Don't Be Hating

NYTimes education reporter Sam Dillon has a nice profile of Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and KIPP CEO Richard Barth, who lead the nation's two most successful and high-profile education entrepreneurial organization while also being married to one another.

Of course, no TFA article would be complete without the requisite disparaging quote from Stanford professor and Obama advisor Linda Darling-Hammond, who has elevated TFA haterism into something of a fine art over the years. TFA hating is an interesting phenomenon and worth exploring in more depth.

I think there are basically two issues at work here. The first is privilege. Teaching is very much a middle-class profession in this country. Teachers tend to be a lot like my aunt, who has lived in the same mid-sized southeastern Pennsylvania town for the last 30 years, raising three kids, marrying twice, and generally living a prosaic American life while making a career as a middle school math teacher. She's never been paid very much, but she takes a lot of pride in her work and enjoys respect in her community.

Many (though certainly not all) TFA corp members, by contrast, come from the privileged backgrounds inherent to Yale and other elite colleges where the organization likes to recruit. I think there's a sense among some that TFAers are parachuting into the teaching profession for a little while, grabbing a piece of moral authority, and then using it to further their already-privileged lives. A teacher like my aunt reading about state dinners for Prince Charles and limousines lined up outside the Waldorf-Astoria might wonder, not unreasonably, why it never occurred to all those rich and famous people to recognize or support her lifetime of service.

The second issue is professionalism. There is a robust strain of thought (of which Darling-Hammond is a leading proponent) which holds that teaching needs to be elevated into the ranks of respected, well-compensated professions like medicine and law. As NCATE president Art Wise recently said, "Professions normally have common programs of preparation and extended terms of practice. TFA does not fit the professional model of teaching; other professions do not assign novices primary responsibility. "

Here's the problem with this argument: most people—like me, for example—know virtually nothing about what it takes to be a doctor. My knowledge of diagnosis and treatment is pretty much limited to "if it's bleeding, make it stop." That's because I've had little exposure to the practice of medicine—I'm not related to or friends with any doctors, nurses, or other health professionals, and I've been lucky enough to avoid seeing very much doctoring from a treatment perspective.

Yet despite the fact that I've never been a teacher or taken an education class, I know a fair amount about teaching—far more than I know about medicine. Why? Because like everyone else who goes to school and then college, I've spent thousands upon thousand of hours in my life being taught. I've observed a range of teaching practitioners in action, sitting in their classrooms day after day for months at a time, unconsciously absorbing their methods, making judgments about which approaches work and which don't.

This is not to say that I wouldn't benefit from conscious exploration of pedagogical theory and explicit instruction in teaching methods. And I'd probably be better off without some of what I learned from my teachers--they weren't all good. But the fact that college graduates come directly from an educational milieu--combined with TFA's rigorous screening process and the tendency of elite colleges to graduate students with the kind of exceptional verbal abilities that research suggests are associated with classroom effectiveness--appears to be enough to make up for what TFA corp members lack in formal experience and training. That's why, on average, they're as effective or more effective than the traditionally-prepared teachers with whom they work.

Regular teachers, who won't be and shouldn't be displaced by the TFA model, deserve a lot more recognition and privilege than they receive. But unless the revolution is coming sooner than I think, we're stuck with class-based society that distributes privilege disproportionately, and all else equal I'd rather Ivy League graduates looked for their status signifiers in low-income classrooms on the Mississippi Delta than in hedge funds and investment banking houses on Wall Street. And while it may be frustrating to advocates for the professionalization agenda that TFA complicates their narrative, that's no excuse for wasting valuable time and energy trying to tear down a program that unambiguously makes the world a better place.

Update: Sherman Dorn turns in a lengthy post describing the above as a "slur against the apparently evil Linda Darling-Hammond." I think this stems from some confusion on Sherman's part as to the meaning of the word "hater" and thus "haterism." I'm using the word in the modern colloquial sense--see the Urban Dictionary here--which denotes a level of sustained, unreasonable animosity that's substantially milder than "hatred" in the traditional sense. 

Those tricky charts

The Fordham Foundation's report comparing high and low achievers under No Child Left Behind had me initially convinced. I wrote an entire blog post claiming that it showed the merits of NCLB, that the law could be credited for closing the achievement gap, and pushing for a future system of accountability that held schools responsible for the education of all children from all backgrounds with all abilities.

In my post I reiterated the gains published by Fordham. They say:

Low-achieving students made solid progress on the National Assessment of EducationalProgress (NAEP) from 2000 to 2007 (an accomplishment surely worth celebrating, even though these students are still far, far behind). Meanwhile, however, the progress of our top students has been modest at best.

Their charts showed me graphically what I had just read. While the chart above purported to present how low achieving students increased in the years following the enactment of the law, the one at left supposedly showed no major closing of the achievement gap before NCLB.

But these aren't the charts we should have seen. I took these same two Fordham charts and combined them below. The solid line represents where Fordham drew the cut-off for NCLB, the year 2000. But No Child wasn't signed into law until January 2002. The first NAEP tests measuring its true impacts could not have been until 2003, represented by the dotted line.

When we make this correction, the claims in the report do not seem to stand up as well. The lower tenth of performers made gains throughout the chart, but especially from 2000 to 2003, where they gained 13 points to their high achieving peers' six. Notably, this accounts for almost all the gain claimed in the Fordham report.
















Fordham's argument, that we've focused too heavily on equity issues while neglecting excellence, could have been made without the misdirection. Along with this analysis of NAEP data, the report also featured a teacher survey. It supported their earlier conclusions, and could have stood on its own merits. Instead, they published both together, and the data doesn't show exactly what they claim. All we're left with, in the end, is debating tough choices.

Update: Mike Petrilli responds, citing the difficulties in defining the "era of NCLB." This is indeed a tough task. It's even tougher to put statements like these:

The fairest approach is to point out the large gains in NAEP scores in the period around 1998-2003 and acknowledge that NCLB’s association with these gains is unknown.

into charts.

My broader point is that if you compare scores across a longer spectrum, from 1992 in reading and 1990 in math (as Fordham did), the lowest ten percent of achievers narrowed the achievement gap from their top ten percent peers by 9, 2, 1, and 4 points, respectively, for 4th and 8th grade math and 4th and 8th grade reading. Those changes are in scale scores, not percentages. That's not exactly a sign of crisis.

Disruptive Assessment

The new book, Disrupting Class, written by Clayton Christensen, author of Silicon Valley bible The Innovator's Dilemma, is getting a lot of attention for its projections that half of all high school courses could be online by 2019. (Education Next has an article summarizing the book.) Beyond this headline, though, is a much more fundamental and interesting prediction.

Christensen and his co-authors Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson suggest a two-step process for the disruptive change they foresee. The first step is the current version of online learning, in which they highlight companies like Apex Learning and public providers such as Florida Virtual School. But, the eventual focus of the disruptive cycle is a wholesale change to "student centric learning," highly personalized learning facilitated by powerful cognitive tutors and technology applications. In the book, the authors are wise to make the not necessarily obvious connection with assessment.

With the change to student-centric learning, assessment--the art and science of testing children to determine what they have learned--can and should change, as well. Student-centric learning should, over time, obviate the need for examinations as we have known them. Alternative means of comparison, when necessary, will emerge.

They don't use these terms, but essentially what they describe is a very powerful, technology-aided formative assessment and instructional approach, under girded by well-defined cognitive models and learning progressions. It's the place where digital media offers the most opportunity and the truly disruptive approach.

Assessment offers a critical connection in Christensen's disruptive cycle between the first phase, online learning, and the second phase, student-centric learning. Since online learning already takes place in a digital environment, and, perhaps more importantly, it is not constrained to a particular pace or time, it provides an immense opportunity to embed technology-enabled formative assessment throughout instruction. New types of assessment tools, simulations, and games that capture a wide variety of descriptive formative data are many times a distraction or add-on in the traditional classroom environment. But, they can and should play a central and critical role in the online learning environment.

Disruptive assessment, driven by continued research and applications of cognitive science and technology, is the big opportunity.

Dueling Manifestos

The extremes in school-reform debates always seem to conspire against the middle, making change a lot tougher to achieve.

It happened again last week when two coalitions of pro-public-school educators and policymakers published reform manifestos. We’re not likely to see really significant, sustained improvement in the educational achievement of disadvantaged students unless we embrace the core recommendations of both documents. But from the way the two camps have framed their arguments—and caricatured each other’s—one would think that reform is a distinctly either-or proposition.

The first statement—A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education—is sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. EPI president Lawrence Mishel and researcher Richard Rothstein enlisted Duke economist Helen Ladd, New York University professor Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, a former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, to help make an argument that Rothstein has made for several years—that “attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children” is a mistake. And that “to be fully effective,” school reform “must be complemented by a broader definition of schooling and by improvements in the social and economic circumstances of disadvantaged youth.”

The key words here are “to be fully effective.” There’s ample evidence that millions of students from disadvantaged families suffer in the nation’s classrooms because they come to school ill-fed, ill-housed, lacking adequate heath care, and without sufficient exposure to language. And a wide range of notable educators, civil rights advocates and policymakers signed the EPI statement for just that reason, from NAACP Chairman Julian Bond to African American scholars such as Glen Lowry and William Julius Williams, present and past urban school superintendents Payzant, Arne Duncan, Rudy Crew, and Beverly Hall, and former federal education officials Payzant, and Diane Ravitch, and Marshall Smith (who sits on Education Sector’s board).

The problem is that many public educators have used the disadvantages that poverty inflicts on many students as an excuse for failing to even try to educate them. It’s an impossible task, they argue, we can’t overcome the baggage that our students bring with them to school. I’ve heard that lame lament over and over in hundreds of public schools in every corner of America. Educators declare that schools can’t make any meaningful difference in the educational lives of disadvantaged students absent the elimination of poverty’s debilitating effects.

They’re wrong. Schools can make a significant difference, even if they can’t be “fully effective” in overcoming the consequences of poverty.

And so advocates of educational accountability, those who say that the only way to give disadvantaged students a chance at a decent education is to hold excuse-inclined educators responsible for their students’ achievement, brought us state testing systems and, in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This camp is behind the second of last week’s manifestos, which was organized by NYC Chancellor Joel Klein and Al Sharpton. Not surprisingly, past or present officials of the organizations that pushed Congress hardest for NCLB accountability, including The Education Trust, the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, and the Progressive Policy Institute (former PPI education director Andy Rotherham now co-directs Education Sector with me), were signers of Klein’s manifesto.

A fundamental failing of NCLB, however, is that it doesn’t account for the reality that some schools are dealt much tougher educational hands than others, by virtue of the fact that their students suffer from the ravages of poverty that the Broader, Bolder manifesto addresses. What we need to do is find ways to give schools credit for successfully improving the educational performance of the kids they have, by using so-called value-added measures of student performance, and by capturing more than just how well schools teach basic reading and math skills. Both are heavy lifts, but they would liberate schools to expand the scope of their mission and encourage them to work hard regardless of their students’ backgrounds.

So both camps are right, and wrong:

Yes, we should find ways to reduce the effects of poverty on students. Doing so will allow them to achieve at higher levels. But no, we shouldn’t assume that schools can’t make a difference on their own.

Yes, we need to hold schools and teachers accountable for their performance. Too many of them simply haven’t embraced high expectations on their own. But no, we shouldn’t pretend that poverty has no impact on students. No accountability system can work unless it is credible, and NCLB, as currently crafted, is not.

Will Data Save D.C. Vouchers?

The Year 2 evaluation of the D.C. voucher program was released today. Given the current debate over whether the program should be funded for another year, I'm guessing this study will see a lot of spin in the next few weeks, since there's a little something for everyone.

Those who'd like to end the program can point out that the results were, all-in-all, underwhelming, but supporters of the voucher program can point to the positive results among certain subgroups. Most notably, students from the first cohort who used the voucher scored significantly higher in reading - supporters might use this to convince lawmakers to hold out for another year or two in order to see if the effects continue for subsequent cohorts. But will a few positive results be enough to save D.C. vouchers?

Update: As Chad points out below, voucher supporters are already grabbing on to the subgroup analysis to support the voucher program. And I've already gotten a couple of news releases with headlines touting "academic gains" and "early successes". For some reason, though, none of these releases mention the fact that the overall analysis of reading results did reach the 91 percent cutoff for statistical significance, but just didn't quite make it to 95 percent. Maybe that's just too stats-nerdy for a press release.

False discoveries: Interpret with caution

Despite my best efforts to persuade, the folks at Fordham's Flypaper blog are again trumpeting the results of the DC voucher program. While they admit the study found no significant difference in academic gains between students who received a voucher and those that did not, they cherry-pick this quote:

However, being offered a scholarship may have improved reading test scores among three subgroups of relatively more advantaged students: those who had not attended a School in Need of Improvement (SINI) school when they applied to the program, those who had relatively higher pre-program academic performance, and those who applied in the first year of program implementation.

despite the Institute of Education Sciences explicitly warning these findings "were no longer statistically significant when subjected to a reliability test" and "the results may be 'false discoveries' and should therefore be used and interpreted with caution."

These quotes are not exactly buried; you can find them in the Executive Summary.

A New Kind of Competition

Last week the University of Phoenix, the biggest private for-profit university in the nation, released its first "Academic Annual Report," which compares the scores of Phoenix seniors to Phoenix freshmen on the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP) test, which is administered by ETS, the same folks who administer the SAT, AP, and GRE. Phoenix says their freshmen enter with lower scores than typical college students but leave at about the same level, evidence (they contend) that a Phoenix education is sound.

Now, one can dispute the methodology here, and point to the fact that MAPP can only capture a sliver of what colleges aspire to teach their students in the best of circumstance, and these would be fair points to make. But they also really miss the forest for the trees. Of far greater import is that here we have an individual university actually voluntarily providing public evidence of how much its students learn while they're in college. This rarely happens. And the fact that a for-profit university is leading the charge is wholly unsurprising.

The public and non-profit university sector has traditionally held an iron grip on an incredibly good market to have in the information age: credentialing higher learning. Elite institutions in particular are essentially selling branded intellectual property; just as corporations like Microsoft and Eli Lilly have made vast fortunes in this business, so too has it worked out exceedingly well for the likes of Stanford and Duke. Given significant financial and regulatory barriers to entry, along with burgeoning demand driven by demographics, public policy, and changing economic conditions, traditional colleges have been able to stay relatively inefficient and complacent in the way they provide educational services while transferring education-generated revenues internally to pay for other things like faculty scholarship, sports teams, etc.

For-profits like Phoenix have historically built their businesses by going after the parts of the market that traditional colleges were either unable or unwilling to serve: adult students, part-timers, occupational training, etc. But it was only a matter of time before they started to turn toward the huge profit center that is the traditional four-year college student. That they've made inroads here despite competing on un-level financial playing field (lacking the direct and indirect tax-related public subsidies non-profits enjoy) just goes to show how much financial slack is built into the cost of educating a traditional undergraduate.

So it stands to reason that for-profits would be much more aggressive in marketing their learning results, in competing for students on educational terms, rather than via brochures featuring five demographically balanced students sitting in a circle on a leaf-strewn academic quad. In the end, education is all the for-profits have to sell. Some traditional colleges and universities see the handwriting on the wall and have pushed to create new venues for self-reporting data, e.g. the Voluntary System of Accountability sponsored by public and land-grant institutions. The Phoenix report just emphasizes that the clock is ticking: either traditional colleges and universities will determine how institutional success in teaching students will be measured and defined, or somebody else will.

Everyone's favorite sound bite

Eduwonkette's post this morning on the long-term effects of teachers needs explanation. In attempting to report on a new study, the crux of her argument is thus:

It's everyone's favorite sound bite: good teachers alone can close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. But if the entire teacher effect doesn't persist from year-to-year - that is, a student only retains some fraction of the learning advantage they get from having a highly effective teacher - these claims simply don't hold up.

There are two problems with this argument. One, the entire teacher effect need not persist for it to be real, and two, the evidence shows time and again that placing a student in the hands of an excellent teacher for even one year has lasting impacts.

Let's look at the study itself. Eduwonkette repeats its finding that, "only about one-fifth of the test score gain from a high value-added teacher remains after a single year." If we dig a little deeper, we see that the researchers found a one-year long-term learning coefficient of .66, with the teacher the student had a year beforehand contributing a full one-third of this effect.

If we look two years out--that is, the student had been under the tutelage of two different educators for two additional years of schooling--that original teacher still contributed about one-fourth of the student's long-term learning gains. These gains attributable to teachers come after controlling for incoming student achievement scores, gender, race, age, income, and learner characteristics (disability and limited English proficiency). These findings in no way challenge previous studies indicating teacher effects accumulate over time.

Update: Eduwonkette responds, but she clearly did not read the study carefully. Unlike other value-added studies that look at teacher effects over time with multiple teachers, this one looked at only the learning gains attributable to one teacher in one year. Then, it asked the question of how much, for example, we can attribute a 5th or 6th grader's math and reading scores with his or her 4th grade teacher. In finding that the 4th grade teacher alone accounted for one third and one quarter, respectively, of a student's achievement scores one and two years later, the study gave us more evidence of lasting teacher effects. True, they diminish slightly over time, but without controlling for future teachers, these findings in no way dampen the lessons from previous studies.

Price-Fixing for the Good of Students

In the early 1990's, a Department of Justice antitrust investigation, along with subsequent court rulings, changed how many private colleges conducted their financial aid dealings, and not necessarily for the better.

The DOJ investigation resulted in a suit against the Ivy Overlap Group, a group consisting of 8 Ivy League schools plus MIT which met annually to discuss students' financial aid packages and prevent bidding wars over students. The DOJ argued that this was an antitrust violation--that the colleges were engaged in price-fixing by deciding on a common family contribution amount for individual students admitted to multiple Overlap Group schools.

The DOJ suit essentially ended communications among colleges about their financial aid practices, which has escalated the bidding wars for top students (precisely what the Overlap Group sought to avoid). For colleges, this means more and more money is spent on merit-based financial aid to woo the most desired students and less aid is available for students who actually need it.

Policymakers aren't happy about the shift away from need-based aid and colleges aren't happy about spending their money to compete with other schools. And so The Institute for College Access and Success has responded with a white paper talking in more depth about the intersection of antitrust law and higher ed financial aid, and also offering a potential compromise that would allow colleges to collaborate on financial aid policy and hopefully end current bidding wars, while not violating any laws (see IHE's article on the TICAS proposal here).

If more collaboration shifted money from merit aid to need based aid, the results could be pretty dramatic. According to TICAS's analysis of financial aid data from the College Board Annual Survey of Colleges, the 946 institutions that participate in the College Board survey provided $3.3 billion in financial aid that was in excess of student need, while $2.4 billion in unmet need remained.

The P Stands for Public

This week's Gadfly has some really interesting nuggets: Fordham Foundation President Checker Finn discusses international benchmarking and the organization's move to the future, and apparently Bill Bennett is launching an entire history curriculum. The latter seems particularly ripe for comment, but I really have beef with only one word in the entire issue: safe.

As in, "a safer and sounder private education," in reference to the DC voucher program. The voucher program's evaluation found no such thing. Parents thought the schools were safer, but the students reported no differences. What I said last summer bears repeating:

...to hold up parental support as evidence of success here is pretty superficial, especially when we consider who made up the control group in the study. The authorizing legislation mandated the “strongest possible research design for determining the effectiveness of the program,” so the Institute of Education Sciences adopted a lottery system for the program, so that the results of the voucher recipients could be compared to the results of non-recipients, while controlling for motivation and other factors. The control group consisted of students who applied but were rejected for the vouchers. This makes for a valid comparison for student achievement, but not necessarily for parental happiness. All of the parents wanted their child educated outside of the DC public schools; it only makes sense that the ones who achieved this goal were happier than the ones who didn’t, especially after only one year.

Moreover, who is the best judge of violence and overall school quality—parents, or the students themselves? On violence, students reported no statistically significant difference between public and private schools. In other words, the people who actually witness and experience violence, the students themselves, reported no increases in seeing weapons; being offered drugs; or being victims of theft, physical assault, or bullying.

Furthermore

Expanding a little more on yesterday's post about "Bigger, Bolder," which presented a lot of good ideas, both educational and non-educational, as an alternative to the current accountability regime, but never quite got around to saying what we should do with the current regime.

Why didn't they? There are plenty of alternatives to having the federal government impose a regulatory accountability scheme on states and school districts. One could say, "Uncle Sam should get out of the accountability business altogether and simply provide enough Title I money to compensate for the negative effects of poverty while leaving it to local school boards and perhaps states to ensure quality; existing governance structures are there for a reason and the nation has managed to prosper under their leadership for quite some time."

Or, one could strike a more moderate pose and say "NCLB is unrealistic and inflexible; we should back off of both the 100% proficiency goal and the 2014 deadline and switch to a system whereby schools are expected to make incremental improvement toward a goal that would be less than 100%, the amount less varying by school based on student demographics and other external factors that influence achievement and are out of educators' control. Districts should also be allowed to opt out of strictly test-based accountability measures and instead present alternative, locally-developed assessments of student achievement in both core subjects and other vital skills like leadership and critical thinking. If achievement as measured by local assessments is good enough, then districts with low standardized test scores shouldn't be identified for improvement or other other regulatory interventions."

I don't agree with either of these policies, but I'm guessing lots of other people do. You could easily imagine a large, well-funded coalition of groups rallying behind them. You could also imagine writing them down and asking a group of well-respected education experts to sign them.
And yet in all the hue and cry about NCLB, all the denunciations and appeals and calls to action, very few people or organizations have been willing to actually put pen to paper and say precisely what policymakers should do. Goals and principles don't count; these are often deliberately vague or amount to artfully-worded statements that the world would be a better place if unavoidable tradeoffs and tough decisions could be avoided. The NEA's NCLB agenda, for example, including items like "Accountability should be based upon multiple measures of student learning and school success," a goal that sounds reasonable and could easily accomodate both policies to strengthen accountability and to destroy it entirely.

So what's stopping people? Perhaps it's not as easy as it seems?

Popping The Tuition Bubble

One of the problems with college student loans is that students assume nearly all of the risk of default. Colleges have no risk -- they get paid up-front -- while lenders participating in the federal student loan program (which controls a large, albeit shrinking, majority of all loan volume) get bailed out by the taxpayers if students don't repay. That means the taxpayer assumes some risk, of course, but the costs are so non-transparent and buried within the federal budget that they don't really influence behavior in any way. As college becomes more and more expensive and students borrow more and more money, this problem is getting worse. As Erin Dillon showed last year, 10-year default rates for students who borrow over $15,000 are nearly 20 percent.

The solution? Allow students to sell a percentage of their future earnings to investors, thus shifting the risk from financially vulnerable and unsophisticated young individuals to financially sophisticated markets that can manage risk appropriately. This would also have the side benefit of creating new market incentives for the colleges themselves to do a better job of helping student graduate and prosper in their careers. This the subject of this new piece from yrs truly and Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI, called "Popping the Tuition Bubble."

A Blank Slate

I think it's fair game to debate the merits of the Broader, Bolder approach to education, but it's like watching a called third strike to assume the new initiative will sway the presumptive Democratic nominee into a certain education policy.

Why? Because, unlike his opponent, he already has one.

It's not too bad either. There's some minor tweaks here and a major proposal there, and it all adds up to a pretty comprehensive education plan.

First, as a caveat to my previous post on the McCain-Obama surrogate debate on education: McCain does not really have a serious education policy at this point. While Obama has two .pdf files totaling 17 pages and nearly 9,000 words, the Republican nominee has a spartan 500 word essay on his website. That's it.

The two senators' legislative history on this issue do not compare either. While Obama chose to serve on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, McCain did not. While Obama introduced 20 bills pertaining to education in the latest Congress, McCain proposed none.

Obama's legislative history paired with his campaign plans draw a fairly clear outline for what he'd like to do as president. Legislatively, he's focused on things like summer and after-school programs for high-needs kids, STEM advancements, and innovation zones (districts that track students longitudinally, reward teachers based on student performance and teacher evaluations, and establish career ladders. His plan has a few clever policy tweaks, things like eliminating the cumbersome FAFSA in favor of a check box on federal tax forms, that make a lot of sense. It also tackles the big issues by proposing mentoring programs and career ladders for teachers, a refundable tax credit for college students, and service scholarships for new teachers who agree to teach in a high need field or location for four years.

These are not minor proposals, and they are not the sign of someone waiting for an education policy savant. McCain, on the other hand, could use some help. His entire education platform is a little more than the length of this post. Now that's a blank slate.

Er...

The K-12 blog topic du jour is clearly the "Broader, Bolder" education agenda that was released today via large ads in the Post and Times. A lot of the agenda items are very worthwhile in their own right, and the signatories include many smart, thoughtful people from across the ideological spectrum. But the individual ideas aren't what really matter here--you can find them all elsewhere. The framing is the thing, and in this respect I think the agenda falls short. The key sentence comes at the beginning of the second paragraph:

"Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning."

I think this incorrect. Rather, education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that education policy can help poor children primarily by improving education. Similarly, labor policy is often crafted around the idea that American families, including schoolchildren, would benefit from higher wages for working-class households; health policy has focused on extending coverage to the uninsured, etc. In each of these fields people tend to stress the importance of their agenda to a point of some exaggeration. But nobody seriously claims to have the single solution for poverty, and this no less true in education than anywhere else.

So the real question is what the signatories mean by the "er" in "Broader" and "Bolder." This suffix implies differentiation, but it's not clear what kind. Broader in the sense of "in addition to"? If that's the case, I have no quarrel, other than to say that there's probably some value in having experts in discrete fields focus on policy issues aligned with their expertise. The agenda calls for an increased investment in health services, for example, which I wholeheartedly support. But I also recall a gigantic battle over exactly this issue last year, featuring massive advocacy efforts, newspaper headlines, Presidential vetos, and all the rest. So it's not like people don't understand this is a problem. And, per Eduwonk, where was this statement then, when it might have mattered? Perhaps the signatories felt like their energies were best confined to education? Moreover, it's not like those policymakers who actually have multiple jurisdictions don't understand that poor children need more than a good school. Ted Kennedy and George Miller, if I'm not mistaken, support NCLB and SCHIP and EITC and WIC and a higher minimum wage.

If, on the other hand, the "er" means "instead of," then I'm opposed. Again, this brings us back to framing--the first big subhead says: "The NCLB Framework Cannot by Itself Meet the Challenge," implying a certain kind of side-taking relative to many well-understood controversies and decision points involving NCLB reauthorization, particularly given the subsequent nods toward concerns about curriculum narrowing, the impossibility of 100% proficiency, etc. But the agenda itself basically ignores these and all other accountability issues, other than to say that "new accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods," a perfectly reasonable goal that's also vague to the point of near-meaninglessness.

There are reasoned positions on both sides of the NCLB and larger school accountability debate, and the signatories all know what they are. By failing to address those issues or weigh in on the knotty decisions that must be made, the reader is left with the sense that the real message here is that students would ultimately benefit from less hard attention to the quality of their schools--a dispiriting idea coming from education experts and a wrong one as well. Yes, the first bullet point is "continue to pursue school improvement efforts," and the ideas mentioned are perfectly legit. But if you're going to frame your agenda in terms of the accountability elephant in the room, you have to tell the world where you think that elephant should go.

Further commentary from Mead , Colvin, Petrilli and Hoff.

Free Advice

Eduwonkette writes:

In this month's issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a new study by UT-Austin professor Julian Vasquez-Heilig and Linda Darling-Hammond, "Accountability Texas-Style: The Progress and Learning of Urban Minority Students in a High-Stakes Testing Context," revisits the Houston miracle by analyzing years of student-level test score and graduation data (1995-2002). There's no version up on the web yet, but here are some key findings: Growth on scores on TAAS exam outpaced scores on the Stanford exam. This appears to be prima facie evidence of test score inflation.

I've always been puzzled by this line of reasoning. NCLB was designed to give states a free hand to set academic standards and adopt tests as they like. Schools are then put under considerable pressure to help students achieve those standards as measured by those tests. And the evidence is incontrovertable that student achievement as measured by state NCLB tests has increased substantially. Evidence from other tests, by contrast, is much less clear. NAEP scores have increased, but not nearly at the same rate as state tests. Ditto tests like the Stanford exams.

But that's to be expected, isn't it? If the entire state system is purposefully geared toward teaching a certain set of standards, wouldn't we expect more improvement there than on a test that measures some other standards? Wouldn't test scores logically go up on the test that matters, instead of the one that doesn't? I can see how some kind of wild divergence would seem suspicious--e.g. a 50% increase on the state test while SAT-10 scores plummet--but shouldn't our baseline expectation be greater progress on the signficant tests aligned to curricula? But to say such divergence is prima facie evidence of test score inflation seems strange.

Maybe Vazquez-Heileg and Darling-Hammond explain all of this, but I can't tell since "there's no version up on the Web yet" and given that Eduwonkette in her day job is not exactly a disinterested observer in what she blogs about, I'm not going to take her word for it. Which brings me to my second point, regarding the research / policy divide.

This chasm of understanding, in which evidence from research fails to permeate the policymaking process, is constantly lamented and discussed, particularly at mass convocations like AERA. I don't understand why. Not because it doesn't exist, but because the solution strikes me as obvious. Here, free of charge, I present my secret methods for bridging the gap, based on time spent on both sides of the divide:

1) Write well. As everyone knows, research written in academese is often hard to read. Some of this can be solved be applying universal principles of good writing, which can be found in various books and guides and thus won't be rehashed at length here, other than to say: writing is a request to be a guest in someone else's consciousness. So be polite, and don't overstay your welcome. Write clearly and briefly, keeping in mind what the reader wants and needs, not what you want and need.

Beyond the above, there are also some important issues of structure to understand. Academic writing tends to be structured something like this:

1) Lit Review
2) Methods
3) Results
4) Conclusions (Possibly--"More research is needed" does not count as a conclusion.)

This is a terrible way to communicate with policymakers. They don't care about the lit review and the methods. You're the expert; they trust that you know what you're talking about and conducted the analysis correctly. (Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.) They're interested in context, results and conclusions. By that I mean: What did you find, and why does it matter? To present this information, you should write like this:

1) Context: why is this issue important?
2) Results: what did you find?
3) Conclusions: what do these results mean? (This should flow logically from the context)

Put the methods in an appendix, and only include stuff from the lit review if it helps establish context or supports your conclusions. I understand that this means writing in a different way than is appropriate for peer-reviewed academic research. Which is fine; different audiences and purpose, different format. To repeat: write for the reader, who wants the good stuff at the beginning, not the end. In fact, all he or she wants is the good stuff. So give that, and nothing else.

2) Let people know. The world is an extremely busy place and nobody is waiting for your next great idea or my next great idea with bated breath. So figure out who needs to know what you've discovered and call them on the phone. Or send them an email, or write them a letter. Reach out -- you'd be surprised how often this works. As long as your message is short and cogent, they'll probably appreciate it and ask for more.

3) Don't make things harder than they already are. Even if you follow steps one and two, getting traction in the policy sphere is still difficult. Politics, limited attention spans, competitors grasping for that same sliver of mindshare--it's not easy. So keep in mind some realities of the 21st Century, such as: If people can't find it on the Internet within two minutes, for free, it doesn't exist. Don't make more work for busy people, and don't try to sell them something that other people are giving away.

Vazquez-Heileg and Darling-Hammond got Step 2 right--getting your paper mentioned in a well-read blog like Eduwonkette is smart. But then--ack!--the paper isn't available. This cuts the potential Eduwonkette-driven audience by 90%. Most policymakers are not going to check back every day waiting for the free Internet version to show up, nor are they going to go buy a subscription to Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, or pay some kind of absurdly expensive per-article fee on a Web site. They'll just move on to other things.

Here's a Simple Rule of Thumb...

...if you're a news organization with some pretensions of respectability, and you're trying to decide whether or not to run an article that, while certain to boost traffic and advertising revenue, clearly stretches the boundaries of good taste:

1) Collapse the title of of the article into a single run-on phrase, then add "www." to the front and ".com" to the end, like this: http://www.titleofarticle.com/

2) Ask yourself this question: Would creepy middle-aged men pay $29.95 a month in exchange for access to this Web site? If the answer is "Yes" then don't run the article.

Application of this rule could have saved the AP and MSNBC from this.

School Choice Trifecta

The Post turns in not one, not two, but three noteworthy school choice stories today. The first suggests that DC's voucher program may be eliminated by an unfriendly Congress. While I don't think the program should be expanded or continued in the long run, the first obligation is to the kids here and I think Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton owes them more than just an "FYI, I'll be taking your voucher away." 

The second story is titled "Charter Schools to Close Over Academics." Ask yourself: How many times you have read this headline without the word "charter" in it? That tells you most of what you need to know. Also, it's not a coincidence that all of the charter revocations in DC have been applied to stand-alone "mom and pop" schools, not schools like KIPP that benefit from a fine-tuned model and the support of larger regional or national non-profit charter management organizations. In the not-too-distant future, both research findings and charter school growth patterns will likely show that this is the future of public school choice. The article also includes commentary from Ross Wiener at the Ed Trust, which is unusual in that they normally don't weigh in on choice issues. I've always been puzzled by this; objectively speaking charter schools have done exponentially more to improve education for low-income and minority students in DC than reforms like NCLB, so you'd think that an organization premised on helping those children would be more engaged... 

The third story (like the second from Jay Mathews) focuses on New Orleans where over half of public school enrollment is in charters. One critic faults charters there for creating an environment of "entrepreneurial opportunism" whereby providers rushed in in the weeks and months after the flood, recruiting good teachers, founding new schools in empty public school buildings, etc., etc. Right. Because clearly the big problem in post-Katrina New Orleans has been an overabundance of resources and attention focused on providing vital public services to the city's poor children.  

Accreditation Explains Everything

InsideHigherEd reports a new flare-up in an ongoing dispute about the way the U.S. Department of Education regulates people who regulate colleges. Yes, this sounds very boring. It's not; it actually explains much about higher education as well as school vouchers and other hot-button K-12 issues. But first, a little history:

For a long time the federal government had very little role in higher education, other than famously giving states Western land rights in exchange for building public institutions that would train students in useful arts like agriculture, mining, etc., i.e. the land-grant universities that remain an important part of higher education today (Contrary to popular belief, the feds didn't grant the actual land on which the universities were built; rather revenue from the land rights financed the building. (Trivia: the University of the District Columbia is a land-grant university.))

That began to change after World War II with the G.I. Bill and even more importantly a huge influx of research dollars into higher education meant to build the nation's technological capacity and fight the Cold War. This had a profound impact on the character of the modern university, cementing research prowess as the over-riding determinant of prestige. The problem is that it happened at the exact same time that the nation's higher education system was expanding to accommodate huge numbers of new students as college-going became the norm. So we made universities care about one thing--research--even as we needed them to be good at another thing--teaching. This fundamental and on some level irreconcilable tension is the source of much of what's wrong with higher education today. 

By the mid-60s the huge, powerful research universities were in their heyday. There was an expectation among many that federal support would expand from research to subsidizing the general operations of the universities themselves. But academic institutions didn't always turn out to be the best places to conduct research, and parts of the general public, along with conservative politicians, saw higher education as the source--both physical and ideological--of the dirty hippies who were allegedly tearing the nation apart. 

So instead of giving money to institutions, Congress gave money directly to students, in the form of subsidized student loans and Pell grants, which are essentially higher education school vouchers (more on this later). This helped fuel an increasingly consumerist mindset among prospective college students, which in turn spawned things like aggressive college marketing and the U.S. News college rankings.

The people who created Pell grants weren't idiots. They realized that you can't just hand an 18-year-old thousands of dollars and let her spend it however she likes. Without some controls, nothing would prevent me from founding Kevin University in my home office, setting tuition at the exact amount of the Pell Grant, and handing out worthless diplomas to gullible and/or complicit lower-income students. So Congress set certain criteria for an institution to be eligible to receive money via Pell grants and subsidized loans. This provision (called "Title IV eligibility," after the relevant section of the Higher Education Act) is the primary leverage point used by Congress to make universities do what it wants, since most students now pay for college, in whole or in part, with some form of federal grant or loan. 

One of the main criteria for Title IV eligibility is accreditation. But of course this still wasn't enough--otherwise I could create Kevin's Accreditation in my spare bedroom, accredit Kevin University, and then proceed to blow my ill-gotten Pell grant money at the track. So Congress directed the U.S. Department of Education to create a body that would essentially accredit accreditors. It's called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, or NACIQI (pronounced nah-SEEK-eeh). 

Accreditation has always been a mixed bag when it comes to quality control. The basic structure, for example, is confusing. In most respects "national" is better than "regional" in higher education--national universities are world-famous, while regional universities are where you go if you can't go somewhere better. In accreditation, it's the other way around: the country is split up among six regional accreditors, each with its own long-established territory, that provide the overall institutional accreditation that institutions need to be Title IV-eligible. Each regional accreditor goes about this in a somewhat different way. So if you read that a university is "nationally accredited" keep in mind that this is not as good as being regionally accredited.  (There's also a whole separate system of program accreditation for things like schools of education, engineering, medicine, etc., but that's a topic for another day).

The current accreditation system works well in some ways. Accredited colleges are very unlikely to steal your money and take it to the track or hand you a worthless diploma from KevU. Accreditation brings certain standards in terms of faculty credentials, financial integrity, etc. Accreditation is based on peer review, so it gives institutions a good opportunity for self-reflection based on expert feedback, if they choose to take it. 

But the peer-based nature of accreditation also limits its utility. There's a tendency toward log-rolling: you don't ask me hard questions, and I'll return the favor. Regulatory capture is a risk: accreditors can see institutions as their clients, not students or the public at large. Accreditors rely on institutional fees to run their operations, which means they often don't have the resources that evaluating something as complex as a university requires. More fundamentally, accreditation lives within the present values of higher education. And in that system, short-changing student learning in favor of research isn't a bug--it's a feature. 

So when the Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened a few years ago and began asking some hard and perfectly valid questions about the fact that a lot of college students don't graduate or learn very much, the Department of Education responded by re-evaluating the role of accreditation. It appointed some new members to NASIQI who weren't inclined to just rubber-stamp approval, and it drafted new regulations which would require accreditors to require colleges to provide some kind of objective data indicating the extent to which they were successfully helping their students learn.

Naturally, the institutions and accreditors took to the challenge with vigor ran to Congress and had language inserted in the Higher Education Act to make such requirements illegal. This is what the recent flare-up is all about. 

This seems to be a trend of late: (1) A regulatory agency charged with ensuring the quality of the nation's education system decides to create new public information about educational success. (2) The system responds by cutting off the process at its knees. That's what happened in New York when the teachers union pushed through dead-of-night legislation to prohibit the use of student performance data in evaluating teachers, and that's what's happening here. 

What are the lessons in all of this? First, while it's easy enough to condemn government bureaucracies for focusing on bean-counting and process instead of bottom-line results, there are plenty of powerful organizations and interest groups out there that wouldn't have it any other way. They want bad government, because it frees them to act in their own interest, instead of the public interest. 

Second, it hasn't been lost on school choice advocates that our higher education system, which is in many respects very successful, maintains a diverse mix of public and private providers who compete for what amount to post-secondary school vouchers. That's why President Bush re-labelled his latest voucher proposal as "Pell Grants for kids" in the State of the Union this year. 

But from the beginning, it was obvious that you couldn't just hand college students a voucher and leave it at that. In any kind of choice-based education system, there has to be some kind of external quality control in addition to what market forces bring. Unlike cars, houses, and other expensive things, schools and universities are far too complicated for consumers to fairly evaluate on their own. They're also institutions that pursue fundamentally public interests, and thus need to be influenced by publicly-elected officials and organizations in a way that gives society more than what freely-acting consumers and providers would produce on their own. 

Accreditation, properly regulated and designed, is one way to do that, and isn't wholly dissimilar from well-run charter school programs that are answerable to publicly-appointed boards. Either way, or any way, a smart combination of choice and public accountability is the best recipe for education, K-12 and higher alike. 

Obama and McCain (surrogates) debate on education

From what I can tell, this morning's debate on education was the first time Obama and McCain surrogates have squared off head-to-head as representatives for each party's nominee. If today's event was any indication of the general election, Obama needs to bone up on his specifics.

McCain's surrogate, Lisa Graham Keegan, has been around the block and through her own mini-scandals, but today she was competent and commanding. She easily dismissed a question asking if No Child Left Behind was an "unfunded mandate" by explaining the difference between authorizing and appropriating funds and citing the rise in federal education dollars since Bush took office. Being experienced in education technology, she easily answered a question about ways schools can incorporate it into classrooms and teaching. She even made the audience laugh when quoting Milton Friedman (no small task for a roomful of reporters and educators) saying two things are resistant to technology: Congress and American public schools.

By contrast, Obama's surrogate, Jeanne Century, was vague and elusive. Her answer on the technology question focused on raising the floor and ensuring broadband access. These are great goals, but Century seemed almost awed at technology, discussing cellphones and the Internet in an airy tone suggestive of some far-off future. Century dismissed the Department of Ed's recent focus on "scientifically based research," at one point saying flat-out it, "makes our research less rigorous." I understand that randomly assigned, control group experimental designs limit what can be studied a little due to cost and ethical considerations, but to call it less rigorous is certainly not the right choice of words.

On a question about dual-language programs, Century waffled because we don't know which languages they should be. She cited the statistics that, by 2010, a third of our students will come from a home where the primary language is not English, and that some schools have students with as many as 100 native languages. While these are important numbers to recognize, they shouldn't paralyze us into inaction or discourage dual-language schools and classrooms. We can make some decisions, right?

Most troubling, Century refused to give a concrete example of how to measure effective teaching, instead preferring to defer to local district and union officials to battle it out. In other words, keep the status quo. On an issue some were calling Obama's "Sister Souljah" for his inclusion of merit pay in an NEA address las summer, surely the candidate has a better answer than this.

These events are usually pretty mundane affairs, but I found myself particularly underwhelmed this morning. As someone who usually comes down more on this side of issues, I was dismayed that all the good ideas and all the strength came from McCain and Graham Keegan.

Putting the Teaching Company Out of Business

If you read the New York Times Book Review or similar publications, you've probably noticed advertisements for "The Teaching Company," which sells audio recordings of college lectures. They've been around for a while and imagine NYT advertising space isn't cheap, so there must be a market here.  I've always been vaguely tempted to buy one, if only to pick up some of the stuff I missed while chronically skipping class as an undergraduate. But I haven't, primarily because it's expensive: they charge $270 for CD recordings and $199 for Internet downloads, which is a lot of money for a product with a marginal cost of production of essentially zero. I downloaded two albums by The Submarines from EMusic yesterday for less than ten clams total--that seems like a better deal.

Fortunately, there's now an alternative to giving The Teaching Company two hundred dollars. You can give Yale University no dollars for something better. The Open Yale Courses Web site, which debuted late last year, offers a raft of well-produced, full-video lecture courses in a variety of subjects, for free. This is a growing trend in higher education, and it raises a lot of interesting questions.  Such as: How can Yale give away a product it's selling to its students for $50,000 a year? The answer, of course, is that Yale isn't giving away the credentialing part of higher education, which is the key to maintaining the exclusivity on which all elite colleges are based. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today. 

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.