Flypaper Cometh

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has launched a new education blog, Flypaper. This is a welcome addition to the edublogosphere and one that I imagine will quickly become a staple of most people's daily edublog shortlist. Why I don't always agree with the folks at Fordham, they're smart and have a lot of interesting, often provocative ideas about education, generally from a kind of reformist center-right perspective. I note, however, there have been no posts from Fordham head honcho Checker Finn as of yet. Finn may not want to admit this to himself, but he was born to blog. Give in to the inevitable, Checker!

It Must Be Mine...Oh Yes...

I was at a concert at the 9:30 Club tonight and saw some guy wearing this T-shirt as I was walking out. Now, as you all know, we work pretty hard here to bring you the best education policy analysis going, and this is part of our job. But the TV recaps? The travelogues and concert reviews? That stuff pretty much happens on my own time. So this seems like a good opportunity for some enterprising readers to band together and do me a solid in return by buying me one of these T-shirts. I'm a size Large, send it to me c/o

Education Sector

1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite 850

Washington, DC 20036

Shafting Poor Students in Higher Education

There's been a fair amount of analysis in recent years about the various ways that low-income students are getting short-changed by higher education financial aid systems, with both states and individual institutions devoting a larger percentage of financial aid dollars to so-called "merit aid" programs that disproportionately benefit well-off students, i.e. those who need the least help. Crucially--and I can't emphasize this enough--much of this aid is not based on merit but rather amounts to colleges throwing $5,000 to $10,000 towards a rich student in the hopes that he/she will be flattered into enrolling and his/her parents will write a check for the remaining thirty-five grand, plus additional donations to the alumni fund down the road.

But there's been surprisingly little attention given to an arguably bigger and more important funding inequity: the public colleges and universities that lower-income, lower-achieving students tend to attend receive and spend a lot less money than the public universities where the wealtheir higher-achieving students go to school. In some states, the financial disparity, even after excluding spending on research, can run close to $10,000 per student or more. In K-12 education, number like that frequently get states thrown into court where they face, and lose, huge school funding lawsuits resulting in billion dollar settlements. In higher education, we think it's justice. This is the subject of my column in today's InsideHigherEd.

Donor Quirks

Yesterday's New York Times article about the strings some donors attach to their gifts to universities reminded me of my own alma mater. Thanks to two dog-loving donors, William and Mary houses the second largest collection of cynogetica: books about dogs. From the Swem Library website, "This is the second largest collection of books about dogs in this country and continues to grow through its own endowment. It contains scholarly work that dates back to the sixteenth century as well as children's literature, breed guides, and the records of the American Kennel Club."

Now there's a good use of an endowment. Hey, it's the reason I went there.

The Diversity Dodge

In the Post, Jay Mathews writes about the long-standing practice among Virginia public universities of discriminating against applicants from Northern Virginia.  No one denies it; a UVA spokesman said "Our primary goal is to enroll an academically strong and diverse class of first-year and transfer students each year. As a state institution, we are interested in enrolling students from all areas of the commonwealth."

This is a clear case of universities taking a worthy and important value--diversity--and rendering it meaningless by using it as cover for their acquiescence to a political spoils system. 

I understand the need to have diverse perspectives on at an institution of higher learning. While I probably wouldn't give that concern as much weight as universities typically do, it's not an illegitimate goal. But a student who grew up in Roanoke isn't exactly bringing the same kind of diversity to the table as a student from Madagascar or Tibet.  The "all areas of the commonwealth" justification also doesn't make much sense; those areas clearly don't include the quarter-acre of land on which the rejected student featured in the piece happens to live. 

This amounts to selfish legislators from Southern Virginia imposing a confiscatory, redistributionist educational opportunity tax on unsuspecting teenagers in Northern Virginia, and universities that would rather go along with it and hide behind the diversity excuse than stand up to public officials who might cut their funding. 

Teacher Tests in Peru

What if teacher applicants had to take a national test? How many would pass? If this were Peru that would be less than 1 percent. Way less. NPR ran a quick story last week on the Peruvian Ministry of Education's attempts to get a handle on poor teacher performance, covered in more detail here (thx to Abdul for the heads-up). As reported, Peru does a relatively good job getting its kids through school--most graduate from its high school equivalent--but the quality of learning is low. Peru was the worst performer of 43 countries on reading, math and science on the 2000 PISA test. So to improve teacher quality, the ministry of education established a test and required all public school teacher applicants to take it. Test takers needed to score at least 14 out of 20 points to pass. Only 151 of over 180,000 teachers in Peru managed to pass the test.

That's one hundred and fifty one teacher applicants out of 180,000 that passed. That’s an astoundingly low number. So I emailed a friend of mine who lives in Lima. She’s not a teacher but she works with kids in an arts program and I figured she might have an interesting take on what’s happening down there. Here’s what she said:

The whole thing seems way out of hand. Was the exam exceptionally difficult? I don’t know- maybe it was. But from what I’ve heard, it was basic. I think the people we’ve got preparing to teach are just really underqualified to teach children. This is a major problem in the long term but even right now it’s a big mess. Last year it was crazy. They declared a huelga indefinida [indefinite strike] because they wouldn’t accept that they might have to take a test. School started but there were still local strikes and teachers didn't show up. So my kids were hanging around a lot, doing nothing. But Macio [teacher friend] is pissed because he’s insistent that this isn’t really even about the testing. They want more money for the whole education system here and more training and support. So my kids are in school now again but it’s still a big mess and there’s a lot of hostility.

The strike last summer was reportedly pretty violent and brought the school system to a standstill. An agreement was reached after 15 days but it didn't end the controversy over how best to improve teacher quality in Peru. In all, it seems pretty clear that the pressure is building on both the labor side and the school management side. This isn't surprising given that we’re talking about a major labor problem if the majority of teachers and teacher applicants lack the knowledge and skills they need to teach kids well. The teachers and the union, are going to have to do more than strike if they hope to improve their profession and the education of Peruvian children. But it cuts both ways and the ministry of education is going to have to acknowledge that testing the teachers may help to diagnose the gravity of the problem but it’s not going to solve it. And they’re going to have to deal with the fact that improving teaching will not happen over night (on the bright side, we see some efforts underway here and with help from outside Peru here and here).

Simple Headlines for a Complex Issue

Declaring a crisis in student loans certainly makes good headlines and it's a great front page piece in April, when many families are reviewing financial aid offers and figuring out how to finance college. But, as the last quote in yesterday's Washington Post piece on the issue pointed out,

"The congressional action and the media coverage on this issue is doing a massive disservice to students and families, many of whom are concerned about paying for college already," said Luke Swarthout, higher education advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "We know many of them are adverse to debt, and for lenders to be sending out a message of crisis in order to secure themselves a bailout potentially could dissuade families from seeking available financing options."

Of course, that didn't stop the Post's editors from using a headline that read, "Exit of College Lenders Sets Off Scramble to Fill Breach." While it's important to report on the problems many student loan companies are facing right now, it is equally as important to point out that the federal government has tools at hand--the lender of last resort program and the Direct Loan program--to address the problem. And that there are many lenders that are still offering student loans.

Another issue that often is missing from current news reports on student loans is whether it's a good idea in the first place to allow institutions to include tens of thousands of dollars in loans, especially high-interest private loans, in their 'aid' packages. The New America Foundation does a great job in this post of pointing out how the easy availability of high-cost private loans, loans that don't have a government guarantee or a fixed interest rate, has allowed colleges to raise tuitions and shift from need-based to merit-based aid (e.g., more grant money going to higher income students).

I also can't help noting that the largest guarantor of these private loans, the Education Resources Institute (TERI), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. TERI credited their financial troubles to disappearing demand among investors for bonds backed by student loans. But you also have to wonder if investors are worried about the potential for high default rates among these private student loans in light of their recent rapid growth, particularly among students with poor credit histories and attending institutions with low graduation rates. Much like the sub-prime mortgage markets, these sub-prime student loans are ripe for default. But unfortunately for students, unlike TERI, they won't get any relief in bankruptcy from student loan debt.

If Only All College Students Were Educated Like Athletes

That's the thesis of Education Sector Co-Jefe Andy Rotherham's op-ed in USA Today. Many undergraduates struggle to succeed and graduate with very little in the way of counseling or academic attention from their institutions. But that's not because those institutions are incapable of providing such support; they often spend lots of time and money helping the subset of students whose continued enrollment they actually care about: major-sports athletes.

Crucially, Andy's piece also contains an element that all experienced op-ed writers know virtually guarantees placement in a major newspaper, something so compelling that persuasive writing instructors absolutely drill this into their student's heads: name-check Kevin Carey. Seriously, no opinion page editor can resist, I swear.

It's All About Tennessee

We just released a report about the teacher-centered Benwood initiative in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In it, I argue that the successful turn-around of eight failing elementary schools was not because the schools rid themselves of their existing teaching staffs but because they put forth an all-hands-on-deck effort to improve teaching and learning in those schools. It’s a tale of teacher improvement. You can read about it here or see the whole thing here.

Also in Tennessee, Memphis may have lost but the Vols took the title over Stanford. As someone who’s learned a lot of good things about UT recently (UT-Chattanooga as one of many partners in the Benwood initiative) and as a former Cal Bear, I couldn’t be happier about that.

Tenure Cont'd

Ed Notes offers a justification for banning the use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions: Using test scores to estimate teacher effectiveness is methodologically complicated. (This is true). Therefore, it should be outlawed. (This is absurd).

Most important things, including teaching, are complicated. If we squelch every attempt to understand such things and act on that knowledge, we'll be left knowing very little about very little, which more or less describes the state of knowledge about teacher effectiveness today. Indeed, most teacher policy failures are a function of privileging easily measurable unimportant things, like master's degrees and state certification, over difficult-to-measure important things, like effectiveness in boosting test scores.

Ed Notes also offers the "it hasn't been tested" argument, i.e. the chicken-and-egg theory of policy obstructionism: it can't be tried because it hasn't been proven; it can't be proven because it hasn't been tried.

Meanwhile, some unknown person who claims to be a social scientist but isn't willing to offer any credentials to prove it labels all critiques of the union's role in legally banning evidence of student learning from judgments of teacher effectiveness as "union bashing." Because if you criticize unions, ipso facto, you're a union basher--as is, apparently, the famously conservative, union-hating New York Times editorial page, which said:

The ban is so nonsensical that lawmakers clearly decided that the only way to get it passed was to keep it hidden deep in the budget documents. Nobody in Albany would say who is behind this language. The driving force, however, is the powerful teachers’ union that gives lots of money and time to state campaigns.

I'd always been under the impression that "science," and thus "social science," involved certain values of empiricism, evidence, and transparency of information., as opposed to endorsing late-night money- and power-driven legislative skullduggery that's antithetical to those things. But maybe "science" means something different wherever they hand out anonymous, theoretical social science degrees, I don't know. 

There It Is

The Times is reporting that, at the behest of the teachers unions, last-minute language was snuck into the New York State budget providing that "teacher[s] shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data."

There's really not much one can add to that; it's hard to imagine a more unambiguous declaration of the union's total disregard for student learning when its members' jobs are at stake.

Community College Conundrum

I took the train up to Philadelphia yesterday to sit on a panel at the American Association of Community Colleges annual convention. The topic was "Community Colleges: Who Should Judge Them And How." My position was that insofar as the main purpose of community colleges is to prepare students to succeed in further education and work, the best way to judge them is to see if their students succeed in further education and work, taking into account where those students were academically and economically when they arrived in college. In the information age, when it's never been cheaper or easier to gather large amounts of data and track this kind of thing over time, there are really no resource or logistical barriers to comprehensive, long-term evaluations of college success. The only thing standing in the way is the colleges themselves, who are deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of this kind of evaluation.

I've made the same argument about four-year colleges and universities many times. It's often not well-received, and I understand why: a lot of these institutions aren't really in the education business. They're in the sorting business, or the prestige business, or the research business, or the professional sports business (great game last night, btw). The status quo method of judging colleges puts them at the top of the heap in terms of status and resources, so they have nowhere to go but down.

Community colleges, by contrast, are at the bottom of the heap. They get fewer public resources to do a more difficult job. They're selling what economists call an inferior good--something people consume less of the more money they have. To most people, every four-year college is better than every two-year college.

This is, of course, completely wrong: there are community colleges out there that are clearly teaching better than many if not most four-year institutions, precisely because they're in the education business. Two-year institutions have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by shifting to a way of judging higher education institutions that puts more emphasis on student learning and success in the workplace. Even if it turned out that the flagship university really is doing better than the the local community college, the actual difference between them is almost surely less than the current perceived difference.

Yet while the overall tenor of the conversation in Philadelphia was less openly hostile than I've seen from the four-year crowd, and a bunch of people came up to me afterward to say "I think you're right," it was obvious that few people were comfortable standing up in a room full of their peers and saying "We should embrace this approach." I think that's because there's something in higher education that's even more powerful than rational self-interest: a culture of politeness, where administrators are loathe to ever speak ill (in public) of their peer institutions, or to embrace any kind of measurement system that would, inevitably and properly, identify some institutions as low-performing.

Hopefully the time will soon come when the two-year institutions, along with the many less selective four-year universities, realize that they have nothing to lose but their chains.

A Simple Change And A Storm of Lobbying

A simple, seemingly technical, amendment to the Higher Education Act has set off a storm of lobbying from for-profit colleges. The lobbying push, which began earlier this year, is targeted toward an amendment that would change the way the Department of Education calculates student loan default rates. Currently, the federal student loan “cohort default rate” is the percentage of students who default on their student loans within two years of leaving school. The amendment would change this to the percentage of students defaulting within three years of leaving school. That one additional year has put many for-profit colleges and their collective representative, the Career College Association (CCA), on the offensive.

Why is the for-profit sector so concerned? Because changing the way the default rate is calculated puts them at risk of losing access to federal student loan money. Changing the calculation will cause the default rate for all colleges to go up, but it is especially bad news for for-profit colleges and could put hundreds of schools at risk of running afoul of the default rate cut-offs for participating in the federal student loan program. Currently, if an institution has a default rate above 25 percent for three years or a one-year default rate above 40 percent, the institution is no longer eligible to participate in the student loan program. And for-profit institutions are heavily reliant on federal loan funds.

The most recent National Post-Secondary Student Aid Survey report shows just how dependent for-profit colleges are on loan money. Seventy-two percent of students enrolled in for-profit institutions took out loans in 2003, compared with 53 percent at private, 4-year non-profit institutions and a mere 11 percent at public, 2-year institutions, the for-profit sector’s most direct competitors. And, students at for-profit colleges borrowed more money—an average annual loan amount of $5,800, slightly higher than the average annual amount for students enrolled in private, 4-year institutions ($5,100).

If for-profit colleges are going to continue to graduate students with heavy debt loads, they need to prove that the degrees are worth it—and default rates are one measure of the value of a degree. Sure, race, income, etc. are a big factor in a student’s likelihood to default, but institutional factors also play an important role. Of course, if you just listened to the CCA, you wouldn’t realize this—they argue that students’ failure to repay loans is not an indication of institutional quality. They even put out a research report to prove it.

In January, the CCA released a study, prepared by Indiana University, purporting to show that default rates “do not reflect on the quality or type of institution attended”. But this conclusion depends on what you characterize as a ‘student’ characteristic versus an ‘institution’ characteristic. If, as the report does, you characterize earning a degree as solely a ‘student’ characteristic, then the fact that this is a top predictor of loan default would simply reinforce the conclusion that default risk falls squarely on the shoulders of students.

But a student’s likelihood of graduating depends heavily on the academic support, financial aid package, and counseling the student receives from an institution. Given what we know about the ability of institutions to influence a student’s academic success and likelihood of graduating, the report actually supports the importance of institutions in lowering student loan default rates. The report concludes that, “…students’ academic trajectories throughout postsecondary education—credits attempted, credits completed, grades earned, transferring, enrolling continuously, time to degree/certificate, and failing credit hours—emerge as strong predictors of loan default. It is this constellation of student academic success variables that consistently represents the strongest set of predictors of loan default.”

But it is important to the for-profit sector that lawmakers don’t reach this conclusion. The amendment to change the default rate calculation has already been softened in response to lobbying efforts—the cut-off for participation in the student loan program will be raised to a 30 percent default rate over 3 years and schools will have until 2012 before the amendment takes effect. These changes will help for-profit institutions, which would see the greatest increase in default rates with the change. According to Department of Education calculations, for-profit colleges would, on average, see their default rates double with the addition of just one year, compared with a 50 to 75 percent increase in other sectors.

For-profit colleges often argue that their sector provides students that otherwise would not attend college—primarily minority, low-income students—with the opportunity to earn a degree. But this opportunity cannot end when a student enters the door and pays his bill, it must include the opportunity to receive needed academic supports and the opportunity to earn a degree. And it's not just for-profit colleges that need to pay attention to student academic success—many public institutions and private, non-profit colleges can do a lot more to support student learning and student success.

Student loan default rates are one measure of the extent to which institutions are providing a real opportunity—with high cut-offs for participating in the loan program, the default rate measure helps to protect students from colleges that simply provide them with the opportunity to pay a bill, rather than the opportunity to earn a valuable degree.

More Than Checking a Box

TEACH Grants, the new grant/loan program (some have called it a ‘groan’) created in the College Cost and Reduction Act is through the rule-making process and is now open for comment (hat tip to Sara Godrick-Rab at the University of Wisconsin who has been feeding us great tips on this issue). According to a January report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the program is proving popular among students, with 30,000 checking a box on their financial aid forms indicating an interest in the program.

But it will take a lot more than checking a box, for both students and financial aid officers, to make sure that this program works as intended and doesn’t end up saddling students with thousands of dollars in unexpected debt.

The intentions of the program are great: to provide an incentive in the form of financial aid to high-achieving students committed to teaching in a high-risk school and in a high-need subject area. And it wouldn’t work to simply give out grants and hope that students follow through—there needs to be some policy mechanism to encourage students to stick with the program. Under the TEACH Grants program students receive grants of up to $4,000 per year in exchange for promising to follow through on the required teaching commitment, but if they don’t follow through the grants are converted (permanently) to loans with interest accruing from the day the grants were provided.

With many requirements (students must teach four years out of eight after graduating, must teach in a high-need subject area and in a school serving low-income students, and students need to check-in to confirm their employment every year) to fulfill the commitment, it will take some excellent counseling from colleges to make sure that each student understands what is required of them, understands their odds of fulfilling the requirement (currently, the Department of Education expects only 20 percent of students to complete the program) and understands the consequences of failing to complete the program.

Counseling for students is required under the TEACH Grants program, but given that higher education administrators have expressed concerns about the added administrative burden of the program, there’s no guarantee students will receive the kind of comprehensive, continual counseling they will need. And without that counseling, we could see many students who thought they were receiving a grant, as the TEACH Grants name implies, but are suddenly getting a bill for additional student loan debt.

Measurement Man

Dan Koretz, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of Education Sector's Research Advisory Board, has a new book out from Harvard University Press called Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It's a great primer, written in plain English, on the important but often opaque subject of standardized testing. Koretz illuminates the complexities of "sampling error," "statistical significance," "reliability," and a host of other tough terms. And he ends with a chapter on "the sensible uses of tests." At a time when standardized tests are the single more influential force in at every level of education, roadmaps like Measuring Up are a valuable comodity.

Law School Confidential

My wife is a lawyer, and so we get the ABA Journal in the mail every month. As a rule, I never read it, because I don't even have time to read all the magazines we get that cover issues I'm interested in knowing more about. But this month's issue features a big picture on the front cover of someone I happen to know: Bob Morse, czar of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.

I've confined most of my rankings analyses to four-year and two-year colleges, but the law school story is similar: the rankings are very influential, which makes law school deans very anxious and upset. The piece kicks off with the story of the dean of the University of Houston law school, who managed the school through the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison, only to resign six years later when Houston dropped five spots on the list.

There are many good reasons to criticize the U.S. News methodology for ranking four-year institutions. But it strikes me that if any segment of higher education has the least cause to complain here, it's law schools, which completely embrace the logic and justice of rankings in the way they evaluate their own students. The legal profession in general is one pecking order after another, ranking everything from schools and students to law firms and judicial clerkships in hierarchies of great consequence. The letter grades that law schools give out hardly matter; performance relative to--i.e. ranked against--other students is everything.

It was only a few years ago that my wife expended a great deal of effort on and experienced a considerable amount of anxiety about the issue of whether she would graduate in the top ten percent of her class at Georgetown Law. (She did.) She was right to worry; some judges explicitly say they won't consider clerkship applications from applicants without this credential. It's particularly important to distinguish yourself if you're coming from a school like Georgetown, which is in the lower half of what most people consider the best schools.

But while she was anxious, much like a law school dean waiting for the new rankings list, she never thought the student rankings process was unfair. Far from it--it's close to a pure meritocracy, giving every student something that at least resembles an equal shot at distinction and opportunity, regardless of where you come from or who you know. That's all she wanted, or expected, and it worked.

The point being, there's nothing wrong with rankings per se, only bad rankings. And the article actually doesn't provide a lot in the way of persuasive critiques of the U.S News law school method. Numerous law schools complain that other law schools lie and cheat on the data they submit, but that's not an argument against rankings, it's evidence that some law schools are apparently run by liars and cheats. While I'm sure the rankings aren't perfect, their focus on selectivity, employment, and reputation seems reasonably appropriate for status- and job-focused colleges of law.

The article comes back to the former Houston dean at the end, where she says their employment placement services (job placement is an element of the rankings) were disrupted after the storm, negatively affecting their score. But that's just telling the truth, isn't it? I imagine any fair ranking of America's most livable cities would have knocked New Orleans down a few spots from 2005 to 2006. You can't shoot the messenger -- or in the case of law school rankings, Bob Morse.

The Wisdom of Galactica

With the conclusion of The Wire, the mantle of "best show on television" falls on Battlestar: Galactica, which bows for its fourth and final season on the Sci-Fi channel tonight. Like The Wire, Galactica features exceptionally strong writing and acting, and has been freed by its relatively small cable audience to explore issues with a depth and sophistication that you never see on network television. Galactica is similarly sustained by focusing on a single, defining theme. On The Wire, it was the dehumanizing effect of modern institutions. On Galactica, it's the absolutely corrupting influence of war. 

There are few more dangerous illusions than the notion that people can survive war unscathed as long as the cause is just. The humans on Galactica are fighting the most just war imaginable: a race of evil cyborgs ambushes a relatively peaceful human society living on a group of planets in the distant future, annihilating billions of people with nuclear weapons and chasing a small band of survivors through space toward the only refuge left to them: the long-lost homeland of Earth. 

Yet instead of making the show about the triumph of the human spirit, Galactica's creators show how that spirit is crushed, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, under the weight of the impossible moral decisions war inevitably brings. That was the essence of Lee Adama's defense of Baltar's collaboration in the final episode of last season. "It was an impossible situation," he says. "When the Cylons arrived, what could he possibly do? What could anyone have done?" You see it in Sol Tigh, who rejected collaboration and ended up promoting suicide bombing, executing his own wife, and was left ruined as a result.  You see it in the pointed contrast between Adama's pilot-episode speech to the troops and Admiral Cain's parallel speech from the between-season movie, Razor, where she gave into the need for revenge and was ultimately undone by it. 

Like any show, the beats and themes on Galactica have started to become more obvious as time goes on; it wasn't hard to guess where Kendra Shaw came from on Razor and where she would go in the end. So while I'll miss the show, I'm glad they're wrapping it up this year. As the creators have made clear, even the best of women and men can only survive war's inhumanity for so long. In this day and age, that can't be said enough. 

Notes on SES

Newly released interim report (pdf) from the Department of Education shows that the number of kids in chronically low-performing schools who are getting free tutoring through NCLB’s Supplemental Educational Services (SES) is rising but still only reaches 17 percent of all those eligible. Same kids also have the option to switch from their school to a better performing school but only a paltry one percent of eligible students are taking advantage of this. Why such low participation rates for SES and public school choice? Mostly because parents don’t seem to know or understand that they have these options (only half of those surveyed said they had been notified about the SES option, and less than a 1/3 said they’d heard about the public school choice option). [By the way, it's increasingly unlikely that SES will survive NCLB reauthorization, at least not without big changes. It's ironic, really, that as an NCLB provision (albeit now the ugly stepsister) SES is not really held accountable in any meaningful way for student outcomes. So changes should ensure that we can at least tell whether or not SES or SES providers (which have tripled in number in the past 3 years) actually improve learning opportunities for kids. Proposals to get rid of SES or lump it together into another pot don't address the participation/access issue or the questionable quality issue.]

The A.J. Soprano Factor

This discussion over at the The Atlantic and at G-Spot about merit and college admissions seems as good a reason as any to reprint, in its (relatively short) entirety, a policy brief co-blogger Erin Dillon and I wrote a few months ago:

Tony Soprano, patriarch of the eponymous crime family on the HBO drama "The Sopranos," had a son named Anthony Jr.—A.J. for short. A.J. was a terrible high school student. None too bright to begin with, he skipped class, experimented with drugs and alcohol, vandalized school property, and eventually got expelled. Nonetheless, A.J. went to college. His mother, Carmela, devoted countless hours to monitoring his grades, scouting for colleges that might accept him, buttonholing guidance counselors, managing the application process, and constantly reminding him of the importance of higher education. For Carmela, the question was not if her son would go to college, but where. In the end, she got her wish, practically dragging A.J. to school.

A.J. Soprano is a fictional character, but the intersection of social class and college access that he illustrates is all too real. Despite a wide range of programs dedicated to increasing access to higher education for all students, college is far more accessible for upper-income students like A.J. than for students of modest means. Chart 1, which is based on newly available data from the U.S. Department of Education's ongoing Education Longitudinal Survey, illustrates this fact.


All of the students in the survey were high school sophomores in 2002 and were given standardized tests in reading and math at that time. Each bar on Chart 1 shows the percent of students with different test scores and levels of family income who had enrolled in college by 2006, two years after their expected high school graduation.

The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores and came from families earning more than $100,000 per year. Despite their academic shortcomings, 58.4 percent of these students went on to college. For high-income students in the second achievement quartile—still below the median—the college-going rate was significantly higher, 85.3 percent.

This is a higher rate than that for those directly opposite A.J.—students from the highest achievement quartile and the lowest income level, less than $20,000 per year. 80.3 percent of these meritorious poor students went to college, which means that nearly 20 percent did not. High-achieving wealthy students, in contrast, went to college at a 96.2 percent clip. In other words, high-achieving poor students are five times more likely than high-achieving rich students to skip college in the first two years after high school.

Some observers have argued that there is no real college-access problem for the brightest students. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 [the top 10 percent] who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high school graduates to the most prestigious schools."

Chart 2 suggests otherwise. Aptitude and achievement play a significant role in college-going, but class matters too. Chart 2 is based on the same group of students as Chart 1, but shows only the percent of students whose first college was a highly selective four-year institution.

The odds of a poor, low-achieving student going to a highly selective institution are 0.2 percent, practically non-existent. Among the A.J. Sopranos, however, 3.5 percent managed to sneak into an elite school, suggesting that admissions preferences for athletes, legacies, and the children of the rich are alive and well.

This contrast between students with similar test scores and different incomes persists across Chart 2. In each achievement quartile, students from the wealthiest families are far more likely than their similar-scoring peers to attend the kind of high-status college or university that often serves as a gateway to personal and professional success.

There are a host of factors contributing to this phenomenon, not all of them involving anxious mothers or college admissions committees giving a leg up to the scions of wealthy alumni. Low-income students frequently attend under-resourced high schools that don't provide good guidance counseling or college preparatory curricula. College tuition is rising much faster than available need-based financial aid, which may lead some college-ready poor students to believe that higher education is beyond their financial reach. But whatever the reasons, it's clear that equal access to college remains an unmet promise in America. When it comes to higher education, it's an advantage to be rich like A.J.

If you want to see the footnotes and standard errors, the original brief is here.

Supply-Side Education Policy, Continued

Expanding on yesterday's post: Tests can be thought of as a kind of tax on the public education system. They consume scarce resources that could be used for teaching purposes. The tens of millions of dollars a year states spend on standardized tests represent funds that could have been used to reduce class size or increase teacher pay. The same is true for the money needed to create data systems that track students who move between school districts, an essential component of calculating accurate high school graduation rates. More importantly, tests consume time, both in the actual taking and in pre-test preparation, reducing the hours available for instruction and thus, presumably, the amount that students learn.

But, as with taxes, tests are necessary because they create a resource--detailed, comparable information about school success--that serves the broad public interest. Tests are compulsory, not voluntary, because otherwise people would have an incentive to free-ride and enjoy the benefit without the tax. The trick is to strike the right balance of taxation, so the short-term negative consquences are minimized (they can't be eliminated) while the public benefit is maximized. If the public resources are used wisely, they support the overall quality of the system and thus the quality of education provided. Individually, the dry cleaner across the street from my house would benefit if he didn't have to pay taxes. But he's better off operating under a system of taxation, because it pays for the sidewalks and roads that bring customers to his door.

People don't like taxes. As a result, they're susceptible to arguments that taxes can be lowered without consequences. Yet many of loudest critiques of NCLB imply the need for more information resources, not less. Fair accountability systems, we are told, will measure value-added growth. They will take into account social studies, art, music, foreign language, critical thinking, creativity, parental satisfaction, etc., etc. It's true, accountability systems would be better if they measured these things. But they can't be measured for free. And they certainly can't be measured using fewer resources than we use today.

Arguments that we could fix this whole mess simply by having less of what people don't like (taxes) and more of what people do like (public resources) are dishonest. In the long run, they breed cynicism and distrust, because they teach people to expect a combination of taxes and services that's impossible to achieve.