g(t)?

Writing in the Boston Globe (per Matt Yglesias), Harvard economist Edward Glaeser cites Tom Kane's research on teacher quality, saying:

The first step toward improving teacher quality is to attract more talented teachers. The second step is to improve teacher selection on the job, promoting the best and encouraging the worst to help society in some other way.

The key words are "attract" and "selection." But just as important are the missing words: "certify" and "train."

The conventional system for bringing teachers to classrooms relies on pre-service training and certification to ensure quality. Students are required to complete a state-approved training program, usually offered at a university, and then obtain state certification, which increasingly involves passing some kind of exam.

Tom Kane's research shows that the training and certification model is near-worthless as a means of effectively guaranteeing or differentiating teacher effectiveness. The paper he wrote with Robert Gordon and Douglas Staiger for the Hamilton Project in 2006 is well worth reading in full, but you can get the gist just by looking at Figure 1, on page 8.

We have three bell curves, one made of a solid line, one a dashed line, and one a dotted line. Each of the lines shows the distribution of a group of elementary teachers in Los Angeles based on classroom effectiveness, as measured by their students' math test score gains, after controlling for baseline scores, student demographics, and program participation. The solid line shows the population of traditionally certified teachers, the dashed line alternatively certified teachers, and the dotted line uncertified teachers.

The graph shows two crucial things. First, the bell curves are wide--there is a lot of variation in effectiveness among teachers within each population. Students with the most effective teachers gain ten percentile points or more in one year; students with the least effective teachers lose ten percentile points. To put that in perspective, the cumulative black - white achievement gap nationwide is about 35 percentile points.

Second, the curves are, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same. There's a tiny bit of daylight between the certified teacher curve and the other two. But it's dwarfed by vast differences in effectiveness within the populations. The long, tedious argument within the education community about the virtues of training and certification amounts to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. As near as anyone can tell, there is no way to figure out ahead of time who is going to be an effective teacher and who is not via traditional training and filtering processes. The best way--arguably, the only way--to figure who is an effective teacher turns out to be letting people teach and seeing if they're effective.

The logic of this quickly leads to a very different approach toward teacher quality--not train and certify, but, as Glaeser writes, attract and select. Do whatever you can to attract smart, motivated, talented people into the profession, and then impose a ruthless screening process based on results in the first few years. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to make those first years as supportive as possible. Yet, seen through the lens of those overlapping bell curves, recent disappointing results from a study of induction models aren't surprising. Some students will suffer in the classrooms of the least effective teachers (academically at-risk students should be protected), but that's just as true of the current system.

The interesting thing is that the Kane / Staiger / Gordon paper came out two-and-a-half years ago. I'm not aware of any serious challenges to the data, methods, or conclusions. As far as education policy papers go, it received a lot of attention, getting written up in the Wall Street Journal here and being name-checked by Nicholas Kristoff here and Bob Herbert here. And of course it garnered hyperbolic praise on this blog, way back when.

Yet the education world keeps right on going with the traditional system. There's a lesson here in human psychology: when evidence is revealed that pushes people completely outside of their established frame of reference, a little mental "na-na-na-na-na-" device turns on and they simply proceed as if it doesn't exist. I suspect the dissonance is particularly jarring for education professionals, since the implication is that, paradoxically, there are severe limits on the extent to which good teaching can be taught.

The findings--which are supported by a host of other teacher effectiveness studies--also raise an intriguing question: If variation in teacher effectiveness isn't attributable to anything we can currently observe, then what's driving it? Is there some kind of innate teaching ability, a sort of g(t)? That combined with more generalized qualities like motivation, intelligence, and the experience of having been well-taught?

I don't pretend to know the answer, but I know that the empirical justification for continuing the current way of doing business in teacher policy is quickly eroding, and that researchers would serve education better by focusing more of their attentions on exploring the source of large differences rather than small ones.

Voice Your Thoughts

Don't forget to read Education Sector Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva's latest report, "Measuring Skills for the 21st Century." A teaser:

When ninth-graders at St. Andrew's School, a private boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, sat down last year to take the school’s College Work and Readiness Assessment (CWRA), they faced the sort of problems that often stump city officials and administrators, but rarely show up on standardized tests, such as how to manage traffic congestion caused by population growth. "I proposed a new transportation system for the city," said one student describing his answer. "It's expensive, but it will cut pollution."

Students were given research reports, budgets, and other documents to help draft their answers, and they were expected to demonstrate proficiency in subjects like reading and math as well as mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to apply information to real-world problems.

Not many public school students take assessments like the CWRA. Instead, most students take tests that are primarily multiple-choice measures of lower-level skills in reading and math, such as the ability to recall or restate facts from reading passages and to handle arithmetic-based questions in math. These types of tests are useful for meeting the proficiency goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and state accountability systems. But leaders in business, government, and higher education are increasingly emphatic in saying that such tests don’t do enough. The intellectual demands of 21st century work, today's leaders say, require assessments that measure more advanced skills, 21st century skills. Today, they say, college students, workers, and citizens must be able to solve multifaceted problems by thinking creatively and generating original ideas from multiple sources of information—and tests must measure students' capacity to do such work....

New assessments like the CWRA, however, illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student's mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students' need to succeed today.

Please join us for a week-long discussion between Silva, Eva Baker, a professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation.

The Performance of Performance Pay

With Barack Obama winning an historic race for the presidency this week (and the nation exhaling in wonder and relief at his victory), Jim Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at Vanderbilt's Peabody College offer a timely reality check in Education Week on performance pay for teachers, a reform that has cycled back onto the education agenda after two decades of dormancy and that the President-elect has endorsed.

Guthrie and Schuermann write that some 10 percent of the nation's school systems employing at least 20 percent of the nation's teachers are now paying teachers on the basis of their performance "in some form or fashion." But in a helpful taxonomy of "what we do no yet know" about performance pay, they point out that there's no compelling research evidence on "the power of financial awards in promoting more-effective teaching and elevating student performance" and that there's no evidence on "the long-term effect of performance awards on the supply of effective teachers." In other words, the rationale for teacher performance pay hasn't been proven. Nor, they point out, is there clear evidence suggesting the "effects of group awards relative to individual performance" or the "preferable mix of financial and nonpecuniary awards"--important second-order questions.

There is, of course, a strong logic to rewarding good teaching and good teachers and Gutherie and Schuermann are sympathetic to the potential of performance pay to strengthen the public school teaching profession. On its face, public education's wide use of a "single salary schedule" to pay teachers strictly on the basis of experience and credentials is more than a little irrational. Guthrie and Schuermann advocate carefully constructed experiments to help answer key questions about performance pay's effectiveness, and they are right to do so. But their study of the performance-pay research makes clear that policymakers' rush to introduce performance pay for teachers isn't necessarily going to make the teaching profession any stronger, and that the Obama administration would be wise to help answer the big questions about performance pay, rather than assume the answers already exist.

FERPA and the student "team"

More and more, information about student learning is going digital. Many systems provide online, real-time access to students and parents about student performance. Having access to student information makes it easier for parents to identify problem areas and help hold students accountable. But we know that parents are not the only non-school actors contributing to a child’s learning. Tutors, coaches, care-providers and mentors are all involved in keeping a student on the path to success. Access to information about the student’s school-based learning could significantly enhance their ability to intervene effectively. FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) prevents schools and teachers from sharing personally identifiable information about student learning with anyone outside of the institution except parents. But parents can consent to release records as long as they:

1. Specify the records that may be disclosed;
2. State the purpose of the disclosure;
3. Identify the party or class of parties to whom the disclosure may be made.

The Supplemental Education Services program addresses the issue of providing personally identifiable student information to SES providers (tutors) by requiring that parents provide written consent for the LEA to release existing student information that pertains to specific achievement goals set for the student. However while SES providers are required to provide progress reports to parents and schools, schools are not required to provide any updates to SES providers after the initial agreement. While I wonder how a tutor can be an effective supplement to the classroom with no idea what’s going on there, the practice does avoid the cumbersome problem of requiring teachers to get written parental consent any time they release student information (a quiz grade, for example) to a tutor. There might be a better way.

FERPA’s regulations provide at least two potential methods to make it easier for parents to allow other members of their child’s learning “team” to be informed about student learning. It’s not clear that parents can only consent to release records that already exist. Parents could consent to release a class of records, for example quiz grades or attendance, to specified recipients going forward for a specific period of time (such as the length of a semester). This is not a widespread practice, but it’s not impossible under the law, and with support from the Department of Education it could become more prevalent.

Technology also provides an easier way to get parental consent to release existing information. FERPA regulations allow for written consent in electronic form so long as the school or educational agency uses a “reasonable method” to authenticate the parent’s identity. In the case of grades, for example, a “reasonable method” may be as simple as a PIN number or password. Within online grade-books and other software, electronic consent could make it relatively easy for parents to act as a gatekeeper for student information that comes from the classroom, quickly and easily passing it on to a tutor or mentor who can then provide better intervention and support for the student.

Testing in the 21st Century

I know a lot of people are tired of testing, and some are tired of hearing about 21st century skills. But both are here to stay and both matter tremendously for education reform. Improving assessment is the very first bullet in Obama’s list of how to reform NCLB, and he intends to do it by creating new models for assessment that measure “higher order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.”

Easier said than done? On Monday Education Sector is going to release a paper I wrote about measuring 21st century skills (yes, 2 for 1! testing plus 21st century skills). At the same time we’re opening up a week-long discussion on our website to delve further into this topic--what should we measure? what can we measure? We hope you’ll join in with some good comments and hard questions.

What is Obama's Mandate?

Echoing Eduwonk, there's no use guessing who will be tapped as the next Secretary of Education. It'll be relatively low on the list of nominations, so things like whether Obama has the right balance of Chicago people, governors, Republicans, and other political calculations make the whole speculation moot. Other decisions come first, and those will shape who becomes Ed Secretary. Taking a look at the exit polls shows this election was about two things--George W. Bush and the economy. They do not suggest Obama won (or McCain lost) based on specifics of their education, health care, tax, or energy policies. Obama won pretty much across the board:

- he won both the rich and poor (and most of the middle)
- he won all levels of education
- he won whether voters had investments in the stock market or not
- he won voters who said race was an issue and those who said it was not
- he won both supporters and opponents of the bailout bill

On issues, the economy was by far the most important; it was more important than the threat of a terrorist attack or appointments to the Supreme Court. Sixty-three percent of voters identified the economy as the most important issue, followed by Iraq (10%), health care and terrorism (9% each), and energy policy (7%). Those numbers aren't even close, and Obama won all of them except terrorism. (Update: in 2004, the highest priority issue, moral values, tallied only 22% of the electorate. This year's 63% picking the economy as the number one issue was two points higher than 1992, about which James Carville said, "it's the economy, stupid.") So President-elect Obama's mandate is pretty clear: fix the economy. That isn't a simple matter by any means, but he'll be given wide latitude to fix it as he pleases, at least for a few months. We'd be silly to think that education is the primary issue on that front, especially K-12.

The best hope for the edusphere should be that he makes the college affordability argument as often as he did during the election. He could start with this or this.

Second First

The Education Trust's latest report on high school graduation rates begins by saying, "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." That line became the lede in media reports in USA Today, CNN, the AP, Education Week ($), etc. Because of the AP's story, it got repeated in hundreds of local newspapers all across the country. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true.

Last week Kevin showed the actual data to be less than convincing. What's also important is the sentiment behind the claim, the sense that our education system is in crisis and getting worse for each generation. If you want to change education in America, and if you want to rally a consensus behind your cause, it's a useful claim. No one likes to regress, and Americans like being #1.

The problem is there's only one "first generation to be less educated than their parents." So, if last generation was the first to be less educated than their parents, this one can't be as well. I was reminded today of a passage in the 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report that could easily be written today. It states:

Some worry that schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems, and drawing conclusions. Still others are concerned that an over-emphasis on technical and occupational skills will leave little time for studying the arts and humanities that so enrich daily life, help maintain civility, and develop a sense of community. Knowledge of the humanities, they maintain, must be harnessed to science and technology if the latter are to remain creative and humane, just as the humanities need to be informed by science and technology if they are to remain relevant to the human condition. Another analyst, Paul Copperman, has drawn a sobering conclusion. Until now, he has noted: Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents [emphasis added].

This isn't to say our education system doesn't have problems, but it does suggest we need a little historical perspective. We're fighting the same rhetorical battles that were fought 25 years ago, and we need to be honest about it.

Vote

Some days there's nothing to talk about except the thing that everyone is talking about, and today definitely qualifies. I've voted in every DC election since 2001 and this morning my polling place was by far the most crowded I've seen, despite the fact that the presidential election is a foregone conclusion and the only local race of note is for at-large city councilperson. In education, we often cite voting and jury duty as reasons for the public education system's being, the rare occasions when people from all walks of life are asked to come together on equal terms and render judgment on one another and the pressing issues of the day. Like Emily Parsons, I grew up in New York where voting was always done by machine, and, like her, I find the un-private DC system of optically scanned cards to be inadequate and mildly disconcerting. Former Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh was right to say that "voting is a civic sacrament" -- particularly, I suspect, for people like myself who don't regularly partake of traditional sacraments or other such rituals. There's something about the quiet moment inside a voting booth with the curtain just drawn behind you, standing in front of levers waiting to be chosen. It's serious; it reminds you of citzenship and country and the gift of democracy. And there's nothing quite like the satisfying "thunk" of pulling that master lever, hearing your small, vital act of will recorded within the machine, and feeling the light of the polling place pour in from behind you as the curtain opens and you turn to leave into what always feels like a better day. 

Update: Hendrik Hertzberg says more or less the same thing at the New Yorker--except, he being Hendrik Hertzberg and it being the the New Yorker, it's about ten times better written. 

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.