Summer Daze

Ok, I have to admit that I've had a bit of a case of spring fever lately. The weather's gotten warmer and suddenly all I really want to think about is how soon my pool will open, when I can get in that first weekend trip to the beach, and how long I'll have to spend in the sun to get rid of the ghastly pasty white color now covering my arms and legs. I love summer, even hot, sticky, humid D.C. summers.

But the reality is that, for education policy wonks, summer should actually be a pretty grim time. During the summer months, we see a significant widening in achievement gaps between poor and affluent children. That's largely because, while summers for middle-class kids mean organized sports, day- and sleep-away camps, horizon-widening family vacations, parentally-encouraged reading for fun, and lots of other brain-stimulating and school-reinforcing activities, for lower-income kids, like many of those in my neighborhood, summer mostly means boredom, opportunities to get in trouble, and losing a lot of educational ground. Another casualty of the outdated agricultural model of public schooling.

Former Clinton economic wonk Gene Sperling writes about this in his latest column, as well as two recent policy proposals--one from Princeton economists Alan Krueger and Molly Fifer for Brookings' Hamilton Project, the other from New Vision Institute smarties Scott Winship, Matissa Hollister, Joel Horwich, Pat Sharkey, and Christopher Wimer, who are working with the Center for American Progress--that would establish government-funded summer opportunity scholarships to give disadvantaged youngsters access to the same educational opportunities middle-class families take for granted during the summer. (It's also worth noting that a number of high-performing charter schools already have created some type of summer institutes, extended school years, or summer enrichment connections to help their disadvantaged students get up to speed and stay there.)

Stay tuned for this topic--along with the weather--to heat up in the coming months.

Thanks to reader CC for the tip on this article.

More Kid Lit and a Book for Grown-ups, Too (Special Notice Readers in D.C. and Philadelphia)

Q&E's comrade-en-blog Joanne Jacobs is touring to promote both her recent book, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School that Beat the Odds. The book tells the tale of Downtown College Prep, a high-performing San Jose, Calif., charter school that serves academically disadvantaged students and prepares them to succeed in four-year-colleges.

Next week, on Thursday, May 11 at 5:30 P.M., Jacobs will be speaking and signing copies of her book in Washington, D.C., at the William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts (click link for address and contact info), a very cool performing-arts themed charter school in Northeast D.C. that currently serves children in pre-k through fifth grade. (WEDJ eventually plans to expand to serve students through high school). Attendees will also be treated to a musical performance by the school's students.

Then, on Wednesday, May 17, also at 5:30 P.M., Jacobs will speak and sign books at the Russell Byers Charter School in Center City Philadelphia (click link for school address and info).

Both events are open to the public free of charge, and no advance registration is required. Jacobs does request, however, that guests bring a children's book to donate to the schools' libraries. Here are a few ideas.

The Yale - Taliban Connection

The NYTimes reports that Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former spokesman and roving ambassador for the Taliban who is currently taking classes at Yale, has formally applied for admission to a degree-granting program at the university.

There appear to be two arguments for why Hashemi belongs at Yale. The first is that he would benefit from a Yale education. Well, sure. Who wouldn't? There are a thousand times more people for whom that is true than Yale has space for. Why choose him? Why not give the golden ticket in the American education lottery to someone less morally compromised, like one of the countless Afghan women the Taliban barred from school?

That leads to the second argument, which is that Yale would benefit from having Hashemi as a student:

In a statement issued in March, the university said: "We acknowledge that some are criticizing Yale for allowing Mr. Hashemi to take courses here, but we hope that critics will also acknowledge that universities are places that must strive to increase understanding, especially of the most difficult issues that face the nation and the world."

Mr. Hashemi worked for the Office of Foreign Affairs under the Taliban, serving initially as a translator and then as a diplomat in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. He was named a roving ambassador in 2000, traveling to the Middle East and Europe. He toured the United States early in 2001, speaking at Yale and several other universities and appearing on public television and radio; he defended the abridgement of women's rights by the Taliban and the destruction of huge Buddhist statues, among other things.

The "abridgement" of women's rights? Abridgement is a, shall we say, somewhat muted way of characterizing things like shooting women in the back of the head with a rifle in a soccer stadium full of cheering spectators. Just to take one example of many.

The supposed benefits of Hashemi's presence seems to be animated by the idea that only through communication and understanding can we ultimately come to reconciliation and peace. As a principle of human relations, I agree with this idea wholeheartedly. But where is the supposed lack of understanding here? Is there any outstanding ambiguity left to resolve regarding the Taliban, any uncertainty as to what it's done or what it stands for? This is an organization that has defined itself in the most unambiguous terms imaginable.

Some would say principles of diversity and tolerance are only meaningful when defended at unpopular extremes. But this is a case of worthy principles extended to illogical lengths, to the point of obvious self-contradiction. It's clear that the relatively small number of universities with the luxury of choosing the composition of their student bodies have a powerful--if somewhat vague-preference for diversity along a large number of dimensions. Again, a good thing. But does it make sense to extend the principle of diversity to people who have aided and abetted regimes that are ruthlessly preoccupied with stamping out diversity by deadly means, particularly when it comes at the expense of some other student?

Kid Lit Is the Answer to Everything

This hillarious Slate article by Jacob Weisberg,* about how impossible it is to comprehend, let alone sing, our national anthem, put me in mind of this episode from one of my favorite children's books:**

Next Miss Binney taught the class the words of a puzzling song about "the dawnzer lee light," which Ramona did not understand because she did not know what a dawnzer was. "Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney, and Ramona decided that a dawnzer was another word for a lamp.

Once again reinforcing my belief that you can learn everything you could possible want to know about a culture from reading its children's books and childrearing manuals.

*Hat tip to Matt Yglesias.

**The first person who e-mails me the title and author of this book gets a free copy of A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom, which, sadly, is not children's literature but is, according to Amazon, a $49.95 value.

UPDATE: Congrats to Marjorie Cohen, who was the first to correctly identify the source of this excerpt as being Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary.

The Lou Dobbs Award for Shameless Opportunism

So there I am last Friday, on vacation, sitting with my lovely wife in a bar about 100 yards from the beach on Grand Cayman. Temperature in the low 80s, sun starting to set over the clear blue-green ocean waters. Thoughts of upcoming snorkeling trip (see right) make me happy. A warm tropical breeze is blowing through my hair as I drink my second (third? fifth?) glass of the local rum/pineapple/coconut concoction.* I am relaxed, and (not coincidentally) education policy is far from my mind.

Then I glance at the television hanging above the bar, and what do I see? CNN, and the regularly scheduled broadcast of "Lou Dobbs Hates Foreign People." Lou is talking about high school graduation rates for Latino students.

My shoulders tense. Hard-won relaxation drains away. Quickly, I beckon to the bartender, a deeply-tanned ex-pat Australian scuba diver named Nigel, for a third (seventh?) concoction. But it's too late.

Lou explains to his audience that because the borders are broken, our great nation is being overrun by illegal Mexican immigrants who are overwhelming our hospitals by selling computer technology to the Chinese, who then outsource IT jobs to Bangalore, which inevitably leaves us vulnerable to infiltration by Al Qaeda agents entering the country in uninspected shipping containers arriving at foreign-owned ports. This can be proved by the fact that the nationwide Hispanic high school graduation rate is barely 50%.

Lou's mostly right on this last point--on-time Hispanic high school graduation rates are much too low. He just didn't bother to mention that most of those Hispanic students aren't immigrants, illegal or otherwise, or that graduation rates for black students are equally low. Or that these numbers were bad long before the current wave of immigration. (For some more actual data on education and immigration, see this month's Charts You Can Trust).

But in briefly entering the education arena in pursuit of another, non-education agenda, Lou isn't breaking any new ground. This kind of thing unfortunately happens all the time. From creationism and school prayer to sex education and "self-esteem instruction," people with all manner of axes to grind use the public schools as a convenient forum for other cultural and societal debates.

Thus, we at the The Quick and The Ed are hereby instituting the "Lou Dobbs Award for Shameless Opportunism," given to people who thoughtlessly wade into education policy debates for reasons that have nothing to do with actually helping students or improving schools. Nominations for future awards are welcome.

*Concoction Recipe:
2,3, or 4 parts dark Caribbean rum (depending on circumstances, i.e. need to counteract effects of Dobbsian television broadcasts)
4 parts pineapple juice
1 part cream of coconut
1 part orange juice
Serve over ice, top with shavings of fresh nutmeg

The Best We Can Expect?

I don't want to overplay the reasons why I don't think Newsweek's "America's Best High Schools" list lives up to it's name, but, now that I've had a chance to look at this year's list, I've got a bit more to say.

One of the things I found most striking, when Andy and I were putting together our analysis of schools on last year's list, was that several schools in the "Top 100" reported half or fewer of their African American students graduating. All of those schools are still on Newsweek's list this year. (I haven't had a chance yet to see if any addition schools on this year's list have similarly low graduation rates.) Considering that a lot of states are still grossly underreporting the percentage of students who fail to graduate, this troubled me. Certainly, we know from research by the Manhattan Institute and Urban Institute that only slightly more than half of African American students nationwide graduate in four years, but shouldn't the schools on a list of the nation's "best" be doing better than that, rather than a little bit worse?

Now, Jay Mathews, who created the list, argues that including graduation rates in the analysis would mean high-poverty, high-minority schools will never make Newsweek's list of Top 100 schools, because their populations ensure they will have high drop-out rates. But I think that gives some of the schools on his list more credit than they deserve.

For example, Atlantic Community High School, in Delray Beach, Florida, ranked #25 on Newsweek's list, reported a 50 percent graduation rate for its African American students in 2004, according to its detailed NCLB report card from the Florida Department of Education. About 45 percent of the school's 2,000+ students are African American, and about 35 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. That's not an affluent, lilly-white suburban school, like many on Newsweek's list, but it's not "high-poverty, high-minority," either. In fact, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at Atlantic Community is lower than the statewide average in Florida, which is 46 percent. Now, I think it's a scandal that nearly half of Florida's kids are economically disadvantaged, but does that mean we shouldn't expect the state's high schools to get more than half their black students to graduation?

Further, there are schools on Jay's own list that prove him wrong. For example, this year's school #87, YES College Preparatory School in Houston, Texas, has a student enrollment that is 92 percent Hispanic, 5 percent black, and has 75 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch--a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students than all but one other school in Newsweek's list. But YES reports a 93.9 percent graduation rate, and 100 percent of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges.

Atlantic may be doing great things for some of its students, but a method that ranks it higher than YES seems to defy common sense.

There's no May 1 Heffalump, either

But there is a series of immigration-related protests taking place nationwide, as some advocates have called for immigrants to boycott work and school to participate in protests and demonstrate their economic significance to the country. The "boycott" isn't universally supported within the movement. Schools and a number of pro-immigrant leaders have urged students to attend classes rather than participating in protests, and many districts have put parents and students on notice that those who skip school to attend the rallies will be disciplined. Nevertheless a reported quarter of middle and high school students in the predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles Unifed School District are absent today.

I'm torn about this issue. On the one hand, education is key to the opportunity that immigrants come the this country to pursue, so their children should be attending school today to help them take advantage of that opportunity. On the other hand, what could be a more American lesson for children to learn than how, through grassroots organizing, a large group of people with little individual power can make those in power listen to them? Of course, the corrolary to this lesson is that true civic disobedience means accepting the consequences of one's actions, so students who do violate compulsory attendance laws and school policies to participate in protests deserve to be punished.

But there's something else that troubled me, too. We know that many of the schools that enroll large numbers of immigrants or their kids are not succeeding. There is a large achievement gap between white and Hispanic students; drop-out rates for Hispanic students--especially males--are abysmal; and overall we're not doing a great job educating English language learners. And organized, empowered parents and communities are critical to addressing these problems. Wouldn't it be cool if these protests generate longer-term political organizing that gives parents a voice and the skills to advocate for their kids? Then we might start to see more of this kind of thing happening. I'm not holding my breathe, though.

In Related News:

Alexander Russo notes that, in contrast to past waves of anti-immigration sentiment, this time around there's not as much talk about the cost of educating illegal immigrant students.

Of course, that might be partly because, as Kevin Carey points out in the latest Charts You Can Trust, undocumented immigrants are just a teensy percentage of children in our public schools. Kevin's got lots of other interesting factoids on immigrants in public education, so be sure to check out his timely piece.

(Over)Simply the Best?

Newsweek's annual list of America's Best High Schools is up online now. Earlier this year, Andy and I wrote a piece raising some concerns with Newsweek's methodology--particularly how the list ignores schools' graduation rates and equity between student subgroups in a school. Jay Mathews, who creates the list, has been kind enough to engage with Andy and me in a dialogue about those concerns, which he mentions in this story.

This year there are two changes in Newsweek's rankings. First, Mathews et. al. opened the list up to include more schools that admit students on a competitive basis (previously, schools that selected more than half of their students competitively were excluded). Second, each school's information is now accompanied by an "Equity and Excellence Percentage" (E and E%), which reflects the percentage of a school's senior class that passed at least one AP exam. The E and E% is an interesting idea, but I think it would be more useful if Newsweek allowed readers to look at the two different pieces of information that comprise it--1.) across what share of a school's students the AP tests that contribute to the school's ranking are distributed, and 2.) how students performed on those tests--separately, since they are very different concepts. (Just to be clear: Newsweek doesn't have these two separate pieces of information and combine them to create the E and E %. But the E and E %, as calculated, conflates those two pieces of information into one statistic.)

And, if you want to know what I really think, check me out on Newsweek radio, here.

What Did the National Charter Schools Week Heffalump Bring You, Sara?

Ok, so there's really no such thing as a National Charter Schools Week Heffalump, and I didn't wake up and find a backpack full of jelly beans and school supplies on my doorstep this morning, nor has the charter community received any great policy treats so far this week. But this week is National Charter Schools Week, anyway. Learn more here.

Shorting the Shorties

Normally, I find stories about the preschool admissions rat-race even more annoying (if that's possible) than Kevin finds stories about increasingly competitive college admissions.

But this WaPo article on the increasing scarcity of high-quality preschool spaces in the D.C. Metro Area is actually pretty good*. The author is focusing on a real concern: The population of kids in the D.C. Metro Area is growing, in part due to immigration, and parents, increasingly aware of the educational benefits of preschool, are more likely to send their children to preschool. But the supply of quality preschool programs isn't growing as rapidly. This means it's harder for parents to find quality preschool programs for their children, because there simply aren't enough spaces to meet demand. It's difficult for preschool programs to expand, because of a lack of both facilities, due to rapid growth and still-tight real estate markets in D.C., and qualified teachers.

Yet the underlying problem here is the economics of preschool itself. Running a high-quality preschool is not particularly lucrative. The margins are low. Many centers barely break even. Ability to raise prices in response to increased demand is limited because of limits on the amount most parents can pay: Affluent families can pay preschool tuitions in excess of what most private colleges charge, but working and middle class parents are already pretty strapped financially, so they are forced to choose lower quality care rather than paying more.

Ironically, while federal, state, and local governments provide a lot of support for K-12 and higher education, government aid for education is hardest to come by at time in children's lives--early childhood and preschool years--when parents may be least likely to make educational investments themselves. Parents of young children tend to be younger and earlier in their careers (and in the case of women, more likely to be working only part time) than parents of older children--meaning they have less ability to pay for education than when their children are older. Further, research shows that investments in early learning have lots of positive externalities--reductions in public education remediation and special ed costs, prevention of future crime and welfare dependency--that parents don't take into account when making choices about preschool.

These market conditions are classic rationales for increased government intervention and investment in helping parents provide high-quality early learning opportunities for their children. Yet only Georgia and Oklahoma now have universal pre-k statewide, and Head Start and childcare subsidies are chronically underfunded. As we're seeing in California right now, critics of increased preschool investments often argue that providing greater government funding for preschool will exacerbate the shortage of preschool spaces. But, while this may be true in the short run, particularly if policymakers guarantee publicly-supported programs are high-quality (as they should), in the long run increased government support may be the only way to ensure an adequate supply of quality preschool--both for families that need assistance and those that are able to pay the full cost.

*(One gripe: The author conflates preschool and child care in several instances, a serious, but unfortunately all too common, error in both media coverage and policy debates about early childhood education.)

Additional Thought: The difficulty many parents face finding affordable, quality preschool for their children in the D.C. area makes stuff like this even harder to swallow. (Disc: I'm on Appletree's board.)

Shameless Self-Promotion

Nope, I'm not complaining about CNN's latest sensationalist "teacher-does-stupid-things" headline. I'm just putting in an utterly shameless plug for folks to come see me perform in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream this weekend (more info and tickets here).

It's a family-friendly production, so if you have children (or just know some) and want to a.) Build their cultural literacy (if you're an E.D. Hirsch fan), or b.) compensate for drama cutbacks due to the narrowing of curriculum in schools due to NCLB (despite Andy's efforts to debunk this), this is a terrific (and relatively affordable) opportunity to do so.

Feed Me!

Among the usual policy debates in the education think tank world about teacher quality, statistical accuracies, or value-added, it's easy to forget that there are kids facing every-day struggles that are more fundamental to basic survival that anything we usually address.

When you come across a story like this, it's an important reminder that sometimes teachers help kids in ways that we don't always recognize or appreciate.

Teacher Kayla Brown realized that some of her Texas elementary school students' underperformance was due to the stark reality that they were literally too hungry to think. In a lesson-filled example of public/private partnership, Kayla teamed up with other teachers and her local church to start a Backpack Buddies program in which teachers snuck brown bags of donated food into students' backpacks when the kids were out at recess. What were the results? The kids got more food, their performance and attitudes went up, and they were saved the social embarrassment of being seen taking handouts.

It's shocking that in this land of plenty some kids don't get enough to eat. And while the government provides food stamps and a free and reduced price lunch program in some public schools, both require a level of agency (on the part of parents or students) that doesn't always make it possible for kids to stave off hunger. What do kids who rely on meals at school do on weekends? How useful are food stamps if kids' parents don't bother to sign up for them? Just as bad, sometimes the food that kids do get from parents or schools is of such low quality, that kids still end up with nutritional deficiencies or—ironically—obesity problems.

Since there's an obvious limit to the efficacy of public welfare, especially in the context of using education policy to address all facets of poverty, we should hope that programs like Backpack Buddies will inspire more partnerships between schools and the community groups that help students in these most basic but profound ways.

For all we think and talk about test scores and accountability, sometimes we need a little reminder that it's hard to measure the value added by a teacher like Kayla Brown.

Posted by Ethan Gray

Spellings Calls Testing Execs on Carpet: Just a Photo Op or Start of Real Reform?

CNN reports that U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings called in executives from major testing companies--including ETS, maker of the error-plagued SAT--for a meeting to discuss the industry's ability to meet the growing demand for standardized tests.

It's great that the Secretary is addressing this issue, which Education Sector's Thomas Toch analyzed in a recent paper suggesting that the testing industry is buckling under the pressure of meeting the new demand for tests created by NCLB. But two questions remain unanswered:

1) Is this meeting merely a chance for the Secretary to show public concern? Or will she use the opportunity to advocate for needed reforms at the federal level, including more financial support for state testing, incentives for colleges to train new psychometricians, and a national oversight board to monitor test quality?

2) Is she only worried about test accuracy? Because while high-profile SAT errors have put the focus on scoring accuracy, the biggest long-term problem with the assessment industry is arguably test quality. States and testing companies struggling to test more students in more subjects in less time seem to be falling back on inexpensive, quick-to-score multiple choice tests that don't assess the higher-order thinking skills students need to learn.

NYTimes Account of Mobile College Students Inaccurate and Overblown

The cover article for the New York Times Education Life section this weekend dealt with the allegedly fast-growing phenomenon of mobile college students. Like all well-written articles, it makes it's main point succinctly in the first two paragraphs:

ERIN MADDEN laughs a little self-consciously referring to what she calls "my college tour." Not the kind that high school students take to look at potential campuses; hers started after she went to college and discovered she didn't like her choice. She transferred to another, and another, and another, and another, ultimately ending up with five colleges on her transcript when she graduated last year.

It wasn't collegiate life as she once imagined it. But it wasn't so unconventional, either. These days, a majority of students take a similarly nomadic path to a degree; about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades.

This is a great example of education journalism that takes a complicated issue and boils it down to a message that's clear, understandable, and mostly wrong.

The biggest mistake lies with the key supporting statistic: "60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution." This is incorrect. 60 percent of graduating students earn credits from more than one institution. This includes students who study abroad for a semester, earn credits at a local college while in high school, or pick up a few classes at a community college over the summer.

In other words, 60 percent of graduates could be characterized as multi-institution students. There are signficantly fewer mobile students who actually transfer from one institution and "attend" another. It is simply wrong to say that the "majority" of students take a "nomadic" path that is any way similar to that of Erin Madden.

For example, the same report that provides the data source for the 60% figure shows that 67% of people who earn a B.A. get it from the first institution in which they enrolled. That includes people who began in 2-year colleges and transferred; if you look at students who, like Erin Madden, began their college careers at 4-year institutions, 80% get their degree where they started.

Moreover, the assertion that the phenomenon of the multi-institution student has "risen steadily over at least the last two decades" is, at best, a broad overstatement. Again, going back to the data source for the key 60% number, here's the percent of B.A. recipients who earned credits from more than one institution in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's:

1970s: 57.2%
1980s: 58.0%
1990s: 59.4%

In other words, the net impact impact of this alleged sea change in the behavior of college students is 2.2 percentage points over 20 years. Why, then, all the attention to this issue?

Partly because it seems so consistent with other pop-culture notions of what those crazy young people are doing these days, offering opportunities for the kind of easy analogies that are too often irresisitable to journalists. The article says:

[It]makes sense for the so-called millennial generation, students famously lacking in brand loyalty, used to having things their way, and can-do about changing anything they don't like. As with other commodities, students are looking for that magic combination of quality, affordability and convenience. They shun CD's to create their own iPod playlists; is it any surprise they shape their own course catalogs? "Everybody can customize it the way they want it," says Ms. Madden, now 24 and working at a Cape Cod media company that runs radio stations and a Web site. "In the world we live in, with the Internet making things so accessible, we try to find what we like."

College attendance patterns and iPods? Really, it's all the same thing, man.

More importantly, higher education institutions have a vested interest in promoting the idea that most students jump willy-nilly from campus to campus, even though that's in no way true. Why? Because it provides a powerful-counterargument against those who want to hold institutions more accountable for whether college students graduate and how much they learn.

If college students start at one institution and either succeed or fail there--and make no mistake, this is still the typical pattern for most people who attend 4-year institutions--then it's reasonable to say that the institution bears some responsibility for that success or failure.

If, however, most students attend multiple institutions, than institutional responsibility is safely diffused. That's why representatives of the higher education establishment love citing the 60% number, it's their way of saying "Students these days, they come, they go--what can we do?"

50% X 33% X 35% = Total Systemic Failure

The Consortium on Chicago School Research issued a comprehensive and important report last week studying how Chicago Public School students succeed or fail in finishing high school, going to college, and earning a bachelor's degree.

On a basic level, the results could not be worse. Literally. Only about half of all students who enter CPS graduate from high school on time. Of those, only about one-third immediately enroll at four-year colleges and universities. Of those, only 35% earn a B.A. within six years. Multiply those three numbers together and you get the B.A. attainment rate for Chicago high school freshmen cited by the Chicago press here and here: 6%.

For black students, particularly men, the results were even worse: only 22% of black male college entrants graduated in six years, which combined with low high school graduation and college entrance drives their overall B.A. attainment rate measured from the beginning of high school forward to near 3%.

Think of it this way: if you sat down and deliberately created an education system designed to prevent disadvantaged students from getting through college, the difference between that system and the one we've got would pretty much be within the statistical margin of error.

There's also some great data showing how some colleges and universities are much more successful than others in helping CPS graduates earn degrees, even after controlling for students' high school academic characteristics. For example, while over 70% of CPS students with a 3.5 high school GPA graduated from Loyola University Chicago, less than 50% of similar students graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. And less than 20% of 3.5 GPA students graduated from Northeastern Illinois University.

When asked to account for low graduation rates, colleges and universities tend to put the onus on financial aid, high school preparation, student motivation--pretty much everything except themselves. These data show that what institutions do matters too, and some are far better destinations for Chicago students than others.

To their credit, CPS leaders avoided the defensiveness and denial that often accompanies critical education reports and vowed to use the results as guide for improvement. Here's one suggestion: give every CPS guidance counselor a copy of the chart with the institution-by-institution graduation rates broken down by GPA (it's on page 81 of the report) and suggest that they steer their brightest students away from places like Urbana Champaign and Northern Illinois.

It's All So Clear Now

Normally I leave charter school issues to my colleagues Eduwonk and Sara Mead. But this morning's front page article in the WaPo struck me as too obvious to pass up.

It details how DC Public Schools is considering a novel arrangement with KIPP, one of the city's most successful charter schools. KIPP wants to start a new middle school, but is having a hard time finding space. Meanwhile, one the regular DCPS elementary schools is losing enrollment and thus has too much space, to the point that it's in danger of being closed. Thus, the arrrangement: co-locate in the same building, don't overlap grades, and coordinate curricula so students from the elementary school can stay in the building and go to the KIPP middle school if that's what they want to do.

Sounds great, right? Not to DC school board vice president Carolyn Graham, who'se worried that if the district helps expand a popular, high-performing charter school to which lots of parents want to send their children, lots of parents will send their children. She said:

"We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability," she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. "We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students would benefit."

Hmmm. You know, that's kind of wordy, let's tighten that up a little:

"We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability," she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. "We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students I would benefit."

There we go. Much more clear.

It's true that more students in charter schools means less students in DCPS. But if you're going to complain about that, you've got to at least make an attempt to say why that would be bad, particularly wih the test scores, parental demand, and the best judgment of the DCPS superintendant providing evidence to the country. The fact that Graham offers nothing of the kind is enormously telling.

Ignorance is Strength, We Have Always Been at War with Eastasia, Holding Schools Accountable for Minority Achievement Hurts Minority Students

Yesterday the AP continued it's week-long inadvertent expose of muddled thinking about NCLB with an article titled "Law raises fear of more school segregation."

NCLB unexpectedly hurting the very students it's designed to help! Man, that would be quite a story if it were, what's the word...oh, right: true. But the story offers little evidence, starting thus:

No one...disagrees with [the] contention that Connecticut hasn't always given its poor and minority students an education as good as it's given its rich and white students. No one thinks the gap between the two systems is a good thing. And no one wants the disparities to continue. In the past, the main hurdle has been money...But now, [Connecticut state education commissioner and noted anti-NCLB litigant Betty] Sternberg says, there's another hurdle: the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"We've had a reluctance on the part of school districts to accept youngsters who come in with deficiencies because they're concerned that if they get enough of them ... they'll become labeled as failing schools," she says.

It's a problem that many experts believe is confounding an effort to eliminate the racial achievement gap on standardized annual tests. That's because the law requires schools to demonstrate that students in specific racial, social and economic groups are making annual progress. A school fails if even one group fails. The more groups in a school, the greater chance for failure.

How do school districts not admit students who live within the district's legal geographic boundaries? Which districts is Sternberg talking about? What's she doing to prevent that from happening? Or is this all just complete supposition?

Also, "many experts" believe this? Such as? Two are cited. First Jonathan Kozol says:

"The really rich and ritzy suburbs that don't participate in any form of integration...[are] going to be rewarded for their selfishness. They're going to be rewarded for their racial insularity because they're not admitting any kids who are at any academic risk. They're not admitting any kids who had been previously studying, for perhaps the first six years of school, in a rotten, overcrowded school."

Again, how exactly do the ritzy suburbs pull this off? Does anyone have an example, even one, of an actual low-performing minority student being illegally turned away from an actual rich white school district? If they did, don't you think that would have made it's way into the story?Moreover, assuming Kozol is right, are we to believe that NCLB has changed that attitude, that the selfish suburbs were previously welcoming these students with open arms?

Expert #2 is:

Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education, [who] works with Chicago public schools and has heard some parents complain about the treatment of inner city children when they move to suburban schools. "I have heard that there is a resentment toward those kids because they are dragging those schools down in the lists," Radner said.

"I have heard..." Case closed! Remember the end of Ocean's Eleven, where George Clooney purposefully makes up the weakest conceivable story about his knowledge of the casino robbery to fool Andy Garcia? The story begins "I know a guy...."

The rest of the article focuses on some inner-city schools which, contra Sternberg, are succeeding despite having lots of low-income and minority students. To wit:

Wedged in a poor, gritty immigrant neighborhood, Henry C. Dwight Elementary School near downtown Hartford, defies the odds. It harks back to an earlier era of learning. Its ceilings are high, there is a fireplace in the library and students wear uniforms as they dart between classrooms. The oldest public school in one of the nation's oldest cities, Dwight finds itself at the center of a growing national debate over whether the nation's newest education experiment is -- unexpectedly -- encouraging school segregation.

Dwight's population is racially and economically diverse, making its future under the law uncertain even though it is currently meeting its goals. The law stresses getting students proficient in math and reading by 2014, the school's principal, Stacey McCann, says. "They're (federal officials) not validating the incremental successes, but we are making great gains," says McCann, who supports the law. "I believe schools ... are making gains, but they might not make the mark that has been set."

When Congress passed the landmark law in 2001, Dwight was one of Hartford's worst-rated schools and exactly the type of multiracial, underperforming school the government intended to pressure to improve. So far, Dwight has. It has met its annual goals under the law even though it has eight special groups it must report to the government and a student population that hails from 21 countries

Okay. So there's a school full of low-income and minority students. Presumably this was just as true before NCLB as it is today. And despite having lots of disadvantaged students, it's doing well, thus proving that those students can in fact learn, and as such removing the incentive for rich white public schools to not admit those students, which they're not allowed to do legally anyway, and which we've been given no real evidence that they're actually doing, and which they were presumably doing prior to NCLB if they're doing it at all, as evidenced by the fact that they they were then and are now rich and white.

Let's say, purely for the sake of argument, that despite being a good school the malignant forces of poverty eventually catch up with Henry C. Dwight Elementary and it falls short of the 2014 goals. How would that affect segregation, one way or the other? It's already segregated. It's already full of minority students. If the school is labeled as inadequate under NCLB, wouldn't that increase the incentive for parents to say "Hey, I'm going to try to get my kid into that rich white school that isn't labeled as inadequate?"

What am I missing?

N Size Fits All

Monday's AP story about minority students being excluded from NCLB accountability calculations has generated enough commotion among legislators and commentators to warrant...another AP story, about said commotion.

I've been of two minds (or hands) on this. On the one hand, I'm a hard-liner on the various bureaucratic gambits and statistical trap-doors currently being used by state departments of educations to relieve pressure on local school systems to close the achievement gap. They're ridiculous, getting worse, and need to stop.

On the other hand--and this is reluctantly the hand I'm going with--both the article and the subsequent react have an unmistakable (yes, Eduwonk got there first) shocked, shocked air about them that in the long run doesn't help the cause.

The original article plays up the fact that "an Associated Presss computer analysis found..." Wait. A "computer analysis"? As opposed to what, an abacus analysis? Is that supposed to lend the article some kind of super-scientific gravitas? Anyway, the "computer" analysis found that minorities make up the "vast majority of students whose scores are excluded." Well, right. Because the thing about minority students is that there are, you know, fewer of them. If you implement a provision that excludes scores from smaller groups of students, and you base those groups on race/ethnicity, than it's to be expected that smaller racial/ethnic groups will be excluded more.

The react article doesn't add much. Various Congressional leaders pledge to investigate these new revelations of provisions that have been common knowledge for years. The recently-formed Commission on No Child Left Behind issued a press release saying:

"This story by the Associated Press is alarming and, unfortunately, confirmed by much of the Commission's own work. If the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is to ensure that all children meet State standards, then allowing large numbers of the most disadvantaged children to fall between the cracks is unacceptable. The issues raised in this article only further reinforce the need to come up with realistic solutions that actually make NCLB a better tool to close the achievement gap. The practices raised in this article have had the effect of making these children invisible and speak to greater transparency over how this law is implemented."

Small point: transparency is arguably the cause of these problems, not the solution. As states have pushed the envelope on adopting large thresholds for excluding minority students from AYP calculations, other states have noticed and followed suit.

Large point: Neither the Commission nor the various allegedly alarmed commentators nor the authors of either article seem especially interested in grappling with the issue of how many minority students should be excluded from AYP calculations. 1.9 million may very well be too high, but the right number isn't zero. Statistically speaking, it doesn't make sense to hold a school accountable for the scores of a tiny number of students, and when you add up tiny numbers from 90,000 schools nationwide, the sum is not so tiny at all.

Moreover, the issue in question--minimum subgroup sizes--is one of a whole range of factors to consider in constructing AYP calculations, including confidence intervals, grade bands, multi-year aggregation, etc. etc. Depending on how you combine these various adjustments, subgroups of different sizes can be appropriate. A small minimum subgroup size with an ultra-permissive 99-percent confidence interval, for example, could exclude more students than a medium-sized minimum subgroup size with no confidence interval. Taking one element of the AYP calculation in isolation oversimplifies the issue to the extreme.

Final point: The most moderate voice on this issue in either story comes from Ross Wiener at the Education Trust:

"The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students' scores don't have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust. While the exemptions were created for good reasons, there's little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law."

Tip: There is no organization on the planet more adamant about preserving the role of NCLB in identifying schools that aren't serving poor and minority students than the Education Trust (my former employer). If you find yourself farther out on the edge on these issues than EdTrust, you've crossed the line from serious analysis and commentary and need to turn around and make your way back.

Labor vs. Education? Surely Not.

In the Washington Post this morning, Harold Myerson, in criticizing the new "Hamilton Project," has this to say about the project's focus on education:

"The authors place great stress on improving American education -- a commendable and unexceptionable goal, but one that may do little to retard the export of our jobs since, as they acknowledge, it's increasingly the knowledge jobs that are going to India and even China.

How's that?

After all, the conventional wisdom is that we need to invest in the education system precisely because of increased competition for knowledge jobs from India and China. I'm not a flat-earth Kool-aid drinker by any means, but the basic point is right: Mobile capital and advances in telecommunications mean that if companies can hire smart, well-educated people for less money on the other side of the world, they will. Since we can't compete in the global labor market on price, our only option is to be smarter and more-well educated. Thus, education is increasingly important.

Has Myerson uncovered some brilliantly counter-intuitive argument here that he just didn't have the space to share with his readers because he was too busy taking shots at Robert Rubin?

Not really.

This is actually just a somewhat oblique and half-hearted attempt to push an argument that's popular with labor folks these days: education is worth less in the labor market than it used to be (a, shall we say, highly-debatable point), globalization is bad, we can't compete with the Indians and Chinese, so the only alternative is high trade barriers and strong unions.

I'm not against strong unions and frankly I'm glad the Post has at least one columnist who cares about labor issues and talks about them frequently. But to set the interests of workers and the interests of education reform in opposition to one another is a terrible and counter-productive idea, both as a matter of policy and politics.

CNN strikes back

Obviously worried that ABC News was poised to wrest away naming rights to the Quick+ED sensationalism award with last weak's teacher sex/murder double dip, Cnn.com goes down and dirty--literally--and adds an oh-so-topical immigration angle with this story:

"Buckets Used as Bathrooms in School Lockdown"

As a side note, I've got say, big props for whoever writes the headlines at CNN. There are all kinds of jobs in this world, and I've always admired people who take quotidian jobs and inject them with a certain undeniable genius and creativity, simply for their own sake. Even when the net effect is to degrade the national education dialogue and make our world just a little bit coarser and less worth living in, you have to admire the dedication.