A Blank Slate

I think it's fair game to debate the merits of the Broader, Bolder approach to education, but it's like watching a called third strike to assume the new initiative will sway the presumptive Democratic nominee into a certain education policy.

Why? Because, unlike his opponent, he already has one.

It's not too bad either. There's some minor tweaks here and a major proposal there, and it all adds up to a pretty comprehensive education plan.

First, as a caveat to my previous post on the McCain-Obama surrogate debate on education: McCain does not really have a serious education policy at this point. While Obama has two .pdf files totaling 17 pages and nearly 9,000 words, the Republican nominee has a spartan 500 word essay on his website. That's it.

The two senators' legislative history on this issue do not compare either. While Obama chose to serve on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, McCain did not. While Obama introduced 20 bills pertaining to education in the latest Congress, McCain proposed none.

Obama's legislative history paired with his campaign plans draw a fairly clear outline for what he'd like to do as president. Legislatively, he's focused on things like summer and after-school programs for high-needs kids, STEM advancements, and innovation zones (districts that track students longitudinally, reward teachers based on student performance and teacher evaluations, and establish career ladders. His plan has a few clever policy tweaks, things like eliminating the cumbersome FAFSA in favor of a check box on federal tax forms, that make a lot of sense. It also tackles the big issues by proposing mentoring programs and career ladders for teachers, a refundable tax credit for college students, and service scholarships for new teachers who agree to teach in a high need field or location for four years.

These are not minor proposals, and they are not the sign of someone waiting for an education policy savant. McCain, on the other hand, could use some help. His entire education platform is a little more than the length of this post. Now that's a blank slate.

Er...

The K-12 blog topic du jour is clearly the "Broader, Bolder" education agenda that was released today via large ads in the Post and Times. A lot of the agenda items are very worthwhile in their own right, and the signatories include many smart, thoughtful people from across the ideological spectrum. But the individual ideas aren't what really matter here--you can find them all elsewhere. The framing is the thing, and in this respect I think the agenda falls short. The key sentence comes at the beginning of the second paragraph:

"Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning."

I think this incorrect. Rather, education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that education policy can help poor children primarily by improving education. Similarly, labor policy is often crafted around the idea that American families, including schoolchildren, would benefit from higher wages for working-class households; health policy has focused on extending coverage to the uninsured, etc. In each of these fields people tend to stress the importance of their agenda to a point of some exaggeration. But nobody seriously claims to have the single solution for poverty, and this no less true in education than anywhere else.

So the real question is what the signatories mean by the "er" in "Broader" and "Bolder." This suffix implies differentiation, but it's not clear what kind. Broader in the sense of "in addition to"? If that's the case, I have no quarrel, other than to say that there's probably some value in having experts in discrete fields focus on policy issues aligned with their expertise. The agenda calls for an increased investment in health services, for example, which I wholeheartedly support. But I also recall a gigantic battle over exactly this issue last year, featuring massive advocacy efforts, newspaper headlines, Presidential vetos, and all the rest. So it's not like people don't understand this is a problem. And, per Eduwonk, where was this statement then, when it might have mattered? Perhaps the signatories felt like their energies were best confined to education? Moreover, it's not like those policymakers who actually have multiple jurisdictions don't understand that poor children need more than a good school. Ted Kennedy and George Miller, if I'm not mistaken, support NCLB and SCHIP and EITC and WIC and a higher minimum wage.

If, on the other hand, the "er" means "instead of," then I'm opposed. Again, this brings us back to framing--the first big subhead says: "The NCLB Framework Cannot by Itself Meet the Challenge," implying a certain kind of side-taking relative to many well-understood controversies and decision points involving NCLB reauthorization, particularly given the subsequent nods toward concerns about curriculum narrowing, the impossibility of 100% proficiency, etc. But the agenda itself basically ignores these and all other accountability issues, other than to say that "new accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods," a perfectly reasonable goal that's also vague to the point of near-meaninglessness.

There are reasoned positions on both sides of the NCLB and larger school accountability debate, and the signatories all know what they are. By failing to address those issues or weigh in on the knotty decisions that must be made, the reader is left with the sense that the real message here is that students would ultimately benefit from less hard attention to the quality of their schools--a dispiriting idea coming from education experts and a wrong one as well. Yes, the first bullet point is "continue to pursue school improvement efforts," and the ideas mentioned are perfectly legit. But if you're going to frame your agenda in terms of the accountability elephant in the room, you have to tell the world where you think that elephant should go.

Further commentary from Mead , Colvin, Petrilli and Hoff.

Free Advice

Eduwonkette writes:

In this month's issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a new study by UT-Austin professor Julian Vasquez-Heilig and Linda Darling-Hammond, "Accountability Texas-Style: The Progress and Learning of Urban Minority Students in a High-Stakes Testing Context," revisits the Houston miracle by analyzing years of student-level test score and graduation data (1995-2002). There's no version up on the web yet, but here are some key findings: Growth on scores on TAAS exam outpaced scores on the Stanford exam. This appears to be prima facie evidence of test score inflation.

I've always been puzzled by this line of reasoning. NCLB was designed to give states a free hand to set academic standards and adopt tests as they like. Schools are then put under considerable pressure to help students achieve those standards as measured by those tests. And the evidence is incontrovertable that student achievement as measured by state NCLB tests has increased substantially. Evidence from other tests, by contrast, is much less clear. NAEP scores have increased, but not nearly at the same rate as state tests. Ditto tests like the Stanford exams.

But that's to be expected, isn't it? If the entire state system is purposefully geared toward teaching a certain set of standards, wouldn't we expect more improvement there than on a test that measures some other standards? Wouldn't test scores logically go up on the test that matters, instead of the one that doesn't? I can see how some kind of wild divergence would seem suspicious--e.g. a 50% increase on the state test while SAT-10 scores plummet--but shouldn't our baseline expectation be greater progress on the signficant tests aligned to curricula? But to say such divergence is prima facie evidence of test score inflation seems strange.

Maybe Vazquez-Heileg and Darling-Hammond explain all of this, but I can't tell since "there's no version up on the Web yet" and given that Eduwonkette in her day job is not exactly a disinterested observer in what she blogs about, I'm not going to take her word for it. Which brings me to my second point, regarding the research / policy divide.

This chasm of understanding, in which evidence from research fails to permeate the policymaking process, is constantly lamented and discussed, particularly at mass convocations like AERA. I don't understand why. Not because it doesn't exist, but because the solution strikes me as obvious. Here, free of charge, I present my secret methods for bridging the gap, based on time spent on both sides of the divide:

1) Write well. As everyone knows, research written in academese is often hard to read. Some of this can be solved be applying universal principles of good writing, which can be found in various books and guides and thus won't be rehashed at length here, other than to say: writing is a request to be a guest in someone else's consciousness. So be polite, and don't overstay your welcome. Write clearly and briefly, keeping in mind what the reader wants and needs, not what you want and need.

Beyond the above, there are also some important issues of structure to understand. Academic writing tends to be structured something like this:

1) Lit Review
2) Methods
3) Results
4) Conclusions (Possibly--"More research is needed" does not count as a conclusion.)

This is a terrible way to communicate with policymakers. They don't care about the lit review and the methods. You're the expert; they trust that you know what you're talking about and conducted the analysis correctly. (Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.) They're interested in context, results and conclusions. By that I mean: What did you find, and why does it matter? To present this information, you should write like this:

1) Context: why is this issue important?
2) Results: what did you find?
3) Conclusions: what do these results mean? (This should flow logically from the context)

Put the methods in an appendix, and only include stuff from the lit review if it helps establish context or supports your conclusions. I understand that this means writing in a different way than is appropriate for peer-reviewed academic research. Which is fine; different audiences and purpose, different format. To repeat: write for the reader, who wants the good stuff at the beginning, not the end. In fact, all he or she wants is the good stuff. So give that, and nothing else.

2) Let people know. The world is an extremely busy place and nobody is waiting for your next great idea or my next great idea with bated breath. So figure out who needs to know what you've discovered and call them on the phone. Or send them an email, or write them a letter. Reach out -- you'd be surprised how often this works. As long as your message is short and cogent, they'll probably appreciate it and ask for more.

3) Don't make things harder than they already are. Even if you follow steps one and two, getting traction in the policy sphere is still difficult. Politics, limited attention spans, competitors grasping for that same sliver of mindshare--it's not easy. So keep in mind some realities of the 21st Century, such as: If people can't find it on the Internet within two minutes, for free, it doesn't exist. Don't make more work for busy people, and don't try to sell them something that other people are giving away.

Vazquez-Heileg and Darling-Hammond got Step 2 right--getting your paper mentioned in a well-read blog like Eduwonkette is smart. But then--ack!--the paper isn't available. This cuts the potential Eduwonkette-driven audience by 90%. Most policymakers are not going to check back every day waiting for the free Internet version to show up, nor are they going to go buy a subscription to Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, or pay some kind of absurdly expensive per-article fee on a Web site. They'll just move on to other things.

Here's a Simple Rule of Thumb...

...if you're a news organization with some pretensions of respectability, and you're trying to decide whether or not to run an article that, while certain to boost traffic and advertising revenue, clearly stretches the boundaries of good taste:

1) Collapse the title of of the article into a single run-on phrase, then add "www." to the front and ".com" to the end, like this: http://www.titleofarticle.com/

2) Ask yourself this question: Would creepy middle-aged men pay $29.95 a month in exchange for access to this Web site? If the answer is "Yes" then don't run the article.

Application of this rule could have saved the AP and MSNBC from this.

School Choice Trifecta

The Post turns in not one, not two, but three noteworthy school choice stories today. The first suggests that DC's voucher program may be eliminated by an unfriendly Congress. While I don't think the program should be expanded or continued in the long run, the first obligation is to the kids here and I think Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton owes them more than just an "FYI, I'll be taking your voucher away." 

The second story is titled "Charter Schools to Close Over Academics." Ask yourself: How many times you have read this headline without the word "charter" in it? That tells you most of what you need to know. Also, it's not a coincidence that all of the charter revocations in DC have been applied to stand-alone "mom and pop" schools, not schools like KIPP that benefit from a fine-tuned model and the support of larger regional or national non-profit charter management organizations. In the not-too-distant future, both research findings and charter school growth patterns will likely show that this is the future of public school choice. The article also includes commentary from Ross Wiener at the Ed Trust, which is unusual in that they normally don't weigh in on choice issues. I've always been puzzled by this; objectively speaking charter schools have done exponentially more to improve education for low-income and minority students in DC than reforms like NCLB, so you'd think that an organization premised on helping those children would be more engaged... 

The third story (like the second from Jay Mathews) focuses on New Orleans where over half of public school enrollment is in charters. One critic faults charters there for creating an environment of "entrepreneurial opportunism" whereby providers rushed in in the weeks and months after the flood, recruiting good teachers, founding new schools in empty public school buildings, etc., etc. Right. Because clearly the big problem in post-Katrina New Orleans has been an overabundance of resources and attention focused on providing vital public services to the city's poor children.  

Accreditation Explains Everything

InsideHigherEd reports a new flare-up in an ongoing dispute about the way the U.S. Department of Education regulates people who regulate colleges. Yes, this sounds very boring. It's not; it actually explains much about higher education as well as school vouchers and other hot-button K-12 issues. But first, a little history:

For a long time the federal government had very little role in higher education, other than famously giving states Western land rights in exchange for building public institutions that would train students in useful arts like agriculture, mining, etc., i.e. the land-grant universities that remain an important part of higher education today (Contrary to popular belief, the feds didn't grant the actual land on which the universities were built; rather revenue from the land rights financed the building. (Trivia: the University of the District Columbia is a land-grant university.))

That began to change after World War II with the G.I. Bill and even more importantly a huge influx of research dollars into higher education meant to build the nation's technological capacity and fight the Cold War. This had a profound impact on the character of the modern university, cementing research prowess as the over-riding determinant of prestige. The problem is that it happened at the exact same time that the nation's higher education system was expanding to accommodate huge numbers of new students as college-going became the norm. So we made universities care about one thing--research--even as we needed them to be good at another thing--teaching. This fundamental and on some level irreconcilable tension is the source of much of what's wrong with higher education today. 

By the mid-60s the huge, powerful research universities were in their heyday. There was an expectation among many that federal support would expand from research to subsidizing the general operations of the universities themselves. But academic institutions didn't always turn out to be the best places to conduct research, and parts of the general public, along with conservative politicians, saw higher education as the source--both physical and ideological--of the dirty hippies who were allegedly tearing the nation apart. 

So instead of giving money to institutions, Congress gave money directly to students, in the form of subsidized student loans and Pell grants, which are essentially higher education school vouchers (more on this later). This helped fuel an increasingly consumerist mindset among prospective college students, which in turn spawned things like aggressive college marketing and the U.S. News college rankings.

The people who created Pell grants weren't idiots. They realized that you can't just hand an 18-year-old thousands of dollars and let her spend it however she likes. Without some controls, nothing would prevent me from founding Kevin University in my home office, setting tuition at the exact amount of the Pell Grant, and handing out worthless diplomas to gullible and/or complicit lower-income students. So Congress set certain criteria for an institution to be eligible to receive money via Pell grants and subsidized loans. This provision (called "Title IV eligibility," after the relevant section of the Higher Education Act) is the primary leverage point used by Congress to make universities do what it wants, since most students now pay for college, in whole or in part, with some form of federal grant or loan. 

One of the main criteria for Title IV eligibility is accreditation. But of course this still wasn't enough--otherwise I could create Kevin's Accreditation in my spare bedroom, accredit Kevin University, and then proceed to blow my ill-gotten Pell grant money at the track. So Congress directed the U.S. Department of Education to create a body that would essentially accredit accreditors. It's called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, or NACIQI (pronounced nah-SEEK-eeh). 

Accreditation has always been a mixed bag when it comes to quality control. The basic structure, for example, is confusing. In most respects "national" is better than "regional" in higher education--national universities are world-famous, while regional universities are where you go if you can't go somewhere better. In accreditation, it's the other way around: the country is split up among six regional accreditors, each with its own long-established territory, that provide the overall institutional accreditation that institutions need to be Title IV-eligible. Each regional accreditor goes about this in a somewhat different way. So if you read that a university is "nationally accredited" keep in mind that this is not as good as being regionally accredited.  (There's also a whole separate system of program accreditation for things like schools of education, engineering, medicine, etc., but that's a topic for another day).

The current accreditation system works well in some ways. Accredited colleges are very unlikely to steal your money and take it to the track or hand you a worthless diploma from KevU. Accreditation brings certain standards in terms of faculty credentials, financial integrity, etc. Accreditation is based on peer review, so it gives institutions a good opportunity for self-reflection based on expert feedback, if they choose to take it. 

But the peer-based nature of accreditation also limits its utility. There's a tendency toward log-rolling: you don't ask me hard questions, and I'll return the favor. Regulatory capture is a risk: accreditors can see institutions as their clients, not students or the public at large. Accreditors rely on institutional fees to run their operations, which means they often don't have the resources that evaluating something as complex as a university requires. More fundamentally, accreditation lives within the present values of higher education. And in that system, short-changing student learning in favor of research isn't a bug--it's a feature. 

So when the Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened a few years ago and began asking some hard and perfectly valid questions about the fact that a lot of college students don't graduate or learn very much, the Department of Education responded by re-evaluating the role of accreditation. It appointed some new members to NASIQI who weren't inclined to just rubber-stamp approval, and it drafted new regulations which would require accreditors to require colleges to provide some kind of objective data indicating the extent to which they were successfully helping their students learn.

Naturally, the institutions and accreditors took to the challenge with vigor ran to Congress and had language inserted in the Higher Education Act to make such requirements illegal. This is what the recent flare-up is all about. 

This seems to be a trend of late: (1) A regulatory agency charged with ensuring the quality of the nation's education system decides to create new public information about educational success. (2) The system responds by cutting off the process at its knees. That's what happened in New York when the teachers union pushed through dead-of-night legislation to prohibit the use of student performance data in evaluating teachers, and that's what's happening here. 

What are the lessons in all of this? First, while it's easy enough to condemn government bureaucracies for focusing on bean-counting and process instead of bottom-line results, there are plenty of powerful organizations and interest groups out there that wouldn't have it any other way. They want bad government, because it frees them to act in their own interest, instead of the public interest. 

Second, it hasn't been lost on school choice advocates that our higher education system, which is in many respects very successful, maintains a diverse mix of public and private providers who compete for what amount to post-secondary school vouchers. That's why President Bush re-labelled his latest voucher proposal as "Pell Grants for kids" in the State of the Union this year. 

But from the beginning, it was obvious that you couldn't just hand college students a voucher and leave it at that. In any kind of choice-based education system, there has to be some kind of external quality control in addition to what market forces bring. Unlike cars, houses, and other expensive things, schools and universities are far too complicated for consumers to fairly evaluate on their own. They're also institutions that pursue fundamentally public interests, and thus need to be influenced by publicly-elected officials and organizations in a way that gives society more than what freely-acting consumers and providers would produce on their own. 

Accreditation, properly regulated and designed, is one way to do that, and isn't wholly dissimilar from well-run charter school programs that are answerable to publicly-appointed boards. Either way, or any way, a smart combination of choice and public accountability is the best recipe for education, K-12 and higher alike. 

Obama and McCain (surrogates) debate on education

From what I can tell, this morning's debate on education was the first time Obama and McCain surrogates have squared off head-to-head as representatives for each party's nominee. If today's event was any indication of the general election, Obama needs to bone up on his specifics.

McCain's surrogate, Lisa Graham Keegan, has been around the block and through her own mini-scandals, but today she was competent and commanding. She easily dismissed a question asking if No Child Left Behind was an "unfunded mandate" by explaining the difference between authorizing and appropriating funds and citing the rise in federal education dollars since Bush took office. Being experienced in education technology, she easily answered a question about ways schools can incorporate it into classrooms and teaching. She even made the audience laugh when quoting Milton Friedman (no small task for a roomful of reporters and educators) saying two things are resistant to technology: Congress and American public schools.

By contrast, Obama's surrogate, Jeanne Century, was vague and elusive. Her answer on the technology question focused on raising the floor and ensuring broadband access. These are great goals, but Century seemed almost awed at technology, discussing cellphones and the Internet in an airy tone suggestive of some far-off future. Century dismissed the Department of Ed's recent focus on "scientifically based research," at one point saying flat-out it, "makes our research less rigorous." I understand that randomly assigned, control group experimental designs limit what can be studied a little due to cost and ethical considerations, but to call it less rigorous is certainly not the right choice of words.

On a question about dual-language programs, Century waffled because we don't know which languages they should be. She cited the statistics that, by 2010, a third of our students will come from a home where the primary language is not English, and that some schools have students with as many as 100 native languages. While these are important numbers to recognize, they shouldn't paralyze us into inaction or discourage dual-language schools and classrooms. We can make some decisions, right?

Most troubling, Century refused to give a concrete example of how to measure effective teaching, instead preferring to defer to local district and union officials to battle it out. In other words, keep the status quo. On an issue some were calling Obama's "Sister Souljah" for his inclusion of merit pay in an NEA address las summer, surely the candidate has a better answer than this.

These events are usually pretty mundane affairs, but I found myself particularly underwhelmed this morning. As someone who usually comes down more on this side of issues, I was dismayed that all the good ideas and all the strength came from McCain and Graham Keegan.

Putting the Teaching Company Out of Business

If you read the New York Times Book Review or similar publications, you've probably noticed advertisements for "The Teaching Company," which sells audio recordings of college lectures. They've been around for a while and imagine NYT advertising space isn't cheap, so there must be a market here.  I've always been vaguely tempted to buy one, if only to pick up some of the stuff I missed while chronically skipping class as an undergraduate. But I haven't, primarily because it's expensive: they charge $270 for CD recordings and $199 for Internet downloads, which is a lot of money for a product with a marginal cost of production of essentially zero. I downloaded two albums by The Submarines from EMusic yesterday for less than ten clams total--that seems like a better deal.

Fortunately, there's now an alternative to giving The Teaching Company two hundred dollars. You can give Yale University no dollars for something better. The Open Yale Courses Web site, which debuted late last year, offers a raft of well-produced, full-video lecture courses in a variety of subjects, for free. This is a growing trend in higher education, and it raises a lot of interesting questions.  Such as: How can Yale give away a product it's selling to its students for $50,000 a year? The answer, of course, is that Yale isn't giving away the credentialing part of higher education, which is the key to maintaining the exclusivity on which all elite colleges are based. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today. 

Governor Crist: Don't Sign That Bill

Gary Fineout, in the Miami Herald, writes about the virtual education bill that is now on Florida Governor Charlie Crist's desk. Florida is not only the fourth largest state, but also a trendsetter for virtual education. Unfortunately for both the state and virtual education in general, this bill takes the state in the wrong direction. Ironically, it will do the exact opposite of what its sponsors purport:

State Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and one of the backers of the legislation, said the state needed to spur competition to boost the availability of online courses. "I've seen students who desperately need online courses and have been unable to access them," said Gaetz, a former school superintendent. "Now school districts can pick and choose and negotiate for price and quality."

Florida already has the largest state-run supplemental virtual school (Florida Virtual School) with the widest array of course offerings in the country. The state also has a strong student choice provision that guarantees students access to these courses. So Senator Gaetz is referring to students that want a full-time virtual education, primarily at the K-8 level. The state authorizes these full-time programs and can already pick and choose and negotiate for price and quality. And, the main barrier to expanding those programs is a legislative cap on funding. So, this bill, which mandates that each of Florida's 67 school districts contract with a provider or develop its own program to provide a full-time K-8 virtual schooling program, is not really about those things. What it does is move Florida from a well-run, successful, state-authorized program to a system that forces each district to manage and authorize its own program.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, this change will actually reduce competition and options for students. Under the current statewide model, families in Florida have at least two options. But, this bill would remove the option from families and give districts, most of which have no experience or mechanisms to oversee virtual education, the option instead.

It's highly unlikely that districts will provide multiple options. It's almost certain that they will contract with either one of the current providers or start their own program--with much less oversight. Even more troubling, the districts, with little administrative capacity to manage these programs, will have incentives to choose the lowest cost providers so they can capture part of the per student funding provided by the state.

Expanding options for students is a worthy goal. The governor should send this bill back to the legislature and ask legislators to develop a bill that spurs robust competition among multiple providers at the state level. And, to re-assert Florida's role as an innovator in virtual education, the state should offer incentives for providers to successfully serve low-income and other at-risk students--students that are many times not well-represented in or well-served by virtual education programs. Instead of mandating just full time programs, a new bill would also provide incentives for districts to work closely with both the Florida Virtual School and private providers to experiment with hybrid learning programs--allowing students to benefit from a blend of the best of both traditional and online learning. With this new bill, students across the state would have access to more than just what their district chooses. All Florida families, whether in Hialeah or Niceville or Tampa, would have access to many high quality options--options that offer a real mix of online and hybrid models to fit a wide variety of student needs.

Money Matters in Education

Last week, I wrote that "I'm not one of those people who believe that "money doesn't matter" in education. That's absurd; money matters a great deal, and there are plenty of schools that don't get their fair share." Ken DeRosa responded by saying:

The "money doesn't matter" meme is not as absurd as Kevin is suggesting, provided that it's qualified with "at today's funding levels." At today's funding levels, money doesn't matter. The correlation between school expenditures and student performance is very low to non-existent. The fact that some schools "don't get their fair share" is irrelevant. The important question is whether schools are getting sufficient funding to educate their students. No one knows the answer to that question. What I do know is that many schools with low funding outperform many schools with much higher funding.

There are several issues here that need unpacking, so let me take them in turn. First, any claims that money doesn't matter in education, at current spending levels or otherwise, have to overcome some obvious and very powerful commonsense arguments to the contrary. There is, for example, a long-established multi-billion dollar private market for K-12 education characterized by significant price variance. Here in DC you can spend a relatively modest amount of money to send your kids to Catholic school or several times that for tony private academies. Presumably the people forking over $31,428 per year (!) for St. Albans aren't idiots who are getting ripped off, but rather smart, well-educated consumers who are getting something for their money besides just peer effects.

More generally, it's common to see per-student spending differences of two-to-one or more in most states. In fact, Ken cites some examples in his post. Imagine you're the parent of a student in one of the schools on the good side of that ratio. You pick up the paper one morning and read that your local school district budget will be slashed by 50% next year, bringing it down to the level of the lowest-spending districts in your state. Do you (A) Panic, on the grounds that this will have a devastating effect on your child's education; or (B) Say to yourself "Well, a meta-analysis of multivariate school funding /outcome analyses reveals inconsistent results and small r-square values, so I'm sure little Johnny will be fine," and go back to drinking your coffee?

You also can't determine "sufficient" funding for a given school district without considering funding for other school districts, because most school funding is used to purchase teachers for whom districts compete. Virginia, for example, has a state school funding formula whereby school districts are required to raise enough local property tax money to meet a "foundation"--read, "sufficient"--funding level. For nearby Fairfax County, that amount is $631 million (Fairfax is the 13th largest school district in America). Fairfax then voluntarily raises another $729 million, which it uses to attract good teachers, which makes people want to live in Fairfax, which leads to high property values, which is one of the reasons Fairfax is able to raise an extra three-quarters of a billion dollars per year for education in the first place. The point being, in a competitive labor market there's no absolute amount of money schools need to provide a good education--if they get much less than everyone else, they are, by definition, screwed.

That said, it's reasonable to believe that schools are insufficiently sensitive to differences in resources. When you give them more money, performance doesn't improve as much as it should. I think this is the proper conclusion to draw from the numbers and studies Ken cites. The real question, then, is what are the implications of this? My take is that (A) We need to pursue policies designed to increase resource sensitivity and do a better job with the money we have, which include but aren't limited to well-designed accountability systems and various reforms involving teacher recruitment, compensation, school leadership, etc. and (B) Any significant new infusions of dollars from court orders, political initiatives, etc., have to be seen as rare opportunities to leverage the reforms needed to increase efficiency, resource sensitivity, etc. Both taxpayers and schoolchildren deserve more than they're getting from school money today.

What I don't believe is that resource insensitivity is an argument against fixing gross inequities in school funding levels. If you've got a school system suffering from the double whammy of not enough money, badly spent, the best reform strategy is, per above, one that combines new resources with systemic reform. The problem with the "money doesn't matter" formulation is that it's been hijacked by privatizers and anti-government zealots (to be clear, I'm not putting Ken in this camp) who use it as an excuse to promote reckless tax cuts and disinvestment in public educaiton. (For more on these issues, see this interview that I conducted with economist Eric Hanushek a couple of years ago.)

differentiated accountability proposals

In response to Secretary Spellings’ March 2008 call for differentiated accountability proposals, 17 states submitted plans. The Department forwarded all 17 plans to a peer review committee, which will comment on them in mid-June before a final decision by the Secretary. Up to ten state plans may be approved. I've had a chance to review all 17 plans, and they vary in quality and method.

Ultimately, there is evidence within the applications to support both sides of the debate. Those who want to preserve NCLB as originally intended will see the lessened importance of disaggregation and specific subgroups as wrong and as a blatant disregard for the law as written. Others who want more state flexibility, a little more lenience, and the recognition that not all failing schools are equivalent will also find evidence to support their cause. Altogether, here are the lessons learned:

• At least four states (Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, and Virginia) used this opportunity to ask to change the emphasis of Public School Choice (PSC) and Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the case of Virginia, they repeated this request throughout the application. In fact, it appeared the state had no other plans for differentiation, as it did not introduce new categories or cut lines to demarcate them.
  

• Two states (South Carolina and Tennessee) acknowledged a change in the number of students who would be eligible for PSC and SES and provided an estimate for the change. South Carolina estimated a 7% decline in the number of students eligible for choice and a 22% increase in students eligible for SES. Tennessee’s numbers were dramatic. They estimated 47% fewer students (-29,333) would be eligible for choice and 73% fewer (-35,551) for SES. Other states declared the eligibility rules would not change in the interim, but they did not address how the differentiated accountability would affect the provisions in the future.

• Despite the Secretary indicating that priority would be given to states with at least 20% of their Title I schools identified as in need of improvement, only three of the 17 met this criteria. About half addressed why, while not meeting the 20% threshold, they should still be considered, but the remainder of states (6/17) ignored the requirement altogether.

• The methods of identifying the new categories varied in style and depth. Many simply divided schools and districts that previously did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) by the percentage of Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) met. For example, South Carolina had three tiers. Schools and districts meeting 90-99% of their AYP objectives were slotted for “limited” intervention. Schools and districts meeting 60-89% would bear “targeted” intervention, and schools and districts below 60% would fall into “comprehensive” support. Twelve states featured this type of division of categories, albeit with different specifics.

• Two states (Illinois and Maryland) have created new categories depending on whether the school and/or district fail in the “all students” category or for single or multiple sub-groups. While Maryland featured a chart that justifies the validity behind this tactic, it also violates the central tenets of disaggregation in NCLB.

• Maryland also included a chart that broke down which schools and districts would be most affected by the changes. As we might expect, the changes give more flexibility to suburban schools that are largely failing because of only one subgroup, compared to urban schools that are struggling across the board.

Arkansas’ application states what many skeptics of the differentiated accountability plan suspect, saying, "In contrast to much of the more national rhetoric of schools missing performance goals for NCLB due to one or two subgroup, the Arkansas data models suggest that missing for one or two subgroups is a more isolated situation…A much more common occurrence is schools missing NCLB due to several subgroups in both reading and math."

New Jersey’s application contains the following alarming passage, which seems to suggest that, even if a school reaches restructuring, it would only have to do it for the failing category that’s to blame:

Our system [of differentiated accountability] does not result in schools with low performing subgroups such as Students with disabilities or English language learners remaining in the least intensive phase of intervention. A school that continues to miss AYP solely on the basis of the performance of one subgroup will continue to move through the phases and will ultimately reach Phase III: Restructuring. However, within this phase of improvement, the intervention will necessarily be focused on improving the subgroup’s performance.

At what point is this just a legitimization of under-the-table negotiations between states and districts over schools that REALLY fail and those that only sort of fail? Surely states already make distinctions at least in terms of oversight and aggressiveness; these plans just codify them.

Arguing for differentiated accountability would have been a lot more defensible if more applications included statements like this one:

PDE’s [Pennsylvania Department of Education’s] proposed differentiated accountability model will allow Pennsylvania to restructure our interventions so that communities with the fewest resources are receiving the most assistance.

Since these sentiments were rare, the cynic in me says these proposals are mostly about avoiding strong consequences for schools and districts with a lot of political power.

Profits vs. Purpose

This article in yesterday's NYT underscores the need for market-sensitive subsidy payments in the federal loan program--or a wholesale shift to the Direct Loan program. The NYT reports that 2-year colleges are worried that their students will have a harder time finding student loans in the next few years. Because it's more expensive now for banks to lend money, private loan companies are less interested in supplying higher-risk, less-profitable loans to community college and career school students.

That's a perfectly reasonable response from a for-profit company, but the purpose of the federal loan program is to ensure that exactly these types of students--those who are too high-risk to find loans on the private market--can receive money for college at a reasonable rate. If private loan companies are unwilling or unable to do that, then we need some fundamental changes to the federal loan program.

One option is to make subsidy payments, which the federal government pays to loan companies to encourage them to participate in the federal student loan program, more sensitive to changes in the credit markets. Subsidy rates would be higher in credit markets like today's, giving lenders sufficient profits to encourage them to lend to all students, and it would be lower when credit markets are better and profits are bigger.

But historically loan companies have resisted this type of subsidy system, preferring to rely on lobbyists and political donations to get subsidy rates that would allow them profits today and even bigger profits when credit markets improve. If they continue to resist a market-based approach to establishing subsidy rates, the best alternative may just be to switch entirely to the Direct Loan program, in which the federal government lends directly to students. Under this system, the government won't have to worry about paying excessive subsidies and all students will be guaranteed loans from the same lender.

If loan companies want to access to student loan business in the future, they'll need to come to the table with some ideas on how to make a profit while also ensuring that the purpose of the federal loan program is fulfilled.

Something to watch this summer

EdWeek is right to highlight the struggle nearly half the states will be facing in the coming years. Twenty-three states, as identified in a recent CEP report, back-loaded their performance targets for reaching the goal of 100% proficiency by 2014. That allowed them to reach relatively easy goals for the early years of NCLB, but now they must meet dramatically rising targets.

NCLB imposed some strange restrictions on the states as they wrote their plans. States must make all increases equal, but they were allowed pauses of up to three years where no improvement was required (for a more complete explanation, see here). Half the states chose steady progress over time. The other half created strange stair-step patterns that will really hurt them in coming years.

This chart shows California's English proficiency goals for elementary and middle school students. The state implemented the NCLB provisions slowly with a modest goal of 13.6% of its students proficient. By keeping these numbers low through 2006-7, they ensured only moderate amounts of school and district failures. But look at the numbers for this year, and the year following. From now until 2014, California's elementary and middle schoolers must improve 10.8% every year.

California hasn't released its 2007-8 performance scores yet. When it does, and when those of other stair-stepping states come out too, we're in for some eye-popping numbers.

Grab That Cash With Both Hands And Make A Stash

Joel Packer, chief lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, has started a blog. (Technically, a transcript of a podcast, but close enough.) Eager to counter the impression that the teachers union agenda begins and ends with a bottomless appetite for new funding without accountability to match, he quickly put up a post quoting the Beatles singing "gimme money that's what I want." Which is all well and good, but then--and really, this is Blog 101--he forgot the follow-up sentence to say that he's just kidding.

An oversight, I'm sure.

Packer goes on to say:

Yes, it takes money to pay for smaller class sizes, expanded professional development for teachers, after-school programs, quality PreK, new textbooks, technology, and modern schools. Yet in each of the past three school years, an average of 63 percent of school districts have received LESS Title I money than they got the previous year.

Title I provides federal money for extra reading and math help for educationally disadvantaged students in schools where low-income students are concentrated. These cutbacks should not be a surprise because since the enactment of NCLB in 2002, funding for Title I is more than $54 BILLION below what was proposed in NCLB. And sadly, President Bush’s budget for next year would further shortchange children and public schools under Title I by another $10.7 billion; more than 4 million low-income children will NOT receive the full range of services and programs they need and deserve.

That’s not even the worst of it. When you compare the overall mandates of the law to the overall money committed, by the end of the Bush years the funding short fall will be more than $85 billion.

I'm not one of those people who believe that "money doesn't matter" in education. That's absurd; money matters a great deal, and there are plenty of schools that don't get their fair share. I co-wrote a whole paper about this just a few weeks ago. But it's simply not the case, as Packer implies, that NCLB suffers from massive budget cuts.

This chart shows funding for the Title I program, the heart of NCLB, in the year prior to NCLB and the years since.

As you can see, there was a large increase (nearly $3.6 billion total) in the first few years and then virtually no increase since, as the federal budget situation tightened due to a variety of factors including inaccurate econometric forecasting, massive, unaffordable tax cuts for the rich, a mediocre economic recovery, post-9/11 security expenses, rapidly increasingly health care costs, and a ruinously expensively foreign war.

Schools were lucky that the increases came early, because even stagnant funding is much better than the pre-NCLB state of affairs. The total increase from 2001 to 2007 amounts to 6.5% annual growth; if that had happened steadily over time instead of up-front it would have blunted some of the "there's been no increase for three years" rhetoric, but that would of course have resulted in billions of dollars less for public education. The formulas that distribute the money, morever, are weighted for poverty, so a number of big urban districts saw Title I funds increase by 50% or more in the space of a few years. That's not bad.

Packer notes that many districts have recently experienced year-to-year reductions. But he doesn't explain why: Title I formulas are, per above, based on poverty rates. As demographics shift and poverty rises in some areas while falling in others, the money shifts too. In other words, all else being equal, those reductions were a good thing, a function of sound public policy designed to focus resources where they're needed most.

Packer says funding is $54 billion short of what was "proposed" in NCLB. The more accurate word is "authorized"--that's the total difference between what Congress appropriated for Title I and the maximum amount it could have appropriated, as authorized under the law. The meaning of those authorization levels is controversial: some people see them as a broken promise, others as an aspirational goal that fell victim to larger fiscal circumstances.

In either case, the appropriation targets are fundamentally arbitrary, not tied to any underlying calculation of how much it might cost to bring all students to proficiency by 2014. It makes more sense to compare actual current spending levels to actual previous spending levels than to hypothetical numbers with little or no inherent meaning. One might ask: what would non-arbitrary numbers look like? What's the real price tag here? Frankly, nobody knows. Increasing student performance to unprecedented levels is undeniably costly; but at the same time the current dollars aren't being spent as efficiently as they could be.

This doesn't stop Packer and others from calling NCLB an "unfunded mandate." Whether you think this is true depends on the scope of your view: in the narrowest sense, NCLB isn't a mandate at all, funded or otherwise--states choose whether to participate and are free to drop out and forgoe federal funding whenever they like. In the broadest sense, NCLB is absolutely an unfunded mandate: K-12 education is 90% state-and-local funded and is very likely to remain so for at least the medium term. So any federal law that calls for broad action and hugely ambitious goals, as NCLB does, is "unfunded" in the sense of "the federal government isn't providing all the money." But that's not necessarily a bad thing: the ADA was unfunded by that definition, as was school desegragation. Unfunded mandates can still be virtuous public policy.

To be clear, I think flatlining education budgets while pursuing mind-bogglingly expensive tax and war policies is inexcusable. For not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, the President could have done much more to hold together the bipartisan coalition that originally supported NCLB and helped more impoverished children get the education they need.

But Packer's rhetoric fails the seriousness test, and serves to emphasize what should be obvious: the NEA's opposition to NCLB is not based on funding levels. There is no amount of money Congress could have spent that would have bought their support. Which, frankly, is one of the reasons the money isn't forthcoming, even from a Democrat-controlled Congress--why spend billions of new dollars for the same political headaches? As Packer says quite plainly in his first post "In case you can’t tell, the National Education Association opposes the law and is leading the way to a fundamental overhaul." It's pretty much as simple as that.

Learning From Not Learning From Toyota

James Surowiecki's business column in the The New Yorker this week is about Toyota, which is poised to end General Motors' three-quarters-of-a-century-long reign as the biggest automobile manufacturer in the world. The secret of Toyota's success is no secret: understanding what the customers wants, combined with a constant focus on steady, continuous improvement. Literally thousands of books have been written about the Toyota Production System, and the underlying ideas have long passed into received wisdom bordering on cliche. Yet despite this transparency, Toyota continues to beat the pants of its competitors every year.

There is a lesson for education here. (No, not that schools are like automotive assembly lines). There is a way of thinking about school reform that goes something like this: Lack of success stems from lack of knowledge about how to be successful. So we need to locate the most successful schools, figure out how they work, and then communicate those "best practices" findings far and wide. This theory is appealing on several levels. First, it implicitly supports the work of researchers and analysts. Second, it's non-judgmental: a school's lack of success isn't because anyone purposfully did anything wrong, it's because they simply didn't know how to be right.

I don't think we know all we need to know about good educational practices. As a rule, the more knowledge to use and more models of success to study, the better. At the same time, a lot of the basic elements of successful schools have been understood for a long time, because they're the elements of any successful organization: leadership, resources, human capital, a functional organizational culture, understanding what your customers (students) need, a constant focus on steady, continuous improvement.

In other words, the biggest policy challenges from an information perspective aren't supply-side, but demand-side: not creating more information about success but giving people better reasons to seek out and use the information about success that already exists. That's really the essence of accountability, or should be--not necessarily telling educators how to improve, but giving them more support and incentives to do so, in a way that makes sense for their communities and students.

G.M. could have embraced the Toyota Production Model decades ago, and if it had, it would still be the number one automaker in the world. But it didn't. I hope our schools, colleges, and universities make better choices.

Another Look at Performance Assessments

Just returned from Providence where I spent two days learning about Rhode Island's diploma system, which includes a number of performance-based assessment requirements. Today at Portsmouth High School I saw students present their senior projects to groups of teachers, classmates, and outside community judges. Beginning this year, to graduate, all 200+ seniors at Portsmouth are required to complete a year-long senior project, consisting of the "4Ps" -- a research paper, a tangible product, a process portfolio, and today's oral presentation. Students select their projects, submit a letter of intent, and work closely with a school or community mentor. And, the projects really are diverse. The first student I saw today presented the stage set she'd designed for the school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Another student's project consisted of running a marathon and fundraising to support leukemia research.

The students were, of course, outstanding. But, what surprised me most were my conversations with the principal, teachers, and state officials about the cultural changes that were emerging from the senior project requirement. Roy Seitsinger, Director of RI High School Redesign, was emphatic that this work was "about transformative cultural change."

Portsmouth Principal Littlefield welcomed us by noting that the past two days he'd felt an "energy he has not seen in this building." And, he compared the buzz and excitement/anxiousness around senior projects with the lethargy that plagued last year's senior class. Numerous teachers echoed his observation of increased student engagement. At the symposium I attended the day before, teachers from Coventry High School, also in Rhode Island, talked about how implementing a portfolio requirement had made teachers' work more transparent. Their work was "no longer self-contained" because each and every teacher saw other teachers' signatures on student work in portfolios. And, this transparency had led to a level of peer pressure for rigor among teachers when assigning and grading student tasks. Likewise, I saw dozens of community members, parents, and business volunteers at Portsmouth serving as presentation judges. The students' senior projects provided a vehicle through which the entire school community engaged together--especially faculty. And, they also provided an opportunity to engage the surrounding community as mentors and judges.

Of course, performance assessments are not new. And, issues of reliability, validity, and seriousness plagued many states' efforts in the 1990s (see Jay Mathew's article in Education Next for a quick history lesson). These are important issues and you'll see much more about accountability and student assessment from Education Sector over the next year. (FYI, Rhode Island students also participate in the standardized New England Common Assessment Program, but as of now it is not a high stakes test.)

But, my main takeaway is that it's just as important, if not more, for us to think about how these reforms can drive other critical goals such as student engagement. And, as technology helps to broaden access to digital portfolios and presentations, public transparency and direct feedback and involvement in students' work products can provide powerful mechanisms for new conceptions of accountability. I'm certain I'm not the only parent that would use these tools extensively to help select a high school for my child.

If you'd like to see what a performance exhibition looks like, the Coalition of Essential Schools is sponsoring a Webcast presentation on Friday, May 30th, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. You can also check out Portsmouth High's senior project handbook and videos of student presentations.

New test-prep data

A new report from the University of Chicago supports Danny's conclusions. Its title, "From High School to the Future: ACT Preparation--Too Little, Too Late," says everything needed.

It documents that teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools believe test scores are mostly determined by test-taking skills, that almost all classes containing juniors focus on test-taking (even if there are significant percentages of seniors who had already taken the test), and that these phenomena are worse in schools with large concentrations of minorities.

There's a difference between teaching the basics and teaching the basics of test-taking. In a particularly illuminating passage, the report quotes a student discussing his or her expectations for and reaction to the ACT:

In March (before the ACT)
Interviewer: Do you know what score you're shooting for?
Student: At least the mid 20's.
Interviewer: Any reason?
Student: So I can pick my own colleges.... If I don't want to go to Daley [a community college], I don't have to go to Daley. I can go to, like I said, [University of Illinois] Champaign or even a better place.

In May (after the ACT)
Interviewer: Do you have a list of schools that you're going to apply to, that you're interested in?
Student: Well, right now I'm basically going to Daley for, like, the first year and a half, so I can get the general, basic classes, and then transfer them out to...IIT, I guess.
Interviewer: Do you think it's going to be hard to get into IIT?
Student: I have a 3.5, and I have a 25 percent [class rank]. The only problem will be the ACT, 'cause I got a 16 on it.
[The student needs a 21 to get into IIT program.]

TAKS-ing Work

Former Education Sector intern Danny Rosenthal weighs in on the test-prep debate from his Houston high school:

Nearly 900,000 Texas high school students recently took the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS. All of the state’s students must pass the test’s math, English, science, and social studies sections to get a high school diploma.

But where I teach math, at Hastings High School in Houston, only 54 percent of students passed the math section last year. So Hastings, a typical urban school serving 3,200 mostly poor black and Latino students, puts intense effort into boosting its students’ scores. Along with other math teachers at Hastings, I did test prep with my students every day for two months leading up to TAKS. As the test approached, that’s all we did in class. The Hastings math department also taught courses devoted entirely to TAKS prep. Some students were assigned to them year. Others were moved into the classes closer to the test.

I’m OK with test prep. When standardized tests are well-crafted, as they are in my state, teachers should use tests to shape their classroom instruction. Done thoughtfully, “teaching to the test” is a good idea. But at my school, and others in Houston, we execute test prep so poorly that it ends up hurting students more than it helps them.

Our problems started early this year, at our first planning meeting two months before the TAKS administration. We began by identifying questions that more than half of our students missed on a diagnostic test. Then we matched the questions to topics covered on TAKS, putting colored stickers for each question on posters around the room. The idea was to focus our work on the skills where students needed the most help.

But neither teachers nor administrators tried very hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the posters when we were finished. The data itself was incomplete because some teachers didn’t bother to post most of their stickers. And we didn’t control for things like the number of times each topic was tested. As a result, the sticker exercise told us little about our students’ needs. Nonetheless, we used the posters to guide classroom study sessions, as well as the test-prep work students did in our computer labs and in weekend tutoring.

Our classroom preparation for TAKS aspires to be “drill and kill,” though the term suggests a level of focus and thoroughness in our work that didn’t exist. Mostly, teachers made worksheets with questions only loosely related to each other taken from previous TAKS tests, or, in some cases, from math textbooks that are largely unaligned with the TAKS test. Think panicked college students poring over Cliffs Notes for the wrong novel.

Sometimes, the school made all math teachers work off of the same worksheets, regardless of the fact that they taught different subjects. One day, my freshman Algebra class was expected to review quadratic equations, a complicated topic that my students had never seen before and lacked the background to understand. On another day, my Algebra II class was expected to review graphing lines, a topic they had already studied in depth for the previous two weeks. Almost every teacher uses the worksheets. It is how things are done.

Our test prep worksheets aim to review important skills. But oftentimes students have not learned these skills in the first place. And the worksheets don’t fix that. Most of the sheets require students to answer multiple-choice questions. Motivated students work through the problems. Others guess. After a few minutes, teachers show students the correct answer, focusing their explanation on the particulars of the problem instead of any broader concepts. Then, the class shuffles on to a new problem, usually unrelated to the first. In this haphazard process, there are few opportunities to make connections or think critically. And students don’t master basic skills either.

Perhaps because these worksheets are so ineffective, Hastings administrators encourage teachers to take their students to the school’s computer labs to use test-prep software. Some students are more engaged on a computer, and the software lets students work at their own pace.

But for others, computers are just a bigger distraction; they spend their time finding ways to bypass the school’s internet filter to get to YouTube. Busy checking their email, teachers often fail to notice. The computer software itself is designed to provide practice, not teach new skills. Students can read a short tutorial summary, but this summary is confusing and almost always ignored. So kids learn little of what they don’t already know.

Hastings also sponsors tutorials after school and on Saturdays to prepare students for TAKS. But only a few dozen kids out of 3,200 typically attend. At one Saturday session I attended, teachers outnumbered students. And the motivated students who do show up are not the ones who need the most help.

The larger problem is that most students just don’t care if they do well on the TAKS test. Last year, several confessed to me that they guessed on most of the questions. The school attempts to combat this indifference with simplistic incentives, offering students a chance to win an iPod just for showing up on TAKS test day and threatening those who fail the test with extra math classes.

But such incentives don’t work very well, and they miss the larger point: Students choose not to try mostly because they think they have no chance to succeed. That’s not their fault. At Hastings, we are far too willing to exchange gimmicky test-prep and other instructional shortcuts for real teaching.

Money-Sucking College Sports Programs

Per last week's ongoing discussion of higher education, one thing nobody seems to dispute is the assertion by "Professor X" that classes like his are "a substantial profit center" for most colleges. The math isn't hard; adjunct professors typically only get paid a few thousand dollars to teach a course that each student pays a few thousand dollars to take. Even taking into account the pro-rate costs of facilities and administrative overhead blah blah blah, the colleges are making a lot of money here. Which begs the question: what are they spending those profits on?

Among other things: phenomenally expensive, money-losing sports programs. That's the conclusion of a new report from the NCAA (InsideHigherEd summary here). It found that median spending on sports among the 119 NCAA Division I football-inclusive sports programs grew by 15 percent in 2006, to $35.8 million. Revenues to support those programs, meanwhile, grew by only 9 percent, to $26.4 million. In other words, the typical D-I university loses millions of dollars per year on sports, and the deficit is getting bigger by the year.

And that's just the median. A handful of schools--19, to be exact--made money, while bunches of them lost $10 million or even $20 million or more. Where does your alma mater stack up in all of this? There's no way to know--the NCAA won't release the numbers for individual colleges.

In its defense, the NCAA has put out a lot more information here than it ever has before, and is quite candid about the the fact that most of its members are essentially siphoning off huge amounts of money that could be used for education, research, need-based financial aid, etc., in order to subsidize sports. To be clear, not all of that money goes to support quasi-professional men's football and basketball teams; these numbers include all sports, men's and women's.

As with all spending decisions, this comes down to priorities: given the choice, most Division I colleges and universities would rather spend money on an activity whose benefits accrue substantially in the form of entertainment for non-students and the greater glory of the university, at the expense of the more mundane task of helping academically vulnerable students stay in college and earn a degree.

Research on Incentives

A new study was just released today from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford that examined the use of incentive programs in charter schools. Do incentives like field trips, t-shirts and iPods--rewards that have a short time frame between behavior and consequence-- provoke students to do better? It was an exploratory study that looked at a limited non-random sample of charters so, like all research, there are limitations to this study. But the report, written by ES board member (disc.) Macke Raymond, suggests that when school staff is on board and committed to the reward program and the rewards are given in a consistent and continuous way, these kinds of incentives can motivate students to improve.