Reality Time

Matt Yglesias observes the spate of union-sponsored Fenty-bashing at the Democratic national convention, driven in large part by the Fenty administration's proposal to pay teachers a lot more money in exchange for more accountability and less job security, and doesn't like what he sees. (Side note: let's all agree to apply some standards of objectivity and reasonableness in the use of the word "bashing." If you're, say, handing out flyers that call someone a "budget-shattering, union-busting, promise-breaking political boss whose poor performance and bad management are costing DC taxpayers millions of dollars," that's bashing. If you say "Fenty's policies would be bad for teachers and public education, and here's why," or, alternatively, "The union position is short-sighted and will degrade the quality of the teacher workforce," that's not bashing, which implies a certain level of name-calling, histrionics, and barely-concealed rage.) Matt notes that:

DC is, at this point, in better financial shape than the vast majority of American localities and also has much worse schools. Under the circumstances, it’s the best possible opportunity for teachers to get what Rhee’s putting on the table — generous reform that puts real resources on the table and thereby keeps teaching as an attractive career path even while building some additional accountability into the deal.

Teacher salaries have been stagnant for a long time. They don't get paid as much as other other well-educated professionals whose jobs require similar levels of training and hard work to do well. Teachers and their representatives in organized labor think this is unfair and would like it to change. And they're absolutely right to do so. It would be great to see teachers consistently making six-figure incomes. A lot of them deserve it, and it would send powerful signals to the job market about the nature and status of the profession.

But the idea that those kinds of dollars are going to arrive without some significant tradeoffs in terms of accountability and job security is a complete fantasy. It will never happen. And the circumstances under which it can happen are fairly uncommon: A powerful sense of need--i.e. a school district whose educational challenges justify the infusion of resources--plus leaders with access to those resources and the willingness to let teachers decide for themselves whether or not to participate. In other words, the deal isn't getting much better than this.

Critics have raised the usual objections about the potential for favoritism and bias in the evaluation process, the spectre of good teachers losing their jobs because they happened to get a particularly tough group of students one year, things went pear-shaped on testing day, etc. But let's think about that for a moment. Here you have a mayor and schools chancellor who've staked their careers and reputations on turning around the school system. To do that, it's vitally important for them to hire, retain, and support good teachers. It would, therefore, be shockingly dumb to start arbitrarily firing good teachers or otherwise treat them unfairly. Fenty and Rhee have every incentive to make sure their evaluation process is sound. If they don't, their jobs are the ones at risk.

This highlights the importance of understanding how the major threads of school reform fit together. Absent political or governmental accountability for results, it's perfectly reasonable to worry that management at various levels--city, district, school--could and will abuse their discretion. If nobody cares whether your students are learning, then sure, give a fat bonus to your buddy and fire the teacher down the hall who called you out for your incompetence. But when there's real accountability and public scrutiny, the incentives change, and policies like tying teacher pay to performance, defined in part by managerial judgment, start to make a lot more sense.

Space, Time, and Inter-District Choice

Just to amplify a few points Erin makes below about Education Sector's new report examining inter-district school choice: One of our main goals in conducting this analysis was to try to get a handle on how the generalized--and very worthwhile--idea of expanding school choice across school district boundaries plays out given real world contraints like geography, transportation infrastructure, and the uneven distribution of high-performing schools.

For example, in an upcoming report Erin will be running the same Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis for the city of Chicago. It will show that only a limited number of students there could benefit from the opportunity to transfer to other districts, particularly in high school. This is partly because of issues like capacity and distance. But it's also because Chicago was built next to a gigantic lake that contains no schools, good or otherwise. So while Chicago students might be able to travel north, south, or west to find better schools, they pretty much can't go east. These things matter.

The way school districts are designed also makes a big difference. Some states--Illinois is one--have hundreds of small districts. Marion County, Indiana, where I used to live, contains eleven separate school districts, including the traditionally urban Indianapolis public schools along with various large and small township school districts, including the tiny district of Speedway, which enjoys unusual wealth owing to its ability to levy property taxes on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the Indy 500 is contested. Inter-district choice in Marion County would undoubtedly benefit many students.

On the other hand, many southern states operate large, whole-county school districts. The map below shows a low-performing school that happens to be located in the middle of the Polk County, Florida district, which encompasses over 2,000 square miles. It takes 45 minutes just to get to the county border from that school, much less find a better school on the other side. Inter-district choice isn't really an option there.



















Some critics of the report have raised the issue of our school capacity assumptions. It's true, as Dianne Piche notes below, that some schools may have more capacity than they'd like to admit. But others have suggested that, absent any definitive empirical evidence of how much successful schools could theoretically expand to accomodate new students, we should have either (A) made no assumptions at all, which is methodologically the same as assuming that schools have infinite capacity to expand, or (B) treated all possible assumptions as equally valid. Frankly, that doesn't make much sense, and the map below shows why.




















The starred school in middle is located in Piedmont School District, which is very affluent and literally built on a hill surrounded on all sides by Oakland Unified School District, a high-poverty district with rock bottom test scores that's been subject to state takeover in the past. There are four low-performing Oakland schools within a five minute drive of the Piedmont school and at least nine within 20 minutes. I think we can all agree that even under the rosiest of scenarios, the Piedmont school couldn't quintuple in size, or more, to accomodate transfer students. There are limits, and any responsible analysis of inter-district choice has to acknowledge that. Piedmont is, of course, somewhat of an extreme example, but that's why we ran the numbers for every single school in California (and Texas and Florida) using a moderate capacity assumption, to see how things play out in the aggregate.

Assumptions

In Dianne’s response below, she talks about two important assumptions we've made in ES's recent report on interdistrict choice--one assumption about driving distance and the other about school capacity. Richard Kahlenberg, an ES Senior Fellow and a well-known advocate of using interdistrict choice as a means to achieve economic integration also takes issue with the assumptions we made regarding these two variables, saying that we’ve artificially limited the outcomes by choosing a driving distance and a school capacity estimate that are too modest.

I disagree with Kahlenberg that the assumptions made in the report are somehow irresponsible, but I do agree that they’re debatable and indicate areas where, as Dianne points out, additional research would substantially further the discussion on the feasibility of interdistrict choice. (Click here to see a full explanation of our assumptions and their impact on the report’s results—also available on page 4 of the report in a full-page sidebar, in smaller, but not fine print).

First up, the driving time assumption. We calculated the potential of interdistrict choice based on the availability of higher performing schools located within a 20-minute driving radius of each lower performing school. It’s important to note that the actual travel time is likely longer because the estimate doesn’t account for traffic or for picking up students along a bus route.

But, even so, is a 20-minute driving time unreasonably short? It might be if you’re a parent desperate for a better school option and willing to transport your kids up to an hour on the bus, but for many parents, most of whom like the idea of their children attending a school that is nearby and easily accessible to them during the day, a 20-minute drive would simply be reasonable. And if interdistrict choice is going to work on a large scale, it needs to work with reasonable commuting distances to schools – distances that allow parents to volunteer, attend PTA meetings, and pick their kids up when needed.

Even if we did assume that parents and students would be willing to commit to longer commutes, our results wouldn’t change by much. This is because, under our model, if one student can travel an hour, then all students can travel an hour. Therefore, increasing the driving distance both increases the available school choices and the competition for those choices. The limits of choice aren’t so much about 20-minutes versus 60-minutes, they’re about how many good schools are out there, how many students are competing to get in, and how much capacity higher performing schools have to enroll students from lower performing schools.

Which brings me to the second assumption – school capacity. Dianne makes the good point that school capacity is a “moving target”. It’s difficult to determine the actual ability of higher performing schools to expand—there is little available data and capacity might change from year-to-year along with population shifts and budgets. The recommendation made by the Aspen Commission on No Child Left Behind to require districts to audit available space in schools would go a long way to removing some of the mystery around school capacity and may, as Dianne predicts, reveal much more space than we’ve assumed is available.

But in the absence of that data, we still needed to make an assumption about the ability of schools to expand to take in transferring students—and we assumed that schools could increase capacity by 10 percent. If we made no assumption about school capacity and instead threw our hands in the air in bewilderment, we would have ignored a hugely important variable in the interdistrict choice equation. By settling on one number as a starting point for discussion, we've been able to move the conversation about interdistrict choice to a place it needed to go—talking about the practical limits and realistic potential of interdistrict choice.

In the end, what I hope readers take away from this report, and what I found particularly interesting, isn’t just the bottom line numbers or debate about our assumptions, but the fact that the potential of interdistrict choice can vary greatly from one community to the next—in some areas, it can have a much bigger impact than the overall numbers might indicate. In East Palo Alto, CA, for example, 35 percent of students could transfer with interdistrict choice--compared with only 9 percent in Los Angeles schools.

And it is this implementation of interdistrict choice programs that is crucial --where will interdistrict programs be most effective and how can they be implemented to best serve the students who are most in need of access to better schools.

Dianne Piché on "Plotting School Choice"

If advocates for children were able to draw school district boundaries anew, nobody in their right mind would configure them with the high levels of inefficiency, inequality and segregation we find today in states like California and Texas (included in the study) and others like New Jersey, Connecticut and Ohio. Education Sector's report on interdistrict school choice underscores the fact that we have consigned large numbers of the nation’s poorest and most academically struggling children--children who are disproportionately African-American and Latino--to schools in districts with the worst track records and least capacity to educate them. Yet, we know that smart, thoughtful approaches to school choice--including providing interdistrict options and successful charter schools, along with parent outreach and incentives for receiving schools--can yield enormous benefits. Low-income parents are empowered and more satisfied. Parents of all races and income levels experience and come to value diversity. Students benefit in tangible and intangible ways. In St. Louis, for example (where I have represented the NAACP and schoolchildren), we negotiated the largest, longest-running inter-district program in the country. Outcomes for the Black students who choose to attend schools in suburban districts are demonstrably better than those who remain in city schools: they have access to more rigorous coursework, and they graduate and attend college at much higher rates.

The good news from this report is the finding by the authors that some 10-20% of eligible students could be accommodated via interdistrict choice under their hypotheses. The sobering news, of course, is that the political will is not quite there yet to help make this happen and that laws like NCLB will need to be amended to strengthen the interdistrict choice provisions.

Finally, while the report provides interesting geographic and demographic data for a handful ot localities, I would argue that its premises, while useful as a starting point, are incomplete in at least three respects:

First, parents who choose demonstrably better schools for their children (whether magnet, private, parochial or interdistrict public) are often willing to have their children transported longer than 20 minutes each way. In the Washington, D.C. area where I live, it is not uncommon for students to commute up to an hour each way to high-performing schools that promise greater access to rigorous coursework and competitive colleges.

Second, in my experience litigating school desegregation cases I have learned that school "capacity" is a nimble & moving target. It is used as a defense by parents and teacher in affluent communities to resist welcoming less advantaged students. Figures rise and fall with school budgets, housing patterns, the commitment of states and the federal government to enforce the law, and, unfortunately, racial dynamics. Recently, in Birmingham, Alabama, the school district argued it could not honor middle school students’ right to transfer out of a school in need of improvement because it lacked capacity in other schools. But when the U.S. Department of Education ordered compliance with the law, capacity was found and the right was extended to all eligible students.

Finally, although the report acknowledges the existence of preexisting choice--i.e., school choice made pursuant to state or local law, magnet programs, informal practices and the like--it does not address the impact on enrollment and capacity. For example, a high school’s enrollment increases and its capacity to accept NCLB transfers is reduced every time an affluent parent chooses to jump district lines and enroll her child in a neighboring district. Because many states and districts allow other forms of choice (with parents usually providing their own transportation and sometimes even making tuition payments to these better schools, in the case of interdistrict choice) and make it available before NCLB choice, there is likely to be more capacity than meets the eye in many schools. Additional research could be helpful in this regard.

--Dianne Piché, Executive Director, Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights

Down and Out of District

That's the title of a Beverly Hills 90210 episode in which Andrea is nearly found out for attending West Beverly High instead of her assigned high school, located in a lower-income part of town. While Andrea gets away with her illegal transfer, many students aren't able to cross district boundaries to attend a better school. In these cases, district boundaries serve as an artificial barrier to choice, often limiting school options to the low-performing schools within district boundaries -- boundaries that often reflect the racial and economic segregation of larger society.

It was this often arbitrary and segregating effect of district boundaries (and not the 90210 episode) that motivated us to look at the potential of interdistrict choice to offer more options to students in low-performing schools. To our surprise, we found that interdistrict choice on a large scale is unlikely to benefit a large percent of students - only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option (see the full report here).

Above, Dianne Piché, Executive Director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights and longtime civil rights advocate, responds to our report and offers her insight on what it means for the discussion on desegregation and school choice. Thanks to Dianne for her thoughtful comments--I expect that they will spark some good discussion about our conclusions and what those conclusions might mean for the future of interdistrict school choice.

Sock Puppet

I had just assumed that when well-respected publications like Education Week decide to allow people to write anonymously under their good name, they make it clear that you can't do stuff like this. Apparently not.

Update: As I should have noted above, the post in question looks like it went up before the blog migrated to Ed Week. So they may very well have a "no sock puppet" rule.

The Schools We Need, Continued

A few additional thoughts on the post below about margins of error, etc., based on the comments in this and earlier posts. (An aside: My take on anonymous commenting is pretty much akin to my take on anonymous blogging: Why? It's a free country, nobody's going to yank you out of your house in the middle of the night because of what you write about No Child Left Behind. Identify yourself, we'll all be better for it. Particularly, I should add, if you're claiming some kind of expertise. If you're really a statistics professor, say so; I'm not giving handles like "StatsProf" any more credence than "Anonymous" or "SomeGuyYellingOnTheStreetCorner.")

First, some people have raised the issue of measurement error vis a vis the tests themselves. And it's true that (A) tests only cover a fraction of what we want to students to know, and (B) tests are an imperfect measure of that fraction. But the place to make allowances for that should be the process of setting cut scores. States don't require students to get 100 percent of the answers right to be deemed "proficient." (In fact, all states have a separate, higher "advanced" level which is also less than 100 percent.) Once states determine what less-than-100 score is proficient, it makes sense to build in some cushion to account for imperfections in the instrument, random variation, etc. This is particularly true if the test is being used for individual high-stakes purposes, i.e. graduation and grade retention policies. But having made those allowances, don't layer on new allowances with confidence intervals and tell the public that students are meeting NCLB performance thresholds when in fact they're not.

Second, there's certainly no unanimity in academia on the issue of confidence intervals. Some very qualified, well-trained people see it one way, some see it another.

Third, what's consistently lost in all of these discussions is the need to balance the risks of Type I and Type II errors. When implementing NCLB over the last six years, states have been almost exclusively interested in making sure that good schools aren't mistakenly identified as "in need of improvement" or "failing" under NCLB. And that's a legitimate thing to worry about. But they've all but ignored the risk of under-performing schools being mistakenly not identified as needing improvement. There's no way to completely eliminate both risks; states have to find a reasonable middle ground between them. Instead, many states have been obsessed with finding new ways to make sure there is absolutely no possible way for a good school to be falsely identified as underperforming, and in doing so have knowingly let schools and districts that are obviously not serving students well slide by for years and years. Of course, focusing only on minimizing the first kind of risk makes sense if you view NCLB as fundamentally illegitimate and malign, but if that's the case just say so and stop pretending your concerns are limited to proper use of statistics.

The Schools We Have, or the Schools We Need

Last week I wrote about the practice of applying statistical margins of error to the percent of students in a school who pass a test. It's a goofy idea, I said, because: "unlike opinion polls, NCLB doesn't test a sample of students. It tests all students. The only way states can even justify using MOEs in the first place is with the strange assertion that the entire population of a school is a sample, of some larger universe of imaginary children who could have taken the test, theoretically. In other words, the message to parents is "Yes, it is true that your children didn't learn very much this year, but we're pretty sure, statistically speaking, that had we instead been teaching another group of children who do not actually exist, they'd have done fine. So there's nothing to worry about."

Eduwonkette responded with her own take on the issue by cutting and pasting from Harvard professor Dan Koretz's recent book on educational assessment, in which he says:

This question was a matter of debate among members of the profession only a few years ago, but it is now generally agreed that sampling error is indeed a problem even if every student is tested. The reason is the nature of the inference based on scores. If the inference pertaining to each school...were about the particular students in that school at that time, sampling error would not be an issue, because almost all of them were tested. That is, sampling would not be a concern if people were using scores to reach conclusions such as "the fourth-graders who happened to be in this school in 2000 scored higher than the particular group of students who happened to be enrolled in 1999." In practice, however, users of scores rarely care about this. Rather, they are interested in conclusions about the performance of schools. For the inferences, each successive cohort of students enrolling in the school is just another small sample of the students who might possibly enroll, just as the people interviewed for one poll are a small sample of those who might have been.

In one sense Koretz frames the issue correctly; this is indeed all about inference. But he's wrong to imply that this is a methodological question best resolved by the consensus opinion of statisticians and assessment professionals. It's not. Rather, this really goes to the heart of how we conceive of public schools, what we expect of them, and how we hold them accountable for student learning.

By one of way of thinking, school outcomes are the result of a production function in which schools are constant and inputs, including students, vary. In other words, the school is what it is, with a certain amount of resources, certain number of teachers with certain qualifications, along with curricula, facilities, etc. Every year, the inputs (students) change. If, in one year, a brilliant group of students comes through the door, outputs (test scores) go up. If a very tough group arrives in the following year, outputs go down. If this is how you see things, then Koretz's analysis makes sense and sampling-based margins of error are fair--indeed, absolutely necessary.

The problem with this idea is that it assumes that schools are inflexible and un-improvable, inert black boxes that serve as little more than conduits for inputs and outputs. Accountability policies assume something else: that both students and schools can vary. That schools can, and must, change they way they teach to fit the particular needs of their students in a given year. If a cohort of particularly difficult students enters the system, and this becomes apparent as they move through first and second grade, by the time they hit the tested grades the school or district needs to reallocate resources and plan accordingly.

Statisticians have a weakness for black box thinking, because the box contains a lot of things that are essentially unmeasurable. You can't put a number on the relationship between a principal and her teachers, the quality of teamwork, the level of commitment and hard work among the staff, the sophistication and flexibility of the instructional plan. You can, however, put a number on student learning--an imperfect one, to be sure, but close enough to render reasonable judgments about school success.

Schools need to be organized, staffed, led, funded--and held accountable--for the performance of the students they have, not those they might have had, or wish they had, or had once or may have again. These students, this year, are the ones who matter. That conviction, and those that follow, are much more than a matter of statistics.

More on Murray

The piece I wrote yesterday about Charles Murray's new book focused primarily on his higher education-related arguments that only 10 percent of people have an IQ high enough to obtain the college degrees that 35 percent of people actually do attain. I didn't really have the space to tackle the first, K-12 half of the book, other than to note that "Murray believes that half of all children are more or less uneducable in the traditional sense and thus need to be identified as such via mandatory first grade I.Q. testing so they can be shunted off into vocational education programs for their own good. This is absurd and immoral, for reasons too numerous to recount here."

Ben Wildavsky does a good job of laying out some of those reasons in today's Wall Street Journal. For example:

International tests show that students in many other nations bypass American kids in reading and math. Could such comparative results really be a function of higher raw intelligence overseas -- or are they more likely to reflect superior educational practices? It is telling that hard-headed education reformers like Eric Hanushek, Chester E. Finn and Jay Greene believe that we can do much more to boost the academic achievement of children upon whom Mr. Murray would essentially give up.

And:

In his brave new world, the bell curve of abilities is cheerfully acknowledged; students and workers gladly accept their designated places in the pecking order; and happy, well-paid electricians and plumbers go about their business while their brainy brethren read Plato and prepare for the burdens of ruling the world. It is hard to believe that a dynamic, upwardly mobile society would emerge from such an arrangement, or "dignity" either. The view outlined in "Real Education" seems far from the one that Mr. Murray put forward in "Losing Ground" (1984). In that influential book, a headlong assault on the welfare state, he called for an "infinitely forgiving" education system in which students can try over and over to succeed, even if only some will.

Well said. I'd also note that Murray's preferred educational regime of IQ testing, tracking, and limiting opportunities for advanced degrees would invest a great deal of new power in government-run schools. That seems very un-conservative to me. And dangerous, given the way such power tends to refract through underlying social biases. Several years ago, I listened to the president of Dillard University, a historically black institution, give a speech about education. When he was in high school, the school tried to put him in the vocational track, because it didn't think he was smart enough for college-level work. They wanted him to be a repairman. He wanted something more.

Another Step into the Mainstream

The Southern Regional Education Board launches its Online Teachers Web site. SREB was one of the first mainstream educational policy organizations to focus on building high quality virtual schooling options. The number of southern states with strong state virtual schools is no coincidence.

Woe, the Banana Slugs

Harvard edged ahead of Princeton this year in the annual least-meaningful-yet-most-publicized measure of higher education quality, the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This is like using advanced satellite telemetry to figure out which Himalayan peak is the world's highest--marginally interesting in a trivial way, but beside the point, which is that they're both a whole lot taller than nearly all of the other mountains. A few meters here or there at the highest altitudes doesn't matter very much. Although it's interesting to note that Harvard appears to have improved not by manipulating the admissions process as colleges like to, but rather by simply hiring more professors, driving up the percentage of classes with fewer than 20 and 50 students. There are worse ways to get ahead.

More interestingly, U.S. News has for the first time published a list of "up-and-coming" colleges, based solely on a peer survey. Some of them clearly deserve the honor -- it's nice to see the University of Maryland - Baltimore County get recognized for years of hard work and success in helping African-American students graduate and earn degrees in science and engineering fields. Elon University consistently scores in the upper ranks on the National Survey of Student Engagement, a measure that--unlike anything in the regular U.S. News rankings--actually says something about the quality of teaching at the university.

But while annual changes in the U.S. News rankings get the most attention, they're actually remarkably stable. The "First Tier" Top 50 is almost precisely the same (Yeshiva University edge up from 52 to 50, knocking out Syracuse and Tulane, which were tied for the last spot last year). Things stay the same in higher education more than they change.

There were, however, a few major movers. No college seems to have fallen farther than UC - Santa Cruz, which dropped 17 places from 79th to 96th. The Banana Slugs' peer assesment score is down a tenth of a point, graduation rates are lower, class sizes larger, the acceptance rate is up, alumni giving is down, and fewer students are enrolling with high SATs. Perhap the distractions eco-terrorist firebombings and whatnot took their toll.

Note: I originally misidentified Elon University as Elon College in this post. I've corrected the mistake.

Pass the Cash

Maybe this wasn't such a good week for DC Public Schools to release their new cash motivation scheme. We already saw that the first year of New York City's plan to pay kids for high scores on Advanced Placement tests did not go so well. Today DC releases their plan to pay kids up to $100 a month for things like attending class on time, having good manners, and earning high grades. Perhaps they could have waited a bit...

The Bell Curve Returns

With the enactment of a new GI Bill, the time has come to once again recall former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ prediction that the original 1944 legislation benefiting World War II soldiers would convert colleges and universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Perhaps it’s unfair — Hutchins, a veteran himself, was a noted legal scholar and philosopher whose influence on the university he led is still quite visible today. But that’s the price you pay for being so spectacularly (and quotably) wrong about one of the great policy issues of our time. Helping returning veterans attend college was only the beginning of the massive mid-20th century expansion of access to higher education in America. Most people see this as an unequivocal good and a job not yet done.

Yet an active strain of educational hobo-phobia remains, a persistent, largely sub rosa muttering that perhaps too many of the wrong kind of people are being allowed inside the ivy-covered walls. It’s not respectable conversation outside of conservative circles, due to its unvarnished elitism and 0-for-the-last-60-years-and-counting historical track record. But it lives on, and now has a new standard-bearer in the person of Charles Murray, author along with the late Richard Herrnstein of the hugely controversial 1994 treatise, The Bell Curve. In his new book, Real Education, Murray offers “four simple truths for bringing America’s schools back to reality.” The third is: “Too many people are going to college.”

Click here to read the rest at InsideHigherEd. 

Margins of Error

Kevin Drum wrote a good post a couple of weeks ago about statistical illiteracy in the media, viz. the widespread tendency to characterize election poll results in which one candidate's percentage point lead is equal to or less than the poll's statistical margin of error (MOE) as a "statistical tie" or "dead heat." Kevin notes:

...probability isn't a cutoff, it's a continuum: the bigger the lead, the more likely that someone is ahead and that the result isn't just a polling fluke. So instead of lazily reporting any result within the MOE as a "tie," which is statistically wrong anyway, it would be more informative to just go ahead and tell us how probable it is that a candidate is really ahead. Here's a table that gives you the answer to within a point or two:

As Kevin notes, if Obama is up by three points, and the MOE is three points, it's 84% likely that he'll be the next President of the United States. That's very different than 50% likely, i.e. an actual tie.

This is directly relevant to education because most states use precisely the same statistical techniques when deciding whether a school has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind. If, say, 65% of students need to pass the test in order to make AYP, and only 62% pass, but the state determines an MOE of 4 percentage points, then the school makes AYP because the score was "within the margin of error."

This is silly for two reasons. First, unlike opinion polls, NCLB doesn't test a sample of students. It tests all students. The only way states can even justify using MOEs in the first place is with the strange assertion that the entire population of a school is a sample, of some larger universe of imaginary children who could have taken the test, theoretically. In other words, the message to parents is "Yes, it is true that your children didn't learn very much this year, but we're pretty sure, statistically speaking, that had we instead been teaching another group of children who do not actually exist, they'd have done fine. So there's nothing to worry about."

Second, per Kevin's chart above, the idea that scores that fall below the cutoff but within the margin of error are statistically indistinguishable from actual passing scores is incorrect. This is particularly true given that, while opinion polls almost always use a 95% confidence interval to establish their MOEs, most states use a 99% confidence interval for NCLB, which results in substantially larger margins of error around the passing score. But states do it anyway, because many of them basically see NCLB accountability as a malevolent force emanating from Washington, DC from which schools need to be shielded by any means necessary.

Think of it this way: let's say your child is sick and you bring him to the doctor. After the diagnosis is complete, you and the doctor have the following conversation:

Doctor: My diagnosis is that your son has pneumonia and needs to be hospitalized.

You: That's terrible! Are you sure?

Doctor: Well, there are few absolute certainties in medicine. It's possible that he only has bronchitis. But I'm pretty sure it's pneumonia.

You: How sure?

Doctor: 84% sure.

What would you do? Would you (A) Check your son into the hospital? Or would you (B) Say "Hey, there's a 16 percent chance this whole thing will work itself out with bedrest and chicken soup. Let's go that way."

States implementing NCLB nearly always choose option (B). That's because they see the law as a process for making the lives of educators worse, not what it actually is: a process for making the lives of students better.

Fresh Signs of the Apocalypse

Over at Ed Week, David Hoff notes that the decline of intellectual standards in this country has become so precipitous that the U.S. Secretary of Education is now appointing bloggers to serve on official National Technical Advisory Committees to evaluate the implementation of state accountability systems under No Child Left Behind. 

Seriously, though, it's a privilege and I'm glad for the chance to be part of the solution, etc. 

BAD Magazine

In a time when smart people of good faith occupy both sides of many heated and complex education debates, it makes sense occasionally to pause, take a deep breath, and denounce things like the incoherent mishmash of policy juvenalia, useless sentiment, and blatant lies found in this article, published by GOOD Magazine, in which we are told that NCLB "requires all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests," Bill Gates and Eli Broad are spearheading the corporate conspiracy to privatize K-12 education, and standardized tests come with instructions about what to do if students throw up on them. It's sort of a perfect distillation of woolly-minded HuffPost-type conventional education wisdom, and in that sense is oddly valuable, because you can read it and know everything that a not-inconsequential percentage of people know (or rather, don't know) about education.

Update: The author of the article, Gary Stager, objects to the above as defamatory and insists that "my article was carefully fact-checked by Good Magazine." Yet somehow the legendary Good Magazine fact-checking department failed to notice that NCLB is not "mathematically impossible," as Stager asserts, because it does not actually "require all of the nation's schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests." That Stager, a self-proclaimed "internationally recognized educator and consultant" would display such basic ignorance of the law he's criticizing tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the quality of thinking and editing involved. Stager also says "It's not 'useless sentiment' to care about children." Well, yes it is, if you think simply saying "I care about children" represents an argument of some kind. 

Wolverines!!!!!

A North Texas school district is adopting a new policy allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons so as to protect students from attackers via gunfights in the cafeteria. But don't worry, every precaution is being taken:

In order for teachers and staff to carry a pistol, they must have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun; must be authorized to carry by the district; must receive training in crisis management and hostile situations and have to use ammunition that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls.

Look for the nation's ammunition manufacturers to begin marketing special "School Safe" non-ricocheting ammunition any day now. Of course, none of this would have been necessary if the federal government hadn't decided to, um, protect students from gun violence:

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog," [District Superintendent David] Thweatt said in Friday's online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Yes, I imagine that the nation's suicidal loners and violent paranoiacs are keenly attuned to year-by-year changes in federal criminal policy. The sad thing is that Shooty McShoot missed the obvious and far more compelling justification for arming the nation's teacher workforce, namely that the recent Russian invasion of Georgia greatly increases the odds of a Red Dawn-style North American conquest, and as we all recall the Soviet paratroopers landed directly behind the local high school.

John McCain's Higher Education Platform

John McCain quietly released his higher education platform last week. It hasn't drawn much notice, perhaps because it's only newsworthy in its lack of depth. Sure, one can't really disagree that we need to "Prepare for the 21st Century in Higher Education" or "Improve Information for Parents," but those are pretty weak platitudes for a major party candidate this late in the game. His "plan" doesn't include any numbers, dollar signs, or specific proposals. 

Update: Author edited for content.  

The Times Magazine on New Orleans Schools

In late 2006, Paul Tough wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine about the challenges of educating disadvantaged children. Exploring--and in some instances taking sides on--the fractious debate over how much schools can accomplish for poor and minority students, it became one of the most widely-discussed pieces of education journalism in years. Now Tough is back with another in-depth article on the same topic, this time through the lens of education in post-Katrina New Orleans. The set-up:

The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood — many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city’s public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators...have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate — poor African-American kids — can achieve high levels of academic success.

In other words, New Orleans has become a kind of rare policy tabula rasa, a magnet for policy entrepreneurs and philanthropies eager to use the once-in-a-generation window of opportunity to transform urban education, rather than tinkering at the margins. This obviously raises the stakes for all concerned. Will it work? If not, does that de-legitimize the whole movement? Unfortunately, it also creates a dilemma for Tough as a writer, since nobody actually knows the answer to the central question the article poses. Five years from now, this will be the beginning to a fascinating story. Right now, it's a start without a finish.

Which is not to say the piece isn't valuable. As Tough notes, the governance structure in New Orleans is radically different than in most cities, close to the "portfolio district" model that's been proposed by people like CRPE's Paul Hill (an Education Sector non-resident senior fellow). In this model, elected officials don't so much run schools as manage them by choosing a mix of non-profits, charter school operators and others, setting performance standards, giving each provider a lot of discretion and flexibility, supporting under-performers and ultimately shutting down those that don't succeed. Or as New Orleans superintendent Paul Vallas says, "We put people in business and we take people out of business."

Clearly, the new education world in New Orleans is bringing a lot of talent and energy into a district that was, pre-Katrina, "disastrously low-performing," characterized by "a revolving door for superintendents...school officials indicted for bribery and theft; unexplained budget deficits; decaying building" etc. And it's hard to not to be impressed and moved by stories like this, about a returned hurricane evacuee and his mother:

Tony’s mother, Trineil, who is 31, was a product of [the dysfunctional New Orleans public school system.] Before the storm blew her family to Denver, she had never been outside of Louisiana, even for a day, and everyone she knew had been educated in New Orleans public schools. She was familiar with schools that didn’t work and educators who didn’t seem to care much. So it felt more than a little strange to her to be standing in her home with Hardrick and Sanders, two highly educated, impeccably dressed black professionals, listening to them describe what [their newly-formed charter school] Miller-McCoy had to offer her son.

“Ultimately, it’s my responsibility to make sure that you get to college,” Hardrick said to Tony. “You’re a sixth grader, and I’m standing in your living room telling Mom that if she will allow you to stick with me until 12th grade, you will be accepted to a four-year university.”

School wouldn’t be easy, she told him. He’d have to arrive each morning at 7:30 a.m., he’d have to wear a blazer and a necktie every day, he’d have to do his homework every night or stay until 6 p.m. the next afternoon to complete it. Hardrick handed Tony a copy of the Miller-McCoy Family and School Covenant, which she wanted him and his mother to sign, along with his homeroom teacher and Hardrick herself. All four people, she explained, had to make a commitment to get Tony to college.

“If you work hard and I work hard, we’ll get you there,” she said. “Is that fair? Are you ready to sign and shake and be officially welcomed to Miller-McCoy?”

Tony looked a little nervous, especially about the 7:30 part, but he nodded his head and said yes. Hardrick handed Tony a pen, and while he signed his name, she asked his mother if she had any questions. “I’m excited,” Petite said. “This is different. Y’all are taking time with these kids.”

What first sold her on Miller-McCoy, she said, was when the woman who answered the phone at the school told her that the boys would wear matching blazers with the school crest. “I said, ‘Blazers?’ I’ve never seen any kids running around in blazers except at St. Augustine” — a nearby Catholic high school — “and that’s where you pay to go to school. This is a public school, and they wear blazers and ties? I want that for my son. I do. I really want it for him. I know he can do it.”

Parental involvement is constantly invoked in education policy debates, in one of two ways: Either it's absence is an insurmountable obstacle that makes certain learning goals all but impossible (and thus school accountability schemes unworkable) or else it's presence creates huge advantages for charter schools like KIPP which obviate any claims that their success might be due to things like superior management, teaching, curricula, organizational culture, etc.

This anecdote suggests that parental involvement isn't set in stone; it is substantially a function of how schools choose to engage parents and what they ask from them. The large majority of parents, black or white, rich or poor, have an intense desire for their children to get a good education. What they don't all have in equal measure is an understanding of how to act on that desire, or the means to act on that desire. Did anyone from the New Orleans school district ever come to Trineil's house, express their commitment to and confidence in her son, pledge themselves to his well-being and ask her to do the same? Apparently not. Parental involvement isn't a fixed quantity; in many places it's an untapped resource. Recognizing and acting on that is what good schools--charter or otherwise--do.

The article also provides an interesting window on the perennial "Can schools do it all?" debate. While Diane Ravitch continues her late-career slouch toward the demography-is-destiny position, the state education superintendent, Paul Pastorek, offers a more nuanced take:

“It would be convenient to say that it’s a whole lot of other people who need to be part of the equation,” he replied. “But we have the job. And we have to do something.” Pastorek said he didn’t want to fall back on the excuse that he had heard from many other school officials, in Louisiana and elsewhere — that it was impossible to fix their schools until other social problems had first been corrected.

But then he switched direction somewhat. In many ways, he said, he was sympathetic to the Ravitch position. “If we want to really get kids to the level that we want to get them,” he said, “and we want to do it in a more efficient and effective way, then we would be well served if we took care of those kinds of problems — if we provided more resources to kids from conception to early childhood, if we took care of mental-health issues and physical ailments and teeth and eye examinations. Including, you know, where these kids go home to sleep at night. I’ve lived in this community a long time, and I can’t imagine how I could ever feel comfortable in neighborhoods that these kids live in at night. And yet they do, and we still expect them to do well.”

Pastorek paused for a moment. “So, now, can I solve all those problems tomorrow afternoon? Can I even get the attention of the people who have control over those things? Right now, in New Orleans, after Katrina, the answer is no, I can’t. But I can’t take the position that I can’t succeed unless I have those things. I have to take the position that we’re going to do it in spite of that. Now, will it be hard? Will I be less successful? Probably yes. But I have to take that approach, because I don’t have really any other cards to play.”

The idea that schools can overcome any external obstacle to student learning, no matter how high, is, on some unavoidable level, utopian. But it's not too much to say that schools can overcome many or even most such obstacles. And there's no way for educators to know ahead of time which students they can reach. Nor are educators in a position to solve all of the outside ills that beset their students. So the only effective attitude--the only moral attitude--is to start with the assumption that every child can be successful, to design schools that reflect this conviction, and not give up on it until the last possible moment. It appears that there are many more people in New Orleans who think this way than there used to be. That's reason enough to be optimistic that the story will end well.

Birth of the Cool (New Teacher Pay Policy)

One of the fun things about living in Washinton, DC is watching the Fenty/Rhee school reform juggernaut in real time. After decimating the bloated central office bureaucracy, closing low-enrollment schools, and generally bringing a sense of urgency, leadership, and strategic thinking that DCPS has long lacked, the chancellor is now moving directly to the teacher workforce, proposing a new pay system that's frankly pretty audacious. Here's where things stand:

Less than two weeks before classes begin, many of the District's 4,000 public school teachers are locked in a heated debate over Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to offer salaries exceeding $100,000 for those willing to give up job security and tie their fates to student achievement. The rift is playing out in a blizzard of cellphone messages and e-mails, Facebook entries and posts on teacher blogs such as D.C. Teacher Chic and Dee Does the District. Some of the teachers who want "green tier" salaries plan to demonstrate this morning at teacher union offices on L'Enfant Plaza.

The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks and older ones often questioning the proposal. Jerome Brocks, a special education teacher with 34 years of experience in D.C. schools, seethes when he talks about Rhee's salary proposal.

"It's degrading and insulting," said Brocks, to ask that teachers give up tenure and go on probation for a year if they choose the more lucrative of the two salary tiers under the plan, which is at the center of contract negotiations between the city and the Washington Teachers' Union. He said that Rhee wants only to purge older teachers and that for instructors to sell out hard-won protections against arbitrary or unfair dismissal is unthinkable. "For Michelle Rhee or anyone to ask that is like Judas and 30 pieces of silver," Brocks, 59, said.

Julia Rosen, putting her classroom in order this week for her third year as a second grade teacher at Key Elementary School, said she would have no problem with a system in which her pay, and maybe her job, was tied to her students' academic growth. "At this school, I think any of us could excel in that kind of a scenario," Rosen, 25, said.

The proposal is the linchpin of the chancellor's quest to overhaul public education in the District, a way to attract and retain high-quality instructors who would be held accountable for growth in student achievement. It would make them among the nation's best-paid public school instructors, enabling those with just five years of experience to make more than $100,000 in salary and bonuses.

Under the proposal, teachers who want to accept lower, but still significant, pay increases can keep the job security that comes with tenure. Those opting for top salaries, however, relinquish that protection. Those coming into the D.C. system would be required to enter the so-called "green" plan.

"Judas"? What is this, Free Trade Hall? It's very hard to square words like "degrading" and "insulting" with a pay system that teachers would only enter of their own volition. There's a certain infantilizing quality to this vision of teacher work, where individuals can't be trusted to make up their own minds about their relationship with management and shouldn't be allowed to make the tradeoff that virtually all well-compensated professionals make: more accountability and less security in exchange for more recognition and compensation.

If Rhee manages to make this stick, the key may very well be this:

One sentiment that seems to bridge the generational divide: The teachers union has done a dismal job in responding to concerns and questions about the plan. "You don't respond to emails, your voice mail is full, the website is not updated and you release no statements to let teachers know where we are in this negotiations process," Breipohl wrote to Parker yesterday.

Some said Rhee, a prolific text-messager, has been far more responsive. "Pardon my ignorance, but why is the Chancellor able to e-mail me back with a multiple sentence response, but George Parker cannot send a one-word reply?" asked "Dee," author of Dee Does the District, who identifies herself as a first-year special education teacher.

Parker said he is trying to keep up with what he described as an enormous volume of calls and messages. "The numbers have just made it impossible to respond in a timely manner and carry on the day-to-day operations of the union," he said.

To be clear, Parker is by most accounts a good, well-meaning guy who is trying to work with the chancellor while dealing with a lot of internal dissent from some truly reactionary elements within the union. But that doesn't change the fact that his whole job is responding to teachers, while Rhee seems manages to be much more responsive to teachers and pretty much the whole rest of the world all at once. I spent some time in the central office earlier this year (doing research for a Washington Monthly article that's not on-line but is, of course, so great that you should run to your nearest library to track it down) and I can tell you that the above is true: Rhee really does respond to all her emails personally. She's also set up a whole "critical response team" whose only job is to fix problems and respond to questions as quickly and well as they can.
And here's the thing I think people don't really understand. Many if not most of those problems are being solved on behalf of DCPS teachers. Here's what I wrote about Margie Yeager, at the time the head of the rapid response team:

Yeager understands the importance of the HR office intimately; from 2001 to 2003, she taught second grade in DC's Simon Elementary School, back when their was no critical response team. At one point the district stopped sending her paychecks. Later, it accidentally cancelled her health insurance. Phone calls to HR were ignored, meaning that Yeager had to find time to come here to the central office--or, as she referred to it then, "this horrible, crazy place." The experience was so traumatic that when the district failed to refund her union dues (which had been embezzled by the union president and squandered on, variously, furs, handbags, shoes, Tiffany place settings, and a double-barreled shotgun) Yeager didn't both to call anyone. Now, many of the people who e-mail Yeager are tecahers dealing with the kinds of problems she once faced.

So on the one hand you've got an uber-responsive chancellor who reformed the bureaucracy to better support teachers and wants to give them the option to voluntarily enter a system that would pay them a whole lot more money. On the other hand, a union that can't return emails and is notable chiefly for a history of theft and venality so outrageous that it's memorable even by the highly attentuated moral standards of DC municipal government. As I said, it's interesting see what happens next.

Say What You Mean

Because he clearly has more patience than I do, Alexander Russo has been pressing Larry Mishel to give a little more detail on what, exactly, the so-called "Broader Bolder" coalition is really all about.

My take on this hasn't really changed since their statement was first released a few months ago. The thesis of the BB manifesto is that, to quote one of its possibly fictional supporters, "efforts to advance student’s learning and development need to combine policies intended to improve schools with policies designed to transform the social and economic contexts in which children and youth develop." The conceit is that there are serious people out there who don't already believe this. Every school reform advocate I know--and I know my share--absolutely wants better social and economic environments for children, and thinks that doing so would help their education. You'd have to be dead stupid to believe otherwise. It's true that many of them don't spend huge amounts of time working on issues like, say, health care, but that's because there are only so many hours in the day and education reform is a pretty big challenge on its own. Division of intellectual labor doesn't automatically imply indifference or antagonism toward other issues. From this perspective, the whole BB effort is an argument with a phantom.

Many of the BB signatories are smart, serious people who presumably understand all of this. So that raises the question of what the effort is really about. Is it, for example, an anti-accountability manifesto in poor disguise? That's arguably a fair assumption, given the stated positions of many BB adherents on the subject. But in his correspondence with Russo, Mishel adamantly denies this, insisting that they're "only against ‘narrow test-based accountability’ -- not any use of tests."

Okay, fair enough, let's take that at face value. It still doesn't really answer much. There are two components of narrow test-based accountability: "narrow" and "test-based." Would Mishel and his colleagues oppose broad (i.e. not narrow) test-based accountability? What if states and schools were allowed to bring in lots of new assessments--AP tests, SATs, the ACT, along with standardized tests in other subjects (to avoid the dread curriculum narrowing) or non-content-focused tests that look at critical thinking, analytic reasoning, leadership, inter-personal collaboration and other so-called "21st Century skills"? How, exactly, would that work? The critical policy choice is "And / Or" -- would schools be held accountable for student results on those tests and tests of reading and math, or would their performance be deemed acceptable if students did well in those areas or on foundational language and computational skills? And of course then there's the danger of "teaching to test," reducing instruction to accomodate assement, etc. Tough choices and tradeoffs, all.

Alternatively, maybe the BBers see the "test-based" element as the real problem. Of course, the question then is: if not test-based, what-based? If the answer is something like actual post-secondary educational outcome data, then I'm down with that. If it's some kind of vague, locally-designed and defined, unverifiable qualitative measure or parental satisfaction survey, then not so much. Remember that the value of standardized testing is not just the common measure but also the fact that self-assessment for accountability purposes is basically a contradiction in terms.

In addition to laying out how schools will be measured, any legitimate position on accountability also necessarily describes what to do with that information. Presumably the BB coalition believes that the current way of doing things is overly punitive, dispiriting, etc. (If not, I'll post a prominent correction.) If not to sanction, label, etc. how exactly will the information from whatever broader, less-test-based measure they come up with be used to spur school improvement, and why do they think that approach will work?

These aren't trivial questions. They go to the heart of how one thinks about educational accountability. Without answers, there's really no way to know what the BB cadre is trying to accomplish, other than suggesting that they're on one side of an argument that doesn't really exist.

College for All Some How Many?

I spent yesterday morning participating in a panel discussion (video here) at the Center for American Progress, responding to a couple of new papers they've commissioned about higher educaiton. The first, by Sara Goldrick-Rab and Josipa Roksa, makes a comprehensive case for expanding the federal higher education agenda beyond the current monolithic focus on student financial aid. The paper is very good. As I told the audience, if you're a Hill staffer, journalist, think tank person, whomever, you could pretty much just stick this paper in your desk drawer and fake your way as a higher education policy expert for months if not years by periodicially referring to its analysis of how things are and recommendations for how they should change.

The second paper, by MIT economist Paul Osterman, is titled College for All? The Labor Market for College-Educated Workers. (Matt Yglesias weighs on this at his new CAP address here). It's also well worth reading. My biggest quibble is actually with the title. This question comes up often, sometimes slightly rephrased as "Is College for Everyone?" or "Should Everyone Go to College?," and it's a silly formulation because the answer is, obviously, no. If you put it this way, people immediately think of their idiot third cousin or that guy from high school who liked to drink grain alcohol and tie M-80s to the backs of squirrels, and they rightly say "Of course not, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being utopian and dumb."

The real question (and the one Osterman actually addresses) is how many people should go to college, and is that number, compared to current college-going and degree completion rates, too small, too large, or about right? Osterman frames the discussion around the college wage premium (the average difference between wages for people who have college degrees and those who don't). This number has been bubbling up with increasing frequency in policy debates, because it hasn't changed much over the last seven years. That's a break with historical trends; from the early 1970s to 2000, the premium grew steadily and substantially, particularly for people with advanced (post-baccalaureate) degrees.

The flate wage premium is being used as evidence in some very significant intra-progressive policy debates. As economist Tony Carnevale put it (he was the other respondent on the panel, societies provide citizens with economic security in three basic ways. One is by the government owning and/or taxing the hell out of production and using those resources to provide cradle-to-grave income and services. The second is making employment the focus of security through strong labor arrangements i.e. unions and guilds. The third is by subsidizing education and credentialling so citizens can earn enough money to take care of themselves. Most societies have some combination of these; the decision is which to emphasize and to what degree.

Historically the United States has bet on door #3, education. And as the wage premium steadily increased even as more students went to college--as the price of college-educated labor rose even as the supply rose too--this looked like a good choice. The stagnant wage premium is causing some people to suggest that this strategy has run its course, the economy has absorbed all the college-educated workers it can, and that the credentialism inherent to degree-granting is actually hurting less educated workers. Since socialism doesn't seem like a realistic option, we therefore need to shift our policy priorities toward more robust labor-focused reforms.

Osterman doesn't take a position on this debate per se, but he does conclude that there are plenty of good reasons to continue investing in more higher education attainment, both from a societal cost/benefit standpoint and for individual students in terms of expected economic returns (as well as not-insubstantial non-economic benefits), for themselves and their children. Carnevale concurred. (He thinks the evidence is even stronger than Osterman allows.)

To be clear, this isn't an argument against supporting organized labor. As Larry Mishel and Richard Rothstein said, "Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor's degrees." But it does mean that progressives shouldn't get caught in a false choice between more, better education and more, better jobs.

Easy Journalism and the Model Minority Myth

The Albany Times recently reported a 50 percent increase in the Asian American population in the Capital Region in New York. The piece considers all Asian immigrants as one homogeneous group following educational opportunities, and ignores the inter- and intra-group differences within Asian-American populations.

The article quotes Lining He, himself an economist and president of the Chinese Community Center of the Capital District, saying “[m]ost Chinese people in this area are very well educated and are working as researchers and engineers.” He’s numbers are technically correct, but they also hide a substantial percentage of Chinese immigrants that do not even graduate high school. According to the US Census Bureau, 48.1% of Chinese immigrants 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is what the media likes to highlight, but we don’t often hear about the 23% of Chinese who have not graduated high school or the 13.5% who are living in poverty. Both percentages are higher than national averages.

Inter-group differences mask even greater disparities. While 44.1% of all Asian immigrants hold a bachelor’s degree (including 48% of Chinese and 63.9% of Asian Indians), only 9.2% of Cambodians and 7.7% of Laotians own a college degree. 53.3% of Cambodians and 49.6% of Laotians do not hold even a high school diploma. These rates are lower than those of Hispanics and African Americans.

Policymakers, educators, and journalists should keep these inter- and intra-group differences in mind. Otherwise, we end up with journalistic pieces like the one quoted above, which neglects to consider the challenges schools face in educating such disparate groups. In the end, all it does is perpetuate the model minority stereotype and report the 10,000 foot-view of demographic changes.

- Posted by Rhea Acuña

Strike Out

Yesterday's Denver Post shows why we won't, or at least why we shouldn't, see a teacher's strike unfold later this month as the city plays host to the Democratic National Convention. The article has many demonstrative points as to why the union has little grounds for a strike. The district's proposal would:

• Increase first-year teacher salaries more than the plan put forth by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association ($42,413 versus $38,000).
  

• Increase bonuses for teaching in hard-to-staff schools and subjects or for teaching in a school with demonstrated growth.
  

• Make 4,484 out of 4,500 teachers better off. That's worth repeating: only sixteen teachers would be no better or worse off than they are now. Imagine a print-out of every teacher's name ranked by their expected raise. With one teacher per line and 49 lines to a page, the document would be 93 pages long. Under the district plan, every teacher before page 88 would get raises larger than 5%.

The bottom of the article has a chart comparing the district and union proposals. Take much time to look at the numbers and you'll see it doesn't amount to big differences (in fact, only 3/24 categories are higher under the union plan).

Granted, the district should give up its "master teacher" idea, where principals would get to select one teacher for a one-time bonus of $2,900. That's ripe for patronage, and the union is right to oppose it. But it's not grounds for a strike.

300 Denver teachers feel the same way.

Lots of Variety in the Sausage

This week's New Yorker book review offers a lesson on pluralism. It compares two works, one by the long-forgotten political philosopher Arthur Fisher Bentley and one by Thomas Frank of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" fame. This passage from the review has particular relevance to education policy:

[Frank] believes that liberals, once in power, will not merely transfer economic resources from business to working people but will tend to the public interest, to good government. Underneath all the fun Frank has with lobbyists and their dainty shoes, the heart of his book is the idea that, just as conservatives actually want government to be corrupt and incompetent, liberals have an equally strong interest in making government work properly.

We see this phenomenon in education too. It's fashionable in some circles to argue NCLB was designed to show schools as failures in order to completely re-shape the educational landscape, opening the door to greater support for vouchers and private schools. There's even limited evidence that some in the Department of Ed. used this rationale to support the law. Under this theory, conservatives win when government (in this case, public schools) fail. In a never-ending cycle, they campaign on the need for more private education options (as evidenced by public school failures), and, when their own policies lead to more public school failure, they argue for more private school options. So the argument goes.

The New Yorker review does a nice job refuting this position in general. Most convincing is the political reality that any party that does a bad job of governing will get kicked out of office by our electoral system. If a party passes bad legislation or ignores crises, they're probably not going to hold their positions long (see the 2006 midterm elections).

Specific examples in the education world make the bad-government-is-good-for-conservatives argument silly. To begin with, elected politicians from both parties face enormous pressure at the local level to advance their city or state's education system. It is local and state governments' most expensive and important function, and a politician who performs poorly in this key area will not last.

At the national level, anyone assuming the NCLB-as-conspiracy premise must believe either that the law was unnecessary--i.e. our schools were wonderful and didn't need a more extensive federal accountability system--or ridiculously punitive--i.e. the law punishes schools unfairly. Neither position was ultimately defensible, because in reality we knew our schools could be a lot better than they were, and they're not being punished in either massive numbers or draconian ways. Mostly they're pursuing benign "other" reforms.

In Thomas Frank's world, competition for policy is between only two groups. Corporations, conservatives, and lobbying are all aligned against the people. He even writes that, "lobbying brings a constant pressure in a single direction."

Bentley's work has far more relevance to today's education policy landscape, in which liberal reform groups frequently are at odds with teachers unions, who in turn disagree with civil rights groups about the future of federal education policy. On most issues, these groups are mostly in agreement, and they likely vote for the same candidates in national elections. But observers would be hard pressed to pin down exactly who are the liberals and who the conservatives on national standards, for example. No, the policy alignments are ever-shifting.

Bentley's primary thesis, and one that sounds downright scandalous in a political climate like ours, is that interests are absolutely essential, that all governing is the result of interest groups, and we are being duplicitous when we decry "special interests" on the other side while accepting them on our own. By extension, as much as there's a portion of the population seeking to "blow up" public education, so is there one seeking to convert schools to bastions of radical leftism.

We in the middle are left sorting it out and making the sausage.

Notes from VirginFest

This year's full-blown rock festival post complete with pictures, band-by-band coverage, etc. won't come until next month, when Maureen and I fly to Texas for Austin City Limits. But here's an abbreviated report from the first day of VirginFest:

As the world becomes ever more inter-connected, there's a certain fear that globalization will ultimately lead to a thin grey soup of culture, into which all the national distinctions we treasure dissolve. You feel it when you walk down a graceful Parisian boulevard in spring and hear dread words like "Ou est le KFC?" Or when you get the feeling that we're headed toward a future where there's an Irish pub on every corner but no actual authentic Irish people left, in Ireland or elsewhere. Call it the tragedy of the cultural commons. 

On the other hand, you've got bands like Gogol Bordello, which essentially answers that age-old question, pondered by philosophers throughout the years: What would happen if Frank Zappa had been born into family of gypsies in the Ukraine in 1972, fled the Chernobyl meltdown, and ended up on the lower east side of Manhattan, where he founded an Eastern European folk/punk band that includes a Russian fiddler, Russian accordion player, Israeli guitar player, Ethiopian bassist, two backup singers of Thai and Chinese heritage dressed in roller derby outfits, and (naturally) an Ecuadorian percussionist / MC? 

Similarly, lets say your whole act consists of a man and woman, both Mexican, sitting on a pair of chairs, each playing an acoustic guitar, with no vocals and an uncategorizable sound that begins with Latin influences and then wanders through rock structures, salsa, flamenco, and the occasional Led Zeppelin cover. How awesome do you have to be to end up on the main stage at VirginFest? Answer: ten kinds of awesome, or Rodrigo Y Gabriela. 

In other words, as with most things, there are plusses and minuses of bringing the world's cultures together. On the whole, I say thumbs up. 

The Data Void

One of the interesting things about working on both K-12 and higher education policy is observing the differences between them. In K-12, there's a long-running and very active research and policy conversation about class size. Books have been written, studies conducted, debates organized, policies implemented, all focused on the relationship between student / teacher ratios and learning. People argue about whether there's a specific threshold class size associated with learning gains (15:1? 18:1?), whether there are differential effects for different student groups, whether marginal dollars are better spent hiring more teachers or better teachers.

All of this occurs despite the fact the class sizes in K-12 don't actually vary all that much. The vast majority are probably somewhere between 15 and 35 students. In higher education, by contrast, class sizes in similar courses can range from less than 10 to 500 or more. In theory, that should permit for even more robust inquiry into the impact of college class size on teaching and learning, particularly since student / faculty ratios are a commonly-accepted and often-used measure of institutional quality.

Yet virtually no such research exists. And this is true for lots of other basic elements of the higher education teaching enterprise. This is the subject of my new column at InsiderHigherEd. Read it here.

Beer Pong Ain't Wimbledon

This paragraph from Inside Higher Ed's article today about efforts to rid college campuses of drinking games makes me wonder if the author has a little experience with the topic...

Like many drinking games, beer pong’s beauty lies in its simplicity. Played on a ping pong table, the object is to toss a table tennis ball across a net and land it in a beer-filled cup on the other side. While the game has different rules in different circles, a successful shot often means your opponent has to chug a beer.

Not surprisingly, beer pong ain’t exactly Wimbledon.

Woeful

Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute says:

There are some districts in [New York] state that recorded proficiency rates of close to 100% on this year's math tests. This Lake Wobegon effect is an embarrassment...

Look, if you're going to start throwing around tired cliches instead of offering actual analysis, at least get the cliches right. As everyone (except, apparently, Sol Stern) knows, the Lake Wobegon effect refers to the mathematically specious idea that, to quote Garrison Keillor, "all of the children are above average." Proficient is not average. Proficient means you've acquired a certain defined set of knowledge and skills. While the percent of students who can reasonably be expected to meet any given definition of proficiency is debatable, there's no inherent generalized reason that it can't be "close to 100%." There are lots of of important things that close to 100% of people can do.

Sharpton and Carey, together at last

I'll be on the Reverand Al Sharpton show talking about class-based school integration policies, starting in about five minutes. I think you can listen here.

Update: The muzak you hear while on hold waiting for the Reverand? Tremendously funky.

Update 2: The first segment seems to have gone well. Good questions. Keeping it real!

Update 3: On to the callers! Jack from Baltimore says the public school system gets a lot of money but wastes it; we need higher standards, AP course, hold the administrators to account. Can't argue with that.

Update 4: Very frank conversations about parental involvement.

Update 5: The last caller veers toward some kind of FCAT conspiracy theory in Florida -- the easy tests go to some communities, the hard ones to others...but then the segment ends.

Summary: Good topic, interesting mix of callers, the Reverand Al was engaged and on point. Notice to producers and bookers: contact Education Sector for smart, well-informed guests!

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.