Supply and Demand in D.C.

I’m finally getting around to reading the full version of the research report, “Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods,” that the Washington, D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education put out in September. And it’s good. Based on research conducted by the 21st Century Schools Fund, Brookings Institution, and the Urban Institute, the report takes a broad look at the impact of school choice on school demand, housing markets, and school quality. The authors are careful not to overreach in their conclusions, but just observing the interaction of these variables is informative and raises some great questions around supply and demand in a choice-driven education system.

But, beyond charter schools and intradistrict choice, what really caught my eye in the report was this chart on private placements for special education students:
While only 6 percent of white students are identified for special education, 50 percent of those identified end up in private school placements. This is compared with 17 percent of Black special education students and 10 percent of Hispanic special education students.

And this trend appears to be related to wealth—the report found that almost half of public special education students in Ward 3, one of the higher-income areas of D.C., attend a private school paid for by the school district. In the other seven wards, this number is only 15 to 20 percent of the special education population. Regardless of the legitimacy of these placements, it’s clear that the money going to support private school tuition for special education students is not distributed equitably across the city.

I realize that this problem is nothing new for D.C., and the school district is not serving special education students as it should, leading to high private school placements rates. But based on this chart, it looks like private school placement isn't just a matter of having a child who isn't being served in a public school--it's also a matter of having (or affording) a good lawyer. And the supply of lawyers in D.C. is more than enough to meet demand.

Update: Our own Tom Toch actually wrote about this issue ($) for the Washington Post back in 1995. From the article preview: "Thomas Toch discusses the fact that the city of Washington DC is paying $13.5 million to educate 624 students in private special education schools, despite the fact that many of them have parents who are well-off financially."

Paying for College

I'm sure it's true, as the Times reports, that the economic downturn is making it harder for people to pay for college, in that this is true for anything expensive and the cost of college in real dollars is growing robustly every year. But it's important to remember that the example around which the story is framed--a family sending two children to private colleges that each charge $30,000 per year to attend--is not at all typical. 73 percent of all college students are enrolled in public institutions that typically charge far less. Instead of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, this family could consider fine public universities like Indiana University -- Bloomington, which is only about 50 miles from Salem, where they live, or IU-Columbus, which is about the same distance, or IU-Southeast, which is even closer. 

Indeed, this is the most likely result of a serious recession--not fewer students going to college (higher education attendance can be counter-cyclical) but students going to different colleges than they would have otherwise. Public universities that were anticipating an easing of enrollment pressure as the current demographic wave crests will need to keep finding dorm and classroom space, while small, non-elite, non-wealthy private colleges like Hanover and Franklin (which enroll the two students in the story) are going to be at serious financial risk. More worrisome would be an acceleration of the existing trend whereby the proportion of poor college students who beging their careers in community colleges is steadily increasing. Given the disparities in degree completion among such students, this will exacerbate education-driven income inequality. 

Update: Moody's is also sounding the alarm about the financial vulnerability of small colleges. At the bottom of the article, one commenter proposes what would amount to a luxury tax on college endowments, with some kind of extra levy on earnings from endowments larger than $500 million, the proceeds of which would be distributed to less-wealthy institutions. This strikes me as kind of a good idea. As with baseball, it wouldn't be severely redisributionist--the Red Sox are still the Red Sox, and Harvard would still be Harvard--but it would give the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of higher education a fair shot at competing--or at least staying in business.

The Old New Thing

Education entrepreneur Chris Whittle is out of work again. Ousted last year from Edison Schools, where he spent sixteen years and upwards of half a billion dollars trying to turn a profit running public schools, the Channel One founder and former Esquire publisher recently cleared out his Midtown Manhattan office at Nations Academy, an international chain of elite private schools that he launched 18 months ago with Dubai businessman Sunny Varkey.

Insiders say that the deep-pocketed Vakrey poured money into the venture after Whittle struggled to find outside investors in the wake of the financial markets’ collapse, and that Varkey demanded a big role in the running the company in return. Whittle, who had spent his last years at Edison under the thumb of new company owners, balked, sources say.

Varkey, who runs an expanding network of proprietary schools in the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, Australia, and his native India, has pulled the plug on Nations’ first two schools—hundred-million-dollar projects on far West 57th Street and in Bethesda, Maryland, that were scheduled to break ground next year.

But he’s reportedly sticking with the Nations upscale school model and he also wants to open less toney private for-profit schools in the U.S. He has hired Manuel Rivera, twice superintendent of the Rochester, New York, public schools and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s education advisor, to scout deals.

Whittle is reportedly planning a new for-profit private school company.

Accuracy

I assume that when major network news anchors are asked to moderate presidential debates, they sit down and work out the questions ahead of time. I imagine they even go to the trouble of writing them down, so they can then read them verbatim and not get stuff wrong. So Bob Schieffer really has no excuse for this, from last night's debate:

The U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world.

It's a provocative statement, in part because it's full of lies. It's true, of course, that the U.S. spends more per capita than most other countries and does worse on some international tests in some subjects and some grades compared to a significant number of other countries, particularly our industrialized competitors. But there are 192 countries in the world and I'll eat my shoe if we're trailing more than 96 of them on any legitimate educational measure. For example, on the 2004 PISA test, "Of the 45 countries ranked in the eighth-grade survey, the United States was 15th in math and 9th in science; among 25 countries in the fourth-grade rankings, it was 12th in math and 6th in science." And that's not a random distribution of countries; PISA tends to undersample nations that lack functioning governments, universities, developed economies, etc. Similarly, according to the OECD countries including Norway and Switzerland spend more per-student on high school, others spend more on elementary school, and a fair number are within 10 percent or so of U.S. levels. 

Now, one could say that Scheiffer's overall point about spending and achievement is valid and the question would have been less clear with the appropriate caveats. But I say: too bad; sometimes the world is complicated and your job is to figure out how to be clear and accurate when you talk about it. There's plenty of legitimate data to suggest that the American education system needs to be better; there's no reason to make stuff up or exaggerate for effect. Indeed, this kind of doomsaying tends to undermine the whole effort to improve education because people think if it's really that bad it must be essentially unfixable. 

Baylor's Spending Spree

There's been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University's decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What's been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here's what they paid:

- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300
- 150 students raised their score by at least 50 points, earning a $1,000 scholarship. Cost: $150,000
- Total cost to the university: $408,300

And here's what they got in exchange:
- a 10-point jump in their average SAT score. It went from 1200 to 1210.
- a mountain of bad publicity

Why would a college pay already-admitted students to retake a college admittance test? Because our reward structure is out of control. Because we use magazine rankings based on prestige and money as our most important measure of higher education quality. We could argue over whether it was logical for Baylor to devote its time and resources (spending time to create the program and spending $40,000 per point increase), but they were responding to a particular incentive. They were trying to game a flawed system, just as other universities have.

Baylor could have used the same amount of money to re-design their pre-calculus, psychology, or Spanish programs to enhance student learning and cut costs long-term. Instead, they took a short-term solution that has no added benefit to student learning or college quality.

Update: Baylor is abandoning the payments, because it had the "appearance of impropriety." It's not actually that the payments were improper, no, it's because they appeared that way.

Ayers Ad Infinitum

At the Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern contends that the real Bill Ayers scandal lies not with his unrepentent domestic terrorism but rather his Marxist school reform ideas. And on some level, that's logical: the Annenberg challenge was an education effort, after all, not a commission to overthrow the United States government. But on pretty much every other level it's complete nonsense, and here's why: there's just very little evidence that the extreme elements of Ayer's education ideology have had much of an impact on anyone with influence, much less Obama. 

It would be safe to assume, for example, that if Ayers' ideas were going to gain a foothold anywhere, it would happen in Chicago. He lives there; he's seen as a respectable citizen; the mayor apparently gave him some kind of award, etc., etc. Chicago has a big distressed urban school district that the Secretary of Education once labeled the worst in the country. I imagine the citizens of inner-city Chicago would be more open to arguments about the evils of the global capitalist system than those of, say, Kenilworth or other suburbs on the North Shore.

Yet I don't see Arne Duncan, an Obama friend and the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, running around quoting Paolo Friere. Instead he hews pretty closely to the policies and ideas that most reformist urban superitendants are adopting these days--ideas that Ayers-ish ed school types tend to hate.  Stern says "I've studied Mr. Ayers's work for years and read most of his books." My question is: Why? It would make a lot more sense to look at Joel Klein's bookshelf and figure out who his influences are. I'm pretty sure Bill Ayers won't make the list.

Stern is just using the Ayers affair as a way to re-litigate the culture wars. Thankfully, the people actually running our public schools have more important things to do.

Baylor, the SATs, and "Merit Aid"

In a move that raises the cynicism and gamemanship bar for college and universities across the land, Baylor University is paying freshmen it has already admitted $300 to re-take the SAT and giving them an additional $1,000 "merit" scholarship if they bump their scores up by 50 points or more. Then it reports their higher scores to U.S. News & World Report, helping Baylor reach its goal of being a "first tier" university on the magazine's annual rankings. 

This should confirm how self-serving and intellectually bankrupt the "merit aid" label has become. Basically, it's used by colleges to describe any kind of financial aid that's not based on financial need.  The phrasing is deliberate; Americans believe in merit and things base upon it, so they approve in principle without bothering to ask what, exactly, the criteria for merit are. Colleges are increasingly granting so-called "merit" scholarships to academically deficient students because they know their parents are wealthy and can afford to pay full tuition, plus donate to the next fundraising drive. (While most transactions in a free market are at arms-length, in higher education the seller forces the buyer to disclose how much money he or she has before deciding how much to charge.) Or they use "merit" aid to buy higher scores on the SAT--a test that higher education leaders routinely condemn. 

It also shows how much colleges and universities care about how much students learn after they enroll: not much. For example, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in a futile bid to become a Tier One school, Baylor could have spent less than $30,000 to administer the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which tests a sample of freshmen and seniors in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and communication skills, in order to see how much progress they made at Baylor. Or they could have given the money to students who are standouts in their field in college, or who served their community, or who actually need the money. Almost anything else would have been better than this. 

An Education Mandate?

Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli asks, "Will Obama have a mandate on education?" His answer is: "not really," and I think he's right. In general I think Obama's education plan hits the right notes: early childhood education, human capital, support for charter schools, willingness to talk seriously about thorny teacher pay issues. Just as importantly, he hasn't promoted any really bad ideas or put himself in a box on No Child Left Behind reauthorization. But as for a mandate -- to me, that's what happens when politicians stake their candicacy on an issue and voters respond. You make a big promise, it gets you elected, and that creates both the opportunity and obligation to follow through on the promise. And I don't think education really plays a major role in the Obama political equation in that respect. Obama has put himself in position to do some good and smart things on education if he so chooses, but he won't be able to draw on mandate-y energy to do so. The current massive financial crisis is undoubtedly changing a lot of bedrock assumptions about the viability of various ideas involving regulation and perhaps even the broader relationship between government, capital, and industry, but those aren't education concerns--indeed, they'll probably make it more likely that education gets shoved to the side for a while. All of which is to say, regardless of what happens next month, the immediate future for education will likely be a lot like the present and recent past. 

Diane Ravitch Gets Her Snark On

Politico's doing this new section where it gets snippy one-liners from behind-the-scenes bigwigs. Today's question asked what zinger they'd suggest Obama or McCain launch in tonight's final debate. As I read through them, mildly amused, I came across (surprise!) one from esteemed education historian Diane Ravitch:

McCain to Obama: These are dangerous times, this is no time for on-the-job training.

Obama to McCain: You are old and tired, and so are your ideas.

The first one, that's a little trite. Pretty sure Hillary used that line almost verbatim. Probably multiple times. McCain's never said it that directly, but he's called Obama naive several times to his face. The line Ravitch suggests for Obama, though? That one's biting.

Picasso and Cézanne

If Kevin needs any help refuting Charles Murray, I'd suggest he use this week's Malcolm Gladwell piece. Gladwell takes to The New Yorker to discuss genius, arguing that we typically (and Murray especially) conflate genius--someone who demonstrates exceptional capacity in some field--with precocity--someone who demonstrates exceptional capacity in some field at a young age:

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity [that all the best creative work is done at a young age] was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

The trick for policymakers is to reward and encourage Picassos to do their style of work while also having a system in place to support the Paul Cézannes. Murray's idea to eradicate the bachelor's degree supports only the former.

The Crisis in Urban Higher Education

As a resident of the District of Columbia, it’s been fascinating to watch the ascendant rock star-dom of Michelle Rhee, the D.C. public schools chancellor. A 38-year old Harvard grad and single mother of two, she’s been profiled in Newsweek, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and featured on Charlie Rose. Her panel at the Democratic National Convention drew capacity crowds. All because she’s trying to reform an urban school system legendary for incompetence, corruption, and failure. And she’s not alone: Big city mayors across the country have seized control of their school systems in recent years, risking political capital on the premise that schools can serve predominantly low-income and minority students far better than they have in the past. Those schools and students have become the central K–12 education challenge of our time.

Washington’s public school system is not, however, the only public education institution in the city. There’s another with very similar problems: deteriorating facilities, shrinking enrollment, rock-bottom graduation rates, and a troubled history rife with tales of mismanagement and worse. It’s the University of the District of Columbia. But while the recent announcement of a new UDC president garnered respectful coverage in the local newspaper, it’s a safe bet that Allen Sessoms — a Yale-educated physics professor and former leader of Delaware State University and Queens College — won’t be making the national media rounds anytime soon. Urban higher education simply doesn’t generate the urgency and attention directed to K–12, even though it faces many of the same challenges and educates many of the same students. This is a huge problem, and a quick look at graduation rates for the less selective public urban universities on the table below shows why.

To see the numbers and read the rest of the column in InsideHigherEd, click here.

Charles Murray: Bachelor's Degrees are Evil

Following up on his recent argument for education futility, Charles Murray has taken to the virtual pages of CATO Unbound to argue that, quote, "The BA degree is the work of the devil." I disagree, and you can read why here, along with responses from Pedro Carneiro here and Bryan Caplan here. Further back-and-forth will follow this week. 

Murray's thesis is a good excuse to spend a little time talking about shockingly counter-intuitive arguments. Briefly: there are too many of them. People who are in the business of publishing articles and essay have a weak spot for this kind of thing, because it's grabby and attention-getting and holds out the promise to the reader that everything you ever thought you knew about [insert topic here] is exactly wrong. There's a certain instant drama to it, in other words. 

Which is not to say that the conventional wisdom is always right--it often isn't--but it's not usually 180 degrees wrong. Rather, the most correct and well-considered arguments often boil down to "X thing you thought you knew is only somewhat true, or not always true, or true but really needs to be considered in the context of Y larger truth, or is becoming less true as time goes on because of Z." But those arguments can be harder to sell and require more attention from the writer and reader both. Meanwhile, I think people are on some level vulnerable to up-is-down/night-is-day argumentation precisely because it seems illogical; in the backs of their minds they're thinking "Nobody would say something so obviously crazy unless there was some truth to it." There's a strong element of Albert O. Hirschman's reactionary "argument from perversity" in all of this as well. 

Principles

Although Eduwonkette and Sherman Dorn are treating it like news, the case of Art Siebens was actually cited by Leo Casey of the UFT on Edwize back in August. In brief, Siebens is an AP science teacher in the District of Columbia who recently lost his job. Supporters have created a Web site making the case that he's a great teacher and his dismissal was unfair. While Dorn went on to note the much more negative take on Siebens from local parents and offer a generally sober analysis, Eduwonkette sees the firing as "haunting" and a "debacle," declaring that "By all accounts, Michelle Rhee should be carrying Art Siebens around on her shoulders."

Assuming the positive testimonials are true--and there's no reason to believe otherwise--there are two possibilities here:

1) His firing was unjust and attributable to an incompetent or corrupt process. Either somebody was pursuing a personal vendetta or the evaluation process was so shoddy that it failed to properly take into account his many virtues as a teacher. 

2) His firing was just and attributable to factors that have not been made public.

I don't know which is true. But then, neither does anyone else in the edublogosphere. None of us know because the necessary information is being withheld due to privacy provisions inherent to school personnel processes. These are provisions that I assume Casey, Jennings et al endorse. (If not, they should say so.) In this case, "by all accounts" means "according to one side of a two-sided dispute in which the other side is legally prohibited from making its case public." This is like rendering judgment in a trial after only hearing from the defense.  

Eduwonkette bills itself as a blog that presents information seen "through the lens of social science." That's an obvious claim to the legitimacy that properly-conducted social science entails. But a crucial principle of social science is matching the strength of claims to the strength and breadth of evidence. And such principles really only matter when they collide with ideology or larger agendas. We may never know if Art Siebens was justly fired--that's the price of confidentiality in h.r. matters--but his case has at least provided some clarity about other things. 

Trading Professors

I recently visited Penn State's campus, and, much like the college Chad describes below, sometimes it was hard to figure out whether the college existed for academics or athletics--the college stadium was larger than many professional sports arenas I've been to and the statue of the Nittany Lion was the most photographed place on campus (with the statue of Joe Paterno a close second, I'm sure).

But, as USA Today reports, Penn State is trying to shift the focus toward academics, using...trading cards. The glossy cards feature top Penn State researchers in an effort to build awareness of their work. No word on whether the cards include the number of hot peppers each professor received on Rate My Professor.

Uniqueness

After finishing my morning coffee and news routine, I start on the day's slog of research. I'm looking at the website of a Mountain West state's flagship university. Then I click on their "Campus Life" section, and I find the following passage (proper nouns removed):

[University X] students are encouraged to become active members of the campus community and develop their full potential. Superior academic programs, combined with plentiful opportunities for a wide range of cultural activities and outdoor recreation, provide a challenging, healthy, enjoyable lifestyle on campus.

The newly renovated [University] Union is the hub of campus, featuring the University Bookstore, numerous eating establishments, computer workstations, a recreation center, and much more. Steps away from the Union, students can work out at [the] Gym or study at [the] Library.

When students aren’t in class or studying, they can participate in university clubs and attend outstanding cultural programs — including films, concerts, theater performances, comedy acts, and planetarium shows. Or they can head for the outdoors and fantastic recreational activities in the Snowy Range [...] Mountains — including skiing and snowboarding, hiking, camping, backpacking, bicycling, fly-fishing, and rock climbing.

With the abundance of outdoor recreational opportunities at students’ doorsteps, it’s easy to understand why [College Town], home of [University], was recently voted one of America’s top 40 college towns by Outside magazine.

Until it gets to the part about mountains and skiing, this university could be any in the nation. It could be your alma mater.

Both the Chronicle ($) and InsideHigherEd lead today with stories on how the current generation--mine--is the first in modern times not to be more educated than the previous one. That is, up until present day, each generation earned more education credentials than their parents. Data suggests that rise has stalled.

I can't help but connect these stories with my experience on the state university website. I look and look for basic information like how many of its entering students return for their second year and how many graduate on time. I get paid to find these things, and I can't, even though they are collected every year by the federal government. I can't even find how many and what type of students are enrolled there. Instead I see that "Rhinestone Cowboys" is the theme of Homecoming this year and some a cappella group I've never heard of will be performing Friday night. Entertainment but not information, that's what higher education has become.

School Buses

Today's Wall Street Journal looks at school buses as engines (pun intended) of desegregation. The article's a little unsatisfactory along the lines of "rising gas prices are hurting school choice efforts" when really we all know school choice efforts are hurt by... school choice efforts. What's wrong with school bus systems is that the routes look pretty much like they did when my parents took them. Public transportation suffers from the collection and distribution problem--if you don't have a bus stop near your home that drops you off close to your destination, you're going to opt for private transportation. It's just plain common sense.

School bus routes, as currently designed, pretty much weave through a neighborhood and then have one destination: the neighborhood school. But it doesn't have to be like this. They could continue on to other schools, giving kids the option to stay on the bus longer and attend the latter one. Or bus routes could be re-vamped entirely, in an effort to distribute kids across cities to the schools they want to go to. It would be like public transportation but for kids only. There'd be express routes, circular routes, and in-bound and out-bound routes.

In an ideal world my dreams, at least.

Real Money

In addition to the collapse of the global economy and our future days spent selling apples on the street while wearing the barrels they came in as clothes, one of the casualties of the current financial crisis is likely to be our collective sense of proportion. At first numbers like "$700 billion" seemed very big--it did to me at least--but now that it's being repeated ad nauseam on cable TV, the newspapers, etc., it will probably start to seem mundane and establish a floor for monumentality in future catastrophes. That, in turn, will make numbers like $1.3 billion seem like a puny rounding error in comparison--and that happens to be the amount of money that various student lenders looted from the public treasury in recent years by finagling the so called "9.5 percent rule." Which is why it's all the more important that people like New America's Steve Burd are on the case with this new comprehensive break-down of the various industry lies currently being bandied about. 

Ayers et al

I'm sure there's a sensible way for scholars of education to talk about Bill Ayers' decades of work in the field and make the case that it has value and that he's a generally nice guy.  But this isn't it. As near as I can tell they're arguing that "unrepentant terrorist" is unfair because really it should be "unrepentant former terrorist," in that the terrorism happened a long time ago, and really it wasn't so much that he "bombed the Pentagon" as that he "participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans." I'm not sure who should be more insulted: people who care about the clear meaning of words, or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements? There are some ostensibly smart signatories to the statement; I find things like this to be baffling. 

Update: The statement also says "The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue." That's a remarkably self-obsessed view. The current attacks appear a whole lot more like part of a pattern of one candidate saying stuff about another candidate in order to win an election. 

America's Worst Colleges

If you write enough blog posts on a given topic, eventually p.r. people will start emailing you stuff in hopes of getting a mention. So it was a while back when someone from RADAR magazine sent me an advance copy of their annual list of "America's Worst Colleges." It's funny and some of it is probably even true. Topping off the list for the second year is the University of Bridgeport, which appears to provide a uniquely toxic combination of low standards, poor outcomes, high price, terrible environment, and ownership by the Reverand Sun Myung Moon. (Making it the Washington Times of higher education, I suppose.) Here's an excerpt:

Nestled on a husk of yellowing grass in the middle of a blighted urban war zone, UB is remarkable solely for its ability to survive. And, as it happens, the Worst College in America remains open for business only because of an unlikely savior.

On the verge of extinction in the early 1990s, the university was rescued from bankruptcy by an arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which offered up a multimillion-dollar miracle. The Moonies' endowment eventually earned the former head of the church a position as university president, and a head scratch from the academic world. Alumni were horrified to learn that a cult long accused of fraud, high-pressure recruitment tactics, and wrenching troubled kids from their parents had effectively mounted a takeover of their alma mater.

Tragically, new students often discover this the hard way. "Scared for my life. UB run by Moonies. Ghetto-type atmosphere," one panicked freshman wrote on an online message board. Of course, if you think the administration is dicey, try leaving your dorm for a stroll in the quad. "The campus is bordered by high-crime neighborhoods," writes a concerned grad, recalling the "naivete and innocence" of incoming students. "They'd trustingly tour the campus and surrounding area by foot and get mugged or killed." The city's violent crime rate is 60 percent above the national average, and over the past two years it has increased by another 6 percent.

For the past decade, incoming students have been presented with "personal alarm locators," portable panic buttons that summon security in the likely event of an emergency.

Despite all this, the university managed to boost its undergraduate enrollment by 6 percent last year, in large part due to its aggressive recruitment of unwitting international students, who make up a whopping 25 percent of the student body. "If you're a foreign student, UB appears to be a lush resort campus conveniently located along beautiful beachfront property," writes one alum about the school's international marketing efforts. (According to its official literature, UB borders "some of the finest sandy beaches between New York and Cape Cod.") 

Bridgeport charges $39,000 per year and graduates 33 percent of students within four years.

Although RADAR is in the humor business, it raises a legitimate point: There really ought to be a widely noted guide to America's worst colleges. All of the institutions jostling for the top spot on the traditional U.S. News list are, for the most part, perfectly fine. You could probably throw a dart at the Top 50 and get a decent education as long as you put in the work. And the students who attend those institutions have the most access to information and ability to make informed choices. People didn't need U.S. News to tell them to apply to Stanford or M.I.T. before the rankings were founded in 1983. 

The students who really need guidance are those who are in danger of attending a legitimately terrible college or university, someplace that will take tens of thousands of your dollars and provide little or nothing in return. The stakes for those students are a lot higher than for someone choosing between Amherst and Brown.  But since identifying the lowest performers is considered impolite in higher education, these kinds of things get left to satire publications, when really they should be in the hands of guidance counselors and parents across the country so they can steer students clear of places like UB.  

The Starbucks / GOOD Magazine Conspiracy of Lies

Last month I noted that GOOD magazine had published an anti-NCLB article so egregious in its lies and incoherence that it stood out in an already-crowded field. This was more annoying than alarming, since I doubt many people take their policy cues from GOOD Magazine.

Unfortunately, as I was paying for my latte in the Capitol Hill Starbucks this afternoon, I noticed a stack of square papers sitting next to the cash register, each emblazoned with the GOOD logo, a cartoon of a school bus with a flat tire, and the words "Education" and "The State of America's Schools." Apparently, in some kind of devious cross-marketing arrangement, GOOD is distributing its education lies in innocuous pamphlet form via the most ubiquitous coffee chain in the world. Here are some falsehoods and misrepresentations:

No Child Left Behind, the 2002 law that ties federal funding and sanctions to gains in standardized test scores, is heralded by some and criticized by others.

As everyone with even a basic understanding of the law knows, NCLB does not tie funding to gains in test scores.

In the "No Child Left Behind" sections, it says:

Federal funding is tied to test performance.

Lie. (See above.)

For any given public school, 9% of the budget comes from federal funds and approximately 91% comes from state, local, and other sources. 

Incorrect. On average, that's how much schools get. But funding at any given public school can vary widely. Some get 20 or 30 percent of funding from the feds. 

Under "Pros" and "Cons" of NCLB, the "Cons" are listed as follows: "Critics charge that tests vary too widely to evaluate school performance nationwide, that teachers are teaching narrowly to the test, that students who learn in different ways are put at a disadvantage, and that one test shouldn't determine who passes and who doesn't, especially if there are errors in the test. 

NCLB wasn't written to "evaluate school performance nationwide" in the sense of comparing school and districts in different states, or states themselves, to one another. That's what NAEP is for. Schools certainly don't always teach "students who learn in different ways" equally well, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to NCLB; the law mandates what to teach, not how to teach. No school is rated by one test; students are tested in multiple subjects and, in elementary and middle schools, multiple grades. It's possible that this refers to students being determined as proficient or not proficient in a subject based on one test--it's not clear--but NCLB doesn't mandate any student-level consequences for passing and failing. And doesn't everyone object to test errors?

High-school graduates going directly to college by percent, national average (2004): 56

According to the Condition of Education, published annually by the U.S. Department of Education, this number is actually 66% and has not been as low as 56% since the mid-1980s.

High-school graduation rate by percent, national average (2005): 69

Drop-out rate by percent, national average (9th to 12th Grade, 2004): 4

There's no way both of these numbers can be true at the same time. If 100 students started high school and 4% dropped out every year for four years, 85 would graduate. Even taking into account students who stay longer, you're still not going to account for the other 16 students.

Some of this reflects a clear misunderstanding of how NCLB works. Some is just sloppy writing. And some is, I suspect, a function of Google-fu research methods: The data sources listed include The ACT, Merriam-Webster, National Center for Education Statistics, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the SAT, School Data Direct, Time, U.S. Department of Education, The Washington Post, and various states. In conducting analysis, you can't just slap together data points from a hodgepodge of publications like this without paying attention to the underlying sources and methods. If you do, you'll almost surely end being wrong on some (or many) levels.