program need to be removed from the political process.

Recently, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke (via New America Foundation) stated that, “a more market-sensitive approach--flexible enough to provide a wider spread during times of market stress and a narrower one during normal times--could provide a more robust structure” than the fixed subsidy rate that is currently set by Congress. Proposals for using student loan auctions to determine subsidy rates are still new (although all parent (PLUS) loans will be issued using auctions starting in 2009), but they hold some promise for moving the process for setting loan subsidies away from politics.

Finally, Burns states that “the case for a strong private-sector program is as compelling today as it was when President Lyndon Johnson created the program.” But while we’re talking about the past, I think it’s useful to revisit the 1979 comments of Alfred B. Fitt, the general counsel to the then newly-established Congressional Budget Office:

Viewed originally as an ingenious and inexpensive way to attract private sector capital to the student loan business, the GSL program [the former name of the FFELP program] has gone through piecemeal alterations that have transformed it into a system much more costly than a direct federal loan program, with the higher costs not redounding to the benefit of student borrowers, but rather to the benefit of the financial institutions that make the loans.

Thirty years later we’re still tinkering with the program, trying to fix this.

Cruel, But Not a Hoax

There's a good higher education article in the The Atlantic this month titled "In The Basement of the Ivory Tower." It's written by an anonymous "Professor X," an adjunct English instructor at both a small private college and a community college in the northeast. The gist is that many of his students are woefully unprepared for even the introductory courses he teaches. So he must fail them, exposing, in the words splashed across The Atlantic's cover, "Higher Education's Cruelest Hoax." Either that or, as the article's blurb puts it, the "destructive myth" that "a university education is for everyone."

One thing's for certain: this piece will be catnip for those who like to adopt the contrarian too-many-people-are-going-to-college-these-days position. This is an especially attractive stance for elitists and/or people who spend a lot of time searching for opportunities to loudly begin sentences with some variation of the phrase "I know it's not politically correct to say this, but..." as if this denotes intellectual bravery of some kind. The article's sad story of one Ms. L, who says she was "so proud of myself for having written a college paper," only to be crushed by a grade of "F," will be used as evidence that we are not doing people any favors by letting them into college. Charles Murray has apparently written a whole book about this--adorned with blurbs from Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett, P.J. O'Rourke, and Tom Wolfe no less--to be published later this year.

Needless to say, I disagree. Not with Professor X's contention that his classes reveal disturbing truths about higher education. He's right about that. "Remarkably few of my students do well in these classes," he writes. "Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence." Yet neither of his employers seems to give a damn, because:

Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students--whatever you want to call it--is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford's Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe they would."

Adjuncts like Professor X get paid squat, while his students pay the same tuition as everyone else. This generates enormous excess revenues for universities, which are used to subsidize research, graduate programs, fat administrative salaries, money-losing sports programs, etc., etc.

No, my disagreement is with the prescription. The promise of higher education neither a "hoax" nor a "myth" (in fairness to Professors X, these words don't do justice to the more thoughtful tone of his piece). After all, without college, what are Ms. L and her struggling classmates supposed to do? Live out the rest of their lives hardly able to read and write? Find some menial job quietly providing service to the likes of Murray, Bennett, and Wolfe, who enjoy three PhDs and a J.D. between them? Everyone in this story is getting screwed, including Professor X. (Who apparently isn't comforted by being the world's greatest telepath. When failing students, that probably makes things worse.)

This is a common problem in education, both K-12 and higher, wherein we take the students with the greatest educational needs, give them the fewest resources and the worst education, and then call their failure inevitable. Here are some alternative suggestions:

How about not shunting the Ms. L's of the world into, in Prof. X's words, the "colleges of last resort" ? He talks of "the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students." How about that not being the nature of his job? He says "the rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy." How about cleaning them? How about not using adult education as a profit center, and instead investing that money in better adult education? Professor X says of his department chairpersons, "They don't mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don't bring them up." How about mentioning them? How about bringing them up?

In one of Professors X's two classes, English 102, "we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet." How about not reading poetry and Hamlet? I have nothing against Shakespeare, but Hamlet was written over 400 years ago and isn't easy to read. How about picking some high-quality prose from the last century, or even this one, which is available for free in abundant supply from publications like The Atlantic, and use that to teach the course?

Professor X is right to call attention to his class. For at least the past half century, we, as a nation, having been trying to implement mass higher education on the cheap. As more and more students go to college--because they need college, because in the information age, access to opportunity is dramatically curtailed without the knowledge and skills it provides--we've put lower-income students, first-generation students, disadvantaged students, working students, immigrant students, minority students, older students, disabled students, students from often dismal high schools, in the colleges of last resort. In the dirty classrooms, with the underpaid professors, teaching the wrong curriculum. And when they fail, we say, hey, we gave you a chance at a college. If we say anything at all.

How about we do something else?

Charter Schools are Great -- But Not Why You Think

The recent celebration of National Charter Schools Week is as good a time as any to make an observation that's been rattling around in my mind for a while in search of a home, or lacking that, a blog post. Which is: charter schools are a boon to public education, but not for the reasons often advertised.

The original rationale for charter schools had several dimensions. First, they would create competition among public schools and thus replicate the competitive dynamics of the marketplace in a controlled environment of public accountability. This would have a positive effect on regular public schools, which would be spurred to improve in an effort to hold on to market share. Second, charter schools would create fertile ground for innovation and customization, giving people a chance to try new approaches and parents the ability to choose a school environment that best fits their child's particular needs.

The jury is still very much out on the "competitive response" benefits of charters schools. There may be some, but there are still a lot public school systems losing students to charter schools every year that remain poorly run. And most charter school are, fundamentally, operated in the same basic manner as regular schools. There are differences, but of degree, not kind.  

For example, last year I spent some time volunteering at a charter elementary school near the Columbia Heights Metro stop here in DC. It had classrooms, teachers, colorful pictures on the wall -- all the things you'd expect. It used an "expeditionary learning" approach to teaching that's employed by charters but also plenty of regular schools. If you were teleported into the lobby and didn't know it was a charter, you wouldn't know it was a charter. 

Yet the school has to hold a lottery every year to determine which students can enroll, since their are many more applicants than slots (By law, DC charters can't pick their students). Most of the applicants came from low-income and minority families, but there were also more well-off parents from the gentrifying neighborhoods nearby. All of this stemmed from the vision of the school's founder and principal, a smart, tireless, dedicated educator who also happens to have an MBA from Yale. 

And there's the difference. Before charters, there was simply no way she would have been able to open and run a public school the way she wanted to. She would have had to find something else to do with her talent and time. Charters allow organizations and individuals other than the government to run public schools. The primary benefit of this doesn't come from creating public schools that are different, but public schools that are better. 

Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation's first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on. 

Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven't tried to reinvent the wheel. They've just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that's all they did, that's way more than enough. 

Vote Your Conscience

Next week I'm going to be appearing at a "Blogger Summit" sponsored by ED in '08. There's a best blog poll. You know what to do.

More Teachers See Unions as "Absolutely Essential"

In recent decades, America has experienced a steady de-unionization of the private sector workforce. This is a real problem, particularly in an era of declining economic security and increasing inequality (problems that partially stem from de-unionization itself). The public sector, by contrast, has pretty much maintained a steady level of unionization, in part because governments don't go out of business and most municipal and education jobs can't be shipped overseas.

Teachers unions represent a substantial percentage of the unionized public workforce. They're politically powerful and seen by some as an impediment to needed school reform (I myself fall into that camp from time to time). Unlike some people, I don't think teachers unions are a bad thing per se. Teachers have a right to organize, period, and schools work best when teachers have a strong voice and role in the educational process. But I wish I agreed with teachers union policy choices more often than I do.

I suspect there's a hope among some union antagonists that teachers unions will fade in power and importance over time, much as their private sector counterparts have. That hope is often based on a generational theory of change: as the teachers who remember or participated in the initial struggle for unionization retire in large numbers in the next few years, they'll be replaced by a younger generation that grew up in a more de-unionized society, people who don't see teaching as a 30-year career leading to a comfortable retirement and will thus be less supportive of what unions have to offer.

According to a new survey of teachers published this week by Education Sector, these hopes are unfounded. From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of teachers who see teachers unions and associations as "Absolutely Essential" increased from 46% to 54%, a statistically significant change. And the change among teachers with less than five years of experience was even more striking: 30% to 51%.

Interestingly, this is despite the fact that most teacher are quite open to reforms of traditional labor arrangements that many teachers unions fail to actively support at best, and oppose at worst. For example:

• 55% agreed that the process for removing teachers who are "clearly ineffective and shouldn't be in the classroom" is "very difficult and time-consuming."
• 42% said their most recent evaluation was "just a formality" while another 32% said it was "well intentioned but not particularly helpful to [their] teaching practice"
• 80% favored giving financial incentives to teachers who "work in tough neighborhoods with low-performing schools," 58% for teachers who "consistently received outstanding evaluations by their principals," and 53% for teachers who "specialize in hard-to-fill subjects such as science or mathematics." All of these percentages represent a statistically significant increase since the same question was asked in 2003.

Teachers were, however, split down the middle on using "value-added" measures to evaluate their performance, which I find disappointing given that I think such techniques have a lot of promise. Most teachers remain skeptical of tying pay to standardized tests. But the majority (52%) "somewhat" or "strongly" support the idea of their union "taking the lead on negotiating a way to add teacher performance as a consideration when deciding and individual teacher's salary.

There were also regional patterns: teachers from the South, were unions are structurally weaker, were more supportive of differentiated pay options than teachers from other regions. The same was true for newer teachers compared to veterans.

The message seems to be that teachers are open to a number of good ideas that could improve the way they're paid and evaluated, but those reforms can't and shouldn't be implemented in a way that's fundamentally antagonistic their labor rights or idenity in terms their union. That doesn't immunize teachers unions from criticism when they oppose commonsensical reforms that most of their members support. But it does point to a collaborative reform strategy--which is as it should be.

Update: Liam Julian at the Fordham Institute turns in a somewhat bizarre reading of the above post here. He says:

To say that the loss of jobs in, say, Michigan and Ohio stems from de-unionization certainly has originality going for it, if not much veracity. To maintain that the steady decline of Ford and General Motors—neither of which can compete with Japanese car makers in large part because they pay something like $2200 more in labor costs per car than does Toyota—is the product of de-unionization is... well, it’s definitely new.

There is, of course, nothing in my post about job loss in Michigan and Ohio. But as long we're (now) on the topic: a significant part of the reason Ford and G.M are paying more in labor costs per car is because they're paying health care costs that our government--unlike those of our foreign competitors--won't. (I look forward to upcoming Flypaper posts advocating for universal health care.) Meanwhile, a growing percentage of the labor force is employed by corporations like Wal-Mart that actively employ blatant and often illegal union-busting tactics--when they're not busy giving money to organizations like the Fordham Institute. Liam also says:

That teachers are only receptive to educational reforms that fit the agendas of their unions—agendas that are inarguably designed to increase union membership, solidify union political power, and ensure teachers don’t work too hard—is not progress of any sort.

I really have no idea how Liam managed to get from here to there. To repeat: teachers unions are often against tougher evaluation systems, against making it easier to fire ineffective teachers, against moving away from the single salary schedule to differentiated pay plans. Our survey indicates that most teachers are, by contrast, in favor of those reforms.

Update 2: Liam responds by saying "I’m unsure whether Fordham receives money from Wal-Mart or its ilk." Really? Here's a suggestion: Trying Googling "Walton Family Foundation" and "Fordham Institute," which returns hundreds of hits, including this one, from Fordham's own Web site, which offers thanks to "the foresight, insight, and checkbook of the Walton Family Foundation and its terrific board and staff."

Liam then tries again to engage in some kind of vague larger argument about unions. Which is pointless, it's obvious where we stand: Liam dislikes organized labor and wishes it would go away; I don't. People can draw their own conclusions about what that says about our respective takes on education policy. The problem with the kind of generalized labor-bashing on display in this post and on Flypaper overall is that it destroys the writers' credibility when it comes to a range of important education policy issues that involve teachers unions. The next time Liam has something to say about merit pay, tenure, or some other issue where he disagrees with a national or local union, people will just assume his opposition stems from his obvious larger anti-union bias. Frankly, I wouldn't blame them.

Update 3: When I first wrote the paragraph above, it said "Liam hates organized labor," but I changed it to "dislikes" before posting because "hates" seemed a little over the top. But that was before I read the comments thread on his post, where he says of unions: "Like all parasites you tolerate them until they become more trouble then they’re worth."

"Hates" it is, then.

Oops, that was a commenter, not Liam. My bad. Back to "dislikes."

Breaking Down School Choice Silos

Over at This Week in Education, Alexander Russo criticizes the charter school movement for being too insular and for being absent from conversations about improving traditional public schools—where the vast majority of students are, and likely will continue, to be educated for the foreseeable future. I agree that too often conversations about charter schools and traditional public schools happen in isolation, or only the context of charters versus districts. I had the good fortune to attend a conference on Tuesday that took a decidedly different tone, focusing on the common goal of Chicago charter schools and Chicago Public Schools—to create many new and better school choices for students and parents in the city.

The conference, held by the Renaissance Schools Fund, a partner to CPS's Renaissance 2010 initiative to create 100 new schools, didn’t focus just on charter schools or just on creating and turning around traditional public schools. Instead the conversation revolved around topics that cut across all types of schools. Sessions focused on best practices for replicating successful school models, how to involve private philanthropy, ensuring that proposals for new schools—whether they are charter or district schools—are vetted through a rigorous quality review process, and the struggles associated with turning around an existing school. The panelists varied from practitioners in CPS schools to charter school operators, to the people in philanthropy and non-profit organizations that work to create and support these new schools. All in all, it was a great discussion about what it takes to establish high quality new school options, including restructuring existing schools.

But I’m not sure if this type of conversation was possible a few years ago, before charter schools were a sizable part of the education scene in many urban districts and before it was clear that charter schools aren’t going away any time soon. And I’m not sure if it will happen in districts that don’t have the leaders—mayors, schools superintendents, and leaders in the business and nonprofit communities—who are willing to see charter schools a source of ideas and talent for improving an entire school district.

One thing was clear from the conference—that lessons learned (and still being learned) from the charter school movement, including balancing autonomy and accountability, ensuring quality in new schools, and replicating existing school models—can be, and should be, applied in school districts that are looking to make some real changes and create new options for students.

Global College Rankings

America has bestowed many gifts on the world--baseball, comic books, the Internet (and really, what else is there?). To that list we can now add college rankings. First popularized by U.S. News & World Report in the early 1980s, rankings were, for a long time, strictly an American invention. But in recent years there's been a huge increase in rankings-related activity around the globe, coming in two forms.

First, publications like the Times (of London) Higher Education Supplement have been trying to establish themselves as the U.S. News of the world, rankings thousands of institutions in every country. This has produced the predictable controversies about methodology, fairness, perverse incentives, etc. At the same time--and this is arguably even more interesting--a growing number of individual countries have been creating internal rankings of all institutions within, for example, Kasakhzstan (really), basically as a means of accountability and quality control, plus providing prospective students and employers with useful information. You can read all about it in my InsiderHigherEd column, published this morning.

Fact Check

The New York Times, April 20, 2008:

The number of low-income students at top institutions is still fairly low but is growing. The share of Harvard undergraduates receiving Pell grants rose to 13 percent this year, from 10 percent in 2003-4. At Amherst, over the same span, the number has risen to 18 percent from 15 percent.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2008:

Elite colleges have made headlines in recent years with financial-aid plans aimed at enrolling more low-income students. But despite those efforts, the proportion of financially needy undergraduates at the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities actually dropped between the 2004-5 and 2006-7 academic years, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal Pell Grant data.

Thus illustrating the difference between an article based on anecdotal stories from a non-representative sample, and an article based on actual analysis of data.  

Paparocrisy

About a month ago, my wife got an email from Virgin American offering some kind of insanely cheap promotional fare from DC to LA. So we decided to make a long weekend out of it, having never really spent any time there outside of the standard airport-taxi-hotel conference center-taxi-airport business trip where you're never outside of air conditioning for more than 30 seconds. The flight was great, the airline seems to actually be designed with what customers in 2008 might want in mind, i.e. laptop outlets, comfortable seats, and--this is the best part--a touch screen in back of the seat in front of you that not only has 20 channels of cable TV,  video games, and on-demand movies, but allows you to order food and drinks any time you want, as opposed to waiting 45 minutes for the beverage cart or what have you. There's also a little keyboard thing that allows you to text people in other parts of the plane. It's cool.

Anyway, we check into our hotel, drive over to some place (the geography was confusing, thank God for GPS) with lots of nice stores, park the car, walk up out of the garage, and we haven't been on the sidewalk for--I'm not making this up--more than 5 seconds when I hear the following conversation (conducted in vaguely Eastern European accents):

Guy#1: There is nobody there, I'm telling you.

Guy#2: I go up there, is Tom Arnold. How much money for him?

Guy #1: Nothing, see, that's what I said, is nobody.   

Sure enough -- paparrazi, complete with bad haircuts and huge telephoto lenses. So I figure, hey, photo opportunity! I pull out my little digital camera and take a picture of the guys standing there on the sidewalk with their big cameras. And they get mad! Guy #1 says, "Hey, not picture, not pictures" -- without irony. 

Exaggeration

The Post story on the Reading First study begins: "Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Behind law..."

Wait. It's only a $6 billion program if you add up the total funding over six years (I think, I'm writing this on a plane). That's a completely non-standard way of reporting federal budget numbers. Nobody says the Pentagon has a $2.4 trillion budget. And reading first isn't "at the heart" of NCLB. The accountability provisions are.

Why exaggerate to sell the story? It's an interesting study -- play it straight.

Choices

Ezra Klein writes about the new, disappointing Reading First results, and concludes:

It would be good if we could really nail down what works in education. But my conclusion, increasingly, is that the best thing you could do for poor kids' educational prospects is increase their parents' economic prospects. That's not to say either exists in a vacuum, but nor does it look likely that we're going to find educational approaches powerful enough to counterbalance the pull of parents, community, peers, playground, etc, etc, etc. Education reform is a piece of the war on poverty, but it isn't, by itself, a winning strategy.

Elsewhere in the post Ezra describes this blog as "brilliant" so he's clearly a smart man of discerning intellectual taste. And there's nothing factually incorrect about this statement (except maybe "playground." What? Is that the monkeybars theory of educational inequality?) 

But nothing is, "by itself," a winning strategy in the war on poverty, right? To take a non-random example, the same is true of universal health care. So the fact that education won't solve all of our ills doesn't really say much about the value of education reform per se. 

Moving a child out of poverty might be better for them in the long run than improving their school. But it's also a much more expensive and inherently difficult long-run proposition. Tackling entrenched poverty in economically depressed areas, creating new jobs, repairing neglected infrastructures, families, and social institutions--these are huge undertakings. Newer, better schools, by contrast, can be established in a few years. We know this because people are in fact building such schools, today. That doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle poverty, any more than saying we can build better health clinics or more affordable housing would mean that. Moreover, you could really help disadvantaged students by moving them out of poverty and giving them a better school. If poverty itself can be beaten, than surely education reform can happen too. 

So I'm just not sure who the other side of this debate about the all-encompassing power of education reform is supposed to be. The Prospect has published some persuasive arguments that education was over-valued during the 1990s as an economic curative by the likes of Robert Reich and many economists. But the value of education generally is distinct from the need for systemic educational improvement, particularly when some flaws in the public school system are so glaring. And it's not like Reich's overly narrow view of the needs of modern workers caused him to lead the war against the war on poverty. There are bad people in charge of that, and they've got plenty of other reasons to do so. 

It seems like some progressives see the possibilities of educational improvement as a barrier to more comprehensive reforms, a mirage that distracts from the real journey. Are any other sustained, large-scale efforts to improve the lives of poor children regarded this way?

Vouchers R.I.P.?

The Century Foundation's Greg Anrig, author of the recently-published The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, has good piece in this month's Washington Monthly declaring the decline and fall of school vouchers. Whether they're quite as dead as Greg suggests is probably a matter of legitimate debate, but his essential points are correct: like many bad conservative policy ideas, vouchers have foundered on errors of both concept and execution. Those who blithely say "give everyone a voucher and the free market will take care of the rest" are obviously not paying attention to what's actually happened when vouchers have been tried.

Beyond serious problems relating to church/state separation and the inherent value of public schools, vouchers just don't seem to work very well. Which shouldn't be surprising: voucher policies are built on the assumption of well-functioning markets, which require informed parents making smart choices on behalf of their students. But that means parents have to make judgments about relative school quality, which is actually a very tricky and complex thing to understand. Studies show that parents with vouchers are often satisfied with their choice, but on some level that's simply because they've been given one--anyone would be happier to go from being mandated (A) to having a choice between (A) and (B), particularly when (A) is often pretty bad to begin with.

Charter schools, as Anrig notes, address nearly all of the biggest problems with vouchers--they're public, not private, and they operate under additional accountability relationships beyond parental choice. That's why charter schools are so much more popular than vouchers, and while evidence on charter school performance remains mixed (I suspect this will change in the next couple of years), there's certain no reason to think vouchers are a better reform. As of now, in 2008, being an unreconstructed voucher supporter is tantamount to proclaiming one's lack of seriousness when it comes to education policy.

For some recent smart thoughts on these and other matters, see this from AEI's Rick Hess.

The same issue of the Monthly also has a "Ten Miles Square" piece from yrs. truly, describing one day in the life of a woman named Margie Yeager, who spent some time working here at Education Sector before going on to more worthwhile pursuits as an all-purpose problem solver in Michelle Rhee's current efforts to reform and improve the DC Public Schools. I'm not sure if it's going to be posted on-line, so you should play it safe and go buy several copies on the newstand for you and your friends.

Replacing Teachers in PG

The Post today reported on Prince George's County, Maryland schools that are going through “staff replacement” as a part of their school improvement efforts. Restructuring failing schools by replacing teachers and leaders can but doesn't always lead to big improvements. Two big things to keep in mind. First, it’s not a wholesale turnover of staff that can or should occur; you’ll need to recognize and hold on to your good teachers. And second, the restructuring is the beginning, not the end, of teacher improvement. You’ll have to work to support and improve teaching in these schools to bring and sustain positive change.

Also, a lesson learned from Hamilton County, TN that didn’t make it into the report we released recently: if you’re going to replace principals, be sure to do that before you involve them in the teacher replacement effort. In at least one of the Chattanooga schools, they replaced the teachers with the help of a principal who was subsequently replaced. So then they replaced the teachers again. No one would expect to make this costly (in so many ways) mistake but it can happen.

The Post article also quotes Deasy saying that the restructuring plans include additional measures, which might suggest that this is part of a more comprehensive plan for improving failing schools in PG. But the examples given include earlier start times at Largo High to allow more after-school professional development for teachers and a student discipline program at Oxon Hill Elementary. Ok, an hour earlier for high school students? I know we’re strapped for time, and that more time could help a lot of schools, but c’mon. There are better and more creative ways to extend time.

And Oxon Hill Elementary. Haven’t visited the school myself but I do know that it shares a zipcode with our brand spanking new city, National Harbor, MD. Yes, our “whole new city on the banks of the Potomac” has its own new name, even though it's technically in Oxon Hill, MD. On that note, I think Oxon Hill Elementary, one of the PG schools slated for restructuring, should rename itself National Harbor Elementary. Corporate volunteerism program in the bag. Seriously, though, I hope there are big plans to get business invested in these schools. At the very least, host the PG County teacher recruitment fair at the new Gaylord Conference Center instead of at PG County Community College. And get them to advertise for PG County Teaching Fellows, which trains, among others, career-changers to teach in PG public schools [disc: my mom did this after 25 years in the federal government. Aside from having to find very old college transcripts to prove she’d taken a college-level math class and then, unable to locate proof of this, having to take another college 101 math class, she enjoyed the program and became the epitome of the second-wind baby boomer who’s great in the classroom. I’m thinking there might be a lot of these types on the banks of the Potomac.]

A New Playbook

The Rockefeller Institute of Government is a respected in-house think tank of the New York State University system that specializes in state/federal collaborations in public policy. When a federalism free-for-all broke out in the wake of the federal No Child Left Behind Act's requirement that states set academic standards and hold their schools accountable for the results, the institute saw an opportunity.


It convened a day-long meeting of national experts on standards, testing, and accountabilty in Chicago with the support of the Spencer and Joyce foundations. The charge was to think outside the box, to brainstorm of new ways to strengthen standards, improve tests, and make accountability more meaningful.


To help frame the conversation, the institute's Allison Armour-Garb compiled an array of new ideas in a report titled "Intergovernmental Approaches for Strengthening K-12 Accountability Systems." Then the institute compiled the transcript of what was one of the livelier exchanges I've been a part on these issues. You can read Allison's paper, the transcript, and a summary of the session by the redoutbable Lynn Olson here.

More and Less

Sunday's Times front-pager about scarily dedicated students in Korea hell-bent on acceptance to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale provides fresh evidence of how the winner-take-all principle is particularly evident in higher education, especially coming on the heels of David Rockefeller's recent $100 million gift to Harvard's $35 billion endowment. There's a pretty good argument that large transfers of wealth from tremendously rich individuals to tremendously rich institutions that serve mostly rich students should be taxed by the government, not subsidized, but I imagine this won't change any time soon.

The article also shows the outsized power and value of globally-recognized brands. The fact that "going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society" is fundamentally similar to the mania for luxury brand names like Louis Vuitton. I think this is a problem, and I wonder if America's elite universities have really thought the implications through. Universities like Harvard are much less than luxury goods manufacturers, and much more, in important and problematic ways.

Less in the sense that they are, as currently constructed, severely limited in their ability to serve more students. They're not global concerns with the ability or inclination to do what a normal for-profit enterprise would do in similar circumstance: find ways to stamp the name on new products and services while carefully managing brand identity and the mix of exclusivity and surging demand. Universities are communities of scholars and students, bound to certain places and traditions and fragile in their own way.

More in the sense that universities serve much higher and more valuable purposes than handbag manufacturers. If Louis Vuitton mismanages the brand by diluting its value in a rush for short-term profits, or succumbs to shifting winds of fashion, then—so what? The shareholders lose money, people are stuck with ugly handbags that they paid too much for, and the world moves on.

If our great institutions of higher learning are damaged or distorted by the growing psychic weight of global demand and escalating wealth, by contrast, that would be a significant loss indeed. They say you can't be too rich or too thin, but I wonder if the time will come when Harvard and its peers decide that you can become too rich and too famous, that students, faculty, and society at large are better served by universities simply being good at what they are—no more, no less.

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.