The Potential for Obama's Promise Neighborhoods

Every week, Geoffrey Canada’s hallmark Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) provides well over 10,000 students with the kinds of educational and developmental supports and opportunities that suburban students enjoy as a matter of course. Almost two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama announced his plan to replicate the HCZ’s efforts in twenty "Promise Neighborhoods" across the country. A few months ago, this plan marked the first point on the President-elect's agenda for tackling urban poverty. And with the release of his Budget proposal last month, President Obama demonstrated that he has not forgotten this promise.

While the Harlem Children’s Zone has been a heartening example of the successful coordination of schools and services, it has not come to be so without incident—nor has it been the only attempt at realizing such a vision. If President Obama’s plan for America’s future is to succeed in 20 different cities across the country, it will need to consider more than just the Harlem blueprint.

Fortunately, there are several examples to study. The Parramore Kidz Zone in Orlando, Fla., is an explicit attempt to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone. And in Europe, several countries over the last 10-20 years have initiated programs attempting a similar integration of schools and services. Among these foreign, nation-level programs are France’s Zones d’Education Prioritaire and Scotland’s Integrated Community Schools. These programs have much to teach us, particularly in the areas of operating scale, data-collection, outreach, and governance.

A realistic appreciation for the operating scope and scale of each project site or "neighborhood" will be critical to the success of the president's plan. Leaders of HCZ had to make tough choices early on, handing over certain elderly nutrition, drop-out prevention and homelessness programs to other agencies. Had they not done so, they likely would have been left with an unsustainable project. And France's ZEP attempted to incorporate too many programs at the outset and expanded too rapidly. As a result, the program grew both costlier and less effective.

While an understanding of scale is important, a program’s effectiveness cannot be measured, let alone improved, without a relevant data-system in place. Officials with the Parramore Kidz Zone continually face this obstacle in trying to measure the impact of their program. In the Orlando area, much of data, e.g. reported incidents of teen pregnancy and child abuse, is collected at the zip-code level only. But the Parramore Kidz Zone spans, but by no means fills, two zip-codes. As a result, it can't measure its impact on things like teen pregnancy and child abuse (zip-code-level statistics include a mess of non-PKZ data). Still, with appropriately local data-collection, claims can be made about a project site’s effectiveness. At the end of its first year, the Parramore Kidz Zone was able to claim responsibility for a 28 percent reduction in juvenile crime, thanks to relevant data from the police department.

Outreach is also a critical concern. These initiatives have learned that they must develop and promote their programs in a way that is accessible and appealing—as informed by input from the community—if the programs are to be successful. The Harlem Children’s Zone has successfully used monetary rewards to encourage participation in its programs. And the Parramore Kidz Zone has learned to approach community members on the members’ own terms, rather than to implement (and market) services by some preformed external model. Without a team to assess a community’s needs and to facilitate participation in offered programs, a project site could provide every service imaginable—at great cost—and still have an underserved community.

Still, getting local governments, education authorities, and service providers to work together effectively is difficult and has proven problematic for these models. Scotland’s Integrated Community Schools established an "Integration Manager" to coordinate school and service objectives and resources and found that success or failure of a site was for the better part determined by the success of failure of that person—poor coordination and leadership meant inadequate services and ineffective decisions. While site members must work together to delegate site responsibilities, they will benefit from an external figure (e.g. an education mayor or federal official) with the authority to act in the capacity of an Integration Manager, holding members accountable when internal regulation stagnates.

The success of the president's 20 Promise Neighborhoods depends on the diligent use of data and outreach, and an effective, empowered governance structure with an appropriate sense of its operating scale. If the administration recognizes this and acts accordingly, we can expect to see the kind of results that the Harlem Children's Zone has proven possible.

--Guestblogger Christopher Frascella (Frascella conducted comparative research on integrated community/school improvement zones as an intern at Education Sector during fall 2008)

WOOOOO BEARCATS!! HELL YEAH! DUKE SUCKS!!!

Or something like that? For the life of me I never even considered the possibility that my alma mater, Binghamton University, would end up going to the NCAA tournament; when I was there the hoops program was a mediocre Division III affair that would attract a couple hundred fans to games at most. So I'm not really sure what to do. But since our drive for sports fame has already produced the requisite embarassing media coverage of player arrests, lowered academic standards, pressure on professors to raise grades, etc., it seems like at the very least we should enjoy this brief moment in the sun, which will likely set around 9:50 PM EDT on Thursday in Greensboro. 

Departure Lounge

Five years after sketching the contours of Education Sector with Andy Rotherham at the Oceanaire restaurant in downtown Washington, I’m leaving the organization at the end of June to become executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington (AISGW), a vibrant consortium of 84 private and independent parochial schools, where I’ll have the opportunity to do a wide range of very interesting work. AISGW announced my appointment yesterday in a generous press release.

Launching Education Sector has been a tremendous experience. I’ve learned an immense amount. I’m more than a little proud of what our team has accomplished. And I’m looking forward to continuing my affiliation with ES once I start at AISGW in July.

I also want to mention another transition at Education Sector. Marshall (Mike) Smith has resigned from our board of directors because he has started working as a senior advisor to Secretary Duncan at the U.S. Department of Education, a perfect job for him. Education Sector wouldn’t exist without Mike. As the director of education programs at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, he was our first funder, giving me the opportunity to spend six months as Education Sector's first full-time employee and encouraging other foundations to support us. Hewlett continued to be our leading funder during Mike’s tenure at the foundation. And along the way he has been an invaluable mentor to me. There's no one working in American education policy today who has had a more distinguished career than Mike.

Scraping Rock Bottom

The higher education accreditation process is successful in a number of ways. If you attend an accredited instiution, it's unlikely that your money will be outright stolen or that you'll be given a fraudulent degree. Credentials and credits from accredited institutions are broadly recognized, portable and non-expiring. The underlying confidence and flexibility this brings goes a long way toward making the American higher education system work as well is does.

That said, accreditation is also opaque and insider-y and only guarantees a minimum level of quality. Accreditors are also very reluctant to actually pull the trigger and de-accredit institutions because doing so cuts off the flow of money from the federal financial aid system and as such consigns institutions to certain financial doom. But whose interests, exactly, are being served by that approach? Take, for example, Southeastern University, in Washington, DC, which is in the final stages of losing accreditation, because of:

deficiencies that include financial instability, dwindling enrollment and a lack of academic rigor...in the current fiscal year, the school spent $57,000 more on fundraising than it collected in gifts, according to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The six-year graduation rate for first-time students seeking bachelor's degrees is just 14 percent. And the faculty has shrunk to just 10 members for more than 30 academic programs at a school attended by 637 undergraduate and graduate students this winter.

It sounds pretty terrible and given the reluctance of accreditors to invoke a de facto death penalty, combined with the horrible institutional dysfunction that's more or a less a way of life in the nation's capital, I'm assuming it is. But failure of this magnitude doesn't just happen overnight. How did it come to this? Well....

Accreditors noted that they had given considerable latitude to Southeastern because of its mission to educate a diverse and underserved student population but that the same problems had persisted for 30 years.

I'm sorry but that makes no sense whatsover. Accreditation is not an outcomes-based process, which we know because colleges and universities generally don't track student outcomes and among those outcomes that are tracked, like graduation rates, there is literally no floor below which you can fall and lose accreditation. Instead, accreditation is mostly a process-based process. Which is arguably a defensible approach for institutions like Southeastern; one could imagine looking at a college that educates a diverse and underserved population located in a distressed urban environment and saying, "You've got a strong faculty and a solid set of academic programs, the resources are adequate and the management is sound, so we're okay with the fact that not all of your students are succeeding because on some level that's inevitable given where you are and who you serve." 

Instead, Middle States apparently let various chronic academic and management deficiencies at Southeastern persist for three decades precisely because it serves an academically and economically marginalized student population. That's just backwards. These are the students who are most vulnerable to a bad education. Plus, Southeastern is a private university that charges $12,000 per year so I imagine students are borrowing a great deal to attend. Debt and poor education in combination are absolutely toxic for low-income students; accreditors ought to act faster to intervene on their behalf, rather than use that marginalization as an excuse to let the colleges of the hook for decades on end. 

If It's Random, Say It's Random

Jay Matthews is gearing up for the college admissions process with five tips on surviving the April crunch. His first is how to handle happy, grieving friends. His recommendation:

The college admissions system, at least for our most selective schools, has become as rational as who wins bingo night at church. Nobody, including the college admissions officers, has a clear idea why certain students are admitted and others are not. Some rejected applicants are just as good as the accepted. Through no fault of their own, some of your closest friends will get into their first-choice college and some will not. You should put aside your own worries for a moment and practice two short speeches. To those who win this lottery, you should say: “That’s terrific. You worked so hard. You earned it. You are going to have a wonderful time.” To the losers you should say: “Of course you realize this is totally random. It has nothing to do with you. You will have a great time at East Pecos State. You will be running the place, and as you know, the research shows the name of your college has no effect on your success in life. All you need is great character and drive, and you have that.”

Besides being entirely rational and sound advice, Jay uses one word that hits the issue more than any other: lottery.

I have a friend who's worked for two college admissions departments. One was a traditional liberal arts college in the Northeast, and the other a highly competitive college in the greater DC area. At the former, she says it was a mostly sane process where they more or less knew the high schools of students, had time to read the student's personal statements, and truly thought about whether the student would be a good fit for this particular institution. Here in DC, at the competitive school, it was totally different. Mainly because of the sheer size of the applicant pool, they had to rely much more heavily on the all-important numbers--high school GPA and SAT score--rather than thinking holistically about the student. The admissions office, even after setting a relatively high standard, had thousands of applicants to choose from, and very little time to do so. During admissions season, each officer was given 50 applications per day. At eight hours a day and 60 minutes an hour, not counting breaks and meetings, the admissions officer had 10 minutes to make a decision about an applicant. Ten minutes (unless, as my friend points out, they're athletes or legacies).

What this becomes, more or less, is a lottery. And if it's a lottery, and everyone treats it that way except the students who invest their time, money, and emotions, maybe we should just start treating it that way. No more pretending it's about student activities, their essay, recommendations, or their devotion to the school. We've all heard about the perfect 4.0 student with excellent extracurriculars who gets rejected from their dream school. Instead, let's just institute a lottery. Schools set their baseline, kids submit their numbers, and then we run a giant lottery for the spots. Poof, like magic. Such a system operates in other fields that we're perfectly comfortable with--medical residency programs or coveted charter schools, for example--so maybe it's time to give it a shot for college applicants.

Update: I had my numbers slightly wrong, and I've updated them in the text. My friend reviewed 50 applications per day, not 500 per week, as I had written. That's where I got the 10 minutes/ applicant figure: 8 hours per day times 60 minutes per hour, divided by 50 applicants equals 9.6 minutes/ applicant.

Default

Thanks to Abdul Kargbo for pointing to me to this segment from today's Democracy Now! broadcast focusing on Reverend Jesse Jackson's new campaign to reduce student loan interest rates and restore consumer protections. The broadcast also mentions a new documentary coming out: Default: The Student Loan Documentary that looks to be chock-full of scary facts about the debt levels students are facing and the debilitating consequences of loan defaults (see the trailer below).

As the Obama administration is proposing billions of dollars in stimulus funds to help homeowners and banks, it should consider the negative consequences for our economy of having millions of college-educated students who are scraping by because of student loan debt. If student loans are truly going to be a way to access a college education and a more prosperous adult life, the federal government needs to offer more flexible repayment options, caps on the amount of loans students are required to repay, more student rights to negotiate payment terms, and bankruptcy protections. Public policy can go a long way to making the student loan system a more humane, and more effective, way to get a college degree.

And improved student loan policy is a way the federal government can directly reduce the cost of college. A student paying off the maximum $31,000 in federal loans over 25 years spends an additional $33,000 for school at a 6.8% interest rate (the current rate for unsubsidized federal loans). Reducing the interest rate for all student loans to, say, 3% would mean the student pays an additional $13,000 - still a lot, but a big reduction in the total cost of college for that student.


DEFAULT - The Student Loan Documentary from Default on Vimeo.

Taking the Environment Seriously

Chase Nordengren flags a recent Brookings paper from Tom Loveless about environmentalism-related questions on the PISA. Loveless is concerned about what he perceives to be ideological bias in questions related to "responsibility for sustainable development." Students taking the test are asked if they agree or disagree with the following statements:

• Industries should be required to prove that they safely dispose of dangerous waste materials.
• I am in favor of having laws that protect the habitats of endangered species.
• It is important to carry out regular checks on the emissions from cars as a condition of their use.
• To reduce waste, the use of plastic packaging should be kept to a minimum.
• Electricity should be produced from renewable sources as much as possible, even if this increases the cost.
• It disturbs me when energy is wasted through the unnecessary use of electrical appliances.
• I am in favor of having laws that regulate factory emissions even if this would increase the price of products.

Loveless says that these statements:

...embrace a superficial view of responsibility. None of the prompts asks students whether they are willing to take personal responsibility for sustainability. They ask whether someone else should—industries, car owners, factories, and society as a whole.

It's wrongheaded to define seriousness about environmentalism in this manner. In what conceivable way could a student "take personal responsibility" for protecting the habitats of endangered species, regulating factory emissions, or disposing of toxic waste? It's the equivalent of taunting someone who's concerned about the national debt by asking if they'd be willing to tithe an extra 10 percent of their paycheck to the federal government. If you're concerned about budget deficits, the best way to "take personal responsibility" for that is to vote for politicians who will promote policies that combine economic growth with spending restraint and sufficient levels of taxation. Just like if you're concerned about carbon emissions, the best thing you can do is elect someone who supports CAFE standards and a real cap-and-trade plan. Or if you're concerned about toxic waste, someone who will regulate toxic waste. The idea that your committment to the public policies that actually matter is "superficial" unless you've also got a compost heap in your back yard is just a way to deflect attention from the real issues at hand.

It's also worth remembering that PISA is run out of France, and Europeans have different baseline views on various issues, including environmental issues. In America, for example, it's taken as a given that everyone should be allowed to vote and get married and attend public school regardless of their race, gender or religion. It wasn't always that way, of course, and still isn't that way in many other parts of the world. And there are still a small number of Americans, your white supremacists and whatnot, who have a different opinion. But those opinions aren't respected or given credence; rather they're deliberately marginalized by our education system and the way we inculcate civic values circa 2009. Similarly, certain attitudes toward sustainable development that are considered controversial here are more or less settled issues elsewhere. Many of the fiercest public debates involve struggles to move ideas back or forth across the line that bounds topics considered to be legitimate subjects of debate, for obvious reasons. 

Ending the Four-Year Charade

We tend to think of college as four discrete years--freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior--when the truth is far from it. But our national four-year graduation rate, as of yesterday, stands at only 36 percent. The six-year rate climbs to 57, but this means a full 43 percent of students entering a four-year institution as full-time students are either still in school 6+ years after entering, or they have dropped out. It is time to end the notion that "four-year institutions" actually graduate their students in four years and time to think of alternative definitions of college success.

The federal government requires all so-called four-year institutions to report one-year retention rates and four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates for all first-time, full-time students. Six-year rates are separated for race/ ethnicity and gender. It doesn't require the data to be broken down by income or for part-time students. Nor does it count transfer students.President Obama wavers between pushing on access and pushing on completion. It's not an either/ or decision necessarily, but the Georgia example shows that completion is the harder to achieve and easier to forget. His big education speech yesterday focused on access and affordability, but his policies have wisely pushed on completions too. And he's addressed pitiful graduation rates in prior speeches.

Some states are already looking at completions data more comprehensively. The University System of Georgia (USG) has a publicly available data warehouse where users can look at one, two, three, four, five, and six-year retention rates, and graduation rates for four through fifteen years, for all public "four-year" institutions. These can be sorted by gender, race/ ethnicity, and whether the student entered as full- or part-time. They aren't even limited to the same institution: the data gives credit if a student graduates at another USG institution.

The following is not to be taken as a knock against Georgia--rather, they should be applauded for making the data available--but the numbers are not pretty. They show the four year standard is no more than a cruel joke. After four years, only three out of 20 institutions have more graduates than dropouts. Never mind the four-year graduation rate: of students that entered a Georgia "four-year institution" full-time in 1992, eight out of 18 institutions had 15-year, system-wide graduation rates under 40 percent. Only four saw more than half their students graduate. These numbers are worse for minorities, part-time students, and low-income students.

We would be wise to learn from Georgia and stop pretending the four year standard exists for most students. Stop collecting static percentages and instead collect raw numbers for if and when students graduate. Calculate a total graduation rate, calculated by dividing all entrants by all graduates regardless of time. Cap it at 15 years, or something insanely high, to give institutions and students the understanding that partial credit (those students self-identifying as "some college, no degree") does not count for much in the workforce. This would give institutions credit for the slow trickle of graduates, and it would paint a more accurate picture than snapshots taken at four, five, and six years. Instead of holding onto cherished notions of four years of college, total graduation rate would give students an honest assessment of their likelihood to finish. Then, use the raw data on student graduations to calculate time-to-degree for every college in America. Of the students that finish, how long does it take them?

We'd be removing the notion that students should graduate in four years (even though most don't already). This could lead to students taking longer than they do now, but colleges and universities have an incentive to get students out as quickly as possible. Students enrolled in low-level courses consume fewer resources, because their classes are larger and the professors are typically lower paid. A strong focus on time-to-degree would strengthen this incentive. It would also re-frame the notion of college. Instead of the dirty secret that college is supposed to take four years but actually takes six, institutions would have to begin competing on lowering this rate, and we wouldn't have this slow backslide into six being the new four. These two rates would focus on precisely what students want to know: what are my chances of finishing? and how long will it realistically take me if I do?

What’s So Scary about a Survey?

The 2008 Brown Center report, authored by Tom Loveless, takes a close look at PISA – the math, reading and science test delivered to 15-year-olds by the OECD – and raises five objections to the test’s methodology and implementation.

The 2006 PISA tests more than 400,000 students from 57 countries representing 90% of the world economy. PISA differs from its main international competitor, the TIMSS math and science test administered by the US Department of Education, in its focus on policy recommendations and emphasis on the application of knowledge to novel problems. Out of the 30 OECD countries tested in PISA, the United States ranked 21st in science and 25th in mathematics (a printing error led to unusable results in reading).

Loveless raises five objections to the PISA test. First, he notes the lack of nongovernmental participation in the test’s policy recommendation process. Second, he criticizes the test’s alignment as overly broad for assessing the effectiveness of schools in particular. Third, he argues that PISA analyses selectively choose variables used in scatter plots, distorting the nature of the relationship between variables. Fourth, he suggests that PISA’s policy recommendations are disconnected from the assessment data. Loveless’ strongest critique, however, is reserved for a series of survey questions in the test which gather students’ self-assessment of their awareness of issues and attitude towards public problems.

PISA asks test-takers questions about their “values, motivational orientations and sense of self-efficacy.” It’s not hard to understand why a student’s career motivations might be closely tied to their abilities. PISA finds, not surprisingly, that a student’s success in science is moderately related to whether the student finds science useful and scientific problems worth solving. Loveless objects, however, to questions on values: students who disagree with government protection of endangered species or regulations on factory emissions are labeled as lacking a sense of environmental responsibility by the test. “It is difficult to see how declaring support or opposition to a policy without knowing the details is a sign of responsible citizenship,” Loveless writes. “It may in fact be exactly the opposite.”

Citizenship is not necessarily ideologically neutral. PISA’s responsibility questions are part of a broader effort to understand issues of student motivation and attitudes which may shed light on differences between nations. PISA doesn’t just measure schooling in math, reading and science, it measures literacy. True literacy, at least in part, means students who can and will use their education as a form of economic mobility and social empowerment. At the very least, PISA’s questions are another attempt to understand what motivates students to do well and what social factors line up with good educational outcomes. What’s so wrong with a little more data?

By Chase Nordengren.

Student Loan Ponzi Schemes

Nevada's Attorney General recently issued a press release warning students about student loan "ponzi" schemes involving sham for-profit colleges and complicit lenders.*

Meanwhile, Higher Ed Watch describes a recent consumer victory against KeyBank for the exact lending practices that the Nevada AG warns against.

* hat tip to Student Lending Analytics, a great blog for staying up to date on student loan issues.

Sophisticated Growth

Over at Swift and Changeable, Charles Barone writes about his new Education Sector report on growth models:

All growth models have strengths relative to the status and safe harbor models laid out in the ESEA statute, and Tennessee's model is no exception. But, as the paper points out, the Tennessee model (variations of which are also being employed in Ohio and Pennsylvania and are under debate in Texas) also has some serious shortcomings.

The Tennessee model is highly technical, using multivariate, inferential statistics. And therein lies a good deal of the problem. More statistical sophistication means less transparency. And it's not clear to me that all that sophistication actually buys you much relative to other, simpler methods of measuring growth.

Some of the methodology and most of the data are proprietary, meaning they are privately owned, i.e., no public access. This all makes it very difficult for even Ph.D. and J.D.-level policy experts to get a handle on what is going on (which I found as a peer-reviewer last year), let alone teachers, parents, and the general public.

Read the full report here.

President Obama Joins the Bubble-Bursting Bandwagon

"And I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test..."

I couldn't agree more, Mr. President. But, as always, the devil is in the details. The Education Sector report Beyond the Bubble details how technology, along with greatly improved cognitive models, can help us build much better assessments that move beyond bubble-filling -- and at the same time offer rigorous and reliable evidence of student learning.

Sherman Dorn, in his friendly critique, warns of overly enthusiastic technology boosterism and fascination with bells and whistles. It's easy to see how a report subtitled Technology and the Future of Student Assessment could be characterized this way.

While the report details the potential for technology as a tool to significantly improve student assessment, the report also offers strong warnings that technology on its own will not get us past the bubble:

Just over half the states, for instance, use computers to deliver a portion of the annual state testing programs mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But, for the most part, these states' investments in technology have not led to fundamental changes in our approaches to testing. Mostly, these investments have simply made old approaches to assessment more efficient. Even the most technologically advanced states have done little except replace the conventional paper-based, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests with computerized versions of the same. Overall, the types of skills tests measure, and what the test results can tell us, have remained essentially the same....without a sound evidentiary model and conceptual underpinning, technology-enabled assessment tools are just more efficient, faster, and accessible versions of the same old tests.

We also need to remember that the use of technology, the Internet in particular, does not necessarily or immediately transform. Businesses, for example, first applied technology in administrative pursuits, improving efficiencies in areas such as purchasing, payroll, and accounting. Forecasts of technology-based paradigm shifts almost always overestimate how quickly change will occur, but more importantly, underestimate the impact of the alterations. John Seely Brown, founder of the Institute for Research on Learning and former director of the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), underscores this point. He writes, "that initial uses of new media have tended to mimic what came before—early photography imitated painting, the first movies the stage, etc."

The large infrastructure investments that states such as Virginia or Oregon have made to digitize testing are very important. They just can't be seen as the end goal.

Obama: Lift Charter School Caps

One of the most specific and meaningful proposals in President Obama's big education speech this morning was his call to reduce artificial restrictions on the supply of charter schools while simultaneously strengthening accountability for charter school success:

But right now, there are many caps on how many charter schools are allowed in some states, no matter how well they're preparing our students. That isn't good for our children, our economy, or our country. Of course, any expansion of charter schools must not result in the spread of mediocrity, but in the advancement of excellence. And that will require states adopting both a rigorous selection and review process to ensure that a charter school's autonomy is coupled with greater accountability –- as well as a strategy, like the one in Chicago, to close charter schools that are not working. Provided this greater accountability, I call on states to reform their charter rules, and lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools, wherever such caps are in place.

It's a completely sensible idea and represents what I think is the only reasonable approach to charter schools. The fact that the best charters schools have long waiting lists of parents and children who they're legally prevented from serving is inexcusible; with all the talk of needing greater parental involvement in education the last thing we should be doing is rebuffing parents who really want to be involved. At the same time, it's clear that we can't rely on market forces alone to regulate charter schools; strong, results-driven public oversight is needed to ensure that low-performing charter schools are shut down and the others have incentives to not be shut down. Andy Rotherham was all over this tradeoff back in 2007 and it's good to see it become part of the president's agenda.

The politics of this are obviously tricky but the Times oversimplifies things by flatly reporting that "Teachers’ unions oppose [charter] schools, saying they take away funding for public schools." It's true that unions have oppposed and continue to oppose expansion of charter schools in many states and cities, but they haven't acted monolothically and don't always oppose charters, there are union-run charters right in New York City, for example.  

Let the Politics Begin

Via the Student Lending Analytics blog, the Hill reported yesterday on the debate between lawmakers over President Obama's proposal to eliminate subsidies to private student loan companies and shift all student loans to the federal government's Direct Loan Program. According to the article, the proposal is facing "stiff bipartisan resistance" from lawmakers, many of whom have received generous campaign donations from private loan companies.

This isn't surprising - the President's proposal threatens to put student loan companies out of business, or at least take away the vast majority of their business, leaving them to make private student loans (which are hard to finance these days) and to service federal loans distributed through the Direct Loan Program. Student loan companies are not likely to go down without a long, hard fight, and have a strong lobbying force for the battle, honed by many years of fighting subsidy cuts and promoting increased loan volume. And they have contributed an impressive amount in campaign donations, which I'm sure opens the ears of some lawmakers to their arguments. From the article:

Nelnet and Sallie Mae, the country’s largest student lender, have traditionally been big campaign donors. Sallie Mae gave out more than $583,000 to lawmakers and political action committees in 2008, dividing the funds nearly equally between the parties. That’s the highest total of any company in the finance/credit sector, which includes credit card companies American Express, Visa and MasterCard, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. NelNet gave out $142,000 in political donations.

But if there was a time to take on the student loan lobby, now is it. With the tight credit markets, student loan companies have had to turn to the government for money to make new loans, strengthening the argument that companies like Sallie Mae and NelNet are just expensive middlemen in the student loan system.

But the question still remains as to whether the Direct Loan Program could smoothly process loans for an additional 6 million students. And it is a high stakes question - the federal loan program touches the lives of many families in the U.S., across the income spectrum, and any hiccup in loan availability will be felt throughout the country. The President, Senators and Congressmen will all hear from their constituents if there is trouble getting loan money for college.

As the article notes, Obama is proposing a lot of change, and very quickly. While lawmakers argue about the idea and student loan companies lobby for their survival, I hope someone at the Direct Loan Program is planning for some big changes to come.

Professional in All But Name, and Paycheck

Myles Brand, president of the NCAA, argues against proposals to give college athletes the option of taking a salary in lieu of free college courses they don't want in pursuit of a degree they'll never obtain, because:

Paying even a few student-athletes would turn universities into entertainment corporations and misses the point that, for most, some college is better than none.

Yes, what a sad day it would be if our great institutions of higher learning were to compromise their academic ideals in pursuit of the fame and money that come with being in the sports entertainment business. Before you know it, they'd be paying the heads of their sports divisions multi-million dollar salaries while simultaneously raising student tuition and freezing faculty salaries, or--even worse--banding together to form some sort of national college sports entertainment monopoly, led by a former university president to give it respectability, which would negotiate multi-billion dollar licensing fees with giant publicly-traded entertainment corporations. Brand concludes by saying:

No one has to go to college to play professional sports. But if you do go to college, you have to be a student.

This would be true if there were no such thing as the "National Football League," which prohibits its teams from drafting players who aren't at least three years removed from high school. In theory, a star prospect could sit at home for three years playing Xbox in between workouts, or play in the Arena Football league, but everyone understands that for all intents and purposes the NFL requires players to play three years of unpaid college ball, or two years after redshirting. A few years ago a talented young halfback from Ohio State named Maurice Clarett thrilled the nation by leading the Buckeyes to the 2003 national championship as a freshman. Operating under the mistaken impression that this is a free country, Clarett decided to abandon his faux studies and enter the NFL draft, as opposed to playing for free for two more years, abandoning his faux studies, and entering the NFL draft. The NFL went to court and blocked the move. After years in legal limbo, Clarett went into a downward spiral that culminated in a high-speed police chase in a vehicle that was later found to contain an open bottle of vodka, an AK-47, two loaded handguns, and a samurai sword. He's currently in the middle of a seven-year contract with the Toledo, Ohio Correctional Institution; you can read his blog here. But it was all worth it, because the NFL and NCAA were able to maintain their agreement to collectively exploit free labor standards. 

The Origins of Summer Vacation

President Obama gave a sharp, comprehensive speech on education today, in many ways his most detailed and ambitious statement on the subject yet. It included strong language on charter schools, early childhood education, and the way teachers are evaluated and paid. We'll have a chance to explore these topics in more detail soon, but one quick note on a piece of oft-repeated conventional wisdom that found its way into the speech. The President said:

We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy. That is why I’m calling for us not only to expand effective after-school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time – whether during the summer or through expanded-day programs for children who need it.

The thing about the origins of summer vacation is one of those factual tidbits that everyone knows, a useful shorthand piece of evidence to use in emphasizing how our education system hasn't changed with the times. But as Elena Silva noted in her Education Sector report on school time, it misses a key part of the story:

Time in school has been added and subtracted in many ways throughout our country’s history, although not always for obvious reasons. School schedules varied considerably by locality early in our country’s history with some schools open nearly year round and others open only intermittently. In large cities, long school calendars were not uncommon during the 19th century. In 1840, the school systems in Buffalo, Detroit, and Philadelphia were open between 251 and 260 days of the year. New York City schools were open nearly year round during that period, with only a three-week break in August. This break was gradually extended, mostly as a result of an emerging elite class of families who sought to escape the oppressive summer heat of the city and who advocated that children needed to “rest their minds.” By 1889, many cities had moved to observe the two-month summer holiday of July and August. Rural communities generally had the shortest calendars, designed to allow children to assist with family farm work, but they began to extend their school hours and calendars as the urban schools shortened theirs.

Turns out that our irrational school calendar is more a function of what was convenient for rich people than is commonly understood, which all things considered isn't surprising.  

Measurement of Growth (Models)

Only three short years ago, our nation's students were measured as either/ or: either they met the "proficiency" standard for academic achievement, or they didn't. Two states, Tennessee and North Carolina, began a pilot program measuring student growth from year to year. No longer were students measured against an arbitrary benchmark; instead they would be measured against themselves and their progress followed year-to-year.

In the 2006, a total of seven schools nationwide met No Child Left Behind's Adequate Yearly Progress standard due to counting student growth. As more states began measuring individual student growth as an alternative, that number grew, to 353 in 2007 and 1,571 last year.

As this trend continues, there has not been much study of what this means for accountability. Until now. Education Sector has just released a report from Charles Barone, director of federal policy for Democrats for Education Reform (and a blogger extraordinaire), looking at how the choices states make in implementing growth models impact accountability. It found some real downsides to growth models like Tennessee's:

• By setting an interim goal short of proficiency, in a state judged by the U.S. Department of Education to have among the lowest standards of any state, it may be setting the bar so low as to evoke fairly small gains in student achievement.
• While the “expected score” system estimates a student’s path to proficiency in three years, in fact, many students will not make it to proficient in three years or ever because of a statistical phenomenon known as Zeno’s paradox.
• Finally, because this model relies on multiple regression analysis, one must be a statistician to understand it. Although complexity may be a necessary trade-off for more accuracy, there is a loss of simplicity and transparency for parents and the general public.

Zeno's paradox is troublesome but interesting to think about. Picture a loaf of bread. Cut it in half. Then cut it in half again. And one more time. The loaf of bread has been cut in half three times, but there's still bread to cut. In fact, you could, with a very sharp knife, cut the bread in half an infinite amount of times. That is Zeno's paradox: you can make progress towards something indefinitely without ever erasing the original. For a student short of meeting proficiency thresholds, they could theoretically make "progress" every year without ever completing the path to proficiency.

Go here to read the entire report.

Friday the 13th – A California Educational Horror Story

The California Teachers Union (CTA) has declared next Friday to be Pink Friday in honor of all of the teachers that will be given pink slips by that day. I think they made an error in naming the event. This Friday is Friday the 13th, and the educational horror story may be scarier than the 8 horror movies made about Jason and this ominous day (ending with Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan). Perhaps a better name for their event would be Friday the 13th Part IX: The Educational Horror Is Unleashed.

Friday the 13th of March is the deadline for local school board to notify teachers whether they have a guaranteed job for the following year. A record number of pink slips are likely to be issued. CTA already estimates that over 20,000 teachers have received pink slips and that number will grow in this last week as the deadline approaches, I would guess in the range of 25,000 when the dust settles. To put this in some perspective, if my prediction is accurate more California teachers will be given layoff notices than the entire state teaching force in 17 different states. Prior to these layoffs, California had some of the largest classes in the nation (only Utah and Arizona have larger), and fewer other adults (librarians, administrators, counselors…) on campuses than virtually any other state. Now some of these teachers will end up being offered their jobs back some time in the summer when the budget dust settles. Basically, districts tend to over-cut positions in the spring to give themselves flexibility, and then hire back some of the teachers as they get more budget certainty in the summer. But unfortunately, many of the best and brightest of these 20,000 will be on to other things before they get hired back. Clearly with better school staffing policies, school districts could target these reductions at less effective teachers, but virtually all districts will make these decisions based on subject areas and then seniority. Districts will generally eliminate positions like librarians, vice principals, art and music teachers… But, then they will start cutting core teachers and increasing class size. Many have argued that class size reduction doesn’t matter much. In this case, we may want to hope that they are right because then this increase may not have a large impact. None the less, March 13 will mark a dark day for California education, and will likely take years to recover.

Doubling Down

Depending on how one counts, over $120 billion of the $787 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—a.k.a. the “stimulus package”—is targeted at the nation’s preschools, schools and colleges—a staggering sum that will double the Department of Education’s budget and increase the federal government’s leverage in education. Much of the funding is earmarked for existing programs, including $17 billion for Pell Grants for college students, $11 billion to expand special education services, and $40 billion for teachers and professors facing layoffs. But there’s also a lot of spending that’s left to the discretion of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Here's one way to spend some of the cash: Build a new generation of full-service facilities for poor kids.

A host of studies makes clear that public schools are going to be a lot more successful with disadvantaged kids if they collaborate more closely with health clinics, parenting projects, and other community resources that counter the devastating consequences of poverty on student achievement. Secretary Duncan has an intuitive sense of this reality, having spent many hours growing up at his mother’s after-school tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago. “The more schools become community centers the better,” he told senators at his confirmation hearing. And on the campaign trail and since, President Obama has touted the logic of comprehensive strategies for urban students, frequently praising the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit supplying a range of services to 7,000 students in central Harlem.

So why not marry the stimulus goal of creating new construction jobs with a comprehensive approach to raising student achievement in impoverished neighborhoods by building facilities that combine schools with a range of youth and family services under a single roof? A great model is THEARC—The Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus—a $27-million, 110,000 square-foot facility that opened in Washington, DC’s, impoverished Anacostia district in 2005.

Funded with public and private monies and run by a non-profit organization, it supplies some of Washington’s neediest students and their families with immunizations, state-of-the-art dental and heath care, psychological services, legal aid, job training, music and fine arts instruction by the Levine School of Music and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Catholic middle school for girls, a full gymnasium run by the city’s Boys and Girls Clubs, and a 356-seat community theater that’s used for everything from graduations to fashion shows.

Why not build a network of these public-private ventures nationwide that includes traditional public schools and charter schools? It would help jump-start the economy and give inner-city kids the comprehensive help they need.

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.