Obama Tells Truth About Washington Weather Wimpiness

Today President Obama brought some much-needed leadership and tough-minded thinking to the crucial education policy issue of hair-trigger weather sensitivity and resulting needless school closures (at HuffPost via Russo):

"My children's school was canceled today, because of what? Some ice," Obama said, and all at the table started laughing. "As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled," he continued. He said that in their old hometown, "you'd go outside for recess in weather like this. You wouldn't even stay indoors." The President said he would have to bring "some flinty Chicago toughness" to Washington. Asked if he was calling Washingtonians wimps, Obama responded: "I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."

So, so true. I lived in Connecticut until I was 12 and then upstate New York through college, and it's just sad the way school gets cancelled here in DC every time the National Weather Service forecasts a 5 percent possibility of light flurries. An inch or more of snow and civilization itself immediately lurches toward post-apocalyptic chaos with all kinds of public institutions shutting down, cars careening off the road, and hordes of people descending on supermarkets to stock up on bread even though we live in a densely populated city with access to major interstate highways and rail lines and as such there is no chance whatsoever that we're going to run out of food.  In four years of high school in Schenectady, New York, where it drops below freezing around Thanksgiving and stays that way until Easter, school was cancelled exactly once and the superintedent endured all kinds of grief about it because all we got was a measly six inches of ice. When I was in Finland last month, I visited a day care center where four-year old children play outside in sub-freezing weather for three hours every morning, and the Finns have the highest test scores in the world. Clearly there's just a basic underlying weakness of character in this part of the country which in turn explains all kinds of other things. 

Gates Speaks

The Post exerpted the education part of Bills Gates' annual State of the Gates Foundation letter on their op-ed page this morning (Disclosure: Education Sector receives grants from the foundation). It proceeds in pretty standard fashion until this sentence, about halfway through:

Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students' achievement in any significant way.

That's one of the (many) good things about being one of the richest and most famous people in the world. You can straightforwardly admit that your initiatives haven't always been successful, because having done so you're still one of the richest and most famous people in the world. It's also the upside of moving into charitable work in the middle of your life as opposed to the end--you have time to learn, refine, and plan for the long term. Gates also said:

We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

This is important because it goes right to the heart of how we think about accountability and educational improvement. NCLB-style regulatory accountability systems are primarily designed to identify low-performing schools and make them better. How they make them better is complicated and subject to debate: we identify them publicly, we give their students the option to transfer away, perhaps we give them more money, or send a technical assistance team from the State Department of Education, or ask them to submit an improvement plan, or implement a new curriculum, or extend the school day, or replace the principal, or the teachers, or something else. There are a lot of options. But they all involve preserving the existing school. And that approach , in turns, stems from the fact that schools are seen as public institutions, which they are, and thus we apply public institution improvement ideas to them. In many areas of public interest, we have little choice--if the Department of Defense isn't performing well, we have to improve it, because we can't not have a Department of Defense, nor can we build a whole new one from scratch. 

Schools are different. They're structurally small and decentralized, whereas Defense Departments are, for obvious reasons, not. We don't have to improve existing low-performing schools. It's perfectly possible to just shut them down and build new ones. The fact that the Gates Foundation had more success creating new schools than changing old ones is unsurprising--turning around a chronically underperforming school is really difficult. So difficult that it's worth asking why we should try, when there are other, better, faster, less expensive options instead? 

Go, Grassley, Go!

As college endowments rose dramatically over the last several years, higher education leaders explained low endowment payout rates as savings for hard times. The rates would inherently rise, they said, when the market turned sour. The market's as curdled as it's been in decades, but a survey released today ($) found less than four percent of colleges are planning to raise their payout rates.

The savings-for-tough-times rationale has not matched actions so far. During the 2008 academic fiscal year (July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008), the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 13 percent and college endowments 2.7 percent. Yet, the average payout stayed the exact same (4.6 percent) as in 2007, when the Dow rose almost twenty percent.

Let's take the case of Harvard, because they're the biggest and most interesting. Harvard's endowment began fiscal year 2000 with $14.3 billion in assets. In nine and a half years since, a period in which the broader market declined, Harvard's endowment doubled to $28.5 billion. Using the rule of 72, it managed to grow in value about seven and a half percent annually. The word "value" here is important; it signifies not the rate of return, but total holdings after donations and its payout rate of 4.25 percent are included. They owe some of that growth to federal tax policies, policies that give breaks to donors and exempt earnings from the grasp of tax collectors.

Reading the stories describing the losses incurred during the first six months of fiscal year 2009, I was heartened to see Senator Charles Grassley (Rep., Iowa) continue his campaign to require colleges and universities to pay out at least five percent of their endowment annually--a requirement that all other foundations manage to meet. The idea makes a lot of sense for college and university foundations, and the five percent requirement, moreover, would affect only the top tier of university foundations, since ones with lower assets tend to spend more than five percent already. The best counterpoint against the five percent mandate is to consider what would happen if colleges and universities were forced to spend all of a largesse in one year. That money could not be spent responsibly or sustainably, and Senator Grassley would be wise to allow for flexibility through some sort of rolling average over a multiple year period.

While heavy-handed government action is the least desired outcome, if colleges and universities do not spend more of their endowments during tough times, a five percent minimum would be a helpful prod.

"Work Hard. Be Nice."

Famously, that's the slogan of the much-discussed KIPP network of charter schools that have had great success in helping low-income and minority students learn. Now it's also the title of veteran Washington Post education reporter Jay Matthews' new book chronicling how the organization came to be what it is today. Education Sector is sponsoring an event this Wednesday, January 28th, at 5PM where Jay will be discussing his book along with Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, and Jonah Edelman, executive director of Stand for Children. Spaces are still available but they're going fast! Sign up here. 

Flatline

Despite piles of research showing what works in raising retention and graduation rates, more emphasis on the need for college graduates, and new instruments to measure student engagement, ACT published data yesterday showing we still lose about a quarter of college students after one year and only manage to graduate about half of our students in five years. These are nearly identical to the rates of twenty years ago.

Here's what the rates look like in a chart (because ACT's charts are designed to show year-to-year changes, the chart below utilizes their data to show how minor the change has been):Over a period when enrollment increased more than twenty percent, it is the failure of our nation's colleges and universities to increase student retention and graduation rates that are causing our higher education stagnation.

Learning From Finland, Or: The Semi-Voluntary Internationalization Theory of Higher Education Reform

What does the Finnish War of 1808 have to do with contemporary higher education policy in America? Plenty! You can read all about it in my new Chronicle of Higher Education column, here. 

Distasteful

I've been trying to figure out why the University of Phoenix story bothers me so much, and I think I've come to an honest realization: at the heart of my disdain is the feeling that knowledge and learning should be freely acquired rights for all people. It strikes me as utterly distasteful that a profit can be made off these things like other on commodities. They're not shoes, and they shouldn't be treated as such.

Some would suggest these feelings are just the effete snobbery of a privileged individual. If someone wants to pay for an academic credential, the argument goes, who am I to stop them? A July 2008 Reason article came to much the same conclusion:

There are legitimate criticisms of the university. But the education establishment's hostility to the institution often lies elsewhere, in an attitude toward for-profit higher ed that is essentially an aversion to change and commerce, the same snobbish disdain directed at payday lenders, providers of adjustable rate mortgages, and inner-city fast-food vendors. Few sins are less forgivable in polite society than offering poor people products they actively seek.

The problem with this line of reasoning, besides its obvious failure of subtlety, is that the items listed alongside for-profit higher education as being repugnant (but ultimately acceptable as commodities) are objectively bad things. Payday lenders prey on people living month-to-month; no wealthy person would ever submit to their usurious rates. Adjustable rate mortgages don't seem to be working out too well either for the borrowers or society at-large. Fast food has caloric, fat, and toxin contents that are simply bad for human bodies. These are not the opinions of a high-minded liberal; they are facts determined objectively by experts.

Unfortunately, our public institutions of higher learning have neither the tools to show whether or if they're superior, nor the moral high ground. As "public" higher education becomes increasingly less reliant on public funds, less willing to devote those funds to teaching and learning, and more invested in high-revenue sports, they slowly begin to look more and more like for-profit education institutions. Worse, the for-profit institutions are not stealing "customers" from public institutions through price mechanisms. Public four- and two-year institutions are often cheaper than for-profit alternatives. Rather, the for-profits are gaining market share by offering more night, weekend, and online opportunities to a group of students who are busy during traditional schooling hours. These are real areas where public institutions could learn from the for-profits.

In other areas experts in higher ed have ample evidence to make their case against for-profits. As the single largest recipient of federal student loan money, the University of Phoenix has an official graduation rate of about 15 percent. This number is so low partly because they actively and aggressively recruit students who are often vulnerable academically and/or financially (for more on their recruiting tactics, check out pages 9-13 of this .pdf file from a lawsuit filed against them earlier this month). The business model of for-profit higher education institutions relies on federal student financial aid for the majority of its revenue, which means it's all of our business how that money gets spent.

It's a flawed argument that demand for a certain product automatically leads to its rightness. Just because one can make a profit off something does not mean one should.

Shameful Cont'd

Matt Yglesias responds to the University of Phoenix post below:

I think the main lesson here is that traditional universities need to do a better job of getting into the niche that’s currently dominated by these poorly performing for-profits. In part, state governments would do well to shift emphasis away from trying to burnish the sheen on their “flagship” traditional universities and toward doing more in the way of providing community college services for working and non-traditional students. But given the nature of the American system, perhaps the bigger part of this is that social and intellectual pressure needs to be brought to bear on rich people to stop donating to already-wealthy universities with huge endowments and to instead focus their efforts where they’ll do more good. Harvard and Yale have plenty of money, and their students aren’t coming from needy families. But plenty of students on the low end of the higher education system are genuinely in need, and they simply don’t have much in the way of decent educational services available to him.

Exactly right. To extend the first sentence a bit further: One of the big shortcomings in the market for post-secondary credentials is the lack of meaningful differentiation in degrees bestowed by non-elite institutions. A degree from Princeton is valuable because it transmits important information about the degree-holder: "I was smart enough to get into Princeton."  But most colleges and universities--well over 80 percent--admit the majority of students who apply. Many admit everyone who applies. And since few colleges provide any kind of objective, comparable, reliable information about how much students learn while they're in college, what's left is a huge mass of largely undifferentiated degrees from non-selective institutions. The fact that we live in an unusually large country with many higher education institutions and a high degree of mobility just makes things worse. Practically speaking, there's simply no way for an employer to understand the difference in the quality of education provided at Southeastern State University at Somewhere as compared to the Regional College of Somewhere Else.  One degree from an accredited non-selective institution pretty much looks like all the rest, and this is what allows the University of Phoenix and other for-profits to thrive. If traditional institutions don't want for-profits to eat their lunch, they can't just assert that they're providing a higher-quality education--they need to prove it, by providing actual credible evidence of student learning results and other outcomes. 

Shameful (Part II)

Not to belabor Kevin's point below, but these are serious allegations against the University of Phoenix (UOP) and its parent company, the Apollo Group. Three former students have begun a class action lawsuit against the company for improper handling of their federal student loans. The students allege that after dropping out early in their first semester, they received collection notices from UOP seeking payment for the exact amount of the federal loans.. In other words, UOP is being charged with paying off the students' federal loans and turning around and demanding payment for the same.

Why would the University of Phoenix voluntarily pay, in cash, the full amount of a student's federal loans in exchange for risky future returns?

That's the question everyone should ask, because it makes no logical sense for a for-profit company to take on the debt of students who are most likely to default. Or perhaps it does, when 77% of your revenues come from federal student loans (as for Apollo), and the federal government has rules about loaning to students at institutions with high default rates.

Shameful

That's the only word for the University of Phoenix's conduct if the allegations described in today's Higher Ed Watch and reported in the Chronicle are true. In a nutshell: Back in the early 90's there were a series of scandals involving unscrupulous for-profit colleges that tricked students into borrowing lots of money through federal loan programs for which the students received little or nothing in return. The students would quickly default on the loans, the colleges would keep the money, and the federal government, which guarantees student loans, would be left holding the bag. In response, the feds prohibited students from using federal loans to attend colleges where more than 25% of borrowers default within two years. (Last year Congress changed the provision to 30% within three years). 

Now three former Phoenix students have filed a class-action suit in Arkansas alleging that after they dropped out of the university, Phoenix payed off their federal loans without their knowledge and then turned around and demanded repayment on more onerous terms that the students would have gotten under the federal loan program. Other for-profit institutions have allegedly used similar tactics in the past, involving collection agencies and other high-pressure tactics. Basically, it's a way of lying about default rates that hurts students in the bargain. Phoenix disputes the allegations. 

I'm not among those who think that for-profit colleges and universities are necessarily bad. It's a free country and some institutions have put together a package of services that students want to buy. For-profits often seem to be focused on meeting the needs of their customers, particularly working and non-traditional students, in ways that traditional non-profits do not. But they also tend to be expensive and highly dependent on students borrowing a great deal of money to attend. Dropout rates at for-profits are often quite high. And if more than a quarter or a third of your students are defaulting on their loans within a few years of leaving, then pretty much by definition they weren't getting a sufficiently valuable service in exchange for their money. 

"Our Schools Fail Too Many"

That's what President Obama (!) said yesterday during his inaugural address, which I watched on a Jumbotron while standing near the Washington Monument with roughly a billion jillion other cold and decidedly warm-hearted people. It was the first of two references to schools, the second being: "And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age."

There are no accidental words in an inaugural address. And there are a lot of different ways to talk about the challenge of improving public education. One could say "Too many of our students are failing" or "Too many children can't read" or any number of other things. If you believe that improving educational results is significantly (although by no means exclusively) a matter of improving educational institutions, Obama's formulation should be heartening. 

Equal Funding for All Low-Income Students

The stimulus proposal recently released by the House of Representatives includes a lot of money for education. That's a good thing, unless you subscribe to the Petrilli school bankruptcy theory of education reform. But while Mike and his colleagues are wrong to think that financial stress will induce more reform-mindedness, they're right to point out that there are better and worse ways to pump out billions of new federal education dollars. In that vein, I have a proposal for how Congress should spend the extra $13 billion in Title I funds:

Equal funding for all low-income students.

One might assume this is the way Title I funds are currently disbursed. But they're not. Instead, Congress adjusts the amount of money each district gets per low-income student based on the states' average level of state and local funding per student. Rich states, being rich, tend to spend more. Poor states, being poor, tend to spend less. As a result, poor children living in rich states like Connecticut get 50% more Title I money than poor children living in poor states like Alabama. The Title I program starts with existing wealth-based inter-state disparities in education funding and makes them worse. 

Under normal circumstances, fixing this would be difficult because it would involve redistributing lots of money from rich states to poor states. But these aren't normal circumstances. It's all new money, so everyone's going to benefit. In a perfect world we'd distribute funding inversely to wealth, as Medicaid does, but I'm a reasonable guy and understand that politics is the art of compromise. So let's just go with a simple formula that everyone can understand:

Equal funding for all low-income students.

An even bigger problem potentially lurks in the $39 billion that Congress is considering giving states to support their general education aid programs.  The problem here is that some of the formulas that drive those programs are deeply inequitable and so throwing money on top of them will also make existing disparities deeper still. The tricky thing is that there are really three kinds of general education aid programs to consider:

1) Good general aid programs in states with equitable funding systems (funding systems being defined as the totality of state aid and local property taxes) that would be become more equitable with more general aid funding. These we should feel good about funding.

2) Bad general aid programs in states with inequitable funding systems that would be become more inequitable with more general aid funding. These we should feel bad about funding.

3) Good general aid programs in states with inequitable funding systems that would be become more equitable with more general aid funding. In other words, it's possible to have a bad overall funding system but a well-designed general aid program that just doesn't get enough money to overcome local property-tax based inequities. Indeed, the under-funding is probably the main source of the inequity, and as such pumping more money into the general aid program would be a good thing.

The problem is that it can be hard to figure out from the outside which states with inequitable systems are a #2 state and which are a #3 state, because most analyses measure (as they should) the overall inequitableness of a given state's funding system as a whole. Congress should keep an eye on this issue as it crafts stimulus policy. 

Wealth Disparities

Kevin writes below about the headline from the report released yesterday by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs--that students are paying more for college, but not getting more (and in some cases getting less). But another important finding from the Delta Project's report is the large and growing wealth disparity between private research universities and pretty much everyone else. While spending per student at most institutions has remained flat or declined over the past 10 years, spending per student at private research universities has increased steadily.

As today's New York Times article states:

[The study] describes a system that is increasingly stratified: the smallest number of students — about 1 million out of a total 18 million students — attend the private research universities that spend the most per student. The largest number of students — 6 million — attend community colleges, which spend the least per student, and have cut spending most sharply as government aid has declined.

Figure 14 from the report shows this disparity:

While no one is suggesting that we redistribute wealth among colleges and universities, policymakers should be concerned about this trend. If we continue on this path--and in particular, if states continue to reduce subsidies to public colleges--we could end up with a two-tiered higher education system: a few students will be able to attend elite, well-funded institutions, while the rest of us get our college degrees from schools that are constantly cutting corners.

This Is How You Spell "HAHAHA We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams of A Generation"

For months I'd assumed that the time would come to use that as a blog post title, but it didn't, and I'm hoping that as of Tuesday it never will. So suffice it to say that Maureen and I made the trek up to Ottobar in Baltimore tonight to see Los Campesinos! and you should buy both the albums they released this last year. (Think Belle and Sebastian with more of a punk sensibility.)

The State and District Dilemma of the Stimulus Package –Supplanting Language will be Critical

Leaks about the content of the House version of the stimulus package surfaced publically this morning (2009%20Stimulus%20Executive%20Summary.pdf). State and school district budgets are clearly facing difficult times, and an infusion of federal funds will be a welcomed event. Education related, the package includes $79 billion for general state fiscal relief, ($39 billion of which is for K12 schools and higher ed) plus Title I ($13 billion), special education ($13 billion), school modernization ($14 billion), technology ($1 billion) and several other smaller investments. But, will states and districts be able to use these new funds without violating “supplement not supplant” provisions that typically accompany federal funding for schools? The details here will be critical. Generally when the federal government provides funding to states it includes boilerplate language requiring that states and school districts supplement the state and local funding provided for a specific purpose for example serving Title I students, and not supplant these funds (use federal funds to reduce the state and local funds provided). The purpose for this language is clear. The federal government wants the investment that it makes actually get to the students that it is trying to serve – in this case Title I students. Absent this language, states would quickly thank the federal government for their investment in Title I, reduce the state and local investment in economically disadvantaged students, and use the freed up funds to redirect to whatever priority the state thought was important like balancing their state budget, or creating some new state initiative like expanding the gifted and talented program. To stop this redirection of funds from happening supplement not supplant language is added. Those violating the requirement must return the funding to the federal government. There is a complex auditing process that accompanies this whole thing.

Of course in the current budget situation, supplanting may be exactly what is intended. State budgets are a disaster. For example in California where they face an over $40 billion budget hole, the current proposal on the table would cut funding for the 2008-09 school year by $2.1 billion and defer $2.8 billion in funding until the 2009-10 school year (here). There would be additional cuts in the 2009-10 school year. And since states can’t print money, states must either cut programs or raise taxes – both of which are bad for the overall economy (think Hoover’s cuts at the start of the Great Depression). So it completely makes sense for the federal government to provide funding to states, and Congress may not have as much concern if a school district uses its new Title I funds to keep from eliminating its arts and music programs and other such actions. But since this is not an allowable use of Title I funds, the district’s business officer will need to do some fancy accounting to launder the Title I funds to free up some funds that can be used for arts and music. Then two years from now the business officer will need to convince the auditors that the laundering did not violate federal law. Then the federal governments will send out their auditors to check the district auditors. Looks like lots of work for the bureaucrats. Keep an eye on the supplement/supplant language in the stimulus package as it moves forward because this is an area where details matter.

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.