What We Do Cannot Be Measured

Two main camps square off in education over and over again. One side, typified by the Broader, Bolder coalition in K-12, emphasizes student demographics. They point out, justifiably, that students enter school with widely divergent skills and expectations. As such, schools can only do so much to rectify the situation. The other, reformist side, says demographics be damned, every child deserves a quality education. Children and schools should all be held to high standards, and we can account for differences on the back end.

The first camp is far less willing to measure results in any systematic way. It makes some sense too. If you believe demography is destiny, no mathematical formula, no matter how complex or inclusive, can address all the factors that go into schooling.

Let's leave the math and the standardized achievement measures alone for a bit. Surely there are other ways to measure a school's, or even an individual teacher's, value? The first crowd says no. Insidehighered published a piece today questioning learning assessments in colleges. The author, Bernard Fyrshman, argues that, because colleges educate many different types of students in many fields, we cannot encapsulate a school's contribution to learning in a number:

Do you want to know whether the school will help a student learn to think, to examine, or to innovate? And of course every one of those talents may differ depending on the discipline. Do you care about what’s happening in the fine arts department or in engineering? And even in engineering, is it civil engineering or software development? Different talents, different intellectual demands, different skills.

But wait, we didn’t ask you yet about the student you’re interested in helping. Is he bright and driven, or laid back and not particularly ambitious? Was his high school a place that turned him on to learning or to text messaging? Does he need remedial coursework or is his transcript full of AP credits? Does your daughter stand out or is she happy sitting at the back of a large lecture hall? Will she grow under pressure or shrivel up and leave? Does your child want competition or collaboration?

The problem with Fryshman's argument, and the entire first camp's in general, is that we really have no good alternatives to assess student learning. In the higher ed world, colleges and universities have successfully kept new data sources from the public (see the recently passed Higher Education Act). For colleges, the only data we really have are graduation rates, and those mask wide differences. Some schools have small or nonexistent gaps between black and white graduation rates. Some, like my alma mater, a large public Big Ten school, have wide discrepancies.

But what about other sources of information? As Fryshman says, engineering students are different than ones studying fine arts. That's a given, but incomplete. How involved are they with campus life? How many papers or projects are they asked to complete? And are they able to find jobs after graduation? Are those jobs in their field of degree? If they graduated from a public school, do they stay in-state after graduation? Do they earn salaries worthy of their credentials? Are their employers satisfied with their skills? Do they go on to pursue, and to succeed, in more education? Are they involved in civic life through voting or volunteering? Most importantly, how do the answers to these questions stack up with the school's peers?

There's more than one way to take a measurement, but instead of pursuing other avenues vigorously, schools are mostly reluctant to release data proving their merit. We're left arguing, as Fryshman does, about standardized tests. But policymakers no longer accept accountability by assurance; they want to see results.

The GI Bill Equation

Jon Oberg (of whistle-blower fame) has a guest post over at Higher Ed Watch on the new GI Bill. While he praises the recent expansion of benefits, he also points out that it will take the cooperation of college financial aid offices in order for veterans to see the full benefits of the bill. As we've shown, colleges have been increasing the institutional aid they give to higher income students over the years, which means fewer dollars for low-income students - and possibly for veterans. Colleges can lessen the impact of federal grant aid by simply using it as an excuse to take away institutional aid the student would have otherwise received. Or colleges can join the federal government in increasing access to four-year institutions by supplementing the federal aid money to ensure veterans graduate with as little debt as possible.

This Chronicle of Higher Education ($) article from last month takes an interesting look at the impact of the GI Bill and the colleges--private, for-profit--that are reaping the biggest benefits from its expansion.

The Supposedly Unfriendly Skies

USAir charged me a dollar for a cup of coffee yesterday morning. I know this is supposed to make me angry, what with the evil airline industry coming up with ever-more-nefarious schemes to suck money from my wallet even as the flying experience deteriorates to levels formerly unknown outside of various former Soviet republics. But I just can't get worked up about it. Most of the whinging is unjustified, I think.

I fly fairly often, probably twice a month on average, short flights and long, national and international, for business and pleasure. It's usually fine. Yes, there's the occasional Kafkaesque nightmare of delays, brought in part by overscheduling. But there are ways to minimize the risk of this (i.e. never, ever connect through O'Hare in the summer, particularly in the afternoon). The seats are a little cramped, but I'm 6'2" and have broad shoulders, so I imagine it's not as bad for most people. Plus, technology is making some things better -- nifty noice-cancelling headphones, for example, and they're going to have wi-fi any day now. The food and coffee they sell in the airport to bring on board is a lot better. Plus, people can't smoke anymore.

So I'd say the experience is a wash, then add on the fact that airline travel is (A) much cheaper than it used to be, and (B) phenomenally safe. Those two things are all most people really care about, and the market has reacted accordingly. It's not like USAir is Exxon/Mobil and they're reaping windfall profits by charging for soft drinks; most of the airlines either went bankrupt recently or are getting there soon. It's properlyiregulated capitalism, and in the long run things tend to work out.

For example, on my return flight, the flight attendant came down the aisle with the beverage cart. "Soft drinks? Coffee? Anyone?" There were probably 60 people on the plane and I don't think a single person bought a drink. So there you have it: for decades airlines have been spending a not-inconsiderable amount of money providing free drinks and snacks that people actually don't want very much, but overconsumed because that's what people do when things are free. And of course they weren't free; the cost just got rolled into the ticket. Now tickets will be a little less expensive, people will only drink cheap coffee or soda if they really want to, and the world will be a slightly more efficient and productive place. That's progress.

Obama on Affirmative Action

As the New York Times noted yesterday, Barack Obama sensibly believes that his daughters shouldn't benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if it comes at the expense of less-privileged white applicants. Applying a much stronger economic lens to college admissions is a good idea and I'm glad Obama agrees. Because college admissions is zero-sum, that might mean trading some racial diversity for income diversity. But if that means the children of two wealthy, powerful, and socially-prominent Ivy League-educated lawyers don't get into Princeton, it's a trade off worth making.

Some affirmative action proponents, however, are worried that introducing this kind of nuance to the debate will hurt the larger cause (hat-tip: Russo):

The Supreme Court has...said that universities could consider race as they worked to diversify their campuses. Proponents of such programs point out that blacks continue to face discrimination regardless of class or income. Some fear that Mr. Obama’s focus on the socioeconomic status of his daughters — as opposed to the diversity of experience and perspective they might bring to predominantly white campuses — may help conservatives in their battle to eliminate race from university admissions and government hiring.

This just shows the how screwed-up the affirmative action debate has become. I'm in favor of racial preferences in college admissions as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools and have to live with legacy of historical racism along with discrimination that still exists today. But somehow affirmative action has gotten turned around so that the primary justification is now that it's good for white people. This is partially the legacy of Sandra Day O'Connor's somewhat tortured logic in the Michigan case, and partially because diversity has been diluted into a kind of all-purpose social good that's handy for any rhetorical occasion. It's also a way to be pro-affirmative action without being intellectually honest about the hard tradeoffs that position entails, and leads to absurd conclusions like the idea that some other Senator's daughter would learn more from hanging out with Senator Obama's daughters at Princeton than she would from a white first-generation college student from a low-income family.

Elsewhere in the article there's also this:

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School and an adviser on black issues to Mr. Obama...and civil rights lawyers like Mr. Payton say Mr. Obama’s daughters should not be barred from affirmative action programs because they may well encounter racial discrimination, unlike their white peers. Studies suggest that employers often favor white job seekers over black applicants, even when their educational backgrounds and work experiences are nearly identical. Mr. Obama’s “daughters are not going to be judged in a colorblind way throughout their lives,” Mr. Ogletree said.

I'm pretty sure that the single biggest thing affecting the way people judge Barack Obama's children throughout their lives will be the fact that their dad was a world-famous Senator and possibly the President of the United States of America, not their race, gender, or anything else. And while this is somewhat of an extreme example, many students at the relatively small number of elite colleges where affirmative action is an issue have social capital that dwarfs that of ordinary students.

Affirmative action is meant to help students who were, say, raised by a single parent who struggled to earn enough to put food on the table, students of promising intellect who bounced around from different schools in their younger years. Students, in other words, like Senator Obama himself (the article suggests that Obama "chose not to mention his race in his application to Harvard Law School to avoid benefiting from affirmative action," although this is unconfirmed.) But once it works, it shouldn't become an intergenerational inheritance, particularly when there are far more worthy lower-income students out there than elite institutions currently choose to serve.

How to Know Your "Merit" Financial Aid Is Out of Whack

Last night my wife and I were sipping adult beverages at a swanky Georgetown pizza and beer joint. This is Georgetown, not exactly your local Pizza Hut. I overheard the couple next to us talking about Harvard's financial aid plan. He was describing how it works:

He: Students under $60,000 pay no tuition.
He (whispering): And they give need-based aid for families making up to $180,000.
She (incredulous): $180,000? That's a lot.

My sentiments exactly.

Charts You Can't Trust (continued)

When done well, graphs and charts tell a story or make a point quickly and coherently. Education Sector has a regular feature we call Charts You Can Trust, where we use a new data source to make a point about the state of education policy. You can read them all here. Despite Kevin's best intentions, we've never actually run one you can't trust. That critique is left for The Quick and the Ed.

Look at the chart below*. It measures the changes in the University of Georgia's undergraduate female enrollment (a pretty hot issue right now).
The chart makes it seem like some big changes were occurring down in Athens. But in reality, if you took the time to calculate the difference between the Fall 2002 and the Fall 2006 female enrollments, you'd find a change of 521 students, or a little less than 4%. To show this reality, the chart should have looked something like this:I suppose we could quibble about whether you should always make 0 the baseline for graphs, but I think we can all agree on the need for honest visual presentations.

*You can find this chart or make your own at the University System of Georgia website here. I made several; some were normal, but quite a few looked like the one above.

HEA, at Long Last

Congress passed a new version of the Higher Education Act yesterday, which President Bush is expected to sign. This is a real milestone -- it's been ten years since the last reauthorization, which is supposed to happen every five years. There's a lot in there to discuss, but in my mind the most disappointing thing is that even as InsideHigherEd calls it a "Huge, Exacting Accountability Bill," and institutions begin complaining about various onerous reporting requirements, the legislation is arguably a step backward on the kind of higher education accountability that matters most.

Basically it increases accountability (via public reporting and "shame lists") for a pretty meaningless measure (year-over-year percentage increase in tuition) while reducing the ability of the U.S. Department of Education to increase accountability for what really does matter--student learning--via the accreditation process. It also prohibits the department from modernizing its data reporting system, basically an anti-accountability measure passed under the guise of bogus arguments about student privacy. The irony is that, as I've written previously, holding down the cost of college--the one thing everyone in Congress seems to cares about--actually requires greater accountability for results, because one of the big things driving up costs is the current perception that price and quality are one and the same.

This is a short-term victory that will exact a long-term cost, not just to students and the public treasury, but to colleges and universities themselves. The vast majority of institutions would be better off in a world where perceptions of higher education quality are more closely tied to their core educational mission. But they're stuck playing a game they can't win, where perception of quality and the resulting rewards are all defined in terms of wealth, status, and exclusivity. Exclusivity is a zero-sum game, while wealth and status involve massive early-entrant, rich-get-richer advantages--basically if you're an old, famous, and rich university today, the odds are exceedingly high that you'll remain so, and probably become more so.

Your typical community college, regional private college, or public university--i.e. where the large majority of Americans actually go to college--would benefit from very different status signifiers that gave them points for being good at what they were designed to be--places that teach students. But they can't change the rules--that's what the government is for. And now the government has caved into the interests of institutions at the top of the status pyramid, leaving all the rest, and their students, and the public at large, out in the cold.

Five years from now--let's hope it's not ten--when all the new measures have utterly failed to hold down rising costs, student debt is still growing at a rapid pace, and policymakers still have no idea whether or not colleges and universities are doing a good job, let's hope Congress makes different, better choices.

Update: See also New America's comprehensive run-down of the best and worst of HEA.

Wholly Anecdotal Sign of the Education Apocalypse

In a taxi on the way to the Miami airport yesterday, talking to the driver, a part-time student at Florida International University, 25 years old, working on an accounting degree, family came to the U.S. from Dubai, born and raised in Miami. Seems perfectly nice, reasonably smart, etc. Asks me where I'm from: Washington, DC, I answer. The capital, right? he asks. How's George Bush? Then he remarks: My sister lives there, her boyfriend was transferred to Seattle. There are two Washingtons, I remind him. Right, right, he says--I always get that confused. So it's cold up there now, right, not all hot and humid like here? Because you're so close to Canada?

Carey / Pipp / Rivers

In my continuing effort to be Joan Rivers to Rick Hess' Johnny Carson -- or perhaps Wally Pipp to his Lou Gehrig -- I again did the Fordham Institute's Gadfly podcast today along with host Mike Petrilli (who, incidentally, does a good job of unpacking the tensions between achievement gaps as measured by relative- vs. criterion-referenced measures here).

Who Watches the Watchmen? Hopefully, Me

Lost in the generally well-deserved praise for The Dark Knight and the subsequent chatter over the million kabillion dollars it's raking in at the box office is the fact that it featured a trailer for Zach Snyder's Watchmen. Interestingly, it looks like the long-awaited/feared adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's seminal 80's graphic novel (which is generally--all though by no means universally--regarded as the greatest comic book ever made) may not suck. If that turns out to to be the case, I'm guessing this is why:

Many in Hollywood have tried to get Watchmen on the screen and failed, including directors Terry Gilliam (Brazil), Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain), and, most recently, Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass. In 2005, Greengrass was deep into preproduction on a present-day, war-on-terror-themed adaptation by David Hayter (X-Men), when a regime change at Paramount Pictures led to its demise. Enter Warner Bros., which acquired the rights in late 2005. Snyder was working on 300 for the studio at the time, and he was alarmed when he heard about the deal. After some soul-searching, his fear of seeing a bad Watchmen movie trumped his fear of trying to make a great one. ''They were going to do it anyway,'' he says. ''And that made me nervous.'' Over many months, and many meetings, Snyder persuaded Warner Bros. to abandon the Greengrass/Hayter script and hew as faithfully as possible to the comic.

Debates over fidelity to source material in adaptation have been around about as long as the movies themselves. The filmmakers' position has always been: "the logic of what makes a good movie isn't necessarily the same as what makes a good (fill in source, usually a book). My first obligation is to the film and the viewer, not the author or the fan." And properly so, there are plenty of examples of adaptations that not only honored the original but transcended it. Often, the need for filmmakers to veer from the source stems from inherent differences in media: books are made of words, while movies are made of sounds and images. You can linger over words, which excel at revealing the inner lives of characters, while the sounds and images in movies force their pace upon you, and excel at evoking an emotional response in the viewer. Experiencing them is different, and so translation can be hard.

Comic books occupy a middle ground between books and movies: they're about words and images. This argues for a default filmmaking approach closer to faithful adaption, since presumably the unusually compelling or skillful use of sequential images is one of the big reasons the comic book is adaptation-worthy in the first place. The extent to which this is true, however, will vary by comic book. As we discussed previously, work by a primarily visual and purposefully cinematic creator like Frank Miller more or less demands panel-by-panel adaption, an approach Snyder used to great effect in 300. Alan Moore is a more interesting case. His particular genius is for understanding and manipulating the way readers experience words and pictures simultaneously, or in extremely close proximity. In most comic books, the words simply communicate what pictures can't: human dialogue. In Watchmen there's a constant and often subtle interplay between the words on the panel and the images behind, before, and after them, and that extends to both the foreground action and background settings. A lot of this isn't obvious on the surface; like most great books, Watchmen benefits from multiple readings. That's why Moore said "'There are things we did [in Watchmen] that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off the things that comics can do that other media can't.''

That's also why the greatness of Watchmen is kind of hard to explain; Maureen asked me about it while we were walking out of Dark Knight, and I was reduced to something along the lines of "Well, it's nominally a murder mystery but really kind of an exploration of the underlying tropes and themes of traditional super-hero comics seen through the lens of real-world cold war paranoia...ah, you really have to just read it."

And it's why there's never been a really good Alan Moore comic book adaptation to date. In League of Extraordinary Gentlemen they took the basic premise, threw out half the characters and all of the story, and made an phenomenally bad film. Their mistake was thinking that--as with Superman, Batman, and Spider-man--the premise was the thing. It's not; it's what Moore and Kevin O'Neil did with it, and what they did is close to untranslatable. From Hell, by contrast, was a pretty decent movie (scripted by Matt Yglesias' father, if I'm not mistaken), because the filmakers realized that the extremely long, dense, visually stylized (and tremendously good) comic book is wholly infilmable, while the premise (Jack the Ripper) is very strong. So they made a semi-adaptation that works pretty well on its own terms. V for Vendetta was more faithful, and thus was pretty good; there I think many of the shortcomings derive from the source material itself.

The value of Watchmen is clearly not the premise (see my lame explanation to Maureen above). Thus any huge divergence from the source, e.g. a "present-day, war-on-terror-themed adaptation" is doomed to fail. But unlike From Hell it may actually be filmable, and if so the key will be the work of artist Dave Gibbons. Like many of the best British comics artists (Preacher's Steve Dillon is another good example) Gibbons is first and foremost a great storyteller who avoids the temptations of stylistic flashiness and focuses on composition, drama, character, inter-panel transition, background detail, etc. And back in the 80s, Moore himself (who provides elaborate descriptions of every panel; the Absolute edition of Watchmen contains his script for the first page, which consists entirely of a single seven-panel fixed tracking shot, and yet the script is like 2,000 words long) was still writing comics using more traditional visual grammar.

All of which makes Snyder's decision to hew closely to the source look like a good one--those shots of Dr. Manhattan striding across the killing fields of Vietnam and his glass palace rising from the sands of Mars look pretty darn cool. Maybe, just maybe, Watchmen will be worth watching.

Boundary Changes

This situation in Fairfax County, VA has some relevance to recent discussions about socioeconomic desegregation plans (see also here and here).

In Fairfax, kids aren't being transported away from their neighborhood school for integration, but the school board did decide to change attendance boundaries to balance enrollments among schools, and took socioeconomic integration into account in its decision. Many of the parents whose children were assigned to South Lakes High School were not happy. South Lakes is under-enrolled by 700 students and has a newly remodeled facility, but it also has a higher percent of low-income students.

Parents filed a lawsuit to stop the school board, arguing, among other things, that the school board overstepped its bounds in trying to balance socioeconomics among the schools. After losing the lawsuit, parents have been requesting transfers to get their kids into their old assigned schools. Many parents are citing the lack of AP classes at South Lakes as a reason for their transfer requests.

As this situation makes clear, changing attendance boundaries is politically difficult, particularly when it increases socioeconomic integration. But this situation also illustrates why socioeconomic integration may be important - if these parents can raise $125,000 to sue the school board, they probably also have the clout to get more AP classes into South Lakes High School, and that's the kind of parental involvement that improves the quality of education for all students.

Economic Theory in Teacher Salaries: Why the ProComp Negotiations Matter

Imagine you have complete control over a new school district. You need to design a salary structure that fits what we know about education. Empirical evidence suggests that:

1. Teachers have steep learning curves, making dramatic improvements in the first few years, but showing few gains, or possibly even slowing, as they near retirement.
2. Teachers, as public employees, often have enormous retirement incentives to stay in their job near the end of their career to max out their defined benefit pension plan.
3. After teachers earn tenure, they secure due process rights that make it difficult for them to be removed.
   
4. The true value of teachers is difficult to measure, and while we've gotten much better at assessing merit, no one indicator, and certainly no proxy, has proven to be sufficient.
   
5. Teacher quality, as measured by college GPA, college selectivity, and SAT score, has declined over time.
   
6. Teachers with higher academic credentials, measured by college GPA, college selectivity, and SAT score, leave the profession earlier and in greater numbers.
7. Teacher quality varies widely by school and subject, with younger and less-credentialed teachers concentrated in high-minority and -poverty schools.
   

Knowing these things, you must create a system for compensating teachers. There's a finite amount of money, so you can't just give all teachers what they deserve $100,000 and call it good. Instead, you have to use what you know to structure a salary system that is empirically based and fair.

You'd want to have a reasonable but not exorbitant starting salary, followed by a dramatic rise for teachers who have proven themselves on the job. Over time you would want to provide incentives for good teachers to stay, but you'd also want to make them demonstrate their merits through rewards for attaining greater educational achievement, working in high-needs schools or high-needs subjects, earning satisfactory evaluations, and for demonstrated value-added student growth.

In other words, you'd want a system like Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp). Crafted after a four-year pilot program and a mixed teacher-administrator task force, ProComp, unlike most performance pay plans across the country, got funded through a citywide vote.

Union and district officials are currently negotiating the future of ProComp, and news reports ($) are showing the union taking particularly polarized positions. Union officials want a 3.5% across-the-board raise, but across-the-board raises have little empirical support. Worse, they're threatening a strike to get what they want, and to time the strike to correspond with the upcoming Democratic National Convention in the city.

District officials are asking for two main changes. They want to increase the starting salary $9,000, to $44,000, and they want to almost triple the amount, from $1,067 to $2,925, for teachers in high-needs schools and subjects. Those requests align well with the empirical lessons above. If evidence matters at all in education, it should help the district's objectives drive these negotiations.

The Libertarian Conspiracy to Destroy Public Education

Occasionally I'll use phrases like "conspiracy to destroy public education" in these pages, and you, faithful reader, may reasonably wonder whether I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect. I wish I were. But no, there really are people out there who simply want to dismantle the entire enterprise, despite evidence of public education's benefits so obvious that David Brooks wrote a whole column about them this morning. People like Neil McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute's "Center for Educational Freedom," who recently published a new policy brief explaining why public education is intrinsically un-American. Again, that's not bloggerly snark, it's the actual thesis: McCluskey believes that public education is a "fundamentally flawed--and un-American--institution" and a later subhead describes "Public Schooling's Un-American Ideals." Basically he argues that we had a perfectly swell free-market system of private schools in the first half of the 19th century which gave a great education to the small fraction of people who were legally allowed to vote, own property, etc., until that proto-communist bastard Horace Mann came along and ruined everything. Because, as we all know, American-ness is wholly a function of the political and social arrangements that prevailed in the years immediately following the founding of the Republic and any deviation from such clearly represents a grave national threat to be destroyed at all costs.

Republican Vice Presidential Picks and Education

While the edublogosphere has analyzed the candidates positions on education, speculated on various Secretary of Education possibilities, and commented on education spokespersons, it has yet to produce anything substantive on the policies of likely vice presidential picks. In order to keep the list manageable and relevant to TQATE, this discussion is limited only to widely speculated picks who also have an interest in education, our chosen issue. Let's start with the Republicans:

- Bobby Jindal, 37-year old governor of Louisiana, would bring spice to a McCain ticket. The son of Indian immigrants, Jindal has been called the "next Ronald Reagan" by Rush Limbaugh. Jindal has shown strong interest in education, serving from 1999-2001 as the president of the University of Louisiana System. During his tenure, he encouraged each school to develop one area of expertise and he got the eight state universities, as one, to recruit high schoolers to stay in-state. Governor since only January, Jindal has already touched some hot education issues, signing a modest voucher law and a law focusing on critical thinking skills, particularly towards evolution, cloning, and global warming.

Bottom line: Last week's joint McCain-Jindal events being disrupted by an oil spill and inclement weather could be the key omen. Plus, Jindal's youth weakens any McCain critiques on Barack Obama's inexperience. His education credentials are still a little thin to help or hurt John McCain this fall, but Jindal is a man to be watched.

- As a very good friend of John McCain, and governor of swing-state Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty has been and continues to be a favorite for the spot. Pawlenty has consistently chosen to make education one of his chief issues. He served 10 years as an attorney for the Minneapolis school district. As governor, Pawlenty chaired National Governors Association's education committee (before leading the whole organization), and in March he assumed the head of the Education Commission of the States. Most widely known is his passage of QComp, a statewide performance pay plan rewarding teachers for positive evaluations and student and school achievement scores. Pawlenty has also proposed summer teacher training academies that look similar to Teach for America's.

Bottom line: Pawlenty's a real contender for the spot, not least because of his strong friendship with McCain. His strong advocacy in education would supplement McCain's seeming disinterest in the topic.

- As governor of Massachusetts and as a candidate for President, Mitt Romney has taken education stands on many issues. An advocate for testing and accountability, Romney implemented Massachusetts' high school exit exam, and, during his campaign, was not shy about taking credit for his state's high NAEP scores. He successfully fought an attempt to stop the expansion of charter schools, but failed to pass performance pay or legislation granting the state a larger role in turning around struggling schools. His effort to increase students' time in schools became a small pilot program that has shown early, limited results. Romney successfully passed a large merit scholarship program, but failed spectacularly in a short-lived effort to restructure the governance of state colleges and universities. On the campaign trail he advocated for school choice and tax credits for home schooling and strongly opposed tuition support for children of illegal immigrants.

Bottom line: Romney is considered to have the best fundraising prowess of any on this list. That alone could be a big reason to call on him in a campaign against Obama's small donation machine. His ties to Michigan don't hurt either. On education, like his stances on other issues, Romney seems to be everywhere. Not necessarily in a good way.

- Another education-minded governor is Florida's Charlie Crist. He served as State Education Commissioner prior to winning the governorship in 2006. Crist has overseen major strife in his state's higher education governance structure. A 2007 report suggested a three-tier system with better defined mission focus. Third-tier schools would focus on undergraduate education, leaving the top tier to address graduate education and research. Its blog has only one post, but 2,752 comments. Starting in 2008, Crist-signed legislation that will allow state universities to charge different rates of tuition. Crist is also a supporter of the 65-cent solution to public education funding.

Bottom line: Crist is credited as almost single-handedly winning the Florida primary for McCain. It was a huge win, and geography alone could lead McCain to pick Crist. Crist's education platform looks similar to McCain's; here's hoping McCain does not take that as a good thing.

IKEA-Operated Schools?

The Associated Press writes about school choice in Sweden, where students and parents have, since 1992, been able to attend publicly financed, privately run schools of choice (they sound a lot like charter schools to me). And it's popular - 17 percent of high schoolers are now enrolled in one of these independent schools.

The article posits this as a radical change for Sweden, "that paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare". But 17 percent enrollment in privately run public schools would be pretty revolutionary for the U.S., too, and this isn't exactly a "cradle-to-grave" country.

Viva Las Vegas

I did a radio interview with KNPR today (the "N" actually stands for "Nevada" and was issued a long time ago, well before they knew what a great call sign that would turn out to be) focused on the Clark County (Las Vegas) school district's latest results under NCLB. Here's the beginning of the story in this morning's local newspaper:

The Clark County School District gave itself an "A" for its 2007-08 performance under federal standards, even though the number of schools needing improvement increased over the previous year and the number of schools showing improvement declined. In 2007-08, 186 schools made adequate yearly progress under the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act, 32 fewer than in 2006-07 when 218 schools showed adequate yearly progress. The number of schools on the state's watch list almost doubled, going from 35 in 2006-07 to 66 in 2007-08.

Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Lauren Kohut-Rost emphasized the rigor of the standards Thursday when the district released its annual report. Schools are judged by 37 separate targets. Falling short of just one target places a school on the watch list for failing to make adequate yearly progress. As a whole, the district met 94 percent of 12,987 benchmarks and expects to qualify for a second consecutive year as a district showing adequate yearly progress.

"That's an A grade we're giving ourselves," Kohut-Rost said. "We're extremely proud of the Clark County School District for making AYP for the second year in a row. That's almost unheard of for a very large urban and very diverse school system. So we're incredibly proud of that."

First, it's by no means unheard of for a large urban school district to make AYP two years in a row; most of them in fact are doing so, primarily because district-level AYP rules have been interpreted by states in extremely lenient ways.

Second, the oft-repeated idea that a school has to meet 37 out of 37 separate targets under NCLB (or some number in the same range, it varies a little by state) is for nearly all schools basically wrong. It's true that NCLB creates a two-dimensional matrix for each school crossing two performance measures (math and reading) plus two participation rates (95% of students have to be tested) with multiple student sub-group categories. So, for example, on one axis you'd have the four measures above, and on the other you'd have various student categories (white, black, Latino, asian, native american, low-income, special education, English language learner, all). 4 X 9 = 36, plus one additional measure (almost always attendance or graduation rates) equals 37.

But--and this is the crucial thing--very few schools have enough students to qualify in all 37 categories. For that to happen, a school would have to be large and enjoy some true United Colors of Benneton kind of diversity. In Nevada, subgroups aren't counted unless there are at least 25 students in the school, so to reach the full 37 you'd need at an absolute minimum of 125 (25 times each of the five racial/ethnic subgroups, with that population also containing significant numbers of poor, special education, and ELL students). Probably you'd need many more. Practically speaking, very, very few schools hit every box--and keep in mind, almost half of the boxes are simply test participation measures that have nothing to do with learning.

So a typical school is more likely to have between six and ten real marks to hit: reading and math performance for all students, one or two racial subgroups, and one or two among poor, special ed, and ELL. This is a lot less unreasonable-sounding than 37. It's why, six years into the law and counting, most schools haven't been labeled as failures. It also means that the "12,987 benchmarks" number is in all probability wildy overstated--I'll bet dollars to donuts that's the number of benchmarks against which Las Vegas schools could have been measured in an alternate universe where every single school in Clark County looks like the "It's A Small World" ride at Disneyland, not the number that was actually relevant after knocking out every subgroup under 25.

Third, the quotes from the school district officials illustrate an underappreciated point about the rationale behind NCLB. Holding schools accountable for test scores is usually characterized as a way to impose some uniformity to the education system, to make sure we bring all students up to the same high standards in a global economy, avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations, etc.-- all of which is true. But it's also a way to make judgment external to those being held accountable. That's what makes recent discussions about locally-designed assessments under a new version of NCLB so problematic. It's not so much what locals would be assessing as the fact that they'd be assessing themselves.

And when you give public officials in high-pressure, high profile jobs that kind of discretion, you tend to get responses along the lines of "That's an A grade we're giving ourselves."

Teaching in the Digital Age

Earlier this month, the Quick & Ed team discussed (here and here) what schools might look like in the future, as online learning continues to take hold. Today, the Washington Post takes a look at how virtual learning changes how teachers teach. According to the article, online teaching jobs can be highly competitive - because of the flexibility in hours, but also because of how it changes the role of the teacher. As the program director for Virginia's virtual schools stated, "People are intrigued and realize its pure teaching--you're not worrying about cafeteria duty."

The Baby Borrowers Last Night

The back-to-back episodes of The Baby Borrowers last night proved my earlier assertion that the show was not about teens taking care of children, but about teens taking care of themselves and their relationships.

Although Baby Borrowers intends to act as a deterrent to would-be teen parents (the show's slogan is "it's not parenting; it's birth control"), the reality is that the teens, as parents, are getting better. They've learned how and when to apply discipline, if still a little raw at both, and they're practicing the skills of running a family household—cooking healthy meals, going to work and balancing budgets, imposing timeouts and bedtimes, etc. If anything, the parenting/ household portions of the episodes show the opposite of what the producers intend. When called upon, the teens mostly step up.

The couples, in contrast, are failing one by one. Daton and Morgan came on the show as a way to test the strength of their relationship, so it was no huge surprise when he became the first of the teens to leave. Kelly has deep doubts about her relationship to Austin, and they are now in limbo, with a promise to break up after the completion of the entire experiment. It just makes for awkward television. Poor David, whose real-life parents are going through a divorce, to have to watch the drama and feel the tension between Austin and Kelly.

Even the couples with prior difficulties have rebounded. Kelsey and Sean seem to have settled in, and they're barely seen in the two hours of show last night (which, in this drama-laced show, means they're doing just fine). Cory and Alicea did the best job of parenting seen yet with troubled teen Sam. After Sam dumped all of Alicea's clothes on the floor, the teen "parents" stood strong, together, against the angst-ridden boy. And Sasha and Jordan returned to their place at the top of the couple/ parent rankings. When one member of each couple was treated to a visit by a friend, Jordan and his best friend hung out with Sasha too. Tellingly, Daton and his friend went to a skating rink, alone, to commiserate about Morgan.

I'm glad the show is almost over—they take care of the elderly next week, before presumably some type of wrap-up—because NBC has made this a painful ride. Unlike the original show, lauded as a success across the pond, NBC made this just another teen drama roller coaster. By selecting struggling couples made up of teens that had never worked a day in their life, they thought they'd get instances of bad parenting. Instead, they got pouty teens and malfunctioning couples who just happened to be babysitting. It's not birth control; it's couples counseling.

That's Funny, But Not Ha-Ha Funny

The Fordham Institute's Liam Julian has vowed to spend his entire summer pounding out overlong responses to this blog, so that we won't "let fly with a barrage of blog blather like none yet seen, safe in [our] assumption that [our] ill-founded fulminations would go unopposed."
Okay.....first of all, it's really a disservice to William F. Buckley's memory to mock his prose style this way. The man's been gone less than six months, show some respect. Also, Liam's posts would be better if he knew what he was talking about. In a lengthy anti-affirmative action screed, he says:

Thus, we have this: Yale accepts a black student whose qualifications are average for the University of Michigan, Michigan accepts a black student whose resume would be appropriate at Florida State, and Florida State fills its classes with black and Latino students whose credentials reflect those of their community college peers.

Yes, imagine what would happen if Florida State made a practice of admitting academically less qualified black and Latino students, some with SAT scores in the 900s or below. Oh wait, we don't have to imagine, because Education Sector published an entire policy paper on exactly that topic just three months ago. It turns out that black students at FSU do just as well as white students. Last year, they did better. Why? Because the university has a great program in place designed to help first-generation college students succeed. Liam has a degree from FSU, yet seems not to have noticed this. Must have been too busy watching the football team slide into scandal and mediocrity.

Then there's this gem from an earlier post about "theory" and the practice of teaching:

Is it not true that much of this theory and methodology is a relatively modern invention, one that did not exist a half-century ago, when fine teachers surely did?

If my calculations are correct, a half-century ago was in 1958. John Dewey published Democracy and Education in 1916. The first half of the 20th century (i.e. the pre-1958 half) featured a series of intense ideological debates about the meaning and practice of public education. Whole educational movements rose and fell, each grounded in theory, with a significant impact on schooling for millions of students. How do I know this? Because I--unlike, apparently, Liam--read Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by noted education historian Diane Ravitch. Liam shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy--Ravitch is on the Fordham Institute's Board of Trustees.

Suggestions for summer reading: less blogging and God and Man at Yale, more education policy and history.

Get Thee Some Graduate Students!

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon writes about the recent shift among school districts to integration policies based on economic status - not race - in light of last June's Supreme Court decision. Bazelon's review of the research on the impact of integration on student achievement highlights a serious problem for integration proponents - there just isn't much good research out there showing student achievement benefits from integration policies, whether they’re based on race or economic status.

I, unlike some people, find the logic behind creating “middle class schools” compelling – concentrated poverty brings with it a host of problems at the school-level, including fewer school resources and less qualified teachers, that tend to exacerbate any problems students are bringing with them from home. But I have yet to see any convincing research to show that busing students to create middle class schools will improve student achievement, at least as measured on standardized assessments.

In Bazelon’s article, for example, she cites research showing that low-income students in middle class schools score better than low-income students in majority low-income schools. That’s interesting, and indicates that concentrated poverty may have an effect on achievement, but it’s impossible to disentangle those results from other things that may be happening—the students in the middle class school may also live in more socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods, or, while they may qualify as low-income, their parents may have higher education levels or hold full-time (albeit low-paying) jobs. This type of anecdotal evidence leaves a lot to be desired, and leaves those who support integration policies with few genuine facts to grab hold of.

The evidence supporting gains beyond test scores, such as graduation rates, college attendance, and employment, also hint to positive outcomes from integration plans, but are frustratingly weak when it comes to research design. METCO, for example, Boston’s long-running integration program, which buses students from the city into neighboring suburban districts, reports that 87 percent of METCO students attend college, compared with 54 percent of Boston public school students as a whole. That’s great, but considering that there are 12,000 students on the waitlist for METCO and students are assigned to the program by lottery, why hasn’t anyone conducted a study comparing the students randomly selected to participate in METCO with those who were not selected? The results from that study would be taken much more seriously and would hold up better to scrutiny than simply reporting comparisons with Boston’s general student population.

Integration proponents' biggest hurdle may not be the recent Supreme Court case, instead, it may be the lack of rigorous research on integration and student achievement. While KIPP and other charter school networks are investing in longitudinal studies on student outcomes, those who would like to see resources spent on integration, rather than building new schools, will need to pursue similarly rigorous research efforts. If they don’t, public support for integration policies may wane in favor of efforts to create new neighborhood schools, segregated or not.

Self-Tying Logical Knots

Reporting from the recent AFT convention, Sherman Dorn makes an important point w/r/t a discussion led by Susan Ohanian (who is waaaay out there on the fringes of anti-NCLB absolutism, to the point where she recently took to the pages of Kappan to denounce the NEA for being too moderate on No Child):

Ohanian worried about the statement by Obama that "the single most important factor in determining a child's achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it's not who their parents are or how much money they have. It's who their teacher is." Ohanian argued that this statement is rhetoric that sets up blaming teachers for all sorts of problems they are not responsible for. A few minutes later, she claimed that the real danger of high-stakes accountability was the destruction of children's imaginations and the creation of a compliant workforce. But there's a logical inconsistency here: how can schools create worker robots if they are not powerful in shaping the lives of children?

I worry (and I said towards the end of the event) that Ohanian's criticism undercut arguments about the importance of the public sphere. You can say that teachers are not crucial to children's lives, but then it's hard to argue that schools should be well-funded. You can say that teachers are not crucial, but then it's hard to argue against all sorts of problematic policy proposals that take authority away from teachers or that position teachers' professional judgment as irrelevant. Ohanian was nodding in acknowledgment at the time, so I think (or I hope) she knows that her impromptu remarks were not consistent with either her deeper views of schooling or that of most teachers.

Dorn is being entirely too generous; this inconsistency is deliberate and sits at the heart of everything Ohanian and her ilk have to say. At the risk of being simplistic, one can divide attitudes about public education within the policy sphere into three basic camps. The first is "Public education doesn't work so let's get rid of it." This is your arch-conservative John Derbyshire-type stuff, which consists of various loosely coupled theories involving IQ determinism, the miracle of free markets, the evils of taxation and organized labor, etc. It enjoys durable appeal in some circles but is almost wholly marginalized in policymaking, owing to the fact that it's completely dumb.

The second is the basic reformist position: "Public education works so let's make it work better." It's the view that informs this blog, one that begins with a belief in the importance of public schools as tremendously vital and fundamentally egalitarian institutions, but proceeds to a fairly critical stance that's centered on ideas like increased accountability for results. It's sympathetic to the need for more educational resources but skeptical that the money we're spending now is being put to maximum use.

While the two positions don't have equal value (in that the first is wrong and the second is right) both have the advantage of logical consistency. If you really believe half of all students are uneducatable and we'd be better of in an all-vouchers-all-the-time world, than destroying public education as we know it makes sense. Similarly, if you believe that schools and teachers have great potential to help students, particularly disadvantaged students, then we should invest in them while also tying that investment to real accountability for student learning.

Then there's third position--the Ohanian position--which is really less a coherent position at all than a set of attitudes and individual agenda items rooted in defensiveness and a desire to maintain established institutions and arrangements as they are. To be clear, some of this defensiveness is quite justified -- there really are first position adherents out there who wish public education harm. But much of it boils down to the idea that while public education needs substantially more funding and teachers deserve much more respect (both of which ideas are, in and of themselves, true) it's unreasonable to suggest that either the funding or the respect ought to be accompanied by any commensurate expectation of enhanced, concretely defined educational results. Or, similarly, the idea that we have to protect children from policies that will either deliberately or inadveratently turn them into dead-eyed grist for the capitalist machine a la Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, yet at the same time schools have little or no upside potential to help economically disadvantaged students learn enough to lead a fulfilling, productive life.

This position is based on no core beliefs regarding the efficacy of public education, but rather shifts back and forth on that question depending on the issue at hand. Of course it's possible to be too optimistic about what schools can do in the face of large social problems, but the Ohanian position seems unwilling to give an inch here, or admit under any circumstances that a not-insignficant percentage of schools and teachers could be much better than they are.

Fear for Your Daughter's Virtue

"Boys crisis" promoter Richard Whitmire has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed offering a new reason to be upset about the higher education gender imbalance: it's turning college girls into, um, women of easy virtue, allegedly because of "what biologists refer to as the operational sex ratio, which in the animal kingdom refers to the changes in mating habits that occur when one sex outnumbers the other." Sherman Dorn does a good job of pointing out the numerous flaws in this argument here (see also Sara Mead from a couple of years ago on the same topic here). I'll just note that this once again raises the issue of affirmative action for men, a terrible discriminatory practice that colleges and universities should abandon.

Race-based affirmative action is a complex issue; on balance I support it for reasons explained here. But whether you're pro or con, I think everyone would agree that it evens out the racial distribution of students among colleges. Because minority students are less likely to attend well-funded schools and less likely to get strong college prep curricula in high school, on average they enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students, and thus end up disproportionately attending less selective colleges. Affirmative action counteracts this, with the result being within-college racial/ethnic makeups that are more representative of the college student body as a whole. Crucially, race-based affirmative action as practiced by selective colleges doesn't hurt non-selective colleges, because it simply brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance.

This isn't true for gender-based affirmative action, because the underlying rationale is very different. Race-based affirmative action makes up for numerous historical and contemporary inequities that obviously don't apply to men. When it comes to gender, however, balance is everything and the only thing, with colleges scrambling to avoid an allegedly catastrophic 60/40 female-to-male ratio which somehow causes previously chaste female collegians to behave like extras in a Motley Crue video.

But gender preferences at a given selective college do nothing to fix the overall problem of more women in college than men. Instead, they merely push that problem down the higher education food chain, from the selective colleges to the non-selectives. If a selective college rejects a more qualified woman in favor of a less qualified man, she's still going to college somewhere. So the net result is that that less selective institutions that by definition don't have as much leverage to shape their class makeup end up having to deal with the problem of bacchanals in the dorm rooms or what have you. In other words, gender-based affirmative action isn't just immoral and possibly illegal under Title IX, it's also selfish.

Plus, I really don't get the logic: colleges are essentially saying they have to not admit women because otherwise women won't want to go there. Isn't this problem inherently self-correcting? If high female/male ratios are a turn-off for women, won't fewer women apply to colleges where the ratio is out of whack? It's kind of like what Yogi Berra said about the restaurant that nobody goes to anymore because it's too crowded.

Forget Something?

The recent New York State Commission on Higher Education report contains a number of recommendations for making New York public colleges and universities globally competitive, and has some good ideas for improving connections with K-12 education and workforce development. But much of the report sounds like the arms race rhetoric common in higher education, and misses out on an important purpose of colleges and universities: educating undergraduates.

The report includes several ideas on ways to improve the research standing of certain NY state universities, including devoting more funds to support research, recruiting “top flight” faculty and graduate students, and enhancing entrance requirements (e.g. raising SAT scores) at these institutions. In fact, the 100-page report mentions “research” a total of 175 times.

“Learning” is mentioned 18 times, “Undergraduate” 11 times. And teaching? Twice.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t valuable recommendations in the report, and ones that benefit undergraduates. The proposal for a seamless transfer system—allowing students to move from one state university to another without risking losing credit hours—is particularly good. But the focus of the report is clearly on research and graduate-level studies.

While US News rankings - much of which are based on the research and "entrance requirements" the Commission seeks to enhance - are seen as the marker of success in much of higher education, the New York State Commission on Higher Education would have done well to eschew that rhetoric in favor of what will likely become an area of increasing concern—improving the quality of undergraduate education.

The NEA Wants Your Stories

I subscribe to the NEA's email list, and the latest one had this eye-catching opening:

Have You Been Caught on YouTube?
A student videotaped a teacher at Malibu High School who lost control of the class and raised his voice while students laughed at him. Another video showed an angry high school teacher forcing a student to stand for the National Anthem by yanking his chair out from under him. Outrageous classroom moments are being captured on cell phone cameras and broadcast on YouTube for the entire world to see. Has this happened to you or any of your colleagues? Share your story and be considered for an upcoming NEA Today article.

They direct you to a discussion board that's a little more on message, but I really don't understand why the NEA would want to collect stories about poor or violent teachers caught on tape.

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.