Stop, Thief

So it's a few minutes before 2AM last night and Maureen and I are sitting at the bar in the downtown Baltimore Holiday Inn, talking to the sound guy for The Hold Steady, a band I started listening to a couple of years ago after buying their album, Boys and Girls in America, solely because it ended up near the top of a whole bunch of Best of 2006 lists from publications I like, such as The Onion. On first listen I was sort of unimpressed -- solid, entertaining bar rock to be sure, but lacking, I don't know--greatness? But that opinion started to change on the second go 'round, and then more so on the third, fourth, fifth, and tenth. And it turned to unreserved admiration after seeing them live at the 9:30 Club. Watching most bands live is fun but ultimately not much more than listening to a bunch of albums you like, by a band you like, played on shuffle, through a really great stereo, at a much louder volume than your neighbors will allow at home, standing alongside a bunch of like-minded fans who, like you, are in the process of enjoying numerous socially lubricating beverages. The Hold Steady, by contrast, are transcendent in concert, inhabiting an alternate reality of greatness, multiplied by 100 and then some. That band live is the closest you can get to joy in two hours while keeping your clothes on.


Anyway, we left the venue, which was in a somewhat horrible pre-fab restaurant and entertainment complex in Baltimore that Maureen aptly described as Applebee's rock and roll, and went out for a while before ending up back at the Holiday Inn, where we had Pricelined a cheap room because I'm getting too old to drive back down the Baltimore-Washington parkway at 1AM after a night on the town. And there they were, the sound guy, another roadie, and lead singer Craig Finn, who's sort of the dorkiest Midwestern rock-god-cool frontman in the world. There was nobody else -- The Hold Steady apparently has no groupies of note. Finn left after a half-hour and we ended up chatting with the sound guy. Audiences in Great Britain are the toughest, he says -- they have very specific opinions regarding proper sound mixing and will let you know if you're not getting the job done. We discussed our shared sense that Wall-E looks to be a good movie, and why. Then I asked him a question that had been bugging me: Why, if the band's new album (the much anticipated follow-up to Boys and Girls in America) was scheduled to be released on July 15th, was it available on iTunes now?

"It leaked," he said, grimly. "Probably a reviewer gave it to a friend who put in on Bit-Torrent or something." Given their recent breakout success, a lot of time and effort had gone into packaging, marketing, and timing the release – only to have it all blown to shreds by the leak. So they had no choice to but to put in on iTunes to provide a paying on-line alternative, while the physical CD launch couldn't be changed. "It's still going to hurt retail sales," he said, "Not just because people will already have the album, but because retailers won't want to spend money and shelf space promoting what's seen as an old product."

Which brings me to the subject of stealing music. I know that information wants to be free and that artists make all their money touring and selling merchandise anyway and that the big record companies deserve what they're getting and that music "sharing" builds the fan base in a time where competition for entertainment mindshare is more fierce than ever before, and I know there's some truth in all of those things. But I also know, and I think you do too, that there's a strong element of b.s. to these arguments, the fervency of which is substantially a function of latent guilt over the fact that people can be greedy and cheap and selfish and as such are enjoying the music of The Hold Steady and others like them without paying for it, and there is no real moral justification for this, none at all. For all the critical acclaim, the band is obviously not rich – they were staying in the Holiday Inn, for Pete's sake, and one of the reasons is that people who know better are using the Internet to steal. To whom I say, with good cheer as a fellow music fan and with faith that you can be better: Stop, thief.

Over-Mentored?

I went to an event at AEI yesterday about the effect mentoring has had on the success of new teachers. Jonah Rockoff, economics and finance professor at Columbia, presented his findings on an evaluation of the $40 million NYC mentoring program. You can read more about Rockoff’s results here. Rockoff found slight increases in reading and math scores among teachers who were given more hours of mentoring. Teacher retention within a school was higher when the mentor previously worked in that particular school.

But though he found a strong connection between what teachers said about the quality of their mentor and success in their own classrooms, newbies with mentors were no more likely to remain in the profession on a long term basis. The tepid results drew a response from the panelists representing the UFT and AFT, who challenged that no statistics can match that of countless personal and professional examples they have either experienced in the classroom or seen while supporting those in the classroom. Unfortunately, they did not provide any hard data, only anecdotes. Indeed, there seemed to be a real lack of consensus among the panelists as to what mentoring really means. Thankfully, a woman finally stood up during the q and a and asked, “How are we defining mentoring?”

This is the exact question I contemplated this past year, as I finished my first year as a Teach for America 8th grade language arts teacher in Charlotte, NC. We’re often told that new teachers have little support, causing them to leave the field within three years, but in my experience, I was overwhelmed with those looking to pass on wisdom, encouragement, and advice. Four different mentors seemed to have four different ideas as to their obligations and role as a support system. I found myself confused and uncertain of their purpose, but confident that the vagueness and excess support was stressing me out! Were we to meet sporadically and informally to discuss upcoming lessons, troubleshoot for the problem-child, and lament the newfound struggle to multitask, or was this a formal, regular meeting to evaluate my strategy and skillfulness or lack thereof?

If the purpose of mentoring is to provide support in order to keep good teachers and make them better, then the responsibility of a mentor must be clear to both parties involved. When there are numerous goals and assorted models of mentoring, it is clear that we need to find “a best practice” in carrying out these programs. Mentoring is one of those good ideas in theory, but is far more complicated than it seems. Until we really understand what we are-and aren’t-trying to accomplish with mentoring programs, it is likely that like the NYC program, we will not accomplish much.

- Posted by Laura Guarino

in no other industry

In no other industry is a man allowed to etch a cross into a child's arm and keep his job. Only now, six months later and a lawsuit filed, did the district seek to fire 8th grade science teacher John Freshwater.

This story is ripe with missteps. The principal dealt with 11 years of complaints. The district failed to respond to high school science teachers chronicling how his students needed to be re-taught the curriculum every year. A former superintendent tried to re-assign him but couldn't because Freshwater was "only certified in science." To top it all off, in December he burned a cross into a student's arm that lasted 3-4 weeks. Yet, the district waited until May to hire a private consultant to document Freshwater's misconduct in order to fire him. That report, while damning, should have been unnecessary.

There are a lot of news stories making this about Freshwater's teaching of creationism in his 8th grade science curriculum. That's not what's relevant here. What is relevant is that, after the cross incident, it took the district six months, a lawsuit, and a report from a private contractor to finally muster the evidence to fire the teacher who burned a cross into a student's arm. I can't repeat that enough.

NCLB this and that

The Hoff notes some new poll numbers that show some racial / ethnic differences in perceptions of No Child Left Behind:

Forty-one percent of blacks and 39 percent of Hispanics believe that NCLB has helped improve their schools. Only 21 percent of African-Americans and 23 percent of Hispanics say the law is hurting their schools. (The rest says there's no difference.) By contrast, 27 percent of whites say the law is helping schools, 31 percent say it is hurting, and 27 percent say it hasn't had an impact.

This shouldn't be surprising, and the explanation is pretty simple: minority groups like NCLB better than whites because NCLB is in fact better for minority groups than for whites. As Eduwonk noted last week, there are resource allocation and prioritization choices embedded in NCLB and any other kind of education law. The authors of NCLB saw an education landscape in which minority, poor and disadvantaged students were falling short in resources and success by every available measure, and so they deliberately designed a system that would change allocations and priorities accordingly. And it seems to be working; as this week's CEP report found, "Student scores on state tests of reading and mathematics have risen since 2002, and achievement gaps between various groups of students have narrowed more often than they have widened."

While lots of things besides NCLB have happened in the last six years that affect student achievement, and the overall improvement is less robust than many hoped, it seems pretty clear at this point that the law is moving things the way it intended: getting more students to basic proficiency levels in reading and math, with an emphasis on traditionally disadvantaged students. That has undoubtedly come at a cost in some areas--we may be paying less attention to other subjects, or to high achievers, or to non-disadvantaged students. That's not a "flaw," as many would have it, but a choice--the kind of choice that grown-ups make, and a choice that I think is more than justified given the catastrophic and all-too-common educational failure that marginalized students have traditionally experienced. It's not, however, a zero-sum choice--I'm pretty sure that a unit of educational resources transfered from a well-off student to a disadvantaged student produces a net gain to society, in that the former student has an abundance of out-of-school resources to fall back on, while the latter does not.

Eduwonkette tries to take on the equity assumptions underlying the proficiency-based NCLB model by saying:

There are at least two ways of thinking about the relationship between achievement and kids' life chances. The first is to consider, in absolute terms, the set of skills that students have. The second views achievement as relative. Most coveted opportunities - jobs, college admission, a good grade in a college course, or positive evaluations in the workplace - are not divvied up based on students crossing an arbitrary line of proficiency or competence. We don't give everyone a job who's passed a basic reading test, nor do we admit everyone to UC-Berkeley who's received more than a 700 on the verbal SAT. Every student in a college course at NYU can't get an A, and faculty measure students' performance against others to assign grades. In short, all of these decisions are made by comparing the performance of those in a pool, and choosing those who come out near the top.

The proficiency view, to my mind, is certainly important to consider when we are thinking about building stocks of human capital. But if we are concerned about inequality and social stratification - ensuring that, on average, every demographic and socioeconomic group is equally prepared to compete in higher education and the workplace - relative achievement measured on a continuous scale is what matters, not proficiency rates.

I take her point but still think this is most wrong. At the very upper reaches of society, like UC-Berkeley or a super-selective university in New York City, this is true. But for the vast majority of people, the relationship between education and opportunity is much more a matter of passing through various gates / getting over various hurdles / choose your metaphor, each of which is based on meeting a specific, non-relative standard. You need to learn enough to graduate from high school, and then enough to get into college, and then enough to earn a college degree, and then enough to land a career-oriented job. Once you're in the job, the relative stuff starts to make a difference. But you're a whole lot better off being in the 10th percentile of bachelor's degree holders than the 90th percentile of high school dropouts in this country. Specific milestones and credentials matter, a lot. And there really are levels of learning that have absolute meaning, particularly with respect to literacy and numeracy, which is why--surprise!--NCLB focuses there.

The Baby Borrowers

NBC debuted a new reality show tonight called The Baby Borrowers. Five teenage (unmarried) couples attempt to parent a baby for three days. It's horrendously riveting television.

Tonight's episode began by introducing the couples. First there's the stereotypes. The show describes Kelly and Austin as the "preppy Southern couple," Daton and Morgan as the Southern California surfers, and Alicea and Cory as children of teenage parents who want to experience it themselves. Sean and Kelsey are from New Hampshire. Sean's trying to prove to Kelsey they aren't ready for a baby, and Kelsey's trying to prove they are. And then there's Jordan and Sasha, the only normal, loving couple in the bunch.

The couples are brought in mini-vans to a cul-de-sac of new homes, one for each of them. After getting a chance to settle in, the girls must don pregnancy vests for a day that starts with them all getting instruction from a registered nurse. Kelly, the Southern belle, flips out at the weight of the vest, begins crying, and refuses to leave the house. Austin feebly attempts to get her to leave, but, after he fails, goes to the class alone. Kelly spends the day crying in bed.

After returning home, the couples receive boxes of toys, diapers, and a crib, which they must assemble before the babies arrive. In the show's only real tender moment, Jordan understands that Sasha is worn out from wearing the pregnancy vest all day and tells her to lie down while he puts the crib together.

The babies arrive the following morning. The parents express various reasons for participating in the experiment, give the teenagers basic instructions, and then leave. Of course, the show takes precautions. The parents are able to watch the action unfold from a live feed, and trained nannies watch over the teenagers at all times.

Hilarity ensues, assuming you can laugh at ten teenagers in charge of a babies. This week's episode treated us to only 12 hours of real time passage, yet we've already seen one teenage "mother" giving up in frustration (Alicea) and one unexpected surprise: the tables have turned on Kelsey, who feels the baby likes Sean more than her. Next week, one of the teenage parents will have to go to work while one stays at home.

My biggest question left unanswered is what's in this for the participating parents. Why would they let their child be taken for three days by incredibly nervous, angsty teenagers? I only hope the babies are getting college scholarships out of this...

Casting Blame

Richard DiFeliciantonio, who is the vice president for enrollment at Ursinus College, and who if I'm not mistaken put out a very popular cover of "Light My Fire" back in the day, wrote an op-ed($) in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week decrying "America's Damaging Lack of Investment of Higher Education." As evidence, he notes that:

The dwindling role of the Pell Grant is a case study in how changing national priorities have resulted in fewer opportunities for the less wealthy. Not long after the program was established, in the 1970s, a Pell Grant covered more than 50 percent of a student's direct costs at a public four-year college and peaked at almost 80 percent. Today the average grant covers only about 30 percent of tuition, room, and board.

Moreover, in constant dollars, the average Pell Grant has remained virtually unchanged, while college tuition has skyrocketed.

"Moreover"? Shouldn't that read "That's because" or perhaps even "In Congress' defense"? He's saying that in the 1970s Congress established a financial aid program for lower-income students and funded it at a level that covered most of the cost of college. Over the years, Congress boosted funding so that the grants would keep up with inflation, plus added more money to account for the fact that more students are going to college. The latter factor has been particularly expensive in recent years as the demographic wave of the baby boom echo has crested; as the College Board noted in a recent report (See Table 1b) total Pell grant funding increased by 73% in constant dollars from 1997 to 2007.

Yet during the same time colleges and universities collectively engaged in a two decade-long festival of tuition hikes that shows no sign of letting up anytime soon, radically devaluing the Pell grant relative to students costs. How, exactly, is this public disinvestment?

Worth Repeating

Matt Yglesias makes a point that can't be made often enough (we make it here at least once a year): when you compare urban school districts on a common measure (the NAEP) and break the numbers out by socioeconomic status, some are much better than others. Which, to my mind, suggests that it's reasonable to focus on the school districts that are doing worse (e.g. DC) and expect that they could improve, a lot.

Of course NAEP results are only one measure but when you look at these districts from other perspectives the results tend to be similar. So when the Washington Post gave the pre-Fenty/Rhee DCPS the full-scale investigative journalism treatment, lo and behold they found that all kinds of non-NAEP reasons to believe that the city schools were, in fact, quite terrible. New York City, by contrast, does quite well on the NAEP compared to other districts and when the new state-specific (i.e. non-NAEP) NYC tests results were released today--hey, major gains. It's hard not to see the pattern.

There's going to be a lot of back-and-forth in the coming days about how much of these gains are legit, and this is a healthy conversation to have. Test scores increases are plausibly the result of many things, virtuous and otherwise. But on some level it's going to be tricky for those who simultaneously think that public education needs large new infusions of money but can't be expected to boost test scores for poor and minority students to argue their way through this, since New York City has in fact received large amounts of new money in the past decade, made teacher salaries more competitive with surrounding suburbs, reduced the percentage of uncertified teachers, won a massive school funding lawsuit, etc., etc. Maybe some of that stuff worked? And, thus, maybe we should raise our expectations for how much NYC educators can accomplish on behalf of their students?

TEACH

It's unfortunate when good ideas become bad policies. Today's posting of final regulations for the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant program serves as just such an example. The rules take effect July 1.

The TEACH grants sound like a great idea on the surface: give students who agree to teach in low-income, high-needs areas $4,000 grants for up to four years while they attend accredited education programs. It's the details that become sticky:

• The "grants" aren't really grants at all; they convert automatically to loans if the student doesn't meet certain conditions. Recipients must teach four academic years in a high-poverty school and in a high-needs area, by at most eight years after finishing coursework.
  

• Interest accumulates from the moment the student receives the TEACH "grant," not from the time they fail to meet their commitment.
  

• Regardless of how long the teacher taught, if it's less than four years, he or she owes the full amount (plus the aforementioned interest).
  

• No matter how many years the student received the "grants," he or she must commit to the full four-year teaching requirement.
  

• "High-needs" does not stay the same year-to-year. While some categories of teachers would be guaranteed by federal law to meet the "high-needs" requirement, those qualifying under state rules would be more susceptible to changes. If a TEACH recipient moved to a different state or if their home state changed their "high-needs" definition, they may suddenly have to pay off what they once thought was a grant. This document shows the changes over time of state teacher shortage areas. Compare any two states, or even a single state over time, and the differences are striking. North Dakota, for example, had 19 teacher shortage areas in 2007-8 while South Dakota had only six. Kansas had 14 areas in 2006-7, but only seven this year. Michigan had elementary teachers listed from 2002 to 2004, but hasn't since (the inclusion of elementary teachers is particularly important, because the federal regulations deal with them ambiguously).
  

With regulations like these, it's no surprise that the Congressional Budget Office estimated 80% of TEACH "grant" recipients will fail to meet the teaching requirement, and thus will face significant new loans.

Transfer to Nowhere

I was having lunch with a colleague last week, and she told me a story about her daughter, who began college at a public four-year university in Virginia and eventually decided to transfer to another public four-year university in Virginia. Upon arriving at the second university, she asked how many of the credits she earned at the first university would transfer over. The answer was, "we don't know -- we're looking into it." One of the courses they didn't know about was introduction to geology, taken at a university with a national reputation in the sciences. Her parents got so frustrated that they drove to the second university, picked up their daughter, and brought her back to the first one, where she re-enrolled. 

Stories like this are not uncommon in higher education. Credit transfer in America is something of a disaster, with little transparency for students and huge amounts of time and money wasted as transfer students are forced to re-take--and re-pay for--courses because their new college won't accept the old credits--a problem students are invariably alerted to after they make the move. It's a consequence of our decentralized higher education system -- institutional incentives run one way while public and student interests run another. There's got to be a better way -- as I explain in this new column in InsideHigherEd. 

Education, Citizenship and Need

I spent the middle of this week in Colorado at an Aspen Institute conference on higher education. It was great (the conference and Aspen both) and a couple of ideas really stuck with me.

One came from economist (and ES non-resident senior fellow) Tony Carnevale, who made the point that in America, work is the essential obligation of citizenship. Not (as is often said) voting--lots of people don't vote and there are few policies or social norms that penalize non-voting. Work, on the other hand--you're expected to work, and the consquences of not working are severe, more so (often much more so) than in other societies. And given that the ability to work productively is increasingly tied to education, preparation for work--education--is increasingly a non-negotiable obligation of citizenship too.

People understand this, which is why the percentage of beginning high schools students (and their parents) who expect to go to college now hovers near 90 percent, with similar numbers for students of differing race/ethnicity. As public opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich noted, this puts consumers in an interesting relationship with higher education. They generally admire colleges and universities, for good reasons. But they also understand that they need higher education, because they can't go anywhere else for the training and credentials that open the door to economic opportunity. They feel like they have a right to be able to enroll in an affordable college that meets their needs. They're increasingly frustrated by the fact that college costs more and more--and they see those rising costs as stemming from the fact that higher education essentially has them over a barrel. This creates a danger of growing public resentment that could undermine the good will on which so much of higher education's elevated standing is based.

Yankelovich drew a parallel to research he conducted for AT&T back in the 70s, when it was Ma Bell. People would get enraged over problems with their phone service, he said, not because the problems were so terrible in an absolute sense, but because they couldn't not have phone service and they couldn't buy phone service from anyone else. They felt powerless, and people really don't like to feel powerless. While I grew up in the post-Bell breakup era, I've certainly had the same reaction to various cable television providers over the years--those %#%&*!s made me wait five hours to turn my service on and they still jack up prices by eight percent every year. In the grand scheme of things it didn't matter much--what's a few hours and a few bucks a month? But--particularly in the pre-satellite dish era--it was the fact that I had no choice that got my goat.

All of which makes me think that if higher education doesn't come to grips with the problem of runaway cost increases, a combination of growing public resentment and new organizations clamoring to get into the market will change the post-secondary landscape more quickly than some might imagine, in ways that are unforseeable and with consequences that society would do well to avoid.

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.