The UnTruth Comes Out

The NEA would like to be seen as an intellectually serious contributor to the discussion about No Child Left Behind, and at the level of individual members and state and local affiliates, this is often quite true. But then you see this (via Matt Yglesias), which looks like something a glassy-eyed Lyndon LaRouche supporter would try to shove in your hands as you're coming up off the Metro, and you wonder why anyone should bother listening to a word the national NEA has to say. The "Halliburton-ization" of the public schools? Neil Bush? Shouldn't the grassy knoll be on there somewhere?

However, reading this wasn't a total loss. I looked at the fine print at the bottom and saw --the NEA has an NCLB blog! Who knew? It's called NCLB - It's Time for a Change!, and features the following hilarious /sad disclaimer:

NCLB - It’s Time for a Change! is a blog written and maintained by a group of writers employed by the National Education Association. They are responsible for the content — what you read on this blog does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Education Association or its affiliates.

In other words, "We've bought and paid for this blog, but won't take responsibility for anything the anonymous writers have to say." Not that I entirely blame them, when the posts tend to begin along these lines:

Joel Packer, NEA Education Policy and Practice director, represented NEA and showed off his legendary encyclopedia knowledge of the law. Packer expertly fielded questions on a host of topics...

So as near as I can tell, there are only three differences between this and the AFT's NCLB Blog:

1) The AFT stands behind what it writes.
2) The people from the AFT who write the posts actually sign their names.
3) Posts at the AFT blog often have something worthwhile to say.

Other than that, pretty similar.

Professor, Teach Thyself

There's an excellent article$ by Jeffrey Brainard in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week about the way science is taught in most research universities. Basically, people have known for a long time--decades or more--that some ways of teaching science are better than others. When classes are designed in way that requires a lot of inter-student collaboration, hands-on learning, and regular feedback from the faculty, students learn more. When students are stuck in the back of a lecture hall passively listening someone drone through notes they've used for years, they learn less.

But many research universities have been slow to adopt best practices in teaching, if they adopt them at all? Why? Because research universities aren't designed to care about teaching. All the incentives--financial, professional, and institutional--are for (surprise) research. So even as Congress is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into financial aid programs designed to induce students to major in science, universities refuse to give those students the kind of education that the universities themselves have determined students need. For example:

Innovators...are limited in what they can achieve, says Susan B. Millar, a senior scientist in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies teaching in science and engineering. "I don't know that you can take these kinds of programs to scale when the unit of change is the individual," she says. "You can only do that for so long, until you get tired or retire. And then it doesn't spread."

Top administrators are loath to force change on departments. "I'm very reluctant to define successful and unsuccessful ways in which this can be done," says Patrick V. Farrell, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Madison, where some of the new teaching methods were developed. "I don't want to say, 'Lectures don't work, but group learning does.' In some contexts that's true; in other contexts, it's not. I'm looking for effectiveness in helping students learn."

I'm not sure which is worse: the anti-empiricism, or the total disregard for students? The only reason the University of Wisconsin provost "doesn't want to say" what the education researchers at the University of Wisconsin know to be true is that would mean having an argument with the faculty that he'd rather not have. One of the unfortunate side effects of giving college professors academic freedom when it comes to their speech and scholarship--and those are undeniably good things--is that the concept has been extended to their teaching to a degree that produces absurd reasoning like this. Obviously, college professors should be given a lot of lattitude to innovate and teach, but to say that the subject essentially can't even be discussed is nuts, and bad for students.

But hey, I could be wrong. If someone sends evidence that UW-Madison is actually evaluating its faculty for their "effectiveness in helping students learn" in any kind of reliable, empirical, public way--not just student evaluations, but something tied to real evidence of learning--I'd be more than happy to retract everything above.

To Teach or Not to Teach

New report (pdf) released by NCES that describes which college grads decide to teach, which don't, and why. It's a statistical report, using data from the 1993-2003 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, "B&B 93/03", so it can be long and boring unless you like that kind of thing. Here's the quick and easy if you don't:

1. Teachers stay put more than we think. Teachers have relatively low attrition rates and are actually leaving the profession at lower rates than their peers in other professions. So caution the characterization of teachers as a bunch of fickle ship-jumpers. Or at least no more so than the rest of us.

2. When they leave, it's mostly for family reasons or to go into an entirely different field. Not surprisingly, it's the ladies who leave for family and the men who leave for business and engineering, often for pay reasons. See #s 4 & 5.

3. Teachers don't test well (but probably raise their hands a lot in class). College entrance exam scores are lower for those who go into teaching. Sadly, there's actually an inverse relationship between these exam scores and the likelihood for teaching (16 percent of grads with the lowest scores went on to teach vs. 6 percent of those with the highest scores). That said, the same pattern is not true for grades. As college grade point average increases, grads are more likely to go on to become teachers. So, are they smarter or not? Depends on how you use testing and GPA to measure smarts.

4. Teachers like teaching. Ninety-three percent said they were satisfied overall with their profession and 90 percent said they'd choose it all over again. But they do have complaints- the richest ones are heard in the teacher's lounge but the report summarizes more politely: Nearly half (48 percent for each) said they're dissatisfied w/pay, parent support, and student motivation.

5. Still more women in teaching- and don't expect this to change. Women earned most of the bachelor degrees in education (79 percent vs. 21 percent for men) so of course more female grads ended up as teachers. Women may have more options now in the workforce than ever before, but the work-life balance issue is going to ensure that we keep coming in droves to teaching. More on the gender differences in the NCES report but also in this AAUW report on the pay gap for college grads from a few months ago *.

Education Week's got more easy to read info about the NCES report here.

* Disc: I was the dir of research at aauw when we designed the study. It can't escape its advocacy but it's good research, conducted by some of the same folks who did the NCES report.

Grad Rate Follies

A new report from Daria Hall at the Education Trust, my former employer (BTW, what's the statute of limitations on that in the blogosophere, vis a vis disclosure? It'll be two years in September, I'm thinking that's the limit. If you agree / disagree, email)--covered here in the NYTimes--makes a point that's not made often enough, namely that the No Child Left Behind Act's provisions related to high school graduation rates are more or less a complete joke. In nearby Virginia, for example, the goal is 57 percent. What? How does a number like that even get chosen? Was there a conversation when some state education official said, "Hey, how about fifty-eight percent?" and somone else said, "C'mon now, these people aren't miracle workers!"

Update: Turns out Virginia upped its target to 61 percent earlier this year, which I think moves the state from an F to a D-minus. Also, more disclosure: Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education. He voted against this target, saying it was too low.

Cracks in the NCLB Foundation

In a speech earlier this week, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, staked out his vision for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Much of the subsequent discussion focused on the Miller's proposal for what are commonly called "multiple measures." He said:

Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills. But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to determine how well schools and students are doing.

This is one of those issues where a few words here or there can outweigh the hundreds of pages that comprise the rest of the law. It's so important that a group of NCLB supporters sent Miller a letter a few weeks ago (link via This Week in Education) saying, essentially, "Please, please don't screw this up."

As this gets discussed in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years, it's important to understand what's at stake. Nearly all the back-and-forth will be about what gets measured. But equally important--perhaps more important--is who does the measuring.

The multiple measures idea stems from one the most common--and correct--criticisms of NCLB: schools are rated almost exclusively based on state assessments in reading and math. This system can be inaccurate and reductive--not only are we limited to one way of measurement, via standardized tests, but we're also limited in what's measured. Subjects like art, music, social studies, etc. are left out, along with the non-academic skills and character traits that schools are charged with teaching students. By expanding school measures beyond once-a-year tests, the thinking goes, we can get a broader, more nuanced, more accurate sense of what schools are really doing for their students.

A worthy goal, to be sure. But here's the problem: in many multiple measure scenarios, it's the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they're judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can't be wholly accountable to themselves.

The people here at Education Sector who handle accounting, for example, are scrupulously honest. Nonetheless, we're required to have our books audited by an outside accounting firm every year. Nobody disputes the necessity of this, just like nobody disagrees with having line judges call serves in and out at Wimbledon. When the stakes are high--as with money, championship tennis, and the educational lives of the nation's schoolchildren--measurement must be independent.

Local measurement will also inevitably create huge inconsistency and variance among schools and districts. People are already confounded by the fact that there are essentially 50 versions of NCLB, one for each state. What's the law going to look like if there's one version for each of the nation's 14,000 school districts, or 90,000 schools? A lot like having no accountability at all.

These are the reasons that we're stuck, for the moment, with standardized tests, their many flaws and limitations notwithstanding. And it's why this single issue has the potential to make various cliched dam-related metaphors come to life. Crack open NCLB with misguided multiple measures, and the entire vast enterprise will collapse.

Fish-y Logic on Higher Ed

In his Times column($) today, Stanley Fish begins by making a perfectly reasonable observation:

Whenever I’m asked, and sometimes even before I’m asked, I advise parents of college-age children to not send their sons and daughters to private schools, but to send them to public institutions, at least if there are any good ones in their state. I say this for the obvious reason. The tuition/fee difference between a good private school and a good state school can be as much as $40,000, and, aside from the dubious coin of prestige, it’s hard to see what you would be buying.

before going on to discuss the state of higher education in Florida, saying some things that aren't true, and then contradicting himself:

Florida is not even in the second tier of university systems in this country. Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, nevermind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina...Five straight years of steadily increased funding, tuition raises and high-profile faculty hires would send a message that something really serious is happening. Ten more years of the same, and it might actually happen.

Virginia doesn't really have a university "system" per se; it has the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech and a bunch of other loosely governed individual campuses. The University of Florida is in the bottom half of the "First Tier" of national university according to U.S. News, just like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Georgia Tech (UVA just makes the top half with a tie for #24).

And if public universities really do offer a similar quality of education at a fraction of the cost of privates, why does Fish want them to become...more like privates? Hike tuition, raise more money, and then spend it on a bunch of faculty who made their reputations as scholars and researchers, not teachers? That's exactly the kind of status-obsessed, students-be-damned behavior that public universities should be avoiding.

Update: Sherman Dorn, who works at a public university in Florida, comments here.

Clintonian Education Policy

In Nashville yesterday and today for the annual DLC National Conversation. Interesting fact: like most conferences, you get a canvas tote bag full of stuff when you register. Unlike most conferences, the bag includes a 100 ml. bottle of Jack Daniels. Which is kind of a good one in principle, except 100 ml. is too big to bring back through airport security, which means you either have to drink it alone in your hotel room a la David Hasselhoff or during the conference itself, which, even in a meeting of elected officials, might be kind of rude.

President Clinton gave a great speech at lunch, offering a full-throated defense of his legacy and of the continued relevance of the DLC. That said, his education comments were short and disappointing--his only recommendation for NCLB is essentially, "fewer tests, but based on national standards," which would make it impossible to implement the growth model reforms that seemingly everyone supports these days.

Paying More for More Valuable Degrees

The NYTimes has an article on an interesting higher ed policy issue: whether colleges should charge more for some degrees than others. Most don't, but there's any argument to be made that this is unfair: some degrees--like engineering--are both more valuable in the job market and more expensive to provide in terms of equipment and labor. By contrast, an education degree is both less lucrative and less costly. Why should teachers implicitly subsidize the education of engineers who suck up more college resources and then turn around and make twice as much money out of school? The flip side argument is that we don't want short-term costs to influence long-term life decisions (particularly since people tend to be quite econonmically irrational about such things), or to warp college curricula around limited considerations of economic value.

A key question to answer, then, is the extent to which student choices of major are influenced by variations in price. If demand for given majors is relatively inelastic, then colleges could probably differentiate up to a point without significant negative side effects and thus make pricing more efficient and fair. On this point, the Times reports:

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.

“We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,” said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. “The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.”

This is maddening. The program has been in place for 15 years and all they have is "purely anecdotal" evidence? How about some actual evidence? Universities know precisely what decisions their students make in terms of selecting courses and majors. For most of them, they have detailed financial records. At an institution the size of the University of Kansas, they have tens of thousands of cases to study. Isn't there an economist or PhD candidate on staff who could answer this question? One of the remarkable--and disquieting--things about universities is how they so infrequently apply their tremendous capacities of analysis and inquiry to themselves.

Miserly Colleges

Lynne Munson of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity turns in a thought-provoking op-ed at Inside Higher Ed today. She takes colleges to task for hoarding vast sums of money in endowments while still charging students high tuition rates:

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

With all the talk in Congress about how much money loan companies (including “non-profit” loan companies) are making off of student loans, it might be worth also taking a look at how colleges spend their endowments. As Munson points out, taxpayers are helping to fund the federal grants and subsidized loans that allow many students to afford the high tuitions at these institutions (and allow these institutions to charge such high tuitions). Meanwhile, donors receive tax breaks for adding to these large endowments. It’s worth asking what the public is really getting out of this deal.

The Onion, Predictably, Sees the Truth

From a story in this week's Onion (Interestingly, not on-line yet, another reason to be psyched they're publishing the print edition in DC now):

New Theories Suggest Kennedy Wasn't Shot - A controversial new book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has raised questions not about the role of a lone gunman or a conspiracy of shooters, but about whether the late president was even shot at all.
While the book, Outside the Crosshair, does not dispute the fact that a massive portion of Kennedy's skull was separated from his head during the 1963 Dallas visit, it maintains that the president suffered fatal explosive-cranial trauma through means completely unrelated to gunshots.
"Certain extreme force was involved in this tragic death," said Dr. Horace Musashi, the book's author and professor of computer science at Mount Union College in Alliance, OH. However...Musashi favors an explanation known as the single-massive-spike-in-blood pressure-theory. After 11 years of painstaking research, Musashi uncovered testimony from anonymous eyewitnesses who claimed that unopened packets of duck sauce and soy sauce were hastily removed from Air Force One..."

The crucial detail is that Musashi is a college professor. Despite the democratization of access to information and expertise, it's still the case that society bestows considerable--albeit undifferentiated--intellectual status on university faculty. As long you have a PhD in something and faculty appointment somewhere, you get a significant added presumption of knowing what the heck you're talking about--if even if what you're talking about has nothing whatsoever to do with your training and field of study.

Not that this is altogether a bad thing, it's good to maintain academic standards and credentials in era where simple assertion of expertise is easier than ever before.

But it has the negative byproduct of lending undue credence to Harvard psychologists who believe in alien abduction, BYU physics professors promoting wacky 9/11 conspiracy theories , University of Minnesota philosophers who see sinister government plots behind the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 and the death of Paul Wellstone, etc. etc.

Churchillian Speech

Ward Churchill was fired by the University of Colorado yesterday because he said that the maintenance workers and secretaries who were burned and buried alive in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were a bunch of Nazis who had it coming. The official reason for the firing was academic misconduct, which has the ACLU in a snit. Churchill's speech, they said was "protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action."

I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and close to a free speech absolutist, but in this case I don't buy it.

For various reasons including limited resources and the need to maintain an atmosphere of collegiality and trust, universities can't go around conducting in-depth investigations into the scholarly conduct of every professor on campus. But they certainly have the right to do so on a case-by-base basis, and it seems more than fair to assume that a person so deranged that he can't see the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of monstrous crimes against humanity might also be a less-than-scrupulous scholar. Sure enough, that's what they found.

The ACLU seems to be saying that liars and plagiarists can innoculate themselves against the consequences of their actions if they can manage to offend enough people to bring scorn and infamy upon themselves and the university that employs them. Plus, who thinks that if Churchill had, for example, been publicly espousing the principles of Nazism--rather than simply ascribing them to innocent victims of terrorism--he'd still have a job? Of course not, because he never would have gotten his job in the first place. Nobody is saying Ward Churchill should be arrested for saying what he said, just that no decent institution of higher education should pay him to do so.

All Competition is Not the Same

Ezra Klein critiques a recent WSJ op-ed$ about income inequality and the return on human capital from Cato's Brink Lindsey, which concludes:

Those interested in reducing meaningful economic inequality would thus be well advised to focus on education reform. And forget about adding new layers of bureaucracy and top-down controls. Real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition.

Ezra says:

Responding to that sort of despair by trying to break the teacher's unions is truly an astonishingly narrow and inadequate solution

I don't put any stock in Cato's voucher-mania, but it's a mistake to assume that every call for more competition in education, challenging the monopoly, etc., is necessarily about breaking teachers unions. For an example, look no further than today's front-page New York Times story about former Democratic fundraiser and Rock the Vote founder Steve Barr, who's challenging urban school districts by opening new charter schools with unionized teachers. Barr says, "If the district doesn’t work with me, I’ll compete with them and take their kids."

The point being, while one could probably accurately surmise that Lindsey wouldn't mind breaking teachers unions, its perfectly possible to accomplish what he advocated for in a pro-union context. Not all attempts to introduce competition into the education system mask a dastardly anti-labor agenda. Plus, given that most serious education observers--left and right--agree that many school systems suffer from moribund bureaucracies in need of reform, implicitly putting unions on the wrong side of that argument isn't doing them any favors.

Doing the Math on Borrower Benefits

As the financial aid legislation in both the House and Senate have moved forward over the past couple of weeks, lobbyists for loan companies have been going full throttle trying to derail efforts to cut subsidies to lenders. They are even using the new legislation to intimidate borrowers into consolidating their loans—my mailbox has been inundated with letters from loan companies threatening rising student loan costs because of the proposed legislation (there have been plenty more since this).*

A recent advertisement in The Politico by the “Campaign to Reform Student Loans” highlights one of their most popular arguments, that the proposed subsidy cuts will “wipe out the interest rate discounts currently available to borrowers.” And then they give some scary calculations: a student with a $20,000 loan will pay an additional $5,000 over 20 years as a result of this legislation, and a student with a $60,000 loan will pay an additional $38,000 over 30 years.

And this is true. A very, very small percent of students would end up paying more on their loan over the course of repayment without these borrower benefits. But, according to FinAid.org—a great source of independent information on financial aid—less than 1 in 29 borrowers will see the full discount from these borrower benefits.

The most common benefits are a .25 percent discount on the interest rate for automatic debit payments and a 2 percent interest rate discount for 48 on-time payments. But less than 15 percent of students sign up for the direct debit, and less than 10 percent qualify for the on-time payment discount for the entirety of their loan. It is not easy to make 48 consecutive on-time payments, and if a borrower misses just one, he or she loses the benefit for the life of the loan.

FinAid writes:

A review of lender SEC filings reveals that the combined cost of all the discounts, including the direct debit and prompt payment discounts, averaged less than 10 basis points (0.10%) over the past decade. That's less than 5% of the nominal "full" 2.25% discount and less than $50 per borrower on average.

Using FinAid’s handy loan discount analyzer, a student with a $20,000 loan that gets the direct debit discount and has a 1 in 36 chance of being late with a payment (a much more realistic expectation) could expect to save $592. For the student with $60,000 in loans, it would be around $1,700. A much lower benefit than loan company lobbyists advertise.

Beyond the mathematics of loan discounts, it’s worthwhile to think about the lenders’ argument: that they should receive more in subsidies so that they can then pass some of the money along to some students as discounts. In essence, lenders are asking for a smaller cut to their subsidies because they want to act as middlemen for this money.

But wouldn’t it make more sense for Congress to just give this money directly to students, either in the form of interest rate cuts or increased grant aid?

* Lenders are interested in getting students to consolidate before the legislation takes effect because, if this legislation works like past changes to subsidy rates, lenders will be able to collect the old, higher subsidy rate for the life of the loan on any loans consolidated before the new subsidy rate takes effect.

Maverick Leads Charge

For those of you intrigued by today's front-page NYTimes story on Steve Barr, the guys who's shaking things up out in L.A., Education Sector was on the story a year ago with this report.

Compacts & Contracts: A Colorado Case

The National Governor’s Association released a report over the weekend calling on states to implement compacts with colleges and universities. It’s a growing trend in higher education, and it deserves a closer look.

The most innovative higher education funding scheme comes from Colorado. In 2005, the state began allocating higher education money based on a student-stipend program called the College Opportunity Fund. Money follows in-state undergraduates to their chosen institution. Students complete a short application in order to be eligible, and the stipend is good for only 145 credits. All stipends to public institutions are equal, and privates get about half that amount. Every institution that opts to participate must agree to a performance contract with the state. The state may purchase fee-for-service contracts for graduate schools, rural education, economic development services, and dual enrollment programs.

Advocates argued the stipend program would increase college attendance for traditionally underserved populations. They argued these students and families suffered more from lack of information about the affordability of higher education than from actual financial limitations. Publicizing the stipend as a use-or-lose system would theoretically address this problem. Accountability schemes in higher education struggle with the principal-agent problem--who exactly is the “client,” students or the state? By setting all stipends equal and allocating funding entirely based on student enrollment, the state has effectively said students are.

National CrossTalk published an in-depth look on Colorado’s stipend program last winter, and they found some things working and some not: the 145 credit limit appeared to be pressuring students to complete college quicker, colleges had almost immediately raised tuition levels to compensate for years of inadequate funding, and the fee-for-service measure had been implemented in such a way that state funding levels remained almost exactly constant. Most important to the program’s success, although current students failed to comprehend the reason for the change, students as young as eighth grade are already registering for the stipends.

Choice requires information, and there will not be symmetry in who has it. Part of the state’s role, then, should be to inform the consumers of their options, or mandate the producers (universities) provide enough data for real choices. That doesn’t appear to be happening. Another gaping hole in this design is that it is entirely state-based. Institutions have no incentive to attract international scholars or high-caliber students from other states, because they’ll receive $0 for enrolling these “clients.”

Before switching to performance contracts with individual institutions, Colorado had a performance-based funding mechanism in place. About 2% of the total general funds in FY2001 were allocated to the governing boards based on performance results. Moving away from this funding scheme to a contractual system means the accountability mechanism has shifted from (admittedly limited) financial consequences to legal ones. The devil is in the details, and we’ll have to wait and see how enforceable the four-year contracts turn out to be.

Contracts are not a panacea. More states should experiment with various accountability tools to better manage this country’s higher education institutions. Kudos to the NGA for featuring various state attempts to do so.

The Box Theory

I am a product of the blue box theory of American History. Flipping through my 10th grade U.S. history text book, it is impossible to ignore the takeover of the special interest box: little blue boxes, outlined and shaded, each one condensing minority perspectives and contributions into half a page or less: Women in the civil war, Immigrants and the railroad.

This weekend, the blue box theory struck again.

The Israeli Education ministry announced Sunday that Israel’s war of independence will now be referred to as a “catastrophe” for the state’s Arab population. A New York Times article notes:

Ms. Fenig, who is the national supervisor of homeland, society and citizenship studies, said, “Pedagogically, it is not right to hide facts and ignore Arab sensitivities if we want to live together and build something in common.”

Though applaud Ms. Fenig’s commitment to marginalized views, I cannot help but wonder if this is an impossible task. Can history text books ever succeeded in incorporating all sides into a coherent narrative, or will minority history never encroach further than boxes?

Flexing Our Way Towards Reform?

Just like during NCLB’s creation, the issue of local control over federal dollars is brimming to the surface again. While far less sexy than highly effective teachers or growth models, flexibility may be another looming battle in the fight over if/when/how to reauthorize NCLB. Recently, Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon introduced the State and Local Flexibility Improvement Act, designed to give state and local officials more authority over federal dollars. In describing the legislation, McKeon used the ever-popular federal-government-ruins-everything refrain in advocating “removing Washington constraints on federal dollars.” The bill proposes expanding flexibility authority for states and local school districts to use federal funding in ways that better match their needs.

Sound familiar? NCLB had four new provisions that provide for this exact type of flexibility. What’s happened since? A new series of reports from the U.S. Department of Education looks at participation rates in each program and how and why districts use (and don’t use) the various provisions.* The newest Education Sector Chart You Can Trust analyzes how these provisions have been used and why participation has been lower than expected.

Interestingly, rural districts have the highest participation rates. These small districts get very small allocations under some Title programs and pooling those funds for other purposes makes a lot of sense for them. Other districts are not quite as enthused with flexibility. Only 16% of districts report using Transferability, a flexibility provision available to all districts. And even fewer districts—one to be exact—used the new Local-Flex program, which was intended to provide even more flexibility to districts.

The reasons that participation isn’t higher vary-and some have to do with uneven implementation and a lack of information. Some districts also reported being frustrated with the small amount of money eligible to transfer—a problem that McKeon’s proposal aims to address. However, a sizeable percent of districts (44%) that didn’t use the program reported choosing not to participate because they already had sufficient existing flexibility in how to use funds.

None of this is to suggest that flexibility isn’t a good idea that could use some tweaking, or that local control isn’t important. It does provide a caution however, that like many education catch-phrases, just “removing Washington,” doesn’t necessarily lead to the kind of dramatic change we all want.

*Full disclosure: I recently left the Department of Education, where I served as the contracting officer’s representative on the contract that produced this evaluation, but an independent contractor conducted all analyses and wrote these reports.

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!