Governor Crist: Don't Sign That Bill

Gary Fineout, in the Miami Herald, writes about the virtual education bill that is now on Florida Governor Charlie Crist's desk. Florida is not only the fourth largest state, but also a trendsetter for virtual education. Unfortunately for both the state and virtual education in general, this bill takes the state in the wrong direction. Ironically, it will do the exact opposite of what its sponsors purport:

State Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and one of the backers of the legislation, said the state needed to spur competition to boost the availability of online courses. "I've seen students who desperately need online courses and have been unable to access them," said Gaetz, a former school superintendent. "Now school districts can pick and choose and negotiate for price and quality."

Florida already has the largest state-run supplemental virtual school (Florida Virtual School) with the widest array of course offerings in the country. The state also has a strong student choice provision that guarantees students access to these courses. So Senator Gaetz is referring to students that want a full-time virtual education, primarily at the K-8 level. The state authorizes these full-time programs and can already pick and choose and negotiate for price and quality. And, the main barrier to expanding those programs is a legislative cap on funding. So, this bill, which mandates 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, is not really about those things. What it does is move Florida from a well-run, successful, state-authorized program to a system that forces each district to manage and authorize its own program.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, this change will actually reduce competition and options for students. Under the current statewide model, families in Florida have at least two options. But, this bill would remove the option from families and give districts, most of which have no experience or mechanisms to oversee virtual education, the option instead.

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--with much less oversight. Even more troubling, the districts, with little administrative capacity to manage these programs, will have incentives to choose the lowest cost providers so they can capture part of the per student funding provided by the state.

Expanding options for students is a worthy goal. The governor should send this bill back to the legislature and ask legislators to develop a bill that spurs robust competition among multiple providers at the state level. And, to re-assert Florida's role as an innovator in virtual education, the state should offer incentives for providers to successfully serve low-income and other at-risk students--students that are many times not well-represented in or well-served by virtual education programs. Instead of mandating just full time programs, a new bill would also provide incentives for districts to work closely with both the Florida Virtual School and private providers to experiment with hybrid learning programs--allowing students to benefit from a blend of the best of both traditional and online learning. With this new bill, students across the state would have access to more than just what their district chooses. All Florida families, whether in Hialeah or Niceville or Tampa, would have access to many high quality options--options that offer a real mix of online and hybrid models to fit a wide variety of student needs.

Money Matters in Education

Last week, I wrote that "I'm not one of those people who believe that "money doesn't matter" in education. That's absurd; money matters a great deal, and there are plenty of schools that don't get their fair share." Ken DeRosa responded by saying:

The "money doesn't matter" meme is not as absurd as Kevin is suggesting, provided that it's qualified with "at today's funding levels." At today's funding levels, money doesn't matter. The correlation between school expenditures and student performance is very low to non-existent. The fact that some schools "don't get their fair share" is irrelevant. The important question is whether schools are getting sufficient funding to educate their students. No one knows the answer to that question. What I do know is that many schools with low funding outperform many schools with much higher funding.

There are several issues here that need unpacking, so let me take them in turn. First, any claims that money doesn't matter in education, at current spending levels or otherwise, have to overcome some obvious and very powerful commonsense arguments to the contrary. There is, for example, a long-established multi-billion dollar private market for K-12 education characterized by significant price variance. Here in DC you can spend a relatively modest amount of money to send your kids to Catholic school or several times that for tony private academies. Presumably the people forking over $31,428 per year (!) for St. Albans aren't idiots who are getting ripped off, but rather smart, well-educated consumers who are getting something for their money besides just peer effects.

More generally, it's common to see per-student spending differences of two-to-one or more in most states. In fact, Ken cites some examples in his post. Imagine you're the parent of a student in one of the schools on the good side of that ratio. You pick up the paper one morning and read that your local school district budget will be slashed by 50% next year, bringing it down to the level of the lowest-spending districts in your state. Do you (A) Panic, on the grounds that this will have a devastating effect on your child's education; or (B) Say to yourself "Well, a meta-analysis of multivariate school funding /outcome analyses reveals inconsistent results and small r-square values, so I'm sure little Johnny will be fine," and go back to drinking your coffee?

You also can't determine "sufficient" funding for a given school district without considering funding for other school districts, because most school funding is used to purchase teachers for whom districts compete. Virginia, for example, has a state school funding formula whereby school districts are required to raise enough local property tax money to meet a "foundation"--read, "sufficient"--funding level. For nearby Fairfax County, that amount is $631 million (Fairfax is the 13th largest school district in America). Fairfax then voluntarily raises another $729 million, which it uses to attract good teachers, which makes people want to live in Fairfax, which leads to high property values, which is one of the reasons Fairfax is able to raise an extra three-quarters of a billion dollars per year for education in the first place. The point being, in a competitive labor market there's no absolute amount of money schools need to provide a good education--if they get much less than everyone else, they are, by definition, screwed.

That said, it's reasonable to believe that schools are insufficiently sensitive to differences in resources. When you give them more money, performance doesn't improve as much as it should. I think this is the proper conclusion to draw from the numbers and studies Ken cites. The real question, then, is what are the implications of this? My take is that (A) We need to pursue policies designed to increase resource sensitivity and do a better job with the money we have, which include but aren't limited to well-designed accountability systems and various reforms involving teacher recruitment, compensation, school leadership, etc. and (B) Any significant new infusions of dollars from court orders, political initiatives, etc., have to be seen as rare opportunities to leverage the reforms needed to increase efficiency, resource sensitivity, etc. Both taxpayers and schoolchildren deserve more than they're getting from school money today.

What I don't believe is that resource insensitivity is an argument against fixing gross inequities in school funding levels. If you've got a school system suffering from the double whammy of not enough money, badly spent, the best reform strategy is, per above, one that combines new resources with systemic reform. The problem with the "money doesn't matter" formulation is that it's been hijacked by privatizers and anti-government zealots (to be clear, I'm not putting Ken in this camp) who use it as an excuse to promote reckless tax cuts and disinvestment in public educaiton. (For more on these issues, see this interview that I conducted with economist Eric Hanushek a couple of years ago.)

differentiated accountability proposals

In response to Secretary Spellings’ March 2008 call for differentiated accountability proposals, 17 states submitted plans. The Department forwarded all 17 plans to a peer review committee, which will comment on them in mid-June before a final decision by the Secretary. Up to ten state plans may be approved. I've had a chance to review all 17 plans, and they vary in quality and method.

Ultimately, there is evidence within the applications to support both sides of the debate. Those who want to preserve NCLB as originally intended will see the lessened importance of disaggregation and specific subgroups as wrong and as a blatant disregard for the law as written. Others who want more state flexibility, a little more lenience, and the recognition that not all failing schools are equivalent will also find evidence to support their cause. Altogether, here are the lessons learned:

• At least four states (Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, and Virginia) used this opportunity to ask to change the emphasis of Public School Choice (PSC) and Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the case of Virginia, they repeated this request throughout the application. In fact, it appeared the state had no other plans for differentiation, as it did not introduce new categories or cut lines to demarcate them.
  

• Two states (South Carolina and Tennessee) acknowledged a change in the number of students who would be eligible for PSC and SES and provided an estimate for the change. South Carolina estimated a 7% decline in the number of students eligible for choice and a 22% increase in students eligible for SES. Tennessee’s numbers were dramatic. They estimated 47% fewer students (-29,333) would be eligible for choice and 73% fewer (-35,551) for SES. Other states declared the eligibility rules would not change in the interim, but they did not address how the differentiated accountability would affect the provisions in the future.

• Despite the Secretary indicating that priority would be given to states with at least 20% of their Title I schools identified as in need of improvement, only three of the 17 met this criteria. About half addressed why, while not meeting the 20% threshold, they should still be considered, but the remainder of states (6/17) ignored the requirement altogether.

• The methods of identifying the new categories varied in style and depth. Many simply divided schools and districts that previously did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) by the percentage of Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) met. For example, South Carolina had three tiers. Schools and districts meeting 90-99% of their AYP objectives were slotted for “limited” intervention. Schools and districts meeting 60-89% would bear “targeted” intervention, and schools and districts below 60% would fall into “comprehensive” support. Twelve states featured this type of division of categories, albeit with different specifics.

• Two states (Illinois and Maryland) have created new categories depending on whether the school and/or district fail in the “all students” category or for single or multiple sub-groups. While Maryland featured a chart that justifies the validity behind this tactic, it also violates the central tenets of disaggregation in NCLB.

• Maryland also included a chart that broke down which schools and districts would be most affected by the changes. As we might expect, the changes give more flexibility to suburban schools that are largely failing because of only one subgroup, compared to urban schools that are struggling across the board.

Arkansas’ application states what many skeptics of the differentiated accountability plan suspect, saying, "In contrast to much of the more national rhetoric of schools missing performance goals for NCLB due to one or two subgroup, the Arkansas data models suggest that missing for one or two subgroups is a more isolated situation…A much more common occurrence is schools missing NCLB due to several subgroups in both reading and math."

New Jersey’s application contains the following alarming passage, which seems to suggest that, even if a school reaches restructuring, it would only have to do it for the failing category that’s to blame:

Our system [of differentiated accountability] does not result in schools with low performing subgroups such as Students with disabilities or English language learners remaining in the least intensive phase of intervention. A school that continues to miss AYP solely on the basis of the performance of one subgroup will continue to move through the phases and will ultimately reach Phase III: Restructuring. However, within this phase of improvement, the intervention will necessarily be focused on improving the subgroup’s performance.

At what point is this just a legitimization of under-the-table negotiations between states and districts over schools that REALLY fail and those that only sort of fail? Surely states already make distinctions at least in terms of oversight and aggressiveness; these plans just codify them.

Arguing for differentiated accountability would have been a lot more defensible if more applications included statements like this one:

PDE’s [Pennsylvania Department of Education’s] proposed differentiated accountability model will allow Pennsylvania to restructure our interventions so that communities with the fewest resources are receiving the most assistance.

Since these sentiments were rare, the cynic in me says these proposals are mostly about avoiding strong consequences for schools and districts with a lot of political power.

Profits vs. Purpose

This article in yesterday's NYT underscores the need for market-sensitive subsidy payments in the federal loan program--or a wholesale shift to the Direct Loan program. The NYT reports that 2-year colleges are worried that their students will have a harder time finding student loans in the next few years. Because it's more expensive now for banks to lend money, private loan companies are less interested in supplying higher-risk, less-profitable loans to community college and career school students.

That's a perfectly reasonable response from a for-profit company, but the purpose of the federal loan program is to ensure that exactly these types of students--those who are too high-risk to find loans on the private market--can receive money for college at a reasonable rate. If private loan companies are unwilling or unable to do that, then we need some fundamental changes to the federal loan program.

One option is to make subsidy payments, which the federal government pays to loan companies to encourage them to participate in the federal student loan program, more sensitive to changes in the credit markets. Subsidy rates would be higher in credit markets like today's, giving lenders sufficient profits to encourage them to lend to all students, and it would be lower when credit markets are better and profits are bigger.

But historically loan companies have resisted this type of subsidy system, preferring to rely on lobbyists and political donations to get subsidy rates that would allow them profits today and even bigger profits when credit markets improve. If they continue to resist a market-based approach to establishing subsidy rates, the best alternative may just be to switch entirely to the Direct Loan program, in which the federal government lends directly to students. Under this system, the government won't have to worry about paying excessive subsidies and all students will be guaranteed loans from the same lender.

If loan companies want to access to student loan business in the future, they'll need to come to the table with some ideas on how to make a profit while also ensuring that the purpose of the federal loan program is fulfilled.

Something to watch this summer

EdWeek is right to highlight the struggle nearly half the states will be facing in the coming years. Twenty-three states, as identified in a recent CEP report, back-loaded their performance targets for reaching the goal of 100% proficiency by 2014. That allowed them to reach relatively easy goals for the early years of NCLB, but now they must meet dramatically rising targets.

NCLB imposed some strange restrictions on the states as they wrote their plans. States must make all increases equal, but they were allowed pauses of up to three years where no improvement was required (for a more complete explanation, see here). Half the states chose steady progress over time. The other half created strange stair-step patterns that will really hurt them in coming years.

This chart shows California's English proficiency goals for elementary and middle school students. The state implemented the NCLB provisions slowly with a modest goal of 13.6% of its students proficient. By keeping these numbers low through 2006-7, they ensured only moderate amounts of school and district failures. But look at the numbers for this year, and the year following. From now until 2014, California's elementary and middle schoolers must improve 10.8% every year.

California hasn't released its 2007-8 performance scores yet. When it does, and when those of other stair-stepping states come out too, we're in for some eye-popping numbers.

Grab That Cash With Both Hands And Make A Stash

Joel Packer, chief lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, has started a blog. (Technically, a transcript of a podcast, but close enough.) Eager to counter the impression that the teachers union agenda begins and ends with a bottomless appetite for new funding without accountability to match, he quickly put up a post quoting the Beatles singing "gimme money that's what I want." Which is all well and good, but then--and really, this is Blog 101--he forgot the follow-up sentence to say that he's just kidding.

An oversight, I'm sure.

Packer goes on to say:

Yes, it takes money to pay for smaller class sizes, expanded professional development for teachers, after-school programs, quality PreK, new textbooks, technology, and modern schools. Yet in each of the past three school years, an average of 63 percent of school districts have received LESS Title I money than they got the previous year.

Title I provides federal money for extra reading and math help for educationally disadvantaged students in schools where low-income students are concentrated. These cutbacks should not be a surprise because since the enactment of NCLB in 2002, funding for Title I is more than $54 BILLION below what was proposed in NCLB. And sadly, President Bush’s budget for next year would further shortchange children and public schools under Title I by another $10.7 billion; more than 4 million low-income children will NOT receive the full range of services and programs they need and deserve.

That’s not even the worst of it. When you compare the overall mandates of the law to the overall money committed, by the end of the Bush years the funding short fall will be more than $85 billion.

I'm not one of those people who believe that "money doesn't matter" in education. That's absurd; money matters a great deal, and there are plenty of schools that don't get their fair share. I co-wrote a whole paper about this just a few weeks ago. But it's simply not the case, as Packer implies, that NCLB suffers from massive budget cuts.

This chart shows funding for the Title I program, the heart of NCLB, in the year prior to NCLB and the years since.

As you can see, there was a large increase (nearly $3.6 billion total) in the first few years and then virtually no increase since, as the federal budget situation tightened due to a variety of factors including inaccurate econometric forecasting, massive, unaffordable tax cuts for the rich, a mediocre economic recovery, post-9/11 security expenses, rapidly increasingly health care costs, and a ruinously expensively foreign war.

Schools were lucky that the increases came early, because even stagnant funding is much better than the pre-NCLB state of affairs. The total increase from 2001 to 2007 amounts to 6.5% annual growth; if that had happened steadily over time instead of up-front it would have blunted some of the "there's been no increase for three years" rhetoric, but that would of course have resulted in billions of dollars less for public education. The formulas that distribute the money, morever, are weighted for poverty, so a number of big urban districts saw Title I funds increase by 50% or more in the space of a few years. That's not bad.

Packer notes that many districts have recently experienced year-to-year reductions. But he doesn't explain why: Title I formulas are, per above, based on poverty rates. As demographics shift and poverty rises in some areas while falling in others, the money shifts too. In other words, all else being equal, those reductions were a good thing, a function of sound public policy designed to focus resources where they're needed most.

Packer says funding is $54 billion short of what was "proposed" in NCLB. The more accurate word is "authorized"--that's the total difference between what Congress appropriated for Title I and the maximum amount it could have appropriated, as authorized under the law. The meaning of those authorization levels is controversial: some people see them as a broken promise, others as an aspirational goal that fell victim to larger fiscal circumstances.

In either case, the appropriation targets are fundamentally arbitrary, not tied to any underlying calculation of how much it might cost to bring all students to proficiency by 2014. It makes more sense to compare actual current spending levels to actual previous spending levels than to hypothetical numbers with little or no inherent meaning. One might ask: what would non-arbitrary numbers look like? What's the real price tag here? Frankly, nobody knows. Increasing student performance to unprecedented levels is undeniably costly; but at the same time the current dollars aren't being spent as efficiently as they could be.

This doesn't stop Packer and others from calling NCLB an "unfunded mandate." Whether you think this is true depends on the scope of your view: in the narrowest sense, NCLB isn't a mandate at all, funded or otherwise--states choose whether to participate and are free to drop out and forgoe federal funding whenever they like. In the broadest sense, NCLB is absolutely an unfunded mandate: K-12 education is 90% state-and-local funded and is very likely to remain so for at least the medium term. So any federal law that calls for broad action and hugely ambitious goals, as NCLB does, is "unfunded" in the sense of "the federal government isn't providing all the money." But that's not necessarily a bad thing: the ADA was unfunded by that definition, as was school desegragation. Unfunded mandates can still be virtuous public policy.

To be clear, I think flatlining education budgets while pursuing mind-bogglingly expensive tax and war policies is inexcusable. For not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, the President could have done much more to hold together the bipartisan coalition that originally supported NCLB and helped more impoverished children get the education they need.

But Packer's rhetoric fails the seriousness test, and serves to emphasize what should be obvious: the NEA's opposition to NCLB is not based on funding levels. There is no amount of money Congress could have spent that would have bought their support. Which, frankly, is one of the reasons the money isn't forthcoming, even from a Democrat-controlled Congress--why spend billions of new dollars for the same political headaches? As Packer says quite plainly in his first post "In case you can’t tell, the National Education Association opposes the law and is leading the way to a fundamental overhaul." It's pretty much as simple as that.

Learning From Not Learning From Toyota

James Surowiecki's business column in the The New Yorker this week is about Toyota, which is poised to end General Motors' three-quarters-of-a-century-long reign as the biggest automobile manufacturer in the world. The secret of Toyota's success is no secret: understanding what the customers wants, combined with a constant focus on steady, continuous improvement. Literally thousands of books have been written about the Toyota Production System, and the underlying ideas have long passed into received wisdom bordering on cliche. Yet despite this transparency, Toyota continues to beat the pants of its competitors every year.

There is a lesson for education here. (No, not that schools are like automotive assembly lines). There is a way of thinking about school reform that goes something like this: Lack of success stems from lack of knowledge about how to be successful. So we need to locate the most successful schools, figure out how they work, and then communicate those "best practices" findings far and wide. This theory is appealing on several levels. First, it implicitly supports the work of researchers and analysts. Second, it's non-judgmental: a school's lack of success isn't because anyone purposfully did anything wrong, it's because they simply didn't know how to be right.

I don't think we know all we need to know about good educational practices. As a rule, the more knowledge to use and more models of success to study, the better. At the same time, a lot of the basic elements of successful schools have been understood for a long time, because they're the elements of any successful organization: leadership, resources, human capital, a functional organizational culture, understanding what your customers (students) need, a constant focus on steady, continuous improvement.

In other words, the biggest policy challenges from an information perspective aren't supply-side, but demand-side: not creating more information about success but giving people better reasons to seek out and use the information about success that already exists. That's really the essence of accountability, or should be--not necessarily telling educators how to improve, but giving them more support and incentives to do so, in a way that makes sense for their communities and students.

G.M. could have embraced the Toyota Production Model decades ago, and if it had, it would still be the number one automaker in the world. But it didn't. I hope our schools, colleges, and universities make better choices.

Another Look at Performance Assessments

Just returned from Providence where I spent two days learning about Rhode Island's diploma system, which includes a number of performance-based assessment requirements. Today at Portsmouth High School I saw students present their senior projects to groups of teachers, classmates, and outside community judges. Beginning this year, to graduate, all 200+ seniors at Portsmouth are required to complete a year-long senior project, consisting of the "4Ps" -- a research paper, a tangible product, a process portfolio, and today's oral presentation. Students select their projects, submit a letter of intent, and work closely with a school or community mentor. And, the projects really are diverse. The first student I saw today presented the stage set she'd designed for the school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Another student's project consisted of running a marathon and fundraising to support leukemia research.

The students were, of course, outstanding. But, what surprised me most were my conversations with the principal, teachers, and state officials about the cultural changes that were emerging from the senior project requirement. Roy Seitsinger, Director of RI High School Redesign, was emphatic that this work was "about transformative cultural change."

Portsmouth Principal Littlefield welcomed us by noting that the past two days he'd felt an "energy he has not seen in this building." And, he compared the buzz and excitement/anxiousness around senior projects with the lethargy that plagued last year's senior class. Numerous teachers echoed his observation of increased student engagement. At the symposium I attended the day before, teachers from Coventry High School, also in Rhode Island, talked about how implementing a portfolio requirement had made teachers' work more transparent. Their work was "no longer self-contained" because each and every teacher saw other teachers' signatures on student work in portfolios. And, this transparency had led to a level of peer pressure for rigor among teachers when assigning and grading student tasks. Likewise, I saw dozens of community members, parents, and business volunteers at Portsmouth serving as presentation judges. The students' senior projects provided a vehicle through which the entire school community engaged together--especially faculty. And, they also provided an opportunity to engage the surrounding community as mentors and judges.

Of course, performance assessments are not new. And, issues of reliability, validity, and seriousness plagued many states' efforts in the 1990s (see Jay Mathew's article in Education Next for a quick history lesson). These are important issues and you'll see much more about accountability and student assessment from Education Sector over the next year. (FYI, Rhode Island students also participate in the standardized New England Common Assessment Program, but as of now it is not a high stakes test.)

But, my main takeaway is that it's just as important, if not more, for us to think about how these reforms can drive other critical goals such as student engagement. And, as technology helps to broaden access to digital portfolios and presentations, public transparency and direct feedback and involvement in students' work products can provide powerful mechanisms for new conceptions of accountability. I'm certain I'm not the only parent that would use these tools extensively to help select a high school for my child.

If you'd like to see what a performance exhibition looks like, the Coalition of Essential Schools is sponsoring a Webcast presentation on Friday, May 30th, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. You can also check out Portsmouth High's senior project handbook and videos of student presentations.

New test-prep data

A new report from the University of Chicago supports Danny's conclusions. Its title, "From High School to the Future: ACT Preparation--Too Little, Too Late," says everything needed.

It documents that teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools believe test scores are mostly determined by test-taking skills, that almost all classes containing juniors focus on test-taking (even if there are significant percentages of seniors who had already taken the test), and that these phenomena are worse in schools with large concentrations of minorities.

There's a difference between teaching the basics and teaching the basics of test-taking. In a particularly illuminating passage, the report quotes a student discussing his or her expectations for and reaction to the ACT:

In March (before the ACT)
Interviewer: Do you know what score you're shooting for?
Student: At least the mid 20's.
Interviewer: Any reason?
Student: So I can pick my own colleges.... If I don't want to go to Daley [a community college], I don't have to go to Daley. I can go to, like I said, [University of Illinois] Champaign or even a better place.

In May (after the ACT)
Interviewer: Do you have a list of schools that you're going to apply to, that you're interested in?
Student: Well, right now I'm basically going to Daley for, like, the first year and a half, so I can get the general, basic classes, and then transfer them out to...IIT, I guess.
Interviewer: Do you think it's going to be hard to get into IIT?
Student: I have a 3.5, and I have a 25 percent [class rank]. The only problem will be the ACT, 'cause I got a 16 on it.
[The student needs a 21 to get into IIT program.]

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?