Another Way to Give Green This Holiday

You probably know about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative, aimed at getting his MIT-created super-sturdy, super-cheap, super-cool (happy green kid-friendly design, no glare in the sun, impenetrable by water or dust) XO computer design to the world's poorest children (w/WiFi). Well, some people and some companies don't like this idea.

I get that it might not work technically (can't say, I'm not that fluent in computers). But I don't get the "give them food instead" critique. Sure, they need food. They need a lot of things, mostly contingent on systemic change that no bag of rice will change either. And you know the saying, give a fish... eat for a day, teach to fish...lifetime. Maybe it's not a good analogy- fishing (although Eduwonk might like it). And we can't know if the XO computer will be well-received, or a tool that results in any sustainable change. But I think these kids and families should get that chance and that experience. So if it works- if those computers and WiFi really get to those kids and creates opportunity and not some unfortunate waste (computers arriving but not WiFi, or vice versa), it seems like an investment that developing countries should at least be able to consider.

BTW, until Dec 30th, for $200 you can buy one of these XO computers, as they're called, for your own kid or for any other kid you know or for yourself I guess, and OLPC will send another one to a child in a developing nation. See OLPC's give one, get one campaign here.

Is There a College Tuition Bubble?

Andrew Gillin at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity released an interesting paper this week exploring the parallels between the housing bubble and ever-rising college tuition.

The comparison is imperfect, because the higher education market lacks the crucial leavening ingredient of naked greed--you can't get rich quick by speculating on a college education, since you can't sell your ownership of the asset. And while student loans are often securitized, government guarantees against default reduce the dynamic of banks and rating agencies conspiring to develop and sell exotic, over-valued financial instruments with a hidden risk of collapse.

But, as Gillin explains, there are a number of similarities. As with the (recent) mortgage market, higher education lenders have little incentive to enforce lending standards, since the government pays off on loans that go bad. Student loan interest rates, like mortgages, also enjoy substantial public subsidies. As a result, demand increases and more people want to buy higher education than otherwise would.

This, of course, is precisely the point, and there's a powerful societal and moral argument for expanding access to higher education. But it has consequences that ultimately play out in the form of inflated tuition, largely because higher education doesn't behave like a normal market.

When the government subsidizes a normal market, the end result is greater production and consumption with both the producer and consumer getting some of the government money. But that depends on a reasonably elastic supply--the ability and willingness of the producer to ramp up production to meet increased, subsidy-driven demand.

Higher education doesn't work that way--the sector is substantially unable and unwilling to increase supply, particularly in the short term. Unable because there are major regulatory and cost barriers to entry--building a new college or university is massively expensive and time-consuming, and involves jumping through a lengthy, hoop-laden accreditation process. Unwilling because the vast majority of higher education institutions aren't profit-maximizing institutions--they're prestige maximizers. Their response to increased demand is to keep production (enrollment) constant, thus improving their admissions selectivity and the "caliber" of student they educate and as a result becoming a more elite institution. Meanwhile, the lack of objective information about quality makes price and quality synonmous, so institutions have to raise prices in order to compete.

So in the end, all the subsidies ultimatlely go to the institutions in the form of increased prices, and the consumer is no better off than when he or she started. Consumers who lack subsidies, meanwhile (mostly middle-income students who don't qualify for need-based financial aid) are worse off. So political pressure mounts to increase subsidies through aid, interest rate reductions, etc. in order to amelioriate spiralling prices, and the whole cycle repeats itself.

This can't go on forever, because there's a limit to how much money the government can or will spend to subsidize higher education. In the meantime, the negative impact of constantly increasing higher education costs are being hidden in part by an overly-simplistic conception of what higher education financial aid is for.

The goal of aid is nearly always framed as access, as in "all students deserve an opportunity to go to college." The problem (only in the sense of an already hard-won success) is that the large majority (nearly 80%) of high school graduates are in fact going to college, a number that has changed little even as costs have risen, a number which is (more or less by definition) an understatement of the percent of people who should go to college who do.

The real issues of concern relating to increasing college prices are threefold:

1) Where students go to college
2) Whether they graduate
3) What happens to them once they leave

Rising prices push non-wealthy students out of presitigous, expensive four-year colleges into cheaper, less-prestigous four-year colleges, and out of the four-year sector into the two-year sector. They also reduce the chances that people who begin college will graduate, because they force students to work nearly full-time (a major risk factor for dropping out) and increase the cost in the cost/benefit equation of staying in school. Finally, they force more borrowing, which narrows post-graduation (or non-graduation) career choices, increases the risk of costly loan default, and simply takes money out of the pocket of people who need it more than their alma mater.

A crucial element of solving the college cost problem lies with policymakers recognizing the link between rising costs and the lack of data about quality, and talking about the issue in more than just simple access terms.

Great idea! But haven't we heard this before?

Christina Samuels at EdWeek turns in another great piece on special education, this time focusing on the over-representation of minority students in special education, particularly in disabilities that require the most subjective assessments. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission will be looking into the issue over the next year and hopefully issue some solid recommendations to address the problem.

Of course, the National Academies looked into this back in 2002 and recommended that teachers be better trained to identify students with disabilities, that resources should be focused on early intervention, and that preschool could provide needed help and support for low-income students before they enter school. I’m not sure what else the Civil Rights Commission will come up with, except maybe some ideas on how to make sure these steps are actually taken.

Our take on this here.

Speaking as Someone...

...who used to regularly take the Greyhound bus from Binghamton to Schenectady back in college, I can tell you that this is just about right.

Pre-K Nearly Everyday

Preschool policy is constantly hitting the headlines these days, this time in NJ. Check out Education Sector's policy course curriculum unit on pre-K policy, great for education and public policy students and anyone wanting to learn about the key issues in the pre-k debates. And if you tell us what you think, you could win a $40 Border's gift card. Good timing for the holidays.

Muddying the Waters

In a column about Blaine Amendments and the efforts of a former Liberty University official to open religiously-oriented charter schools in New York City, George Will writes:

Now he wants to create a charter school -- a public school enjoying considerable autonomy from, among other burdens, teachers unions. It would be affiliated with his New Horizon Church.

This kind of reflexive anti-teachers union commentary make things more difficult for everyone.

It's true that there are places, like Los Angeles and Detroit, where teachers unions are actively on the wrong side of the charter school issue. But how do you write about charters, unions, and New York City without noting that the United Federation of Teachers has opened its own charter school?

Moreover, it's simply not the case that a desire to evade dealing with unions is the principal force, or even a significant factor, driving people to open charter schools. A lot of the "burdens" they're trying avoid come from adminisration, not teachers. Mostly they're just really motivated to create and run a public school, because they see it as a way to make the world a better place.

But that depth of understanding is beyond George Will, who never misses an opportunity to take a shot at labor. I've been free with criticism of unions on this blog and elsewhere, but there's a big difference between being a union critic and a union opponent. This kind of rhetoric just politicizes and polarizes the issue, which in turn makes it harder to create and sustain charter schools--an agenda Will supports.

Christina Hoff Sommers: New Success for Girls Clearly a Horrible National Crisis

Got an email from AEI today which begins as follows:

The New York Times reported yesterday that girls swept the team and individual honors for the prestigious Siemens Competition in Math, Science, and Technology. Two 17-year-old girls split first prize, a $100,000 scholarship, for their work on creating a molecule to block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. Young women have also been doing well in the older contest, the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search). Both the accomplishments of young women generally and the progress women are making in the sciences are subjects AEI resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has been studying. In October, she hosted a conference at AEI on the National Academy of Sciences report that examined the claim that women are the victims of widespread bias in the fields of engineering and science. Her book, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Touchstone, 2000), looks at the gains young women have been making and argues that society needs to pay attention to how boys are faring as well.

Let me get this straight: Women are vastly under-represented in the sciences, particularly at the highest levels. This is substantially a function of the fact that girls have traditionally been steered away from the sciences, both explicitly but also as a result of broader social norms. As a result, boys have traditionally dominated things like science fairs. Now, in 2007, for the first time ever, girls sweep the top awards at a prestigous science fair. In the past, when boys won all these awards, it was seen as unremarkable at best and at worst as evidence that girls were either unsuited for or ininterested in the sciences.

And AEI and Christina Hoff Sommers see this as further evidence that we must immediately start paying more attention to boys. I assume that when the first Fortune 500 company hired a black CEO, similar memos were circulated announcing the end of racism and the need to address the burgeoning crisis of anti-white discrimination.

President Bush's Secret $5 Billion Anti-Poverty Program

The Bush Administration hasn't exactly been a friend to low-income Americans. Vetoing health insurance for poor children, undermining labor protections, squandering resources on tax cuts for the super-rich--the list goes on. But as David Hoff reports in Education Week, there's one area where both the President and Congress have consistently pursued what can only be described as progressive public policy focused on the welfare of the neediest children: the formulas used to distribute Title I funding.

Title I is the main funding program under No Child Left Behind, and as such has been highly controversial, because of wide-spread perception that NCLB is "under-funded." This largely a matter of perspective--Title I gets a lot more money, almost $5 billion per year, than it did pre-NCLB. But Title I funding has also fallen far short (over $10 billion in the current year) of what Congress could have provided under the law's authorization targets. Congressional Democrats see this as a broken promise, and by any measure it's a wasted opportunity to build bipartisan support for the law.

But lost in the debate over total Title I funding has been the issue of how Title I money is distributed. Before NCLB, Title I funds were squandered using the so-called "Basic" formula, which essentially gave districts a flat dollar amount per poor student, even if district poverty rates were very low. That's a good strategy for spreading funds among as many Congressional districts as possible, but a lousy way to target resources to those who need it most.

Since NCLB, all the considerable new money has gone into a different set of formulas that are far more targeted, either by limiting eligibility to districts with a minimum poverty rate, or by increasing funding per low-income student on a sliding scale tied to poverty rates. The new formulas also give states incentives to distribute additional state and local resources based on poverty.

As Ed Sector wrote in a policy brief last year, the result has been substantial new funding targeted to the progressive ("Targeted," "Concentration," and "Incentive") formulas (FY 2007 looks much the same):





























There's no secret political calculus here; much of the impetus for this reform back in 2001 came from Democrats like Senators Kennedy, Landrieu, and Bayh, along with Representatives George Miller, Adam Smith and Cal Dooley. The net effect is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into places like New York City and reduce what would have otherwise gone to Republican-leaning suburbs.

And while President Bush, to his discredit, vetoed the recent education and labor appropriations bill that would have provided the first major increase in Title I funding since 2003, both his proposed budget, that bill, and all the other funding proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike have stuck to principle of focusing new federal education resources on the districts with the most poor students. If you believe school funding levels matter, this has made a significant difference in the lives of the most disadvantaged children. In a time when such consensus is hard to come by, this deserves more attention.

Default Rate Amendment a Step in the Right Direction

Inside Higher Ed’s article on student loan “cohort default rates”—the percent of students not repaying their student loans as calculated by the Department of Education—is well worth reading for a good background on how we ended up with the current 2-year calculation. It also talks about the potential implications of a proposed amendment by Rep. Raul Grijalva to change the calculation to a 3-year default rate. Currently, the cohort default rate is calculated as the percent of students who default in the first two years of repayment—the proposed amendment would extend this to the first three years of repayment. Adding another year to the calculation could increase the default rate by as much as 62 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the student loan program.

Possibly the most interesting part of the article is the extensive comments section at the bottom, which shows the contentious nature not just of this amendment, but of student lending and defaults in general. A few selections:

As a colleague once observed back in the early 90s, institutions don’t default, borrowers do. The observation is still valid today.

There are definitely suspect people in every profession, but this pointing the finger business has got to stop. You can find many ways to calculate the default rate, but instead of wasting the time of the congress to manipulate these numbers, why don’t they take that time to fix the economy? Stop pointing fingers in the wrong direction. Instead, see what you can do to improve your immediate area.

If enacted, this will put financial aid offices on the defensive for matters they have little if any control over. The schools who this type of policy punishes are inevitably schools who admit a large number of students who have been poorly served by the K-12 system and from lower economic backgrounds (often the same group).

Low default rates are not evidence that elite universities are good schools, they’re evidence that their students have economic advantages to begin with. High default rates reflect the opposite.

The highly charged nature of this debate is even more reason to have more, and better, information on loan defaults. Yes, there are student risk factors that impact default rates, but as Education Sector’s recent policy brief showed, total debt levels also have a big impact, and institutions can go a long way to ameliorating that risk factor.

In the end, default rates are a symptom, though, not the problem. To truly address the problem of growing student debt, we need to figure out a way to keep college costs in line with inflation. Until that happens, all federal student debt policy will be just a stopgap solution.

Depressing Education-Related Newspaper Correction of the Day

From the Post:

A Nov. 25 Outlook article on young people's knowledge of American history and government incorrectly said a survey found that U.S. high school students had missed almost half the questions on a civic literacy test. The students were in college.

School Choice in Little Beirut

I’m traveling in Portland, Oregon right now and noticed the December, “Best Schools” issue of Portland Monthly magazine, with 631 private and public schools rated. I picked it up, curious to see what characteristics they felt were important when ranking schools, figuring this might hold some relevance to the characteristics parents consider important. Now, this is taken with a giant grain of salt—the target demographic for this magazine isn’t exactly the one policy wonks usually think about when discussing school choice (a $114K 2008 Maserati made their gift guide recommendations, and I picked up the magazine in the checkout line at Whole Foods).

First interesting thing to note is that they highlight the Portland public school transfer system as an option for parents interested in living in one school zone, but sending their kids to school in another. Apparently, about a third of Portland Public School students don’t attend their neighborhood school. Looks like I might need to come back out here to do some school choice research. The first step they recommend? To attend “Celebrate” at the Portland Expo Center, where parents can meet representatives from every school in the district.

Second interesting thing is that the information in their “Best Schools” public school guide included a mix of federal measures of school performance, state ratings, and additional information, like teacher-student ratio, that parents consider important. Ethnic diversity, the percentage of “non-Caucasian” students attending a school, was also one of the characteristics listed. This just underscores that, despite what people might say in surveys, demographics do play a part in school decisions and it’s important for policymakers to be aware of that when designing school choice programs.

Third, compared with the variety of information on school performance available for public schools, the private school guide looked a little paltry. Most of the categories were descriptive—tuition range, percent receiving financial aid, religious affiliation. The only student performance measures available were average SAT reading and math scores, and those were only available for schools with a 12^th grade. If I were shopping for a school, this would leave me a little unsatisfied after the abundance of information about public schools.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised when I read this magazine. In the city where I grew up, a magazine catering to people who buy Rolexes would not even bother ranking the public schools, much less focus most of the print space on them. So it’s encouraging to see a city—even if it’s arguably one of the more progressive places in the country (dubbed “little Beirut” by Bush I)—where public schools warrant multiple pages of description.

The Same Same-Sex Story

Peter Meyer, writing in the newest Education Next, tells us a familiar story of same-sex schools. He cites NAEP statistics that show boys aren't doing as well as girls, spotlights a handful of successful single-gender schools and quotes people who reference but do not cite "study after study" that demonstrates that both boys and girls in single-gender schools are more academically successful and ambitious than their peers in co-ed schools. He uses the also-familiar hook of choice saying that choice brings opportunity. He is right about this--choice does bring opportunity-- but he is wrong to equate the single-sex education movement to a "liberation from prejudice", just as the Gadfly was wrong to call it a "matter of basic civil rights."


The "civil right" is a good quality education. Not the choice to be educated with any particular population. And the fact that Martin Luther King III really likes Brighter Choice charters, which Meyer and Davis (for Gadfly) can't help but point out, does not make single-sex education inherently better for black and Latino kids. Nor does it make it "the affirmative action for the sexes," as Meyer, who also can't help but write about his own experience at an all-boys Catholic school, refers to it.

Absolutely, we have a race and gender problem in our schools. The h.s. grad rate for black and Latino males is somewhere below 50 percent and far far worse in central city schools. But that doesn't mean race- and gender-specific schools are the solution. I have my own set of anecdotes about black male students who thrived in an all-black all-male setting. But we currently have no empirical evidence to support that the race/gender characteristic matters most, or if at all, for student learning. And that is the point, right? Student learning. There is some new research on the efficacy of single sex schools in the pipeline and if it shows that separating kids by sex is what makes the difference, I'll be the first to say so. But please let's offer choices because they really do make a difference for these kids, not just because it seems to make sense on the surface or because it appeals to our need to feel like civil rights workers.

Sooner or Later

There's a pretty strong consensus among ed-reform types that the goal of high school--and by extension, K-12 education as a whole--should be to prepare students to "succeed in the workplace and/or higher education." The words vary, but usually that's what people say. One of the problems with NCLB is that it's not really focused on this goal, because it's essentially an elementary / middle school law, testing kids in every grade from 3 to 8, but only once in high school. Moreover, students usually take the high school test in the 10th grade, and the passing standards aren't that hard, often at the 8th grade level or so. That means that we're effectively holding schools accountable for making sure students have the skills and knowledge they need when they begin high school, not when they finish.

Not surprisingly, a lot of students leave high school unprepared for work or higher education, and it doesn't take long for this to become apparent. Over 75 percent of high school graduates go to college, and colleges have their own standards for what students need to know in order to begin college work. If students don't meet them--usually by failing an entrance test--they're stuck in non-credit-bearing, remedial courses. Essentially, they end up borrowing money to pay the local public university or community college to teach them what their high school should have taught them for free.

The scale of this problem becomes pretty obvious when you look at something like the Spring 2008 schedule of classes at the University of the District of Columbia, the only public university in DC and the destination for many graduates of our sorry local school system. The math department is offering:

16 sections of "Basic Mathematics"
13 sections of "Introduction to Algebra"
9 sections of "General College Math I"
7 sections of "General College Math II"
4 sections of "Intermediate Algebra"
2 sections each of "Pre Calc with Trig I," "Pre Calc with Trig II," "Calculus I," "Calculus II," and "Calculus III"
1 section each of "Differential Equations," "Number Theory," "Linear Algebra," "Advanced Calculus," etc. etc.

Section after section of courses covering material that a lot of the students attending DC private colleges finished before they even got to high school.

Gifted Children, Remedial Editing

The Washington Post has taken a perfectly reasonable article on an important subject--the challenge of differentiating instruction for children of variable abilities--and ruined it by forcing it through through the tube of the standard-issue NCLB controversy. While it's a good idea to use different method to teach diverse children, apparently all K-12 education stories in 2007 must be framed in exactly the same way. The article begins:

Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.

Once again we're confronted with the bone-tired cliche of "unintended consequences," the hook for at least 50% of all education policy stories ever written. They tried to do one thing, but then some other thing happened! Ooooh...interesting!

After the requisite quote from the advocate for gifted children saying exactly what you would expect an advocate to say, we get more detail about what "some scholars" are saying:

"We don't find any evidence that the gifted kids are harmed," said Chicago economist Derek A. Neal. "But they are certainly right, the gifted advocates, if they claim there is no evidence that No Child Left Behind is helping the gifted."

Except that's not what the advocates are saying. They're saying, how to put this...oh right, they're saying NCLB is "diverting resources and attention from the gifted." Making things worse than however they were before NCLB, in other words.

I'm not debating the underlying issue here--heck, I hope NCLB is diverting resources and attention from the gifted to the non-gifted; if it's not, it isn't working very well. Resources and attention are limited and the low-performing children need them more.

But if you're going to frame an article this way, you have to make sure that your lede, in addition to having a clear thesis and a connection to the events of the day, isn't directly contradicted by the evidence you present to readers later in the piece.

Knocking Some Vegans Together to Start a Mosh Pit

Carrie Brownstein, of the late, lamented, forever awesome Sleater-Kinney, has a new blog. Here's a sample:

Each of us has a deal-breaker when it comes to songs, albums, or musicians....My deal-breaker is preciousness: when the music is a tiny, baby bird that needs us to be nurturing and respectful, otherwise it can't spread its wings. I like quiet music, folk music, solo artists--it's not a matter of volume or numbers, but it is a matter of art being able to stand on its own two feet. I don't think music needs to be coddled, no matter how delicate or soft it sounds. When a band or singer makes me go "awwww," as I would at the sight of a newborn child, then that is a band that needs a pacifier not an amplifier. Other indicators of preciousness include, but are not limited to: matching old-timey outfits; mumbling, soft-spoken stage banter that trails off and is quickly followed by a cutesy smile, which for some reason garners huge cheers from the audience; being so nervous on stage that someone in the crowd has to yell "you can do it!" or "we love you" (exception made here for child performers); asking people to lie down on the floor for the next song; and any audience sing-along or participation so complicated that it needs to be explained BEFORE the song starts. When I am at an overly precious show, I am often filled with contrarian, immature urges: suddenly banging a gong, stepping on a whoopee cushion, or knocking some vegans together to start a mosh pit. I think what bothers me the most about preciousness is that it takes good form and reduces it to good manners, and turns performance into charade. I have no trouble taking music seriously or considering it special, but I don't need to be instructed about why it is.

Normally I'd take the time to invent some half-plausible thematic connection between the underlying ideas of this post and various trenchant education policy issues as a means of justifying this being written on company time, but everyone's already left for Thanksgiving and seriously, who am I kidding? I miss Sleater-Kinney! Plus, I kind of think there's an entire life philosophy lurking inside this post.

Have a great holiday.

Don't Just Blame the Football Players

Via Inside Higher Ed, Rainy River Community College in International Falls, Minnesota decided to end its football program because of high student loan default rates. According to the International Falls Daily Journal article, Rainy River has the highest student loan default rate in the country at 31.1 percent—that means that one-third of Rainy River’s students that take out federal student loans default on those loans within two years of leaving the college. And as I showed in an October Charts You Can Trust, it is very likely that Rainy River’s 10-year loan default rate is actually much higher.

With such a high default rate, Rainy River is at risk of losing its eligibility to participate in the federal loan program completely, meaning that no students could receive federal loans. But what do student loan default rates have to do with the football program?

Apparently the school had a difficult time getting football players to find the right balance between athletics and academics. And so they cut the football program to remove the distraction. I hope, though, that they are planning more significant changes to address the high default rate. As I also showed in the October Charts You Can Trust, default rates are much higher for students with large amounts of debt or low salaries after graduation. Rainy River can make a big impact on its default rate by finding ways to reduce the amount students are borrowing, increase their graduation rate, and ensure students have marketable job skills when they leave.

As my colleague, Kevin Carey, showed in his Washington Monthly article on community colleges, some are doing a better job than others. And it looks like Rainy River has a lot to learn from community colleges like top-rated Cascadia Community College in Washington, which boasts a two-year default rate of just 5.6 percent.

On "Privatization"

According to the Post, DCPS Chanchellor Michelle Rhee is thinking about hiring some outside organizations to manage the district's lowest-performing schools. The article begins as follows:

As Rhee Weighs Privatization, Doubts Abound

By Theola Labbe and V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 18, 2007

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, in considering turning over the management of 27 failing public schools to nonprofit charter education firms, is sending a clear signal that she intends to shake up the moribund bureaucracy that has failed generations of students.

But experts and school advocates say they are uneasy about the lack of details surrounding her idea, particularly given evidence across the country that charters and schools under private management sometimes fare no better than traditional public schools.

"There's nothing in the literature [to suggest] that privatization will get you revolutionary results," said Henry M. Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College.

It's worth noting that the word "privatization" means different things in different contexts. In health care, for example, it can mean selling public or non-profit hospitals to private companies, which then own them outright and run them at a profit. That seems like a reasonable use of the word "privatize."

What Rhee is considering, by contrast, is hiring either a for-profit or a non-profit organization to take over certain administrative and management functions for a fixed period of time, with the schools, teachers, and students remaining firmly in the public realm--accountable to public officials, paid with public funds, remaining public employees, etc. That's a lot different then selling off a hospital, to the point where I'm not sure using the same word to describe both scenarios is useful.

As to whether this would be good for DCPS, I imagine that depends mostly on who they hire and how they structure the arrangement. If I said, "Hey, I'm thinking about renovating my bathroom, any advice?" and you said "There's nothing to suggest that hiring someone to renovate your bathroom guarantees that you'll end up with a great bathroom, or a better bathroom than you'd get if you did the work yourself. Historically, people who have hired bad bathroom renovators tend to end up with, statistically speaking, bad bathrooms." I'd think you were either an idiot or a jerk being deliberately obtuse. Of course. Doesn't that go without saying?

Perspectives on Immigrant English Learners

Edward Gresser is an expert on trade policy at PPI*, but he also spends his time tutoring first generation immigrant students. He offers his perspective on teaching these students in Education Sector's newest First Person essay. More practical ideas for educators of ELLs here.

Btw, Gresser also just released a new book on American liberalism and globalization.

*EdSector and Eduwonk leader Andy Rotherham is a senior fellow at PPI.

After Five-Year Absence, International Students are Returning to American Colleges & Universities

In March, 2007, Margery Yeager and I reported on the overall downward trend in foreign student enrollment at American colleges and universities. Of the many factors contributing to this decline, perhaps the most significant were the strict, hastily enacted F-1 student visa restrictions implemented in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. This led to a steep drop-off in the number of foreign students coming to the US, but the effects were especially pronounced for students from the Middle East. Political and diplomatic tensions with China also resulted in a decline in the number of students from that country, not to mention the fact that the subjects Chinese students were often most interested in—mainly in the physical sciences—were seen by the US government as being sensitive from a national security standpoint.

As a result of these new restrictions, fewer student visa applications were approved, resulting in a significant decline in the number of international students coming to the US. Coincidentally, this all happened as other countries were getting more aggressive in their efforts to recruit international students. In addition, some of the top sending countries, like China, Korea, and Japan were experiencing domestic transformations that resulted in fewer of their students seeking educational opportunities abroad.

However, the downward post-Sept. 11 trend appears to be ending. The Chronicle of Higher Education—citing the most recent "Open Doors" report put out by the Institute of International Education (IIE)—reports that the number of foreign students pursuing higher education in the United States is rebounding to pre-Sept. 11 levels. For the 2006–07 academic year, the number of new foreign students was 582,984, just shy of the all-time high of 586, 323, reached in the 2002–03 school year. Together, these new international students contributed about $14.5 billion to the US economy.

This upward trend has been attributed to several factors, the most prominent of which was the loosening of the post-Sept. 11 student visa restrictions that had resulted in the denial of many F-1 visa applications. The top 5 sending countries were the same as for the previous year, although the orders had switched somewhat, with India and China having replaced South Korea and Japan in first and second place respectively. Also, a Saudi government-funded scholarship program placed Saudi Arabia in the top 20 sending countries for the first time ever. Another newcomer to the top 20 is Viet Nam, where a growing middle class has produced a 30-percent jump in enrollment for Vietnamese students in the US.

The "Open Doors" report also reveals a changing pattern in enrollment among international students as more of them are enrolling in non-4-year programs. For example, in 2006, 6.7 percent of F-1 visas issued went to students enrolled at community colleges. The figures are even more striking in the case of Vietnamese students. Over 50 percent of approved visas went to students who were planning to attend community colleges in the US. Also, a sizeable portion of new enrollments have been in non-degree-granting institutions like English-language schools and professional-certificate programs. This particular category of student numbers around 39,000, a 27-percent increase over the previous year. This change in enrollment patterns is at least partly due to high tuition costs, since all international students have to pay the out-of-state rate at the institutions they attend.

But despite the positive trend in the overall student enrollment numbers, the "Open Doors" report contains some words of caution. It reports a 1.5 percent drop in undergraduate enrollments and no increase in Ph.D.-level enrollments. Also, the number of European students fell by 2.3 percent, a drop attributed to more European colleges and universities offering courses in English. Perhaps most seriously, a brief produced by the American Council on Education shows that other countries are increasing their efforts to recruit international students, and thus drawing potential students away from the US. From 1999 to 2004, international-student enrollment growth rates were: 108 percent for Japan; 81 percent for France; 46 percent for Germany; 42 percent for Australia; 29 percent for Britain; but only 17 percent for the US. And, while the numbers of students coming to the US is on the rebound, many international students are frustrated that there is no coordination among different agencies in the US. Victor C. Johnson, associate executive director for public policy at an international educators' association, says that although American colleges and universities are successfully recruiting more international students, some recently enacted rules and regulations make it harder for students to, for example, get drivers licenses or Social Security numbers once they are in the US.

Ultimately, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the authors of the "Open Doors" article are right to celebrate the return of foreign students to American universities and colleges. In addition to the money they put into the US economy through tuition payments and living expenses, foreign students represent a large and diverse talent pool that becomes even more valuable if international students choose to remain in the US after completing their studies. Demonstrating an understanding of the value of international students, the US government has eased many of the post-Sept. 11 visa restrictions that had kept so many away. That is a good first step. But as other countries are becoming more and more aggressive in recruiting international students, the US cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It's not enough to simply let students into the country and hope they can fend for themselves. The next step would be to put in place a streamlined system within which the various agencies foreign students have to deal with—Social Security Administration, Departments of Motor Vehicles, insurance companies—work more efficiently to make life easier for international students in the US.

--Posted by Abdul Kargbo

Ohio State Football and the Fallacy of Self-Accountability

A few weeks ago, I successfully predicted the exact number of points the University of Michigan would score against arch-rival Ohio State in their annual football showdown, thus outperforming legions of so-called sports experts while inadvertantly illustrating the fallacy of self-accountability in K-12 and higher education.

The prediction came at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), where I presented a paper on college rankings. The point of the paper, which we'll be re-publishing here at Education Sector in a few weeks, was to parse criticisms of the U.S. News and World Report rankings and criticisms of rankings per se. I wrote:

Reasonable consumers of rankings understand...that the real-world difference between institutions on a ranking list doesn't necessarily correspond to the ordinal difference.... If Ohio State's football team finishes the season ranked #1 in the country due its 14-0 record and 17-point average margin of victory, including a crushing 56-3 defeat of Michigan in front of 107,501 heartbroken fans in Ann Arbor, while the #2 and #3 ranked teams both finished at 12-2, people understand that the difference between #1 and #2 is bigger than the difference between #2 and #3.

The paper was scheduled for a late afternoon symposium, and I spent the preceding hours listening to discusions like "Community Colleges as a Critique of Neo-Liberalism." So when my turn to speak arrived, I didn't realize that my beloved Buckeyes had suffered a grievious home loss to Illinois, curse them and all they hold dear, just a few hours earlier, ending my hopes for an undefeated season. The Michigan game was yesterday, and I was way off on the first part of the score -- Ohio State managed only 14 points, not 56.

BUT--I was exactly right about Michigan. They scored only 3 points in losing to OSU for the fourth consecutive year and the sixth time in the seven-year career of OSU coach Jim Tressel, ending a regular season that began with humiliating home loss to a Division I-AA school, putting Michigan coach Lloyd Carr's career in jeopardy and vaulting the Buckeyes to their third consecutive Big Ten championship and a spot in the Rose Bowl. Clearly, I need to put together a chart comparing my on-the-record prediction with those of all the alleged football experts and pundits, as a means of selling a subscription-only tout newsletter to gamblers and pigskin junkies.

The point being, if you let individuals or organizations define how they'll be publicly evaluated, this is what you get. People are people, and few are going to be reliably objective about owning up to their successes and failures in a neutral way, particularly when the stakes are high. That's really what The Pangloss Index is all about, as well as this recent piece on higher education accountability I wrote for Change.

This principle was also in display on the front page of this morning's Washington Post, which documented how many states have defined "persistently dangerous" school (one of the eleven Pangloss components) in such a way that even the most violence-wracked schools aren't identified. This shows how nominally holding someone accountable for something, but letting them define how that something will be measured, is worse than not holding them accountable at all, because it creates the illusion of accountability that doesn't exist. When California education officials say "there are no persistently dangerous schools in this state," as they have every year since NCLB was enacted, someone might actualy believe them.

This also deserves comment:

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) has introduced a bill that changes "persistently dangerous schools" to "schools which do not have a safe climate for academic achievement," on the grounds that the name alone was causing anxiety over the policy.

"It's not going to be as threatening for schools," she said. "This will remove the stigma associated with high violence."

Chuck Buckler, Maryland's director of student services and alternative programs, said the original term is unpleasant -- akin to telling parents that they were sending their children to a war zone.

"I don't like the title at all," he said. "When this all came about, I said, 'This is something that's going to be a death knell for a school. Everybody will transfer out.' "

He said he was surprised to find that most parents at the six persistently dangerous schools in Baltimore didn't transfer their children to other schools.

The designation, he found, caused communities to rally around their schools and try to make them safer, an effort he said had brought improvements.

Do we really want to remove the stigma associated with high violence? Because that strikes me as one of the more useful stigmas to have. Maybe parents will try to pull their kids out of persistently dangerous schools, or maybe--as in Baltimore--they'll try to make the school less dangerous. But surely both outcomes are better than pretending the school isn't violent, and leaving students to suffer the consequences.