Secretary Spellings and Dungeons and Dragons

Can't get enough bad NCLB puns? Check out Secretary Spellings on NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. And apparently, while Karl Rove is a master of political strategy, he's not so good at asking someone out on a date...

Pollitt Sets Things Straight

Last Sunday wasn't a banner day for gender and journalism. The Times gave too much credence to the scientifically-unsupported single-sex theories of Leonard Sax, while the Post did one worse by publishing this monumentally inane opinion piece from professional anti-feminist Charlotte Allen, who argued, in all seriousness, that women are stupid, because their brains are small, and so they should stay home where they belong. Today the Post took a small step toward atonement by publishing a response from Katha Pollit, which you should read. An exerpt:

For Allen, it's definitely the woman: her brain is just too puny. She cannot mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space -- and that, as we all know, is the very definition of smarts. Funny how that definition keeps changing, as women conquer field after field that was supposed to be beyond them. In the 19th century, physicians insisted women couldn't cope with college: studying would send rushing to their brains the blood that was needed for the womb. Back then, nobody credited women with the superior verbal abilities and memories Allen says scientists now find women to possess.

True to form, she dismisses these as minor talents that only helped her "coast" through school and life. But back when the experts were explaining why women couldn't be lawyers or professors or poets (at least not very good poets), nobody said verbal skills and memory were trivial; they only became trivial when women were found to excel at them. Now the sexists diss women as inferior mental-object-rotators. I have no idea whether this is true, and whether if so it's unchangeable, but you have to admit this is a very narrow scrap of turf on which to plant the flag of manly superiority.

I let my subscription to The Nation lapse a while back, but Pollitt's sharp perspective and clear writing were what I've missed most. Read the whole thing.

A Narrowed Point of View

Since it looks like NCLB isn't going to reauthorized until 2010 or so, we should probably all hunker down and prepare for a steady stream of stories like this one, about a Montgomery County elementary school that spent an entire morning focused on art in protest of the curriculum narrowing effects of the federal law. The story then pivots, as all such stories do, to recent studies from CEP:

Her sentiments echoed a report released last month by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, which found that many elementary schools across the country have allotted more time to reading and math by cutting time for social studies, science, art and physical education. The issue of "curriculum narrowing" has become a key part of the debate over reauthorizing the 2002 federal law, which is designed to improve reading and math proficiency.

It's worth noting, first of all, that reporters routinely misinterpet the CEP data or present it in ways that aren't really accurate. Sometimes they just botch the numbers entirely; in other instances--like this one--they're vague to the point of being misleading. All we're told here is that "many" districts have cut a range of subjects, including art. But a quick look at the actual CEP report, which was released a few weeks ago, shows that the percent of districts that reduced time on art--the entire subject of this story--was 16%. The number is right there on Table 1, on the second page of an eight-page report. So either the reporter (or her editor) didn't bother to read it, or read it and chose not include the number in the story. Why? I imagine because it calls the story's premise into question; 16% doesn't feel so much like "many." The CEP reports, moreover, suggest that districts most likely to cut time in subjects like art to increase time for reading and math are chronically low-performing districts that are really under the NLCB gun--districts not like Montgomery County.

More broadly, this whole conversation about the impact of NCLB on curricula needs to get beyond the simple formulation of "Curricula narrowed; ergo NCLB bad." There are only so many hours in the school day. Priorities need to be set and choices must be made. The 16% of districts that cut art in favor of reading and math didn't necessarily make a bad choice, unless you think that all districts had, pre-NCLB, miraculously arrived at the precise optimal mix of subjects and time. Reducing time for art in order to ensure that elementary school student can read might be exactly the kind of hard decision those students need.

Update: AFTie John nods approvingly, saying:

If you're an NCLB lover, there's no use trying to contact the reporter She's too far gone. She writes that the morning of art focused attention on "a national reality: that art is often squeezed out of the curriculum by the academic rigors of the No Child Left Behind law."

This is just a matter of definition, then. If you think 16% is "often," then it's a fair piece. If not, it's not. John?

Update 2: John responds:

Well, a little extrapolating and back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggests that 4 million students (16% of ~ 25 million public K-6 students) are missing more than 30 hours of art instruction per year. So, yes, Kevin, I think that's a lot of lost art instruction. But the art of defending NCLB against all comers is alive and well at Education Sector.

This is the "if you multiply some number times some other number times some other number times the entirety of the American public education system, the result is a non-trivial number" excuse, i.e. the last refuge of scoundrels. Again, those 30 hours of art and music instruction weren't poured down a rat hole somewhere. They weren't "lost," they were replaced by 30 hours of instruction in reading and math. The result, presumably, is students who are better able to read and do math but have less skill in and appreciation of art and music. Is that--as John seems to believe--obviously a bad thing?

Update 3: John juxtaposes the statement above about the last refuge etc. with the following from a paper that Education Sector published last year:

Taken in isolation, some of the provisions described above may seem inconsequential, amounting to 1 percent or less of school spending. But when the costs of these provisions are added together, they amount to a significant percentage of all school resources. As Table 9 shows, the eight provisions described above add up to almost 19 percent of all school spending. This amounts to roughly $77 gazillion* in school spending per year nationwide.

30 hours is about 2.7 percent of the roughly 1,100 hours of instruction schoolchildren get per year. That's for the 16 percent of districts made cuts in art and music (the percent that cut art is presumably less). So, once again, this is a matter of definition. If you think that four tenths of one percent (.027 X .16) is comparable to 19 percent then John's comparison is apt. If not, it's not. 

See also this thread at D-Ed Reckoning, whose commenter says:

As a musician and composer, I can say that trading some time teaching music for time teaching reading, assuming they're actually teaching reading, is a perfectly OK tradeoff. Why? Because one can't perform written sheet music without being able to read. One's decoding skills have to be good enough to recognize words from English, Italian, French, and German.I'm looking at a piece right now that has the following words on it, just on the first line: Trompete, Langsam, Con Sordino, crescendo, Senza Sordino. If I couldn't read those words, I wouldn't be able to play the music, even if I could perfectly execute the instructions encoded on the staff itself. Music and art are valuable for both the heart and mind, but reading and math are necessary for success in anything, including music and art.

Tough Questions about UDC

One of the Washington Post's best columnists doesn't publish on the op-ed page, but in the Business section: Steven Pearlstein. I've become a regular reader over the last few years, not just because he provides a lot of insightful, well-informed commentary on business and economic issues, but because he's written some really good pieces on higher education. A few months ago he wrote a pair of smart columns on the University of Maryland's recent efforts to become more efficient, and yesterday he took on a topic that doesn't get enough attention here in DC: The University of the District of Columbia, which he describes as:

...a poorly run institution that is driven more by political imperatives than economic ones and spends too much money doing the wrong things badly.To put it bluntly, the District doesn't need -- and probably can't support -- a quality land-grant university. Its population is too small and its tax base too narrow. Most of its public school graduates are unprepared to do college-level work. And the most pressing need of its businesses and its unemployed residents is for an effective teaching machine that can make up for the deficiencies of the public school system and train its residents for the tens of thousands of "middle skill" jobs offered by the regional economy. In other words, what the District needs is a community college.

This is true. UDC is a particularly glaring example of problem that, to varying degrees, crops up repeatedly in higher education. There is one established model for organizing a high-prestige institution of higher education. It's been in place since the late 19th century, when Harvard president Charles Eliot led the push to adopt the German research university model, and it involves hiring faculty who have been extensively trained as researchers and then organizing them into semi-autonomous departments defined by the major academic disciplines. As the nation has evolved over the last 120 years from giving only a small percentage of students a higher education to where we are today, with almost 70 percent of high school graduates going to directly to college, we've basically just stamped out copies of that model and built them in every major population center. The problem is that while that model works pretty well for the top students, it becomes progressively less effective as the mission of the university necessarily becomes more and more focused on providing more basic, vocational classes to students who didn't get a great high school education. And of course there are few cities providing a worse high school education than Washington, DC.

So when a city like DC decides, as it did some years ago, to invest in a public university, there's a natural inclination to want to build the "best," most prestigous institution it can, something that can be a source of civic pride, something that represents high aspirations for the community and its students. But what you end up with is a bad mismatch between organizational design and purpose, lots of wasted money, and students not getting the education they need.

Research for Richard Simmons

From USA Today: “Time spent in physical education does not detract from elementary school students' ability to excel in the classroom and may even help improve girls' academic performance, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.”

Wait, I thought that boys were the ones that had to move around to learn, not girls. I’ll just leave that one for Sara Mead to ponder.

The CDC report does show that children, boys or girls, should move around during the day—no surprise to anyone who has been around a child. And “the study indicates that trimming physical education programs may not be the best way to raise test scores in schools.” In the article, this leads to a lot of bemoaning NCLB and the resulting curriculum narrowing. But I find this encouraging—schools can teach reading and math and keep physical education, it’s not a zero sum game after all. Someone call Richard Simmons and make sure he sees this report.

Generation X Grows Up

I graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in May 1992, with a B.A. in political science. Things felt uncertain then. Early in my first semester in 1988, my poli-sci teaching assistant calmy explained why she was a communist and how the revolution was on its way; by the time I graduated the Berlin Wall was a memory. The recent recession was just wrapping up and it seemed likely that the Reagan / Bush administration would continue for at least four more years. The value of a liberal arts degree in the job market was quickly demonstrated by my first four quasi-full time jobs after graduation: camp counselor; sporting goods salesman; waiter in a rib restaurant; camp counselor again.

The class of '92 also fell smack-dab in the middle of the "Generation X" demographic, so people like me were fed a steady of magazine articles and movies describing our alleged apathy, cynicism, and fondness for flannel. It wasn't all b.s.; as a younger member of the generation, Chuck Klosterman, once observed with only slight exaggeration:

Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b)they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true.

But this begs a question that is never asked enough: Were we right, in retrospect? Things worked out fine for me, I went to grad school, got a job, got married, got a better job, made more money, stayed married, bought a house, travelled to some places, and so on and so forth. So did almost all of my friends from high school and college.

But of course you can't responsibly generalize from your own experiences or those of people you happen to know. To really answer that question, you'd have to go to the trouble of identifying a large, statistically representative sample--say roughly 10,000 people who earned a bachelor's degree in 1992 or 1993--gather a lot of baseline data about each person, and then diligently keep track of them as the years passed, following up with more detailed surveys every few years or so for the next decade. It would cost a lot money and you wouldn't really know the answer to the question for a good 15 years, which is roughly 14.5 years after the magazines and movies got bored and started talking about something else.

Thankfully, the federal government did just that, and released the latest results today. This is from the National Center for Education Statistics' "Baccalaureate and Beyond" longitudinal study, which began with students who finished college during the 92-93 academic year and followed up in 1994, 1997, and 2003. I'm not sure there are any blockbuster findings, but in a way that's the point: studies like this do mundane but crucial work of providing empirical foundations for our sense of things, clarifying and updating the common wisdom. A few highlights:

• People go to school so they can work. Roughly two-thirds of the original grads majored in what the report calls "career-oriented" fields: business, education, engineering, health, etc., as opposed to "academic" fields like my poli-sci degree, arts and humanities, math, biology, etc. While colleges rightly see themselves as much more than vocational, the plain truth is that most students go to college with pretty straightforward ambitions to get a decent job and thus life.
  
• Things are different for men and women. At the the three follow-up points--94, 97, and 03--the percent of men who were neither employed nor enrolled in grad school was 6, 4, and 5 percent, respectively. For women the numbers were 7% in 1994, 8% in 1997, and 18 percent in 2003. As people get older, marry, and start families, the arcs of their careers and lives continue to diverge by gender.
  
• Things get better as you get older. The average graduates' salary nearly doubled from 1994 to 2003, from $30,800 to $60,600, in constant 2003 dollars. From graduation to 1994, 29% of graduates were unemployed at least once. That percentage fell to 22% in 94 -97, and 13 percent from 97-03, despite the latter time period being twice as long. Among those with a full-time job, the percent in jobs they considered to have definite career potential went from 44% in '94 to 59% in 97 and 90% in '03.
  
• For college grads, the business of America is business--and education. In 2003, 28% of working 92/93 grads were "business workers and managers," while another 19% were "educators."
  
• There's more than one way to get a good job. Career-oriented majors were quicker to get a job and less likely to be unemployed, but by the time 2003 came the academic majors had mostly gotten through grad school and caught up; there was no statistically significant difference in 2003 earnings between career and academic majors, after controlling for other factors.

What I and my fellow Gen-X grads didn't know, of course, was that our pessimism was mostly unwarranted. We knew were post- a lot of things: modern, Cold War, etc. We just didn't know what we were pre-, yet. Luckily, it turned out to be prosperity; the economy was just beginning a historic expansion during which nearly all the new money went to college graduates like us. In general, if you made it through college, things worked out, if not in the short term than probably the mid- and most likely the long. All the more reason to make sure that more students have similar opportunities today.

Filling in the Research Gap

A report released today by the National Consumer Law Center is worth looking at if you follow student loan issues. The report examines the terms, including interest rates and fees, of 28 private student loans issued between 2001 and 2006. The growth in private student loans over the past few years has gotten a lot of attention, but what has been missing from the discussion is an accounting of the actual terms of these loans. Until now, most of that information has been anecdotal.

The report's title, "Paying the Price: The High Cost of Private Student Loans and the Dangers for Student Borrowers" makes its conclusions pretty clear. And it's worth keeping in mind that the National Consumer Law Center is a consumer advocacy group, so it approaches the topic from a consumer protection perspective. Even so, this is the first real look at the terms of these loans, and, much like the anecdotal evidence has indicated, it's a marketplace where students need to tread carefully.

And Missing a Few Other Things...

Per Kevin’s post below, a few notes on today’s Washington Post article on student loans in today’s volatile credit markets:

The Post, unlike some other publications, made an effort in this piece to distinguish between federal loans, those guaranteed by the federal government and that carry a fixed interest rate, and private loans, which are completely separate from the government and act like any commercial loan that requires a credit check and carries a variable interest rate. But the Post article switches back and forth between describing what’s happening in these two related but distinct markets, adding to confusion over where students are most likely to see an impact on loan availability.

Private loans are where most of the action is. Prior to this tightening in the credit markets, loan providers were offering private loans, often with extremely high interest rates and fees, to students with poor credit histories or at colleges with poor graduation and job placement track records. Loan companies are curtailing this practice because of the higher default rates among these students. This could actually be a positive development—private student loans are not eligible to be discharged in bankruptcy, and a loan with a high interest rate made to a student with a low chance of graduating or getting a job is more a recipe for life-long indebtedness and a destroyed credit history than it is an educational opportunity.

The potential for decreased private loan availability is cause for concern, though, if it spreads to students with better credit histories. At many institutions, private loans have become an essential part of the financial aid package as tuition prices have continually outpaced increases in federal aid. But, for many students, the additional availability of federal loans for parents (PLUS loans), additional loans for graduate students (Grad-PLUS loans), and increases in loan amounts for students whose parents can’t get PLUS loans should help to cover shortfalls in the private loan market.

On the federal loan side, the industry is seeing less change. The second paragraph in the article points out that students with federal loans (the fixed interest rate, government guaranteed ones) could see higher upfront borrowing fees. The fees the government charges for new loans are nothing new. What’s happening is that private loan companies, which have in the past waived these fees as an incentive to get schools to choose them as a lender, are less likely to offer this incentive in the wake of reduced guaranteed profits from the government and a tightening credit market. But before students fret about increased upfront fees, they should consider that recent legislation also reduced interest rates on subsidized federal loans, a benefit they will see through the life of the loan.

And, it seems that this credit crisis is hurting some student loan companies more than others. Sallie Mae, the biggest, and PHEAA, also a giant in the industry, have announced plans to reduce the federal loans they offer. These two banks were also in the top ten of the student loan securitization market—the market for auctioning student loans to raise money to make new loans and also the market that is having the most trouble. On the other hand, J.P. Morgan Chase, a large bank that is less susceptible to changes in the securitization markets, announced that it would be cutting both fees and interest rates on student loans.

The tightening of the private loan market may help shake out some loans that shouldn’t have been made in the first place and could force some colleges to lower their reliance on easy access to private loan debt. On the federal loan side, the Department of Education should certainly keep an eye on this situation and needs to be prepared to step in as a lender of last resort if the current debt markets worsen and student loan eligibility is genuinely threatened. Right now, though, despite media efforts to sound the alarm, it looks like there are a few worrisome signs, but no real crisis in student loans.

Same Sax Story (And Some Sense From Sara)

Leonard Sax, self-described as "uniquely unqualified to lead the single-sex public education movement" (but doing it anyway) continues to play the hero of journalists everywhere wanting to write about separating girls and boys in schools. Here he is again in this long article in the NY Times magazine. I can't say how glad I am that Sara is back blogging. Her take on this article (gender-based education dressed up as single-sex schooling) is right on point.

Missing the Big Picture

The Post went on the front page this morning with news of how the credit crunch is making student loans less available and more expensive. One student explained the consequences:

Andrew Helms, 24, a master's student in Arab studies at Georgetown, said he had to take out $50,000 in loans to cover the first of his two years of graduate studies. He still has undergraduate debt to pay off. His federal loan is fixed at a 6.3 percent interest rate, while his private loan rate has reached 7.8 percent. Any rise in the latter would be "a substantial concern," he said. School debt "determines what you'll do after graduation," he said. "People who want to go into humanitarian work will have to wait until 10 to 15 years down the road until after you have paid off your loans. . . . I might have to sell my soul to an oil company."

It's worth mentioning--since the Post doesn't--that the odds of Mr. Helms having to prostitute himself to Exxon/Mobil are less a function of marginal interest rate changes than the fact that he just borrowed $50,000 for one year of graduate school. 

Long-term trends rule the world. It's those simple straight lines, steadily ascending from the lower left to the upper right, that define the basic nature of our lives. Even more so when the change is exponential, like compound interest or global population growth over the last hundred years. But paradoxically, the steadier--and thus more important--the trend, the less likely it is to be "news" because news is new and long-term trends are well-known and always happening. There's no "ta-da" moment, no intriguing hook, no fresh angle. So it is with steeply rising college tuition,  which had become so regular and unchanging that we've come to accept it as inevitable, and thus not newsworthy in anything but the most general way. Less important, temporary changes like interest rate fluctuations make headlines, the massive sums to which those rates are applied don't. 

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 9

MY NAME IS MY NAME!  I think I want that to be my ringtone.

That's also Marlo, all of him, in five words. The longer the Game goes on, the more the logic of it means that the only winners will be those who ignore money, loyalty, family, honor, delusions of respectability, anything, and play it strictly for its own sake. All you get is your name on the corners, at least for a while. 

When HBO sent preview copies of Season Five around before the season started to generate advance coverage, they only distributed the first seven episodes. I'm guessing that was to keep the news of Omar's shocking murder by Kenard under wraps, which in understandable, but I think they could have saved David Simon some mixed review by releasing all ten, because eight and now nine were great, vintage great. On some level all five seasons have worked this way, with patience at the beginning paying off at the end. 

Summary: Gus is on the hunt for Templeton, while Lester finally pulls off the big bust, taking down Marlo, Chris, Cheese, and Monk, with handshakes and photo-ops all around. Steintorf tells Rawls and Daniels to juke the stats. Clay Davis puts Lester onto Levy. Bubbles makes it to his anniversary, and frankly this has all been worth it for that alone. Kima is true to her word, and McNulty's days seem numbered.  

It's interesting how the Stanfield crew have adopted almost a predestinationalist view of the the world. When Snoop was staring down the barrel of the gun, did she really believe that deserve had nothing to do with it, that it was just her time? There was a lot in those last few moments, telling Michael that their promise to him--you're part of our family--was always a lie, pausing at the end to wonder if she looked pretty, knowing she wouldn't anymore. 

This week's past-season role call: Namond, Bunny, and the Deacon, leaving only Prez...yep, there he is in preview for the finale. Well done. Also, who was the guy in the evidence room? 

One of the interesting things about The Wire is the way certain elements of the story kind of sneak up on you. With all the hubbub about fabulism earlier in the season, I had kind of assumed that the parts with Dukie and Chris were mostly texture, just a way to provide continuity from last season. Nope, it's all connected--I should have known. 

Union Busting

AFTie Ed flags this story from Illinois, where it appears that when teachers in a newly-opened charter school attempted to unionize, the school responded with various heavy-handed and probably illegal tactics including loyalty oaths, etc. In my mind, if a charter school opens its doors, the teachers are happy working there without being represented by a union, and (most importantly) the students get a high-quality education, then that's fine. If, however, the teachers decide they want to unionize, then the only morally defensible response is to accept it, embrace it, bargain, and move forward. The right to organize is non-negotiable. Union-busting tactics like these are just as odious in public education as in Wal-Mart or anywhere else, if not more so. Any responsible teaching of history in the public schools will include the prominent role of labor in creating the way of life that all workers, union and non-union alike, currently enjoy, as well as the vicious, sometimes deadly struggles that those gains required. Schoolchildren shouldn't be taught those lessons even as their school administrators repudiate them. 

Dummies for Dummies

Via Russo, let me heartily endorse Greg Toppo's article in USA Today about people who preface this or that agenda with the assertion that students today are stupider than they've ever been, which they know because some study indicates that many students are ignorant of some historical or geographical fact that they happen to care about. To wit, Toppo begins:

In her new book, The Age of American Unreason, cultural critic Susan Jacoby tells of a dinner conversation with a student who was about to graduate with honors from Michigan State University in 2006. After Jacoby dropped a reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "fireside chats," she watched as the student "looked absolutely blank" in response.

According to Wikipedia, Susan Jacoby was born in 1945. She grew up in the years immediately after the Roosevelt presidency, among, one presumes, people who had personally listened to his fireside chats. As her Web site details, she's spent the last four decades as a public intellectual, during which time I imagine she's learned a tremendous amount. The honors student, by contrast, was probably born around 1985, and has no personal memory of presidents before George H. W. Bush. Prior to their dinner conversation, she had spent 40 fewer years than Jacoby living and learning.

Which is to say that (1) A person's sense of what facts and ideas matter most is inevitably influenced by their personal history and frame of reference, and (2) People are lousy at maintaining an accurate sense of what they knew, when. Without direct evidence to the contrary, as in "I didn't know that then because it hadn't happened yet," I think we unconsciously assume that we've always known what we now know. At the very least, our sense of this is biased in a way that inaccurately minimizes our previous ignorance, and thus convinces us that we were smarter then than people of a similar age are now.

I'm guessing, for example, that had Susan Jacoby been unlucky enough to have dinner with a professional scold in 1966, she might have shocked him with her ignorance of some noteworthy detail of Grover Cleveland's second administration.

Toppo's article also highlights the sin of attributing the alleged ignorance of today's youth to whatever trendy phenomenon is mostly likely to get people's attention and offer opportunities for facile analogies and unsupported assertions. You know, the kids today with their MTV hippity-hop music Ipods Myspaces Internet chat rooms:

[Mark] Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, due in May, blames digital technology, which distracts kids in ways their parents could never imagine. "When we were 17 years old, social life stopped at the front door," says Bauerlein, 49. Now teens can continue their conversations online, on Facebook, by instant messaging or on cellphones in their bedrooms — all night. "Peer-to-peer contact … has no limitation in space or time."

On some level, this is understandable. Bauerlein was 17 in 1976, well before the Federal Communications Commission lifted its now-infamous ban on the installation of telephones in teenagers' bedrooms.  

Now, there are people out there with legitimate things to say on this topic, people like E.D. Hirsch (who Toppo quotes) and his ideas about the role that knowledge plays in learning. Hirsch, it should be noted, is not as conservative as people think based on the conservative embrace of Cultural Literacy; his work focuses less on knowledge for specific knowledge's sake than knowledge as an essential building block for learning to read and gaining higher conceptual skills.

But there are plenty of others who bemoan the fact that some large percentage of high school seniors got the wrong answer on a multiple choice question of historical fact and then quickly proceed to denounce educational reforms that emphasize rote memorization skills as measured by multiple choice tests.

With Your Weekend Coffee

Via This Week in Education, NPR's This American Life will focus this week on human resources, with a segment on NYC's infamous "rubber rooms". So, enjoy your weekend coffee with Ira Glass's oddly soothing voice and what will, no doubt, be an entertaining but depressing look at a baffling institution.

If I Only Had a Gun

Various Nazis have been apocryphally quoted as saying "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun." When people like Cato's Brink Lindsey, writing in the New Republic($), identify culture as the chief source of educational inequality, I feel the same way.

The "riddle" Lindsey purports to solve is why low-income people are less likely to graduate from college. It is not, says Lindsey, because the government isn't doing enough to help them. Shocking to hear this from Cato, I know. He frames the specifics thusly:

As of 2003, 80 percent of high school seniors from families in the top 20 percent of income enrolled in college the fall after graduation, while only 49 percent from families in the lowest 40 percent did so. That class divide translates directly into big disparities along ethnic lines. In 2006, 34 percent of white Americans aged 25- 29 held college degrees, compared to 19 percent of African Americans and only 10 percent of Hispanics.

Note that in pivoting from class to race, Lindsey switches from a measure of college enrollment to one of college completion. Why? Perhaps because if he had kept his measures consistent, they wouldn't be so dramatic. According to this table, the rolling three-year average rates of immediate college going (which are preferable given small sample size issues with the Census data from which these numbers are derrived) in 2003 for white, black, and Hispanic students were 66%, 60%, and 58%, respectively. This U.S. Department of Education study of high school sophomores found (Table 34) that the white / black difference in college-going expectations varies by less than three percentage points. Black students are more likely than white students to aspire to achieve a PhD, MD, or other advanced degree. It turns out that, despite the allegedly pernicious "acting white" stigma, etc. etc., minority students want to go to college pretty much just like everyone else.

Lindsey acknowledges that the differences that do exist are rooted in different levels of high school achievment. He also acknowledges that low-income and minority student go to worse high schools--before asserting that two aren't connected. Yeah, quite a coincidence, that. As evidence, he cites the Coleman Report. For the non-education wonks in the audience, let me offer some advice. Anytime you read the words "As we have known since the 1966 Coleman Report...." or some variation thereof, immediately discount the likelihood that the author is arguing in good faith by 50%. I'm not talking down Coleman, who was quite a social scientist, but it's been 42 years and we've learned some things since then. Conservatives and Cato types will constantly tell you that "money isn't the answer" just before they drive home and write a $25,000 check to the private school where they send their kids, or to mortgage company to pay for the house in the wealthy suburbs with the good schools.

Lindsey concludes by conceding that because poor children don't have the capacity to act as autonomous agents, "government intervention to improve [their] circumstances could actually expand the scope of individual autonomy." Programs like "preschool enrichment programs along the lines of Head Start, but more intensive and beginning with even younger kis." That's an interesting endorsement from the vice president for research of an organization with the stated goal of destroying public education as we know it, but okay. Must be Sara Mead's influence.

Lindsey is not wrong to say that culture matters. Of course it does. It just doesn't matter as much as he thinks, relative to the influence of schools. This is just the latest in a long history of agenda-driven arguments against the efficacy of public education. Cato makes it because public education is expensive and popular; people like to pay taxes to support government schools, and Cato is against taxes and government. Others make similar arguments from the left, because they're worried that a belief that schools can help poor students will undermine efforts to make fewer students poor. It's all of a piece.

It's too bad that on the relatively rare occasion that putatively left-leaning magazines like TNR and others decide to write about education, they don't have much to say other than it's not important. It really is.

Real Issues, Real Learning

Adam Doster, in an article in the 25 Feb. 2008 issue of The Nation, discusses several schools across the country that are using social issues to teach basic concepts. For instance, in Social Justice High School (SJHS) in Chicago (part of the brand new Little Village Lawndale High School, where 98% of students qualify as low-income), students participate in weekly colloquiums about social issues that affect their lives (like the income gap), designed to spark them to deeper inquiry, covering basic standards requirements (like reading) along the way. For instance, Doster quotes Rico Gutstein, a math professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who recommends using the unequal distribution of wealth or racial profiling as backdrops for math lessons.

Doster notes that some conservative groups (City Journal and the New York Sun) have argued against this type of teaching, saying that it imparts liberal politics in the place of a “general education.” (Some believe teaching social issues to be even more pervasive and destructive.) But this is a red herring: the issue is not so much about politics, but educating students, and students learn better when they can relate to the subject matter and the manner in which it is taught. The 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) reports that 98% of students reported being bored in school, and 39% of them said that was because the “material wasn’t relevant” to them while 75% percent said they were bored because the “material wasn’t interesting” – two intimately related problems. E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, stresses the necessity of a high-quality curriculum here, here, and here, among other places, but successfully teaching our students is at least as much about methods/pedagogy as curriculum. Good methods often hinge on teaching skills via a relatable curriculum.

Whether students learn math by analyzing the achievement gap or understand Central Place Theory by looking at White Flight, the learning is the key, and this type of learning requires critical thinking that will allow students to demonstrate this knowledge. And in the age of accountability, another end – passing the test – is just as important as the means.

Some may argue that teaching math is great, but shouldn’t be done vis-à-vis topics of questionable existence or unwieldy or unconfirmed political charge. In response, I would ask why we use “widgets” to explain the principles of mean, median, and mode, and how we can have political science courses at all.

There is a debate over whether or not inadequate teaching methods are the result of inappropriate reactions to NCLB by teachers and schools and the persistence of poor teaching, or of direct, logical results of NCLB mandates. But either way, effective instructional methods shouldn’t be challenged based on political-ideological grounds – like whether or not the methods at SJHS are imparting liberal politics over a “general education.” To raise the achievement of all students, we need to meet them where they are, not wish they were where we want them to be, and present topics to them in ways that they can understand and from which they can benefit.

Posted by Sumner Handy

Sara Returns

Former Education Sector staffer Sara Mead not only authored many of this blog's best posts in its first year of existence, she also came up with the name. I've always harbored a secret, irrational hope that she'd come back to the Q&E fold but now that she's launched a brand-new early education blog at the New America Foundation, that seems unlikely. Our loss is the gain of small children everywhere.

1,000 Words, or More

Via Ross Douthat, these pictures of the long-abandoned Detroit School Book Depository are oddly beautiful in a very sad kind of way.

Eggs

Firing another salvo in the baseball / teaching debate in response to this post from Matt Tabor, Leo Casey begins with an ode to the pastoral nature of the game, pivots to a defense of baseball unionization and Curt Flood--which no one is disputing--before seizing on word that Tabor quotes someone else using: commodity. "We Are Not Commodities" declares Leo--that's the title of the post--"we are men and women, proud of our profession, skilled in our craft, dedicated to our students. As long our our union is standing...." etc., etc. You get the drift.

Hmmmm.....commodities. Let's talk about those for a moment. Merriam-Webster's definition of commodity includes the following:

"a mass-produced unspecialized product"
"a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price"
"one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market"

That sounds pretty bad, I can see why Leo would take umbrage at the mere suggestion that teachers be treated like a commodity. I mean, eggs are a commodity, right? And that has a lot of implications. Most importantly, there was until recently hardly any market for quality eggs. Ironic, given that people say "he's a good egg," when at many supermarkets you cannot, in fact, buy a good egg, in the sense that it tastes better than any other egg. Eggs are only differentiated one one, easy-to-measure scale: size. There are six official sizes or "grades"--Jumbo, Extra- Large, Large, etc., with prices to match.

Commodification leaves the market vulnerable to quality problems--people selling inferior eggs for the same standard price--so we've developed a government-controlled inspection system whereby minimum standards are established that eggs must meet before they enter the market. Because you can't crack all the eggs open to see how they taste before selling them, those standards are mostly tied to the means of production. When you see a U.S. Department of Agriculture grade on an egg carton, that means the plant processed the eggs following USDA's sanitation and good manufacturing processes.

When something is a commodity, quantity matters more than quality. This affects the basic way we think about the product. If, for example, I was baking a quiche and felt like it needed more egg, it probably wouldn't occur to me to buy better, more eggy eggs. How could I? Instead, I'd throw in bigger eggs, or more of them--increase the egg/quiche ratio, in other words.

Commodification also means that producers are mostly competing on price, which tends to keep prices down. But that's okay if you're a producer, you can make it up on volume. It's okay if you're the government quality regulator, since it maintains your reason for being. And it would actually be a plus if you were running an organization whose finances were based on getting a fixed amount of money for every every egg sold. For you, the more the better.

It's a problem for consumers, though. If I'm frying up an egg in a pan, I don't much care whether it's Jumbo or Extra-Large. I'm glad the government is enforcing some baseline safety standards by trying to ensure that my egg isn't full of salmonella, although I'm disturbed that the regulators often bend to political pressure to ease off on the quality controls. But what I really want is a great-tasting egg. This is doubtless why there's been a big increase in the market for organic eggs in recent years. But since the USDA is in charge of certifying eggs as organic, there are concerns that the process is becoming subject to the same problems of regulatory capture, and once again consumers are getting the shaft.

But hey, not to worry, because of course teachers are not eggs and, as Leo has clearly explained, the very last thing the United Federation of Teachers wants is for its members to be treated like commodities.

Also, this post is worth reading.

Selection Effects and...What?

In the comments section of Matt Yglesias' response to this morning's post on improving the higher education market, several readers raise the issue of selection and peer effects in higher education. This comes up a lot. Essentially the argument is that very selective colleges provide a lot of value to students, and are thus worth paying for and trying to get into, because:

A) It's good to go to college with a lot of other very bright students, from whom you'll learn a lot and strive to compete against.

B) Hanging out with those peers for four or more years is also valuable because you're accumulating a great deal of social capital in the forms of networks that will help you later in life.

C) The simple fact that you attend a selective college sends strong signals to the job market that you had what it takes to get admitted in the first place.

All of these things are true. By themselves, they're probably enough reason for people to rationally pursue an elite college education. But they have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of education those colleges provide.

By this line of reasoning, if everyone collectively decided that the most elite college in America was the University of the District of Columbia, then UDC would, in fact, be the "best." Heck, if all a college did was provide a place for the smartest students to eat, sleep, socialize, listen to music, read books, watch sports, blog, and talk among themselves for four years, without ever offering a single course or actual formal educational experience of any kind, it would still provide all the benefits listed above.

In other words, if the best arguments in favor of elite higher education institutions are completely divorced from the actual practice of higher education, then that's a problem. And it's particularly problematic if that ethos influences national higher education policy, because of course the vast majority of students attend colleges that provide little or no peer or selection benefits and thus really need their institution of higher learning to actually teach them stuff and help them earn a degree.