Dispatch from Austin City Limits

Within seconds of setting foot on Texas soil, a horde of fire ants swarm up my shoe and begin sinking their fangs into my ankle, leaving angry sores that last for days. Combined with the total airport power failure and the crazy drunk woman in the airplane seat in front of us, I begin to wonder if my third annual summer music trip with Maureen (after Lollapalooza in 2006 and VirginFest in 2007) might be ill-fated. But luckily the ants are the last bad thing to happen, and Austin City Limits is a blast.

We arrive a day early and spend Thursday touring around town, starting with barbecue at the Salt Lick, browsing through vintage records at Antone's, and then on to the University of Texas campus. The undefeated Longhorns are hosting Arkansas on Saturday and burnt-orange T-shirts are everywhere. (Various local publications allege that the UT starting quarterback is named "Colt McCoy" but I'm pretty sure this is just an elaborate joke devised to mock gullible out-of-towners.) We stop by the world-famous Ransom archive (Gutenberg Bible, check; fascinating early drafts of Underworld, check) before heading on to the museum (which recently acquired a great Anselm Kiefer) and then the Texas statehouse.

Except apparently you're not supposed to call the statehouse the "Statehouse" but rather the "Capitol" because, as our tour guide mentions on at least eight separate occasions, Texas was its own country for ten whole years before joining (and then dropping out of, and then re-joining) the Union. In any case, it's a beautiful building. If you speak while standing directly on the lone star in the center of the rotunda, it produces acoustic effects that are, while not quite Wren's whispering gallery, still kind of neat. We're staying with friends, whom we meet for Tex-Mex near their place in the very pleasant surrounding hills.

Day One

There's a line at the brunch place full of fellow concert-goers--capacity at Zilker Park is 65,000 and it's full all weekend--but the half-hour wait for my guacamole omelet is so, so worth it. We park and ride the shuttle to the main gate, emerging into a hot-but-not-oppressive afternoon sun. Wandering over to the "AT&T Blue Room" stage, we catch the end of an energetic set from What Made Milwaukee Famous. Then we navigate through a sea of folding chairs (more on this later) to catch the insta-buzz NYC sensation, Vampire Weekend. They're okay; I have no particular objections to the music but find their preppy smugness to be off-putting. Maureen agrees. "That one," she says, pointing to lead singer Ezra Koenig on the Jumbotron, "is going on my list of guys who need to have their [butts] kicked."

"John Mayer is still first on the list, though."

We've got an hour before the next act, on the other side of the park (there are seven stages in all, so the whole enterprise requires careful planning). The food is much better and cheaper than at our previous festivals and the drinks are plentiful. (Overall the concert organization was terrific with the lone, notable exception of running out of Lone Star tallboys by mid-Saturday afternoon.) Marketers are handing out sweatbands festooned with the logo of the recently deceased Washington Mutual; I grab a handful to sell as collector's items on Ebay. We make our way near the front of the AT&T stage and settle in for the most multi-cultural band in all of creation, Gogol Bordello. 

It's hard to describe how preposterously entertaining they are, in a bordering-on-and-often-crashing-into-absurd kind of way. The video clip below only hints at their awesome gypsy-rock assault (warning: the sound is terrible because the microphone on my little camera can't handle the rock music). You half expect to be handed a release form explaining that images of you may appear in the next Sacha Baron Cohen movie, what with frontman Eugene Hutz's manic testosterone-addled raving, the roller derby outfits, and all the rest. It's like they're daring you not to get the joke. 

We decide to skip Jenny Lewis' performance in the [Dead Bank] tent since she'll be here in DC on Thursday. We catch a little Hot Chip and then idle near David Byrne, looking sharp in white hair and an outfit to match, doing the Peter Gabriel world music thing. That leads to local favorite Alejandro Escovedo's tight, expert sound. He's on one of the smaller stages and the median age of the crowd suddenly jumps up about 20 years. The band is super-professional as the evening turns to night and they lay down old favorites along with much from Alejandro's justly lauded new album, Real Animal. It's wise, hopeful, and good way to finish the day. As we wait in line for the shuttle bus, The Mars Volta plays on the big AMD stage, sounding like what you'd get if you shot Led Zeppelin full of amphetamines and locked them in steel cage for a musical battle to the death. 

But that wasn't the end of the day. As the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital of the World," Austin is stuffed with great venues into which many ACL bands book late-night gigs. We walk up 6th Street (which is a lot like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and I mean that in the worst possible way) to Emo's Outdoors and the Drive-By Truckers. They arrive after midnight, start a little slow, and my mind begins to wander as I reflect on how age makes it harder to stand all day and stay up all night. But then, at the stroke of 1AM, the Truckers reach beneath the dashboard, flip a switch that shoots reserves of moonshine directly into the engine, and rip through an incendiary set of southern rock anthems that are damn close to the Platonic ideal. Later, we walk back to the car, senses heightened, knowing it will be hard to sleep. 

 

Day Two

The idea was to get there early but we end up needing more time to recover than originally planned. As we walk to the buses, Maureen dashes into the historic Driskill Hotel for a drink of water only to emerge minutes later with a sly grin. "Robert Plant is in the lobby," she says. "We had a moment." I pale, flashing back to Hammer of the Gods. What kind of moment!?! "There was eye contact," she explains. "We bonded because we both have long curly hair."  

Brushes with greatness take time and so we grab lunch and the next band to see is...the Drive-By Truckers. Redundant? No, sir. Shonna Tucker grabs swigs of Jack Daniel's mid-song, Mike Cooley makes me want to take up smoking, and Patterson Hood regales the audience with a lengthy story of how his momma recovered from a six-year vodka bender by marrying a 350-pound long-haul trucker named Chester who killed eight men escaping a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam. Highlight (see clip): a rousing version of "Hell No I Ain't Happy" -- truly, a song for our times. 

We buy some concerts T-shirts and CDs from the temporary Waterloo Records outlets before heading over to see MGMT.  This involves a lot of navigation through the afore-mentioned lawn chairs, which are proof that profound technological change doesn't always involve fancy computers. We all remember folding lawn chairs, but the key innovation was making them collapsible to the point where you can sling them over your back with relative ease. The lawn chair profusion at ACL has become so great that they've had to designate special areas in which chairs can and cannot go. As with other sectors of the economy, advances in lawn chair technology have expanded the boundaries of possibility, resulting in new incentive structures and the need for new policies to match

Unfortunately, when the crowds get big enough, those boundaries start to erode and movement slows to a crawl, like rush hour gridlock in a big city. Personally, I think deploying new chair tech is fine if you're physically unable to walk or stand for long periods of time, but otherwise sitting in front of one stage all day betrays a fatal lack of seriousness and arguably moral weakness in matters of or relating to rock and roll. 

Anyway, MGMT draws a huge crowd as the Brooklyn duo wisely augments their synth-driven sound with a solid three-piece band. They play most of their excellent debut, Oracular Spectacular, with the highlight being a mass-jump-inducing rendition of "Kids." (see clip).

From there we walk back to the AT&T Stage end of the park--and here let me pause to suggest that if you're going to spend what I presume was a lot of money to have "delivered by AT&T" plastered on everything and you're marketing to a generally youthful, affluent audience who as such are likely to own AT&T-exclusive iPhones, you might want to give some thought to what will inevitably happens when tens of thousands of people in close proximity try to use said phones all at once: they'll be repeatedly reminded that your network kind of sucks. 

But I digress. We listen to Conor Oberst doing a reputable job in the distance before Iron & Wine begins on the Dell Stage. There's a cute couple with an even cuter three-year old daughter sitting behind us, which gives me hope that my future children won't cramp my music-loving style. (Readers with evidence to the contrary are kindly asked to keep it to themselves; we all need our illusions. Although Blues Traveller and Band of Horses are playing the same stage tomorrow, Sam Beam pretty much wraps up the crazy beard championship while playing a lot of good tunes from the Woman King EP and The Shepherd's Dog. It gets dark and our Austin friend joins us for Beck, who kicks off with "Loser" before playing some pretty good stuff from his new record as well as his ultra-depressing break-up album, Sea Change. We pause on our way out to hear Plant and Allison Kraus sing "The Battle of Evermore"--not bad--and decide to follow the crowds and walk all the way back to town. 

At this point we're pretty tired so obviously the smart thing is to get some rest drink several margaritas before heading back to Emo's for another post-midnight show. As we arrive Man Man is finishing up an act that seems to consist of wearing denim cut-offs and white face paint while jumping up and down in unison and beating on things. So we grab a few Shiner Bocks and wait for Okkervil River to begin. They do not disappoint. We saw them open for The New Pornographers at the 9:30 Club a few months ago and they were good then, but now the Austin natives are truly in their element, playing in front of an adoring crowd that knows all the lyrics by heart. The space fits about thousand people total but only a few hundred beneath a makeshift overhang in front of the cramped stage, and it's hard to imagine anything to improve. Highlights: "Unless It's Kicks" and "A Girl in Port," among many (see clip). 

We get home even later and more wired than the night before. 

Day Three

Of all the bands in all the world, there may be none more ill-suited to play on a huge festival stage at 1:30 in the afternoon under the hot Texas sun than a two-person post-punk act that looks, sounds, and feels like a smoke- and fashion model-filled downscale London nightclub at 4AM, i.e. The Kills.  But that's exactly where they were, and they were not happy. You could practically see last night's alcohol steaming off of Alison Mosshart's vampire skin, while Jamie Hince repeatedly cursed his manager and made comments like "This is suicide" and "We've never played in daylight before." (One suspects that getting dumped by Kate Moss last week didn't help.) But credit where due: they didn't mail it in. It was actually a good set, helped by the fact The Kills have released some stellar albums in recent years. Mosshart would venture to the front of the stage for a few seconds, recoil from the light, retreat back to her microphone, retch, cover her head with a towel full of ice cubes, and then try it all over again. It was actually kind of charming. 

We rehydrate and then return for Stars, day to The Kills' night in term of sound and disposition. Torquil Campbell repeatedly thanks the crowd and organizers for the honor of performing as the veteran Montreal pop rockers play mostly highlights from Set Yourself on Fire and In Our Bedroom After the War. Next up is Neko Case, playing what she says is the final date on what must have been a very long tour supporting Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. At first I'm worried that the spare arrangements will be insufficient for the space and crowd, but the music grows in confidence throughout the hour. We then turn quickly back for a repeat from Okkervil River, the crowd again super-appreciative and the music again strong and driven, although the band starts to get ragged toward the end. 

Originally the plan was to pivot back to the Raconteurs, but I grow weary and the beverage stands call. So we grab some dinner and I'm pleasantly surprised by the nearby White Denim show on a smaller stage. Then we shimmy through the chairs and crowd to get near the Band of Horses, whom I'd never seen live before. Turns out I didn't know how much I was missing. They wisely play nearly all of Cease to Begin, which is tailor-made for a festival setting, all hooks and soaring choruses.  At one point lead singer Ben Bridwell looks out into the crowd with a beatific smile and says "Wow, look at all these people. Y'all are beautiful. I love you!"

Maureen says, "He just put the bong down and walked right on stage." And let's just say that, based on the olfactory evidence, Bridwell had a lot of company.

Foo Fighters close things out but frankly these are always the least fun parts of a festival; due to the lack of other shows you end up standing in the dark with a zillion people about half a mile from the stage watching tiny figures on a big screen. Plus we have tickets to The Black Keys at Stubb's downtown. So we leave to the strains of "Learn to Fly" and make it to our concluding show of the weekend just as the Akron blues-rock duo begins to play. "Growing up in Akron would make anyone sing the blues," notes Maureen, an Ohioan herself. I can't argue with that, so we order one last Lone Star and relax in the evening air, enjoying the final cymbal crashes and heavy chords of a terrific Austin weekend.

Scalpel

Mike Petrilli mischaracterizes what it means for a program to be labeled "ineffective" by the Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). His argument starts with the presidential debate last week with this exchange:

LEHRER: What I'm trying to get at this is this. Excuse me if I may, senator. Trying to get at that you all -- one of you is going to be the president of the United States come January. At the -- in the middle of a huge financial crisis that is yet to be resolved. And what I'm trying to get at is how this is going to affect you not in very specific -- small ways but in major ways and the approach to take as to the presidency.

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

LEHRER: Spending freeze?

MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.

LEHRER: Would you go for that?

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.

When Obama went on Face the Nation and elaborated that there are government programs that do not work, Mike decided to give Obama some scalpel help and used OMB PART scores to determine which Education programs should be cut. Besides PART itself possibly not making it into the next administration, here's why the scores should not be used in the way Mike suggests:

1. PART treats every program equally, so the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics is one program with a budget of $500 million. Education is split into many tiny programs, so the BLS is graded on the same curve as the $1 million B.J. Stupak Olympic Scholarship Program. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is not one program, but seven. No other agency is hit as hard as Education in this way.
2. Government programs, as Mike well knows, are often shackled with poor designs. A compromise here or there makes the original intent of the program nearly impossible to achieve. PART assesses how well the program accomplishes its goals, but if its goals are conflicting or unclear, let alone flat-out impossible, the program earns a bad score. See this review of the federal Perkins loan program, designed for needy college students:

   The program's institutional allocation formula (i.e., how much program funding is given to each school to offer Perkins aid) is designed to heavily benefit postsecondary institutions that have participated in Campus-Based programs for a long time, at the expense of more recent entrants or new applicants. Since these longstanding institutions do not have a higher proportion of needy students, this allocation formula tends to limit the program's ability to target resources the neediest beneficiaries.
   

3. Education programs are not the only ones receiving "ineffective" ratings from PART. Using this "scalpel," we would also cut Amtrak, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Americorps, Veterans Disability Compensation and Veterans Home Loans, and the Air Force Base Operations & Support. This last one alone is funded at twice the level of all the programs Mike lists. It fails because, "The overall program does not have long-term, outcome-based performance measures. Program elements do have performance measures, though they are often input or output oriented rather than focused on outcomes that directly and meaningfully support the program's purpose."
   
4. PART scores are binary, meaning OMB managers must answer either "yes" or "no" to questions about program efficacy. There's no room for flexibility whatsoever. Imagine an agency that juuuust fails on every measure. It would receive a score of 0. An agency that gets even one yes, no matter how many horrendous other failings it has, would have a higher score.
   

If you want to know more about PART scores, see here.

Candor

In a discussion about the use of standardized college admissions test, William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard university, says:

"At Harvard we get terrific students, and we turn out terrific students later on. Is that due to Harvard or is that due to the students to begin with? Who knows?" 

I appreciate honesty and candor as much as the next guy but shouldn't you know? Students pay a lot of money to go to Harvard, the government kicks in a bunch as well, and here a high-ranking official admits that the university really has no idea whether it adds any value or simply provides a pure sorting-and-networking service. Of course the phenomenon of human learning is extremely complicated and subject to all kinds of endogenous and exogenous factors, so this is not a simple question to answer. To really make some headway you'd need at minimum a group of very smart, highly-skilled people with access to large amounts of resources along with specific training in various complex research and analytic methods, plus proximity to thousands of potential subjects to study. In other words, a place just like Harvard University. I mean, they've got research centers devoted to figuring out everything from astrophysics, genomics, and nanotechnology to cancer, AIDS, and peace in the Middle East. Is it crazy to think they could figure out how much they contribute to their own students' learning? 

Due Diligence

Clearly whoever's running the "Firesales, Mergers and Acquisitions" department at J.P Morgan isn't aware that there's a WaMu Tent here at ACL or else they'd be here tearing down signs, hanging out backstage with Jenny Lewis, etc.

What $700 Billion Could Also Buy

Matthew Yglesias makes a quick point that deserves elaboration, particularly in the current financial climate. His basic argument (and I'm adding some of my own as well) is that if we think of the "economy" consisting only of the stock market, then sure, the bailout seems like on OK idea. But there's also measures of job security, unemployment, equality, health care, quality of life, etc. And if we consider other options on which we could be spending that money, the bailout makes a lot less sense.

The first thing we have to acknowledge is that $700 billion is a ton of money. As in it would automatically be the largest line item in the 2008-9 budget. It's more than we spent last year on Social Security ($608 billion), Medicare ($386 billion), or Defense ($481 billion). The bailout would cost about 65% of our total discretionary budget last year.

$700 billion will increase our national debt by 7 percent at the drop of a hat.

It's amazing how quickly consensus arrives when a financial crisis emerges. What could we do with $700 billion instead? Simple arithmetic tells us that every man, woman, and child could get a tax cut of $2,300 (if we limited it to taxpayers only it would rise to almost $4,000). If we wanted to be a little more selective, we could pick and choose from any number of good ideas that pump a ton of money into needed areas. We could try to actually solve some root problems too, either by addressing the housing issue head-on or using incentive programs to increase the savings rate. Anything progressive instead of reactive. I can't quickly retrieve the figures for repairing all our bridges and roads, cleaning up our waterways, or investing in alternative fuels, but here in the ed world, a $700 billion investment in the nation's human capital would go a long way. Heck, implement all the proposals of this week's College Board Rethinking Student Aid report for the bargain basement price of $60 billion. Or start with Education Sector's Eight Education Ideas for 2008 for a total cost of about $18 billion.

The point is there are a lot of good ways to invest $700 billion in the United States. Spending it all to rescue bad mortgages seems like one of the worst.

Students on a Balance Sheet

Inside Higher Ed reports today about Spelman College's new financial aid initiative intended to ensure students make it to graduation. Says Spelman's Vice President for Development:

The worst thing from our perspective would be to have a student who’s a senior, who may have upwards of $60,000 in loans, not be able to graduate.

Indeed. Students don't get partial credit for completing half of a college degree. It's all or nothing, and it's much more difficult to find a job that will allow you to repay tens of thousands of dollars in student loans if you don't have a diploma in hand. But you don't hear much about the relationship between student loan defaults and the United States' low college graduation rates - less than two-thirds of students overall graduate in six-years, and less than half of minority students graduate on time. The ten-year default rate for students with high debt loads who received a four year college degree is 20 percent. For students who don't get a degree, that number is certainly much higher.

Spelman provides a great example to other colleges interested in raising graduation rates and reducing student loan defaults. And colleges can start by reallocating some of the financial aid that is currently going to recruit wealthy students and use it to ensure that students don't just have access to a four-year degree, but actually attain it.

Over at Higher Ed Watch, Stephen Burd writes another good post on why we shouldn't be bailing out student loan companies, and says "These defaults are not just numbers on a balance sheet, they're students." So true.

Music Woo

Heading out of town to Austin City Limits, back with full report next week, policy team will be providing expert commentary and/or bitter sarcasm in the meantime.

Why Didn't I Think of That

Once upon a time, all the way back in the early 1980s, Congress passed a law that guaranteed lenders a minimum return of 9.5% on student loans. The financial world was very different back then--the prime rate was almost 19% in 1981--and the student loan industry wasn't as robust. But as time went on interest rates dropped into the mid-single digits, more and more students borrowed, and the guarantee wasn't needed anymore. By 1993 the prime rate was down to 6% and the 9.5% program had become a big hole in the public treasury that lenders could stand beneath and lap up leaking money at the taxpayer's expense. So Congress passed another law to shut the loophole down.

Lenders responded by making money honestly devising a series of dodges and gambits to keep the pipeline open, such as taking money made from old loans made under the 9.5% program, sprinkling magic fairy dust on it, and then "recycling" it back into the same old accounts, where it was then re-lent as a new loan but claimed as an old loan that received the 9.5% guarantee. This went on for more than a decade, at what was until recently assumed to be a cost to taxpayers ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, under political pressure, the Bush Administration shut the program down, making the lenders pay back all the money they took allowing the lenders to keep all the money they took as long as they promised not to take any more. For more on this, see the always-valuable Stephen Burd at Higher Ed Watch.

Now comes word that the taxpayers weren't actually ripped off to the tune of over $500 million. No, the real price tag will be closer to $1.2 billion, and while such numbers might seem quaint given today's headlines, call me old-fashioned but that still seems like a lot of money. But apparently I just don't understand the right way to think about this. Contacted by Paul Basken, a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, one lender explained($):

Loan agencies "across the nation have moved forward beyond the 9.5 loan issue," said Patricia Beard, chief executive of the South Texas Higher Education Authority. Anyone concerned about the welfare of student borrowers should instead devote "attention to something that matters to the nation," such as the overall downturn in capital markets, she said.

According to the Chronicle, the South Texas Higher Education Authority "was found to have claimed 93 times the amount of loans now considered eligible for the 9.5 percent program." But never mind, because they have "moved forward beyond" all of that messy business. Why be stuck in the past? I'm going to remember this when prosecutors coming knocking on my door after discovering my scheme to defraud taxpayers out of huge sums of money. Come on, fellas--I've moved forward! Or maybe I'll try this out at home with my wife. Yes, it's technically true that I failed to put the garbage out for three consecutive weeks, resulting in a huge colony of rats establishing permanent legal residence in our back yard. But why dwell on past mistakes? I've moved forward, sweetheart--why can't you?

And where, exactly, would the lenders like to move forward to? To finding new ways to grab loads of taxpayer money, naturally--as Basken reports today, lenders are angling for a piece of the $700 billion bailout pie. Perhaps the plan is to make the cost of the 9.5% scam pale in comparison.

Unigo

The U.S. News & World Report college rankings will be irrelevant in three years and dead in ten. They will not be killed by outright competitors like the Princeton Review, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, or even the recent Forbes magazine rankings utilizing Ratemyprofessor.com. They'll be slayed by a 20-something named Jordan Goldman.

Goldman is not bringing us another set of rankings using mathematical formulas, no matter how related they are to student outcomes. Goldman's site is based solely on real student impressions. They're not politically correct, and colleges will not be happy with what they say.

Goldman's design is essentially a Facebook/ MySpace Website devoted solely to students picking colleges. There are no rankings, only reactions, essays, photos, and videos taken by alumni and current students, all unpaid interns so far, collected and put online by Goldman's staff. Goldman's site, Unigo, is free and will run off advertising revenue. It's no coincidence that some of the most successful start-up companies in the last five years have followed this model (see Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). People don't like to pay for content they can get for free, and in a world where Internet users can find anything in a moment, they are not going to pay for college reviews published in magazines or books anymore when they can get better, more relevant, content online.

Unigo asks real students their perspective on their school in open-ended essay formats. Unlike other mediums, where space is at a premium, Unigo publishes everything. They offer their own condensed version too, but links allow readers to find the full piece. They're often breathtakingly honest in a way that will surely both draw in readers and give heart attacks to university administrators. Consider snippets culled from reviews of Louisiana State University ("We can drink any college under the table and do it with some class and hospitality."), Cornell ("I tend not to blame the suicides on the school. As for blaming suicides on the weather: if you're that cold, then buy a jacket, for God's sake. It's much less messy, and you don't even have to write a note first."), or Quinnipiac University (approvingly called "a white school").

While college administrators attempt to fight off magazine rankings on one hand and state and federal government officials with the other, they've launched voluntary systems of accountability. Those efforts have yet to offer much in the way of new information, and they'll be blindsided by the power of student-driven content organized on the Web. Unigo offered 267 colleges and universities a two-week preview of the site, but most denied. At Davidson College in North Carolina, vice president of admissions Christopher Gruber summarily dismissed Goldman's creation, saying,

I've got to be honest with you, I'm not spending a ton of my time navigating those student-driven sites. It's too much to manage. My sense is that the traditional big players, like Princeton Review, are the major sources for online information too, in part because those are the names that parents still recognize. Those are the names that are going to have greater panache, and so those are probably the ones that will be turned to. The ones that we supply information to are the ones that we spend the most time on, filling out surveys for them to make sure that that information is accurate.

Gruber, of course, doesn't realize that students drive higher education decisions. And as Sunday's Times notes, he is clearly oblivious to the fact that 230 current Davidson students—one eighth of its student body—have already posted reviews, photos, and videos to a site that has barely even launched.

Besides those participation numbers, what will really drive this site is the thirst for more relevant information. Students see hundreds of college-produced guidebooks of diverse students sitting on a lawn, presumably solving the AIDS epidemic, or sterile photos of students in a lab, with a professor over their shoulder that just screams, "Come to our school! Our faculty are great!" In reality, every college has some sort of lawn, some sort of diversity, and some claim to faculty greatness. But there are no numbers to support those claims, nothing to show somehow that their lawn is greener, their diversity is more relevant, or their faculty are actually better teachers. Real student observations will trump these Potemkin catalogs with ease.

The paper version of the Times piece drives the point home best. On the page opposite the article was an advertisement for the University of Richmond. We see a large image of a woman looking resolutely into the distance and three smaller pictures of, respectively, a woman in a science lab with a test tube, a professor looking over a student's shoulder, and their main campus quad. It's paired with the following text:

A curious mind thrives at Richmond. Faculty who inspire. Students who challenge. Incredible facilities. The latest technology. More opportunities than you can imagine. And generous financial aid resources to help make it affordable. Recognized as one of America's premier liberal arts universities, we offer an intimate environment where students explore a wide variety of academic possibilities. Our small classes encourage intellectual debate, close interaction with professors and hands-on research. Satisfy your curiosity at Richmond.

What does that even mean? What college would not say those things about itself? Unigo already has 89 reviews, 40 photos, and six videos, all written, taken, or produced by students currently at the University of Richmond. Some of the students are happy with their choice of school; others are not. One describes the student body as, "shallow, self-centered, competitive, rich preppy students whose main concerns are themselves, their money, the way others perceive them, and oh yea.. themselves." while another says the worst thing about the school is the "racial problems."

Unigo still has some bugs to be worked out. I've been checking it every day this week, and some of the links have failed and the videos refused to load. But it's gotten better each day, and a site with such unfiltered information, from real, current students, is certainly worth watching.

Ugh

In a Reykjavik-level summit of "people who irritate me," Deborah Solomon interviewed Charles Murray in the New York Times Magazine college issue over the weekend, producing this priceless exchange:

What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!

I’m sure you’re aware that unemployment is very high right now. There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians. I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician — that’s hard. If you want jobs that are in high demand, go to any kind of skilled labor. And by labor, I mean things that pay $30 or $40 an hour.

So here in a few sentences we have Solomon's typical haughty know-nothingness--unemployment is "very high?" True, except when compared to most of our industrialized competitors, most of the last four decades, and any objective definition of the words "very high"--combined with Murray's remarkably cloistered elitism. To heck with college--just join the wonderful world of work (I believe this is a ride at Epcot Center) and you too will be able to "get a good doctor in a minute and a half..." 

Avoiding the Elephant

Doug Lederman reports on a recent conclave of higher education leaders opposed to new government oversight:

Even as other speakers agreed that the temptation to increase direct federal oversight of accreditation and higher education was ill-conceived, they were more accepting of the notion that colleges have brought much of the criticism behind that temptation on themselves, and that much of the scrutiny was deserved.

In other words: While our critics are right that we're underperforming, we reject their proposed solutions, even though we have no credible solutions of our own, and our objections are rooted in a general aversion to oversight as opposed to a specific analysis of the problem and how it might be solved. 

Good luck with that. 

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.