Tier Ducks

The latest international test results are in, and they bring mostly good news for US educators. Yesterday's release was the fourth edition of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) since the original 1995 administration. Rather than use TIMSS merely for hyperbole, it's worthwhile to look at them more holistically.

First, TIMSS should not be used merely for rankings. While it's technically accurate to say the US had the ninth highest score in 8th grade math, for example, just that number alone does not do justice to the truth. Five countries (Chinese Taipei, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan) scored significantly above us, five countries scored about where we did (Hungary, England, Russia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic), and 37 countries scored well below us (including places like Australia, Sweden, and Norway). Similar tiers exist across fourth and eighth grades for math and science.

The results are meant to show interesting across-time comparisons as well, and in that respect, we're doing quite well. Our scores have risen both in raw numbers and against the average. At the same time, we've also narrowed gaps in mathematics since 1995 for blacks and whites, whites and Hispanics, and low- and high-achievers:

• 4th grade white-black gap fell from 84 to 67
• 4th grade white-Hispanic gap fell from 48 to 46
• 8th grade white-black gap fell from 97 to 76
• 8th grade white-Hispanic gap fell from 73 to 58
  

Despite this progress, the biggest difference in the scores of US students is not between countries, but rather remains within our own. In fourth grade math, the effect size of US students attending high-income versus low-income schools is 1.4 times as large as the difference between US students and the highest performing country. In science, the effect size by income is three times what it is between the US and the leading nation. Income gaps continue to persist at levels higher than all others, and that should be the real story out of these results.

Edu-Jobs

If you're looking for a job in the education world, this might be a good place to start. It's the Public Charter Schools Job Board, and it lists openings nationwide for everything from teachers and principals to assessment specialists and chief financial officers.

Finland Cont'd.

As you'd expect, Finland's child care policies are more generous than ours; Matt Yglesias explains more here and here. Meanwhile, on the teaching front, all K-12 teachers are required to go through rigorous university-based training, in most cases through a master's degree. But only 10 - 12% of applicants to university teaching programs are accepted. In other words, the system seems to be roughly what you'd get if you locked Linda Darling-Hammond and Wendy Kopp in a room and didn't let them out until they'd struck a grand bargain about the nature of teacher selection and training. This raises some interesting path dependency-type questions about education; viz. the extent to which various generally admired aspects of the Finnish education system are contingent on the caliber of its teaching workforce and the resulting implications, or lack thereof, for American policy.

We're moving our way through the Finnish education system chronologically, starting with early childcare centers on Monday, lower secondary yesterday, upper secondary today, and higher education later in the week. The school we visited yesterday is in the part of town where many recent immigrants live and thus belies Finland's reputation for total racial / ethnic homogeneity. The biggest immigrant populations, we are told, come from Russia, Estonia, and Somalia. Oh, and Iraqi refugees of course, which is just wonderful to contemplate as an American.  

Meanwhile, I won 300 euros playing blackjack in the Helsinki Grand Casino last night. Gambling is awesome! Seriously, I don't know why people don't do it more often. 

Equality

Nordic countries are famous for their egalitarian attitudes and social policies, and so far the Finns have said nothing to contradict this. In the U.S., there's significant variance in funding between school districts. (Contrary to popular wisdom, this is not primarily a function of differences in local property wealth--state funding passed local funding as the single largest source of school revenue in the 1970s and roughly two-thirds of inter-district funding variance nationwide is a function of wealth differences between states, not differences within states. The richest states have roughly twice the taxable wealth per-student compared to the poorest, and this matches inter-state spending differences almost exactly.)  In Finland, we are told, funding is centralized and equitable; this morning the principal of a school we were visiting claimed that "It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, you go to the same school." This kind of equality is a function of a lot more than funding, of course, extending also to a national curricula and an unusually high-quality pool of well-educated teachers. 

This can create conflict with the natural desire of parents to provide more to their children, as with the case of a famous Formula One driver (last week we were told that Finns specialized in certain occupations, including race car drivers, ice hockey goalies, and international diplomats) who wanted to pay for an extra teacher specifically to benefit his son, who attended the school we visited. The principal said no, that wouldn't be possible, causing the driver to rant about this $%^&ing communist system, etc. 

Now he's supposedly planning to come to America and drive for NASCAR. So there may be some self-selection at work here as well. 

Convicted

Earlier this year I wrote a long magazine story about four African-American drug dealers from West Baltimore--essentially, the real-life guys from The Wire--who, after being arrested and indicted on a raft of federal murder, drugs, weapons, and conspiracy charges, suddenly began using a bizzare constitutional fundamentalist defense that has origins among white supremacist militia crazy people. When the story was published, they hadn't actually gone to trial yet; I just assumed they would be convicted since their defense amounts to legal gibberish. Yesterday that's exactly what happened; all four were convicted on most of the charges, three of them for first-degree murder. 

The Ryan Leaf Syndrome

What do leaders in other industries do when they aren't certain about which credentials matter for success? If the markets for football quarterbacks and financial advisers are any indication, as Malcolm Gladwell argues they should be, education leaders must be willing to interview and try out many candidates for teaching jobs.

Making professional sports predictions based on collegiate (and sometimes high school) success is notoriously difficult. Gladwell uses the especially difficult case of NFL quarterbacks to make his point: NFL teams, despite watching hours of live game films and testing players' speed, agility, strength, and intelligence, still are pretty bad at predicting which quarterbacks will eventually be successful in the pros. They make horrible decisions based on their faulty decision-making that have real consequences for their franchise.

Take the case of Ryan Leaf, a wildly successful college quarterback for the Washington State Cougars. The San Diego Chargers traded three draft picks, a reserve linebacker, and a Pro-Bowl running back to move up one space, from second to third, just to have the right to draft Leaf in 1998. The Indianapolis Colts were drafting #1, and there was serious debate about whether they should opt for Leaf or the other top quarterback in the draft, a guy by the name of Peyton Manning. The Colts took Manning, the Chargers Leaf, and one became a household name. But before we knew which one it would be, the Chargers believed they had a franchise quarterback. They lavished Leaf with a four-year, $31 million contract and an $11 million signing bonus. Before beginning his first season, Leaf said he was, "looking forward to a 15 year career, a couple of trips to the Super Bowl, and a parade through downtown San Diego."

Leaf started the 1999 season well, becoming only the third rookie quarterback in history to lead his team to a 2-0 (preseason) start. But by his third game, Leaf managed to complete just one of his 15 passes. It went for only four yards, and he fumbled three times. He was benched after nine games in which he threw 13 interceptions compared to only two touchdowns. After bouncing around the league, Leaf was forced to retire in disgrace at the age of 26.

This is what happens when an organization bases their personnel decisions completely on what happened in the past. Leaf had all the tools--he threw the ball with speed and precision, had succeeded in major college sports, and had the body to withstand the demands of the National Football League--but he couldn't cut it, and his team suffered the consequences.

Contract that experience with how financial advisers are recruited. As anyone who's seen The Pursuit of Happyness or read Gladwell's piece understands, financial advisers have few input requirements. Instead, they're chosen through a highly competitive process. A wide open field of candidates--the guy highlighted in Gladwell's article regularly interviews at least 20 candidates per job opening--are whittled down based on work habits, not necessarily on their education credentials. Then, after an intensive review period, they are given an apprentice role. After another three or four years, the firm is finally in possession of what it considers high-quality financial advisers. This is a lengthy and expensive process, and it requires extensive human capital development and a comprehensive system for sorting high- and low-achievers.

If we apply these lessons to human capital development in education, we start to understand that the traditional teacher professionalization model is backward. We shouldn't even try to sort out the difference between the Ryan Leafs and the Peyton Mannings of the teaching world. Instead, we should break down barriers to entry, encourage high-quality applicants from diverse backgrounds, and use some initial criteria to sort applicants based on work ethic and intelligence, but then focus most of of our attention on what happens on the job. Until school districts have the data and political courage to do so, they'll be like NFL teams choosing between Tim Tebow, Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy, Graham Harrell, or Chase Daniel. They're all fine, but which one will be great and which one will be Ryan Leaf?

Reason to Worry

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Paul Basken reports today that student loan providers are worrying about the economic health of colleges. Private colleges that don't have a large endowment and are heavily dependent on tuition for revenue could face problems balancing their budgets in light of the recent tightening in the private student loan market. Students are having a harder time taking out the private student loans needed to pay tuition, meaning that they are likely to move to a lower cost public college, a 2-year institution, or just stop attending altogether. And if small private colleges can't meet their enrollment goals, they may be facing a serious financial problem.

But this situation isn't just the result of another credit crunch in need of a bailout. In fact, private loan debt was too easy to get for a while, meaning that many students who could not afford large, high-priced student loans were getting them anyway. In that sense, the recent restriction of private lending is a correction to the market (much like the reduction in subprime home loans). And, during the time of easy credit, many colleges engaged in some convoluted tuition pricing - raising the sticker price while providing lots of merit aid to recruit high scoring students.

Basken quotes Daniel Meyers, president of First Marblehead, a leading private loan company, as saying that "colleges are experiencing 'this very strange effect' where more than 1,000 institutions are 'all trying to charge $45,000 or $46,000 a year, most very unsuccessfully...and consumers have woken up to be much more discerning people'." More discerning consumers are not a bad thing - before the credit crunch, many students were able to take on a lot of debt for a degree that wasn't worth the price tag.

When we return to more normal credit markets, hopefully both lenders and students will have become more discerning consumers, with lenders doing a better job of assessing student risk factors and the value of degrees, and with students thinking critically about whether a particular college is really worth a $45,000 price tag.

Helsinki...

...is very dark this time of year. I knew this was true in theory, but having never ventured this far north in the winter before, I wasn't quite prepared for arriving at 3:30 PM, i.e. dusk, walking around the city at 4:30 PM, which might as well be 4:30 AM in terms of darkness, having dinner, going to bed, sleeping for eight hours, waking up, having breakfast, getting into a van, arriving at a day care facility for our scheduled tour, and it's still dark. It's a Fiddler on the Roof light pattern, basically--sunrise, sunset, all in the space of about six hours. That said, the people are friendly and as is always the case when you travel abroad, one's sense of possibility as to how things in America might be different is expanded, in terms of everything from public policy and cultural attitudes to food and bathroom fixtures.   

Finland Bound

I'm leaving tomorrow for a week-long junket fact-finding mission to Finland along with some other think tank people and journalists who will be learning why the Finns are beating the world on PISA and other measures of education success. We'll be in Helsinki, so if you have any suggestions about places to go and people to see--education-related or otherwise--send me an email, kcarey at educationsector.org. And if you actually live in Helsinki, we're staying in the Sokos Hotel Vaakuna Helsinki--drinks are on me. 

One of the nice things about vacationing in visiting Finland in an official capacity is that you get invited to the Finnish embassy here in DC for a pre-trip orientation / dinner / sauna bath. The embassy is just as you'd expect, all blond wood, glass, steel, and elegant Nordic design. The dinner included meatballs and I know just enough about Finnish history not to ask if they were Swedish. Afterwards, we retired to the embassy's extensive subterranean sauna facility--the only "diplomatic sauna" in Washington, FYI--where our host, a cheerful broadcast journalist, regaled us with stories of his youth spent in a special army ranger outfit based near the Arctic Circle whose mission was to travel via cross-country skis to positions on the Eastern border and repel attacking Soviet helicopters with shoulder-fired missiles. Why this hasn't replaced the comparatively-much-less-exciting biathlon as an official Winter Olympics sport is a mystery. 

Earlier in the evening, he suggested that I should ask Finnish education officials why, if the Finns rank so high on PISA, the University of Helsinki is only the 68th best university in the world. But while I hope to learn about many things next week--early childhood education, recruiting high-quality teachers, and the Bologna process, among others--that one I already know. 

In primary and secondary education, success is defined in terms of how much students learn. We can--and do-contest the hows and whys of it, but no one really debates the principle. In higher education, by contrast, success is defined in ways that have little or nothing to do with student learning. The world rankings he cited--which place 17 American universities among the top 20--are based entirely on research measures like publications, citations and prizes. A university could literally not enroll undergraduates and it wouldn't affect their position a bit. 

OECD is now in the process of piloting a higher education version of PISA. Countries that lack world-renowned research institutions may find their standing improved when the focus shifts to student learning. But Americans won't know if our unchallenged reputation for having the world's best higher education system is deserved, because we have--sadly--chosen not to participate. I guess when one measure says you're the best, there's no reason to support any others. 

Are Value-Added Effectiveness Measures Good Enough to Use for Compensation Decisions?

There’s a great deal of attention being given to using test scores to measure teacher performance these days, recent announcements from the Gates foundation ensure this will be high on the national agenda in coming years. But recent studies show that the value-added measures contain significant amount of error. Which raises questions: how can imperfect measures be incorporated into high-stakes decisions like teacher pay? How good is good enough?

Reformers have been waiting for longitudinal data systems to be implemented to provide value-added data to support improvements to compensation and retention decisions. The data is now there in several states, but the quality of the new information may not be as good as many of us had hoped. Just before Thanksgiving, two new studies were released that show the lack of stability of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness over time. The first by Dan Goldhaber looks at North Carolina data to see if pre-tenure teacher effectiveness (measured by the value-added gain of a teacher’s students) is a good predictor of their effectiveness post-tenure (here). The study showed that a teacher ranked in the bottom quintile of teacher effectiveness has a 32 percent chance of being in the bottom quintile post-tenure. While this is better than random (random would be around 20 percent), it is not much better than random. At the same time, 11 percent of the poor performers pre-tenure (bottom quintile) end up being in the top quintile post-tenure. The measure is a little more consistent at identifying top performers – 46 percent of top performers are top performers post-tenure (see Table 1 for all measures of pre and post value-added effectiveness). Goldhaber also looked at using the first 3-years of data to predict outcomes, and the predictive power does not change much.

Table_1a.pdf

A second paper by Tim Sass shows similar results from California and Florida studies. (here)
This paper focuses on whether value added measures of teacher quality are stable enough to use for compensation decisions. It shows similar results as the Goldhaber study over time. The lack of stability over time may not be surprising given the group of students a teacher gets each year is random. The data can not measure whether a teacher had a particularly disruptive class in the first year, and a better group of students the next. So, the randomness of classroom make-up may have a lot to do with these results. The Sass study shows that while measurable, student characteristics explain some of the differences in value-added effectiveness, but most of the differences across time are unexplained (See Table 2 for complete effectiveness measures).

figure_2.pdf

The part of the Sass study that caused me the greatest concern was how inconsistent these value-added measures are across tests. Students in Florida take two tests annually. They take a low stakes norm-referenced test and a high stakes standard-aligned test. Sass looks at how stable these value-added measures are across these two tests. So for this comparison, the random draw of students is the same for any given teacher. While these results look a little more stable (43% of bottom quintile teachers remain in the bottom quintile on the other exam), they are not as stable as you would hope. If just switching the exam moves 5 percent of teachers from the bottom of the distribution to the top, it would likely make teachers question the validity of the measure reflecting true effectiveness.

These papers and a few others suggest that value-added measures are not very consistent over time, and may not be the panacea for which some reformer have been hoping.

How Good is Good Enough? Now you would think that the bar for improving teacher compensation and tenure decisions would be pretty low. The current compensation structure is based almost exclusively on a teacher’s years of experience and college credits/advance degrees. Advance degrees have been consistently shown to have no impact of teacher effectiveness. For experience, teachers appear to improve their craft slightly over the first two to three years, but additional experience does not seem to have any impact. Clearly moving to value-added compensation could more accurately reward effective teachers than the current system. However, if a compensation system were based partially on these value added measure, I think that teachers would perceive the outcomes above as too arbitrary. It also makes me think that principals and mentor teachers could do a better job of predicting effectiveness than last year’s test results. (See Brian Jacobs on this question – principals seem to do pretty well on the identifying teachers at the top and bottom of the distribution, but their measurement is less predictive than prior year’s value-added (here). Of course this is not an either or choice. Can principals armed with value-added test results do an even better job than either one alone? What about a combination of principal evaluations, mentor teacher evaluations and value-added? Are there more rigorous evaluation methods like those of the Teacher Advancement Program or others better predictors than the value-added measures? (See Ed Sector Report on Teacher Evaluation here) As with all good research, it leads to more research. And with Gates interested in these topics, more research is likely to be on its way.

Two Steps Back

Two pieces of bad news today for those working to build a quality supply of public schools:

First, the 1st District Court of Appeals in Florida ruled that a 2006 law creating the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission conflicts with the Florida state constitution. According to the court, the Commission, which would be an independent, statewide office established to approve and support charter schools, was unconstitutional because the Florida constitution limits oversight of charter schools to local school districts.

Well, it looks like it's time to change the Florida constitution. A growing body of research shows that having, in addition to local school districts, one or more professional authorizers whose sole focus is approving and overseeing charter schools makes for a healthier and higher quality charter school sector. In fact, a 2006 ES report on Florida charter schools stated that the proposed Schools of Excellence Commission, "will likely reduce the number of appeals to the State Board and relieve unwilling sponsors of their chartering responsibilities while significantly improving the quality and transparency of authorizing across the state."

And the second piece of bad news is the bailout bill passed in the House Education Committee in Michigan which allowed Detroit to keep it's "first class school district" status (reducing the enrollment threshold from 100,000 students to 60,000 students) and thereby limiting the opening of new charter schools in the district. As we've reported, maintenance is required among Michigan's charter schools, but a blunt limit on opening new charter schools does nothing to improve the quality of charter schools or the quality of Detroit Public Schools.

Darling-Hammond Unbound

Score one for the KAPPAN magazine. The edu-magazine has a very timely piece on school accountability in its just-mailed December issue by top Obama policy advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. Anonymous "reformers," some of whom also have ties to the Obama administration-in-waiting, have been taking shots at the Stanford professor during the transition, in part because she has been tough on the quality of state testing under NCLB. They have declared her to be "anti-accountability."

The KAPPAN piece provides a valuable window on her thinking. She's indeed not a fan of NCLB-brand multiple-choice testing. "NCLB reinforced using test-based accountability to raise achievement, yet the US has fallen further behind on international assessments of student learing since the law was passed in 2001," she declares at the top of the article.

Darling-Hammond has spent a lot of time studying the teaching and testing systems of high achieving industrialized countries and likes them better than ours. Among other things, she says, they teach fewer topics in greater depth; focus more on reasoning skills and applications of knowledge rather than on coverage of content; and rely heavily on open-ended questions "that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and write extensively," in contrast to US tests that "rely primarily on multiple-choice items that evalute recall and recognition of discreet facts." She's right about that.

Darling-Hammond points approvingly to a "growing emphasis" in high-performing countries on "project-based, inquiry-oriented learning" that has led "to an increasing prominence for school-based tasks, which include research projects, science investigations, development of products and reports or presentations about these efforts"--so-called performance tests. The bulk of the article (written with co-author Laura McClosky) describes approvingly locally administered peformance assessment in countries ranging from Finland to Australia, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the UK.

There's little doubt that LDH would push to introduce these kinds of assessments into US public education if she were to have a senior role in the Obama administration: We need, she writes, "a new vision of assessment" in American education. To the extent that testing drives teaching, that would be a good thing.

The question is whether she would push to incorporate performance tests into NCLB-style statewide testing systems, or try to move testing down to the local level.

In writing that "the policy community has little understanding about how systems of assessment for learning might be constructed and managed at scale," she is acknowledging the challenges of using performance testing under the NCLB system, cost and scoring reliability chief among them. One thing she might do if she goes to work for Obama would be to have the federal government sponsor an effort to address the difficulties of doing performance testing at scale, and give states financial incentives for using such tests. Given the growing consensus that well-crafted performance assessments would represent a big step towards teaching students the higher-order thinking skills that they need today (Darling-Hammond points out that US students score lower on problem-solving that their international counterparts), this would be a smart investment--and a refreshing change from the Bush administration's hear-no-evil, see-no-evil stance on test quality.

Another possible policy solution, she implies elsewhere in the article, would be to include performance-based local assessments into "overall examination scoring systems." That's what several of the countries she has studied do.

The big question for supporters of NCLB's statewide standardized testing systems is whether performance assessments would be used for holding educators accountable for student achievement. Much edu-blood was spilled over that question a year ago, when Rep. George Miller included the notion of local assessments in a draft NCLB reauthorization bill.The combatants eventually withdrew from the field and the Miller draft was decommissioned.

But it's clear that Darling-Hammond is ambivalent about using performance testing to hold educators accountable for student achievment. She notes that the countries she has studied "do not use their examination systems to rank or punish schools or to deny diplomas to students." Finland, she writes, "has no external standardized tests to rank students or schools." Instead, she writes approvingly, the testing systems in Finland and other countries are closely linked to efforts to develop teachers' ability to teach higher-level skills to their students; they are part of the countries' human capital strategies.

So, if Barack Obama gives Linda Darling Hammond a major role in his administration, we're going to have a big policy debate over testing in American education and whether we should move beyond NCLB accountability to something potentially very different. Such a debate wouldn't be a bad thing.

Harvard's Endowment Falls to $29 Billion

Even after large stock market losses, if Harvard paid out five percent of its endowment--a requirement for all private foundations except those of colleges and universities--it would increase the school's budget by $214 million.

They've suffered a large financial loss on paper, but so have the rest of us, and lawmakers shouldn't let the economic downturn curtail efforts for endowment sanity.

The Rachel Maddow Show

I'll be on Rachel Maddow's Air America radio show today at 1:15 6:00PM, talking about why college keeps getting more expensive. Rest assured, state legislatures will get their share of blame. But I'll also be pointing the finger at people like SUNY-Buffalo president John Simpson, who apparently sees the current economic crisis as the perfect opportunity to raise student tuition in order to fund a grand agenda of local economic development and institutional status-promotion. “It’s easier to push a conversation about this kind of substantive change today than it was a year or two ago, because the world wasn’t in such crisis,” Simpson said earlier this week. Call it the "shock doctrine" theory of making college less affordable. 

Some might say that SUNY would still be relatively cheap even if Simpson's plan to raise tuition by 63 percent over the next decade were implemented. But that depends on the student. A new report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education includes the following statistics about how the net cost of attending a four-year public university has changed over time as a percentage of the median income of families in the lowest and highest income quintiles.

Lowest quintile 1999 - 00 : 39%

Lowest quintile 2007 - 08 : 55%

Highest quintile 1999 - 00: 7%

Highest quintile 2007 - 08: 9%

Over the last eight years--and for quite a while before that--the rich have gotten much richer in America at the same time that college has gotten much more expensive. The two trends roughly cancel out. And since people in the highest quintile run things, they don't really see a huge problem. For low-income families, by contrast, college has always been a stretch, even after taking into account higher levels of financial aid. Middle- and upper-income families will probably be able to absorb tuition hikes. Low-income students at the margin, by contrast, will be increasingly priced out of the four-year sector, or have their studies compromised by the need to work, or be shouldered with unmanageable debt. I'm not saying there's never cause to raise tuition, but it would d be nice if students actually got something back in return--better support services and more well-paid instructors, for example. Instead they're being asked to pay for research and other things that help everyone but those paying the bills. 

Oxygen

A co-worker and I were discussing today the oft-repeated education reformer line that schools should be for students and not for adults. See Joel Klein use a version here and Michelle Rhee's iterations here, here, here, or here. It's a good line, if for nothing else than it puts traditional powers in education policy (read: teachers unions) on the defensive as if they do not consider student concerns, and it does it without even naming them.

My co-worker and I are talking about this trend, and she suggested a metaphor that might contrast the line. Whenever you board a plane, she points out, they go through a long safety ritual. "Please note your nearest exit rows" and "fasten your belt by inserting the buckle and pulling tight on the remaining cord." They also insist that, in the case of an emergency, adults secure their own oxygen masks before attending to their children. Despite the best instincts of parents, this policy actually makes some sense. There's no point in having a bunch of adults trying to help out their children first and fainting in the process. Better to secure their own safety in order to be in a position to help those who need it.

It's an extreme metaphor to be sure, but it actually makes some sense in the context to long-struggling urban education systems. They're bad, they've been bad, and they're crashing for whole segments of the population. But it isn't just the students that need help--district finance, curricula, infrastructure, technology, etc. are all suffering--and adults who try to rush in without fixing some of these problems first will just faint and flounder. They'll have no air.

I'm generally sympathetic to what Rhee is trying to do: she's going after the adults in the system who have long settled for complacency and demographics to explain why DC's public schools have been so bad. But in an effort to test the all-publicity-is-good-publicity theory, she's lobbing fireballs like this one, from last week's Time piece:

Rhee is, as a rule, far nicer to students than to most adults. In many private encounters with officials, bureaucrats and even fundraisers--who have committed millions of dollars to help her reform the schools--she doesn't smile or nod or do any of the things most people do to put others at ease. She reads her BlackBerry when people talk to her. I have seen her walk out of small meetings held for her benefit without a word of explanation. She says things most superintendents would not. "The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn't respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. "People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job."

Kevin doesn't like the magazine cover's title ("How to Fix America's Schools"). But it's not just the title. The cover itself is Rhee looking stern in a classroom, dressed in black, holding a broom, suggesting she'll sweep away problems. Quotes like the one above and the cover photo--two things Rhee had complete control over--are the things that test the publicity theory. Like the plane crash metaphor,"interests of children" advocates need to be careful how much they say and do, or else they may find they're lacking air.

Competition on Quality, Service, and Price

A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting where a higher education spokesperson flat-out stated there was no market demand for student learning data. His group had done focus groups, he said, and it just wasn't as high on their list as other things. His point would be fair, even if true, if there was real, meaningful data available on student outcomes in higher education. Instead, his argument is a chicken-and-egg conundrum. We have no meaningful data, so students and parents don't request it. Students and parents don't request it, so colleges don't provide it.

Luckily, consumer preferences can change. Automobile companies told Ralph Nader that safety didn't sell. He shamed them into understanding it can, and now car commercials are as much about side-impact safety beams as they are about horsepower. The automotive industry wasn't about fuel economy when gas prices were cheap, but all of a sudden we're seeing advertisements extolling a vehicle's miles per gallon. Ford went to Congress today hat in hand promising to develop electric vehicles and sell the Hummer brand.

All this is to say that we don't always have to accept $6 million buildings only for tutoring athletes or $55 million dorms complete with Coldstone Creamery, 7/11, state-of-the-art gym (pictured), grocery delivery, room cleaning, and laundry service as the sole basis on which colleges compete for students. They could, you know, compete on quality, service, and price.

For more on this topic and many others, listen to today's Education Sector event, "Is Technology the Answer to Rising College Costs," below:

Generalizability

The Michelle Rhee story continues to percolate ever-upward through layers of media, landing on the cover of Time this week. While there are many sound policy-based reasons for supporting her reform efforts, I have to admit one of the things I like is that she talks the way I talk. Not just about education, but in general. Which isn't surprising; we're the same age and both graduated from upstate New York universities in the same year, 1992. (Mine, SUNY-Binghamton, was where people tended to enroll when they couldn't get into hers, Cornell). To wit: "What I'm finding is that our principals are ridiculously--like ridiculously--conflict-averse," Rhee says. When I was in high school one English teacher went on at length about how the ubiquitous improper use of the word "like" as a means of emphasis was a clear sign of the linguistic apocalypse. Now famous Ivy League-educated Time-cover-gracing people talk this way. (Although there's still some loss in translation--I suspect the second "ridiculously" should have been italicized.)

The story is well-written and worth reading. My biggest qualm--and it's amazing how often this happens--is on the magazine cover. Inside, the piece is titled "Rhee tackles classrooom challenge," which is fair enough. But the cover title is "How to Fix America's Schools." And that's wrong. It would be a mistake to over-generalize about the lessons of DCPS, which is (thankfully) unusual. Most school districts haven't been systematically degraded by three decades of often corrupt one-party rule. Most districts don't employ significant numbers of truly incompetent teachers. Most districts are not unequivocally the worst in the nation when compared to similar districts. Most districts get much less funding per student. Most high-poverty districts aren't funded at levels similar to the surrounding wealthier suburbs. And so on. 

The educational challenges in DC are unusual and, compared to most districts, extreme. The needed changes are of commensurate severity. Seeing DC as the definitive proving ground for larger questions about tenure, management style, etc. is not going to serve anyone's interests in the long run. The issues themselves will become over-politicized and thus harder to solve. And inferences drawn about what makes sense for other districts will be distorted by the differences with DC. 

Brainstorm

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving break. Mine was excellent, including a trip to New York to see The Seagull, right up until the part that involved being on the southbound New Jersey Turnpike at 11PM in the middle of a rainstorm, stop-and-go-traffic, etc. Then, not so much. 

Announcement: Starting today I'm going to be a regular contributor to Brainstorm, the group blog at the Chronicle for Higher Education. It will include a fair amounting of cross-posting from Q&E along with new material. You'll also be seeing my byline in the print edition, starting with with this column about the biennial "Measuring Up" state report cards and how they were right all along. 

Edison-Go-Round

EdisonLearning, the school management company founded by Chris Whittle in the early 1990s, has fired it CEO, Terry Stecz, two years after he replaced Whittle. In a memo to Edison staffers, Michael Stakias, the president of Liberty Partners, a New York-based private equity firm that is Edison’s majority owner, announced that Jeff Wahl, Edison’s chief operating officer since 2007, would replace Stecz immediately. Before joining Edison, Wahl spent 15 years in various management roles at General Electric. Maybe Liberty's hoping he's got the right background to illuminate a path to profitability at a company named for the inventor of the lightbulb.

Stecz apparently didn't. He was working in management at Pharmacia, the $14-billion heathcare company with products that included Celebrex and Nicorette, when Liberty recruited him to be Edison’s COO in 2004. He became Edison’s CEO when Liberty pushed Whittle out of the company’s management in early 2007. Stecz struggled, with little apparent success, to shake off Edison troubled legacy as a controversial, unprofitable school management company, going so far as to change the company’s name earlier this year from Edison Schools, Inc, to EdisonLearning and announce a move into on-line education.

Whittle hasn’t fared much better that his successor. The high-living entrepreneur set out to launch an international network of high-end for-profit private schools when he left Edison in early 2007, only to depart his new company, Nations Academy, last summer in the wake of a falling out with his major investor, Sunny Varkey of Dubai.

Whittle is reportedly planning a new for-profit private school business. And he’s trying to raise some cash. He’s put up for sale for $27 million a guest house and a third of the property on his 11 acre estate on Georgia Pond in the Hamptons. Six years ago, when Edison’s stock crashed and the company nearly went under, Whittle sought to sell the entire estate, where the neighbors include Steven Spielberg and Martha Stewart, for $45 million, before taking the property off the market when Liberty bought Edison.

18th Century Skills

Before there were “21st Century Skills,” there were “18th Century Skills.” None other than Benjamin Franklin identified 13 virtues to which he aspired. But Franklin knew that simply trying to embody his virtues without keeping track of his performance wouldn’t be enough. So he created a series of tables to record daily transgressions.Quantifying his data this way made it possible for Franklin to track his progress over time. While he never achieved perfection on the scale he created, he “was by the endeavor a better and happier man” and “had the satisfaction of seeing [marks representing transgressions] diminish” over time.
Not unlike Mr. Franklin, teachers gather quasi-quantitative data about students every day. Doing so can be as simple as a system of behavior checks and minuses. But unless that data is captured consistently over time and communicated to all of the adults who work with that student, we miss opportunities to identify trends and correlations that can help us serve students better and assess the impact of our interventions. Technology has the potential to make such information easier to capture and quantify as well as to provide improved tools of analysis and communication. Wireless Generation, for example, develops simple ways for teachers, students and others to capture quasi-quantitative information about academic and social indicators on hand held devices. Having the information digitized makes it easy to identify trends and correlations.


Imagine if digital tools that could highlight a correlation between lapses in Temperance and Chastity had been available to Mr. Franklin.

Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, Part 2

Continuing from yesterday's post about Gladwell's new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it's a book about unequal opportunity--how individual success and failure are a product of external circumstances, much more so than people like to believe, and how those circumstances vary profoundly among people in complex, inequitable, and often random ways. 

In the chapter on expertise--a concept that has (justifiably) gotten a lot of attention from cognitive and education researchers--Gladwell asserts that there's essentially no such thing as great accomplishment without long, hard work. You need roughly 10,000 hours of practice at something to be really good at it, he says, and what distinguishes people like Bill Gates from others isn't fantastic intellect--although Gates certainly has that--but rather the fact that he had an exceedingly rare opportunity to accumulate those hours early in his career, at exactly the right moment in history. Which leads to another of Gladwell's main themes: timing. The 20th century's software titans were all born around 1955, he notes, just like the 19th century's industrial giants were born near 1834 and the most successful Manhattan lawyers were born in a few years bracketing 1931. All of these people had the intelligence and courage to take advantage of a rare opportunity created when the circumstances of their business fundamentally changed. But the fact that the opportunity presented itself in the first place was just luck. Men (and women) need their moment in order to succeed. 

From there Gladwell moves on to family background and culture, with a side conversation about IQ. He notes the lack of correlation between extremely high IQ scores and success in life, and offers the sad example of one Chris Langan, IQ of 190+, who grew up with an abusive father in a broken home, dropped out of college due (he claims) to some truly incompetent and uncaring financial aid officers, and currently lives on a horse farm in rural Missouri, working in solitude on a theory of the universe that nobody will ever read:

He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how...These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone.

Gladwell devotes most of the rest of the book to culture. Appalachian blood feuds, Korean airline crashes, successful Jewish lawyers, and the tendency of Asians to be good at math, he says, can all be explained by the particular values, attitudes, and inclinations of different cultures. Asian agricultural societies are built around rice cultivation, he observes, which requires entrepreneurial ism, attention to detail, complex management, perseverance, and phenomenal amounts of work, all year long. European-style wheat cultivation, by contrast, is much simpler, amenable to mechanization and unskilled labor, and lets you take half the year off. The things you need to do to cultivate rice are the same things you need to do to learn math, he says, noting:

When students sit down to take the TIMMS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It ask them all kinds of things, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it's so tedious that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on TIMMS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. 

The book also has a whole chapter about KIPP, and this is where the flaws in Gladwell's way of writing are most glaring. He cites Karl Alexander's well-known "summer learning loss" research of students in the Baltimore public schools. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their well-off peers, Alexander found, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead. It's an important point, and has led to a lot of discussions about the use of time in school. (See an ES report on the subject here.) But this leads Gladwell to say the following:

What Alexander's work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding--all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at [Alexander's data]. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it...For it's poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that's the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city. 

The weird thing is that Gladwell goes directly from here to a description of the KIPP Bronx Academy, which indeed provides students with more time. But, as Gladwell himself notes, it also has a culture that demands a lot of effort from students. The KIPP teachers emphasize discipline, self-control and respect for authority, peers, and oneself. They explicitly teach students how to listen and respond in class. They consider every student, no matter how disadvantaged, as bound for college. Does Gladwell really believe that most inner city schools work this way? That the only difference between KIPP and regular public schools is time? Long hours are far from the only "lessons from the rice paddy," as Gladwell more than adequately describes.  

Gladwell is often characterized as public intellectual, and he's clearly a very smart guy. But his real genius lies in explanation. His 10,000 hours of expertise came not in sociology but journalism, at the Washington Post. He's a master of marrying compelling anecdotes with important ideas. The world is a complicated, confusing place, and Malcolm Gladwell makes it understandable by telling stories that are fun to read. This is an extremely difficult thing to do, and nobody does it better. But there's a temptation in this kind of writing to sand down the edges of things to a bright polish and summarize complex issues in a pithy phrase. It's a comforting, attractive message--things are simpler than you think. But it's not always true. Saying that school time matters is one thing--saying it's the only thing that matters is something else entirely. 

That said, I admire the spirit of Outliers and really enjoyed reading it. It's rooted in compassion and a belief in the possibility of a better world. Gladwell thinks that if people really appreciated all the dimensions of opportunity, they'd be more likely to support ideas and policies designed to expand opportunity to more people. Gladwell himself is an outlier, and the book is a worthy way to use the influence that position affords. 

Malcom Gladwell's Outliers,, Part 1

Malcom Gladwell's new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days--90 at the outside--before I'd heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab myself in the eye as a distraction from the pain. I believe the medical term for this is "Thomas Friedman Syndrome."

Outliers is a good book in many ways, and says a lot about education. It's a critique of the standard narrative of extraordinary success, those inspiring tales of hard work and gumption that are often used to explain the achievements of sports stars and CEOs. The Bill Gates's of the world, in other words--and the Malcolm Gladwells. These stories are badly incomplete, Gladwell says, because they ignore context. Success is not just a matter of who people are, but where they come from, along with countless instances of plain luck, for better and for worse. 

The first chapter deals with the fairly well-known phenomenon of birthdays and Canadian hockey players. A hugely disproportionate number of elite hockey players have birthdays in January, February and March. That's because the age cutoff for entry into junior hockey leagues is January 1. A five-year old hockey player born on that day (they start early in Canada) could be as much as 25 percent older than his youngest competitors, giving him a major advantage in size, strength, and coordination. Since junior league hockey is a ruthless meritocracy, that success would lead to selection in more elite leagues, and thus more opportunities for practice, better coaching, more success, even more elite leagues, and so on. What begins as an arbitrary age-based difference evolves into actual differences of skill and technique, masking the original injustice. 

Gladwell notes that this problematic in two ways. First, it's patently unfair to children born at the end of the year, who have virtually no chance of advancing to the highest hockey ranks. Second, it's really inefficient as a means of matching training with talent. Canada has effectively cut its pool of potential hockey stars in half. 

The parallels with higher education are obvious. Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed

As a Democrat, and as someone who thinks smart people should be running the country, I'm thrilled. But the assumption that a true valedictocracy would naturally lead to an administration staffed exclusively by the graduates of a tiny handful of private universities is wrong. The process by which students end up at Harvard and then the upper reaches of government is nothing close to a pure merit-based sorting process. First, all kinds of educational resource misallocations at the K-12 level give greater opportunities to upper-income students. Then elite colleges add admissions preferences for legacies, donors, the children of the rich, famous and powerful, and graduates of long-established networks of elite private secondary schools. From there it's a short distance--via alumni, social and recruiting networks--to the seats of power in finance and government, which, like many elite colleges, are on the East Coast.

So while the President-elect himself comes from famously humble origins, the family and educational backgrounds of the advisers Brooks mentions contain a vastly disproportionate number of elite university professors and administrators, wealthy families, and exclusive private high schools, when compared to the population at large. That doesn't mean those people aren't brilliant, talented and hard-working. They are, in the same way that NHL hockey players are. But in both cases they're products of an inefficient and unfair system. In any given year, the 50 smartest public high school graduates from the state of Florida will surely have more raw intellectual ability than the 50 smartest graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy, but members of the latter group are much more likely to end up in the West Wing someday. 

More on Outliers, KIPP, why Asian students are good at math, and K-12 education generally tomorrow. 

Time Matters

Last month Seattle parents released an analysis of student learning time (defined as time students actually spend in class) at the city's ten high schools. They found large discrepancies:

At Garfield High in Seattle, classes last at least 55 minutes. At Nathan Hale High, they're often 50. Garfield has eight short days when students arrive late or leave early so teachers can collaborate and train. Nathan Hale has 40, and schedules 100 minutes each week for students to simply read.

At the end of the year, that means students at Garfield spend about 23 more hours in each academic class — roughly the equivalent of four more weeks of instruction, according to an analysis done by a parents group in West Seattle.

The article follows with a dramatic "does it matter" without ever answering the question. Like money, education commentators tend to look to the research without thinking about common sense. Do time and money matter in education? The logical answer is of course they do, but there might not be a direct linear relationship between the two inputs and educational outcomes. There are always confounding variables--things like central office inefficiencies cutting down on the impact of money or a teacher not using her time effectively.

But we should not dismiss inputs as completely irrelevant, especially in the case of these two high schools. Students at Garfield High School spend 23 hours more in class than their peers at Nathan Hale. That's about four weeks of extra schooling.

That lost time matters. Nathan Hale has lower percentages of white and low-income students than Garfield, yet it has lower test results in reading, writing, math, and science. Despite having greater diversity, Garfield has lower achievement gaps in reading between men and women, whites and blacks, students on free and reduced lunch and those who are not, and students in special education. Nathan Hale is a good school, but Garfield outperforms it across the board despite a harder assignment.

State and district officials don't seem to see the link between Garfield's success and its additional time. The article quotes Kathe Taylor, policy director at the State Board of Education, wondering if counting minutes is like missing the forest for the trees, saying "If one school district can do in two hours what it takes another six hours to do, and the students achieve equally well, then you have to ask what difference does it make." Nathan Hale's principal chimes in to say, "Raw minutes is nowhere near the whole story."

Not the whole story, maybe. But not one to ignore either.

Hat tip to NCTQ.

Student Loan Shenanigans

Sherman Dorn blogged today about the difficulties his wife has had getting Nelnet (a loan company that has engaged in nefarious practices in the past) to process her paperwork for the federal loan forgiveness program. The program provides loan forgiveness up to $17,500 for teachers who teach in hard to staff subject areas, like special education.

Dorn wants to know if anyone else has had similar troubles getting their loan forgiveness paperwork processed. My guess is that yes, there are others out there with the same problem.

High School Seniors Are Like Opilio Crab

I love the Deadliest Catch, an action filled Discovery Channel show about Alaskan crab fishermen. I might just eat crab instead of turkey this year because Captain Phil asked me to. But I've never been able to find the education connection I needed to write about the Deadliest Catch on Quick & Ed--until now (not that that stops some of us). And I'd like to say thanks to Inside Higher Ed for giving me the opportunity.

Kent Barnds writes in a column for IHE today about how the tough, hard bitten job of a crab fisherman is like, well, a college admissions officer. Ignoring, of course, the admissions officer's climate controlled office and cushy chair.

Here are a few of the parallels Barnds draws: the unwanted commentary both admissions officers and the now famous fishermen receive from those who haven't actually done the job; the need to catch just the right amount of crab, or students, to meet the quota; and the anxiety of watching the pot come out of the water wondering if it'll be full of crab or just contain a dead fish--much like the anxiety admissions officers face as they get replies from admitted students. Hauling a 700-pound pot filled with crab and risking a paper cut: it all has drama.

Barnds says, "Jonathan Hillstrand, who captains the Time Bandit, once declared “We’d rather be lucky than good any day.” Let’s be candid — it takes quite a bit of luck to predict and “know” where the crab will be and takes just as much to predict and “know” what 17-years olds will think and do." So the end lesson is that, like opilio crab, 17-year old high school seniors are running in herds along the ocean floor and admissions officers are in boats, developing a strategy to find them and figuring out the right bait to haul them in.

At least the admissions officers don't have to toss the females back into the ocean anymore.

Admired, Not Read

Last year, I was invited to Dickinson College in southern Pennsylvania to debate the meaning of success in higher education. My counterpart in the discussion was Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College, a small liberal arts school in Annapolis, Maryland. We were introduced by our host, and Nelson went first. His speech was erudite, passionate, and replete with classical references. He waxed eloquent about the meaning of knowledge, and how teaching as an enterprise was central to the St. John’s philosophy. I found myself glancing uneasily at my own notes, which had always served me well in the past but suddenly seemed paltry by comparison.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had run headlong into the Great Books of the Western World, the subject of a smart, engaging new book by Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe. In A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, Beam traces the history of a peculiar moment in the development of America’s striving middlebrow culture, when hundreds of thousands of families across the nation decided to spend a lot of money on ancient texts that few would ever read. It’s also a story of higher education, and a 140-year-old argument about the responsibilities that colleges have to students.

Beam’s narrative begins in 1869, with the appointment of Charles Eliot to the presidency of Harvard University...[for more, in which I argue that the great books matter and liberals need to reclaim the liberal arts, click here]

EVENT: Computers, Professors, and the Cost of Higher Education

Note: Pushing this back to the top as a reminder to sign up, and also because the magazine article in question is now live to the world, here. Read it! Right now!  

It's commonly believed that higher education suffers from an acute case of "Baumol's Cost Disease," an affliction that causes labor-intensive industries to become less productive over time. It takes a professor just as long to deliver a 90-minute lecture today as it did 100 years ago, the thinking goes. But other industries have radically increased productivity in the meantime, often via use of technology, driving up the cost of highly-skilled labor across the labor market. In other words, colleges have to pay a premium for productivity increases they don't actually get, which is why tuition is now a zillion billion dollars and anyone planning to send their kids to a private college should expect to be in in debt for the rest of their, and their children's children's, natural lives. 

In fact, this is wrong. Colleges are perfectly capable of becoming more productive in the same way that lots of other industries have--by substituting capital for labor and replacing lots of expensive employees with less-expensive computers. It's not a theoretical idea--hundreds of colleges are doing this right now and more are jumping on board every day. Given that colleges are about to be mightily screwed by recession-induced budget cuts, this trend is likely to accelerate. But you haven't heard about it, in part because the significant cost-savings aren't being passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. This is the subject of new article I've written for Washington Monthly which you can--nay, must--read here. 

And to see a sure-to-be-fascinating discussion of these issues, live and in person, featuring a panel full of experts, plus myself, sign up for and attend this Education Sector Event, to be held on the morning of December 2nd here in Washington, DC. Ask questions, heckle, throw things, get free magazines and related materials--it's sure to be a great time. 

Philadelphia Public Schools Gain Market Share, Blames Charters

In the private sector when an enterprise gains customers it's a good thing. Apparently that is not the case in Philadelphia School District, where their chief budget officer says charter schools are costing the district $105 million because 27% of their students were previously home-schooled or educated in a private school. Putting aside the idea that a 5% increase in market share is a bad thing, let's do some math. Stay with me here.

The city's chief budget officers claims charters, because of increased market share, are costing the city an extra $105 million. Charters educate 34,4000 students in the city and receive $320 million in reimbursements (including some state funds) for a total per-pupil expenditure (excluding private money) of $9,302.33.

The city reimburses charters $8,088 for every student in general education and $17,658 for every student in special education. Assuming charters took the same percentage of special education children as traditional public schools (13.2% in Philadelphia), how much should the city be spending on these new charter students?

13.2% of children in special ed. * $17,658 per student = $2,330.86
86.8% of children in regular education * $8,088 per student = $7,020.38
$2,330.86 + $7,020.38 = $9,351.24

So charters are actually getting less than they should. More students, less money, and the city complains?

Bailout Back and Forth

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson set off a flurry of activity when he suggested last week that some of the $700 billion bailout money might go to help companies issue private student loans. Higher Ed Watch explains in this post why Paulson's plan is a bad idea.

NASFAA (the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators), though, seems to think it's a great idea, saying that "stricter loan eligibility requirements and higher interest rates and fees on non-federal loans are jeopardizing educational opportunity." A letter sent Wednesday from representatives of colleges, students, and organizations like the Project on Student debt explains why NASFAA is wrong, and Higher Ed Watch explains what colleges can do to ensure educational opportunity without any government bailouts. Inside Higher Ed has all the back and forth here.

But while everyone has been talking about private loan eligibility, one of the biggest, most genuine threats to college access--reductions in public college funding--has actually been happening. The California State University system got approval on Wednesday to turn away at least 10,000 eligible students next fall because of overcrowding and underfunding.

Cash-strapped Colleges

With headlines predicting a steep recession, colleges and universities are already making budget cuts. Compare what some schools are saying about the financial crisis:

Morton Schapiro, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, which has long had a commitment to accepting students without considering their financial situation, said he doubted that all colleges with such full need-blind policies would be able to hold to them.

“The major dial you turn for most financial crises is that you admit more students who can pay, as a way of increasing revenues,” Mr. Schapiro said. “With the tremendous decline in wealth, I think fewer people will hold on to needs blind.”

with what others are already doing:

In October, Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., increased its fund-raising campaign goal for undergraduate scholarships to $350 million from $225 million, which has "helped reinvigorate giving" specifically for this priority, says Simeon Moss, press office director at Cornell. While overall giving is down, donations directed toward undergraduate aid have soared to $63.4 million in fiscal-year 2008, from $13.7 million in fiscal-year 2007, he says.

There are good and bad ways colleges and universities can manage their budgets during tough times. Tying fundraising efforts to student financial aid seems to be one of the good ones. Kudos to Cornell for taking proactive action.

Stalking the Iron Sheik

Last night I saw an advance screening of Darren Aronofsky's new movie, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging, down-on-his-luck professional wrestler and Marisa Tomei as a local stripper who may or may not have a heart of gold. It's a very good movie that you should definitely go see when it's released in theaters next month. The Wrestler is a human drama first and foremost, but it's also about the cold reality of working life, the aesthetics of late-80s hair metal (musical and otherwise), and the strong bonds of subculture brotherhood. It was shot on a shoestring $6 million budget in hand-held documentary style, and the contrast with the precise, controlled visuals of Requiem for a Dream and the criminally-underrated The Fountain is pretty amazing. 

I'm not giving much of the plot away in revealing that the movie revolves, in part, around the possibility of the protagonist, one Randy "Ram" Robinson, participating in a 20th anniversary rematch of an epic 1989 pay-per-view showdown with a wrestler named "The Ayatollah." As we all know, this is a thinly-veiled reference to the classic 1984 title bout between Hulk Hogan (Randy basically looks what Hogan would have looked like if he'd spent the last 20 years on a crystal meth bender, or living the life that Mickey Rourke actually lived) and Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, a.k.a The Iron Sheik. And this, in turn, is all the excuse I need to tell my Iron Sheik story.

The Sheik, now retired, was born in Iran and had real wrestling skills, competing on the national team (Iran has some of the best wrestlers in the world) in the late 1960s. By the 1970s he had moved to the U.S., where he wrestled under names like The Great Hussein Arab (insert joke about McCain campaign rallies here). Certain contemporaneous developments in geopolitics made his status as the designated "heel" or bad guy in the pro wrestling ring more or less inevitable, and he went on to a successful career, winning the heavyweight title before losing it to Hogan while awing fans in mid-sized regional municipal auditoriums across the land with the power of his patented finishing maneuver, the "camel clutch." 

Anyway, it was some time in the late 1990s, and I was in the Indianapolis airport waiting for an outbound flight. I was hungry so I went to the scary food court, grabbed something greasy and marginally edible, and went to find a table--only to see, sitting right in front of me, the Sheik himself, amiably chatting with another really large dude who was obviously a fellow wrestler. They'd been in town the previous night for a match at the since-demolished Market Square Arena (site of Elvis' last concert, fyi). I didn't want to interrupt them--the 12-year old in me still found him extremely scary--so I sat nearby to eavesdrop. Their conversation went something like this:

Another Really Large Dude: "Hey, did you hear that The Undertaker bought a place on a golf course in Myrtle Beach?"

Sheik: "Real estate is always a smart place to invest."

ARLD: "Yeah, Hacksaw Jim Duggan told me he cleared $100,000 on his place in Florida last year."

Sheik: "If Jake the Snake had at least put his money in T-bills like I told him to, he could have retired five years ago."

And so on and so forth, the most mundane conversation imaginable, except they referred to everyone, and each other, by their stage names. It was surreal. Eventually they finished their burgers and walked to airport security, at which point the security guys started jumping and down, pointing, and yelling "the Iron Sheik!" (airport security jobs were close to minimum wage gigs back then, as you'll recall). We ended up on the same plane, but the Sheik and ARLD were in first class so I didn't get a chance to hear more.

No real point to this story other than a brush with semi-greatness, and you should really go see The Wrestler.  

Dear President-Elect Obama...

NCLB reauthorization may not be at the top of the next administration's to-do list, what with the economic meltdown and two wars, but President Obama will need to tackle President Bush's signature education law eventually. And he'll need all the good ideas he can get.

Today, ES releases two briefs offering ideas on how the Obama administration can reform NCLB. Title 2.0 focuses on how President Obama can revamp the federal role in human capital by focusing Title II dollars on higher impact reforms. And In Need of Improvement offers a number of steps Congress and the Obama administration can take to strengthen NCLB's choice provision.

Not-So-Great Expectations

Higher education is haunted by a formula, which goes something like this: P/R=G.

The P stands for student preparation, broadly defined — the combination of innate ability and elementary-school and secondary-school preparation that students bring to college. Imagine those attributes normalized on a scale going from 0 to 1, with 1 describing the smartest, most well-educated student in the world.

The R stands for rigor, defined by individual colleges and universities — academic requirements, placement-exam cut scores, and the general difficulty of the work. R increases as standards become more rigorous, with the top values at places like the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The G stands for the odds of a student's earning a degree. An intelligent, well-prepared student attending a college with typical standards would be very likely to graduate. An ill-prepared student who enrolls somewhere with unusually tough standards would not.

The P/R=G formula dominates the way people think about college graduation rates and student success. And, not coincidentally, it puts colleges in the position of having no real responsibility or efficacy when it comes to making G higher. They can't make P higher, because raw ability is what it is, and the elementary and secondary schools are someone else's problem. And they can't make R lower, because that would betray their scholarly ideals and dumb things down for the best students. A low G is regrettable, but really, what can be done?

It's a pretty depressing conclusion. So I was glad to read a report on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, known as Cessie, which says that the formula is all wrong. 

Read the rest of this column at the Chronicle of Higher Education here. 

Hot Boys (With Audio)

If you missed Education Sector's talk last week with author Peg Tyre you can listen to it below. The discussion features Tyre, best-selling author of The Trouble with Boys, New America Foundation Senior Analyst Sara Mead, and USA Today columnist Richard Whitmire. Topics ranged from gender differences in NAEP scores and ADHD diagnoses to boy-girl brain differences and why boys like the video game World of Warcraft.

Last Week, Next Up on Testing

The paper we released last Monday is the first in a series to explore what the next generation of assessments might look like. I received many many emails and comments over the past week, some via our online discussion. A quick recap from all of that:

First, there is a surprisingly strong reaction to the term “21st century skills.” Most wanted to say something about how important and significant these skills are to the students they teach or know. And in general there was agreement that there is a set of “21st century” skills that students need more now than before. But the term “21st century skills” seemed like an unpromising default to many, a way of avoiding specificity. One comment was particularly pessimistic but perhaps a fair point: “It’s a meaningless term—by the time we figure out what it means, it will be the 22nd century. Then what?” As an aside, I initially avoided the term but decided to take it on to see if I could push past the platitudes.

Second, there is a lot of interest at the local level in the new assessment tools and quite a few questions came in about which ones worked best, which ones should teachers/schools/districts use. My response is that there isn’t one tried and tested (sorry for pun) assessment that districts and schools should adopt and start using. The CWRA, which I profiled in the report, is one example—and I think a good one—of how schools are trying out new forms of assessment that measure reading, writing and math skills and problem-solving, inquiry and decision-making skills. The larger point is not that this is the right test for every school or district, but that this is the right direction for assessment.

Related to this is the problem of cost. There was a lot of concern about finding funds for assessments like the CWRA. “Even if my school wanted to try this,” wrote one teacher about the CWRA, there’s no way they would spend any extra money on it. This isn’t surprising, wrote Jack Beirwirth, who is the superintendent of Long Island’s Herricks Public Schools, the first public school district to use the CWRA. We’re all cutting back, he said, on programs, services and jobs. But the CWRA is well-worth the extra cost--teaching and measuring critical thinking and analytical reasoning are among our goals, he explains. Herricks also became one of four school districts participating independently in the 2006 PISA.

There were also a lot of comments about breaking down the distinction between instruction and assessment. Can we “embed” assessment in teaching, so that teachers can learn how their students are doing and improve their practice at the same time. So that assessment is not seen as a series of burdensome tests but also a tool for continuous learning. This isn’t easy—it requires teachers who know how to use assessment both for generating summative information and to inform their daily practice. But it can be done--see Paul Curtis’ description of New Tech High's approach.

Emerging technologies play a big role in this (I received several emails asking “what about technology?”). Our next paper on assessment--this one by Bill Tucker-- will examine how information technology can be used to improve assessment.

A Financial Aid Shake Up

Last Friday, FastWeb, a free, online scholarship search service, released the results of a survey it conducted on student borrowing, showing that half of students applying for private loans, parent PLUS loans, and home equity loans were denied access to funds. If this number is accurate, it means that a large number of students will need to adjust their college choices--from a private to a public institution and from a 4-year to a 2-year institution--because of financial constraints.

There's good reason to be skeptical of FastWeb's high numbers--the survey was sent out to users of the website (people already looking for additional financial aid) and the response rate was low (1,202 responses out of 7 million invitations). It's likely that those who took the time to fill out the survey were also the ones having the most trouble finding financial aid.

But we do know that private student loans, because of the tightening of credit markets, are more difficult to get. While the actual percentages of students being denied private loans may not be as high as FastWeb reports, it's still higher than in previous years, when easy access to credit helped fuel a boom in private lending.

So what are policymakers to do?

Tuition levels have risen to the point at which federal lending limits are insufficient to cover tuition at pretty much all private colleges and even some public, 4-year institutions. As a result, some congressional members are talking about raising federal loan limits again to make up for some of the lost private loan dollars. But that would be a mistake.

Tuition levels were able to get as high as they are partly because of easy debt--in an era of loose borrowing requirements, students were able to access large amounts of private loans. This was a great situation for colleges--students took out large amounts of loans, the institutions got paid, and students were left to bear the debt burdens. While lip service was paid to the need to reduce tuition prices, there wasn't much real pressure - enrollments stayed high and tuition bills were paid. Now that private lending is more limited, there may be some real price pressure on colleges to reduce tuition rates, or at least limit increases.

Adding to the argument against raising federal loan limits is a recent admission by the University of Phoenix that it sets tuition partly based on federal loan limits. And it actually cut tuition in its two-year Axia college division after seeing that students were dropping out because they maxed out their loan eligibility. So maybe less borrowing and more pressure to lower prices isn't such a bad thing in higher education, and could lead to more reasonable tuition rates.

Even when the credit markets loosen up, we (hopefully) won't return to the wild west days of lending that led to our current problems. Just like subprime mortgates aren't really good for home ownership, subprime student lending isn't really good for college access or success. Tighter private loan markets might result in a more cost-consciousness, on the part of students and parents, and institutions.