Voice Your Thoughts

Don't forget to read Education Sector Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva's latest report, "Measuring Skills for the 21st Century." A teaser:

When ninth-graders at St. Andrew's School, a private boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, sat down last year to take the school’s College Work and Readiness Assessment (CWRA), they faced the sort of problems that often stump city officials and administrators, but rarely show up on standardized tests, such as how to manage traffic congestion caused by population growth. "I proposed a new transportation system for the city," said one student describing his answer. "It's expensive, but it will cut pollution."

Students were given research reports, budgets, and other documents to help draft their answers, and they were expected to demonstrate proficiency in subjects like reading and math as well as mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to apply information to real-world problems.

Not many public school students take assessments like the CWRA. Instead, most students take tests that are primarily multiple-choice measures of lower-level skills in reading and math, such as the ability to recall or restate facts from reading passages and to handle arithmetic-based questions in math. These types of tests are useful for meeting the proficiency goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and state accountability systems. But leaders in business, government, and higher education are increasingly emphatic in saying that such tests don’t do enough. The intellectual demands of 21st century work, today's leaders say, require assessments that measure more advanced skills, 21st century skills. Today, they say, college students, workers, and citizens must be able to solve multifaceted problems by thinking creatively and generating original ideas from multiple sources of information—and tests must measure students' capacity to do such work....

New assessments like the CWRA, however, illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student's mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students' need to succeed today.

Please join us for a week-long discussion between Silva, Eva Baker, a professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation.

The Performance of Performance Pay

With Barack Obama winning an historic race for the presidency this week (and the nation exhaling in wonder and relief at his victory), Jim Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at Vanderbilt's Peabody College offer a timely reality check in Education Week on performance pay for teachers, a reform that has cycled back onto the education agenda after two decades of dormancy and that the President-elect has endorsed.

Guthrie and Schuermann write that some 10 percent of the nation's school systems employing at least 20 percent of the nation's teachers are now paying teachers on the basis of their performance "in some form or fashion." But in a helpful taxonomy of "what we do no yet know" about performance pay, they point out that there's no compelling research evidence on "the power of financial awards in promoting more-effective teaching and elevating student performance" and that there's no evidence on "the long-term effect of performance awards on the supply of effective teachers." In other words, the rationale for teacher performance pay hasn't been proven. Nor, they point out, is there clear evidence suggesting the "effects of group awards relative to individual performance" or the "preferable mix of financial and nonpecuniary awards"--important second-order questions.

There is, of course, a strong logic to rewarding good teaching and good teachers and Gutherie and Schuermann are sympathetic to the potential of performance pay to strengthen the public school teaching profession. On its face, public education's wide use of a "single salary schedule" to pay teachers strictly on the basis of experience and credentials is more than a little irrational. Guthrie and Schuermann advocate carefully constructed experiments to help answer key questions about performance pay's effectiveness, and they are right to do so. But their study of the performance-pay research makes clear that policymakers' rush to introduce performance pay for teachers isn't necessarily going to make the teaching profession any stronger, and that the Obama administration would be wise to help answer the big questions about performance pay, rather than assume the answers already exist.

FERPA and the student "team"

More and more, information about student learning is going digital. Many systems provide online, real-time access to students and parents about student performance. Having access to student information makes it easier for parents to identify problem areas and help hold students accountable. But we know that parents are not the only non-school actors contributing to a child’s learning. Tutors, coaches, care-providers and mentors are all involved in keeping a student on the path to success. Access to information about the student’s school-based learning could significantly enhance their ability to intervene effectively. FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) prevents schools and teachers from sharing personally identifiable information about student learning with anyone outside of the institution except parents. But parents can consent to release records as long as they:

1. Specify the records that may be disclosed;
2. State the purpose of the disclosure;
3. Identify the party or class of parties to whom the disclosure may be made.

The Supplemental Education Services program addresses the issue of providing personally identifiable student information to SES providers (tutors) by requiring that parents provide written consent for the LEA to release existing student information that pertains to specific achievement goals set for the student. However while SES providers are required to provide progress reports to parents and schools, schools are not required to provide any updates to SES providers after the initial agreement. While I wonder how a tutor can be an effective supplement to the classroom with no idea what’s going on there, the practice does avoid the cumbersome problem of requiring teachers to get written parental consent any time they release student information (a quiz grade, for example) to a tutor. There might be a better way.

FERPA’s regulations provide at least two potential methods to make it easier for parents to allow other members of their child’s learning “team” to be informed about student learning. It’s not clear that parents can only consent to release records that already exist. Parents could consent to release a class of records, for example quiz grades or attendance, to specified recipients going forward for a specific period of time (such as the length of a semester). This is not a widespread practice, but it’s not impossible under the law, and with support from the Department of Education it could become more prevalent.

Technology also provides an easier way to get parental consent to release existing information. FERPA regulations allow for written consent in electronic form so long as the school or educational agency uses a “reasonable method” to authenticate the parent’s identity. In the case of grades, for example, a “reasonable method” may be as simple as a PIN number or password. Within online grade-books and other software, electronic consent could make it relatively easy for parents to act as a gatekeeper for student information that comes from the classroom, quickly and easily passing it on to a tutor or mentor who can then provide better intervention and support for the student.

Testing in the 21st Century

I know a lot of people are tired of testing, and some are tired of hearing about 21st century skills. But both are here to stay and both matter tremendously for education reform. Improving assessment is the very first bullet in Obama’s list of how to reform NCLB, and he intends to do it by creating new models for assessment that measure “higher order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.”

Easier said than done? On Monday Education Sector is going to release a paper I wrote about measuring 21st century skills (yes, 2 for 1! testing plus 21st century skills). At the same time we’re opening up a week-long discussion on our website to delve further into this topic--what should we measure? what can we measure? We hope you’ll join in with some good comments and hard questions.

What is Obama's Mandate?

Echoing Eduwonk, there's no use guessing who will be tapped as the next Secretary of Education. It'll be relatively low on the list of nominations, so things like whether Obama has the right balance of Chicago people, governors, Republicans, and other political calculations make the whole speculation moot. Other decisions come first, and those will shape who becomes Ed Secretary. Taking a look at the exit polls shows this election was about two things--George W. Bush and the economy. They do not suggest Obama won (or McCain lost) based on specifics of their education, health care, tax, or energy policies. Obama won pretty much across the board:

- he won both the rich and poor (and most of the middle)
- he won all levels of education
- he won whether voters had investments in the stock market or not
- he won voters who said race was an issue and those who said it was not
- he won both supporters and opponents of the bailout bill

On issues, the economy was by far the most important; it was more important than the threat of a terrorist attack or appointments to the Supreme Court. Sixty-three percent of voters identified the economy as the most important issue, followed by Iraq (10%), health care and terrorism (9% each), and energy policy (7%). Those numbers aren't even close, and Obama won all of them except terrorism. (Update: in 2004, the highest priority issue, moral values, tallied only 22% of the electorate. This year's 63% picking the economy as the number one issue was two points higher than 1992, about which James Carville said, "it's the economy, stupid.") So President-elect Obama's mandate is pretty clear: fix the economy. That isn't a simple matter by any means, but he'll be given wide latitude to fix it as he pleases, at least for a few months. We'd be silly to think that education is the primary issue on that front, especially K-12.

The best hope for the edusphere should be that he makes the college affordability argument as often as he did during the election. He could start with this or this.

Second First

The Education Trust's latest report on high school graduation rates begins by saying, "The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which today's young people are less likely than their parents to have completed high school." That line became the lede in media reports in USA Today, CNN, the AP, Education Week ($), etc. Because of the AP's story, it got repeated in hundreds of local newspapers all across the country. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true.

Last week Kevin showed the actual data to be less than convincing. What's also important is the sentiment behind the claim, the sense that our education system is in crisis and getting worse for each generation. If you want to change education in America, and if you want to rally a consensus behind your cause, it's a useful claim. No one likes to regress, and Americans like being #1.

The problem is there's only one "first generation to be less educated than their parents." So, if last generation was the first to be less educated than their parents, this one can't be as well. I was reminded today of a passage in the 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report that could easily be written today. It states:

Some worry that schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems, and drawing conclusions. Still others are concerned that an over-emphasis on technical and occupational skills will leave little time for studying the arts and humanities that so enrich daily life, help maintain civility, and develop a sense of community. Knowledge of the humanities, they maintain, must be harnessed to science and technology if the latter are to remain creative and humane, just as the humanities need to be informed by science and technology if they are to remain relevant to the human condition. Another analyst, Paul Copperman, has drawn a sobering conclusion. Until now, he has noted: Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents [emphasis added].

This isn't to say our education system doesn't have problems, but it does suggest we need a little historical perspective. We're fighting the same rhetorical battles that were fought 25 years ago, and we need to be honest about it.

Vote

Some days there's nothing to talk about except the thing that everyone is talking about, and today definitely qualifies. I've voted in every DC election since 2001 and this morning my polling place was by far the most crowded I've seen, despite the fact that the presidential election is a foregone conclusion and the only local race of note is for at-large city councilperson. In education, we often cite voting and jury duty as reasons for the public education system's being, the rare occasions when people from all walks of life are asked to come together on equal terms and render judgment on one another and the pressing issues of the day. Like Emily Parsons, I grew up in New York where voting was always done by machine, and, like her, I find the un-private DC system of optically scanned cards to be inadequate and mildly disconcerting. Former Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh was right to say that "voting is a civic sacrament" -- particularly, I suspect, for people like myself who don't regularly partake of traditional sacraments or other such rituals. There's something about the quiet moment inside a voting booth with the curtain just drawn behind you, standing in front of levers waiting to be chosen. It's serious; it reminds you of citzenship and country and the gift of democracy. And there's nothing quite like the satisfying "thunk" of pulling that master lever, hearing your small, vital act of will recorded within the machine, and feeling the light of the polling place pour in from behind you as the curtain opens and you turn to leave into what always feels like a better day. 

Update: Hendrik Hertzberg says more or less the same thing at the New Yorker--except, he being Hendrik Hertzberg and it being the the New Yorker, it's about ten times better written. 

Early Voters

Obama wins the crucial 5-17 year-old voting bloc. On this day of speculation and hype, that's about all the real election news you're going to get.

The Post story even quoted one ten-year old who cast his vote based on education policy:

Taylor Irwin, 10, is an Obama supporter who has been following the candidate's education plan.

"He said that he would increase the number of children that are eligible for early education," Taylor said. "I think it's important for children to get exposed to learning at an early age."

An education voter. That'll show EDin08's detractors!

Smoking

Politics is strange business. Here in DC we have a very popular mayor and a reform-minded schools superintendent who are, for the first time in living memory, putting serious political capitol and genuine reformist energy behind an effort to turn around a school system that's been universally regarded for many years as one of the worst in the nation. Have they been perfect? Of course not. But there undeniably is hope and progress, two things the district has sorely lacked. Yet the DC City Council has been growing increasingly antagonistic toward the mayor and chancellor, despite lacking anything resembling a coherent alternate viewpoint or education agenda of any kind. Instead, it's all about hurt feelings and disrespect. On Friday the Post reported the following exchange:

Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), in one of several tense exchanges with Rhee, complained that she had provided more information to the media about the fund shift than to the council. Rhee said that was not the case.

"I disagree with that," she said.

"You keep disagreeing with that and you won't be around here too long," said Barry.

Under normal circumstances if you disgrace yourself and lose your job by getting busted smoking crack in hotel room with a woman who isn't your wife, and then get busted with crack again by park police in 2002, and then test positive for cocaine in 2006, you're looked on with a mix of pity and disdain--if you're lucky. Yet in DC Barry remains a potent political force, to the point where people with actual jobs have to waste an afternoon pretending to be polite while he talks smack. This is definitely one of the downsides of democracy. 

Don't Waiver

The National Governors Association lobbied hard against the "maintenance of effort" provision included in the recent Higher Education Act reauthorization. It should come as no surprise then that the NGA has already asked for an across-the-board waiver, citing the recent economic crisis and expected state government shortfall. The law does include a waiver provision for, "a natural disaster or a precipitous and unforeseen decline in the financial resources of a State or State educational agency," but a recession does not exactly count as unforeseen, and nowhere is the plural used, meaning all states cannot be granted one en masse. Besides, not all states are experiencing budget shortfalls; energy-intensive states are actually doing well ($).

What's really important to understand is the federalism at play here in higher education finance. The maintenance of effort provision applies only to public institutions, so let's stick with a discussion of them. Public sector tuition gets set in different ways depending on the state. Some states let institutions set tuition rates either outright or by default. Some have governor-appointed boards do the rate-setting, and some state legislatures even do it themselves. The point is that legislatures and governors have a lot of say in tuition policy, even if they prefer to play the part of unwilling accomplice. In my home state of Iowa, we have a Board of Regents that is governor-appointed. They set tuition policies for the three state universities. They end up caught in the middle of a constant push and pull for power by the universities and the legislature. The legislature thinks the Regents coddle the universities, while campus officials cry out that the Regents are in the bag for the legislature.

These things matter when it comes to something like the maintenance of effort provision, because state governors and legislatures are crying bloody murder that the feds are having too much of a role in higher education. See the NGA's press releases opposing the provision before it became law here, here, here, here, and here. Their opposition almost killed it entirely, and they are certainly the reason it became almost entirely toothless. The law always had a provision allowing states to use five-year rolling averages in its calculation (so states, your budget cuts of the early 2000s actually lower that average now), but it got tied to such a tiny tiny sum of money that it became effectively meaningless. The total money at stake for 2008 is $66 million, a drop in the bucket when you consider that we spend 242 times that, $16 billion, on the federal Pell Grant program. State governments spend much more than that.

Governors and legislatures are the willing victims in this instance. States would like federal policymakers to believe they've done their share in funding higher education. And it's partly true. An unreported fact is that states provide almost exactly the same revenue per full-time equivalent student that they did in 1980 (in constant 2007 dollars). Of course, this does not account for rapidly expanding costs in other areas, especially health care, but the problem isn't just state spending, as is commonly reported elsewhere. The real problem is tuition.

While states have managed to hold the line on state expenditures, they have been unable to hold back tuition at public colleges and universities. According to the states' own numbers, from 1982 to 2007 tuition increased 190% over inflation. Much as we'd like to blame institutions for coddling undergraduates with fancy dorms and expensive perks like chefs and new-age gyms, state governments have been complicit as well. Their desire to compete with private institutions has caused them to ignore equity concerns and spend scarce funds on ever-increasing merit aid, which quadrupled from 1996 to 2006.

Enter the feds. The federal government has no role in setting tuition whatsoever. Its role in higher education is limited to providing financial aid for needy students, getting dollars into the hands of researchers, and providing tax breaks for donations to non-profit foundations that are more and more essential to higher education. But they feel the pressure of rising tuition costs nonetheless. They feel it from parents during election time, but they also feel it from organizations like the NGA, which is critical of how little a percentage of tuition Pell Grants now cover.

The meager maintenance of effort provision is a good start. Secretary Spellings should quickly dismiss this latest attempt to skirt responsibility.

Schools left out of technological innovation?

If it takes a village to raise a child, that village might become increasingly virtual. Technology is making it easy to create learner-centered networks. Several developing projects aim to maximize the power of networks and improve learning. TeamPlay Foundation uses software to link students with a network of mentors. The mentors help students set goals and “see the path from here to there,” says co-founder Gunnar Counselman. In Chicago, the Electronic Learning Record project (a.k.a. Bettr@) aims to facilitate the formation of “interest nets” that will share content and help learners set goals and assess their progress.

Both groups are finding traction outside of traditional public schools. TeamPlay works with a variety of after-school and youth development programs, with plans to expand. Bettr@ director Patrick Whitney envisions working with home school-ers and potentially some charter schools, but not traditional schools. “Innovations come from the edge,” he says.

Neither group plans to focus on traditional public schools. Is it because schools are intractable by nature? Could schools and teachers be wary of the legal landscape of sharing student information? Or is something else going on?

Four-Day Weeks

Budgets are tight and schooling is expensive. So it’s not surprising to see state officials proposing new ways to cut costs in education. But this idea to eliminate the required 180-day schedule—something South Carolina state superintendent Jim Rex is proposing—is surprising. This will give districts more options for how they set up their school schedules. More options sounds good. But the most likely result here is that cash-strapped districts will cut the school week to 4-days a week. What’s wrong with this? Pretty much everything related to student learning. Rex estimates that it will cut nearly 20% of costs for maintenance, facilities, and bus driver salaries. But this is the wrong way to cut costs. Aside from the inevitable complications for working parents-- what will kids do on that extra week day?--there is absolutely no reason to think that fewer longer days will help students learn. Research on time and learning suggests just the opposite— kids need quality instruction and learning opportunities on a regular and consistent basis. Knowing this, many other states and districts are actually proposing to extend school time. And while I’ve served as the skeptic on some extended school time proposals, the fact that kids need more, not fewer, opportunities to learn is incontrovertible. So unless South Carolina--and any other state or district thinking about this-- has a solid plan for more quality out-of-school learning opportunities, this is going to mean less learning for students.

So what’s a state to do? Marc Porter McGee of ConnCan has some interesting ideas here, including cutting overhead and shedding unnecessary contracts. States and districts are going to have to be careful, though, with these decisions about what's necessary— bus driver salaries and facility costs may not seem directly connected to student instruction but if cutting these means cutting school time, less cost means less learning.

Losing Ground?

As I wrote a couple of days ago, there's a lot to recommend in the new report about high school graduation rates from the Education Trust (where I used to work). But the media seems a little fixated on the first sentence: "The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which today’s young people are less likely than their parents to have completed high school."

It's a big dramatic statement, and the New York Times jumped on it in an editorial that ran yesterday, saying:

Americans should be deeply alarmed by new data showing that the country is continuing to lose ground educationally to its competitors abroad. The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.

Time magazine picked it up in a story that ran today, saying:

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world where children are now less likely to receive a high school diploma than their parents were, according to an Oct. 23 report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group based in Washington.

Two things to keep in mind. First, the statistic comes from the latest batch of education numbers released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD is indeed a collection of industrialized countries. But it's not an organization of all industrialized countries. The table from which this number was pulled includes 29 OECD member countries and six additional "partner economies." It's true that, by one measure, the U.S. is the only member country with a generational decline in high school degree attainment (more on this below). But the comparison list doesn't include Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Iran, South Africa, Argentina and Venezuela, among others. There may be differences of opinion about the meaning of "industrialized," but I'm pretty sure Japan qualifies. Whether high school attainment is stable or rising in every other industrialized country, I don't know. In any case, the phrase "only industrialized country in the world" is over-broad. 

Second, the decline is very small and depends on how you look at it. According to the table, here's the percent of American students graduating from high school by age cohort:

25-34: 87%

35-44: 88%

45-54: 89%

55-64: 86%

While the average age of first-time parents is in the mid-20s, that number has been creeping up over the years.  But (obviously) many people aren't first children, so the average age of anyone's parent at the time of their birth is probably around 30. That means that a person in the 25-34 cohort is likely to have parents in the 55-64 cohort, whose high school attainment percentage is one point lower. I assume the Trust is using the 45-54 cohort, which is two points higher, but that's too young to be parents of most of the 25-34 year olds. Either way, there's not much difference. 

Also, the fact that the numbers are all near 90 percent means that OECD must be counting GEDs, since commonly used measures of on-time high school graduation (like the numbers cited elsewhere in the Ed Trust report) are generally much lower, in the mid-70s. And because people sometimes pick up GEDs later in life, there's some chance that the number for the 25-34 cohort will tick up a percentage point or two as time goes by. 

The chart also shows a drop in high school attainment from the 35-44 cohort in the Russian Federation (which is certainly industrialized)--not at all surprising given the many other measures (e.g. life expectancy) on which Russia is in decline. Say what you want about the Soviet Union, but it was good at getting students through school. 

None of which means that the Education Trust is wrong to say that far too many students are dropping out of high school (particularly low-income and minority students) and that states need to do much more to hold schools accountable for high school graduation rates and support them in efforts to improve. But these kind of alarming statistics tend to take on a life of their own once they're repeated in major media outlets, so it's important to get them exactly right. 

College Gets More Expensive, Part MCMXVII

The College Board released it's annual Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing reports today. These are generally considered to be the definitive sources of new information on the respective topics and are chock-full of informative historical tables if you're interested in that kind of thing. While the data itself is reliable, the College Board tends to spin the annual results in ways that reflect well on its customer base: the higher education industry. So the press release was titled "College Prices Increase in Step with Inflation." The New York Times bought into this hook line and sinker and then did it one better, titling its article about the reports "College Costs Up Slightly, Report Says." Given that tuition has been routinely doubling the inflation rate for the past 20 years, this is good news, right?

Well, no. Average college tuition at public universities was up a healthy 6.4 percent this year, well in line with historical trends. Inflation-adjusted tuition was lower because inflation was higher, due to the run-up in energy prices among other factors. Now, it's true that on a long-term basis, on average, wages and income rise along with inflation. But at the moment we're still teetering on the brink of economic calamity (or we fell off a couple of weeks ago and just haven't gotten around to admitting it yet.) Unemployment is up, people are losing their shirts in the stock market, and the domestic automotive industry is about to collapse. The bottom 50% of households--i.e. the households that are most vulnerable to changes in college costs--are no better off today than they were eight years ago in terms of income, even as the price of college has risen dramatically. Suggesting that everything is copacetic because a worldwide spike in oil prices combined with a global food crisis and other terrible problems had the effect of deflating real tuition calculations is absurd.

Update: I note that the Times has now changed the headline to "Downturn Expected to Drive Tuition Up." Better!

Sweating the Big Stuff

The Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that about 400 new charters have opened this fall, bringing the total number of charter schools to 4,600, with a national enrollment of 1.4 million. But charters rely heavily on the credit and bond markets to finance buildings, start-up, and cash-flow. And such funding is becoming much more expensive, or drying up altogether, in the wake of the global financial implosion, experts on charter finance and banking industry sources say. At the same time, a number of charter school authorizers meeting in Indianapolis this week reported they aren't seeing a lot of strong applications for new charters. Conclusion: a tough job--building good schools for disadvantaged kids from scratch--is about to get tougher.

100% or...What?

The 2014 target for 100% proficiency is one of the most vexing parts of the No Child Left Behind Act. On one hand, it seems absurd to suggest that every single student in America, all 49 million of of them, could pass a legitimate proficiency standard in both reading and math less than six years from now, and that every school where that standard isn't met is, by definition, deficient. Even taking into account "safe harbor" provisions that drop the actual number a few points below 100%, it's still a huge challenge, one the nation's schools are not currently on track to meet. The 100% goal is one of the principle reasons that a lot of people think NCLB is a rigged game and thus a conspiracy to destroy public education so as to pave the way for takeover by profit-hungry corporations, etc., etc. 

At the same time, I understand the logic behind it. The law was enacted in 2002. The proficient targets haven't been set particularly high. Any goal less than 100% would have been tantamount to giving up on some percentage of that year's kindergarten class, to looking the parent of a five year-old in the eye and saying "Twelve years just isn't enough time to teach your child to read and do math at a relatively low level." Settling on a goal lower than 100% also raises the question of how much lower and which children, exactly, would be written off from the get-go. Given the historical relationship between race, class, and educational opportunity in America, it's not hard to guess whose children those would have been. 

This raises the question of what would happen if the federal government didn't mandate a uniform timeline for all states. "Why not let the laboratories of democracy take a shot at it?" one might ask. "They're good people; even if they made different decisions, surely they wouldn't game the system in an utterly fraudulent, cynical way...."

Except we know they would. We know this because, as Anna Habash explains in a new report from the Education Trust, that's exactly what many of them have already done when given flexibility to decide how to hold high schools accountable for graduation rates under NCLB. 

Here's how it works: States are required to hold high schools accountable for graduation. But unlike with achievement scores, where every school has to meet a proficiency target that starts with where the 20th percentile school was in 2002 and ends with 100% in 2014, states can pick whatever end-goal graduation rate target they like and use whatever improvement trajectory they choose. 

That provides two different, exciting ways to render the provision completely meaningless. One is to pick an absurdly low goal. Welcome to the state of Nevada, where all manner of sins are legal and the statewide high school graduation rate goal is 50 percent. In other words, as long as your odds of graduating are better than what you get when you slap down $20 on red at the roulette wheel, you're doing fine. Alaska chose 55.58%, because apparently 56% even was just too heavy a cross to bear. And so on. 

Other states have been a little more clever. Instead of setting the bar at knee height, they adopt a putatively high bar but give schools centuries to get there. Maryland, for example, theoretically has a 90% graduation rate goal. But it will accept any improvement as sufficient progress, even 0.01%. At that rate, the state's African-American students will all be graduating by the year 3117, by which time we'll all be cursing in Mandarin Serenity-style and learning will take place via coaxial cables jammed into the back of your head. 

The point being, this isn't as simple as it seems. To be effective, accountability policies need to challenge schools to achieve more than they may believe they can achieve, but not challenge them so much that the entire process loses legitimacy. The policies also need to balance realism about the potential to improve the system as it stands with the moral urgency of helping students who are enrolled right now and can't wait to grow up while we fiddle with the only schools they have. 

One way way get around the seemingly insoluble 100% problem is to change the back-end responses and incentives as schools approach the final steep climb to the top and pass various points of diminishing returns: the closer you get to 100, the more the consequences of failure become a matter of foregone positive incentives rather than mandatory negative ones. In any case, it's a tricky set of issues for the next Congress and President to address. 

Weighted Student Funding

Over on Flypaper, Stafford is blogging about today’s School Finance Redesign Project panel (the report should be here, I gather, but it looks like the site is down). She laments what she sees as inevitable union resistance to the good idea of weighted student funding, which Fordham touts as a panacea for public schools.

I don’t think weighted student funding is a bad idea, necessarily. But it’s worth noting that we’re sitting in a cautionary tale. The District of Columbia Public Schools used a weighted student formula for several of its most dysfunctional years before it was abandoned by Fordham favorite Michelle Rhee. There’s a good summary of the system from 2006 here. Among the pitfalls:

An unintended consequence of the WSF implementation is that certain key staffing decisions have become uneven and inconsistent across schools, such that DCPS cannot tell parents with absolute certainty what each school is providing for their students. Full autonomy regarding how dollars are spent has led to 150 different decisions to determine an adequate ratio for counselors, appropriate levels of support in literacy and numeracy, and how (or even if) content areas such as art, music, and PE are delivered to students.

The report concludes that the weighted student formula did not to do enough to “ensure that critical educational resources — not simply dollars — are distributed consistently and equitably.”

Seven Percent

When the media report the number of schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), they generally report things like, "xxx number of schools failed this year under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law." This does a real disservice on lots of fronts. One, it belies the fact that states set their own standards. Two, it scares people, because the numbers are often in the hundreds. What they don't report is the actual percent of schools facing consequences, and, perhaps more importantly, what those consequences are.

A new Center on Education Policy report found that seven percent of all Title I schools in the country are now in "restructuring," meaning they were unable to make AYP for five consecutive years. Think about that number for a moment. Seven percent. We hear all the time how awful NCLB is and how it identifies too many schools as failing, but seven percent of persistent underperformers really isn't very high at all.

The same report recorded two other important findings. First, about twenty percent of schools going through restructuring are able to make AYP the following year. This is a good sign of progress. Second, nine in ten schools in restructuring choose options like extra professional development focused on school improvement, on-site technical assistance with more intense support and monitoring, and on-site leadership coaches or facilitators. These aren't exactly the drastic measures we hear about from the media.

Special Ed Vouchers

Governor Palin's speech on special education last here has drawn a fair amount of commentary; Sara Mead provides a comprehensive analysis here. As Mead notes, one of the main proposals was to create a voucher program for students with disabilities modeled on the McKay Scholarship program in Florida. Sara wrote a comprehensive analysis of that program while she was here at Education Sector, you can read the report here. 

Iowa Student Loans

Last week the Project on Student Debt released "Student Debt and the Class of 2007." My home state, Iowa, moved up one to claim the top spot. It was no small coincidence that over the weekend Iowa's Attorney General released his own report documenting the Iowa Student Loan Corporation's misleading advertising and improper practices.

This weekend's report outlined the dubious practices of Iowa Student Loan, including that it:

• paid employees bonuses based on loan volume
• paid colleges based on the number of borrowers
• falsely marketed private loans as the lowest-cost options
• steered students into private loans at the expense of cheaper federal loans with better repayment terms
• compared itself in market share and price offerings to for-profit lenders

Iowa Student Loan published numerous misleading advertisements aimed at increasing loan consolidation. For example, they published a table showing a hypothetical student with $60,000 in loans could cut their monthly payment in half, from $700 to $337. They did not mention the term of the loan would extend to 30 years and increase the student's total interest payments from $24,188 to $74,752.

This is a real problem in a state where students at each of the state's three public four-year postsecondary institutions all face debt loads above the national average. At the University of Iowa (my alma mater), 61% of students graduate with an average debt load of $22,181. The University of Northern Iowa averages about the same debt load but has a higher percentage of students borrowing. At Iowa State University, the state's land-grant college, graduates average $31,501 in debt. Both Iowa and Iowa State have higher graduate debt burdens that any of their peers.

There's no particular reason why Iowa should have this problem. Its economy has not been hit particularly hard. Its universities are not particularly expensive (the sticker price, that is). And its taxpayers are not particularly frugal. Instead, middling government support for higher education and a student loan corporation more worried about its loan volume and competing with the for-profit sector have slowly made Iowa what it is today: the least affordable higher education state in the country.