How Colleges Short-Change Women

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today editorial writer Richard Whitmire, author of a forthcoming book about how K-12 schools supposedly short-change boys, looks at the issue of gender discrimination in college admissions. Says($) Whitmire:

In desperate attempts to keep their campuses from swinging hugely female, as far more women than men apply to college these days, straight-A girls are told to look elsewhere, while B-average boys get the fat envelope.

As a typical example, Whitmire notes that "the admittance rate for men at the College of William and Mary was an average of 12 percentage points higher than the rate for women from 1997 to 2006." To which the dean of admissions there responds, "Even women who enroll ... expect to see men on campus. It's not the College of Mary and Mary."

Whitmire wants to know why nobody is filing a big splashy lawsuit about this. The main reason seems to be the phenomenon that the William and Mary guy alludes to--compared to other admissions preferences, the student/group interests here are conflicted.

A given minority student applying to college presumably has two congruent interests: (1) to increase their chances of admission, and (2) to increase the chances that other minorities will be admitted. Both interests lead to the same policy: affirmative action.

Men and women, by contrast, have two opposing interests: (1) to increase their chances of admission, and (2) to decrease the chances that other members of their gender will be admitted. In other words, give admissions preference to me (or in the case of women, don't discriminate against me), but once you've done that, don't apply the same policy to anyone else, because I'd rather have more of the other gender and not too many of my own.

That said, admissions preferences for men are clearly a terrible, selfish policy. The original (and still best) justification for affirmative action was to help students who, because of their race, had fewer opportunities to attend a good K-12 school and had historically suffered discrimination in society at large. For boys, the former is highly debatable--there are good reasons to think the so-called "boys crisis" in K-12 education is overblown--and the latter could obviously not be less true.

In the end, the biggest losers here are women from the middle and lower parts of the socioeconomic spectrum. This is why:

The overall pool of college students is, for the purposes of this discussion, fixed at 57 percent women, 43 percent men. Individual college policies don't change that in the aggregate, because everyone can go to college somewhere. So gender-based admissions policies don't solve the gender imbalance, they just redistribute it downward to colleges that don't have selective admissions, and thus aren't in a position to manipulate their gender mix.

As a result, women who attend selective colleges suffer a reduced chance of getting into the college of their choice, but enjoy a more balanced gender distribution. Men who attend selective colleges get a leg up on admissions, and get to hang out with smarter women who are more fun to talk to and will earn more if they marry them someday. For men, it's win-win; for women, it's win-lose.

The lose-losers are women who attend non-selective colleges and universities, women who are more likely to be first-generation, mid-to-low income students. They have to put up with an even more maldistributed gender mix than they would otherwise experience, plus the men they go to school with are less smart than they would otherwise be.

So if you're a women attending Regional State University and you're wondering why there aren't very many guys around, and the ones who are around are a bunch of drooling idiots, blame the admissions director at William and Mary.

Attention Researchers

At Teacher Magazine, Jessica Shyu ask her readers to weigh in on what makes teachers stay. Good question. After that, we should figure out what makes them leave. Then we need to know what makes people join or not join the profession in the first place.

Of course, we already have plenty of theories, conjectures, and conventional wisdom about these questions. We do not have nearly enough useful research. It's time to stop asking for anecdotes and start asking for data.

For example, which of the following would be more attractive to chemistry majors with at least a 3.2 GPA: A $3000 raise for teachers or a career ladder program that uses the same money to provide opportunities for advancement and promotion. I don't know the answer, but a simple study could tell us. A more clever study could tell us the approximate dollar value of a career ladder program to any subset of the student population we're interested in. And it could do the same for other policies that affect whether or not people want to teach.

Researchers have already done surveys and analyzed the labor market, but these inquiries have been limited, and many are now outdated. With a current and comprehensive study, we could reshape recruitment and retention to improve teacher quality. JPMorgan and McKinsey have the data. It’s time for schools to have it too.

Q&A on Special Education and NCLB

Sherman Dorn raises some great questions about special education and NCLB in response to my CYCT on the topic.* While Dorn thinks that my answers to his questions are all an unqualified ‘yes’, I’d say they’re more of a ‘yes, but…’:

• Do schools use special education as an excuse not to educate students identified as having disabilities?

Here we agree that the answer is yes. And I think we’d also agree that it is important to qualify this answer. Often, teachers and principals don’t have the tools to adequately address learning problems or disabilities. While I think holding schools accountable for teaching students with disabilities to grade-level standards is one part of the equation for improving the success of special education students, another, very important part, is ensuring that teachers and principals are well-trained and have the resources they need to carry out this responsibility.

• Should schools be pushed to educate students with disabilities better?

We also agree on the answer to this question: yes. And—as I said above—accountability is an important part of this push. But another part will be equipping teachers and schools to meet the challenge, or else we can push all we want, but won’t get very far.

• Can students with disabilities reach the proficiency standard identified by states?

As I say in the report, for the majority of students enrolled in special education—around 80 percent—the answer is yes. These students are identified with disabilities that do not preclude them from reaching grade-level standards. In these cases, I do think that the ultimate goal should be grade level achievement. For the minority of special education students for whom grade-level achievement may not be possible—the ones with the most severe disabilities—alternate methods are needed to hold schools accountable for their achievement.

Under NCLB, we already allow states to use alternate methods for approximately 30 percent of special education students. Ten percent are assessed with alternate assessments, these are intended for students with severe cognitive disabilities. Twenty percent are assessed under ‘modified standards’, these are intended for students who are not able to achieve grade-level standard within the typical timeframe, but do not have severe cognitive disabilities.

As Dorn notes at the end of his post, the limits on the number of students who can be assessed with alternate methods needs to be based on research on the proportion of students for whom this is appropriate. The Commission on No Child Left Behind did some research on this and found that the current limit for testing students with ‘modified standards’ is too high. And so, while we may need to improve the methods we use to assess this group of students, I’m not convinced that the overall percent of students that are assessed with alternate methods needs to be increased.

Dorn offers an idea for an alternate method of testing special education students—students can take a lower grade-level assessment so long as they increase a grade-level each year. This will still hold schools accountable for increasing student achievement from one year to the next, but also recognizes that some students are not yet at grade level. This could work for the students currently covered under ‘alternate assessments’ and ‘modified standards’, but for the majority of special education students, I still think that the ultimate goal needs to be grade-level achievement. Growth models hold some potential for addressing this—they can be used to hold schools accountable for improving student achievement while also recognizing the huge differences in where students start.

• Is NCLB the best current tool to prod states and schools to educate students with disabilities better?

My answer to this is a yes, with a big BUT. The key word is current. Right now, NCLB is the best accountability measure students with disabilities have had since IDEA. BUT, it is certainly not the best measure they will ever have, at least I hope not. While I applaud NCLB’s focus on achievement gaps and disaggregating data, I also think there’s a lot to do to improve the quality of assessments, add more nuance and accuracy to identifying the ‘in need of improvement’ schools, and improve the consistency and accuracy of state standards. This is hard work that will require resources, good policymaking, and solid research, but I don’t think that rolling back accountability is the way to get to an improved NCLB.

*Sherman, thanks for the name correction!

Lonestar Leadership: New Education Chair in Texas

Texas Governor Rick Perry named a new chairman to the State Board of Education yesterday. Perry chose Don McLeroy, a staunch conservative dentist known for his strong views on curriculum: yes to abstinence, no to evolution.

I could tell you more about McLeroy, but you should take a look at his surprisingly candid website. In case you’re short on time, or in case a wise bureaucrat gently suggests that McLeroy take down the site, I’ll describe some highlights.

In an essay on standards and state tests, McLeroy dismisses state authority in education, the same authority he will now oversee. “Not only has the rise of the State led to mediocrity in our schools, it has provided a base for monopolistic educational ideas, views and fads to gain a dogmatic hold over our entire State. It has stifled diversity, a trait that is so necessary in all fields of endeavor.”

In a barely-coherent polemic on evolution, McLeroy lists 117 arguments against Darwin’s theory. Don’t ask me what he means by #115, “[Evolution] moves to fast to see; moves to slow to see.”

In “The Gift of Medievil Christendom to the World,” McLeroy argues that “Freedom… is never found in the ancient world... It is never found in the rest of the modern world. Freedom is unique to the areas of the world that have been touched by Christianity.”

As Chairman, McLeroy will have several important duties. In coming years, the nation’s second most populous state will create new curriculum standards in English, reading, writing, and science. McLeroy will appoint committes and chairs while setting the agenda for each board meeting. His role may be especially important due to the split composition of the board: seven firm social conservatives and eight moderate republicans and democrats.

Update: The Dallas Morning News editorial staff gives its take on the appointment.

Terrible PhD Completion Rates

Richard Vedder is at least two standard deviations more conservative than I am on most issues, but his higher education blog is a consistent source of sharp commentary and outside-the-box thinking. Yesterday he discussed abolishing tuition at Harvard; today's topic is the shocking state of PhD completion:

A half century ago, it was common for persons to get their Ph.D. in four or five years and some, including myself, did it in under three years (at age 24 yet). Today, a majority of those entering graduate programs do not have their degrees in six years, and in the humanities, a majority of Ph.D. candidates have not completed their degree in TEN years!!! Of those who DO get their humanities Ph.D. within 10 years, a majority have not received the degree after six years. The dropout rates are about as high as for undergraduate education.

Dropout rates in undergraduate education are pretty bad, especially at non-elite public universities, where dropout rates of 60 percent or more are not uncommon, particularly for low-income and minority students. That large numbers of people who have already proven to be college material, by virtue of completing a bachelor's degree, are spending years of their lives in the futile pursuit of doctorate strikes me as a massive waste of resources all around.

Plus, 10 years? That's insane. Part of me would love to figure out a way to get an advanced degree in a really interesting, complicated area. Then Vedder says:

Part of the problem is that dissertation preparation has gotten out of hand. I have sat on Ph.D. committees where professors force students to do months of additional work of trivial worth in order to fine tune and extend some esoteric thought that the professor fancies.

and I think: Nope, there's no way I could deal with that. Life is short, and there's work to do.

More on Special Education and NCLB

As promised, ES has a new Chart You Can Trust on NCLB accountability and special education students.

As this great article in EdWeek discusses, some lawmakers and education groups (such as the National Education Association and National School Boards Association) are calling for more flexibility when assessing special education students. Specifically, they’d like to give students assessments deemed appropriate by the students’ Individual Education Plan team (the group responsible for deciding on a special education student's education plan). But advocates for special education students argue that allowing this kind of flexibility will lower achievement standards and turn back the clock on accountability for these students.

I argue that the majority of special education students can meet the same, grade-level standards as regular education students, and holding them to different standards could be detrimental. Click here for more on this issue.

Happens to the Best of Us

Per CNN:

The longtime chairman of the Roger Williams University board admitted Monday to using the N-word during a board meeting, saying it "kind of slipped out."...Papitto, who has given the school at least $7 million and whose name is on the only law school in Rhode Island, said he had never used the term before.

"The first time I heard it was on television or rap music or something," he told WPRO.

That's understandable. As we all know, the N-word is bandied about like nobody's business on network television these days. And since Papitto, like most 80-year old white men, probably listens to rap music two or three hours per day, one can understand how it could slip out in a casual conversation about the difficulty of finding minorities to sit on the university board. It must be tough, having grown up in '30 and '40s--when, of course, racial slurs were unknown--only to endure a coarsened 21st century culture to which he inevitably, and forgiveably, succumbed.

Investing in Harvard Graduates (for real)

Richard Vedder offers some fairly radical ideas about how higher education financial aid could be different, particularly at elite schools:

Rich schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton should let students in for free in exchange for a share of student earnings beyond subsistence for X number of years after graduation. In other words, Harvard should buy equity in the "human capital" that it allegedly creates, include it as an asset in its endowment, and there should be no student loans. Alternatively, students should be given the option of paying tuition now with no future obligation. However, I see no reason why Harvard, Yale and Princeton charge any tuition at all given that they earn at the minimum $75,000 per student in sustainable endowment income annually. There is a fairly decent case that can be made that, given the huge value of tax exempt status to them, these should not be allowed to charge tuition, although I would not go that far.

I probably would go that far. Barring some kind of catastrophic collapse of the nation's financial markets, it seems likely that at some point in the next 10 - 20 years, at least one university--probably Harvard--will reach the theoretical limit of the size of a non-profit university's endowment beyond which some combination of internal and external pressure makes charging tuition untenable.

On the other point, I wonder how much a sufficiently-sized group of Ivy League freshmen could raise per person on the open market if they securitized a portion of their future collective income over a given time period -- a percentage big enough to be worth buying but small enough to avoid massive disincentives to earn? Is that even possible, legally?

EduCap: A For-Profit Company in Non-Profit Clothing

The next time someone says you can't get rich working in non-profits, just show them the story on EduCap in today’s Washington Post. EduCap is a “non-profit” private student loan company, whose CEO receives $1 million in annual compensation. This story makes you rethink what it means to be a non-profit, and it also underlines how much money—and how little oversight—is in the whole student financial aid game.

The article details (although it still left me a little confused…) the corporate structure of EduCap—a nonprofit lending company that owns both the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation and Loan to Learn, it’s lending brand.

Despite it’s non-profit status, which exempts it from paying federal income taxes, EduCap reaps enough profits to buy a Gulfstream IV Jet, to take its board on retreats to the Bahamas , and to offer to fly financial aid officers and their spouses to a Carribean island for an all-expense paid conference (which did not happen after intense media scrutiny).

The CEO claims that EduCap helps students by offering private loans to bridge the gap between federal loans and the cost of college. But I have to wonder how offering a high-risk student (probably low-income, and with little or poor credit history) a large amount of loan money at a high interest rate (18 percent in some cases) is helpful. It’s more likely to put these students at risk of bankruptcy or a lifetime of student loan debt.

If EduCap really wanted to help these students, it would, like a true non-profit, cut down on the perks and the million-dollar CEO salary and use its profits to offer at-risk students grants and/or loans at very low interest rates. If it doesn’t want to do this, then it should call itself what it is—a for-profit private loan company.

*An illustrated example of how non-profits in the student loan industry get rich: StudentLoanFollies.pdf

Monopolizing the Mantle of Public Education

Via Joanne Jacobs:

New Detroit Public Schools superintendent Connie Calloway said Thursday that she does not support charter schools, and she intends to present ideas that will help draw students back to the struggling school system.

"Charter schools mean suicide for public schools," said Calloway during her first board meeting, causing the crowd at Kettering High School to erupt in applause.

Calloway said Detroit Public Schools must get to the root of the persistent enrollment loss plaguing the 116,000-student district.

She identified two immediate reasons: ongoing disputes the district faces and the desire of parents to have safe, clean and orderly schools.

There are legitimate arguments to be had about charter schools--how they should be expanded, funded, governed, and held accountable. Some charter schools are great, others aren't, and no one should think they're an educational cure-all. But surely the most dishonest trope among charter opponents is the deliberate attempt to put charter schools outside the boundaries of "public" education.

Charter schools are public schools. They're governed and funded by the public and they enroll public students, free of charge. I've been in a bunch of charter schools here in DC--again, some great, some not--and I would defy anyone to walk in the front door and explain what makes them less than fully public.

Perhaps new superintendant Calloway understands this better than she lets on, with her odd "suicide" construction. Suicide comes from within, after all, so the question is what essentially public element of schooling is at risk here--something other than an inability to provide "safe, clean, and orderly" schools, I assume? If so, what is it? If not, what are we losing that's worth mourning for?

(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.