Report: College Students, Professors Getting Raw Deal

Everyone knows that college is getting more expensive, but it's easy to get lost in the vagueness of that general knowledge and lose track of exactly how expensive, how that rate of change is changing, and (in particular) where all those additional dollars go. Fortunately the good people at the Delta Cost Project have taken the time to analyze vast amounts of revenue and spending data submitted by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education and report their findings, which were released today.

They found that average tuition for full-time undergraduates at public research universities increased from $4,486 in 2002 to $5,825 in 2006. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation and presented in constant 2006 dollars.) That's an increase of 29.8 percent during a time of economic expansion. Tuition is going increase terribly in the next few years, and it will be blamed entirely on declining endowments and state appropriations, and those problems will certainly be culprits, but let's not forget that tuition also increased terribly when state revenues and endowments were on the way up. (This is partially mitigated by a simultaneous surge in enrollment.) The pattern for public master's degree institutions was virtually identical: tuition went from $3,652 to $4,710, a 29.0% increase

Some may say that this overstates the problem because many students don't pay the full sticker price, and in the past there's been some truth to that. But apparently things have changed. Here I'll just quote directly from the report:

Among public institutions, sticker prices routinely increased less than gross tuition revenues. This happens because more public institutions are using differential pricing to capture greater increases in tuition from students other than in‑state undergraduates. These higher tuitions can come from out‑of‑state students and international students, or from professional schools such as business, law and engineering where full-cost pricing is increasingly common. Institutions are also turning to user fees to fund many functions (e.g., technology fees), which have become a significant source of revenue. This means that focusing on sticker price increases alone understates the real impact of price increases for many students.

One could argue that price increases aren't necessarily bad for students if the money is used for things that benefit students, like education. But it turns out that's not happening either. At the same time that tuition jumped 29.8% at public research institutions, education and general spending per FTE student increased by only 2.5%. At public master's institutions, which imposed a 29.0% tuition jump, spending on education declined by 2.1%. Many students are spending more and getting less.

The report then puts these two sets of numbers together to calculate the student share of costs for education and related expenditures. In 2002, the ratio was 39% at public research universities. By 2006 it had jumped to 49%. Same thing at public master's institutions: 36% to 46%, in just four non-recessionary years. That's a scary trend. Education expenditures as classified under the federal reporting system, moreover, include the total costs of professors' salaries. Since many professors spend only part of their time teaching, these numbers significantly understate what students are paying for the educational services they receive.

Where, then, is the money going? In public institutions, it's mostly a matter of holding overall spending fairly steady while shifting more of the revenue burden to students. Private institutions, by contrast, have seen really spending growth. But the overall trend is clear: even as colleges are charging students much more and reducing the proportion of money spent on education and professor's salaries, they're spending a relatively larger amount of money on "administration, maintenance and support."

In other words, if you're a college student and you feel like you're getting a raw deal, you're probably right. And if you're a college professor who feels the same way, you're probably right too. 

Duncan Takes the Hill

At first, I didn't think my Education Sector colleagues and I were going to get into Arne Duncan’s Senate confirmation hearing yesterday. Arriving at 8:00 for the 10:00 event, we were surprised to find a line of 50 people already camped out in the hallway. They were a pretty disheveled crew, and they weren't exactly jazzed about the Duncan event. A couple were dozing off. But as 10:00 approached and the line grew to several hundred people, these early birds at the front began to disappear, replaced by well-heeled lobbyists for major education organizations, including a half dozen from the National Education Association. It turns out that the organizations hired a company to have homeless people arrive at 4 am to hold places in line for them (a thriving business on Capitol Hill, I discovered). At a rate of what one of the company’s representatives said was $30 an hour, the NEA spent over $1,000 to get its team in the room. The homeless seat-savers, of course, only saw a fraction of the fees. Perhaps they should unionize.

The hearing itself was pain-free for Duncan. He had some good opening lines—“never before has being smart been so cool” and “we can’t wait [to help disadvantaged kids] because they can’t wait.” We learned that he scored 20 points against Duke in a losing cause when he played basketball for Harvard. And for those trying to get a read on Duncan’s likely priorities at the Department, some of his comments were telling.

“I’m a big fan of “growth models,” he said, referring to calls in the policy community to shift the way the No Child Left Behind Act requires states to measure school performance to take into account how much schools improve individual students’ achievement over the course of a year, in contrast to measuring the law’s early focus on gauging how many students in a school meet state standards—a strategy that didn’t take into account the many non-school factors in student achievement and thus gave schools serving affluent schools an advantage.

He weighed in on the school time debate, saying “our day, our week, and our year are too short” in education.

He also sent a strong signal to the education establishment that he would support school reform. He plans, he said, to “challenge the status quo every single day.” I’m not sure that’s what the NEA lobbyists paid big bucks to hear, but that’s what they got.

“Teacher quality,” he said, “must be addressed on many levels: recruitment, preparation, retention, and compensation.” He endorsed pay for performance for teachers and praised the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, the $99 million program that promotes performance pay. “We can’t do enough to incent talent,” he told the members of the Senate Heath, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Notably, Senator Tom Harkin, a pro-labor Iowa Democrat who president over the hearing on behalf of chairman Ted Kennedy, gave a shout out to Teach for America, the alternative-certification program founded by Wendy Kopp that the unions are not thrilled about (TFA gets $14 million a year in federal appropriations, Harkin told the hearing). Duncan echoed Harkin’s praise of TFA and Kopp and extended it to other social entrepreneurs working in school reform, including Jon Schnur, a former Gore aid and founder of New Leaders for New Schools. He’s working on the Obama education transition and is a likely candidate for an administration job.

But Duncan is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. He’s looking for solutions. Tapping the drive and the talent of education entrepreneurs like Kopp and Schnur makes sense to him. But so does expanding preschool and early childhood education. New research on the importance of intensive early language instruction in helping poor kids develop the cognitive skills they need in schools but often don’t get at home makes this a no-brainer, so to speak.

So is putting health clinics in schools in poor neighborhoods and keeping schools open 12 hours a day to teach parenting classes and English to immigrants, all things Duncan endorsed at the hearing. “The more schools become community centers the better,” he said. He wants to improve learning from within schools and without. Smart.

The College Savings Delusion

While riding Metro home from work last night, I looked up and noticed one of those advertisement placards they run inside the cars, which was promoting the District of Columbia's 529 plan. The slogan was (I may not have the wording exactly right): "Math is complicated. Saving for college is simple." And I got to thinking: Is it? Really?

The ad was clearly aimed at families in the middle class and below, and was meant to appeal to their anxieties about paying for their children's higher education. Such concerns are justified; college is getting more experienced by the year. But let's stop for a moment (or two) to recap why it's so expensive. For the past several decades, the government--primarily states--has been slowly but steadily pulling back from funding higher education at the same time that colleges and universities have been relentlessly raising raising prices and increasing spending. The policymakers in a position to make such decisions don't want to spend more money to fix this problem--they're the same people who decided to pull back funding in the first place. Nor do they want to have a huge fight with the colleges and universities about the relentless tuition increases, because that would be hard. But they still have this problem of families worried about college, and these people are upset, and they vote. So they hit on a solution: more college savings! To sweeten the pot, they throw in a bunch of tax breaks (because spending public money on tax breaks somehow isn't spending public money), which end up primarily benefitting upper-middle class and rich people because they're the people who are actually in a position to worry about big taxes on capital gains and save lots of money in the first place, so it ends up becoming a bonanza for people who don't really need the help, but that's okay, because we're building an ownership society and lower- and middle-class families get a little taste too. As an added bonus, the savings go into the stock market, which allows policymakers to make certain assumptions about yearly returns based on the long-term historical return to the S&P 500 or what have you, which has the effect of essentially creating money out of thin air that can then be applied to the future projections of the ever-rising cost of college, which further relieves policymakers from having to spend actual money addressing said problem, and instead they can spend it on something else, like the [Insert Policymaker's Name Here] Center for the Study of [Insert Policymaker's Name Here], or tax cuts for the rich, or both.

Except it turns out the that stock market is run by liars and thieves who, instead of efficiently allocating capital to productive purposes etc. etc., actually spend their time constructing ever-more-elaborate schemes to defraud the entire world out mind-boggling sums of money. Worse, they turn out to be really stupid thieves who ended up blowing up the entire edifice on their way out the front door with all the money they stole in plain sight of the aforementioned policymakers who were apparently too busy doing things like choosing the font size on the stationery for the Center for The Study etc. to notice. 

As a result, there are now tens of thousands of families across the land with children starting college or in college who would have been better off sticking their money in a mattress than investing in a 529 plan. Heck, they'd have been better off sticking 70 percent of their money in a mattress and spending the other 30 percent on a flat-screen TV and a Wii, because at least that way they'd have a fun way to spend time with their kids during the day while they're not at the job they've just lost and their kids aren't at the college they're not attending because it's too expensive and half their tuition money disappeared in the Wall Street rubble. Meanwhile, the people who run 529 plans have nothing to offer other than utterly senseless comments like this from the p.r. guy in Maryland, who said "We remind people that investments for college are meant to be for the long-term. It's important to stay the course."

And that's whole the problem in a nutshell. Retirement is long-term, in the sense that it happens both in a long time and over a long time. People saving for retirement can afford to ride out ups and downs in the market, and since the goal is to live off the income from your investments and retirement itself lasts (hopefully) for several decades or more, there's also more flexibility to weather a financial storm once you're retired. College, by contrast, is at most a mid-term proposition, eighteen years at the outside. And paying for college is decidedly short-term, since, last I checked, colleges still get paid up-front. 

There's an alternative to all of this: Families pay their fair share of taxes under a reasonably progressive system and policymakers use that money to adequately support higher education and need-based aid while also exercising oversight over colleges and universities that in turn show some restraint in pricing while rejecting enrollment management techniques that direct scarce aid dollars to wealthy students. And when the time comes for people who ride Metro to pay for college, they don't have to worry about astronomical bills or whether their hard-earned money somehow ended up paying for a disgraced trader's second summer house in the Hamptons, because college is affordable.

Simple. 

Merit Pay for College Teaching?

As the Chronicle reported a few days ago and InsideHigherEd reported today, Texas A&M has proposed giving professors bonuses of up to $10,000 based on student evaluations. Predictably--and in my mind, appropriately--many people have raised serious objections to the this. Student evaluations aren't necessarily reliable measures of student learning, some studies indicate that they're biased toward professors with easy grading policies, etc., etc. All fair points. As Clint Magill the A&M Faculty Senate speaker, said to Scott Jaschik, “Any evaluation of teaching that doesn’t include some measure of learning has some real problems.”

BUT -- what seems missing from the discussion is the logical next step: If we agree that there's a need to create better incentives for high quality teaching in higher education, and we agree that the best measures of high quality teaching are based not on subjective student evaluations but objective measures of how much students learn, then why not give professors a $10,000 bonus based on objective measures of how much their students learn? Learning is measurable, after all. Not completely and not to the same extent in all subjects, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that there's no way to arrive at an accurate estimate of how much a group of 300 students learned over the course of a semester in, say, Introductory Physics. And a substantial percentage of all the courses taught in higher education are similar to Introductory Physics in that they're based on a well-established body of knowledge that is testable and doesn't vary tremendously from course section to course section or even campus to campus.

If we gave colleges and educators more incentives to improve the quality of teaching and the larger educational environment, maybe we'd read more stories like this one, in today's New York Times, describing how the physics department at M.I.T has:

...replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

The only real problem with these two paragraphs is the word "pioneering"--it's not like educators are only just now discovering that students learn more in an interactive, collaborative, student-centered environment. That's been known for a long, long time. Yet large lecture classes and other inhospitable learning environments have been allowed to persist--and are still in wide use today--because there are few if any incentives to change them. Which is not to say that professors can change them alone--a superior educational environment for students requires a shared commitment from and collaboration between the faculty and the institution. But while the implementation of the Texas A&M plan is obviously problematic, the underlying goal is sound.

Update: Speaking from experience, Ezra Klein weighs in. 

Low Literacy Shockingly High

Last week the National Center for Education Statistics released data about adult literacy rates(here). It shows both state and county level estimates. When I opened up the links to the data, I was expecting the numbers to be bleak, but not as bleak as they actually were. Nationwide 14.5 percent of adults are estimated to be low literacy. And as you would expect, these adults are concentrated, and the concentration generally mirrors the communities where educators struggle to help K-12 students achieve. But some of the concentrations of illiteracy are startling. The data is provided by county:

Los Angeles – 33%
New York – 25%
Bronx – 41%
Queens – 46%
Miami-Dade – 52%

A Very Bad Good Idea

In the course of composing what sounds like the winning entry in a Thomas Friedman column parody contest, Thomas Friedman wrote the following in his new column:

"One of the smartest stimulus moves we could make would be to eliminate federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose these careers."

Look, being a columnist for the New York Times is a pretty good gig and one of the minimum requirements ought to be spending the 30 seconds it takes to figure out that this is, in fact, a terrible idea. 

Federal income taxes are progressive. The average starting salary for teachers is just over $35,000 per year. A new teacher at that salary without dependents who doesn't itemize and files the 1040EZ would pay just over $3,500 in federal income taxes. A veteran teachers making $65,000 per year is going to pay, depending on the assumptions you make about marriage, dependents, deductions, etc., closer to $10,000 per year. Salary schedules and pension benefits in the teaching profession are such that compensation is already skewed toward veteran teachers. This would make that worse. It would also be really expensive: 3.2 million public school teachers at an average salary of $50,000 and federal tax liability of $6,500 = $20 billion per year, more than Title I and Title II of NCLB combined. If we're going to spend that kind of money on enhancing teacher quality--and in the abstract, that's a good idea--how about spending it in a way that's actually focused on attracting new teachers to the profession, or rewarding high-performing teachers, or teachers in shortage areas, or teachers who teach in high-needs schools, or some other set of policies where resources are matched with goals in a minimally thoughtful way? Never mind the problems of picking one worthy profession among many for special treatment in the tax code and all that entails. 

 

Starving the Schools Into Submission, Cont'd

Mike Petrilli responds to the post below and comments from Eduwonk about the Petrilli/Finn/Hess strategy to catalyze a new era of education reform through the financial immiseration of the K-12 school system by concluding:

...if you want taxpayers to provide extra resources, let’s see some serious reforms. And that means not accepting the status quo as a given.

Again, I think Mike is having trouble adjusting the realities of the world we're living in today. The last 25 years have been times of plenty in America, at least for people in the upper strata of the economy. From 1983 to 2007 we had only three mild, short recessions and a great deal of real growth. More overall wealth meant more money available for public services. As a result there have been few if any severe, lasting cuts to funding for K-12 education. Most of the salient arguments have been about whether to give the schools more money. When those proposals were debated, many people made arguments more or less like the one Mike makes above: historically, the public school system hasn't shown very much upside resource sensitivity, in the sense that new dollars haven't led to a commensurate increase in student learning. Therefore new investments should be contingent on reforms to ensure that the new dollars actually make a difference. It's a valid argument and one with which I generally agree. There's also evidence to back it up: As I've noted elsewhere, in the early 1990s Massachusetts reformed it's funding system and spent new money while simultaneously putting in place an ambitious system of standards and accountability. Ten years later, it had vaulted ahead of other states in posting the best test scores in the nation.

But that was then. We are now dealing with a set of circumstances that few people alive today have experienced first-hand. Did Mike see the terrifying unemployment graph in the New York Times this morning? Here it is:

That's the picture of a 747 in free fall with a lot air yet remaining before the ground. It's far from obvious that the TARP program is working. The stimulus bill hasn't been passed. The Fed can't drop interest rates any lower. We're in deep trouble; the only question is how bad for how long.

State and local tax revenues, which fund over 90% of public education, are going to take a huge hit. So the question on the table is this: do we pass a stimulus bill that includes state and local revenue sharing, in which case public services like K-12 education will experience serious budget cuts, or do we not, in which case public services like K-12 education will experience extremely serious budget cuts. That's the choice that Petrilli characterizes as a matter of "extra resources." In blithely transferring the logic of how best to spend more money to the present day, Petrilli, Finn, and Hess are asserting that the optimal circumstances for education reform can be found among varying degrees of fiscal pain, as if marginal changes in funding are indistinguishable regardless of where they fall relative to current norms.

This is also a good time to make another point about school funding. It's often observed that spending on K-12 education has increased much faster than inflation over time on a per-student basis. This is true. It's also true that some of those dollars have been spent in strategically ineffective ways, particularly in hiring more teachers rather than better teachers. But a lot of the money was spent simply doing what a decent society does--transferring some of the wealth created in the private sector to public sector employees whose efforts make the private sector growth possible in the first place. I've suggested that education could be more productive with technology, but that argument holds much more for secondary and post-secondary grades. Younger children in particular will always need real live teachers to learn. Some of those children will go on to create vast fortunes and it's not unreasonable that a small fraction of that wealth be enjoyed by their teacher, or the person who teaches their children. From 1983 to 2007, real GDP per capita in the United States increased by almost two-thirds. Educators deserved to share in that growth, and I'm sure many could plausibly argue they should have shared more.

Science Magazine Enters the Arena

I recommend the January 2, 2009 issue of SCIENCE, containing a special section on education and technology. With articles on subjects such as cognitive tutors, open education resources, and technology and testing, it's a worthy read (pesky subscription required, view overview and article abstracts). More importantly, the edition represents a welcome commitment by the magazine to increase coverage of scientific research and science issues in education. As editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts concludes in his opening editorial, "we now recognize that we must look at the 'art' of education through the critical lens of science..."

The School Poverty Gambit

In National Review Online, Mike Petrilli, Checker Finn, and Rick Hess argue that any kind of stimulus-driven state revenue sharing program that prevented painful budget cuts to the public schools would be bad for students, because what the public schools really need right now are painful budget cuts:

There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value — and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective...Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions...Team Obama and its Congressional allies could...require the various education interest groups to “take a haircut,” just like auto workers, investors, and shareholders have had to do. As the auto bailout required the U.A.W. to forfeit its beloved “jobs bank,” states taking federal dollars could be required to overhaul their tenure laws, ban “last hired, first fired” rules, experiment with pay-for-performance, make life easier for charter schools, and curb unrealistic pension promises.

So, a combination of regulatory malpractice in DC along with greed and incompetence on a world-historical scale on Wall Street creates the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, pushing the already-shaky American auto industry over the brink. Republican senators from non-union states see this as an opportunity to destroy the U.A.W., which bears a significant but ultimately (having not caused said economic crisis nor designed and marketed cars people don't want to buy) minority share of the responsibility for the auto industry's woes. And Hess, Finn, and Petrilli say "Hey, good idea, and while we're at it, let's go after the teachers unions too!" Investors and shareholders are being forced to take a haircut because the greedy, incompetent companies they own drove themselves into bankruptcy. Teachers are supposed to take a haircut because--just because?

Underlying the larger argument is the idea that the public schools will implement a whole suite of needed reforms if only we can put them under sufficiently terrible financial stress. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that this will work. It's true, as the authors note, that funding for public education has grown faster than inflation over time and that the system hasn't had to deal with a debilitating financial shock in a long time (Most people, I suspect, consider this to be a good thing.) But there have been recessions and financial crises and plenty of marginal changes in the rate of education spending growth. There have even been budget cuts, once you start to break down the numbers at the local level. Are there any examples--any?--of a state or school district that has ever responded to a fiscal crisis with reforms that actually benefitted students in the long run? Overall spending differences also provide some useful information here. Which state has better education policies and results: Mississippi or Massachusetts? 

Or to put it another way, Petrilli et al seem to think that because more money won't make a bad school system better (which is often true), less money will do the trick. In reality, the most likely consequence of massive school budget cuts--besides taking a lot of money out of the hands of middle-class workers who will respond by reducing consumption and driving us further into a Depression--is to cause everyone to hunker down in survival mode and make school reform harder. Successful school models, e.g. KIPP, often require extra resources to implement. Ditto grand bargain proposals like the Michelle Rhee tenure-for-merit-pay plan. The idea that the public school establishment can be impoverished into submission is unsupported by evidence and too clever by half. 

The Nature of Teaching

Before the holiday, Chad posted an item about a November '08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled "Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?" Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included "a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument," they were still only able to predict about 12 percent of subsequent teacher effectivness, leading them to conclude:

...schools and school districts wishing to increase the effectiveness of their teacher workforce may be aided by the systematic use of a broad set of information on new candidates, and particularly if they gather information outside the realm of traditional teaching credentials. Nevertheless, our results are also consistent with the notion that data on job performance may be a more powerful tool for improving teacher selection than data available at the recruitment stage.

They're being charitable. 12 percent isn't very much. It's 12 percent. And that amount is consistent with (and in most cases, larger than) pretty much every other similar study that's been conducted. They all point to same the conclusion: the nature of the teaching profession is such that you simply can't predict ahead of time with any degree of accuracy who's going to be a good (and bad) teacher. 

Chad's post produced pushback in the comments section, and in general this whole line of reasoning (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a recent article) has been attacked by people who are in the teacher preparation and certification business. I think they're wrong, and in being wrong they're putting parochial concerns ahead of the larger best interests of the teaching profession.

The success of an individual in any given job is generally a function of three things: 1) Personal qualities like intelligence, motivation, diligence, creativity, discipline, organization, inter-personal skills, work ethic, etc.; 2) knowledge and skills related to the job; and 3) the nature of the organization in which they work. But the relative importance of these three factors in terms of success varies widely among professions. Once you get past a fairly minimal level of competence, there's very little difference between the best McDonald's cashier and the worst. It's a simple job requiring little training and there's no way to be great at it. 

Some jobs are more complex and important but still highly dependent on knowledge and skills. My uncle, for example, repairs commercial air conditioning units for a living. It's complicated work. You could plunk a Nobel-prize winning physicist down in front of a huge broken HVAC unit and, unless he had the right training, he'd have no way to fix it. Nor would he be able to figure out how to fix it on his own. And if he did receive the right training, it's unlikely that he'd be much better at HVAC repair than my uncle, despite his (presumably) genius I.Q. HVAC units are a lot more complicated than cash registers and as such people who repair them are more well-paid, but once you learn to fix them, they're fixed--they can't really be fantastically well-fixed. 

Other professions are different. A good friend of mine, for example, finished her law degree at Georgetown a few years ago and is now practicing appellate law. It turns out that she's really good at this. But while she couldn't do her job without the knowledge she learned in law school, that knowledge isn't what distinguishes her from other lawyers. It's her personal qualities--she's an unusually smart, analytic, creative and hard-working person. And not coincidentally, law is a profession where there is huge variance in effectiveness, where greatness is absolutely possible, and great lawyers are paid and recognized as such. The same is true in professions like medicine, journalism, business and the arts. In every case, knowledge and training matter, but it's the relatively large influence of personal qualities that leads to the possibility of greatness and all that entails. 

The most important conclusion to draw from Kane's research is that teaching is one of those professions too. Gladwell built his article around the non-predictability of teacher effectiveness, and that's gotten a lot of attention because it has implications for certain concrete policy issues like teacher certification. But the larger, more important point is that that non-predictability flows from the large variance in teacher effectiveness. Some teachers are much, much better than others, as is always the case in professions that depend highly on personal qualities--as I've defined them, or in terms like "expert thinking" and "complex communications" (per Murnane and Levy), or something else. Yes, these qualities can be improved and inculcated to an extent, and the quality of the school in which people teach matters too. But think back to the best teacher you ever had. How much of their success compared to the worst teacher you ever had was a function of what they learned in graduate school? And of course there's the obvious example of higher education where there are also great teachers and terrible ones and huge variance in effectiveness in a profession where little or no formal teacher training or certification is required.

The problem with the teaching profession as currently organized is that it puts too much emphasis on the things that matter less (note: I'm not saying they don't matter at all), i.e. knowledge and skills, and not enough emphasis on the things that matter more, i.e. personal qualities like intelligence, work ethic, etc. By contrast, my friend wouldn't have gotten a job as an appellate lawyer if she hadn't clerked for a federal judge, and she wouldn't have gotten the clerkship if she hadn't graduated magna cum laude from a Top 20 law school, and both of those things--the grades and the admission to Georgetown--were in turn a function of the personal qualities that make a great lawyer. The legal profession is organized to select and filter for the things that matter in lawyering in a way that the teaching profession--where ideas like "Top 20 school" and "magna cum laude" mean very little--is not. And that applies not just to hiring but everything that happens afterward--great lawyers are rewarded and recognized and credentialed in all kinds of meaningful ways that teachers aren't. 

In other words, people who insist on maintaining the primacy of knowledge and skills in the teaching are standing in the way of a goal they often profess to hold dear: elevating teachers to the ranks of true professionals. It's understandable, in a way--there's a lot of institutional and professional prestige in the current way of things, and moving away from it involves an idea that seems contradictory--that there are severe limits on the extent to which good teaching can be taught. But that's what the data show, and the sooner our attitudes and policies reflect that, the better off teachers will be.

Barista Training in Chicago

From the Chicago Sun-Times today:

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

And apparently these machines weren't intended for the teacher's lounge:

"We also look at it as a waste of money because the schools didn't even know they were getting the equipment, schools didn't know how to use the machines and weren't prepared to implement them into the curriculum," Sullivan (the Inspector General) said.

A new barista training program, perhaps?

The Situation Room

Presuming all goes well and I'm not bumped for someone more photogenic and/or an international crisis of some kind, I'll be on CNN's The Situation Room today between 4:15 and 4:45, where they're using Malia and Sasha Obama's first day of school as an excuse to talk about the DC public schools they won't be attending, why said schools are so bad, Michelle Rhee, etc. CNN didn't ask but in case anyone's wondering I think the Obamas are perfectly justified in sending their children to the best schools they're able to find and afford. I also hope that they and the many other political and business leaders in Washington DC who are similarly fortunate feel a commensurate special responsibility to help give all of DC's schoolchildren the opportunity to attend a public school of similar high quality. 

Change, Exported

I'm in Panama (the country with the canal, not the city with the Spring Break parties) seeing some family. Driving down the Pan-American Highway, a road that links Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to the far south of South America, I see a sign for a Panamanian presidential candidate with the slogan, "El Cambio en que puedes confiar." Translated: The Change You Can Believe In.

I guess this means President-elect Obama is already shaping foreign elections...

Too Much Information?

Higher education policy disputes in Washington, DC are generally about information. As a rule, the federal government doesn't (and shouldn't) regulate how universities conduct their academic affairs. So most new federal initiatives consist of lawmakers asking questions: How many of your students graduate? How much money do you spend? On what? And so on. For the DC higher education lobby, the standard response to proposed new information reporting requirements is to (A) Loudly declare that they're a bad idea, and then (B) Go back to the office and try to come up with a justification for (A).

Such justifications come in three flavors. First, that American colleges and universities operate under a sacred principal of autonomy that dates back to (and possibly precedes) the founding of the Republic. This one hasn't been working very well lately, mostly because it's not true, but also because it begs the question of what, exactly, universities have to hide. The second argument is that new reporting requirements represent a terribly onerous administrative burden--because higher education institutions are apparently the only organizations in all the world that have been unable to use information technology to realize vast increases in the efficiency of gathering, storing, and processing information. Third, colleges argue that sending more information to the feds would constitute a grave threat to student privacy, a kind of creeping Big Brotherism that must be opposed at all costs. This one has been gaining traction lately, particularly given the current administration's attitudes towards civil liberties.

It's also nonsense. Colleges are more than happy to cough up individual student data to non-profits set up by the student loan industry. Then I pick up the New York Times and read that colleges are perfectly willing to disclose information about individual students to large private corporations, in exchange for money, so those corporations can sell students high-interest credit cards and give them a head start on pursuing the American dream of over-consumption and ruinous debt. Because while the U.S. Department of Education (a public agency accountable to elected officials which operates under strict federal privacy rules) can't be trusted, Bank of America can. It all depends, as it usually does, on whose interests are being served.

Department of Things I Am Sad to Have Been Right About

From a post dated July 12, 2008:

Walking out of an afternoon showing of Wall-E last weekend, I noticed some big cardboard movie displays advertising The Spirit, a forthcoming movie based on the classic Will Eisner comic book series, to be written and directed by Frank Miller. We're clearly living in a Frank Miller heyday, and it's been a long time coming...[four-paragraph summary of Miller's career]...but to be honest I'm worried that Miller's descent into over-stylization and self-parody, both visually and verbally, is too deep to reverse, and that he'll end up crashing and burning at the very moment when decades of influential work are finally bringing him fame and fortune."

From The Onion AV Club, this week:

In comics, it took Miller decades to devolve into embarrassing self-parody. In film, he’s made that leap over the course of a single disastrous film. A.V. Club Rating: D

From the New York Times:

To ask why anything happens in Frank Miller’s sludgy, hyper-stylized adaptation of a fabled comic book series by Will Eisner may be an exercise in futility. The only halfway interesting question is why the thing exists at all...a talky, pretentious stew of film noir poses and crime-fighter clichés.

Etc., etc. It's a shame.

Crisis Averted

In May the Center on Education Policy (CEP) released a report looking at how states structured their Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs). The No Child Left Behind Act required only that AMOs reach 100% by 2014 and that each increase must be equivalent, and it allowed states up to three years of no growth. It being 2002 at the time, about half the states chose to backload their AMOs, calling for no gains in the early years of the law, followed by steep increases each year leading into 2014. Depending on your cynicism, this was either to allow districts the opportunity to prepare for the new requirements or a way to force changes to the next generation of the federal education law.

The May CEP report warned of the impending consequences of such backloading:

Although states may have had logical reasons for choosing a backloaded approach, it appears that schools and districts in backloading states are likely to have more difficulty making AYP than in previous years, and the number of schools identified for NCLB improvement in these states might rise.

The numbers are now in ($) for 46 states and the District of Columbia, and it turns out the CEP report was wrong. Nationwide, 7.3 percent more schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) this year, for a total of 35.6 percent of all Title I schools. But, that increase was led by the states categorized by CEP as "incremental." While backloaded states averaged only a 3.2 percent increase, incremental states rose 7.7 percent. The percent of schools rated "in need of improvement" rose 2.1 percent for a total of 17.9. This too was led by states that were incremental in their AMOs.

These results suggest that Charlie Barone was right: the safe harbor provision is working. Safe harbor allows districts and schools to make AYP so long as they reduce by 10 percent the percentage of students in any sub-group not meeting proficiency targets. Backloading states are clearly benefiting from this provision (which Charlie dubbed the "poor man's growth model"), and this is entirely a good thing. The law's built-in flexibility is being put to work. The fear that 100 percent of schools will fail is not happening, and the sky remains intact.

The Gladwell/ Kane Theory of Teacher Recruitment

Overheard: a business CEO will hire any Harvard MBA before they even begin the program. It isn't the education itself that makes them valuable employees, in this estimation, it's the screen that let them in that proves their quality. In education, it turns out all of our traditional screens, and even some untraditional ones, don't tell us much about how effective the incoming teacher will be.

In a recent report for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jonah Rockoff, Brian Jacob, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger look at a host of teacher recruit characteristics and analyze their ability to predict the teacher's effectiveness in the classroom based on these characteristics. The characteristics include some commonly studied ones like their SAT scores, whether the teacher passed their licensure test on the first try, their undergraduate major, and the selectivity of their undergraduate college. The list also included less commonly used measures like tests of cognitive and mathematic ability, conscientousness, extraversion, and efficacy. They also included a commercial screener used by several large urban districts.

The added information did lead to better predictions. But even with all these new variables on incoming teachers, the researchers could explain only 12 percent of the variance in teacher effectiveness. As they wrote, "This underscores the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of identifying systematically the most highly effective or ineffective teachers without any data on actual performance in the classroom."

The findings do not mean this difficult task is impossible (promising research out of Louisiana suggests that teacher preparation programs matter), but it does suggest we take the Malcolm Gladwell / Tom Kane theory of teacher recruitment more seriously. It means that, to get a higher quality teaching workforce, it isn't simply a matter of recruiting more talented, more efficacious, or more extraverted teachers. It means allowing more people to try their hand at the profession, intensively screening them while they're in the classroom, and then enacting salary and personnel policies to both keep them in the profession and keep them performing at a high level.

Unfortunately, we're much more willing to allow screens (really just educated guesses) at the moment of hiring than after the teacher has been in the job. One huge obstacle in basing personnel decisions on teacher effectiveness is being confident that value-added measures reflect actual value and not the effects of one bad class. Some excellent research by Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen tested the bad-apple theory in teacher value-added effectiveness. They used three years of data to rank teachers into five groups, and then asked what percent of teachers moved groups. In one dataset, 31 of 281 teachers placed in the bottom group in their students' growth in both math and reading. If we denied these teachers tenure, would we losing great teachers? Or ineffective ones, as the data would predict?

As the chart at left shows, the estimations were by no means perfect. The screen would eliminate some fair and even some very good teachers, but mostly (and this word is not comforting to teachers or their representatives) it screened out ineffective teachers. Mostly the teachers who were ineffective in their first three years were ineffective after.

The word "mostly" should not be reason to summarily dismiss the use of value-added teacher effectiveness scores in personnel decisions. Rather, it should be embraced as a good start, something to be combined with other evaluations, especially given new research suggesting good teaching cannot easily be screened at the hiring stage.

Giving the Game Away

The No Child Left Behind Act is often criticized as creating "perverse incentives" or "unintended consequences" whereby seemingly virtuous policies inadvertently cause more harm than good by incenting bad behavior. It's a convenient man-bites-policy-dog way to frame a news story, and it allows people to preface denunciations of the law with some variant of "Of course I agree with the goals of the NCLB, but..." I've always been puzzled that educators are so quick to argue from the assumed moral weakness of their colleagues, taking as a given that teachers and administrators are bound by various made-up laws of human behavior that compel them to sell little Johnny down the river at the first opportunity. 

That said, the general principle is sound: education is complex and multi-dimensional and accountability systems should reflect that. Incentives should be aligned with goals; if they're not, problems can arise. There's a longstanding concern, for example, that holding high schools accountable for student learning will create incentives for schools to "push out" low-performing students by implicitly or expliciting encouraging them to leave. The solution seems pretty obvious: hold high schools accountable for graduation rates, reducing the temptation to engage in devious push-out behavior. Shut down the easy way out. 

Unfortunately, the high school graduation provisions in NCLB as written are pretty much a joke, allowing many states to adopt insane metrics that bear little or no resemblence to the actual percent of students graduating from high school and/or creating improvement timelines so attentuated that schools wouldn't have to get all students through high school until roughly the launch date of the Starship Enterprise. So the U.S. Department of Education took two eminently reasonable steps by require all states to (1) adopt a common standard of "high school graduation rate" whereby those words actually mean what they say, and (2) create improvement timelines that don't theoretically terminate in the next millenium. 

This would go along way toward solving whatever perverse "push-out" incentives currently exist. It also reflects the explicit policy of nearly every state in the nation, as expressed by their governors in a recent agreement. Naturally, the National Governor's Association supports this policy is working to eviscerate this policy while people are distracted during the upcoming transition. As Charlie Barone reports: 

A reliable source tells us that the NGA is lobbying the Obama transition team to roll back the regulation issued by Secretary Spellings in October that requires states to set a uniform and accurate method for measuring high school graduation rates. Spellings simply put in regs what the Governors themselves pledged to do more than three years ago. However, only 16 states so far have done so.

NGA has targeted a key member of the education transition team to carry their water for them and has been pressing hard, but it is not entirely clear whether the targeted person is helping them.

High school graduation rates represent a useful clarifying issue. There is no doubt that all students need to graduate from high school. There is no doubt that many students don't, and that poor and minority students are less likely to graduate than others. There is no earthly reason why the method for calculating high school graduation rates should vary from state to state, or that it should be anything other than "of those students who begin high school, the percent who graduate." If you're against meaningful accountability for a common high school graduation rate standards, then you're simply against accountability and common standards, period, full stop. 

Investing in the Downturn

Budget cuts and fights to preserve funding will dominate the headlines for at least the next year. But, sometimes, even in a downturn, it's important to invest new funds in particularly promising areas. It's why even in the face of massive financial uncertainty, GM is doing what it can to continue investments in ideas such as the battery-powered Chevy Volt.

A recent article in the Newport News, VA Daily Press gives a good example from education. The article highlights the impressive growth of the Virtual Virginia online learning program. The program offers 22 different AP courses and serves 2,200 students. But, despite the program's success, funding limits capacity and there are wait lists for some courses. And, with looming budget cuts, even the program's current capacity is at risk.

Consider these important facts in the article when thinking about this investment decision:

• The program was designed to serve schools that couldn't afford to hire teachers for AP and other classes.
• More than a quarter of U.S. high school students lack access to advanced courses at their schools, and those at small or rural schools "have the least opportunity to take one or more advanced courses in math, science, English or a foreign language," according to a 2007 NCES report.
• Local districts also save money by not having to hire teachers; Virtual Virginia, for example, only requires districts to pay for textbooks and computer access and assign teachers to monitor students' in-school online sessions.

We don't have enough evidence from the article to run the numbers on the Virtual Virginia program, but it's likely that this type of program is the "Chevy Volt" of public education. It might actually save money. And, it's especially important if we prioritize effectiveness in accomplishing important goals, such as broadening and ensuring equitable access to advanced courses in math, science, and other areas.

The Southern Regional Educational Board, which does study these issues at a much deeper level, just published a thoughtful policy brief making the case for a better, more sustainable funding model for state-run virtual schools. Embedded in the brief is the idea that performance is important--even more so in a downturn.

PS -- Of course, things are so bad at GM that even the Volt is taking a hit.

Journalists and Charter Schools

Eduwonkette has some beef with the Washington Post's recent coverage of charter schools, specifically the Post's claim that public charter schools are outperforming district-run public schools (thanks Chad) on student achievement measures. Accompanying the test score results, the Post reported on the successful practices many schools engage in as reasons for their high scores - many of which wouldn't be possible without the freedom granted to these schools through charter schooling:

With freedom to experiment, the independent, nonprofit charters have emphasized strategies known to help poor children learn -- longer school days, summer and Saturday classes, parent involvement and a cohesive, disciplined culture among staff members and students.

Eduwonkette's complaint is about the accuracy of the Post's comparisons and she reaches back to 2004 and the hubbub that followed the AFT's report, which found that charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools. Eduwonkette's problem seems to be that charter school advocates are happy to take results coming from bad research design (the Post's coverage) so long as they are favorable, but jumped all over the research design of the AFT's report when it came out, even taking out a full page ad in the New York Times.

Sure, advocates are always happy to see results that support their position, but it's not fair or even all that reasonable to compare the Post's journalistic reporting of one city's results with the AFT's research report comparing charter schools and traditional public schools nationwide. The AFT sought to make a judgment on charter school performance across the nation, and made pretty big claims about the results, saying that they, "reinforce years of independent research that show charter schools do no better and often underperform comparable, regular public schools". In contrast, the Post made conclusions about the performance of charter schools in just one city, and, to their credit, included a graphic that shows the variance in charter school performance, rather than just relying on averages to tell the story.

This variance is the most important point in the story - that there is nothing inherent to charter schooling that produces higher student achievement, but, given the flexibility, there are some very concrete things schools can do to dramatically improve student achievement. That's good news for both charter schools and district-run public schools. And it's very good news for students.

Of course Eduwonkette has a point about the difficulties inherent in drawing conclusions from these types of comparisons - it's difficult to get true random assignment or perfect control groups and there is interference from a host of confounding variables. And it's important that journalists understand and explain these limitations and contextualize the results. But I would argue that there are very different implications and responsibilities when this type of rough comparison is conducted by and reported in a newspaper article than when it comes as a research report from a national and very prominent organization.

It's also important to mention the Post's first story in their charter school series, this one focusing on potential conflicts of interest in the charter school board. Clearly, conflicts of interest are bad and should be avoided, but I'm having a hard time seeing 1) how, exactly, these conflicts of interest manifested themselves in bad decisions by the charter school board and 2) a negative impact on charter schools in D.C., which, as the second story indicates, are doing well in large part because of a rigorous approval process by the charter school board. As this letter to the editor states, it's very important that journalists avoid dragging someone through the mud simply because he happens to work in and have expertise in an area, and then volunteers his time to share that expertise in an official capacity. It sends a message to the business community that they, and their expertise, are not welcome in public education.

Public Goods

The Washington Post deserves praise for the series they've been running recently on charter schools. But this graphic is mislabeled and misleading. Charter schools are public schools too, and it'll be nice when they're seen as complementary, friendly competition to traditional public school systems.

Edubroderism

Like many people, I think President-elect Obama has made a good choice in selecting Chicago Public Schools superintendent Arne Duncan to be the next Secretary of Education. I've seen him speak in public twice and was impressed both times; he comes across as knowledgeable, down-to-earth, and committed to creating better schools for children who desperately need them. While Chicago clearly has a long way to go and the city's NAEP scores still lag other big urban districts, it's been on my mental list of cities that appear to be well-led and moving in the right direction. 

The pick took a while and in the interim a spate of stories appeared characterizing the selection as symbolic of various internecine education policy fights with the Democratic party. Of course, such divisions exist. But there's a growing tendency among various observers to engage in a certain kind of education policy high Broderism, using the disputes as an excuse to call for a renewed effort to build consensus, move beyond entrenched ideological positions, find common ground, set aside anger, and combine the best ideas of both sides in forging a new synthesis on behalf of the children. 

Look, maybe there are education issues where the middle way is best. But maybe there aren't. Sometimes the middle ground is a no-man's-land full of trenches, shell craters, and standing water. As is often the case, opposing ideas are sometimes irreconcilable. The new edu-centrism would be more convincing if people spent a little more time articulating what these synthesis policies actually look like, and why they're better than the ideas currently being debated. That's the difference between a position and a pose. 

More Than Butts in Seats

Education Sector recently completed an extensive process looking at higher education accountability systems in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. In part, we undertook the task to be able to answer comments like this one at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

As a former dean, I was responsible for collecting and reporting “outcome” data on both students and programs to the provost, who then reported it to the appropriate accrediting bodies. I am not aware of any attempt to use the data to inform policy decisions. To use the data in that way would have been completely inappropriate, since we only tended to collect data that was required, easily collectible, and fit neatly into a file for statistical analysis : butts in seats, before and after measures on very elementary standardized exams, student perceptions of faculty, etc. I don’t think any educated person would consider using such data to assess the quality of an institution.

Note how the commenter places contemptuous quotes around "outcomes." While his experience backs up our findings that many places are not collecting enough accountability information, our report documents places where it is being done: The University of Texas System is using Collegiate Learning Assessment and National Survey of Student Engagement scores in a meaningful way. South Dakota is using Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency scores to calculate learning gains for students in their first two years in college. The University of Hawaii-Hilo is using major field exams to test student knowledge across nine disciplines. Ohio is calculating expected graduation rates using student input demographics. A handful of states are using real wage data to track graduates after degree completion. These examples show that it is possible to assess student learning and outcomes across large and diverse higher education systems. States just need to follow these early leaders.

The other thing to note about the above comment is its derision of the current accountability system. Not only was his institution not collecting meaningful data, but they had no mechanism in place to use it effectively. Read our report, Ready to Assemble: A Model State Higher Education System, to see what data states are already collecting and how they are putting it to work.

Do What's Already Being Done

In September 2006, the bipartisan Spellings Commission lamented low college graduation rates, rising student costs, and inadequate information about student learning.

But while the report was correct in its emphasis, it was eventually doomed by the federal government's limited role in higher education. If colleges are going to be held accountable, states will have to carry most of the load. About three-quarters of all undergraduates are educated at public two- and four-year institutions, states provide the bulk of the funding for these institutions, and governors and state legislators appoint the trustees and governing boards that run them. If our colleges and universities are to improve, it must be states that provide the leadership. And, in an economic climate where postsecondary education credentials matter more than ever, it is in the best interest of states to maximize their investments.

In 2008, Education Sector conducted a comprehensive analysis of state higher education accountability systems. We examined thousands of documents, Web sites, laws, and policies for all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. We worked to answer two fundamental questions: 1) What kind of information does the state gather about its colleges and students? 2) How does the state use the information it gathers to make colleges and students more successful?

The results were both hopeful and sobering. On the plus side, states are collectively gathering a great deal of valuable information. Some have developed innovative methods to measure student progress in learning, graduation, and success in the work force. Others are carefully tracking the way colleges are distributing financial aid to low-income students. From research output to student engagement to economic impact, states are accumulating more information about more things in higher education than ever before.

But no state is gathering all the information it could. Best practices exist in isolation, with a handful of states tracking important outcomes that most states ignore.

Read today's Education Sector report, "Ready to Assemble: A Model State Higher Education Accountability System," to learn what states are already doing to make higher education systems accountable.

Time for an Education Bailout? California’s Schools Will Likely Need One

The latest numbers from California suggest that the state is running out of money so quickly that it may have to start to pay its bills with IOUs. It is uncertain what the impact of the state’s problem will be on schools, but it looks bad, and is getting worse by the day. In November, the state’s Legislative Analyst estimated a budget gap of around $28 billion between now and June 2010. The annual budget is just over $100 billion with around 40 percent of that going to schools (K-12 and community colleges) (see report here). The budget gap has jumped in the last week to $40 billion, and the urgency is mounting to act fast before the state runs out of money. The Governor has started a debt clock that ticks at $470 for each second of inaction (here) The State Treasurer has suggested that the state may have to stop all construction projects because it will run out of funding paying for its constitutional obligations.

The Governor called a special session in Nov with a lame duck state legislature to address a then smaller gap, and the session ended with no results. He declared a new special session with a new Legislature in December and started with generally the same mix of new revenues and cuts. The political battle is over how much of this gap will be covered with cuts vs. new revenues. The Governor and legislative Democrats (majority party in both houses) are proposing a mixture of new taxes and program cuts, with many differences between the two. In contrast the legislative Republicans are calling for programmatic cuts to solve the problem.

So What Does All of This Mean for Schools?
Schools have been waiting to see how bad the cuts will be. Today’s news suggests that it could be pretty bad. The Senate and Assembly Republican (minority party) weighed in with a proposal that was heavier on the cuts than on the new revenues (here). Combined their plan would address $22 billion of the $40 billion hole. And of that $22 billion roughly half ($10.6 billion) was reduction to K-14 education (K-12 schools and community colleges which are funded together through a constitutional minimum guarantee). In addition they propose significant reduction to early childhood programs. Since this year is already half over, there may not be a lot that schools can do to reduce costs significantly in the current school year, although they better save onto every unobligated nickel. And, while this proposal was quickly blasted by the Governor and the Democrats (here), it is important to recognize that this proposal only addresses half of the problem. So, if the state is going to solve the $40 billion hole, it may take this level of cuts to education or higher plus additional cuts and new taxes.

Why the Rest of the County Should Care.
One in every eight students in the US is educated in California. California current funding per pupil is already below the national average, and near the bottom if adjusted for cost of living. Because of its modest funding and high costs, California schools have smaller staffs than schools in other states – larger class sizes and fewer administrators and other support staff. Take off another $10 billion in funding, and class sizes will balloon even more. At what point does it become a national interest to keep schools from going under. Is it time for the federal government bailout for education? I think this would be a better investment in our future than many of the other bailouts being provided.

Finlandia

We returned from Finland on Saturday, so here are my initial overall impressions, focused mostly on the implications for K–12 education. To begin, let me acknowledge that one can't draw firm conclusions about cause and effect after a short visit. Spending a week in a far-off country means you return knowing a lot more than you knew, and a lot more than most people know back home. You're also armed with various illustrative anecdotes and quotations that are useful to bolster arguments. But I would never claim total knowledge of the American education system, and I live there, spent 19 years in school there, get paid to write and think about it full-time, etc. So my factual assertions will be limited to the obvious (e.g. it's very dark in winter), first-hand observations, and expert sources. When I say, for example, that "Finns are a punctual people," that's based on both experience (e.g. the senior ministry of education official who arrived at an 11:00 AM meeting at precisely 11:00 AM and said "I'm sorry for almost being late.") and official documents (it's a direct quote from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' official "Guide to Finnish Customs and Manners.")

I'll start by sketching out what Finland is like and how the education system works in broad strokes. It's a remote and sparsely populated nation. There are slightly fewer than 5.5 million people living in a land area about 80 percent the size of California, mostly near the southern coast. The population is racially and religiously homogenous—98 percent are native Finns and 82 percent are Lutheran. For almost 600 years, Finland was under the dominion of Sweden, which is why Swedish is still the second national language and all students are required to learn it in school, despite the fact that the Swedish language minority comprises only five percent of the population. The country's small immigrant population is growing, notably with Russians, Estonians, and Somalis. Finland has very liberal international trade policies, which is more or less a prerequisite for prosperity when you're a long way from everything and your only natural resource is wood. Labor markets, by contrast, are highly regulated, with roughly 70 percent of workers belonging to trade unions, including teachers. The biggest company is Nokia, the cell phone giant.

The Finnish sensibility is an interesting mix of individualism and cultural solidarity. On the one hand, they're very invested in the idea of equality and seem quite comfortable with the high-tax, high-service Nordic welfare state. Because Finland is geographically and linguistically remote—Finnish is a difficult language understood by few non-Finns—they seem to understand the need to stick together. But that mutual support is a means of giving people space to live their lives in an individual, self-directed way. Our hosts at the Finnish embassy in America said that they were far more involved with their neighbors and local community in the U.S. than back home. Finns tend to be taciturn; the chairperson of the Education Committee in Parliament compared Finns to the allegedly indecisive, endlessly voluble Swedes by telling us that "In Finland, we talk a little while, make a decision, and get to work." 

Finland received the highest scores in the world on PISA, an international test of 15-year olds in science, reading and math. That success was repeated on the 2003 and 2006 version of the test. This was, and is, a big deal for them. For most of its history, Finland was ruled by larger, more powerful nations to the east and west. Unlike Americans, they're not prone to think in terms of exceptionality and national greatness.

It's important to understand what Finland's PISA test score distribution looks like beyond the world-beating average. Performance in the top 10 percent of Finnish schools is almost exactly the same as the average among the top 10 percent of all OECD schools. Performance in the bottom 10 percent of Finnish schools, by contrast, is better than the median score for the OECD. In Finland, the Lake Wobegon effect is essentially real—it appears to have few if any low-performing schools. And this is perfectly congruent with the aims of its larger social and economic policies--few people get very rich, but no one is truly poor.

Finnish children don't start 1^st grade until they're seven years old. But most are engaged with state-supported early childhood services from an early age. Parental leave policies are (as Dana Goldstein explains) very generous, and once parents return to work they have the choice of a receiving a child care subsidy or enrolling their children in municipal day care (the most popular option; we visited three such facilities during the week.) They're not in a big hurry to teach reading, focusing more on play and socialization, but it would be inaccurate to describe Finnish day care as non-educational. Half-day "preschool" begins at age six.

All children attend basic primary schools through the ninth grade, when most Finns are 15 years old. All schools follow a single national core curriculum that spells out what subjects must be taught at each grade level, the content to be covered, and the minimum number of hours of instruction. (This includes religious instruction or philosophy for those who opt out.) There are no formal national tests administered to all students a la NCLB. Nor is there a British-style inspectorate system. However, as fellow junketeer Matt Yglesias notes, this doesn't mean that there's no governmental assessment or oversight. National education officials used sample-based assessments to gauge progress, and local municipalities also administer tests as a means of managing their schools. It just happens in a more low-key, non-public way.

Grade retention is virtually unheard of in Finland, homework is generally light, and after-school tutoring is rare. As I wrote earlier, Finns spend significantly less time on education than most countries, particularly the other high-performing nations. While ability grouping is officially disallowed, the principal in the primary school we visited said they try to give more instruction to high-end students in subject like math. While there are no charter schools or vouchers per se, some parents have options among public schools, particularly in Helsinki where population density makes travel to multiple schools feasible. One principal in a school we visited spoke of the school's music and foreign language programs as being key to attracting students. But since standards, funding levels, and teachers in public schools are generally uniform and evenly distributed, and (per above) school-to-school performance variation is unusually low, there seems to be less impetus to create policies designed to engender market competition. 

After ninth grade, the system splits in two. Some students apply to and attend "upper secondary" schools, where they study for three (or sometimes four) years and take college prep-type classes. These students are given a lot of latitude to decide what classes to take (see previous re: independence), and the courses mix students from different age cohorts. Upper secondary students are required to take high-stakes, subject-specific "matriculation exams," the rough equivalent of "A-levels" in the U.K. The results help determine whether students get into the university of their choice—or any university at all. School-level results are publicized by the Finnish media, to the consternation of education officials.

The rest of the students attend three-year vocational high schools, where they receive further education while training for careers. Admission can also be competitive; the vocational school we visited turns away many applicants for it hairdressing program every year. (Hair seems important; one student noted that "Finnish hair is fine and thin, so if your hairdresser makes a mistake the whole village will know.") In one class students were practicing on mannequins while another taught them how to calculate profit margins and otherwise run the financial side of the business. Most Finnish hairdressers are sole proprietors who belong to the hairdressers union. (For those who think welfare states are totally incompatible with capitalism and entrepreneurialism, let me direct you to words such as "profit margins" and "sole proprietors" in the previous sentence.")

The Finnish higher education system has a similar dual structure. There are 20 universities, research institutions built in the classic German mold, and 28 polytechnic institutions where students study subjects like engineering, business and nursing. ("Vocational education" generally has a much broader meaning in Finland than America.) While students can theoretically cross back and forth between the dual tracks, most don't, with the upper secondary schools providing the large majority of undergraduates in both universities and polytechnics. Men are required to spend a year in military service, and it's normal for Finnish students to knock around for a while and not start college until their early or even mid-20s. College tuition is universally free and students also receive a small living stipend while they study.

When asked to reveal the secrets of their PISA success, Finns generally cite two things: egalitarian policies and the quality of the teaching workforce. Finnish teachers are required to get a master's degree from a university in order to get a full-time job. Admission to the programs is extremely competitive, with 10 – 12 percent admission rates overall and a 7 percent rate for the primary teacher education program at the flagship University of Helsinki. A faculty member there told us that applicants came from the top half of the upper secondary pool, which is itself already selective. Teacher applicants sit for a single national exam, with the top scorers moving on to a second screening process based on interviews and in some cases structured teaching observations.

Once they hit the classroom, teachers' salaries are fairly modest, roughly equal those in America. Tenure isn't as automatic as in the states, but all teachers are unionized and enjoy substantial job security. While base salaries are determined by a uniform national schedule, teachers can get paid more to teach in the frozen north or on small islands in the eastern archipelago. Locally-funded performance pay is also an option—in the Helsinki upper secondary school we visited, the municipal government sent the entire faculty on a vacation to Rome as reward for meeting pre-defined (and partially test-based) performance goals. The national student / teacher ratio is slightly below the OECD average, but classes can sometimes be quite large. Teachers are said to enjoy a great deal of autonomy in the classroom—as long as they stick to the national curriculum. "Teachers are told what to teach," one Board of Education official told us, "but not how."

Teaching as an extremely competitive and prestigious profession is obviously quite a contrast to the state of things in the United States. Over the course of the week, we asked almost everyone we spoke with—teachers, principals, ministry officials, politicians—why Finns were so eager to get into teaching. Some cited the satisfactions of professional autonomy. But most came around to some variation of "it's just always been that way." Interestingly, while everyone had clearly thought about this a lot, their historical explanations varied substantially. The consolidated Finnish creation myth of teacher prestige goes something like this:

For many hundreds of years, Finland was a province of neighboring greater powers, first Sweden, then Russia. In the mid-19th century, a new sense of national identity began to emerge, expressed by poets, painters and composers (e.g. Sibelius). At that time, Finland was a very rural society. In every village, there were two important people: the priest and the teacher. Literacy was valued, in part because of Lutheran tradition. So teachers helped Finns become Finns. In the early 20th century the progressive labor movement put a strong emphasis on education and training. Meanwhile, the agrarian movement (now represented by the Centre party in Parliament) put a strong emphasis on the civilization of the rural population. Pro-Christian groups also valued civic education. Many teachers were called to serve as non-commissioned officers in the 1939 Winter War with Russia, a source of national pride. In general, Finnish people understand the vital importance of education to national prosperity and survival, and thus appreciate the role teachers play.

All of which may be true, although as Matt pointed out at one point, many similar things could be said of other European countries where the best and the brightest aren't clamoring to get into the classroom today.

What, then, to conclude about Finland? Despite my recent admonitions, I'm sure that Finnish PISA scores will continue to be deployed as easy evidence in support of various policy agendas. So here are the winners and losers in the "Inappropriately De-contextualized Finnish Education Policy Olympics":

Winners
Teacher unionism
National standards
Mandatory university-based teacher education
Government-sponsored child care and early childhood education
High entry standards into teaching
Teacher autonomy

Losers
Expanded school time
Class size reduction
Strict regulatory and inspectorate-based accountability systems
Increased teacher salaries
School choice

Of course, it makes zero sense to look at things this way. Which is not to say that we have nothing to learn from Finland or other countries; Americans spend too little time considering lessons from abroad. But we have to think about the totality of systems and societies. With that in mind, here's my best guess—and it's a hypothesis, nothing more—about why Finland is so successful and what that means.

In a nutshell, Finland suggests that an egalitarian culture and social policies to match not only make education more effective, they make it less complicated. Or to put it another way: if you know you can trust people, it eliminates the need to do a lot other things.

If you can convince your best students to try and become teachers, for example—even though only 10 percent will be accepted and they'll have to spend five years getting a master's degree—you reap a lot of benefits. Teacher training can be rigorous because the students are smart enough to handle it. Teachers can manage larger classes and work autonomously to achieve common curricular goals. Maybe you don't need to pay them more than a middle class wage (although this is complicated by Finland's very different labor market and compressed range of salaries throughout the economy relative to the American labor free-for-all.) The fact that bad teachers are hard to fire is only a minor annoyance, because there just aren't many bad teachers.

If you provide decent social services and support families with children throughout their lives, then students come to school with fewer behavioral problems, more ready to learn. The high school students we saw were just like ours in many ways—energetic, curious, easily distractable, strangely dressed. But there was an underlying calm to it all that American schools seem to lack. There were no hall monitors, no security guards, and the school administrators reported spending very little time on discipline. The school—and society at large—trusted the students, and the students responded.

All of this makes the primary and secondary schools in Finland good places to work, which makes good people want to work there, which makes them good places to work, and so on. The Finnish combination of social and education policy clearly has many virtues and it's no wonder that many people want to learn from their example. The whole Broader / Bolder agenda essentially boils down to, "If we were Finland, we wouldn't need education reform."

Which may very well be true. But we're not Finland, we haven't been, and we won't be anytime soon. What, then, should we do?

We could start by getting closer. People sometimes dismiss the possibility of learning from Nordic countries out of hand due to their small size and high level of homogeneity. But I don't really buy that. Finland has a lot of empty space, climactic extremes, little arable land or mineral wealth. Nearly everyone is white and the population is dominated by one religion, with most inhabitants living in or near the capital city. But all of those things are also true of Utah; the only difference is that Finland has twice as many people. And the American states that come closest to Finland-level education performance aren't like Utah. They appear to be Massachusetts and Minnesota, both of which have long traditions of liberal policy and only one of which has an obvious Scandinavian cultural tradition. Massachusetts in particular has people from all sorts of racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Moreover, there's no inherent contradiction between prosperity and things like generous parental leave, subsidized child care, universal health care and equitable school funding systems. The United States has the 6th highest GDP per capita in the world, while Finland is 20th—but with a lot less poverty. It's not that we can't be more like Finland, it's that many of us just don't seem to want to. 

That said, Americans have distinct national values that differ from other parts of the world, and distinct realities to confront. Our individualism is more rugged, for one. We’re huge and diverse, open to immigration, and changing all the time. Our federal system of government limits the scope of national policies. We don't have the Finnish historical tradition of valuing teachers, wherever it might have come from.

This creates vexing problems of timing and sequence. We didn't do what was needed to create good schools for everyone. But we can't turn back the clock or make ourselves what we're not. There's a fair critique of the contemporary education reform movement that likens it to an escalating series of pharmaceutical interventions—you give someone a drug to solve a problem, and it works to some extent but also creates side effects that require more drugs, and so on with a need for constant monitoring and fine-tuning and escalating complication, all at great expense, when all the while the patient would have been much better off they'd never been sick in the first place. But a lot of our schools are sick, right now. Finland trusts local schools to do a good job (while monitoring performance in a relatively non-intense way), and they respond. Sadly, a lot of American students are educated in municipalities (I live in one) that have historically proven to be untrustworthy.

So, I think we need to move full speed ahead with policies aimed at identifying the lowest performing schools and improving them by whatever means necessary, including shutting them down and educating their students elsewhere, along with creating more public school choices for parents. There's little to learn from Finland here, due to the absence of really terrible Finnish schools.

Finland suggests that you can have national standards without somehow stamping all the individuality out of K–12 education. National standards are seen by many as a political non-starter in the United States, due to the clichéd (but broadly true) observation that conservatives don't like the "national" part and liberals don't like "standards." But that's mostly a political problem. There's really no strong empirical or policy justification for having, say, 51 different sets of standards for 4th grade math, assigned to students based on their residence in political subdivisions that were created via semi-arbitrary historic processes involving essentially non-educational events (i.e. wars, purchase from foreign countries, etc.) People speak from time to time about states as the laboratories of democracy etc. in this area, but that strikes me as mostly nonsensical and really just a way of constructing an after-the-fact policy argument to justify not spending time working on a politically difficult issue.

I'm not ready to endorse the Finnish dual-track secondary / post-secondary system. It has advantages, particularly in the (relative) non-marginalization of students who attend vocational schools and the whole idea of career-focused education. But while the official Finnish education org chart has lots of horizontal lines going back and forth between the tracks, officials there acknowledge that few students actually move from vocational education to university degrees. Putting people in their place so early in life seems, well, un-American.

Finally, it really does all seem to come back to teachers. There's a huge push underway in the K–12 policy world right now to improve the quality of the teaching workforce. But whenever someone suggests doing this by raising some bar or another—e.g. program entry standards, rigor of training programs, certification requirements, on-the-job performance and tenure standards, etc.—the response is always something along the lines of "Where are you going to find all of these new people who want to be teachers? We barely have enough now." Teach for America has already disproved this in principle, at least to an extent. Twenty years ago, graduates of elite colleges weren't clamoring to enter the teaching profession as it was then defined. Then Wendy Kopp came along and defined it differently, appealing to people's sense of service and adding the crucial element of selectivity—and thus, prestige. Teaching in Finland is not a high-prestige profession that anyone can enter. Indeed, there's probably no such thing.

We don't have Sibelius or a compressed wage distribution or a tradition of teacher prestige in America, so we're probably not going to get to a 10 percent program acceptance rate—or the Gladwell / Kane model of letting four candidates give teaching a shot for every one we give a permanent job—anytime soon. But I think we can do a whole lot better than we are. And if we did that—along with common standards and social policies that support families—we could start to break out of the cycle of low performance and increased pressure and political backlash that we're currently in, and move toward a world where education is more trust-driven, less complicated, and more effective all around.