During the Democratic presidential debate a few nights ago, host Brian Williams asked a question about extending the school day or year. Since this is an issue I've been following, I thought I'd update you on what the candidates think about the idea of a longer school day or school year. The full transcript is here.
Williams asked: Do you believe we in this country need to extend the school day and/or extend the school year? And will you commit to it?
Some excerpts from their 30-second responses included:
Kucinich saying there's a statue above the House of Reps entitled "Peace Protecting Genius", that there's a connection b/w global warring and global warming, and that pre-k and college should be free to all. I'm not getting the connection to school time but maybe it's got something to do with more bake sales and books?
Richardson saying he'll commit to "it" by hiring 100,000 new science and math teachers, getting rid of NCLB, and integrating civics, language and art back into the curriculum. The last point tangentially hits the problem of a narrowing curriculum, which more school time could address, so he's ahead so far.
Obama saying we need more instruction in the classroom, and more money for math and science research. Talking about "more" in general I guess means he's good with the "more school" thing too.
Clinton saying "a family is a child's first school" and that we need to support "it" through "nurse visitation or social work or child care" and that we need pre-k and an "innovation agenda". Also, something about Sputnik and more math and science. She gets a demerit just for bringing up Sputnik.
Edwards saying we still have two public school systems, we need pre-k, better nutrition, a national teaching university, incentive pay, and second-chance schools for dropouts. A lot of interesting education ideas, pre-k the only one that hits on extending school time and even that is not really what the extended school debate is about at this point.
Dodd saying how proud he was to be Head Start's Senator of the Decade, says the feds need to be a better partner with locals, and that community colleges should be tuition-free. Again, invoking head starters and then maybe something meaningful is hidden in his comment about fed-local supports?
And there was Biden saying: Yes. We should go to school longer, we should have a minimum of 16 years of education, and we should focus these efforts on the poorest kids.
This was a lightening round (30 sec limit) and the issue of extending school time is complicated so I didn't expect anyone to get into the many pros and cons of implementing and paying for this type of reform. But it was, after all, a yes or no question. So the prize goes to Biden on this one.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Small (podlike, academy-style, learning community, schools-within-a) School
Small schools are not the hot topic anymore, at least not like they were ten years ago. This is unfortunate because it is now, after more than a decade of experimentation and research and writing, that we really have something to learn from. But so goes education reform.
Still, small schools reform has a little (I won't say small) stream of federal funding in the Small Learning Communities Initiative–$93 million this past year). And they are still touted by philanthropists and ed reformers as a "modernization" approach for high schools and middle schools (in crowded company with early college, dual enrollment, IB programs, et al).
So it seems we still clearly value the goal of small for our schools. It's hard to find a high school out there that isn't trying, somehow, to get smaller. Small schools, schools-within-schools, small learning communities (SLCs), "houses" or "families" or "pods" or "academies", as well as charters and magnets, which both often highlight their smaller size as a benefit–the one sure thing is that there is great variation in how we intend to get small. I would add that, depending on the model, there is also great variation in the degree to which small really means small. I've seen SLCs- and dare admit that I've been a part of creating them- that bring teachers and kids together into a "learning community" in the same huge building with the same huge 2000+ population and with the same average 30+ class size. I can't say that the "school" or the "learning community" seemed much smaller, to the kids or to the teachers. And I know principals who nearly pulled their hair out over the scheduling nightmares it created. But I've also seen it work, even for large traditional high schools. Albeit with a lot of staff and community support, large schools that break into small schools really can function as separate small organizations, where the students and parents and staff create a new structure and a new culture. And, like charters, these have a sense of new vision and purpose and "small community" that seem to work. But, again like charters, there are also a whole host of questions about cost and space and sustainability.
Edweek captured these and other worthy comments and questions about small schools–what the term actually means and what it looks like in practice– in an online chat on Tuesday, transcript here worth reading.
Still, small schools reform has a little (I won't say small) stream of federal funding in the Small Learning Communities Initiative–$93 million this past year). And they are still touted by philanthropists and ed reformers as a "modernization" approach for high schools and middle schools (in crowded company with early college, dual enrollment, IB programs, et al).
So it seems we still clearly value the goal of small for our schools. It's hard to find a high school out there that isn't trying, somehow, to get smaller. Small schools, schools-within-schools, small learning communities (SLCs), "houses" or "families" or "pods" or "academies", as well as charters and magnets, which both often highlight their smaller size as a benefit–the one sure thing is that there is great variation in how we intend to get small. I would add that, depending on the model, there is also great variation in the degree to which small really means small. I've seen SLCs- and dare admit that I've been a part of creating them- that bring teachers and kids together into a "learning community" in the same huge building with the same huge 2000+ population and with the same average 30+ class size. I can't say that the "school" or the "learning community" seemed much smaller, to the kids or to the teachers. And I know principals who nearly pulled their hair out over the scheduling nightmares it created. But I've also seen it work, even for large traditional high schools. Albeit with a lot of staff and community support, large schools that break into small schools really can function as separate small organizations, where the students and parents and staff create a new structure and a new culture. And, like charters, these have a sense of new vision and purpose and "small community" that seem to work. But, again like charters, there are also a whole host of questions about cost and space and sustainability.
Edweek captured these and other worthy comments and questions about small schools–what the term actually means and what it looks like in practice– in an online chat on Tuesday, transcript here worth reading.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Scholarly Spirits
In the spirit of the holiday, today’s Inside Higher Ed has an interview with the author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Gets you thinking about hauntings at your own alma mater.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Shanghai Diary
Greetings from the other side of the world. I'll post pictures and offer lengthier observations that aren't clouded by the effect of the 12-hour time difference on my mental state when I get back later this week. A few notes in the meantime:
*Shanghai is vast. Once you get outside of the Bund and the older touristy areas like the French Concession, it's just huge swathes of helter-skelter construction, wide boulevards, and liberal use of neon. It's like Houston crossed with Las Vegas except ten times bigger and everyone is Chinese.
*There's really been an explosion in activity internationally around college rankings. Twenty-five years ago it was pretty much just U.S. News & World Report; now there are multiple global higher education rankings (like those produced by Shanghai Jia Tong University, host of the event), as well as lots of countries doing internal rankings, continental rankings, etc. Apparently the Malaysian equivalent of Margaret Spellings got canned a few years ago when the state university dropped 19 places in the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (even though the decline was entirely a function of a switch in the methodology).
*I wish I could say that I was able to listen to a half-hour presentation from the very nice woman from the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education describing their new, quite sophisticated college rankings system without mentally composing various snarky blog posts with titles beginning "Cultural Learnings of...." But that would be a lie.
More later this week.
*Shanghai is vast. Once you get outside of the Bund and the older touristy areas like the French Concession, it's just huge swathes of helter-skelter construction, wide boulevards, and liberal use of neon. It's like Houston crossed with Las Vegas except ten times bigger and everyone is Chinese.
*There's really been an explosion in activity internationally around college rankings. Twenty-five years ago it was pretty much just U.S. News & World Report; now there are multiple global higher education rankings (like those produced by Shanghai Jia Tong University, host of the event), as well as lots of countries doing internal rankings, continental rankings, etc. Apparently the Malaysian equivalent of Margaret Spellings got canned a few years ago when the state university dropped 19 places in the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (even though the decline was entirely a function of a switch in the methodology).
*I wish I could say that I was able to listen to a half-hour presentation from the very nice woman from the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education describing their new, quite sophisticated college rankings system without mentally composing various snarky blog posts with titles beginning "Cultural Learnings of...." But that would be a lie.
More later this week.
The Gifted Island
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is starting his revamp of the city’s gifted education program by limiting admission to only those students who score in the top 5 percent on two citywide exams. According to the NYT article, one of the tests used, the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, “gauges students’ understanding of colors, letters, numbers, sizes, comparisons and shapes.” But according to the results of an NCES study released today, sorting students based on a test is unlikely to address problems of equal access in NYC’s “gifted and talented” system.
Findings highlighted from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which assessed preschoolers’ knowledge and skills, included:
Children with two-parent families scored higher than children with single-parent families in several aspects of early literacy: letter recognition, or children’s ability to identify letters of the alphabet; phonological awareness, or understanding of the sounds and structure of spoken language; and conventions of print, or understanding such aspects as the reading of English text from left to right.
The percentage of children demonstrating proficiency in numbers and shapes ranged from 40 percent among lower socioeconomic status (SES) families to 87 percent in higher SES families.
Given these results, won’t the tests Chancellor Klein wants to use only reinforce existing socio-economic divisions among who participates in "gifted" programs, maintaining the heaviest concentration of “gifted and talented” in the wealthy Upper West Side of
Also, do we want to be testing and sorting kids before they even start school? Research from social psychologists indicates that labeling kids as “gifted” impacts both student and teacher expectations, and subsequently student academic success. It seems to me that offering a “gifted and talented” curriculum (i.e., engaging, challenging, creative) to all students wouldn’t be such a bad idea, rather than reserving these "islands of relatively happy functionality" for students who test well.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Obama's Plan(ning) for Education
So it looks like Obama's going to announce a plan on education. Good. Now, c'mon. With a record of ideas and nearly a year now on the Education Committee, you've got plenty of good stuff to work with. We're waiting and we're expecting something better than this.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Cloud-y Thinking
Via This Week in Education, Time's John Cloud says:
Cloud's characterization of education research is exaggerated and, frankly, kind of obnoxious. Education is more politicized than I'd like, but I don't see how that makes it different from other fields. Alas, what a shame that education research doesn't enjoy the pristinely empirical, de-politicized, consensus-rich environment that characterizes debates over tax policy, entitlement reform, and other issues studied by economists like Martin Feldstein.
Most of Cloud's piece is about the relative efficacy of public schools vs. private schools. Conventional wisdom, along with a fair amount of research, has it that private schools are marginally better. But then the Center on Education Policy comes out with a study that suggests otherwise. Aha! says Cloud. Apparently, if education research were a "science" not a "circus" there would be no such disagreement. Moreover, CEP is allegedly an "advocacy group for public schools" (they're not), so they can't be trusted.
I reality, the tendency for education researchers to draw the differing conclusions that so frustrate Cloud stems from the fact that the things education researchers often compare are, obectively speaking, not that different from one another. When you aggregate lots of private schools together and compare them to lots of public schools, the two populations are pretty similar. The same is true when comparing public schools to charter schools, certified teachers to non-certified teachers, fourth graders nationwide in 2006 to fourth graders nationwide in 2007, etc. When actual variance is small, legitimate differences in methodology, population, etc. can put one study on the plus side of zero and the other on the minus--not because one researcher is lying for political reasons and one isn't, but because they're both trying to quantify effects that are objectively de minimis.
Apparently, this frustrates journalists who crave certainty and simple answers.
Note: Erratic blogging over the next week from me as I'm leaving tomorrow morning for the "3rd Meeting of the International [College] Rankings Expert Group" in Shanghai. I missed the first two and I hear the after-parties are insane. Assuming various electronic connections and conversions work as planned, I'll be posting pictures and random observations.
Harvard professor Martin Feldstein used to tell students in his introductory economics class that economists agree on 99% of the issues in the field. From the nature of monopolies to the basic laws of inflation, Feldstein asserted, economists of all political stripes are in accord on the same principles. He claimed that what we read about in the popular press are the 1% of economic issues where the data support no clear-cut conclusion.
I'm pretty sure Feldstein was exaggerating the 99-1 split in economics, but I have often thought that education research shows precisely the opposite ratio of agreement to disagreement. Education experts seem to concur on almost nothing. Research in the field is so politicized and contradictory that you can find almost any study to support your view. If economics is a 99-1 science, education is a 1-99 circus.
Cloud's characterization of education research is exaggerated and, frankly, kind of obnoxious. Education is more politicized than I'd like, but I don't see how that makes it different from other fields. Alas, what a shame that education research doesn't enjoy the pristinely empirical, de-politicized, consensus-rich environment that characterizes debates over tax policy, entitlement reform, and other issues studied by economists like Martin Feldstein.
Most of Cloud's piece is about the relative efficacy of public schools vs. private schools. Conventional wisdom, along with a fair amount of research, has it that private schools are marginally better. But then the Center on Education Policy comes out with a study that suggests otherwise. Aha! says Cloud. Apparently, if education research were a "science" not a "circus" there would be no such disagreement. Moreover, CEP is allegedly an "advocacy group for public schools" (they're not), so they can't be trusted.
I reality, the tendency for education researchers to draw the differing conclusions that so frustrate Cloud stems from the fact that the things education researchers often compare are, obectively speaking, not that different from one another. When you aggregate lots of private schools together and compare them to lots of public schools, the two populations are pretty similar. The same is true when comparing public schools to charter schools, certified teachers to non-certified teachers, fourth graders nationwide in 2006 to fourth graders nationwide in 2007, etc. When actual variance is small, legitimate differences in methodology, population, etc. can put one study on the plus side of zero and the other on the minus--not because one researcher is lying for political reasons and one isn't, but because they're both trying to quantify effects that are objectively de minimis.
Apparently, this frustrates journalists who crave certainty and simple answers.
Note: Erratic blogging over the next week from me as I'm leaving tomorrow morning for the "3rd Meeting of the International [College] Rankings Expert Group" in Shanghai. I missed the first two and I hear the after-parties are insane. Assuming various electronic connections and conversions work as planned, I'll be posting pictures and random observations.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Everyone is Wrong About Vouchers
Both Ezra Klein and Megan McCardle post about vouchers today, and both are wrong, albeit in completely different ways. Megan says:
Vilest? In the age of Dick Cheney, Larry Craig, et al.? More to the point--from a policy standpoint, I'm very supportive of giving parents more educational choices within a public school context. I think charter schools are clearly the right way to do this, not vouchers, but at the same time I believe that while some voucher supporters really do want to destroy public education by privatizing the schools, others really do want to help desperately disadvantaged kids get a decent education. It's not a simple issue, and if you're going to take a voucher away from a low-income mother who chose to put her child in a better private school, you'd better have a damn good alternative lined up for her. Not some hypothetical set of principles or general wish that she wasn't poor, but another, better school, today.
But to say that any well-off parent who exercises school choice by moving to the suburbs has a moral obligation to support vouchers--and is a vile hypocrite if they oppose vouchers--is silly. Voucherizing a whole city like DC wouldn't work. There aren't enough good private schools to teach all those students in the short run, and--more importantly--there wouldn't be enough in the long run. Look at how the private sector provides other services to low-income communities. Not banks, but check cashing outlets and pawn shops. Not decent grocery stores (much less Whole Foods), but convenience stores. The only sit-down restaurant in all of Ward 7 in DC is a Denny's. A Denny's. Why does anyone believe education would be any different? Particularly since--unlike with banks, grocery stores and restaurants--low-income kids don't just need parity, they need something better than what non-poor kids receive.
Well, one might respond, we there are good schools in the suburbs--lets send them there. Leaving aside the obvious massive logistical and political challenges that would entail, that's still a bad solution. Well-functioning communities need local schools that interact with and support the institutions and people around them. Why is it so hard to imagine that we could improve education for city students by building them good public schools where they live? This failure of imagination is also where Ezra falls short, when he says:
No, no, no. I know lots of white, relatively affluent parents, here in DC, who are trying to figure out where to educate their young children. They're not fleeing poverty, they're fleeing bad public schools. It's not that they don't want their kids to grow up around other children of different races or income--heck, they'd like that, they're DC liberals for goodness sake. But their higher priority is a safe, quality education, which the city schools do not provide.
Moreover, this idea that poverty inevitably "dissolves" schools just isn't true. There are good charter schools in DC within walking distance of the U Street neighborhoods where the "new blogging elite"--to use Ezra's term($) for people like Megan and himself**--tend to live and socialize. Most of the children in these schools are minorities and qualify for the federal free lunch program. I challenge Ezra to spend an hour, or a day, or however long in one of those schools and then explain how poverty invariably "dissolves" anything.
The single biggest education-related failure of the contemporary left--and the folks like Ezra who write at The American Prospect are guiltier than most--is a willful refusal to recognize that while poverty matters, schools matter too, and some schools are much better than others. Since they're generally smart folks, I can only assume that this refusal is purposful and a function of the fact that they see good schools for poor children as compromising some larger narrative or effort aimed at reducing the number of poor children in the first place. For the sake of future generations, I hope they succeed, but I wish they weren't making education worse for this generation in the meantime.
**UPDATE 1: Ezra notes here that this quote was taken out of context and wasn't intended, as I state above, as a self-aggrandizing label for himself and his friends. My bad.
UPDATE 2: Dana Goldstein offers some thoughtful comments here, and points out that TAP's range of work on education is more intellectually diverse than I imply. She says:
That seems reasonable.
I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they've made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.
Vilest? In the age of Dick Cheney, Larry Craig, et al.? More to the point--from a policy standpoint, I'm very supportive of giving parents more educational choices within a public school context. I think charter schools are clearly the right way to do this, not vouchers, but at the same time I believe that while some voucher supporters really do want to destroy public education by privatizing the schools, others really do want to help desperately disadvantaged kids get a decent education. It's not a simple issue, and if you're going to take a voucher away from a low-income mother who chose to put her child in a better private school, you'd better have a damn good alternative lined up for her. Not some hypothetical set of principles or general wish that she wasn't poor, but another, better school, today.
But to say that any well-off parent who exercises school choice by moving to the suburbs has a moral obligation to support vouchers--and is a vile hypocrite if they oppose vouchers--is silly. Voucherizing a whole city like DC wouldn't work. There aren't enough good private schools to teach all those students in the short run, and--more importantly--there wouldn't be enough in the long run. Look at how the private sector provides other services to low-income communities. Not banks, but check cashing outlets and pawn shops. Not decent grocery stores (much less Whole Foods), but convenience stores. The only sit-down restaurant in all of Ward 7 in DC is a Denny's. A Denny's. Why does anyone believe education would be any different? Particularly since--unlike with banks, grocery stores and restaurants--low-income kids don't just need parity, they need something better than what non-poor kids receive.
Well, one might respond, we there are good schools in the suburbs--lets send them there. Leaving aside the obvious massive logistical and political challenges that would entail, that's still a bad solution. Well-functioning communities need local schools that interact with and support the institutions and people around them. Why is it so hard to imagine that we could improve education for city students by building them good public schools where they live? This failure of imagination is also where Ezra falls short, when he says:
...white parents fleeing pockets of poverty is not an argument for school vouchers. What they're fleeing is the poverty -- which, at a certain density, dissolves just about any school.
No, no, no. I know lots of white, relatively affluent parents, here in DC, who are trying to figure out where to educate their young children. They're not fleeing poverty, they're fleeing bad public schools. It's not that they don't want their kids to grow up around other children of different races or income--heck, they'd like that, they're DC liberals for goodness sake. But their higher priority is a safe, quality education, which the city schools do not provide.
Moreover, this idea that poverty inevitably "dissolves" schools just isn't true. There are good charter schools in DC within walking distance of the U Street neighborhoods where the "new blogging elite"--to use Ezra's term($) for people like Megan and himself**--tend to live and socialize. Most of the children in these schools are minorities and qualify for the federal free lunch program. I challenge Ezra to spend an hour, or a day, or however long in one of those schools and then explain how poverty invariably "dissolves" anything.
The single biggest education-related failure of the contemporary left--and the folks like Ezra who write at The American Prospect are guiltier than most--is a willful refusal to recognize that while poverty matters, schools matter too, and some schools are much better than others. Since they're generally smart folks, I can only assume that this refusal is purposful and a function of the fact that they see good schools for poor children as compromising some larger narrative or effort aimed at reducing the number of poor children in the first place. For the sake of future generations, I hope they succeed, but I wish they weren't making education worse for this generation in the meantime.
**UPDATE 1: Ezra notes here that this quote was taken out of context and wasn't intended, as I state above, as a self-aggrandizing label for himself and his friends. My bad.
UPDATE 2: Dana Goldstein offers some thoughtful comments here, and points out that TAP's range of work on education is more intellectually diverse than I imply. She says:
What I would like to see is public school choice that regionalizes education in such a way as to encourage kids from more affluent families to attend high quality public magnet and public charter schools in nearby poorer neighborhoods or cities. This provides a good, close-to-home education for poor kids and integrates schools without having to wait for concentrated poverty and wealth to be wiped off the map. It also encourages average or under-performing urban schools to catch up with better specimens within their system, and provides them with models for success.
That seems reasonable.
The Dangers of Defaulting
FinAid.org has a loan default calculator on its website that calculates how much it costs to default on student loans. I calculated the default costs with my current federal loan and the results were startling. In my situation (long repayment term, low interest rate), the total cost of my loan after 12 months of non-payment would increase nearly 80 percent.
And if after defaulting I paid the minimum each month for the life of the loan, the added collection costs would mean paying off my loan until I am SEVENTY. I’d be cashing in social security checks before I paid off my student loan debt.
FinAid.org also has a calculator that looks specifically at the impact of collection costs on how long it takes to pay off student loan debt after a default. Right now, maximum collection costs—fees charged by collection agencies—are not well-defined in the federal loan program, but can be as high as 40 percent. If I defaulted and a 40 percent collection cost were added to my loan, I would have to live until 104 to pay off my loans. Well, at least student loan debt is discharged when you die.
Student Loan Debt through Rose-Colored Glasses
The College Board made news this week with the release of its latest Trends in College Prices and Trends in Student Aid reports, which showed tuition rising faster than inflation and student grant aid lagging behind. The reports also showed continued growth in student borrowing, particularly in private education loans that are not guaranteed or subsidized by the federal government. And so the trend continues—higher college prices and higher debt for students.
But how much of a burden is this growing student loan debt? If you look at the Department of Education’s student loan default rates—the percentage of students not repaying their loans—student loan debt isn’t much of a problem. The Department of Education’s reported default rates are still remarkably low. The logical conclusion from these low default rates is that students must be just fine managing their debt – or are they?
A recent Education Sector CYCT shows that some students—those with high debt, low incomes, and minority students—are at much higher risk of defaulting on their loans than overall default rates indicate. And the average time from graduation to the first default is four years—two years longer than the Department of Education follows students for its calculations. According to this Business Week article, even loan companies don’t put much stock in the Department of Education calculations and prefer to look at lifetime default rates.
If lawmakers, college officials, and the general public want an accurate picture of student loan defaults—an important indicator of how well students are handling their debt—we need default rates disaggregated by student characteristics and data that follows students over the life of their loan. While this might paint a less-rosy picture of student loan debt, it will be a far more accurate indicator of how well students are managing their debt.
Money's Worth for New Teachers
Spend your money on mentoring new teachers, says a new report by the New Teacher Center. Not surprising that a center that provides training to new teachers would issue a report saying we should provide training to new teachers... But the findings by themselves are compelling. Their cost-benefit analysis, released yesterday at a Hill briefing, finds that for every $1 spent on new teacher induction, the return to society by year 5 is an impressive $1.66. At the district level, that translates to $1.88 for every dollar invested. The report adds to a growing body of work that supports beginning teacher induction as a cost-effective strategy to improve the overall quality of the teacher workforce.
For district and state leaders thinking about this approach, which they should, the Center's report estimates a per teacher cost of about $6,600 for a program that supports 119 new teachers (total cost of $786,000 for the district program). There's a much more detailed breakdown of costs, and benefits, in the full report here.
For district and state leaders thinking about this approach, which they should, the Center's report estimates a per teacher cost of about $6,600 for a program that supports 119 new teachers (total cost of $786,000 for the district program). There's a much more detailed breakdown of costs, and benefits, in the full report here.
More Good Education Labor News from NYC
It's been a good month for education labor in New York City.
First there was the announcement of an important new merit pay plan supported by both the district administration and the United Federation of Teachers. Now, as reported in the New York Times, "In the largest successful organizing drive in New York City in half a century, 28,000 child care providers will join the city’s teachers’ union as the result of an overwhelmingly pro-union vote."
This strikes me as good news all around. For the child care workers surely, who are currently paid less than $20,000 a year on average, often without health care and other benefits. But also for parents, children, and society at large. The transition to an economy where women are becoming fully engaged in the workplace has been, in historical terms, remarkably rapid. We're still catching up on the long-term ramifications, one of which is the need for a much more robust, high-quality child care infrastructure. And an important part of that is making sure that child care workers are well-supported, trained, represented, and compensated.
First there was the announcement of an important new merit pay plan supported by both the district administration and the United Federation of Teachers. Now, as reported in the New York Times, "In the largest successful organizing drive in New York City in half a century, 28,000 child care providers will join the city’s teachers’ union as the result of an overwhelmingly pro-union vote."
This strikes me as good news all around. For the child care workers surely, who are currently paid less than $20,000 a year on average, often without health care and other benefits. But also for parents, children, and society at large. The transition to an economy where women are becoming fully engaged in the workplace has been, in historical terms, remarkably rapid. We're still catching up on the long-term ramifications, one of which is the need for a much more robust, high-quality child care infrastructure. And an important part of that is making sure that child care workers are well-supported, trained, represented, and compensated.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Godless Educrats?
The Atlantic's 150th Anniversary issue arrived at my house last week, and I've been leafing through the selection of short essays at the front about "The Future of the American Idea." The quality varies a lot--Edward O. Wilson's 400 words are a model of economy and clarity, the policiticians, not so much. One of the contributors is Tim LaHaye, minister and author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series. Given the chance to say anything he wanted about religion and America, he decided to focus his scarce resources by writing about($) ...vouchers, concluding:
It's not so much the ideas themselves that are noteworthy (other than how extreme they are), but the choice of topic. I'm guessing LaHaye has a wide range of grievances when it comes to American laws, society, and culture. I had always assumed that choice and school prayer issues were relatively far down on that totem pole, more the thing you say when you have to say something about education than a core part of the ideological agenda. But maybe I was wrong.
Until we break the secular educational monopoly that currently expels God, Judeo-Christian moral values, and personal accountability from the halls of learning, we will continue to see academic performance decline and the costs of education increase, to the great detriment of millions of young lives. This could easily be changed if parents were empowered to spend their tax dollars at schools of their choosing—and not at schools chosen by anti-God, anti-Christian humanist educrats, like those who now control public education from kindergarten through graduate school.
It's not so much the ideas themselves that are noteworthy (other than how extreme they are), but the choice of topic. I'm guessing LaHaye has a wide range of grievances when it comes to American laws, society, and culture. I had always assumed that choice and school prayer issues were relatively far down on that totem pole, more the thing you say when you have to say something about education than a core part of the ideological agenda. But maybe I was wrong.
Least Surprising Education Headline of the Year
The Center on American Progress sponsored an event last week focused on college rankings. I was on the panel along with a representative of U.S. News & World Report, and recent late-night comedy star Paul Glastris. During the Q&A, I made a point that I try to make whenever someone gives me a chance, and sometimes even when they don't, which is that the problem of constantly-rising college costs is actually more connected to the U.S. News rankings than people commonly understand. It's well-known that colleges engage in various shenanigans to boost their rankings, like counting a $15 donation a student given by a senior as three $5 donations over the subsequent three years, in order to boost the "alumni giving rate." But that's small potatoes in terms of what drives the rankings; the big opportunities are tied to money. 10 percent of the rankings are a function of spending per student (by contrast, admissions rates are only 1.5 percent), while an even larger percentage is driven by things that cost money to buy, like small class sizes and well-paid professors.
That translates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you're a selective college), its ranking would go up. All of this stems from a deficit of reliable, comparable, institution-level measures of quality. Thus we have this crazy higher education market with no value proposition, one where cost and quality are assumed to be the same thing -- and in the sense that high-end higher education is a luxury good that primarily serves to signal your exclusive ability to acquire and pay for it, they are the same thing.
Like many higher education problems, U.S. News exacerbates this problem but didn't create it; there are a whole host of long-established values and incentives that reward institutions for raising as much money as possible and spending it with little care for efficiency.
Therefore, it comes as a surprise to absolutely no one to see this headline in the New York Times: "College Costs Rising Rapidly." Once again, average tuition and fees for public and private universities rose at more than double the rate of inflation. Higher ed folks can--and will--make whatever excuses and caveats they like about net prices, public appropriations, appropriate price deflators, etc., but the bottom line is that by whatever measure you choose--percent of GDP, median income, anything--higher education simply costs more today than it ever has before, and there is precious little evidence to show that those resources are being spent in a way that correspondingly increases benefits for the students and taxpayers who foot the bill.
UPDATE: Matt Yglesias comments here, Unfogged here.
That translates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you're a selective college), its ranking would go up. All of this stems from a deficit of reliable, comparable, institution-level measures of quality. Thus we have this crazy higher education market with no value proposition, one where cost and quality are assumed to be the same thing -- and in the sense that high-end higher education is a luxury good that primarily serves to signal your exclusive ability to acquire and pay for it, they are the same thing.
Like many higher education problems, U.S. News exacerbates this problem but didn't create it; there are a whole host of long-established values and incentives that reward institutions for raising as much money as possible and spending it with little care for efficiency.
Therefore, it comes as a surprise to absolutely no one to see this headline in the New York Times: "College Costs Rising Rapidly." Once again, average tuition and fees for public and private universities rose at more than double the rate of inflation. Higher ed folks can--and will--make whatever excuses and caveats they like about net prices, public appropriations, appropriate price deflators, etc., but the bottom line is that by whatever measure you choose--percent of GDP, median income, anything--higher education simply costs more today than it ever has before, and there is precious little evidence to show that those resources are being spent in a way that correspondingly increases benefits for the students and taxpayers who foot the bill.
UPDATE: Matt Yglesias comments here, Unfogged here.
Richard Simmons, No Child Left Behind, and Me
Via the NEA's anti-NCLB blog, we learn that Richard Simmons wants phys-ed to be included as a "multiple measure" in the reauthorized version of NCLB. Really! He even went on Letterman (Remember Letterman? Those were the days. The '80s, to be specific) to promote the plan. This is good news--not in an education policy sense, of course, but because it gives me a reason to tell my Richard Simmons story.
The year: 1993. The setting: Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Having graduated from college the previous spring, I'm taking a year off before starting grad school. Not for any good reason, mind you, I just forgot to sign up for the GRE in time to apply for the '92-'93 school year. I've got 12 months to expand my personal, cultural, an intellectual horizons before heading back to academia, but my first priority is to find a place to live, since my room in the fraternity house is spoken for. I consider moving home, but my Dad starts throwing ugly words like "rent" into the conversation. My friend Jon had just finished up at UNC-Chapel Hill, and suggests I move there for the year, on the grounds that (A) the weather is great, and (B) the social life is even better. Unable to refute this air-tight logic, I pack up everything I own, which takes up roughly 40 percent of the space in my Honda Civic hatchback, and drive south. We move into a two-bedroom apartment in a complex on the outskirts of town where the police have established a sub-station to save time and fuel expenses and the rent is $200 a month, total. We get jobs as waiters at a chain barbecue restaurant, where we work two lunches a week and Friday and Saturday nights from 6PM to midnight. The rest of the time is spent playing pickup basketball and Sega Genesis, as well as availing ourselves of the afore-mentioned social life. I become a devoted, life-long Tar Heels fan for the entirety of the 1992-93 basketball season. Life is sweet.
When we're awake in the morning, we listen to Howard Stern. I know, I know. This was, I must emphasize, Stern in his prime, before he got tired and copied and his moment as King of All Media came and went. He had a kind of rude greatness back then. Richard Simmons was a frequent guest, and he was always hilarious. One day I'm reading the sports page and I see an advertisement for some kind of Richard Simmons event, where he will be live in person at the local mall. Since my schedule is clear for, roughly, the next 175 consecutive days, we hop in the Civic and rush to meet the great man in person. Sure enough, it's a huge event in the mall atrium, with a line of people circling the fountain under the skylight with the fake plants (you know the one I'm talking about). Someone is handing out these little laminated wallet-sized cards with Richard's list of ten personal affirmations printed on both sides. They read like a verbatim transcript of future Minnesota Senator Al Franken's Stuart Smalley's "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and people like me" SNL sketch. We begin laughing uncontrollably. Again, let me remind you of the year and suggest that this sort of obnoxious behavior had not yet been definitively branded as the oh-so-typically-Gen-X conceit it surely was.
Suddenly, ringing out across the Mall atrium, we hear, in that unmistakable Simmons whine, a piercing cry: "You!"
We stop. Who, us?
"Yes, you. Come over here. Come here."
Richard is yelling at us! In the mall! It may be the greatest thing ever! We rush across the atrium, dodging various Simmons devotees as we go.
"Richard!" we say. Not sure what to say next. It's Richard Simmons!
"I saw you making fun of the personal affirmations. Tch! You should be ashamed!"
"Richard! We listen to you on Howard Stern all the time!"
"Oh! I don't know why I go back there. He's so mean. Isn't he mean?"
"Richard! You're awesome!"
"Thank you. But you you shouldn't make fun..."
And that was about it, as the people in line behind us were starting to get restless. Up to that point (heck, maybe still) my closest brush with greatness. Richard didn't stop going on Howard Stern, of course, or Letterman, or trying to make people feel better about themselves and be healthy at the same time. It's 14 years later, his NCLB proposal is silly, and we probably won't meet again. But I'm glad I met him then, I'm glad he's still doing his Richard Simmons thing now.
The year: 1993. The setting: Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Having graduated from college the previous spring, I'm taking a year off before starting grad school. Not for any good reason, mind you, I just forgot to sign up for the GRE in time to apply for the '92-'93 school year. I've got 12 months to expand my personal, cultural, an intellectual horizons before heading back to academia, but my first priority is to find a place to live, since my room in the fraternity house is spoken for. I consider moving home, but my Dad starts throwing ugly words like "rent" into the conversation. My friend Jon had just finished up at UNC-Chapel Hill, and suggests I move there for the year, on the grounds that (A) the weather is great, and (B) the social life is even better. Unable to refute this air-tight logic, I pack up everything I own, which takes up roughly 40 percent of the space in my Honda Civic hatchback, and drive south. We move into a two-bedroom apartment in a complex on the outskirts of town where the police have established a sub-station to save time and fuel expenses and the rent is $200 a month, total. We get jobs as waiters at a chain barbecue restaurant, where we work two lunches a week and Friday and Saturday nights from 6PM to midnight. The rest of the time is spent playing pickup basketball and Sega Genesis, as well as availing ourselves of the afore-mentioned social life. I become a devoted, life-long Tar Heels fan for the entirety of the 1992-93 basketball season. Life is sweet.
When we're awake in the morning, we listen to Howard Stern. I know, I know. This was, I must emphasize, Stern in his prime, before he got tired and copied and his moment as King of All Media came and went. He had a kind of rude greatness back then. Richard Simmons was a frequent guest, and he was always hilarious. One day I'm reading the sports page and I see an advertisement for some kind of Richard Simmons event, where he will be live in person at the local mall. Since my schedule is clear for, roughly, the next 175 consecutive days, we hop in the Civic and rush to meet the great man in person. Sure enough, it's a huge event in the mall atrium, with a line of people circling the fountain under the skylight with the fake plants (you know the one I'm talking about). Someone is handing out these little laminated wallet-sized cards with Richard's list of ten personal affirmations printed on both sides. They read like a verbatim transcript of future Minnesota Senator Al Franken's Stuart Smalley's "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and people like me" SNL sketch. We begin laughing uncontrollably. Again, let me remind you of the year and suggest that this sort of obnoxious behavior had not yet been definitively branded as the oh-so-typically-Gen-X conceit it surely was.
Suddenly, ringing out across the Mall atrium, we hear, in that unmistakable Simmons whine, a piercing cry: "You!"
We stop. Who, us?
"Yes, you. Come over here. Come here."
Richard is yelling at us! In the mall! It may be the greatest thing ever! We rush across the atrium, dodging various Simmons devotees as we go.
"Richard!" we say. Not sure what to say next. It's Richard Simmons!
"I saw you making fun of the personal affirmations. Tch! You should be ashamed!"
"Richard! We listen to you on Howard Stern all the time!"
"Oh! I don't know why I go back there. He's so mean. Isn't he mean?"
"Richard! You're awesome!"
"Thank you. But you you shouldn't make fun..."
And that was about it, as the people in line behind us were starting to get restless. Up to that point (heck, maybe still) my closest brush with greatness. Richard didn't stop going on Howard Stern, of course, or Letterman, or trying to make people feel better about themselves and be healthy at the same time. It's 14 years later, his NCLB proposal is silly, and we probably won't meet again. But I'm glad I met him then, I'm glad he's still doing his Richard Simmons thing now.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
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:
"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.
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.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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.
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!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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:
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.
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.
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.
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