(Student) Slip 'n Slide®

I’ve been around long enough to understand that one new study shouldn’t be cause for celebration. But yesterday when EdWeek wrote up a study on summer learning deficits [subscription required for the full article] that carried tremendous policy implications, I was a little taken aback when I got to this section:

Daria L. Hall, the assistant director for K-12 policy development for the Washington-based Education Trust, a nonprofit group that promotes high academic standards for disadvantaged children, worries that the findings will take policymakers’ focus off the need to close a different kind of gap.

“We can’t allow the problems of the out-of school inequities to overshadow the problems of the in-school inequities,” she said. “However way you look at it, low-income kids and kids of color get less than their fair share of quality teaching, curriculum, and resources.”

The study traced about two-thirds of the gap in achievement between high SES and low SES students in 9th grade to elementary school summer deficits. The remaining third was traceable to differences already evident before the students began 1st grade. The study, conducted by Karl Alexander and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, found no statistically significant differences between the gains of high and low SES kids during the school year.

Presumably, Hall is taking issue with the conclusion that SES, accumulated, made all the difference. We know poor kids get fewer advantages in education (as evidentiary support see here or here), but this study says that, at least in urban districts with high concentrations of poverty, there isn’t a large difference between one bad school and another. Further, since Baltimore’s population mirrors many cities across the country, urban districts could implement new school calendars to ameliorate within-district achievement gaps. Hall’s point is well-taken that this step wouldn’t fix all achievement disparities, but it too casually dismisses what a district can do.

While it isn’t a new concept for researchers to argue for restructuring school calendars, this study utilized the best dataset available. Past investigations analyzed summer learning loss between kindergarten and first grade; Alexander included fall and spring tests (to measure summer and school-year learning) from 1st-5th grades, and continued to follow the students until they were 22. This allowed him to track whether students completed high-level coursework in high school or went on to college. Previous studies haven’t gone this far; past analyses found that summer learning differences matter, but they hadn’t yet systematically traced those effects over time. Alexander shows empirically what we’ve all assumed: home life matters in educational attainment, and, if the numbers are generalizable, it matters more. I’m not ready to lump this study in as just one more for the pile.

Sundaes on Sunday

President Ronald Reagan might have given the cold shoulder to the Department of Education, but he was sweet on ice cream.

“Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food…Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim July 1984 as National Ice Cream Month and July 15, 1984, as National Ice Cream Day, and I call upon the people of the United States to observe these events with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

That makes July National Ice Cream Month, and the third Sunday (that's this weekend) official National Ice Cream Day. Celebrate appropriately.

Sure...

At NROnline, Bill McMorris writes about legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives to cut student loan interest rates:

This bill also fails to deliver on the Democratic promise to make college more accessible to lower-income students. Cutting interest rates and forgiving debt serve to benefit college graduates, not perspective students. The Republican proposal, which would aid lower-income families by increasing Pell Grants without relieving individuals of their responsibility to repay their loans, was rejected along partisan lines.

Assuming for the sake of argument that he means prospective students, I still don't know what this means. If a low-income student goes to college, graduates, and gets a break on their loan repayment, that's not helping low-income students because they're technically not students anymore? And while using the money to fund Pell grants instead of cut interest rates is actually a pretty good idea, I can't help but note that the House Republicans had markedly less enthusiasm for taking money from the student loan companies who contribute generously to their campaigns and giving it to the poor college students who don't vote for them back when they controlled Congress and were in a position to actually do it.

More Financial Education

Along the lines of Kevin’s post below about financial literacy, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story yesterday about a pastor who’s stuck in the never-ending cycle of default and repayment on his student loans. The pastor took out $15,000 in loans in 1984, owes nearly twice that amount now, and will still be repaying them in 2029. Since I’ve started doing work on student loans, I’ve heard many stories like this.

When most students are taking out loans, no one is there to counsel them on the salary they will need to make the minimum payments, or even to warn them of the serious financial consequences of defaulting on the loan. In my experience, getting over $30,000 in loans is as easy as signing a few pieces of paper, with absolutely no discussion of your plans for future income and only minimal loan counseling (an online ‘class’ that you can complete without even reading the information).

A student who defaults on their loan can see the amount they owe grow exponentially. Each time the borrower defaults, an 18.5% collection fee is added to their loan balance plus any accrued interest. If a borrower defaults multiple times, the loan balance can easily double. This increase is enough to ensure that many of these borrowers will never be able to repay their loans.

Current legislation includes both income-based repayment, which helps borrowers to stay out of default by pegging payments to their income, and loan forgiveness for borrowers working in public service fields. Both of these will likely help students in the future avoid the financial devastation of defaulting on their loans. But for the borrowers who do default, we need to address the punitive nature of how student loan defaults are handled, and find a better way to both encourage personal responsibility and also provide a means for these borrowers to repay their debt and recover financially.

(This comic is all too appropriate, but the reality is that it is not a joke for a lot of people.)

Financial Education Needed

There's an ad for LowerMyBills.com ("As Featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show") running along the side of the article I'm reading on the New York Times Web site right now which says, and I quote, "Mortgage Rates Fall Again In Washington DC! $510,000 mortgage for under $1,498/Month!"

If you were to buy a house today for $510,000 and put five percent down on a 30-year fixed mortgage at the going rate (6.33%), the monthly payment would be $3,008 per month.

This is one of the reasons people are losing their homes right now. I'm not saying there aren't others, or that consumers bear no responsibility for knowing what they're getting into when they borrow. But come on.

Consultants Earning Their Keep

Alexandar Russo, June 25th:

Kevin Carey mystifyingly defends the management consultant crowd by blaming incompetent management for DC schools' problems.

The Washington Examiner, today:

Communications breakdown caused boxes of sporting goods, computers and other essential equipment to be left padlocked in a shuttered District of Columbia junior high school for almost an entire year while a neighboring school was starved for supplies, a city consultant told The Examiner.

Souljah-ing the Teachers Unions

Ezra Klein follows up on last week's discussion of the lamentable tendency of left-leaning pundits to burnish their independent credentials by mindlessly bashing teachers unions and/or adopting other conservative eduction tropes.

As regular Quick & ED readers know, that doesn't mean teachers unions should be immune from criticism--far from it. I myself have engaged in a fair amount of what I'd like to think was mindful bashing of objectionable union policies (this post about teacher pay is an example, with the union response here and my counter here). The difference being that the debate was about an actual issue, involving research findings, real-world contract issues, etc.

By contrast, the generalized teachers union bashing from the left is, as Ezra notes, much more in the vein of then-candidate Bill Clinton's famous Sister Souljah denunciation. That's remembered as a canny political move that signaled Clinton's independence from traditional Democratic interest groups to moderate voters, so at first the parallel to pundits who aren't running for office might seem inexact. But of course they are running for an office of a kind--Grand Champion of Brave Intellectual Integrity.

The thing to remember is that it wasn't entirely obvious at the time that Clinton could get away with saying what he said in a speech to the Rainbow Coalition. The risk is what made it effective. Being the 735th person to point out that teachers unions are sometimes an obstacle to sensible school reform, by contrast, isn't going to get anyone into the Liberal Apostasy Hall of Fame. If you're going to criticize teachers unions, get your facts straight and have something meaningful to say. Otherwise, you're not impressing anyone but yourself.

School Names, Again

More on school names from Jay Mathews at the Washington Post, this time focusing on North Virginia. Evidently, presidents and well-known people “tend to be controversial, whereas few Americans have bad things to say about rivers, lakes, forests or freedom.” And don’t forget sea creatures!

Mathews thinks it would be better to name schools after people. He quotes the Manhattan Institute: “Teachers at Lincoln Elementary, for example, can reference the school name to spark discussions of the evils of slavery and the benefits of preserving our union.”

Teachers could spark the same discussion by displaying a five dollar bill or a penny, not to mention dozens of other great ways to excite students about a lesson on the civil war. In other words: Anything a name can do, we can do better.

Slap Them In Irons

There are times when I think that the the universe of generally-recognized post-secondary credentials is far too time-bound and monopolized by traditional education organizations. The fact that degrees are so standardized and derivative of time spent learning--two years for an associate's degree, four years for a bachelor's degree, too many years and the flower of your youth for a doctorate, etc.--instead of being based on actual objective evidence of learning strikes me as terribly limiting. It stays that way in large part because the current system is in the best interests of traditional colleges and universities, which dominate both the teaching and credentialing functions of higher education--and thus have a financial interest in basing the credential on how long (and thus, how much money) you've spent being taught by them.

Then I read articles like yesterday's Times expose of so-called financial advisors who steal from old people under the guise of paper-thin credentials:

[Scammer guy] is one of tens of thousands of financial advisers working hand-in-hand with insurance companies to market themselves to older Americans using impressive-sounding credentials like “certified elder planning specialist,” “registered financial gerontologist,” “certified retirement financial adviser” and “certified senior adviser.”

Many of these titles can be earned in just a few days from for-profit businesses, and sound similar to established credentials, like certified financial planner, that require years of study, difficult tests and extensive background checks.

The clear lesson here--beyond the obvious fact that people who effectively rob senior citizens of their life savings by tricking them into investing in ridiculously inappropriate investment vehicles are nothing more than common thieves who should be slapped in leg irons and send away to lengthy prison sentences--is that a wholly unregulated market for educational credentials would surely produce more abuses along these lines. That doesn't mean we should be stuck with the standard year-based degree system forever, but it does mean that loosening up the market should be accompanied by a commensurate increase in oversight.

The Special Education Accountability Debate

Today’s Ed Week article on NCLB and special education accountability is a great discussion of the two sides of this debate: states want more flexibility under NCLB to establish different standards and assessments for special education students, and special education advocates want NCLB to stay where it is—holding states accountable for getting special education students, with a few exceptions, to the same grade-level standards as other students.

I’m siding with the special education advocates on this one.

This report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities outlines the big reason why—most special education students aren’t diagnosed with a disability that precludes them from reaching grade-level standards. Instead, the diagnosis is meant to ensure that students receive the supports they need to achieve at grade-level. In addition, the current flexibility under NCLB already excuses approximately 30 percent of special education students from regular state assessments and standards. That’s already a higher percentage than the Aspen Commission on NCLB found reasonable.

Making this debate stickier is the fact that minority and low-income students are overrepresented in most disability categories. Studies have shown that the process of diagnosing a disability isn’t color-blind, and minority student have a higher chance of being diagnosed with a disability. This makes reducing the accountability for educating special education students an even riskier proposition, because it will disproportionately reduce accountability for minority and low-income students.

More to come from ES on this topic, but this Ed Week article makes a great primer.

Another Student Loan Scandal? Or Not?

In a fresh blow to the beleaguered student loan industry, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has charged some companies in the fast-growing private student loan market of charging students higher interest rates because they attend colleges where students are more likely to default on their loans. In uncovering yet another scandalous lender practice, Cuomo...

Hey, wait a minute.

Isn't that what lenders are supposed to do, price their loans based on risk? InsiderHigherEd reports,

Taking a specific college, or type of college, into account as a factor in determining a credit score could theoretically mean that loans to students at, say, Harvard could be seen by lenders as less risky and therefore more desirable than those made to students at community colleges, for-profit institutions and historically black colleges.

It's not a matter of lenders "seeing" anything, Harvard students are less risky and more desirable than other students, obviously so. Yet Senator Dodd has responded by introducing legislation to "Prohibit lenders from using any data in their underwriting that may have disparate impact on the loan products, terms, or conditions available to student borrowers based on race, age, and other personal factors, or the institution they attend."

So if you're a poor student with an IQ of 180 who gets into Harvard and you need a private loan to make ends meet, you have to pay above-market interest rates in order to subsidize the rates other, riskier students? Is that fair? Are we going to make that student pay higher rates on her Visa bill too, to avoid "disparate impact" in that credit market?

Clearly, it's important to give people a way to borrow money for college without having to pay usurious interest rates that will limit their choices later in life. But that's why we already have a massive, federally subsidized student loan program, where everyone pays the same interest rate regardless of race, age, personal factors, or the institution they attend. Cuomo is going after the private loan market, the whole point of which is to offer credit as credit is due. As the article notes, tying loans to institutional default rates will disadvantage the credit-worthiest students at high-default institutions, but in the long run a private market should be expected to sort that out, because it's in the lender's financial interest to do so.

The student loan industry has been subject to plenty of harsh, deserved criticism of late. But this seems like crossing the line into political opportunism.

Moderate Democrats' Original Sin

In his Post column today, Richard Cohen commits the original sin of moderate Democrats writing about education.

Cohen slams the Democratic candidates in last week's DC-based presidential debate for calling for more school funding without acknowledging that the DC school system is reasonably well-funded and still does a terrible job. Fair enough. But then he continues:

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything close to a call for real reform.

The salient fact about DC is not that it has education problems. Every big city in America has those. The overriding issue is that our schools are worse than other big cities that also have kids, parents, and teachers unions. In fact, the Washington Teachers Union has kept a pretty low profile since being humbled by a massive corruption scandal a few years back. In DC at least, they're not the big issue.

But that kind of nuance is lost on Cohen. He's doing what far too many center-left types do when discussing education: playing off the conservative agenda, rather than taking time to come up with an agenda of his own.

The standard right-wing education agenda has three and only three principles, which have stood unchanged for decades:

1) More money won't fix education.
2) Teachers unions are the problem.
3) Vouchers are the solution.

The great advantage of these principles--in addition to being easy to remember--is that they fit like a glove with, respectively, conservative anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-government principles. And since this country is never going to actually de-fund and privatize public education while breaking the teachers unions, you never have to come up with something new to say. George Will, for example, clearly has a column on each of these topics on file, which he republishes once a year after a few minutes of updating names and dates with, one assumes, the "find and replace" function in Microsoft Word.

That said, there are elements of truth in each case. Money obviously matters in education, but many public school systems, like the DC schools, are terribly inefficient. Teachers unions are strong advocates of public education and protect rights that teachers deserve, but they also stand in the way of sensible ideas like tying teacher pay to performance. And issues of constitutionality and larger public policy concerns aside, there are plenty of disadvantaged students in bad public schools who would, in the short term, be much better off in a private school.

This, in turn, creates space for people with an independent image to maintain--your Cohens and Mickey Kauses--to burnish their street cred by selectively adopting one or more of the conservative education principles. So Cohen denounces calls for school funding, Kaus is always looking for a chance to take shots at teachers unions, contrarian-by-design publications like The New Republic trumpet their support for vouchers, etc. As with the three principles themselves, little of this is about education policy per se. Rather, it's about using education policies as a proxy for other things. Maybe there was a time when this came across as gutsy truth-telling, but at this point it all feels like pro forma gesturing and nothing more.

The sad thing is that there are plenty of ways to apply the center-left mindset to education without simply adopting simplistic right-wing bromides. Instead of simply supporting or denouncing more school funding, reform the way funding is distributed within school districts, or adopt a "weighted funding" approach where money follows the student. Instead of being for or against vouchers, support expanded choice in the context of public education, with charter schools. Instead of being reflexively pro- or anti-union, work with unions to reform things like teacher pay and help create a labor-management relationship for 21st century schools.

There are ways to do all of these things, and to talk about them sensibly. But that would mean paying attention to education for its own sake, something too few pundits and politicians seem willing to do.

CNN, So-Called Legitimate News Organization

Cnn.com has revamped its site, including a shakeup of its front-page news categories. "Education" has traditionally had its own spot, usually--this being America--near the bottom under Celebrity News, but still on par with Science, Health, etc.

Well, no more. Education has been nixed as stand-alone category and has been replaced by "Funny News." As of this writing, 2:20 PM EDT, the two stories in this new category are:

"Stealing Another Man's Wife Costs $4,802"

and

"Larry the Cable Guy Gets Own Beer"

As a wise man once said, it's not that you can't make this stuff up, it's that you wish you had to.

A School By Any Other Name...

Researchers have discovered a new culprit for low academic achievement: school names. The Salt Lake Tribune reports, “in Florida, five schools are named after George Washington although 11 honor manatees, also known as sea cows.”

God forbid that schools be named after animals known as sea cows. Let’s hope that no manatees read the Salt Lake Tribune this morning – probably a safe bet, but who knows what will happen if the story gets picked up on the Atlantic coast.

The article describes a study that found that schools are less likely than ever to be named after civic heroes and more likely to be named after natural features. The authors think this trend may be linked to poor civic education.

Does the name of a school really affect the education of its students? I don’t know, and I don’t think there is any research on the question. But if the connection does exist, wouldn’t Manatee Elementary do a better job educating its students about biology and sea life than Jefferson Elementary?

I guess the real way to fix American education is to name schools like this: “Roosevelt Amino Acids a² + b² i-before-e Hyperbole High School”

NCLB (R)Evolution?

The SCOTUS desegregation decision sucked up all the ed policy air last week, but other issues still moved ahead, e.g. NCLB reauthorization (subject of today's lead WaPost editorial), to which Sec. Spellings added some new ideas as reported by USA Today's Greg Toppo:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday proposed "a more nuanced" way of evaluating schools under President Bush's No Child Left Behind school reform law — one that would differentiate between schools that are close to meeting state math, reading and science standards and those that are "chronic, chronic underperformers."

Under the proposed change, public schools with just a few struggling students could help students without being labeled underperforming. In the bargain, they'd avoid sanctions that can include firing staff, privatizing or even closing their doors.

A lot of the discussions around changes to the core AYP formula have focused on the "growth model" concept currently being piloted in some states, whereby schools are rated not by the percent of students meeting an absolute standard but by the percent of students on a growth trajectory to meet the absolute standard at some point in the future. The idea is to give schools credit for making a lot progress, even if the end result is still below par.

Spellings is talking about a different idea: creating nuance around the degree and scope of underperformance. A common--and essentially correct--criticism of NCLB is that it treats schools that miss the bar by a little with a few students in the same way as schools that miss the bar by a lot with a whole bunch of students. This proposal would make life easier for schools in the former category.

Probably a good idea, as approving quotes in the article from various NCLB proponents suggest. However -- We need to make sure that achievement gaps for vulnerable student subgroups -- low-income, minority, special ed, and LEP -- can't be tolerated indefinitely. Moreover, if we're going to go down this road, there should be a corollary: if we're going to go easier on the schools that miss by an inch, we need to do more, sooner, for students in schools that miss by a mile. If a school is far below the proficiency line with little growth for nearly all of its students, then there's no point in waiting six years to take action. Those kids need something different and better today.

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Courting Unfulfilled Promises

I'm an editor, not a blogger. And I often cringe at the lengthy prose of many blog posts, saying to myself, "they sure could use a good editor." But the recent Supreme Court ruling on race and schools has brought out the blogger in me. First, I do respect our justice system, the Supreme Court, its justices, their decisions and all. But I can't help scoff at the futility of this decision in light of what many refer to as "the promise of Brown."

In 2004 there were celebrations all over to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, the landmark 1954 desegregation case. Many books were published and conferences held. As associate editor of a higher education magazine at the time, I helped guide the publication down this road, interviewing the Brown plaintiffs, school officials in Topeka, Kan., scholars and activists that were involved then and now.

But what stood out among the commemorations and celebrations was the reality that after 50 years, the promise of Brown had not yet been realized. The court had ruled in 1954, but it took until the mid-1970s for the public to begin to act and then, only after court orders, much like the court-ordered desegregation ruling in Louisville, which along with Seattle's integration plan, prompted yesterday's High Court decision. And still, even after 30 years of court-mandated desegregation efforts, the consensus among educators was that there was still more to be done.

Thanks to yesterday's ruling, however, it will have to be done some other way. Even though the ruling allows for a limited use of race, which has sparked hope among some, to put that limitation into practice will take more resolve than many will demonstrate. If the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on race and college admissions, Grutter v. Bollinger, is any indication-and it is-many of those who have started to act will now start to retreat. Soon after that ruling, race-conscious programs all over the country began folding, in fear of potential lawsuits.

Brown's reality of a quality education for all seems less likely in court rulings and more so in the voluntary actions of a public that is truly and deeply committed to this goal. I see more of Brown's reality in innovative school reform efforts, such as charter schools and public school choice, which have their drawbacks but are initiated in a spirit of free will and not obligation. And I see more of Brown's reality in the D.C. mayor's radical move to charge someone with nontraditional, but proven experience with the task of turning around a struggling public school system. I recognize that these efforts have to be proven, but after 50 plus years of waiting for the promise of Brown, I'm ready to put my hopes in something else.

- Posted by Robin V. Smiles, Editor, Education Sector

Segregation is unconstitutional, so desegregation must also be?

Cruel irony dripped from the Supreme Court’s decision today to declare unconstitutional the school assignment plans in Seattle and Louisville. In Brown v. Board the Court ruled that districts could not segregate schools based on race. Today’s ruling says, in effect, districts can not desegregate based on race either. I respectfully disagree with Liz in arguing that the ends in this instance do justify the means, and that the race-blind language in Brown should not be understood so literally as to ignore the larger social issues the case addressed.

From 1975 to 2000, under court order to desegregate, Louisville assigned students to schools based on a number of categories, including race. When let go from court supervision, the district voluntarily chose to keep the racial classification as one factor in its school assignments. Today’s decision essentially makes the same tools used to desegregate schools only seven years ago now unconstitutional, as if de facto segregation had been permanently overcome.

The Court erred tremendously in considering the school assignment plans from Louisville and Seattle together. True, both plans utilized a numeric race window as a consideration for assigning children to schools, but the similarities stop there. The majority, written by Chief Justice Roberts, repeatedly cited the fact that a Seattle school with 30% Asian-American, 25% African-American, 25% Latino, and 20% white students would not be allowed under their plan. In an effort to create diversity, Roberts is surely correct in asserting such a school should qualify.

The majority faulted both districts for assigning students based on either/ or racial classifications: white/ nonwhite in Seattle and black/ other in Louisville. But the demographics in the two districts are not comparable. In Louisville, the dichotomy was real; only a tiny percentage of students did not fall into one of these categories. Seattle, on the other hand, had significant percentages of students of Hispanic and Asian descent.

Roberts also repeatedly emphasized the infrequency of Louisville’s usage of race as a reason for it to be abolished. His logic was that, since it was a small factor (only about 3% of the school assignment decisions employed race at all), it was expendable. But small usage does not mean small importance. Today, over one third of black and Latino K-12 students still attend schools where at least 90% of the students are considered a minority. More than one in six African-American students attends a school with a minority population greater than 99%.

These concentrations manifest in poor schools. Blacks are considerably more likely to
attend schools with lower average academic skills than whites are. And they are more likely to be enrolled in schools with larger class sizes and with teachers who are less prepared than their counterparts in predominantly white schools. Compared with tenth grade whites, tenth grade black students are more likely to attend schools with security guards (71 vs. 47 percent), metal detectors (21 vs. 3 percent), and bars on the windows (9 vs. 2 percent).

In Louisville, a district with an African-American concentration of 34%, the plan required blacks to make up between 20-50% of each school’s students. This is a fairly large window, and the fact that 70% of its schools fell more than five percentage points away from the average indicates flexibility in the plan’s implementation. Furthermore, some schools went over the 50% maximum, meaning it was not a strict “quota” by any definition.

Opponents of using racial guidelines suggest socioeconomic status (SES) as a proxy for race, but targeting by SES alone does not achieve the desired results. In 2004-2005, the US Department of Ed. highlighted five districts (Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County, NC; San Francisco, CA; Brandywine, DE; and La Crosse, WI) that had implemented SES-based school assignment plans. None of the five eliminated racial segregation. Both North Carolina districts saw substantial hikes in their racial concentrations; Charlotte-Mecklenburg's percentage of students in racially segregated schools increased 25%. The other three districts achieved only modest gains. La Crosse's meager 3.25% reduction scored top marks, and had the advantage of nine extra years.

Near the end of the majority decision in the Michigan law school affirmative action case, the Court suggests that 25 years from now racial preferences will no longer be necessary. While this is an admirable goal, it should not be constrained by a given number of years. Instead, we must continue to utilize racial considerations until the statistics begin pointing to a world where race is neutral.

Desegregation: Does the end justify the means?

An article in the BBC reports that the Supreme Court has just narrowly decided that the race of a student cannot be a factor in determining where they are to attend school. Stemming from affirmative action plans in Louisville and Seattle, the case was brought by white parents whose children were denied entry to their public school of choice because of racial quotas.

Opposition to the desegregation programs was not one sided, either. Parents of black students also expressed frustration at seeing their kids shipped all over the city according to where quotas of black students needed to be filled, rather than to their local school. One mother is quoted saying: "I prefer to have my kid go to a school for poor black people across the street rather than spend hours on a bus to go to a school for poor white people on the other side of town."

So what does this ruling imply in the light of open interdistrict choice, a current hot topic in education reform? The choice to transfer out of district is generally seen to be a liberating and valuable option to poor, minority, inner city students whose dismal local schools are sabotaging their life chances. However, studies on open interdistrict choice policies in Massachusetts and Minnesota , among others, have shown that it actually increases social stratification, with white students significantly overrepresented in the percentage of students who utilize the option. Also, the already underperforming schools that lose students lose money as well. The results? Schools increasingly divided along the lines of race and quality.

Although the repercussions of this ruling combined with the growing popularity of interdistrict choice policies may exacerbate inequalities in education, I cannot bring myself to disagree with the ruling. You cannot fix inequality with inequality. We must not be telling children that they can't attend their school of choice because of their race, be they white or black, no matter how admirable our intentions are; in this case, the end doesn’t justify the means.

This case also brings to light an issue that needs to be addressed: Do choice and equality run counter to one another in education? And if so, how can policy address this under the shadow of the Constitution and this recent ruling?

The Debate over Student Loan Auctions

At the Higher Education Finance Working Group policy briefing yesterday, the discussion, in true financial aid style, was lively, a little snarky**, and, at times, thoroughly confusing. One area where it did shed some light was the debate over loan auctions in the federal loan program (Inside Higher Ed writes it up here).

In the current system, Congress decides how much of a subsidy (called “special allowance payments”) the federal government will pay to lenders in the federal loan program. Critics argue that letting Congress decide that number, which impacts lender profits, allows too much political influence in the system.

Auction proponents claim that loan auctions would allow the market, and not politicians, to determine bank profits. With loan auctions, each year loan companies would bid on the ability to make federal student loans. The ‘best’ bids would be those that offer to make loans for the lowest subsidy rates.

Lenders don’t like this idea, which they claim would create too much instability in the loan market—schools would not know which lenders they will be working with from year-to-year. Lenders also claim that it would drive out smaller lenders unable to match the bids of larger lenders, and it would hurt students, who would see fewer benefits and worse service from lenders that are working off of smaller profit margins.

These are all reasonable concerns, but I’m still skeptical. Lenders usually end this argument by saying that the current system is perfectly fine, works great for everyone and should be left alone. That makes me think that the party it really works best for is the lenders, since they are the ones interested in keeping the status quo.

I haven’t seen good evidence yet that we can’t devise a loan auction that allows the market to determine subsidy rates while also protecting smaller lenders (they could bid in groups) and ensuring that lenders maintain the service necessary to keep default rates low (we could start by cutting the amount the government pays lenders on defaulted loans). There must be good policy solutions out there that balance the interests of all three parties—taxpayers, students, and lenders—better than the system we have today.

**I get a little cranky on the opinion page of yesterday’s USA Today about a mailing I got from Sallie Mae—it is misleading and points to the need for more oversight and regulation in the student loan industry.

Local Teachers Union Leaders Speak

Teachers unions are at the center of many raging education policy debates, and opinions about them are as strident and varied as they could be. But while representatives of the national unions, along with unions in big city schools districts, get most of the press covereage, the experiences and ideas of the leaders of the nation's thousands of smaller local unions are often left out. Which is a shame, because the local collective bargaining table is where many of the most important education decisions are actually made.

In a new Education Sector report, "Leading the Local," Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 30 recently-elected local union leaders from a diverse group of districts across the country. Their thoughts, on a range of topics from teacher pay to union-management relations to leading multiple generations of teachers in an era of increasing competition and accountability, show that local union leader positions on these issues are much more complex and varied than people commonly understand. Regardless of where you stand on the issues, if you care about teacher policy, you should read this report.