A Quick History Lesson

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, would-be commerce secretary Senator Judd Gregg evokes a revisionist history of the FFEL (private lenders) vs Direct Loans (government as lender) debate as evidence of Democrats' intentions to move to a single-payer, government-based health care system. I can't comment on Democrats' future plans for health care, but his comments on the history of student loans require some correcting.

From the article:

...Mr. Gregg argues that he has history on his side. The Democrats, he says, pulled the same public-private switcheroo before with student loans for college. Back in the late 1990s, "there was a huge debate in the committee . . . between myself and [Senator Ted] Kennedy over a private plan versus a public plan." In the end, they compromised -- the government would offer loans directly to students, but that program would have to compete with private-sector lenders. "And the agreement was very formal, and the record shows this very clearly. We agreed to level the playing field, put both plans on the playing field at an equal status and see who won. Well, private plans won. Big time."

Given the choice, most borrowers went to the private sector for their loans. But the Democrats who wanted to nationalize the student-loan market did not take defeat in the marketplace gracefully. "They didn't like that," Mr. Gregg says. "So ever since then they've tilted the playing field back and now they're going to wipe out the private plans in their budget."

Given the current situation of private lenders, it's hard to say that they won "big time"in the competition with the Direct Loan program. But, even more important to correct, is the allusion that all private lenders wanted to do was compete in a true marketplace until the Democrats came along and tilted the playing field. From the beginning, private lenders sought to limit the impact of Direct Lending through legislation. Private lenders got a legislated cap on the market share of the direct loan program for its first five years, ensuring that they wouldn't be out-competed entirely. And lenders sued when the federal government tried to lower fees in the Direct Loan program to compete with private lenders, saying that the Department of Education did not have the authority to make those changes.

And early evidence indicated that private lenders were not competing successfully with the Direct Loan program - in its first years, Direct Loans grew to a third of the student loan market. But that market share dropped as lenders competed aggressively (sometimes too aggressively) for schools' student loan business. Contrary to Senator Gregg's comment that borrowers went to the private sector, students rarely get to choose between the Direct Loan program and private lenders - schools make that decision and offer students one or the other. Lenders know this, and targeted heavy marketing to financial aid offices. This New York Times article from 2007 sums up the history of competition between private lenders and the federal government pretty well.

Mayoral Control is, in Fact, about Style

Secretary Duncan’s public endorsement of mayoral control in New York City this month comes on the heels of months of controversy for the city’s chancellor Joel Klein, whose tenure seems to be endangering not only NYC’s mayoral control but the viability of Mayor Bloomberg’s entire reform agenda. The allegations driving the calls for Klein to quit have little to do with whether Klein is right, and everything to do with who he is. “He’s a great litigator, he’s probably the smartest person I’ve met,” Randi Weingarten says, “But his view is it’s my way or the highway.” In systems with mayoral control in particular, conventional wisdom and leadership style matter as much, if not more, than winning policy arguments.

School systems are essentially “people [administrators] working with and through people [teachers] to influence people [students].”* For better or worse, politics are inherent in any school system, especially one which gives so much power to one directly-elected mayor and his hand-picked chancellor. These kinds of problems led authors William Sharp and James Walter to advocate participatory decision-making for urban superintendents in their 2004 book The School Superintendent: The Profession and the Person. Neither individual nor group decision making will advance the best reforms: while individuals are subject to bias and overconfidence, groups are impossibly slow at deciding. Perhaps most importantly, participatory decision-making can allow Bloomberg and Klein to preserve the executive power they need to effect real change while cultivating the social capital with teachers, parents and students to keep their political agenda from falling apart in the mean time.

One person in the position to learn a lot from Klein’s troubles is DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Kevin Carey is right to reject Nick Kristof’s questions about Rhee’s bedside manner: union leaders are hard-headed, and Rhee’s staffing policies should be judged by public debate, not by backroom placation. Still, Rhee’s challenges on discipline, attendance and standards will still be there even after the immediate fight over firing is fought and won. Whether legitimate or not, decisions to withhold information about the budget or firing her own children’s principal run the danger of appearing arbitrary and capricious. By letting teachers set some (but not all) of the agenda and making obvious that she values their input, Rhee can make the person-to-person connections she needs to overcome her image and preserve the political prerogatives of her office. In particular, Rhee will have to build systems to protect against truly arbitrary firing and create a rigorous system of professional development (the first signs of which are here) in the District before she pushes for greater firing rights. Fear, in this case, will not motivate teachers to get better but only motivate them to dig deeper into cynicism and complacency.

Rhee knows she can’t fix DC alone: she frequently makes statements like “teachers are the solution” to urban education woes or teachers are “the agents of social justice” in the District. By forming personal relationships open to mutual criticism with as many teachers as she can, Rhee can avoid the breakdown in trust, confidence and collaboration which have derailed Klein’s agenda.

By Chase Nordengren.

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* Ellen Goldring and William Greenfield, “Understanding the Evolving Concept of Leadership in Education: Roles, Expectations, and Dilemmas,” in The Educational Leadership Challenge: Redefining Leadership for the 21^st Century, ed. Joseph Murphy, Vol 101, no 1, Yearbook of the National Society of Education. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.

Things I Learned in Madison, Wisconsin

* The UW campus and state capitol are located on an isthmus between two lakes with confusingly similar names, Mendota and Monona. My brain keeps translating both into "Mendoza." 

* In April, a single day can feature three full seasons worth of weather, going from freezing rain to collar-loosening sunshine in the space of a few hours. To adapt, many students have set their minimum temperature threshold for cargo shorts and flip-flops at roughly 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

* UW students and faculty are interested enough in higher education policy to not only show up in good numbers for my lecture but indulge a lengthy analogy between the educational practices of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries and America in the present day. And let's face it, I'm not exactly David Sedaris when it comes to wit and drawing a crowd. The WISCAPE program here does a lot of interesting work and they're not afraid to ask tough questions, even when those for whom the questions are tough includes the Madison campus and UW system itself.  

* The good local CD store (you know the one I'm talking about) is still in business! I buy a Rodriguo y Gabriela live album that I didn't know existed, which of course is the whole point of the good local CD store.

* Students today: more socially aware or more debauched than ever before? Judging by the place I had coffee, both. On the one hand, the woman sitting next to me laughingly tells her friend an alcohol poisoning-related story from last weekend that was so outrageous I can only assume it's entirely true. On the other hand, here's a verbatim sample of restroom graffiti:

WE NEED:

 (not prioritized numerically)

1) A vast, new deal-type public works program

2) Stop wasting $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan

3) Increase the tax burden on $250,000 plus incomes

4) Repeal tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs abroad

5) 5 million TRULY green jobs.

The "not prioritized numerically" qualifier makes this twice as awesome. 

* Judging from what stores on State Street are selling, here's what today's college students like to buy: Beer, coffee, used books, sandwiches, posters, ice cream, university-themed T-shirts, video games, CDs, sneakers, elaborate paraphenalia for smoking "flavored tobacco," beer.

* Get up early and you can watch the crew team practice on Lake Mendoza Mendota. This is so pleasingly collegiate that I think all colleges should subsidize crew, if only for purely aesthetic reasons. 

* I spent a free hour in the campus art museum, which is first-rate. Highlight: Peter Gourfain, "Fate of the Earth Doors," and contemporary sculpture generally, as well as Dutch painting from the 17th Century. I pretty much had the place to myself until 70 local high school students arrived to learn in small groups, one of which was conducted in French. Clearly they didn't get the memo about No Child Left Behind outlawing art and foreign language.  

* The campus contains not one but two buildings that were designed to repel violent assault by people pursuing a progressive agenda. The "Red Gym" opened in 1894 as a combination gymnasium / armory. In 1886, a Chicago rally in support of striking workers turned into a deadly confrontation with police, which became known as the Haymarket Affair (or Riot, or Massacre, depending on your point of view.) Nervous about worker uprisings, the Wisconsin legislature (located less than a mile away) decided that the thing to do was train male college students into a local militia and house them, along with their weapons, in a massive, medieval-style castellated fortress, complete with those little slots in the top of the walls, presumably so laborers advocating for an eight-hour work day could be shot down with crossbows and the like. (Later, the Gym hosted key meetings of the Wisconsin Progressives led by Robert LaFollete.) 

Similarly, the Mosse Humanities building was constructed in the brutalist style in the late 1960s, when Madison, like many campuses, was wracked by demonstrations against the Vietnam war. The windows are narrow, shielded, and 20 or so feet off the ground, above concrete embankments tilted in a sharp, hordes-of-students-repelling angle. (Fears of violence weren't entirely unjustified; on August 24, 1970, a group of anti-war activists exploded a huge car bomb in an attempt to destroy Madison's Army Mathematics Research Center, killing a research scientist (and father of three young children) named Robert Fassnacht who was working late at night in a non-AMRC part of the building.) The Mosse building is unpopular and hasn't aged well and they're thinking about tearing it down. 

* Vitamin D is naturally produced when people are exposed to sunlight. Without it, they're prone to rickets and other diseases. In 1923, a UW-Madison professor named Harry Steenbock discovered that Vitamin D could be produced in food, including milk, by irradiating it with ultraviolet light. After patenting the process with his own money, Steenbock was offered a huge payout from the private sector. Instead, he helped found the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the first such "technology transfer" entitity, which splits revenues between researchers, industry and the university. Vitamin D soon found its way into cereal bowls everywhere and rickets was cured. Steenbock's original work has been extended and refined by Madison researchers over the decades, and Vitamin D has generated literally hundreds of millions of dollars for the university. 

Can you Get Seniors to Work Harder?

Many high school students headed to college tend to check out during their senior year, especially the second half of their senior year. By that time, they have applied for colleges and will either get accepted or not based on the work that they have already done, but the work that they do in their senior year does not matter much in that calculation. Yet, many of these same students then enter college unprepared and have to spend their first term taking remedial courses in math and language arts. Beside driving up the cost of a college education for the state and the individual, those taking remedial courses are also less likely to make it through to graduation. In California over half of students entering the state university system (CSU) have to take either remedial math, remedial English or both.

So several years back, the CSU system partnered with K-12 to see if they could identify students at risk and help them avoid remediation. The Early Assessment Program created an augmentation to the 11th grade standard assessment that students could take to see if they were ready for college work. If a student passed this test then they would not have to take remediation in college. If they failed the test, they had their entire senior year to fix their issues before they get to college.

So, can you get seniors to work harder? Early results on the program are just starting to be available. The early results suggest that the program was able to reduce the probability of needing remediation by 6 percent in English and 4 percent in math (news article on study). Not off the charts, but this is enough of an improvement that the program probably paid for itself. It will be interesting to track this work to see if the reduction in remediation also helps increase college graduation rates.

Stimulating Stimulus Discussion

The Department of Education is in the process or has distributed the first $44 billion of K-12 stimulus funding. Most of this funding will flow to school districts based on established formulas. Clearly this funding provides a great opportunity for local education leaders to do the right thing with the funds and make investments that will improve educational opportunities for students. But, many in the education reform community fear that most of this funding will be used to support business as usual. This should not be surprising especially in states where the new federal funds will largely be used to backfill reductions in state and local school funding. Yet, the educational investments made in the stimulus package have been marketed as supporting both jobs and reform. Round 1 has been heavy on the jobs, and light on reform. But in Round 2, the reformers get their shot.

The Department of Education has $4.3 billion in Race to the Top and $650 million in What Works Innovation funds which provide a historic opportunity to reward states, school districts, and entrepreneurs doing good work for kids. The stakes are extremely high for these pots of fund because this might be the most important opportunity school reformers get in the foreseeable future to make a difference. (If the Administration is serious about beginning to balance the federal budget, then there is not likely to be a lot of discretionary funds for the education world. And, without additional funding, the NCLB reauthorization debate may not be able to buy desired reforms like previous reauthorizations.) So this may be the education reformers shot. As some have questioned, can $5 billion leverage a $600 billion industry to change?

For these two pots us funds to leverage the types of changes necessary, the Secretary will need to ensure that he gets the governance and accountability structures accompanying these funds right. Here are some of the questions the Secretary will face. How should the department distribute these funds? What criteria should be used? How should the department evaluate recipients and ensure that the process is fair and transparent? And, importantly, how can the administration support educational entrepreneurs without the perception of cronyism?

Hear the answers to these questions and more! Join Education Sector next week, Weds. April 29 10:30 – 12:30 for:

Ensuring Accountability for Federal Incentive and Innovation Funds.


Panelists include: Ted Mitchell, CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund; Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI; and Andrew Rotherham, Education Sector co-founder. Education Sector Senior Policy Analyst Rob Manwaring, as moderator. To be held from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the Capitol Hilton (16th and K Street, NW) in the South American Room. To attend you must RSVP to: http://www.educationsector.org/events/events_show.htm?doc_id=863218

Teach For America Growth

There's a cottage industry of journalists and commentators who criticize Teach for America (TFA) as being unscalable. Their main complaint is that, while a worthy program (and they always acknowledge TFA's success), the number of teachers entering the profession through this route is tiny compared to the total workforce. In a piece that is typical of this view, Dan Brown writes in today's Huffington Post (emphasis his):

Over 99.8 percent, a near-total, of America's teachers are not part of Teach For America. If we are serious about repairing our education downslide-- and I believe President Obama is-- we cannot look to TFA as our crucial beacon. Teach For America is a triumph of private sector innovation that should continue to be heartily supported and responsibly expanded, but its embedded exceptionalism innately limits it from modeling nationwide reform.

This type of logic has several errors. First, the TFA-phenomenon is not just exclusive to TFA. TFA has also spawned New Teacher Project (TNTP) programs currently operating in 18 cities. These must be counted in any honest assessment of TFA's impact, because they are essentially individual districts that have decided to run their own TFA-like programs.

Second, TFA has only been in existence since the early 1990s. There are teachers in the classroom who've been teaching for 40 years. So no, TFA teachers do not represent a large portion of all teachers. A proper metric would be to look at the percentage of all new teachers entering through TFA, and on that measure, it has a larger market share. Approximately 170,000 teachers left the profession altogether in 2002. They were replaced, in part, by 3,300 TFA and TNTP teachers. This is only two percent of new teachers, but ten times higher than Brown's .16 figure for all teachers.

Third, Brown ignores growth and demand. TFA and TNTP roughly tripled their numbers between 2002 and 2008, a time when the size of the teaching workforce stayed relatively constant. We don't have great data on the number of new teachers every year, but TFA and TNTP could have supplied up to five or six percent by now. And this year, applications for the programs are up 42 and 44 percent, respectively. College graduates from our nation's elite postsecondary institutions are clamoring to get into teaching through these programs, to the point that their acceptance rates are now down to 15 percent. That's a big deal, and suggests there's room for expansion.

Fourth, as evidence mounts that these programs work, there will be an even greater push for expansion. In a large sample of North Carolina teachers, researchers found that the effect of having a TFA teacher was greater than the effects due to experience. It concluded that, "programs like TFA that focus on recruiting and selecting academically talented recent college graduates and placing them in schools serving disadvantaged students can help reduce the achievement gap, even if teachers stay in teaching only a few years." Such findings matter, and they'll only propel the growth of TFA and TFA-style programs faster. We should be careful not to underestimate its growing impact.

State DREAM Acts Work

Two forthcoming journal articles show that controversial policies allowing illegal immigrant high school graduates to attend college at in-state prices work. In the nine states with policies (a tenth, Nebraska, did not have theirs in place long enough to study), foreign-born noncitizen Latinos were 1.54 times more likely to enroll in college than peers in states without such assistance. And, despite being ineligible for federal financial aid and legally prohibited from working after they graduate, they persist in college at rates similar to Latino peers with citizenship. Now, if only there was something Congress could do...

Another Piece of Evidence for Mayoral Control

There's a short video going around the Internets of Michael Bloomberg speaking about mayoral control of a city's public education system. Here's the video in full:



Most of it is general arguments for mayoral control, bolstered by Bloomberg's claims at the beginning about rising test scores in New York City. Whatever you feel about the authenticity of those, I'm most struck by this passage that starts at the :16 mark:

When I came into office we had 12,000 teachers quit on a base of 80,000 every year. Today that's down to 5,000 teachers that quit or retire. In the old days, seven years ago, we couldn't recruit enough teachers to fill those slots. Today between 50 and 60,000 teachers apply for those 5,000 slots.

If true, those teacher retention numbers are pretty striking. They say something about teacher satisfaction. And, since it costs a lot of money to recruit and train a new teacher, the district is experiencing some savings there. Not to mention the benefits to student learning of having less teacher turnover. Bloomberg doesn't cite the starting numbers of teacher applicants, but it's a good thing that the district now has a larger pool of applicants to choose from. Instead of evaluating a district leader solely on the basis of student test scores, it would be nice to know more information like this, on the quality of the work force.

Goldilocks and Pell Grants

It's hard to make everyone happy on federal financial aid. Postsecondary institutions and state legislators decry the declining value of the Pell Grant over time. They're right; it does buy less than it used to. But, federal legislators argue the Pell, the primary vehicle for student aid for low-income students, has been regularly increased and it is tuition increases that have caused its value to decline. For a vibrant discussion on whether colleges and universities desperately need new federal funding or simply absorb it, see the comments section from this article. The only group that's left out of this discussion is students.

In February I wrote about a smart new proposal in President Obama's budget that would have guaranteed Pell Grant funding and indexed them to the consumer price index (CPI), a Bureau of Labor Statistics calculation based on the change in price of common goods and services, plus one percent. I wrote that such a step would curtail political debates and ensure stability for a program that should not be subject to annual haggling. And the one percent above the CPI is an allowance that higher education suffers from Baumol's cost disease and thus faces some additional costs that other industries might not.

Yet, somehow, no one seems to be fighting for this proposal. Congress doesn't like it because it takes away their annual authorizing power (even though they've already given away much of their power by approving non-discretionary tuition tax credits that primarily benefit middle- and upper-income families). Tax hawks don't like it because it makes another program an entitlement, even if it's one we approve every single year anyway.

Most puzzling, voices representing colleges and universities, and their interests, have been mostly silent. Until today, that is, when the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article titled, "Even Under Obama's Plan, Pell Grants Trail Tuition." In says even the Obama plan, which would raise the Pell one percent more than the consumer price index would still lag behind the cost of tuition, fees, room and board. It says, instead, "A simple solution would be to index the maximum award to tuition growth." Simple, yes. Smart, no.

The chart below shows the Pell's actual value over time and what it would have been had it been indexed to inflation, compared to tuition increases by sector. Had the Pell been indexed to inflation, it would indeed be higher than it is today. But it would not have been nearly enough to cover college tuition costs, because those have outpaced inflation by enormous amounts. Unlike the article would have us believe, that's not the fault of the Pell, or federal legislators. It's the fault of colleges and universities that have been unable and unwilling to control costs.

The Oddly Selfless Use of University Endowments

Like many organizations, colleges and universities are feeling the effects of the battered economy--revenues are down or growing less quickly, forcing higher education leaders to confront the possibility of layoffs and other painful austerity measures. A relatively small number of institutions, however, have the good fortune to be sitting on gigantic piles of money in the form of endowments that swelled to record size when times were good. There's reason to think that, for some, the aggressive investment strategies that added so much lucre to the treasury are now shrinking the hoards of cash at an equally rapid rate. But they still have a lot of money left, much more than they had even 10 years ago. Yet, as Harvard freshman and ace blogger Dylan Matthews writes (via Matt Yglesias, an alum):

Harvard has tens of billions of dollars. How many tens of billions they won't say, but it's in that ballpark. However, because they're slightly less obscenely wealthy than they were before the economy went to hell, the Harvard administration has started laying people off without cause. Some students, like the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) and its supporters (like me and Perspective), think that this is uncalled for. We think that Harvard should be more forthcoming about its financial situation, so that students and other members of the community can evaluate whether we really need to lay off workers to weather the recession. And until Harvard releases the information that would allow such a debate to take place, it should stop cutting jobs and find other ways to make up the shortfall. After all, if they're going to cut the jobs of valued members of our community, we have a right to know why that's happening, and how necessary or unnecessary that is. I, for one, kind of doubt that a university that can pay for massive concerts/carnivals can't cough up the cash necessary to pay its workers.

This raises a larger, intriguing question of how university administrators and trustees balance their personal interests against the long-term welfare of the institution. From a selfish perspective, it's in the best interests of college leaders to aggressively spend the endowment in the short term--to avoid layoffs and angry students when times are bad, and to pay for new buildings and famous professors and various other things that cover the institution--and thus the leaders--in glory when times are good. 

And yet, this doesn't tend to happen. Instead, most institutions are pretty conservative when it comes to endowment spending--to the point where they had a tremendous conniption fit when Congress mulled over the idea of requiring them to adhere to the modest five percent annual payout requirement currently imposed on other non-profits. Even when the investment and donor dollars were pouring in, the typical university only spent about 3.9 percent of its endowment on actual stuff other than the cost of managing the endowment itself.

Partly, I imagine even the wealthiest universities haven't quite come to grips with the reality of owning assets larger than the annual GDP of a typical developing nation. But mostly I think this is just one symptom of a larger way of thinking that seizes the minds of college leaders everywhere--a kind of institution-centric view of things that dominates their thinking in profound and important ways.

By that I mean: the institution comes first--before the students, before the faculty, before even the people in charge. In many ways, it's an admirable way of doing business. Universities are among the most long-lasting, essentially virtuous institutions in all of human society. They've preserved crucial values and knowledge in times of great unrest, adapting and improving along the way. The particularly American philosophy of institutional self-reliance--foreign universities often get proportionately larger state subsidies but are more tightly regulated and have far less capacity to raise money on their own--has resulted in an elite higher education sector of great standing, longevity and wealth. For example, I'm writing this from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I'll be knocking around for the next couple of days and speaking on Thursday. The university is really kind of awesome, full of museums and theaters and grand buildings, packed with bright, energetic people trying to make the world a better place. 

But there's a downside to all of this: Institutional and societal interests aren't always aligned. For example, it's good for a university's reputation and bottom line to focus on enrolling lots of rich smart kids, but frankly what we need are more colleges that are good at, and want to be good at, teaching students at the median (among the population of potential college students, which isn't the whole population) or below. Institutions tend to want to grow into fully autonomous city-states when we actually need a more interconnected, cooperative higher education community. Institutions often take a dim view of employee unionization. Belief in the greatness of the institution can also become a little cultish and weird, disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the outside world. And so on. 

And I suspect the perpetual building of the institution causes college leaders to inappropriately discount the urgent needs of today in favor of a more abstract tomorrow. Which isn't to say that universities should blow out their endowments for short-term benefit, but there is a balance to be struck. Harvard's been around for over 370 years. It's future is pretty secure. It's gotten steadily richer and more famous over time, and those long-term trends will probably continue. Future leaders will likely be better positioned to deal with future crises--just as the university today is better off than it was 25 or 50 or 100 years ago.  But the people the university employs today need jobs right now. Universities might be among the few--perhaps the only--institutions that have become too adept at taking the long view. 

Salary Schedule Slopes

At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union, then-Senator Barack Obama endorsed changing teacher compensation structures from traditional single salary schedules—where teachers are paid based only on their educational credentials and years of experience—to one reflecting the performance of individual teachers in the classroom. His mention of pay for performance elicited boos from the assembled members of an organization that eventually endorsed his candidacy for president. Proposals for performance plans have caused controversy in cities like Washington, DC, but, while it's a worthwhile goal to more directly link individual performance to individual pay, traditional single salary schedules are likely to remain in place for some time. Some reflect what we know about teacher effectiveness, but many do not.

Research shows that teachers have steep learning curves—they become much more effective in their first few years on the job and then level off. And a great deal of research shows the link between teacher effectiveness and educational credentials to be minor or nonexistent. A district designing their salary structure based on these findings can more effectively attract and reward high-quality teachers without increasing the overall amount of money spent on compensation.

The slope of teacher salary schedules is likely to have a significant impact on the quality and character of the teacher work force in any given district. Higher starting salaries are more likely to attract high-quality candidates into the profession. A district with only small returns for experience is likely to face retention issues as teachers leave for more lucrative positions or grow frustrated because their pay increases aren't commensurate with their increasing effectiveness in the classroom. Each of these decisions, made at the local level, helps shape a district's teacher work force by influencing its ability to attract and retain quality teachers.

New York City is an example of a city that rewards teachers with large raises when they meet certain experience milestones (teachers earn large raises at seven, 10, 15, 20, and 22 years) and smaller or nonexistent raises in other years. Such policies are likely to distort teacher decision-making, giving teachers too little reason to stay when they are far from the "step" and too much reason to stay when they are near—a teacher in New York is unlikely to leave after 19 years, for example, because they stand to earn an 11 percent raise, more than $8,000, if they stay one additional year.

The chart below compares New York City's current schedule to one that's based on what research says about teacher effectiveness in general. (Scroll over the dollar signs embedded in the chart to read descriptions of the differences between the current system and the proposed schedules). The costs of these schedules are comparable, in that they generate the same total expenditures on teacher salaries, assuming the national averages of the percentage of teachers who have bachelor's and master's degrees and who are in various stages of experience in their careers. The schedules are in present dollars and would be adjusted annually for cost of living increases.



The proposed salary schedules begin with a relatively high starting salary in order to recruit high-quality candidates into the field. They front-load salaries so as to reward early career gains to teacher effectiveness and to provide financial rewards to the teachers most likely to leave the profession. But, unlike districts with hard plateaus, the proposed schedules reserve small bonuses from years 11-25. And, instead of large arbitrary increases before and after multiple years of stagnation, the new schedules follow a gentle, predictable curve that places no extra emphasis on any one year. Teachers who felt burned-out after year 19, for example, would feel no strong financial compulsion to stay an additional year.

Because there is little compelling evidence suggesting teachers with master's degrees outperform their bachelor degree-holding peers, the proposed schedules eliminate the more than $5,000 in bonuses New York awards for master's degrees. Instead, the proposed schedules give only a small bonus to teachers with master's degrees—calculated to cover the cost of obtaining 32 graduate-level credits at the nearby Teachers College at Columbia University.

With finite resources, these choices matter. Single salary schedules will likely continue to be used in most school districts for some time. Districts should construct these schedules in a way that will attract and retain the most effective classroom teachers. To read more about the ways districts structure their teacher salary schedules and to see more cool charts, check out the full report here.

Many thanks to Abdul Kargbo for creating the interactive charts like the one you see above.

B.U.: Boo Hoo

Sunday's New York Times had an article about the Boston University admissions and financial aid offices. We learn a lot about how these offices work, and it's mostly unflattering. See if you can find what I mean in the passage below:

For example, last year, Boston University gave $43 million in institutional aid to incoming freshmen. To end up at that figure, it offered $150 million to accepted students (27 percent took the offer). This year, despite a budget deficit for the university and freezes on hiring and new construction projects, the school is offering even more — $160 million — with hopes of spending $45 million. Ms. McGuire says the higher aid figure recognizes that more people need help, that B.U. raised tuition by $1,370 (almost 4 percent), and that it will very likely need to offer more aid to get enough students to attend. “We are assuming not as many people will take the offer in this economy,” she says. “We are building that in.”

Did you find it? The trick is to do a little mental math and know where to get accurate information. Boston University allocated $43 million in financial aid last year, and plans to raise that to $45 million this year, an increase of 4.65 percent. At the same time, they're also raising tuition $1,632 (the article's figures are wrong), from $35,418 to $37,050, which calculates out to a 4.61 percent increase. In other words, in possibly the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Boston University, with endowment assets of $1.1 billion, is generously increasing financial aid by a net of .04 percent.

Fire Rich Rodriguez

University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez was profiled over the weekend:

He arrived on the tradition-rich Michigan campus last year and glumly kicked off his tenure with a 3-9 season. It represented the most losses in a season in the program’s 129-year history and the first year without a bowl game since 1974.

All along, Rodriguez said the first season would be the toughest.

“I wish I could sit here and say I know that we’re going to do this and that this year, but I’m still a little nervous because we’re going to have a lot of youth still there,” he said. “The vision of this program is taking steps each and every year. We’re on track.”

I went to graduate school at Ohio State. As such, I'm legally required (as enumerated in binding language included in the standard OSU diploma) to hate the University of Michigan, particularly the football team. This is a golden age for Michigan haters--recent years have featured a humiliating home defeat at the hands of a Division 1-AA team, five consecutive losses to OSU, and the catastrophic nine-loss season. To put that in perspective: the last time Michigan lost as many as seven games was 1962. Ohio State has never lost more than seven football games in a year, and it last happened in the 19th century. OSU coach Earl Bruce was fired because he only won nine games for six consecutive years in the 1980s. 

The point being, winning in college football is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You assemble a dominant program that always wins, and so all the good recruits want to go there, and so the program always wins. Managed correctly, this can continue more or less forever--OSU hasn't had a losing season since the Johnson administration. But a key part of that management is psychological, creating an iron-clad expectation of permanent victory. "We don't rebuild, we reload," etc. 

And here Rich Rodriguez is talking about "taking steps each and every year"? Why not just call them baby steps and be done with it? Pre-excusing another season of mediocrity by blaming the "youth"? If you're going to coach in the Big House, you are required to promise greatness. And if you don't deliver, you get carried out on your shield. As an Ohio State fan, the only thing more painful than a resurgent Wolverine squad would be a team that's not good enough to be worth hating. 

Dispatch from Turkey

I spent the last couple of weeks on vacation in Turkey, before, during and after President Obama's visit. They love him there and the fact that he came as part of a larger trip to Europe--as opposed to the Middle East--was seen as symbolically a very big deal. The visit included a Q&A session with local university students, which seems to have gone well (video here):

Answering questions from Turkish university students at the historic Tophane-i Amire Hall in Istanbul at a session titled "Live and Online Discussion with President Obama" yesterday, Obama did nothing but solidify that image. At the end of the session, Obama took time to shake hands with the majority of the students, a scene a million miles from the previous U.S. president's visit to Turkey. A few seconds before George W. Bush was shaking hands with the guests at the Galatasaray University in June 2004, his bodyguards were checking their palms for weapons.

Obama was not only different than Bush, but also different from most politicians the students knew. "This attitude is not something a Turk is used to," said Denizcan Demirkılıç, who studies law at the Bahçeşehir University. "How many of the students in this hall ever got to sit this close to a politician? You can stand 30 or 40 centimeters from the president of one of the greatest countries of the world, you ask him questions and shake hands with him. Our politicians have a lot to learn from that."

Demirkılıç was one of the 99 students who were selected for the session, mainly due to their previous participation in programs at U.S.-related institutions or had spent a year in the United States on exchange programs. Most of the students were informed about the possibility of a conference a few weeks ago and last week received calls confirming their attendance. There was no further preparation for them, and as one of Obama's assistants announced prior to the Q&A session, there were "no rules and no restrictions" on what they could ask, as affirmed by students afterward.

Ece Başaran from the Bahçeşehir University was in the United States during Obama's presidential election campaign. Başaran said she was impressed by the president's honesty. "He is very charismatic and honest," she said. "I was in America during the campaign, and he continues to say what he was saying then. There is not a change in his stance. He knows how to touch critical points, but he does it in a certain way that he doesn't hurt you.

In one sense diplomacy is a formal process by which officials representing sovereign nations negotiate over matters of mutual interest, but there's also a lot to be said for simply treating people well and understanding how they see themselves. President Bush liked to refer to Turkey as a "moderate Islamic country," which cuts against Turkey's identity as a nation founded on secular principles. It's true that the vast majority of Turks identify themselves as Muslim, but lots of countries are religously homogenous and nobody calls Finland a "liberal Lutheran country."

Which is not to say that the tension between secular and religous ideals isn't real. Turkey is, famously, the land where the forces of religon, geography, politics, and culture intersect and sometimes collide. We spent our first night on the Gallipoli penninsula in a small hotel built in the village of Kocadere (Number of residents: 23. Percent of residents working in small-scale agriculture: 100). But even that tiniest of population centers has two distinct features: A mosque complete with a blue and white minaret from which prayers are broadcast five times a day, and a small municipal building in front of which stands a flagpole waving a crisp Turkish flag, as well as a polished bust of Mustafa Kemal, hero of the Gallipoli campaign and father of the nation. 

Turkey is also a good place to see where a lot of the fantastic items of antiquity in European museums and capitals used to be before they were stolen or otherwise acquired. The Pergamon museum in Berlin, for example, is a great place to visit, but I suspect its dramatic marbles of gods and monsters would look even better if they still sat on the original site of Alexander the Great's perfect city, looming over the valleys near the Aegean Sea. Same thing with the bronze horses of St. Mark's in Venice, stolen from the Hippodrome when the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. (Well-travelled animals, those horses--how many other objects have been appropriated by both Nero and Napoleon?) It makes you wonder why, exactly, the word "crusade" continues to enjoy such positive connotations. 

Driving down the Aegean coast is a lot like spending several days inside one of those Poussin landscapes you study in Art History 101. The metaphors are so obvious and strong that you can't help but indulge in a lot of highly cliched reflection on the breadth and cyclical nature of history, civilizations rising and falling and leaving only their bones behind, etc.. No sooner had we climbed up to the ruined temple of Athena in Priene when an honest-to-goodness goatherd drove his flock up around the scattered pieces of Ionic column and through the 2,000-year old mountainside theater. Touristically speaking, it was awesome--they should really charge extra for that kind of thing. 

Same thing with Istanbul, where you can stand on top of the Theodosian walls and under the dome of the Hagia Sophia (where a prostitute is supposed to have danced on the altar during the sack; seriously, what was up with those Crusaders?). President Obama was there last week, and at the Blue Mosque nearby, apt locations for a Christian born of a Muslim father to talk about a better future for people of all faiths. 

Survey Says...

Next week the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) will be releasing results from a poll regarding ongoing contract negotiations with the District of Columbia Public Schools. I was able to get a look at the survey instrument (.doc), and it's what you might kindly call "one-sided."

When asking about the general conditions in DC public schools, it unnecessarily includes the phrase "facing teachers," as if the conditions were bad enough to require "facing" and that teachers are the only ones doing so. Question ten asks respondents to identify which of two, and only two, approaches would best help turn around failing schools: "using student test scores and other measures of teacher performance to evaluate teachers and making it easier to dismiss teachers who are not measure up, or offering more professional development opportunities for teachers and providing additional training, peer support, and mentoring for teachers who need to improve." (Given only these two options, I wonder which one teachers would choose.) Questions 13 and 15 attempt to be parallel but mix up their pronouns, but these are all minor fouls.

Unfortunately it gets worse. Chancellor Rhee's proposal gets a cursory 271 word description, about one-fourth of the 1,033 nice words devoted to WTU's. Overall, the survey gives a laundry list of 20 positive things the WTU contract would provide teachers (compared to zero listed for Rhee's), and only then gets to the main point of the survey--do teachers prefer the WTU contract proposal or Chancellor Rhee's.

When the results of this survey are announced next week, I hope the media and other stakeholders recognize how the results were achieved.

Slumdog Ivy Leaguer

Wake Forest University is hosting a conference this week on making the SAT optional for admission, and they invited Daniel Golden to headline. Golden, author of a book called The Price of Admission that documents all the ways children of wealth and privilege are favored in college admissions, was an interesting choice to headline this conference, because he's actually ambivalent about the SAT:

Some, including our friends at colleges like Wake Forest that have made it optional, argue that using the SAT in admissions amounts to a preference for privilege, because of the sizeable scoring gap between whites and minorities, and between high and low-income students....I agree with [SAT] critics that disparities in scoring by race and social class, exacerbated by test-prep and other coaching options available to affluent students -- are profoundly disturbing. I also don’t believe students should be admitted on the basis of test scores -- or grades -- alone. Creative aptitude, extra-curricular activities and leadership are all important.

At the same time, though, I'm a product of the SAT generation. I was one of the thousands of bright, middle-class public high school students who were able to attend a elite college at least partly because the test helped extend the vision and reach of the Ivy Leagues beyond a cluster of old-boy prep schools. Emotionally, I guess, it's hard for me to accept that a test that broadened opportunity for so many young people is now responsible for denying that same opportunity to others.

It also seems to me that opponents of the SAT often talk as if it's the only instrument of privilege in college admissions -- ignoring the preferences for children of legacies and donors. Unlike those preferences, the SAT at least tries to gauge the candidate's individual merit. And, even granting a bias toward the white and wealthy, the SAT may remain useful in comparing two candidates within the same racial and economic groups -- or when a score goes against type. For instance, if a minority applicant from a low-performing high school does well on the SAT, that score could be a noteworthy indication of academic potential.

But if--as in so many of the examples I cited in my book--a legacy or a development applicant, with all of the advantages of wealth and parental education, bombs on the SAT, that's a strong signal that he or she may not be serious about learning--and that the admissions staff should resist lobbying on the applicant's behalf by the development or alumni office. Indeed, without SAT scores to act as a check on these preferences, it's likely that the number of legacies and development admits at elite universities would be even greater than it already is.

This, I think, is the key argument against the eliminate-SAT crowd. It may or may not be biased against minorities and low-income youth, and kids can be coached on how to improve their score. But, what else do we have that's better, that elite colleges and universities would trust as a replacement? High school GPAs are tarnished by grade inflation and high schools themselves are yoked to reputations. Personal statements are no less coachable than SATs, and extracurricular activities favor the children of parents with time and money. Even worse, none of these things are objective; a student in Abilene, TX cannot be compared to a student from Anchorage, AL on these things.

The SAT, on the other hand, is a national test. A perfect score means the same thing everywhere. College and university admissions offices are already overburdened with applicants to the point of making admissions like lotteries. Taking away one of the more objective measures would make the process all the more opaque.

Making Pell Mandatory

President Obama's budget proposal included several major changes in student financial aid, including a proposal for the biggest change in the federal student loan system since its inception. People on either side of the student loan issue can debate the pro's and con's of the President's proposal to end subsidies to private lenders - and there are some legitimate arguments to be had, along with a lot of complicated cost projections. But Obama's proposal to make spending on Pell Grants mandatory is clearly right and long overdue - yes, it costs money, but it is also a simple matter of fairness.

Currently, Pell Grants are discretionary spending - while Congress hasn't let the program run out of money in the past, keeping Pell on the discretionary side of the federal budget gives Congress control over the amount of money that is distributed and leads to uncertainty for students and their families about whether the Pell Grant money will be there for them when they enter college. Tax credits, on the other hand, which go to more moderate and middle-income students, are not discretionary - every family and student who deducts their tuition or checks the box for the Hope tax credit are guaranteed to get that money. There is no worrying about whether the IRS will just stop giving the credits, and no rush to send tax returns in early to ensure the money is available.

And this isn't just an arcane federal budget issue. I previously worked with high school students who were applying to college, and it was a common refrain among the primarily low-income students and parents that they had to get their federal aid applications in early or else Pell Grant money might not be available anymore. This uncertainty added stress and confusion to the aid process. And it stood in stark contrast with my tax filings, which I have used over my life for tuition deductions, Hope credits, Lifetime Learning credits, and student loan interest rate deductions. I'm not low-income, but I've gotten a lot of federal aid to go to school and I've never worried about whether it would be available.

And it's not just me. The General Accounting Office released a report in 2007 showing the income distribution of different aid programs - how many low-income and high-income people got various grants, loans, and tax credits. The data is from 2003-04 and the total amount spent on the three primary tax benefits - the Hope Credit, the Lifetime Learning Credit, and the Tuition Deduction - exceeded the total amount spent for Pell Grants. But the three tax credit programs are not nearly as well targeted.

Below is a chart showing the distribution of aid dollars through the tax credit programs and the Pell Grant program. Pell grants are very clearly targeted to the lowest income students - nearly all of the aid dollars go to students in the $0 - $40,000 income range, and grants drop off sharply for students with income above $40,000. The same is not true, however for the tax credit programs - and particularly for the tuition deduction, where 37 percent of recipients make $100,000 or more in income.
If we are going to continue to guarantee middle and high-income families help with paying for college, the least we can do is make the same promise and commitment to low-income families.

Choice and Chance

This weekend, I had the privilege of drawing names for the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School enrollment lottery. E. L. Haynes is a high-performing charter school located in what a real estate agent might describe as a “transitioning” neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Its Board of Trustees is full of influential local leaders from the field of Education and beyond.

E.L. Haynes is a public school of choice, open to all residents of the District. But its enrollment lottery isn’t about choice. It’s about chance.

Few students choose to leave E.L. Haynes from year-to-year, and the school gives enrollment preference to siblings. That means there were no spots available for new families in Kindergarten, 1st grade or 2nd grade. In Pre-Kindergarten, after siblings, only 14 spaces remained. As I drew 154 names for those 14 spots, the E.L. Haynes staff dutifully recorded who was 98th on the waiting list and who was 105th. The school regularly enrolls some students from the waiting list, but can’t provide parents with much information about how many or when.

One woman and her toddler whooped and celebrated when they were chosen. The room buzzed when I drew a twin as #9, guaranteeing the sibling a spot. With one draw I had given away two spots! The pressure grew. I looked at the faces of the waiting parents and began to wonder which card in the box was theirs. Had I inadvertently buried it? Was it stuck against the side of the box? How much fishing was appropriate, or should I just draw whatever card was on top?

If you move to the block of Otis Place NW where E.L. Haynes’s shiny new building is located with a 6-year-old child, enrolling is extremely unlikely. In fact, the parents who lost in this year’s Pre-K lottery might have better odds of getting their child into E.L. Haynes if they have another child and enter the Pre-K lottery again, hoping to sneak the older child into a primary grade as a sibling.

When I drew the last name for an official Pre-K berth, a woman in the crowd drew a sharp breath. I had drawn her son’s best friend. She sat quietly as I started to draw the waiting list. When I hit #20, tears began to run down her face. Sometime after #50, she left the room.

Pulling Back the Welcome Mat

The front page of Saturday's Washington Post included an article on why there are so many charter schools in D.C. and yet so few in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. The article does a good job of outlining how differences in state law impact whether charter schools open - in Virginia, for instance, charter schools must get approval from the district they're proposing to take students away from. This is a likely reason that three of the four charter schools in Virginia target students at risk of dropping out - basically students the district was likely to lose anyway.

But what the article only briefly touches on is how, once a charter school has been approved and opened, districts can essentially pull the welcome mat out from under the school's (and the students') feet. Districts are under no obligation to be easy to work with in getting adequate facilities or ensuring funding is sent to the school in a timely manner, and in fact have motivation to make those processes as difficult as possible. Take the example from the article of KIPP's school in Anne Arundel County, Maryland:

In 2005, the Anne Arundel County school board rejected a charter for the Knowledge Is Power Program, one of the most successful charter-school operators in the nation, for fear of losing students. Two weeks later, amid public outcry, the board reversed itself.

But the school closed in 2007 in an acrimonious dispute over classroom space. It was the first time in 13 years a KIPP school had shut down. "Clearly, we weren't welcome," said Steve Mancini, a KIPP spokesman.

Parents and students lost a good school option, despite public demand, because the school district was able to play enough political tricks to get KIPP to leave, and the district was under no obligation to assist the school or the students attending it. When districts are able to put up political hoops that charter schools must jump through, it is the students that suffer most. These games distract charter school operators and teachers from their core mission of serving students, and instead focus attention on adult interests.

A charter school planning to open in Richmond, VA in 2010 is staring down the same obstacle course that the KIPP school faced. After getting a hard fought approval from the Richmond City School Board (it would be the only charter school in the city), the school faces continued resistance from the Board and an uncertain future because the school board--an elected body whose membership changes regularly--can revoke the charter at any time.

It is not enough to change the charter school laws in these states to make it easier to open a quality charter school - the laws also need to ensure that charters are sufficiently insulated from the politics and obstacles that districts can throw their way. Improvements in state charter school laws wouldn't just help make the lives of charter school operators a little easier - it would also protect the interests of the students and families that choose these new, public school options.

Superlatives and Scales

A friend from the business world responds to my recent post on teacher evaluations in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to describe her company's personnel assessments:

We rate employees on a 5 point scale with 1 being the best. So, say out of 100 employees, maybe 10 would be a 1. There would be a lot of 2's, maybe 20 or 25. Most employees would be a 3, maybe 50. There would be some 4's, maybe 15, and there would be just a few 5's. Fives would be on warning, they would receive no bonus, and have a limited period of time to improve or they would be terminated. There's even pressure on the 4's. I don't think a 4 is sustainable over a long time. And, of course, all this is measured against goals that we set each year.

We wouldn't want evaluations to run on a perfect normal curve, but this business model seems a lot more reasonable than one which rates a super-majority of employees as above average.
And, it prescribes specific outcomes that depend on an employee's performance.

I also got some feedback around the choice of words CPS uses from people wondering if I'd find it more palatable if they used terms a little less positive than "superior" and "excellent." That would be a start, but it would still be remarkable that 61 percent were placed in the top category and 32 percent in the second, compared to only 0.3 percent receiving the lowest mark. There's also little room for differentiation. A first year teacher who shows promise should, in an ideal system, earn a label of "developing" or "needs improvement."

Other comments suggest it won't make a difference, that tenure would protect under-performing teachers even if they earned less generous evaluations. Maybe, but these ratings are the backbone of personnel files, and any employee with superlative-laden evaluations is harder to terminate than one who has more honest appraisals.