TAKS-ing Work

Former Education Sector intern Danny Rosenthal weighs in on the test-prep debate from his Houston high school:

Nearly 900,000 Texas high school students recently took the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS. All of the state’s students must pass the test’s math, English, science, and social studies sections to get a high school diploma.

But where I teach math, at Hastings High School in Houston, only 54 percent of students passed the math section last year. So Hastings, a typical urban school serving 3,200 mostly poor black and Latino students, puts intense effort into boosting its students’ scores. Along with other math teachers at Hastings, I did test prep with my students every day for two months leading up to TAKS. As the test approached, that’s all we did in class. The Hastings math department also taught courses devoted entirely to TAKS prep. Some students were assigned to them year. Others were moved into the classes closer to the test.

I’m OK with test prep. When standardized tests are well-crafted, as they are in my state, teachers should use tests to shape their classroom instruction. Done thoughtfully, “teaching to the test” is a good idea. But at my school, and others in Houston, we execute test prep so poorly that it ends up hurting students more than it helps them.

Our problems started early this year, at our first planning meeting two months before the TAKS administration. We began by identifying questions that more than half of our students missed on a diagnostic test. Then we matched the questions to topics covered on TAKS, putting colored stickers for each question on posters around the room. The idea was to focus our work on the skills where students needed the most help.

But neither teachers nor administrators tried very hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the posters when we were finished. The data itself was incomplete because some teachers didn’t bother to post most of their stickers. And we didn’t control for things like the number of times each topic was tested. As a result, the sticker exercise told us little about our students’ needs. Nonetheless, we used the posters to guide classroom study sessions, as well as the test-prep work students did in our computer labs and in weekend tutoring.

Our classroom preparation for TAKS aspires to be “drill and kill,” though the term suggests a level of focus and thoroughness in our work that didn’t exist. Mostly, teachers made worksheets with questions only loosely related to each other taken from previous TAKS tests, or, in some cases, from math textbooks that are largely unaligned with the TAKS test. Think panicked college students poring over Cliffs Notes for the wrong novel.

Sometimes, the school made all math teachers work off of the same worksheets, regardless of the fact that they taught different subjects. One day, my freshman Algebra class was expected to review quadratic equations, a complicated topic that my students had never seen before and lacked the background to understand. On another day, my Algebra II class was expected to review graphing lines, a topic they had already studied in depth for the previous two weeks. Almost every teacher uses the worksheets. It is how things are done.

Our test prep worksheets aim to review important skills. But oftentimes students have not learned these skills in the first place. And the worksheets don’t fix that. Most of the sheets require students to answer multiple-choice questions. Motivated students work through the problems. Others guess. After a few minutes, teachers show students the correct answer, focusing their explanation on the particulars of the problem instead of any broader concepts. Then, the class shuffles on to a new problem, usually unrelated to the first. In this haphazard process, there are few opportunities to make connections or think critically. And students don’t master basic skills either.

Perhaps because these worksheets are so ineffective, Hastings administrators encourage teachers to take their students to the school’s computer labs to use test-prep software. Some students are more engaged on a computer, and the software lets students work at their own pace.

But for others, computers are just a bigger distraction; they spend their time finding ways to bypass the school’s internet filter to get to YouTube. Busy checking their email, teachers often fail to notice. The computer software itself is designed to provide practice, not teach new skills. Students can read a short tutorial summary, but this summary is confusing and almost always ignored. So kids learn little of what they don’t already know.

Hastings also sponsors tutorials after school and on Saturdays to prepare students for TAKS. But only a few dozen kids out of 3,200 typically attend. At one Saturday session I attended, teachers outnumbered students. And the motivated students who do show up are not the ones who need the most help.

The larger problem is that most students just don’t care if they do well on the TAKS test. Last year, several confessed to me that they guessed on most of the questions. The school attempts to combat this indifference with simplistic incentives, offering students a chance to win an iPod just for showing up on TAKS test day and threatening those who fail the test with extra math classes.

But such incentives don’t work very well, and they miss the larger point: Students choose not to try mostly because they think they have no chance to succeed. That’s not their fault. At Hastings, we are far too willing to exchange gimmicky test-prep and other instructional shortcuts for real teaching.

Money-Sucking College Sports Programs

Per last week's ongoing discussion of higher education, one thing nobody seems to dispute is the assertion by "Professor X" that classes like his are "a substantial profit center" for most colleges. The math isn't hard; adjunct professors typically only get paid a few thousand dollars to teach a course that each student pays a few thousand dollars to take. Even taking into account the pro-rate costs of facilities and administrative overhead blah blah blah, the colleges are making a lot of money here. Which begs the question: what are they spending those profits on?

Among other things: phenomenally expensive, money-losing sports programs. That's the conclusion of a new report from the NCAA (InsideHigherEd summary here). It found that median spending on sports among the 119 NCAA Division I football-inclusive sports programs grew by 15 percent in 2006, to $35.8 million. Revenues to support those programs, meanwhile, grew by only 9 percent, to $26.4 million. In other words, the typical D-I university loses millions of dollars per year on sports, and the deficit is getting bigger by the year.

And that's just the median. A handful of schools--19, to be exact--made money, while bunches of them lost $10 million or even $20 million or more. Where does your alma mater stack up in all of this? There's no way to know--the NCAA won't release the numbers for individual colleges.

In its defense, the NCAA has put out a lot more information here than it ever has before, and is quite candid about the the fact that most of its members are essentially siphoning off huge amounts of money that could be used for education, research, need-based financial aid, etc., in order to subsidize sports. To be clear, not all of that money goes to support quasi-professional men's football and basketball teams; these numbers include all sports, men's and women's.

As with all spending decisions, this comes down to priorities: given the choice, most Division I colleges and universities would rather spend money on an activity whose benefits accrue substantially in the form of entertainment for non-students and the greater glory of the university, at the expense of the more mundane task of helping academically vulnerable students stay in college and earn a degree.

Research on Incentives

A new study was just released today from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford that examined the use of incentive programs in charter schools. Do incentives like field trips, t-shirts and iPods--rewards that have a short time frame between behavior and consequence-- provoke students to do better? It was an exploratory study that looked at a limited non-random sample of charters so, like all research, there are limitations to this study. But the report, written by ES board member (disc.) Macke Raymond, suggests that when school staff is on board and committed to the reward program and the rewards are given in a consistent and continuous way, these kinds of incentives can motivate students to improve.

Giving an Inch?

In a rare moment these days, Bush administration officials and Congress are being applauded for their quick and measured response to problems (or, more accurately, the threat of problems) with student loan availability. Spurring lawmakers along was a looming Sallie Mae conference call with college officials, in which some speculated that Sallie Mae--the nation's largest student loan company--might announce it was pulling out of the federal student loan program, or severely limiting its participation.

But in the Sallie Mae call, held yesterday, the company announced that they would continue to make student loans and praised the government's recent action as "quite helpful." This, no doubt, came as a relief for many lawmakers, but the lingering question is whether this is the inch that will eventually become a mile.

As Stephen Burd at the New America Foundation points out today, one of Sallie Mae's best friends on Capitol Hill is already pushing for more. And it's difficult to disentangle genuine concern about student well-being from empty rhetoric coming from the many lawmakers and lobbyists who stand to benefit from a more profitable student loan industry.

On a positive note, though, it looks like Secretary Spellings, the Treasury Department and Congress have managed to separate rhetoric from reality this time. Let's hope they continue to focus on helping students and not just bailing out lenders.

Higher Ed Hypocrisy

We live in a time of information abundance. It's now possible to track and record most of what happens to an individual student over their entire educational lives, from the time they enter kindergarten to the day they graduate from college, and beyond. This isn't something we could do, it's something a growing number of states are doing, right now. So the real sticky issues aren't technical but normative: Who should control this information? How should it be used? How do we balance the obvious benefits for understanding and improving educational systems with individual rights to privacy?

All of these issues surfaced a couple of years ago, when the U.S. Department of Education proposed modernizing its long-established systems of gathering information about individual colleges and universities, in a way that involve gathering privacy-protected data about individual students. But instead of engaging in a serious conversation about the issues above, the association of private colleges went into full-blown the-apocalypse-is-nigh mode, shouting "Big Brother" from every available rooftop and getting Congress to include language in the soon-to-be-enacted Higher Education Act that would make the system illegal.

Yet at the very same time they were recruiting guileless students to joing their alleged crusade on behalf of student privacy, the private colleges were happily sending privacy-protected data about those same students to a massive national database of individual college student records. This one just happens to be run by a non-profit organization founded by the student loan industry. To be perfectly clear: I think there's nothing wrong with the organization, which is called the National Student Clearinghouse. But its very existence shows just how hypocritical the private colleges have been. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today.

This, by the way, will be a regular gig. The column now has a title, "Outside the Circle," and will be published twice a month at InsiderHigherEd, with a home where past columns can be accessed and read. Of course, at some point in the future--my best guess at the moment is late November, early December--I'll have exhausted my mental list of higher ed-related grievances, so if you have ideas for columns that I can steal use, please send them my way.

A Wrong Turn for Virtual Education in Florida

Last December I flew to Tallahassee to testify as part of the Florida State Legislature's K-12 Virtual Education Workshop. As a native Floridian, I've been proud of my home state's leadership in virtual schooling. Florida Virtual School is the largest and one of the most successful state-run virtual schools in the country. It's widely regarded as a nationwide model. And, while I'm less intimate with the details of the state's two full-time K-8 programs, Florida Connections Academy and Florida Virtual Academy, they have consistently achieved As and Bs in Florida's state accountability system. At the legislative workshop in December, most participants emphasized that Florida was doing things the smart way.

So, I was shocked to read the new virtual education bill that has just recently cleared the legislature (the governor has not yet signed the bill). The bill has a number of flaws, but the most egregious is its mandate that each of Florida's 67 school districts contract with a provider or develop its own program to provide a full-time K-8 virtual schooling program, beginning in the 2009-10 school year. Thus, Florida will move from a well-run, successful, state-authorized program to a system that forces each district to manage and authorize its own program.

This is a horrible idea for a number of reasons:

1. Reduced Accountability and Quality: From the charter movement, we've learned that high-quality authorizing is one of the essential components leading to high-quality educational experiences. Moving to a district-by-district model, especially when many of the districts have neither the capacity, nor desire, to authorize this type of program, almost ensures that there will be much weaker authorizing and relatively little oversight for these programs.


2. Reduced Competition and Fewer Student Options: Ironically, this change will likely reduce student options. Under the current statewide model, families in Florida have at least two options. And, there's no reason that this number couldn't grow. But, it's highly unlikely that districts will provide multiple options. It's almost certain that they will contract with either one of the current providers or start their own program. So, not only do students have fewer programs to choose from, but it's likely that a mini-monopoly will develop in each individual district.


3. Wrong Emphasis: A district-by-district scheme makes sense if it allows each district to customize virtual education programs to integrate and strengthen its current educational offerings. But, districts can already do this by working with the state's existing supplemental program, the Florida Virtual School. This bill addresses full-time virtual education--a parallel system that does not integrate with the district's current programs. And, as noted above, it's very likely that the providers and offerings will be the exact same.

To date, Florida has been wise in its virtual education program design, avoiding the problems in a number of states such as Colorado, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. While almost every other state looks to Florida's current programs as a model, this bill takes that model in the opposite direction.

Money-Sucking Flagship Universities

I went to an event at the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday morning which was keyed to the release of a new book from the College Board, titled College Success: What It Means and How to Make It Happen. It was well above average as such events go and I'm looking forward to reading the book, which was edited by two economists: Morton Schapiro, president of Williams College, and Michael McPherson, former president of Macalester College and current president of the Spencer Foundation.

At one point in the discussion, (which also featured the president of Miami-Dade College, a gargantuan (i.e. 100,000 + students) community college in Florida, as well as the dean of student affairs at the University of Maryland) President Schapiro noted some of the findings from the book's first chapter, which found that a disturbing number of reasonably well-prepared graduates of Chicago Public Schools attend non-selective public universities like Chicago State University, where their odds of graduating on time are about the same as being hit by a bus on the way to Grant Park. (I exaggerate only slightly; the six-year graduation rate at Chicago State is less than 20 percent.)

But Schapiro was quick to follow this by saying that (A) this is probably because Chicago State doesn't have very much money, and (B) while lack of resources at big urban campuses is ususally in part of a function of more prestigious flagship campuses going to the legislature and grabbing all of the money for themeselves, he would not (nodding to the University of Maryland person on the panel) argue against that. So when the event turned to Q&A, I stood up and and asked, in so many words, "Why not argue against that? Resources are limited and graduation rates at CSU and its ilk are terrible; why not spread the wealth more evenly?"

Normally people in higher education will answer this question with some vague allusion to the need for a better world where there's more than enough money for everybody and we all hold hands in peace and harmony. But Schapiro is an economist, and one of the virtues of economists is that they're trained to think about things from the perspective of limited resources and unavoidable choices. So he did what most people won't do, which is actually answer the question honestly. He said, (I'm paraphrasing, here and below) "I take your point, it's a tough question, but I think about how the state of Wisconsin has let the flagship UW-Madison campus decline relative to Michigan-Ann Arbor over the last couple of decades in favor of its regional campuses, and I can't honestly say I think that was the right choice."

Similarly, McPherson spoke about how important it was that states like Michigan have managed to maintain an elite world-class research university, how it was just intrinsically important that such institutions be supported, beyond even the many research benefits they provide, and that they're a tremendous source of pride, both within the state and nationwide.

What I found most striking was that here you have two extremely knowledgeable, smart, and accomplished researchers, people of good faith who have experienced higher education from the president's perch and studied it extensively from an empirical perspective, and yet their opinion on this issue seemed significantly informed by a gut feeling that the traditional elite research university should take precedence, come what may. There was nothing utilitarian about it, no calculus of best return on public investment or cost / benefit in terms of student outcomes, graduation rates, earnings, or what have you at different campuses. Instead it was: These are the flagship universities!

All of which is to say that there's a tremendously powerful underlying psychic investment within higher education in the traditional status hierarchy, a sense that the comprehensive tier-one research university represents a kind of pinnacle of thought, virtue, even civilization. And I understand why. But at some point we're going to have to fully come to grips with the fact that the large majority of citizens and workers in this country need a high-quality postsecondary education of some kind, most of them will never get anywhere near a flagship research university, and if we continue to seriously short-change their education, the consequences will often be (e.g. Chicago State) very dire.

Fudging The Numbers

Technical Career Institute, a for-profit college in New York City, has found a new and creative way to keep its students from defaulting on federal student loans--paying off the debt. Inside Higher Ed reports today on an audit report released this week by the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, which found that TCI paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to loan companies to keep their cohort default rates (the percent of students defaulting on federal student loans) below the cut-off for participating in the federal student loan program.

Unfortunately for the students, TCI wasn't being generous. The college paid off the students' federal loans, but then tried to collect the loan amounts and even reported the students to collection agencies when they didn't pay. Because the federal loans were technically repaid, TCI did not report these students as having defaulted, thereby keeping it's cohort default rate artificially low and ensuring it had continued access to federal loan and grant money--a big source of income for for-profit institutions.

Because the federal 'cohort default rate,' which determines eligibility to participate in the federal student aid programs, is based on the first two years after a student enters repayment on a loan, for-profit institutions have big incentives--millions of dollars in federal money--to keep students out of default for those first two years. TCI's actions are an extreme example, but other practices include encouraging students to enter forebearance or deferment on their loans until the two-year cut-off has passed, or employing default aversion companies to heavily track students for the first two years.

Default aversion is not necessarily a bad strategy, so long as it helps students avoid default over the life of their loan and not just those first two years. But data released by the Department of Education earlier this year, indicates that this isn't the case--for-profit institutions' default rates nearly double in the third year. This is a higher rate of increase than any other higher education sector, which see increases of 50 to 75 percent.

The current default rate calculation is a poor indication of students' ability to pay off student loan debt and can obviously be artificially lowered with some funny business practices. The Higher Education Act amendment to extend the cohort default rate calculation to three years is a step in the right direction and will make it a little harder for these institutions to fudge their numbers. But the Department of Education also needs to start publishing lifetime default rates for institutions. The purpose wouldn't be to sanction institutions for high lifetime default rates, but to give students an accurate picture of their risk of defaulting when they enroll--a picture that will be harder for institutions to distort.

False Positives, Seed Corn, Etc.

This story in today's Post about the 27 schools in DCPS that are in "restructuring" mode under NCLB is well worth reading. Faced with a federal mandate to choose among various reforms--charter school conversion, private management, replacing teachers and principals, etc.--Chancellor Rhee decided to send groups of outside teachers, parents, students and educators into the schools in order to gather some qualitative data beyond what the test scores say. Their conclusion: many of these schools are very bad.

This illustrates an important point about correlation. NCLB is often criticized for relying almost exclusively on standardized test scores in reading and math. Beyond the fact that this ignores many other important subjects and broader educational goals, the tests themselves can only measure certain domains within reading and math, with imperfect accuracy. The efficacy of NCLB, therefore, is heavily dependent on the correlation between school-level test scores and school-level performance on everything that tests don't measure. If the correlation is high--if schools with terrible test scores also tend to be terrible in many other ways--than the system works. If the correlation is low, it doesn't.

This article suggests that, in DC anyway, the correlation is pretty high. I'm not surprised. The "tests don't measure everything" argument has always struck me as semi-convincing in terms of false negatives--one could plausibly imagine a school using some kind of maniacal eat-your-seed-corn test prep strategy to make AYP, even though it's actually not any good. It's a futile strategy in the long term, but it might work for a few years.

It seems very unlikely, by contrast, that non-correlation is going to produce a lot of false positives. In other words, if you miss AYP for six consecutive years--that's the criteria for ending up in restructuring, like the 27 DC schools--there's very likely a legitimate reason involving poor educational practices that need to be fixed. And for the most part, that's what the teams found. I realize this wasn't a formal study and so the observers may have gone in looking for problems. But it's hard to get past comments like these, from the students:

The question to a focus group of Dunbar High students was: What did they like best about going to school there? "Freedom," said one who takes Advanced Placement classes at the school in Northwest Washington. "We can do whatever we want at this school. That's the only good thing about this place."

The report notes that "In many cases, [the reviews] depict rudderless and cheerless institutions where students wander the halls with impunity during class and staff members have all but given up trying to maintain order." It also says:

But the theme resonating most powerfully in the reports is student frustration with the lack of academic rigor. Although there are always a few inspiring instructors, students -- none of whom were named -- said too many teachers approached their jobs with indifference and low expectations. "Teachers don't teach us a thing throughout the entire period," said one Lincoln student. "When visitors come, they start working." At Anacostia High in Southeast, evaluators described a history class exercise where students were prompted to respond to the question, "Where is your favorite place to shop?" None of the randomly selected students at Dunbar High responded positively when asked whether the school was preparing them for college. Pressed further, they said they didn't even feel ready for the workforce beyond high school.

Here's the one phrase I'd encourage you to keep in mind: "lack of academic rigor." Lack. There's a common way of thinking about school reform in urban areas like DC that goes something like this: These students come from tough home lives and have many barriers to learning, and as a result they're not doing very well academically under the standards we have. Increasing those standards and raising expectations is, therefore, punitive and counterproductive, a case of making a hard life harder still, and will result in more dropouts and further disengagement from education.

But when you talk to actual students--and this is by no means an isolated incident--they tend to make the opposite point, which is that low expectations are the problem. Lack of rigor isn't just symptomatic of bad teaching, it is bad teaching. The state of adolescence is such that you know enough to know that you should be held to high standards, but you also need adult supervision to enforce those standards. If NCLB is identifying and fundamentally changing schools where students get nothing but the freedom to do whatever they want, it must be doing something right.

The Saga of Professor X

The Atlantic article I wrote about last week, from Professor X, has generated a lot of discussion over the last week or so. (Brief aside: is there a more pseudonym-inspiring profession than non-tenured college professor? Seriously, these folks don't seem able or willing to order pizza using their own names. I'm sure there are good reasons for this, but whatever those reasons are, they don't reflect well on academia.). E.g: Matt Yglesias, Sherman Dorn, Michael Ayers, EdPolicyThoughts, Armed Liberal, Flypaper, Ross Douthat.

Consider the Snark

In cataloguing blog-related irritations, Sherman Dorn says, "Your snark isn't nearly as funny as you obviously think it is, and it's going to be less funny tomorrow." My first reaction was "The funniness of my snark will live FOREVER, dammit!" but of course Sherman is mostly right. Snark is at best a means of making a point and amusing your audience simultaneously, at worst a particularly belittling and divisive kind of discourse. This reminded me of a passage in a book I was reading over the weekend, Consider the Lobster (And Other Essays), by David Foster Wallace. The essay was Wallace's lengthy (of course), footnote-laden (also, of course) and altogether brilliant (see prvs.) review of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, originally published in Harper's earlier in the decade.  As is the case with most of his essays -- and most great essays in general, come to think of it -- Wallace uses the occasion to touch on a variety of deeper and more generalized truths about the human condition, including: 

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

There's a truncated version of the essay here (I think this is what was actually published in Harper's) but in addition to missing lots of good material it puts the footnotes at the end, rendering it semi-unreadable, so really you should buy the book and read the whole thing, along with Wallace's similarly profound reflections on the pornography industry, John McCain, talk radio, Dostoevsky, Tracy Austin, 9/11, John Updike and, of course, lobsters. 

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.