Merit Pay Mania

I'm a day late to the merit pay roundabout between the American Prospect's Ezra Klein, the Atlantic's Matt Yglesias, and the New Republic's Jason Zengerle. But the points are still worth discussing, particularly Ezra's kick-off post, which begins thusly:

I'm always amused by well-paid journalists and pundits complaining that teacher's compensation isn't closely enough linked to performance. Is Megan [McArdle, like Matt an Atlantic blogger] hauled into [Atlantic Editor] James Bennet's office once a week, presented with updated traffic numbers where traffic boosts and drops are disaggregated from intra-Atlantic links and general noise, and then paid less or more depending on her performance? Of course not.

Ezra continues in this vein, writing a variation on a point that is often made by merit pay critics, which goes something like this:

"People are always saying teachers should be paid based on merit like other professionals. But other professionals aren't paid strictly or objectively on merit; they're paid based on all kinds of subjective and irrational bases, or they're paid for being more experienced and well-educated, just like teachers. You're faulting current teacher pay systems for falling short of a standard that doesn't actually exist."

This is true in the strictest sense, but it isn't a good argument against merit pay. The most damning critique of the standard teacher pay system is not that it falls short of some perfect, objective, rational ideal. It's that it fails to incorporate merit in any way whatsoever. More specifically, it precludes merit. Even if a school or district has all the evidence in the world that Teacher A is twice as good as Teacher B, data no reasonable person would dispute, and it has a strong, obvious interest in paying Teacher A more as a result--to recruit her, retain her, motivate her, whatever the reason may be--it may not boost her compensation.

This simply isn't true in most professional jobs. I've worked for five organizations since I left graduate school--two in the public sector, three non-profit--and in every case managers had discretion to pay their better employees more, either when hiring them or giving them raises. The quality of the process varied a lot, and that's important, but at least they had the option. Broadly speaking, I'm guessing this is true for nearly all professional occupations except for K-12 teachers.

This problem is compounded by the fact teachers are generally quite limited in availing themselves of de facto merit pay through professional advancement. Ezra and Matt both cite the supposedly non-meritorious nature of compensation for journalists, as well as the fact that "merit" itself in that field is hard to define. But the bottom line is that there's a clear hierarchy in journalism that is sensitive to merit and positively related to pay (this is Jason's point), particularly if you expand the field to include book-writing and editing. I'm guessing James Fallows has done okay for himself financially over the course of his career, because he's a really good journalist. Matt himself is another obvious example--if you graphed a blogging-related salary histogram of the all the bloggers in all the world, you'd see a flat line at $0 going straight across the page from left to right, until finally in the 99.99th percentile or so it would tick up into positive numbers, and include Matt, who gets paid to blog precisely because he's one of the best bloggers in the business.

The principle applies to other fields as well--you can move into management, or to a wealthier firm, one that's wealthy not because it happens to be in a wealthy area, which is why schools are (or are not) wealthy, but because it's better at what it does, and thus has more money to pay, not least because it hired and paid particularly meritorious people in the first place. Law firms, consultants, and accountants work this way. For most professionals, merit pay is a function of both individual merit in your job and your ability to get hired and paid by a meritorious organization.

K-12 teacher compensation, by contrast, is relatively flat and uniform--you can get close to poor as a teacher, but you can't get near rich. Opportunities for advancement and outside earnings are relatively few, and even then you still don't get paid that much extra. While the median salary for journalists and many other professions is modest, there's at least a high upside at the top, which has a big impact on incentives for the best and brightest to enter the profession. Nothing like that exists in teaching.

Other professions, moreover, have less objective systems for paying teachers because they naturally don't lend themselves to objectivity as well. By contrast, the main goal of teaching--improving student learning--is, in fact, measurable to a considerable (although certainly not perfect) degree of accuracy. We should evaluate the objectivity and precision of teacher pay systems against what is possible for that profession.

All of which is the longest possible prelude to saying kudos to the United Federation of Teachers and the management of New York City Schools for announcing a new merit pay plan yesterday. This is, as Eduwonk said, an important moment, coming from the cradle of teacher unionism and the nation's biggest school district. It's easy enough for people like me to harangue union leaders about merit pay, but a lot harder to hammer out agreements in real-world political settings that meet the needs and priorities of rank-and-file teachers. I hope it works well, and that the meritorious schools and teachers in New York get the additional pay they surely deserve.

Unions, Pay for Performance and No Grapes

A new report from the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights highlights four types of teacher union initiatives that have the "dual purpose" of improving student learning and improving the working conditions of teachers: pay for performance, decreasing the role of seniority in hiring practices, involving parents and the community in decision-making and enhancing teacher professional development. Pay for performance is a bit of a sore thumb here, as the most controversial of the bunch, but the point really worth highlighting from this report is that local teachers unions and districts are, at least in some cities, collaborating to develop strategies that satisfy both "sides".

Does this spell hope for reformist district leaders and unions that are butting heads? Maybe, but the debate is still pretty intense. Which makes sense-- people feel strongly about schools and they feel strongly about unions. Put them together and you've got a firestorm. As someone who grew up with a picture of the Sacramento March in my bedroom (next my preferred posters of Scott Baio and the PYT-era Michael Jackson), I've always believed in unions. They existed to protect workers and the working class. To give voice to the less powerful. To help bridge the inevitable tensions between democracy and capitalism.

I still believe this. And as I see it, teacher's unions need to exist, and they need to be strong. Steve Jobs' suggestion that unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is "off the charts crazy" is just the type of divisive remark that fuels the firestorm. But in fairness, something's definitely not right with today's teacher's unions. They need to get beyond the myopic stance of protecting salaries and tenure above all else. No, they shouldn't back down on giving teachers respect and voice and control over their working conditions– teachers are the ones who work everyday with our kids and, by and large, they really do care and try and work hard, and they do deserve protections. But the unions also need to get a grip on the language and provisions in some of these teacher contracts- does anyone really believe that involuntary transfers are, in practice, a good idea? And they need to recognize that facilitating changes that protect students and the larger school community will in the end be better for the whole of the teacher workforce. The message then is yes, you matter, you're important. But no, it's not all about you.

So I'm hopeful when I see evidence that local unions and districts are making some headway in working together. Certainly the warring us versus them mentality is not constructive. Nor, by the way, are the back and forth claims of Cesar Chavez or the UFW as an ally. Give me a break. Letting the grapes die on the vines is completely different from letting your most vulnerable students languish in bad schools.

Barone Speaks

Charlie Barone is offering up a wealth of informed commentary on NCLB reauthorization and other matters over at Swift & Change Able. Plus, they have cartoons. I'm jealous!

Schools as Scapegoats?

Larry Mishel and Richard Rothstein have written a long piece for The American Prospect titled "Schools as Scapegoats," which is a good summary of the labor-centered critique of education reform. They make some good points, but I think their larger takes on the political and the policy implications are deeply misguided.

First, the good points. A Nation at Risk was released 24 years ago on a wave of scare-mongering about public education--if we don't reform the schools, people said, the economic consequences will be so dire that we'll all be speaking Russian and/or Japanese in a matter of decades or less. Literally within minutes of the report's release, we embarked on the greatest economic expansion in history, leaving the Japanese in our dust, the Berlin Wall in ruins, and American workers as the most productive in the world, despite the fact that many of the critiques embedded in A Nation at Risk are as true today as they were then.

Now, that doesn't mean the critiques were wrong, or that the education system was responsible for the expansion. It might have happened in spite of the schools, since things like the Fed licking inflation or real estate bubbles and liquidity traps in Japan or the ideological and economic bankruptcy of Communism or the Internet have little do with education policy one way or another. But either way, Mishel and Rothstein are right to call foul on the idea that economic prosperity--particularly for the middle and lower classes--begins and ends with education. For years people have been saying "Adopt my education agenda or we're going to become a third-world country," and they've always been wrong.

Rothstein and Mishel are also right to say that education can't be the only answer to rising income inequality. For example:

Another too glib canard is that our education system used to be acceptable because students could graduate from high school (or even drop out) and still support families with good manufacturing jobs. Today, those jobs are vanishing, and with them the chance of middle-class incomes for those without good educations.

It's true that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But replacements have mostly been equally unskilled or semiskilled jobs in service and retail sectors. There was never anything more inherently valuable in working in a factory assembly line than in changing bed linens in a hotel. What made semiskilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today's working class doesn't get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. Rather, it has everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality. Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor's degrees.

That said, in addition to getting some of their facts wrong,* I think Mishel and Rothstein misread the extent to which this is politically vital, as well as the implications for education policy. As a result, they're making things worse for families they ostensibly want to help.

I understand that it's frustrating when influential politicians justify some kind of horribly stupid and inequitable economic policy by saying "It's all good; we just need to reform public education, preferably with vouchers." But it's silly to say, or even imply, that the horribly stupid policies depend on the education justification. Does anyone seriously think that Newt Gingrich would have raised the minimum wage in the 1990s but for some talking points about school choice? Or that George Bush couldn't have implemented his phenomenally irresponsible and deeply unfair tax cuts for the rich without the rhetorical cover provided by No Child Left Behind?

Please. Redistributing money and power to the rich and powerful was the foundation of the conservative agenda, as Jon Chait recently described brilliantly in The Big Con. Chait is a connoisseur of bogus arguments and devious strategies, and nowhere in that book is there a chapter describing the crucial--or for that matter, even nominal--role of the argument from education reform in advancing the inequality agenda. If they hadn't said "we just need to reform the schools," they would have said something else, or just stuck to the various crackpot theories and outright lies that were much more important to making their case. It all would have happened anyway.

The second--and more substantive--problem with Mishel and Rothstein, both here and in their larger bodies of work, is that they seem to believe it's not enough to simply argue that education reform is a bogus palliative for inequitable economic policy. They believe we must attack education reform itself, that the only way to ensure that corporate tax cuts are never again falsely justified by a school reform agenda is to convince people that school reform is not needed and/or will never work.

This comes in two forms, the "everything is fine" argument and the "it can't be done" argument. Mishel tends to stick to the former, like when he insisted that high school graduation rates aren't so bad after all. Rothstein focuses more on the latter, arguing that schools "can't do much better" by poor kids than they do today, or trying to debunk KIPP, or peddling the (incorrect) notion that NCLB requires schools to erase all achivement difference between poor- and non-poor students.

I'm not saying issues like graduation rates or the efficacy of KIPP schools shouldn't be debated. But it's strange to see two smart "progressives" devoting all of their education-related energy toward tearing down any and all non-funding-related efforts to help low-income and minority students--until you realize that they're really not talking about education at all.

And so Mishel and Rothstein conclude their article by correctly denouncing the "suppresion of unions and the abandonment of the norm of equality," but then immediately follow with "These are not problems that can be solved by charter schools, teacher accountabilty, or any other school intervention." Sure--but that's not an argument against charter schools, teacher accountability, or any other school intervention. Or do Mishel and Rothstein actually want people trying to create better schools for poor children to abandon their efforts, just so we can force plutocrats to invent some new lies (which they undoubtedly will) while we throw the problems of the poor into even starker relief?


* Rothstein and Mishel state that:

"The American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess and former Clinton White House domestic policy staffer Andrew Rotherham jointly write in an AEI article that "study after study shows an America unprepared to compete in an increasingly global marketplace." They worry that the urgent "competitiveness agenda" could be derailed if we are distracted by a focus on equity-improving outcomes for disadvantaged students."

Hess and Rotherham explain why the "competiveness" agenda can be in conflict with the equity agenda--exploring this tension is the point of the article--but to imply that the article is an argument against equity is simply wrong.

Clearly, Our Work Here is Done

When we started Education Sector two years ago, we had big dreams--a new kind of organization, combining the best that think tanks and high-quality journalism have to offer, a place that would have a deep and lasting impact on the American educational experience.

And now that our work has been cited on the Colbert Report (click on the "Paul Glastris" clip), there's obviously nothing more we could hope to accomplish.

Hillary Clinton and the Never-Ending College Fundraising Campaign

Hillary Clinton unveiled her presidential campaign higher education agenda yesterday. On the whole it's quite good and by far the most substantive proposal from any of the major candidates thus far. The safe thing for a Democrat is to focus on financial aid -- everyone's in favor of making college more affordable -- so it's no surprise to see worthwhile proposals to consolidate the HOPE and Lifetime Learning Credits into a single, refundable, advanceable credit, increase Pell grants, expand the G.I. Bill, simplify the financial aid application process, and boost the Americorp education award.

What distinguishes a higher education campaign proposal is the extent to which it goes beyond aid, into the quality and conduct of higher ed itself. And there are a number of smart ideas here, including money to help colleges boost graduation rates (which are terrible at many public universities, particularly for low-income and minority students) and create incentives for community colleges and 4-year institutions to collaborate on improving course articulation (also a huge and under-recognized problem) and increasing transfer and graduation rates. Sen. Clinton also wants to prod the U.S. Department of Education to gather and release more consumer information on graduation and employment outcomes, putting her on the side of transparency and accountability.

She also somewhat gently suggests that the elite universities now in the process of amassing vast hoards of money might want to use a little more of it to help their students:

Hillary is challenging some of the most selective schools in the U.S. to further expand access for low-income and minority students by spending a greater percentage of their endowment annually on recruiting more low-income students and students of color, supporting them so that they graduate and growing the pipeline of students that are prepared to compete for admission to the most selective schools. The endowments of the 12 wealthiest universities total $155 billion and in recent years and have gotten tax-free returns of almost 20%. These elite institutions benefit tremendously from their tax-exempt status as well as from federal student financial aid and research grants

This brings to mind Wednesday's front-page Post story about the University of Virginia's current $3 billion fundraising campaign, which dwarfs the amount of money UVA tried to raise just 10 or 15 years ago. UVA is not alone in this; all the elite universities are headed down the same road, even as their financial advisers are using the existing endowment to earn billions more in the stock market.

Essentially, we're seeing our increasingly unequal, winner-takes-all society reflected in our higher education system. Take, for example, this from the end of today's Post article about J. Christopher Flowers, a Harvard graduate and financier who recently made and then withdrew a $25 billion offer to buy student loan giant Sallie Mae:

He has given Harvard about $25 million, including the endowment of a professorship in honor of his parents.

Now, $25 million is an awful lot of money--unless you're Chris Flowers, who's worth $2 billion, or Harvard, which has an endowment worth $35 billion. The endowment's investment earnings alone last year--$5.7 billion--were bigger than the total endowment at all but a handful of other universities. Yet the U.S. taxpayers dutifully subsidized Flowers' $25 million drop in Harvard's very large bucket, with tax deductability on one end and exemption on the other.

What are elite universities going to do with all that money? I don't think they really know. The head fundraiser at UVA said "he has heard talk that $3 billion 'isn't enough to get us where we need to go.'" That is, obviously, absurd. UVA, Harvard and the rest were elite institutions with bright students, beautiful campuses, and esteemed professors long before they embarked on the project of accumulating huge piles of cash. They're raising money simply because they can, and if you can, why wouldn't you?

The question is: when do you have so much money that it starts to warp your public mission, or raise uncomfortable questions about your tax status and spending decisions? The Clinton proposal suggests that time may be fast approaching. As Robert Reich recently said :

"I'm all in favor of supporting the arts and our universities, but let's face it: These aren't really charitable contributions.... I see why a contribution to, say, the Salvation Army should be eligible for a charitable deduction. It helps the poor. But why, exactly, should a contribution to the already extraordinarily wealthy Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard University (which already has an endowment of more than $30 billion)?"

And lest you think only redistributionist liberals think this way, this from conservative economist and AEI fellow Richard Vedder:

I looked at three schools --Harvard, Yale, and the University of Virginia. At all three schools, less than four percent the average daily endowment base in the 2006-7 school year was spent. If Harvard and Yale had spent 5 percent and dedicated the increased spending to tuition reduction, they could have eliminated undergraduate tuition charges altogether --easily. If Virginia, which is a less well endowed public school, spent 5 percent and dedicated the added spending to tuition reduction for all students from families with less than $100,000 annual income, I would guesstimate that tuition could have been reduced well over $5,000 on average per student --an amount equal to about 60 percent of the in state tuition charges.

What this means is this: rich schools have chosen to charge students high tuition and then use the funds to increase the size of their endowments (especially so at Harvard, Yale, and, I believe, Princeton) rather than relieve financial pain for parents. The IRS requires non-university charities to spend 5 percent out of their endowments if they want to keep tax exempt status. There is a reason for that. Donors making new gifts and universities with investment income are getting a tax break for helping defray the cost of higher education. As Wick Sloane reminds us constantly, these tax breaks can be expressed in "Pell Grant equivalents." Tax policy currently favors the “Harvards” of the world relative to the poor kid needing a Pell Grant.

All of which is to say, I'm glad Sen. Clinton is putting this issue on the table, and I expect we'll hear more about it in the future.

Even More on Perlstein

I have a few things to add to Kevin’s criticism (see below) of Linda Perlstein’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post. Just as Perlstein dismisses the potential of growth models and doesn’t address the critical distinction between a poorly designed law and poor execution of a law, she skates over NCLB’s existing provisions for students with disabilities.

According to Perlstein, “Under the law, a small minority of disabled students are allowed to take a test of more basic skills.” The trouble with this statement is that the percentage of special education students allowed to take different tests isn’t really all that small.

One percent of ALL students tested, or approximately 10 percent of special education students, can be tested with alternate assessments and have their scores count for NCLB purposes. This provision is meant for students with the most severe disabilities. Another two percent of all students tested—roughly 20 percent of special education students—can be tested with modified assessments meant for students with less severe disabilities. In sum, thirty percent of special education students do not need to take regular tests for their scores to count under NCLB.

Thirty percent is not a small number. As I showed in this July Charts You Can Trust, over 80 percent of special education students fall into categories that in no way preclude them from reaching grade-level standards. That leaves less than 20 percent of students with a disability such as mental retardation, developmental delay or autism that might require an alternate test.

It’s not clear from Perlstein’s op-ed how exactly she thinks NCLB should be changed to create, as the sub-head promises, “a better way to handle special needs.” What Perlstein does ask for is that special education students be taught “what they need to learn in order to make their own adequate yearly progress.”

While that goal may sound nice, in practice it would undermine the increased individual attention special education students receive because of NCLB—increased attention that even Perlstein acknowledges “is easily the best outcome of the law so far”. Critical to this increased individual attention is the fact that NCLB expects most (and perhaps not enough) special education students to reach grade-level standards, spurring schools and districts to give these students the resources they need to achieve at grade level.

More from Perlstein

Coincidentally, the day after I posted about Linda Perlstein's new book, Tested, she has an op-ed in the Post. In many ways, it's Tested writ small: interesting, well-written, and less than meets the eye.

Perlstein is concerned about the impact of NCLB on students with disabilities. She recounts seeing "Whitney," a fourth grade girl with mild mental retardation, fruitlessly trying to learn fourth grade material, and blames this on NCLB's mandate of grade-level testing for all students. One obvious solution is a growth model, which Perlstein acknowledges...but not really:

While many elements of the landmark education law are up in the air, one provision almost certain to be included is the "growth model": assessing the "adequate yearly progress" of schools not by calculating how many fourth-graders passed a test compared with the previous year but by measuring the progress made by each child. This is a welcome change and if executed properly may yield far more useful information.

But a large problem remains: Under the versions of the law under discussion, Whitney will still be given the fifth-grade test in fifth grade, the sixth-grade test in sixth grade and so on. She will probably fail these tests -- no surprise to her teachers -- and whatever progress she makes, unless it is so miraculous as to wipe away her deficiencies altogether, will go uncredited.

Not true. A growth model "executed properly" would absolutely give Whitney's school credit for the progress she makes, even if she fails the test. That's the definition of a growth model.

Perlstein talks further about the more generalized problem of schools not giving individualized instruction to students who lag behind, before saying:

You can blame No Child Left Behind, the climate it's induced or the questionable choices people make in its name. Whichever way, as long as students are judged only on grade-level tests, no matter their needs, and as long as the education they get the rest of the year hews to that goal, they will lose out.

Wait, wait. "Whichever way"? That's a pretty important distinction, isn't it? If you're going to blame NCLB--as this op-ed, titled "A 'No Child' Law for All Children, clearly does--than that's one thing. That means the law should change. If, by contrast, you're going to blame "questionable choices" by educators, that's a very different thing.

And it seems clear that the latter problem is really what Perlstein observed. Teaching students material that's way above their heads is bad educational practice. And you can't say the incentives built into NCLB leave educators with no other option, because--as Perlstein makes clear--it's also futile. Even under the current, no-growth-model law, schools teaching students like Whitney have two choices: inappropriately teach at grade level, in which case Whitney fails the test this year and every year after that, or teach at the right level, in which case Whitney fails the test this year but catches up and passes tests in the future.

So the op-ed really should have been titled, "Local teachers mean well, nonetheless fail to teach children with disabilities appropriately." But that message doesn't get you onto the Post op-ed page--or sell books.

UPDATE: Aftie Michele says:

Wait--so Carey thinks it is educationally inappropriate to teach students above grade level but it's just dandy to test them every year knowing they will fail, because some day they will catch up to grade level and pass such tests?

I think schools should assess students in a way that will give them accurate information about what students know and can do. I also think schools should know how far students are from acquiring the knowledge and skills they'll need to stay on track to graduate from high school and be ready for work, further education, and leading a happy, productive life. The only way to know the second thing is to test against grade-level standards. But there's nothing preventing schools from using other formative assessments for students with disabilities like Whitney. And, more to the point, the fact that Whitney has to take a grade-level test on one day at the end of the year doesn't somehow obligate the school to teach her at that grade level for the other 179 days, if in fact that's a bad idea.

Education Policy Courses & Pre-K

Check it out! If you don't already get the Education Sector bi-weekly digest, you might not have seen that we have a cool new resource: sets of materials for education and public policy courses. Our aim is to help bridge academia and policy, so we're packaging resources on a variety of topics in education policy into units. The first set of materials is designed for a unit on pre-k policy. Take a look, tell your friends, and let us know what you think. If it's useful, we'll make more.

Linda Perlstein's Tested

At any given moment, there's a limited amount of room in the general consciousness for books about education, and over the past few months a lot of that space has been occupied by Linda Perlstein's new book, Tested. Which, as I explain in my review in this month's Washington Monthly, is too bad. Tested is a fine example of education journalism, and worth reading just for that. But it tries to be much more, a broad indictment of NCLB, and in that is far less successful.

Part of this can be attributed to the conventions of narrative non-fiction writing. The best examples start with a compelling story, and then put that human drama in a much larger context, weaving in history and policy to find the greater meaning in it all. It's fantastic when it works--think Jon Krakauer, Michael Lewis--but it's really hard to do well. Crucially, your human story actually has to support the meta-narrative. In the case of Tested, it doesn't. Perlstein spent a year in a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Maryland, that has experienced a remarkable turnaround in test scores, basically going from most of the kids failing to most passing in just a few years. That's come at a cost in terms of curriculum narrowing and test prep. This raises all kinds of difficult questions related to the efficacy of schools and the lives of poor children. But Perlstein doesn't have a lot interest in addressing those conundrums, because that would get in the way of book's conceit as an anti-NCLB expose.

Readers interested in a different take on the same issues should check out Karin Chenoweth's It's Being Done. Like Perlstein, Chenoweth is a former Washington Post education reporter, and she also spent time a great deal of time inside high-poverty, high-scoring schools. But she reaches a very different set of conclusions. Her book isn't cheerleading and has a strong dose of realism about what it takes to help students who come to school with an array of barriers to learning. But it turns out that schools can do a lot to help them nonetheless--more than some people would like to admit.

UPDATE: D-Ed Reckoning weighs in here.

Arguing Over the Meaning of the New Fordham Study

The Fordham Institute has released an significant new study on the rigor of state academic standards. Bottom line: they're all over the place, with huge variation between states (which we already knew, but it's good to have further confirmation), and within states between subjects and grades (which we didn't know, and it's important that we do). Many states, for example, have set their "cut scores" (see Andy Rotherham's explanation of how that process works here) higher in middle school than in elementary school, and higher in math than in reading. Test results that seem to indicate a crisis in middle school or mathematics education may actually show a state standard-setting process that isn't as well-calibrated as it needs to be.

So kudos to Fordham for this important, timely analysis. In particular, it shows the danger of giving states unlimited discretion over the process by which they judge their own educational success. Like many people, I'm somewhat ambivalent over the idea of national education standards--depends on the subject, sensible in theory but tricky in practice, worried the U.S. Department of Education will screw it up, etc., etc. But surely there's some threshold level of inter-state variation that's simply intolerable, and if variance from the 14th to the 71st percentile (the difference between the rigor of Wisconsin and South Carolina standards in eighth grade reading) doesn't meet that threshold, I'm not sure what does. Those who want to give the states vast new amounts of "flexibility" under the next version of NCLB should take heed.

The messaging around the report is tricky, however, particularly coming from Fordham. After a brief interlude of non-boringness, Bob Herbert reverted to form today in his Times column , using the Fordham report to argue that NCLB is a crock and the whole testing-based-accountabilty enterprise needs to be scrapped (Fordham's response to Herbert is here).

Herbert's column is pretty useless, but on some level predictable after Checker Finn's piece$ in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, titled "Dumbing Education Down." If, like Herbert, you're not paying attention, it's easy enough to read this as an anti-NCLB indictment. Which it kind of is; it would have been nice to see some of the language from Fordham's response to Herbert (i.e. "The answer is not to throw out testing, but to do testing right, with expectations that are consistent from state to state, grade to grade, subject to subject, and over time, and that prepare students for college and work.") in Finn's op-ed.

Maintaining a consistent line of criticism while conducting new research is tricky; Fordham has been raising alarms about a so-called "race to the bottom" in state standards-setting for some time. Now their report says what's actually happening is a "walk to the middle," with the outliers both low and high regressing to the mean. That's an important finding, but Finn's op-ed emphasizes only one side ("more states have let their tests grow easier to pass than have made them harder). Given that, the previous rhetoric, and headlines like "The Proficiency Illusion" and "Dumbing Education Down" it's not surprising that people like Herbert are confused.

Go Schools.Com/Courage

This is year 2 of the Public Education Network's national campaign for good public schools. Its aim is to get people talking about public schools, caring about public schools, etc. I don't know how PEN is evaluating its success, or if it can, but its efforts are a drop in a pretty dry bucket. In an effort to improve public schools, we're all pretty focused on what's not working. If you were to read a random selection of policy papers on education right now, you'd hear different voices of the same chorus: our school teachers are weak and maldistributed, school leaders are even weaker, our students are overtested or poorly tested or both, and we need more and better choices if we want our kids to be able to compete in a global economy. Much of this is true, and the fundamental inequity that some policies are trying to address is absolutely a worthwhile civil rights fight. But lest we succumb to the baby/bathwater problem, we should be reminded that public education is still one of, if not the best social service system we have. And it is without a doubt our nation's most important democratizing institution. So how useful is PEN's campaign? Not as useful as it would be if we had a real marketing strategy for our nation's public schools-old and new models alike- the way we do for other publicly-funded endeavors.

p.s. Video-gaming war wouldn't be my pick for schools. But then neither would Kanye West in all his educational glory.

Death at an Early Age

I was in San Francisco the weekend before last, not at the big ETS teacher quality shindig with everyone else, but across town at an event sponsored by CFED (formerly, in a Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-to-KFC kind of way, the Corporation for Enterprise Development) focused on building assets for low-income families. The topic was school funding fairness, and the audience was mostly child advocates who tend to be removed from many education debates. It was a good reminder that that the conceptual and organizational divide between the education and human services spheres is significant and problematic. They often don't know or understand what we're doing, and vice versa.

So, in a small attempt to bridge the gap, let me just note that President Bush's veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program expansion is surely the worst education news of the day. Children--students--die every day in this country for lack of health insurance, a moral stain that has set for much too long.

The New York Times reports that "The White House has rejected as “preposterous” any suggestion that Mr. Bush does not care about the welfare of poor children." I'm sure that's true, since you'd have to be a sociopath to feel otherwise. The President just doesn't care about poor children as much as he cares about financing massive tax breaks for the wealthy, disastrous foreign wars, cowtowing to big business interests, and staying in the good graces of the militant anti-governement types who comprise what's left of his small and shrinking base of support.

Two Down, Five to Go

I wasn't going to read Bob Herbert's education column today, because Bob Herbert is boring, but then I thought of T.A. Frank's excellent article on the Herbert boringness phenomenon, and decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did! Instead of the standard establishment fare I was expecting, Herbert comes strong from the edu-reform CW perspective, saying we need more charter schools like KIPP and endorsing the Kane / Staiger / Gordon teacher-effectiveness-based, fie-upon-certification induction model.

With Nicholas Kristoff's column from earlier this year, which made the same exact point, that makes two New York Times columnists to jump on the Kane bandwagon. How many more can he bring on board? David Brooks seems like the obvious next choice, this is right up his alley, and he can probably get Friedman to bite if he uses the word "Bangalore" a lot. It'll be tougher sledding from there, though -- if Kane can get Maureen Dowd to write 700 words on teacher quality, I'll be impressed.

Philly Phun

While Eduwonk was busy making sure the whole edu-world knows about the Missouri Department of Education's shameful anti-NCLB conspiracy, I spent the weekend in Philadelphia visiting friends, eating a lot of good food, and generally soaking up the kind of festive atmosphere that can only come from the knowledge that you, as a city, are collectively sticking it to millions of baseball fans in the greater New York metropolitan area.

On Saturday my lovely wife and I spent some time on Philadelphia's famed museum-lined Benjamin Franklin parkway, which is the big wide street Rocky sprinted down before climbing the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, turning to face the city, and doing that arms-above-the-head, jumping-up-and-down, end-of-"Gonna Fly Now"-montage thing. Thirty-some years after the movie was released, tourists repeat this manuever approximately once every 30 seconds, all day long.

Anyway, they were having some kind of big street-festival type thing, which featured a bad rock band at the end and a motorcycle stunt team in the middle, sponsored by Red Bull. Interesting fact: watching someone jump off a ramp on a motorcycle and then do handstands on top of the motorcycle or better yet backflips with the motorcycle before landing on another ramp is exponentially more exciting in person than on TV. This is a consequence of the CGIfication of entertainment, I think--what with the computer special effects these days, nothing on a screen is truly thrilling, even if you objectively know it's real. Seriously, I now have a much greater appreciation for why people pay $40 to see this stuff at various regional civic centers nationwide.

The event was also rife with for-profit student lenders (Philly has a zillion colleges) who offered a simple, enticing deal: in exchange for your name and email address, we'll give you a frisbee, a beer bottle opener key chain, and barrage you with offers to lend you vast amounts of money at non-subsidized and possibly usurious interest rates, starting tomorrow and ending (possibly) when you die. Who could resist? I know I didn't.

I also saw a guy with a T-shirt that said the following:

Knowledge is Power.
Power Corrupts.
Study Hard.
Be Evil.

Finally, at long last, our blog has a slogan.

NCLB Lawbreakers

Via Eduwonk, a story of what appears to be a widespread conspiracy within the Missouri Department of Education to systematically violate the No Child Left Behind law. According to a U.S. Department of Educaiton investigation, the state illegally failed to identify many low-performing schools and districts as not making "adequate yearly progress" under the law. It also failed to identify schools as "in need of improvement," because that status is assigned to schools that missed AYP two years in a row, and the state never compared the current year's AYP list to the previous year's AYP list.

Why did Missouri do this? Because they don't like NCLB:

In an interview with Thompson Publications, a state official acknowledged that Missouri circumvented the law at least partially due to philosophical objections to aspects of NCLB. Misunderstandings betwen [the U.S. Department of Education] and the state also played a role, said Becky Kemna, Missouri's new director of federal programs.

Another issue is that Dee Beck, Kemna's predecessor and an outspoken critic of many aspects of the law, retired just before [U.S. Department of Education] monitors visited--a fact Kemna tried to address diplomatically.

"I'm in kind of a difficult spot," she said. "I just took this job. I don't want to be seen as being critical of the past director."

Nontheless, she said, the problems outlined in the report were the result of "a combination of not agreeing with aspects of the law and not being clear about what was expected of us in some cases."

Kemna laters complains that Missouri should have been cited for merely"a faulty calculation" on district AYP. Next time I cheat on my taxes, I'm going to run that one by the IRS.

A couple of observations:

One, it's amazing to see the difference between the way NCLB is talked about and the way it's playing out on the ground. Even as we witness the sorry spectacle of the California Teacher's Association denouncing George Miller and Nancy Pelosi for not watering down the law enough (memo to liberal interest groups: if you find yourself denouncing Nancy Pelosi as a tool of the conservative establishment, its time to seriously consider switching medications), there are whole states where the law has already been rendered effectively meaningless.

Second, this kind of behavior is beyond the pale. It's one thing for a state to monkey around with confidence intervals and N-sizes and various other dubious mechanisms for relieving pressure on schools to improve. I've criticized those measures in the past and will again. But they've all been approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Nobody's breaking any laws.

This, on the other hand, is illegal pure and simple. Congress will reauthorize NCLB some day, and when it does various chief state school officers and state officials will wring their hands and complain about burdensome federal intrustion, violations of state's rights, etc. etc. When they do, I hope someone reminds them how Missouri definitively proved that when it comes to education, some states simply can't be trusted to the right--or legal--thing.

Lions and Tigers and Bears!

Yesterday, President Bush signed into law the College Cost Reduction and Access Act—legislation that increases Pell Grants, cuts interest rates on student loans, expands loan forgiveness, and pays for it all with cuts in government subsidies to student loan companies. The headline of the Chronicle of Higher Education article about new legislation read “As President Bush Signs Bill Increasing Student Aid, Several Lenders Announce Cuts in Staff or Benefits.” The article also cites concerns that reduced subsidies to loan companies will result in a decline in the number of small lenders participating in the federal loan program.

…banks leaving the business, layoffs, and benefit cuts…oh my!

But before you shake your head that this bill is destroying the federal loan program, you have to ask: Is the purpose of the federal loan program to create a profitable banking industry or is it to provide financial aid to students?

The College Cost Reduction and Access Act answered this question, or at least it provided the Democrat’s answer: the purpose of the loan program is to give aid to students. Yes, reduced lender subsidies may mean that loan companies need to run a leaner business, but it also means that more taxpayer money for federal student aid will make it directly to the students, bypassing the loan companies as middlemen.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the threat of reduced borrower benefits, while real, isn’t as problematic as loan companies would like you to think. First, very few students receive the full amount of these borrower benefits, and second, this money isn’t being taken away from students, it is being reallocated. The money is going to increased Pell grants and reduced interest rates, rather than given to loan companies as profit that they can then pass along to students as “benefits”.

Overall, this legislation does a good job of directing aid money where it is needed--need-based grants and relief from student debt.

Heroes or Just Hard Workers?

Matt Yglesias approvingly cites a recent post from Alex Tabbarok, in which Alex mocks the teacher-as-hero archetype (e.g. Freedom Writers etc.) as unscaleable, and recommends Direct Instruction instead. "The problem," Matt says, "is that it's just not realistic to build an entire system composed of teachers like that." This is a common refrain, particularly among critics of media-darling ed reforms like KIPP and Teach for America.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that we don't need to build an entire system composed of teachers like that. Most American schoolchildren are doing okay, and if they're not, the necessary fixes probably don't require anyone to work 80 hours a week.

What we have is a minority of children, most poor and people of color, being crushed under the twin burdens of impoverished home lives and dysfunctional schools. It may very well be the case that the only way to help them is to put them in very well-run schools full of exceptionally smart, well-trained teachers who put forth extraordinary time and effort. This seems to work, and I'm not aware of too many other models that can say the same.

And it's not at all clear to me why this isn't achievable at scale for most at-risk students. Many of them are in cities, all of which have big law firms and hospitals that absolutely depend on exactly the kind of time- and human capital-intensive model described above. If law and medicine--the two professions against which education is constantly measuring itself, and lamenting its inferior status--can build stable business models that assume a steady influx of super-motivated people in their 20s and 30s, why not education?

The Spellings Commission, One Year Later

I went to the signing ceremony for the "College Cost Reduction and Access Act" this morning, at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. Flanked by Pell grant recipients, Secretary Spellings, and members of Congress including Rep. George Miller, President Bush offered some fairly pro forma remarks in favor of Pell grants and going to college generally. He took the opportunity to note the recent increase in NAEP scores and twice turned to Chairman Miller, in a friendly way, while calling on Congress to speedily reauthorize NCLB.

He also congratulated the Secretary for her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which delivered its final report one year ago. The commission was then regarded as a marginal success, at best. But I think history may judge otherwise.

At the time, most of the press attention focused on rancor within the commission, the refusal of the American Council on Education (apex of the higher education lobby) to sign on, and the fact that the commission's original, sharply-worded recommendations had been substantially watered down. It looked like one more example of higher education beating back calls for reform.

But to her credit, the Secretary stuck with the issue over the next year, sponsoring a series of meetings around the country and focusing on the foundation of the commission's recommendations: the need for greater transparency and public information. For an industry as large and important as higher education, we know remarkably little about how well it actually educates its students. Getting that information is a predicate for many other reforms--you can't help colleges become more productive, effective, and affordable if you don't have the denominator in the productivity equation.

And in just the last month, the efforts of the commission and others pushing the same issues have begun to bear fruit. One higher education association after another has announced or rolled out new initiatives focused on providing new public information. The private colleges launched a new Web site that allows institutions to voluntarily disclose information on costs, graduation rates, enrollment, and other measures. The public colleges will do the same later this year, and just today announced a new initiative, backed by a $2.4 million federal grant, to study ways to assess student skills and educational outcomes. On-line and for-profit colleges are also getting into the game. All of this puts more pressure on the big regional accreditors to do a better job of promoting transparent measures of student learning results, a big priority for the Department over the last year.

Now, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the strategy here. The Spellings Commission made a two-part argument: create and disclose more public information about institution-level outcomes, then hold institutions accountable for the results. The higher education establishment has essentially decided to concede the first element--but on its own terms, in order to preclude the second. More public information is very hard to argue against on principle--particularly if you're in the business of knowledge creation--and was going to come eventually, one way or another. Given that, higher education leaders have decided they're best off controlling that process as much as possible.

You can see elements of this in the private college Web site, the "University and College Accountability Network," or "U-CAN." In the upper-right hand corner of each college's page, there's a prominent click-through box that says "What Makes Us Special?" Putting aside the fact that this sounds like a question you'd ask a bunch of third graders, it's clear what's going on here: the private colleges are asserting their specialness as way to avoid accountability. As I wrote in this month's Change, (not on-line, sadly):

Like snowflakes, no two colleges are exactly alike. They're big, small, public, private, old, young, rich and poor. This diversity is a huge asset to the nation, a factor any effective accountability system should take into account. But just as all snowflakes are light, cold, and wet, higher education institutions are far more alike than they are different. Most organize and run themselves in the same way, with academic departments, professors, deans, tenure, and credit hours. They offer degrees with the same names that take the same amount of time to earn. The teach many of the same classes, and over half all bachelor's degrees are awarded in just five major disciplines--business, education, social science / history, psychology, and communications.

Yet rather than embracing their common purpose, colleges like to focus on their differences as a way of asserting their uniqueness. This is an anti-accountability gambit--if you're unique, you can't be compared. If you're not comparable, you can't be judged.

There's also a place at the bottom of the page where it says "For more about our students, click here:" Some colleges have chosen to post their results from the National Survey of Student Engagement, which has been cited by the Spellings Commission and many others as a promising way to compare institutions. But the wording is telling: NSSE results measure the institution, not the students, providing information about the quality of teaching practices and overall educational environment. Unsurprisingly, the U-CAN site doesn't provide ways to sort and compare the contributing institutions--a consequence of their unique specialness, no doubt.

That said, it's certainly a step in the right direction, and in the long run I don't think higher education institutions will be able to control the terms on which information about them is considered and judged. That's a good thing; for parents, students, and even the colleges themselves. A more accountable higher education system will be a more effective one, and ultimately that will lead to the resources and support the nation's colleges and universities need and deserve.

UPDATE: James Traub hits on a lot of these themes in the upcoming NYTimes Magazine, here.

Kid Politics

SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) passed in the House and is now on to the Senate where it will hopefully get more than the 60 votes needed to override the President's veto. If we care about poor kids, this political battle is one worth paying attention to.

So too is the debate over pre-k- who needs it, who pays for it, and how to design it. Education Sector is hosting an event on this with David Kirp and Joan Lombardi tomorrow evening (space limited so rsvp). Kojo Nnambi also covers the preschool issue today with Kirp, Libby Doggett of Pre-K Now and Gail Bjorklund of Fairfax County Office for Children.