The Math of Merit Pay

Bured in yesterday's Ed Week write-up ($) of McCain's speech was a quote that nicely sums up the common concerns over merit pay:

Bettye Oldham, a retired teacher from Cincinnati, said she had mixed feelings about the merit-pay proposal.

“I think it’s a good idea if it’s run correctly,” she said. “But you can’t judge teachers the way you can judge manufacturing companies.” Some students come to school with “issues that prevent them from learning,” she said, which can make it harder for teachers to reach them.

I picture what Ms. Oldham might look like, and I can see her mulling the pros and cons of merit pay. She's probably worried that it would reduce teachers to nothing more than cogs on an assembly line, but also understands the implicit logic that good doctors and lawyers make more money than bad ones. Teachers, on the other hand, are paid only by credentials--all teachers in the same district with a bachelor's degree and 12 years experience, for instance, are paid the exact same amount no matter their talent or specialty area.

Merit pay seeks to measure some of the work teachers do. While the precise math is a little too complicated for this blog, in essence it looks like a fairly straightforward algebra problem:

Student achievement = age + prior achievement + student demographic information + teacher quality + measurement error

A common argument against merit pay, and the one repeated by Ms. Oldham, is that there are too many human elements for the measurement of teaching. But that argument overlooks even the simple version of the merit pay equation. Race, income and prior achievement are all factored in, and the error term captures all those things that are not predictable--a student's situation at home, whether they had a good breakfast, whether it's too hot or cold, etc.--all things that surely affect the student's score but are not measurable.

It might seem a little too whiz-bang to trust the capabilities of modern statistical computer programs, but mathematicians far greater than I are working to refine the exact statistical equations. We've made giant strides in our ability to compute the value an individual teacher adds to student learning. Let's not let fear of complex, modern math get in the way of promising reform.

Update: Fred Klonsky responds with the "human element" argument. He's making my point for me though, because it really goes back to a fear of assessment of teachers' work. We are comfortable measuring a baseball player's batting average, even if they had a bad breakfast, a rough flight the night before, or an argument with their spouse. In fact, their results are published the next morning in your daily paper. I can't imagine A-Rod explaining poor results on the field with his off-field Madonnna shenanigans. There are "human elements" to everything in life.

Un-Advanced

John McCain spent a lot of time in his NAACP speech in Cincinnati yesterday talking about the many teacher reforms he'd put in place--performance pay, a greater role for principals in staffing matters, and peer evaluations, among them. If McCain's education advisors had been on the ball, they would have told the presumptive Republican presidential nominee that those very reforms are already in place in Cincinnati, with the blessing of the local teacher union, no less. The question is, What have the reforms wrought there?

Where's Rick, Someone Call Rick

"All I can say is that President Weingarten's early signals do no credit to Al Shanker's legacy."

McCain Speaks

In his long-awaited (if you're an education policy person, which admittedly narrows the field somewhat) education speech, Senator McCain said:

We should also offer more choices to those who wish to become teachers. Many thousands of highly qualified men and women have great knowledge, wisdom, and experience to offer public school students. But a monopoly on teacher certification prevents them from getting that chance. You can be a Nobel Laureate and not qualify to teach in most public schools today. They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" -- all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it. If we're putting the interests of students first, then those qualifications should be enough.

I'm generally sympathetic to policies aimed at opening up the teaching profession, because it seems clear that success in the classroom is a function of multiple factors (experience, subject matter knowledge, pedagogical skills, training, work ethic, verbal ability, general smartness, innate talent for teaching) some of which are given undue weight under the current system and some of which are basically ignored. The world's greatest teacher would have all of these qualities in spades, but of course such people are few and far between and it's apparent from the track record of initiatives like Teach for America and some of the better alt-cert programs that people can be reasonably successful with less of some things (experience, training) if they have enough of the others.

That said, I hate this sentence: "They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" -- all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it." Putting words like theory and methodology between contemptuous quotes (shouldn't we invent a new punctuation mark to distinguish those from regular quotes?) is ridiculous. Teaching is an extremely complicated endeavor. A teacher's ability to share knowledge (which is in itself an extremely reductive conception of what teaching actually means) is naturally going to be improved by a solid understanding of theory and methods. Of course some ed schools teach those things badly or over-emphasize them, but that's no reason to dismiss them out of hand.

This is garden variety anti-intellectualism and doesn't speak well of Senator McCain's approach to policy or other matters. One could imagine, for example, that having a lot of knowledge about war and a desire to conduct wars but lacking a larger theoretical understanding of geo-politics and the methods of statecraft might lead one to actively support a ruinous foreign war and then continue to support it even after its ruinousness has become obvious for all to see.

In theory.

Realism and Anonymity

Thoughts on a couple of recent blog-related discussions:

First, I endorse Eduwonk's take on NAEP scores and their meaning in relation to recent state-specific assessment results. The recent dramatic test score gains in New York and now Maryland have produced a spate of circular reasoning on the part of the "NCLB is a conspiracy to destroy public education and pave the way for Wal-Mart to take over the schools" crowd. That argument holds that the pace of improvement and narrowing of class-based achievement disparities envisioned under the law are absurd and unrealistic--thus, the conspiracy. As evidence, they note that such improvement has never happened before. Now that it's actually happening, the argument is, apparently, that it can't actually be happening, because it's never happened before. Or something.  

Second, it's clarifying to read Eduwonkette's back-and-forth with Jay Greene. The basic problem is that she's jumbling up a discussion of peer review with a discussion of motive and and anonymity. Here she puts blog posts, think tank publications, and academic research on a single continuum of "credibility," asserting that peer-reviewed research is most credible, think stuff less so, and blogs least of all.  But this misses the obvious point that credibility and the processes used to ensure it are highly dependent on purpose. 

The purpose of academic research is to inform, to add to a collective body of knowledge. As a result, credibility assurance processes have been developed that make sense given that purpose, primarily peer review and transparency of sources and methods. Motive and authorship aren't as important--when I read an article in an academic journal, I'm less concerned with who did the work than how they did it, where the data came from and what methods were used for analysis. It wouldn't really bother me if authorship were attributed to "An assistant professor at Columbia University" as opposed to an actual named person; the format of academic research is such that the things I need to know to judge credibility are right there in black and white, or embedded in the journal's publicly stated peer review process.

The purpose of blogs, by contrast, as with all opinion writing, is to persuade. And the motive to persuade always comes from somewhere--agendas, convictions, ideologies, etc. Unlike academic research, opinions and arguments can't be evaluated purely on their own terms. And this is reflected in the credibility-assurance practices of organizations that are in the business of publishing opinions. Op-eds in the Washington Post, for example, always have a little blurb at the end telling the reader who the author is. There's a reason: Imagine if you read a column arguing that climate change isn't such a big problem after all, written by Jane Smith. If you saw that Jane was a p.r. flack for ExxonMobil, you'd take it one way. If you saw that she was the president of the Sierra Club, you'd take it another, and for good reason. Same words, different meaning. 

Motives and affiliations matter, particularly in the realm of opinion. That's why respectable publications like Education Week don't publish anonymous op-eds. Heck, they don't even publish anonymous letters to the editor. Why they've abandoned this logical, time-honored standard when it comes to their officially-endorsed blogs, I really don't understand. 

McCain Goes Virtual for Education

Today, during his speech to the NAACP, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain released his education plan. And, for a man who only last week was learning to go online (sorry, couldn't resist), it's a strong start.

John McCain Supports Expanding Virtual Learning By Reforming The "Enhancing Education Through Technology Program." John McCain will target $500 million in current federal funds to build new virtual schools and support the development of online course offerings for students. These courses may be for regular coursework, for enhancement, or for dual enrollment into college.

John McCain Will Allocate $250 Million Through A Competitive Grant Program To Support States That Commit To Expanding Online Education Opportunities. States can use these funds to build virtual math and science academies to help expand the availability of AP Math, Science, and Computer Sciences courses, online tutoring support for students in traditional schools, and foreign language courses.

John McCain Will Offer $250 Million For Digital Passport Scholarships To Help Students Pay For Online Tutors Or Enroll In Virtual Schools. Low-income students will be eligible to receive up to $4,000 to enroll in an online course, SAT/ACT prep course, credit recovery or tutoring services offered by a virtual provider. Providers could range from other public schools, virtual charter schools, home school parents utilizing virtual schooling resources or district or state sponsored virtual schools. The Department of Education would competitively award the funds to a national scholarship administrator who would manage the student applications, monitoring, and evaluation of providers.

I'm pleased to see Senator McCain up the ante on the $120 million virtual schooling innovation fund that I proposed last year. One important emphasis that is missing from Senator McCain's plan is a focus on innovation. While his fund as proposed would likely spur the development of more virtual learning experiences, it would not capitalize on digital learning's unique potential for rapid innovation and improvement. I guess it's ok for the federal government to provide scholarships, but a much more highly leveraged federal role would research how digital learning could improve instruction and then, importantly, rapidly spread these improvements. As I recommended in my report Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education:

Each grantee would have to develop a plan to pilot test, evaluate, and replicate a project in one or more virtual school programs within two years. Over time, grantees with the strongest records of having their innovations adopted by others would get preference for additional funding. All materials, methods, technologies, and data developed through the fund would be available for adoption via a public and freely available open source model.

Senator Obama, who has leveraged the Internet extensively in his campaign, is largely silent on these issues. Perhaps he will consider enhancing his education plan.

Too Weird for The Wire

A little over four months ago, after weeks of dutiful episode summaries and commentary, I posted a short piece about the final episode of The Wire, promising to follow up with more. Alas, I never got around to it, and the guilt has been haunting me ever since.  So, as a gesture of contrition to our loyal readership, I've written a whole magazine article in this month's Washington Monthly about a group of drug dealers from West Baltimore--essentially the real-life guys from The Wire--who are defending themselves against a massive federal drugs/weapons/conspiracy/murder indictment using constitutional fundamentalist legal theories developed by white supremacists, gun nuts, Timothy McVeigh militia / patriot crazy people, etc. Featuring cameo appearances by Geraldo Rivera, Toby Keith, and former heavyweight boxing champion Hasim Rahman, plus some really terrible rap lyrics. 

Set The Research Free!

While Jay Greene and Eduwonkette are going back and forth about peer-reviewed versus think thank research, I’m wondering how you get your hands on all this great, peer-reviewed research in the first place.

Last week, the journal Nature announced that it was offering researchers the option of making their publications available for free online. This allows people beyond the elite world of academic institutions to gain access to this research - a smart move for researchers who want their work read and utilized beyond the small world of academics who subscribe to these journals. As a field that seeks to provide information to people outside of academia—teachers, school leaders, non-profit organizations—the education research world should be a leader in providing free, online access to academic articles. Instead, much high-quality, peer-reviewed research is locked away in a multitude of expensive journals with little attempt to make the research affordable or easily accessible.

Yesterday, for example, I tried to access an article in a peer-reviewed education research publication. I tried getting the article through an education research database that Education Sector subscribes to—a database that is supposed to provide us with full text articles from this particular journal. But, as it turns out, there is a 12-month delay in getting articles from this journal. In order to get access to the most recent research, I would need to pay $30 for one article, which may or may not provide what I need—I don’t know because I only have the abstract on which to base my purchasing decision.

Note to academia: this is not an effective method for getting people to read or use your research.

I guess I’ll just have to turn to research from another think tank or policy organization—it may not be peer reviewed, but it’s accessible. And in a world with online access to nearly everything, that just may be more important.

First Come First Serve

Per below, the comments on today's student debt column are really a must-read, here's one:

Senior Citizensin Student Loan Debt and credit
I have rearely , if ever, seen anything written about the plight of many senior citizens who carry old student loan debt. I graduated university in 1985 [ some loans dating from ‘81]. My loan debt ballooned because of the interest,yes, but more importantly, I had a family crisis [ terminally ill child]and I was physically and emotionally unable to begin to address the issies. I WAS in contact with the banks and the USDE. At one point [ late 80s] I eas even willing to collect soda cans and bottles [ that’s all I could do because I was homeless] but I was told “that’s not good enough.” It wasn’t until I get good jobs inthe late 90s and 2000 that I could begin to pay anything. Now I am living on ONLY Social Security; I AM paying on my loans, but the staggering sum of interest accrued is enough to send me to cardiac arrest. I wish there were some relief! If there is any will someone PLEASE tell me!

Dee DeMusis, at 10:35 am EDT on July 14, 2008

Now, I know for a fact that there are journalists out there who read this blog. Come one--this piece writes itself! You've got impoverished senior citizens AND the health care crisis AND uncaring student loan companies, all wrapped up in a compelling personal story that provides a fresh angle on a hot issue. Your lede's already written! Track this poor woman down and take the rest of the week off, your work is done!

Fat Cats

Kevin pre-empted my post on today's DC Examiner, but there's even more to it than Kevin described.

Today's story gave us the base salary and other compensation for eight local superintendents, including Jack Dale, superintendent of Fairfax County. Dale will make $292,000 in base salary this year, plus a $62,000 retirement contribution. He runs an agency responsible for educating 165,000 students with 13,090 teachers and 26,778 total staff members with a budget over $2 billion. Just down the road from Dale and Fairfax County schools is George Mason University. Its president, Alan G. Merten, made $642,500 ($) in total compensation in 2006-7 including a car and a house. Merten's school educates 30,000 students a year and has a $750 million budget. Who's better paid, Dale or Merten?

The Examiner piece also provides its own rebuttal. It lists eight local superintendent salaries, and all earn total compensation packages between $250 and $350,000. Eight separate school boards determined the appropriate compensation level for their chief executive, and they all offered salaries in this range. This suggests the salaries were market-based.

The story today wasn't an isolated incident. The New York Times ran a piece last week along the exact same lines. It chronicled the severance package of Barbara Trzeszkowski, employed in Keansburg, New Jersey for 38.5 years, first as a long-time teacher and then as superintendent. Keansburg is known as an "Abbott district," so-called for its eligibility for state funds targeting extremely needy schools. Buried in the article mainly critical of her financial windfall was this quote:

Joe Hazeldine, who was chairman of the Keansburg school board and a member of the personnel committee at the time Ms. Trzeszkowski’s most recent contract was negotiated, defended it recently from his home in North Carolina. He said Ms. Trzeszkowski was “worth every single penny she earned, if not more.”

“She’s a remarkable administrator,” Mr. Hazeldine said. “She took Keansburg from the bottom of the Abbott districts to the top. Our college acceptance rate quadrupled. We had kids going to Ivy League schools. That doesn’t just happen. How do you put a price on that?

In education, apparently, we must.

Shameful

One of the things you learn when writing for newspapers and magazines--something that's not at all obvious otherwise--is that the process by which a finished package of article and headline comes together actually consists of multiple, semi-connected parts. Basically you come to an agreement with your editor about the essential thrust and structure of the piece, write it, work with the editor on modifications etc., until it's finished. Then, in an entirely separate process, somebody, often a separate third party, comes up with the title and accompanying blurb--the "hed" and "dek" in publishingese. Then if you're lucky enough to get your piece on the cover, somebody--possibly another person--comes up with another headline, accompanying blurb, etc. Oftentimes you don't even find out what your article is going to be titled until it's published.

This process can produce some strange juxtapositions, particularly when the various parties involved are working from different imperatives. The editor, if she's good at her job, will be concerned with matters such as clarity, logic, concision, fairness, persuasiveness, and accuracy. The headline-writer, by contrast, tends to be more focused on coming up with something pithy and attention-grabbing. And this is doubly true, or more so, for the cover headline-writer, where degrees of grabbiness translate directly into circulation and sales.

Unfortunately, the system can sometimes go awry and result in a "telephone"-like iterative process of escalating sensationalism, as with this piece in today's DC Examiner, which looks at how much money the superintendents of the area's large public school districts are paid. Basically, they do pretty well in the grand scheme of things, making $200,000 to $400,000 per year plus benefits. Which isn't nothing, but as the article notes, these are immensely difficult jobs that involve running some of the largest school districts in the United States. There's not a single quote in the article from anyone who thinks they're overpaid. And as an accompanying sidebar notes, their salaries are chump change compared to what the leaders of big, locally-based private corporations make, i.e. the $31 million pulled down by the CEO of Lockheed Martin.

The hed for this article is "Packages for schools chiefs full of bonuses, lucrative retirement" along with a semi-compensatory dek: "Benefits commensurate with job's long hours, criticism, officials say." This teeters on the edge of sensationalism but I can sort of live with it. The cover, by contrast, is a whole different story: "Fat cat edu-crats: High pay, lavish perks enrich schools chiefs"

That's just shameful. It's journalism of the lowest order. It does a disservice to the author and frankly embarrasses everyone involved with the Examiner, which is a free paper distributed in boxes around the DC metro area. The vast majority of passers-by who glance at that cover aren't going to flip through to page 4 to read the whole article with the lack of criticism, the Lockheed comparison, and all the rest. They're just going to mentally file it away as one more piece of evidence that public education is inefficient and ridiculous, that the government is over-taxing them and wasting their money on feckless bureaucrats. They'll be a little more filled with unjustified anger toward the public sector. They'll "know" one more thing that's actually wrong. All so the Examiner can sell a little more advertising, never mind the truth.

Indebted

One of the real flaws in the way news is perceived and communicated lies with the way people think about change in the short- and long-terms. There's a bias toward volatility -- important things that yank around a lot, up and down, tend to garner more attention than things that don't. The stock market is a perfect example; while the long-term trend is upward, on any given day the major indices can rise or fall, leading to daily news stories seeking to explain why. Ninety percent of the time this is total b.s.--absent some kind of huge and obviously meaningful financial event, nobody can accurately interpret the collective meaning of the millions of discrete decisions that play out in terms of equity prices. But the stories get written anyway, as do larger stories about the economy, which, being cyclical, tends to always be changing one way or another (it's doing great! now it's tanking! now it's doing great again!).

Steady long-term trends, by contrast, get much less attention--paradoxically, because they're actually more important. A trendline with a constant slope is hard to write a story about, because the "news" today is exactly the same as the news yesterday--so why write about it today? It's not so much change that's newsworthy, in other words, but change in change. The problem is that this logic plays out, day after day, year after year, and one day you look up and the world has become a very different place without anyone seeming to notice--perhaps in a better way, perhaps not.

So it is with college prices and student debt. Every year The College Board puts out a report on college prices, and every year it says exactly the same thing: they're up, a lot, faster than inflation or family income or anything else one might reasonably compare them against. And the impact of this is clear: students have to borrow more money to go college--a lot more. From 1997 to 2007, total student debt increased by 61 percent after adjusting for inflation, to nearly $60 billion per year. This increased reliance on debt has allowed both institutions and public policymakers to avoid making hard decisions about efficiency and affordability in higher education--the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd.

Update: For those of you who haven't clicked through and read the actually column yet -- and really, what's keeping you? We all know reading blogs is the same as working -- the comments below the column itself are fascinating, there are some truly harrowing student debt stories in there, go check them out.

iStan, High School Football, and Data-Driven Reflection

It looked like a makeshift MASH unit from the outside. But inside it was filled with flat-panel monitors displaying patient vital signs, a real-time video feed, and in the middle of the room, a surgical table. iStan, a life-like, sensor filled mannequin, occupied the middle of the table and waited for a team of medical students to diagnose and treat his condition.

Welcome to the state-of-the-art in medical education.

iStan is used by medical and nursing schools to simulate patient interactions and responses. At the table, a medical school instructor told me how he uses both the sensor information (patient vital signs, drugs given, airflow, gas mix in lungs, etc.) and lab video to have detailed discussions with med student teams after a simulation. They can pinpoint who was doing what at any moment (did you really clear the airway?) and show the consequences through the patient's reactions. It's a powerful teaching tool.

Interestingly, this data-driven reflection is also the state of the art in the US Army. It has "instrumentalized" many of its war games and other performance exercises -- using video and sensors to gather multiple sources of data about what is happening and when. As in the medical school simulations, this extensive data can illustrate multiple interactions among team members in a complex situation, leading to very rich "after action" reflective conversations about what happened, why, and how to improve. In both the military and medical education, technology has enabled instructors to use immense amounts of descriptive data to generate powerful and reflective teaching opportunities.

Can we take these concepts to K-12? Actually, we already have. Go visit your high school's football coach and ask him how he uses practice and game video with his team to break down each component of a play.

Immutable Daredevil and the (Possibly Tragically Delayed) Frank Miller Ascendency

Walking out of an afternoon showing of Wall-E last weekend, I noticed some big cardboard movie displays advertising The Spirit, a forthcoming movie based on the classic Will Eisner comic book series, to be written and directed by Frank Miller. We're clearly living in a Frank Miller heyday, and it's been a long time coming. The comics artist and writer burst into prominence in the early 1980s with a seminal run on Daredevil before creating in 1986 what remains his most famous and influential work: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. After breaking with mainstream comics publishers over his objections to industry self-censorship, Miller spent most of the 1990s creating a gritty crime series for Dark Horse Comics called Sin City along with a personal project rooted in a childhood obsession with Spartan warriors, called 300. The latter was, of course, adapted into a phenomenally successful and profitable 2007 film of the same name, grossing close to half a billion dollars worldwide on a $60 million budget. Coming on the heels of Robert Rodriguez's successful 2005 Sin City adaptation ($158 million gross, $40 million budget), it's little wonder that Hollywood is suddenly green-lighting all things Miller. 

In some ways, it's strange that it took so long. Miller's approach to comics has always been intensely and purposefully cinematic; Sin City is pure film noir on paper and even the early Daredevil work featured moody establishing views and rigorous visual coherence. Rather than feature his heroes in exaggerated comic-bookish poses, Miller carefully planned story sequences shot by shot. I bought Daredevil #181 the day it was published, and the double-sized story of Bullseye murdering Daredevil's nemesis/ex-lover Elektra, only to be defeated by Daredevil in an epic battle that raged across the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen, still stands as one of the greatest single comic book issues ever made, and defined the Daredevil character in perpetuity.* 

Much of that material was incorporated into the 2003 Daredevil move adaptation. Yet that movie was mediocre at best, and in retrospect the reason is clear: the film-makers used Miller's stories and characters but failed to take advantage of his single greatest strength: his genius visual style. Rodriguez and 300 director Zach Snyder, by contrast, translated Miller's comics nearly shot for shot, essentially using the panels as a storyboard, and the results speak for themselves. After years toiling in the relative obscurity of comics (and several failed attempts at the movies, see Robocop 2 & 3 (actually, don't)) Miller is finally getting the resources and recognition he deserves.

And yet...it must be said: Frank Miller hasn't done anything good in years. Ten years, to be precise--the 300 mini-series was released in 1998. Looking back, it was clearly his artistic apex, and the resulting fall has been steep. His post-That Yellow Bastard efforts on Sin City were repetitive. He spent years working on a Dark Knight sequel that I frankly can't remember a panel of. And for the the last three years he's been slowly releasing new issues of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, pencilled by Jim Lee. It's shockingly bad. So much so that I seriously wonder whether Miller has suffered some kind of mental break/total artistic collapse; it might be the worst high-profile comic I've ever read. It's badness is all the more painful in contrast to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's simultaneously-released Eisner Award-winning All-Star Superman, which will probably go down as one of the ten or so greatest Superman stories ever told, and, even worse, Miller's previous re-conception of Batman's early years, the four-part 1987 Batman: Year One, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, which in some ways has been just as influential as The Dark Knight (its traces are all over the new Christopher Nolan Batman films). 

There's still some great stuff from Miller's earlier years to tap: another Sin City adaptation is on the way, and someone really ought to make a movie out of the Martha Washington sci-fi series he did with Dave Gibbons. For all its flaws, Ronin could be terrific in the right hands. Heck, even an adaptation of Elektra: Assassin,  goofy and probably unfilmable though it is, would have been way better than the painfully inept cheap-o Jennifer Garner flick of which the less is said the better. 

But to be honest I'm worried that Miller's descent into over-stylization and self-parody, both visually and verbally, is too deep to reverse, and that he'll end up crashing and burning at the very moment when decades of influential work are finally bringing him fame and fortune.

*One of the interesting things about superhero comic books is the total lack of character development in the conventional sense. Because the iconic characters need to last forever for economic reasons, they can't ever change in any significant way. They have beginnings, but never end. As a result, the artistic challenge for the comics superhero creator is less to tell a story than define a situation, a particular combination of character circumstances and external environment within which other writers and artists can explore essential themes. 

Some characters get there right out of the box--the unchallenged big three, Superman, Spider-man and Batman, haven't changed in any truly significant manner since their very first issues. Each was perfect in its own way, and it's not a coincidence that those characters remain vital decades later (and have spawned the most successful movie franchises). Others take longer--the X-Men didn't become the X-Men we know today until Chris Claremont and John Byrne took over the book around the same time that Miller made Daredevil his own.  The Punisher was created in 1974 and was a reliably popular if second-tier anti-hero for years afterward, but there's simply no imagining any other version of the character now that Garth Ennis is finishing up his MAX run and accompanying pre- and postscripts.

And some never get there. As durable and mildly famous as she is, there's never really been a definitive run on Wonder Woman, a fact that Joss Whedon lamented when he was (unsuccessfully) trying to adapt the character for film. The iconic Avengers story turned out to be The Ultimates, which reached its heights even as the Avengers themselves were being disassembled. History suggests that it's actually really difficult to achieve that combination of compelling origin, motivation, personality, powers and milieu that all the great characters have. 

The interesting thing is that once a superhero character is truly defined, it exerts a gravitational force on all future stories that is all but insurmountable. Superman is who he is: alien, noble, decent, powerful, incorruptible, always alone. There are always new ways to explore those qualities--see All-Star Superman, it's really good--but there's no way to change them. That means that while the stories themselves can be moving and gratifying in all the ways good stories are, they rarely have any permanent significance vis a vis the characters themselves. You can, for example, read Miller's Daredevil, which wrapped up in 1984, put it down and then start reading Brian Michael Bendis' Daredevil, which began in 2001, and lose virtually nothing for having missed the hundreds of issues published in between. Bendis isn't continuing the Daredevil story; he's retelling the Miller-defined Daredevil myth. That's why there are few things more absurd than a comics fan complaining about some inconsistency in "continuity" on a major hero; the whole idea of a linear, irreversible chain of time and causality runs counter to the essential logic of the characters and the industry. It's also why the large majority of the best superhero comics published in the last decade came when writers and artists were given the chance to step away from the so-called "regular" books and re-tell the stories with total freedom, i.e. the Ultimate and All-Star lines at Marvel and DC respectively or thinly disguised facsimiles like Alan Moore's Supreme, Kurt Busiek's Astro City, etc. 

 

Shanker Seance Cont'd

Rich Kahlenberg takes to the pages of The American Prospect to apply the Shanker lens to the Sharpton / Klein vs. EPI et al "dueling manifestos" controversy, concluding:

Moving forward, Sen. Barack Obama would do well to agree in part and disagree in part with combatants on both sides of this old war -- something Shanker himself showed was possible by strongly defending the role of teacher unions in education but also challenging union orthodoxy where he believed it was bad for children. The Sharpton/Klein group is right to say schools matter and that teacher unions too often block needed efforts to get rid of bad teachers and encourage great educators to teach in high-poverty schools. Shanker forthrightly acknowledged these problems, supporting bonuses to attract good teachers to low-income schools and backing a "peer review" plan in which teachers judge one another and fire incompetents. Under such programs, more teachers are terminated than when principals evaluate teachers because every good teacher is hurt by the presence of bad teachers in a school.

What Shanker never did, however, was demonize teacher unions or say teachers alone should be held accountable. Oddly missing from the Sharpton/Klein mission statement is any call for student accountability. Why, as Shanker asked, would kids work hard to do well when told: If you fail this test, we won't punish you, but we will punish your teacher? Kids going to selective colleges have a strong incentive to do well, but for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much.

"Learn from both sides" is inherently appealing but I don't think Rich really makes the case here. Where, in anything the Sharpton / Klein folks have to say, is there evidence of "demonizing" teachers unions? This nonsense certainly qualifies as such. But it's not demonizing to suggest that teachers unions support bad policies, any more than its inherently demonizing to disagree with anyone about their policy choices. There is simply no way to have a productive education policy dialogue if anyone who publicly criticizes union positions on the issues automatically gets thrown into the anti-labor camp.

As for the "student accountability" issue, I'll confess to never having really understood what we're missing. Students get grades, and if they don't pass, they don't graduate, which in this day and age is a catastrophic consequence and certainly a sufficient incentive to learn. Of course, it's well known that social promotion is rampant in many schools, which is why some states have decided to only award 12th grade diplomas to students who can pass a 9th or 10th grade (note: not a 12th grade) test. But as a rule, people on the teachers union side of the issues are opposed to such policies. Their positions tend to be less about balance via accountability for everybody and more about accountability for nobody.

Moreover, to say that "for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much" is really, strikingly wrong. Students who go to nonselective colleges still have to take college placement tests, and the majority of them fail those tests, at which point they're assigned to non-credit-bearing remedial classes, paying thousands of dollars out of pocket (increasingly funded by student loans) to re-take courses they were told they passed in high school but really didn't. Remedial college students are far less likely to graduate than their peers. As for those who go into the workforce, is Rich really saying that there's little or no relationship between academic achievement and the ability to do well in a career? If so, why are we even debating the issues, that's a profundly anti-education argument more than anything else. I don't think Al Shanker would approve.

Fox, Meet Henhouse

Depending on who you talk to, Congress is either on the verge of finally passing the long-delayed new version of the federal Higher Education Act, any day now, really, or time has run out and it's all going to get pushed off into 2009 and beyond. Either way, it's worth pointing out that, based on the language currently being considered, Congress is on the verge of doing something very smart and then immediately undermining that smart thing by doing something that's very, um, not smart.

Here's the smart thing: the new law would require colleges and universities to report graduation rates "disaggregated by gender, by each major racial and ethnic subgroup, by recipients of a Federal Pell Grant, by recipients of a [federal student loan], and by recipients of neither a Federal Pell Grant nor a [federal student loan."

This is a commensense and extremely important provision. The federal government spends many billion dollars per year on aid programs for financially needy students, and state governments spend billions more. A whole host of programs, research areas, and controversies exist surrounding the issue of college access for low-income undergraduates. Yet there is shockingly little data about what happens to those students once they get to college. We collect graduation rates for basketball and football players, but not for students receiving financial aid. This clearly needs to change.

Unfortunately, the bill proceeds to add this qualifier: "if the number of students in such subgroup or with such status is sufficient to yield statistically reliable information and reporting will not yield personally identifiable information about an individual student. If such number is not sufficient for such purposes, then the institution shall note that the institution enrolled too few of such students to so disclose or report with confidence."

This seems reasonable, no? It wouldn't make sense to calculate a graduation rate for, say, one student. But here's the problem: the bill as written would allow individual institutions to determine the threshold for "statistically reliable." This is a terrible, terrible idea. It is the road to madness, because inevitably different institutions will choose to interpret the provisions in different, self-serving ways. This is a certainty. Congress made the same mistake when it wrote No Child Left Behind and allowed states to determine which statistical tests to apply in deciding how to hold schools accountable for student performance. Some decided to use a p < .05 test of statistical significance; others chose p < .01. Some decided that five students was the minimum number for reporting results; others decided it was 100 students. Worse, many states change their statistical standards every year.

It's highly likely that at most institutions, students on financial aid graduate at a lower rate than the student body as a whole. This can be embarrassing, further giving colleges reasons to use the most expansive exclusion rules imaginable. And since there are thousands of higher education institutions out there, the U.S. Department of Education won't even be able to do what it does with states under NCLB, which is require them to make their statistical standards public and submit them for approval.

If those goes through as written, here's what will happen: after a number of years, the data will finally be released to the public. Researchers will quickly notice that many institutions with signficant numbers of students on financial aid aren't reporting results as required. When asked, the institutions will say they applied a statistical test, but won't say what the test was. Then the colleges that did report results will argue that, due to the inter-institutional variance in reliability standards, it's unreasonable to compare Pell grant graduation rates at one institution to another, which of course is pretty much the whole point of having them in the first place.

There's a better way, which is the way graduation rates are currently reported: institutions submit all their data, confidentially, to the National Center for Education Statistics, and then NCES applies a uniform statistical standard to all institutions. That's the way it already works with the race and gender disaggregation, and it works perfectly well: small n sizes aren't reported and qualifiers are attached to rates that are statistically less reliable. If this new language goes through the whole thing will end in tears and we'll have to wait another ten years to find out which institutions are doing a good job helping low-income students earn degrees.

(Trying to) follow the money

Public and private funding is pouring into Teach for America as the highly regarded organization expands the number of recent college graduates that it places in some of the nation's toughest-to-staff classrooms. The organization plans to quadruple its operating budget from $40 million to $160 million between 2005 and 2010 as in doubles, to some 8,400, the number of its"corps members" working in disadvanted urban and rural public schools.

But the Office of Inspector General at the US Department of Education has charged TFA with failing to account for half of the $6 million the organization received in federal discretionary grants between 2003 and 2005. The IG's office scrutinized a sample of the federal funds and concluded in a report released last month that "TFA did not fully comply with applicable laws and regulations..." The organization "could not provide adequate supporting documentation [for half of its expenditures] because it lacked sound fiscal accountability controls," the IG's office wrote, adding that, "On several occassions, we requested additional documentation from TFA's Vice President of Accounting and Controls, but she never provided us with adequate supporting documentation or an explanation of the expenditures."

TFA told the IG's office that it has since implemented a new accounting system and updated its fiscal policies and procedures.

The Baby Borrowers: Try Before You Buy

The Baby Borrowers is not about teenage couples trying to raise kids. It's about teenage couples, period.

The examples of bad parenting are shocking, but I tend to think they're mostly indicative of the constraints of the situation. In one instance, Daton and Morgan's "son" soils his diaper at the home of another teen couple. Morgan tries to get him to walk to the bathroom, but she's giggling and he doesn't want to walk, so she ends up dragging him. Nevermind that a child with a soiled diaper is being drug across the floor of someone else's house, because, really, neither the house nor the child belongs to anyone in the room. No one's really responsible at all, making the whole exercise at times painful and always riveting, but more importantly, it's just entertainment.

Mostly we see how, at any given time, one member of the couple is struggling with the burdens of parenthood. How the other member of the couple reacts means all the difference. When Austin refuses to stay home with the kids, preferring to leave Kelly at home while he works, Kelly pouts. Then, when Austin takes a shower, Kelly leaves the house to commiserate next door. No one is left watching the twin two-year olds that were supposed to be in their care.

Sasha and Jordan provide the best example of a functioning couple. Although they face much more difficulty with two-year-old Luke this week, they each step up when the other fails. Sasha teaches Jordan how to comfort young Luke when he's crying, and later, when Luke rebels against Sasha too, Jordan is there to bring her back and calm her down. The episode ends badly for even these two though, as we see Sasha preparing to pack and leave. The announcer leaves us hanging.

Besides the primary lesson of waiting to have children until a suitable, cooperative partner has been found, the show deserves credit for one other thing: it does a really good job of making crying sound like the worst noise on earth. That audible reminder is powerful, and the only true birth control evident in the show. Next week that deterrent is gone as the couples take over pre-teens.

If You Were John McCain's Education Advisor...

After much breathless anticipation, John McCain will finally be addressing education in a formal campaign appearance a week from now at the NAACP. Let's imagine you were given free rein to write that speech. Assuming the senator would give the remarks as delivered, and, as speechwriter, you would not be bound to the letter of what he's said in the past (not that he's said that much about education). What would you say? What could you say?

For all the edublogosphere's patter about the education ideas of the two major candidates, McCain's opponent is the one in the best position. Read this excerpt from the AP article announcing McCain's coming address for proof:

Unlike Democratic candidate Barack Obama, McCain is not calling for increasing the roughly $23 billion the federal government now spends to implement the law. Much of that goes toward educating poor children.

Keegan said McCain would reallocate how the money is spent. For example, more would go toward merit-pay programs for teachers. School districts are increasingly experimenting with programs like that, in part because of a Bush administration program that helps pay for the initiatives.

The national teachers' unions oppose linking student test scores to teacher pay. Obama supports the idea when teachers help negotiate and craft the merit-pay plans.

These are absolutely perfect paragraphs for Obama. In the first graf, McCain doesn't want to increase spending for "educating poor children." Instead, he'll take that money and reallocate it for merit pay for teachers. Obama supports that too, but only if the merit pay plans are structured with teacher buy-in. Obama comes off as reasonable and measured, while McCain comes across as the guy down the street grumbling about his taxes.

McCain is left in a pretty tough position. Education is not his passion, and it shows with how little he's put into the issue. His choices at this point are:

• supporting the strong accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. That's defensible but not politically popular.
  
• promoting red-meat conservative education priorities like vouchers and school prayer. He did that with moderate success in 2000, but that seems a little tired this time around.
  
• passively ignoring it, answering questions when pressed but offering no real substance on his own volition, and letting Lisa Graham Keegan do all his education bidding.
  

He's clearly chosen a small helping of each of the first two and a massive portion of the last one. It's only July, but it's amazing how out-maneuvered he's been on this issue. I'll be shocked if next week's speech changes that.

Testing the Limits

Measuring Up, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz's new book on educational testing, is making the rounds in the education policy and blogging worlds. My review, the latest installment in Education Sector's "What We're Reading" series, is now live on the ES Web site.

What Does It Mean to Be A Good University?

Most of the first twelve years of my life were spent in Storrs, where my father was a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Connecticut.  So I've always had a soft spot for UConn, rooting for their great men's and women's basketball teams and generally trying to keep an eye on how things are going. Thus, I read with interest this article in the Times about how things have apparently improved.  I don't normally do this -- in fact, I don't think I ever have before -- but for reasons that I hope will become clear I'm going to reprint most of it here and comment in italics along the way. I'm searching for three words--can you guess what they are?

Shedding the ‘Safe’ Label

By MORGAN McGINLEY
Storrs

MICHAEL J. HOGAN arrived at the University of Connecticut last September as its 14th president knowing he was inheriting a school vastly improved from a decade ago. Once a “safety school” with deteriorating facilities, the university now boasts rising test scores among entering freshmen and spruced-up academic facilities, thanks to a nearly $2 billion taxpayer-funded construction investment.

UConn is "vastly improved, we are told. Evidence: higher scoring students are enrolled, and the buildings are nicer. 

Dr. Hogan’s predecessor, Philip E. Austin, oversaw the largest expansion in the school’s history when the governor and state legislators committed to improving the state university system. After 10 years at the helm, Dr. Austin stepped down in 2007, saying it was time for someone else to lead.

The university’s 33-member search committee selected Dr. Hogan as its unanimous choice after a nationwide search. Now that Connecticut has been transformed into a modern campus with sparkling new buildings and programs that attract more of Connecticut’s best students, who once fled the state for higher education, university officials said they wanted Dr. Hogan to take the university up another level.

Why are the higher-scoring students enrolling? Because the buildings are nicer. 

“A decade ago, the university did not have the campus to support a great academic program,” said Dr. John W. Rowe, president of the university’s board of trustees. “The university has gone from being a safety school to much more selective. But we have a long way to go to be in the ranks of leading universities such as Michigan, California and North Carolina.”

Nice buildings are really important, although they could be nicer still, which would attract even higher-scoring students.  

Dr. Hogan came from the University of Iowa, where he was executive vice president and provost. He was inaugurated in April, and as he looks toward his second academic year here, he must contend with the implications of a state budget deficit and a looming recession. He also inherits a $315 million endowment, smaller than those of many other public universities.

Dr. Hogan knows that if he is to make the school among the nation’s best universities, he must improve several areas, but most important is its financial health.

“We’re the only public university among the top 25 that does not have a $1 billion endowment fund,” Dr. Hogan said. “We need to work our way into that club.”

To that end, the university also will soon announce a $450 million fund-raising drive, he said.

Nice buildings are expensive, and the legislature is unreliable. Therefore priority one is to raise a bunch of money, some of which will be spent on more nice buildings, and some of which will be stashed in the bank, because the more money in the bank the better the university looks. 

U.S. News & World Report rates Connecticut the best public university in New England, and has Connecticut, Purdue University and Iowa tied for 24th in the nation. Dr. Hogan said that a major goal is to break into the magazine’s list of top 20 public universities.

“We’re supremely good among public universities and we’re on a track to get better,” Dr. Hogan said.

Raising a bunch of money has the added benefit of increasing the university's U.S. News ranking, which is a "major goal." Nonetheless, UConn is "supremely good." Supremely!

Dr. Hogan, 63, said he will work to raise academic standards, especially in the graduate schools. A handful already receive high marks in national rankings, like the Neag School of Education, ranked 12th among public universities and 21st among all universities by U.S. News & World Report, and the dental school, which consistently places its graduates in top-flight residencies. But many more are far down in the pack. A strategic plan for academic success, a chief focus of Dr. Hogan’s, is due in September. He is optimistic.

“The quality of the applicant pool gets better every single year, and it’s more diverse,” he said.

"Academic standards" and "academic success" are defined exclusively in terms of U.S. News rankings and the number of high-scoring students, which one attracts by raising a lot of money and spending it on nice buildings, which all works together strategically in that high rankings are mostly a function of how many high-scoring students you attract and how much money you raise. 

The average SAT score for incoming freshmen rose to about 1200 from 1192, more than 150 high school valedictorians and salutatorians are enrolling and 20 percent of the freshman class will be minority students, a fact Dr. Hogan points to with pride. The proportion of freshman minority students has increased more than 100 percent since 1995.

The state’s investment in new buildings at Storrs and branches statewide, as well as the excitement generated by its nationally ranked basketball and football teams, drew more applicants this year to the university, officials said, so they decided to expand the entering class by 250 to a total of 3,400.

Spending the money on the nice buildings--and really, I think we get the point about that--is complimented by spending money on successful basketball and football teams, which draws more applicants from which more high-scoring students can be drawn. Diversity, defined in terms of the percent of minority student who enroll as freshmen, is also a plus. 

Now we skip a few grafs...

Ryan McHardy, 25, the president of the student government, praised Dr. Hogan for his strong interest in improving academics and campus life for students. Mr. McHardy said Dr. Hogan has toured the campus with student leaders at night to discuss safety and other aspects of student activity.

Dr. Hogan, who specializes in American diplomatic history, holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Northern Iowa and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Iowa.

He held several positions at Ohio State University before going to University of Iowa, where he worked on university fund-raising efforts, student recruitment and programs to boost academic and research quality.

Dr. David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University, was president of the University of Iowa when he hired Dr. Hogan as executive vice president and provost in 2006.

“The main criterion for the faculty was someone who was a scholar and appreciated the role of faculty in higher education. He had a national reputation as an outstanding scholar,” Mr. Skorton said. “He is a humanist. He’s a historian. Many universities have a heavy emphasis on bioscience, life sciences. Mike was as good with those faculties as he was with the liberal arts faculties. It’s hard to do, and Mike did it well.”

Dr. Hogan is committed to increasing the minority faculty, which is 11 percent. He plans a dedicated fund so that the school can offer larger salaries when competing for minority scholars.

He also wants to increase the size of the faculty, now at about 1,400, by 125 positions. He believes the university could double its research grants, which currently are $190 million. The University of Connecticut Health Center’s plan for a large new hospital has caused a furor among major hospitals in the Hartford region, which fear competition. Dr. Hogan seeks a collaboration so that the school and other medical facilities benefit mutually. He said doing otherwise would duplicate resources and risk the loss of large science grants.

Research grants and economic development also make the university look good, while taking some of the money you raise (the part not spent on nice buildings, presumably) and giving it to the faculty keeps everyone happy. Dr. Hogan's been around the track a few times so he understands how this works. 

So, what are the missing words? Anyone? 

Teaching

Learning

Graduation

They don't appear anywhere in the piece. And there's a reason for that: Teaching, learning and graduation don't matter in higher education when it comes to defining university success. Cut out this article, fold it up and put it in your wallet (or bookmark it or save it on your Kindle or whatever the appropriate 2008 action is). Everything you need to know about why colleges and universities do what they do, and don't do what they don't do, is there. UConn is being perfectly rational here, and everything Dr. Hogan is doing makes sense, given the rules of the game as it's currently played. It doesn't matter how well you teach. It doesn't matter how much your students learn, or how likely they are of graduating. What matters is how much money you have and how many "good" students you convince to enroll. Everything else is gravy. And until we do something to change that, until the essential questions about quality are different when the presidential search committee fans out and the New York Times comes calling, college students won't learn as much as they need to learn, too many won't graduate, and college will cost more than it should. 

Say What You Will

Envious of Eduwonk's extreme makeover, we at the Quick & the Ed have decided to stay ahead of at least only one step behind the curve by adding comments to the blog. Standard rules apply: we'll delete anything that annoys me is libelous or patently offensive, otherwise let us know what you think. If nobody comments, we'll assume that means the pristine logic of the posts makes any further commentary redundant and any criticism impossible.

The Indefensible Position

Esquire has a semi-regular feature called "The Indefensible Position" wherein authors try to explain that "car wrecks are good for you," or "Shakespeare was a hack." Continuing in this proud tradition, Flypaper's Liam Julian bravely defends rich Manhattanites who are mad that it's getting harder to buy your kid into Harvard.  Says Liam:

It would be a shame, though, if America’s best colleges were to accept large numbers of pupils who are less academically able than are many to whom they, the colleges, deny entry.

Yes, that would certainly be terrible. Why, if this kind of things keep up, pretty soon elite colleges will be turning down the most academically able students in favor of legacies, recruited athletes, professor's offspring, and the children of powerful politicians, famous celebrities, and rich people who donate large amounts of money to the endowment, while simultaneously enforcing a de facto cap on high-achieving Asian students. Thankfully the perfect meritocracy of the Ivy League admissions process has defenders at the Fordham Institute, so that, quote, "lesser minds" won't sully Harvard Yard. 

Seriously, I have to wonder if Liam even read the article.  Clearly there are lots of unusually smart students enrolled in New York private schools, some of whom deserve to go to Princeton, etc.  At the same time, it's just as obvious that part of what you're paying those schools for is an established pipeline into the Ivies that increases your child's chances of admission beyond what merit brings, and that's certainly the case if you spend 40 grand on a private Ivy League admissions counselor.  Cutting down on this stuff and broadening the admissions pool will bring in more smart students, not less.

Perhaps Liam was too busy quoting reading a Thomas Sowell NRO column that blames the French defeat by Nazi Germany on...wait for it...teachers unions.  You can't make this stuff up. 

The End of Liberal Professors?

The comments section for yesterday's most-emailed Times front-pager about the wave of retiring liberal boomer professors seems to consist mostly of "good riddance, dirty hippies" etc. etc.  And like many people I'm occasionally amazed and appalled by the way the academy seems to provide a comfortable home for various unrepentant terrorists, unapologetic Stalinists, conspiracy nuts, and fraudsters/morons. But it's also obvious that such people are few and far between--most liberal professors, I'm guessing, are a lot like the retiring UW-Madison scholar in the article, Michael Olneck, who is described as follows:

His father was a Socialist. Right out of high school, in 1964, Mr. Olneck organized support for the Mississippi Project’s black voter-registration drives. Later, he took a bus to Washington to protest the war in Vietnam, served on the strike coordinating committee atHarvard during the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and demonstrated atPresident Nixon’s inauguration in 1973.

In other words, he fought for civil rights when many people were trying to extend the nation's centuries-long subjugation of minorities. Then he fought for getting the country out of a war it ruinously decided to extend, followed by protesting the criminal Nixon administration. Frankly, I'm glad someone who ended up so decisively on the right side of history chose to spend his career teaching young Americans. Better professor Olneck than one of the many people, still alive today, who were wrong on all counts. 

The article contrasts Olneck with one his colleagues, Sara Goldrick-Rab, a 31-year old assistant professor in the same department. But, oddly, the author focuses as much on differences in their methods as their politics:

Like many sociologists and education researchers, Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research. Ms. Goldrick-Rab has embraced such experiments..."

I kind of see where the author is going with this, but I don't think it really holds water. Dealing exclusively with theories and narratives isn't necessarily radical (see Broder, David) and there's nothing inherently moderate or non-ideological about data-focused research. It all depends on what kinds of questions you're trying to answer and how you talk about results.

And in point of fact Dr. Goldrick-Rab happens to be liberal by any conventional use of the term. I first met her a few years ago during a conference here in DC. It's true that she likes data -- I couldn't help but notice during our group "break-out session" (boy, do I hate break-out sessions) that while everyone else was offering anecdotes and opinions, she kept citing actual research and actual results to support her positions. Later she came up to me at lunch, introduced herself, and told me in the nicest possible way that she was going to be publishing a paper in which she concluded that many of my recently-voiced ideas about college graduation rates were wrong. She's since published some really interesting work on student transfer and community colleges, among other things, and her new financial aid project, mentioned in the Times article, looks to be ground-breaking. But at the same time it's pretty clear from reading the blog she co-writes with her husband Liam that she's very focused on social justice and other liberal priorities; she's just using the best available quantitative methods to do her work. 

So it appears that the liberal professoriate is alive and well. And if younger faculty members like Sara are any indication, that's a good thing. 

Schools of the (Very Near) Future

At least one district in South Carolina is ahead of the Jetsons, per Erin's post below. Anderson School District #4 is proposing its own model for the school of the future, which they say is coming in the next year or two. They call it the Inside Out Learning Center and it stands out as quite different from traditional schools--no grade levels, personalized instruction and a flexible schedule. Anderson County Superintendent Jim Rex and Assistant Superintendent Joanne Avery are going to be here for the NCTAF conference in 2 weeks to say more about the model. This year's NCTAF conference is dedicated to building a 21st century education system so look for a lot of people with school of the future visions. My bet for (high) school of the future is New Tech High, where they've taken project-based learning to the next level with technology--so students are assessing themselves and each other on a wide range of outcomes as a regular part of their learning. Started as one school in Napa and now there are dozens all over and outside of California. New Tech folks will be at the NCTAF event too.

Schools of the Future

In the intro to the 1980’s TV show The Jetsons, the eponymous futuristic family is shown traveling in a bubble-like flying car, walking on floating moving walkways, and being shuttled to their destinations in little flying saucers. But when the son Elroy and the teenage daughter Judy are dropped off at school, their saucers fly into a brick and mortar school—it may be floating several miles above the Earth, but it would be identifiable by someone from the 1880’s as a school.

The former Edison Schools, now edisonlearning, is betting that the TV writers for the Jetsons are wrong. As Tom Toch writes, Edison is now joining the education software world and intends to become a player in the crowded field of companies offering curriculum and instruction online. I sat in on a conference call about Edison’s recent change and noted that the “future” came up several times, along with anecdotes about teachers sitting in a warehouse in front of computers, teaching and advising students remotely, and visions of highly differentiated instruction fostered by technology.

If this education future is coming to traditional school systems—Clayton Christensen is betting on it, and as Bill Tucker notes below, the growing number of students learning online is an indicator that change is happening—it has some powerful implications for school reform. Virtual education and highly differentiated instruction allow for a much more customized learning experience in which students have more control over how their instruction is delivered—fully online, in a hybrid classroom/computer-based system, etc.—but with that control, accountability needs to follow. Our current accountability system is based on the premise that brick and mortar schools will continue to exist—that there will be principals and teachers to hold accountable for the entirety of a students’ learning. But what if a student learns algebra online from a teacher in the UK, and English literature in a storefront classroom near home? How should accountability be distributed to ensure that students are getting quality instruction? As choice increases and students have more control over where and how to learn algebra or English lit., accountability for results will need to be distributed more widely than it is today, and more of the accountability burden will need to fall on the students and parents making those choices.

Or perhaps all of these questions are moot, and—as 1980’s TV writers envisioned—brick and mortar schools won’t fundamentally change. There’s no question that Edison understands the often slow, laborious process of reforming the traditional public school system, but they're betting, along with many others, that change is coming to education—the only question is when this "future" will happen. According to The Jetsons, it'll be sometime after we get those flying cars.

This Week on The Baby Borrowers

For a show being lauded some places as the "antidote" to teen pregnancy and for "educating teens about unplanned pregnancy," The Baby Borrowers focuses far too much on teenage drama to be taken seriously.

In my review of last week's first episode, I panned NBC for resorting to stereotypes, referring to Kelly and Austin as the "preppy southern couple" and Daton and Morgan as "California surfers." But what was cheesy in the introductory phase of the show became downright obnoxious as they continue it. That alone may be enough to make me stop watching.

Last night's episode showed two days of the social experiment. In it, the teens spent their first nights with the babies, and then one of the parents had to get up and go to work in order to earn money for food and rent. We learn from the announcer that for most of the teens, this is the first real day of work they've ever done. Eight of the ten participants are 18 and the other two are 20, so the fact that they've never worked says something about which types of teens the show's producers picked. I digress.

For the most part, last night focused on the drama of two couples. Alicea and Cory fight and bicker, but mostly we see Alicea avoiding responsibility and acting like the spoiled child she is. She refuses to help at all with the baby, she goes to work at a sawmill dressed to go clubbing, and cannot even muster the patience to figure out how to make the baby's formula in the morning. Cory, for his part, tries his best. He stays up all night with the crying baby, but, when the baby's diaper needs changing on a playdate, Cory tries to pass the duty off to Kelly (one of the other teens) simply because she smelled it first.

Sean and Kelsey face similar problems. Kelsey had great confidence in her parenting skills before coming onto the show, but now cannot deal with the real, crying baby. Her anxiety gives her stomach problems, and she shuts down, locking herself in the bathroom. This leaves Sean with the baby, and no one to go to work. The next day, Kelsey goes to work, not because they need the money (somehow I doubt NBC will let either the babies or the teens starve), but because she wants to escape the baby burden.

We get to see barely any successes. We do see that Kelly has rebounded nicely from her panic attack over the pregnancy vest. The moments we get to see Jordan and Sasha (my favorites by far) are rare, but they do provide (again) the one truly heartening moment of the entire episode. When the mothers of the teen girls come to visit for a few hours, Sasha's mom begins crying after seeing how well the couple are working as a team and managing the new responsibilities. She realizes she harbored doubts about her daughter's ability that turn out to be unfounded.

These extremely brief moments are not what the show is about though. Instead, we're watching teenagers who've never worked before try to handle the tough task of raising children. The producers want us to see failure and drama, and that's mostly what we get.

The Company Formerly Known as Edison Schools

After 16 years, endless controversy, and a sea of red ink, Edison Schools is no longer. CEO Terry Stecz, who replaced Edison founder Chris Whittle as chief executive in early 2007, announced yesterday that Edison Schools would henceforth be known as edisonlearning, and that the company intends to become a player in education software, focusing on student tracking systems and other "achievement management solutions." Whittle predicted the company would be managing 1,000 school with a million students by 2010 when he lured Benno Schmidt away from the Yale presidency to help launch Edison in 1992. But Whittle and Schmidt could never make the company profitable and after reaching a financial high water mark in February 2001, when the company's stock was worth nearly $2 billion, things went South in hurry when venture capital dried up with the Dot Com Bust, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of Edison's revenue reporting, the company lost a string of contracts, a teacher union-led attack on for-profit school managers intensified, and the work of running schools for mostly disadvantaged kids in poor neighborhoods proved a lot tougher, and less profitable, than the company had expected. Nor has the company been able to scare up much new business in the No Child Left Behind era, a period where states and schools systems have scrambled to find help in turning around the many failing schools identified by the law.

Edison's competitors haven't fared much better. Of the dozen or so other substantial for-profit school management companies that sprung up in the 1990s, most have disappeared, switched to non-profit status, or are limping along. Only one or two companies are profitable and they haven't expanded as far or as fast as expected.

So Edison's executives and majority owner, a New York-based private equity firm called Liberty Partners, are hoping that rebranding the company will lead potentinal clients in the education world to give the company a fresh look, to put aside Edison's troubled past and the legacy of it flamboyant founder. But changing the name on the door and moving into the educational software business doesn't alter the fact that Edison spent 16 years and nearly half a billion dollars trying to find a way to run high-quality public schools for disadvantaged kids as a viable business--surely one of the most important experiments in American educational history--and failed. More than anything else, the announcement of edisonlearning is a sobering commentary on school reform.

That's Good News

The world is complicated place -- a lot of grey areas, a lot of ins, outs, and what-have-yous. It's hard to be sure. Yet I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's unambiguously a good thing that it's apparently getting harder for rich Manhattanites to push their children into Harvard by spending vast sums of money on expensive private schools, $46,000 private Ivy League admissions consultants (that's not a typo), etc. etc. The reason (anecdotal, to be sure): all the criticism of the Ivies' plutocracy-sustaining admissions policies and near-total lack of economic diversity seems to be paying off, at least a little. I've said previously that all the hoopla surrounding Harvard's more generous aid policies is only justified if it results in more equity as defined by the real coin of the realm in elite higher education: admissions. If this is legit, great--hopefully in the future we'll be reading more stories about people with too much money losing their minds because it turns out there are still a few things that money can't buy.

Oh What A Tangled Web

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Paul Basken reported last week on a leaked document which spells out the contractual relationship between Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student loan company, and USA Funds, the nation's largest loan guarantee agency. On the surface, a contractual relationship sounds pretty boring, but considering that guarantee agencies are responsible for overseeing lenders in the federal loan program, this type of relationship poses some serious conflict-of-interest problems.

Guarantee agencies must be non-profit or state-based entities, and, in addition to being the primary insurer of federal loans, they are responsible for ensuring lenders perform due-diligence on loans before filing a claim for repayment on a defaulted loan. This helps to protect against fraud in the federal loan program by ensuring lenders don't file false default reimbursement claims.

Because of their oversight responsibilities, guarantee agencies are supposed to maintain an arms-length relationship with lenders. When Sallie Mae purchased USA Group, of which USA Funds was one part, it could not, as a for-profit company, also acquire USA Funds. Instead, USA Funds remained a separate entity, but Sallie Mae contracted with the company to provide guarantee services on all of its loans. And a good chunk of Sallie Mae's fee-based revenues come from this arrangement.

Both the GAO and Inspector General have issued reports advising against this type of close-knit relationship between guarantee agencies and lenders, but in 2004 the Department of Education overruled the Inspector General's recommendation that USA Funds and Sallie Mae end their relationship. Perhaps leaks like this will spur the Department of Education to re-think its position.

For more information on the history of Sallie Mae and its relationship with USA Funds, check our report from last year here.

Creep

No Child Left Behind took a big hit today. Secretary Spellings' formal approval($) today of six "differentiated accountability" state pilot plans solidifies what I wrote a month ago: these are little more than ways to avoid consequences.

The name of the pilot program, "differentiated accountability," bugs me. While suggestive of reasonableness and perspective, it really hits at the core of NCLB. It provides flexibility in acknowledging that schools with all their students failing are different that ones with only a portion. But isn't that the exact opposite of what we needed? Wasn't No Child primarily urging us to not be satisfied with overall averages but instead look at all types of students?

When we take data and parse out how African-American, Latino, special education, or other small categories of students are doing, we gain information that we didn't have before. NCLB required this disaggregation of data, it held schools accountable for making sure every single category of students reached proficiency, and it made achievement gaps prevalent in our national dialog more so than ever before.

The new flexibility backtracks from that. All six of the approved plans (for Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio) feature some type of simple arithmetic formula based on the number of categories in which a school fails. So, for example, schools in Ohio with 31% of their sub-groups failing are treated differently than ones with 29%. These numbers are completely arbitrary. That they vary widely by state shows they were made randomly or with political considerations in mind.

Secretary Spellings, in approving the plans, said this:

As the person who sees and approves state accountability plans under NCLB, I can tell you there is strong pressure to weaken, water down, find loopholes, and delay real accountability. Some of these efforts often have fancy names like "multiple measures" or "authentic assessments." Others efforts are not so fancy, like when opponents spend millions to tarnish NCLB.

Millions weren't spent today to tarnish NCLB. The Secretary did it herself.

Update: David Hoff finds the comments made by expert peer reviews. It's chock full of quotes like this:

The methods appeared largely to be based on methods of convenience rather than a focus on the underlying causes of schools inability to meet AYP. [bold original]

and this:

Very few of the proposals included a backstop to ensure that schools in milder levels of intervention did not allow any single group to persistently under-perform.

Data that Makes Clay Christensen Happy

Clayton Christensen, author of a new book that predicts an explosion in K-12 online learning, has another data point for his projections spreadsheet. Top line from Friday's National Center for Education Statistics report on K-12 technology-based distance education is that enrollments increased by 60 percent, from an estimated 317,070 in 2002-03 to 506,950 in 2004-05.

The trend lines are becoming clearer, as these figures reinforce last year's Sloan Consortium estimates of 700,000 K-12 students engaged in online courses in 2005-2006. (Yes, the Sloan data was released last year and covers a more recent time period. Sigh.)

The NCES data is mostly as expected, with a few interesting tidbits.

As Expected:

• While the NCES data covers all forms of technology-based distance education, the survey finds a significant shift away from two-way video delivery to Internet-based delivery. Have to believe this shift has continued to accelerate from 2005 to 2008.
• As expected, the vast majority of enrollments are at the high school level. Moreover, 39 percent of public high schools offered technology-based distance education courses in 2004-05.

Going Against Conventional Wisdom:

• Common perception is that online learning serves mostly advanced students. The NCES survey finds that AP and dual-credit enrollments are only a small part of total enrollments, at 3% and 12% respectively.
• They're not all homeschoolers. In districts with students enrolled in online courses, 86% of students accessed these courses from school. In a subset of higher poverty districts, the number of students accessing from school rose to 92%.

Of Concern:

The table below shows course completion rates and passing grades by district characteristic (click table for larger image). Both large districts and urban schools had exceptionally low percentages of students that completed courses with a passing grade. Urban schools reported 39% of students completing with passing grades and didn't know the course completion status for an additional 46% of their students. My guess is that these are credit recovery students and the districts only really keep track of who gets a credit. Interestingly, poverty concentration was not a significant driver of course completion status.

**PS: Edison Schools, granddaddy of private education management organizations, gets into the online learning business (via EdWeek $). The article cites Terry Stecz, Edison's CEO, describing the company's “hybrid” school design model "that would enable students to learn both through traditional classroom and newer technological means."

Mapping Preschool

I've been spending a lot of time lately working with geographic information systems (GIS) mapping technology - it's a great tool that gives you a whole new way to look at information by mapping education data and neighborhood demographics, including school district boundaries, school locations, income data, and school performance information. And currently it's sorely under-used in education research and policy. Education Sector is working on changing that and you can expect some cool maps from us in the coming months, but in the meantime I'm sharing an application that just arrived in my inbox via my GIS newsletter.

The state of Illinois, as part of implementing its 2011 preschool for all goal, has created an Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map. The goal is to allow agencies to better match services with needs. Users can map the distribution of early childhood services, including Head Start, state agencies, and private sector care, along with demographic information related to population and federal poverty levels.