The Trouble With Watchmen

I don't think Watchmen is a very good movie. 

I say this not because I'm a hater, like this guy. I first read Watchmen, the comic book, as it was published in 12 installments in 1986. A few years later, I bought the collected version so I wouldn't wear out the originals. Then DC published an oversized hardback version, allegedly with new color separations or something; I bought that too. I've probably read it cover-to-cover 15 or 20 times. 

And that's likely part of the problem. Watchmen is not a comic book adaptation like Spider-Man or The Dark Knight. It's much more a translation in the vein of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, or 300, which got Zack Snyder the Watchmen gig. Like those movies, it repeats much of the source dialogue and, more importantly, the same progression of images that form the narrative backbone of the film. Good as a story might be, it starts to wear thin on the 21st viewing. 

As for the rest of the trouble--it isn't the acting. Malin Ackerman should stick to comedies, but otherwise everyone is good. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Billy Crudup, and Jackie Earle Haley as, respectively, The Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach, are very good. There are a few terrible scenes, like the, um, encounter in the Owlship after the building fire, and a lot of the gore is distractingly gratuitous. Snyder re-stages the left-to-right, horizontally framed, speed-up / slow-down fight scene from 300 during the prison break for no particular reason other than it was cool the first time. But the atmosphere of Cold War dread is there and the characterization is totally faithful, so we get Moore's explorations--now somewhat dated, but a revelation 23 years ago--of traditional superhero archetypes set in a version of the real world. So the masked urban avenger is an unbalanced right-wing fanatic; the man who suddenly gains God-like powers is promptly co-opted by the military, until he starts to become unmoored from his--and our--humanity. People who beat up other people while wearing leather costumes have a penchant for fetishization, egomania and/or cruelty. It's good stuff, yet it doesn't save the film. 

Nor does the problem lie in what didn't make it into the movie. Rather, Watchmen suffers from the opposite issue. Sin City and 300, both originally by Frank Miller, made sense to translate because both are straightforward dramas told in an inherently cinematic visual style. Watchmen, by contrast, stretches a thin plot over nearly 400 dense and multi-layered pages, much of which is devoted to flashbacks, side stories, background material, and snippets of a pirate-themed comic-book-within-the-comic-book that serves as a thematic counterpoint. Snyder tried to include as much as of this as possible, apparently on the theory that the first duty of a director is to feed the passions of obsessive Internet message board-dwelling comics super-fans. He seems convinced that, as a recent Wired profile put it, that "Even slight changes to Watchmen, changes that will enhance its appeal to the masses, seem certain to alienate the very people who loved it in the first place." 

If such people exist--and I suspect there aren't nearly as many of them as Snyder believes-- they're insane. I loved it in the first place and found myself fidgeting throughout most of the dragging, disjointed 2 hours and 45 minute running time. The single major deviation from the original comic is the ending, and it's arguably an improvement. 

But the real problem with Watchmen the movie isn't the story or the running time or Malin Ackerman or Zach Snyder's unwillingness to risk the wrath of geek fandom for the sake of narrative drive. It's that Watchmen the comic book really is, as its author Alan Moore has said, "unfilmable." Or, to be more precise, the aspects of Watchmen that make it a great comic book are unfilmable, because they're inseparable from the medium itself. Said Moore in 2003:

The stuff that makes Watchmen radical is not really the stuff that's in the plot. It's not the dark treatments of the super-heroes...the most radical thing about Watchmen was the storytelling, the ideas behind it, things that only emerged in the telling...We had a ton of intellectual ideas, but it was just around about issue #3 when we suddenly noticed that something interesting was happening with the storyline. It was just borne out by the fact that Dave [Gibbons, the artist], was capable of putting in all of this incidental detail and that I was capable of writing narratives that have more than one strand to them...The story seemed to demand a specific way in telling it, a specific way of seeing the world. It had to be seen all at once rather than in a strictly linear way...All these tiny, little moments, coincidences, linkages--that all boiled up into this sort of complex tapestry or piece of machinery. It turned out very much like a piece of watchwork. It was like--well, there was a kind of Swiss watch feel to the structure of it, as though it was sort of jeweled flywheels and everything all completely in place in their settings...there are some sequences that you've got two or three separate narratives all going on in the same sequence and occasionally linking up with each other in ambiguous ways or non-ambiguous ways. We were trying out a whole new repertoire of things...

It's not a coincidence that the best part of Watchmen the movie is the one that hews most closely to the actual experience of reading the book--the sequence where Dr. Manhattan tells the story of his life, shown in brief fragments, some only a few seconds long, jumbled up out of sequence, with Philip Glass' beautiful score to Koyaanisquatsi (Hopi for "life out of balance") playing in the background. Watchmen the comic is an exceptionally complex symphony of words and images that can't be untangled any more than one could pull apart and re-arrange in another medium a Glass composition and expect not to lose the greatness of it in translation.  

Unions Supporting a Spending Cap?

In 2005 the California Teachers Association (CTA) and other unions declared war on Governor Schwarzenegger when he called a special election and placed a spending limit and tenure reform initiatives on it. The CTA coalition was able to soundly defeat the Governor’s initiatives in the special election, and Schwarzenegger’s tenure as an education reformer was largely over. In the process, the pounding that he took lead to his approval rating falling from 58% approval in Jan. 2005 to 34 percent in August 2005. Fast forward to 2009. To fill a $40 billion budget hole the Governor and the Legislature negotiated a budget package that no one is particularly happy about, but it may have saved the state from budget anarchy. A part of that solution was to once again call a special session and place a spending cap before the voters. For voters this might seem like déjà vu all over again, but not for the teachers’ union. What has changed? While the CTA has still not decided whether it will formally support the spending cap, it is not likely to oppose it either(here). So what has changed? The answer is a technical ambiguity with the state’s education funding guarantee in the state constitution.

A little background. California lives in a world of ballot box budgeting where much of the key decisions on spending are determined by voter approved initiatives. One of the most imposing initiatives is Proposition 98, a funding mechanism for K-14 education (K-12, community colleges and child care/preschool funds). Generally Proposition 98 creates a minimum funding guarantee that is increased annual by the growth in student population and growth in the economy (growth in per capita income). When the state General Fund is having a bad year, the state can provide less funding to education, but must restore the funding to education when the General Fund has a good year. This mechanism has generally resulted in funding for schools following the overall economy with lots of booms and busts (For a primer on Prop 98 I wrote in my prior life see here). But, because of the unique level of decrease in state revenues this year, and specifics of the Proposition 98 formulas, there is constitutional uncertainty about what the minimum guarantee would be in 2009-10 and beyond. At stake is $8 billion in annual funding for schools. In a rational world, the Governor and Legislature would figure out what an appropriate funding level is in 2009-10, but California budgets are often far from rational. And, the guarantee that prop 98 provides is what schools get especially in tough times regardless of whether the amount makes any sense. For example, in the current year, the just adopted budget decreases funding for the 2008-09 school year by $7.3 billion, with about half of this decrease being achieved by providing funding to school districts on July 1 that they would have normally received throughout this spring. This accounting and cash flow move lower the 2008-09 funding level which in turn lowers the 2009-10 required spending level. Normally the reductions that school experienced in 2008-09 would be restored to their budget over the next several years (ususally 3-5 years or so. But no one can agree whether in this particular year, the state would need to restore these cuts in the future. This is a big uncertainty for the school community, and clear would lead to lawsuits for the foreseeable future. Instead of letting the courts decide, the Governor and Legislature are sending this issue back to voters.

And the Governor has been able to take advantage of this constitutional uncertainty to neutralize the CTA on the spending cap initiative by only allowing an initiative (Prop 1B) that fixes the $8 billion constitutional uncertainty to be implemented if the spending cap passes (Prop 1A). In addition, Schwarzenegger was able to delay the repayment of the $8 billion plus a little more until after he is out of office. So, instead of suffering a second defeat at the hands of CTA, he has neutralized the education lobby. Of course the interests of CTA in this package are not the same as the rest of California’s public employee unions which are likely to oppose the spending cap. This will be an interesting tension to watch. In the end what will voters think? We will find out May 19th.

Geographic Divide

Digging around Census data, trying to find something else entirely, I came across this chart. I knew the South had lower educational attainment rates, but I don't think I realized just how stark it would look on a map. In 2007, the Census estimated that 84 percent of adults had at least a high school diploma. States colored pink in this chart are states that are above that mark. States in white are below the average. Other than New York and Florida, there's a pretty clear geographic trend. Nothing surprising maybe, but a pretty nice visual.

LittleBrownie.com

As a long-time Girl Scout (from Brownies through my senior year of high school), I felt it was important to share this excellent cookie locator tool: http://cookielocator.littlebrownie.com/

For everyone living in a city, where it is very difficult to find Girl Scout cookies, this site is a lifeline to Tagalongs and Samoas. And an important step in the right direction in the Girl Scouts' efforts to modernize.

Bubble Trouble

If you haven't yet read the discussion room chat on Bill Tucker's Beyond the Bubble, it's well worth your time. I found this paragraph most striking:

There is an implication in [the] question that classroom assessment are rich, performance based tasks compared with the low-level multiple-choice tests administered by the state. It appears that Monty hasn't been in schools lately to listen to the hum of scanning machines scoring these "wonderful" classroom assessments. When I was the director of assessment in Wyoming, we included extended performance tasks on the state assessment (the first state assessment under IASA) that shocked the field. Why was it a shock? Because teachers-by their own admission-had not moved to the depth of knowledge called for in our performance tasks. Therefore, I would argue that state tests can serve as a model of what we want to see in the classroom.

This is a really interesting idea and one that often gets overlooked. While a lot of people deride the use of bubble tests, we tend to ignore the fact that the exact same score sheets are used to evaluate classroom learning all the time. As someone who hasn't been out of the classroom that long, I can attest that very good teachers, teaching high-level classes, employ Scantrons, too. They aren't just used for the statewide exams mandated by NCLB. Teachers at all levels choose to use them for their own formative assessments. Partly this is done out of ease and partly it's a reflection of limited resources. Scantron machines return quick, decisive results. Newer versions even format the results into a gradebook. Individual teachers simply do not have the time or resources to investigate more promising assessments. It will be up to districts, states, or other partnerships to develop the types of assessments that move us beyond the bubble.

Watchmen Part One

The Post's Philip Kennicot says Watchmen is a bad movie, which may or may not be true, I haven't seen it yet. His reasoning: it's an overly reverent adaptation of a bad comic book. Now, everyone's entitled to their opinion--even opinions as wildly divergent from the critical consensus as that one--but sentences like this don't inspire much confidence in Kennicot's judgment:

The graphic design, by Gibbons, was manically detailed, hyperkinetic and worked out with the precision of a movie storyboard.

Manically detailed, yes. Precision of a storyboard, yes. But "hyperkinetic"? Does Kennicot even know what that word means? I'm not sure I could name a major comics artist whose art is less hyperkinetic than Gibbons'. The whole visual aesthetic of Watchmen deliberately avoids motion lines and splashy, jittery panel layouts in favor of a steady montage of mostly equal-sized panels in a standard 3 by 3 grid. This is just a case of a critic throwing in a word that's commonly used to describe comic books without actually knowing what he's talking about. 

What's Wrong With Astronomy?

Maureen Dowd approvingly quotes Senator John McCain's twittered mockery of $2 million in federal funding for the promotion of astronomy in Hawaii, because "nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy." Last I checked, astronomy was a legitimate branch of science. To conduct the kind of astronomy that involves observation of light, you ideally need to put your observatory somewhere that is A) high in the air, and B) far away from artificial light. As such, there's no better place in America to build an observatory than the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii, which is A) nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, and B) in Hawaii, which is farther away from the rest of civilization than anywhere else on planet Earth. They take light pollution on the Big Island so seriously that individual light fixtures in restaurants on the beach, some 14,000 feet and 40 miles away from the observatory, are required to have special shields that keep the light from emitting upward. The observatory site is managed by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, which notes:

Mauna Kea is unique as an astronomical observing site. The atmosphere above the mountain is extremely dry -- which is important in measuring infrared and submillimeter radiation from celestial sources - and cloud-free, so that the proportion of clear nights is among the highest in the world. The exceptional stability of the atmosphere above Mauna Kea permits more detailed studies than are possible elsewhere, while its distance from city lights and a strong island-wide lighting ordinance ensure an extremely dark sky, allowing observation of the faintest galaxies that lie at the very edge of the observable Universe. A tropical inversion cloud layer about 600 meters (2,000 ft) thick, well below the summit, isolates the upper atmosphere from the lower moist maritime air and ensures that the summit skies are pure, dry, and free from atmospheric pollutants...More major telescopes are now located on Mauna Kea than on any other single mountain peak, and Mauna Kea is widely recognized as offering better conditions for optical, infrared and millimeter/submillimeter measurements than any other developed site.

Of course, there was a time when other states also had areas with similar geographic features--high elevation, little light-polluting human development--and as such built observatories that were the site of important scientific achievments, like the discovery of Pluto, which happened at the Lowell Observatory in 1930 in the then-very small town of Flagstaff. That is, Flagstaff, Arizona, currently represented in the United States Senate by John McCain. 

Preparing to Fall Off a Cliff – The Problem of One-Time Funds

Last Friday Joseph Conaty, acting Assistant Sec. of Elementary and Secondary Education discussed the unique opportunity that this one-time infusion of stimulus funds provides in an event hosted by Teachscape and the Carnegie foundation (audio discussion and slides here starting Thursday). Much is still unknown about how some of the funding will be distributed and what its uses are especially the $5 billion available for incentive funding. Of course, many school districts will just be using this infusion of federal funds to backfill severe budget cuts that they would otherwise have to make because of falling local property tax revenues or declining state budgets. These districts will be trying to use the new funds to keep in place their current program while trying not to violate the supplement not supplant and maintenance of effort requirements of the federal funds. (See here for discussion). But even the districts that are trying to backfill for potential cuts may not be acting in a fiscally prudent way. One of the first axioms of budgeting is not to use one time funds for ongoing purposes. This is how many states got into fiscal difficulty at the start of this decade when they used dot-com bubble funding to create on-going programs or cut taxes. When the bubble burst, then states were stuck. At least one state – California – has yet to work its way out of the bad decisions it made with one-time funds. Effectively it wasn’t politically viable to increase the taxes back the level they were before the windfall or eliminate the new programs that were created.

During Dr. Conaty’s briefing, he responded to a question about the one time nature of these funds by describing the stimulus funds as a “cliff effect” or a large one-time (or limited term) infusion of funds that will end. So what should districts do with these funds when they are facing a cliff? (It should be noted that for the political reasons discussed below, the steep cliff that schools are currently facing - basically cutting federal funding in half - will likely be more of a gentle bluff because of the politics discussed below.)
Dr. Conaty threw out one concrete answer – districts could invest these funds on school facility repairs, a somewhat unsatisfying answer for many reformers because new shiny buildings may not change the outcomes for kids much (An aside, my wife, a resource economist, hit me with the same suggestion when I described the issue to her). Of course schools don’t tend to like to use operation funds for capital outlay because they can usually go to their voters and get more funding for facility needs, but often have a difficult time when they ask voters for more operational funds.

This raises the question, of what states and school districts should do when faced with a cliff? Should they jump by investing much of their new one time funds on on-going programs? There are two ways to approach this issue: What is best for education collectively and what is best for a specific district. Collectively, the education community may want to see most of this new funding committed to on-going staffing costs. Unions would certainly support this type of use of the funds because it would mean an increase in union membership, or salaries and benefits, or both. In addition, use of the funding for ongoing program purposes creates a better negotiating position when the stimulus funding runs out, and Congress is faced with having to ask education to go back to their historic budgeting levels (i.e. minus these one-time funds). If much of the stimulus funds are committed to ongoing investments, the education community will be able to argue that cutting funds back will diminish the educational gains that have been made and would lay off large numbers of teachers in districts with the kids that need it most. In addition the impact of teacher lay offs would be detrimental to the economic recovery (that we all hope is happening in two years). So, if the education community can collectively act somewhat irresponsibly, by spending this one-time funding on ongoing purposes, they can make it even more difficult for Congress to reduce their historic investment. First, this would fly in the face of the “New Era of Responsibly.” (here). Second, this would often not be in the best interest of the district as discussed below.


The best course of action for a specific district is likely different than the collective approach, and the answer really depends upon the condition of the districts budget going into this. If the district just fell off of a cliff because of a dramatic fall in its state and local funds, then using this federal parachute to avoid cuts makes sense (although making some cuts and saving some of this one-time money would likely be a better approach).
If the district is in a somewhat better position, then the district will be faced with a choice between many of these sexy and perhaps most promising new school reform ideas (early childhood education, rewarding effective teachers, creating promise neighborhoods … ) and considering the boring conservative budget axioms like never invest one-time funds on ongoing programs. So while it is great to talk about all of the reforms that could be funded using these dollars, taking the school reform leap is a risky one. What will those more fiscally conservative districts do with the funds?

1. Create large reserves – Not very sexy, but this is likely the best use of these funds. Through creating a reserve, districts could spread the benefits of the federal investment over a longer time period than 2 years. Now technically, the stimulus funds need to be spent in a timely fashion or districts will lose the funds. But, there are carry over provisions for the base federal budget funds. And most states allow districts to carry over a certain share of their state and local funds. So, districts should spend stimulus funds first, and then horde some of their base funds (again trying not to get in trouble with the accountants and auditors). Even districts that are using all of their federal funds to backfill cuts, might be well advised to make some cuts, and put a little aside for 2011-12 when they might fall off a cliff.

2. Make investments which will reduce future operating costs. Invest in district upgrades and data systems that will make the central office more effective. Replace old boilers, deferred maintenance other repairs that will lead to greater energy efficiencies, and/or reduce future cost obligations.
3. Improve the quality of local assessments, instructional materials, and computer technology.
4. Contract out for temporary services. This could include targeted professional development for teachers and principals, hiring school turn around consultants …

Taking these actions would best position a school district to weather the difficult fiscal times that are likely to be a part of education finance for the foreseeable future. But as discussed above, if all districts took these steps that are fiscally prudent for the district, it would be easier for Congress to reduce the funding at the end of the stimulus funding. So the interest of the collective and of the individual district may be in conflict.

Of course we can likely count on their being some less fiscally prudent districts that will:

1. Hire new staff or increase salaries.
2. Create new programs within the district.
3. Provide reward incentives. While over the long run teacher compensation should be reformed to have a portion of a teachers salary depend upon some measure of performance, using one-time funds for teacher and principal rewards is not likely to have the incentive effect that one might like. For example if funding for teacher rewards was going to be provided in 2009-10, it would likely be based at least partially on 2008-09 assessment results. But, guess what you can’t create an incentive through rewarding teachers after the fact. Ask California how well this worked for the hundreds of millions that they provided in rewards after the fact.

Unfortunately, the types of reforms that have the most promise are more likely to take ongoing resources instead of one-time. So some districts may be temped to not be conservative, and use the funds to maintain existing programs, create new ones, hire new staff and generally improve the quality of their educational services while at the same time stimulating the economy by creating jobs. And what happens two years from now when they fall of the cliff? Maybe the feds will provide another parachute (even though it is not in the current budget planning). If not base jumping off cliffs may not be that much fun. “Base jumping is a highly dangerous sport that can easily injure and kill participants” (basejumper.com).

Given that the funding that districts control (Title I, special education and stabilization funds) is not likely to go to investments that will drive the type of reforms that education needs, it becomes apparent why the $5 billion in incentive funding is so important to the reform community. We will have to wait any see the rules on these funds.

In response to this post a friend sent me this link on basejumping. Can stimulus funds be used for this? Maybe some of the incentive and innovation funds?

Department of Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

New York magazine has an interesting article this week about former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, now president of the New School in New York City. Kerrey has been warring with his faculty over a variety of issues, leading to angry protests, votes of no confidence., etc. Why? Well...

...Yet most faculty say they would have been fine with all of Kerrey’s proposals (and then some) if he’d done one simple thing: Consult them. “He saw us as employees,” says Prewitt. “And senior faculty don’t think of themselves as employees of the president.”

Isn't that one of those things you don't admit in public? One gets the sense from the article that while Kerrey has some good ideas and is in a tough spot, he's also kind of unfocused and may not have the right disposition for the job. Still...

The Utility of Perkins Loans

While President Obama's proposal to end subsidies to private student loan companies may have been his boldest financial aid move in the budget, his proposal to expand the Perkins Loan program was the most surprising. Starting with Eisenhower, presidents have been trying to cut the Perkins Loan program and, given Obama's big moves on Stafford Loans and Pell Grants, I would have expected Perkins Loans to be on the chopping block in the 2010 budget.

Instead, the President is proposing to fix some longstanding inequities in the program, expand it, and use it as leverage to get colleges and universities to do other things he wants, like keep tuition increases low and give out more need-based financial aid. Perkins loans are unusual because colleges originate and service the loans using a revolving loan pool funded by the government -- colleges also get substantial discretion in deciding which "exceptionally needy" students get the loans. This discretion, combined with a distribution formula that results in wealthier, more expensive colleges getting more funds, make it a popular program among private colleges and universities.

Perhaps the President decided that, rather than fighting the higher ed establishment over cutting the program, he would use its popularity with some of the oldest and most influential campuses to leverage bigger changes in higher education. Not a bad trade-off, especially since the $1.1 billion Perkins Loan program is small relative to the $40+ billion Stafford Loan Program, but ultimately Perkins Loans are duplicative and don't help to simplify the complicated tangle of financial aid programs. And with other proposed changes in the budget, they won't even be the best loan deal for students anymore.

Used as an additional source of loan funds for the neediest students, Perkins loans have generally had the most generous terms of the three federal loan programs - the lowest interest rate at 5%, subsidized interest during school, and flexibility during repayment. But President Obama is proposing to eliminate the in-school interest rate subsidies and the Stafford Subsidized loan program will have a lower interest rate by the 2010 school year (4.5%) thanks to the Democrats' 2008 legislation cutting interest rates in half.

There are better ways to increase aid for low-income students than expanding the Perkins Loan program, including raising limits on the Subsidized Student loan program (now that it has a super-low interest rate) or using funds from cutting the Perkins Loan program to further increase Pell grants. The utility of expanding the Perkins Loan program isn't to provide more aid to students (there are better and easier ways to do that), the utility of the program is that it provides a point of leverage for the federal government among staunchly independent private (and public) colleges.

A Step Forward

Yesterday Dartmouth University announced that its next president will be Jim Yong Kim, currently chairman of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. Asian-Americans make up a much greater percentage of students in America's elite colleges and universities than the population as a whole, to the point where there seems to be a pretty strong circumstantial case that Asian students are now subject to race-based admissions discrimination not dissimilar to the infamous "Jewish quotas" utilized by Ivy League institutions in the early 20th Century. (Dan Golden's The Price of Admission has a whole chapter on this and is well worth reading in full.) But for a variety of reasons that hasn't translated into representation in the upper reaches of higher education leadership, where Asian-Americans remain few and far between. So this is welcome news.

Open for Discussion: The Future of Student Assessment

There is one place where you can find a rare consensus among NCLB proponents, critics, teachers, and policymakers—none are really satisfied with the state of testing today. At a time when students are tested more than ever—and test results are used to make critical judgments about the performance of schools, teachers, and students—our testing methods don't serve our educational system nearly as well as they should. Can technology transform the way we assess our students?

Today through Thursday, please join us in an online discussion to explore technology's role in improving student assessment. Our all-star panel, including Charles Barone, Ph.D., director of federal policy for the Democrats for Education Reform and former Democratic staff director of the House Education and Labor Committee under Congressman George Miller from 2001 to 2003, Margaret Honey, Ph.D., president of the New York Hall of Science, and former vice president of the Education Development Center and director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology, and Scott Marion, Ph.D., vice president of the National Center for the Improvement in Educational Assessment and former director of assessment and accountability for the Wyoming Department of Education, will engage with your questions.

Recruiting

One of the consequences of electing an administration that's ideologically predisposed to believe that government can make the world a better place is that it puts a premium on hiring talented people to run the government. (If you hold the opposite view, shortchanging personnel, and thus government services, just proves you were right all along.) The vast amounts of new money pouring forth from Washington, DC just increases the urgency--the new administration really has to deliver the goods. Recruitment is complicated and involves many factors like pay, responsibility, status, etc., but it's important not to forget environment.

For example, this afternoon I went to a meeting at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In addition to rhyming with "thud," H.U.D. has the bad fortune of being located in southwest Washington, DC, which is generally isolated and filled with big office buildings and not much else. Upon arriving at H.U.D., I was immediately shuttled to a security desk, whereupon I waited in line for twenty minutes behind eight other people,  each of whom was required to present an I.D. (the information from which was entered into a computer) and then stand behind a piece of tape on the ground and stare into a camera. Then they were given an official visitor's pass, complete with photo. After this I went through an x-ray machine and metal detector set-up and had to be wanded by the security guy after setting off the alarm. Then I was led past a series of security checkpoints through doors that locked behind me. 

In other words, going to a meeting at H.U.D. involves experiencing, in rapid succession, the charms of the DMV, airport security, and prison. 

The meeting itself was interesting and full of friendly, smart folks. I learned, for example, that people and organizations that are in the business of building new housing in economically distressed neighborhoods are called "housers." But it was a relief to go back to a normal, friendly think tankish work environment, and these kinds of things mater. 

Flexibility

As the global economy continues its terrifying free-fall into an abyss of undetermined depth, the demand for high-quality, government-subsidized services will naturally increase. But since government revenues are being dampened by the same world-wide economic meltdown, public institutions have less money to meet surging demand. To wit:

Admissions officers at the State University of New York college campus here are suddenly afraid of getting what they have always wished for: legions of top high-school seniors saying “yes” to their fat envelopes. Students are already tripled up in many dorm rooms after an unexpectedly large freshman class entered last fall. And despite looming budget cuts from the state, which more tuition-paying students could help offset, officials say they are determined not to diminish the quality of student life by expanding enrollment at their liberal-arts college beyond the current 6,000 undergraduates.

The assumption that the potential degradation of student life is so great as to make any expansion of services impossible deserves more scrutiny than it gets here. I accept the basic premise that an over-capacity university provides less to students than an at-capacity university. But how much less? In what way, exactly? I lived in a triple room for a semester in college; it annoyed me mildly on some days, and then I walked out of the room and lived a student life no different than when one of my roomates moved out. Are larger class sizes the problem? I'd be more concerned about this if a robust body of research existed that examined the link between class size and student learning in higher education, but alas it does not. In other words, I don't think it makes sense to just automatically assume that the marginal costs of adding, say, 500 slots to a campus, which will in some ways be disbursed among all 6,500 students plus faculty and administration, necessarily outweigh the considerable benefits to those 500 students. Times are tough, public universities need to adjust along with everyone else. 

More broadly, I'd observe that an information-centered industry that's tethered to a site-based model of service delivery with high fixed costs and an inability to easily or quickly scale is going to have a tough time managing over the long term in a world where information technology is changing the cost and scale equations so fundamentally. 

An Out and Back Hike on the FFELP Trail

President Obama's budget proposal, released last week, called for an end to government subsidies to banks and private loan companies making federal student loans through the FFEL Program. Instead, the government would ramp up the Federal Direct Loan Program (FDLP) under which the government lends directly to students, eliminating the "middlemen" in the FFELP. This represents a bold shift in policy from the previous administration, which favored the privately administered FFELP, and it means that Obama's administration is willing to take on the lobbying force of the private loan companies, which include heavy-hitters like Sallie Mae.

Of course, now is the time to take on banks and loan companies since they have already spent a lot of lobbying capital getting government money to just stay afloat. Also, with the recent government infusion of support for FFELP, it will be harder for its advocates to argue that it is more efficient and less expensive than the government-administered FDLP. In the past year, the Department of Education has propped up private loan companies in the wake of the credit-market freeze by offering to buy up loans, thereby providing some liquidity to the student loan market and freeing up money for loan companies to make new loans. This helps the lenders, and it also helps students by ensuring continued access to federal loans. But it doesn't do much for taxpayers, which, as Kevin Carey explained earlier, are stuck paying for two loan programs to do pretty much the same thing.

President Obama's proposal makes sense in the current credit climate, but it's nothing new - he's basically taking us back to 1965, when the FFELP was born, and is proposing to run the program as it was first envisioned - with little government support. [insert dreamy, flashback music here]

When the federal student loan program began (then called the Guaranteed Student Loan Program), the federal government provided private loan companies with an 80 percent guarantee against default and a 6 percent interest rate - to compare, there is now a 97 percent guarantee against default and a guaranteed profit called the "Special Allowance Payment", which President Obama wants to eliminate.

Policymakers in 1965 opted to administer the student loan program through private loan companies, instead of through a direct loan program, in order to attract private loan capital to the student loan market, using a government guarantee as an incentive. But, lenders were reluctant to participate and had trouble getting money to make new loans, so the government gradually ratcheted up the guarantee and the subsidies to lenders. And, in 1972, the government created "Sallie Mae" as a secondary market for student loans (for more history, see here).

Like other "government sponsored entities," such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae was established as a for-profit, privately operated corporation set up to increase investments in student loans. And it was successful - Sallie Mae was profitable and supported the growing student loan market. Then, as private loan capital became cheaper and easier to get in the 1990's and early 2000's, Sallie Mae went completely private - cutting off its access to government funds. The original goal of creating a loan program that used private capital (not Treasury funds) was realized, and as the Bush administration lowered subsidies and the loan guarantee, FFELP was headed toward the original 1965 vision.

And then we all know what happened - credit markets dried up and lenders were left without any money or access to Treasury funds. This is where we turn around and head back down the trail.

First, the Department of Education passed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, which created a type of secondary market by authorizing the Department of Education to buy up loans and create liquidity in the market. Then, the Department of Education advocated for increasing subsidies by changing the way they are calculated.

And now the Obama administration is taking us back to the very beginning, where we're deciding whether to head back down the trail using private loan companies or switch direction to the direct loan trail. Only now, using private loan companies doesn't seem like such an innovative way to leverage private capital to administer a federal loan program, instead it seems risky and unstable. If Obama's budget goes through as planned, we'll get a chance to see where the other trail takes us. Hopefully it's a little less rocky.

Merit Aid is a Lie

In an article titled "To Keep Students, Colleges Cut Anything But Aid," the New York Times reports that:

With the economy forcing budget cuts and layoffs in higher education, colleges and universities might be expected to be cutting financial aid. But no. Students considering a wide range of private schools, as well as those who are already enrolled, can expect to get more aid this year, not less. The increases highlight the hand-to-mouth existence of many of the nation’s smaller and less well-known institutions. With only tiny endowments, they need full enrollment to survive, and they are anxious to prevent top students from going elsewhere.

There's nothing factually wrong with the article, but it's also a good example of how language can obscure meaning. The practice the Times describes, which is used to some extent by the vast majority of colleges, is called tuition discounting--charging students less than full tuition. This is what economists call "price discrimination." In a normal market, price is determined at the intersection of supply and demand. But to maximize revenue, a firm doesn't want to charge everyone the equilibrium price. It wants to carefully walk up the demand curve and charge each individual customer the most that they're willing to pay. This is normally hard to do, because the amount of money a customer is willing to pay is, in part, a function of how much money they have, and most economic transactions happen at arm's length--when I walk into a car dealership to haggle, the salesman doesn't know if I'm living hand-to-mouth or if I hit the Powerball jackpot last week.

But colleges have an unusual advantage in their market, because in order to be eligible for financial aid, you have to fill out a long form disclosing your income and assets, and only then does the college decide how much to charge you. This makes price discrimination much easier. (Imagine if you had to do that to buy a car!) The good thing is that this ends up being a fairly progressive and economically efficient system--rich students pay more than poor. But it's really not accurate to say that colleges are spending money on financial aid when they regularly discount their price below a published tuition level that is actually far above the equilibrium market  price. If, for example, Georgetown raised its tuition to $100,000 per year and then charged everyone exactly the same amount that it currently does, it would report vast new aid "expenditures" that aren't real. Nor would students actually be "getting more aid." 

More pernicious is the practice of dividing all financial aid into two categories: "need-based" and "merit" aid. Most people are in the habit of believing that words mean what they appear to mean, and so they assume that "need-based" aid is given to students who meet some generally-accepted standard of financial neediness, while "merit" aid is given to students who exhibit some kind of academic or other merit. In fact, only the former is true. Here's one college official describing what merit aid actually means, in the Times article:

At Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pa., for example, merit aid, at its highest, made up about 22 percent of the financial-assistance pie. The share declined to 6 percent two years ago, but crept up to 7 percent last year and will increase to 8 percent for next year’s entering class. “The families I’m concerned about are the near-misses — the $90,000 to $130,000 families, who almost qualify for aid but not quite,” said Robert J. Massa, the college’s vice president for enrollment. “Those are the families I want to target more merit-based aid to.”

Very clearly, there is nothing "merit-based" about that aid. It's just financial aid for the middle-  and upper-middle class, disbursed as part of Dickinson's price discrimination program. Which is not to say there is no actual merit aid, there is, but I suspect the vast majority of the aid labelled as "merit" is actually disbursed for reasons like this. I personally know a very wealthy lawyer whose academically marginal son was offered "merit" aid at a number of private colleges that were obviously keen to enroll a student whose parents would pay close to full freight. "We were surprised," he told me. "My son's not a very good student!"

The problem with falsely describing this as "merit aid" is that it makes discussions of equity in financial aid policy more difficult to have. While financial aid spending has (caveats above notwithstanding) increased significantly in recent years, a smaller proportion of those dollars are going to true need-based aid. But if you complain about this, as I am known to do, the reaction is often "What's wrong with merit? Shouldn't we reward excellence? Isn't that what this great nation is all about?" Followed by, depending on the person, a long disquisition on how the moral fiber of America is weakening and socialism is just around the corner (or has long since arrived.)

The point being, let's call things what they actually are.   

 

Charity Cynic

The Obama budget has already received vociferous opposition on its proposal to raise billions of dollars in additional revenue by capping the tax deduction for charitable contributions at 28 percent. One tv pundit predicted horrible unintended consequences and that contributions would fall "off a cliff." That analysis is actually dead wrong, and the policy is really quite brilliant.

Individuals who itemize their taxes are eligible to reduce their tax liability for charitable donations by the percent of income they pay in taxes. In other words, someone in the highest tax bracket (35 percent) is eligible to cut their taxes by 35 percent for every dollar they give to charity, up to 50 percent of their adjusted gross income. Someone in lower brackets reduces their liabilities at lower levels. Obama's proposal would cap the reductions at 28%, even for those in higher income brackets.

The chart at left (from this NBER paper) shows why this proposal will work for both the short- and long-term. It depicts charitable giving over time sorted by income. Pay particular attention to the black and red lines, because those are the income groups that will be most affected by Obama's proposed changes (the tax will technically hit those with incomes $250,000 and above, but the Alternative Minimum Tax makes many of these filers pay the 28% rate already). Note that the black and red lines take significant dips and dives. These are not random.

Upon taking office in 1981, President Reagan lowered the highest income tax bracket from 70 to 50 percent. As this rate fell, high-income tax filers had lower tax incentives to donate to charity. In 1986, Reagan proposed lowering the rate again, this time to 33 percent. Before the tax provisions took effect but while the proposal was being discussed, charitable contributions from high-income tax filers rose. That's the spike you see in 1986. The rate lowered again the following year, and it stayed relatively constant until 1993. President Clinton had campaigned on raising the highest-income tax brackets, and he set about to do that once in office. Note the big giving spikes around 1992 and 1993. President George W. Bush successfully lowered the top rate in 2002, and again, the giving rate responded.

All this is to say that tax policy works in the short-term. Givers are very responsive to changes in charitable deduction rates, and they modify the timing of their gifts. If President Obama wants to stimulate giving in the short-term, lowering the rate on deductions is the best way to do it. If donors have the option of deducting 35% of their tax liability this year or 28% next year, they're going to do it now. His proposal actually stimulates giving in the short-term.

So what about the long-term? Actually, there's not a whole lot to worry about here either. Americans have historically been the most generous donors of all industrialized societies, and in the last 50 years, growth in charitable giving per capita has outpaced GDP per capita. Some individual non-profits may have a hard time attracting donors, but on the macro level we'll be just fine. A 2006 survey found that only seven percent of high-income donors would dramatically reduce their giving if the tax benefits fell to zero. Twenty-eight is a long way from zero.

Obama's proposal stimulates short-term giving (which we desperately need), it shouldn't hurt giving in the long run, and it will bring in needed funds to the federal budget (that will be directed to health care). It's an incredibly brilliant scheme.

Department of Corrections

I put up a post yesterday saying that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has signed up several people for senior slots in the department. I took the post down after I learned more details about their status. Here's where thing stand:

Marshall (Mike) Smith, head of the education program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation until last November and acting deputy secretary during the Clinton era (and, until recently, an Education Sector board member), has signed on for a year or two as a senior counselor to Duncan and is currently playing a key role on the education portion of the stimulus package.

Jon Schnur, co-founder and CEO of the social entrepreneur enterprise New Leaders for New Schools and a former aide to Vice President Al Gore, is on leave from New Leaders and is serving as a senior consultant to Secretary Duncan.

And Bob Shireman, founder of The Institute for College Access & Success and a long-time Washington higher education wonk, is on leave from his organization to advise Secretary Duncan on higher education.

Stay tuned. The stimulus package and the Obama budget suggest the Education Department is going to have a very high profile.

Time to Take a Stand

President Obama's Access and Completion Incentive Fund, which will help large numbers of low-income students graduate from college, is part of a larger package of reforms including the elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL)--that is, the program in which the federal government guarantees and subsidizes student loans made by banks and other for-profit companies. Under the plan, the federal government would lend the money directly, as it already does for many students. The savings would be used to help fund the completion initiative and transform the Pell Grant program from a "discretionary" program subject to the whims of the annual appropriations process into a "mandatory" program with permanent funding and the grants indexed to inflation. All in all, this would be a huge boon for college students in need. 

But early word is that the past 24 hours have generated an enormous amount of counter-pressure from the student loan industry. Given what a good deal they're getting, it's not hard to understand why. From today's New York Times:

The government already pays a subsidy to banks and others making what are called federally guaranteed student loans. It also covers nearly all the losses if a student defaults on such a loan. In the current economic crisis, it is buying the loans, thereby providing the banks with capital for new lending. That has caused critics to say they wonder whether a middleman is really needed in this business.

“What has happened is, we set up a system in which we ensure liquidity by allowing them to dump their paper on us,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. If lenders rely on the government for money to make more loans, he continued, “What is the purpose of the loan industry?”

In other words, we now have a system that works like this: The federal government hands for-profit lenders some money. The lenders put some of that money in their pocket and hand the rest to students in the form of loans. If the students don't pay it back, the federal government hands the for-profit lenders some more money to cover the loss. If the students do pay it back, the for-profit lenders put some more of that money in their pocket and hand the rest to the federal government. Rinse, repeat. It's nice work if you can get it. 

The loan industry argues that it provides better "service" than the federal direct lending program. I am skeptical, for I was a student borrower once. For the first five years, the loan was held by a bank. Then I switched over to the federal direct lending program. In both cases, the "service" consisted of: A) Providing me with a mailing address where I was supposed to send my monthly check, and B) Cashing the check. Keep in mind that this is the same industry that recently used its government-subsidized profits to lobby the government to make sure that students can't discharge their loans in bankruptcy. Of course, they kept that option open for themselves, so now we have students in desperate financial straights who can't get out debt to companies that have walked away from all their own debt.  

It will be interesting to see how higher education responds to this proposal. It's easy to lobby for more Pell grants when there are no complications or downsides. Now it means going up against an industry with which higher education has long had a cozy--perhaps too cozy--relationship. Many college financial aid officers are said to support the FFEL program. Keep in mind these are the same people who were recently caught up in a series of embarassing scandals in which the loan industry used some of its government-subsidized profits to wine and dine college loan officers or even give them stock and/or put them directly on the payroll. 

Moments like this don't come along very often. Finally putting the Pell grant program on secure footing while helping more students graduate would pay of for students and society alike. It's time for everyone involved to stand up and be counted. 

See more from the always-valuable Higher Ed Watch here, while Matt Yglesias hits the politics:

Rather than a debate between progressives who want the government to provide a public service and conservatives who want the service to exist just insofar as it can be supported by the private market, we have a debate where both sides agree that the service ought to exist but the right thinks it’s important that it be done in a less efficient more costly manner because doing it that way generates profits for people who in turn give them money in some kind of nutty sense is supposed to preserve the integrity of the private sector.

A Brand New Day for Federal Higher Education Funding

President Obama's FY 2010 Budget Proposal includes the following:

Focuses on College Completion. It is not enough for the Nation to enroll more students in college; we also need to graduate more students from college. A few States and institutions have begun to experiment with these approaches, but there is much more they can do. The Budget includes a new five-year, $2.5 billion Access and
Completion Incentive Fund to support innovative State efforts to help low-income students succeed and complete their college education. The program will include a rigorous evaluation component to ensure that we learn from what works.

If enacted, this could be a very big deal. The federal government provides higher education with a lot of money, but nearly every penny comes in the form of tax preferences, research funding, and student financial aid. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, there was talk of giving institutions direct subsidies, much as the feds had recently begun funding K-12 schools. Instead, lawmakers created the Pell grant and federal student loan program. Ever since, national higher education policy has been governed by a well-understood principle: The feds don't give colleges any money to directly support education, and in exchange the feds don't have any say in what colleges do.

This could alter that relationship, perhaps fundamentally. And for that reason, a lot of pressure will be brought to bear in the coming months to send the Access and Completion Incentive Fund to a quiet death. You won't read about in the newspapers, because nobody wants to be seen as opposing college completion, and that's not how lobbyists who know what they're doing operate. But there are plenty of folks in the higher education world who would gladly turn down $2.5 billion in order to preserve the sacred principles of institutional autonomy and federal non-interference. And if there's one thing they have in common, it's this: they're not the people educating low-income college students.

Higher education likes to speak with one voice, because that's the smart thing to do, but in reality there are all kinds of divergent interests at play. Institutions that are in the business of maintaining admissions policies that give preference to legacies, the children of wealthy donors, and graduates of classist private high schools--that is, institutions with policies that discriminate against poor students--aren't going to have any interest in trading autonomy for resources designed to help low-income students graduate, because they enroll very few low-income students, and most of them graduate anyway. If allowed, these institutions will roll right over the community colleges and public four-year institutions whose students are in great need of these resources.

To be clear, I'm not sanguine about an expanded federal role in higher education. Federal lawmakers could screw it up--there's certainly plenty of precedent. The key here is to structure the initiative so that the hard-edged federal role focuses on outcomes while preserving institutional autonomy to act in a way that best serves their students and institutional mission, and doesn't sacrifice academic standards in the bargain.

I don't know how much of an effect a new program like this will have. What I do know is that if nothing is done, the same terrible completion rates that disadvantaged students have experienced in the past will continue in the future. Institution-level graduation rates for low-income students are hard to come by, but national studies show that only 54% of students from families with income below $25,000 who begin college at a four-year institution with the goal of getting a bachelor's degree actually graduate within six years. Their four-year graduation rate is 26%. And when we break down institutional graduation rates by race/ethnicity, some truly appalling statistics emerge.

This table, for example, from a report Education Sector published last year, shows that only 14% of black students enroll in colleges where at least 70% of black students graduate within six years, while over 27% enroll in colleges where fewer than 30% of black students graduate within six years. Improving these outcomes does not inevitably lead to lowering expectations for students--quite the opposite, in fact. And contrary to popular belief, it's simply not the case that all those non-graduates eventually hang on to swirl and transfer and graduate in eight, 10 or more years. Many just don't graduate at all. If we can't fix this problem, President Obama's ambitious goals for higher education completion will come to naught.

If we had institution-level graduation rates for low-income students, I strongly suspect we would find similar results--institutions where the odds of low-income students earning a degree are so low as to call into serious question why why nobody is standing at the gate with a sign that says "Abandon All Hope, Nearly All of Ye Who Enter Here." That's what autonomy has given us. It's time to do something new.

Corn is Evil

In education circles, people love to say that "it's all about the kids" - a good motto, if overused sometimes, and a helpful reminder of the purpose of all of those education policies. As hard as it is to keep education policy from being hijacked by adult interests, I have a hard time imagining that folks at the Department of Agriculture sit around thinking about the well-being of schoolchildren when they're implementing the National School Lunch Program. And, as Alice Waters describes in this NYT op-ed, the result is a program that feeds students unhealthy, processed foods that hurt, not help, the battle against childhood obesity and diabetes. And, for the education world, the fatty, overly sugary foods likely contribute to behavioral and attention problems in the classroom.

While it's difficult to change the meals parents feed their children, the free lunch program is an area over which the government has control, and it can be redesigned to provide students with at least one fresh, healthy meal a day. And, even better, it can also help support local, sustainable farming. So what is the hold up? Corn.

Okay, not just corn, but it serves as a symbol of the large agribusiness lobby that has an interest in keeping the free lunch program just as it is. As Waters explains, the Department of Agriculture pays big American food producers for their leftovers and then passes these foods--processed cheese, frozen chicken nuggets, pizza--along to schools at substantially reduced prices.

Fortunately, there is an ongoing revolution in food, led by people like Alice Waters and Will Allen, a 2008 MacArthur fellow, showing that good, healthy food doesn't need to be limited to those who can afford to shop at Whole Foods and that the interests of schoolchildren and local farmers can be joined in a way that improves both the environment and children's health. The federal government can make it easier, not harder, for people like Waters and Allen to introduce healthy food into schools by shifting away from the highly processed leftovers sold by large food producers and better supporting connections between schools and local farms.

Obama's pick of Tom Vilsack, a former Governor of Iowa, to head the Department of Agriculture does not bode well, however, for any dramatic changes in the National School Lunch Program. Maybe one day, though, the Secretary of Agriculture will turn away from the industrial farm lobby and say "no thanks" to the frozen chicken nuggets because, you know, it's really all about the kids.

Update: Our resident Iowan, Chad Aldeman, responded with this commercial from The Corn Refiners Association explaining the virtues of highly processed corn products:



Sounds vaguely familiar...

Government Autopilot

President Obama's budget is out (.pdf), and the first thing that strikes me as entirely sensible is indexing to inflation some of our established tax and spending programs. Instead of arguing eternally over whether or by how much federal Pell Grants should be expanded, they would now automatically rise with the Consumer Price Index (plus one percent, a concession to the ever-increasing costs of higher education). We've done this before with elements of our tax code, and it's an effective solution to policy gridlock.

Prior to the 1980s, our tax code suffered from what's called bracket creep. Our tax brackets were set as real dollar amounts, but inflation would cause salaries to rise into higher brackets than intended. Over time, people slowly paid higher taxes each year until we began indexing our tax brackets to inflation. Bracket creep has been essentially eliminated.

Other programs are not indexed to inflation and thus face similar problems. The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) is one such example that's causing problems in today's political climate. The AMT was a response to a 1969 IRS study showing that 155 individuals earning over $200,000 managed to avoid paying any income taxes whatsoever. The AMT targeted these individuals who were escaping their tax burdens, but since it was not indexed to inflation, it has ensnared greater numbers of people each year, to the point that it would have affected millions of taxpayers if Congress had not adopted patches each of the last two years. Those "patches" have replaced sound policymaking. Rather than finding an appropriate level and letting it move with inflation, we have to wait for Congress to debate on changes each year.

Obama's budget would begin indexing the AMT and Pell Grants, but there's no economic or political reason to stop there. The federal minimum wage could also be indexed to avoid the consequences that occur when Congress imposes changes over a short period of time. Republicans in power in the past let the minimum wage erode over time to inflation. Democrats, once back in power, quickly upped the rate. These cycles impose real costs on the economy as businesses adapt to radically higher rates. To keep the minimum wage's buying power at a steady level over time, we should be indexing it as well.

The budget will no doubt be a political ping pong ball in the coming weeks, but this is one provision that should stay. It will set controversial parts of the government on autopilot and avoid recurring debates. Who knows, it might even free up time and airspace to debate neglected policy.

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.