Early Voters

Obama wins the crucial 5-17 year-old voting bloc. On this day of speculation and hype, that's about all the real election news you're going to get.

The Post story even quoted one ten-year old who cast his vote based on education policy:

Taylor Irwin, 10, is an Obama supporter who has been following the candidate's education plan.

"He said that he would increase the number of children that are eligible for early education," Taylor said. "I think it's important for children to get exposed to learning at an early age."

An education voter. That'll show EDin08's detractors!

Smoking

Politics is strange business. Here in DC we have a very popular mayor and a reform-minded schools superintendent who are, for the first time in living memory, putting serious political capitol and genuine reformist energy behind an effort to turn around a school system that's been universally regarded for many years as one of the worst in the nation. Have they been perfect? Of course not. But there undeniably is hope and progress, two things the district has sorely lacked. Yet the DC City Council has been growing increasingly antagonistic toward the mayor and chancellor, despite lacking anything resembling a coherent alternate viewpoint or education agenda of any kind. Instead, it's all about hurt feelings and disrespect. On Friday the Post reported the following exchange:

Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), in one of several tense exchanges with Rhee, complained that she had provided more information to the media about the fund shift than to the council. Rhee said that was not the case.

"I disagree with that," she said.

"You keep disagreeing with that and you won't be around here too long," said Barry.

Under normal circumstances if you disgrace yourself and lose your job by getting busted smoking crack in hotel room with a woman who isn't your wife, and then get busted with crack again by park police in 2002, and then test positive for cocaine in 2006, you're looked on with a mix of pity and disdain--if you're lucky. Yet in DC Barry remains a potent political force, to the point where people with actual jobs have to waste an afternoon pretending to be polite while he talks smack. This is definitely one of the downsides of democracy. 

Don't Waiver

The National Governors Association lobbied hard against the "maintenance of effort" provision included in the recent Higher Education Act reauthorization. It should come as no surprise then that the NGA has already asked for an across-the-board waiver, citing the recent economic crisis and expected state government shortfall. The law does include a waiver provision for, "a natural disaster or a precipitous and unforeseen decline in the financial resources of a State or State educational agency," but a recession does not exactly count as unforeseen, and nowhere is the plural used, meaning all states cannot be granted one en masse. Besides, not all states are experiencing budget shortfalls; energy-intensive states are actually doing well ($).

What's really important to understand is the federalism at play here in higher education finance. The maintenance of effort provision applies only to public institutions, so let's stick with a discussion of them. Public sector tuition gets set in different ways depending on the state. Some states let institutions set tuition rates either outright or by default. Some have governor-appointed boards do the rate-setting, and some state legislatures even do it themselves. The point is that legislatures and governors have a lot of say in tuition policy, even if they prefer to play the part of unwilling accomplice. In my home state of Iowa, we have a Board of Regents that is governor-appointed. They set tuition policies for the three state universities. They end up caught in the middle of a constant push and pull for power by the universities and the legislature. The legislature thinks the Regents coddle the universities, while campus officials cry out that the Regents are in the bag for the legislature.

These things matter when it comes to something like the maintenance of effort provision, because state governors and legislatures are crying bloody murder that the feds are having too much of a role in higher education. See the NGA's press releases opposing the provision before it became law here, here, here, here, and here. Their opposition almost killed it entirely, and they are certainly the reason it became almost entirely toothless. The law always had a provision allowing states to use five-year rolling averages in its calculation (so states, your budget cuts of the early 2000s actually lower that average now), but it got tied to such a tiny tiny sum of money that it became effectively meaningless. The total money at stake for 2008 is $66 million, a drop in the bucket when you consider that we spend 242 times that, $16 billion, on the federal Pell Grant program. State governments spend much more than that.

Governors and legislatures are the willing victims in this instance. States would like federal policymakers to believe they've done their share in funding higher education. And it's partly true. An unreported fact is that states provide almost exactly the same revenue per full-time equivalent student that they did in 1980 (in constant 2007 dollars). Of course, this does not account for rapidly expanding costs in other areas, especially health care, but the problem isn't just state spending, as is commonly reported elsewhere. The real problem is tuition.

While states have managed to hold the line on state expenditures, they have been unable to hold back tuition at public colleges and universities. According to the states' own numbers, from 1982 to 2007 tuition increased 190% over inflation. Much as we'd like to blame institutions for coddling undergraduates with fancy dorms and expensive perks like chefs and new-age gyms, state governments have been complicit as well. Their desire to compete with private institutions has caused them to ignore equity concerns and spend scarce funds on ever-increasing merit aid, which quadrupled from 1996 to 2006.

Enter the feds. The federal government has no role in setting tuition whatsoever. Its role in higher education is limited to providing financial aid for needy students, getting dollars into the hands of researchers, and providing tax breaks for donations to non-profit foundations that are more and more essential to higher education. But they feel the pressure of rising tuition costs nonetheless. They feel it from parents during election time, but they also feel it from organizations like the NGA, which is critical of how little a percentage of tuition Pell Grants now cover.

The meager maintenance of effort provision is a good start. Secretary Spellings should quickly dismiss this latest attempt to skirt responsibility.

Schools left out of technological innovation?

If it takes a village to raise a child, that village might become increasingly virtual. Technology is making it easy to create learner-centered networks. Several developing projects aim to maximize the power of networks and improve learning. TeamPlay Foundation uses software to link students with a network of mentors. The mentors help students set goals and “see the path from here to there,” says co-founder Gunnar Counselman. In Chicago, the Electronic Learning Record project (a.k.a. Bettr@) aims to facilitate the formation of “interest nets” that will share content and help learners set goals and assess their progress.

Both groups are finding traction outside of traditional public schools. TeamPlay works with a variety of after-school and youth development programs, with plans to expand. Bettr@ director Patrick Whitney envisions working with home school-ers and potentially some charter schools, but not traditional schools. “Innovations come from the edge,” he says.

Neither group plans to focus on traditional public schools. Is it because schools are intractable by nature? Could schools and teachers be wary of the legal landscape of sharing student information? Or is something else going on?

Four-Day Weeks

Budgets are tight and schooling is expensive. So it’s not surprising to see state officials proposing new ways to cut costs in education. But this idea to eliminate the required 180-day schedule—something South Carolina state superintendent Jim Rex is proposing—is surprising. This will give districts more options for how they set up their school schedules. More options sounds good. But the most likely result here is that cash-strapped districts will cut the school week to 4-days a week. What’s wrong with this? Pretty much everything related to student learning. Rex estimates that it will cut nearly 20% of costs for maintenance, facilities, and bus driver salaries. But this is the wrong way to cut costs. Aside from the inevitable complications for working parents-- what will kids do on that extra week day?--there is absolutely no reason to think that fewer longer days will help students learn. Research on time and learning suggests just the opposite— kids need quality instruction and learning opportunities on a regular and consistent basis. Knowing this, many other states and districts are actually proposing to extend school time. And while I’ve served as the skeptic on some extended school time proposals, the fact that kids need more, not fewer, opportunities to learn is incontrovertible. So unless South Carolina--and any other state or district thinking about this-- has a solid plan for more quality out-of-school learning opportunities, this is going to mean less learning for students.

So what’s a state to do? Marc Porter McGee of ConnCan has some interesting ideas here, including cutting overhead and shedding unnecessary contracts. States and districts are going to have to be careful, though, with these decisions about what's necessary— bus driver salaries and facility costs may not seem directly connected to student instruction but if cutting these means cutting school time, less cost means less learning.

Losing Ground?

As I wrote a couple of days ago, there's a lot to recommend in the new report about high school graduation rates from the Education Trust (where I used to work). But the media seems a little fixated on the first sentence: "The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which today’s young people are less likely than their parents to have completed high school."

It's a big dramatic statement, and the New York Times jumped on it in an editorial that ran yesterday, saying:

Americans should be deeply alarmed by new data showing that the country is continuing to lose ground educationally to its competitors abroad. The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.

Time magazine picked it up in a story that ran today, saying:

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world where children are now less likely to receive a high school diploma than their parents were, according to an Oct. 23 report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group based in Washington.

Two things to keep in mind. First, the statistic comes from the latest batch of education numbers released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD is indeed a collection of industrialized countries. But it's not an organization of all industrialized countries. The table from which this number was pulled includes 29 OECD member countries and six additional "partner economies." It's true that, by one measure, the U.S. is the only member country with a generational decline in high school degree attainment (more on this below). But the comparison list doesn't include Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Iran, South Africa, Argentina and Venezuela, among others. There may be differences of opinion about the meaning of "industrialized," but I'm pretty sure Japan qualifies. Whether high school attainment is stable or rising in every other industrialized country, I don't know. In any case, the phrase "only industrialized country in the world" is over-broad. 

Second, the decline is very small and depends on how you look at it. According to the table, here's the percent of American students graduating from high school by age cohort:

25-34: 87%

35-44: 88%

45-54: 89%

55-64: 86%

While the average age of first-time parents is in the mid-20s, that number has been creeping up over the years.  But (obviously) many people aren't first children, so the average age of anyone's parent at the time of their birth is probably around 30. That means that a person in the 25-34 cohort is likely to have parents in the 55-64 cohort, whose high school attainment percentage is one point lower. I assume the Trust is using the 45-54 cohort, which is two points higher, but that's too young to be parents of most of the 25-34 year olds. Either way, there's not much difference. 

Also, the fact that the numbers are all near 90 percent means that OECD must be counting GEDs, since commonly used measures of on-time high school graduation (like the numbers cited elsewhere in the Ed Trust report) are generally much lower, in the mid-70s. And because people sometimes pick up GEDs later in life, there's some chance that the number for the 25-34 cohort will tick up a percentage point or two as time goes by. 

The chart also shows a drop in high school attainment from the 35-44 cohort in the Russian Federation (which is certainly industrialized)--not at all surprising given the many other measures (e.g. life expectancy) on which Russia is in decline. Say what you want about the Soviet Union, but it was good at getting students through school. 

None of which means that the Education Trust is wrong to say that far too many students are dropping out of high school (particularly low-income and minority students) and that states need to do much more to hold schools accountable for high school graduation rates and support them in efforts to improve. But these kind of alarming statistics tend to take on a life of their own once they're repeated in major media outlets, so it's important to get them exactly right. 

College Gets More Expensive, Part MCMXVII

The College Board released it's annual Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing reports today. These are generally considered to be the definitive sources of new information on the respective topics and are chock-full of informative historical tables if you're interested in that kind of thing. While the data itself is reliable, the College Board tends to spin the annual results in ways that reflect well on its customer base: the higher education industry. So the press release was titled "College Prices Increase in Step with Inflation." The New York Times bought into this hook line and sinker and then did it one better, titling its article about the reports "College Costs Up Slightly, Report Says." Given that tuition has been routinely doubling the inflation rate for the past 20 years, this is good news, right?

Well, no. Average college tuition at public universities was up a healthy 6.4 percent this year, well in line with historical trends. Inflation-adjusted tuition was lower because inflation was higher, due to the run-up in energy prices among other factors. Now, it's true that on a long-term basis, on average, wages and income rise along with inflation. But at the moment we're still teetering on the brink of economic calamity (or we fell off a couple of weeks ago and just haven't gotten around to admitting it yet.) Unemployment is up, people are losing their shirts in the stock market, and the domestic automotive industry is about to collapse. The bottom 50% of households--i.e. the households that are most vulnerable to changes in college costs--are no better off today than they were eight years ago in terms of income, even as the price of college has risen dramatically. Suggesting that everything is copacetic because a worldwide spike in oil prices combined with a global food crisis and other terrible problems had the effect of deflating real tuition calculations is absurd.

Update: I note that the Times has now changed the headline to "Downturn Expected to Drive Tuition Up." Better!

Sweating the Big Stuff

The Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that about 400 new charters have opened this fall, bringing the total number of charter schools to 4,600, with a national enrollment of 1.4 million. But charters rely heavily on the credit and bond markets to finance buildings, start-up, and cash-flow. And such funding is becoming much more expensive, or drying up altogether, in the wake of the global financial implosion, experts on charter finance and banking industry sources say. At the same time, a number of charter school authorizers meeting in Indianapolis this week reported they aren't seeing a lot of strong applications for new charters. Conclusion: a tough job--building good schools for disadvantaged kids from scratch--is about to get tougher.

100% or...What?

The 2014 target for 100% proficiency is one of the most vexing parts of the No Child Left Behind Act. On one hand, it seems absurd to suggest that every single student in America, all 49 million of of them, could pass a legitimate proficiency standard in both reading and math less than six years from now, and that every school where that standard isn't met is, by definition, deficient. Even taking into account "safe harbor" provisions that drop the actual number a few points below 100%, it's still a huge challenge, one the nation's schools are not currently on track to meet. The 100% goal is one of the principle reasons that a lot of people think NCLB is a rigged game and thus a conspiracy to destroy public education so as to pave the way for takeover by profit-hungry corporations, etc., etc. 

At the same time, I understand the logic behind it. The law was enacted in 2002. The proficient targets haven't been set particularly high. Any goal less than 100% would have been tantamount to giving up on some percentage of that year's kindergarten class, to looking the parent of a five year-old in the eye and saying "Twelve years just isn't enough time to teach your child to read and do math at a relatively low level." Settling on a goal lower than 100% also raises the question of how much lower and which children, exactly, would be written off from the get-go. Given the historical relationship between race, class, and educational opportunity in America, it's not hard to guess whose children those would have been. 

This raises the question of what would happen if the federal government didn't mandate a uniform timeline for all states. "Why not let the laboratories of democracy take a shot at it?" one might ask. "They're good people; even if they made different decisions, surely they wouldn't game the system in an utterly fraudulent, cynical way...."

Except we know they would. We know this because, as Anna Habash explains in a new report from the Education Trust, that's exactly what many of them have already done when given flexibility to decide how to hold high schools accountable for graduation rates under NCLB. 

Here's how it works: States are required to hold high schools accountable for graduation. But unlike with achievement scores, where every school has to meet a proficiency target that starts with where the 20th percentile school was in 2002 and ends with 100% in 2014, states can pick whatever end-goal graduation rate target they like and use whatever improvement trajectory they choose. 

That provides two different, exciting ways to render the provision completely meaningless. One is to pick an absurdly low goal. Welcome to the state of Nevada, where all manner of sins are legal and the statewide high school graduation rate goal is 50 percent. In other words, as long as your odds of graduating are better than what you get when you slap down $20 on red at the roulette wheel, you're doing fine. Alaska chose 55.58%, because apparently 56% even was just too heavy a cross to bear. And so on. 

Other states have been a little more clever. Instead of setting the bar at knee height, they adopt a putatively high bar but give schools centuries to get there. Maryland, for example, theoretically has a 90% graduation rate goal. But it will accept any improvement as sufficient progress, even 0.01%. At that rate, the state's African-American students will all be graduating by the year 3117, by which time we'll all be cursing in Mandarin Serenity-style and learning will take place via coaxial cables jammed into the back of your head. 

The point being, this isn't as simple as it seems. To be effective, accountability policies need to challenge schools to achieve more than they may believe they can achieve, but not challenge them so much that the entire process loses legitimacy. The policies also need to balance realism about the potential to improve the system as it stands with the moral urgency of helping students who are enrolled right now and can't wait to grow up while we fiddle with the only schools they have. 

One way way get around the seemingly insoluble 100% problem is to change the back-end responses and incentives as schools approach the final steep climb to the top and pass various points of diminishing returns: the closer you get to 100, the more the consequences of failure become a matter of foregone positive incentives rather than mandatory negative ones. In any case, it's a tricky set of issues for the next Congress and President to address. 

Weighted Student Funding

Over on Flypaper, Stafford is blogging about today’s School Finance Redesign Project panel (the report should be here, I gather, but it looks like the site is down). She laments what she sees as inevitable union resistance to the good idea of weighted student funding, which Fordham touts as a panacea for public schools.

I don’t think weighted student funding is a bad idea, necessarily. But it’s worth noting that we’re sitting in a cautionary tale. The District of Columbia Public Schools used a weighted student formula for several of its most dysfunctional years before it was abandoned by Fordham favorite Michelle Rhee. There’s a good summary of the system from 2006 here. Among the pitfalls:

An unintended consequence of the WSF implementation is that certain key staffing decisions have become uneven and inconsistent across schools, such that DCPS cannot tell parents with absolute certainty what each school is providing for their students. Full autonomy regarding how dollars are spent has led to 150 different decisions to determine an adequate ratio for counselors, appropriate levels of support in literacy and numeracy, and how (or even if) content areas such as art, music, and PE are delivered to students.

The report concludes that the weighted student formula did not to do enough to “ensure that critical educational resources — not simply dollars — are distributed consistently and equitably.”

Seven Percent

When the media report the number of schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), they generally report things like, "xxx number of schools failed this year under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law." This does a real disservice on lots of fronts. One, it belies the fact that states set their own standards. Two, it scares people, because the numbers are often in the hundreds. What they don't report is the actual percent of schools facing consequences, and, perhaps more importantly, what those consequences are.

A new Center on Education Policy report found that seven percent of all Title I schools in the country are now in "restructuring," meaning they were unable to make AYP for five consecutive years. Think about that number for a moment. Seven percent. We hear all the time how awful NCLB is and how it identifies too many schools as failing, but seven percent of persistent underperformers really isn't very high at all.

The same report recorded two other important findings. First, about twenty percent of schools going through restructuring are able to make AYP the following year. This is a good sign of progress. Second, nine in ten schools in restructuring choose options like extra professional development focused on school improvement, on-site technical assistance with more intense support and monitoring, and on-site leadership coaches or facilitators. These aren't exactly the drastic measures we hear about from the media.

Special Ed Vouchers

Governor Palin's speech on special education last here has drawn a fair amount of commentary; Sara Mead provides a comprehensive analysis here. As Mead notes, one of the main proposals was to create a voucher program for students with disabilities modeled on the McKay Scholarship program in Florida. Sara wrote a comprehensive analysis of that program while she was here at Education Sector, you can read the report here. 

Iowa Student Loans

Last week the Project on Student Debt released "Student Debt and the Class of 2007." My home state, Iowa, moved up one to claim the top spot. It was no small coincidence that over the weekend Iowa's Attorney General released his own report documenting the Iowa Student Loan Corporation's misleading advertising and improper practices.

This weekend's report outlined the dubious practices of Iowa Student Loan, including that it:

• paid employees bonuses based on loan volume
• paid colleges based on the number of borrowers
• falsely marketed private loans as the lowest-cost options
• steered students into private loans at the expense of cheaper federal loans with better repayment terms
• compared itself in market share and price offerings to for-profit lenders

Iowa Student Loan published numerous misleading advertisements aimed at increasing loan consolidation. For example, they published a table showing a hypothetical student with $60,000 in loans could cut their monthly payment in half, from $700 to $337. They did not mention the term of the loan would extend to 30 years and increase the student's total interest payments from $24,188 to $74,752.

This is a real problem in a state where students at each of the state's three public four-year postsecondary institutions all face debt loads above the national average. At the University of Iowa (my alma mater), 61% of students graduate with an average debt load of $22,181. The University of Northern Iowa averages about the same debt load but has a higher percentage of students borrowing. At Iowa State University, the state's land-grant college, graduates average $31,501 in debt. Both Iowa and Iowa State have higher graduate debt burdens that any of their peers.

There's no particular reason why Iowa should have this problem. Its economy has not been hit particularly hard. Its universities are not particularly expensive (the sticker price, that is). And its taxpayers are not particularly frugal. Instead, middling government support for higher education and a student loan corporation more worried about its loan volume and competing with the for-profit sector have slowly made Iowa what it is today: the least affordable higher education state in the country.

Standards

The DC Board of Elections publishes a voter guide that includes brief statements from each of the candidates. Here's one from a Ward Eight candidate for the State Board of Education. Ward Eight is the poorest area in the city. 

The statement of a candidate that declares my information deemed necessary to protect the qualified experiences of/and the integrity for the School Board's Participation are the 10 years of experience Teaching in the Public Schools and the priorities which process the stature of qualified participation to support the focus of the school's mission and accomplishments that defend the appropriate education-with rights to an adequate education.

Another begins like this:

Hello, I am...an inspiring, intelligent, phenomenal Washington with great ambitions, infinite achievements and life long experiences. I was a student in the DC Public School system.

Let me be the first to note that this post is immediately preceeded by one in which I condemn the practice of mocking DCPS employees whose jobs are much harder and more important than mine. But there's nothing funny about this, not for DC teachers, graduates, or students currently enrolled. It's deadly serious -- we need to do better. 

Helping

A couple of weeks ago, Eduwonkette wrote a long snarky post about job openings in the NYC and DC school chancellor's offices, challenging her readers to propose absurd titles like "Senior Finder of Efficiencies," "Senior Blackberry Correspondent" etc. It included the following:

Do all superintendents of big districts get drivers? I had no idea. But just think about the splashy, tell-all book you could write! I'm out of the running as I have no license, but you can find the job posting here. Or if you're in the market for something different, you might apply for the "Critical Response Team."

As it happens, I spent some time at the DCPS offices earlier this year, following members of the Critical Response Team around to see how they work. You can read the story I wrote about it here. In short, their job--their only job--is to help people, all day long, from the crack of dawn until late at night. Most of the people they help are teachers and parents.  They also work with administrators, vendors, members of the general public--anyone who picks up the phone or writes an email, they listen to and try to assist. As a result, they deal with literally every thorny, intractable, heartbreaking problem a struggling urban school district can encounter. They work much harder than any Ivy League graduate student, think thank analyst, or blogger I could name. They deserve appreciation, not cheap mockery at the hands of people who should, but don't, know better. 

A Fox Guarding The Hen House

Paul Basken's article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education does a great job of laying out the conflicts of interest and perverse incentives in the student loan industry that can lead to unsavory business practices.

As the article describes, a former Sallie Mae employee has filed a lawsuit alleging that the company engaged in fraudulent debt collection practices resulting in ballooning debt for some students. At the heart of the issue is the increasingly interwoven relationships between guarantee agencies and loan companies. Guarantee agencies are supposed to be independent entities that oversee the collection activities of loan companies like Sallie Mae in order to protect both students and the federal government from fraud. But, at least in Sallie Mae's case, this relationship has gotten a little too close for comfort:

Most guarantee agencies are independent of the lenders they oversee. Sallie Mae, however, has a contractual arrangement with USA Funds, the nation’s largest guarantee agency, that gives Sallie Mae extensive financial and operational control over the guarantor that oversees its work. USA Funds, with only about 75 employees of its own, pays Sallie Mae about $250-million a year to provide hundreds of workers to perform most of its guarantor operations. That effectively has left Sallie Mae since 2000 in the role of overseeing its own lending activities.

Whether the lawsuit is legitimate or not, it's clear that the safeguards and oversight in the federal loan system designed to protect students and taxpayers have broken down, putting everyone at risk. And this guarantee agency-loan company entanglement is only the beginning - to understand the extent of the troubles, read the whole article here.

Governor Palin and Higher Education

Over the last seven weeks, numerous people have tried to find meaning in Governor Palin's college career. Being mindful of the likely 13-day expiration date on this particular conversation, let me summarize and offer a few thoughts. We know that over five years Palin came in contact with five different colleges, enrolled in four, and transferred four different times before earning a bachelor's degree in 1987. The order goes like this: 

1) University of Hawaii - Hilo (never enrolled)

2) Hawaii Pacific University

3) North Idaho College

4) University of Idaho

5) Matanuska-Susitna Community College, Alaska

6) University of Idaho (2nd time)

Some have suggested that there's a relationship between the relatively non-selective, non-elite nature of these institutions and Palin's much-noted struggles in television interviews. That's nonsense; lots of articulate people graduate from public universities. Sarah Vowell graduated from Montana State, and let's face it: Idaho, Montana, tomato, tomahto. 

The Los Angeles Times made a big deal about the fact that nobody at those colleges seems to remember much about Sarah Heath circa 1982-87, as if that's somehow strange or even vaguely sinister. As Sherman Dorn rightly notes, it's actually completely typical. Public universities tend to be large and impersonal and often do a poor job of engaging their students. "I don't remember her," said Roy Atwood, Palin's academic advisor at the university. I guarantee you my academic advisor doesn't remember me, because we never once met. He (she?) was just a name and a phone number that I could call if I wanted advice, and I never did. Colleges that have succeeded in boosting student retention rates talk a lot about "intrusive" advising, reaching out to students proactively, but that clearly wasn't happen back at the U of I in the mid-80s. 

The LA Times also notes:

Palin's parents -- a high school science teacher and school secretary -- could not afford the college tours so common today. Their four children were expected to, and did, work their way through college."We didn't have the luxury of spending a week driving around visiting universities to see what they're like," said Kim "Tilly" Ketchum, a high school friend. "We were looking at pictures of campuses."

Palin and Ketchum picked the University of Hawaii at Hilo from a brochure. Only after arriving in Hawaii did they realize that Hilo had rainfall approaching 100 inches a year. "The rain," Ketchum said, "was disturbing.

This is right, except for the part about "so common today." Remember those weekends when you and your parents spent all that time driving around visiting colleges, getting on each other's nerves? Most people don't, because most students don't apply to lots of colleges, and that's as true now as it was then. In this sense, Palin is just guilty of being an average American college student. (And it does rain a lot in Hilo; I've been there. The Big Island of Hawaii is the most climactically diverse place on the face of the Earth. In a few hours you can drive from the beach through a desert that gets less than 10 inches of rain per year, over a 14,000 foot lava-spewing volcano, through a rain forest, to an area that gets over 125 inches of rain per year--Hilo.) 

Governor Palin worked in food service jobs over summers to help pay college expenses, and again that's very typical; most college students work. Most don't make money from beauty pageants, but heck, that sure sounds a lot better than the night shift at Kinko's. 

Palin's transfer activity was definitely above the norm, but as Sara Goldrick-Rab notes, it's hardly unheard of, and that includes transferring down from a four-year institution to a two-year community college, which happens more than you might think. What's a little more unusual is then getting back to a four-year institution and managing to complete the whole process within five years. Only 41 percent of all students who start college at a four-year institution earn a bachelor's degree within five years, whether they transfer or not. 

This suggests an above-average level of discipline and determination on the governor's part, which certainly isn't inconsistent with her subsequent career. As to what she learned there--who knows? Nobody really understands how much students at any college learn, since as a rule colleges don't try to measure that sort of thing, and if they do they don't make the results available to the public. In any event, it all happened over 20 years ago, and like most other professional people her age, most of what Governor Palin has--or hasn't--learned in life came outside the walls of an educational institution.  

In other words, Governor Palin's college career doesn't really tell us much about her, other than reinforcing her goal-oriented-ness and supporting her claims of being in touch with the average American experience. 

Double-Take

Kevin yesterday posted a nice piece on Colorado's innovative new strategy of rating schools both by the percentages of students who meet the state's achievement standards in math and reading (required by NCLB) and by individual student achievement gains over the course of a school year (a "value-added" approach).

Combining the two school-rating strategies is the only way to accurately reflect schools' contributions to student learning while preserving the law's commendable commitment to getting low performers up to proficiency and giving schools meaningful incentives to improve the achievement of all students.

Doug Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I discuss the two-track accountability concept in a commentary we did for Education Week a couple of weeks ago.

Dreary News on Student Debt

The Project on Student Debt just released its third annual report on student debt trends, this one looking at the Class of 2007. Not surprisingly, student debt loads continue to rise—the report found that debt levels rose 6 percent from 2006 to 2007 to an average debt load of $21,900. This report, though, includes a data point that should worry students more than just the cost of college or their total student loan bill: while debt levels rose 6 percent for recent graduates, salaries only rose by 3 percent.

It hasn’t always been this way—in the past, salaries helped to mitigate the impact of increases in student debt. According to this report by NCES, while debt levels rose substantially between 1993 and 2000, the monthly payments students were making didn’t take up a significantly higher percent of their salaries, mostly because salary increases were able to keep pace with debt levels. But that’s old data, and it’s likely that students’ debt burdens have increased recently and will only get worse as the economy slows down.

According to FinAid.org’s loan repayment calculator you need a minimum salary of $30,243.60 to afford to repay the average $21,900 loan of a student graduating in 2007. Considering that the average starting salary of a liberal arts graduate in 2007 was $30,502, a lot of graduates will need to consider alternative repayment options to afford their monthly payments. Fortunately federal loans provide those options—income based repayment schedules, extended repayment terms, and graduated repayment. Unfortunately, private student loans don’t, and as students continue to rely on private loan debt, a larger share of their monthly income will be going to pay for their college education.

And alternative repayment plans aren't intended for the average student. According to this NCES report, only 11 percent of 1993 graduates repaid their loans with an alternative repayment plan. The remaining students were on the typical, 10-year schedule. Longer repayment schedules are a great option for students entering low-paying careers, but they also have their downsides—for one, students are repaying loans for up to 30 years of their working lives, they end up paying more in interest, and longer repayment schedules have the potential to make the federal loan program more expensive by extending the amount of time the federal government is subsidizing student interest rates.

As the credit crunch worries higher education administrators, parents, and students about access to loans to attend college, the larger economic woes we’re facing should worry the country about students’ abilities to meeting their growing debt obligations. College graduates are supposed to be one of the biggest economic engines in this country—excessive student loan debt hinders graduates’ abilities to fulfill that role.

A Thousand Words

The graph above shows a group of schools in Denver, Colorado, courtesy of the State Department of Education. The numbers have some interesting implications for how to think about poverty, achievement, growth, and accountability in K-12 education.

Each of the circles represents an individual school. The size of the circle is a function of enrollment--the bigger the circle, the more students enrolled. The color is tied to poverty, with blue schools having less than 20 percent of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, red schools more than 80 percent, and green, yellow and orange in between.  

The Y-axis represents a snapshot of achievement, based on the percent of students who scored as proficient or advanced on the state test. Schools closer to the top scored the highest. The X-axis represents yearly growth in achievement for the students in the school, in percentile terms, compared to other students who started the year in the same place academically. Schools farther to the right on the X-axis saw more achievement growth than most of their peers. 

What does the graph suggest? Several things. First, a clear relationship between poverty and overall achievement. All of the lowest-poverty schools (which presumably have a disproportionate number of high-income students, although this isn't always the case) have above-average achievement, and most have above the median growth. The high-poverty schools, by contrast, are closer to the bottom.  This shouldn't surprise anyone; most such education graphs look like this in some way, which leads many people to see poverty as determinative. 

But look closer. What this really suggests is the income is indeed pretty determinative--but only at the top of the income distribution. In other words, if you put a bunch of well-off students together in a school with few or no poor students, it's extremely likely that they'll do well. They have a lot of advantages outside of school, and their schools tend to be better-funded and staffed. One would be hard-pressed to find the inverse of the classic "beating the odds" school--someplace where, despite high income and low poverty, achievement is terrible. They just don't exist. 

Among high poverty schools, by contrast, there's a lot more variation. In terms of absolute performance, some are at the bottom, many are in the middle, and a few are closer to the top. And in terms of variation in growth, they're all over the map, from below the 20th percentile to above the 90th. 

In other words, it'd be tough to blunt or reverse the impact of socioeconomic status on educational achievement at the top of the income spectrum. But that's okay--why would you want to? On the other hand, there's a lot of potential to help high-poverty schools, particularly if we look at overall achievement and growth simultaneously. 

Graphs like this also point to the need to react to achievement data in a more sophisticated way. Under NCLB, all of the schools near the bottom of the distribution get treated the same, regardless of growth. That doesn't make much sense. Instead what we need to do is take the schools on the bottom left, the low-achieving / low-growth schools, and accelerate the process by which they either improve or are shut down. There's no point in waiting six years to close a school where achievement is low and students are learning less during the year than most other students who also started the year with low achievement. 

At the same time, we should be pouring resources into the high-poverty, high-growth schools, so we can support success and build on it.  Labeling is important, too: NCLB doesn't actually label schools as "failing" despite what you read in the newspaper, but it ought to for low-status/low-growth institutions. On the other hand, high-growth schools should be complimented and described in very different ways. 

Missing the Big Picture

In comments below, a reader trots out a main pillar of the Sol Stern Ayers-does-too-matter argument: "Ayers serves a prestigious role in THE association for education professionals." By which Mr. / Mrs. Anyonymous means: Bill Ayers was recently elected "Vice President of Curriculum Studies" for the American Education Research Association. 

Let's be sure to clear this up in the short time we have left before everyone suddenly stops caring: AERA is THE association for education researchers. Thus, the "R." It's large and conducts an annual meeting every year in which lots of research is presented, some of it good, some not.  I've been several times and always learned something. But while they pick a different annual "theme" (2008: "Research on Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility," 2007: "The World of Educational Quality," etc.) the real big theme every year is actually "How Can We Get Policymakers and Pratictioners to Pay More Attention to Our Research?"

The truth of the matter is that the VP of Curriculum Studies at AERA has about as much influence over your average public school classrom as the VP of Whatever for the American Political Science Association has over your average Congressional committee hearing. I'm not saying that's good or bad (probably both, depending on the circumstances), but that's the way it is. 

Waiting for Sputnik

Over at Flypaper, Stafford Palmieri asks, "What will be the next Sputnik?" Readers who aren't full-time policy types may not realize just how often this question is asked in education circles. The story, as it's (endlessly re-)told, goes like this: American schools were soft and complacent in the 1950's until the nation was shocked into attention by the launch of the 1957 Soviet satellite, whereupon President Eisenhower pushed through a series of teacher training and curricular reforms designed to breed a new generation of scientists so the United States would never be caught so unawares again. Sputnik became synonymous with "Huge important event that suddenly causes the general public to care a whole lot more about K-12 education than they did."

The answer to Stafford's question, however, is pretty obvious: Nothing. Sputnik was a once-in-a-lifetime happening, as evidenced by the fact that we're still waiting for the next one, most of a lifetime later. It was, almost literally, a deux ex machina event.  The "whither Sputnik" question tends to come at the end of a long process whereby a person or group of people chooses to tackle a particular education problem, spends a lot of time and effort arriving at a series of preferred solutions, tries mightily to enact that agenda, and fails. Having failed, they appeal to the heavens for help, which never comes.

Waiting for Sputnik is a waste of time. If the public won't embrace certain ideas, then the ideas need to be improved, or the communications effort augmented, or the political environment changed. These things are difficult and frustrating and take time--but not as much time as waiting for deliverance from God and/or a machine. 

Supply and Demand in D.C.

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."

Paying for College

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.

The Old New Thing

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.

Accuracy

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. 

Baylor's Spending Spree

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.

Ayers Ad Infinitum

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.

Baylor, the SATs, and "Merit Aid"

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. 

An Education Mandate?

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. 

Diane Ravitch Gets Her Snark On

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.

Picasso and Cézanne

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.

The Crisis in Urban Higher Education

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.

Charles Murray: Bachelor's Degrees are Evil

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. 

Principles

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. 

Trading Professors

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.

Uniqueness

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. I get 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.

School Buses

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 an ideal world my dreams, at least.

Real Money

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. 

Ayers et al

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.