Moral Education

From the AFTBlog: "Yes, deliberately falsifying documents is wrong, but...."

Rule of thumb in sentence construction: the word "but" does not belong after the words "falsifying documents is wrong." Whatever you're writing is sure to go downhill from there.

In this case, AFTie Beth is excusing a California school district that appears to have engaged in some paperwork shenanigans in order to get more class-size reduction money out of the state. Beth's excuse--and the district's--seems to begin and end with "we needed the money."

Back when I was assistant state budget director in Indiana, one of my jobs was to look after the giant pot of money the state set aside to support K-12 education. Every two years, the legislature would appropriate that money based on a projection of how many students would be enrolled in each school district. If the actual enrollment was higher than the projection, the legislature would either have to appropriate extra money (which it didn't like) or pro-rate funding distributions to districts (which they liked even less).

One year the actual enrollments came in unusually high, and when we looked to see where we'd gone wrong, we found a district where, despite the fact that enrollment had been declining steadily for years, over 1,000 new students had suddenly been added to the rolls.

Expect they hadn't, really. It turns out the district had discovered a loophole in the state funding law that was designed to foster cooperation between public and private schools. Some small private schools--particularly low-revenue parochial schools--don't have the resources to hire teachers for, say, AP Physics. So the state allowed districts to adjust their enrollment counts upward if they helped out and enrolled private school students in public courses.

This district had cut a deal with a local private school whereby it would provide mini-courses lasting two weeks to 1,000 students, putting the state on the hook for something like $10 million in extra funding.

Another district tried to count a 16-year old girl who had dropped out of school after having a baby as a student, on the grounds that she was engaged in "self-directed study" at home. The subject she was allegedly studying? Child care.

In each case, their excuse was, "we needed the money." Which was true, but not an excuse, any more than it would have been if the superintendant had knocked over a bank on the way into work. For some things, right is right and wrong is wrong. Isn't that what we teach in school?

An AERA Newbie

I just finished my first trip to AERA and, while shocked by the sheer number of people there, I was generally impressed with the research, presentations, and thoughtful comments. Consistently, people expressed a desire to make research a critical part of both ground-level action and the policy decision-making process.

Appropriately enough, USA Today published an article on Wednesday questioning the relevance of education research—no doubt it crossed their mind that most of the 14,000 attendees would be receiving that very paper on their hotel doorstep. Citing some examples of less than relevant research from last year’s conference, the article stated that “the science produced is often inconclusive, politically charged or less than useful for classroom teachers. And when it is useful, it often is misused or ignored altogether.” That’s a tough challenge to AERA.

While the discussion at AERA about relevance and getting research into the hands of decision makers was encouraging, it doesn’t change the fact that much of the research coming out of the education research community is inaccessible. It is inaccessible because of the overly-complicated, technical language used, and also is literally inaccessible—locked away in journals too costly for anyone but universities to access on a large scale. Researchers who shake their head in wonder when policies are enacted that directly contradict what is currently known about say, student learning or assessment, need to remember that they are, in essence, selling their research to policymakers and practitioners. And if you’re trying to sell something, you take the product to your customer and you sell it in their language, not expect your customer to start speaking yours.

Communications Mastermind Needed

My brief excursion to AERA went well (Standing room only in my session! Okay, it was a small room...), but is ending on a bad note as I am currently stranded in Hell on Earth the American Airlines terminal at O'Hare, waiting for a flight that may or may not be leaving for National Airport this month, if ever.

However, it does give me a chance to let our fearless readers know that Education Sector is in the market for a communications manager. If you want to change the education world (in a good way) at a place where communications is an integral part of the organization, not an afterthought (I promise you will never, ever be handed a finished paper that you've never seen or even heard of before along with vague instructions along the lines of "we're releasing this in 20 minutes, see if you can get people to, you know, read it or something..."), then give us a look.

New Dealing

Andy and I propose a New Deal for Urban Public Schools, as part of a Harvard Law and Policy Review online symposium that also features work by Joel Klein, Stefanie Sanford and Steven Seleznow, and Charles Ogletree, Jr. and Susan Eaton.

More About That Smart Baby

Earlier this week, on the Guardian's website, I explained why educational baby toys won't make your infant smarter in England, either.

Drawing the line

The Wall Street Journal reports today($) that in 2004 the National Association for Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), the trade organization for financial aid officers, “considered setting clear rules to curb gifts from lenders—and decided against it”. While NASFAA may have had that choice in 2004, it no longer does—either NASFAA takes action or Congress will.

Currently, the ethical line for financial aid officers is more like a fuzzy bar, with a lot of wiggle room. In the news coverage, I have heard quotes ranging from aid officers who aren’t willing to accept pens or paper from lenders, to aid officers who feel that it’s okay to accept Broadway tickets, a nice dinner, or a fully paid conference trip. I don’t doubt that the majority of aid officers are conscientious about keeping lenders at an arms length. For these aid officers, however, there are no national guidelines to help guide their behavior, or to provide a basis for reporting the unethical behavior of colleagues.

After missing the opportunity in 2004, NASFAA now has a second chance to be proactive about setting industry standards for ethical behavior. But this window is closing quickly.

Senator Kennedy has proposed legislation to regulate relationships between lenders and colleges, and Attorney General Cuomo is leading the charge by compelling schools and lenders to adopt a code of conduct in return for dropping lawsuits against them. Multiple colleges have already signed on to Cuomo’s code of conduct, along with Citibank, and—as of today—Sallie Mae (both banks also agreed to pay $2 million into a fund to educate students about the financial aid industry). I doubt there will be a third opportunity for NASFAA. As the organization responsible for representing financial aid officers, they need to be willing to draw the ethical line on what is, and is not, acceptable behavior in relationships between lenders and colleges.

My Very Smart Baby

Have you read Sara Mead's report, Million Dollar Babies? You should. It will tell you all about how we, as parents, future parents, educators and policymakers, shouldn't get caught up in the mass marketing hype around baby products that claim to make our babies smarter. Disclaimer: if you search my home you will find evidence that I have used some of these products, namely Baby Einstein videos and CDs. I admit that I may have even purchased them-- in the sleep-deprived haze of those first few months I bought a lot of things that I thought might make it all easier. And yes, they did make things easier and might have been worth the $29.99 or whatever I paid.

Now, on a trial basis (not having plunked down the $149 for my very own) I have the distinct pleasure of using the Baby Plus "Prenatal Education System", which promises on its website to make my soon-to-be born baby more alert, interactive, and just all around smarter upon birth. If you can picture it, I'm wearing a fanny pack-type belt around my stomach that has 16 settings ("lessons"), each providing a slightly different rhythmic beat. Sounds like a drum beat or, I imagine to the baby, like I'm working in a factory or at a construction site. I'm supposed to wear this thing twice a day for an hour to "stimulate brain growth". The science of it, explained under a section of the website called "The Science", is complete with a timeline beginning with Confucius and carrying on through the Quing dynasty all the way to the "fetal enrichment technology" introduced somewhere around the 1970s and 80s.

I'll let you know the results when my baby comes out smarter than yours.

Off to AERA

I'm heading to Chicago tonight to attend the annual American Education Research Association conference, where I'll be participating in a symposium titled Implications of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education: The Challenges of Assessing Quality in Postsecondary Education -- Thursday at 10:35 in the Marriot, Huron room, 10th floor. If you saw the op-ed Tom Toch and I wrote for the Post last week, you'll have a pretty good sense of what I'll be saying.

After the symposium wraps up at noon, you can grab lunch and head to the Marriot ballroom at 2:15 for "Bitch Barbies Love Bully Boys": Transgressive Femininities and Gender Hierarchies in Schools.

I know, I know -- too easy.

Intended Consequences

There's an old saying: "Beware of unintended consequences." It's good advice for long-term planning. It's also an important principle for identifying facile policy arguments, like those in this WaPost op-ed, in which a local second-grade teacher claims that the No Child Left Behind Act, written to help low-income and minority students, actually harms them.

This kind of sudden logical inversion has a long and ignoble history, outlined well in Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction, which anyone who makes or cares about policy debates should read. For centuries people have been saying things like "welfare makes people poor" or "suffrage will hurt women," and for just as long people have nodded their heads with enthusiasm. The evidenciary bar should be incredibly high for saying things like this, but somehow it never is. I think people assume that nobody would say something so obviously silly with a straight face if it weren't somehow true. Editors also have a fatal weakness for this stuff, which is a lot punchier than carefuly parsing the actual truth.

The op-ed is garden-variety: Rich white kids get things from their home environment that poor and minority kids don't; thus, achievement gaps are unavoidable. But that doesn't mean that poor and minority kids bring nothing to school, they "speak foreign langauges, make music, tell vivid stories, and have other skills not typical of their peers."

Minority students "make music" and "tell vivid stories"? Seriously? I thought people stopped saying things like that in public a while ago.

Because poor and minority students come to school behind, schools have created a "caste system" where disadvantaged children are relegated to classes that are low-level, test-prep, drill-and-kill, and presumably many other bad hyphenated things.

Now, there was a time, not so long ago, when there was no No Child Left Behind Act, when there were no consequences for schools where low-income and minority students did poorly. Presumably, the caste system in question didn't exist back in that halcyon era of authentic education. You know, those palmy days when schools gave a rich, high-quality education to all their students, black or white, rich or poor.

If you believe that, I've got an op-ed to sell you.

More Blame For Title IX

The College Sports Council, self-defined as a "national coalition of coaches, athletes, parents, and fans" that is trying to "reform Title IX regs that have led to the widespread elimination of opportunities for male athletes" has put out a report that says the NCAA's stats undercount the number of men's teams that have been cut over the past 15 years. The Independent Women's Forum thinks this is great and re-posts a host of charts and graphs (with subtitles like "Football's Not the Problem") that tells a basic story that no one really disagrees with, although we might squabble over the numbers a little. In short, CSC says the average number of male teams offered by an NCAA Division I institution fell from 10.2 in 1981-82 to 8.9 in 2004-2005 while the average number of women’s teams rose from 7.3 to 10.2. The NCAA will give you slightly different numbers but agrees that men's teams are down and women's are up. And so?

So the story goes that men's teams, namely wrestling and gymnastics and other "small interest" sports, are going extinct because of Title IX, "sacrificed" to make room for female athletes. Yes, these sports are in jeopardy. And yes, Title IX's proportionality standard (that women's sports opportunities correspond with the percentage of women on campus) does have a role in this- it's pushing institutions to make hard choices about how to invest their resources (and with more women on campus every year, it does get harder).

But scapegoating Title IX and letting the universities off the hook is inaccurate and certainly isn't going to help male or female "student athletes". The real problem? Faced with hard decisions about how to invest equitably in men's and women's athletics, institutions are simply not willing to touch the glory sports: football and men's basketball. These budgets, including coaches salaries, are higher than they've ever been, and rising. Lay that over the framework of having to spend equally (yes, that is where Title IX comes in since men's hoop and football support male athletes) and something's gotta give. Should we cut the 6-figure video play-back machine for the football team (we really need it if we want to be good) or should we cut some other sports? Hmmm...

JMU is the most recent best example- they cut 10 teams (7 men's, 3 women's) last fall and started a big debate over how and why Title IX was at fault. The fact is that JMU tiered all of its sports (tiers 1, 2, and 3 depending on funding, alumni support, and other factors) and then chose to cut spending by cutting all tier 3 sports. This included men's teams (7) and women's teams (3) and was a decision made for pretty obvious reasons: they had to cut and they weren't willing to cut into the big teams. Even JMU, which initially named "compliance problems" as the reason for the cuts later admitted it was a financial decision. Message to those blaming Title IX for all athletic cuts: it's almost always about economics and rarely about compliance.

So if institutions aren't willing to cut into (not cut out, just cut into) football and men's basketball, don't blame Title IX. And the argument that these sports are the financial backbone of college athletics doesn't wash either. Most football teams- even the big D I-A schools- don't even pay for themselves. They run deficit programs while their budgets keep rising. No one's trying to cut men in favor of women (male collegiate athletes still outnumber female athletes)- they're cutting what doesn't matter to them in exchange for what does.

Selective Opinion Gathering

I can't believe this WaPo "What do you think of the takeover?" piece with comments from parents and educators doesn't include a single voice representing schools East of the River. And three out of four speakers are linked to schools West of Rock Creek Park.

Competition and Standards: Better Together

Andrew Coulson's WaPo op-ed today is fundamentally flawed because it treats standards and choice/competition/customization in education as mutually exclusive competing policy approaches, rather than what they really are--complements that are both more effective when combined. It's no coincidence that the percentage of children attending publicly-funded schools of choice in the United States has increased significantly in the past 15 years--at just the same time as the standards movement has taken off. Standards, by shifting the focus of public accountability from the inputs schools use and what they do to the outcomes they achieve for students, enable schools to have greater autonomy and flexibility in their operations, allowing greater educational diversity and meaningful options. A focus on outcomes also demands greater educational customization to achieve those outcomes for kids with differing learning styles, interests, and innate abilities. At the same time, some form of standards and public reporting of student and school performance are essential for a well-functioning education market, because they address the principal agent problem and provide parents with useful information to make informed educational choices. Coulson's own examples demonstrate this: For-profit tutoring systems in the U.S. and Japan are independent of government, but they damn well are judged by parents based on the results they produce for students on nationally-administered college and, in the case of Japan, high school entrance exams. Like peanut butter and jelly, choice and standards are just better together.

Panic! Some More

Since the college admission panic story has already been beaten to death by Reuter's, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, the Washington Post obviously had no choice but to go above the fold with exactly the same story today. This is what happens when there's a big education story that (A) writes itself, and (B) everybody knows is coming months in advance.

Jay Mathews hits all the standard notes--lead with crestfallen high school senior, dreams crushed by a blizzard of rejection letters, quote the outraged parent, pivot to the big picture, throw in some statistics, use words like "frantic" a lot.

The article also makes the same mistake the rest of them make, noting that "many students apply to as many as a dozen schools, often the ones least likely to accept them," without making the connection that this contradicts the idea that the admissions rate race is getting harder to run. Once more, with feeling: the overall difficulty of getting into an elite college is a function of two things. (1) the number of slots in elite colleges; and (2) the number of qualified applicants to elite colleges. Not applications. Applicants. If the same number of well-qualified applicants submits more applications for the same number of slots, admission rates will decline, but the odds of getting into college will not. The same is true if more people apply to elite schools who have no chance of getting in.

Mathews also throws in the delicously ironic but almost surely bogus idea that retired baby boomers will, in an act of cliche-confirming selfishness, be "shoving aside some of their children and grandchildren to take up university spaces" once they're retired.

Then, in the last four grafs, Mathews goes all Columbo by saying "Just one more thing--none of this really matters." The average college admissions rate is stable at 70 percent, you can always transfer, and research says it doesn't really matter where you go to college anyway. Great--but then why are we reading this article again?

Panic! At the Rich Suburban High School

Q: When does a tiny statistical change in a number that affects a miniscule number of people merit breathless coverage in the New York Times?

A: When the number has something--anything--to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.

In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it's annual exercise in college admissions scaremongering on Page A14 yesterday, but it remains the most-emailed article on this site as of 2PM today. Due to the "frantic" and "ferocious" competition for admission and an "avalanche of applications to top schools," this was "the most selective spring in modern memory at America's elite schools," resulting in "brutally low acceptance rates" at schools like Harvard, which accepted 9 percent of applicants, the "lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."

Nine percent! Man! Why, just last year, the admit rate at Harvard was....

Actually, it was nine percent then too.

Technically, 9.3 percent, as compared to this year's rate of 9.0 percent. Funny how that didn't make it into the article; I guess there just wasn't room with all those adjectives and adverbs. The Wall Street Journal made the same omission when it ran exactly the same story($) two days ago, although on the whole the WSJ piece had better data and did include previous-year data for other schools. Only Reuters provided the helpful context of how much Harvard's admission rate has changed when it ran exactly the same story a week ago.

These stories, which appear every year at the same time and with about the same degree of predictability as cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, are based on the premise that it is much, much harder than it used to be for smart kids to get into a top-flight college. But is that what the numbers actually say? It's true, as the Times article notes, that the number of high school graduates increased from 2.4 million in 1993 to 3.1 million last year. But that's a very selective timeline; 1993 and 1994 were--not coincidentally--the years with the fewest graduates since the early 1960s. One could just as easily note that the number of high school graduates today is almost exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.

Since the number of slots in elite schools is basically a constant, the real culprit is the denominator, the number of applications. An increase in applications isn't the same thing as an increase in applicants--if the same number of qualified applicants doubled the number of applications they submitted for the same number of slots, institutional admit rates would drop even though the odds of a given student being admitted would not. The article notes that students are filling out "ever more" applications, but seems not to notice, or care, that this undermines the logic of the piece.

Similarly, not all of the people who apply to Harvard have a realistic chance to get in. If the marginal increase in applications is disproportionately comprised of people who are treating the Harvard application like a $65.00 Powerball ticket, then falling admit rates are a mirage.

But there's no room for these kind of uncertainties when you're focused on scaring the bejeezus out of striving parents who wrongly believe that elite colleges are the alpha and omega of opportunity for their children.

Amazing Girls

I'm a bit late in commenting on this Sunday NYT article about the tremendous stresses on affluent girls in a Boston suburb, but since it's still the 3rd most e-mailed article on the Times' site, I guess it's still relevant. Author Sara Rimer's writing seems to fluctuate between trying to make you feel sorry for these girls and awed by their "amazingness" (they speak Latin!, they do experiments with DNA!), but the major emotional response triggered in me was annoyance at yet another NYT article bemoaning how hard it's become to get into the Ivy League and other elite universities.

I don't want to dismiss these girls' feelings--being a teenager is lousy no matter who you are, and I certainly would never want to go through that again--but failing to get into an elite university of your choice, while crummy in the near term, not only won't ruin your life, it's as issue that only impacts a tiny percentage of the teen population. The constant focus on the problems of a small subset of affluent, predominantly white students has real negative impacts on public debate about education in this country. Sure, it's stressful to feel like you have to take 5 AP classes and participate in a variety of extracurriculars--but a bigger problem is the larger numbers of young people who don't even have access to AP classes or the kinds of extracurriculars available to students at this high school.

The question of stress on teenage girls deserves a bit more consideration: One thing I didn't mention in the paper I wrote last year about educational gender gaps is that the improving achievements of young women--which are the major driver of gender gaps favoring girls in college-going and some other measures, because boys haven't lost ground--do seem to have come with a cost, in that girls (and not just privileged girls) report high levels of stress, more so than boys. Of course, it's possible young girls have always felt more pressure than boys to be perfect or, as a coach quoted in the NYT article says, please everyone. In the past, this might have meant hiding your intelligence and being meek and docile. Today, at least for daughters of professional parents, it means being accomplished and academically successful. I'm troubled we've set up a world where some girls (and I'm sure also some boys and plenty of adults) feel they have to please everyone, but a world where girls please people who are important to them by compiling accomplishments that have long-term educational and professional payoffs is still a better world than one where girls please others by doing things--playing dumb, getting pregnant--that have negative long-term impacts.

Reading this article, I couldn't help thinking about the paper I have out this week about parental anxieties around early childhood development and the growing market in educational infant and toddler toys and videos that claim--with little evidence--to help parents build "smarter" brains in their children. I'd be willing to bet that many of the girls who are stressed out about extracurriculars, AP, and getting into elite schools were raised in homes where parents worried about fostering their children's brain development and played classical music to stimulate neuron growth. And I suspect they'll grow up to be mothers who carry these same anxieties into raising their own children. At the same time there are enormous inequities and these girls have had opportunities, experiences that are dramatically different from those of their less-advantaged peers, and that have produced real academic and life outcome disparities that favor affluent girls.

As Annette Lareau illustrates compellingly in her book Unequal Childhoods these inequities are linked to dramatic differences in childrearing approaches between professional and disadvantaged families--and both approaches have costs for the families that use them and their children. I'd like to believe there's a possible world in which we can give all kids access to the benefits of the professional approach to childrearing--confidence, strong verbal skills, cultural competencies and knowledge--without some of the costs that appear to be associated with it, and with some of the benefits--strong family connections, independence, more free time for adults and children--that are connected with the less advantaged approach. Pipe dreams? Probably. But, while I'm older than the "amazing girls" and wasn't as amazing a teen as they, like them I was raised to believe in a world of limitless possibilities. So I'll keep hoping.

Universal Pre-K?

Good discussion between Richard Colvin and Bruce Fuller about the movement towards universal pre-k and whether publicly-funded preschool for all kids is a desirable policy goal. They're both smart and thoughtful about this, so it's worth checking out, as is this debate we hosted between Bruce and NIEER's Steven Barnett last spring on the question of universal vs. targeted preschool. Joanne Jacobs weighs in here. I'm looking forward to reading Bruce's book (still waiting to get a copy), so more on this issue when I've had a chance to do that.

Tangentially: Joanne posts about a Tennessean article on "outsourcing parenting." I understand why this bothers some people, but it's worth noting that one of the benefits of modern economies is the achievement of greater efficiency through comparative advantage. There's no reason to believe this isn't also the case for at least some elements of child care and child rearing. I certainly have sympathy with folks who hire someone to teach their children to ride a bike, since I can't ride a bike, so if my hypothetical future kids are going to learn to ride a bike, I'll probably have to hire someone to teach them.

DC Schools Takeover: Probably a Good Thing

It looks like DC mayor Adrian Fenty will be allowed to take over the city schools. As my colleague Sara Mead has written (when she's not busy in her day job as conventional wisdom-busting provocateur), all mayoral takeovers aren't created equal--they can be done well, or badly. But specifics aside for the moment, I think this is a good idea, for a couple of reasons.

First, mayoral takeover creates a whole new kind of accountability. Critics of school-focused accountability systems like NCLB rightly note that the people writing the laws are never subject to the kind of tough accountability measures they impose on educators. And for various reasons--low voter turnout, fractured responsibility--people seem to get re-elected to urban school boards on a regular basis even when the schools are a dismally run as they have been here.

Mayoral takeover is different. Mayor Fenty is tying his political fortunes to school improvement in a deliberately high-profile way. That means that the smart people whose job it is to get him re-elected in 2010 won't be sleeping well the night before the 2009 test scores are released. Those kinds of incentives and pressures can be a good thing in a lot of ways.

Second, when mayors assume responsibility for the schools, they send an important message, both to the general public and the educators and students within the system: "Our schools are not a lost cause." Urban education and urban students have long been written off as irredeemable, victims of greater forces perhaps, but beyond saving in the end. That kind of attitude can infect the culture of a school system and become self-sustaining. Mayoral takeover send a very different signal: someone with a lot to lose is willing to take a risk on an uncertain but vitally important proposition. That's a good thing too.

Big Lending Speaks

Today’s Washington Post business section has a front-page article discussing big lending’s efforts to fend off proposed cuts to student loan subsidies. Two thoughts:

First, Sallie Mae and its fellow big-lenders need to move on from trying to sway policy through lobbying pushes, public relations campaigns, and campaign contributions. Instead, it’s time they propose some policy solutions they would be willing to accept—solutions other than maintaining the status quo. There are already ideas out there for market-based methods to establish subsidy rates—for one example, check out New America’s loan auctions idea. Lenders will be better served in the long run by helping to design a system that allows market-forces instead of politics to establish subsidy levels.*

Second, let’s embrace the current dual-program structure rather than continue the endless back-and-forth between proponents of Direct Lending (in which the federal government provides loans to students directly) and the Federal Family Education Loan Program (in which private banks make loans to students, and the federal government subsidizes those loans). Granted, this dual-program structure is unusual, but the tension between the two programs is likely the best method of ensuring both are efficient, effective, and innovative. If either fails in one of those criteria, there will be lots of people calling for its removal, and another program ready and willing to take its place—that’s good motivation to stay competitive.

I’m happy to see this kind critical discussion of the federal student loan market. Keeping both private lenders and the federal government on their toes will help to create a student loan program that serves both students and taxpayers well.

*Any good policy will balance the need for low subsidy levels with the need to keep smaller lenders in the student loan industry. Loan giants, like Sallie Mae, will be at a huge competitive advantage in any market system, and without special consideration for smaller lenders, a market-based policy risks pushing small banks out of the student loan industry. This would reduce options for students, and small, local banks that provide personal service are a great option to have. Also, industries that consist solely of corporate behemoths (think cell phones) generally don’t have five-star customer service.

Hell? No.

The Chairman of the House Education Committee in Colorado resigned from his chairmanship after the Rocky Mountain News published an email to a colleague in which he said, "There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherziers."

The tendency of some people to conflate the privatization, voucher, and charter movements is one of the more tedious things you have to deal with in talking about important issues like choice and the place of education in the public and private spheres.

To be clear, there really are people out there who want to privatize and destroy the public schools. They're all voucher supporters, and a lot of them are quite sympathetic to charters, not because they actually care about--or even understand--charters per se, but because they see charters as a step in their direction. I don't know that I'd go so far as to condemn them to Hell, but they're no friends of public education

But tarring charter schools with other people's bad intentions is wrong. The commonly-made distinction between charter schools and public schools is inaccurate; charter schools are public schools. I guarantee that if you were teleported into the classroom of a good charter elementary school here in DC, there would be nothing to tell you that it was anything other than a particularly well-run public school. Same predominantly minority and low-income DC kids, same base funding source, same accountabily under No Child Left Behind. If, on the other hand, you were teleported into a DC private school, believe me, you would know.

The Unions Come Clean

Over at EdWise, Leo Casey finally reveals the answer to the Master's degree mystery. It's well worth reading, because Leo describes exactly what's wrong with teacher policy today. But first, a few house-cleaning items:

Leo alleges that the Clotfelder, Ladd, and Vigdor (CLV) study cited in the previous post refutes the findings and recommendations in the Education Sector paper Frozen Assets. Nonsense. Frozen Assets said, "while salaries for teachers typically increase throughout their careers, research suggests that teacher effectiveness in the classroom does not increase on a similar trajectory."

That is precisely what the CLV study says:

Compared to a teacher with no experience, the benefits of experience rise monotonically to a peak in the range of 0.092 (from model 4) to 0.119 (from model 5) standard deviations after 21-27 years of experience, with more than half of the gain occurring during the first couple of years of teaching.

The study found that teachers gain more effectiveness in the first two years than in the entire rest of their career. Yet experience-based salary schedules increase pay on more or less a straight line from year 1 to year 30, i.e. not a "similiar trajectory."

Leo notes that in states like New York, Master's degrees are required for teachers to gain full certification, so it's reasonable for unions to want teachers to be paid for the credential. Sure--except last time I checked, which was when I worked on education policy for a state legislature, teachers unions wield a great deal of influence over education policy in state legislatures. Or is all that lobbying money being wasted? That's why I originally asked why unions don't go to the "bargaining table and/or state legislature" to fix the Master's degree problem.

But then Leo actually does give the answer, which is worth quoting in full:

There is, morever, an important educational reason for teacher unions to support the retention of the Masters degree requirement, beyond the concerns of fairness and reasonableness. Teacher unions are avid supporters of the full professionalization of teaching, and we understand that every profession needs a rigorous induction process, including a full foundational education. All of the significant and powerful professions in American life, such as law and medicine, require a graduate education as an entry gate-keeper into the profession. Our problem is that far too many undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs in schools of education fall far short of professional teaching standards, and do precious little to prepare novices for the challenges of teaching. If teaching is to advance as a profession, and if the quality of American education is to be improved significantly, the quality of teacher preparation programs must also be dramatically improved. Rather than eliminating the Masters degree requirement for teaching licensure, we must make it a more meaningful and useful part of an essential teacher education. That option may not be a prohibitive favorite at the races, but it certainly beats a bet on a dead horse.

If, in the future, you're ever trying puzzle through why a particular teacher policy issue is so irrational and hard to resolve, go back and read this paragraph. The "professionalism" agenda is so vital that it takes precedence over "concerns of fairness and reasonableness." Sure, the teacher preparation programs are doing a bad job (not just at providing in-service Master's degrees; Leo helpfully expands the indictment to preparation of novice teachers as well). Sure, the prospects for improving them seem grim. Sure, this sucks for teachers. But there are more important things to consider.

The professionalism agenda is an artifact of the iron triangle of teacher policy that exists in every state, with teachers unions, schools of education, and state certification boards sitting at the vertices. There's nothing wrong with professionalism as an idea, but in the case of education, research keeps showing that the tools of teacher professionalism--degrees, state certification, most professional development programs, etc.--have little or no impact on teacher effectiveness. That shouldn't be surprising, since the various processes and organizations in questions have been deliberately disconnected from any objective evidence of student learning.

Without being so grounded, they have inevitably become completely self-justifying. Therefore, the only defense against charges of ineffectiveness is to defend the idea, institutions, and processes of professionalism as ends unto themselves. Just as student interests in education are too often subordinated to adult interests, teacher interests are too often sacrificied to larger organizational interests.

Mystery solved.

Update: Sherman Dorn provides an interesting historical perspective on the meaning of professionalism and how it relates to teaching and public education.