Welcome to the Quick and the ED, a blog from Education Sector offering smart, provocative, and witty commentary about a wide range of issues in American education, from preschool through graduate school, and including both today's hot topics and more off-the-beaten-path stories.
I’m finally getting around to reading the full version of the research report, “Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods,” that the Washington, D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education put out in September. And it’s good. Based on research conducted by the 21st Century Schools Fund, Brookings Institution, and the Urban Institute, the report takes a broad look at the impact of school choice on school demand, housing markets, and school quality. The authors are careful not to overreach in their conclusions, but just observing the interaction of these variables is informative and raises some great questions around supply and demand in a choice-driven education system.
But, beyond charter schools and intradistrict choice, what really caught my eye in the report was this chart on private placements for special education students: While only 6 percent of white students are identified for special education, 50 percent of those identified end up in private school placements. This is compared with 17 percent of Black special education students and 10 percent of Hispanic special education students.
And this trend appears to be related to wealth—the report found that almost half of public special education students in Ward 3, one of the higher-income areas of D.C., attend a private school paid for by the school district. In the other seven wards, this number is only 15 to 20 percent of the special education population. Regardless of the legitimacy of these placements, it’s clear that the money going to support private school tuition for special education students is not distributed equitably across the city.
I realize that this problem is nothing new for D.C., and the school district is not serving special education students as it should, leading to high private school placements rates. But based on this chart, it looks like private school placement isn't just a matter of having a child who isn't being served in a public school--it's also a matter of having (or affording) a good lawyer. And the supply of lawyers in D.C. is more than enough to meet demand.
Update: Our own Tom Toch actually wrote about this issue ($) for the Washington Post back in 1995. From the article preview: "Thomas Toch discusses the fact that the city of Washington DC is paying $13.5 million to educate 624 students in private special education schools, despite the fact that many of them have parents who are well-off financially."
I'm sure it's true, as the Times reports, that the economic downturn is making it harder for people to pay for college, in that this is true for anything expensive and the cost of college in real dollars is growing robustly every year. But it's important to remember that the example around which the story is framed--a family sending two children to private colleges that each charge $30,000 per year to attend--is not at all typical. 73 percent of all college students are enrolled in public institutions that typically charge far less. Instead of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, this family could consider fine public universities like Indiana University -- Bloomington, which is only about 50 miles from Salem, where they live, or IU-Columbus, which is about the same distance, or IU-Southeast, which is even closer.
Indeed, this is the most likely result of a serious recession--not fewer students going to college (higher education attendance can be counter-cyclical) but students going to different colleges than they would have otherwise. Public universities that were anticipating an easing of enrollment pressure as the current demographic wave crests will need to keep finding dorm and classroom space, while small, non-elite, non-wealthy private colleges like Hanover and Franklin (which enroll the two students in the story) are going to be at serious financial risk. More worrisome would be an acceleration of the existing trend whereby the proportion of poor college students who beging their careers in community colleges is steadily increasing. Given the disparities in degree completion among such students, this will exacerbate education-driven income inequality.
Update: Moody's is also sounding the alarm about the financial vulnerability of small colleges. At the bottom of the article, one commenter proposes what would amount to a luxury tax on college endowments, with some kind of extra levy on earnings from endowments larger than $500 million, the proceeds of which would be distributed to less-wealthy institutions. This strikes me as kind of a good idea. As with baseball, it wouldn't be severely redisributionist--the Red Sox are still the Red Sox, and Harvard would still be Harvard--but it would give the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of higher education a fair shot at competing--or at least staying in business.
Education entrepreneur Chris Whittle is out of work again. Ousted last year from Edison Schools, where he spent sixteen years and upwards of half a billion dollars trying to turn a profit running public schools, the Channel One founder and former Esquire publisher recently cleared out his Midtown Manhattan office at Nations Academy, an international chain of elite private schools that he launched 18 months ago with Dubai businessman Sunny Varkey.
Insiders say that the deep-pocketed Vakrey poured money into the venture after Whittle struggled to find outside investors in the wake of the financial markets’ collapse, and that Varkey demanded a big role in the running the company in return. Whittle, who had spent his last years at Edison under the thumb of new company owners, balked, sources say.
Varkey, who runs an expanding network of proprietary schools in the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, Australia, and his native India, has pulled the plug on Nations’ first two schools—hundred-million-dollar projects on far West 57th Street and in Bethesda, Maryland, that were scheduled to break ground next year.
But he’s reportedly sticking with the Nations upscale school model and he also wants to open less toney private for-profit schools in the U.S. He has hired Manuel Rivera, twice superintendent of the Rochester, New York, public schools and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s education advisor, to scout deals.
Whittle is reportedly planning a new for-profit private school company.
I assume that when major network news anchors are asked to moderate presidential debates, they sit down and work out the questions ahead of time. I imagine they even go to the trouble of writing them down, so they can then read them verbatim and not get stuff wrong. So Bob Schieffer really has no excuse for this, from last night's debate:
The U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world.
It's a provocative statement, in part because it's full of lies. It's true, of course, that the U.S. spends more per capita than most other countries and does worse on some international tests in some subjects and some grades compared to a significant number of other countries, particularly our industrialized competitors. But there are 192 countries in the world and I'll eat my shoe if we're trailing more than 96 of them on any legitimate educational measure. For example, on the 2004 PISA test, "Of the 45 countries ranked in the eighth-grade survey, the United States was 15th in math and 9th in science; among 25 countries in the fourth-grade rankings, it was 12th in math and 6th in science." And that's not a random distribution of countries; PISA tends to undersample nations that lack functioning governments, universities, developed economies, etc. Similarly, according to the OECD countries including Norway and Switzerland spend more per-student on high school, others spend more on elementary school, and a fair number are within 10 percent or so of U.S. levels.
Now, one could say that Scheiffer's overall point about spending and achievement is valid and the question would have been less clear with the appropriate caveats. But I say: too bad; sometimes the world is complicated and your job is to figure out how to be clear and accurate when you talk about it. There's plenty of legitimate data to suggest that the American education system needs to be better; there's no reason to make stuff up or exaggerate for effect. Indeed, this kind of doomsaying tends to undermine the whole effort to improve education because people think if it's really that bad it must be essentially unfixable.
There's been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University's decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What's been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here's what they paid:
- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300 - 150 students raised their score by at least 50 points, earning a $1,000 scholarship. Cost: $150,000 - Total cost to the university: $408,300
And here's what they got in exchange: - a 10-point jump in their average SAT score. It went from 1200 to 1210. - a mountain of bad publicity
Why would a college pay already-admitted students to retake a college admittance test? Because our reward structure is out of control. Because we use magazine rankings based on prestige and money as our most important measure of higher education quality. We could argue over whether it was logical for Baylor to devote its time and resources (spending time to create the program and spending $40,000 per point increase), but they were responding to a particular incentive. They were trying to game a flawed system, just as other universities have.
Baylor could have used the same amount of money to re-design their pre-calculus, psychology, or Spanish programs to enhance student learning and cut costs long-term. Instead, they took a short-term solution that has no added benefit to student learning or college quality.
Update: Baylor is abandoning the payments, because it had the "appearance of impropriety." It's not actually that the payments were improper, no, it's because they appeared that way.
At the Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern contends that the real Bill Ayers scandal lies not with his unrepentent domestic terrorism but rather his Marxist school reform ideas. And on some level, that's logical: the Annenberg challenge was an education effort, after all, not a commission to overthrow the United States government. But on pretty much every other level it's complete nonsense, and here's why: there's just very little evidence that the extreme elements of Ayer's education ideology have had much of an impact on anyone with influence, much less Obama.
It would be safe to assume, for example, that if Ayers' ideas were going to gain a foothold anywhere, it would happen in Chicago. He lives there; he's seen as a respectable citizen; the mayor apparently gave him some kind of award, etc., etc. Chicago has a big distressed urban school district that the Secretary of Education once labeled the worst in the country. I imagine the citizens of inner-city Chicago would be more open to arguments about the evils of the global capitalist system than those of, say, Kenilworth or other suburbs on the North Shore.
Yet I don't see Arne Duncan, an Obama friend and the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, running around quoting Paolo Friere. Instead he hews pretty closely to the policies and ideas that most reformist urban superitendants are adopting these days--ideas that Ayers-ish ed school types tend to hate. Stern says "I've studied Mr. Ayers's work for years and read most of his books." My question is: Why? It would make a lot more sense to look at Joel Klein's bookshelf and figure out who his influences are. I'm pretty sure Bill Ayers won't make the list.
Stern is just using the Ayers affair as a way to re-litigate the culture wars. Thankfully, the people actually running our public schools have more important things to do.
In a move that raises the cynicism and gamemanship bar for college and universities across the land, Baylor University is paying freshmen it has already admitted $300 to re-take the SAT and giving them an additional $1,000 "merit" scholarship if they bump their scores up by 50 points or more. Then it reports their higher scores to U.S. News & World Report, helping Baylor reach its goal of being a "first tier" university on the magazine's annual rankings.
This should confirm how self-serving and intellectually bankrupt the "merit aid" label has become. Basically, it's used by colleges to describe any kind of financial aid that's not based on financial need. The phrasing is deliberate; Americans believe in merit and things base upon it, so they approve in principle without bothering to ask what, exactly, the criteria for merit are. Colleges are increasingly granting so-called "merit" scholarships to academically deficient students because they know their parents are wealthy and can afford to pay full tuition, plus donate to the next fundraising drive. (While most transactions in a free market are at arms-length, in higher education the seller forces the buyer to disclose how much money he or she has before deciding how much to charge.) Or they use "merit" aid to buy higher scores on the SAT--a test that higher education leaders routinely condemn.
It also shows how much colleges and universities care about how much students learn after they enroll: not much. For example, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in a futile bid to become a Tier One school, Baylor could have spent less than $30,000 to administer the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which tests a sample of freshmen and seniors in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and communication skills, in order to see how much progress they made at Baylor. Or they could have given the money to students who are standouts in their field in college, or who served their community, or who actually need the money. Almost anything else would have been better than this.
Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli asks, "Will Obama have a mandate on education?" His answer is: "not really," and I think he's right. In general I think Obama's education plan hits the right notes: early childhood education, human capital, support for charter schools, willingness to talk seriously about thorny teacher pay issues. Just as importantly, he hasn't promoted any really bad ideas or put himself in a box on No Child Left Behind reauthorization. But as for a mandate -- to me, that's what happens when politicians stake their candicacy on an issue and voters respond. You make a big promise, it gets you elected, and that creates both the opportunity and obligation to follow through on the promise. And I don't think education really plays a major role in the Obama political equation in that respect. Obama has put himself in position to do some good and smart things on education if he so chooses, but he won't be able to draw on mandate-y energy to do so. The current massive financial crisis is undoubtedly changing a lot of bedrock assumptions about the viability of various ideas involving regulation and perhaps even the broader relationship between government, capital, and industry, but those aren't education concerns--indeed, they'll probably make it more likely that education gets shoved to the side for a while. All of which is to say, regardless of what happens next month, the immediate future for education will likely be a lot like the present and recent past.
Politico's doing this new section where it gets snippy one-liners from behind-the-scenes bigwigs. Today's question asked what zinger they'd suggest Obama or McCain launch in tonight's final debate. As I read through them, mildly amused, I came across (surprise!) one from esteemed education historian Diane Ravitch:
McCain to Obama: These are dangerous times, this is no time for on-the-job training.
Obama to McCain: You are old and tired, and so are your ideas.
The first one, that's a little trite. Pretty sure Hillary used that line almost verbatim. Probably multiple times. McCain's never said it that directly, but he's called Obama naive several times to his face. The line Ravitch suggests for Obama, though? That one's biting.
If Kevin needs any help refuting Charles Murray, I'd suggest he use this week's Malcolm Gladwell piece. Gladwell takes to The New Yorker to discuss genius, arguing that we typically (and Murray especially) conflate genius--someone who demonstrates exceptional capacity in some field--with precocity--someone who demonstrates exceptional capacity in some field at a young age:
A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity [that all the best creative work is done at a young age] was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.
The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.
The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.
Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.
The trick for policymakers is to reward and encourage Picassos to do their style of work while also having a system in place to support the Paul Cézannes. Murray's idea to eradicate the bachelor's degree supports only the former.
As a resident of the District of Columbia, it’s been fascinating to watch the ascendant rock star-dom of Michelle Rhee, the D.C. public schools chancellor. A 38-year old Harvard grad and single mother of two, she’s been profiled in Newsweek, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and featured on Charlie Rose. Her panel at the Democratic National Convention drew capacity crowds. All because she’s trying to reform an urban school system legendary for incompetence, corruption, and failure. And she’s not alone: Big city mayors across the country have seized control of their school systems in recent years, risking political capital on the premise that schools can serve predominantly low-income and minority students far better than they have in the past. Those schools and students have become the central K–12 education challenge of our time.
Washington’s public school system is not, however, the only public education institution in the city. There’s another with very similar problems: deteriorating facilities, shrinking enrollment, rock-bottom graduation rates, and a troubled history rife with tales of mismanagement and worse. It’s the University of the District of Columbia. But while the recent announcement of a new UDC president garnered respectful coverage in the local newspaper, it’s a safe bet that Allen Sessoms — a Yale-educated physics professor and former leader of Delaware State University and Queens College — won’t be making the national media rounds anytime soon. Urban higher education simply doesn’t generate the urgency and attention directed to K–12, even though it faces many of the same challenges and educates many of the same students. This is a huge problem, and a quick look at graduation rates for the less selective public urban universities on the table below shows why.
To see the numbers and read the rest of the column in InsideHigherEd, click here.
Following up on his recent argument for education futility, Charles Murray has taken to the virtual pages of CATO Unbound to argue that, quote, "The BA degree is the work of the devil." I disagree, and you can read why here, along with responses from Pedro Carneiro here and Bryan Caplan here. Further back-and-forth will follow this week.
Murray's thesis is a good excuse to spend a little time talking about shockingly counter-intuitive arguments. Briefly: there are too many of them. People who are in the business of publishing articles and essay have a weak spot for this kind of thing, because it's grabby and attention-getting and holds out the promise to the reader that everything you ever thought you knew about [insert topic here] is exactly wrong. There's a certain instant drama to it, in other words.
Which is not to say that the conventional wisdom is always right--it often isn't--but it's not usually 180 degrees wrong. Rather, the most correct and well-considered arguments often boil down to "X thing you thought you knew is only somewhat true, or not always true, or true but really needs to be considered in the context of Y larger truth, or is becoming less true as time goes on because of Z." But those arguments can be harder to sell and require more attention from the writer and reader both. Meanwhile, I think people are on some level vulnerable to up-is-down/night-is-day argumentation precisely because it seems illogical; in the backs of their minds they're thinking "Nobody would say something so obviously crazy unless there was some truth to it." There's a strong element of Albert O. Hirschman's reactionary "argument from perversity" in all of this as well.
Although Eduwonkette and Sherman Dorn are treating it like news, the case of Art Siebens was actually cited by Leo Casey of the UFT on Edwize back in August. In brief, Siebens is an AP science teacher in the District of Columbia who recently lost his job. Supporters have created a Web site making the case that he's a great teacher and his dismissal was unfair. While Dorn went on to note the much more negative take on Siebens from local parents and offer a generally sober analysis, Eduwonkette sees the firing as "haunting" and a "debacle," declaring that "By all accounts, Michelle Rhee should be carrying Art Siebens around on her shoulders."
Assuming the positive testimonials are true--and there's no reason to believe otherwise--there are two possibilities here:
1) His firing was unjust and attributable to an incompetent or corrupt process. Either somebody was pursuing a personal vendetta or the evaluation process was so shoddy that it failed to properly take into account his many virtues as a teacher.
2) His firing was just and attributable to factors that have not been made public.
I don't know which is true. But then, neither does anyone else in the edublogosphere. None of us know because the necessary information is being withheld due to privacy provisions inherent to school personnel processes. These are provisions that I assume Casey, Jennings et al endorse. (If not, they should say so.) In this case, "by all accounts" means "according to one side of a two-sided dispute in which the other side is legally prohibited from making its case public." This is like rendering judgment in a trial after only hearing from the defense.
Eduwonkette bills itself as a blog that presents information seen "through the lens of social science." That's an obvious claim to the legitimacy that properly-conducted social science entails. But a crucial principle of social science is matching the strength of claims to the strength and breadth of evidence. And such principles really only matter when they collide with ideology or larger agendas. We may never know if Art Siebens was justly fired--that's the price of confidentiality in h.r. matters--but his case has at least provided some clarity about other things.
I recently visited Penn State's campus, and, much like the college Chad describes below, sometimes it was hard to figure out whether the college existed for academics or athletics--the college stadium was larger than many professional sports arenas I've been to and the statue of the Nittany Lion was the most photographed place on campus (with the statue of Joe Paterno a close second, I'm sure).
But, as USA Today reports, Penn State is trying to shift the focus toward academics, using...trading cards. The glossy cards feature top Penn State researchers in an effort to build awareness of their work. No word on whether the cards include the number of hot peppers each professor received on Rate My Professor.
After finishing my morning coffee and news routine, I start on the day's slog of research. I'm looking at the website of a Mountain West state's flagship university. Then I click on their "Campus Life" section, and I find the following passage (proper nouns removed):
[University X] students are encouraged to become active members of the campus community and develop their full potential. Superior academic programs, combined with plentiful opportunities for a wide range of cultural activities and outdoor recreation, provide a challenging, healthy, enjoyable lifestyle on campus.
The newly renovated [University] Union is the hub of campus, featuring the University Bookstore, numerous eating establishments, computer workstations, a recreation center, and much more. Steps away from the Union, students can work out at [the] Gym or study at [the] Library.
When students aren’t in class or studying, they can participate in university clubs and attend outstanding cultural programs — including films, concerts, theater performances, comedy acts, and planetarium shows. Or they can head for the outdoors and fantastic recreational activities in the Snowy Range [...] Mountains — including skiing and snowboarding, hiking, camping, backpacking, bicycling, fly-fishing, and rock climbing.
With the abundance of outdoor recreational opportunities at students’ doorsteps, it’s easy to understand why [College Town], home of [University], was recently voted one of America’s top 40 college towns by Outside magazine.
Until it gets to the part about mountains and skiing, this university could be any in the nation. It could be your alma mater.
Both the Chronicle ($) and InsideHigherEd lead today with stories on how the current generation--mine--is the first in modern times not to be more educated than the previous one. That is, up until present day, each generation earned more education credentials than their parents. Data suggests that rise has stalled.
I can't help but connect these stories with my experience on the state university website. I look and look for basic information like how many of its entering students return for their second year and how many graduate on time. Iget paid to find these things, and I can't, even though they are collected every year by the federal government. I can't even find how many and what type of students are enrolled there. Instead I see that "Rhinestone Cowboys" is the theme of Homecoming this year and some a cappella group I've never heard of will be performing Friday night. Entertainment but not information, that's what higher education has become.
Today's Wall Street Journal looks at school buses as engines (pun intended) of desegregation. The article's a little unsatisfactory along the lines of "rising gas prices are hurting school choice efforts" when really we all know school choice efforts are hurt by... school choice efforts. What's wrong with school bus systems is that the routes look pretty much like they did when my parents took them. Public transportation suffers from the collection and distribution problem--if you don't have a bus stop near your home that drops you off close to your destination, you're going to opt for private transportation. It's just plain common sense.
School bus routes, as currently designed, pretty much weave through a neighborhood and then have one destination: the neighborhood school. But it doesn't have to be like this. They could continue on to other schools, giving kids the option to stay on the bus longer and attend the latter one. Or bus routes could be re-vamped entirely, in an effort to distribute kids across cities to the schools they want to go to. It would be like public transportation but for kids only. There'd be express routes, circular routes, and in-bound and out-bound routes.
In addition to the collapse of the global economy and our future days spent selling apples on the street while wearing the barrels they came in as clothes, one of the casualties of the current financial crisis is likely to be our collective sense of proportion. At first numbers like "$700 billion" seemed very big--it did to me at least--but now that it's being repeated ad nauseam on cable TV, the newspapers, etc., it will probably start to seem mundane and establish a floor for monumentality in future catastrophes. That, in turn, will make numbers like $1.3 billion seem like a puny rounding error in comparison--and that happens to be the amount of money that various student lenders looted from the public treasury in recent years by finagling the so called "9.5 percent rule." Which is why it's all the more important that people like New America's Steve Burd are on the case with this new comprehensive break-down of the various industry lies currently being bandied about.
I'm sure there's a sensible way for scholars of education to talk about Bill Ayers' decades of work in the field and make the case that it has value and that he's a generally nice guy. But this isn't it. As near as I can tell they're arguing that "unrepentant terrorist" is unfair because really it should be "unrepentant former terrorist," in that the terrorism happened a long time ago, and really it wasn't so much that he "bombed the Pentagon" as that he "participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans." I'm not sure who should be more insulted: people who care about the clear meaning of words, or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements? There are some ostensibly smart signatories to the statement; I find things like this to be baffling.
Update: The statement also says "The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue." That's a remarkably self-obsessed view. The current attacks appear a whole lot more like part of a pattern of one candidate saying stuff about another candidate in order to win an election.
If you write enough blog posts on a given topic, eventually p.r. people will start emailing you stuff in hopes of getting a mention. So it was a while back when someone from RADAR magazine sent me an advance copy of their annual list of "America's Worst Colleges." It's funny and some of it is probably even true. Topping off the list for the second year is the University of Bridgeport, which appears to provide a uniquely toxic combination of low standards, poor outcomes, high price, terrible environment, and ownership by the Reverand Sun Myung Moon. (Making it the Washington Times of higher education, I suppose.) Here's an excerpt:
Nestled on a husk of yellowing grass in the middle of a blighted urban war zone, UB is remarkable solely for its ability to survive. And, as it happens, the Worst College in America remains open for business only because of an unlikely savior.
On the verge of extinction in the early 1990s, the university was rescued from bankruptcy by an arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which offered up a multimillion-dollar miracle. The Moonies' endowment eventually earned the former head of the church a position as university president, and a head scratch from the academic world. Alumni were horrified to learn that a cult long accused of fraud, high-pressure recruitment tactics, and wrenching troubled kids from their parents had effectively mounted a takeover of their alma mater.
Tragically, new students often discover this the hard way. "Scared for my life. UB run by Moonies. Ghetto-type atmosphere," one panicked freshman wrote on an online message board. Of course, if you think the administration is dicey, try leaving your dorm for a stroll in the quad. "The campus is bordered by high-crime neighborhoods," writes a concerned grad, recalling the "naivete and innocence" of incoming students. "They'd trustingly tour the campus and surrounding area by foot and get mugged or killed." The city's violent crime rate is 60 percent above the national average, and over the past two years it has increased by another 6 percent.
For the past decade, incoming students have been presented with "personal alarm locators," portable panic buttons that summon security in the likely event of an emergency.
Despite all this, the university managed to boost its undergraduate enrollment by 6 percent last year, in large part due to its aggressive recruitment of unwitting international students, who make up a whopping 25 percent of the student body. "If you're a foreign student, UB appears to be a lush resort campus conveniently located along beautiful beachfront property," writes one alum about the school's international marketing efforts. (According to its official literature, UB borders "some of the finest sandy beaches between New York and Cape Cod.")
Bridgeport charges $39,000 per year and graduates 33 percent of students within four years.
Although RADAR is in the humor business, it raises a legitimate point: There really ought to be a widely noted guide to America's worst colleges. All of the institutions jostling for the top spot on the traditional U.S. News list are, for the most part, perfectly fine. You could probably throw a dart at the Top 50 and get a decent education as long as you put in the work. And the students who attend those institutions have the most access to information and ability to make informed choices. People didn't need U.S. News to tell them to apply to Stanford or M.I.T. before the rankings were founded in 1983.
The students who really need guidance are those who are in danger of attending a legitimately terrible college or university, someplace that will take tens of thousands of your dollars and provide little or nothing in return. The stakes for those students are a lot higher than for someone choosing between Amherst and Brown. But since identifying the lowest performers is considered impolite in higher education, these kinds of things get left to satire publications, when really they should be in the hands of guidance counselors and parents across the country so they can steer students clear of places like UB.
Last month I noted that GOODmagazine had published an anti-NCLB article so egregious in its lies and incoherence that it stood out in an already-crowded field. This was more annoying than alarming, since I doubt many people take their policy cues from GOOD Magazine.
Unfortunately, as I was paying for my latte in the Capitol Hill Starbucks this afternoon, I noticed a stack of square papers sitting next to the cash register, each emblazoned with the GOOD logo, a cartoon of a school bus with a flat tire, and the words "Education" and "The State of America's Schools." Apparently, in some kind of devious cross-marketing arrangement, GOOD is distributing its education lies in innocuous pamphlet form via the most ubiquitous coffee chain in the world. Here are some falsehoods and misrepresentations:
No Child Left Behind, the 2002 law that ties federal funding and sanctions to gains in standardized test scores, is heralded by some and criticized by others.
As everyone with even a basic understanding of the law knows, NCLB does not tie funding to gains in test scores.
In the "No Child Left Behind" sections, it says:
Federal funding is tied to test performance.
Lie. (See above.)
For any given public school, 9% of the budget comes from federal funds and approximately 91% comes from state, local, and other sources.
Incorrect. On average, that's how much schools get. But funding at any given public school can vary widely. Some get 20 or 30 percent of funding from the feds.
Under "Pros" and "Cons" of NCLB, the "Cons" are listed as follows: "Critics charge that tests vary too widely to evaluate school performance nationwide, that teachers are teaching narrowly to the test, that students who learn in different ways are put at a disadvantage, and that one test shouldn't determine who passes and who doesn't, especially if there are errors in the test.
NCLB wasn't written to "evaluate school performance nationwide" in the sense of comparing school and districts in different states, or states themselves, to one another. That's what NAEP is for. Schools certainly don't always teach "students who learn in different ways" equally well, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to NCLB; the law mandates what to teach, not how to teach. No school is rated by one test; students are tested in multiple subjects and, in elementary and middle schools, multiple grades. It's possible that this refers to students being determined as proficient or not proficient in a subject based on one test--it's not clear--but NCLB doesn't mandate any student-level consequences for passing and failing. And doesn't everyone object to test errors?
High-school graduates going directly to college by percent, national average (2004): 56
According to the Condition of Education, published annually by the U.S. Department of Education, this number is actually 66% and has not been as low as 56% since the mid-1980s.
High-school graduation rate by percent, national average (2005): 69
Drop-out rate by percent, national average (9th to 12th Grade, 2004): 4
There's no way both of these numbers can be true at the same time. If 100 students started high school and 4% dropped out every year for four years, 85 would graduate. Even taking into account students who stay longer, you're still not going to account for the other 16 students.
Some of this reflects a clear misunderstanding of how NCLB works. Some is just sloppy writing. And some is, I suspect, a function of Google-fu research methods: The data sources listed include The ACT, Merriam-Webster, National Center for Education Statistics, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the SAT, School Data Direct, Time, U.S. Department of Education, The Washington Post, and various states. In conducting analysis, you can't just slap together data points from a hodgepodge of publications like this without paying attention to the underlying sources and methods. If you do, you'll almost surely end being wrong on some (or many) levels.
The Chronicle of Higher Education starts a new series today, “Sticker Shock”, focused on the rising cost of higher education—it’s not a new topic, but as the author, Goldie Blumenstyk, says, it’s “damnably complex,” and there are no clear solutions. With The Chronicle’s deep knowledge of higher education issues, this should be an enlightening series.
In the first installment, Blumenstyk presents an overview of the rising cost of higher education - the growing burden tuition places on family incomes and the increasing debt loads of college graduates. While discussions of college costs often focus on tuition in terms of family income or total student loan debt, they often don’t consider how salaries for college graduates figure into the cost equation.
In 2005, NCES took a look at the debt burden—the percent of monthly income dedicated to loan payments—for students who graduated college in 1993 and 2000. Debt burden is a useful measure because it takes into account total debt levels, terms of repayment (e.g., interest rates, flexible repayment plans), and graduates’ salaries. Based on the NCES report, the debt burden for graduating students didn’t actually increase much, despite a jump in the average total debt at graduation.
From 1993 to 2000, the average amount borrowed among graduating students who took out loans rose from $12,100 to $19,400, but the debt burden only rose from 6.7% to 6.9%. This is partly due to more favorable interest rates for the later cohort, but also because salaries one-year after graduation rose from $28,300 to $34,100.*
Unfortunately, these numbers are old and we don’t know if salaries are continuing to keep up with the rising debt loads of students—recent media accounts would suggest they aren’t. As we face an uncertain economic future in which salaries for recent college grads might not rise as quickly as their loan debt, debt burden should be another regularly cited indicator of the impact on students of rising college costs.
*Loan amounts are in 1999 constant dollars and salaries are in 2001 constant dollars.
Back in the summer I grumbled about the lack of open-access academic journal articles in education research. Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on efforts among scholarly publishers to both allow open access to articles, and make money.
Frances Pinter, the publisher of Bloomsbury Academic, which is pioneering this new approach, says, “"I'm tired of the divide between open-access people who have nothing but disdain for publishers, and publishers who don't really know how to take a few risks and try some new models." I’ll admit that I often fall into the first half of that quote, but she makes a good point that this is an area where a little cooperation could go a long way.
No Child Left Behind has become a non-issue on the campaign trail, in part because the politics are too complicated for both candidates, and in part because there are, frankly, more important things to worry about these days. Overall, there's a fairly solid elite consensus that the law is at best founded on smart principles but seriously flawed, and at worst a horrendous corporate conspiracy and/or prime example of Bush Administration malfeasance. Meanwhile, the Washinton Post looks at the data for local school districts in a front-pager this morning and finds that NCLB is...working exactly as intended. In nearly every local district, in both reading and math, the percent of non-poor students passing tests is going up while the percent of poor students who are passing is going up even faster, narrowing socio-economic achievement gaps. Schools identified as low-performing reacted to the so-called "label and punish" AYP system by...redoubling their efforts to not be low-performing. For example:
The onus of failure also sparked a shakeup at Shady Grove Middle School in Montgomery County. Three years ago, the school missed a test-score target. If just one more student from a low-income family had passed in reading, the school would have made adequate yearly progress, the label of success.
"We were stopped dead in our tracks," Principal Lance Dempsey said. "It was very crushing. And it was by one kid."
Dempsey launched a schoolwide literacy plan. She pushed teachers to learn techniques to integrate reading into every subject and gave them weekly training in reading instruction. Teachers started meeting regularly to identify students who were falling behind and to make plans to help them. Educators across the region are taking similar steps. Physical education and art teachers often weave math and literacy lessons into games and projects.
The result, Dempsey said, is a better school. "I think it gave us an opportunity to say, 'Whoa, we are leaving a few kids behind.' " In 2005, only two-fifths of students in poverty passed in reading. This year, almost three-fourths passed.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
While only 6 percent of white students are identified for special education, 50 percent of those identified end up in private school placements. This is compared with 17 percent of Black special education students and 10 percent of Hispanic special education students.
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 