Breaking the Greed / Virtue Dichotomy in Teacher Pay

Commenting on the new issue of Quality Counts, which compares states on teacher pay measures and suggests that teachers make less than comparable professions, AFTie Ed says:

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..." I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure. If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field. People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

This is a variant on the baseline teachers union position on money, which is, "We're not in this for the money; give us more money."

Let me be first to say that this isn't actually an absurd concept on its face. There's no good reason that people should be forced into penury just because they're doing socially valuable work in the public sector. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's not the strongest rhetorical case, and more to the point, it's not necessary. Look at the two doctors on the front page of the Post this morning, identical African-American twins from PG County named Vince and Vance who look just exactly like you'd think a Vince and Vance would look, and also happen to be Army reservists who volunteer in Afghanistan. They're clearly not doing that for the money (although I'm guessing the elapsed time between the story hitting the newstands and getting optioned for TV/movies could be measured in fractions of a second), but as a cardiologist and urologist, I'm guessing they have plenty of money. In medicine, you can do good and well at the same time.

But you've also got to go to medical school, which as we discussed here a few days ago, was thoroughly Flexnerized almost a century ago. Much higher, more uniform standards, longer, more difficult to get into, extended clinical induction model, etc. etc. Also, fewer practitioners and less organized labor. I don't know if all those factors necessarily have to go together, but the fact that they do in medicine has to be meaningful on some level.

The problem with the "we do this for the children not the money" line is that it paints teachers as the kind of professionals that provoke admiration but not aspiration -- people appreciate them but are glad someone else is doing the work. Ed himself goes on to say that "I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall." I wonder he's thought through just how much things would have to change for that to become true.

Disconnected Youth

Disconnected, disengaged, at-risk. All terms to describe the kids who aren't in school, don't have jobs, can't find purpose. Plenty of work out there that argues that we need to reconnect these young people to school, work and civic life. The Campaign for Youth (CFY) is an alliance of about a dozen youth-focused organizations (including the National Youth Employment Commission, American Youth Policy Forum, Forum for Youth Investment) that's recently developed A National Investment Strategy for Reconnecting America's Youth. Check out the summary of their recommendations (pdf).

Spellings Stands Firm

I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back--has to have been more than a year ago--and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone's just a top-line manager/figurehead type or if they actually pay attention and know what they're talking about, and she's the latter. Her friendly, folksy demeanor is a real asset in environments like that; it puts people at ease while also making them less likely to ask really sharp questions.

Her basic message on NCLB was that the President would veto any reauthorization that waters down accountability, and that if Congress won't move she's going to go ahead and implement stuff on her own during the 11 months she has left. It's never been entirely clear to me why the U.S. Department of Education is legally allowed to let some states and not others (or, for that matter, any states at all) implement accountability systems that clearly diverge from NCLB requirements, as it has with the state "growth model" pilots. I suspect the answer is that it's not legal, but since nobody's ox was gored, they just did it anyway. Back in my first job in state government, I remember asking our staff attorney"Are we allowed to do that?" and she said, "We do what we want, and if people don't like it they can sue us. Which is unlikely, because they probably won't know we did it, and even if they find out, suing a government agency is harder than you think. You need standing, you need money to pay for a lawer, and it takes forever. Our lawyers are free and we're not going anywhere."

What about the little guys?

Top colleges—Harvard, Yale, Davidson, University of Virginia—have all made great headlines in the past year by dramatically expanding the financial aid they offer to students and eliminating or significantly shrinking the debt students will graduate with. Yale announced Monday that it will be spending another $307 million from its endowment for increased financial aid and research. This is great, but what about all those colleges, especially the small, private ones, that don’t have the endowment money to keep up with Harvard and Yale?

InsideHigherEd reported this week (The Harvard Trickle-Down Effect) on a session at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute which focused on exactly this question. Despite the fact that most of these schools—small, liberal arts colleges—don’t compete directly for students with Harvard-type schools, they are still worried about the ripple effect from Harvard’s aid announcement, primarily the pressure from students and parents to provide similarly generous aid packages.

While Harvard’s aid plan is great for Harvard students, it’s just not a realistic way to address the problems of rising tuitions and rising student debt at most institutions. And, as we’ve shown here and here, generous aid policies at the most elite institutions can have a negative impact on need-based aid because lower-tier institutions respond by offering tuition discounts to recruit high-performing students. Or, as InsideHigherEd summarizes:

C. Brent DeVore, president of Otterbein College and the session’s moderator, briefly and cogently laid out the financial aid picture leading up to and including Harvard’s announcement. He described how many small private colleges turned to financial aid based on students’ academic or other merit (as opposed to purely financial need) to compete for students’ attention, both against the prestige advantage of the elite colleges and the price advantage of most public colleges. That trend was exacerbated as states, particularly in the South, embraced lottery-driven scholarships that in some places have made an education at a public university virtually free.

As parents’ have become increasingly accustomed to such tuition breaks, merit-based aid has often been replaced by “want-based” aid, “demand-based” aid, and “match the scholarship down the street” based aid, DeVore said, to knowing nods from the presidents in the room.

The presidents’ concerns about the new trend in super-aid policies from elite institutions ranged from lowered expectations about how much financial responsibility a family should bear for a college education to even higher tuition increases and more competition for faculty. Presidents’ ideas for countering this competition ranged from broadening the recruitment pool of students to doing a better job of promoting the academic advantages of a small institution.

But there was no mention of what kinds of budgeting changes schools could make to keep their tuition increases down and make them more price competitive. It seems like a budgeting response may be just as important as a PR response. What I'd like to know is whether there are any small, independent colleges without gigantic endowments that are doing innovative and smart things to keep tuition increases and debt-levels reasonable and maintain need-based aid, but without hurting the institution's bottom line.

New Leader at Carnegie

Stanford's Tony Bryk, a member of Education Sector's research advisory committee, was recently appointed the new President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many people don't realize just how influential Carnegie has been since it was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906. It developed the Teachers Annuity and Insurance Association, which become the TIAA in TIAA-CREF, the giant educator's retirement and insurance company. It founded the Educational Testing Service, ETS, which publishes the SAT, GRE, and AP tests. It sponsored the Flexner Report, which completely revolutionized medical education in America, moving medical schools from a group of semi-professional, unregulated institutions with dodgy, inconsistent standards and questionable quality to the much more uniformly high-quality, well-regulated institutions we have today.

The Carnegie classifications, which put higher educaiton institutions into categories like "Research I," "Research II," "Comprehensive / Master's"," etc.(they've since altered the names) remain the dominant way of categorizing colleges and universities, and define the research status hierarcy that institutions try to climb. It played a signficant role in the discussion that led to the creation of Pell grants in the early 1970s. Former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer's books High School and College, published in the 1980s, were very influential and remain (somewhat depressingly) accurately description of the challenges those institutions face.

Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation's history suggests that higher education is arguably more subject to positive influence via philanthropic/foundation initiative than K-12. This is partly a matter of scale and governance. The vast majority of college students attend one of about 3,500 two- and four-year colleges--compared to 90,000 schools--with more concentrated governance and control. But I also think higher education is inherently more sensitive to the things that philanthropies are in a position to change: public perception, the consensus of research--information, in other words. Colleges are also intensely status- and peer-conscious, so if you can leverage a few key actors, the rest will follow of their own accord.

Most education philanthropy focuses on K-12, because those challenges seems more urgent, but I think that many organizations--particularly the big new foundations getting into the game--are missing a chance to make a lasting difference in the higher ed arena. If they achieve only a fraction of what the Carnegie Foundation has over the last century, it will be time and money well spent.

Update: A reader points out that refering to the Carnegie Foundation as a "philanthropy" is confusing, since it doesn't give out money like, for example, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an ES funder), but rather does most of its work in-house. Good point, I was thinking about non-profit policy-focused organizations generally, many of which operate with some mix of in-house and sponsored work, but that wasn't clear.

The reader also notes that the Carnegie Foundation developed the "Carnegie Unit," which is still the standard way that high school courses are categorized and measured. When someone says that high school students who want to go to college should take at at least three "units" of math, four English, etc., etc., they're talking about Carnegie units. Apparently this was an outgrowth of the development of TIAA -- they needed a standard way of measuring how many courses teachers taught. This illustrates a larger point--also inherent in the story of the Carnegie classification of colleges and universities--which is that defining the way things are measured often has more lasting influence than the measurement itself.

Democracts and NCLB

Sam Dillon's Times front-pager on NCLB-bashing among Democratic presidential candidates came out a few days before I hit the road to spend Christmas with the fam, but apparently I'm not the only one who didn't get to it until after the New Year. As Eduwonk notes, the buried lede in that piece was the major thought division between the candidates and House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller. Now Miller's counterpart in the Senate, Ted Kennedy, comes with a Post op-ed saying the same thing, in stronger words:

The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.

So what gives? I actually think there's no mystery here. The politics of NCLB suck for Obama, Clinton, et al because a certain number of people really hate the law and those people disproportionately vote in the primary, while there's no comparable counter-contingent with strong feelings running the other way. But the candidates don't actually want to engage in "all-out opposition not just to specific details but to the entire thrust and ideology of NCLB," to quote Jonathan Kozol quoting NEA President Reg Weaver on the union's position, because they don't actually think that way. That's why the end of Dillon's article is a litany of "buts"

Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he said. When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability. And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.” But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”

That's classic pre-general campaign hedging. To say that we need to radically overhaul or jettison the law while maintaining accountability makes no sense; accountability is where the core meaning of the law begins and ends. The candidates are just pandering as much as they think they can get away with, and Kennedy and Miller are sending public signals about where those limits lie. Given the way things are going for Senator Clinton, winner of the New Hampshire NEA's endorsement and strongest NCLB basher among the major candidates, my guess is that the high water mark of anti-NCLB rhetoric from the D side has passed, with relatively little effect on the public discourse in the long run.

Some things are just what they seem.

Blogging and So Much More

Education Sector has a new position open for a policy associate. It's a great opportunity to join ES and work on a range of ed policy projects. Q&Ed blogging rights included. More details here.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 1

After more than a year's hiatus, the final season of The Wire debuted tonight. By popular demand, we're back with the weekly blogging. If you've been catching up on the DVDs recently--and if you haven't been, you should start--see here for the final post from last season (or just search for "wire" in the search box at right for the whole list), and here at the Guardian Unlimited for my take on why it's the greatest American television program (sorry, "programme") ever made. Matt Yglesias also wrote a good post last week arguing that while series creator David Simon's pessimistic worldview may be objectively overstated, it's essential for the series' artistic success. Bonus: a response from Simon himself in the comments thread.

Episode 1 summary: Carcetti shuts down the Major Crimes Unit investigation of the Marlo / Chris / Snoop organization and rowhouse mass murders because he's sucking money of out the police budget to cover the school fiscal crisis (and because he won't take school money from the governor he plans to unseat). McNulty is drunk and angry again, which is bad for his relationship with Beadie but good for the viewership generally. Bubbles is clean, and if there's an ounce of sympathy in David Simon's soul, which there may not be, which may be a good thing, he'll end up okay.

Herc is gone from the force and working for Levy, which means he's working for the criminals he used to incompetently try to put in jail. Whether this is a net plus for the murderers and drug dealers of Baltimore remains to be seen. Herc is so dumb that he can't even figure out how to abuse his expense account. (A lobbyist friend of mine taught me this a long time ago, when I tried to beg off his paying for lunch on the grounds that we had discussed nothing business-related. "I don't care if my clients pay for your lunch" he said. "But if they don't pay for yours, they don't pay for mine.") Marlo is scheming against Prop Joe and Method Man.

The Baltimore Sun, meanwhile, is apparently much like all the other important instutitions in the city: declining, absurd, and led by incompetents, but populated by a few smart, flawed-but-noble individuals who haven't stopped fighting for the greater ideals the institution represents. In this case, that would be Meldrick Lewis from Homicide:Life on the Streets, who's now ten years older and more of a stickler for usage.

In many ways, however, there's not a lot to say about Episode 1, because not a lot happens, which is the way every season of The Wire begins, which is one of the many reasons it's so great. The Wire is only the only show I've ever seen that fully takes advantage of long-form television's greatest asset: time. The typical movie runs 120 minutes, 200 at most. That's more time than a 44-minute TV episode, but you've still got to accomplish a great deal of character and narrative development in a small space. A series has more potential in theory, but for a long time every TV episode was structured like a 44-minute movie, with the additional burden of having to structure the plot around commercial breaks. The 1980s saw the introduction of season-long story arcs in the better dramas, but even those only went halfway, interspersing stand-alone episodes and continuing to give every episode some kind of beginning, middle, and end. Even critically-hailed series like The Sopranos still work this way.

The Wire, by contrast, is essentially one story in five chapters, a season per. The first few episodes are all about establishing characters, settings, and themes, and only as the story progresses do you start to see how it's all connected. The Wire also packs much more into each minute, simply by not wasting time explaining things to the viewer. Most TV shows are absolutely clogged with clunky expository dialogue (Typical C.S.I. scene: Grissom: "The body is completely exsanguinated." Coroner: "You're right, Grissom, all the blood has been drained from the body.") The Wire does you the favor of assuming you're not stupid. Like all art worth experiencing, it asks you to pay attention. The result is a cumulative dramatic force that's unmatched. It also leaves room for lots of small, understated moments pregnant with meaning, like when Beadie decides she's left the light on for McNulty long enough...and then changes her mind, for at least a little while longer.

Next week: The Sun's dubious editor decides to gin up an expose of the school systemm. which mean's we'll get to go all meta on TQATE by discussing fictional critiques of shaky education news coverage right along side the real thing.

Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style

The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.

In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, it begins with an anecdote, follows with confirming quotations, and only then gets around to providing any actual data:

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council...The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003

First of all, if you reduce 98,700 by 5.2%, you get 93,568. Reduce that by 6.7% and you get 87,299. Even accounting for rounding errors, that's not 83,500. Copy editors are supposedly maniacal about English usage, which is fine, but what about arithmetic?

More to the point, the "evidence" that both law and medicine are simultaneously becoming less attractive is that law school applications dropped by 15.4% from 2004 to 2006, while medical school applications increased by 27.3% from 2003 to 2006.

If newspapers insist on squeezing copy into the standard trend-story mold, then I guess there's little one can do to stop them. But if the numbers don't back the alleged trend up, then just leave the numbers out. It makes this stuff (a little) less aggravating.

Comic Book Guy Can Read

Back from a two-week hiatus, will be catching up on various edu-related stories that occured in my absence.

Starting with the most significant, that of course being this NYTimes piece about schools using comic books as an instructional tool:

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

It all sounds good, but edu-eminence Diane Ravitch throws cold water on the idea, saying "If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool. What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step."

This reflects two common assumptions about comic books, both which are wrong. First, that comic books are fundamentally unsophisticated as a medium. Second, that supporting a youthful enthusiasm for comic books reduces the likelihood of students moving to more serious, legitimate literary forms.

Comic books seem simple, but they're not. This mistake stems from confusing the form with the genre. The most popular American comic books have long been superhero stories, featuring lots of explosions, skin-tight costumes, and tales of good vs. evil. But the most popular forms of all media tend toward pop-culture, lowest-common demoninator fare; whether it's Transformers at the box office, American Idol on television, Chris Daughtry in music, or Harry Potter in the book store. Don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but J.K. Rowling ain't Henry James. The fact that the number one movie of 2007 was Spider-Man 3 doesn't lead anyone to conclude that film as a medium is always and irredeemably low culture.

The comic book form is actually very complex. First you have all the challenges of story, pace, characterization, narration, and dialogue that are inherent to writing. Then you have a whole separate set of challenges related to creating visual art -- tone, perspective, color, mood, composition, etc. Then you have to figure out how to present a host of images in sequence, understanding the way readers will mentally fill in the transitions from one perspective, scene, and point of view to another. Finally (and most importantly) you have to understand how the words and pictures fit together, the manner and impact of readers rapidly switching back and forth between reading words and seeing pictures, two very different cognitive experiences. Comic books incorporate elements of writing, painting, illustration and film, but it's really the combination of forms that make them unique and complex. As Umberto Eco once said, "Comic books have a language of their own."

The mistaken idea that comic books are simple leads to the second, Ravitchian idea that introducing students to comic books is educationally dangerous. This is wrong. Reading comic books is reading, first of all, not watching TV or playing Halo 3 or listening to Chris Daughtry. I don't think there's some kind of substitution effect at work where students who read comic books will read fewer books; rather they'll read more of everything and not read less of everything else.

Case in point: I've been reading comic books regularly since I was nine years old and now I essentially read and write for a living. More broadly, when I think of the typical comic book reader, "illiterate" isn't the word that comes to mind. Sartorially and socially challenged, maybe, but as a rule comic readers tend to be much more intellectual and word-focused that the average Jane or Joe. Rather than continuing the ignoble tradition of Fredric Wertham, education scholars faced with the massive problem of illiteracy should support every promising avenue they can find.

Update: Sherman Dorn makes many good points about the generally shoddy, ahistorical nature of the education reporting in this piece here.

Paying and Evaluating Teachers

The Denver Post reports on Obama as the next great supporter of ProComp, Denver's highly praised pay-for-performance, or merit pay, program. This issue of teacher pay has become one of the big education debates among Democrats in the 2008 presidential campaign (both Clinton and Edwards are against merit pay but support differential pay–extra for teachers in high-need schools and teaching shortage subjects).

Merit pay is usually couched as a recruitment and retention issue–let's attract and keep good teachers by giving bonuses for performance– but the real question on merit pay is about teacher evaluation–if we're going to pay extra for the best performance, how do we fairly and accurately assess performance? Education Sector is hosting an event on this very question next Tuesday. Details here.

Ringing in the New Year

The student loan industry is likely hoping for a better start to 2008 than they experienced in 2007, when New York Attorney General Cuomo started off the year with an investigation into improper relationships between financial aid offices and loan companies.

Jonathan Vogel speculates over at Inside Higher Ed on what colleges and lenders can expect in 2008, as the fallout continues from Cuomo’s investigations.

New Year's Update

On vacation until Friday, thus the light, blackberry-based posting. Stay tuned for exciting features such as gratuitous Ohio State boosterism and why Diane Ravitch is wrong about comic books.

Best of 2007 (Colleague Edition)

Continuing in the "Best of" spirit of the times, here's the list of 2007's best songs from Daria Hall, Assistant Director for K-12 Policy at the Education Trust. Daria knows substantially more about NCLB implementation than I do, a fact I note in sympathy as much as in admiration. Daria is also trusted source of new music recommendations, so--as with NCLB policy--similarity between this and previous posts is generally a function of my availing myself of her expertise and not the other way around.

Keep the Car Running- Arcade Fire
Fans- Kings of Leon
Imitosis- Andrew Bird
Impossible Germany- Wilco
Paper Planes- M.I.A.
All the Old Showstoppers- New Pornographers
Breakin’ Up- Rilo Kiley
Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)- Robert Plant and Allison Krauss
Nude- Radiohead
I Feel It All- Feist
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window- The Hold Steady (I’m Not There Soundtrack)
Stronger- Kanye West
Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car- Iron & Wine
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
Rehab- Amy Winehouse

The Testing Quandary

ES Co-Director Tom Toch answers a tough test question posed by the NYT's Freakonomics blog:

Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more? Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?

Other respondents include Fair Test's Monty Neill and Gaston Caperton, the President of the College Board (for some reason, he really likes the SAT...). Read all of the responses here.

It's (Not) So Easy

The Post ran a useful article a few days ago ("Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick For Schools") about one of the more interesting challenges of NCLB reauthorization and education policy generally: expanding the scope of educational accountability beyond standardized test scores in reading and math to include many other important things--mastery of other subjects, more generalized abilities like critical thinking and analytic reasoning, "soft" skills like leadership and teamwork, graduation and success in college and the workforce, etc. etc. But it leaves the central question answered: if nearly everyone thinks this is a good idea, why aren't we doing it already ?

Mostly, I think, because this imperative bumps up against other imperatives, and nobody has figured how to adequately reconcile their inherent conflicts.

NCLB was designd to make the assessment of schools objective, universal, and unavoidable. In other words, all schools within a state are assessed according to the same standards and in the same way. There are very good reasons to put a premium on this. Without objectivity and universality, it's a short road back to the default judgment that most schools render upon themselves: "We're doing the best we can, given the students we have." Given how badly some schools and students are failing, that's just not good enough.

The way that NCLB achieves objectivity and universality, however, has significant shortcomings. It's a mechanistic process, based on rules intead of human judgment. The problem is that it's really hard to developing rules that (A) accurately assess something as complicated as a school and (B) people can understand.

For example, here's a by-no-means-exhaustive list of some of the important categories of information we might want to gather about a school and its students, along with the number of possible values for each:

Student Race/Ethnicity: 5 (White, Blank, Hispanic, Asian, Indian)
Student Gender: 2 (Male, Female)
Student LEP status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Disability status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Economic status: 2 (Low-income, Not Low-Income)
Student Gifted status: 2 (Yes, No)
Subjects: 5 (Math, Reading/LA, Social Studies, Science, Art/Music)
Proficiency Status: 4 (Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced)
Value-Added Growth: 3 (Below Expected, Expected, Above Expected)
Attainment (i.e. graduation, progression to next year in school): 2 (Yes, No)
Grades: 4 (Typical grade configuration)
Timeframe: 4 (Now, Short-Term, Medium-Term, Long-Term)

Keep in mind that this is, in many ways, a very conservative estimate of the number of possible variables. There are more than five significant racial/ethnic groups, more than five important academic subjects, more than four potential levels of academic proficiency or value-added growth to consider, far more than one category of disability, gifted status, etc. Heck, you could even argue about gender.

But even this highly simplified model produces 307,200 possible outcomes. Each of them tells us something different, and as such could theoretically merit a different response. This throws the decisions of NCLB's authors into a fairly sympathetic light. They knew that a 307,200-element accountability system wouldn’t fly, so they started narrowing things down.: Two subjects and five racial/ethnic categories. One category each for LEP, special ed, and economic status, but no combinations—in other words, we measure the performance of white children and low-income children, but not white low-income children. Gender and gifted status are out. One proficiency level, no value-added. Only seven of 12 grades, and multiple grades can be combined. Include one growth measure (safe harbor), but make it either/or so you don’t create extra variables. Each of the 16 distinct outcomes (two subjects X eight student categories, although very few schools will have all eight) has equal and overriding status as an indicator of school success. Miss one, miss all, it doesn’t matter—your identification as not making AYP is the same. Then, having rolled the entirety of a school’s success into the single binary AYP variable, put it on a four-level time scale: 0-1 years in a row, 2-3, 4-5, 6 or more. Each level corresponds to a collection of mandated and optional responses—None, In Need of Improvement, Corrective Action, Alternative Governance.

Even this relatively small level of complexity seems barely manageable. The testing industry is popping rivets trying to handle two academic subjects in seven grades. State Department of Educations struggle, some mightily, to gather all the required data and turn school ratings around on time. There are constant complaints about the expense and bureaucracy of compliance and time lost to preparing for and taking one test in two subjects per year.

And even with all the compromises and simplifications, most people still don't know how the NCLB system actually works. That diminishes the capacity of the law to act as a catalyst for change, since educators and policymakers can't constructively respond to signals they don't understand.

The article quotes Ed Trust's Amy Wilkins saying maybe this is okay: "Proponents of multiple measures say it will give a richer, fuller view of a school, but this isn't about a rich view of a school. It's about failures in fundamental gate-keeping subject areas." That view reflects Title I's origins in and continued focus on compensatory education for low-income children, and I agree this needs to remain the first priority. But like it or not, NCLB has come to be about all students and all schools, and that demands a richer view on some inescapable level.

Adding more information to the existing rules-based system will consume even more scarce resources and create even more hard-to-manage complexity. Not adding more information will leave us with an accountability system that reflects only a fraction of what we want for schools. That argues for a non-rules-based approach, one that relies more heavily on human judgment, since people are much better at making sense of vast amounts of information from disparate sources than rules. But that, in turn, threatens universality and objectivity. Perhaps one could mitigate this problem by aggregating many judgments through more robust market-focused systems, but then we're opening up a whole new can of worms...

Anyway, it's tricky. Anyone who thinks the shortcomings of the existing system are a result of obvious choices not made should think again.

Best of 2007 (Wife Edition)

In addition to being smart, beautiful, and possessing the most spouse-friendly hobby imaginable (cooking), my wife Maureen also has fine taste in music. She looks at blogging with suspicion, particularly having read this and last year's special music festival posts and noting that at least of half of the insightful critical opinions and observations, such as they are, were hers, not mine. I tried citing the timed-honored principle of spousal communal ownership of intellectual property, but she didn't buy it. So, here's Maureen's iPod "Best of 2007" playlist:

Arcade Fire, "(Antichrist Television Blues)"
The National, "Apartment Story"
Radiohead, "Bodysnatchers"
LCD Soundsystem, "North American Scum"
Band of Horses, "Is There A Ghost"
Wilco, "Impossible Germany"
Bloc Party, "Hunting for Witches"
Spoon, "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"
The White Stripes, "Icky Thump"
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, "The Sons of Cain"
Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining"
Iron & Wine, "Boy With a Coin"
The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour"
Stars, "Take Me to the Riot"
The Apples in Stereo, "Can You Feel It?"
White Rabbits, "While We Go Dancing"
Andrew Bird, "Fiery Crash"
Buffalo Tom, "You'll Never Catch Him"

I might have gone with different selections in some cases-- "Woman King " or "Jezebel" for the Iron & Wine song, for example -- but overall this is a fine way to spend 90 minutes driving to your parent's house for the holidays.

"Best of" lists are often a good way to identify your critical / genre weak spots; I bought The Hold Steady's "Boys and Girls in America" a year ago solely because it was on top of a lot of Ten Best lists from respectable sources. On first listen I was like "Not bad," on second, "Pretty good," on fifth, "Kind of great!" and so on and so forth. By the time I saw them at the 9:30 club last month I was three/fourths convinced they're authentic American geniuses; it was certainly one of the ten best concerts I've ever seen.

Fire This Time

Last week the Post reported the following:

A technology manager for District schools who stuck schoolchildren with his tabs for thousands of dollars worth of lavish restaurant meals, nightclub jaunts and a visit to a strip club was charged yesterday with filing fraudulent expense reimbursement requests.

The story ran in the Metro section, below the fold. That's because municipal corruption in DC is like lake effect snow in Cleveland--the fact of it isn't news, only the magnitude. Compared to the property tax office, teachers union, and charter school board officials who stole hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, this guy is the equivalent of a small flurry.

I note this in light of the ongoing efforts of DC mayor Adrien Fenty and schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to get legislation through the City Council that would allow Rhee to fire central office employees "without cause," which in gov-speak means "if she thinks they're doing a bad job." Fenty and Rhee are getting a fair amount of pushback from the council and the civil service and teachers unions, but it looks like the plan will go through.

To be clear, even the current sclerotic civil service system can manage to fire convicted felons. Similarly, "Work hard or I'm going to fire your a--" is not, in and of itself, a comprehensive management strategy. It's equally important to identify and support high-performing--or even normal-performing--employees, to create a constructive, collaborative work environment that attracts talent.

That said, incompetence and corruption are two sides of the same coin, flowing from a generalized organizational culture of indifference--or even opposition--to things like excellence, accountability, and service to the public. That's what Fenty and Rhee are after, I think, and given the catastrophic failure of the system they're trying to change, they deserve a great deal of latitude in how they try to get there.

"School Choice on Steroids"

NPR’s Larry Abramson takes a trip to Mapleton school district outside of Denver, Colorado, where they are “trying to offer school choice on steroids.” But (unlike in baseball) this isn’t magic. Test scores are still low, and the idea of school choice hasn’t fully permeated the mindset of students and parents in Mapleton.

Despite offering everything from a hands-on, project-based school modeled after New Tech High in Napa, California to an International Baccalaureate school complete with uniforms, many parents still base their choice decisions on convenience. Many of the school improvements promised by choice theorists depend on parents choosing schools with the best academics. But reality shows that parents and students make decisions based on a host of other factors—where their friends go, how close the school is to home or work, and some very important, if not academic, criteria, like school safety.

The research and advocacy around school choice often focuses on building the supply of schools and reducing barriers to choice for parents and students, but not much has focused on what is needed to build a knowledgeable consumer base. There is a bit of a “build it and they will come” attitude about school choice reform. But without a culture of informed choice, school choice reforms might either see little to no impact, or might see choice (somewhat like the higher education market) shifting priorities to things like sports or fancy facilities and away from the quality of teaching and learning in schools.

Listen to the segment here. And if you want more NPR segments on school choice, check out these two pieces—one on Green Dot Public Schools’ takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles, and the other profiling Green Dot’s founder, Steve Barr.

The Post Fails Math

One of the ways you know a particular story has really embedded itself in the public consciousness is when it becomes a genre. As in the "People who think public education should teach X blame NCLB for reduced attention, resources, etc. for X" story, of which roughly 632,000 have been published in major media outlets in the last five years. Today's version in the Post focuses on music education, and contains a significant error. It says:

Despite research showing that students who study music have better attendance, achievement and lifetime earnings, music classes are struggling to survive. Supporters of such classes place some of the blame on the federal No Child Left Behind law....As instructional time in math, language arts and other subjects students must achieve proficiency in has risen, time devoted to other subjects has declined. Time spent on arts and music in 2007 is about half what it was before No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, according to a report recently released by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy.

The sentence I've italicized above is not even close to being right.

You can read the Center on Education Policy report referred to in the article here. It only shows detailed data for changes in instructional time for elementary schools. According to the report, the districts surveyed devoted 110 minutes per week to art and music in 2007. Districts that reduced time for art music reported an average reduction of 57 minutes. 110 minutes is not "about half" of 167 minutes, it's 65.8%, a hair below two-thirds.

Much more importantly, only 16 percent of districts reported reducing time for art and music at all.

Needless to say, this is a hugely important distinction. The plain meaning of the sentence printed in the Post is that NCLB has caused a 50% reduction in the total time spent teaching art and music. The report suggests that the actual number is closer to five percent (.34 X .16). In other words, the story is wrong by as much as an order of magnitude.

This seems like a classic symptom of the objectivity / accuracy value imbalance in the media -- newspapers will go to great lengths to make sure that a political reporter's spouse's friend's cousin's college roomate didn't buy lemonade from a stand in front of the candidate's neighbor's house, yet they make math mistakes like this all the time.