Teacher Pensions

Call it the chart that launched a conference. In 2007 Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell released a report called “Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio’s Teacher Pension System.” The report, and the attention spawned by it (including a two-day conference Thursday and Friday last week), was driven by one simple chart.

The chart shows the retirement wealth accrual over time for teachers. The report’s title is evocative of the chart; namely, it demonstrates vividly the enormous financial pressure teachers face at various stages of their careers. Podgursky, Costrell, and others have since drawn similar charts for a number of states, and they all show how teacher retirement accounts grow slowly over time, only to spike dramatically at various ages determined by state pension plan formulas. Ohio’s, the first of the state charts and the one below, has two such spikes, one for an early retirement incentive and again at the “normal retirement age.” In the chart below, the hypothetical teacher who enters teaching at age 25 gains over $100,000 in future pension wealth at age 50, 55, and 60. Every year they choose to work past age 60, they forfeit pension wealth, meaning they’re actually losing money by working additional years.

Not surprisingly, these peaks correspond neatly to retirements: teachers do respond to the incentives, and they are, for the most part, retiring when the retirement formulas tell them to do so. Research from California shows that teachers changed their retirement age to 61.5 (an unusual retirement age) in response to changes in the state’s retirement structure in the late 1990s. In an era when Americans in general have been retiring at later ages (due to declines in average pension and Social Security wealth), teachers have been retiring younger.

So there I was spending two days last week in frigid Nashville discussing these peaks and how, if, or whether they could/should be fixed. With the Dow and the S & P 500 plunging to six-year lows, it was an interesting time to be having the discussion.

With only a few exceptions, most teachers have defined benefit (DB) pension plans. This means they are guaranteed retirement benefits determined by a formula, which are almost always derived by multiplying some replacement factor (typically 1-3%) times years of service times average final salary. If a teacher lived in a state with a constant replacement rate of 2% and retired after 25 years on the job with a final average salary of $50,000, her benefits would look like this:
Monthly benefit = (.02 X 25 X 50,000)/ 12
= $2,083.33

DB plans were once common in the private sector too, but their frequency has fallen since the mid 1970s. They have been replaced by defined contribution (DC) plans. DC plans, like their name, define the retirement contribution an employer makes on an employee’s behalf. In most DC plans, the employer contributes a certain percentage of an employee’s wages into a 401(k) account.

The conference at times devolved into a DB versus DC debate, but before I get into why that’s a false choice, I’ll take some time to weigh their strengths and weaknesses.

DB plans allow individuals to make predictable estimates of their retirement wealth. Since they are usually accompanied by cost-of-living adjustments, they should not erode significantly because of inflation. They last until the individual passes away. They pool risk, so that the fund can make wise, long-term investments. And when a recession hits, current teachers and all taxpayers bear the responsibilities of DB benefit promises. If their goal is to provide a secure retirement as a reward for a career of service, they do their jobs.

At the same time, DB plans transfer wealth from mobile workers to non-mobile ones (mobile workers contribute but never capture the full benefits that longevity assures), from young to old (the young pay into a system that backloads rewards), and from men to women (women live longer and thus earn benefits for more years). (As an aside on teacher quality, DB plans promise nothing to prospective teachers who want to try out the profession. If they leave before being “vested,” usually after five or ten years, they get nothing.) State-run DB plans are subject to interest group influence, which has caused rising payout rates and given teachers more generous pensions over time, especially when compared to private-sector workers. Worst of all, public sector DB plans are typically locked in. A state that increases pension benefits during boom times cannot rescind this offer during boom cycles. In fact, in many states, pension benefits can never be reduced from the time a teacher begins their career.

DC plans offer an alternative. They give every employee the same percentage of salary contribution. In this way, they make it much easier for employers to project future obligations. Individuals have choices; they can participate if they want to or not, invest as they please, and take the money with them when they leave. There is no “maximum” DC pension wealth, because the contribution stays the same regardless of age or service. If a teacher passes away prematurely, her heirs inherit what remains of the account.

Or, the money in a DC plan could run out. Individuals tend to do a bad job of investing, not saving enough, not diversifying their portfolio, investing in too risky or too conservative assets. DC plans are also subject to the whims of the business cycle, since an employee must reduce risk as they near retirement. All of these factors make DC plans less efficient; DB plans often earn investment returns one to two percentage points higher than DC participants.

Ultimately, the DB plans suffer from two main things. One is the aforementioned peaks, and the other is portability. Both are fixable.

The peaks of the current systems are a serious problem. They pull bad teachers to stay in the profession too long, just so they’re able to earn a full pension. And they push out teachers who want to stay in the profession, because of the severe financial penalties on teachers who opt to stay in after their “normal retirement age.” But peaks are not unique to DB plans. Employees with DC plans time their retirement decisions to coincide with high market values of their accounts. Alternatively, we’re now seeing stories of people delaying retirement because of current economic conditions. Of the two, DB plans are the ones that are not inherently linked to peaks.

Politicians like to reward active interest groups with tangible benefits, especially if those benefits are obligations only at some time in the future. Teacher pensions fit this precisely: their unions have significant influence on state politics, and a promise for pension benefits accrues to members slowly over time. Current politicians saddle future ones with the budget problems while satisfying an interest group. In an analysis of the actions of Missouri’s state legislature, which increased teacher pensions nine times during a ten-year period from 1991-2001 (netting each teacher about $75,000 in future benefits and imposing a $5.4 billion long-term liability to the state), researchers saw little evidence of any real analysis. The economy was running smoothly, so state legislators spent as if there were not going to be tech or housing bubbles looming in the next decade.

Other states have taken similar paths, making reform seem impossible, but two states have experimented with legislation that has introduced sanity to the process. Oklahoma and Georgia now have laws on the books requiring a two-year deliberation period before making any changes to the state pension plan. The state must create an analysis at the front-end of the impacts of the proposal, update the analysis after an additional year, and then pass the legislation. Legislators are no longer able to commit the state to large future budgetary obligations without two full years of deliberation.

The second problem with DB plans is interstate portability. Because benefits accrue slowly over time, a teacher who splits her years of service between two states will earn a significantly smaller pension than someone with the same number of years of service in only one state. Researchers at the conference found a hypothetical teacher with 15 years of service in each of two states would accumulate 35-65% less pension wealth than one who stayed put. Thus far, mechanisms to increase portability mostly fail. Teachers can cash out of the first pension program to purchase additional years of service, but in the process they often must forfeit all of the employer’s contributions in the process. These are substantial sums, since employers often contribute the majority of the fund. Some states even mandate the teacher forfeit any earned interest.

But these rules are not fixed in stone. In reality, these prohibitive rules are in place for nothing other than to enrich the state fund on the backs of teacher-leavers. States have no real incentive to fix them now, but they could form partnerships across borders to agree to more equitable rules for interstate movers. If this didn’t work, the federal government could threaten a pension fund’s tax-exempt status if it refused. Or, employers could begin offering a form of DB plan called cash balance (CB). CB plans guarantee individuals a (generally low) return on their investments and typically require the employer to contribute some percentage of the employee's salary. The account is in the employee's name, but the benefit--the interest rate and contributions--are guaranteed, placing the risk with the employer. An employee can choose whether to take the account balance as a lump sum payment or transfer it to a lifetime annuity.

Ultimately, the peaks and portability problems are the largest barriers to the status quo. Because while defined benefit retirement plans for government workers often come under scrutiny for being too generous(including and especially those of teachers), it's important to think about the goal of any retirement system. Defined contribution plans might be better if the goal is to minimize cost and risk to the employer while giving the employee maximum flexibility. But if it is to create a loyal workforce with the prospect of a secure retirement, then defined benefit plans are quite successful.

Lessons from Grey's Anatomy?

Beyond the Bubble discusses how technology can provide opportunities to improve student assessment. The report briefly highlights iStan, a life-like, sensor filled mannequin used by medical and nursing schools to simulate patient interactions and responses.

Medical education is obviously very different from K-12. But, it's not so different that we can't learn from the practice. Examples from medicine and a variety of other fields show that we can think differently about how to assess students' knowledge and skills -- with profound implications for more personalized instruction. Here's one account from Oklahoma:

“See one, do one, teach one’ is what we used to say,” [Dr. Rhonda] Sparks said. “Once I’d watch something and an instructor had talked to me about it, then I could perform that procedure. Then once I could perform that procedure, I was responsible to teach someone else.” She said some students wouldn’t gain as much experience as others because of random chance, poor mentoring or even simple shyness. The training center allows the university to standardize the learning experience for all students and even tailor the lessons to the students’ strengths and weaknesses.

This is the world that we need to prepare our students to succeed in. It's not just doctors, but also nurses and physician assistants working both individually and in teams. Nor is it some distant future. This is the profession today -- in hundreds of hospitals, medical schools, and even on Grey's Anatomy...

A Little Knowledge

Ezra Klein links to the video of lunatic CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli going on what appears to be an entirely sincere rant about the stimulus package and the Obama administration's plans to help distressed homeowners. As Ezra notes, "Santelli sells himself as a sort of financial sector Howard Beale: He's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. The problem is he's on the trading floor of a stock exchange surrounded by the very masters of the universe who started this mess."

At one point in the video, the conversation turns to idea of helping homeowners in danger of foreclosure refinance at lower rates. Santelli is having none of this, despite the fact that higher-than-projected mortgage default rates are what led to the rapid devaluation of allegedly investment-grade securities held by large financial institutions whose staggering blindness to such risk led to insolvency, frozen credit, a great recession (if we're lucky) and the end of the financial world as we know it. 

At that moment, the trading floor guy to Santelli's left turns and says "How about we all stop paying our mortgage? It's a moral hazard!"

The concept of "moral hazard" has itself become a hazard, I think. Like a lot of ideas rooted in economics, it's one of those insights into human behavior that isn't entirely obvious until somebody explains it to you, and then it seems like new window onto the world. Wikipedia defines it as "the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk." It's theoretically applicable to all kinds of situations: If drivers feel like airbags will protect them in a crash, they'll drive more recklessly, reducing the net injury-reducing benefits of airbags. If you forgive someone's debt, they'll borrow more recklessly, increasing the chance of future default. And so on. It's a useful perspective, something worth keeping in mind.

The problem is that "moral hazard" has for many people been elevated to the level of F=MA as an iron-clad law of the universe and as such is used to justify all kinds of cruel and spurious positions. It's aparently why we didn't bail out Lehman Brothers, which in retrospect looks like a catastrophically bad call. It's poorly understood by many as a catch-all justification for never offering any kind of helping hand. Empirically speaking, there's less evidence to support it than one might think--developing countries whose debt is forgiven don't actually have a horrible track record of subsequent reckless borrowing, for example. Air bags don't actually turn lots of safe drivers into reckless ones, because it still really sucks to crash your car. 

There's an educational lesson in all of this: picking up conceptual bits and pieces here and there without understanding the larger theory and complexities thereof can leave you worse off than if you'd never picked up the bits and pieces to begin with, because you think you understand more when you really understand less. 

The Sugar

If you drive away from the center of Washington, DC on East Capitol Street, around RFK Stadium and across the Anacostia River, you eventually come to the intersection with Benning Road, and a Denny's. For the last decade, the pancake emporium has been the only-sit down restaurant in Ward 7 and as such a symbol of the struggle to bring economic development and a decent life to the mostly low-income DC residents east of the river. This is one of the real dillemmas of urban development: people in low-income neighborhoods like Wards 7 & 8 may have little money per-capita, but they still have a fair amount of money collectively, since there are a lot people living there. And so businesses locate there to serve that market. But they tend not to be very good businesses from a quality-of-life standpoint; if you drive up and down Benning Road you see a lot signs for businesses that conveniently sell multiple things that are bad for you in the same place, e.g. "Checks Cashed, Instant Tax Refund" or "Lottery / Beer / Liquor" or  "Burritos, Chinese Take-Out, Fried Shrimp." 

The city of DC has been taking steps in recent years to try and fix this, as with a new government-subsidized shopping complex in Ward 8 that recently opened up, complete with a Giant supermarket, a Wachovia bank, and other sorts of businesses that one might find in the more affluent parts of the city and surrounding suburbs. And directly adjacent to the complex there's a brand-new IHOP that was filled with customers at 10:30 this morning, all eating at the first sit-down restaurant the area has had in a long time. 

But there's another business thriving in the various run-down strip malls east of the river: dialysis centers. Wards 7 & 8 appear to have been struck by the diabetes epidemic that is afflicting communities nationwide. And the only two sit-down restaurants east of the river, parking lots full because these are the only options the free market provides, are in the business of selling their customers liquid sugar. 

All of which is to say that it's complicated, this business of understanding and managing the intersection of market forces, private capital, consumer choice, public infrastructure, and multiple concerns of health, employment, and quality of life. And there are implications for public education, particularly as the public, non-profit, and private education sectors increasingly co-mingle. You'll see see more from us on this topic in the coming months. 

Love Your Children, Go To Jail

Via Eduwonk by way of DFER, the story of Yolanda Hill, a Rochester mother of five who has been shackled and thrown in prison for enrolling her children in a good school system:

Greece [school district] officials hired a private investigator to look into Hill's claim that her children lived with their grandmother. According to his report, over four months this school year, Hill was seen driving her kids each morning from her home on Morrill Street [in an adjacent disrtict] to her mother's home, where they would board buses for various Greece schools. The school district says that the education provided for the children due to the filing of false paperwork was worth $28,000.

This makes perfect sense when we start with a society that's unusually and increasingly stratified by income, with residential patterns to match, and say "Hey, let's draw lines around our gated enclaves of privilege and create school districts that look exactly the same!" In a decent society that takes educational opportunity seriously, it's utterly insane. 

This also raises some important points about "parental involvement," the lack of which is frequently cited as a reason to not expect too much from schools that enroll many poor and minority children. Ideally, it would be great if parents were able to invest a lot of time in helping their children learn. But if you're a single parent who didn't get a very good education when you were in school, and you have five children, and you're struggling to put food on the table by holding down multiple low-paying jobs (if you're lucky, given skyrocketing unemployment) then the best thing you can do for your kids--the best way to be parentally involved--isn't to spend three hours a night helping with homework or bake cupcakes for the PTA but to get your children into a good school, a school that has the resources and staff to give your children what you can't. 

See here for some ideas about how to fix the financial side of things and here for a look at breaking down barriers between districts.  

Questionable Odds

Nate Silver became justly famous for making the transition from sabermetrics to election predictioneering, but color me skeptical of this New York magazine article that includes his take on the upcoming Oscars. His statistical model, it says:

...involved building a huge database of the past 30 years of Oscar history. Categories included genre, MPAA classification, the release date, opening-weekend box office (adjusted for inflation), and whether the film won any other awards. We also looked at whether being nominated in one category predicts success in another. For example, is someone more likely to win Best Actress if her film has also been nominated for Best Picture? (Yes!) But the greatest predictor (80 percent of what you need to know) is other awards earned that year, particularly from peers (the Directors Guild Awards, for instance, reliably foretells Best Picture). Genre matters a lot (the Academy has an aversion to comedy); MPAA and release date don’t at all. A film’s average user rating on IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) is sometimes a predictor of success; box grosses rarely are.

So that's the six major Oscars (the four acting awards plus picture and director) with five nominees per category multiplied by 30 years multiplied by, what, 10 categories of data? 9,000 discrete pieces of information, total? That's not a huge database, that's a medium-sized Excel spreadsheet. Which may explain the improbable odds, e.g. that Slumdog Millionaire has a 99.0 percent chance of winning Best Picture while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has a 0.0 percent chance.  That's just goofy; anyone who's watched the Oscars faithfully through the years, and yes I admit to this personal shame, knows that the academy is more fickle and unpredictable than that. Anne Hathaway has a 0.0 percent chance of winning Best Actress? Because Oscar voters are famously averse to giving awards to beautiful young actresses? Taraji P. Henderson is four times likelier than Viola Davis to win Best Supporting Actress, because Benjamin Button was nominated (but has no chance of winning) and Doubt wasn't (event though it produced three other acting nominations)? I know journalists are averse to numbers but this is an article that desperately needs a few sentences explaining the concept of "standard error." 

Anyone who wants to give me 50-1 odds on Button and/or Hathaway, or 5-1 on Viola Davis, I can be reached at kevincarey1@gmail.com.  Don't worry, it's a sure bet, Nate Silver's predictive models are foolproof. 

Reassurance Needed

In addition to fully funding NCLB, the stimulus bill includes a gargantuan $54 billion fiscal stabilization fund for education. In many ways this money is best understood as not education-related at all, but simply a politically palatable way for the federal government to prevent pro-cyclical state and local budget cuts that would accelerate the current economic death spiral. If you have to choose public employees to not lay off, in other words, teachers are (delusions of magical poverty-driven school reform notwithstanding) a pretty good choice. They're not "government bureaucrats," they often play an outsized role in their local communities, there are a lot of them, most people feel pretty good about spending public money on education, etc.

Most of the fund is in a big general pot. States have to apply for this money, which is mostly a formality since the funds will be disbursed using a pre-established population-based formula, and there is exactly no chance whatsoever that state applications will be turned down. Given the gravity of the economic situation, even something like Illinois voters amending their state constitution to anoint Rod Blagojevich governor-for-life shouldn't be disqualifying. Heck, bribe money probably gets into the economic bloodstream as fast as anything.

Nonetheless, there are a few policy-related items in the stabilization fund section of the law. For example, in submitting the sure-to-be-accepted applications, state have to provide "assurances" of the following:

• They will give K-12 and higher education (calculated separately) at least as much money in 2009, 2010, and 2011 as they did in 2006.
• They will establish longitudinal data systems to link up various student, school, university and teacher records. 
• They will improve their standards and tests. 
• They will support struggling schools
• They will, and here I quote directly, "comply with the requirements of paragraphs (3)(C)(ix) and (6) of section 1111(b) of the ESEA (20 U.S.C. 6311(b)) and section 612(a)(16) of the IDEA (20 U.S.C. 1412(a)(16)) related to the inclusion of children with disabilities and limited English proficient students in State assessments, the development of valid and reliable assessments for those students, and the provision of accommodations that enable their participation in State assessments" as well as "comply with section 1111(b)(8)(C) of the ESEA (20 U.S.C. 6311(b)(8)(C)) in order to address inequities in the distribution of highly qualified teachers between high- and low-poverty schools, and to ensure that low-income and minority children are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers."

In other words, in order to get the stimulus money, states have to assure the Department of Education that they will comply with federal laws that were enacted over seven years ago. Readers unfamiliar with the actual nature of federalism in the United of States of America might assume that compliance with the law is one of those things that are just kind of assumed and don't require additional bribes and written reassurances, but in the real world implementation of federal statute is much more a matter of negotiation. States have systematically chosen to ignore the above provisions with no real consequences, which unfortunately serves to highlight the generally toothless nature of the "assurance" process, in that it has less weight than the explicit statutes states have contravened. If history is any guide, the states will, in putting their applications together, cut and paste the above text out of the law, insert the words "We will" in front of each section, cash the checks, and be done. I would love to be wrong about this. 

Much more promising is the $5 billion "State Incentive Grant" portion of the stabilization fund. That's still a lot of money, even in the present depressingly grand scheme of things. Because the states are broke, they will all apply for the money, and there will be a lot of pressure on Secretary of Education Duncan to disburse the funds in the much same way as the big pot of stabilization money: proportional to size, so everyone gets their "fair" share, and subject only to a set of vague and infinitely malleable reassurances. But as I read the statute, he has a great deal of discretion to be much more inventive and forward-looking in deciding who gets how much money and establishing bright lines in terms of eligibility and use of funds. Done right, the process could be the launching pad for a terrific multi-year agenda. 

Beyond the Bubble (cont.)

Below, Chad highlighted my new Education Sector report on technology and the future of student assessment. In the report, I show how technology can help to both deepen and broaden assessment practice--by assessing more comprehensively and by assessing new skills and concepts.

Beyond the Bubble, of course, refers to the multiple choice question types that dominate NCLB-mandated state assessments.* But, it also refers to breaking through the static nature of the current policy debate around testing. You can hear me talk more about the current debate and discuss the implications of the report in this online interview.


*Disclaimer: Multiple choice question types can be an important part of a nutritious and well-balanced assessment diet.

Stalled at Launch

In K-12 education we have long debates about the purposes of public schooling, whether the focus should be on the basics or 21st century skills or if that's even a useful distinction, the best ways to assess student learning, how to contruct accountability systems that do more harm than good, etc. But underyling that discussion is a general consensus that it's possible to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate of what students know, and that it's useful to compare students who attend one educational institution to students who attend other educational institution in this regard--or, at the very least, make the information public in a way that the people who attend the institutions and pay for the institutions can understand. In higher education, by contrast, no such agreement exists and indeed there are plenty of folks out there who find the whole idea puzzling and inappropriate. As such, higher education finds itself in a difficult spot: desperate for more public resources, but unable to marshall any convinving evidence of what those resources will produce in terms of how much college students learn. This is the subject of my new column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Beyond the Bubble

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama frequently made comments like this one from April, where he said too much time was spent, "preparing students for tests that do not provide any valuable, timely feedback on how to improve a student's learning. Creativity has been drained from classrooms as too many teachers are forced to teach fill-in-the-bubble tests." This is a good sentiment, but it's an unfortunate reality that our current accountability system is reliant on such instruments. In a new Education Sector report, Bill Tucker looks beyond the bubble:

Students today are growing up in a world overflowing with a variety of high-tech tools, from computers and video games to increasingly sophisticated mobile devices. And unlike adults, these students don't have to adjust to the information age—it will be all they've ever known. Their schools are gradually following suit, integrating a range of technologies both in and outside of the classroom for instructional use. But there's one day a year when laptops power down and students' mobile computing devices fall silent, a day when most schools across the country revert to an era when whiteboards were blackboards, and iPhones were just a twinkle in some techie's eye—testing day....Still, the convergence of powerful new computer technologies and important new developments in cognitive science hold out the prospect of a new generation of student testing that could contribute to significant improvements in teaching and learning in the nation's classrooms.

Read the full report here.

That's Settled

The recently-enacted stimulus bill includes $13 billion in extra funding for Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act. Since Title I currently receives a little over $12 billion per year and the maximum amount authorized under the law is $25 billion, by my count NCLB is now "fully funded" and I assume those persons and organizations who have cited the lack of such funding as their principle objection to NCLB will now be foursquare in favor of holding all schools accountable for student performance via standardized tests. 

Hired, Not Hired

Here are descriptions of two teachers hired for the 2008-2009 school year in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD):

• Bachelors degree in Interdisciplinary Studies of Health Science from U of Texas - Arlington, with no advanced degree, applied August, now teaching Special Education.
• Philosophy graduate from Florida International, with graduate degrees in Digital Media and Buddhist Studies, applied August, now teaching Math and Chemistry.

Alternatively, here are descriptions of two teachers who applied but were not hired:

• Credentialed in Math and Mandarin, Masters degree, 3.8 undergrad GPA. Applied April, would “probably” have accepted a timely offer with SFUSD, but became “frustrated” with the process. Now teaching in Lafayette.
• Engineering degree (3.8 GPA), Math credential, Masters degree. “Very satisfied” with SFUSD student teaching, applied February, but hiring timeline was “very important” in decision to withdraw. Now teaching in Ravenswood.

According to the latest report from The New Teacher Project, these examples are indicative of a larger problem in SFUSD, where the district has been successful in recruitment but losing quality applicants because of late hiring.

Nowhere To Go But Up

Readers who don't live in the DC metropolitan area may not know that, in addition to numerous national private universities like Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, Catholic, and American, we the perenially disenfranchised residents of the nation's capital also have jurisdiction over a single public institution, the University of the District of Columbia. Formed some thirty years ago via the awkward merger of three existing colleges, UDC has historically proved to be a typical creature of DC municipal governance, i.e. inefficient, ineffective, wasteful, patronage-driven, possibly corrupt, etc., etc. 

Last year the UDC board hired a new president, Dr. Allen Sessoms, formerly of Queens College and Delaware State. Sessoms immediately vowed sweeping changes, and so far he's been a man of his word, proposing to spin off part of UDC into a stand-alone community college, raise admissions standards (there are currently none) at the four-year institution, shake up the faculty (average age: almost 70) and increase in-state four-year student tuition from $3,800 to $7,000, a level more in line with other four-year public universities in the area. Unsurprisingly, students are unhappy and have mounted protests of various kinds.

Obviously, the prospect of nearly doubling tuition for students who often work full time, raise families, and come from modest financial backgrounds shouldn't be taken lightly. But as Sessoms recently noted, "The graduation rate [16 percent graduate within eight years] is an abomination." And this gives me an opportunity to further ride several personal hobby-horses into the ground revisit several topics of ongoing interest. First, that higher education debates are too often about price when they should really be about value. All things being equal, students are better off paying less for college than more. But they're also a lot better off paying $28,000 over four years for a bachelor's degree than paying $15,200 for no bachelor's degree. Yet there haven't been any massive student protests about UDC's shocking, could-hardly-be-lower graduation rate. 

Which leads to my second point: for reasons that are mostly a function of semi-arbitrary historic distinctions, traditional governance arrangements, and the modern societal consensus about the legal age of majority, everyone seems perfectly comfortable with the idea that, during the three months that elapse between high school graduation and college enrollment, students pass from a state of shared responsibility for educational outcomes (shared between the student and their school) to total personal responsibility for educational outcomes, leaving the institution itself out of the equation. UDC is--sadly, shockingly--not alone in having graduation rates that are within striking distance of absolute failure. You can find them most often at other urban universities, in cities like Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere, particularly when you start to break the numbers down by race and gender. And yet this arouses nothing approaching the concern and condemnation often directed toward high schools in those very same cities, even though the essential problem involves exactly the same students and public educational institutions that fail in very similar ways. (To read more about how colleges can improve graduation rates without sacrificing academic standards, see this report.) 

 

Save Community Colleges

Despite the fact that the economy is shedding half a million jobs per month, the "moderate" approach to stimulus in Congress appears to involve rejecting aid to state and local governments and thus ensuring pro-cyclical cuts in public employment. As a result, education budgets are sure to suffer, and there's a strong case that no institutions are more vulnerable than community colleges, which get short-changed in the public budgeting process when times are good and don't have endowments and other diverse revenue streams to fall back on now. With crumbling, outdated facilities, many community colleges are ill-equipped to handle the surge of new students who will arrive seeking refuge and re-training as job losses mount. Mid-career workers with families facing sudden, unexpected unemployment aren't going to enroll full-time in their state's four-year residential flagship university, which probably wouldn't admit them in the first place. Yet the unbalanced power dynamic in most states is such that economically well-off students in the flagships will get more protection, even though they're already receiving far more public support than their less advantaged peers in public two-year institutions. 

All of which means that we need a comprehensive new federal plan to help community colleges, as Sara Goldrick-Rab and Alan Berube describe in their new article published by the Brookings Institution.  It's a summary of a longer piece that will be out shortly and should be required reading for federal policymakers looking for smart, creative ways to not only mitigate the damage cause by the great recession but lay the foundation for a better higher education system in the long term. 

Duncan Puts Up a Three-Pointer

There’s a clear message emerging from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s early public pronouncements: He’s going to push for higher standards than most states have adopted under NCLB, and that may include national standards (and tests). In pushing the Obama administration’s stimulus priorities in a speech yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education, Duncan said a $15 billion “race to the top” fund in the stimulus package would “enable us to spur reform on a national scale—driving school systems to adopt college and career-ready, internationally benchmarked standards.” The money, he said, would provide hefty financial incentives for policymakers to “put in place state of the art data collection systems, assessments and curricula to meet these higher standards.” Duncan’s rhetoric is a sharp break from that of his predecessor, Margaret Spellings, who was content to leave the issues of standards and test quality to the states. If Duncan pushes on the standards issue, he’ll have the benefit of growing support in the Washington policy community for some form of voluntary national standards. He’ll face plenty of opposition from the Left and the Right, however; progressives and conservatives both want to leave the key questions of what students should achieve and how to measure what they learn to local communities—the fact that local educators have tended to expect far too little of many students notwithstanding.

Pork and Bears

It's frustrating watching the stimulus bill be held up and criticized because of allegations of pork contained within, as if we know anything about what the pork actually aims to accomplish. It's easy to look at the provision's title and label it wasteful, but more difficult to actually determine its merits. It reminds me of John McCain, during the 2008 presidential election, decrying the notion of the federal government spending $3 million to study bear DNA. McCain joked repeatedly during the campaign, even during a commercial and a debate, that he didn't know whether it was a criminal or paternal issue. Yuk, yuk, yuk.

Turns out the study employed about 200 people over five years and was able to document the bear population at significantly higher numbers than expected. Those results could likely lead to the grizzly bear's removal from the endangered species list, which would open areas to development and logging that had previously been restricted. As former Republican Governor of Montana (and McCain backer) Judy Martz said during the campaign, "unless you live among these issues it is pretty hard to understand what is going on." We should keep that lesson in mind as we pursue an all-important stimulus plan.

Face Time

Is a college diploma the certification that a student has spent enough time at the college, or is it a certification that the student meets the institution's academic standards? That question is central to a debate at Tufts over whether the school should limit the number of Advanced Placement credits a student can earn. To Tufts faculty at least, the answer is the former:

James G. Ennis, chair of the committee and sociology professor, said that the past year has seen much debate among the faculty about the transfer value of AP credits. He said many faculty members have questioned whether the substance of an AP test can truly replicate the value of face-to-face coursework at Tufts.

In other words, it's not enough to have a nationally normed standardized achievement test measuring a student's content knowledge in one of the 30 subjects now offered. No, a better way to ensure quality would be to have different Tufts faculty teach their own versions of the courses to small to medium sized classes, administer their own examinations, and submit their own subjective grades. And students can have access to this Tufts brand all for the low, low price of two annual payments of $25,700.

Or they could pick the version that's standardized across the country, that's graded rigorously against thousands of their peers, and which costs students exactly $86. Is the decision about quality, or is it about the Tufts brand?

I Hate the Way You're Not Around

There's nothing that will turn over preconceptions in today's IES report that found no difference between reading and math scores of students taught by teachers certified through traditional or alternative routes. The main conclusion is that there's simply not that huge of a difference between traditional and alternative certifications.

Part of the reason the certification route did not matter is simply that the teachers in them are not all that different: neither traditional nor alternative certification programs have particularly stringent entry requirements, leading to a group of prospective teachers who primarily come from schools that aren't particularly selective, who enter programs that also do not have stringent entry requirements, and who exit college with unspectacular GPAs (the study excluded prestigious alternative certification programs like Teach for America). If you want to learn where most of our teachers come from, look at a state's certification exam. New York has data from 2006-7 on the certification exam pass rates for all teacher education programs in the state. The top ten producers include names like NYU (487 test-passers) and Hofstra (562), but also lesser-known schools like the College of Saint Rose (620), Medaille (657), D'Youville (666), and Touro College-Manhattan (678). People forget that our teachers are as likely to come from Boricua College (18) as they are from Vassar (18) or from Saint Lawrence (30) as they are from Sarah Lawrence (12) of 10 Things I Hate About You fame. Teachers come from Elmira (92), Nyack (32), Pratt (22), Daemen (341), Keuka (58), Nazareth (328), Yeshiva (21), and the Dominican College of Blauvelt (36). It's hard to tell which of these are good or bad, alternative or traditional.

The other half of the equation is that the two words connote two very different program designs, when in reality there are not enormous differences. At the most basic level, we think of "traditional" programs as ones which combine content, methodology, and behavioral psychology into a bachelor's degree program. But traditional programs are not the same everywhere. Some require coursework equivalent to a college major, others to a minor, and some require prospective teachers earn a BA before even entering the program. The required course hours in the study varied from 240 to 1,380.

We think of "alternative" as the opposite to "traditional," a crash course for teachers to enter the classroom. But in the study, the required coursework varied here too, from 75 to 795 hours. In other words, the two terms are not mutually exclusive: 15 percent of alternatively certified teachers took more coursework than their traditionally certified peers.

These two reasons are the primary drivers for all the "no statistical differences observed" in the study. Among them:

• no difference between alternative and traditional certifications
• no difference between high- and low-credit alternative certifications
• no difference between high- and low-credit traditional certifications
• no difference in teacher learning curves
• no relationship between student scores and teacher training content, including pedagogy or fieldwork
• no benefit for teachers majoring in education

The only substantial difference the study found was between teachers currently taking coursework and those who are not. Students with teachers occupied with coursework scored lower than those with teachers who were not enrolled in classes.

Today's report does not lead to any new understanding of the teacher workforce, but it adds to the research showing little to no difference in the effects of the credentials teachers carry when they enter the profession. Consequently, it also adds greater urgency to figuring out better ways to evaluate, develop, and compensate our teaching talent.

4 for 44

Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently outlined President Obama's education priorities during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill. Speaking before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Duncan argued that education was "the most pressing issue facing America" and highlighted four areas that the new administration plans to prioritize. Read how our ideas inform the secretary's agenda here.

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The Burden of Proof

Paul Basken (one of the best higher education reporters in the business IMHO) filed a short piece($) in the Chronicle a few weeks ago about struggles to improve the quality of teaching in engineering. He wrote:

After a close-up look at 40 American engineering schools, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has released a new report on the matter, but the diagnosis is old news: A widespread emphasis on textbook-heavy theory over hands-on practice discourages many students and leaves the ones that remain unprepared for real-world problems. With the difficulty long known, why have solutions been so elusive? Among the reasons cited by college leaders: a faculty culture resistant to change, and perceived pressure from accreditors.

And:

The "problem-based approach" in Georgia Tech's biomedical-engineering program includes asking sophomores to spend an entire semester exploring a big-picture question, such as how to keep the blood supply safe from the AIDS virus, said Laurence J. Jacobs, a professor of civil and mechanical engineering and an associate dean at Georgia Tech. Other colleges are having a much more difficult time introducing such changes in their traditional engineering programs because of faculty members who "are very, very protective of their curricula," Mr. Jacobs said. Changing faculty attitudes is the key, said an author of the Carnegie report, Sheri D. Sheppard, a professor of mechanical engineering and an associate vice provost for graduate education at Stanford University. The science foundation has spent millions of dollars trying to encourage universities to break up old styles of teaching, and it still couldn't overcome the "cultural issue of change" among faculty members, Ms. Sheppard said.

I went to college, four years of undergrad, two more in grad school. Both of my parents are retired college professors, and I recently taught a graduate course in education policy for Johns Hopkins. But I'm not of higher education. I've spent my career in public policy, first in the executive and legislative branches at the state level, then in various non-profit think tanks in DC. And I am just baffled when I read things like this. Maddened. Because it seems to me that one could easily summarize the two paragraphs above as follows: 

People have known for a long time that college students learn more when they're actively engaged in learning via hand-on practice and other means. But many professors refuse to adopt these methods, because they don't want to and they don't have to.

Am I missing something? To be clear, I'm not advocating for some kind monolithic scripted curriculum. When I put my class together, I made choices about subject matter and methods that suited my expertise and instructional strengths and weaknesses. But it seems to me that the more autonomy faculty are given in the classroom, the greater the burden of proof to demonstrate that their choices are actually working, with that proof being based, in significant part, on some evidence of what students learn. Isn't that what higher eduction is all about--evidence? And if the methods or approaches aren't working, they shouldn't be allowed to continue, period, regardless of who the instructor might be. Blaming this problem on "culture" is a dodge, a way of obscuring responsibility, as if faculty are helpless victims of some larger infectious mindset and not professionals who are, as such, responsible for the choices they make. 

Invest in the Future

This morning's New York Times has a good read analyzing what we can learn from Japan's Lost Decade, a period where they suffered a real estate bubble, pumped government spending as a stimulus, but could not raise economic growth. Here's the takeaway:

Japan’s experience also seems to argue for spending heavily to promote social development. A 1998 report by the Japan Institute for Local Government, a nonprofit policy research group, found that every 1 trillion yen, or about $11.2 billion, spent on social services like care for the elderly and monthly pension payments added 1.64 trillion yen in growth. Financing for schools and education delivered an even bigger boost of 1.74 trillion yen, the report found.

But every 1 trillion yen spent on infrastructure projects in the 1990s increased Japan’s gross domestic product, a measure of its overall economic size, by only 1.37 trillion yen, mainly by creating jobs and other improvements like reducing travel times.

Economists said the finding suggested that while infrastructure spending may yield strong results for developing nations, creating jobs in higher-paying knowledge-based services like health care and education can bring larger benefits to advanced economies like Japan, with its aging population.

In other words, a stimulus should not just be tax cuts or paying people to dig holes and then fill them in. A stimulus should invest in education. Let's hope our Senators are reading the same article.

Big Edu-cuts Proposed for Stimulus Package, Maybe

The latest tin can to come flying out of the maelstrom over the Congressional stimulus package is a document purporting to be recommendations for education cuts by the staff of centrist senators Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, and Republican Susan Collins of Maine, increasingly key players in the stimulus debate.

Passed along by folks with a big stake in the game, the document suggests that staff want to reduce education spending dramatically as part of cuts totaling $78 billion to the sprawling, $900 billion Senate version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The $15 billion "state incentive grants" that the Obama administration wants to use to leverage school reform would be eliminated under the purported Nelson\Collins staff plan. The plan would cut $25 billion out of the $76 billion in "state stabilization" money intended to stave off teachers lay offs. And it would cut in half proposed increases from special education, Title I monies for disadvantaged students, Head Start, and teacher-quality partnership grants. Nearly $14 billion in new money for college Pell Grants would stay. Stay tuned.

Bill-Board

Bill Gates, borrowing a tradition from his mentor Warren Buffett, has published his first Annual Letter, his reflections on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has been full-time since leaving Microsoft last summer.

Education commentators have focused on what they’ve characterized as a quasi-mea culpa in Gates’ discussion of the foundation’s 9-year, $2 billion investment in high school reform, particularly its effort to transform the nation’s large, often-alienating comprehensive high schools into smaller, more-personal educational environments. “We are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short,” Gates writes, a declaration that some have interpreted as a suggestion that abandoning comprehensive high schools for smaller alternatives is an unfruitful reform.

That’s an unfortunate interpretation, because anyone who has spent time in the nation’s urban (and, for that matter, many suburban) high schools knows that the anonymity that pervades such schools contributes to a debilitating culture of apathy and alienation and is a root cause of the academic failure that afflicts so many American public secondary schools.

Not all large high schools are bad, of course. And not all small ones are successful--as the Gates Foundation discovered the hard way. But small schools are more likely to create the sense of connectedness among students and teachers, the sense of being known and valued, that motivates people to work hard. They encourage stronger bonds between students and teachers and generate a level of genuine caring and mutual obligation between them that is found far less frequently in large, comprehensive high schools. Small schools, in other words, are more likely to produce the conditions that make learning possible.

As Bill Gates points out in his Letter, that’s not enough. You also have to have high standards, a sound curriculum, and good teachers. Smaller schools are a means to an end, not an end in itself. But studies involving rural, suburban, and urban high schools have found that student and teacher attendance are typically higher in small schools. So are student involvement in extracurricular activities and graduation rates. Teacher turnover and student disciplinary problems are lower.

Because these results are necessary, but not sufficient, Gates has shifted much of its high school reform funding to networks of charter schools like KIPP, High Tech High, and Aspire Public Schools. As charter schools, they have more autonomy to address the other side of the reform equation—rigorous academic expectations, attracting top leaders and teachers, revamping the school day and school year to maximize instructional time, etc.

The Gates Foundation also gravitated to charter school networks because it learned that it’s a lot easier to establish a culture of success in a new school than it is to try to graft such a culture onto existing schools. Yet the schools’ powerful cultures, their sense of purposefulness, is also very much derived, their leaders are quick to point out, from the schools’ small size. The average charter school enrolls under 300 students, less than half the enrollment of traditional public schools, while some urban comprehensive high schools have as many as 5,000 students.

Unfortunately, there are only a relative handful of the new, high-performing charter schools that Gates praises in his letter, at most a couple of hundred that have made significant progress in closing achievement gaps for disadvantaged students. The financial and other challenges of increasing the number of such schools significantly are daunting. Which, perhaps, leads the Gates Foundation and others committed to school reform back to the traditional public school system—bearing the lessons it has learned from KIPP and other school networks.

Footnote: As some people know, I wrote a Gates-funded book several years ago called High Schools on a Human Scale, in which I made a case for abandoning comprehensive high schools, an argument that I had discussed more briefly in a 1991 book called In the Name of Excellence.

Good Point

Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education observes that if the great recession forces school districts to cut their personnel budgets under "last in, first out" rules, they'll end up firing substantially more teachers than they otherwise would, because the last in tend to be younger and lower-paid and thus you have to fire more of them to save the requisite amount of money. She estimates that a 10 percent reduction in school personnel expenditures nationwide would result in 262,000 more lost jobs (and thus loss of health insurance, etc.) under seniority-based firing policies than under seniority-neutral policies. 

New Rule on Spending by States Lacks Teeth

That's the headline for an upcoming Chronicle of Higher Education article looking at whether a maintenance of effort provision included in last fall's Higher Education Opportunity Act will actually affect any states. The provision tied a small grant program to states maintaining at least five-year spending averages. Only one state, Rhode Island, is failing to do so. Over a period when enrollment in the state increased nearly ten percent, funding is now 5.2 percent below the five-year average, in unadjusted dollars. They'll lose $330,000 in federal funds, or .18 percent of their budget. Only two other states were within ten percent of the five-year average, Michigan at 3.9 and South Carolina at 6.1.

Value Added

Colleges and universities distinguish themselves from one another in lots of different ways-- scholarly reknown, the size of the endowment, success on the athletic fields, etc. But the most commonly-used measure is probably the "quality" of the freshman class, as measured by standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Average incoming SAT scores at University of Texas campuses, for example, look like this:


















The Austin and Dallas campuses are getting students at 1200 and above while the non-selective regional campuses like Pan American and Permian Basin are below 1000. This conforms with nearly any measure of prestige and status one could name: Austin is an internationally known, Research I, AAU institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment and a football team that was lucky enough to beat my Ohio State Buckeyes in the Fiesta Bowl last month, not that I'm bitter. (Although: "Colt McCoy"? Really?) Permian Basin has none of these things, and probably never will.

But SAT scores leave the question of college student learning unanswered. It's odd, the way we give colleges credit for how their student did on a test they took while they were juniors in high school. Colleges argue that high SAT scores are an implicit quality signal because they reflect high demand, but the demand may just be for the prestige and the football team and the nice facilities and the chance to hang around with other students who also have high SAT scores. To really get a handle on learning, it makes more sense to test a sample of freshmen and a sample of seniors, and see how they compare. And in fact the University of Texas system has done exactly that, using the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Here's what they found:





















Each block on the graph shows two data points: freshman and senior scores on the CLA. As you'd expect, freshman scores correspond fairly closely with SAT scores: Austin and Dallas have the highest, regionals like Permian Basin the lowest, and the rest are in between. Much more interesting is growth. While Austin students arrive at high levels, they don't seem to improve very much while they're in college--the difference of 53 points is less than half the national average of 111 points. This may because of some sort of "ceiling effect," or it may be that elite universities don't focus much on improving students who arrive in great shape to begin with. Pan American and Permian Basin have very similar freshman scores, but Permian Basin's growth is more the double that of UTPA -- 197 to 90, bringing students from well below the national average on entry to above it on completion.

The CLA, it should be said, is not the be-all and end-all of college assessment. It's a general assessment of analytic reasoning, critical thinking and communications skills that doesn't measure mastery of the disciplines. It's subject to measurement and sampling error, like any standardized test. But it's also being used at hundreds of institutions and is based on a lot of smart thinking in psychometrics. It should be the beginning of much more attention to how much students learn while they're in college. This is how we ought to be thinking about success and prestige in higher education.

The CLA results also highlight severe limiations in the way we credential college students, and the vast differences in ability among students who are all pushed through a system that in many ways assumes they're the same. Note that despite the unusual growth at Permian Basin, seniors there still score well below freshmen at Austin. The premium given in the job market to degrees from highly selective institutions is, in that sense, quite rational; students could literally learn nothing while at an elite college and still outperform most other college grads.

The real inefficiencies and failures in the labor market occur at the individual level, particularly among the great masses of students with degrees from non-selective and thus largely undifferentiated instutitions. Lets say you're a very bright student who, for financial or family reasons, chooses to attend college at a local four-year institution like UTPB, except in a state that doesn't publish value-added measures like the CLA. You work hard, excel at your studies, and graduate at the top of your class. Do you get credit for this? No, you do not. The market cares little about college grades because they're opaque and inconsistent. So it assigns you the average value of a UTPB freshman, based on SAT scores, because that's the only comparable information it has. By the same token, the guy who finished last at Austin is over-valued in the market. And of course the brilliant person who never got a college degree at all is left completely out in the cold.

Sample-based measures like the CLA are only the beginning; what we really need to do is start attaching a lot more useful information to individual college credentials while also making the credentialling process itself more open and flexibile, less about having been taught by some kind of formal institution and more about having actually learned something real.

"No, we don't cheat. And even if we did, I'd never tell you."

Tommy Lasorda was talking baseball, but there are edu-implications. Gotham Schools is covering some back and forth about the process of grading the New York state ELA (English Language Arts) assessments. Eva Moskowitz says it’s easy and shouldn’t take so long, but teacher/grader/blogger “Miss Brave” says it’s disorganized and potentially unfair. Scoring problems are not new, but Miss Brave highlights a particularly tricky problem:

If you and all the other graders at your table happened to notice that the essay appeared to be written in two very different handwritings, as if it sure looked like the teacher had made a few changes, and you voiced your concerns, your
objections were dismissed.

Having teachers proctor high-stakes exams in their own schools is an open invitation for problems, especially where cash incentives for performance exist. Of course, we hope that teachers don’t influence the answers of their students during a test, and undoubtedly most of them wouldn’t. But when a student is struggling, and a teacher is walking by, it can be difficult to resist the urge to help. And even a pause or a quizzical look can influence a student’s answer. Unfortunately, it seems the fox is guarding the hen house on this one. Principals, districts and states have little incentive to check for this particular kind of score inflation, unless it becomes so egregious that it can’t be ignored. As for Miss Brave? She was told to “MYOB.”

The Growth in Growth

Prior to the 2005-2006 school year, schools around the country were required to count how many students in each school were "proficient" to determine whether a school made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). That year, two states, Tennessee and North Carolina, began the Growth Model Pilot program to allow schools to meet AYP another way, by moving children sufficiently along on a path to proficiency. No more was it just about status; growth and progress mattered too. It was a fairly inauspicious start: in that first year, a grand total of seven schools nationwide made AYP by growth targets alone. But in 2007, 353 did, and last year, 1,571 schools did it. This represents just a fraction of our country's 90,000 schools, but the growth in growth is a positive sign.

The difference between old and new is one of "status" versus "growth." Status models count as making AYP only those students who score above a pre-determined cut-off. Schools have a strong incentive only to worry about those students close to meeting (or close to failing to meet) that bar. These are the "bubble kids," the ones where extra attention may be just enough.

In contrast, the best growth models encourage adults to watch the progres of all students. If a student fails to meet proficiency standards but makes sizeable gains in the process, that student counts towards a school's proficiency. In Tennesee, where they have a particularly rigorous growth model, a student who scores in the "proficiency" range is not counted as such if she has slid backwards to the point where her future proficiency is in doubt**. No more ignoring kids at the poles.

The growth models as currently implemented are by no means perfect. Several states, for example, have implemented a system where students have to cross thresholds into newly created tiers to qualify as making growth. These are more or less arbitrary and not much more than additional layers of status--a student could still meet AYP by making a small jump across a threshold or fail to make AYP despite large gains within a tier. As more states get approved to use growth models--15 will be using them in 2009--further study will be needed on their impacts (see the first program evaluation here). Yet, growth models are already adding needed flexibility to the unpopular No Child Left Behind Act, flexibility that may better identify successful schools that help students below proficient make larger than expected gains.

**To clarify, I meant this sentence to suggest only that Tennessee's growth model was rigorous in this specific context. Whereas North Carolina and other states count all kids above the target plus those on pace to be above it as making AYP, Tennessee adds another wrinkle. It looks like this:

AYP = kids above proficient + kids on pace to be proficient - kids above proficient on pace not to be

This is just one among many trade-offs each growth model makes. North Carolina, for example, chose a relatively simple model that takes the amount a student is behind and divides it by three or four years, depending on the student's grade. If the student made gains higher than that, they count towards AYP for growth. Tennessee, on the other hand, uses multiple regression to predict future scores, a far more complicated and difficult to explain system. These issues are complicated, and the implementation choices states make matter. Look for more from Education Sector in the near future on this very topic.

The Americans

One of the great pleasures of living on Capitol Hill is the ability to walk out the front door on an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in February and amble down to the National Gallery of Art. Great national museums are normally experienced during short vacation-related timeframes that force you to engage in a fairly brutal calculus of weighing the desire to see iconic works against the desire to fully appreciate them and your brain's limited capacity to process the experience. Living nearby means you can focus on small pieces of the permanent collection or ignore it entirely and give all your attention to exhibitions like the one currently on the ground floor of the West building dedicated to Robert Frank's seminal book of mid-20th century photography, The Americans.

Before today, I knew enough about art and culture that I could have told you that The Americans was considered to be a milestone in photography, that Frank was a European Jew who brought an outsider's perspective to America, much as Tocqueville had, and that the book was highly controversial on publication due to its unsparing portrayal of race and class in the 1950s, which stood in stark contrast to popular photography like that published in Life magazine. Knowing things like this serves you in good stead at dinner parties or if you happen to end up on Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It's also no substitute for spending a couple of hours actually looking at the photographs, thinking about what they mean, and marveling out how Frank condensed years of work into less than 100 images, each of which contains a small world and which together seem to miraculously tell a story as deep and rich as the nation itself.  Yesterday I only knew about Frank's work, while today I know it, or at least I've begun to know it, and that makes all the difference. 

Taking Requests for Non-Education-Related Pop Culture Posts

From time to time I'll be at an event or conference of some sort and someone will walk up, introduce themselves, and say "I like your blog." (This is, FYI, a surefire conversation-starter; I'm as susceptible to flattery as the next guy.) Yet often--it actually happened twice this week--this is followed by "especially the posts that aren't about education." From there the conversation trends quickly to matters like the tragedy of Frank Sobotka and why Omar loved Honey Nut Cheerios. While this is all to the good since you really can't spend too much time pondering the larger meaning of Omar, it does make me wonder about the posts about education. But I'm going to yield to the collective wisdom of our readers (or at least our sociable conference-going readers) and take requests for further posts on topics wholly unrelated to education. The final season of Galactica? The new Watchmen movie? Books? Video games? Rock music? You tell me! The comments are open. 

Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste

If all goes as planned, the Department of Education's budget could double between now and President's Day. Double. In. Less. Than. Three. Weeks. As I read reports and reactions in the edusphere, I'm amazed at the nonchalance from the left and the lack of imagination from the right.

Let's start with the left. With post titles like "Overstated" and "Stimulus Bill Intensifies But Does Not Change Federal Role" from sites and sources I respect, my mind keeps going back to the figures we're talking about here. As Charlie Barone points out in a great post, the new money will be the largest increase in federal education funds ever. Money alone does not change the federal role in education, but it's hard to believe that this kind of increase will not have a major impact, especially come re-authorization time.

There's indication that people are already getting used to the money. A USA Today article on the stimulus package had this innocent-looking paragraph in it:

Mary Kusler, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators, says Title I and IDEA "are areas where they cannot cut back three years from now."

Congress continues to assert that these funds are temporary, although those assertions are somewhat unbelievable. In a conference call on the stimulus on Wednesday, House Committee on Education and Labor Chairman George Miller was somber and eloquent throughout the call. But when asked if a $500 increase in the Pell Grant would be permanent or for only the next two years, as the stimulus is, Miller reiterated that it was an "emergency recovery act" but also indicated the decision would be made later, in concert with President Obama's future budget requests. My question is: does anyone really believe the first time we "fully fund" No Child Left Behind, as this bill does, it will be the last? Won't cities, states, and interest groups (like the American Association of School Administrators, for example) adjust to this influx and kind of like it?

The right is as upset as the left is credulous. Over at the Gadfly, Mike Petrilli and Checker Finn are ready to pronounce the entire school reform movement dead. "How so?" they ask:

Because of what turns out, in retrospect, to be a tragic flaw in the strategy of many reformers in recent decades: offer the education establishment a lot more money in return for a little reform. Understandable, sure, and in many state capitols and along the banks of the Potomac there probably was no other way to go about it. But what happens when the extra money dries up? When even the pre-reform money sinks into the recessionary soil? During flush times, buying reform seemed to make a certain kind of sense and to be relatively low risk, a bit like buying a big new house or fancy new car. During hard times, however, that turns out to be the very definition of unsustainability.

This analysis is both gloomy and missing in all creativity. The stimulus may or may not have some key ed reform provisions, depending on which way the Senate goes, but if George Miller, Arne Duncan, and Barack Obama have a say (and I think they will), the provisions will be in the final version. What's more, the Gadfly analysis has no vision into the future. "Fully funding" NCLB gives the Department of Education and future Congresses more leverage to go after pet reforms. Advocates of local control used to be able to say that federal spending in K-12 education was "only nine percent" of all education dollars. But now that ratio is changing, and where I come from, more money contributed means more influence. A higher percentage of federal dollars means greater clout, too.

That, I think, is the real lesson here. The stimulus package is an unfathomably large sum of money that will be passed through Congress in an incredibly short period of time. Three weeks is a blink of an eye in legislative history, and soon the federal role in education will be changed irrevocably. Let's not pretend that that's not true or that it's an entirely bad thing. Crisis breeds opportunity.

Additionally: If you're still unconvinced, consider doubling the federal investment in education again. It would then total 35-40 percent of all revenues. Or, think of the fact that, in a few weeks, we'll have doubled the federal investment in education in 2002 and again in 2009. 2016, anyone?

Stimulus Package – Restricted Funds Grow While Unrestricted Funds Shrink

States will be glad to see the in large infusion of federal funds into K-12 education. But will they help districts balance their budgets without major teacher layoffs? Most of the reductions in state and local resources are unrestricted funds resulting from reductions in local property tax revenues or state general support for schools. All of the new federal funding will be restricted funding that can not replace the unrestricted funds that districts are losing. So, likely districts will have to lay off hordes of teachers that are supported with unrestricted funds at the same time that they hire teachers for special education and Title I activities. Much of the time, these will not be the same teachers (if we want them to be highly qualified). The fix would be to allow Fiscal Stabilization funds to be used for general K-12 purposes instead of restricting the funding for Title I, special education and career tech. Here are the details:

Let’s just concentrate on the three big pots of funding – Title I ($13 billion), Special Education ($13 billion), and Fiscal Stabilization Funds ($39 billion – shared with higher education).

Title I – These funds are distributed through existing Title I formulas, and the funds are general subject to restrictions that the funds support disadvantaged students (Schoolwide Title I schools have a little more flexibility). These funds have supplement not supplant requirements which restrict the funds from replacing funding sources that the state or locals would otherwise have provided. Estimates of district by district allocations for Title I and special education are available (here).

Special Education – Distributed by existing formulas can only be used for special education, and subject to supplement not supplant language.

Fiscal Stabilization funds – The distribution of these funds is a little more complicated, but once the state shares have been determined, and K-12’s share of that is determined, then the K-12 funds are distributed using a combination of the general purpose funding formula used in that state, and the state’s allocation method for Title I funds. While the funds are distributed using the general purpose fund formula, the Stabilization funds can only be used for ESEA, Special Education and Perkins Career and Technical Education purposes.

States are Cutting General Purpose K-12 Funding that Can’t be Backfilled with Title I and Special Education Funds
To illustrate this point, it might be easiest to focus on a specific school district. I will look at the impact on Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) which is the second largest in the country and located in a state that is facing one of the worst state budget crises in the nation. Based on the analysis of the Congressional Research Services (referenced above), LAUSD would receive $218 million in Title I funds and $91 million in special education funds for the 2009-10 school year. I estimate that LAUSD will get in excess of $250 million in fiscal stabilization funds (there are too many moving parts to get an accurate estimate here). So in total, LAUSD would receive around $550 million for 2009-10 to be used mainly for Title I and special education purposes.

California’s Governor has proposed cutting general purpose funding to schools by about $2 billion in the current school year, and effectively $3 billion in 2009-10 from the current funding level (which has already been cut in adopting the 2008-09 budget). As part of this reduction, he is also allowing schools to reduce the school year by 5 days. Of course there are other specific programmatic cuts, deferrals and other budget gimmicks, but most of the reductions are general purpose. LAUSD educates roughly 11 percent of California’s students, LAUSD share of the cuts will be around $550 million for the two fiscal years combined. [It should be noted that California education advocates would argue that the reductions are much larger than suggested here because these cuts come on top of the state not providing statutorily required cost of living adjustments in either year. The advocates estimate the total cuts at around $10 billion. Which the actual cuts are probably somewhere between the Governor’s numbers and the advocates numbers, using the Governor’s numbers makes the point on the impact of the stimulus package]

LA’s Cuts Roughly same as LA’s Funding Under Stimulus
Perhaps by magic perhaps by intent, but the cuts that LAUSD will face under the current budget proposal are roughly equivalent to the new Stimulus funds they would receive. Unfortunately, the color of the money is different. They will lose general purpose funds, and get restricted funds. What will this mean for their budget? Basically, they will have to cut a large number of programs being funded with general purpose funds. Then at the same time they will have to create or expand another set of programs to serve special education and Title I students. And, if they cut a program that is general fund supported, and replace it with new ESEA, special ed or Stabilization funds, they will likely violate the supplanting language and have to give some of the funding back to the feds.

What Can be Done About This?
A simple change in the stimulus package to allow the fiscal stabilization funds to be used for general purposes instead of targeted purposes could quickly fix the issue. This would mirror the flexibility that higher ed or other parts of state budgets will have with respect to the stabilization funds. Absent such a change, it will be difficult for districts to use the stimulus funds without a whole lot of unintended consequences.


Correction: It was brought to my attention that may initial post was inaccurate. The Fiscal Stabilization funds can be used for any ESEA purpose not just Title I uses. While this broader flexibility would provide districts more options than just Title I, it is still replacing general purpose funds with restricted funds.

Why KIPP Matters

I first heard the word "kip" in seventh-grade gymnastics class. It was a special move where, lying on your back, you pulled your legs to your chest and then quickly pushed them forward. The momentum would propel you up and into a standing position. This was all theoretical of course, at least for me; I never have been able to do one.

I find it fitting that this gymnastics move is a homophone for one of the most well-known and successful innovations in the education world today. The Knowledge is Power Program (the education world's KIPP) has performed this same motion for hard-luck children for the last 15 years, not in a theoretical way but on the ground where it counts. Last night Education Sector hosted Jay Matthews to discuss his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America, with Jonah Wright Edelman, executive Director of Stand for Childen, and Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation. If you missed the discussion, please enjoy it below:

ContreDemps

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama White House are facing an early test of their school reform street cred. Earlier this week the Senate Appropriations Committee, where Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over education, stripped out of the stimulus package several provisions being pushed by school reform groups, the administration, and Democratic leaders on education in the House. Harkin, a pro-labor guy, dropped money targeted to charter school construction from the infrastructure section of the package, lopped off a $100 million that would have doubled the size of Teacher Incentive Fund (a federal effort to promote teacher performance pay), jettisoned language requiring school systems to distribute teachers equitably among affluent and impoverished schools as a condition for portions of the incentive funding, and struck language requiring states to establish computer systems capable of linking students and student test scores teachers, a prerequisite for rating schools and teachers on the basis of how much their students learn. Since these initiatives have been opposed by teacher unions seeking to preserve the hegemony of public schools and the current practices of paying and assigning teachers on the basis of credentials and seniority, it's not much of a stretch to assume that the teacher unions got to Harkin. The looming question is how Duncan and Obama are going to deal with the divisions within their own party on the education issue.

Van Milder

If you're a policymaker looking at how long it takes college students to graduate these days and you know that educating upperclassmen costs more than educating freshmen and sophomores (the former take smaller classes and use more campus resources), you might think it would be a good idea to penalize students who take more than four years to graduate. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Students who graduate with more than the bare minimum of credits could be lazy cretins who only want to hang on to a partying lifestyle, true, but they could also have perfectly legitimate reasons for needing those additional credits. Students accumulate superfluous credits when they study abroad, transfer, seek additional majors or minors, or, heaven forbid, change their minds.

The policymaker role should be to examine why some students graduate in four years and others do not. Is it because they were required to take remedial classes that did not count towards a major? Is it because they changed their minds seven times (oh and by the way that's the average now)? Is it because their major simply required more credits, or because they chose to pursue multiple majors and minors? Were they transfer students whose credits were not accepted? The answers to these questions matter.

Only careful policies can address these issues. Legislators in Virginia, on the other hand, are proposing a crude one: they want to charge all in-state students who fail to graduate after accumulating 120 credits (the bare minimum) the out-of-state rate. In other words, a student from Virginia attending the University of Virginia would see their tuition bill climb $10,000 per semester as soon as they reached the 120 credit limit. They except students pursuing majors requiring more than 120 credits.

Part of their complaint hinges on the concern that qualified students from northern Virginia are being rejected at the three major public universities in Virginia (UVa, Virginia Tech, and the College of William and Mary) in favor of out-of-state students who pay higher tuition bills. The logic behind their proposal is to create an incentive for students to finish earlier and thereby create more room for in-state students. But the solution makes no sense for this problem for a couple reasons. To begin with, the proposed penalties target in-state students only, which does not solve the problem of too many out-of-staters. Next, these three schools are not the ones with time-to-degree problems. All three have very high four-year graduation rates, and a 2005-6 report found that at all state public four-year postsecondary institutions, first-time, full-time students took an average of 4.1 years and 131 credits to complete their degree, and the numbers were even better at the targeted schools. This also means the average student would be subjected to the legislators' tax for one full semester.

Policymakers should be concerned about time-to-degree. We know that too many students take too long to graduate, and often the policies of colleges and universities are to blame. Take a look at page 28 of this report out of Tennesee and you'll notice that transfer students are routinely forced to take 20-25 additional credits in order to earn their degree. Those are credits that are wasted in the transfer process due to instituional policies. Those are the types of barriers Virginia state legislators should target in order to accomplish their stated aims.

H/t/Eduwonk.

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.