Yes, I'm Going To College (Unless I Go Pro)

A new NCES report about high school sophomores shows that most of them "plan and expect" to earn a 4-year college degree or higher. The racial breakdown shows this to be true for 77 percent of black students, 87 percent of Asian students, 81 percent of white students, and 73 percent of Latino students. Almost all (93 percent) of high income kids, 79 percent of middle income kids and 66 percent of the lowest income kids say they'll receive at least a bachelor's degree.

These percentages are all big jumps from 1980 and 1990- not so surprising really since we've done a pretty good job advertising that a college education is valuable and ultimately the gateway to the middle class. And since everyone basically believes they are middle-class, it's not surprising that most would probably think they would go to college.

Sadly, we know many of them won't go and many more won't graduate.

Which brings me to my neighbor, who at age fourteen will look you straight in the eye and tell you he plans to be a professional basketball player. This despite the fact that he does not play on his school's basketball team, nor has he (in the four years I've known him) ever participated in a team sport. When I point this out to him, he waves me off and I realize that while one part of him is genuinely planning to go pro there is another part of him that knows he won't. Will he go to college? Yes, he says. But he's taking pre-algebra again and doesn't know what the PSAT is when I ask him. I also ask him what college he plans to go to. He doesn't know and doesn't want to answer. He's not looking at me straight anymore and I think he realizes–now that we're really talking about it–that his options are pretty limited.

My neighbor's no exception. A sociologist at UNC-Charlotte, Roslyn Mickelson, wrote an article back in the 90s about a phenomenon she called the attitude-achievement paradox. Focused on mostly low-income Black students, she found through her research that student attitudes operate on two different levels. These kids know that college is highly valued in society and so express positive attitudes about it. But on another level, the one rooted in their daily lives where college graduation is the exception not the norm, they realize that the path to college is not so clear for them. Ask these kids if college is important and they will convincingly agree. Ask them if they plan to go and they will nod with certainty. Then ask them how they will get from here to there. They may pause, shrug or say they'll figure it out later but they probably won't start describing their course schedules, college application materials, and financial aid options.

All this to say that these kids really don't need us to emphasize how and why college is so important (stay in school! college grads earn more!). They need some concrete knowledge and skills and support to navigate the not-so-obvious and never easy process of getting from where they are to where they "plan and expect" (and deserve) to get.

Village People

“It takes a Village” was the refrain of this morning’s policy breakfast forum held by the D.C. State Education Office on it’s new report, “Double the Numbers for College Success: A Call to Action for the District of Columbia.” In response to the report’s conclusion that 9 out of 100 D.C. students complete college on a traditional timeline, a wide range of ‘villagers’ at the forum stated their commitment to improving college access and attainment for D.C. students.

While it may have confirmed what many on the panel and in the audience already sensed, this report provided the important service of establishing common ground – that 9% college graduation is much too low – for a wide variety of education advocates whose agendas sometimes conflict. Instead of promoting individual agendas, the theme today was collaboration, as a wide range of speakers – parents, university presidents, council members, the mayor and superintendent – emphasized the need for a commitment from everyone in the city.

I don’t want to rain on the village parade with all the encouraging talk of collaboration and commitment (no sarcasm there, it really was encouraging), but I’ve got to push the question – “Double the Numbers” is just a start, right? It will certainly be an achievement, but an 18% college graduation rate can’t be the finish line.

P.S. An interesting element of the report is the wide range in DC students’ graduation rates at various universities. Among the top three universities DC students attend, graduation rates were 9% at UDC, 12% at Howard, and 51% at Trinity University. As the report states, this emphasizes the need to help students understand that not all colleges are created equal when it comes to getting students to graduate, and key to increasing graduation rates is encouraging students to attend institutions that have the most success with low-income and minority students.

Department of Odd Juxtapositions

Both from NYT's ten most e-mailed:

"Preschoolers Grow Older as Parents Seek an Edge"

"Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes"


Hint: Moms and Dads, if you're kid's growing pubic hair, it's probably time to let him/her move on to kindergarten.

Getting on the Little People Bandwagon

The Century Foundation hearts preschool. And they think it should be universal, not targeted.

Stupid and Happy

So, does Brookings' Tom Loveless know how to work the press or what? It's all about the counterintuitive, kids. The latest Brown Center Report on American Education shows that kids in countries with higher average math test scores are less likely to say they enjoy math and are good at it than kids from countries with lower test scores, which is not quite the same as "Happy, Confident Students Do Worse than Math," but, hey, what's it matter. I mean, I was miserable in high school and I did very well in math, so it must be true, right?

It's not surprising the report got most attention for its most counterintutive finding, but I actually think it's a lot less interesting than the report's other sections, which looked at trends on the main and long-term NAEP (scores are up in math, stagnant in reading and science, and high school students are faring worst of all the age groups), and whether or not differences in state performance on NAEP and their own state tests means states are "gaming the system" by lowering their standards, an interesting question relevant to the renewed interest in national standards. Most interesting, IMHO: Loveless suggests that the poor NAEP performance of high schoolers may reflect their tendency to screw around on the test. Teenagers screwing around?!?! Who knew?

Learning on the Brain

Writing in the fall American Educator cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham explains why much of the hype about brain-based learning is just that, and he proceeds to eviscerate several popular "brain science"-based education myths, including the myth that schools are designed for left-brained students, the myth that schools are designed to suit girls' brains, and the myth that classical musical is critical to stimulating young children's brains. Well worth reading.

Gratuitous Edu Catblogging

Joe Williams reports that the NYC Department of Education is cracking down on rats and mice in the city's schools, following a NY Post report that 360 school cafeterias were rife with the vermin. Ewww! Hope none of them are participating in Erin's cook-off. Jelly, pictured here, offers her services to the students of New York.

Spending Limit Silliness

AFTie Ed has been posting extensively on the issue of state Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiatives. He thinks they're bad for education, and he's absolutely right.

TABOR provisions--often implemented via ballot iniative or constitutional amendment--limit annual state spending growth to a fixed percentage, typically tied to the inflation rate and sometimes a measure of population growth. State spending typically increases at higher rate, usually in line with the overall growth in the economy. If the economy grows by 5%, for example, 1% might be due to population growth, 2% to inflation, and 2% to increases in economic productivity. TABOR provisions essentially deny the public the right to invest the fruits of productivity growth in public services, including schools. Thus, public employees--like teachers--whose work contributes to economic growth don't share in those rewards.

In addition to being simplistic and mechanistic, TABOR provisions are also intensely undemocratic. They amount to the citizens of today denying the citizens of the future the chance to have different opinions about how much public spending is desirable (unless that amount happens to be less than spending today).

Ed's advocacy on this issue also emphasizes a point that sometimes gets lost in the various internecine education policy disputes around unions and collective bargaining: while unions may be wrong on some of the issues within education policy, they're on the right side of many of the most important issues outside of education policy, this being just one example. There are plenty of people out there who couldn't care less about the intracies of seniority-based transfer rules or merit pay, they just want to cut school spending and use the money to fund tax cuts for big corporations and rich people. That those policies should be opposed we can all agree.

Like Oil and Water?

Teachers Unions and Charter Schools--like oil and water, right? A new report from the National Charter School Research Project and the Progressive Policy Institute looks at what happened when the two organizations convened a group of charter and teachers union leaders at PPI. No, the building did not explode. But some common themes did emerge: Different metaphors and frames for viewing education issues mean both sides often find themselves talking past each other, and while leaders of both the charter and labor movements tend to view the other in light of its most extreme members, moderates within both movements actually share a lot of the same goals and views for what good schools should be like. And both movements could gain something of value from one another. It's a preliminary foray, but expect more action around this topic down the road.

The Lemons' Last Dance?

This summer, the Department of Education required states to include Equity Plans with their Highly Qualified Teachers Plans as part of NCLB compliance. Between the NCLB attention and groups like The Education Trust pushing the issue, teacher equity is increasingly becoming a top concern for states.

That’s why this California law, signed by Schwarzenegger on September 28^th, could be a harbinger of things to come. As states move to comply with the teacher equity provision of NCLB, they may look more closely at the impact of teacher transfer and hiring rules, especially if typical strategies like incentives, targeted recruitment, and mentoring are insufficient in addressing the teacher equity problem.

This law underscores the need for high quality and independent research on the "Dancing Lemons" issue - research that examines the real impact of collective bargaining on teacher quality relative to the impact of other important factors, such as working conditions and pay.

School cafeteria bake off!

No, don't run screaming! These ladies are SERIOUS, and it all sounds pretty tasty to me.

Honestly, though, it’s a nice reminder of the dedication of school employees, including the ones you don’t hear about in policy debates.

Why I Love Leo Casey

Read this post, in which Leo both weighs in on the homework debate and critiques Alfie Kohn's broader world view. I don't agree with everything Leo says, but he cuts to the heart of what's wrong with the debate that's often constructed between "rigor" and "authentic learning."

The Great "H" Debate

So, Ryan at Edspresso, Joe Williams, AFTie Michele and NYC Educator are engaged in a lively debate about whether or not public officials who have some responsibility for public education and send their kids to private schools are hypocrites. Several people also wrote to me and Tom about this issue in DC following our Post piece about the problems facing DCPS. I tend to react negatively to these kinds of arguments because I don't think it's fair to kids to use them as a debating props simply because you disagree with their parents.

It is disconcerting, however, when policymakers actively oppose efforts to give disadvantaged families access to better education options that the policymakers already enjoy. Something feels terribly insensitive when the person arguing that children from poor families must be forced to remain in crummy public schools, because allowing them to leave would hurt the public school system, is someone who has no similar compunctions about removing their own children from the same system. But I think Ryan has chosen the wrong thing to focus on here. The issue really isn't whether or not policymakers send their kids to public schools--even if policymakers do choose to send their kids to public schools, this still reflects a choice--a choice that disadvantaged families don't have.

This is also an issue I see playing out on a more personal level because many of my friends are people who work in education policy and care about public schools, but as the ones who live in DC are starting their families, they struggle with the issue of where to send their children to school: should they move to Virginia of Maryland? try to afford a home in one of the DC neighborhoods fortunate enough to be in a "good" school attendance area (and hope the lines don't change too much)? look into private schools? do any charter schools provide good enough options? I know many people who've found ways to craft a good education for their children from charters and options available in DCPS, but it requires effort, savvy, and in some cases a good bit of luck. These decisions have implications that extend beyond education because DC's civic and fiscal health and growth require it to retain stable, professional families. And it's hardly an issue unique to DC.

Finally, I want to disclose that this issue--should people in charge of public schools be required to send their children to those schools?--is one I have a somewhat unique perspective on, because, as readers know, I am the daughter of a public school principal. Because my dad's contracts required him to live in the school districts he worked for, in practice that meant my sister and I had to go to the high school of which my dad was principal. Fortunately for us, it was an excellent school. But it's not always easy having your dad for the principal, even when he's a good and popular principal and you love him a lot. I'm not complaining, but I think it's worth pointing out that sometimes there are good reasons for people who run public schools to choose not to send their kids to the schools they run, because being in a school your mom or dad's in charge of can have its own problems.

Diploma Mills? Or Something Else Altogether?

This month's installment of Education Sector's ever-popular "Charts You Can Trust" series describes the startlingly large number of doctorates in education being handed out by a trio of universities--two based in Florida--that provide most of their services to mid-career educators via distance learning and the Internet. (Thanks to This Week In Education for the link).

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern University granted 447 doctorates in education in 2005. To put that in perspective,that's three times as many as the university that granted the fourth-largest number of education doctorates, Teachers College at Columbia. It's fives times as many as the number 10 university, the University of Virginia.

It's tempting in discussions like this to start throwing around phrases like "diploma mill." But that would be unfair, primarily because schools of education generally do a terrible job of rating the quality of their programs and graduates in any kind of objective, comparable way. You can get a bad education in a traditional classroom and a good education via non-traditional means. Until established ed schools step up and demonstrate what they're really worth, speculation about quality-for-quantity tradeoffs at places like Nova remain just that: speculation.

That said, it's hard not to wonder what the degrees earned by the legions of new Nova doctors really signify. A friend of mine earned an Ed.D. from a top-ranked Ivy League school last year. It took her seven years--classes, teaching assistantships, lengthy dissertation written under the supervision of a well-respected researcher, the whole nine yards. I imagine her experience was so dissimilar to that of a typical Nova graduate that giving them both a degree with the same name is inaccurate in a fundamental way.

Perhaps that's what's really needed--more differention and variety in degree designation, so that everyone knows the difference between people who completed a classic doctoral program and those who simply completed a lengthy course of study. Without that--or objective, outcomes-based measures of program quality--we're sure to see further commodification of college degrees.

The Wire, Week Five -- Ain't Misbehavin'!

This week The Wire took us inside one of the toughest jobs you could ever have: establishing order and discipline in a middle school classroom. But there’s something making it much tougher in Prez’s case—the dismally low-level classroom assignments he’s asking students to complete and the depressingly low expectations that such assignments embody. (As Stephanie Robinson—one of the nation’s foremost experts on teaching and a principal partner at the Education Trust—often puts it, “The classroom assignments teachers give students are a very accurate proxy for exactly what and how much they expect students to learn.”)

However, as is often true of The Wire, you have to watch very carefully to catch all of this. For viewers with Tivo or some other way to pause the action, take a careful look at the worksheet the camera focuses on for a few seconds. It contains 20 numbers. The directions read, “Move the decimal point two (2) places to the left.” The objective of the worksheet is written at the top: “IDENTIFY THE LEFT DIRECTION.” Knowing how to move decimals is important, but odds are that that these thirteen-year-olds already know their left from their right. Even if Prez has a few who aren’t quite sure, there are better ways to teach it.*

It often seems paradoxical to non-educators, but mindless worksheets like that are actually more likely to cause kids to misbehave in class—and eventually to drop out of school—than challenging assignments. At one point Prez asks Michael why he’s not working on the problems: “Come on, this is easy. I know you can do it.” The look on Michael’s face tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between student behavior and academic expectations: We need to give students something to behave for if we want them to work hard and take school seriously.

* Put your hands in front of your face, palms outward. Point your thumbs at each other. The hand that makes an “L” shape is your left.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

School Safety Summit

What Catherine and Leo said. Seriously, as Alexander Russo points out, recent tragic events notwithstanding, school violence rates are down, and schools are actually among the safer places kids can be. (And while you're there, check out the Colbert Report clips)

He Can't Be Serious

Reeling from recent school shootings, Rep. Frank Lasee of Wisconsin introduces a bold new proposal: Give guns to teachers. "To make our schools safe for our students to learn, all options should be on the table," he said, according to an AP article in today's USA Today. "Israel and Thailand have well-trained teachers carrying weapons and keeping their children safe from harm. It can work in Wisconsin." The article is quick to point out that Thailand and Israel might not be quite the epitome of peace and safety that we're going for in our schools.

NCLB Ratings Week

Jennifer Booher-Jennings' op-ed in today's Washington Post on the unfortunate incentives NCLB gives educators to focus on average students at the expense of the above-average and those who are really struggling may sound familiar to Education Sector and Washington Monthly readers, who were able to read an extended discussion of the problem here a year ago.

NCLB encourages teachers and principals to neglect large swaths of students because the law's drafters decided to judge schools on the basis of whether a sufficient percentage of their students cleared a statewide test score hurdle once a year, rather than on the basis of how much schools educate each student over the course of a school year (which presumabely is what parents and taxpayers want to know). This is in-the-eduweeds stuff, but the point is that the single-score method incentivizes schools to focus on kids who score close to state standards, because such kids are going to be a lot easier to get over the bar than kids who can barely read and write. (In theory, schools will have to focus on these kids by 2014, when NCLB requires 100 percent of students to meet state standards--but loopholes in the law will allow schools to continue to ignore at least some of these kids). Nor are kids who cruise over the bar worth focusing on; schools don't get any credit for raising their scores, even though they represent more than half the kids in many school systems.

I don't like making educators out to be cynics, caring only about the kids who will help them keep their reputations and, ultimately, their jobs. Many teachers obviously care deeply about all their students. But educators are rational people and the logic of NCLB is pretty clear--it's the kids near the bar, those who score near state standards, who are going to provide the biggest returns on tutoring and othe investments, because schools only have to raise their scores slightly to get them over the reading and math bars and thus help educators avoid the consequences of failing to meet NCLB's performance expectations--consequences that ultimately include losing their jobs.

All this matters because NCLB's school-rating system is at the core of the law's effort to raise student achievement. Encouraging schools to help students at the expense of others (including the neediest students) isn't exactly good public policy--or smart politics.

The solution to NCLB's wrong-headed school-rating incentives is to expect schools to increase every student's achievement every school year, a so-called value-added method of rating schools. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings earlier this year allowed North Carolina and Tennessee to begin rating schools this way. If NCLB's reauthorizers are smart, they will ensure that in the near future every other state has the capacity to do the same.

The benefits of a long-term investment

Eduwonk brings up some good points about an op-ed in today’s Washington Post - while “triaging” students might be a reasonable response to making AYP in a single year, there are few rewards in the law for continuing that approach over even a couple of years. Also, states, not just Tennessee and North Carolina, have already taken advantage of flexibility in NCLB to do what the author recommends: reward schools for making progress, even if students don’t cross the proficiency threshold.

Principals and teachers concerned with making AYP have little motivation to ignore students with the lowest test scores. In fact, this is illustrated best in a quote from the op-ed:

“Ana’s got a 25 percent, the teacher said. What’s the point in trying to get her to grade level? It would take two years to get her to pass the test, so there’s really no hope for her. I feel like we might as well focus on the ones there’s hope for.”

What’s the point? Aside from giving Ana a chance to succeed academically, there is still an NCLB “point” in getting her to grade level. If the school invests in Ana in 3rd grade despite her low scores, Ana could be adding to their percent proficient by 5^th grade. The school, or school system, will still be accountable for Ana in 2 years, so I’m confused as to why it is rewarding to ignore Ana. The ultimate goal of 100% proficiency does, after all, mean 100% of students, Ana included.

On another note, several states have already created ‘Index’ systems that reward schools for increasing achievement at all levels. States’ calculations differ, but essentially schools receive an increasing number of points (say, zero for Level 1, 20 for Level 2, 30 for Level 3, etc.) with the maximum number of points given for students scoring at or above proficient. For some states (e.g., New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts) this formula is used to determine which schools meet AYP, for others (e.g., Pennsylvania, South Carolina), this is used for safe harbor. Either way, it rewards schools for growth, without ignoring the ultimate goal of 100% proficiency.

Is NCLB 99% pure? No, and it is important to keep pointing out problems with the incentive system, and potential solutions, but it is also necessary to keep both the short and long-term incentives in mind.

Speak English or Die

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month.

Well, not everyone is celebrating in the same way. I'm assuming these folks in Danbury CT, site of the recent "Danbury 11" protests, are not so keen on it.

Don't worry, Danbury. A recent study by Douglas Massey of the Woodrow Wilson School, along with Rubén Rumbaut and Frank Bean from the University of California-Irvine, concludes that Spanish is not actually winning the language wars. Not even in South Texas or Southern California, where the largest concentrations of Hispanics live.

The study finds that by the third generation only 17 percent of children of Mexican immigrants can speak Spanish fluently. By the fourth generation, it drops to just 5 percent. So it appears that we're not really holding onto our native language much at all. Just as the German immigrants a century ago gradually gave up their native tongue for English too. Despite the half a million elementary school kids who went to bilingual German-English schools at that time and the absence of any English-only legislation, English managed to survive.

Make no mistake. The bilingual education debate is complicated for good reasons. But the benefits of teaching and learning more than just English in our schools are well documented and simply undeniable. Unfortunately, the unfounded fears of people who speak only English, and related conspiracy theories about Atzlan, get in the way of productive solutions.

And certainly put a damper on an otherwise month full of great celebrations.