The College Debt Delusion

Per Chad's post from last week about the way the U.S. Department of Education seems to be going out of its way to explain away the recent rise in student loan default rates as a hurricane-driven, one-time-only, move-along-nothing-to-see-here phenomenon, and Erin's earlier analysis showing that the most commonly-used default measures badly understate the true extent of the problem, it's worth wondering what exactly, motivates this tendency to talk down the reality of loan default. And I think the answer is pretty obvious: college prices have been increasing steeply for a long time, nobody knows what the heck to do about it, and so people want to believe that default rates are low because that's the only way to sleep at night. 

To review: From 1988 to 2008, average tuition and fees at public universities more than doubled in real dollars. Median family income and spending on student financial aid did not rise as fast--not even close. And so a greater percentage of students had to borrow greater amounts of money to make up the difference. According to the College Board, 26% of student attending public four-year universities borrowed in 1993. By 2004, that number was up to 47%, at the same time that the average real-dollar amount borrowed grew by 36%. When the latest numbers are released soon, I expect they'll be even larger. In just the last eight years, total annual combined public and private student loan volume increased from $42.5 billion to $78 billion in constant dollars. 

These numbers are troubling for all kinds of reasons and there's no end in sight. Colleges and universities have a tremendous amount of leverage in setting prices; they're heavily subsidized by the public, protected from traditional competitors by high costs of entry and from non-traditional competitors by high regulatory hurdles, and in the business of selling a must-have, globally coveted product whose value continues to grow. There are ways to break the pattern of constant price escalation, which I'll explore at greater length in a magazine article next month, but in the short-to-mid-term it's a safe bet that the student debt problem will be with us for some time and will only become more acute.

But as long as students pay that debt back, universities and lawmakers can tell themselves that it all worked out in the end. Sure, it was expensive, and sure it was burden to repay. But it was all worth it, right? The students got a valuable degree, everyone got paid--what's the problem, really? 

Never mind for a moment the interests of efficiency and equity for low- and middle-income families. Never mind that it's perfectly possible to borrow way too much money and still pay it back. The illusion of minimal student loan default rates is just that, a mirage and a veil, one behind which the reality of financially overwhelmed students is becoming more obvious by the year. But people don't want to know that, because then their failure to solve the higher education cost spiral--and in some cases their complicity in sustaining it--would itself become a much heavier burden to bear. 

Hollywood vs. Higher Ed

While I'm happy that the entertainment industry is producing fine shows like Mad Men, it's also engaged in some really scary and reprehensible lobbying with respect to higher education, basically trying to force colleges to create an infrastructure for electronic spying and eavesdropping in a futile attempt to shore up an archaic business model for a few more years. To read more about why this is such a terrible idea, and how academic freedom is being sacrificed in the name of a larger battle between those who sell intellectual property and those who sell the means of its transmission, read my new column in today's Inside Higher Ed. 

Mad Men

While of course it's an outrage that The Wire was once again snubbed by the Emmy awards, it's worth noting that the winner for best dramatic series, Mad Men, is a very good show. I watched season one on demand in August, catching up before the beginning of season two, an activity that was probably so typical for someone of my age, race, class, occupation, marital status, etc., that there is doubtless a Web site or two out there cackling with glee over its ability to predict the television watching habits and other cultural predispositions of people like me with near-total accuracy. Whatever; Mad Men is really great, for several reasons. There are the things you'd except: writing, direction, acting. It also has the really interesting milieu of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, with the nation on the verge of becoming something different and all the men drinking Scotch in the middle of the day while wearing exceptionally nice suits. I read somewhere that the setting in a movie is a lead character unto itself, and that's especially true here.

But the thing that really elevates Mad Men is the way the plot dynamics and character development synchronize in such interesting ways. The twin themes of the show are the particular nature of American self-definition and the politics of gender. And in both cases those things drive the narrative and the characters simultaneously. Don Draper, the protagonist, is the creative director of a mid-sized but quite successful advertising agency. His particular talent is understanding the hidden hopes, urges and anxieties of the American buying public, and how to tap into that collective psyche in ways that sell things. Draper knows that in the prosperous consumer society American had become, people don't buy things for what those things are. People buy things for how things for how those things make them feel--and in America, more so perhaps than anywhere else, you are what you feel you are, what you decide you are. At the same time (spoiler alert) we learn throughout the course of the season that Draper himself is an extreme example of self-creation. "My life goes in only one direction: forward," he tells someone who wants to drag him back to the past he left behind. Draper understands that future-facing urge for the new so acutely because he lives it every day. It's his great talent, but it also threatens to pull him apart. 

Similarly, Mad Men positively wallows in the unreconstructed sexism of the time, when all the women were "girls" and wives were expected to fool themselves while their husbands wander. On the surface the plot-lines are standard issue: romance, infidelity, etc. But that's just an excuse to explore more interesting territory, as the characters seem to sense, nervously, that the ground of gender relations is starting to shift beneath them. And again this is personified in the characters: Don's wife Betty, who has the perfect life she always wanted and can't figure out what's missing, office manager Joan, who revels in the power of her attractiveness but also senses the tragedy of its limitations, and most of all Peggy, the aspiring copywriter, Don Draper's doppleganger in her desire to will her way to a different destiny but with all the massive differences that being young, single, working class and female bring. 

It all comes together beautifully in the final episode of the first season, where Draper is pitching an advertising campaign to Kodak, which wants to sell a funny looking plastic wheel in which people store and display photo slides. Using slides of his own family, thinking of the ways he both loves and betrays them, Draper talks about the enduring power of nostalgia, of a longing for an earlier, simpler time. "It's not called the wheel," he says. "It's called the carousel." It's an absolutely devastating scene, all the more so when Draper rushes home to his perfect home and family only to find it...empty. Mad Men is an emotionally brutal program, as pitch-dark in its own way as The Wire or Battlestar Galactica in its honesty about the human condition. Not the greatest show in television history, of course, but that's over now, and Mad Men is certainly worth your time. 

Peace, I Hope

It's been a little hard to stay focused on education for the last week, what with the sense that outside our small office overlooking Connecticut Avenue, history is unfolding by the minute, hour and day. And because I've been somewhat obsessively reading the many moving tributes to and reflections on David Foster Wallace, who died last week, far too young. Over the past year I've consumed virtually every piece of non-fiction he wrote, and in doing so I was awestruck at his insight and mastery of prose. There was also, regardless of topic, a humility and essential human decency in the personality behind the writing that was chastening in a way; he challenged you with the example of his generosity of spirit and discipline of mind. He was also ruthlessly honest and self-critical, so with that in mind I'll simply note that there are times when I meet someone smarter than I or read someone who is a more talented and skilled writer, and I can't avoid pangs of jealousy and self-doubt, yet Wallace was one of those people who was so much smarter and so much more talented and accomplished that such small feelings seemed foolish, and I was just grateful that he chose to share his ideas and work, too briefly, with the world.

Plus, he was all about the greatness of The Wire. Peace, DFW.

Choices

There was a time, lasting about two months, between when I finished grad school and when I landed my first real job. The logistics got to be a little dicey toward the end; my lease was expiring at the end of the summer, the potential new job was in a different city, my girlfriend had just moved to a different different city, and the uncertainty and stress of it all started to get me down. I complained about this to my thesis advisor, a smart, tough woman who had held a variety of important jobs in and out of Ohio government. She told me--in a nice enough way but with the clear implication that I had a lot yet to learn--that I was being stupid. "Stress isn't not knowing what you're going to do with your life," she said. "Stress is knowing exactly what you're going to do, and that you can't do anything else." 

I thought of her while reading Roger Cohen's column last week (see also Ezra Klein here), in which he noted that one of the beneficial effects of the current vast financial meltdown is that perhaps fewer Ivy League graduates will be going directly into the lucrative investment banking industry. (Indeed this is now pretty much assured given that as of today there are no more investment banks to speak of. Times change, don't they?) But it still begs the question as to why so many students, given the rare and phenomenally valuable opportunity to do whatever they want with their life, tend to do not only the same narrow thing, but a thing that involves sacrificing vast amounts of their youth to a very difficult, not particularly enjoyable, and socially worthless job, all in the pursuit of money that they won't have time to enjoy?

I suspect the answer has a lot do with what some people call the paradox of choice. If you're on the Ivy League track, then up until the day you graduate you know exactly what you're supposed to do: work hard and grab a medallion from the small number of colleges and universities that are universally regarded as the very best. You can do this with no fear that you're making the wrong decision. No one will say "Harvard? Why?" 

But once you finish, your path is much less clear. Indeed, the whole point of getting the medallion, in theory, is to have as many choices--and thus as un-clear a path--as possible. If you've never been in that situation before, and you don't have the wisdom of hindsight, this is a new and stressful circumstance. And so I suspect many students choose a path based less on what they actually want to do with their lives and more as a way of finding something that's the equivalent of the path they've already taken: safe, reliable, accepted and validated among peers and society at large. My undergraduate institution didn't have a direct line into Goldman Sachs, so for us the default was "law school." I'm pretty sure at least half the people taking the LSAT that year did so not out of any particular interest in the law but because it was a good answer to the constant question of "What are you going to do when you graduate?" As a result, a lot of time and money was wasted amassing legal knowledge that ulimately went unused--or didn't, but confined people's lives and careers in ways they would later come to regret. 

Which makes me think that the best career advice colleges could give their students is not how to start a career but how to think about a career. (That's what a liberal education is for, isn't it? Not what to think, but how?) I, for example, didn't set out to become a policy analyst / manager / columnist / blogger / occasional journalist. Instead, I learned enough in grad school to get a job, where I had some success and learned some new things. Those new things led to another job, where I had some more success and learned some more new things, and so on, and so forth. That's how a lot of careers work these days. You can't map out that path ahead of time. All you can do is put yourself in a position to have success, learn new things, and hopefully make smart choices along the way. 

And while that kind of uncertainty can be daunting at the beginning, there are no students more well-equipped to be successful, and no nation or time in which more opportunities for success are available, than those Ivy League students finishing college in this day and this place. If the present Wall Street Chernobyl causes a few more such students to wander in different directions for a while, we'll all be better for it in the end. 

Pay Up

One of the headlines from last week's Aspen-sponsored, Gates-funded education summit in Washington was the widespread assumption among the several hundred reform movers and shakers gathered at the Mayflower Hotel that it would be a good thing to move from the patchwork of 50 different state standards that we have under NCLB to more common standards, such as voluntary national standards.

But moving in that direction raises the question of whether there's any guarantee that the forces that have produced mostly low state standards under NCLB wouldn't exert the same downward pressure on national standards.

I put the question to two people who have a lot of experience with accountability: Sandy Kress, who was the Bush administration’s point person on NCLB during the law's drafting, and Michael Barber, who build a new accountability system in the UK for the Blair government. Both believe that the solution involves paying states to do the right thing. Establish rigorous standards, they suggest, and then offer states significant financial incentives to adopt them and reward schools for reaching them.

In contrast, NCLB requires states to set their own standards and take action against schools that don’t meet the standards—a system that incentives states to set the bar low.

The consensus seems to be that imposing rigorous standards on states won't fly politically, that states will have to come to the party of their own volution. That's fine. Then the McCain or Obama administrations need to work on getting the incentives right. We need higher standards than NCLB has produced.

Bailouts

A letter from Friday's New York Times:

Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:

My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.

If the trouble in the finance industry means there are fewer high-paying jobs available for recent college grads, there may be a bit of truth to this statement. The least the feds could do is let students discharge their loans in bankruptcy.

DC Teacher Chic

Is one of the more interesting teacher blogs up right now, providing a ground-level perspective on how things are playing out in DCPS amidst all the national attention, ongoing reforms, tense contract negotiations, general tumult, and of course the day-to-day challenges of a very difficult job. Check it out. 

In other news, preliminary 2008 enrollment numbers indicate that 37 percent of all DC public school students are now enrolled in charter schools. In part, this is because some formerly private Catholic schools converted to charters. But it also reflects the ongoing loss of students from DCPS and continued growth in and parental demand for charters. Charters continue to enroll a very small percentage of all student nationally, but in some areas they are now clearly established as by far the most influential school reform model. The numbers also serve as a reminder to those who think the current DCPS reforms are going too far, too fast. The days of unlimited time horizons for turning around failing school systems are, thankfully, starting to fall behind us. 

Baseball Metaphors in the Edu-sphere

People in Boston are fretting over losing education talent to New York City, comparing it to the Red Sox losing Babe Ruth and Johnny Damon. Let's hold off on the Ruth comparisons until they're able to call their own shots, literally.

The Damon comparisons are just ridiculous and show these writers are not baseball fans. Since the good-bat-no-arm Damon signed a four-year, $52 million contract with the hated Yanks, the Sox have two fewer regular season wins but a whole lot more money to spend.

Oh, and a World Series title.

Grindhouse

The "issues" section of official McCain-Palin campaign Website has a page devoted to "John McCain's Plan for Strengthening America's Schools." The first of his Education Principles reads as follows:

John McCain Will Enact Meaningful Reform In Education. Now is the time to demand real, new reform earned through discipline, grinding work, tough choices and leadership. John McCain has dedicated his career in public service to the hard and sometimes unpopular work of achieving meaningful reform.

"Grinding"? Really? That's an awfully strange choice of words. Merriam-Webster offers several definitions, including "to weaken or destroy gradually," which I hope wasn't the intent, to "rotate the hips in an erotic manner"--no, that's probably not it--and "drudge ; especially : to study hard ." I'm guessing that's what they were shooting for, although I have to say it's not the most inspiring message for America's youth: "I will reform education so as to ensure that you are required to spending countless hours engaged in the kind of academic drudgery that forever extinguishes your love of learning!" Probably, the intent was to signal a certain old school toughness and anti-whippersnapper attitude on McCain's part, and who knows, there are a probably lot of fellow elderly voters out there who share that point of view. In any case, students always have other options if grinding doesn't work out, like goofing off a lot, finishing near the bottom of your academic class, and marrying a rich person. 

Update: A reader suggests via email that by "grinding" McCain is referring to the process of reform, not the educational experience he wants that reform to achieve. That's a fair point. I'm skeptical that, given his historical inattention to education, McCain actually intends to do such grinding work, but nonetheless that seems to be what he's saying. Lesson: don't blog before the first cup of coffee. 

Don't Blame the Weather

On Tuesday the Department of Education released its annual report on student loan default rates. Under their official calculations, the rate jumped from 4.6 to 5.2 percent. In the press release announcing the increase they attribute the rise to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Media coverage bought this line, most obviously the Chronicle of Higher Education, which titled its story ($), "Hurricanes Blamed for 13-Percent Jump in Student-Loan Default Rate," without questioning whether this assertion were true. It's not, and here's why:

To begin with the most minor but the most obvious criticism, the timing is off. In Secretary Spellings' press release she attempts to help news writers understand which students were counted in this year's default rates. She explains:

The FY 2006 default rates represent the percentage of borrowers in the Federal Family Education Loan and William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan programs who began loan repayments between Oct. 1, 2005, and Sept. 30, 2006, and who defaulted before Sept. 30, 2007.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, and Rita came on September 24, 2005, so technically the cohort Secretary Spellings is talking about had not yet entered repayment. Default rates are currently calculated as the percent of students who enter repayment in a given year who, two years later, have been more than 270 days late for a payment. We know that student loan defaults rise linearly at a pretty steep clip for the first five years, so there's no particular reason the 2006 cohort, who would have been impacted by the storms during their first year of payments, should have struggled any more than the ones from 2005, who were in their second year of being counted.

Second, the default rates in hurricane-ravaged states simply are not the problem. Here's a graph I assembled using the Department of Ed's own data. The blue line represents student loan defaults from all colleges and universities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas--the states hardest hit by the hurricanes. The red line represents the number of student loan defaults nationwide. Total defaults increased a lot faster than the ones in hurricane-ravaged states, making Spellings' claim more than dubious. Which brings us to the real issue: while the student loan default rate, as currently calculated, remains "historically low," as the Dept. of Ed put it, the number of loans continues to skyrocket. Look at the graph below and decide which line looks out of place. The blue and red lines are the same as in the first graph, but I've added lines for the total number of borrowers entering repayment for those particular states (yellow) and for the US as a whole (green).
The 2006 cohort of students broke the record of the number of students entering loan repayment, set the year before. We had nearly four million citizens who began paying student loans in 2006. That's twice as many as ten years ago.

Instead of talking about the "historically low" student loan default rate, we need to shift the conversation to a more realistic picture. A 2003 report from the Department of Education Inspector General suggested looking at the lifetime of the loans, especially given their evidence that the default rate is more like 20-30 percent at four-year colleges and 40-50 percent at for-profit institutions. Granted, the recent Higher Education Act reauthorization did take us a step in the right direction by changing default rates from two to three years time, but that's a far cry from a ten year or a lifetime analysis. The number of students on loans continues to escalate, and we need a better measurement tool to compensate. And we certainly can't blame the weather.

The Teacher Autonomy Paradox

In addition to the longer article on How the Dems Lost on Education, the American Prospect also published a shorter semi-companion piece I wrote today, on-line, called "The Teacher Autonomy Paradox." Unlike the longer article, it hasn't appeared in any format before today. The argument is that while at first it might seem like the interests of elevating teaching to the ranks of the most well-respected, well-paid professions would involve granting teachers more autonomy, in fact the opposite is true: Only by relinquishing some autonomy will teachers finally be able to attain the true professional status they deserve. Think of it like a really good DVD extra, i.e. not the normal kind, with the blooper reels and 10-minute "making of" documentary that mostly consists of the star and director sitting in folding chairs on the set congratulating one another, but rather one of those extended out-takes that's as good or better than the actual movie (This is Spinal Tap being an excellent example) and makes you think they could have made the movie twice as long and it would have been just as awesome. 

What Works

Since its creation in 2002, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), housed at the Institute of Education Sciences, has been quietly putting out reports on the efficacy of education policy programs. Every couple days I get a new evaluation in my inbox, most often telling me that program X showed "no discernible effects" or the studies of intervention Y fail to meet "WWC evidence standards**."

This is unquestionably a good thing, as we move the field of education towards a more empirical science. It makes sense to have an unbiased resource for principals and superintendents to be able to find objective analyses of programs. They have neither the time nor the inclination to sort through long research reports on individual programs. Let alone picking the best out of all that are available. Instead of relying on this process or research peddled by textbook or program developers (who have a strong vested interest in their products), we have an outside body reviewing the research and demanding high quality experimental designs. We're introducing rigor into our analysis.

Of course, we're moving at a snail's pace. Pick any of the topic areas in the WWC website, and you'll see mostly "no studies identified" or "no studies meeting evidence standards." Of 74 interventions listed on the elementary school math page, only five passed the WWC screens to even merit a review. Of those five, four were found to have no discernible effects on mathematics achievement. One and only one program, Everyday Mathematics, is able to demonstrate potentially positive effects. Teachers, principals, district administrators should all be out buying it. It's developers and publishers should be citing this distinction on their homepages and in all their sales materials. But the news that it is the only rigorously evaluated and proven mathematics curriculum is nowhere to be found.

Implementation of what works is likely to be slow. The affiliated Doing What Works site will help, but getting the right research into the hands of decision-makers will inevitably take time. But we're moving in the right direction, and I'm always happy to see a new WWC review. Keep them coming.

**Last week a popular literacy textbook published by Houghton Mifflin earned such a rating. Although nine studies had been conducted on the textbook, none met WWC standards for experimental design. Education Week story ($) here.

Update: Catherine, in her effervescent post about "new math," made me realize I forgot to point out that we're not living in a policy bubble here. Everyday Math is used in 175,000 classrooms and 2.8 million children nationwide. That includes the District of Columbia. DC Teacher Chic has the scoop on how it plays out in District classrooms.

How the Dems Lost on Education

I wrote an article for the new issue of The American Prospect titled "How the Dems Lost on Education." It's the story of how "Democrats have been stumbling on education policy for years, fracturing the progressive coalition, tainting the party brand, creating undeserved political opportunities for Republicans, and, worst of all, standing in the way of school reforms that primarily benefit low-income and minority children." You can read the whole thing here.

Because of the lead time involved in writing for a print magazine, I wrapped up the article in late July, about a week before Senator McCain decided to take to the pages of the New York Daily News and endorse the Klein / Sharpton Educational Equity Project. In one sense this was a bummer because it fit my thesis exactly and would have brought the story all the way up to the present moment, but now at least I can claim credit for prescience. 

I think it's fair to say that education policy has never been a priority for John McCain. He's taken highly public positions (and, lately, counter-positions, but that's another story) on a number of important issues: foreign policy, campaign finance reform, immigration, etc. But never education. Why, then, the sudden interest in what amounts to an intra-progressive dispute over the relative efficacy of education and social services for the poor?

Simple: it's good politics. McCain concludes his op-ed as follows:

I am proud to add my name to the growing list of those who support the Education Equality Project. But one name is still missing: Barack Obama. My opponent talks a great deal about hope and change, and education is an important test of his seriousness. The Education Equality Project is a practical plan for delivering change and restoring hope for children and parents who need a lot of both. And if Sen. Obama continues to defer to the teachers unions, instead of committing to real reform, then he should start looking for new slogans.

The aim here is not to win over people who care deeply about education to McCain's side. It's to muddy the larger waters by suggesting that, if elected, Obama will abandon the promise of his lofty rhetoric and sell out to the parochial concerns of traditional Democratic interest groups. Republicans have been using education this way for years, and not without some justification. Even without directly attacking their opponents, Republicans have also periodically seized the open ground of education reform to translate the public's justifiable dissatisfaction with public education into political gain. As the article notes, President Reagan and then-Governor Bush did this to great effect. The end goal isn't to make education a Republican issue per se but to neutralize it as a potent Democratic issue--which, given the party's ideological sympathy for egalitarian, public institutions like the schools and the nation's strong collective belief in education, it should be. 

If you want to hear more about this and comment / heckle in person, the Prospect and the New America Foundation are sponsoring an event on the topic this Friday at 11AM at 210 Cannon House Office Building, featuring Representative Artur Davis (D-Ala.) and yrs truly along with others with various interesting and alternative points of view.  You can sign up here. 

Step aside U.S. News

In the next month, the Boeing Company will release its own college rankings, based on data from internal evaluations of its 160,000 employees. Boeing plans to keep the results private - it will only release them to individual institutions, but institutions are free to make them public. And you can bet that "ranked #1 by Boeing" will show up on the front page of some lucky college's website.

If other employers follow Boeing's lead, this could have some interesting implications for the world of higher ed accountability, and you can bet institutions will pay attention to how they're ranked by big employers. Richard Vedder, from the Center on College Affordability and Productivity has some interesting thoughts Boeing's announcement here.

Fiddling

It was a little strange to be sitting in the Mayflower Hotel this morning listening to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings say that "Rome is burning!" with respect to American educational outcomes when Wall Street really does seem to be burning, but these events get scheduled far in advance and her larger point that perpetual achievement shortfalls and large socio-economic educational disparities will seriously weaken American competitiveness is sound. The topic is always a little tricky to talk about, though, given America's pre-eminent global economic standing and unique combination of size and educational attainment.  Given that, politicians tend to pick which dimension happens to be convenient for their argument. So last week Barack Obama lamented the growth in the overall number of PhDs in China and India compared to declining U.S. numbers, while this morning Secretary Spellings noted that we're "behind Denmark and Finland" in terms of the percent of younger working-age adults with post-secondary degrees, and both things are true. But it remains the case that the United States is, relative to other countries, both unusually large (third biggest in both land mass and population) and extremely well-educated, and it will be some time before India and China catch up in educational attainment in percentage terms--or, I imagine, before Scandinavian countries (or other small high achievers like Singapore) manage to bring their success to U.S.-size scale. (One of) our big economic advantages is enjoying the advantages of high absolute numbers and perentages simultaneously. The more useful perspective, which really came out in Sir Michael Barber's lunchtime  presentation (note: American audiences can't get enough of references to Winston Churchill, George III, Charles I, etc.), is to focus on the U.S. position in terms of comparable learning results via international tests like PISA, because that gets you past international differences in secondary and postsecondary credentialing systems, and indeed this is an area where there's real cause for concern. 

Hot Boys

Education Sector non-resident senior fellow Peg Tyre, a former education correspondent at Newsweek, is streaking towards the best-seller lists with her just-published book, The Trouble with Boys, a thoroughly researched and deftly written contribution to the raging national debate over if--and if so, why--boys are strugging to stay up with girls in today's increasingly competitive educational culture. Published just three days ago, the book is already among the top two dozen sellers on the both the Amazon and Barnes and Noble lists. An essay Peg wrote for Newsweek's got more than a million hits in 48 hours. She'll be at our offices in Washington on November 13 to discuss the boys crisis, an event that also features former Education Sector policy analyst Sara Mead, who has written extensively about the issue as well.

Roll Tide

Buzz Bissinger, he of Friday Night Lights fame, turns in a very worthwhile read on college football and Nick Saban, head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide. Bissinger thinks our priorities are a little askew when a football coach earns $3.75 million in base salary, 25 hours of non-commercial airline flights, a free country club membership, two cars for use by his family, and incentive bonuses for reaching a bowl, winning the game, and being named coach of the year. And, oh yeah, graduating his players.

Saban's team went 6-6 last year, meaning he made $583,000 per win. Average faculty salaries at Alabama are $116,00.

The Google and The Internets

Are you a Virginia resident looking for more information about higher education? Need information on financial aid? The State Council on Higher Education in Virginia has an excellent resource list including the "Internet" and "Libraries." According to the site, libraries, "have resource books with information about national financial aid programs" and the "Internet" provides:

free electronic searches for information about different types of grants and scholarships available to students.

Free electronic searches!! I want free electronic searches. Can someone tell me where I can find this "Internet" thing?

It sure is nice to see our states buckle down and handle the big issues in college affordability with such great resource lists.

And the Real Problem Is...

Now that it's September and most college students are back in their dorms, the press has quieted down about the looming "student loan crisis" that made for great headlines a few months ago. As this article, online at the American Prospect, explains, this is because there hasn't been much of a crisis after all. As many people tried to explain amidst the loan crisis hubbub, this is an area where the federal government actually has a functioning back up system in place -- the Direct Loan Program.

The article also touches on the actual loan crisis in higher education - the ever-larger amounts of debt students are graduating with, the growing dependence on private student loans, and the lack of real debt counseling for students (often still teenagers) who sign on the dotted line for tens of thousands of dollars in loans.

McCain on Obama on Education

In a new John McCain adverstisement, an announcer says the following about Barack Obama's record on education:

Education Week says Obama "hasn't made a significant mark on education". That he's "elusive" on accountability. A "staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly."

You have to watch the ad carefully to pick up the sourcing, which doesn't exactly follow the text. Education Week only said the first thing, about the "significant mark." The "elusive" line is actually from the Washington Post, and the last, "staunch defender" part is from the Chicago Tribune. And in that case from a Tribune columnist, Steve Chapman, writing here. 

Are there any rules or accepted practices about this kind of thing? Can you quote some crazy thing from a Bill Kristol or Maureen Dowd column in a political ad and simply source it to "The New York Times."? Obviously, I understand there's no honor among thieves etc., but still...

The Obama Education Speech

Barack Obama delivered what his campaign billed as a "major policy address" on education today in Dayton, Ohio. Excerpts from the prepared remarks and comments below:

Every four years, we hear about how this time, we’re going to make [education] an urgent national priority. Remember the 2000 election, when George W. Bush promised to be the “education President”?

This is an odd criticism. An awful lot of people would probably argue that Bush has been the wrong kind of education President, but he's undeniably been an education President. No Child Left Behind was one of his signature domestic policy achievements and the administration has steadily pushed the issue, for good or ill, ever since. 

The rising importance of education reflects the new demands of our new world.

I suspect these folks would have liked more nuance here. 

"...children here in Dayton are growing up competing with children not only in Detroit, but in Delhi as well."

The likelihood of your city being singled out for attention on education and workforce issues is now crucially dependent on its name beginning with the same first letter as a major Indian and/or Chinese city filled with Friedmanesque software engineers willing to work for ten bucks an hour. See also: Baltimore / Bangalore; Seattle / Shenzen, etc. etc. 

If we want to keep building the cars of the future here in America, we can’t afford to see the number of PhDs in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as it’s dropped here in America.

I'd like to see this and similar sentiments phrased so it's clear that more PhDs in China, South Korea, Japan, and elsewhere is a good thing that will help America in the long run. The world has many vexing problems and the more smart, well-educated people to solve them, the better. An expanded well-educated class in China and elsewhere will create new markets for the kind of high-value goods and services that America produces, and they'll make newer, better products that we'd like to buy. Perhaps most importantly, they'll improve the lives of people in those countries, which we should all care about. Many countries in Europe plus Canada, Australia and others have comparable levels of college degree attainment to the United States and I don't think anyone wishes that weren't the case; indeed it's not a coincidence that those countries are also our military allies, trading partners, etc. And of course Japan already falls into this category. 

The question of whether America is producing enough advanced degree-holders to support a vibrant auto industry or what have you should really be considered on its own terms--terms that I suspect don't have much to with the total number of PhDs (a metric one would anticipate China and India eventually dominating in that they have many more people) or even PhDs per capita, but rather the quality of PhDs plus the many other factors influencing the competitiveness of various industries i.e. health care costs, intellectual property law, infrastructure, integrity of the financial markets, etc. 

If we want to see middle class incomes rising like they did in the 1990’s, we can’t afford a future where so many Americans are priced out of college; where only 20 percent of our students are prepared to take college-level English, math, and science; where millions of jobs are going unfilled because Americans don’t have the skills to work them; and where barely one in ten low-income students will ever get their college degree.

My favorite paragraph thus far. Out-of-control college price increases are a vexing problem that grows worse every year. Low levels of college preparation among college-goers points to the need to greatly improve curricula, instruction, and guidance in high schools. And socioeconomic disparities in higher educaiton should always be defined as they are here, not as the percent of low-income students who go to college but the percent who graduate. 

Lincoln created the land grant colleges to ensure the success of the union he was fighting to save.

A bit of an overstatement. Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 into law, but I don't think he had much to do with it's conception; Presidents didn't really pursue legislative agendas back then as they do now. 

In the past few weeks, my opponent has taken to talking about the need for change and reform in Washington, where he has been part of the scene for about three decades.
And in those three decades, he has not done one thing to truly improve the quality of public education in our country. Not one real proposal or law or initiative. Nothing.

While Virginia Walden Ford did a nice job of making the case for McCain on education over at Eduwonk a couple of weeks ago, in the end this criticism is fair. John McCain has pushed a lot of issues in Congress, both foreign and domestic, but education has never been one of them and was virtually absent from his campaign agenda until relatively recently. 

You don’t reform our schools by opposing efforts to fully fund No Child Left Behind.

True, although Democrats have been running Congress for coming up on two years now and they haven't proposed to fully fund it either. 

Obama's education plan will "finally put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one by providing a $4,000 tax credit to any middle class student who’s willing to serve their community or their country."

There are plenty of worse ways to spend money than tying college aid to national service. But (per above re: college prices) history suggests that there's no amount of federal student aid that colleges and unviersities can't absorb--and then some--by raising tuition. I'm also not a fan of financial aid via tax credit; the Clinton-era HOPE and Lifetime Learning credits cost the treasury billions of dollars per year, they're not nearly as well-targeted to (per above re: socieconomic attainment disparities) low-income students as are other forms of aid. 

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Forcing our teachers, our principals, and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong. And by the way – don’t tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test.

Unsatisfying. Fundamentally, the NCLB debate is not about resources. Even a "fully funded" NCLB would provide less than five percent of what it costs to run the nation's K-12 school system. The debate is about how best to measure educational success and what do when we determine that success is insufficient. Reasonable people can differ profoundly on those questions, but I'm pretty sure nobody is for "throwing up your hands and walking away from them." Similarly, re: "don't tell us..."--who, exactly, is telling us this? That's just a straw man and a flimsy one at that. 

We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy.

Yes, we do! Education Sector will be releasing a new report on this very topic next month. Watch this space for details.

It’s time to ask ourselves why other countries are outperforming us in education. Because it’s not that their kids are smarter than ours – it’s that they’re being smarter about how to educate their kids.

An important acknowledgment that educational failures are often the result of educational problems, which is surprisingly hard for some people to admit. 

A while back, I was talking with my friend Arne Duncan, who runs the Chicago Public Schools. He was explaining how he’d managed to increase the number of kids taking and passing AP courses in Chicago over the last few years. What he said was, our kids aren’t smarter than they were three years ago; our expectations for them are just higher.

Right on.  

...as President, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.

Arguably the most significant line in the speech. I take this as a clear commitment to public school choice and multiple ways of building and governing public schools, BUT with a strong emphasis on quality and accountability, i.e. "responsible," or as Obama goes on to say, "Charter schools that are successful will get the support they need to grow. And charters that aren’t will get shut down." This is one of those issues where I think there's really not much room for reasonable debate:  Of course we should give parents choices among public schools and create new pathways for entrepreuneurialism and innovation, and of course that should only happen in a context of meaningful public accountability beyond simple market forces.  As Eduwonk notes, the fact Obama delivered this kind of sharp message in Ohio, where charters have been very controversial, is meaningful.

And when our teachers succeed in making a real difference in our children’s lives, we should reward them for it by finding new ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. We can do this. From Prince George’s County in Maryland to Denver, Colorado, we’re seeing teachers and school boards coming together to design performance pay plans.

This is another step toward the new consensus around teacher pay, which is that everyone now concedes that some kind of differentiation beyond the standards steps-and-lanes experience + credentials system is needed, so the real debate is about paying teachers for what other things and how. The politically safe approach is to limit this to teaching in shortage areas and hard-to-staff schools, so just by using the phrase "performance pay," Obama sends a good signal.

teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don’t improve, they’ll be replaced. Because as good teachers are the first to tell you, if we’re going to attract the best teachers to the profession, we can’t settle for schools filled with poor teachers. 

Again, simply talking about "poor teachers" and the general idea of firing teachers for poor performance is, in and of itself, valuable for the purposes of moving this debate to reasonable ground. Since these issues tend to play out district-by-district at the contract neogotiation level, there's little a President can do to influence them on the policy front, but the bully pulpit affects the tenor of highly public negotiations like those that are going on DC right now, in terms of how the press reacts, how the national unions choose to intervene, how much political capital local leaders are willing to expend, etc. 

I’ll create a parent report card that will show you whether your kid is on the path to college. We’ll help schools post student progress reports online so you can get a regular update on what kind of grades your child is getting on tests and quizzes from week to week. If your kid is falling behind, or playing hooky, or isn’t on track to go to college or compete for that good paying job, it will be up to you to do something about it.

The college prep part of this is, if properly implemented, a very good idea. The speech notes above that only 20 percent of student who go to college are fully prepared to succeed there. That's a frightening number, and most students and parents simply don't know if they're on that track until it's too late. They take classes in high school, pass them, earn their diploma, apply to college, get accepted, and enroll, and only then find out that they should have taken a whole different set of course, years before. 

The speech finishes off with more China and India stuff. Again, we need to talk about these competitive threat issues in more sophisticated non-zero-sum terms. 

Doing School Choice Wrong

Today, ES released a Charts You Can Trust (a Maps You Can Trust, really) showing the failures of Massachusetts' interdistrict choice program--failures which mean that affluent students are more likely to benefit from the interdistrict choice law. Problems with the law include a lack of transportation to get students to their new schools; a lack of outreach to parents to inform them of their new options; and allowing school districts to opt-out of the program, which means that only one of the districts surrounding Boston has opened its doors to new students.

These problems are not unique to Massachusetts. Many states with open enrollment laws that allow students to cross attendance boundaries and school district lines to attend the school of their choice have similar shortcomings--and similar results.

But this isn't to say that interdistrict choice can't be done well--it can, but it costs more money to provide transportation and outreach to families. And it means making the politically difficult decision to require all districts to participate. As we reported a couple weeks ago, interdistrict choice has potential to help students in some areas, but there are limits to what it can achieve and it needs to be done well to avoid the pitfalls of policies like Massachusetts'.

Why the U.S. News Peer Survey Will Never Die, and Probably Shouldn't

The Yale Daily News reports that, in a "major statement," Yale refused to fill out the U.S. News & World Report college rankings peer reputation survey this year, while also refusing to join other private colleges and universities in signing a letter promising to boycott said survey. To begin, this is only true if by "major" you  mean "cautious, difference-splitting and not particularly important." Moreover, those who think the declining participation rate in the U.S. News survey will eventually render it inoperable and thus de-legitimize the rankings are kidding themselves, for two reasons. 

First, because U.S. News can always survey someone else. (Note: there's a nugget of conventional wisdom out there that U.S. News changes its methodology every year so the rankings will be shuffled and thus generate news. While there were changes in the past, this is at least the fifth or sixth consecutive year in which there have been virtually no alterations, so that meme should be laid to rest.)  

Second, because for every institution that's hurt by the survey, which makes up 25 percent of each college's score, another benefits and will thus likely continue filling out the form. And looking at which are which, the survey probably makes the rankings better, not worse. 

Among the "first tier" Top Fifty national universities, here are the ten with the biggest negative difference between their peer reputation ranking and overall ranking, with the ordinal difference in parentheses. In other words, these are the top schools whose U.S. News ranking most exceed the esteem of their peers:

Lehigh (-14)
Wake Forest (-13)
Emory (-12)
Notre Dame (-12)
University of Rochester (-12)
Tufts (-11)
Brandeis (-10)
Washington University in St. Louis (-8)
Rice (-7)
Boston College (-7)

Here are their counterparts on the flip side, those whose rankings are lower than the peer survey would indicate:

UNC-Chapel Hill (+10)
UC - Davis (+10)
Penn State (+10)
University of Florida (+10)
Georgia Tech (+11)
Washington University (+11)
University of Michigan (+13)
UC - Berkeley (+15)
UW - Madison (+15)
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (+16)
UT - Austin (+23)

The difference is obvious -- all of the over-ranked universities are private, while all of the under-ranked universities are public. That's because public universities, being large and on some level committed to enrolling a diverse student body, tend to fall short on other components of the rankings that favor a small, wealthy student body: alumni giving rates, percent of applicants who are rejected, median SAT scores, percent of students from the top 10 percent of their high school class, etc. 

While the peer survey is in many ways rooted in unexamined reputations that go back decades or more (and  the entire U.S. News methodology should of course be replaced with something completely different and much better), it at least has the effect of limiting the ability of universities to spend their way up the rankings through pure marketing and fundraising tactics. That's a good thing, and the reason you'll never see a Rose Bowl Coalition of Big Ten and Pac Ten universities joining the boycott. 

Michelle Rhee's "Plan B"

It looks like Michelle Rhee wants to bypass the teacher’s union and link teacher licensure to “effectiveness” as determined by OSSE. The union has already tripped up, in my opinion, by rejecting the principle of the idea and upsetting people like Kevin.

But really, they have a point about the nuts and bolts problems of teacher evaluation in DC. In all the coverage of the DC contract negotiations, no one seems to have noticed or cared that this year’s DC-CAS scores didn’t come back in time to be used for teacher ratings. That means teachers couldn’t be evaluated by the standards for success they set for themselves in September. Evaluations were done anyway, regardless of the fact that the system didn’t provide teachers with the evidence they needed to prove their effectiveness.

Would you want to bet your teacher’s license on the OSSE bureaucracy’s ability to fix the teacher evaluation process all at once? Or would you ask that they demonstrate a working system of evaluation before they tie it to your livelihood? I don’t think it’s asking too much that teachers at least be able to examine the evaluation process the Chancellor wants to use before she uses it to fire them.

The Competition Effect Emerges

I like the Council of Great City Schools and it's director, Mike Casserly, but I confess I'm not really sure what he's getting at here. He's right that muddled governance and Congressional meddling have done DCPS no favors through the years. But his thesis that the lack of coordination between DC's three-part arrangement of a regular district, charters schools, and vouchers is the big problem (really two-and-a-half parts; the voucher program is small, thus far ineffective, and unlikely to grow) strikes me as off. He says:

The issue here is neither the voucher program nor charter schools themselves. It is a Congress and other political leaders who have established two alternative systems that now run parallel to the D.C. school district without boosting its capacity to get better. If this arrangement created competitive pressures to improve, it would have worked in the students' favor. But there is little to suggest that is happening here or in other cities. Instead, D.C.'s educational system is more fractured than ever, with little common ground among boosters of either strategy.

"Little to suggest"? That's hard to square with the following excerpt from an interview with George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union (from NCTQ per Flypaper):

Have your views of the role of the union changed over time? How?

I think it has a lot to do with the landscape in the system right now. We have the second highest number of charter schools-56 or 57 charters. So we are in a competitive market here in D.C.

The union has now had to take on a dual role. Previously our main concern was bread and butter issues—to make sure teachers have good benefits and working conditions. We didn’t have to be that concerned about keeping children in [D.C. schools]. But now around 21,000 of our students are in charters and around 45,000 in public schools. We lost 6,000 students last year. The charter schools have created a competition where the very survival of the union and the job security of our teachers is not dependent on the language in our contract. It is dependent on our ability to recruit and maintain students because we are funded pretty much by the number of students we have enrolled in the public system.

It puts the union in a different light. It’s not just the contract that protects jobs but also student enrollment. We are expanding our professional development because that impacts student achievement and if parents perceive we improve student achievement then we stand a better chance of getting students back who moved to charter schools. The more students we have, the more teachers we can employ, and the more security we can develop in terms of jobs.

Meanwhile, this is Michelle Rhee being interviewed by John Merrow:

JOHN MERROW: What is your relationship with these charter schools, with these KIPP schools? Are they your competition?

MICHELLE RHEE: Well, I mean, I certainly think that, in some ways, you know, they are, but we have 100,000 school-age kids in Washington, D.C. I want every single one of those kids in an excellent school.

JOHN MERROW: But you are losing students. You've 100,000 school-age kids, but you're now at around 50,000.

MICHELLE RHEE: Correct.

JOHN MERROW: You're hemorrhaging students. Is that a concern?

MICHELLE RHEE: I believe that, when we begin to, on a consistent basis, have schools that have compelling, and engaging, and rigorous programs for kids, will we begin to attract back and see our numbers start to go in the other direction? I absolutely think so.

Anything's possible but when the head of the teachers union says we need to do A, B, and C to respond to competition from charter schools and the chancellor says we need to do X, Y, and Z, to win back students we lost from charters school, perhaps some kind of competition is in fact occuring.

And while "fractured" has an inherently negative ring to it, one could argue that giving charter schools space to develop in a way that's wholly insulated from DCPS and all its problems has not been such a bad thing.

Full-Service Schools

I had the good fortune to moderate a symposium on education policy in Denver last week hosted by Mayor John Hickenlooper. It was one of ten non-partisan events the host city organized in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention on wonky topics ranging from global warming to transportation infrastructure.

There were several highlights to the conversation among the ten panelists at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, including a declaration by John Wilson, the executive director of the National Education Association, that his union is open to changes to the traditional single salary schedule for teachers. A couple of weeks earlier, the NEA's Denver affliate had theatened to go on strike during the convention over Denver's closely watched alternative to the single salary schedule, called ProComp.

The Denver Classroom Teachers Association had originally signed onto the four-year-old experiment, which combined incentives pay for working in tough-to-staff schools with performance pay tied to strong evaluations, student achievement, and professional development work. The local started making feints towards the picket line in part because superintendent Michael Bennet wanted to give less experienced teachers larger raises than veterans to lower attrition among the city's newer teachers.

Bennet got most of what he wanted in a deal signed during the convention. Word has it that the Obama campaign suggested to the NEA that it probably wouldn't be in the interest of the Democratic party and the several hundred NEA members serving as Democratic delegates to have images of striking teachers playing on a continuous CNN loop in the middle of the convention.

On another topic, Paula Prahl, a vice-president at Best Buy, a symposium sponsor, offered up one of the pithier formulations on public school finance that I've heard: Our dependence on the property tax system to fund public education has turned public schooling into a property right. So if you don't have property [ie, if you don't live in a school system with decent property values], you don't have the right to a good education.

But for my money, KIPP founder Mike Feinberg made one of the most important contributions to the roundtable discussion, which in addition to Wilson and Prahl included Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, former Colorado Governor and LA school superintendent Roy Romer, Obama advisor Jon Schnur, billionaire school refomer and philantropist Eli Broad, former Cleveland superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett, and a number of others in the school reform and corporate worlds.

In response to a question from one of the 350 or so people in the audience about whether schools should be expected to overcome the many disadvantages that students from poor families bring to the classroom, Feinberg pointed out the KIPP is build on the premise that there should be high expectations for all kids--and that schools serving kids from impoverished backgrounds need to surround them with support. KIPP provides a longer school day and school year, tutors, parent education programs, and host of community partnerships that supply vision screening, health care, counseling and other services.

KIPP, it struck me as Feinberg was speaking, suggests the futility of the now-several-months-long debate between two rival camps of mostly Democratic school reformers. The first, the Education Equlity Project, a coalition of reformers, urban political leaders, and civil rights advocates organized by New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, is advocating a regulatory reform agenda: rigorous standards, school accountability and, above all, changes in the way teachers are hired, fired and compensated. The project is the brainchild of Klein's deputy, Chris Cerf, who has sought to build a coalition of African American political leaders to counter the influence of teachers' union in urban education. Cerf believes that it's going to take minority communities and their elected representatives standing up to the unions to win the new teacher compensation systems and other changes that he, Klein and others are pushing to attract and keep talent in urban schools.

The EEC was out in force in Denver, co-sponsoring a press conference and panel discussions featuring rising African American political stars like Corey Booker of Newark and Adrian Fenty of Washington.

The other group, formed by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, argues in a manifesto called the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education that it's not reasonable to assign to schools alone the challenge of, or the responsibility for, educating disadvantaged students. It's unfair to expect schools to bear that burden without the help of better health care and housing and improvements in other aspects of the lives of the disadvantaged.

The two factions have polarized the school reform debate dramatically in recent months. Needlessly, the KIPP model suggests. Many KIPP schools have produced impressive results by combining the core elements of both camps. They have reconfigured the school day and the school year. They have rethought teacher recruitment, roles, and compensation. And they have demanded accountability from every adult in their buildings. At the same time, many of the 66 KIPP schools around the country have sought to address head-on the dearth of social capital among many of their students and have extended their relationship to their students far beyond the classroom to help improve their students' readiness to learn.

At their best, they represent a new breed of innovative youth service and education centers. It's a model for the rest of public education, though one that raises a lot of issues for public educators and school reformers alike, as I'll discuss in a forthcoming Education Sector report.

"would not benefit..."

A little after noon today, the Washington Teachers Union (WTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, sent an email to its members that begins as follows:

Dear [member],

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has proposed regulations that would require a DC Public School (DCPS) teacher to demonstrate effectiveness as a condition for teacher licensure renewal. This proposed regulation would not benefit DCPS teachers, as a teacher's true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher's right to renew his or her license.

The email goes on to label as "dangerous and discriminatory" a proposal that would create "a new Advanced Teaching Credential that would require a candidate to demonstrate effectiveness to continue teaching in a District of Columbia Public School." It then offers a sample letter for members to write to DC elected officials, including the following:

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has proposed a new Advanced Teaching Credential that would require new and current teachers to demonstrate effectiveness in order to obtain licensure renewal. Clearly these proposed regulations would not benefit DCPS and have no relationship to student achievement.

I understand that the WTU has an obligation to look after the interests of its members. That's what it's there for, and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, I think a well-functioning school system requires teachers who are well-represented and have their voices heard. And while it's easy to be self-righteous and say "we need to worry about what's good for the children in our schools, not the adults," that's an extreme and ultimately self-defeating formulation. The adults in the schools will determine whether the children are well educated. Both interests must be served. When those interests collide, as they sometimes do, they should be balanced. It's fair to say that adult interests have had too much sway in many cases, but we can't pretend they don't exist. I suppose it'd be in the best interests of students for adults to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for $10,000 a year, but I don't think anyone could reasonably suggest that teachers be forced to do so.

The letter also makes the fair point that it could be confusing and problematic to have the OSSE engage in a teacher evaluation process that's separate from or overlapping with processes conducted by the district itself. The WTU calls for a comprehensive and ongoing process" of teacher evaluation that "uses clearly-defined standards." I agree.

But--it's hard for me to attribute reasonableness and good faith to the WTU in all of this when they say that "a teacher's true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher's right to renew his or her license." That's a clear line, and they're on the wrong side of it. Nobody deserves the right to a job irrespective of their ability to do it well, particularly not people who teach schoolchildren.
It's also hard to credit the idea that the proposed regulations "clearly" have "no relationship to student achievement" when, as the letter notes, the final regulations defining the Advanced Teaching Credential haven't even been issued yet.

The bottom line is that the teaching profession needs to become more attuned to and aligned with the reality of teacher effectiveness, defined as success in helping students learn. There are all kinds of difficult issues to contend with in getting there. But the kind of principled rejection of that idea embodied in this letter will marginalize teachers unions in a way that serves no one well in the end.

Update: Interesting comments thread on this here.

Backward, Forward, Upside-Down

Last week, Post business columnist Steven Pearstein praised the Fenty/Rhee proposal to pay teachers much more money in exchange for more accountability and less tenure. In doing so, he also acknowledged the tradeoffs and potential complications:

Sure, there will be times when teachers will be treated in an arbitrary and capricious way if they give up their tenure rights. Guess what: It happens all the time in the private sector, where hiring, promotion and pay decisions are sometimes made with incomplete information, favoritism, or undue emphasis on one factor or another. But despite this imperfection, despite the numerous instances of unfairness and poor judgment, somehow the vast majority of Americans manage to find a job, move up the ladder and enjoy their work, and companies manage to operate successfully and turn a profit.

Leo Casey of the United Federation of Teachers in New York responded to the above by saying, "In short, non-union employees are regularly screwed, so why should unionized teachers expect a fair shake? Can anyone say “race to the bottom?”

I think Leo is getting the directionality wrong. To be sure, there are millions of workers in jobs that combine low wages, few benefits, and a high degree of vulnerability to the caprice and ill intentions of management. Unions have historically played a tremendously valuable role in lifting such workers up, giving them the compensation, stability and dignity they deserve.

That said, there are also steps on the career and professional ladder above and beyond solid, reasonably paid union and civil service-type jobs: management and the highly-paid professions. Once people move into this realm, they start to relinquish the very same workforce protections and guarantees that they gained when they moved from poorly-paid, unstable positions into the the solid middle. But they do so from a very different position, one that affords them far more power to negotiate in the labor market and more flexibility to make choices about where to work.

The Fenty/Rhee proposal is really about moving teachers up into that third category. It's a race to the top, not the bottom. That comes with serious implications for the nature of teacher collective bargaining, which is why the DC contract negotiations have taken on larger national significance. But it's a conversation that has to happen if schools are going to get the kind of talented, highly-paid teachers they need. (Read more on this from Paul Tough at his new temporary Slate education blog here.)

Boast Away

Like all good Ohio State University alumni (M.P.A. ‘95), I’ve been preparing to obsessively follow the highly-ranked Buckeyes football team from the pre-season all the way to the traditional blowout loss in the National Championship game on January 8th. But this year my loyalties are divided. I have a new favorite team: the aptly-named Mavericks of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, which recently had the temerity to issue a press release announcing that it may be doing a particularly good job of helping its students learn.

Oh, the controversy! By citing its unusually high scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, UNO was either giving in to satanic temptation or paving the way for totalitarian dictatorship, depending on who you asked. “Shame,” said one anonymous commenter at Inside Higher Ed. “Lies,” said another. “Gamesmanship,” said an official at the State University of New York at Binghamton, lamenting that his faculty’s hard work in developing local assessments would be undone.

Well, that’s easy for him to say. Binghamton is the flagship university in the SUNY system. It can pick and choose from among the best students across New York State and nationwide, most of whom come from relatively well-off backgrounds and enroll full time, living on-campus or nearby. Binghamton’s median SAT scores are high, funding levels generous, and scholarly reputation strong, leading U.S. News & World Report to rank it as the 37th best public university in America — sorry, 34th best, up three from last year, which Binghamton proudly announced on August 22nd. In a press release.

Apparently, it’s perfectly OK to boast about your performance on a measure that’s highly correlated with, and partially based on, how well your students did on a standardized test they took when they were juniors in high school. But a test of how much they learned after enrolling? Gamesmanship!

Read the rest of this column here at Inside Higher Ed.

The Loving Hardass

I'll second Kevin's link to Sherman Dorn. Sherman's post does a nice job splitting the difference between the Education Equality Project and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Read it all, but note especially his title, "The Loving Hardass." I think that's about right where we should be in accountability for schools: we should not forget that we're working with children from diverse backgrounds, nor that we have a responsibility as adults to do our jobs as best we can with what we have.

That said, Sherman's even-handed approach lacks the insistence necessary for change. We need our education leaders to say, with more frequency and greater urgency, things like, "We can prove it doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is or what your home life is -- every single child can achieve." We need more speeches that include unequivocal lines like this one:

For the children who are denied the education they need to fulfill their God-given potential, it is a personal tragedy, and an inexcusable injustice. It is also an affront to American values, and a threat to America’s role as an incubator of innovation.

This must change.

Contrast the above quotes with this, the third graf of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education:

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner.

Ignoring for a moment what type of message this sends, consider that the word "education" appears in the Broader, Bolder title. It isn't a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Social Policy" or a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Children's Policy." The authors specifically chose to include the word "education" in the title, but spend the brunt of the statement asking for an expansion into early childhood education and health services and for education policymakers to pay more attention to student experiences outside of school. Again, those are worthy goals, but they ignore what schools can do. Writing in Democratic Education, in 1987, Amy Gutmann had a strong rebuttal to this point that still applies today:

Among the many myths about American education in recent years has been the view that schooling does not matter very much--except perhaps for the pleasure it gives children while they experience it--because it makes little or no difference to how income, work, or even intelligence gets distributed in our society. Like most myths, this one has no apparent author but a lot of social influence. Unlike some myths, the myth of the moral insignificance of of schooling distorts rather than illuminates our social condition. Its prophecy--of inevitable disillusionment with even our best efforts to educate citizens through schooling--is self-fulfilling because it pays exclusive attention to the question of whether schools equalize and neglects the question of whether they improve the political and personal lives of citizens.

Sweet

Reading the somewhat positive reviews of Matthew Sweet's new album generated a fit of early-90s nostalgia over the weekend, so I threw the trio of albums he recorded with Robert Prine, Richard Lloyd et al into the car and gave them a re-listen while driving around town doing errands and such. Conclusion: still really good! But while Altered Beast and 100% Fun are certainly minor classics, 1991's Girlfriend remains a certified desert island-quality pop-rock masterpiece. On one level it's just another piece of evidence supporting the first principle of musical greatness, namely that while talent, hard work, and inspiration can take you far, the path to true immortality necessarily involves falling deeply in love only to have your heart ripped from your chest, thrown to the ground, and stomped so badly that you have no choice but to write songs about it because nothing else can ease the pain. Yet Girlfriend is also noteworthy for being a particularly comprehensive example of the genre, narratively speaking. Blood on the Tracks is mostly aftermath, a pure howl of rage. Rumours demonstrated the commercial potential of keeping the band together after everyone cheated on and betrayed everyone else--no easy trick. (Sleater-Kinney managed this for one song but I suspect the wounds in that case didn't go so deep.) In Girlfriend, Sweet takes nearly half the album explaining the precursors of his failed marriage, laying out with brutal honesty how his own obsessive neediness and impossible expectations sowed the seeds of the inevitable breakup. Then, the gut-punched anger of "Thought I Knew You" on track 8 is followed by sadness ("You Don't Love Me"), defiance ("I Wanted to Tell  You"), and so and so forth all the way to the philosophic resignation of "Nothing Lasts," the original title of the album. Of course, the perspectives of heartache have their limitations--some things last. Girlfriend, for one. 

Dorn Speaks

I've sort of resisted buying into the "dueling manifestos" charaterization of this and that, since the makers of the respective documents insist that wasn't their intent and I'm inclined to believe them. Nor are they really written in a way that allows for clear comparisons. But in the end it's fair to say that they represent two competing perspectives on education reform and the dueling meme seems inescapable, so with that in mind let me say that I find very little to disagree with in Sherman Dorn's lengthy take on the subject and I recommend it for those who really like diving into these weeds.

A Great School Depression?

Not to be insensitive (okay, maybe a little), but color me skeptical of Sam Dillon's new piece in the New York Times, "Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools," which stitches together a variety of anecdotes and data points related to mortgage foreclosures, rising food and fuel prices and state budget shortfalls into a picture of school fiscal distress that's almost surely overblown. And in some cases, misses the point entirely:

Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County [Kentucky] have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.

and:

West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.

As others have noted, school transportation is notoriously inefficient, wasteful and polluting. Rather than characterizing the above as evidence of a terrible financial crisis, it would make a lot more sense to call it what it is: a case of rising fuel prices causing schools to implement common-sense fuel efficiency measures that should have been in place a long time ago, and we're all better off as a result. 

Also:

In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory.

The national poverty rate didn't change in 2007 and while the economy seems to have deteriorated since then, I doubt poverty has suddenly yanked back up to where it was in the early 1990s. The article also cites an increase in the number of students applying for free- and reduced-price lunch. It's worth noting that those numbers held steady and in some cases rose all the way through the late 1990s, even as poverty fell to historic lows in 2000, so that measure doesn't have a great track record in terms of sensitivity to changing poverty conditions. 

The point being, we (a) live in a big, diverse country, and (b) have not vanquished the business cycle, so there will inevitably be places and times when the fiscal fortunes of schools and students take a turn for the worse. But if you simply pick and choose the most alarming numbers and quotes, you're almost surely going to portray things as worse in the aggregate than they really are. 

Words from Vowell

Sarah Vowell offers a paeon to Pell Grants:

I paid my way through Montana State University with student loans, a minimum-wage job making sandwiches at a joint called the Pickle Barrel, and — here come the waterworks — Pell Grants. Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my elbows in ham instead of 40.

Ten extra hours a week might sound negligible, but do you know what a determined, junior-Hillary type of hick with a full course load and onion-scented hands can do with the gift of 10 whole hours per week? Not flunk geology, that’s what. Take German every day at 8 a.m. — for fun! Wander into the office of the school paper on a whim and find a calling. I’m convinced that those 10 extra hours a week are the reason I graduated magna cum laude, which I think is Latin for “worst girlfriend in town.”

People tend to talk and think about student financial aid and college access in pretty straightforward terms: College is the kingdom of opportunity, but they charge at the gate to get in. Give students financial aid and they'll go to college; don't give them aid and they won't.

But while economics tells us that there must be students whose go / no-go college attendance decisions are affected by marginal differences in price, in the grand scheme of things it's pretty clear that most students are going to college whether or not Pell Grants and other aid programs are well-funded. College has doubled in price in real dollars over the last two decades, aid programs haven't kept up, yet the percentage of high school graduates going on to higher education hovers at an all-time high. 

Most students, in other words, are entering the kingdom, one way or another. The real difference financial aid makes is in what happens when they get there. Spiraling tuition is forcing more low-income students out of the four-year sector into community colleges, and while you can get a great education in the two-year sector, your odds of ultimately earning a bachelor's degree are much lower. Without sufficient financial aid, a lot of students are forced to work near full-time, and while Sarah Vowell went on to the pages of the New York Times, studies show that working 30+ hours a week is a significant risk factor for dropping out before earning a degree. Or students grind through, but miss the experiences that make college so worthwhile. Or they finish, but buckle under the burden of debt (un-dischargeable in bankruptcy, thank you Sallie Mae) five or ten  years down the road. 

In other words, Pell Grants don't always make the difference between nothing and something when it comes to a college education. But they do make the difference between something and something worth having.