The Real 21st Century Skills

The question of so-called "21st Century Skills" has been subject to hot debate in education circles recently; you can read Elena Silva's thoughtful take here, a more skeptical perspective in a recent U.S. News & World Report column from Andy Rotherham here, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills web site, hostility to the whole idea live-blogged by Fordham here, and more. It's a tricky set of questions, whether new skills are really needed for the current era, whether they should properly be thought of as distinct from so-called "basic" skills, etc. Fortunately, we need worry about those questions no longer, because it's hard to imagine a more definitive dialogue than this:

Comparing Treatments

The recently-passed stimulus bill provides money for comparative analysis of medical treatments for various ailments. It's the first such authorization, and it will allow us to answer whether ailment X is best treated with pills, therapy, or surgery. These types of comparisons have long been absent in discussions of educational pedagogy, but yesterday's IES/ Mathematica report does just that. It looks at four common math programs that collectively control about 32 percent of the K-2 math curricula market. It found statistically significant scores for students using two of the four programs:

average math achievement of Math Expressions and Saxon students was 0.30 standard deviations higher than Investigations students, and 0.24 standard deviations higher than SFAW [Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley] students. For a student at the 50th percentile in math achievement, these effect sizes mean that the student’s percentile rank would be 9 to 12 points higher if the school used Math Expressions or Saxon, instead of Investigations or SFAW.

One program (Saxon) offered one additional hour per week of instruction, which suggests its success may owe partially to additional time expenditures, but the two successful programs tended to offer more lessons per week devoted to word problems, addition and subtraction of facts with whole numbers, money, place value with whole numbers, fractions, probability, decimals, and percents.

The study looked at 39 schools implementing new math curricula in the 2006-7 school year. Researchers added 71 additional schools for 2007-8, so we'll have expanded results next year. Math is a good place to begin this comparative process, though, because for too long we've relied on industry-created demonstrations of effectiveness. While this study is only preliminary, it's extraordinarily useful to have objective, comparative results on educational programs.

Obama Draws the Line on Charter Schools

One of the most important education lines in President Obama's speech was "We will expand our commitment to charter schools." This is best understood not in terms of any particular public policies but rather in terms of the awesome power presidents have to define the boundaries of public debate. To see evidence of this in education, we need go no further than Obama's predecessor.

Education was one of the most important issues in the early pre-9/11 Bush presidency, with intense negotiations around the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which ultimately led to No Child Left Behind). As Nicholas Lemann described in a terrific New Yorker article, in mid-2001 the press was mainly focused on one issue: vouchers. This was understandable; the standard conservative Republican line on federal education policy had been, since at least the Reagan era, mainly about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and privatizing K-12 schools through vouchers. 

But Bush wasn't interested in that. Instead, he went the opposite way, empowering the feds and focusing on improving public schools through test-based accountability. Reasonable people can disagree about how well this worked, but it's very clear that it had the effect of marginalizing vouchers and privatization as national issues. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which are influential in many other areas, were completely shut out of the DC education debate. If you define yourself as being more extreme and conservative on an issue than a president who is widely seen as extreme and conservative, you don't leave much space on which to stand.

Obama's forceful position on charter schools is likely to have the same effect, but this time on those who want no forms of choice in public education at all, who reject the idea of letting independent, mostly non-profit organizations run public schools. If you believe, as some people do, that charter schools are nothing more than a stalking horse for the Wal-Mart-ification of public education, you're in for a long eight years. 

Obama's Bold Goals for Higher Education

In his speech last night, President Obama said, "By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. That is a goal we can meet." Not long afterward, a friend emailed to ask if I though this was realistic. Answer: it depends, as these things often do, on exactly what the president means.

President Obama is almost surely referring to educational attainment statistics compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD statistics showing that America has lost its long-standing lead in the percent of adults with a college degree are frequently used in education policy circles as evidence that we need to repair various parts of our leaky education pipeline. (As someone who's written a lot about low college graduation rates, I was glad the president noted that this is substantially a problem of people starting college but not finishing.) The relevant statistics, if you're interested, can be found here, by clicking on "Indicator A1: To What Level Have Adults Studied?" and then selecting Table A1.3a on the spreadsheet. 

A glance at the table shows that there are two important questions to answer: Are we talking about just bachelors degrees ("Type A"), or bachelors and associate's degrees ("Type B")? And is the 2020 goal in relation to all adults, or just the newest generation of adults?

If we want to be #1 in the percent of adults age 25-64 with a bachelor's degree, that won't be too hard, because we currently trail only Norway, 31% to 30%. 

If we want to be #1 in the percent of adults 25-34 with a bachelor's degree, it will be much harder. We're still at 30% on that measure--educational attainment in the U.S. has been steady for a long time--but Norway is at 40%, the Netherlands 34%, Korea 33%, Denmark 32%, and Sweden 31%, Israel 30%. This is the trend that has everyone so worried--the difference between the two age cohorts shows that we used to be much better than everyone else (we're far ahead in the 55-64 age bracket), but other countries have since caught up and moved ahead.

In terms of the percent of adults 25-64 with a bachelor's or associates degree, we're #3 at 39%, behind Canada (47%) and Japan (40%). In the 25-34 cohort, however, we're 12th (also 39%), and some countries like Canada, Japan, and Korea are so far ahead (55%, 54%, 53%) that catching up in eleven years is unrealistic.

This is further complicated by the fact that these aren't all apples-to-apples comparisons. Different countries choose to structure their higher education systems and define degrees in different ways. Norway, king of Type A degrees, basically doesn't offer Type B degrees. That's not necessarily a good thing; I think there's a lot to be said for diversity in credentialing so students can go to college for enough time to learn what they want to learn, and no longer. (I'd say that we should also have one-, three-, and five-year degrees, but what we really need is degrees that aren't based on how much time you were taught but what you actually learned, and no, I don't mean simple test-based certification but rather much richer processes that make learning goals and outcomes in higher education a lot more transparent than they are today.) 

Also, if these numbers are going to be the basis for national policy, they need to be accurate. The American Council for Education, the leading higher education lobbying group in DC, uncovered inaccuracies in the 2006 OECD numbers recently. (The numbers cited above are correct.) 

A decline in educational attainment relative to other countries is obviously cause for concern. But we probably shouldn't get too hung up on a few ordinal positions at the very top. America's great advantage historically has been to combine high attainment rates with size. If we end up in a position where we have much better college attainment rates than all other countries or population groups of comparable or larger size (i.e. China, India, the collective E.U.) and fall behind only a few countries that are far smaller, we'll still be in good shape. (When we identify our most fearsome economic competitors, I suspect Norway and the Netherlands aren't near the top of the list, and for good reason.) 

Put another way: As long as we're the best of the biggest and the biggest of the best, we'll be okay.

No Cheese for You

Last week, the New York Times reported on the particularly hard hit historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) are taking in the current economic downturn. As the article notes, these institutions serve, often as a central part of their mission, a disproportionately large number of low-income students who are the first in their family to attend college. In other words, the goal of these institutions—historically and currently—is to expand college access. As a result, HBCU’s enroll a much higher percent of students receiving Pell grants and loans to pay for their college education—not exactly the best population for building a large endowment to float you through tough economic times.

In the NYT article, Dr. Marybeth Gasman, an expert on HBCU’s, is quoted as saying that, "At some institutions, you might be going from eating brie to cheddar, while at H.B.C.U.’s, you might not have any cheese left." As this recent report from the Delta Cost Project shows, it's not just HBCU's that might be left without any cheese—there is a large and growing wealth gap in higher education, and institutions serving anything but the most elite populations of students are at risk of significant cutbacks that threaten the quality of education students receive. HBCU’s may be getting the news coverage today, but they are the canary in the higher finance coal mine for many more colleges.

Particularly threatened are the public open access 4-year and 2-year colleges—those institutions serving students most like the populations at many HBCU’s. As the Delta Cost Project report describes, students at these institutions have been paying more in increased tuition, but have not been getting more (and in some cases less) as spending on education related expenses has stayed steady or declined.

Even during times of plenty, many of these institutions operated on thin budgets and actually cut costs even while tuition prices rose because of declining state contributions. Now that states are facing huge budget deficits, colleges will likely be asked to cut back further and increase tuition even more. Eventually, the constant cost cutting required as states ratchet down their investment in public higher education will result in less college access, poorer learning outcomes, lower graduation rates, and will reduce the ability of higher education to help fuel an economic recovery.

As the money from the stimulus bill begins to flow to states, increased college access and affordability for low-income students should be a top priority for state lawmakers. By supporting the colleges and universities that educate the largest numbers of students and ensuring that these students continue to receive a quality education, state lawmakers can utilize the stimulus money to help the U.S. economy get back on its feet.

Diminishing Funds = Diminishing Leverage

It's too bad the Washington Post reporter covering a new piece of higher education legislation in Virginia didn't read the bill's fiscal impact statement. If she had, she might not have portrayed the it as evenhandedly as she did. The legislation, which would force Virginia institutions to enroll at least 80 percent of their undergraduates from in-state, would impose almost $21 million annually in additional costs on the institutions. In exchange, state legislators have offered to appropriate about half that amount, $12.5 million, for this initiative while simultaneously cutting about $150 million from general fund appropriations to higher education. It's not exactly a fair trade.

This fight is mainly about coveted spots at the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary. Legislators proposing the changes have heard from constituents that qualified in-state applicants are being rejected to these schools in favor of out-of-state students. The institutions now have in-state enrollment rates of 58 and 64.3 percent, respectively.

It's an admirable sentiment for state legislators to see the state universities as serving state residents. Unfortunately, the same legislators do not see their own obligations, namely, that it takes state revenue to do so. Prior to the current round of budget cuts, the state provided only 18 percent of William and Mary's budget and eight percent at UVa. Those numbers will likely fall in coming years, and with already low percentages of revenue coming from state coffers, the state has little leverage to demand changes in enrollment policies. The institutions got used to the current funding model in which out-of-state tuition heavily subsidizes in-state students. The state cannot easily rescind one half of that equation.

If legislators are successful in passing this bill, they should be mindful of another passage in the impact statement:

Given that the additional general fund can cover only a portion of the lost revenue under this proposal, it is likely that these institutions would increase their tuition and fees to cover the difference.

If and when this happens, legislators will have only themselves to blame.

College Dropouts

Matt Yglesias had an indirect hit on an important piece of data this morning. In the post, he uses Census data to show that a majority of Americans attend college. What he glosses over in the process, though, is that 17 percent of Americans in 2007 reported their highest level of educational attainment as "some college, no degree." In other words, about a fifth of adult Americans are college dropouts (represented by the red slice in the pie chart above). We have almost as many college dropouts age 25 and up as we do adults with associate's, Master's, professional, and doctorate degrees combined.

Kahlenberg on KIPP

Rich Kahlenberg published a review of Jay Matthews' new KIPP book (Work Hard. Be Nice.) in the Washington Post Book World back of the Washington Post Outlook section yesterday. Rich spends the first half of the review giving Jay good marks before devoting the second half to warning readers that:

...there are also two misguided "lessons" that many readers may take from "Work Hard. Be Nice": that the KIPP example suggests that union-free charter schools are the key to closing the achievement gap and that poverty and school segregation are just excuses for teacher failure.

This is pretty close to the consolidated left-liberal attitude toward KIPP, so it's worth spending a little time unpacking the two "misguided lessons" Kahlenberg describes.

On unions, Rich notes that while it's true that most KIPP schools don't have unions, some do, and that some schools with unions have achieved KIPP-like success, and that many schools without unions are bad. All valid points. But this just serves to underscore the need to get beyond a top-level "Unions are good vs. Unions are bad" way of thinking and focus on the actual issues at play. 

At KIPP, Kahlenberg notes, teachers "put in a longer school day (beginning at 7:15 and ending at 5 p.m.); teach Saturday classes and three weeks of summer school; and [are] subject to firing without due-process rights." Given that KIPP-like results have proven damnably hard to achieve, it's fair to assume that longer days and fewer work rules are an important part of the KIPP success equation. That doesn't mean those things are needed in every school, but they seem to be needed in these. So the union / KIPP question strikes me as pretty simple: if unions screw up the winning KIPP formula, they're a problem. If they don't, they're not. Union-free charter schools are surely not the only key to closing the achievement gap, but they're pretty clearly a key for thousands of students in KIPP schools today. 

Per the second lesson, Rich notes that "KIPP does not educate the typical low-income student but rather a subset fortunate enough to have striving parents who take the initiative to apply to a KIPP school and sign a contract agreeing to read to their children at night." Again, there's doubtless some truth in this. But as the KIPP DC Web site notes, the first class of students arrived in Fall 2001 scoring at the 21st percentile in reading and the 34th percentile in math. In 2005, they were at the 71st percentile in reading and the 92nd percentile in math. Somehow, despite the magic power of having exactly the same "striving parents," those students were crashing and burning in the regular public schools four years before. 

One could theorize that KIPP might not have been able to achieve the same results with a demographically similar group of students with parents who didn't give a damn. Maybe. And maybe, as Rich suggest, KIPP's results are further enhanced by students who can't handle the rigor and move back to other schools. But even if those things were true, so what? Nobody else was stepping up back in 2001 to help those students. Not enough people are stepping up now. This is a problem, all of sudden, organizations that have figured out to help disadvantaged students with parents who care about their children's future? KIPP stays under the microscope of suspicion until it proves that it can help every poor child, while thousands of public schools across the country stay open even though they've definitively proved unable to help any poor children? 

Click here for the audio of a recent Education Sector event featuring Jay and others discussing the book. 

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.

Want more? Sign up for Education Sector's Biweekly Digest to stay informed about our work!

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.