3-Year Degrees Are The Future, and Always Will Be

The Post ran a story recently titled "Colleges Consider 3-Year Degrees to Save Undergrads Time, Money." This is one of those ideas that gets rolled out every now and then and never goes anywhere. And I think it's pretty clear why. There are actually two distinct proposals mentioned in the article, which confusingly oscillates between them. The first is giving students a way to earn a traditional four-year bachelor's degree in three years. The second is awarding a degree for only three years of learning. Both ideas ultimately suffer from higher education's opaque and limiting convention of measuring academic progress in terms of time. 

The problem with the earn-a-four-year-degree-in-three-years idea is that there's nothing really new about it. Students can already take AP classes, dual high school / college enroll, go to summer school, sign up for an extra class each semester, or otherwise try to get through more material sooner. But the financial incentives aren't always great -- summer school isn't free, so you're stilling paying for the same number of credits. Plus, many students are on the five- and six-year tracks for their 4-year degree (or longer), so three years is unlikely. 

And just because a relatively small subset of students could finish early doesn't mean they will. I myself was lucky enough to go to a high school that jumped on the AP program early, back in the mid-80s, so I walked into college with 24 credits under my belt. It would have been pretty easy to finish a semester or even a year early. But why do that--college is fun! Instead, I strategically took it easy, throwing some three-course semesters into the mix and generally avoiding classes that met before noon. That still left me with only eight credits left to earn going into my last semester. So I took two classes: the last prerequisite for my major (an introductory course, incredibly) and a women's studies class, on the premise that it would be a good place to meet women. 

The problem with the other proposal--awarding a degree for only three years of learning--is that three is 25 percent less than four, and so three -year degrees will be worth 25 percent less than four-year degrees in the job market, and so people won't want them. The question of transition to graduate and professional school also goes on the table. 

Some might say, "No--it will be a three-year bachelor's degree." But what does that even mean?What's a bachelor's degree other than a credential certifying that you were enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited college or university for the equivalent of four years? It's true that Europe is rapidly transitioning to a standard three-plus-two bachelor's and master's system, but the last year of college prep high school there is roughly equivalent to the first year of college here.  

All of this flows from the inherent vagueness and inflexibility of defining higher education credentials exclusively in terms of time--credit hours, two and four-year degrees. The basic unit is still the number of hours you spent in a room having someone teach you, not any reliable, consistent measure of what you actually learned. 

And that, really, is what we need. People study a lot of different things in college. It's exceedingly unlikely that the body of knowledge, skills, experience, and attributes necessary to begin a career or graduate-level studies or some other agreed-upon milestone is exactly the same in all of them. But with a few exceptions, e.g. five-year engineering and pre-med programs, that's what we pretend. Instead of trying to stuff four years into a three-year basket, we need to start defining and differentiating courses of study while making assessment results much more transparent, so people can take their credentials into the job market with confidence, regardless of how long those credentials took to earn. This is a good start. 

The Condition of School Choice

Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect wrote last week about the importance of opening up school district boundaries to allow parents in urban areas to send their kids to suburban schools, and vice-versa. Making district boundaries more porous is one step toward reducing the growing resegregation of our communities and schools, and it may be beneficial to those students who do transfer. But it doesn't address what most families fundamentally want - a good, safe school in their community.

As I wrote in this report, inter-district choice just isn't going to impact large numbers of students in many large, urban areas - there simply aren't enough good schools nearby to take transferring students. And that's assuming that suburban schools will open up a substantial number of seats - something which will require financial incentives or politically unpopular mandates. This isn't to say that inter-district choice policies aren't worth pursuing, it's just that they will take increased resources and careful attention to be done right. And for school choice to impact a large number of students in many urban areas, policymakers need to combine increased choice across district boundaries with building better schools, whether it's charter schools or traditional public schools of choice.

As a sidenote, and an addendum to Chad's great Condition of Education series, the recent report also includes some relevant information on public school choice. As one might expect, white, non-poor, and suburban parents are more likely to report moving to their current neighborhood for a school:
But among parents who reported having choice among public schools (46 percent), the patterns look different in who takes advantage of school choice, with students of minority and lower-income parents attending public schools of choice at a higher rate:

One disturbing result in the new report is that parents with less than a high school diploma reported the lowest rates of choice. And this was a drop from the 2003 survey results. It's hard to say what, exactly, the reason is for lower choice among parents with lower education levels, but it may indicate that policymakers at all levels - state, district and school - need to step up outreach efforts to ensure choice is accessible to all families.

The Condition of Education: College Wage Premium

We often talk about the college wage premium as if it's some sort of bonus you get once you've earned higher educational credentials. The chart showing average median wage by educational attainment is pretty common--each attainment level is given its own bar, they're arranged left to right in increasing education levels, and the median wage rises on the page left to right. It's a simple and effective way to say that college pays off.

What is less commonly understood is that college isn't just a bonus: it has, for a long time, been a safety net against wage decline. The chart below illustrates what this means. Since 1980, real wages for Americans with bachelor's degrees or higher have risen $3,000, or 6.7 percent. Over the same period, wages for Americans with less than a high school diploma and for those with a diploma or its equivalent have fallen 23 and 17 percent respectively. In other words, it's not so much that earnings for those with bachelor's degrees have accelerated rapidly; it's that they've held onto their market position while others have fallen precipitously.
This makes a difference in the way we think about educational attainment. If college was just a way to get a bonus, you might be content with what you have now. If, on the other hand, you understood that you would likely suffer large penalties over time if you opted not to go, you might think about college differently. You might see it as more essential.

The Condition of Education: Economic and Racial Segregation

The National Center for Education Statistics holds an annual Condition of Education event that's sort of like a State of the Union speech, only without politics, fanfare, or clapping, and with graphs and a sole focus on education. Other than the annual "special analysis" section (this year's is on International Assessments and will come out in the summer), all the information is culled from other surveys and products that are available elsewhere. This might sound boring, but it's a nice time to think about larger trends in education nationwide and get a physical copy of the compendium of data.

Over the next few days I'll highlight some of the charts and tables I found most interesting. The one at left looks at the percentage of students, by race, who attend a high-poverty school, defined as a school where 75 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Nationwide, about a third of black and Hispanic children attend a high-poverty school, while only four percent of white children and 13 percent of Asian/ Pacific Islanders do. By contrast, only four percent of black and six percent of Hispanic children attend low-poverty schools, defined as schools with ten percent or less of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

These numbers are in part a reflection of growing segregation in our nation's schools. Since 1990, the percentage of students attending a school with a minority population comprising at least 75 percent of the student body has risen from 16 to 24. A third of all black and Hispanic students attend such schools. 62 percent of whites attend a school where the student body is more than 75 percent white.

These conditions will not likely be addressed through school assignment policies. The Supreme Court has ruled that even non-binding race windows are unconstitutional in school assignment plans. Efforts to integrate by economic factors face their own complications, not least of which is the flight of effective teachers out of low-income, high-minority schools.

Solutions must do one of two things. Either they must attempt to address large-scale housing and location decisions that are the basis for school segregation in the first place, or they must ignore the problem entirely and address the symptoms, rather than the problem itself, head on. The former would require localities to emphasize mixed-use neighborhoods and other zoning tools to address de facto segregation. The latter would suggest focusing more resources and attention on these schools, such as providing incentives for effective teachers to work in them. Without such efforts, schools will be powerless to counter prevailing societal living patterns.

Aligning Financial Incentives With College Success

Postsecondary institutions have few financial incentives for results. Their funding streams are either divorced from students entirely (through federal research grants or block state funding) or based only on the number of students they enroll (through per-student funding and tuition). This is true at the K-12 level as well, but K-12 schools at least have a regulatory system (like it or not) attempting to drive results. Higher education has neither the funding nor the accountability systems to hold institutions to high standards. While it's not true that institutions have no incentives to graduate students--upper-level students consume far more campus resources than their lower-division peers--they continue to operate as business-as-usual despite roll-the-die odds on college graduation. Institutions are more or less left to their own devices, with all the good and the bad that implies.

States are beginning to experiment with new ways to fund their colleges and universities that hinge funding on student success. This experimentation is a good sign, but it gets tricky really quickly.

Ohio, for instance, is about to adopt a plan to fund its public postsecondary institutions entirely on their ability to retain and graduate students. It's innovative in that the money is not based on pure raw numbers--the state will instead compute "expected" course completion and graduation rates, based on student socioeconomic factors, and reward institutions that meet or exceed these predicted rates. This is much more sophisticated than Ohio's current system of basing funding only on the number of students enrolled on the 14th day of the semester. And, it gives institutions incentives to be accountable for student success.

Yet, Ohio's plan is lacking one significant element: there's nothing to incentivize quality. The opposite is true really, because institutions would have financial motives to make their academic programs easier. More students + lower standards = more graduates = more money. That's not a formula for success.

Ohio is in a position, unlike most other states, to enhance the equation with outcomes data. Its institutions collaborate with the state’s Department of Jobs and Family Services to collect employment data on recent graduates of all postsecondary institutions in the state. The resulting data show the percentage of students who graduated between 2001 and 2006 who were employed or enrolled in more postsecondary education six months after completing their degree, as well as the number of 2002 graduates employed at the end of 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Six-month, in-state employment numbers of graduates from public universities ranged from 67 percent (Miami University) to 83 percent (Wright State and the University of Akron). Community colleges had some of the highest numbers. Graduates of the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science were found to be employed and in-state 89 percent of the time and graduates of the MedCentral College of Nursing were at 92 percent.

These data aren't perfect--they discount students who leave the state and give salary numbers for academic discipline but not by institution--but they would nonetheless be powerful in the hands of students and their parents. If such information were aggressively marketed to students and parents, the quality portion of the equation would be driven by student demand rather than institutional prerogative. That isn't possible right now, but it would make the higher education market a whole lot more focused on quality.

In the end, experiments like Ohio's are a real risk for accountability advocates. A bad or misaligned accountability system is worse than nothing at all, and as Ohio policymakers push forward they must be careful to balance quantity and quality concerns together.

The Case Against Helping Low-Income Families Save for College

A couple of weeks ago I published a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education more or less denouncing 529 college savings plans on the grounds that policymakers have used them to avoid the hard choices inherent to actually keeping college affordable while simultaneously inducing families to gamble away their hard-earned money in a casino run by a particularly mendacious house. 

Not long afterward I received an appreciative email, signed, simply, "Mom who lost the college funds for her daughter."  

I thought of that while reading about the recently announced initiative spearheaded by the New America Foundation and the Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in St. Louis to increasing 529 college savings plan participation among low-income families. 

As a liberal circa 2009, I know I'm supposed to be all about asset building for the poor. It's one of those clever policy ideas that lets you be in favor of improving the economic lives of low-income households without associating yourself with retrograde, dependency-generating social programs. A hand up, teach a man to fish, etc., etc. Welfare for a post-welfare world. And of course I'm not really opposed to giving every newborn a savings bond or something along those lines. There are worse ways to spend public money. (Mass incarceration and ruinous foreign wars come to mind.) 

And yet...I have qualms.

First, I don't think 529 accounts are really assets at all. Most non-rich people accumulate assets in two forms: housing and retirement savings. There's a permanency to both of these things. You become a homeowner and (recent catastrophic events notwithstanding) build up equity over time. Eventually you own the house (or the next one, or the one after that) free and clear and it provides a roof over your head for the rest of your life. Similarly, the point of saving for retirement isn't just to spread your income out over your whole life. It's to save enough money so that income from the assets is enough to sustain you. In both cases the idea is to build something that holds core value while providing additional ongoing benefits, something than can be passed on from one generation to the next.

529 plans are just a way to extend the cost of college over time. "Pre-paid tuition plans," for example, are actually another form of 529s, and there's really no difference--you pay over 22 years (or less) instead of four, and when you're done, there's nothing left. Your kid has something of value, of course, something asset-like, but you're back to square one. 

Obviously, part of the appeal of 529s is the tax savings on investment income. But that means you have to take on risk of investment losses--a risk exacerbated by the (relative to houses and retirement) shorter time horizon and the total inflexibility of when you need to spend the money. Retirement can be delayed or spending adjusted in a downturn, and a house that's lost value is just as good at keeping you warm and dry. But if you lose the college funds for your daughter, her whole life is turned on end.

New America's chief assets person, Ray Boshara, says that "Structured and invested properly, 529s hold enormous, un-tapped potential to get more students, especially those least likely headed to college, on a path to attend and complete college." Putting aside for the moment whether "enormous" is empirically justified, I assume the phrase "invested properly" is a nod toward the practice of reducing investment risk as college approaches. Which is a good idea--but it also diminishes expected returns and further reduces 529s to simply stretching the college payment timeline and little else. If you assume some families are going to make money in the market, then you have to assume that others are going to suffer terrible losses for no other reason than they unluckily had children at the wrong time. That's a steep price to pay. 

Plus, more broadly, doesn't the best way to help low-income families save involve helping them earn more money than they need to spend, so there's some left over to save? In other words: helping them not be low-income anymore? And if they're poor, presumably any money they save comes at an unusually high opportunity cost in terms of foregone consumption.  A lawyer making half a million dollars a year who saves $1,000 for college presumably feels nary a pinprick of pain. What is that--a 60-inch flatscreen instead of a 64-inch? 40 fewer minutes playing blackjack in AC? For a poor family, by contrast, $1,000 means less housing, food, basic amenities--important stuff. And keep in mind, the lawyer is the one getting a better tax benefit out of 529s, because he's paying at a higher rate. 

New America, to its credit, wants progressive 529s that subsidize accounts for low-income families. But this still seems a lot like pre-funded Pell grants. Why not just use the same money to increase Pell grants? The argument then turns toward behavioral effects. The director of the CSD says "There is evidence that savings for college may focus attention of parents and children on post-secondary education, affecting their outlook, orientation, course selection, discipline, and academic achievement." That's an interesting contention--what evidence and how does it get to "may" focus attention? This would be useful to know, given the shocking lack of good research linking student financial aid to college-going. I'm sure New America is fully in favor of increasing income equality and lowering college costs and investing in Pell grants, too. But there's only so much money to go around. 

In other words, it's less that I think all of this is a bad idea per se and more that it seems like one more in a ever-growing list of small-bore college access programs that ignore the two overwhelmingly important issues: out-of-control price increases and inadequate public support. By creating the appearance of a solution, it's easier to leave the actual solutions undone. Instead of inventing complicated new ways to help low-income families save scarce dollars so they can pay for colleges that get less affordable by the year, let's just make college affordable in the first place.  

Informed Demand

Ed is Watching responded to my recent report about school choice and pointed me to this website from the Education Policy Center - a website designed to inform Colorado parents about available school options. I took a quick look and the website looks helpful, providing a step-by-step guide for parents on enrolling in schools out of their district and finding charter schools. What I'm really interested in, though, is how they market this website to parents - how do they ensure that lower-income parents, who may not have time to surf the web during work, get access to this information? And are they talking to schools about how to reach out to those parents?

There is no doubt--as I found looking at other markets in low-income communities--that having well-informed consumers is critical to creating and maintaining high-quality options in a marketplace. But it takes more than publishing school report cards to create the kind of well-informed parents that will really drive quality in an education market.

Parents (and consumers in general) tend to rely on their social networks for information about schools, and parents without informed social networks are at a serious disadvantage in learning which schools are the good schools. Overcoming this disadvantage requires more than just making information available to parents, it requires an active, coordinated information campaign using multiple outlets--the internet, radio and television, and going door-to-door. And schools need to be a prominent part of the information campaign, by reaching out to parents and encouraging them to participate in school choice.

In my report, I look at the banking industry and efforts to increase the number of low-income households with checking or savings accounts. Mainstream banks face several hurdles when reaching out to low-income customers, including mistrust of banks, a misunderstanding of the costs of checking and savings accounts, and a lack of awareness of the account options available. To overcome these hurdles requires a lot of outreach and aggressive information campaigns. When the City of San Francisco, for example, decided to promote an initiative to make low-cost bank accounts available to low-income residents, it ran ads throughout the city about the high cost of using check cashing outlets and promoted the city's new program with the slogan, "Everyone is Welcome". The city also provided banks with information to help them reach out to low-income customers and better meet their needs.

Banks in other cities have reached low-income customers by being flexible in how they provide their services - instead of only operating in stand alone branches, banks meet customers in the places they already go, like grocery stores and pharmacies. And some have also partnered with check cashing and payday loan outlets to offer traditional checking and savings accounts along with the check cashing services customers already use.

A 'build it and they will come' attitude does not work in banking, or in education. If we truly want a dynamic marketplace in which all parents are well-informed and actively choosing, it will take a lot more outreach and a lot more flexibility than we typically see today.

Comparable Difficulties

New York City is full of high profile, compelling education controversies. Mayoral control! Rubber room! Budget cuts! Swine flu! So it won’t be surprising if little attention is paid to the recent announcement that a plan to phase in the use of actual teacher salaries in the city’s Fair Student Funding budgeting system has been postponed. In part, it’s because the problem is obscure and confusing (what were we using before, one might wonder, fake salaries? No wonder the teachers are so cranky!). But the decision to postpone the phase-in of actual teacher salaries has important implications for one part of the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind act.

The battle is over Title I’s comparability provision. Title I is intended to target poor children with federal funds to provide additional educational resources to combat the effects of poverty. The comparability provision applies within a given school district (not across district lines) and is designed to ensure that districts spend roughly the same amount on all of their schools, then use Title I money to add extra resources for poor children. But districts can meet the comparability requirement using instructional staff-to-student ratios and budget for salaries using the district’s average teacher salary, not the actual salaries paid to specific teachers. That means in schools with lots of veteran and highly-credentialed teachers, whose salaries are higher than novices, the actual cost of paying twenty teachers may be significantly higher than the cost of paying twenty teachers in the school down the road. The schools full of veteran, expensive teachers are usually schools with the most affluent students. Researcher Marguerite Roza has proven that such disparities can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually between schools.

These intra-district spending disparities may pale in comparison to larger inter-district differences (see Roza and Kevin Carey for more), but they are compelling and quantifiable, which makes them an appealing target for federal intervention. During the 2007 Congressional NCLB reauthorization hearings, Amy Wilkins, vice president of governmental relations and communications at the Education Trust, declared in written testimony that “if Congress does nothing else in this reauthorization…it should amend the comparability provisions to ensure true funding equity at the district level.”

But the spending inequities that the comparability provision allows practices that comparability are deeply integrated into the budgeting practices of most districts. Roza also found that “despite the honest attempts of many district leaders, those in large- and mid-sized urban districts are generally not aware of the inequities revealed in dollar-to-dollar spending comparisons of non-targeted resources.” The most obvious remedy, redistributing teachers to even out the average salaries among schools, is not especially appealing.
So where does New York City fit in? Forcing transfers of teachers is not the only way to achieve comparability. Robert Gordon, now Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor at OMB, helped design the city’s Fair Student Funding plan. He has suggested that tightening the comparability provision should be paired with increasing flexibility around local and federal funding streams. That would free districts to compensate for teacher salary disparities in a variety of ways, instead of being limited to forcibly redistributing teachers. A handful of districts, including New York City, are moving in this direction with budgeting practices often referred to as “weighted student funding.” These districts determine a dollar amount of funding for students, weighted by characteristics like grade level, disability and even past performance, and then allocate that money directly to schools. The model ensures equitable per-pupil spending and allows schools to adjust spending without being limited to balancing teacher salaries among a fixed number of positions.

New York City’s decision not to transition to actual teacher salaries makes the Oakland Unified School District the only one using actual teacher salaries. This follows a transition period where schools that were benefiting from salary differences were “held harmless” with the help of a special local property tax to prevent involuntary teacher transfers or sudden shortfalls. The current economic climate makes that kind of supplemental spending seem unlikely.

The 2007 Miller discussion draft of NCLB included a proposal to require comparability compliance based on actual teacher salaries within three years. At first glance, sure, intra-district spending equity seems like a no-brainer. New York City’s decision demonstrates that the change might be harder than it looks.


(This is my last post as the Fordham Fellow at Education Sector. Many thanks to both organizations.)

Lie To Me Frame Policies With Human Nature in Mind

Kevin Drum responds to this post about school funding, futility, etc:

It sounds to me like Kevin C. is agreeing that suburban parents will protect their schools like crazed weasels, and the only way to overcome this is to lie to them early and often. And he thinks I'm the pessimistic one?

In retrospect, titling that post "Lie To Me" and talking about hiding information from parents was a bad idea--as is blogging at 4 AM after a night on the town. So let me take another shot. The point I was trying to make wasn't so much about dishonesty as framing and communication. 

If parents and taxpayers were purely rational people, then only two things would really matter when it comes to public finance: the total amount of money they pay in taxes and the way the government chooses to spend that money on services. The basis of taxation and the means by which tax dollars are collected and distributed should matter much less, if at all. (Assuming certain underlying conditions like democratic governance and lack of corruption, of course, i.e. not living in DC.) 

So let's say your household makes $100,000 a year, of which you pay $30,000 in taxes. Of that, $20,000 goes to Uncle Sam via federal income and payroll taxes, $6,000 goes to the state via income and sales taxes, and $4,000 goes to a number of local governments, including your school district, based on property taxes. (You're also paying some corporate, excise, and other taxes but to keep this simple we'll stick with the big ones). You have one child, for whom your school receives $10,000 per year, in total, from local, state, and federal sources.  

If your elected officials came along and said "Hey, were going to revamp the tax code and the school funding formula, so some of your taxes will go up and others down and the money will flow in very different ways, but in the end you still owe $30,000 in taxes and your kid's school still gets $10,000," then you shouldn't really care. A dollar's a dollar and they're all green. 

But in fact people don't think this way. They tend to be much more proprietary about local taxes and proportionately much less interested in taxes paid to and spent by governments that are far way--even though the latter collect most of the taxes. Local finance is much more tangible. Automatic payroll deduction is regular and abstract; the money disappears in small chunks before you ever see it. Ditto with sales taxes--a little nick, one transaction at a time. Property taxes, by contrast are based on a physical thing, and even if they go into escrow every month with your mortgage payment, you still get a large annual bill from the local government that spells out the total. Similarly, a lot of federal money is spent on things that happen in other places to other people. Federal spending is also complicated and thus opaque. Local spending is immediate, straightforward, and easy to identify--fire protection, police, sanitation, and most of all schools. 

So when you tell people that you're going to take a chunk of their child's locally-generated, locally-spent property tax revenue and give it to other people's children in other school districts, they get angry. That's why so-called "Robin Hood" school funding programs have been unpopular. When their kid is involved, everyone turns into Prince John. 

Yet when the state implements a school funding formula with precisely the same effect in terms of total tax burden and total school spending, but does so using sales and income taxes distributed via formula, people get much less angry. Indeed, they're generally supportive. As I should have made clearer in the original post, there's nothing revolutionary about the Indiana formula--all states do this to some degree (although Indiana more than most.) 

All ethical people recognize a general obligation to the well-being and education of all children. At the same time, parents are intensely protective of their own children's well-being. If you ask them to choose between their kid and someone else's, they'll choose theirs. That doesn't make them weasels--just humans. But that also means that when a certain class of parents wields more political power than others, there's a high likelihood of injustice. 

To guard against that, we have to be smart about how issues are framed. We need to understand the foibles of human cognition and act accordingly. If property taxes are irrationally hard to redistribute, than redistribute something else. Appeal to larger ideals of child welfare and the   economic benefits of universal education. This works--most states have adopted policies that level out local wealth-based spending differences, and the trend has improved over time. We shouldn't lie to parents. But there are better and worse ways to tell them the truth. 

Choice gone bad

Generally school choice is a good thing except when it is not. Some districts have struggled with school choice open enrollment policies running the risk of further desegregation of schools if transportation options are not provided. These two districts, however, have taken school choice to a whole new level. These two districts have created legacy policies that provide preference to out of district students whose parents are alumni. This is a bad enough idea in higher education where it has long been a practice. Bringing it to K-12 seems like a step back in the equity world. Lets hope that this is not a trend. One of the district trustees sums it up best

"What's wrong with being elitist? We're Beverly Hills"

State Budgets Vary

The Center on Reinventing Public Education last night released an interesting analysis of state budgets under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus bill). The biggest takeaway is that the current economic crisis, combined with the federal government's response, will impact states in very different ways. The chart at left shows expected state K-12 expenditures in 2009 and 2010, including stimulus funds.

You can click on the chart or follow the link to see where your individual state falls on the continuum, but the most important thing to recognize is just how different the budget picture is in California, facing deficits in excess of 10 percent, than it is in New Hampshire, Mississippi, Nebraska, Montana, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota, which each have double digit surpluses. This makes a great case that reform efforts should be focused on the places that actually have the capacity to do so, as opposed to the places focused on just digging themselves out of giant financial holes.

Lie To Me

As a rule I enjoy Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones. But his occasional forays into education generally descend into naysaying and pessimism--Kevin's one all-purpose insight on the subject is that education policy is hard and as such not worth trying to solve. For example:

But to some extent education is a zero-sum game. If we invest more money in inner-city schools, it means less for the suburbs. If we try to attract the best teachers to urban schools, it means that suburbs get weaker teachers. If we do it anyway, suburban parents will start sending their kids to private schools. And the point at which public support for No Child Left Behind evaporates is the point at which suburban schools start "failing" in large numbers. That isn't something suburban parents will tolerate, and they'll simply vote out of office anyone who tries to make them.

First, education isn't a zero-sum game. It's not like there's an immutable fixed quantity of teachers out there--we can improve training and recruitment, among many things. Moreover, there's a very consistent pattern in the research: whether you're looking at class size, teacher quality, or various other generally agreed-upon interventions, student sensitivity to education quality varies with educational need. If you're a well-off suburban student with two college-educated parents and an enriching home environment, class size doesn't matter that much. If you're a low-SES student with none of those advantages, class sizes matters a lot. This is common sense: the more the rest of your life deprives you of educational opportunities, the more what you get in school matters. A straight redistribution of resources from the current state of things (where wealthiest students get the most resources) to resource equity or even providing the neediest students with more would create a net increase in aggregate education outcomes.

Second, Kevin's sense of the essential selfishness of suburban parents (he says that "One of the great third rails of education policy debates is acknowledging the fact that suburban parents will flatly never go along with anything like [allowing children from poor districts to transfer into wealthier suburban districts]) is simplistic and overstated. 

Your typical suburban parent / voter has two competing impulses. On the one hand, most decent people recognize a general societal obligation to provide all students with a free public education. That's why every state constitution guarantees such services and nobody is in a hurry to repeal those provisions. On the other hand, when asked, parents will jealously guard the resources available to their own children.

So the key thing is to not ask.  For example, back when I worked on education funding in Indiana, we created a formula that allowed local school districts to keep all of the revenue they generated through property taxes, but then distributed state funds inversely to local property wealth, equalizing the overall funding level. The effect was to redistribute hundreds of millions of dollars of sales and income tax revenue from the wealthiest school districts to the poorest. But because that transfer occured in the context of an immensely complex formula understood by less than half a dozen people and negotiated in a back room long after the official hearings had finished and the press had gone home, nobody really got upset by it, because nobody knew exactly how much money they were losing, and we were in no hurry to tell them.  

The point being, sometimes too much information is detrimental to fair public policy. States that have tried to explicitly transfer local property wealth between districts have had a horrible time of it, because the extent of the redistribution was too obvious. Sometimes it's better to hide the true extent of people's contributions to the common good. Otherwise they'll start asking questions and from there it's a slippery slope all the way back to every family huddling alone in a cave and foraging for fruits and nuts. 

Harlem Miracles?

Elizabeth Green asked for my thoughts on a recent study of the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), especially in relation to two counter-claims on its findings: either the HCZ is, as David Brooks posited, a "Harlem Miracle," or, as argued by Aaron Pallas over at Gotham Schools, Brooks is "gullible" and "dumbstruck," and it's just too early to draw conclusions on HCZ's merits.

The (preliminary) research by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie attempted to separate any gains (or losses) due to HCZ activities (it provides free clinics to expectant mothers, after-school programs, a college-success office, community health programs, and so on) from accomplishments attributable to HCZ's Promise Academy schools alone. It's not easy to separate these things, but Fryer and Dobbie took special care to do so. They compared HCZ children not just to city or state averages, but took advantage of the oversubscription of the schools (more devoted parents wanted to enroll their kids in the schools than there were available seats) in order to compare lottery winners to lottery losers. In addition, they compared students who attended Promise Academy to siblings who did not (because the parents of such children received the same support services, the researchers were able to separate the effects of the services and the effects of the schools combined with the services).

The chart at left shows how the 2005 cohort of entering 5th graders have fared over time. Losers of the lottery actually had higher fourth and fifth grade scores on the state math exam, but Promise Academy students have erased the small gap by 6th grade, opened a lead on their peers in 7th, and are well above by 8th grade. They have not quite closed the black-white achievement gap, but they have narrowed it significantly.

These results come after controlling for gender and income. This is key, and one of the biggest things critics of the study have missed. Pallas attempts to show the report's errors by presenting Promise Academy's scores on state math and English tests for the same cohort. His graph shows only modest gains in gap narrowing, but it's because he doesn't control for anything. It might seem insignificant to only close the black-white gap and not the income gap, but the charts clearly show the former to be sizable and persistent.

Pallas also argues that the results are invalid because they come on the high-stakes but less-valid state tests. That may be, but his own bias comes out in the comments when he writes that,

As a general rule, I think it’s a bad idea to rely on a single assessment to make judgments about the efficacy of schools, or educational programs or policies. We expect public schools to contribute in so many ways to the social and intellectual development of children and youth, and no single measure can come close to capturing the full spectrum of goals that we have for our public schools.

In other words, he criticizes the HCZ for not showing their effectiveness on "good" standardized tests, but even if they had, it wouldn't be enough because test scores are bad.

Moreover, Pallas says, Promise Academy children don't score nearly as well on more rigorous exams. His alternate data comes from low-stakes exams that students might not work hard on, but this criticism would still work if we saw evidence of some sort of ceiling effect. If Promise Academy did a really good job of raising kids just to a bare minimum, just above the "proficient" line on state tests, the school's scores would jump but the kids wouldn't have learned much.

This chart shows that's not happening. The entire (blue) curve of Promise Academy students shifts to the right over time, indicating that all are making progress, not just the "bubble kids." The red line is the lottery losers, and it shows that Promise Academy children advanced at much faster rates than children from other motivated families who entered the lottery and lost. The results were not just limited to math, either. Promise Academy children made statistically significant gains in English Language Arts compared to their peers, albeit smaller ones than in math.

These findings are all well and good, but how do we disentangle the effects of schooling from the effects of everything else? Fortunately, there's a natural experiment already occurring. The lottery winners and losers, both made up of HCZ students, show that there's something additional gained by attending the Promise Academy. Also, Promise Academy parents have access to all of the programs mentioned above plus nutritious food, pre-made meals, travel vouchers, and general advice about supporting their children in school. These parents have children who are enrolled in Promise Academy and those who are not. The parents and families are the targets of these programs, which means their benefits should accrue relatively evenly among their children. They don't. The siblings of Promise Academy students do achieve slightly higher than their peers and miss fewer days of school, but these effects are nowhere near the ones observed in the Promise Academy students. There must be something about the combination of services and schooling to account for such differences.

David Brooks has a political agenda and only 750 words to write about it, so he takes these findings and runs with them. He sees the school as the one extra element and takes that to mean that the school is what made the difference. He might be right, but in the process he ignores the possibility that the combination of intense services and intense schooling made the difference.

It's fair to criticize Brooks for coming to the wrong conclusion. What isn't fair is to attack Promise Academy or the study itself.

Grocery Stores, Banks, and...Schools?

It costs money to be poor. As the feature article in yesterday's Washington Post Style section lays out, individuals living below the poverty line pay more for many things middle and upper income people consider basics, including food and banking services.

These markets--for fresh food from grocery stores, and checking and savings accounts from mainstream banks--have failed in many low-income, urban neighborhoods. Despite a high number of customers and sufficient wealth to support large, full-service grocery stores and mainstream bank branches, many of these neighborhoods haven't seen either in decades. The result is what some advocates call "food deserts"--communities with little or no access to fresh food, like fruits and vegetables. And it means that the little money low-income families may have to save at the end of the month goes to check cashing fees and outrageous annual interest rates for short-term loans.

Given the failure of these other markets in low-income, urban neighborhoods, why should we expect education markets to succeed in bringing higher quality schools to these communities?

This is the question that started our research for Food for Thought - the Education Sector report released today. And what we found was that we shouldn't expect education markets to do a better job of serving low-income families - not without dedicated attention from community leaders, policymakers, school operators and entities like charter school authorizers to actively building a quality supply of education providers and also establishing the informed demand necessary support a market focused on school quality.

As it turns out, advocates working to improve the markets for fresh foods and mainstream banking have some lessons for education and can provide strategies for establishing a marketplace that is focused on quality and meets the needs of individual communities. To find out more about these strategies, read Food for Thought here.

Dispatch from Bates College

I spent last Friday at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, talking about how technology will (and won't) change liberal arts colleges. The gist: well-regarded, selective institutions like Bates will be fine as long as they don't price themselves out of existence, but the future is bound to have a lot more technology-enabled transparency around student outcomes, and small colleges should think seriously about how IT can expand their service and educational reach beyond 1,700 disproportionately well-off undergraduates.  

The whole day was enlightening. As the graduate of two well-regarded but large and inevitably depersonalized public universities, I'm always attracted to the greener grass of the liberal arts college. They seem like civilization in perfect miniature--library, church, theater, meeting place, carefully placed beneath a canopy of trees. Whenever I visit one, I'm struck by the depth and quality of student-faculty interaction (with the caveat that I probably never end up meeting with a representative sample in either case.) 

Bates is a particularly good place to make jokes about the oft-predicted demise of "brick-and-mortar" institutions, since, architecturally speaking, it features little else. Lewiston itself is straight out of a Richard Russo novel--square, block-long former textile buildings next to a strong river crossed by steel bridges and only now shaking off the effects of industrial pollution from days gone by. Maine is a relatively poor state that's suffered through the ups and downs of fishing, shipbuilding, and logging through the years. But the decision to nurture a small collection of superior liberal arts colleges looks better all the time. 

Maureen and I decide to make a weekend out of it since neither of us had travelled in Maine before. I'm of the opinion that while some iconic tourist destinations (e.g. Times Square) should be avoided at all costs, others should be embraced. So we head to the gigantic L.L. Bean mothership in Freeport, where I purchase a parka for my two-year-old nephew, a microfiber towel for my dog (What? He gets wet when it rains!), and pair of titanium camping sporks. Think about it: titanium is so light and strong that until recently stockpiles were held in strategic reserve by the Defense Department. Now they use it to to make utensils for eating ramen noodles outdoors. This is either the whole point of modern society or a sign of its imminent demise--I'm not sure which.   

Maureen, meanwhile, laughingly accuses me of spending $18.00 just so I can have an excuse to use the words "titanium camping spork" in conversation and/or on blogs. This kind of irrefutable spousal insight is, frankly, disconcerting.  

We spend the rest of the weekend driving up and down peninsulas that will apparently be choked with vacation traffic in another few months. The wind and fog alternate with sunshine and I have a greater appreciation for why people buy all those L.L. Bean sweaters. The Irish pub in Bath serves a killer pastrami sandwich, consumed before driving past the hulking Bath Iron Works to the nearby maritime museum, where we learn just how complicated building a ship really is. All non-Mainers are from "away," we're told. I sort of like the blunt, all-encompassing nature of that; it speaks to a stubborn--and increasingly rare--American sense of place.  

I Think Maybe It's Both

Ten days ago David Brooks wrote a column praising Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone, citing dramatic achievement gains of its students, and calling it a miracle of the no-excuses model of education. Brooks took the opportunity to praise reformers who believe schools should be the focus of education policy, angering those who think our education system cannot be fixed without addressing society's larger ills. This second camp has jumped on Brooks for ignoring all the things the Harlem Children's Zone does for kids besides schools: high-quality pre-kindergarten, health screenings, counseling, arts and media programs, a fitness and nutrition center, etc.

We could spend a week debating which side Canada really falls on, or we could just read the book written on Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone. It has a passage where Canada answers this question directly:

And where did Canada stand? He agreed with [Richard] Rothstein that the public school system needed more money, not less. But on the other basic principles of the education debate, Canada found himself with [Abigail and Stephan] Thernstrom, on the right. "I'm for vouchers, I'm for charter schools--I'm for anything that blows up the status quo," he told me. Canada felt that liberals' hearts were in the right place on poverty and education, but something--maybe it was their dependence on teachers' unions, maybe it was an overly idealistic view of how public education worked--had led them astray on this issue. "It is my fundamental belief that the folk who care about public education the most, who really want to see it work, are destroying it," he said. Anyone who looked at the urban public school system not as an abstract idea but up close, every day, the way Canada had for the past twenty years, would want to blow it up too.

So, Canada wants to spend more money, institute vouchers, reduce teachers union's influence, and blow up public schools. Which side wants to endorse all of those things? In other words, Canada doesn't fit neatly into either camp. Let's keep arguing about it though.

Civics 101

Jay Greene continues to fight the fight on vouchers:

the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers. All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard. This would include NCLB and other federal education legislation that Kevin praises charter schools for more strictly obeying.

Well, yeah. The "taxation" in the "Taxation Without Representation" on DC license plates refers to the taxes Congress has imposed on the entire nation, including DC. Those laws, as they apply to DC, are undemocratic. But surely Jay sees the distinction between members of Congress imposing a law on everyone, including their own constituents, who can then respond at the ballot box if they're unhapy, and Congress imposing a law only on DC, the one place in America without representation in Congress. Think of it this way: a few weeks ago the DC City Council passed a law recognizing gay marriages performed in other states. How would the residents of Fayetteville, Arkansas feel if the DC council were also allowed to impose that law on them?

On the other hand, I have to admit that Jay is entirely right about this:

But I continue to be puzzled by the argument that vouchers are bad because they are less accountable than charters. Whatever regulation you believe is desirable for schools could be applied to vouchers as well as to charters.

True! I am willing to state, now and for the record, that if currently unaccountable voucher schools were, at some future point, held accountable in the same manner as charters, they would be accountable in the same manner as charters. Really, there's no escaping this sort of iron logic.

Education Sector Job Openings

Education Sector doesn't just challenge conventional policy wisdom -- we're challenging conventional economic wisdom as well: We're hiring!

We're seeking a policy analyst to work primarily on higher education issues, with a specific emphasis on improving learning outcomes, degree attainment, and access for undergraduate students.

And, we're hiring a communications manager to develop and implement strategies to effectively communicate our ideas to policymakers, educators, the media, and other key audiences. (Congratulations to our previous communications manager, Stacey Jordan, who is now rolling up her sleeves with the Obama administration.)

We're also seeking applications for fall interns. Please see our job openings and internship descriptions.

Jay Greene's Long Strange Voucher Trip

Jay Greene has published a long and weirdly incoherent response to this post on DC vouchers. Most of it I'm happy to let stand, but this (you have to run it through a negative de-sarcasticizer to find the meaning) deserves comment:

...vouchers aren’t really accountable because even though they were democratically created, subject to oversight and renewal within 5 years of creation, and mandated (unlike charters) to participate in a rigorous random-assignment evaluation, they don’t have the word “public” in them.

I'm sorry, but democratically created? Really? This is how Jay chooses to describe the voucher program that was imposed on D.C. by Congress, that passed the U.S. House of Representatives by exactly one vote, i.e. the one vote that we don't have?

And let's dispense with idea that charters and vouchers are on any kind of equal footing in terms of accountability. Charter schools can be shut down by the D.C. charter board for low performance, and a number of them have. Charters schools have to administer a panoply of D.C. state tests and are subject to labels and consequences under NCLB, just like regular public schools. Private schools taking public money through voucher programs, by contrast, have always assiduously avoided being subject to same level of public scrutiny imposed on public schools, in D.C. and elsewhere. In addition to overall marginal results, the evaluation Jay cites doesn't include results by school.  It doesn't even include the names of the schools. 

Vouchers are a simplistic, unworkable version of a perfectly reasonable idea: giving parents educational choices and opening up public education to competition and innovation will improve outcomes for students.  Over time it's become clear that those goals are best accomplished in the context of non-profit organizations working under a regulatory regime that leaves sufficient room for innovation and new entrants while maintaining accountability for results and controlling who gets to participate--i.e. charter schools.  There's just no evidence that a freewheeling private sector approach will work, either in terms of response or outcomes--see Edison Schools, R.I.P. Why people like Greene continue to beat the drums for an obsolete policy idea is beyond me. 

Linkages

Imagine you are an 18 year old graduating from high school this May. You've made your college choice already based mostly on location, the school's football team, family ties, and money. Wouldn't you like to know whether that choice was a good one, whether kids just like you who had made the same decision in years prior turned out successful? That they'd been able to transfer their AP credits, enroll in regular coursework, begin accumulating credits, and earn good GPAs? Did they like the school and were they successful enough to return another year?

In some places, you can actually find this information already. North Carolina, for example, maintains interactive Web sites for prospective freshmen and transfer students that enable students to see how their peers performed at their new school. Students can see, for example, the average GPA among students transferring from Catawba Valley Community College to another state institution; the average credit hours those students completed after arriving; the number of students taking English, math/science, and social science classes; the average GPA earned; and the percentage of students in good academic standing at the end of the year. Similar information can be found for individual high schools.

I recently shared the high school site with a North Carolina teacher. She was astonished it existed and thrilled to be able to use it. She can now show it to her students considering where to attend school next year or to her administrators to demonstrate how well (or poorly) their kids perform at the next level.

Yet, too few people know about these resources. They're buried on the University of North Carolina System Web site, and I wouldn't have found them if I hadn't been explicitly looking. They also have some jargon--they refer to "Transfer Student Performance" as TSP reports, which means nothing and is a serious barrier to a layperson (and whose cousin was mocked in Office Space). And, even when you find the information, it comes in an ugly computer-printout-circa-1987 style.

In an era where college access and completion are more important than ever, it's vital to get this information in the hands of students. That requires better data for most states, because far too few have such capacity. States like North Carolina are leaders in this area and should be commended, but even they need to make a concerted effort to get the information to students making choices. Or else, as in the past, they'll base their decisions on other, less important things.

Oversight Needed

There's probably no better report out there on the continuing implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) than this one from the GAO. It focuses on general and specific trends in 16 states and the District of Columbia. Most scary are passages like this one, present in sections on each of the states under study:

However, due to the present economic conditions, state officials said the Massachusetts oversight community is facing budget cuts of about 10 percent at a time when increased oversight and accountability is critically needed. To illustrate the impact of the impending budget situation, the Inspector General told us that his department does not have the resources to conduct any additional oversight related to Recovery Act funds. This significantly impacts the Inspector General’s capacity to conduct oversight since the budget of the Inspector General’s office is almost entirely composed of salaries, and any cuts in funding would result in fewer staff available to conduct oversight. In addition, the State Auditor described how his office has already furloughed staff for 6 days and anticipates further layoffs before the end of fiscal year 2009. Similar to the Inspector General’s office, 94 percent of his department’s budget is for labor and any cuts in funding generally result in cuts in staff.

The story is similar in other states. Georgia, for example, has cut its State Accounting Office 43 percent, its Inspector General 19 percent, and the Offices of Planning and Budget and the State Auditor 11 percent each.

Why DC Vouchers Don't Matter

President Obama wants to appropriate enough money to keep the DC voucher program going for the children currently enrolled. Good--this is the only ethical position to take. I know some Democrats in Congress wish the program had never been implemented, but that's the price of losing elections. Dragging low-income and minority students out of their schools just so the N.E.A. can score some petty political revenge would be inhumane and a political debacle besides.

That said, there's a strong element of artifice to this whole debate. The DC voucher program does not represent serious public policy. It was a P.R. move, a bone thrown by the previous administration to the privatization crowd it marginalized by supporting NCLB. The voucher dream (setting aside the obvious anti-labor agenda for the moment) has always been to introduce market dynamics to public education--to create new competition and provide incentives for innovators and entrepreneurs to bring energy and resources to the enterprise of educating students. 

The DC voucher program does none of these things. No new schools have been built as a result, no groundbreaking programs created, competition spurred, or innovators attracted. It's basically just an exercise in seeing what happens when you take a couple thousand students out of pretty bad schools and put them in a range of other schools that are, collectively, somewhat better. Answer: some of the students may be doing somewhat better! I think we already knew this. 

Remarkably, the DC voucher program is being taken seriously even as, right here in the same city, charter schools are actually creating the whole range of market responses that vouchers are not. Drive across the river and see the brand-new schools built by KIPP and SEED, which are just a part of the tens of millions of dollars of new investment in public education spurred by charters, a wave of new organizations and people coming to the nation's capital to educate disadvantaged students, along with many others who were here already, people who never would have been able to operate within the traditional public system. 

One could argue, I suppose, that if vouchers had been given to 17,000 students instead of 1,700, they would have had more impact. But I'm not so sure--I kind of doubt that Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day would up and build annexes in Anacostia in response. In any event, why bother? DC charter schools are directly accountable to the public and specifically designed to serve urban students. Why would it be better to re-direct public funds to schools that are neither of those things?  

Yet the DC voucher debate is playing out on national television and has provoked a seemingly endless series of righteous editorials from the Washington Post. This seems to be the real purpose of school vouchers--giving people the opportunity to scramble for the moral high ground of defending disadvantaged youth. Many wealthy members of Congress send their children to private school! So does our wealthy President!  Outrage!  Hypocrisy revealed! Meanwhile, voucher opponents paint themselves as brave defenders of the education system, as if this was some crucial battle against the Wal-Martification of public schools. 

In that sense vouchers do have some utility--they separate people who are serious about education policy from people who aren't. The more you shout and carry on about them, the less you're paying attention to the issues that really matter.  

2010 Budget

The Department of Education today released its 2010 budget. You can read the full thing or check out Alyson Klein's first look. Things that I noticed:

• the budget shifts money around reading and early childhood. It would cut Reading First state grants and Even Start while creating two new programs called "Title I early childhood grants" and "Early learning challenge fund."
• $50 million for a high school graduation initiative is a nice thought but not likely to make a major impact.
• Weak language around $500 million annual "College access and completion fund." It says money should be used to "improve degree attainment rates in higher education and identify and promote what works in helping needy students get a degree," but gives states "considerable flexibility" and allows this money to replace spending on functions currently undertaken by guaranty agencies (that will be cut elsewhere). This program had promise, but it needs strong language in order to address persistent achievement gaps in higher education.
• On Tuesday the New America foundation called it an uncertain future for two grant programs that began in 2006. The future is clearer today, and it's a short one. They're axed after 2010-11.
• Harlem Children's Zone-like efforts can expand. The budget includes $10 million in competitive grants for nonprofits to plan "promise neighborhoods."
• Teach for America gets $15 million, notable because little of their government funding has come through the Department of Education.
• The "What Works and Innovation Fund" grows $100 million, from $650 to $750.
• Arguments about making the Pell Grant an entitlement program have been heated, but did you know that it is already, in part? In 2009, "7 million undergraduates will receive up to $4,860 from discretionary funding and an additional $490 from mandatory funds to help pay for postsecondary education."
• Obama has called for an end to Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, citing cost savings. Some have criticized the plan by suggesting the federal Direct Loan program couldn't handle the volume. The answer to that can be found in the 2010 budget. Counting a program where the feds stepped in to ensure the availability of the student loan market during the credit crunch, "over 75 percent of Federal student loan volume in the 2008-2009 academic year will be financed through capital provided by the Department of Education."
• DC voucher program's funding decreases, but is not cut entirely. It would go from $15 million in 2008 to $12 million in 2010, presumably to pay for Obama's position that kids currently receiving scholarships could continue, but the program will not expand.

Comparing Effectiveness

The NY Times magazine last weekend ran a lengthy interview with President Obama. Part of it deals with education and his opinions on education, but the most interesting passage was when the president is talking about health care. In it, he describes how, while a patient's involvement in their own care is a good thing, there are a lot of decisions that are best left to more knowledgable experts:

I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors are going to be driving treatment, because, I just speak from my own experience, I’m a pretty-well-educated layperson when it comes to medical care; I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, You know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with himor go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.

And so, in that sense, there’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options. And certainly that’s true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill and we have an obligation to get those costs under control.

This seems to me like exactly the role the federal government should play. It should not dictate the actual decisions on the ground, but it should be able to provide information that leads to better decisions, especially in areas where it provides direct funding.

One of those areas is education. All districts must have math and reading curricula and a system for developing their teachers, but they lack good information on the effectiveness of their choices. They must base their decisions on company-produced studies, academic research, or, worst of all, local political calculations. Besides dangers of bias, research conducted by companies selling something often compare the effects of the treatment to the effects of doing nothing. Not surprisingly, something is usually more effective than nothing. Academic research tends to focus only on the general value of interventions, so it has something to say about phonics versus whole word reading instruction, new math versus old, or the general value of professional development. But it tends not to evaluate specific programs or interventions, or, if it does, the programs are boutique and unscalable. Not to mention the fact that academic research is buried in inaccessible journals and jargon.

Local decisions become a political parlor game. The math curriculum adopted is the one favored by a few teachers on some committee because they've found it useful in their classrooms, a sample size of one. The professional development plan shoved onto teachers is the one who had the best salesman to woo district officials. And so on.

The Institute for Education Sciences has begun edging towards comparative effectiveness research, releasing an evaluation of math textbooks and reading intervention programs in the last couple months, but we need much more. The US Department of Education spends a smaller percentage of its budget on research and development than any other federal agency, and it could do a lot more. It could be an influential voice to say, "you can pick whichever program you want, but here's some good information to inform your decision about which ones work and whether they merit their cost. And, oh by the way, we'll give you more money if you choose the ones that work best at the lowest price." Following the information will be left to local policymakers, but the federal government has a role in providing good information and nudging those decisionmakers into choosing wisely.

Comparative effectiveness research is not cheap. The stimulus bill provided the first-ever invesment in such research, and even its $1.1 billion appropriation will be only a beginning. Yet, it has potential to save much more down the road as our health care system erradicates inefficiencies. Such research is also not apolitical either, but neither are the decisions at the local level. Better to have a respected federal body to hear all the voices and make non-binding recommendations than have less knowledgable local actors making the same, under-informed decisions in 15,000 different districts.

Green Dot Rising

Doug McGray has written a terrific piece in this weeks' New Yorker about Steve Barr and Green Dot Public Schools' insurgent campaign to reform public education in Los Angeles--and now beyond. As with most good narrative articles, it's not readily summarizable (and the endlessly quotable Barr makes it a lively read in any case, e.g. "I don't want to blow up L.A.U.S.D.'s ass, but what will it take...." 

Urban education reform fights are often explicitly cast in labor vs. anti-labor terms. And there's often truth in that. But Barr complicates this way of thinking. He's a Democrat and an organizer. His schools are unionized. When he needed the signature of unionized teachers to take over Locke High School, he went and got them. He's sincerely trying to partner with national unions like the AFT to expand his movement beyond L.A. There are bona fide anti-labor types within the public school choice movement, but Steve Barr isn't one of them.

Instead, what McGray very clearly describes is a fight against a school district that was willing to let a massively dysfunctional high school sit and fester for years on end. A district that stood side-by-side with the city teachers union in fighting to retain the right to continue that neglect. The article doesn't paint Barr as a miracle worker, or Green Dot as a source of fantastic new pedagogy and world-beating teaching. Rather, they've taken a building that wasn't actually functioning as a school in any true meaning of the word, and installed what all schools need: discipline, expectations that students will work, teachers who believe they can succeed. Charter schools were originally sold as a source of innovation. But as it turns out, many of the most successful charters have been a source of something even more important: competence. 

Now U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is talking to Barr about expanding the Green Dot approach nationally, to target the bottom one percent of schools, the Locke's of America, schools where failure is least ambiguous and ongoing neglect hardest to justify. Barr wants to work with AFT President Randi Weingarten to get this done. It'll be fascinating to see if Barr's initial skirmishes in L.A. grow into something more. 

Massive Disinvestment?

Andrew Delbanco has written a thorough and fair-minded article in the New York Review of Books about how the current economic crisis is exposing the way our higher education system is one "in which 'merit' is the ubiquitous slogan but disparity of opportunity is often the reality." He makes one point, however, that deserves some scrutiny:

These institutions—long before the current crisis—were seeing what Peter Sacks, in an indignant and informative book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, calls "massive disinvestment" by the states. The University of Virginia now receives a mere 8 percent of its funding from the state of Virginia, down from nearly 30 percent a quarter-century ago. At the University of Wisconsin, in a state with a long progressive tradition, only about 19 percent comes from public funds—also down from around 30 percent just a decade ago. To make up for the decline in public money, tuition rates at public universities have been climbing even faster than at private institutions—a trend likely to accelerate, at least in the short run.

It's not that simple. The chart below, from David Longanecker, President of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, shows public appropriations and net tuition revenue per FTE student, adjusted for inflation, from 1984 to 2008. This clearly illustrates the well-known role of higher education as the budgetary balance wheel in state appropriations. When fiscal times are bad, you can't just close down the prisons and let murderers run free, while you can cut funding for the universities and expect that tuition will make up the difference. When times are good, by contrast, state policymakers would rather spend the extra money on things that everyone feels good about, like universities, instead of more problematic services like welfare, incarceration, etc.

Thus, you see public money (the blue bars) flowing into higher education during the economic good times and out during the bad. The net result has been mostly a wash--real appropriations per FTE are higher than they were in 1983, albeit lower than the peak in the go-go years of the late 1990s, when states were swimming in unexpected revenue. One could reasonably argue that this is still a cut because higher education shrunk as a percent of all government spending, which tends pick up a portion of productivity gains and thus rise faster than inflation. True. But a lot of that was a function of other trends, most notably skyrocketing health care costs and an aging population, both of which put huge pressure on state Medicaid budgets. The other important factor is college enrollment, the red line on the chart. From 2001 to 2005, public institutions were hit with the unfortunate two-fer of a recession-induced funding pullback just as the baby boom echo was cresting. Thus, the sharp decline in revenues per student. But they made a lot of that back in the later years of the expansion as enrollment levelled off and revenues increased, the normal historical pattern.

So, overall, "massive disinvestment" is inaccurate. The government is hanging in there. (This varies a lot by state, of course, some are much worse, others better.) Not what many (myself included) would wish in an era that values information and learning more than ever, but not a total walkback by any means.

A related but distinct phenomenon is the issue of (as Delbanco frames it) public investment as a percentage of higher education revenues. Even as public revenues have been flat in absolute terms over the long haul, they've declined significantly relative to all higher education revenues. Why? Because colleges and universities have boosted spending much faster than inflation, and they're making up the difference by hiking tuition. Thus, you see the yellow bars (real per FTE net tuition revenue) doubling in absolute terms while also comprising a larger percentage of the whole, and as such making public revenues (the blue bars) a smaller percentage of the whole.

Of course, all of this could look much worse in a few years, depending on how things go with the economy. The decision to funnel a big chunk of federal and state stimulus funding into K-12 and higher education will help.

The question Delbanco doesn't address is whether the long-term trend of higher education spending running far ahead of inflation, economic growth, family income, public appropriations, and everything else is an unavoidable fact of life that needs to be accommodated or a public policy problem that can be substantially addressed. I think it's the latter, and as public coffers and family pocketbooks are increasingly barren, I think others will too.

The Problem With Saving For College

A few weeks ago the New York Times "Education Life" section published a long piece about saving for college. The premise is that, if current trends continue, college will eventually become so expensive that parents need to to start socking money away from pretty much the moment their eyes first lock across a crowded restaurant. Seriously, don't even wait to pick up the check--tuition is going up by the minute! Therefore, responsible parents should follow a program that is carefully delineated with subheads like (I am not making this up) "Newborns and toddlers," "The Preschool Years," etc. 

I know the whole frog-in-a-boiling-pot-of-water thing is a myth, but how did we get so comfortable with this? I'm not saying people shouldn't pay part of the cost of higher education, particularly at private institutions, or that saving is a bad strategy per se. But somewhere along the line things got out of hand. And much of the blame lies with our public policymakers, who love to peddle college savings ideas, all manner of tax breaks , subsidies and incentive programs. Since pretty much everyone likes college, and savings, and thinks that society could use more of both, putting the two together is irresistible. 

But the more I think about this, the more I believe it's a dodge. In this day and age, higher education (not just university education, but post-secondary education broadly defined) should be considered a basic public service, supported by public revenues, combined with effective oversight to restrain college costs. I think college savings plans are increasingly just a way for politicians to escape those obligations. And now we're seeing the consequences, in the wreckage of tens of thousands of 529 colleges savings plans. This is the subject of my new column at the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Myth of Too Many Great Students

In the course of a witty and poignant reflection on his daughter's college search, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes:

The dirty secret of the American educational system is that there's a glut of good kids -- excellent grades, first-rate test scores, a blizzard of extracurriculars. We've all read the stories of the despairing admissions officers wading through applications from one overachiever after another, cursing the gods -- "No, not another valedictorian!"

It's true, we've all read those stories, because newspapers like the Post love to publish them. But the idea there's this new or problematic oversupply of super-qualified high school students--it's nonsense, really. The dirty not-so-secret of the American educational system is that a quarter of the kids don't graduate from high school on time, and for black and Latino students it's closer to half. Of those who do finish, many aren't even minimally prepared for college-level work--national remediation rates for college freshmen are, depending on the estimate, 25 to to 40 percent. In 1978, seven percent of all 17-year olds scored over 350 on the NAEP long-term trends math exam. Last year, it was six percent. Achenbach says that kids these days "routinely" apply to "12 or 15" colleges. Last I checked with the folks at the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute who study these things, about two percent of students apply to 12 colleges or more. 

In truth, the frenzied college admissions rate race is a niche phenomenon concentrated in the wealthy sections of a relatively small number of metropolitan areas located disproportionately on the coasts. Of course, those are also the places where agenda-setting national newspapers are published, and where the people who write for them live. But let's not pretend that their lives are in any way representative of most American college students, people who tend to be focused on more mundane problems like getting a decent high school education, finding enough money to get through the local public two- or four-year college, and earning a degree.